Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

GOP-led states push for control of school aid as Trump promises a smaller federal role in education

Collin Binkley, AP News

Governors in several Republican-led states are pressing the Trump administration to cut strings attached to their federal education money, a goal conservatives have long dreamed of that now appears within reach as President Donald Trump moves to dismantle the Education Department.

Iowa put itself forward as a test case this month, asking the Education Department to consolidate its federal aid into a single grant — called a “block grant” — with few spending requirements. Oklahoma submitted a similar request Tuesday, asking for more flexibility to steer federal money toward areas including private school and religious education options. The idea has failed to gain support in Congress in the past, but Iowa and Oklahoma are suggesting the Trump administration has the power to act alone.

Where We Stand: Protect Our Kids

Randi Weingarten, American Educator

As President Donald Trump tries to abolish the US Department of Education (ED) by executive order and Elon Musk takes a chainsaw to the federal government and the services and security it provides Americans, the AFT is fighting to protect our kids against the gutting of federal funds our kids now receive. We are fighting for our students to have more, not less. On March 4, as part of our Protect Our Kids campaign, we joined with students, families, educators, and advocates across the country, leading over 2,000 local actions to show that we won’t stand by as vital education funds are slashed to hand a $4.5 trillion tax cut to billionaires. Actions included clap-ins and walk-ins, teach-ins and rallies, parent meetings, webinars, and more. From coast to coast, communities focused on what our kids, public schools, and universities need. Like in Sacramento, where college and K–12 affiliates of the CFT marched with students and advocates. Educators at scores of schools in Los Angeles, New York City, and Miami held walk-ins and handed out leaflets.

The Life and Education of Karen Lewis

Jeff Bryant, The Progressive

Karen Lewis, the renowned Chicago educator and activist best known for her leadership as president of the Chicago Teachers Union during the historic Chicago Public Schools nine-day strike in 2012, lived a tremendous life. Her leadership and organizing strategies built the CTU into a strong progressive, community-based force and inspired a wave of teachers strikes across the country. Now, four years after her death from brain cancer, I Didn’t Come Here to Lie tells the story of Lewis’s life and education, in her own words.  In the book’s foreword, cowriter Elizabeth Todd-Breland and editor Jill Petty note that the memoir is largely drawn from recorded interviews and conversations that took place over more than a dozen visits with Lewis between 2017 and 2020. The book’s conversational nature makes Lewis’s wit, wisdom, and passion for the future of Chicago students and teachers leap off the page.

Language, Culture, and Power

Crushing Dissent Through Immigration Law

Chip Gibbons, Jacobin

The events of recent weeks are so disturbing that they are worth recounting in detail. Mahmoud Khalil was returning home with his pregnant wife on the evening of March 8, 2025, when four plainclothes officers with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) informed him he was under arrest. As his wife refused to leave his side, the officers threatened to arrest her, too. Khalil was whisked away, first to New Jersey, then to Louisania. Following his arrest, it was announced that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was seeking to deport Khalil using a vague McCarthy-era law that allows the US government to expel someone if the secretary of state finds their presence could have adverse consequences for US foreign policy. Khalil is a US permanent resident, meaning he has many of the same legal rights as US citizens. In seeking to revoke his residency status, the Trump administration has not alleged Khalil has committed a single crime. Instead, they’ve made clear they are targeting him for his activism for Palestine.

Defiant Dreamer Doesn’t Fear Deportation Under Trump

Billal Rahman, Newsweek

A Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient has told Newsweek that she doesn’t fear deportation under the Trump administration. “I could lose my DACA come December because I’m fighting against that administration but at this point, I’m like I don’t care,” Karla Castaneda, the executive director of the Workers’ Rights Education Project, said in an interview.

“At this point, it’s like we need to fight,” she added.

English Learners Are Increasingly Struggling with Mental Health Challenges

Maggie Marcus, The Century Foundation

It has been five years since that fateful moment in March 2020 when the world as we knew it changed. Three years later, the federal government declared that the COVID-19 pandemic was no longer an emergency. Of course, we still see its ramifications, particularly in terms of mental health impacts. The National Institute of Mental Health says that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the mental health of both adults and children, specifically in terms of anxiety, depression, and substance use disorder. Overnight, youth lost their social interactions with teachers and peers, creating a sense of isolation and loneliness. According to a recent article in the Atlantic, we are all spending more time alone, which can be particularly harmful for adolescents and youth.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Syracuse education scholars: Why schools must protect trans kids

George Theoharis, Syracuse.com

One of the defining qualities of the best schools in our country is the ability to create a welcoming environment that fosters robust education for each and every child, but specifically for the children who are the most vulnerable, at the greatest risk, and who are most likely to struggle. We are in a moment in our national political discourse where there are real and pervasive threats to this endeavor. The books that are used to expand students’ minds and teach about the breadth of the human experience are under attack. As any English teacher knows, a book’s value cannot be assessed on a single paragraph or page. We are seeing this wave of censorship and challenges across the country.

How improving air quality in schools would minimize the threat of bird flu spread

Dr. Jay K. Varma, Chalkbeat

Experts are growing increasingly worried that bird flu — avian influenza H5N1 — will evolve into a strain that causes widespread illness and death in humans and that the federal government is neither sufficiently containing the epidemic in animals, nor preparing sufficiently for widespread human illness. While containment, preparedness, and overall response for national epidemics are inherently federal government responsibilities in the United States, there is one critical intervention that states and large cities should take now: Improve indoor air quality in schools and congregate settings.

How Covid’s mental health toll transformed California’s schools

Emma Gallegos, Ed Source

When schools shuttered five years ago, many students like Benjamin Olaniyi turned to their phones to find connection during a profoundly unsettling and isolating time. “Social media made us feel more connected with the world,” said Olaniyi, who is now a junior at King/Drew Medical Magnet High School in Los Angeles. The pandemic struck in the spring of his sixth grade year, causing him to miss a school camping trip he had looked forward to. He remembers a sense of unity online in those early days amid the uncertainty and fear.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

When a hurricane washes away a region’s child care system

Sara Murphy, Hechinger Report

Three-year-old Fitz Lytle was burying a plastic cheetah toy in a tub of lavender-scented sand.

“Is Fitz going to help them?” asked Shelby Ward, an early childhood mental health specialist sitting nearby. “A police car will help them,” Fitz replied, steering a matchbox-sized police car around the mound where the cheetah’s ears poked out. The rescue vehicle was one of several figurines, along with fences, homes and plastic tea lights symbolizing electricity and candles, chosen for their relevance to the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The Category 4 storm dumped nearly 15 inches of rain on this North Carolina town late last September and caused more than $59 billion in damage to the western part of the state.

US academic groups sue White House over planned deportations of pro-Gaza students

Robert Tait, The Guardian

US academic groups have sued the Trump administration in an effort to block the deportation of foreign students and scholars who have been targeted for voicing pro-Palestinian views and criticism of Israel. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Middle East Studies Association (Mesa) filed a lawsuit at a US federal court in Boston on Tuesday accusing the administration of fomenting “a climate of repression” on campuses and stifling constitutionally guaranteed free speech rights. Lawyers acting for the groups warn that the crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech is likely to herald a broad clampdown on dissenting views in higher education and elsewhere.

“How Fascism Works” Author Jason Stanley Plans to Leave the U.S. [Video]

Michele Martin and Jason Stanley, Amanpour and Company

Trump’s America has started to challenge and redefine academic freedom, and Yale Professor Jason Stanley is sounding the alarm. He is the author of “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.” Stanley joins the show to discuss how new teaching guidelines are stoking a culture of fear, and why he’s taking drastic measures as a result.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

How the Education Department cuts could hurt low-income and rural schools [Audio]

Jonaki Mehta, NPR

President Trump’s efforts to shutter the U.S. Department of Education are in full swing. On Thursday, he signed an executive action instructing U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education,” and to do so “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.” Before that, the department had already announced it was shrinking its workforce by nearly half, with cuts to all divisions.

A Historical View of Trump’s Anti-DEI Crusade

Johanna Alonso, InsideHigherEd

In 1961, shortly after the University of Georgia admitted its first two Black students, a math instructor asked a group of white students to write down their feelings about the integration—and the segregationist riots that followed. Decades later, Robert Cohen, a professor of history and social studies at New York University and a senior fellow at the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, became the first historian to analyze those writings in an attempt to better understand the racial ideas of university students in the South at the time. He found that many students’ views were rooted in their lack of knowledge about America’s history of slavery and racism; they received no education on those topics in Georgia’s K-12 schools, nor at UGA itself.

Now Is the Time for Big Ideas

Naomi Klein, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Astra Taylor and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, In These Times

About a month after Donald Trump was inaugurated to a second term, and as it became overwhelmingly clear that Elon Musk’s role alongside him is to gut the administrative state and pave the way for widespread privatization, Haymarket Books held ​“An Emergency Town Hall” to help situate this ​“Corporate Coup in Global Context.” The roundtable discussion included bestselling journalist and author Naomi Klein, who is known for many books, including The Shock Doctrine, No Logo and Doppleganger; writer, author and organizer Astra Taylor, who cofounded The Debt Collective and most recently coauthored Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea; author, journalist and professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who is a contributing writer at The New Yorker and recently wrote the main post-election article ​“Why Didn’t the Progressive Movement Challenge Kamala Harris” for In These Times and who wrote, among other books, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and edited How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective; and professor Chenjerai Kumanyika, who helped guide the discussion, cohosts the Uncivil podcast and also created and hosts the widely popular Empire City podcast.

Democracy and the Public Interest

An OC school district spent big on an elite sports academy. Was it worth it?

Jill Replogle, LAist

The multipurpose room, or MPR, is a standard feature of California schools — a big, often drab room where you can stage a play or a science fair. But the MPR at what used to be Bernardo Yorba Middle School in Yorba Linda was converted last fall into a high-tech gym. Brand new training equipment lines the walls — seven of the machines cost more than $10,000 each, according to invoices reviewed by LAist. Next door, the “recovery center” has plush recliners equipped with red-light therapy. During a recent visit, a high school wrestler named Max kicked back in one of the chairs after a workout, wearing compression boots, retail price $800.

A Supreme Court Case Could Change How We Think About and Pay For Religious Schools

Daniel Mollenkamp, EdSurge

Under the first couple of months of the new administration, education has come in for significant and contested revamping. The federal education department has suffered deep cuts, which are the subject of a lawsuit from Democratic state attorneys general. A bitterly disputed executive order has tasked Education Secretary Linda McMahon, wife of the wrestling impresario, with shuttering the department. She has called it a “final mission,” one that she claims will give parents greater control. McMahon’s effort comes as school vouchers and education savings accounts are making gains in states across the country. Researchers and advocates draw a connection to charter schools, emphasizing that charters offer an example of how choice options might shape up.

ACLU, teachers, students sue St. Francis Area Schools over book bans

Madison McVan, Minnesota Reformer

The ACLU of Minnesota and the state teachers union filed two separate lawsuits Monday against St. Francis Area Schools, alleging that the district’s book bans violate the Minnesota Constitution and a 2024 law banning book bans. Students, teachers and parents are also plaintiffs in the lawsuits. St. Francis Area Schools adopted a library policy in November that relies on ratings from a website called BookLooks, which has ties to the right-wing group Moms for Liberty. Books with a BookLooks rating of 3 or higher (out of 5) are subject to removal from St. Francis bookshelves at the request of a student, parent or community member.

Other News of Note

March 28, 1898: Wong Kim Ark Wins Citizenship Case

Zinn Education Project

On March 28, 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, holding that children born in the United States, even to parents not eligible to become citizens, were nonetheless citizens themselves under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants who were barred from ever becoming U.S. citizens under the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, Wong Kim Ark was denied re-entry to the United States after a trip to China, on the grounds that the son of a Chinese national could never be a U.S. citizen.

Wong Kim Ark [Video]

American Experience, PBS

United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) [Lesson Plan]

iCivics