Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Students Want to Talk About Race. Let Them

Tyrone C. Howard & Keara Williams, Education Week

The guilty verdicts last month in the federal case against the men who murdered Ahmaud Arbery serve as yet another reminder that we need more classroom conversations about how to talk to students about the volatile situations that remain connected to racial justice in America. We also need to be reminded of just how to conduct them. The aftermath of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor—as court cases in all three tragedies have either concluded or are ramping up—have left feelings of hurt, anger, and despair among students who are trying to process the totality of these horrific events.

How to avoid being duped by false Ukraine information — and other news literacy lessons

Valerie Strauss, Washington Post

Here is the latest installment of a weekly feature I have been running for some time on this blog — lessons from the nonprofit News Literacy Project, which aims to teach students and the public how to sort fact from fiction in our digital and contentious age. The News Literacy Project was founded more than a decade ago by Alan Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter at the Los Angeles Times, and it has become the leading provider of news literacy education. You can learn more about the organization and its resources and programs in this piece.

7 Takeaways for Educators From Biden’s State of the Union

Evie Blad, Education Week

President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address mentioned students and schools alongside pressing national issues like COVID-19 recovery and foreign relations. But maybe you’re a stressed out educator who was too busy to watch? We’ve got your back. Here’s a cheat sheet of K-12 education mentions in the address. Read complete coverage of the State of the Union here.

Language, Culture, and Power

The United States needs bilingual education

Izzy Yuan, High School Insider

February 28, 2022

Bilingual education is a basic necessity in today’s global society. It’s a form of education in which students need to learn two or more languages. It’s designed to provide dual language programs, in which instruction is given in two languages. Although this might be different in other countries, the primary objective of bilingual education in the United States is to teach English to students who are not as proficient in English while building their literacy in their home language. U.S. citizens also have the leisure to learn a second language for fun, unlike places like South Korea where English is a required course.

Students learning indigenous science to fight climate change

Ryann Blackshere Vargas, Spectrum News

Dozens of high school students in Los Angeles are learning ancient land practices as well as ways to combat climate change with old and new science. The Indigenous Science program is a new curriculum at Anahuacalmecac International University Preparatory of North America. The LAUSD charter school is the only school for Indigenous people in LA County. The science class extends beyond the classroom to the outdoors, where students learn about creating green spaces and planting native seeds. Native traditions are central to the curriculum and amplify the need for Indigenous voices in the fight to curb climate change, says the school’s executive director

The Indigenous Science program is a new curriculum at Anahuacalmecac International University Preparatory of North America, an LAUSD charter school that is also the only school for Indigenous people in LA County.

Afro-Latinas Stress The Complexity Of Their Roots

Jacqueline Cardenas, Chicago Reporter

The first time DePaul junior, Ariana Collazo heard of an Afro-Latina individual in school was last year during her Afro Caribbean class when Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat came to speak to her class.  “Listening to her story was really inspiring and I’ll never forget watching her,” said Collazo. Collazo said she felt connected to the author’s experience of being ostracized and the way classmates treated her differently growing up, coming from a Puerto Rican and African American background.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Community Schools Could Fix a Major Problem in Education

Jeff Bryant, The Progressive

Leslie Hu remembers the very day, a Thursday in March 2020, when her school, Dr. Martin Luther King Academic Middle School in San Francisco, received word from the district office that Friday would be the last day the school would be physically open until further notice due to the coronavirus epidemic. Without waiting for guidance, she and a few other staff members, “immediately went into overdrive to connect with as many families as possible,” she tells me.

Working late into the evening, the staff members made “wellness calls” to deliver messages of care and reassurance. “Our message was, ‘We are not abandoning you. What do you need? We still care,’ ” recallsHu, a community schools coordinator and social worker at the school.

New LAUSD superintendent on enrollment declines, school choice and Covid | Q&A

Kate Sequeira, EdSource

New Los Angeles schools Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has packed in a lot during his first three weeks on the job — overseeing changes to the district’s mask mandates and debuting an extensive 100-day plan outlining his priorities for the district. Carvalho, who comes to Los Angeles Unified after serving nearly 14 years as the superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools, is faced with a number of challenges made worse by the pandemic.

When students counsel other students [AUDIO]

Education Beat Podcast

For students who are leery of adults, peer counseling can provide a safe place to work through difficult family problems, stress, and depression. California has urged schools to invest in mental health programs, like peer counseling. What are the benefits and pitfalls of programs where students counsel students?

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Lower-income families more likely to lose income during child care disruptions

Karen D’Souza, EdSource

The latest wave of Covid cases this winter has disrupted even the best-laid plans for child care. But low-income parents have been hit disproportionately with a double whammy in recent weeks — losing both child care and income at much higher rates than their well-heeled peers, according to the Washington Post’s analysis of census survey data. Day care closures and other disruptions increased from December to January, as cases of the omicron variant peaked, but they were most common in households that make less than $25,000 a year, data from the Census Household Pulse survey shows.

Proof Points:  Researchers blast data analysis for teachers to help students

Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report

The numbers were supposed to shed light on what was happening in public schools. That was the idea behind the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. It mandated that every third through eighth grade student had to take an annual test to see who was performing at grade level.  In the years after the law went into effect, the testing and data industries flourished, selling school districts interim assessments to track student progress throughout the year along with flashy data dashboards that translated student achievement into colored circles and red warning flags. Policymakers and advocates said that teachers should study this data to understand how to help students who weren’t doing well.

When colleges defraud students, should the government go after school executives?

Cory Turner, NPR

In a shocking investigation, the U.S. Senate declared the federal student loan program “plagued by fraud and abuse.” Its report heaped scorn on for-profit trade schools for serving 22% of federal student loan borrowers but accounting for 44% of defaults. “The school keeps the student aid money … and the student is left holding the bag with a poor credit rating, no job and no income to repay the student loan,” U.S. Rep. Marge Roukema, R-N.J., declaimed in her crusade against for-profit “bad apples.”

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

CORE’s Struggle for Fair Housing Rights in LA

M. Keith Claybrook, Jr., Black Perspectives

It has been 60 years since the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) targeted racially segregated housing in Los Angeles. Although the main stage of the Black Freedom Movement was the American South, the struggle stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. The Black population in Los Angeles grew exponentially after WWII, settling largely in the “socially isolated and physically dilapidated South Central and Watts” while others would integrate the historically white areas of West Adams and Compton. This resulted in white flight. By November of 1961, CORE turned its attention towards integrating housing in Los Angeles with a renewed sense of power and faith in the ability to challenge and change racially discriminatory practices after the success of the Freedom Rides. Like chapters in Brooklyn, NY and Seattle, WA, CORE in Los Angeles started the “special Freedom Dweller campaign” targeting the areas of Glendale, Burbank, Torrance, Monterey Park and the Centinela Valley. The Freedom Dweller campaign executed the CORE strategy of research and dialogue before taking nonviolent direct-action. And according to Andrea Gibbons, “By early 1962, CORE had tested thirty-three buildings, and was involved in litigation and campaigning around several of them.”

Inequality has long driven Black parents to pull children from public schools

Amaarah DeCuir, Washington Post

In this moment marked by the coronavirus pandemic, national uprisings against police brutality and systemic racism, and reports of harmful and dismissive treatment of Black students in classrooms, Black families are withdrawing from local public schools at rates that far exceed previous years. It is a reminder that despite 65 years of desegregating our nation’s schools, the school integration movement has failed to provide Black students with the conditions they need to thrive — well-funded schools, relevant curriculum and freedom from discrimination.

African students say they’re facing discrimination as they try to leave Ukraine [AUDIO]

Frank Langfitt & Eleanor Beardsley, NPR

Among the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing Ukraine are many Africans and South Asians who were studying and working in the country. As they have tried to cross the borders into neighboring countries, some have voiced complaints of discrimination and poor treatment, while others have said they’ve seen exceptional kindness extended to them. To get a sense of these varying experiences, NPR spoke to refugees, many of whom are students, as they tried to cross borders into Poland and Hungary.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Colorado bill would make schools post all teaching materials online

Erica Meltzer, Chalkbeat

Colorado schools would have to post lists of textbooks, worksheets, websites, and surveys administered to students, as well as teacher training materials under a Republican-sponsored bill up for consideration this week. “On the heels of COVID, you had a lot more awareness from parents seeing curriculum that students were using, what students were learning,” said state Rep. Tim Geitner, an El Paso County Republican, and the bill’s sponsor. “The purpose of the bill is to just add transparency around our most important public institutions.” It’s one of more than a dozen curriculum transparency measures being considered in statehouses around the country, the latest in an ongoing battle over how race, gender, and history are taught in America’s classrooms.

How the War on Critical Race Theory Revived Anti-Gay Activism in Schools

Mark Jacob Stern, Slate

For decades, anti-gay activists have pushed their agenda by masking their homophobia in a concern for children’s innocence. But as gay Americans have demanded equal rights and gained greater visibility, these anti-gay sentiments have fallen out of favor in polite society. As a result, the bigots began cloaking their hatred of homosexuality in terms of religious liberty and “natural law.” Now, the anti-gay lobby has found a tantalizing new opportunity to continue their crusade: The right’s war against critical race theory. Suddenly, Republican lawmakers are establishing speech codes for public schools, censoring students and teachers, and banning diverse educational materials. Homophobic activists have piggybacked off this campaign by reframing LGBTQ-related school speech as dangerous liberal propaganda.

How women claimed their place in America’s history books

Erin Blakemore, National Geographic

Women have always been part of history. But for centuries, their participation in it was overlooked: Early history texts often excluded women altogether, aside from accounts of powerful women like queens. Historians—who were almost entirely men—often saw the past through the lens of the “great man” theory, which holds that history is largely shaped by male heroes and their struggles. That changed in the 20th century, with the birth of women’s history as an academic discipline, a push to recognize the achievements of women—and a movement to ensure women had equal access to the academic institutions where their history might be taught. In the United States, the result was National Women’s History Month, an annual celebration born from the activism of historians intent on making sure women got their due.

Other News of Note

Russian police jail kids who took flowers and ‘No to War’ signs to Ukraine’s embassy [Audio]

Bill Chappell, NPR

They carried flowers, and handmade signs reading “нет войне” — No to War. They tried to leave their message outside Ukraine’s embassy in Moscow — and for that, they were arrested.

That’s the story emerging in Russia about five children, ages 7 to 11, who went with their mothers to visit the embassy on Tuesday. Their excursion could have served as a reminder of shared humanity, even during a conflict. But police in Moscow didn’t see it that way. They detained the kids and parents, putting them in a holding cell.

Immigrant Youth Hold Rally Demanding Biden End All Deportations

Jenna Mcguire, Common Dreams

A day after President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, immigrant youth from across the U.S. rallied outside the White House on Wednesday, demanding an end to all deportations. Organized by United We Dream—the largest immigrant youth-led group in the country—activists at the rally drew attention to the president’s failed immigration policies and unveiled a banner acknowledging the over two million people who have been deported or expelled under the Biden administration. “President Biden can praise his administration’s purported achievements all he wants, but at the end of the day, young, Black, brown, and immigrant people from across the country know of his failures to protect our communities,” said Cynthia Garcia, national campaigns manager for community protection at United We Dream, in a statement.