7.10.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Create Belonging for Students, says 2026 Teacher of the Year

Tim Walker, NEA Today

For years, students in Haverford School District in Pennsylvania had expressed frustration at the lack of diverse perspectives in the curriculum. District leaders turned to high school social studies teacher Leon Smith to co-lead an effort to establish a culture of more inclusivity and belonging. An Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. history and AP African American studies teacher, Smith embraced the task, and his dedication and work contributed to the development, language, and implementation of these goals across the district. “It was important for me to use this opportunity to uplift the voices of students and mentees who felt the school environment was unsafe and exclusionary,” he recalled. Soon, as part of these efforts, Smith’s leadership was instrumental in the creation of the first African American History course in the district, first as an elective then as an AP class.

Randi Weingarten said Newark Public Schools visit confirmed her fears about AI in the classroom

Jessie Gómez, Chalkbeat

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said recently that her visit to Newark’s Park Elementary School reinforced her worry about screens and AI in schools. The day after her Newark trip, she proceeded with a high-profile call for a ban on student-facing AI in elementary schools. “The classroom is very quiet, and it’s basically a super duper tutoring center,” Weingarten said in June, recalling her visit to see Khanmigo, an AI chatbot created by Khan Academy, in action. The comments followed an awkward juxtaposition for Weingarten, who leads the country’s second-largest teachers union. The AFT partnered with OpenAI and Microsoft last year to provide AI training to its members and has also promoted the use of Khanmigo.

Faster solutions, lower test scores: How AI is eroding math skills

Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report

When ChatGPT arrived in late 2022, educators quickly asked whether students would use artificial intelligence to cheat, learn or simply get through homework more efficiently. Evidence is beginning to point toward a troubling answer: Many students appear to be completing assignments faster while learning less from them. This conclusion comes from one of the largest studies of how generative AI is changing student behavior and academic skills. Sina Rismanchian, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, partnered with researchers at McGraw Hill to analyze millions of student interactions with ALEKS, an online math platform used by more than four million students a year, from fifth grade through college. Because ALEKS includes both low-stakes practice problems and college placement tests, the researchers were able to compare how students behaved and performed before and after ChatGPT’s arrival.

Language, Culture, and Power

Short thousands of bilingual teachers, California schools turn to high school students

Zaidee Stavely, EdSource

California’s audacious goal of having half of all K-12 students enrolled in bilingual education programs by 2030 has encountered one big stumbling block — there aren’t enough qualified bilingual teachers. To help remedy that, a $10 million grant tucked in the state budget aims to help school districts recruit high school students as future bilingual teachers. The funding in the education budget bill that passed Thursday allows schools to partner with community colleges and universities to help students obtain a teaching credential and the bilingual authorization required to teach English learners. Assemblymember David Alvarez, D-Chula Vista, said the idea for the legislation came in part from school districts that communicated about their struggles to find qualified bilingual teachers. “I kept hearing from districts and educators that bilingual students want to become teachers but run into a fragmented system with no clear path through high school, community college, university and credentialing,” said Alvarez.

These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected. Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled.

Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen, ProPublica

For the first few weeks after he arrived at the immigration detention center in Winnfield, Louisiana, 18-year-old Elder Chavez was wide awake most nights, listening to the creaky sounds of the bunk beds and to voices of dozens of men, also sleepless, around him. He suffered terrible headaches and would finally doze off around 4 a.m. — just when guards would begin to summon the detainees for breakfast. Then he’d sleep for most of the rest of the day. He had developed the schedule of an owl. And he thought to himself that the dark circles that had appeared under his eyes made him look like one. He’d landed at the Winn Correctional Center after Alabama state police had caught him in December going 15 mph over the speed limit and driving without a license. He was on his way home from getting his favorite sandwich, carne asada, when he was pulled over. Once the officers realized he was an immigrant, they called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Reading for pleasure builds empathy in children, but fewer kids are picking up books just for the fun of it

William Dee Nichols and Michelle Kearney, The Conversation

Reading allows children to live in a vibrant world, surrounded by fairies, elves and talking animals, transporting them to places where the impossible becomes real. But reading for pleasure also helps children learn more effectively and broadens how they view, interpret and interact with the world. It gives them a form of expression that fuels their imagination and empathy for themselves and others. But the percentage of children who read for fun is declining. Just 37% of 9-year-olds and 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day in 2025, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. By middle school, just 1 in 7 kids say they read for pleasure each day. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics has also tracked declines in kids and teens who read for fun, finding that in 2023, 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun each day, down from 27% who said they did so in 2012.  

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Housing, groceries, and medical needs: Detroit’s Health Hubs helping to get kids to school

Hannah Dellinge, Michigan Public

Upbeat on-hold music blared from Jerrica Mickens’ cellphone for nearly 50 minutes as she searched on her laptop for affordable housing for a parent in Detroit. Mickens was on a three-way call with a mother and a legal aide hotline the morning of April 21 in her Central High School office. As the two waited for a representative to answer questions about the mother’s landlord troubles, Mickens asked what else her family needed. Did they want to pick up a box of groceries for the month? Did the kids need new clothes? Did anyone in the family need mental health services? Mickens is one of nine “navigators” whose job is getting to know school communities and discerning their needs. They play a critical role in the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s 10 Health Hubs. Since launching in 2023, the hubs have contributed to improved attendance in the district and helped thousands of families, officials say.

Preparing Climate-Ready Teachers

United Nations University

On 22 June 2026, UNU-IAS contributed to the Global Sustainable Development Congress 2026, which convened leaders and professionals across higher education, government, industry and civil society to exchange ideas and expertise and advance collaborative sustainability solutions.

As part of the event, UNU-IAS and UNESCO Jakarta co-organized the joint roundtable session From Frameworks to Action: Preparing Climate-ready Teachers. It brought together educators, higher education institutions, education ministries and other education stakeholders to discuss how teachers could be better prepared to deliver quality climate change education. UNU-IAS presented an analysis of international frameworks and guidance on climate change education and introduced the draft Climate Change Competency Framework for Educators, which was developed by consolidating key competencies for educators.

Learning with a Warmer World: Climate Change Education for Forms of Life

Melissa Diamond, Tomas Rocha, Educational Theory

Climate change poses a threat to young people’s capacity to flourish both now and in the future. In response, Aristotelian Climate Change Education aims to cultivate radicalized climate virtues in students and give them structured opportunities to contemplate Socrates’s question—“How should one live?”—amidst conditions of unprecedented ecological uncertainty. However appealing this approach may be to environmentalists, it faces a serious objection from political liberals who appeal to the principle of neutrality toward competing conceptions of the good life. In this article, we draw from critical theorist Rahel Jaeggi’s Critique of Forms of Life to address the concern about liberal neutrality while deepening our account of Aristotelian Climate Change Education. 

Access, Assessment, Advancement

From the chatroom to the classroom, these women professors face the manosphere in real life

Lauren Nutall, The 19th

Julie Shayne has spent the better part of her teaching career navigating campus politics made complicated by being a woman. Each semester, she once again finds herself on edge at the beginning of the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies course she teaches. While most of her students have been pleasant, she said she has had to remain cautious of red flags. “My classes meet a diversity requirement, so I get students in there who don’t want to be in there, or at least initially, they think they don’t want to be in there,” said Shayne, who is a teaching professor at the University of Washington Bothell. “So they’re almost resentful that they’re having to spend time learning something that they think is just political or opinion or however they feel.”

Abortion pills could come to California community college health centers

Andrea Baltodano, CalMatters

Community college students in California could gain access to medication abortion through campus health centers under a proposal that would extend reproductive health services already required at the state’s public universities. Assembly Bill 2540 would require community colleges with student health centers to offer access to medication abortion beginning in 2029, if the Legislature provides funding. The bill builds on Senate Bill 24, a 2019 law that requires University of California and California State University student health centers to provide medication abortion beginning in 2023. Supporters say the bill would close an access gap for community college students who may face transportation, cost, privacy or insurance barriers when care is only available off campus. But campus health center directors warn that many community colleges may not have the funding, staffing or clinical capacity to provide the service.

California colleges reveal their military weapons stockpile after CalMatters investigation

Phoebe Huss, CalMatters

For many public colleges and universities in California, keeping their campuses safe includes owning military-grade weaponry — AR-15s, stun grenades designed to cause temporary blindness and sonic weapons that resonate so loudly they are known in the armed forces as the voice of God. According to state law, campus police can only own military equipment if the college believes there is no other way to uphold civilian safety. That law, which passed in 2021, also requires police to make all their equipment dealings exceedingly clear to the public. However, not every college follows every part of the law, according to an investigation by CalMatters into all 148 public campuses in the California Community Colleges, University of California, and California State University systems.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Federal civil rights data holds schools accountable. Under Trump, it’s 6 months late [Audio]

Jonaki Mehta, All Things Considered

For more than 50 years, the Education Department has revealed a host of realities about how students are being treated in every public school across America: which kids are being bullied, which ones are being harassed and which students can access the internet, among other things. The agency’s Civil Rights Data Collection is intended to do just that — help keep schools accountable. The latest information, collected about the 2023-24 school year, was supposed to be published last December, according to the Education Department’s own deadline. But it hasn’t been.

Children’s Exposure to Recent Family Member Criminal Legal System Involvement

Naoka Carey and Rebekah Levine Coley, JAMA Network Open

The past 50 years has seen an enormous expansion of the criminal legal system in the US, with wide-ranging potential consequences for children, families, and communities, Recent work has found that nearly 40% of US children have family members who are criminally charged at some point during their childhood, with almost 1 in 10 experiencing a caregiver’s incarceration. These rates are significantly higher for American Indian or Alaska Native and Black children and differ dramatically across states and neighborhoods. Prior research has conceptualized children’s family criminal legal contacts, and parental incarceration in particular, as an important social determinant of health. Parental incarceration has been associated with adverse birth outcomes, behavioral concerns, unmet health care needs, increased depression and anxiety, and alterations in telomere length. Parental incarceration is also associated with reductions in children’s educational attainment, social networks, and engagement in prosocial activities.

Rohingya Refugee Teachers in Cox’s Bazar [Audio]

Will Brehm and Chris Henderson, FreshEd

Today we explore the Rohingya refugee crisis. My guest, Chris Henderson, conducted research on teacher motivation in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, which is home to over 1 million Rohingya refugees. Chris Henderson is an Education in Emergencies Specialist at NORRAG at the Geneva Graduate Institute. His latest article, which entitled “Through teaching I found myself again”: The role of self-efficacy in Rohingya refugee teachers’ motivation to teach in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, will soon be published in Compare.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Teachers in Michigan school district can pick from 32 phrases or face legal review over classroom posters

Lily Altavena, Chalkbeat

Teachers in Michigan’s Romeo Community Schools have 32 motivational phrases they’ll be able to display in their classrooms next school year. And if they want to display another motivational phrase? It could take four layers of review, including sign-off from legal counsel. The approved messages are inoffensive: “Everyone is welcome.” “Be Yourself.” “We value all voices.” But a few phrases missing from the list, like “Hate has no home here” or “All are welcome here,” have become synonymous with LGBTQ acceptance — along with lawsuits and disputes in school board meetings across America. Teachers and parents in Romeo Community Schools, about 40 miles north of Detroit, said the approved phrases themselves aren’t what they find offensive. But they said the list grew out of what they describe as an effort by the school board to root out signs and symbols associated with LGBTQ pride, and a policy the school board passed last year banning displays of political ideology.

Mistrust Built the Network: What Informal Survival Systems Teach Us About American Democracy

Ayomide Samuel, NP

Americans tend to talk about distrust of government as a warning sign, evidence that something in the democratic project is breaking down. I’d push back on that. For most of this country’s history, distrust of formal institutions hasn’t weakened American democracy so much as built large parts of it. When official systems excluded people, or simply failed to show up, communities didn’t sit around waiting for reform. They built their own networks of obligation, governed by their own rules, answerable to their own members. Call it civic life by other means, organized, in each case, around the working assumption that the state could not be counted on. That history complicates the story we tell ourselves as the country turns 250. The usual version treats trust in institutions as democracy’s foundation and distrust as its decay. But look closely at how informal survival systems actually formed, and the relationship runs the other way: durable trust between neighbors has often grown directly out of justified distrust of the state.

How Unions Can Save Higher Education—and Democracy

Abdullah Shihipar, The New Republic

American higher education is in crisis. Changes to student loan financing, a decline in the number of international students, and a weaponized federal research apparatus are creating historic challenges for everyone. Every day, new pitfalls emerge out of Washington and state capitals across the country. Right now, for instance, the Department of Education is finalizing a rule that would limit financial aid for graduate students if the program they are enrolled in does not produce enough graduates who make enough money, threatening a large number of graduate arts programs. At stake are the jobs of thousands of people who are employed by schools across the country. Now we’re beginning to see the toll this is taking.

Other News of Note

As the Pentagon stays quiet, AP reconstructs a US strike that killed over 100 Iranian children

Julia Frankel, AP News

It was the deadliest reported strike in the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Most of the victims were children. In almost any other conflict, these haunting truths would be seared into national memory. Yet more than 120 days since at least one U.S. missile struck an Iranian primary school, there remains no final accounting of what happened. The Trump administration has yet to directly accept the blame or formally release findings of a Pentagon investigation into the bombing, even though the military possessed evidence almost immediately that the site of the school had been struck, a U.S. official with knowledge of the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss an ongoing investigation, told The Associated Press. The AP has reconstructed the story of the attack, beginning in the schoolyard on the morning of Feb. 28, drawing from open-source information, video footage, human rights reports and interviews with researchers and civilians inside and outside Iran to reveal previously unreported details about the bombing in Minab, including the diversity of children killed.