6.12.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Local control, national conflict: School boards in the COVID-19 and culture war era

Jon Valant, Ariell Bertrand, Rachel M. Perera, and Nicolas Zerbino, Brookings

On Sept. 29, 2021, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) sent a letter to President Biden warning of a “growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation” targeting local school board members. The letter followed a wave of raucous meetings in which conservative protesters confronted board members over their response to the COVID-19 pandemic and “culture-war” issues involving race, gender, and sexuality. NSBA described these confrontations as tantamount to acts of domestic terrorism. It called for a response from several federal agencies—including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security—as well as local and state officials.

Teacher stress declines, but still higher than other working adults

Diana Lambert, EdSource

More than half of K-12 public school teachers who took part in the 2026 State of the American Teacher Survey reported experiencing frequent job-related stress, down from 62% the year before. Stress is much lower among similar working adults, with about 34% reporting frequent job-related stress, according to the report. “Teacher well-being has leveled off since the worst of the pandemic and improved slightly this year, but teachers still fare worse than other college-educated working adults,” said Elizabeth D. Steiner, a RAND senior policy researcher and lead author of the report. “For many teachers, high stress and financial strain remain a persistent part of the job.” Female teachers are more likely to report high levels of stress than their male counterparts. This year, 59% of female teachers and 44% of male teachers reported frequent high levels of job-related stress.

Hacking Canvas; or Reimagining Technology in Education [Audio]

Claire Bond Potter, FreshEd

Today we unpack the massive global hack of the Canvas Learning Management System in May 2026 that impacted some 9000 education institutions and stole an estimated 275 million users’ data. To discuss this event and its implications with me is Claire Bond Potter. Claire Bond Potter is Professor of History emeritus at The New School for Social Research, author of the Political Junkie Substack, and creator of Why Now?, a political-history podcast.

Language, Culture, and Power

The Minneapolis immigration crackdown ended months ago. For children, trauma remains

Moriah Balingit and Andy Steiner, Los Angeles Times

The little girl approached the therapy dog outside the school library, reaching out to touch her fluffy blond coat. Social worker Nicole Herje leaned in. “How does it feel when you pet Sage?” Herje said. “I like it,” the girl said. “In Ecuador, I had a dog.” A few months earlier, this girl and many of her classmates at Valley View Elementary were staying off the streets to avoid the immigration officers flooding their suburban Minneapolis community. Attendance plummeted as families kept their kids from school during the Trump administration’s enforcement surge. Sage the goldendoodle is not just a cute diversion. She’s part of a broader strategy to address the psychological wounds of children who witnessed arrests, lost relatives to deportation or endured anxious weeks indoors. At least four students at the school were detained and sent hundreds of miles away to a Texas family detention center.

Birthright Citizenship Existed Before the Fourteenth Amendment

Van Gosse, History News Network

Within the next few weeks, the Supreme Court will rule on the Trump administration’s argument that the Fourteenth Amendment’s opening sentence — “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” — only applied to formerly enslaved persons and their children. This is self-evidently a spurious claim, but the arguments that countered it, defending the Fourteenth Amendment as a new universal right in 1868, miss some crucial history: free Black people had enjoyed birthright citizenship in much of the United States since its founding. The Fourteenth Amendment’s explicit purpose was to extend the birthright principle into a uniform national citizenship, and the men arguing for it built upon a long tradition in doing so.

Open Letter to UCLA Chancellor Julio Frenk

UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Arab, & Anti-Muslim Racism.

Dear Chancellor Frenk: Following your announcement on May 14, 2026, “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism Publishes Roadmap to Fight Discrimination,” we write to remind you that your continuing silence on anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism at UCLA is highly consequential and contributes to intensifying racism and violence against Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and their allies, including Jews, on our campus. As our letters and reports show, we have tried for the past three years to bring documentary evidence of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism to the attention of the chancellor’s office. We have produced three substantive reports and sought often during the past three years to communicate the climate of entrenched and institutionalized anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Muslim racism at UCLA, to no avail. 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

These teens have the weight of the world on their shoulders. Mental health is taking a nosedive

Anissa Durham, CalMatters

Elias Avalos felt like he was running in circles during his junior year of high school, losing motivation, and burning out. He juggled four AP classes and felt the pressure of being the child of Salvadoran immigrants. “I’ve been dealing with feelings of burnout and unbelonging for a while,” the now 17-year-old senior says. “I think how I really ground myself when I feel like that is through skateboarding. It’s a hobby that dissociates from any work I have so that I can de-stress.” He’s one of a growing number of Black and Latino boys who are left to manage their mental health on their own. In the 2026 Children Now report scorecard, 94% of the state’s youth ages 14-25 report mental health concerns in an average month, with stress and anxiety the most commonly reported concerns. 

A Brief But Spectacular Take on Changing the Lineup [Video]

Mason Thomas, PBS Newshour

Playing sports teaches more than just the game, it helps kids build confidence and navigate challenges both on and off the field. Mason Thomas brings that philosophy to Harlem Lacrosse in Compton, California, where he mentors students on and off the field. He shares his Brief But Spectacular take on changing the lineup in lacrosse.

The first school year under a Texas law targeting LGBTQ+ students

Bekah McNeel, The 19th

Adrian Moore was sharing a blanket with his friends, watching the sun come up over Morton Ranch High School before the first day of his senior year. Parents and teachers milled among the teenagers, overseeing the “Senior Sunrise” tradition to kick off the semester. The principal approached Adrian’s mom, Julie Johnson, looking pained. She told Johnson that due to a recent change to Texas law, this year teachers and staff would be required to call her son by the name on his birth certificate — a name he had never used in his entire time in Katy Independent School District. The hope and promise represented by the Senior Sunrise event went cold, as Adrian and his friends wondered what lay ahead. They’d heard about a new “anti-DEI” law when it passed.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

It’s a high-demand job with lots of openings. How LAUSD trains adults for a role in child care

Kate Sequeira, Los Angeles Times

An experiment involving preschool children is unfolding in South Los Angeles, one that aims to solve a persistent problem in the region’s stressed day-care industry: the lack of workers. In a partnership between a Los Angeles Unified adult school and an early education center — which happen to share a campus — adult students receive tuition-free job training plus convenient access to the field work hours they need to earn their child development assistant permit. “We know that there’s a big need in that space, and that many of our adult education students have this interest and these competencies,” said LAUSD board member Kelly Gonez. “It’s really about creating a pathway that’s going to help them meet the requirements and be able to enter the field.”

Trump officials went after dozens of colleges. Now they’re rewriting the rules for all of academia

Collin Binkley, AP News

A year ago, the White House was unleashing a blitz on higher education. At one campus after another, Trump officials opened investigations and cut federal funding unless schools fell in line with the Republican president’s political agenda. Now, after a campaign that put dozens of universities under investigation, President Donald Trump’s administration is taking a wider approach, moving to rewrite the federal rules that govern all of higher education. Demands that were being pressed on individual schools are being written into the fine print for thousands of U.S. universities. “We’re coming over the higher education system and course correcting,” Nicholas Kent, undersecretary for the Education Department, said in an Associated Press interview. Unlike investigations that target individual campuses, he said the new tactic has power “to affect 6,000 institutions.”

Five Big Changes Coming to Higher Education This Summer

Meredith Kolodner, Matt Krupnick, and Jon Marcus, Washington Monthly

Since the start of President Donald Trump’s second term, the White House and Congress have worked aggressively to overhaul federal student financial aid. On July 1, many of those efforts will come to fruition. Student borrowers will begin to see different options for loan repayments and forgiveness, while current students will face new limits on how much they can borrow in the first place. Low-income people will have more funding available to pursue career and technical training. These moves have cheerleaders, critics, and skeptics. The Hechinger Report checked in with experts around the country to find out what they’re wondering and watching for as it all unfolds. 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Investing in Care: A Public-Private Model for Youth Opportunity

Colin Greer and Reynard Loki, CounterPunch

If we are to understand the conditions facing vulnerable children, we have to begin with a difficult truth: poverty remains the central force shaping their lives. It is not the only factor, but it is the most consistent one—structuring access to health, education, safety, and opportunity from the earliest years onward. Children, by definition, are dependent. Their well-being is tied to the systems that surround them—family, school, community, and public institutions. When those systems are strained by poverty, the effects are not marginal. They are often paralyzing. Barriers to opportunity—whether in the form of underfunded schools, unstable housing, environmental hazards, food insecurity, or lack of healthcare—are not experienced as abstract policy failures. They are lived constraints that narrow what a child can imagine for their future.

As schools close nationwide, Black students bear the greatest burden

Megan Kuhfeld and Ayesha Hashim, The Hill

As school districts nationwide confront declining student enrollment, reduced funding, expiring pandemic relief funding and budget shortfalls, conversations about school closures and so-called rightsizing are intensifying. From large urban systems to smaller districts, leaders are under pressure to consolidate and reduce costs while still accelerating academic recovery for students.

Amid these difficult financial decisions, one reality is overlooked: School closures rarely affect all communities equally. Our research shows that school closures disproportionately affect Black students and those from low-income communities — two groups that already face some of the greatest educational challenges in the wake of the pandemic.

Screens are leaving schools fast, though some students with disabilities rely on them [Audio]

Jonaki Mehta, All Things Considered

Ninth grader Soraya Martin is a bubbly, social teenager who recently found a new passion. “I’m a very creative writer, I love to write stories for fun,” she says. Mary Acebu, a Filipino woman wearing all black with a flowered vest and knitted beret, leans over a desk to help a student at her desk. The student has long brown hair in a ponytail and a gray sweatshirt. Stories come naturally to Soraya, but reading and writing don’t. That’s because she has dyslexia. “Academically, school has always been a really big challenge for me.” Then last school year, she started using technology that allows her to do a number of things: dictate her writing rather than type, listen to books rather than read them on a page and take photos of notes on the board. It changed everything. Instead of getting caught up in whether a word is spelled right, Soraya finds that with speech-to-text built into her school laptop, she can simply let the words flow from her brain out of her mouth.

Democracy and the Public Interest

The sweeping ways religion is mixing with public education

Laura Meckler and Lauren Lumpkin, Washington Post

New laws and policies across the country are dismantling the idea — celebrated by some, rejected by others — that prayer and proselytization should be kept out of public schools. Increasingly, religion is being injected all over the place. With the Supreme Court rapidly changing its views on what is and is not permissible, policymakers — particularly in conservative states — are pushing the limits on incorporating religion into the school day. Public school classrooms are required to post the Ten Commandments, Bible verses are being injected into social studies curriculums, and some school districts are required to allow students to leave campus midday to participate in Bible study. “Like a teenager with a new car, states are trying to figure out how far and fast they can go,” said Michael A. Helfand, a law professor at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and an expert in church-state law.

Schools as Shared Civic Infrastructure

Elizabeth Clay Roy, Stanford Social Innovation Review

In 2025, a group of Philadelphia high school students asked a question few adults consider: Where are young people actually welcome to be? To talk and connect with each other? Looking beyond home and school, they felt the city’s “third places” like parks and libraries were scarce, poorly maintained, or uninviting. Their research revealed underfunding at the Parks and Recreation Department, and they decided to focus their efforts on influencing the City Council. Some students approached the idea of advocacy shaped by prior experiences of being dismissed, or with skepticism or fear. This time was different. With a structured process and the guidance of their civics teacher, they moved from discussing their concerns to researching the issue and practicing civic skills, from analyzing budgets to communicating effectively. By the time they met with the chair and vice chair of the City Council’s Parks and Recreation Committee, they felt confident and respected as community members offering solutions.

NYC proposal would add younger students to school leadership teams — and pay them for it

Amy Zimmer, Chalkbeat

New York City elementary and middle school students may soon have a greater say in shaping their education by joining their school leadership teams — and earn $300 doing so. School leadership teams, or SLTs, are committees of educators and parents that collaborate to develop and evaluate school policies aimed at improving student outcomes and ensuring that a school’s goals and budget align. Through a shared decision-making process, these teams create a sort of blueprint for the school year, known as a “comprehensive education plan.” Under state law, all schools are required to have these governing bodies, and when Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged a more democratic model of mayoral control, he said he would tap the existing infrastructure of parent involvement, including SLTs.

Other News of Note

The Little Sister Facing the Big Brother

Naghmeh Sohrabi, These Are The True Things

Can a society survive if its citizens lose the ability to live alongside people they oppose? This is increasingly not a philosophical question for people in Iran but one as vital (or even more vital) than “daily bread,” argues Dr. Maryam Nasr-Esfahani, a feminist philosopher and ethicist, and a member of the faculty at the Research Center for Human Sciences and Cultural Studies in Tehran. While Iran in the Western press is once again shunted into a limited set of topics such as geopolitics, conflict, and regime survivability with a smattering of economic desperation thrown in for good measure, Dr. Nasr-Esfahani begins her talk (given in the fantastically named “The Weight of the World” bookstore) in Tehran with the following words: “This talk is not about war and peace in a military context. It makes no claims about that. Besides, we fundamentally have no agency in that story.”