Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Partisan divides over K-12 education in 8 charts

Jenn Hatfield, Pew Research

K-12 education is shaping up to be a key issue in the 2024 election cycle. Several prominent Republican leaders, including GOP presidential candidates, have sought to limit discussion of gender identity and race in schools, while the Biden administration has called for expanded protections for transgender students. The coronavirus pandemic also brought out partisan divides on many issues related to K-12 schools. Today, the public is sharply divided along partisan lines on topics ranging from what should be taught in schools to how much influence parents should have over the curriculum. Here are eight charts that highlight partisan differences over K-12 education, based on recent surveys by Pew Research Center and external data.

Culture war inside America’s public schools illuminated through new NPR/Ipsos poll [AUDIO]

WBUR

A new NPR/Ipsos poll brings some much-needed nuance to the culture war battles that have been playing out in America’s public schools this year. Here & Now’s Jane Clayson speaks with NPR education correspondent Cory Turner.

Approval of Nation’s 1st Religious Charter School Will Spark Legal Battle

Mark Walsh, Education Week

Oklahoma’s approval of the nation’s first Catholic charter school lays the groundwork for a seismic boost in government aid to religion, but seems certain to lead to a legal challenge likely to make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. “It’s hard to think of a clearer violation of the religious freedom of Oklahoma taxpayers and public-school families than the state establishing the nation’s first religious public charter school,” Rachel Laser, the president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said in a statement. “This is a sea change for American democracy.”

Language, Culture, and Power

The Latest on the DACA Hearings and Immigration in the U.S. [Audio]

Garrett Bohlmann, Houston Public Media

The future of DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) is in the hands of U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, as thousands of dreamers enrolled in the program anxiously anticipate what the decision could mean for them. First, we speak with Charles Foster, Chairman of Foster Global, an immigration law firm, who explains the history of DACA and what the legal options are for the thousands of dreamers who would be impacted if Judge Hanen terminates the program. Then, we’re joined by Cesar Espinosa who explains the programs FIEL Houston provides as well as its mission to empower the immigrant community in Houston, the state of Texas, and the U.S. We also talk to University of Houston Associate Professor of Law, Daniel Morales, who discusses the latest in immigration-related news in the U.S., including the investigation over two private planes that delivered migrants to California and the history behind immigration and its economic impact.

UNDOCU-LIFE: No Longer Dreaming | Más Allá del Sueño [Audio]

Jose Luis Mendoza and Lucía Matamoros, Hola Cultura

How do immigration experiences differ? How are they similar? Since Undocu-Life launched, we’ve spoken with five narrators about their own experiences with immigration. In our concluding episode, three of our narrators—Brenda Perez Amador, Gerson Quinteros, and Maria Nunez Pereira—come together for a roundtable discussion. They take our earlier conversations further, expanding on how their passions for education, social change, and family shape their identity. These conversations are important to have, especially during an uncertain time for U.S. policies like DACA that are meant to help immigrants.

Black Immigrants in the South [Audio]

Leah Donnella, NPR

Being Black and an immigrant is an increasingly common phenomenon in the South, where 1 in 10 Black people are immigrants. Still, despite growing numbers of Black immigrants in the region, their experience is fraught with worries over discrimination and assimilation.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Summer reading: 5 books that explore LGBTQ teen and young adult life

Jonathan Alexander, The Conversation

In recognition of LGBT Pride Month, The Conversation reached out to Jonathan Alexander – an English professor with a scholarly interest in the interplay between sexuality and literature – for recommendations of young adult fiction books that feature LGBTQ characters. What follows is a list that Alexander, who has just stepped down as the children’s and young adult fiction section editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, considers as “must-reads” for this summer.

New Jersey is teaching kids about climate. Opponents call it ‘indoctrination.’

Anya Kamanetz, Grist

Carolyn McGrath thought she was ready for her testimony in front of the New Jersey Department of Education. An art teacher, she had dressed in a jaunty polka-dot blouse and chunky green necklace, and had a written statement prepared in favor of teaching climate change in every school subject. She hadn’t expected any controversy. But by the time it was her turn to walk to the podium last month, she was so nervous she visibly shook.  “It was such an uncomfortable situation,” she said later. “I don’t like confrontation.”

How a school lunch lady sparked better trauma response for schools [AUDIO]

Education Beat Podcast

A school lunch lady’s response after the Oklahoma City bombing sparked a new understanding of how teachers and school staff can help students recover from traumatic events, from wildfires and floods to school shootings. As wildfire and flood season approaches in California, leading experts in childhood trauma and school crisis and disaster recovery discuss how schools can best prepare for natural disasters and other traumatic events, and what happens if they don’t.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

The Looming Child Care Cliff

Ramenda Cyrus, American Prospect

Two years ago, in the midst of negotiating Build Back Better, Congress passed a block of grants intended to stave off impending disaster in the child care sector. The problem was a chronic lack of capacity, exacerbated by a severe labor shortage as workers shifted to better-paying jobs. These grants indeed stabilized the sector. But if they are not reauthorized by Congress before their expiration in September, activists and policy watchers worry about wholesale economic impact.The pandemic-era funding totaled $52 billion, mainly delivered through the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and Child Care Stabilization Grants with money from the American Rescue Plan. Some $37 billion of those grants is set to expire, which would be a gaping hole in an already strained and underfunded economic sector.

In California’s youth justice system, many high schoolers graduate with grade-school reading skills

Betty Maquez Rosales & Daniel J. Willis, EdSource

Many teenagers who’ve spent time in California’s juvenile detention facilities get high school diplomas with grade-school reading skills. During a five-year span beginning in 2018, 85% of these students who graduated from high school and took a 12th-grade reading assessment did not pass it, according to data from the Division of Juvenile Justice, the agency operating state youth facilities.

Biden vetoes bill gutting student loan forgiveness; plan’s fate now rests with Supreme Court

Nirvi Shah, USA TODAY

President Joe Biden vetoed Wednesday a bill that would repeal his signature plan to forgive student loan debt for tens of millions of Americans, salvaging a key issue of his presidency that remains under siege at the Supreme Court. “I won’t back down on helping hardworking folks,” Biden said in a tweet that included a video of him rejecting the legislation. “That’s why I’m vetoing this bill.” The rejection marked the fifth veto of Biden presidency but this one might especially sting: Loan forgiveness was a significant campaign pledge for Biden, and all of his attempts to ease life for borrowers are under attack.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

After 10 years, Chicago school closings have left big holes, and promises unkept

Sarah Karp, Nader Issa, Lauren FitzPatrick,  & Alden Loury, NPR

George Smith Jr. looked over his shoulder every day on the walk home across the street from his Englewood school, scared of the tense environment, scared of neighborhood gangs, scared of getting jumped. But he loved his elementary school. His band class gave him peace, his after-school programs something to do. And despite the anxiety he carried into adulthood, he was devastated when the school was one of 50 closed in 2013 by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Mixing with better educated families improves life chances of lower income children

Sarah Cattan Kjell G. Salvanes  Emma Tominey, IFS

Children from low education backgrounds are more likely to enroll in ‘elite’ degree programmes that lead to high paying jobs if they go to school with children whose parents have those degrees themselves, says new research. These high-paying degrees, such as medicine, economics and law from top universities (Ivy League equivalents), lead to higher lifetime earnings for graduates. This means the findings could be useful for shaping government policy to increase social mobility, say researchers. The study of Norwegian schoolchildren found that classes where children from both low- and high-education families are more equally mixed have higher enrolment in elite programmes at top universities, equivalent to studying subjects like medicine or law at Ivy League institutions (US) or Oxford and Cambridge (UK).

How Housing Segregation Shaped America’s ‘Gayborhoods’

Gillian Branstetter, ACLU

For much of the last century, the “American dream” has centered on homeownership by married, white families. Alongside explicitly racist policies like racial segregation enforced by redlining, banks and realtors routinely rejected applications for mortgage loans and housing from single or divorced adults of any race, prizing the married heterosexual white man as the most “deserving” debtor and homeowner. The further away from this ideal someone happened to live — by virtue of their race, gender, marital status, or sexuality — the less likely they were to find housing outside of the country’s growing and strictly segregated urban centers.

Democracy and the Public Interest

In a deep red Florida county, a student-teacher revolt shames the right

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, Washington Post

By now, it’s obvious that the reactionary culture warriors who want to reshape American education are inspiring a serious liberal counter-mobilization in response. Remarkably, this backlash to the backlash is gaining momentum in some of the reddest parts of the country.

A raucous school board meeting in Hernando County, Fla., on Tuesday night captured what’s striking about this new phenomenon. The scene featured teachers pointedly declaring that right-wing attacks are driving them to quit, even as parents and students forcefully stood up on their behalf, demanding a halt to the hysteria. “I have never seen such fear from my colleagues as I have seen in the last two months,” social studies teacher Victoria Hunt told the board.

A group claiming to protect parents’ rights in public schools is labeled as extremist [AUDIO]

Odette Yousef, NPR

The activist group Moms for Liberty has grown rapidly during the pandemic years, claiming to fight for parents’ rights in public education. The Southern Poverty Law Center is labeling it as extremist.

Educational Rights and Requests to Remove Instructional Materials

Gavin Newsom, Rob Bonta, Tony Thurmond, The State of California

As we close this school year and look to the next, communities across California and the nation are being confronted with threats that invoke a darker past. In the first half of the 2022-23 school year alone, 1,477 books were banned nationally, with teachers and librarians threatened with prison time for shelving the wrong book. 1 As state leaders elected to represent the values of all Californians, we offer our response in one shared voice: Access to books-including books that reflect the diverse experiences and perspectives of Californians, and especially those that may challenge us to grapple with uncomfortable truths-is a profound freedom we all must protect and cultivate. This letter outlines key considerations to assist you with fielding requests within your community while you continue to support your students and their educational rights.

Other News of Note

Reclaiming Public Rights

John Rogers, Just News

Across southern California this past week, public schools and school board meetings have become theaters of conflict.  Conservative advocates have pushed back on plans for Pride Month celebrations, challenged efforts to teach stories about children with gay parents, and rejected social studies curriculum that includes LGBTQ+ civil rights history.  These actions often have been propelled by hateful rhetoric—for example, characterizing educators as “groomers”—and by violent tactics, including brawls outside the gates of elementary schools.  Yet the advocates often frame their efforts in civil rights language.  They tell us that they are simply seeking to secure parents’ rights.   But if rights speak to moral and legal entitlement, then no one parent (or even any small group of parents) can claim a right to determine what books everyone else in the school can read.  No parent has a right to limit learning opportunities and make other children feel unsafe or their families devalued.  If we want to use the language of rights in our community and in our schools, we would do well to heed history.