Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Teacher Well-Being and Intentions to Leave

Sy Doan, Elizabeth D. Steiner, Rakesh Pandey, Ashley Woo, RAND

The well-being and mental health of kindergarten through grade 12 (K–12) public school teachers has been a topic of national concern during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In 2021 and 2022, teachers were twice as likely to report experiencing frequent job-related stress and difficulty coping with their job-related stress than the general population of working adults. Restoring teacher well-being could improve job performance and job satisfaction and boost retention for teachers of all backgrounds. Recent media reports suggest that many districts and schools across the country are implementing new programs — or expanding existing offerings — intended to reduce teacher stress and burnout and promote well-being and retention.

A Mississippi teen unpacks how the Jackson water crisis impacts education [AUDIO]

Cory Turner, Lauren Migaki, & Janet W. Lee, NPR

Georgianna McKenny’s award-winning podcast begins, fittingly, with a blaring alarm. It’s an alarm clock, waking her 17-year-old cousin, Mariah, as she navigates a morning, back in January, when living in Jackson, Miss., meant waking up without access to clean water. No showers, no drinkable water out of the tap, and, for a few days, no school.

Newsom is proposing a boost in mental health funding. Why children’s advocates are worried

Kristen Hwang, Cal Matters

Come March, California voters will get the chance to weigh in on sweeping changes proposed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to the state’s mental health funding system — including a $4.68 billion bond measure to add treatment beds — but critics say the proposal pits children’s mental health services against the state’s ballooning homelessness crisis. Newsom announced his intent in March to divert nearly one-third of the state’s Mental Health Services Act money  — roughly $1 billion — to housing homeless individuals with severe mental illness or drug addiction.

Language, Culture, and Power

11 Years After DACA: Hundreds of Thousands of Undocumented Youth Remain in Limbo

Solcyre Burga, Time Magazine

Erika Martinez was watching the news with her mother when she first heard that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was being rescinded. “I just remember being frozen, like I’m standing in front of the TV in our living room and I guess I’m just numb to it,” the 23-year-old recalls. “I’m like, ‘Are they ending it today? Does that mean that they’re not even going to phase it out so that I can apply?’” Martinez was eligible for DACA—an executive order program implemented under former President Barack Obama, exactly eleven years ago, that offered undocumented people work authorization and protection from deportation for two years at a time if they were brought to the U.S. as children—but she does not have DACA because the program has stopped accepting new applications.

Tukwila’s student poets reassure new refugees: ‘You aren’t alone’  [AUDIO]

Amy Radil, KUOW

Lost friendships; bewildering new schools; family pressure to succeed — those are some of the hallmarks of the teenage refugee experience that sisters Nila and Ada Safi can now describe in heartbreaking and hilarious detail. They came to Tukwila from Afghanistan in 2019. And they found a poetry workshop that helped them delve into their own journeys. Now they have words of encouragement for other newcomers. June 20 marks World Refugee Day. According to the United Nations, at the end of last year there were more than 100 million people forcibly displaced around the world. This day is meant to honor “the strength and courage of people who have been forced to flee their home country.”

This Teacher Turned Her Journalism Experience Into a Bilingual Media Literacy Class

Nadia Tamez-Robledo, EdSurge

Alba Mendiola was at the top of her career about seven years ago. As an investigative journalist for Telemundo in Chicago, she had won seven Emmys in 16 years. It was at that pinnacle that Mendiola decided to leave journalism for another dream — she wanted to be a teacher. Now the former broadcaster has reached a new milestone as the recipient of the News Literacy Project’s Alan C. Miller Educator of the Year award.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Healthier School Lunches May Have Curbed Childhood Obesity, New Study Finds

Caitlynn Peetz, Education Week

Changes to the national school lunch program in the last decade that cracked down on sodium and fat content in school meals and required more fruits and vegetables could have reduced children’s likelihood of becoming overweight, according to a new research paper. In 2010, as education advocates sounded the alarm over increasing childhood obesity—a health condition that can have major long-term consequences for young people—lawmakers passed a bill allowing the U.S. Department of Agriculture to overhaul the National School Lunch Program for the first time in decades. The department’s new rules under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act set minimum nutrition standards for school meals and reduced portion sizes. The rules also called for more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and limited sodium, sugar, and fat.

How Community Schools Can Transform Parent Involvement for the Better

Jeff Bryant, The Progressive

Both common sense and research seem to conclude that parent involvement matters a lot for student success and even for improving schools in general. According to the U.S. Department of Education’s analysis of parent involvement and education success in 2017, “Good cooperation between schools, homes, and the communities can lead to academic achievement for students, as well as to reforms in education.” Despite these findings, policy leaders and politicians have often given false impressions of what parent involvement should look like, or they’ve taken stances that pit parents’ interests against schools and teachers. Fortunately, educators that are implementing a school improvement strategy, commonly called community schools, are clarifying how schools should go about inviting parents into a collaborative process that benefits not only student learning but also the functioning and effectiveness of schools. The community schools approach, while achieving different outcomes in different places, has at its core a commitment to address the holistic needs, rather than strictly the academic needs, of students and families and to make schools essential hubs of services and activities for their surrounding communities.

Schools are counting – and helping – more homeless students [AUDIO]

Education Beat Podcast

When Ana Franquis’ family was evicted, they had nowhere to turn. Their local school district helped them out, with food, diapers, even hotel vouchers. How are school districts using pandemic funds to find and support homeless students? And  what will happen when the funds run out?

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Rising Above the threshold:  How to increase postsecondary value

Kim Dancy, Genevieve Garcia-Kendrick, and Diane Cheng, IHEP

The best path to upward economic mobility is a college degree, but higher education remains unaffordable for many who could benefit the most. Rising college costs underscore the importance of ensuring students receive an economic return from their investments in postsecondary education. Rising Above The Threshold: How Expansions in Financial Aid Can Increase the Equitable Delivery of Postsecondary Value for More Students uses publicly available data to find that at least 2,414 institutions, enrolling 18.3 million undergraduates nationwide, typically deliver a minimum economic return to students, defined as Threshold 0. Students meet Threshold 0 if they earn at least as much as a high school graduate, plus enough to recoup their investment in college within ten years. But approximately 500 institutions, enrolling nearly 1.5 million undergraduate students, do not meet this threshold. Affordability is part of the reason why. The analysis illustrates how policymakers can increase equitable value for students by doubling the maximum award available through the federal Pell Grant and implementing free college programs.

Pell Grant eligibility for students in prisons to be reinstated in July

Betty Márquez Rosales, EdSource

For the first time in nearly three decades, people incarcerated nationwide will have expanded access to the federal Pell Grant on July 1 to help pay for the cost of college education programs. “From a purely symbolic perspective, it’s incredibly powerful … that we are trying to find ways to give them the resources to succeed,” said Keramet Reiter, director of the first University of California bachelor’s program for students in prison.

‘This Is Corruption’: Alito Urged to Recuse From Student Debt Cases Over Billionaire Ties

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Wednesday faced calls to recuse himself from two high-profile cases that will soon decide the fate of President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan after a ProPublica report revealed the judge’s ties to Paul Singer, a billionaire with financial connections to right-wing groups backing efforts to block relief for tens of millions of borrowers. In a letter to Alito on Wednesday, the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC) noted that Singer—a hedge fund tycoon whose private jet flew Alito to Alaska for a fishing trip in 2008—has “direct and indirect financial ties” to parties in Biden v. Nebraska and U.S. Department of Education v. Brown, cases brought by opponents of student debt cancellation.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Meet the New Group Promising to Tackle School Funding and Segregation Together

Mark Lieberman, Education Week

A pair of public school experts argue that two of the most enduring challenges in education—underresourced schools and schools that remain highly segregated by race and income—are too often seen as separate problems with distinct solutions. They’ve formed a new organization in hopes of bringing the goals of more funding and a richer mix of students in schools together. Brown’s Promise, launching this month, is a nonprofit that will support litigation and advocacy centered around addressing the roots of school segregation and underfunding of public schools at the same time. The organization’s name refers to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, setting the stage for the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

‘Rich White Men’ reinforces the argument that inequality harms us all

Ericka Taylor, NPR

Drawing from a collection of captivating anecdotes and supported by extensive data, Garrett Neiman’s Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys’ Club and Transform America makes a compelling argument that inequality harms us all. People in marginalized communities must reckon with having unequal access to the opportunities that make success nearly a foregone conclusion for those positioned on the highest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. But, Neiman argues, social and economic inequities prevent even the rich white men at the top of the power structure from being able to experience their full humanity.

LA Times Today: Child-care providers by day, Amazon drivers by night. Workers fight for living wages [VIDEO]

LA Times

State-licensed child-care providers are a necessity for thousands of working families in California. Many low-income families rely on vouchers from the state to pay for childcare, but they rarely cover all the costs, forcing providers to find alternate income sources or shut their doors. L.A. Times early childhood education reporter Jenny Gold wrote about how child-care workers are fighting for living wages.

Democracy and the Public Interest

6 More States Will Soon Let Almost All Students Attend Private School With Public Money

Libby Stanford, Education Week

A major push in state legislatures this year means nearly all students in six more states will soon be able to use public money to attend private schools. The proliferation of new or expanded private school choice programs that have universal or near-universal eligibility marks major momentum for school choice advocates who have dubbed 2023 “the year of universal choice.”

So far this year, lawmakers in 14 states have passed bills establishing school choice programs or expanding existing ones, and lawmakers in 42 states have introduced such bills, according to EdChoice, a nonprofit that tracks and advocates for school choice policies, and FutureEd, a Georgetown University-based education policy research center.

The ‘Tennessee 3’ created a historic teachable moment. Will schools be allowed to teach it?

Marta W. Aldrich & Laura Testino, Chalkbeat Tennessee

When Wyatt Bassow and Ava Buxton missed classes one morning this spring to see democracy in action in Tennessee, they witnessed history that they acknowledged probably wouldn’t be fully taught at their high school less than a mile away. Justin Pearson, one of two young Democratic lawmakers who were dramatically expelled from office just a week earlier by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, was taking his oath of office again that day outside the state Capitol in Nashville after being voted back in by officials in Shelby County.

Other News of Note

Why Unions Need More Democracy

Ege Yumuşak, Boston Review

Few of us have a voice in the political systems we are embedded in; the decisions that shape our lives are mostly made behind closed doors in rooms we can’t access. In theory, one exception to this rule is collective bargaining—a right that only 10 percent of U.S. workers exercise. enough: to escape what philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls “private government,” the subjection of workers to the unaccountable authority of employers. By engaging in bargaining, the idea goes, workers can limit the scope of their employer’s control over their lives, improve their pay and benefits, and win protections to ensure they are treated with respect and dignity. In their new book, Rules To Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations, veteran labor organizer Jane McAlevey and researcher Abby Lawlor expose how the practice of collective bargaining has often fallen short of this ideal. “Most negotiations today function a bit like our mangled democracy,” they argue.

A Letter to My Nephew (1962)

James Baldwin, The Progressive

Dear James: I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. I have known both of you all your lives and have carried your daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed him and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don’t know if you have known anybody from that far back, if you have loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man. You gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort. Other people cannot see what I see whenever I look into your father’s face, for behind your father’s face as it is today are all those other faces which were his. Let him laugh and I see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and I hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child. Let him curse and I remember his falling down the cellar steps and howling and I remember with pain his tears which my hand or your grandmother’s hand so easily wiped away, but no one’s hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs.