Just News 6.5.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Trump’s Education Department is backing away from addressing civil rights for Black students

Annie Ma, AP News

For generations, the federal government enforced civil rights laws with an eye toward remedying historic, systemic discrimination against Black people and other people of color. The Department of Justice pressed schools to desegregate. The Department of Education worked to promote equal opportunity and held schools accountable for racial bias. But under the Trump administration, efforts to address deep-rooted inequities for students of color are being cast as discriminatory against white students. Programs that have long withstood legal scrutiny are now quick to be deemed “ illegal DEI ” — diversity, equity and inclusion — by the White House. Schools that do not comply have faced threats to their funding, and in some cases, lost federal grants. Civil rights lawyers describe the Republican administration’s actions as a complete inversion of legal history.

Most Teachers Receive No Formal Guidance on AI Use

Andrea Malek Ash and Katherine Senseman, Gallup

Although prior research finds that six in 10 teachers use AI for their work, including three in 10 who use it at least weekly, just 18% of teachers report receiving any type of formal guidance from school administrators on how AI tools should be used. Across 10 tasks educators might use AI for, about one-third (34%) receive no guidance at all, while about half of teachers (48%) receive only informal guidance. This lack of clarity is leaving many K-12 teachers to navigate a rapidly changing technology landscape without support.

How English Teachers and College Faculty Are Navigating AI in Their Classrooms

Matt Minton, The Progressive

When Carlo Rotella, professor of American Studies, English, and journalism at Boston College, penned a New York Times Magazine article titled “I’m a Professor. AI Has Changed My Classroom, but Not for the Worse,” he was tired of seeing the media’s constant “doom and gloom” coverage surrounding artificial intelligence’s impact on students. In the article, Rotella argues that the ubiquity of AI chatbots has forced him to “make humanities instruction even more human.” “I wanted to write something that said, ‘Well, actually, we don’t have to just lay down for this.’ This is a time to think about what it is that’s unique and rare and precious about a college classroom,” Rotella tells The Progressive. “Let’s double down on that.” He says fellow professors and students who read the piece have been encouraging. But the resistance he’s gotten from general readers—who have told him to find a use for AI in the classroom—is indicative of a widespread push to embrace and invest in AI across sectors and areas of social life.

Language, Culture, and Power

Most Americans broadly support public education for undocumented students – regardless of their political affiliation and religion

William McCorkle, E. Kyle Romero, and Lina-Maria Murillo, The Conversation

All public schools in the U.S. must provide an education to all students, regardless of their immigration status. In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right of immigrant students in Texas to attend school free of charge, regardless of their citizenship, in Plyler v. Doe. Texas had passed a law in 1975 that allowed public school districts to charge these students tuition, or not let them attend altogether. This law was repealed following the Supreme Court decision.

As scholars of history and education, we are particularly interested in understanding how Americans feel about this policy, which has been in place for four decades. Some legislators in states like Ohio, Idaho and Oklahoma have unsuccessfully tried to make it harder for immigrant students to attend public school, by proposing that all public school students must share their immigration status prior to enrolling in school.

What happened when a tiny school district refused to ‘bend the knee’ to Trump and ICE

Ariel Gilreath, The Guardian

On an April morning at Winooski high school, the day started with a writing prompt: Do you feel safe in school? Why or why not? The students – whose families hail from across the globe and speak Arabic, Nepali, Spanish, Somali and more – wrote their responses before reading them aloud. “I feel safe in school because I saw the school doors are locked every time,” one student said. “ICE can’t come in,” said another. The sense of security students feel in this multilingual learner class at the Vermont high school is hard-won. Since the start of the second Trump administration, the federal government has investigated schools for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, rescinded a policy protecting students on school grounds from Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests and threatened school districts with the loss of federal funding. Administration officials have also encouraged states to challenge a decades-old supreme court decision guaranteeing undocumented students’ right to public schooling.

The Popular Guys in the AP Class: Status, Relationships, and Academic Identity for Boys at an Urban School

Suneal Kolluri, Teachers College Record

The academic performance of Black and Latino young men has long been a source of concern in educational circles. Advanced Placement classes—challenging courses that can earn students college credit—underserve Black and Latino young men. Some argue that racially minoritized young men who do well in school pay a social price for doing so, losing friends by way of AP participation. Ultimately, the exclusion of young men from the most challenging high school coursework has implications for their educational attainment. This study complicates notions of masculinity, popularity, and academic achievement. First, young men are not entirely absent from AP. In addition, experiences of “popularity” are complex and varied, and how popularity corresponds with AP participation is uncertain for this group.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Weaving a Legacy: Karen Hunter Quartz Retires

John McDonald, UCLA School of Education and Information Studies

There is a new quilt hanging in an installation in the library at the UCLA Community School. The theme of the quilt is “Threads of Migration,” depicted by panels embroidered with images of home and celebrating immigrant roots and identity. The quilt was made by UCLA Community School alumnae, mothers, and established UCLA scholar-activists with deep connections to the community school who call themselves the WEAVE collective. “We’ve been together for a long time. We meet monthly and talk about life, and so we created this little weave collective of women. We have a logo, it’s hilarious – Women for Equity Art Making Voice and Education,” says Karen Hunter Quartz, the director of the UCLA Center for Community Schooling. “We learned to embroider together and made images that represent our homes, and we put it together in a quilt. We’re like, ‘we can’t give this away,’ so we installed it last month in the RFK library.”

Community Schools Grow, Despite Trump Attacks

Cindy Long, NEA Today

Amber Bradley, a social science teacher at River City High School in Sacramento, California, knows that educators alone can’t provide all of the resources a student needs to learn – like regular access to nutritious meals outside of the school day, healthcare, clean clothing, or housing. That’s why her school adopted the Full-Service Community Schools (FSCS) model to bring in local partners to help provide access to basic services. “We had a food bank, after school enrichment, school and basic necessity supply closets, language support, legal services, tutoring, and other resources that a school itself wouldn’t be able to provide without community partners,” she says. “We became a hub for the entire community, not just for students and their families, but for everybody.”

Narratives of youth climate activism: exploring the diversity of meaning-making on climate change and citizenship 

Alice Fonseca, Paula Castro, Journal of Environmental Psychology

The psychology of climate change (CC) has been more attentive to people as “green” consumers than as citizens. Moreover, when looking at people’s roles as citizens, it focuses more on individual motivations to join collective action, and less on the plural views of stable members of CC activist-collectives – who, however, occupy their place in citizenship by relating in contrasting ways with State institutions and policies and by making competing rights-claims. Drawing from an interdisciplinary framework connecting the approach of social representations with political science’s models of citizenship, this paper explores interviews (N = 28) with young Portuguese activists stably engaged in three different types of CC activist-collectives. It aims to understand the shared narratives of CC and citizenship that the interviewees construct.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Racial and Ethnic Wage Gaps Among Early Educators

Daphna Bassok, Anna J. Markowitz, and Deiby Mayaris Cubides Mateus

Early childhood educators in the United States earn considerably less than their K–12 counterparts, and, among early educators, teachers of color earn less than their White peers. However, the drivers of these wage gaps are not well understood. Using data from a unique, large sample of early educators (N = 18,383) working in sites that receive public funds in Virginia, we document significant racial and ethnic pay gaps. These wage gaps persist across models that account for a more comprehensive set of relevant variables than previous research, including sector and geographic region as well as teachers’ role, education, and experience. We found that, on average, White teachers earned $19.51 per hour, $1.43 more than Black teachers and $1.15 more than Hispanic teachers. While sector, region, and teachers’ roles, education, and experience were all correlated with racial and ethnic wage differences, differences persisted not only across models that accounted for these factors but also in models comparing educators working in the same site.

The Dismantling of Black Studies

Jafari Sinclaire Allen, The Nation

Everyone I know in the US academy—students, staff, faculty, university publishers, and cultural-institution workers—is afraid. But the recent assault on higher education is not evenly distributed. Black studies is where the attack has been the most deliberate, the most structural, and the most revealing of what is at stake. In recent months, university leaders have dismantled departments and deliberately narrowed the pipeline producing the next generation of Black scholars. What is happening is not just a series of isolated bureaucratic decisions; it is a coordinated assault.

Trump’s mass deportation campaign takes a toll on college students [Video]

Fred de Sam Lazaro, PBS Newshour

For years, researchers and advocates have documented the barriers students from immigrant families face when pursuing higher education. But the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has introduced new challenges and fears, even for many immigrants who are legally in the United States. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports from Minnesota for our series Rethinking College.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The implications of climate change for the learning and development of children and youth living in poverty

Jolly Noor, Erin Flanagan, Leanne M Lacap, Mariam Farooq, Mariya Bezgrebelna, Kimberly Fung, Swelen Andari, Carmen Anthonj, Godfred O Boateng, Maya Gislason, Samantha Green, Bonnie Fournier, Jo Henderson, Burcin Ikiz, Glen P Kenny, Robert D Meade, Caroline Metz, Abhay Sachal, Gregor Wolbring, Sean A Kidd, The Lancet

Education is a key determinant of population health. Climate change is increasingly disrupting education systems worldwide, with disproportionate consequences for children and youth living in poverty. In this Review, we synthesise evidence on how climate change affects learning and development among children and youth (aged ≤24 years) living in poverty within formal educational settings. 29 primary studies published between 2010 and 2024 across 18 countries were included. Climate-related exposures were linked to reduced academic performance, compromised readiness to learn, intensified household and caregiving pressures, damage and disruption to learning environments, and inequities in system capacity. Across diverse geographical contexts, climate-related exposures consistently interacted with poverty to magnify educational disruption and deepen existing inequities. Viewed through a rights-based and intergenerational justice lens, the findings of this Review position educational disruption as a crucial yet neglected dimension of climate-related harm, demanding urgent, equity-centred integration of education within climate adaptation and social protection policies.

State lawmakers continued to weaken child labor protections in 2026

Nina Mast, Economic Policy Institute

Many state lawmakers took encouraging steps in 2023 and 2024 to strengthen their child labor standards—in response to high-profile reporting of widespread child labor violations across the U.S. and simultaneous efforts to weaken state child labor standards in the wake of COVID-19. But trends in 2026 suggest that this momentum may be waning despite continued increases in child labor violations. Meanwhile, opponents of strong child labor standards have continued to erode state standards and—in effect—chip away at the basis for federal standards, which have also come under threat. In fiscal year 2025, more cases of federal child labor violations were uncovered than during any other year since the Great Recession, and hazardous work violations ticked up again after declining in the year prior.

N.Y.C. Children May Get Up to $3,000 From City for College Accounts

Matthew Haag, New York Times

Kindergartners in New York City could receive as much as $3,000 toward their college education from the city under a plan by elected officials that aims to combat income inequality and expand access to higher education. The one-time contributions would be among the largest investments in a child savings account program in the United States. Under the proposal from the City Council, which would expand an existing initiative, students from low-income families in the city would receive $3,000 while other students would get $1,000. Both figures are considerably higher than the current contribution of $100.

Democracy and the Public Interest

How News of Parents’ Activism in Schools Frames Educational Possibilities

Melissa Sherfinski and Eric Lemley, American Journal of Education

The researchers examine how parents’ rights groups gain power and how authoritarianism may spread and be received in educational settings. We analyzed US news reporting on parents’ rights activism leading up to the 2024 election and immediately after it, how local place and leaning of news sources inform production of news on parents’ rights activism, how news sources framed messages about parents’ rights activism in light of the outcomes of the 2024 election, and how teachers, families, and children are positioned within media discourses. Research Methods/Approach: We used ethnographic content analysis of frames and discourses in eight major US newspapers across pre-to-post-2024 presidential election periods. Findings: Parents’ rights activists and media tend to use “flood the zone” strategies promoting extremist school politics. Only two parents’ rights groups received consistent coverage but monopolized reporting. Countermovement groups worked against the grain but received limited space in news cycles.

Civics could bridge divides. Teachers fear crossing the line

Karissa Waddick, USA TODAY

Bathed in the glare of her classroom’s fluorescent lights, Kit Vontz mulled how others her age felt about the nation’s future. “There’s so much going on right now, and it’s kind of overwhelming,” Vontz, 18, recently told the small group of other seniors slouched over their desks in the Alexandria City High School government class. They were discussing research on Gen Z attitudes toward democracy.  Vontz’s classmate, David George Fite, said he’d found it hard to avoid a “hopeless mindset.” A history buff, Fite added he’d become dismayed by the political “chaos” he’d seen in the news. Trust in the government among young Americans is at a record low, according to the most recent Harvard Youth Poll. The survey, published in April, found just 26% of 18- to 29-year-olds felt hopeful about the country’s future. The results reflect an erosion of faith in the nation’s democratic systems among young Americans across partisan lines.

Avoiding the Supreme Court’s Religious Charter-School Trap: Governance Change for the New Legal Era

Kevin G. Welner, Carol C. Burris, and Preston C. Green III, NEPC

Forty-six states and the District of Columbia permit charter schools to open, and 33 states plus D.C. allow independently governed charter schools that the Supreme Court may soon declare to be non-state actors not bound by constitutional obligations. This could create major legal tensions, as states may be unable to exclude religious charter schools from public funding while also losing the ability to enforce constitutional protections against discrimination and government establishment of religion. The issue stems from the Supreme Court’s increasing willingness to require states to fund religious institutions on equal terms with secular ones, potentially opening the door to publicly funded religious charter schools. States with independently governed charters could face heightened constitutional risk, while those with district-governed charter systems may be better positioned to preserve charter schools’ public character and oversight.

Other News of Note

Valedictorian’s speech cut after unscripted immigration comment

Jeanine Santucci, USA TODAY

A high school valedictorian was cut off while delivering a speech at graduation, and video of the incident has been widely shared online as a familiar scene played out: a school’s attempt to silence a speaker’s unplanned message actually amplified it across the nation. Video of Clayton High School valedictorian Leen Hijaz in Johnston County, North Carolina, just outside Raleigh, shows her wrapping up her speech with a message about her peers and onlookers using their voices. “Before I leave the stage, I have one last thing to say. Every single person here has a voice, and we are privileged to have the freedom to use it when so many people around the world are struggling and suffering to be heard,” Hijaz said.

“Only Official Sources”: Indoctrination In The Russian Educational System

Amnesty International

This document examines how the Russian authorities manipulate and abuse the educational system, seeking to ensure that the young generation unquestioningly supports all their policies and decisions, including those that expressly contravene Russia’s human rights obligations, encompass military aggression abroad and otherwise defy international order. This practice violates international law, including the UN Charter, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which require amongst other obligations that education promotes respect for human rights, understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations. Amnesty International has analysed Russia’s evolving legislation, official documents, education materials, internal educational “methodological recommendations” and other data — all revealing a disturbing picture of schools being converted from temples of knowledge into factories of compliance.