Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

What children in poverty could lose from the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’

Cory Turner, NPR

Low-income children and families would be among the groups hit hardest by Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act. While the bill would be a boon to wealthy Americans, it would scale back resources for the nation’s poorest households, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office warned in a recent letter to lawmakers. In an effort to pay for an extension of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, Republicans in both the House and Senate want to change or reduce key social safety net programs that provide health care, food benefits and financial assistance for millions of children.

Young children may go hungry as summer begins

Jackie Mader, Hechinger Report

Tens of thousands of children could go hungry this summer as a growing number of states and cities decline federal summer food dollars, slash their own offerings or reach capacity earlier than expected. More than 40 percent of summer meal participants are children ages 5 to 8. Thirteen states, all led by Republican governors, opted out of the federal SUN Bucks program this summer, which launched in 2024 and provides $120 in grocery benefits for eligible school-aged children during the months when school is out. Those states include Indiana, where last year, 669,000 children received SUN Bucks benefits, and Tennessee, which would have received $70 million in federal funds for the program.

Pulling the Rug Out Beneath McKinney-Vento: How Block Granting Will Likely Remove Protections for Unhoused Children and Youth

National Education Policy Center

On Tuesday, the NEPC Newsletter explained important research about the effects of moving program funding into block grants. In particular, researchers have shown how block-grant funding levels tend to drop over time. The newsletter added a second point: that the promised flexibility of block grants also tends to be an illusion. To illustrate that point, we asserted that McKinney-Vento protections for unhoused children and youth were not flexible—a poor choice on our part. In fact, the Trump budget proposal is likely to erase those protections, leaving no rights for these most vulnerable among our neighbors.

Language, Culture, and Power

Hiding From ICE in LA

Brandon Tauszik, Mother Jones

After the election of President Donald Trump, many undocumented immigrants knew there would be a push for mass deportation. The new president had promised it, again and again. The recent escalation—including Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids at homes, restaurants, car washes, and Home Depot parking lots across Los Angeles—has left many immigrants in California on edge. Protests erupted across the country. Police clashed with activists. And, in the aftermath, a national headline took hold: a battle in LA. But that framing—of conflagration and resistance—misses the more pervasive reality: the daily fear of simply living in LA under a constant threat from ICE. For many, it means sheltering in place—avoiding work, social life, or even a walk outside.

UNESCO appoints Indigenous co-chairs to protect languages and knowledge amid climate crisis

Anita Hofschneider, Grist

For more than 30 years, the United Nations has helped support research positions at universities to delve into the most pressing issues facing humanity: climate change, sustainable development, peace, and human rights. Nearly 1,000 UNESCO chair positions have been established in universities across 120 countries. But only a handful of them — fewer than 10 — have been explicitly dedicated to issues facing Indigenous peoples. Now, two Indigenous researchers from Canada and India have been tapped to co-chair a new role dedicated to advancing Indigenous rights through strengthening data sovereignty, stemming language loss, and improving research practices. Amy Parent, a member of the Nisga’a Nation in British Colombia, and Sonajharia Minz of the Oraon Tribal Peoples in India have been named co-chairs of the UNESCO Chair in Transforming Indigenous Knowledge Research Governance and Rematriation.

Punish to Rule

Loic Wacquant, The New Left Review

Colonial punishment is of special theoretical and historical interest when it comes to conceptualizing the penal state for three reasons. First, under imperial rule, state violence is suffusive, explosive and multifaceted, woven into the fabric of the colonial economy, society and polity.footnote1 Legal and extralegal force are closely enmeshed, as are military and civilian agencies tasked with delivering them. Second, the colonial Leviathan is the quintessence of the racial state: it fashions and defends naturalized social difference and hierarchy. So its erection and operation reveal the organic connection between punishment and race as two interlocking forms of material suasion and public dishonour. Racial hierarchy finds its official expression in the juridical duality of European citizen and native subject. 

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Queer educators will soon unveil 10 new LGBTQ+ lessons for California public schools

Daniel Villarreal, LGBTQ Nation

A coalition of local educators and LGBTQ+ organizations in California are unveiling 10 new LGBTQ+ history lessons for the state’s K-12 public school classrooms under the theme “Pride, Resistance, Joy: Teaching Intersectional LGBTQ+ Stories of California and Beyond.” The lessons spotlight intersectional queer and transgender histories, from Asian-American Pacific-Islander organizing to queer immigration activism, and are rooted in community archives and lived experiences, the coalition said. The curriculum was created by local K-12 teachers in collaboration with the LGBTQ+ history organization One Institute, the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, the UCLA History-Geography Project, and the queer student support program Out for Safe Schools at the Los Angeles LGBT Center. The ongoing collaborative partnership has been developing LGBTQ+ history curriculum for state schools since 2018.

RFK Jr. Ripped Over ‘Reckless and Deadly’ Halt on US Support for Global Child Vaccine Program

Brett Wilkens, Common Dreams

In an incendiary stunner delivered via a prerecorded video statement played Wednesday to attendees of the global vaccine summit in Brussels, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that the United States is suspending financial contributions to the lifesaving organization as it aims to vaccinate hundreds of millions of children around the world. Kennedy—described by a coalition of green groups during his quixotic 2024 presidential campaign as “a dangerous conspiracy theorist and science denier whose agenda would be a disaster for our communities and the planet”—accused Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance of having “ignored the science” on childhood vaccination.

More than half of US teens have had at least one cavity, but fluoride programs in schools help prevent them – new research

Christina Scherrer and Shillpa Naavaal, The Conversation

Programs delivering fluoride varnish in schools significantly reduce cavities in children. That is a key finding of our recently published study in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

Fluoride varnish is a liquid that is applied to the teeth by a trained provider to reduce cavities. It does not require special dental devices and can be applied quickly in various settings. Our research team found that school fluoride varnish programs, implemented primarily in communities with lower incomes and high cavity risk among children, achieve meaningful rates of student participation and reduced new cavities by 32% in permanent teeth and by 25% in primary – or “baby” – teeth. We also found that school fluoride varnish programs reduced the progression of small cavities to more severe cavities by 10%.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Quebec provides universal childcare for less than $7 a day. Here’s what the US can learn

Isabeau Doucet, The Guardian

When asked how much she pays for childcare, Leah Freeman chuckles and says she isn’t sure. “It’s like C$93 (about $67) every two weeks or something. I barely see it leaving my bank account,” she said. To most parents in the US, where the average cost of childcare is $1,000 per month and can reach more than $2,000 a month in some states, the idea of paying so little sounds impossible. But it’s happening – north of the US border in Quebec, Canada, where Freeman’s three-year-old daughter, Grace, attends a subsidized early childhood education center (centres de la petite enfance, known by its acronym CPE), for C$9.35, or less than $7 a day.

Trump Kills Youth Jobs

James Baratta, American Prospect

Hours after federal agents arrested New York City Comptroller Brad Lander for attempting to escort a defendant out of immigration court, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York held a hearing across the street to consider extending a temporary restraining order to delay the “phased pause” of Job Corps centers nationwide. Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr., who granted the initial temporary restraining order on June 4, extended the order through today, June 25, preventing the Labor Department from taking steps to kill a program that has “help[ed] young adults build a pathway to a better life” for 60 years.

At Columbia, International Students Face “Chilling Effects” of Trump Admin [Audio]

Maximillian Alvarez, In These Times

One year ago, Columbia University became ground zero for the student-led Gaza solidarity encampment movement that spread to campuses across the country and around the world. Now, Columbia has become ground zero for the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on higher education, academic freedom, and the right to free speech and free assembly — all under the McCarthyist guise of rooting out ​“anti-semitism.” From Trump’s threats to cancel $400 million in federal grants and contracts with Columbia to the abduction of international students like Mahmoud Khalil by ICE agents, to the university’s firing and expulsion of Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers union president Grant Miner, ​“a tremendous chilling effect” has gripped Columbia’s campus community.

These community college grads are headed to universities. A basic income program helped make it happen

Julia Barajas, LAist

Under a scorching sun, thousands of students, faculty, family and friends gathered at the Greek Theatre this month to celebrate L.A. City College’s graduation. These community college grads are headed to universities. A basic income program helped make it happen

In his remarks, the college’s president, Amanuel Gebru, noted that many students had balanced their schoolwork with jobs, family responsibilities and much more. As he listed each challenge, graduates in the crowd nodded along. “You did more than finish,” Gebru told the graduates. “You rose through uncertainty, overcame setbacks, and held onto hope when it was hard to find.”

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Poverty and the Brain: The New/Old Language of Cultural Deficit

Christopher Hu and Diane M. Hoffman, Educational Researcher

In this essay, we consider recent narratives in the science of brain development under poverty in relation to the older idea of the culture of poverty. We argue that in theorizing poor parenting and deficient linguistic stimulation as the primary pathways of influence through which poverty exerts its damaging effects on the brain, brain science builds on and offers new evidence for the supposed cultural deficits of those in poverty even as anthropological evidence from studies of learning under poverty challenges the deficit narrative. Brain development science has further catalyzed global iterations of the culture of poverty that obscure not only the material and structural forces that make poverty salient but also the sociocultural situatedness of learning and development.

Crews unearth relics of enslaved children’s lives at site of 1760s school

Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Washington Post

Underneath William & Mary’s Gates Hall, which is undergoing renovation, archaeologists are donning hard hats, steel-toed boots and safety glasses to find what has long been hidden in its foundation: the remnants of the Williamsburg Bray School, which educated enslaved and freed Black children in the 1760s. They’ve already discovered the near-complete foundation of the school — one of the oldest surviving buildings in the country where Black children were taught before the American Revolution — and signs of the daily life that occurred above it. And on Thursday, a museum about the Bray School opened to the public in Colonial Williamsburg.

UNICEF spokesperson James Elder warns situation in Gaza worsening as water crisis looms

Paul Johnson, ABC News Australia

The screams of injured children who can no longer access painkillers fill the air in Gaza, where UNICEF spokesperson James Elder says “daily atrocities” are not only being committed but have escalated in the past fortnight. Mr Elder told 7.30 Gaza is facing multiple crises, even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says his nation will continue its war there until the nation’s objectives are completed. Mr Elder says water is now scarce, may run out in just a fortnight and could result in children dying of thirst. Children in Gaza though are already dying, with a May UNICEF report stating 50,000 children had been injured or killed since Israel’s response to Hamas’s October 7, 2023 terror attack.

Democracy and the Public Interest

The Political Youth Movement That Propelled Zohran Mamdani to Victory

The New Republic

Donald Trump has, somehow, only been president for six months, but he’s already done deep, unimaginable damage to America’s institutions, laws, and norms, leaving chaos and wreckage that will take years of hard work to repair. But there are some things in this country that are still sacred; some laws remain inviolable, such as the ironclad guarantee that if you are in a Bushwick nightclub after 10 p.m., people will start dancing ecstatically when the DJ finally plays Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.” The Swedish cult pop star’s anthem has long had a hold on America’s hipper citizens, and never fails to get the dance floor packed. But last night, watching young members of the Democratic Socialists of America sing and embrace each other at a victory party for Zohran Mamdani, who won New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary on Tuesday, you could practically see the molecules in the air vibrate. There was an exhilaration in the air, a mix of defiance, relief, and joy.

Zohran Mamdani on education: The Democratic primary winner’s plans for NYC schools

Amy Zimmer, Chalkbeat

If presumptive Democratic candidate for mayor Zohran Mamdani wins in November, he would oversee the nation’s largest school system – but he doesn’t want to do it alone. The 33-year-old democratic socialist told Chalkbeat he is “opposed to mayoral control in its current iteration” and would advocate for a system that would lean on partnerships to govern the system of roughly 911,000 students and 1,600 schools. The Queens assemblyman doesn’t have a long track record when it comes to city schools, but he is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and a former standardized testing tutor who would like to study racial and gender bias in the specialized high school exam.

The Pulpit Is on the Precipice of the Schoolhouse Steps, and People Are Fighting Back

Danny Cherry, The Progressive

In his 2022 book, Battle for the American Mind: Uprooting a Century of Miseducation, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote that the U.S. education system is a 16,000 hour battle “for our kids and our country.” This view is popular within the Christian nationalist movement, of which Hegseth is a proponent—advocates see children as blank vessels for their worldview that the United States is God’s chosen land, and that Christians are meant to have dominion over it. Since the United States told white evangelicals they had to desegregate their schools, Christian nationalists have turned education into a political lightning rod and treated schools as ideological war zones, leaving hardworking teachers and impressionable students to suffer collateral damage.

Other News of Note

Black Earth

Christina Cooke and Cornell Watson, The Bitter Southerner

In the months before Patrick Brown was born in November 1982, his father, Arthur, lay down on a road near the family’s farm to prevent a caravan of yellow dump trucks from depositing toxic soil in his community. The governor of North Carolina had authorized the dumping of the soil, contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which had been linked to cancer, in the rural county. A preacher and a farmer, the elder Brown knew the chemicals would likely leach into the sandy loam and clay soil of Warren County, located in North Carolina’s northeastern Piedmont region, up near the Virginia border. He knew they could contaminate the water and make residents sick — and like hundreds of his fellow protesters, he believed that his community was being targeted because it was one of the poorest in the state, populated mostly by people of color.