Just News 5.1.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Inflation is sucking the life out of teacher pay raises, report says

Cory Turner, NPR

The average salary for a public school teacher in the U.S. rose to $74,495 in the last school year, up 3.5% from the year before. But adjusted for inflation, today’s teachers are estimated to be earning less, not more, than they were in 2017. That’s according to a new review of school-related data from the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union with 3 million members. The annual release includes the latest data — collected directly from state departments of education — on teacher and support staff salaries, student enrollment and even how much money schools are getting from federal, state and local sources.

Civil Rights Cases Slow at Education Dept. Amid Trump’s Overhaul

Michael Bender, New York Times

The Education Department resolved roughly 30 percent fewer complaints of discrimination in American schools last year than in 2024, the sharpest year-to-year decline in more than three decades amid a Trump administration overhaul of civil rights enforcement, according to government data obtained by The New York Times. The drop came despite a record number of students seeking help from Washington to confront claims of prejudice, bias and bigotry in schools, according to the 2025 budget request from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. The slowdown has left about 20,000 students awaiting word from the government about the status of their claims, according to the data, which is maintained by the Education Department. The slower pace raises questions about whether the Trump administration’s continued pursuit of severe cuts to the department’s civil rights staff has hampered its ability to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

Who’s Thinking of the Children, Since Trump Isn’t?

Rann Miller, The Progressive

When President Donald Trump laid off nearly 1,400 workers from the Department of Education last year, he knew that his actions would make it much harder for the department to carry out its core tasks to protect students. The layoffs were part of a larger strategy: Trump’s ultimate goal is to shut down the Department of Education for good, and he has since shifted many of the department’s primary functions to other cabinet departments, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of the Interior, the Department of Labor, and the Department of State.Before Trump’s second administration, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights protected the rights of students from marginalized groups in schools receiving federal funding by enforcing anti-discrimination laws in areas such as admissions, athletics, and discipline. Those marginalized groups include students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, and students of color, including African American students.

Language, Culture, and Power

Cultural Relevance at Scale: The Effects of an Ethnic Studies Expansion on Academic Outcomes

Biraj Bisht, Sade Bonilla, Grace Kim, and Emily K. Penner, American Educational Research Journal

Ethnic studies is a culturally relevant curriculum designed to address the instructional needs of an increasingly diverse student population. However, evidence regarding the effectiveness of this curriculum at scale remains limited. This study evaluated the impact of districtwide implementation using a student-level difference-in-differences design with two-way fixed effects. We found that enrollment increased overall grade-point average by 0.17 points (0.24 SD), with the largest gains observed in math and science, and reduced course failure by 5.6 percentage points (0.14 SD). These benefits extended to all student groups, with stronger effects among academically vulnerable, male, Black and Latinx students and those with individualized education plans. Our findings suggest that well-implemented ethnic studies can be scaled effectively and can potentially reduce disparities in student outcomes.

Trump vs. Dreamers: Justice Dept. Moves to Make It Easier to Deport 500K+ DACA Recipients [Video]

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

The Trump administration is continuing its attacks on DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, that has given deportation relief and work permits to immigrants who came to the United States as children. The Board of Immigration Appeals — an administrative court within the Justice Department — recently ruled that DACA status is not enough to spare someone from deportation, a decision that sets a precedent potentially putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk.

Prolonged DACA renewals put California educators with temporary immigration status in limbo

Lasherica Thornton, EdSource

An early education teacher in California’s Central Valley may soon be forced out of the classroom as delays in renewing her immigration status and work authorization stretch far beyond the usual timeline. Her renewal is still “processing,” according to the application portal. If uprooted from the classroom, the toddlers in her class will lose their teacher overnight. “I am scared,” she said. “The process is taking longer than usual.” The teacher spoke to EdSource under the condition of anonymity because she is afraid of personal attacks and immigration enforcement action. Her permit expired last week. Across the nation, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, recipients — which include thousands of educators in California — are facing extremely long renewal delays lasting over five months, leaving schools at risk of sudden staffing disruptions and exposing the vulnerabilities of a temporary immigration status.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

How California’s Kids Are Taking On Big Oil

Padma Balaji, The Nation

At his home in Pasadena, high schooler Atticus Jackson frantically shoved his belongings into his car as the sky turned a deep orange. A few hundred feet away, the fire climbed up the mountain and a cloud of red and gray smoke obscured the view. He drove out of his city, ash raining down on the sidewalks below, in complete shock. “It felt like my world had been thrown off its center,” he said. The catastrophic Palisades fire, along with the Eaton fire, razed more than 50,000 acres in southern California. Experts say they were fueled by climate change. Galvanized by the disaster, Jackson founded a Sunrise Movement chapter in Foothills, the area that includes Pasadena and Altadena, to advocate for environmental justice in his community. And, exactly a year after the blaze narrowly missed his house, Jackson met with contingents from the national Sunrise Movement in Altadena for a rally to demand accountability and transparency from local leadership.

For Jorge Galindo, Feeding Kids is Personal

Ali Schalop, NEA Today

After a career in restaurants, Jorge Galindo has spent the last twelve years as a cafeteria manager in El Paso’s schools. Over the past two years, Galindo, or Mr. G as he’s known to his students, has been serving the students at Clendenin Elementary school. “I’m a proud Clendenin Unicorn,” he says.For Galindo, feeding the children of Texas is personal. “I grew up with cafeteria food,” he explains, “I was in a low-income area… and I knew a lot of the ladies that worked in the cafeterias… When I was in football, one of the ladies was a good friend of the family, and she knew when game day was coming to slip me an extra portion because she wanted me to make that extra tackle.” Galindo has carried this memory with him as he makes an effort to return the favor to the students of El Paso ISD, 29% of whom live below the poverty line.

Educational Outcomes of Natural Disaster Versus Conventional Pathways to Homelessness: Evidence from Hurricane Harvey

Meredith P. Richards, Alexandra E. Pavlakis, Cheyenne Phillips, and J. Kessa Roberts, Educational Researcher

Students often become homeless due to conventional, economic instability; however, they also become homeless from natural disasters. We provide initial empirical evidence comparing these pathways to homelessness in the context of Houston and Hurricane Harvey. Analyzing 7 years of data on 321,439 students using a comparative interrupted time-series approach incorporating student-level fixed effects, we find students who became homeless due to Harvey were more representative of district students overall and had more similar educational outcomes after the storm. Conversely, students who became homeless due to conventional reasons had more adverse outcomes, which improved after identification. We discuss these findings in light of the differential social constructions of these subgroups and conclude with implications for policy and practice.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

America’s Licensed Child Care Deserts

Hailey Gibbs and Casey Peeks, Center for American Progress

“During the pandemic, we lost our child care—our provider had to shut down,” said Anna Butcher, a mom of two from Morgantown, West Virginia. “I lost my job around that same time, but then when I went back to work, we couldn’t find any care. The centers were booked out at least a year, if not more. And the price was astronomical for this area.” The Butcher family’s experiences are, unfortunately, not unique. Child care in the United States—composed largely of a patchwork of small businesses often operating on thin profit margins—is increasingly inaccessible to families across the income spectrum.

Trump’s Top Child Care Official Wants a ‘Bonfire of Regulations’

Coral Davenport, New York Times

When Alex Adams arrived in Washington late last year as the Trump administration’s point man on child care, he was little known outside his home state of Idaho, where he had helped engineer a massive deregulation effort that became the envy of many conservative activists. He made his intentions clear right away. Federal child care regulations, he told his new staff, should “fit on an index card in my back pocket,” according to two people who heard him make the remark. Now, five months into his job as head of the Administration for Children and Families, which controls about $25 billion in child care and preschool funding for some 2.3 million poor children, Mr. Adams is preparing what he has said will be a “bonfire” of regulations.

How Has the Price of College Changed?

Charlie Wigul and Hans Johnson, Public Policy Institute of California

A common perception among students and families in California is that college is more expensive now than ever before. But factoring in financial aid, college is less expensive now than it was 15 years ago for most students, especially for those who attend the state’s public universities. Students who receive financial aid pay much less than the sticker price across all California schools, and they represent a large majority of students at UC and CSU. About half of first-time, full-time undergraduates in California receive financial aid from the federal government—and students of all income levels utilize it. A standard federal aid package could include grants, student loans, or work-study. After adjusting for inflation, the average net price of college for federal aid recipients at UC and CSU has lowered by at least 25% since 2008, across every household income level except the highest. At private nonprofits, middle class students have seen the greatest decreases in net price.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Rising inequality is the root of affordability problems

Josh Bivens, Hilary Wething, and Ben Zipperer, Economic Policy Institute

When most people—including policymakers—complain about a lack of affordability, they think of prices being too high. But affordability is the outcome of a race between prices and incomes. After all, goods and services were a lot cheaper 90 years ago during the Great Depression, but we all know that nearly everybody is richer today than their peers back then. Bringing incomes into the affordability picture makes for better understanding and better policy. New Congressional Budget Office data show that rising income inequality is the main reason that affordability feels out of reach for too many U.S. families. For more than four decades, most of the income growth in the U.S. economy has been funneled to those at the very top, leaving typical families with far less than their proportionate share of the economy’s gains.

War’s Deep Scars on Education in Iran

Financial Tribune

School closures after the recent US-Israeli military attacks on Iran have left deep and potentially lasting damage on the country’s education system. What began as an emergency response to security concerns quickly turned into one of the most serious disruptions to learning in recent years, exposing structural weaknesses in digital education and widening inequality among students. Following the attacks in late February, in-person education was suspended nationwide to protect students and school staff. School closures after the recent US-Israeli military attacks on Iran have left deep and potentially lasting damage on the country’s education system. What began as an emergency response to security concerns quickly turned into one of the most serious disruptions to learning in recent years, exposing structural weaknesses in digital education and widening inequality among students.

Somalia’s malnourished children hit hard by Iran war

Ammu Kannampilly and Olivia Le Poidevin, Reuters

For Somalia’s malnourished children, already suffering the twin catastrophes of looming famine and radical cuts in foreign aid, the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran means more than soaring petrol pump prices; it ​is a matter of life and death. Shortages of lifesaving therapeutic foods exacerbated by shipping disruptions are forcing clinics to turn away severely malnourished children and ration supplies, Reuters reporting ‌shows. Almost half a million children under 5 suffer from “severe acute malnutrition” or “wasting”, the most life-threatening form of hunger, and the delays are worsening the effect of the aid reductions.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Book bans and culture wars came for libraries. They’re still standing strong.

Nadra Nittle, The 19th

Sarah DeMaria still remembers how close she came to resigning from her role as a school librarian. It was the summer of 2023, and after a year of vicious personal attacks, politically motivated book challenges and police reports to flag so-called pornographic content in the library, DeMaria had enough. She packed up her office with no plan to return to the Hempfield School District in South Central Pennsylvania. But then she thought about her students: “If I left, who was going to be their voice?” she wondered. “Who was going to protect their books?”

Cases of student press censorship attempts on the rise in California schools

Thomas Peele, EdSource

Student journalists at the Redwood Bark at Redwood High School in Marin County aren’t alone in facing recent attempts to control student journalism. Despite protections in a 1977 landmark state law, the Student Free Expression Act, which prohibits administrators from interfering with the gathering and publication of news, student reporters and their journalism advisers have encountered censorship attempts in recent years, including efforts to punish advisers for students’ stories and to remove content. In one case, a principal told them that their job was to paint the high school in a good light.

1,000s of Chicago MS, HS Students Expected to Join Union-Driven Day of Action

Lauren Wagner, The 74

Chicago Public Schools teachers will host assemblies, history lessons and music performances before transporting middle and high school students to an afternoon rally May 1 as part of a communitywide day of civic action. Following weeks of discussion prompted by the Chicago Teachers Union, the district agreed April 16 to let schools voluntarily participate in International Workers Day. Superintendent Macquline King required classes be in session but said students can participate in the union’s optional field trip to the rally and march near downtown Chicago, where participants will advocate for increased state education funding and protest the Trump administration.

Other News of Note

Why It’s More Important Than Ever To Learn About May Day

Jackson Potter, In These Times

In a late April editorial titled ​“CPS CEO Macquline King did not need to cave to the Chicago Teachers Union,” the Chicago Tribune editorial board expressed dismay over Chicago Public Schools’ decision to mark the historic importance of May Day, a holiday meant to commemorate a worker-led campaign for an eight-hour work day. The editorial claims that celebrating May Day risks turning schools away from being ​“places of learning.” Why would the Chicago Tribune have such strong objections to observing an event that originated in Chicago in 1886, which is celebrated across the globe as International Workers’ Day?

Teaching the Truth About May Day: Reclaiming Labor’s Global Holiday

Zinn Education Project

At a moment when politicians aligned with the MAGA movement are banning books, restricting curriculum, and attacking educators for teaching honest history, May Day offers a powerful example of the kind of story they don’t want told — and the kind of story we must fight to protect and keep telling if we are to build a more just world. That effort to control history is not abstract. In Lowell, Massachusetts, a film about the city’s mill workers — women and girls who organized some of the earliest labor protests in U.S. history — was removed from a National Park site following a Trump administration directive. The film was censored because it tells the story of workers organizing and challenging exploitation — history that makes clear ordinary people can confront corporate power and win.