Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

What Happened When Students Led Fights to Reverse Book Bans

Eesha Pendharkar, Education Week

Edha Gupta had attended Central York High School for her entire school career, and she never saw herself as an Indian-American girl reflected in the books she was assigned to read. Then, in September 2021, she read in the local newspaper that her district, located about two hours west of Philadelphia, had barred teachers from using about 300 books, articles, and documentaries related to diversity, equity, and inclusion that a district diversity committee had compiled in response to the racial justice activism that followed George Floyd’s 2020 murder by Minneapolis police. That was the final straw for Gupta, who decided she had to speak up against what she perceived as an attempt to ban books that finally would represent students like her.

Education was once the No. 1 major for college students. Now it’s an afterthought.

CBS News

Five decades ago, the U.S. was training an army of college students to become teachers, with 1 in every 5 bachelor’s degrees earned in the field of education. That guaranteed a steady pipeline of educators entering the profession, a vital resource for schools around the country, and for the economy as a whole. Today, education is an afterthought for many college students, who are more likely to study business, engineering, and even the visual and performing arts, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. Even as the population of college students has increased by 150% since 1970, the number of bachelor’s degrees in education has plummeted by almost 50% — a steeper drop than that for English, literature and foreign language majors. Meanwhile, schools in all 50 states report teacher shortages in at least one subject area last year, according to the Brookings Institution.

Plenty of Black college students want to be teachers, but something keeps derailing them

Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report

A growing problem in American classrooms is that teachers don’t resemble the students they teach. Eighty percent of the nation’s 3.8 million public school teachers are white, but over half of their students are Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American and mixed races. The small slice of Black teachers has actually shrunk slightly over the past decade from 7 percent in 2011–12 to 6 percent in 2020–21, while Black students make up a much larger 15 percent share of the public school student population.

Language, Culture, and Power

The ‘Un-Becoming’: A former L.A. gang member finds his resurrection tale at UC Berkeley

James Rainey, Los Angeles Times

Jessi Fernandez joined a street gang at 13. By his 20s, he had been shot at more times than he could count. He got busted for methamphetamine possession and spent time in Los Angeles County jail for carrying a loaded gun. Yet the persistent danger didn’t wash away a street kid’s dream — that he would get rich as a drug kingpin, then turn legit.

Escapist fantasies became harder to embrace by late 2015, when rivals gunned down two of Fernandez’s closest friends in a few months’ time. The second had lived with him like a brother for at least a year, before being shot down not far from their front door in Boyle Heights. Fernandez, then 22, held 20-year-old “Shorty” as he bled on the asphalt, huddled between two cars.

Are Latino ‘Systems of Knowledge’ Missing From Education Technology?

Nadia Tamez-Robledo, EdSurge

At a time when school districts are spending money on edtech like never before, it’s perhaps natural that some educators would be skeptical about both the pace and enthusiasm behind it. As we’ve reported in the past, some teachers have clearly expressed that tech tools should support and not replace their expertise. Meanwhile, changing demographics of students in U.S. public schools raise questions about whether curricula and edtech are staying culturally relevant.

Global Flows and Critical Cosmopolitanism

Catherine Compton-Lilly And Margaret R. Hawkins, Harvard Educational Review

In this longitudinal case study, Catherine Compton-Lilly and Margaret R. Hawkins explore one immigrant youth’s engagement with transglobal activities and flows of information and his emerging awareness of the world. Contending that transglobal flows create learning opportunities that are rarely available to children raised in mononational and monocultural spaces, the authors add to scholarship that highlights the knowledge, awareness, understandings, and literacies that children in transglobal families bring to classrooms. Specifically, they examine twelve years of longitudinal data following the youth’s development of a critical cosmopolitan stance and then apply a transliteracies framework to analyze complementary facets of emergence, uptake, resonance, and scale implicated in transglobal relations and comparisons. The article closes with recommendations for educational practice.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

New report details alarming health impact of climate change on children

Nisarg Bakshi, Good Morning America

A new report released this week by the Environmental Protection Agency projects the devastating health impact of climate change on children. Effects include higher rates of respiratory disease, reduced academic achievement, higher rates of infections and risk of housing insecurity in coastal cities. “Children have unique vulnerabilities,” Jeremy Martinich, chief of EPA’s Science and Impacts Branch and a co-author of the report, told ABC News. “This report is really intended to provide a new level of specificity about some of these risks.” One major risk is extreme heat waves, which can have a negative impact on children’s health and education.

Isolated, no air conditioning: Louisiana youth in solitary cells amid heat, ACLU says

Sam Levin, The Guardian

Incarcerated youth in Louisiana have been locked for days in solitary confinement in a former death row prison unit, facing extreme heat in cells with no air conditioning or windows, according to declarations filed on Monday in an ACLU case. According to a 2017 study by the Pregnancy in Prison Statistics Project, about 58,000 expectant mothers are incarcerated each year. Sworn statements from children imprisoned inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola prison, allege that youth spent roughly four consecutive days in isolation earlier this month, and were given only 8min a day outside their cells to shower. On those days, the heat index, which measures how hot it feels based on humidity and temperatures, ranged from 115F to 132F (46C to 55C), placing the youth at high risk of heatstroke and other serious health impacts, according to the ACLU’s experts.

In New Jersey, climate change education is rolled into all sorts of school subjects [AUDIO]

Seyma Bayram, NPR

New Jersey was the first state in the country to mandate climate change be taught across all grade levels and in most subjects.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

EPA wants stricter rules for child care centers, schools serving young children

Kara Arundel, K-12 Dive

A draft proposed rule announced Wednesday by the Environmental Protection Agency would significantly reduce acceptable levels of lead paint in older buildings, including in elementary schools with kindergarten classrooms, preschools and child care centers. The measure, if finalized, would reduce the annual lead exposures for about 250,000 to 500,000 children under age 6, according to an EPA news release.

Biden has another plan for mass student loan forgiveness. It could be excruciatingly long

Alia Wong and Nirvi Shah, USA TODAY

Last summer, in the space of about 20 minutes, President Joe Biden laid out his plan to forgive student loan debt for more than 40 million borrowers. On Tuesday, roughly a year later and with that plan undone by the Supreme Court, a very different process for erasing debt on such a wide scale begins. It’s expected to take several months, if not longer. The resulting rule may also face legal challenges, which could drag things out further. The administration is leveraging the country’s primary higher education law to write a regulation that will allow the government to cancel some student debt. Much is unknown about exactly what the process will look like and how far a new loan forgiveness plan would go, although the undertaking will be familiar to experts in higher education.

How the Supreme Court’s overturning of affirmative action could lead to the end of legacy admissions

Chauncey Devega, Salon

In a much-dreaded outcome, the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court have finally decided to end the use of race-conscious affirmative action programs in college and university admissions. Not surprisingly, the same right-wing justices who were so outraged at race-conscious affirmative action showed little concern or similar contempt for donor and legacy admission programs which are a de facto way for unqualified and underqualified white students to buy or otherwise sneak their way into the country’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. The Lawyers for Civil Rights (LCR) is now pushing back against the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action by filing a federal civil rights complaint against Harvard College “challenging its discriminatory practice of giving preferential treatment in the admissions process to applicants with familial ties to wealthy donors and alumni.” Per the law, Harvard will have to end legacy and donor preferences if it wants to continue to receive federal monies.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Why these NJ schools are so diverse, while many are segregated — affordable housing has been key

Karen Yi, Gothamist

The fourth-graders at Claremont Elementary School in Franklin Township, New Jersey already know many of the basic building blocks of a good neighborhood. Days before the end of the school year in June, they were busy designing environmentally friendly communities using protractors and poster-sized dry erase boards. One agreed-upon guideline among the 9- and 10-year-olds: Houses belong near leafy parks, not by gas stations or power plants. “[People] can get really sick because of all the pollution that’s like right by your house,” student Jaynellie Rodriguez said. Like her imagined neighborhood, Rodriguez said her real house is by a big wooded area. But she knows that’s not the case for each of her classmates, who come from all sorts of socio-economic and racial backgrounds.

The untold history of affirmative action — for White people

Valerie Strauss, Leslie T. Fewick, and H. Patrick Swygert, Washington Post

The U.S. Supreme Court last month rejected race-based affirmative action in college admissions in a 6-3 vote that rolled back decades of precedent and will force big changes in the way many of the nation’s private and public universities decide whom to accept into their programs. There was a lot of commentary after the decision was made public on June 29, much of it looking at the history of affirmative action and the ways in which schools may approach admissions in the future — but this post offers two different approaches to the discussion. One, on the unknown history of affirmative action for White people, was written by Leslie T. Fenwick, the author of the award-winning and best-selling book “Jim Crow’s Pink Slip” and a finalist for the position of U.S. education secretary in the Biden administration. She is dean emerita and professor of education policy at Howard University, and a former Harvard University visiting fellow and visiting scholar.

House Republicans seek 80% cut to federal program for students from low-income families

Matt Barnum, Chalkbeat

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives want to dramatically slash funding for Title I, the long-running federal program that sends money to schools based on the number of children from low-income families that they serve. A bill advanced by a Republican-controlled House subcommittee on Friday seeks to cut Title I grants by 80% or nearly $15 billion. The proposal is part of a broader package of GOP-backed cuts to schools and other federal programs. The bill would also ban the use of funding to teach “critical race theory,” although the concept is not defined.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Calling all youth: Chicago’s Mayor Johnson wants your ideas for his first city budget

Reema Amin, Chalkbeat Chicago

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is looking to the next generation for help on his first city budget proposal. The former middle school teacher and union organizer is holding a budget roundtable discussion exclusively for Chicagoans ages 13 to 24. The July 25 event on the ninth floor of Harold Washington Library is an addition to the usual round of July budget engagement meetings.

Teaching students to be skilled citizens

Jack Schneider, Eric Soto-Shed, and Karalyn McGovern, Phi Delta Kappan

Civics has long been neglected in the preK-12 schools. Yet there is growing support for civics education, coming from a broad range of voices. In 2021, for instance, more than 300 experts from across the political spectrum released The Roadmap to Educating for American Democracy, which was swiftly endorsed by six former secretaries of education — Republicans and Democrats. And new civics requirements have been introduced by both Republicans and Democrats in states like Indiana and Massachusetts. A window of opportunity seemingly has opened. But an opportunity for what, exactly?

Southern California school board rejects curriculum that mentions Harvey Milk

Alicia Victoria Lozano, NBC News

A Southern California school board has become the latest proxy for culture wars brewing across the country after a conservative bloc voted to formally reject state-endorsed curriculum that would have mentioned gay rights figure Harvey Milk. On Tuesday, a heated Temecula Valley Unified School District board meeting dissolved into shouts and jeers as parents, teachers and community members confronted one another over a three-paragraph mention of Milk in supplemental materials for students in grades one through five. At least three people were ejected from the five-hour hearing and escorted outside by law enforcement officers. In the parking lot, stickers in support of the far-right Proud Boys group mysteriously appeared on cars.

Other News of Note

Young People in Nigeria Are Taking on Political Corruption and Police Brutality

Zainab Onuh-Yahaya, TeenVogue

Most people who voted for Peter Obi, Nigeria’s Labor Party presidential candidate in the country’s 2023 presidential election, can’t attest to knowing him personally. But Perpetual, who shares her hometown of Agulu in Anambra state with Obi, says she can. So in February, amid a crippling economic downturn and the inconvenience of cash scarcity that preceded the election, 23-year-old Perpetual made the trip from her current home in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, to Agulu, where she is registered as a voter. It was her first time exercising her civic right. But this was not about bringing her kinsman into power; for her, voting had become a matter of life and death. “I decided to vote because we needed change,” Perpetual, who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her anonymity, tells Teen Vogue. “This country is as good as… dead. It will kill us, too, if we don’t bring it back to life.”