Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Moms for Liberty hears from GOP contenders on conservative education

David Jackson, USA TODAY

The rising political group Moms For Liberty prepared to wrap up its national summit Saturday by hearing from long-shot Republican presidential candidates and preparing to be active during the 2024 campaign. The relatively new organization, founded in early 2021, elevated its profile this weekend by attracting 2024 Republican frontrunner Donald Trump and big-name GOP challengers Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley. Moms For Liberty also heard Saturday from Republican candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, who touted his speech by tweeting that “parents know what is best for their kids, not the government.” The Southern Poverty Legal Center has described Moms For Liberty as anti-government extremists who “use their multiple social media platforms to target teachers and school officials” and “spread hateful imagery and rhetoric against the LGBTQ community.”

Teachers Are Facing an ‘Intentional Toxic Disrespect,’ Secretary Cardona Says

Madeline Will, Education Week

Teachers should be thanked for their hard work throughout the pandemic—but instead they’re facing an “onslaught of disrespect,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona told union delegates in a rousing speech July 3. “You went from the pandemic to persecution,” Cardona told educators at the National Education Association’s annual representative assembly here. “In some parts of this country, they’ve developed an intentional, toxic disrespect against teachers in public schools.”

It’s Getting Hard to Stage a School Play Without Political Drama

Michael Paulson, New York Times

Stevie Ray Dallimore, an actor and teacher, had been running the theater program for a private boys’ school in Chattanooga for a decade, but he never faced a school year like this one. A proposed production of “She Kills Monsters” at a neighboring girls’ school that would have included his students was rejected for gay content, he said. A “Shakespeare in Love” at the girls’ school that would have featured his boys was rejected because of cross-dressing. His school’s production of “Three Sisters,” the Chekhov classic, was rejected because it deals with adultery and there were concerns that some boys might play women, as they had in the past, he said. School plays — long an important element of arts education and a formative experience for creative adolescents — have become the latest battleground at a moment when America’s political and cultural divisions have led to a spike in book bans, conflicts over how race and sexuality are taught in schools, and efforts by some politicians to restrict drag performances and transgender health care for children and teenagers.

Language, Culture, and Power

Counting in Chinese [AUDIO]

Andrea Long Chu, The Dig

Writer and critic Andrea Long Chu wanted to ask her family one simple question.

How home languages enhanced preschool curriculum in Fresno [AUDIO]

Education Beat Podcast

California State Preschools are asking new questions of families about the languages their children speak at home. Fresno Unified has been doing this kind of family interview for almost a decade. Preschool teachers use the information to help plan curriculum and incorporate songs and books in children’s home languages, including Spanish and Hmong. How does including home languages enrich preschool classrooms and help children become bilingual?

Here’s what schools should know about the growing CROWN Act

Anna Merod, K-12 Dive

The movement to prohibit race discrimination based on hair texture and hair type in schools and workplaces is gaining traction across the nation, with newly signed laws in Michigan and Texas bringing to 23 the number of states that have adopted versions of the CROWN Act. While broader federal protections already prohibit sex- and race-based discrimination, the CROWN Act provides another tool to fight bias, said Patricia Okonta, assistant counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is advocating — alongside the CROWN Coalition — for CROWN acts in all 50 states.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

From air quality to elephants, how teachers in New Jersey are personalizing climate change education [AUDIO]

Here & Now, WBUR

Teachers soaking up their well-deserved summer breaks are already daydreaming about how they’ll inspire their next class of students on a tough subject: climate change. New Jersey is the first state to mandate all of its public schools, starting in kindergarten, to incorporate lessons about climate change into the curriculum. The standards first went into effect last fall.

‘It awakened a part of us’: How NYC students are turning the trauma of gun violence into action

Julian Shen-Berro, Chalkbeat NY

Leslie R., a recent Brooklyn high school graduate, still thinks about the February afternoon that three people were shot outside her campus. She watched police gather at the scene from a window inside the Williamsburg Charter High School. Her brother, a ninth grader with no cellphone, had already left the building. She had no way to ensure he was safe. “You shouldn’t have to worry about that,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to worry about somebody being shot, or somebody dying.” Students and educators at the school continue to reel from that day, when violence arrived at their doorstep. A teenager, who didn’t attend the school, allegedly shot two students and a staff member. All three of the shooting victims survived. But the trauma of the incident has lingered among members of the school community.

The Pandemic Has Faded From View. But Many Educators Still Have Long COVID

Mark Lieberman, Education Week

More than three years after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down schools, one in 20 K-12 educators believe they have long COVID. Another 14 percent think or know they previously had it but eventually recovered. These figures, drawn from a nationally representative survey conducted from May 31 to June 9 by the EdWeek Research Center, illustrate the toll of a highly variable and unpredictable disease that’s still mysterious to researchers and portions of the general public.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

California Child Care Providers Secure Largest Pay Increase in State History

Karen D’Souza, KQED

California’s struggling child care providers will be getting the largest pay increase in state history as well as an ongoing overhaul of the reimbursement rate under the tentative agreement hammered out Friday evening between the state and Child Care Providers United, a union that represents 40,000 home child care providers across the state. “Today child care providers have made history by standing together, strong and united, to demand the pay we are worth and the quality child care California’s children deserve,” said Nancy Harvey, an Oakland child care provider and member of the CCPU bargaining team in a release. “We forged an agreement through 2025 that will deliver the largest increase in pay in the history of the state and set us on the path to finally be reimbursed for the full cost of providing care.”

Why Congress should pay grandma to mind the kids

Alyssa Rosenberg, Washington Post

If child care ever did get the federal investment it so desperately needs, what should the government pay for? Broadly, parents need greater access to more affordable child care. But they need it at different hours, and they’d like it to come in a variety of forms and to pay a range of people to do the work. To meet all those needs, policymakers have to help grow the range of child-care options and trust parents to make the best choices for their families. Most child care is geared toward parents who work from about 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays only. For parents who work evenings, nights or weekends, there are services at just 8 percent of traditional day-care centers and 34 percent of home day cares, as Linda Smith and Victoria Owens note in a May report from the Bipartisan Policy Center. A mere 2 percent of centers and 16 percent of home day cares are open between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Activists spurred by affirmative action ruling challenge legacy admissions at Harvard

Colin Binkley, AP News

A civil rights group is challenging legacy admissions at Harvard University, saying the practice discriminates against students of color by giving an unfair boost to the mostly white children of alumni. The practice of giving priority to the children of alumni has faced growing pushback in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action in higher education. The NAACP added its weight behind the effort on Monday, asking more than 1,500 colleges and universities to even the playing field in admissions, including by ending legacy admissions. The civil rights complaint was filed Monday by Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit based in Boston, on behalf of Black and Latino community groups in New England, alleging that Harvard’s admissions system violates the Civil Rights Act.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The Biden Administration Begins Student Debt Relief Plan B

David Dayen, The American Prospect

“Today’s decision has closed one path. Now we’re going to pursue another.” With that, President Biden committed his administration to a second option for canceling student debt, just hours after the first one was struck down by the Supreme Court. Cynics are already grumbling that the goal is less to cancel student debt than to appear to be fighting for it. Chief Justice John Roberts and his colleagues were determined enough to nullify the first student debt relief program based on a non-injury by an unwilling plaintiff. Why would a second bite at the apple go any better? In any case, the timeline of the president’s path would likely put an ultimate reckoning out past the 2024 election. Still, supporters of this Plan B can point to what tripped up the first effort at debt relief, and how a new process could fix those missteps in a way that would make it harder for the Court to work its will. The first thing to be said is that this is not Plan B as much as it is Plan A.

#BlackLivesMatter Turns 10

Samuel Bestvater, Risa Gelles-Watnick, Meltem Odabaş, Monica Anderson And Aaron Smith, Pew Research

In July 2013, activists first used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to spark conversation about racism, violence and the criminal justice system following George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. Ten years later, Black Lives Matter stands as a model of a new generation of social movements intrinsically linked to social media. The enduring power of the hashtag itself is clear: More than 44 million #BlackLivesMatter tweets from nearly 10 million distinct users currently exist on Twitter today, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of publicly available tweets from July 2013 through March 2023.

GOP Education Censorship Laws Intensify Economic Inequality

Adewale A. Maye And Jennifer Sherer, LA Progressive

In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests calling for justice following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, right-wing backlash has taken concrete form in highly coordinated campaigns against books, programs, or curricular resources designed to analyze and address systemic racism, sexism, and homophobia. Over the past two years in state legislatures across the United States, campaigns targeting a caricatured version of “critical race theory” (CRT) have evolved into intertwined attacks on truth itself and the workplace rights of teachers, librarians, and other educators.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Right-wing media push for privatization and school choice in response to SCOTUS affirmative action decision

Audrey Mccabe, Media Matters

Right-wing media are using the end of affirmative action to call for measures that would chip away at America’s public school system.  On June 29, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to end race-conscious admissions programs at colleges and universities. Right-wing figures and outlets largely celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision, claiming that the policy was discriminatory against white and Asian applicants. The end of affirmative action falls in line with the right’s efforts to dismantle the American public school system, including the push to defund government education and instead invest in private school vouchers in their crusade against “woke” public school curriculums. The group of policies referred to by the right as “school choice” not only fails to improve educational outcomes — it’s also a policy that, as writer Wajahat Ali explains, is “all about entrenching right-wing power, control, and Christian nationalism.”

Why Red States Are Blocking New School Voucher Programs

Glenn Daigon, The Progressive

Idaho, Virginia, Texas, Kentucky, and Georgia. What do the latter red and purple states have in common? All but one of them are governed by very conservative Republican governors. All but two voted for Trump by solid margins in 2020, and all of them have Republican majorities in at least one of their legislative chambers. In 2023, the five states were also a major testing ground where well-funded and powerful interest groups sought to expand existing school voucher programs. In each case, legislators rejected voucher expansion proposals, often by wide margins.

These bills focused on traditional voucher programs, which are state-funded scholarships that help pay for students to attend private schools, as well as the increasingly popular Education Saving Accounts, which establish savings accounts from taxpayers’ money and allow families to use the funds to pay for educational expenses, including private school tuition. Some of these voucher programs are narrowly focused on a small segment of students; others are more universal.

The right-wing scheme to upend public education — for $125 per hour

Judd Legum and Tesnim Zekeria, Popular Information

On June 20, educational consultant Jordan Adams delivered a much-anticipated presentation to the Pennridge School Board, revealing his recommended changes to the Eastern Pennsylvania school district’s social studies curriculum. Adams, the founder of Vermilion Education, appeared via Zoom. The curriculum experts who work for the district recommended that first grade social studies focus on “Rules and Responsibilities,” “Geography,” and “Important People and Places.” Adams instead proposed that 6- and 7-year-olds learn “American History: 1492-1787” and “World History: Ancient Near East.”

Other News of Note

Youth Disability Activist Urges RA Delegates to Stand Up to Discrimination [Video]

Cindy Long, NEA Today

A superhero spoke today at the 2023 NEA Representative Assembly. Her name is Helena Donato-Sapp, a youth activist for disability rights and inclusion. She is a 14-year-old Black girl who was born with serious medical issues that caused learning disabilities she will carry throughout her life. “But, let me be very clear here, these disabilities are only one part of my many identities,” she said. “I am Black. I am dark-skinned Black. I am a Black girl. I am adopted. I have gay fathers. We are a multiracial family. One of my gay dads is an immigrant. The other gay dad was raised in poverty. I am not just one thing. I am many things, and these multiple intersectional identities shape my world.”  Her identities give her power, she said, but they also “rain down bias and discrimination on me.”