Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

How States Are Testing the Church-State Divide in Public Schools

Evie Blad, Education Week

Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters has ordered educators in his state to teach the Bible, a move that adds to a list of recent actions by state leaders who are testing the limits of the separation of church and state in public schools. Walters, who’s built a national profile as an outspoken critic of “woke indoctrination,” sent a June 27 memo to the state’s district superintendents directing them to incorporate the Bible into lessons for 5th through 12th grades as “one of the most historically significant books and a cornerstone of Western civilization.” “This is not merely an educational directive but a crucial step in ensuring our students grasp the core values and historical context of our country,” Walters wrote, later adding that “immediate and strict compliance is expected.”

Chaplains, communism, child labor: Florida education laws that take effect July 1

Jay Waagmeester, Florida Phoenix

Despite queasiness on this score in other GOP-controlled states, a Florida law implementing volunteer chaplains in schools will take effect Monday. The law has generated concern regarding the qualifications required of chaplains and separation of church and state. Volunteer chaplains must pass a background check — the law specifies no other qualifications. Applicants must submit their name and religious affiliation to the school for public disclosure. Members of the Satanic Temple have indicated they would participate in the program, the prospect of which stalled the program in some states but not Florida.

Legislating inequality: The Christian Confederate roots of Project 2025

Bruce Gourley, Church and State Magazine

“[I]nvoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God,” the Constitution of the Confederate States of America composed by southern slaveholders in 1861 sought to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” The authors of Project 2025, the latest playbook for restructuring the federal government in order to accomplish the policy goals of Christian Nationalists, similarly declare their manifesto will “decide America’s future” by securing their “God-given individual rights to live freely” and exercise dominion over others. Many Confederate states issued formal statements explaining slaveowners’ decision to secede from the United States of America, a decision openly rooted in a cultural construct of white supremacy and Black slavery.

Language, Culture, and Power

The Māori saved their language from extinction. Here’s how.

Aroha Awarau, National Geographic

Five years ago, in the heart of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation, along the Canadian St. Lawrence River across from Montréal, Kanen’tó:kon Hemlock and Ieronhienhá:wi Tatum McComber pondered a question posed by their friend and mentor, Māori language advocate Sir Tīmoti Kāretu. Kanien’kéha, the Mohawk language, is one of the world’s many endangered Indigenous languages. Over the past two decades, McComber (Bear Clan) and Hemlock (Bear Clan) have been part of a community effort to operate an immersive language school, which surrounds Mohawk students with fluent language speakers. As she put together plans for the school at the turn of the 21st century, McComber looked around the world for inspiration and forged relationships with others who have successfully rekindled their languages.

An African American studies class is too ‘divisive’ for one Maryland school district

Kristen Griffith, Baltimore Banner

The Harford County school board rejected the latest version of the advanced placement elective course. (Nick Hunt/Getty Images for MVAAFF) The nearly 100 Harford County Public School students who signed up to take the Advanced Placement African American Studies next school year will have to find a new class. The latest version of the college prep course piloted at three Harford high schools was rejected by the school board last week in 5-4 vote, with some members calling it divisive, with a progressive agenda and too much focus on racism. The curriculum, designed by a national nonprofit called the College Board, will be widely available for the first time this fall, but not in Harford County. “The topics are heavily politically oriented and perpetuate the message of oppressed versus oppressor,” Terri Kocher, a board member who voted against the class, said at the meeting. “I think we’re missing an opportunity to present positive messages of unity and great American contributions.”

National report highlights severe cost of inadequate juvenile justice system

Gwenette Writer Sinclair, Youth Today

Fight Crime: Invest in Kids released their report “Costly, Punitive Juvenile Justice Approaches Undermine Healthy Adolescent Development,” during a Zoom briefing that brought together experts to discuss the urgent need for reform in the juvenile justice system. One key highlight: Rather than helping to fix juvenile crime in America, our current justice system often makes it worse. The report shows that our juvenile justice system often fails to consider the realities of adolescent development. Adolescents, unlike adults, are still maturing cognitively, meaning they lack the capacity to effectively self-regulate, plan for the future, or control impulses.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

How Education Systems Respond to Extreme Climate and Environmental Events

Radhika Nagesh , Susannah Hares and Luciana Leite, Center for Global Development

South Asia has experienced unprecedented heatwaves this year, with temperatures soaring well above the usual seasonal highs, prompting school closures across the region. These incidents are emblematic of a growing global trend: educational institutions are having to adapt to the increasing frequency and intensity of climate and environmental crises. Nearly a billion children live in countries highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Environmental shocks and long-term climate shifts impact children’s wellbeing, yet our understanding of how education systems interact with these events is limited. South Asia in particular is susceptible to such shocks, and governments frequently mandate school closures in response to extreme heat and inclement weather. In this blog we examine past trends of educational responses to such events in the region.

We can do more to teach about complexity and coexistence

Julie Flapan, Ed Source

Sitting in the rear-facing “way back seat” of my family’s station wagon in 1979, we were counting trees tied with yellow ribbons to memorialize 55 Americans held hostage in Iran. As kids, we didn’t understand the conflict, but one thing was clear: Securing the hostages’ freedom was a collective national obsession. Much has changed about the way we express our democratic values in the U.S. and how we think about innocent hostages held today in Gaza. My nostalgia makes me wonder how young people make sense of our current political divisions, including at UCLA.

Infinite Aid: How to be an Ally to the Autistic Community

Zipporah “Zipp” Pruitt, YRMedia

It is important to talk about ways to be an ally to peers diagnosed with autism. Neurotypical people are those who do not have autism or other neurologically atypical patterns of thought or behavior, as defined by Oxford Languages. Neurodivergent people are those who have autism or other mental differences. There has been a recent focus, for better or worse, on the representation of autism, but it has been largely coming from the viewpoint of neurotypical people, causing limited and or problematic depictions of autism in the media. Autistic people have been going to social media to make their voices heard and thanks to that, two autistic individuals have decided to go on the record to say how neurotypical people and neurodivergent people can become better allies.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Disrupting Dominant Research Paradigms: A Collective Journey to Chicana/Latina Feminista Methodologies [Video]

Dolores Delgado Bernal, AERA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.

5 ways anti-diversity laws affect LGBTQ+ people and research in higher ed

Abbie E. Goldberg, The Conversation

Over the past year, nine states have banned diversity, equity and inclusion policies and programs in higher education. More than 20 others have similar legislation in the works. News accounts often focus on job cuts that follow the enactment of these measures in places such as Texas and Florida. But that doesn’t scratch the surface of the many ways these laws are changing academia. My new study with the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examines one segment of academia, LGBTQ+ faculty, and finds many are distressed, discouraged and scared by the anti-DEI campaign.

Tears and fears: University of Utah students say goodbye to cultural centers closed under anti-DEI law

Courtney Tanner, Salt Lake Tribune

Kailah Figueroa doesn’t know what she’ll do now without the student equity center she had found a home in as a freshman. It was there that she could get tutoring and print off the papers she needed to turn in for class. It was a space she felt comfortable to hang out, waiting for her bus to head home to Glendale on the weekends. A place where she saw other students who looked like her, who are also Native, where she knew she could let go and be herself without judgment or stupid questions about teepees. And it was the spot she always knew she could find her twin brother, napping on a bean bag chair in the back.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The Lives of Seven Children Tell the Story of UK Inequality

Danny Dorling, Jacobin

One way to try to understand the health and priorities of a state is to look at how its children are treated. In the fall of 2018, there were about fourteen million children in the UK. If you divide those fourteen million into seven groups, ranging from the poorest to the richest families, and select the middle child from each group of two million, you have seven representative children by income. By chance, these seven children might also reflect the distribution of other aspects of life in the UK — through their ethnicity, for example, the range of geographical areas they have grown up in, or whether they live with one parent or two (or very occasionally none). Few British families with young children have much wealth, making income the best measure to differentiate their circumstances. In the UK, income largely determines children’s life chances. Seven is the minimum needed to represent the range.

Why educators must build data-centered practices during times of DEI pushback in schools

H. Richard Milner IV, Lisa Bass and Dana Thompson-Dorsey, The Tennessean

We work as university professors at three institutions in the South. We develop instruments to measure educators’ knowledge, beliefs, and mindsets about meeting complex and intricate needs of an increasingly diverse student population. Specifically, our project aims to develop tools to study educators’ knowledge and values toward practices consistent with what a robust body of research literature tells us about ways to ensure all students have a fighting chance of academic and related success, both inside and outside of education. Indeed, student demographics in U.S. schools are becoming increasingly diverse, and rather than expecting educators to disregard practices that ensure students’ humanity and dignity in education, research is clear that educators need to intensify their commitment to educational equity, not decrease it.

Philly students rally for more school funding at state capitol as budget debate grinds on

Azia Ross, Chalkbeat

Students from 17 Philadelphia high schools rallied at the state capitol in Harrisburg last week to demand that lawmakers provide adequate support to their underfunded public schools. The roughly 40 students who participated in the rally were part of a Youth Leadership Fellowship at PhillyBOLT — which stands for Building Our Lives Together — to learn how to create change in their communities through field trips and curriculum. They also went on a similar trip to the city in May to stress the importance of school funding. “Schools all over the city don’t have adequate central air systems; they have worn down books and school supplies, and the buildings are literally collapsing at the seams,” said Mecca Patterson-Guridy, who spoke at the rally about her experiences as a coach with PhillyBOLT.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Can a civics teacher persuade her students to believe in democracy?

Greg Jaffe, Washington Post

Shannon Salter checked the results of an online poll that she gave each year to her high school civics students. One of the questions asked whether they would support lowering the voting age to 16. “Everyone said no,” Salter told her students in late April. “That has never happened before. So, I am dying to dig into why.” Salter, a 53-year-old White woman, stood at the front of the classroom. Her students, Black and Hispanic teenagers drawn from Allentown’s working-class neighborhoods, were arrayed around her. All were seniors. Most were weighing whether they will become first-time voters in the fall when the presidential election could come down to their state, Pennsylvania.

Rural Republicans are Fighting to Save their Public Schools

Alec MacGillis, The Atlantic

Arrive an hour south of Nashville into the rolling countryside of Marshall County, Tennessee—past horse farms, mobile homes, and McMansions—and you will arrive in Chapel Hill, population 1,796. It’s the birthplace of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan. And it’s the home of Todd Warner, one of the most unlikely and important defenders of America’s besieged public schools. Warner is the gregarious 53-year-old owner of PCS of TN, a 30-person company that does site grading for shopping centers and other construction projects. The second-term Republican state representative “absolutely” supports Donald Trump, who won Marshall County by 50 points in 2020. Warner likes to talk of the threats posed by culture-war bogeymen, such as critical race theory; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and Sharia law. And yet, one May afternoon in his office, under a TV playing Fox News and a mounted buck that he’d bagged in Alabama, he told me about his effort to halt Republican Governor Bill Lee’s push for private-school vouchers in Tennessee.

Debunking the School Choice Movement’s Top Evangelist

Peter Greene, The Progressive

Corey DeAngelis is an influential, if not the most influential, voice in the rightwing campaign to demonize public schools and privatize public education. The guy’s résumé hits all the bases in the libertarian gameplan. After earning a doctorate at the University of Arkansas’s education reform program (funded by the pro-school choice Walton family), DeAngelis helped found the Education Freedom Institute, became a senior fellow at the Reason Foundation, worked as an adjunct scholar at the CATO Institute, took up an appointment as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and was hired on as a senior fellow at Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children.He still holds all of those jobs, but his more common title is “school choice evangelist.” As the recent school voucher wave has surged in state after state, DeAngelis has been there to spread the word. While on tour in support of his new book, he distills the current pro-voucher argument.

Other News of Note

Frederick Douglass: “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” [Video]

Zinn Education Project

In 1852, abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivered his speech “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” on July 5 at an event commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Rochester, New York. Douglass’ words resonate today. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.