Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Disrupting White Supremacy and Anti-Black Racism in Educational Organizations

John B. Diamond and Louis M. Gomez, Educational Researcher

White supremacy and anti-Black racism are deeply embedded in educational organizations and disrupting them is key to creating more racially just schools. This essay details how the regular practice of organizational routines reproduces racial domination and subordination. We argue that combining critical perspectives on race with organizational improvement approaches can help disrupt this reproductive process. More specifically, educators can engage in critical reflection and action to interrupt, deconstruct, and redesign organizational routines in ways that challenge and hopefully undermine white supremacy and anti-Black racism in schools. We highlight how this approach could help create more racially just educational contexts.

In ‘Above Ground,’ Clint Smith uses poetry to confront the legacy of slavery [Audio]

Terry Gross, Fresh Air

With some fiction and nonfiction books about Black history banned in some schools, it’s a particularly good time to talk with my guest, Clint Smith. His nonfiction book “How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America” won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. It was also on The New York Times Book Reviews list of the 10 Best Books of 2021. For that book, he visited eight places central to the history of slavery in America to better understand the distortions in the way the history of slavery was taught to him and to most children, and the ways many Americans deceive themselves about that history. Smith is also an award-winning poet, and I’m happy to say he has a new collection called “Above Ground.” It deals with the legacy of slavery in a more personal way, through poems addressed to his young children about what their grandparents endured and escaped. The poems are also about fatherhood and the joy and anxiety surrounding it, especially as a Black father.

“Closed by Order of the Governor”: Teachers in the Crossfire of Florida’s War on Public Education

Isabela Dias, Mother Jones

On the morning of January 23, Jean Faulk opened her inbox to find an email labeled “urgent” from her principal at Bayshore High School in Bradenton, Florida. “Based on clarifications from the state in December, teacher-created classroom libraries fall under what the state is defining as library material,” Wendell Butler Jr. wrote to his staff of 75 or so teachers. Faulk and her colleagues suddenly were expected to cross-check their books against an online catalog of district-approved titles. If a book wasn’t in the system, it would have to be inspected by a librarian. The email instructed Bayshore’s faculty to “remove or cover” classroom libraries until the materials had been reviewed.

Language, Culture, and Power

A critical examination of policies and practices impacting the education of unaccompanied immigrant children in the United States

Ruth M. López and Natalia Giraldo-Santiago, EPAA

Beginning in 2014, increasing numbers of unaccompanied immigrant children (UIC) arrived and were apprehended at the United States-Mexico border. These children were fleeing violence, poverty, environmental disasters, as well as state-sanctioned violence and political instability influenced by interventions and support from the U.S. government spanning several decades. The purpose of this article was to examine the factors that shape the educational experiences of UIC in the United States during and after detention. The following questions guided this analysis: (1) What policies and practices impact the education of apprehended UIC in the United States? (2) What are the conditions formerly apprehended UIC encounter in schools?

How Schools Can Address Racial Stressors, An Expert Explains

Ileana Najarro, Education Week

Farzana Saleem, an assistant professor at Stanford University’s graduate school of education, has focused her research on understanding how parents of color talk to their children about race and prepare them for racism, with a particular focus on how Black youth and families are having these conversations. At a time when states are passing legislation limiting how teachers can discuss race and racism in K-12 schools, Saleem is now looking into how schools and teachers play a role in interventions for students of color dealing with racial stressors both in and out of school, whether that’s being called a racial slur, or witnessing discrimination, etc. Earlier this year she and her colleagues launched an 11-week intervention program in four northern California schools, around helping middle and high school students address and heal from racial stress and trauma.

California high schools are adding hundreds of ethnic studies classes. Are teachers prepared?

Megan Tagami, Cal Matters

California high school students will be required to pass an ethnic studies class to graduate, starting with the class of 2030. That means the state needs lots of new ethnic studies teachers. But do educators need a special credential to teach ethnic studies? Some ethnic studies advocates say allowing any social science teacher to instruct the subject will lead to watered down and ineffective courses, while school districts argue that flexibility is important if they’re going to fill the roles.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

We will stop at nothing to protect the children

Alexandra Petri, Washington Post

I can think of nothing worse than children — in school, sitting at their desks, reading banned books. A horrible thought, all those children solemnly holding books in their hands and reading them and putting the thoughts in those books into their minds. Learning the wrong lessons and growing up — the wrong way. Growing all the way up. Getting to grow up and think thoughts about those improper things they read in unsanctioned books, their whole lives, maybe. Horrible. I can think of nothing worse. Children who get to be 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and beyond — children who get to grow and have children of their own, and call their mothers or forget to call them, children who get to see the places they always wanted to see and children who get to be the best aunts in the world, but one afternoon in 2023 they read a book I didn’t approve of. I can’t imagine anything more horrible. Something must be done. To protect the children, we must stop at nothing.

Student Activists Push Congress for Action on Climate Change Education

Arianna Prothero, Education Week

Two-hundred student activists from across a dozen states have collaborated to write a pair of House resolutions calling on U.S. lawmakers to take action on climate change—specifically, how it affects the nation’s youth and schooling. The resolutions, sponsored by Democratic Reps. Mike Thompson and Barbara Lee, both from California, call for the House of Representatives to support comprehensive K-12 climate change education in schools and greater mental health investments for children and teens impacted by the changing climate.

As Colorado moves toward a ban, which states allow corporal punishment in schools?

Alia Wong, USA Today

Colorado could be on the brink of doing something nearly two dozen states have yet to do: outlaw corporal punishment in schools. “I thought this was already done. I did not realize this was still a thing,” Aurora Public Schools board member Michael Carter told lawmakers at a hearing for a bill that would ban the practice. “One of the things that everybody in here knows, I believe, is that it does not work.” Carter said he was physically disciplined as a student in Texas in the 1980s. The Colorado General Assembly appears set to pass the bill, one of several state legislative efforts this year to get rid of school-based corporal punishment for good. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona sent a letter to education and government officials Friday calling for an end to the use of physical discipline such as paddling in the 23 states where it is “either expressly allowed or not expressly prohibited.”

Access, Assessment, Advancement

State Preschool in a Mixed Delivery System: Lessons From Five States

Karin Garver, G. G. Weisenfeld, Lori Connors-Tadros, Katherine Hodges, Hanna Melnick, and Sara Plasencia, Learning Policy Institute

Most states in the United States operate their public preschool programs in a mixed delivery system that serves children in local education agencies (LEAs) as well as non-LEA settings, such as Head Start agencies, child care centers, private schools, and family child care homes. A mixed delivery system has many benefits, including adding valuable capacity—in terms of both workforce and facilities—to serve children; providing families with choice in the environment they prefer for their children; and supporting small businesses. There are several challenges to operating a mixed delivery system, however, such as coordinating and supporting the participation of preschool providers across settings, from large LEAs to small private providers.

To inform state preschool administrators and policymakers as they refine their mixed delivery systems, this report describes the mixed delivery systems of five states that have taken different approaches to supporting providers across settings.

This educator turned lawmaker wants to end misuse of standardized testing

Valerie Strauss, Washington Post

The national news is full of depressing stories about repeated acts of violence in schools, expanding restrictions in Republican-led states on what teachers can say about race and gender, and staffing shortages so severe that some districts are going to four-day school weeks. Something getting less attention but shouldn’t be is the annual springtime ritual of standardized K-12 testing. It involves millions of students who are forced to take exams to obtain scores that educators say don’t tell them anything they don’t already know.

UC proposes first-time systemwide admission guarantee to all qualified transfer students

Teresa Watanabe, LA Times

The University of California on Tuesday unveiled its first-ever systemwide admission guarantee for qualified transfer student applicants — but access to particular campuses is not assured. To receive the guarantee, community college students would need to complete a newly unified set of general education courses required by both UC and California State University, complete specific coursework needed for UC majors, and earn a minimum GPA.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The Income Gap Is Becoming a Physical-Activity Divide

Matt Richtel, New York Times

Over the last two decades, technology companies and policymakers warned of a “digital divide” in which poor children could fall behind their more affluent peers without equal access to technology. Today, with widespread internet access and smartphone ownership, the gap has narrowed sharply. But with less fanfare a different division has appeared: Across the country, poor children and adolescents are participating far less in sports and fitness activities than more affluent youngsters are. Call it the physical divide.

Afghanistan: Girls’ education activist arrested by Taliban

Nicholas Yong, BBC

A prominent Afghan campaigner for female education has been arrested by the Taliban, even as teenage girls and women remain barred from classrooms. Matiullah Wesa, 30, had often received threats – he has spent years travelling across Afghanistan trying to improve access to education for all children. The Taliban did not say why Mr Wesa is in custody. His house was also raided.

His arrest follows the detention of a number of other activists who have been campaigning for women’s education.

Public Education Is Vital for Democracy. But It’s Not the Solution to Poverty or Inequality

Jennifer Berkshire, Jacobin

I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump told supporters in Nevada after they helped him notch a decisive win in the state’s 2016 Republican caucuses. The line was typical: dashed off, casually cruel, instantly divisive. And it instantly distinguished Trump from his competitors in both parties. He wasn’t promising his supporters a brighter future, but only if they got more education or retrained for a better job. There was no talk here of “access,” “opportunity,” or “human capital.” Instead, Trump was trashing yet another political norm: the bipartisan consensus, stretching back a half century, that the solution to economic inequality is more and better education. In his important and timely new book, The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy, Jon Shelton chronicles the evolution of that belief, long elevated to the status of common sense. It’s the story of how political elites fell in love with an idea, abandoning a redistributive agenda in favor of education. The result, argues Shelton, has been ever-widening economic inequality and a stark political divide.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Teachers Union Head Says Critical Race Theory Bans Are a Front for School Privatization

Jack Ross, Capital and Main

Randi Weingarten heads the American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union in the United States with 1.7 million members. She says the “culture wars” rocking school boards and legislatures are a way to build support for laws to expand private school voucher programs that use education funds to pay students’ tuition at private, online or even religious schools. This year, 29 state legislatures are considering bills to either create or expand voucher programs, according to Weingarten, in addition to the 72 voucher and tax credit programs already passed in 33 states. She asserts that efforts by right-wing lawmakers like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to ban critical race theory and books containing “woke” messaging are only part of this larger effort to redirect public school dollars.

Florida expands its voucher program to every student, regardless of income [Audio]

Lynn Hatter, NPR

GOP lawmakers in Florida have voted to expand the state’s school voucher program to every student, regardless of family income. Critics say lawmakers have wildly underestimated the program’s costs.

Virginia school district parents practice calm communication on culture war issues [Audio]

Randi B. Hagi, All Things Considered

As arguments continue to flare across the country about what is best for kids in schools, one community is trying to turn the heat down. Rockingham County, Va., is in the Shenandoah Valley, and they’re working to bring those who disagree about public education and transgender students to the same table and possibly the same page. From member station WMRA in Harrisonburg, Randi B. Hagi reports.

Other News of Note

Martin County School Board Meeting [Video]

Grace Linn, Youtube

Good afternoon folks. I am Grace Linn and I have lived in Jensen Beach for over 33 years. I am 100 years young.