Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

American Federation of Teachers will defend educators punished for teaching about racism and discrimination

Collin Binkley, Philadelphia Inquirer

One of the nation’s largest teachers unions on Tuesday vowed to defend members who are punished for teaching an “honest history” of the United States, a measure that’s intended to counter the wave of states seeking to limit classroom discussion on race and discrimination.

In a virtual address to members of the American Federation of Teachers, president Randi Weingarten said the union is preparing litigation and has a legal defense fund “ready to go.” She promised to fight “culture warriors” who attempt to limit lessons on racism and discrimination by labeling it as critical race theory. At least six states have passed new laws limiting how race can be taught in the classroom, and similar proposals are being considered in more than a dozen others.

California voters give schools and teachers top grades in year-end survey

John Fensterwald, Ed Source

espite perceptions of the public’s widespread unhappiness with the slow reopening of California’s schools last spring, most voters surveyed, including parents, gave the highest marks in a decade of polling to the state’s public schools in general and their schools in particular.

However, on most issues in the survey, Democrats and Republicans generally disagreed. One notable issue was whether schools should spend more time teaching about the causes and consequences of racism and inequality. At the same time, they also expressed worry about the effects of the pandemic on children and said they’d strongly support various measures to accelerate student learning, including hiring counselors and providing intensive tutoring and summer school.

Black Girls Matter [OppArt]

Isis Davis-Marks

Language, Culture, and Power

English-Learners May Need More Support This Fall. But That Doesn’t Mean They’re Behind

Ileana Najarro, Education Week

The country’s 5 million English-language learner-students—three-quarters of whom speak Spanish as their home language, federal data show—faced unique challenges during the periods of remote schooling last year. But, experts say, it’s important to remember being immersed in their families’ languages and cultures also offered some potential benefits for this group. COVID-19 had a disproportionate negative impact on the nation’s communities of color, including Hispanics, in terms of health and finances. And a federal government report from last year found that some English-learners had limited access to computers and the internet, complicating their remote learning experience. While learning through screens, these students often found themselves with less time for casual conversations with their teachers and peers, causing some to worry their English skills might regress.

Young, Bilingual, and Black

Ayanna Cooper, Language Magazine

Where can you find dual language English/Haitian Creole instruction for students in first and second grades? At Mattahunt’s Toussaint L’Ouverture Academy (TLA), a Boston public elementary school. Founded in 2017, TLA is the nation’s first early learning English–Haitian Creole dual language program. The U.S. Department of Education Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) lists Haitian Creole as the sixth most common language of K–12 English learners in the U.S. (U.S. Department of Education, 2019). After two decades of advocacy and planning by dedicated community members of Haitian descent, educators, politicians, and other stakeholders were overjoyed when the school finally enrolled its first class of students.

Anti-AAPI violence affects high school students

Rosa Caramazza, Elena Su, and Aryn Lee, The Sagamore

“Hate is a virus,” one poster said. “Today we mourn, tomorrow we act,” was written on another. Masses of students gathered in front of 115 Greenough on Mar. 26 after the school day and spilled onto Cypress Field. In the wake of a spike in violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) across the country, Brookline community members have been speaking up about discrimination against the AAPI community. Among those who attended the vigil was Alicia Hsu, a former Brookline teacher and longtime resident, who has been an active advocate for increased representation and discussion of Asian American and Pacific Islander issues. During her time in Brookline, she has experienced microaggressions from her fellow colleagues.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Drones, yoga, and math: Summer school looks different this year for Michigan students

Karen Dybis, Chalkbeat Detroit

After a challenging pandemic school year, some Michigan students are heading back to class for the summer. But it’s not your typical summer school program. Educators say that while students need summer classes that help offset pandemic-related learning losses, higher student failure rates, and concerns about mental health, it is also important that they have classes that create positive school-based experiences and rebuild their social and emotional well-being. “We know the only way to move them forward is to take care of the whole person,” said Donna Barash, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the West Bloomfield School District.

Pandemic yearbook: 9 students — in their own words — on life, learning and loss as the Coronavirus pushed into a second turbulent year

Andrew Brownstein, The 74

It was only Feb. 27, 2020 — a mere 17 months ago — that the first school in the United States closed due to COVID-19. Somehow it seems longer in pandemic time. For students, like everyone else, that temporal elasticity could be chalked up to a host of things, from the monotony of quarantine to isolation from family and friends to the mostly invisible barriers between the spaces where we worked, played and dreamed. In March 2020, The 74 launched “Pandemic Notebook,” an intimate series designed to capture, in their own words, how students are living through this strange period.

An Indianapolis tutoring program meets homeless students where they are

Aaricka Washington, Chalkbeat Indiana

Tutor Rita Novak remembers the time when she managed to connect with a child in a homeless shelter. The girl usually liked to dance and avoid schoolwork. But Novak talked patiently about the task, tweaked the assignment, and the child gradually started to come around. Novak thinks giving her attention and meeting her needs did the trick. “It makes you feel good when that connection does happen,” the 76-year-old retired teacher said. Novak is among scores of volunteers working with School on Wheels, an organization that brings tutors to unhoused students. After a year of working virtually with them, the group returned to schools and more recently to shelters, seeking to replicate that human connection that sparked Novak’s distracted student.

 

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Aspiring teachers get new help paying for college

Cory Turner, NPR

New rules kick in today that will help aspiring teachers pay for college and complete a years-long overhaul of the federal TEACH Grant program — from a bureaucratic bear trap that hobbled thousands of teachers with unfair student loan debts to a program that may actually make good on its foundational promise: to help K-12 educators pay for their own education in exchange for teaching a high-need subject, like math, for four years in a low-income community. “The changes announced today deliver much-needed improvements to the TEACH Grant,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. “Respecting and honoring teachers who serve students with the greatest needs also requires that we ensure these educators receive the support to which they are entitled from this important federal program without having to jump through unnecessary hoops.”

For Hispanic boys in Memphis, the pressure to work full-time comes with a cost: lower graduation rates

Ian Round, Chalkbeat Tennessee

When José Ayala was a student at Kingsbury High School in Memphis, many of his male friends would miss class to work, seeing a day’s pay as more valuable than a day of school. Eventually, some of them dropped out and took jobs, primarily in construction and roofing, he said. Quickly, they were making enough money to support their families — and much more than Ayala, who volunteered for a nonprofit organization during high school and graduated in 2018. “A lot of times we get access to larger amounts of money than usual high schoolers,” Ayala said of Hispanic boys. The lure of full-time jobs is one reason Hispanic boys in Memphis leave high school early and have historically had one of the lowest graduation rates in Shelby County Schools. Other factors include communication barriers for English language learners and the lack of Hispanic role models among teachers and school staff.

Pathway to jobs in education for refugee graduates under new UNHCR and Teach For All partnership

UNHRC, The UN Refugee Agency

UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the Teach For All global network are teaming up to support employment in education for refugee university graduates through a network of teaching fellowship programmes.  The partnership will support the inclusion of refugees in host communities. According to the World Bank, economic returns for college attendance are the highest in the educational system with an average 17 per cent increase in earnings per year of schooling. Under the partnership, graduates supported by UNHCR’s flagship higher education scholarship programme, DAFI – the Albert Einstein German Academic Refugee Initiative – will have a pathway to employment through a teaching and leadership development fellowship with Teach For All. “This exciting partnership with Teach for All will help refugee graduates to transition into the job market and fulfil their immense potential as active members of their host communities,” said Rebecca Telford, UNHCR’s Chief of Education.

 

 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The Damage of Mexico’s Pandemic School Closures Has Been Catastrophic

Alexandra Zapata Hojel, Slate

Soon before June 7, Mexico’s nationwide official school start date, Sonia received a message from the principal at her children’s elementary school in Mexico City: “Are you aware that the school, in terms of infrastructure, after 14 months of absence, requires thorough cleaning, pruning of overgrown plants, washing the water tank, fixing of the lighting and repainting?”

The letter went on to ask parents if they could donate money to buy supplies or help carry out the physical work. It was a painful request. Like millions of other families in Mexico, Sonia’s has lost most of their income as a result of the pandemic. Paying the monthly internet bill so her two young children are able to access virtual classes has been a struggle. When she and her sister-in-law called to ask why the government wasn’t doing the work to get the school ready for classes, they quickly realized that the principal was even more frustrated than they were. She told Sonia and her sister-in-law that a team from the Ministry of Education had come to the school and filled out a document saying that they had cleaned and fixed up the school even though they had done nothing more than walk through the patio for a couple of minutes. “We are on our own,” the principal said to them.

LA has more diversity but is still segregated. Could that mean more uprisings? [Audio]

Larry Perel, KCRW

A staggering 81% of metropolitan regions across the nation have become more racially segregated since the 1990s, according to findings from UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute. The Roots of Structural Racism Project found that while California is diverse, racial residential segregation has changed little in the Golden State, especially in some Southern California cities. Stephen Menendian, the study’s lead author, says the United States has transformed since the 1960s. “We’ve always been a multiracial country. But for most of the 20th century, we were most regarded as a primarily Black and white country.” He explains that duality changed with the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which brought in more Asian and Hispanic Americans to the West Coast and the Southwest. In California’s Bay Area, Asians are on track to be the largest plurality within a few decades.

Understanding democratic education policy queerly: toward a queer democratic framework

Bethy Leonardi, Michele S. Moses, Education Policy Analysis Archives

The aim of this paper is to bring together concepts and commitments from both liberal and queer theories with the purpose of designing an integrated framework for equity-focused education policy analysis and implementation. In essence, we aim to build a conceptual bridge between queer and liberal democratic theories and to develop what we call a “queer democratic framework” for policy analysis and implementation. We use the case of the Fair Accurate Inclusive and Respectful Education Act (FAIR) throughout this paper as an exemplar of how queer policy analysis and implementation change the terms of the policy discussion. We argue that as an example of a policy that comes out of liberal democratic theory, FAIR can only go so far. It is symbolic and positive, but cannot reach emancipatory aims in practice without queer analysis and implementation.

Democracy and the Public Interest

How the pandemic helped fuel the private school choice movement

Evie Blad, Education Week

The fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic provided state lawmakers with a new talking point this year as they pushed public programs to send students to private schools. In statehouses around the country, advocates for private school choice pointed to frustrations with school closures and remote-learning struggles as they touted vouchers, tax-credit scholarships, and education savings accounts. And they saw a wave of success: Six states had enacted new programs by July 1, and a bill to create a new program in Missouri awaited Gov. Mike Parson’s signature. Governors also approved expansions of 14 existing voucher and tax-credit scholarship programs by loosening eligibility restrictions or expanding their budgets.

QAnon’s new ‘plan’? Run for school board

Ben Collins, NBC News

Drake Wuertz came to the school board meeting in Seminole County, Florida, in late June with a message familiar to those who had heard him speak at previous meetings: America’s children are at risk of systemic abuse. And the way to stop it is to run for local office. “They’re being carried away through our education system, through the woke ideology that’s infiltrated professional sports, through the sexual grooming and pedophilia that’s apparent in the entertainment industry,” Wuertz, 36, said in a video of the Seminole County School Board meeting posted by the district’s YouTube account. “We need to run for precinct committees, we need to run for City Council, run for school board and primary the RINOs in this room,” he said, using an acronym for Republicans in Name Only.

Shouting matches, arrests and fed up parents: How school board meetings became ground zero in politics

Ryan Miller, USA Today

When Barb Mozdzen opened last month’s school board meeting in Chandler, Arizona, for public comment, she had a caveat. While many attendees indicated they were at the meeting to discuss “critical race theory,” the topic was not actually on the agenda that day.

In fact, critical race theory wasn’t being taught in Chandler’s schools, and neither the board nor administration had discussed the possibility of implementing it into the curriculum, said Mozdzen, the board president. In the following hour, an attendee said he saw no distinction between critical race theory and equity trainings. Conservative activist Charlie Kirk said the board was “stomping on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.” And, outside, the chair of the right-wing Patriot Party of Arizona, Steve Daniels, was arrested.

 

Other News of Note

Why We Need the Utopian Imagination: Jeet Heer; plus George Sanchez on LA’s Boyle Heights [Audio]

Jon Wiener, Start Making Sense–The Nation

“Utopian” has been a term of abuse in politics for a long time now, synonymous with “irrational” and “impossible.” Instead, we are told, we should focus on realistic plans to improve things. But The Nation is publishing a special issue in defense of utopia. Jeet Heer explains how the dreams of a good society keep hope alive and expose the inadequacy of present structures. Also: the Los Angeles neighborhood of Boyle Heights is known today as the heartland of Chicano culture. Historian George Sanchez explains how its multicultural, interracial past made it a bastion of progressive democracy. His new book is Boyle Heights.