Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Gov. Newsom’s twists and tricks to spare cuts to schools and community colleges in state budget

John Fensterwald, EdSource

True to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s promise, the 2024-25 budget compromise that the Legislature announced Saturday and will pass this week will spare TK-12 and community colleges from cuts that other state operations will bear. TK-12 funding will be flat and will continue Newsom’s major commitments to multiyear, multibillion-dollar programs, including community schools and before- and after-school expansion. The budget will even throw in a couple of billion in new revenue that Newsom didn’t call for in January or in his May budget revisions. Newsom and legislators, meanwhile, struggled to squeeze an additional $28 billion out of a $211 billion general fund spending. But protection for schools and community colleges will carry risk. To balance the budget, Newsom and legislative leaders rely on budget maneuvers that would give a button-down accountant acid reflux.

Why U.S. Schools Are Facing Their Biggest Budget Crunch in Years

Sarah Mervosh and Madeleine Ngo, New York Times

After several cash-flush pandemic years, school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, with pressure closing in on multiple fronts. A flow of federal dollars — $122 billion meant to help schools recover from the pandemic — is running dry in September, leaving schools with less money for tutors, summer school and other supports that have funded pandemic recovery efforts over the last three years. At the same time, declining student enrollment — a consequence of lower birthrates and a growing school choice movement — is catching up to some districts.

Federal COVID relief dollars improved student test scores, two new studies find

Erica Meltzer, Chalkbeat

Did federal pandemic relief dollars improve student achievement? It’s the $190 billion question hanging over American schools as the deadline looms for them to spend the last of the money intended to help them weather pandemic disruptions. Two new research papers released Wednesday attempt to isolate the effects of federal relief spending on student test scores. Both analyses, which were conducted independently, find that spending under the relief programs known as ESSER improved test scores in reading and math, and that the improvements were in line with other research showing that more spending boosts student achievement. But the studies could not answer which specific spending decisions — which approach to tutoring or summer school, how many social workers and counselors, what investments in better attendance and student engagement — actually made a difference. That’s because the federal government gave districts significant flexibility and did not require detailed reporting on how the money was spent.

Language, Culture, and Power

Colorado’s first-in-the-nation law aims to graduate youth who have been in the justice system

Jenny Brundin, Colorado Public Radio

High school students played a major role in the passing of House Bill 24-1216. Many signed a ceremonial copy of the law on the west steps of the Capitol on June 17, 2024. Colorado is the first state in the nation to offer a youth engaged with the justice system a “bill of rights” so that even if a student gets in trouble, they have a pathway towards completing their education. The new law aims to eliminate barriers to finishing school. Last year alone, nearly 6,500 Colorado youth entered the justice system. They had less than a 20 percent chance of earning a diploma.

This week, students, parents, educators and legislators took part in a ceremonial bill signing on the west steps of the State Capitol. “A lot of us make bad decisions,” said State Sen. James Coleman, one of the bill’s sponsors. “But in the end, our students still matter … All students matter.” Students from several alternative high schools played a big role in lobbying for the bill’s passage.

Chicago schools that removed police officers saw slight drop in high-level discipline violations: study

Reema Amin, Chalkbeat

Chicago high schools that removed police in the last few years saw a slight dip in the most serious types of student disciplinary violations, according to a new study released Wednesday. The study, from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, comes as Chicago Public Schools plans to launch a new safety policy for the upcoming school year that will unilaterally remove school resource officers, or SROs, from all campuses. The study’s authors looked at the district’s more than 80 CPS-run high schools, and focused on those that removed officers after the summer of 2020, when the Chicago Board of Education directed Local School Councils to decide if they wanted SROs on campus.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

The kids are not alright: Countries fail to include children in their climate plans

Anya Kamenetz, Grist

Kathrin Zangerl is a pediatrician at the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health in Germany, where she is a specialist on how climate change affects children at different stages in their lives. For instance, an infant’s developing lungs make her more susceptible to lasting harm from air pollution. A teenager, on the other hand, might be more likely to become part of the mental health pandemic among adolescents, where climate anxiety is a factor. In other words, children have differing needs, more vulnerability, and interventions that work for adults might not work for kids. “Children are not tiny adults,” she said. So when Zangerl and other researchers combed through the official national climate adaptation plans of 160 countries, they were looking for consideration of the needs and roles of children, especially when it comes to health. How many countries are taking kids into account when they think about climate change?

Hawaii settles lawsuit from youths over climate change. Here’s what to know about the historic deal

Jennifer Sinco Kelleher, AP News

About two years after 13 children and teens sued Hawaii over the threat posed by climate change, both sides reached a settlement that includes an ambitious requirement to decarbonize the state’s transportation system over the next 21 years. It’s another example of a younger generation channeling their frustration with the government’s response to the climate crisis into a legal battle. Navahine v. Hawaii Department of Transportation is the world’s first youth-led constitutional climate case addressing climate pollution from the transportation sector, according to statements from both sides. The lawsuit said one plaintiff, a 14-year-old Native Hawaiian, was from a family that farmed taro for more than 10 generations. However, extreme droughts and heavy rains caused by climate change have reduced crop yields and threatened her ability to continue the cultural practice.

Teens say they learn more in school about frogs’ bodies than their own

Nadra Nittle, The 19th

Sriya Srinivasan stopped menstruating for nearly three years and had no idea why. She went online for answers, and the search results frightened her so much that she stayed silent about the problem instead of asking relatives or teachers for help. “I was searching on the internet for, ‘Where’s my period?’ What is going on?’” said the 16-year-old from Solano County, California. “It told me that I was dying in different ways, whether that was ovarian cancer or I had a tumor. I didn’t want anyone else to be as scared as I was during that time, so that’s why I hid it.” Finally, a doctor’s visit for an unrelated issue revealed the culprit, a medical condition that she’d like to keep private. But Srinivasan has been public about how little she knew about the menstrual cycle before hers came to a halt. Now through the state’s citizen-led legislative process, she’s championing legislation that would mandate that California’s public middle and high schools expand the definition of comprehensive sexual health education to include menstrual health.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

As War Stretches On, Gaza’s High School Students Put Their Dreams on Hold

Hiba Yazbek, New York Times

Karim al-Masri was supposed to start his final exams on Saturday morning, just a few weeks shy of graduating. Instead, he spent his morning filling bags of water to freeze into ice, which he sold to support his family. “I should have been studying and preparing for my final exams,” said Mr. al-Masri, 18. But, more than eight months into the war, “I’m spending my days working to provide for my family to cope with the situation.” Mr. al-Masri was one of nearly 39,000 students in Gaza who were unable to take their high school final examinations scheduled to begin on Saturday across the Palestinian territories and in Jordan, and who would not be able to graduate, according to the Palestinian Education Ministry.

LGBTQ Students Face Barriers to Getting Student Loans Without Parents’ Participation

Nora Neus, Teen Vogue

The day Salvador turned 18, he left home for good. It was February of his senior year in high school in a southern state and he had nowhere to go, but he knew he couldn’t stay at home where his Catholic parents vocally disapproved of him being gay.  “There was… a lot of crying, a lot of fights, a lot of different drama,” Salvador, who used a pseudonym to preserve his anonymity,  told Teen Vogue. “There were a lot of threats of conversion [therapy]-type things… Sending me to Mexico and stuff like that.” So Salvador crashed with a friend and then bounced around for the rest of his senior year as a homeless student. No one in his family had gone to college, but he knew he wanted to apply. “I knew that I was good at studying,” he said. “And I knew that I was good at school. Not even good at it… that was my entire thing, just being really good at school and being really involved in school and student government and different student orgs.”

Saul Alinsky and Contemporary Campus Protests

Steven Mintz, Inside HigherEd

Recently, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked 22 scholars to recommend books that speak to the recent campus protests. The contributors are an academic who’s who and include the anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Nicholas Dirks; Omer Bartov, a leading authority on the Holocaust and genocide; the cultural critics and essayists Andrew Delbanco, Merve Emre and Laura Kipnis; the legal scholars Noah Feldman, Randall Kennedy and Samuel Moyn; the historians of U.S. social movements Michael Kazin and Robin D. G. Kelley; the philosopher and ethicist Martha C. Nussbaum; and the postcolonial literary theorist and feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. I found their suggestions fascinating. They range from Steven Kelman’s Push Comes to Shove, a 1970 study of the institutional, political and personal psychological dynamics behind the escalation of student protests in the late 1960s, to studies of Palestinian history and poetic and political expression.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

College may not be the ‘great equalizer’ − luck and hiring practices also play a role, a sociologist explains

Jessi Streib, The Conversation

The idea that a college degree levels the playing field for students of different socioeconomic classes has been bolstered in recent years. Research from 2011 and 2017, for example, found that earning a bachelor’s degree helped students from less advantaged backgrounds do as well as their better-off peers. Jessi Streib, a sociology professor at Duke University, was skeptical. According to other research, everything associated with landing a good job – professional networks, high GPAs, internships, status symbols – is unequally distributed by class. To find out whether college is the “great equalizer,” or whether more is at play than a bachelor’s degree, Streib interviewed 62 students at a public university who were majoring in business – the most popular major. She also chatted with 80 hiring agents and formally interviewed many more employers. Here, she shares her findings.

Math ends the education careers of thousands of community college students. A few schools are trying something new

Steven Yoder, Hechinger Report

It’s 7:15 on a cold gray Monday morning in May at Linn-Benton Community College in northwestern Oregon. Math professor Michael Lopez, in a hoodie and jeans, a tape measure on his belt, paces in front of the 14 students in his “math for welders” class. “I’m your OSHA inspector,” he says. “Three sixteenths of an inch difference, you’re in violation. You’re going to get a fine.” He’s just given them a project they might have to do on the job: figure out the rung spacing on an external steel ladder that attaches to a wall. Thousands of dollars are at stake in such builds, and they’re complicated: Some clients want the fewest possible rungs to save money, others a specific distance between steps. To pass inspection, rungs must be evenly spaced to within one sixteenth of an inch, the top rung exactly flush with the top of the wall.

These Researchers Study the Legacy of the Segregation Academies They Grew Up Around

Jennifer Berry Hawes, ProPublica

One young researcher from Alabama is unearthing the origin stories of schools known as “segregation academies” to understand how that history fosters racial divisions today. Another is measuring how much these private schools — which opened across the Deep South to facilitate white flight after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling — continue to drain public school enrollment. And a third is examining how these academies, operating in a “landscape marred by historical racial tensions,” receive public money through Alabama’s voucher-style private school tuition grants. All three researchers are white women raised in Alabama, close in age, who grew up near these academies. The women — one recently received a doctorate and the other two are working on theirs — approach their research from the varied disciplines of economics, education and history. Their inquiries are probing the very schools some of their family and friends attended.

Democracy and the Public Interest

A Charter School Network in Los Angeles Goes Union

Nicole Barraza and Marin Hodges, Jacobin

On June 12, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) announced that teachers at all six schools in the Citizens of the World Charter School network voted overwhelmingly to unionize. The teachers, who backed the union with 90 percent support, are unionizing as the Citizens of the World Charter (CWC) Educators United local of UTLA. Citizens of the World teachers join a small segment of unionized charter-school teachers, who represent about 11 percent of all teachers employed by charters. The win is significant because if unions were to succeed in growing their presence in charter schools more broadly, it would mean a major blow to charter boosters’ decades-long effort to undermine teachers’ unions. Jacobin contributor Sara Wexler spoke to two Citizens of the World teachers about their organizing drive and why they decided to unionize.

A Small-Town Texas Librarian’s Big Stand Against Book Bans

Lise Olsen, American Prospect

Suzette Baker, from unincorporated Kingsland, was feted recently by the Authors Guild in New York City as a “Champion of Writers”—the first-ever recipient of a national award established to honor librarians who fight book bans. In 2022, ​​she was fired from her job as a Llano County librarian after resisting orders to ban books and protesting against censorship. In response to Baker’s story, a local mom named Leila Leah Green and other library patrons filed a federal lawsuit, supported by the Author’s Guild. In 2023, they won a court order that forced county officials to restore eight of the 17 titles that had been removed from library shelves. “Baker’s brave defense of her community’s right to read is a testament to the vital role librarians play in upholding free speech and creative expression in the face of censorship,” said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest writers organization.

“Fake News” or Real Science? Critical Thinking to Assess Information on COVID-19

Blanca Puig, Paloma Blanco-Anaya,Jorge J. Prez-Maceira, Frontiers

Few people question the important role of critical thinking in students becoming active citizens; however, the way science is taught in schools continues to be more oriented toward “what to think” rather than “how to think.” Researchers understand critical thinking as a tool and a higher-order thinking skill necessary for being an active citizen when dealing with socio-scientific information and making decisions that affect human life, which the pandemic of COVID-19 provides many opportunities for. The outbreak of COVID-19 has been accompanied by what the World Health Organization (WHO) has described as a “massive infodemic.” Fake news covering all aspects of the pandemic spread rapidly through social media, creating confusion and disinformation. This paper reports on an empirical study carried out during the lockdown in Spain (March–May 2020) with a group of secondary students (N = 20) engaged in diverse online activities that required them to practice critical thinking and argumentation for dealing with coronavirus information and disinformation. The main goal is to examine students’ competence at engaging in argumentation as critical assessment in this context. Discourse analysis allows for the exploration of the arguments and criteria applied by students to assess COVID-19 news headlines. The results show that participants were capable of identifying true and false headlines and assessing the credibility of headlines by appealing to different criteria, although most arguments were coded as needing only a basic epistemic level of assessment, and only a few appealed to the criterion of scientific procedure when assessing the headlines.

Other News of Note

June 28, 1969: Stonewall Riots

Zinn Education Project

On June 28, 1969, New York City police arrived at the Stonewall Inn, a bar in Greenwich Village that catered to the gay community, to conduct a routine raid and arrest any individuals found to be cross-dressing. The raid did not proceed routinely, and resulted in resistance and demonstrations by the bar’s patrons and other individuals who gathered around the scene. The Stonewall Riots are considered to be a spark that ignited the gay rights movement. However, in Teaching Stonewall’s 50th Anniversary, Teaching Tolerance editors note that it is important for students to learn that the gay rights movement did not begin with Stonewall.

Lesson plan: Life of LGBTQ+ activist Marsha P. Johnson and her legacy at Stonewall [Video]

PBS Newshour Classroom

Born in 1945, Marsha was born as Malcolm Michaels in Elizabeth, New Jersey. After high school, she moved to New York City, where she found a sense of community among other LGBTQ drag performers and sex workers. She changed her name to Marsha P. Johnson, with the “P” standing for “Pay it no mind.” While she struggled with homelessness and mental illness, Johnson always made sure to help others in need. She co-founded a homeless shelter for LGBTQ youth named STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries) along with fellow trans activist and friend Sylvia Rivera, and spoke out about the AIDS epidemic. Johnson also participated and lead the Stonewall Uprising on June 28, 1969, a series of protests after a violent police raid of the gay club Stonewall Inn. Johnson died in 1992, but her work and legacy lives on today.