Just News 3.6.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Families turn to states for civil rights support as Trump dismantles the Education Department

Collin Brinkley, AP News

In their mostly white school district, Black students routinely heard racial slurs. White classmates hurled insults like “slave,” “monkey” or worse. It often went unpunished.

Parents made those claims in a 2024 complaint asking the U.S. Education Department to investigate racial bullying at the Pennridge School District in Pennsylvania. They thought their complaint had the power to make things better. Instead, it became one of thousands sitting in a federal office with little hope of gaining attention after layoffs by the Trump administration.

Families say they’ve had nowhere else to turn. “There was an expectation that something was going to happen,” said Adrienne King, who has two daughters in the district and is president of the NAACP Bucks County chapter. When nothing did, “it’s a very hollow, empty feeling.” One of the Education Department’s biggest jobs is to police discrimination in America’s schools. But amid mass firings and shifting priorities, that role has waned. In its place, there’s an emerging push for states to step up.

Navigating conversations with children about war, conflict and other traumatic events

Cheyanne Mumphrey, Associated Press

The conflicts and wars unfolding across the globe — from the Middle East to Ukraine — can be deeply upsetting to children who see images and headlines or who have family members affected. Parents and caregivers are struggling with how much to say and what to share with kids at different ages. Experts say keeping explanations honest but age‑appropriate, connecting with children’s feelings, and focusing on what’s being done to keep people safe are good first steps.

Limiting exposure to graphic images while answering questions calmly can help protect a child’s sense of security. When children show persistent signs of trauma or anxiety, professionals suggest seeking help from counselors or mental‑health providers.

What we know about the strike on a school in Iran as the death toll rises 

Chantal Da Silva, Molly Hunter, Larissa Gao, Amin Khodadadi, Shira Pinson, Matthew Mulligan and Tavleen Tarrant, NBC News 

The elementary school called with an urgent message about her son. “The war had started,” she was told. Come pick him up. The mother, who asked not to be identified, said she had only just dropped the boy off and couldn’t leave immediately since she had patients to see in her job as a midwife. Then the earth shook. And she ran. It was too late. Three airstrikes had hit Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab in southern Iran, killing 168 people, according to the town’s mayor. Many of them were children. One of them was her son. “By the time we arrived, the entire school had collapsed on top of the children,” the mother told NBC News. “People were pulling out children’s arms and legs. People were pulling out severed heads.”

Language, Culture, and Power

The Curriculum and the Slur

Steven Mintz, Substack

Yesterday I attended a public meeting of the Texas State Board of Education. The meeting had two registers, and they cannot be separated. The first was the formal one. The board had convened to deliberate on proposed K–12 social studies standards — the frameworks that will govern how millions of Texas children are taught to understand history, citizenship, and their place in a shared world. In my professional judgment, those standards are age-inappropriate in places, excessively content-dense, poorly aligned vertically, and ideologically imbalanced in a specific and consequential way: they organize the story of Texas through the lens of Western and Judeo-Christian civilization while marginalizing the histories of South and East Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and while minimizing the central role of Texas’s own Tejano population.

Tennessee GOP effort to track K-12 student immigration status advances

Melissa Brown, Chalkbeat

Tennessee Republicans continue to advance legislation that would require public schools track and report the immigration status of their students despite heated pushback from local educators.

House Bill 793 would require schools to start tracking and reporting anonymized data on students’ immigration status as early as next school year. But an amendment filed Wednesday indicates a controversial 2025 effort to either block undocumented students from enrolling in K-12 schools or charge their families tuition is dead for the year.

Restorative Times: An Entangled Exploration of White Time, Hospitality, and Restorative Justice in Schools

Daniel Thalkar, Youth

This paper explores the entanglement of the coloniality of time, justice, and emancipatory horizons through the lens of restorative justice in public schools. The author utilizes Jacques Derrida’s theory of hospitality in order to demonstrate how restorative justice, as an open spacetime of impossible choices, creates liberatory possibilities. The author utilizes Charles Mills’ “white time” to deconstruct racial capitalism’s notions of time as they manifest in schools and to reflect upon how restorative justice’s orientation towards relational, fluid temporalities offers a means through which the ethico-ontoepistemological assumptions that underlie oppressive systems in schooling can be questioned and transformed. A restorative justice approach grounded in hospitality, this theoretical paper argues, offers a way through the oppressive temporality of White Time.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Children shouldn’t have to defend themselves from climate change

Georges Benjamin, and Lisa Patel, American Public Health Association

Recently, our consortium received a letter from a 12-year-old Girl Scout after her classmates became sick during a record-breaking heat wave in Sacramento last summer. “For my Silver Award project, I’m working to help protect kids from extreme heat by asking schools to teach students how to recognize and respond to heat illness,” she wrote. “A lot of students don’t know the signs of heat illness or when they need to ask for help.” Her note was thoughtful and determined. It was also deeply unsettling. Children should not have to design public health interventions for themselves. That is our responsibility. Earlier this month, the federal government announced the repeal of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, the 2009 scientific determination that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases threaten public health. In plain terms, it is declaring that the pollution driving climate change no longer counts as a health threat, as it is described in a specific provision of the Clean Air Act. As physicians and public health leaders representing hundreds of thousands of clinicians nationwide, we strongly oppose this decision.

Youth climate activists confront Trump’s energy agenda in court 

Lesley Clark, EE News by Politico

Young climate advocates doing battle against President Donald Trump’s energy priorities — and the fossil fuel projects the administration advances — will soon have their day in court. Oral arguments in three youth climate cases — the first of which will take place Wednesday before the Alaska Supreme Court — come as the administration has rolled back regulations aimed at capping greenhouse gas emissions, pushed for expanded oil and gas production and extended lifespans for aging coal plants. Each of the cases is backed by Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based law firm that has scored victories in Montana and Hawaii, but has struggled to convince federal judges that youth have a constitutional right to a healthy environment that can be protected by a court.

Embedding children’s rights in climate-resilient cities

Manish Thakre, Open Global Rights

In response to the rapid growth of urban populations, the United Nations offered local governments a roadmap in 2023 to embed children’s rights within climate action. By 2030, an estimated 60% of city dwellers will be under 18. Cities worldwide—home to most of the world’s children—are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. Rapid urbanization, intensifying climate risks, and inadequate infrastructure all disproportionately affect children. Yet, urban planning often overlooks children (age 0–18), despite their resilience and agency in pushing to keep global temperature rise below 1.5˚C. “Cities are where the climate battle will largely be won or lost,” said UN secretary general António Guterres.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

What Will Be Left After the University of Texas Destroys Itself?

Aaron Boehmer, The Nation

In 2023, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 17 into law, banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at public institutions across the state. In the years since, the University of Texas at Austin has been steadily remaking itself in the image demanded by conservative legislators across town. The university’s most recent changes include the consolidation of African and African Diaspora Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, and Mexican American and Latina/o Studies into a single “Social and Cultural Analysis” department, as well as a UT system-wide policy asking faculty to avoid “controversial” topics in the classroom. While the shift seems sudden, these attacks are in line with an ant-DEI, right-wing agenda that has been years in the making.

The Right Expands Its Campaign to Censor College Professors

Eleanor J. Bader, The Progressive

When John White, a tenured professor of English Education and Adolescent Literacy at the University of North Florida, attended the first department meeting of the fall 2025 semester, he was stunned to hear that four words—diversity, equity, inclusion, and even culture—had been removed from the college’s course catalog. He was further shocked to hear that these words also had to be excised from syllabi. “We teach with a focus on social justice and making the world a better place for our kids,” White tells The Progressive. “As I saw it, this request was a violation of academic freedom.” White says that he initially refused to comply and, immediately after the meeting, wrote to the dean of the College of Education, asking to see the rule that prohibited these terms. “I learned that the Florida Board of Governors had conveyed this request verbally,” White says. “The rule had never been codified. We were being censored by a rule that literally did not exist.”

Wealthy universities, facing steep endowment tax hikes, cut PhDs and libraries

Ira Porter, Christian Science Monitor

Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber lobbied members of Congress repeatedly to deter an increase in the endowment tax on colleges and universities. Instead, when the One Big Beautiful Bill Act passed last summer, Princeton became one of a handful of schools whose endowment tax ballooned. Now, President Eisgruber is preparing his institution for change as it prepares to pay an endowment tax of 8% on net investment earnings this year, up from 1.4%. He’s asked department heads to make budget cuts and says more could come. He announced this month that over the next decade, Princeton expects to lose $11 billion in endowment investment earnings.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Trump child savings accounts: What they are, who they can help and their impact on wealth inequality [Audio]

Carmen Russell-Sluchansky, WHYY

In the heart of the 2026 tax season, the federal government is rolling out one of the more high-profile economic policies of President Donald Trump’s administration: Trump Accounts — or 530A investment accounts — a new tax-advantaged savings and investment program designed to give American children a financial head start. Created under the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the accounts provide a federal contribution and a tax-advantaged way for families to invest on behalf of their children. Each child born from last year until the end of 2028 and whose family opens an account will receive $1,000 in seed funding. Families can add another $5,000 per year and investments grow tax deferred until the child reaches adulthood.

ProPublica Sues Education Department for Withholding Records About Discrimination in Schools

Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica

ProPublica has sued the U.S. Department of Education in federal court in New York, accusing it of withholding public records about how it’s enforcing civil rights protections for millions of American students. The Education Department has failed to provide public records related to its investigations, communications and other work that ProPublica sought through four Freedom of Information Act requests filed last year. The Education Department’s civil rights arm for decades has investigated allegations of discrimination in schools. It historically has kept an online list of its open investigations and posted the findings of completed inquiries. But under Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, the Office for Civil Rights has been decimated and the work of its remaining investigators is largely cloaked in secrecy.

The Mothers Who Marched for Equality in Hillsboro, Ohio

Aaron Rovan, Smithsonian Magazine

Eleanor Cumberland slid into a narrow chair in the corner of a cramped courtroom in downtown Hillsboro, the seat of Highland County, Ohio. Through the window behind her, the weak March sun glinted off the brown skin of her neck. As the county commissioners called the meeting to order, she steeled herself for a fight. Truthfully, she was there for her mother, Imogene Curtis, who died thirty-seven years earlier, in 1985. “When she saw something that wasn’t fair, that wasn’t right,” Cumberland often said, “she did something about it.” Beginning in 1954, Curtis led one of the longest-sustained community actions of the early civil rights movement: a two-year protest of the local school district by Hillsboro’s Black community. Starting in the fall of that year—four months after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation—Curtis and about eighteen other mothers and their children marched a mile from their houses to the white school to seek admission, only to be turned away. Yet they continued this routine each day for two years.

Democracy and the Public Interest

This Summer, Students From Hundreds of Colleges Will Heed One Urgent Call

Michael Roth, New York Times

Between 1962 and 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. visited Wesleyan University four times to talk with students and teachers about the struggle for civil rights and nonviolent activism. It was a dark time in this country, but Dr. King told his audience that moral ends could yet be achieved through moral means, and that “we can move through the darkness of the hour to the brightness of a new day.” Some undergraduates heeded that call, and were inspired to join the many others around the country traveling to Mississippi, where voting rights were under attack. Freedom Summer, as that unforgettable season in 1964 was called, involved dangerous work. Many participants were beaten or arrested. A few were murdered. But they shook the conscience of a nation, and their efforts eventually led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

A Nationwide Book Ban Bill Has Been Introduced in the House of Representatives

Kelly Jensen, Book Riot

Following this week’s State of the Union Address, House Republicans worked quickly to advance legislation to ban books from public schools nationwide. House Resolution 7661 (H.R. 7661), also known as the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act” would modify the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by prohibiting use of funds under the act “to develop, implement, facilitate, host, or promote any program or activity for, or to provide or promote literature or other materials to, children under the age of 18 that includes sexually oriented material, and for other purposes.” The bill was introduced by House Representative Mary Miller. 17 additional Representatives cosigned it. H.R. 7661 is an anti-trans bill, and tucked within its provisions are those that ban books for those under 18 that “include sexually oriented material.” This is the same vague language used in numerous states across the U.S. to ban books from public schools and public libraries.

Feeling Their Way Through It: Educators’ Emotions and Ethical Sensemaking of Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act

Renee Moran, Natalia A. Ward, and Amber N. Warren, Teachers College Record

The study is situated in Tennessee, following the 2022 passage of the Age-Appropriate Materials Act (AAMA). This legislation required schools to maintain and publicly disclose a complete list of educational materials while implementing review processes to ensure content appropriateness relative to student age and maturity levels. The AAMA’s scope extended beyond school library collections to encompass all materials accessible to students, including those in teachers’ classrooms. This study investigates how educators make sense of ethical tensions created by Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022, with attention to how emotions shape their reasoning, decisions, and actions. By centering educators’ lived experiences, the study contributes to understandings of ethics, affect, and professional agency in policy-constrained contexts.

Other News of Note

Wynton Marsalis on What Jazz Can Teach Us About Democracy [Video]

Amanpour and Company

After nearly 40 years, the legendary jazz musician Wynton Marsalis is stepping down as Manager and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center. The world-renowned trumpeter and composer helped found this New York institution in the 1980s with a mission to build a more conscious, collaborative and creative world through the art of jazz. Marsalis joins the show to discuss his tenure and why he believes “jazz is the perfect metaphor for democracy.”