6.19.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

America’s Teachers Can’t Afford to Teach

Randi Weingarten

Teachers’ paychecks have never fully reflected their passion or professionalism, but as America’s cost-of-living crisis persists, educators increasingly cannot afford even life’s basic necessities.

Rebecca Mikkelson, a school counselor in New Mexico, currently works three jobs just to buy the basics—groceries, a place to live, and health insurance. “The message this sends is deeply troubling: even when educators follow the rules, invest in education, eliminate my debt, and work full time in public service, financial security is no longer guaranteed,” she tells me. “This is not a personal failure, it’s a systemic one.”

Education Department Changes are Leaving Millions of Vulnerable Students at Risk

Nadra Nittle, The 19th

The Trump administration took aggressive new steps on Tuesday to shut down the Department of Education. Through agreements with other federal agencies, the administration announced that it would give the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice oversight of some of the Education Department’s key functions. HHS will oversee special education and rehabilitative services, while civil rights enforcement, student privacy protection, and training and advisory services will head to the Justice Department. These moves follow earlier partnerships that led to the relocation of more than 100 K-12 and higher education programs to external government agencies.

The Battle Over AI in the Classroom (Audio)

Natasha Singer, The Daily—New York Times

With the school year ending, all over the country educators and parents are taking stock of the drastic shift caused by artificial intelligence in the classroom.

Today, Natasha Singer, a technology reporter, discusses the year that reshaped American classrooms and how one dedicated teacher helped his students chart their own path into an uncertain future.

Language, Culture, and Power

ICE arrest outside Baltimore elementary school draws rebukes from state and local officials

Moriah Balingit, AP News

An immigration arrest outside a Baltimore elementary school drew sharp criticism from state and local officials Friday and renewed debate about the presence of enforcement operations at or near educational settings. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials arrested Jesus Acevedo-Sanchez and an unidentified woman Thursday morning outside Commodore John Rodgers Elementary/Middle School as preschoolers, kindergarteners and their families arrived for end-of-school ceremonies, a Baltimore City Public Schools spokeswoman said. Details of the arrest were murky. A video taken by a bystander and shared with CNN shows a man squirming under the weight of officers as they pinned him facedown to the ground outside the school. A woman in the vehicle looks on as children in school uniforms are rushed past by adults.

DACA marks 14 years under a cloud of detention, deportation fears

Reena Diamante, Spectrum News

Monday marks 14 years since President Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, which allows undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children to live and work in the country. It was meant to provide temporary relief, but Congress has never agreed on how to help these immigrants permanently. Now, advocates fear that the Trump administration is dismantling the program by detaining and deporting DACA recipients.

MCPS journalism students cite concerns about censorship, push back against district memo

Ashlyn Campbell, Bethesda Today

More than 150 Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) students have signed an open letter to district leaders citing concerns over censorship after a March memo from the district directed administrators to review student publications before distribution. “This is absurd. I mean, it makes absolutely no sense to me,” Richard Montgomery High sophomore Ian Chen, who led the open letter effort, told Bethesda Today on Thursday. “MCPS leadership, they want control over what we publish … they care more about controlling the coverage, what’s being reported about them, than maintaining student press rights.” Students from all 25 high schools and the leaders of 20 student newspapers in the district signed the letter, which raises concerns about the freedoms of student journalists in Maryland and was published Friday on the Richard Montgomery High student paper website. Eight teachers and 154 students signed the letter, Chen said. 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Trump EPA move sparks fears over kids’ health [Audio]

YCC Team, Yale Climate Connections

In February, under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency announced the repeal of its endangerment finding. This finding provided the legal basis for regulating climate pollution under the Clean Air Act. Cooper: “I was dismayed. … And as a mother and a grandmother, I couldn’t imagine that the EPA … would take that position.” Almeta Cooper of the nonprofit Moms Clean Air Force worries about how this will affect kids – because in addition to warming the climate, fossil fuel pollution harms people’s health.

How teachers are transforming climate education

Julia Heiss, UNESCO

A quiet transformation is taking place in classrooms worldwide, where climate change is no longer confined to textbooks but brought to life through everyday learning. From Brazil to Cambodia, Indonesia and Rwanda, teachers are leading this shift, turning sustainability into a lived, everyday experience rather than a standalone topic. These efforts are supported by UNESCO’s programme on Education for Sustainable Development, which supports countries that connect climate learning with real-life action. Through this initiative, teachers are being trained to turn schools into spaces where sustainability is not an add-on but central to everyday learning, embedded across curricula, teaching and school life.

Efforts to combat climate change often exclude Indigenous people – and they may not have any recourse

Buket Altınçelep, The Conversation

Imagine living in the same forest as your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and all your ancestors as far back in time as stories can tell, and depending on the forest for food, shelter, recreation and education. Imagine, then, that the forest depends on you, too, because you and your people have protected it for generations. Then, along come government officials who tell you what you already know: The forest is precious, an environmental and ecological gem that should be preserved. And then they tell you that to protect it, you all have to leave.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Lessons from the first state in the nation to offer universal child care 

Karen Fischer, Hechinger Report

Like many families, Jessica and Adrian Garcia, who live in the mountain resort town of Ruidoso, had to cobble together different child care options for their son when they returned to work after his birth in 2023. In August 2021, New Mexico expanded subsidized free child care to households earning up to 400 percent of the federal poverty line — at the time, $87,840 for a family of three. The Garcias earned too much to qualify. Jessica, who works at the local branch of Eastern New Mexico University, and Adrian, a police officer, settled for a part-time day care schedule two days a week that cost $300 a month for their son to attend daycare two days a week because they couldn’t afford full-time hours.

July 1 brings big student loan changes. Here’s what you need to know [Audio]

Cory Turner, NPR

On July 1, a host of new student loan changes from last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will kick in, including the end of a short-lived Biden-era repayment plan, the start of two Republican-designed repayment plans and strict new borrowing limits for some students. There’s a lot to parse, and not every change will impact every borrower. So we’ve designed this story to make it easy to find the guidance that does apply to you, or to the borrower in your life.

The Day After Disparate Impact

David Randall, Minding the Campus

The Trump administration’s Department of Justice has struck a great blow for nondiscrimination in law. It has published a learned, lengthy, and persuasive opinion concluding that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s guidelines on disparate-impact liability under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act are unconstitutional. “Disparate impact” is the doctrine that any action with a disparate effect by race, sex, or other protected characteristic is prohibited, regardless of intent. Literally every action has a disparate impact. The doctrine, therefore, empowers the government to intrude arbitrarily into every sphere of life, while giving private institutions an overwhelming incentive to engage in preemptive counter-discrimination to avoid lawsuits. Disparate impact is the legal heart of the authoritarian discrimination regime that has governed America for three generations.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The Fight Over What Educational Equality Should Look Like

Marybeth Gasman, Forbes

In Nothing Less Than Equality: The Battle Over Segregated Education in the Nation’s Capital, Tikia K. Hamilton challenges the common assumption that African Americans uniformly embraced integration as the singular path toward educational justice. Instead, Hamilton reveals a more complicated and deeply human story, based on the daily lives of Black parents, teachers, civic leaders, and activists in Washington, D.C. These individuals fought for equal education long before a national consensus on desegregation emerged. Hamilton’s work pushes readers to reconsider what educational justice looked like in Black communities and why many saw the preservation of Black educational institutions as worth defending.

Stop Yapping and Pay New Parents

Elliot Haspel, Jacobin

If you scan social media, the conversation about American families seems like a cesspool: arguments abound over whether podcaster Alex Cooper’s pregnancy is hypocritical, whether “girlbosses” are to blame for America’s declining birth rate, and whether environmental toxins are sending teenagers’ sperm count plummeting. Beyond the rage-bait, however, positive momentum is building around an idea that will actually help new parents and their children: just pay them. A few weeks ago, Democratic Reps. Tom Suozzi and Debbie Dingell, and Republican Reps. David Valadao and Blake Moore introduced the Supporting Newborn Parents Act. The Act would create a new, fully refundable $2,000 tax credit that parents could get immediately upon having a child.

Disaster Schooling Experiences and Emergent Crises: Lessons From Puerto Rico

Melissa Colón, Rosalyn Negrón, Lisa Jahn, Anthropology and Education Quarterly

This paper examines the disaster schooling experiences of Puerto Rican educators, families, and students across multiple crises following Hurricane Maria. Drawing on 11 months of ethnographic research, we analyze how schooling unfolded across disasters and how long-standing vulnerabilities and structural inequalities shaped responses. Findings reveal the significant role of schools and educators in supporting children and underscore the need for equity-driven, disaster-resilient education systems capable of supporting just and sustainable futures.

Democracy and the Public Interest

The New Federal Voucher Program Fact Sheet

In the Public Interest

The National Coalition for Public Education (NCPE) has been monitoring the rollout of the “Education Freedom Tax Credit,” the federal dollar-for-dollar refund for money spent fueling the private school industry–the schools and the scholarship granting organizations that will feed upon the public funds. Following a recent Treasury department preview of the program’s long-awaited regulations, NCPE published a fact sheet well worth reading, that lays out the harm to public schools this program poses. Of course, such harms go well beyond the impact to public schools themselves. Public education is the foundation of a functioning democracy and a thriving economy.

June 16: A book versus a bullet

Abigail Noko, Mail and Guardian

There are some people whose lives become a bridge between history and conscience. Seth Mazibuko is one of them. He was the youngest member of the students’ committee that led the peaceful protest in Soweto. I met Mazibuko during a recent visit to the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum in Soweto. To speak to him is to encounter not only a survivor of one of South Africa’s defining moments but a man who has spent decades insisting that memory must do more than lament. It must provide a foundation on which to build and move us to act. This year marks 50 years since the June 16 Soweto Uprising.

Kansas City’s Black Abolitionist Freedom School Is Working, and It Just Graduated a New Class of Organizers

KC Defender Staff, Kansas City Defender

The afternoon was hot enough that some of them wanted the shade. They stayed by the fire anyway. “If you can hear my voice, clap twice. If you can hear my voice, clap three times and say it’s gonna be all right.” Melissa Ferrer-Civil, Kansas City’s first Poet Laureate and the director of the academy, quieted the circle the way she always does. More than thirty of them had gathered into a circle on Sankara Farm, twenty-seven acres of Black-owned land on the edge of Kansas City where culturally relevant food still grows in open defiance of the grocery stores that abandoned our neighborhoods.

Other News of Note

Juneteenth [Digital Exhibit]

The National Museum of African American History and Culture

Join the museum’s Juneteenth celebration – during the entire month of June – and embrace the rich history of Freedom Day each week.

What is Juneteenth, and why is it important? [Video]

Karlos K. Hill and Soraya Field Fiorio, Ted-Ed

At the end of the Civil War, though slavery was technically illegal in all states, it still persisted in the last bastions of the Confederacy. This was the case when Union General Gordon Granger marched his troops into Galveston, Texas on June 19th and announced that all enslaved people there were officially free. Karlos K. Hill and Soraya Field Fiorio dig into the history of Juneteenth.

Why schools haven’t taught about Juneteenth, and why they should

John McDonald, UCLA Newsroom

On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring “all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”

The reality though was that the Emancipation did not end slavery. Freedom for many would be won state by state in battles across the remnants of the Confederacy, with the help of nearly 200,000 Black soldiers who joined in the Union effort after Lincoln’s proclamation.

Even as enslaved Black people in some Confederate states at midnight on December 31, 1862, watched and waited for their freedom, many others did not know they were free. And as the war waged on thousands of confederates fled to the frontier state of Texas, taking thousands of enslaved Black people with them. It would be two-and-a-half years, more than two months after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, that 250,000 enslaved Black people in Texas would learn of their freedom.