Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Immigrant families rejoice over Biden’s expansive move toward citizenship, while some are left out

Valerie Gonzalez and Juan A. Lozano, AP News

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants had reason to rejoice when President Joe Biden unveiled a highly expansive plan to extend legal status to spouses of U.S. citizens but, inevitably, some were left out. Claudia Zúniga, 35, married in 2017, or 10 years after her husband came to the United States. He moved to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, after they wed, knowing that, by law, he had to live outside the country for years to gain legal status. “Our lives took a 180-degree turn,” she said. Biden announced Tuesday that his administration will, in coming months, allow U.S. citizens’ spouses without legal status to apply for permanent residency and eventually citizenship without having to first depart the country for up to 10 years. About 500,000 immigrants may benefit, according to senior administration officials.

The Civic Promise of Juneteenth

Tobin Miller Shearer, Time

While Martin Luther King, Jr.’s January birthday has been a national holiday for nearly four decades, the four-year-old Juneteenth federal holiday already holds greater promise for civic education. Precisely because a more racially contentious dynamic has unfolded around Juneteenth, this relatively recent celebration has opened the door to a focused telling of Black history. By contrast the relatively lukewarm reception to Martin Luther King Jr. Day has made education about difficult stories from our nation’s past less likely.  Juneteenth, on the other hand, holds more promise for honest encounters with a past often obscured by the politics of the present. Unlike the 2021 unanimous Senate vote and 415-14 House tally in favor of the Juneteenth holiday, the 1983 voting process for the King holiday was lengthy and conflictual. 

End Legal Slavery in the United States

Andrew Ross, Tommaso Bardelli and Aiyuba Thomas, New York Times

Today we celebrate Juneteenth, the day when word of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the farthest outpost in America. Many people do not realize that Emancipation did not legally end slavery in the United States, however. The 13th Amendment — the culmination of centuries of resistance by enslaved people, a lifetime of abolitionist campaigning and a bloody civil war — prohibited involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” In the North, that so-called exception clause was interpreted as allowing the private contracting of forced prison labor, which was already underway, and in the ex-Confederacy it gave rise to the much more brutal system by which freed men and women were routinely arrested under false charges and then leased out to plantation owners and industrialists to work off their sentence. Some historians have described this convict leasing system as “worse than slavery,” because there was no incentive to avoid working those people to death.

Language, Culture, and Power

Small Step Could Bring Big Relief to Young Undocumented Immigrants

Miriam Jordan, New York Times

President Biden on Tuesday announced an initiative that could be life-changing for hundreds of thousands of undocumented young adults, known as Dreamers, whose ability to live and work in the United States has long been tied to a temporary immigration program that has been on life support. The new directive will enable many beneficiaries of an Obama-era program known as DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, to swiftly receive employer-sponsored work visas for the first time. Eventually, the young immigrants could apply through their employers for green cards, or permanent lawful residency.

The Schools That Are No Longer Teaching Kids to Read Books

Xochitl Gonzalez, The Atlantic

Recently, an old friend of mine from elementary school ran a hand over my bookshelf, stopped, and said, “You stole this.” “I did not!” “Yes, you did. You totally stole it from school.” She pulled out my copy of The Once and Future King, and showed me the inside of the front cover. It was stamped: board of education, city of new york. Okay, so I stole it. But I had a good reason. I loved that book so much; I couldn’t bear to return it to the school library. My grade-school memories are full of books: bulletin boards that tracked the class read-a-thons, hand-written book reports, summer-reading lists. But a student growing up, as I did, in New York City’s District 20, will have a very different experience today. The city has adopted a new literacy regimen under which many public elementary schools are, in effect, giving up the teaching of books—storybooks, narrative nonfiction books, children’s chapter books—altogether. The curriculum is part of an initiative from the Eric Adams administration called, ironically, NYC Reads.

Supporting Students With Incarcerated Parents

Mariah Solis, NEA Today

When children are not able to frequently see and talk to a parent in prison, they may often feel alone and unable to talk about what they are going through. An elementary school counselor in Minnesota, Anna Whooley regularly sees how the stigma of having an incarcerated loved one negatively affects students. “I see students with a lot of anger, sadness, confusion, or even fear that it may happen to them or the other parent as well,” Whooley says. Although the United States makes up roughly 5 percent of the world’s population, the country is the world leader in incarceration, negatively impacting millions of families.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Chicago teachers demand climate solutions in their next contract

Juanpablo Ramirez-Franco,  Grist

Solar panels. Heat Pumps. Electric buses. Those are just three of the things the Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, is hoping to acquire in their latest negotiations for a new contract, one that would address the rising toll of climate change in the more than 500 schools in which their members teach.  Arguably one of the most powerful unions for teachers in the nation, the CTU held public negotiations last Friday in a crowded elementary school gymnasium, facing off against leaders from Chicago Public Schools, or CPS.

Mass. teachers unions explore new strategies to address hot classrooms

Carrie Jung, WBUR

While many area school systems have already dismissed students for summer break, some, like Boston Public Schools, don’t officially end the school year until Friday. That’s a problem for the 10 BPS schools without air conditioning that must stay open during this week’s heat wave, with the exception of Wednesday, the Juneteenth holiday. BPS leaders have not announced any closures for the final two days of school. Spokesman Max Baker said the ten schools without air conditioning are too old to install cooling systems in and lack the infrastructure to support the energy demands. He said in a written statement that the impacted schools have received fans to use in classrooms. “Students in these schools will receive cool treats, courtesy of our Food and Nutrition Services team,” he added.

A school shooting in Tennessee sparked activism — and now frustration

Darreonna Davis, The 19th

Ibtihal “Ibti” Cheko, 17, thought she would spend the legislative session in Tennessee advocating for laws about how guns should be stored and implementing background checks for those who want to buy them. Instead, Cheko and other organizers with Students Demand Action pivoted to trying their hardest to make sure Senate Bill 1325, which would permit faculty and staff to carry handguns at school, did not pass.  They weren’t successful. The bill, which was co-sponsored by three Republican state senators, passed in both chambers in April. “There was this general consensus of just powerlessness among me and my peers, because it seemed like nothing we did mattered,” said Cheko, who is a student at Hume-Fogg High School in Nashville.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Investing in Childcare Supports All of Us

Tessie Ragan, The Progressive

We have a child care crisis in the United States. As a child care education provider, I know how to fix it: Put families first. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that each month, tens of thousands of Americans miss work due to a lack of child care, resulting in $122 billion annually in lost productivity, earnings, and revenue. Meanwhile, early childhood education and child care workers are among the lowest-paid workers in the country, even as we’re entrusted with our nation’s most valued and vulnerable population.  I’m also a veteran of the U.S. Armed Services. I grew up with a military dad and a mom who was an early childhood educator on military bases. I knew I wanted to serve my country like my father and be an educator like my mother.

When colleges close, students are left scrambling. Some never go back to school

Michael Rubinkam and Maryclaire Dale, AP News

Katherine Anderson trekked from Texas to Philadelphia last year for a college program she couldn’t find anywhere else, combining the music business, entrepreneurship and technology. Two weeks ago, she received the startling news the university would be shutting down within days. The closure of the University of the Arts has left her and 1,300 other students scrambling to find somewhere to go or something to do. By the time the school announced its closure, many colleges had already cut off admissions for the fall. Anderson was accepted into the music industry program at nearby Drexel University, which she said wasn’t a perfect match, but “the next best thing, I guess.”

How democratizing universities would supercharge the pro-Palestine divestment movement

Akin Olla, Waging Nonviolence

The pro-Palestinian divestment movement has erupted across the country, after over a decade of bubbling and stirring under the guidance of organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine. Students have built encampments, led walkouts and passed student government resolutions demanding that their universities cease investing their endowments in companies that uphold Israel’s genocidal apartheid system. Some student governments have even passed resolutions preventing their own budgets from being used to benefit Israel’s regime in any way. University of California Davis was the first to do so, blocking off its $20 million budget from genocide-supporting companies. This of course pales in comparison to the full demands of the students in the University of California, or UC, system, the divestment of its entire $27 billion endowment.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

School Integration Made Kids Less Conservative [Audio]

Have You Heard

Students who lived through court-ordered desegregation in the South grew up to become less conservative, more tolerant adults. That’s the finding of provocative research from education scholar Mark Chin, who compared students who attended integrated schools with their peers in the same county who didn’t. Mark says his research is a reminder to academics to think bigger than test scores when looking at the impact of education policy. But it also provides us with essential context for understanding today’s wave of school privatization in the South: an effort to produce kids who will be more conservative and less tolerant as adults.

50 years after desegregation order, how do Boston schools teach it? [Audio]

Saraya Wintersmith  WGBH News

Alana Laforest, a rising junior at Boston Latin Academy, has taken U.S. history classes and was among the first students in the city to take an Advanced Placement African American studies class this year. But when it came to learning about a notorious chapter of Boston history — how forced busing led to years of violence and decades of resentment — most of her education didn’t come from a teacher in a classroom. Maybe it should have, the 16-year-old Haitian American said.

Behind the scenes, a battle looms over fair funding for school construction

John Fensterwald, EdSource

In the coming days, Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to confirm his commitment to place a state school construction bond on the November ballot. What he hasn’t committed to yet — but must decide in the next 10 days — is whether to reform a method of sharing state matching money that has long favored property-rich districts over their property-poor neighbors. Along with a June 27 deadline to write ballot language, Newsom and legislative leaders face the threat of a lawsuit challenging the legality of the present system that ignores vast inequalities in districts’ ability to upgrade and repair schools. The public interest law firm Public Advocates filed its warning, a 21-page demand letter, with state officials in February. Public Advocates is calling for a new method that shares more state bond proceeds with districts that need more help. Their proposal focuses only on repairing and renovating facilities, not new construction.

Democracy and the Public Interest

‘They Came for the Schools’ details how GOP targeted race and identity in classrooms [Video]

Laura Barrón-López and Karina Cuevas, PBS Newshour

In 2021, an affluent, suburban school district in Texas gained national attention when parents and local conservative activists falsely accused the district of indoctrinating students with critical race theory. Mike Hixenbaugh’s “They Came for the Schools” details how it became a blueprint for Republicans across the country and exposes their ambitions. Laura Barrón-López reports.

Louisiana requires display of Ten Commandments in all classrooms

Daniel Trotta, Reuters

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry on Wednesday signed into law a bill that makes the state the only one in the country to require displaying the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. The American Civil Liberties Union immediately announced it would sue to block the law, saying it violates the constitutional separation of church and state and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Landry signed the bill, opens new tab along with a package of others he said were designed to “expand faith in public schools.” “If you want to respect the rule of law, you’ve got to start from the original law-giver, which was Moses,” Landry said at the signing ceremony.

Why was Joseph Komrosky recalled from the Temecula school board?

Jeff Horseman, Press Enterprise

A promise to be boring might not seem like a winning political message. But it appears to be one, at least in Temecula, where supporters of recalling school board President Joseph Komrosky suggested making board meetings “boring again” after a year of controversy and division. Komrosky, one of three Christian conservatives elected in Temecula in 2022, is set to lose his seat on the Temecula Valley Unified School District board. The latest results — posted Friday evening, June 14 — in the June 4 recall election show him losing by 213 votes — 51% to 49% — with 88 ballots to be counted in his bid to stay in office. Komrosky’s apparent ouster comes about two months after voters in Orange recalled two conservative board members who voted in favor of a policy requiring parents to be told if their child identifies as transgender. The recall push goes beyond Southern California. A trustee of a public school district outside Sacramento who made anti-trans remarks was recalled in March, while two trustees pushing a conservative agenda in a rural Alameda County district face a July recall election. Recent recalls of conservatives “highlight a growing public frustration with the efforts of radical conservatives to foment conflict through exclusionary policies,” John Rogers, a UCLA education professor who’s studied conservative activism in public schools, said via email. That said, “Christian Nationalism remains a potent force in the political landscape,” Rogers added, “with recent national polls indicating that a majority of Republicans embrace or are sympathetic to the view that ‘God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.’”

Other News of Note

Research Shows 10,000+ Killed or Harmed in Growing Global Attacks on Education

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

More than 10,000 students, teachers, and academics were killed or harmed in thousands of attacks on education in 2022 and 2023, according to research published Thursday amid Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip, which has seen its schools and universities decimated by the U.S.-backed Israeli bombing campaign. The Global Coalition to Protect Education From Attack (GCPEA) identified roughly 6,000 attacks on education in 2022 and 2023, a 10% increase compared to the two preceding years. The highest number of attacks took place in occupied Palestine, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Myanmar, and explosive weapons—including rockets and landmines—were involved in about a third of the attacks.