Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Should children take part in nonviolent struggle?


George Lakey, Waging Nonviolence

In fifth grade I was introduced to children as nonviolent warriors. In one of our elementary school’s story collections I ran into a tale from the Norwegian resistance to Nazi German occupation during World War II. It was centered on the problem of preventing Norway’s store of gold bullion from falling into the hands of the occupiers.The first step was moving the gold to storehouses on farms in Norway’s mountainous western coast. The next step — of getting the gold on ships to Britain, where the country’s royal family had already fled — was going to be a lot harder due to the patrols of German warships. Ordinary Norwegian fishing vessels might stow gold under their fish and make it to Britain, but that left yet another problem: How to get the gold down the side of the mountain to the fjord — and to the fishermen?

‘Unprecedented scale’ of violations against children in Gaza, West Bank and Israel, UN report says

Julian Borger, The Guardian

More grave violations against children were committed in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel than anywhere else in the world last year, according to a UN report due to be published this week.

The report on children and armed conflict, which has been seen by the Guardian, verified more cases of war crimes against children in the occupied territories and Israel than anywhere else, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar, Somalia, Nigeria and Sudan. “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory presents an unprecedented scale and intensity of grave violations against children,” the report said.

An Educator’s Commitment to LGBTQ+ Inclusivity

Brenda Alvarez, NEA Today

In 2017, a Holicong Middle School student, from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, shared with his school principal how they were having a difficult time being in a school that had little supports in place for them. At the time, the student was beginning to identify as a transgender male and wanted a more supportive environment. They suggested a GSA club. The principal obliged. Keith Willard, the student’s social studies teacher, jumped at the opportunity to launch the club. He recalls telling his principal: “I’ll absolutely do it, and it’s going to be the best GSA.” With help from a local nonprofit, the school’s English teachers and librarians, Willard started the GSA by creating an LGBTQ+ classroom library, with curated titles that were appropriate to a middle school audience.

Language, Culture, and Power

How a network of D.C. schools produced giants of American art

Mark Jenkins, Washington Post

The art room at Armstrong, one of D.C.’s first high schools for African American students, was “a beautiful place, just where I belonged.” So recalled a former student whose comment is placed at the opening of the Anacostia Community Museum’s “A Bold and Beautiful Vision: A Century of Black Arts Education in Washington, D.C., 1900-2000.” This particular memory belonged to Alma Thomas, who ultimately became a major artist and one of the city’s best-known Black painters. The 1911 Armstrong graduate is the ideal person to introduce this celebratory exhibition, since she was both an artist and an arts educator who taught for decades at Shaw Junior High School.

The magic of mariachi music in school [AUDIO]

Education Beat Podcast

In San Jose’s Alum Rock Union School District, students from third to eighth grade gather after school to learn how to play guitar, trumpet, violin, guitarrón, and vihuela, and to sing mariachi music. What is the impact of a bilingual music program like this one? With new funding available from California’s Prop 28, can districts expand programs like this one or will they have to do something new? 

Southcentral Alaska’s Russian Old Believer schools deliver bilingual education immersed in cultural customs

Riley Board, Anchorage Daily News

Out East End Road from Homer, Voznesenka has a village feel but a school of more than 130 pre-K through 12th-grade students. There aren’t buses or any athletic programs. Principal Mike Wojciak has been living and working here for over a decade. “We’re very unique compared to … if you are looking at the Central Pen schools or Homer. We’re very much a village school,” Wojciak said. “We’re 24 miles from town and there are no town amenities here.” The Southern Kenai Peninsula is home to several villages of Russian Old Believers, a group that split from the Russian Orthodox Church in 1654 and came to the United States in the 1960s. In the public schools in the villages, Old Believer culture and bilingual education run throughout the school day.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Two Visions of a Populist Education System

Jeff Bryant, The Progressive

When pundits describe the current political zeitgeist as a drift toward “populism,” they’re generally trying to convince you that something very bad is going on. But it’s important to understand that populism, a term that basically means the will of the people, can swing both ways. Nowhere is this more obvious than in education policy and politics. For at least the past three decades, education policy has been mostly dominated by centralized decision-making—an approach that punishes schools and teachers based on standardized test scores, and encourages privately operated enterprises like charter schools to compete against neighborhood schools. These are ideas that never enjoyed widespread popularity. But now that the centralized approach seems to be waning, education has become a policy arena influenced by a greater number of voices. Among those rising voices is the increasingly popular movement toward an approach called community schools.

Debby Lee Cohen, Who Helped Prune Plastic From Schools, Dies at 64

Penelope Green, New York Times

As an artist who liked to play with scale, Debby Lee Cohen created monumental pieces, like the giant puppets she designed for Manhattan’s annual Village Halloween Parade, as well as miniatures, like the tiny forest she once made for a work by the interdisciplinary artist and composer Meredith Monk, with whom she often collaborated. A decade and a half ago, Ms. Cohen became an anti-plastics activist when she learned the scale of waste in New York City’s public schools.

Newtown High graduates told to honor 20 classmates killed as first-graders ‘today and every day’

AP News

It was an emotional graduation ceremony for high school seniors in Newtown, Connecticut, who observed a moment of silence for their 20 classmates who were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Principal Kimberly Longobucco read the names of the first graders who were killed on Dec. 14, 2012 along with six educators as the class of 2024 and their families looked on Wednesday, Hearst Connecticut Media reported. “We remember them for their bravery, their kindness and their spirit,” Longobucco said. “Let us strive to honor them today and every day.”

Access, Assessment, Advancement

California Is Adding A New Grade For All 4-Year-Olds. But Not Every District Has The Right Space For Them

Elly Yu, LAist

When Thomas Pace, director of facilities at San Bernardino City Unified, thinks about all the construction that needs to happen at the schools in his district, he struggles to get the math to work. Many of the existing kindergarten classrooms don’t meet state standards, and now, they’re preparing to layer in another grade for young children: transitional kindergarten. In 2021, California embarked on a $2.7 billion plan to offer TK to all 4-year-olds by the 2025-2026 school year in what’s poised to be the largest free preschool program in the country.

Students, Gaza and a New Vision of Safety

Sarah Jaffe June, In These Times

The sign hanging over the student encampment at Chicago’s DePaul University bore a slogan that has echoed through almost all of the justice movements over the past several years: ​“We Keep Us Safe.” The tents beneath it fragile, just a thin layer of canvas between the students and the rest of the world. A statement of purpose and of solidarity; a reminder of the tents so many Palestinians in Gaza are living in right now as they move, and move again, and move again from homes destroyed by U.S.-made bombs delivered by Israeli planes into supposed safe zones.

How pro-Palestinian protesters at one UC campus got a deal

Michael Burke, EdSource

Sitting across from UC Riverside Chancellor Kim Wilcox inside a conference room on the campus, Samia Alkam presented him with her Palestinian identification card. A doctoral student at Riverside, Alkam’s identification limits her to the West Bank in Palestine. She explained to Wilcox that even though she also has American citizenship, Israel bars West Bank residents like her from traveling to places such as Tel Aviv and Jerusalem without a special permit or visa. That was relevant to the matter at hand, as Wilcox and Alkam deliberated over what to do about a summer abroad program offered by Riverside’s School of Business. As part of the program, students visit Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Hundreds of children live on Skid Row. Can L.A. do more for them?

Paula Esquivel, LA Times

In the mornings, just past 7:30, dozens of children on Skid Row start making their way to school in the June gray. For younger ones, the trip is somewhat easier.  A yellow bus pulls up not far from Union Rescue Mission and picks up kids who attend Ninth Street Elementary, a Los Angeles Unified School District school. The middle schoolers study on the same campus. But theirs is a charter school and they don’t have a bus. To get to school they walk several blocks, past tents and tarp shelters, careful not to step on discarded needles or human waste.  Skid Row, if it must be said, is not a place for children. And yet there are more than 100 families living there now, with more than 200 children. 

1,000 days have passed since the Taliban barred girls from secondary education, the UN says

Rahim Faiez, AP News

One thousand days have passed since girls in Afghanistan were banned from attending secondary schools. That’s according to the U.N. children’s agency, which said Thursday that “no country can move forward when half its population is left behind.” UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell in a statement urged Taliban authorities to allow all children to resume learning immediately, and called on the international community to support Afghan girls, who she said need it more than ever. The agency estimates that more than 1 million girls are affected. The U.N. has warned that the ban on girls’ education remains the Taliban’s biggest obstacle to gaining recognition as the legitimate rulers of Afghanistan.

What does the end of pandemic recovery funds mean for schools and students? [AUDIO]

Scott Detrow, NPR

A funding cliff – that’s what many public schools could face when they return to classes in the fall. During the pandemic, the federal government rolled out Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funds, hundreds of billions of dollars, money that made a big difference for a lot of public schools. With the abrupt switch to remote learning, social isolation, a global pandemic, kids were really struggling. 

Democracy and the Public Interest

What Would Religious Charter Schools Mean for Public Education?

Kevin G. Welner, NEPC/Education Week

The charter school movement was once the golden child of the U.S. education reform world, celebrated and bolstered by billionaire philanthropists and by politicians of both major parties. But charter schools are in the midst of radical changes and are confronting an increasingly unstable alliance supporting them. Republicans arguably dealt the first major blow. While President Donald Trump embraced the charter school growth policies of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ great passion was instead for private school vouchers. Other Republicans have shown the same preference, with charters suffering from a bit of GOP neglect.

What’s a book ban anyway? Depends on who you ask [Audio]

Elizabeth Blair, All Things Considered

“Book ban” is one of those headline-ready terms often used by the news media, including NPR, for stories about the surge in book challenges across the U.S. The American Library Association launched its annual Banned Books Week in 1982. There are banned book clubs. States have introduced or passed laws that’ve been called bans on book bans. Meanwhile, many people fighting to get books removed from school libraries are not fans of the term book ban. The practice of censoring books has been around for centuries. But what does it actually mean to ban a book today? The answer depends on who you ask.

School boards, long locally focused and nonpartisan, get dragged into the national political culture wars

Kathleen Knight Abowitz, The Conversation

In more than 90% of U.S. public school districts, school board elections are nonpartisan and have been for centuries. But that long tradition may well be changing – and putting at risk the quality of the country’s education system by introducing divisive national political issues into the process by which a local community governs itself. At present, nine states have passed legislation that enables school board races to be partisan. Four states provide for board elections that have partisan affiliations listed on the ballot; another five states permit districts to choose nonpartisan or partisan races. Bills introduced in six states in 2023 would require or permit school board candidates to declare party affiliations on the ballot.

Other News of Note

Remembering James Lawson and his fierce dedication to the power of nonviolent action

Ethan Vesely-Flad, Waging Nonviolence

Martin Luther King Jr. called him “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.” To Rep. John Lewis, he was “the architect of the nonviolence movement.” Jesse Jackson simply called him “the teacher.” We at the Fellowship of Reconciliation are blessed to have counted him among our core team of organizers and as a pillar of our spiritually-grounded movement for nonviolent social change. It is with reverence that we remember his life and time with us. James M. Lawson Jr., who died Sunday at age 95, was born on Sept. 22, 1928 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. His family moved to Massillon, Ohio, when he was young, and as a deeply Christian family – his father and grandfather were ministers – Lawson began regularly reading the Bible. He had a prophetic and liberatory interpretation of the Gospels from an early age.

James Lawson Eulogy to Representative John Lewis [Video, 2020]

James Lawson, C-SPAN

Civil Rights Activist James Lawson Eulogy to Representative John Lewis