Just News 5.15.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

A Generation in Suspension: Iran’s Adolescents Between Protest, War, and a Future Without Horizon

Shirin Vossoughi, Radio Zameneh

Our dialogue began in 2024, bringing together Shirin Vossoughi, an Iranian scholar of education living and working in the United States, and Darvish, a pseudonym for an Iranian educator and psychologist who has worked with young people ages 13 to 22 in Iran. Our conversations have broadly focused on how best to support youth in navigating the range of challenges they face in the Iranian context, and on thinking together about questions of design, learning, and well-being within complex political, economic, and social conditions. Given the relatively limited attention to Iranian children and young people’s experiences in coverage of the December 2025–January 2026 protests and the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran that began on February 28, we decided to share some of our discussion more broadly in the form of an interview. Darvish has been living outside Iran for several months.

The revolt against i-Ready: Private equity-backed software faces parent, teacher and student fury

Tyler Kingkade, NBC News

In Anchorage, Alaska, math tutor Katelynn Petersen has watched hundreds of students struggle to use the software. “They all hate it — it’s so boring and so monotonous,” she said. In Rhode Island, school speech therapist Denise Champney said she’s seen children get so frustrated with the software’s animations and spoken prompts that one punched the screen of his Chromebook. “It is just incredibly infuriating,” she said. In Los Angeles, eighth grader Ward Wooden agrees. “I’m losing brain cells every time I do a lesson,” he said. They’re all complaining about i-Ready, which has quietly taken over America’s public school classrooms, reaching nearly 14 million students each year.

What makes a good teacher? Ask a Republican and a Democrat, and they are likely to agree

Gustavo E. Fischman, Eric Haas, Margarita Pivovarova, The Conversation

If you follow the headlines, it can seem like K-12 schools in the United States are a political battlefield. Some conservative parents and advocacy groups are lobbying to remove certain books from classrooms and libraries, most often those that highlight LGBTQ+ issues or race and racism. Some civil liberties groups, librarians and progressive parents, meanwhile, are pushing back against book bans, saying they are a form of unnecessary censorship. Parents and school boards also are clashing over a range of other issues, ranging from how transgender and nonbinary students are treated and which bathrooms they can use, to whether teachers should use artificial intelligence in the classroom. Beyond this evidence of political polarization, though, there’s another, less divisive reality. Ask people to name their best teacher, and regardless of their political affiliation, they will likely offer a similar answer. Most people will say that they learned a lot from a teacher who knew them, cared about them and made learning relevant to their lives.

Language, Culture, and Power

UCLA online textbook gives voice to Asian American, Pacific Islander history and cultures

Terry Tang, AP News

Model minority. Perpetual foreigner. The centuries-old stereotypes of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders as passive bystanders in American culture and politics still persist, despite U.S. history being full of examples to the contrary. The way to change that, scholars believe, is by teaching younger generations that history. A free, digital textbook overseen by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center aims to be a high-caliber guide to help high school and college educators nationwide teach more effectively about AAPI experiences. “Foundations and Futures: Asian American and Pacific Islander Multimedia Textbook” is the culmination of years of work by 100 contributors, from curriculum developers to illustrators. “Our presence, our practices, our cultural rituals and things like that are not deemed as ‘American,’” Karen Umemoto, a co-editor and the Center’s director, told The AP exclusively before the $12 million project’s official launch Saturday. “The actual putting together of this textbook also became our fight for inclusion and represents our right to be seen, our right to speak.”

Artist Masako Miki crafts modern take on ancient Japanese folklore [Video]

PBS Newshour

“The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons” is an ancient Japanese folktale about supernatural beings taking over the night. At an art museum in Boston, artist Masako Miki is bringing the tale into a colorful and even cuddly present-day. Jared Bowen of GBH Boston takes us there for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Judge denies pause on ICE enforcement on school grounds

Naaz Modan, K-12 Dive

A federal judge has denied two Minnesota school districts’ request to temporarily stop Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity on school grounds in a lawsuit that ultimately seeks to overturn a Trump administration policy allowing such enforcement. Duluth Public Schools and Fridley Public Schools filed the lawsuit in February in response to federal Operation Metro Surge, which led to a reported increase in ICE activity on or around school grounds in Minnesota. U.S. District Judge Laura Provinzino, however, said on May 6 that the administration’s 2025 guidance undoing protections for schools and other sensitive locations “did not change DHS’s ability or authority to engage in enforcement activity at or near protected areas.”

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Data centers, air pollution, climate math: Lessons from a climate and education conference

Caroline Preston, Hechinger Report

Students who attend schools near data centers are more likely to see their math performance decline than those who don’t. Attending school near noisy airports is also associated with declines in math scores. After participating in a math lesson incorporating information on renewable energy, U.S. students were more likely to say they knew about climate change and felt some hope about combating it. Children in India who learned about air pollution in arts lessons were more likely to understand the environmental problem, but not necessarily to change their behavior in ways that might alleviate it. Those were among the research findings, many of them preliminary, discussed at a conference I attended last week on climate change and education organized by SustainableED, a Brown University program.

Why schools are opening parking lots for homeless students and families

Neal Morton, The 19th

As an 8-year-old boy steered his bicycle in figure eights, his mother piled three plates with pizza and pineapple slices from an outdoor kitchen shared with more than a dozen other families who call this parking lot home. She carried the plates past her family’s sedan — their last asset and, until recently, their only shelter — and placed the dinner inside a recreational vehicle assigned to them for the next six months. After dinner, she helped the third grader with his homework, then made sure he showered and brushed his teeth before bed. The next morning, she drove the 10 miles to her son’s school, where she works as a part-time site monitor. Their belongings and beds and private bathroom, meanwhile, remained secure at the city-owned lot, where homeless families like theirs find temporary stability.

Students stay in college longer when they have easier access to food, new study finds

Julia Barajas, LAist

Community college students who make use of CalFresh benefits during their freshman year are more likely to stay on track academically and return for a second year, according to a new working paper from the California Policy Lab and UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education. CalFresh, known federally as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, provides monthly food benefits to low-income individuals and families in California. The program enables them to buy food with an Electronic Benefit Transfer card. The research finds that community college students who had CalFresh benefits throughout their first year were more likely to complete a full-time course load, consisting of 30 or more credits. These students were also more likely to enroll the next year, compared to similar students who were also eligible for benefits but did not receive them.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Childcare in the US and Nordic Countries

Brian Dew, Peoples Policy Project

This report examines the gap between US and Nordic childcare systems. The United States funds public childcare at around one-fifth the Nordic level and leaves the rest to families. Families absorb fifteen-thousand-dollar fees per child per year or the foregone earnings of caregivers; childcare workers are paid wages too low for a professional workforce; US child poverty runs four times the Nordic rate. Every Nordic country closed the gap the same way: funding care publicly and paying workers professionally. A similar system in the US would cost a fraction of what it once did. A handful of US states and cities are following that path.

Hampshire College Rejected the Market Model of Education

Annie Levin, Current Affairs

On Tuesday, April 14, it was announced that Hampshire College, my alma mater, a pathbreaking experiment in radical pedagogy, would be permanently closing in the fall of this year. With its first class of 250 students in 1970, Hampshire’s founders took the bold approach of believing that young people could design their own educations. The college never had tests or grades, and students created their own majors. This self-directed curriculum has been imitated elsewhere but retained its purest form at Hampshire. So long as you could find a mentor, you could cobble together a concentration in almost anything: game design, ancient Irish, cheesemaking—the world was your oyster. That was the idea, anyway. As you can imagine, at an underfunded school full of overworked faculty and weird teenagers, things often went pear-shaped. But failure and the self-discovery that went with it were all supposed to be part of the Hampshire experience.

Mass protests in Argentina decry Milei’s funding cuts to prized public universities

Almudena Calatrava, AP News

Tens of thousands of Argentines flooded the streets of major cities nationwide on Tuesday to protest funding cuts by libertarian President Javier Milei to the public university system that represents a near-universal point of pride in this crisis-prone country. Vast crowds in downtown Buenos Aires marched toward the government headquarters to denounce budget shortfalls eroding the financial foundation of the country’s higher education. Argentina’s public university system, a cornerstone of its well-educated workforce cherished by its large middle class, has been tuition-free since 1949 and produced five Nobel Prize laureates. Congress passed a law last year to fund universities’ operational costs and raise teacher salaries in line with high inflation. But the government has not implemented it as it challenges the legislation in court.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

As school districts cut budgets, DEI work may be first to go

Marianna McMurdock, CommonWealth Beacon

Claire Galloway-Jones stepped up to lead the Brookline school district’s Office of Educational Equity in July 2023 at a time when families, staff, and students were losing trust. The wealthy, coveted district on Boston’s edge faced allegations of repeatedly failing to address incidents of racial bullying and harassment, including a case in which an eighth grader knelt on a Black classmate’s neck, mimicking the murder of George Floyd. Educators of color had a pattern of staying only a few years; from 2021 to 2023, 18 left their positions. The Brookline school district, whose staff declined to comment for this article, has also churned through five superintendents in the last decade. At the start of the 2024-25 school year, the district announced a projected $8 million budget deficit, and all operations funding for Galloway-Jones’s department was pulled. She sought other sources of funding, including a $25,000 state grant to recruit and retain teachers of color. But she said the district denied the routine request without explanation. 

From childhood to university, economic inequality shapes life chances worldwide

Amy Carmo, United Nations News

Examining the relationship between economic inequality and children’s wellbeing in 44 OECD and high-income countries, the UNICEF report found that rates of income inequality and child poverty remain stubbornly high in most countries. Children growing up in wealthier but more unequal countries face worse physical health and poorer educational outcomes, the report warns. Across the countries surveyed, households in the top 20 per cent of earners bring home more than five times the income of those in the bottom 20 per cent. “Inequality profoundly affects how children learn, what they eat, and how they feel about life,” said Bo Viktor Nylund, Director of UNICEF Innocenti centre. The report also linked higher inequality to poorer health outcomes. Children in the most unequal countries are 1.7 times more likely to be overweight than those living in more equal societies – a trend associated with poorer diets and missed meals.

Can early universal preschool reduce socioeconomic inequalities in child development? The role of duration and intensity of preschool attendance in the French birth cohort

Lawrence M. Berger, Lidia Panico, Anne Solaz, Early Childhood Research Quarterly

High quality early childhood education and care programs can foster the development of cognitive and noncognitive skills. We estimate the effects of the duration of attending free universal preschool (école maternelle) in France between age 3 and 4 on children’s cognitive skills and global development, leveraging differences by birth month to identify plausibly exogenous variation in duration of preschool exposure. Using nationally representative data from the French Elfe birth cohort and a large sample of more than 12,000 children, we measure cognitive skills and global development via the British Ability Scale and the Child Development Index, respectively, when children were approximately 3.5 years of age. Our results provide evidence that universal preschool programs have the potential to foster children’s early cognitive skills and global development, and may help reduce early socioeconomic inequalities.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Learning to Teach Under Fire

Neven Holland and Keara Williams, Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

As primarily conservative politicians aim to discredit and outlaw curricula centered on discussions of systemic racism, complex historical topics, gender equality, and other related issues, it is especially significant in today’s contemporary context for educators to engage in pedagogical practices that center marginalized students for improved learning and flourishing in pursuit of a multiracial democracy. In this conceptual article, we suggest a set of recommendations to help educators conceptualize and execute their work under censorship laws in what we refer to as politically tense spaces. We recommend unlocking principled resistance, adapting curriculum for critical consciousness, sustaining Black fugitive pedagogical practices, engaging in union and community involvement, and preparing teacher learners for navigating such environments. We argue that educators’ central responsibility to students remains unchanged by educational gag orders. 

As Elections Approach, Californians See Value in Civic Education

Tani Cantil-Sakauye and Mark Baldassare, PPIC

With a consequential primary fast approaching, Californians are preparing to choose new leadership—with results that will determine the direction of their state. A healthy democracy depends not only on participation, but also on an informed public that understands how government works, how to evaluate competing claims, and why civic engagement matters. That understanding doesn’t emerge automatically—it has to be taught through civic education. And a growing majority of Californians agree. Six in ten Californians say public schools should make civic education a high priority—and that support is broadly expressed across demographic groups and regions of the state and, notably, is bipartisan. Majorities of both Democrats and Republicans agree that it is very or somewhat important for young people to learn how elections operate, how to evaluate different political viewpoints, and how to detect misinformation about elections. In these polarized times, civic education stands out as rare common ground.

Majority of new Tennessee vouchers awarded to higher-income families

Melissa Brown, Chalkbeat

The majority of Tennessee’s new vouchers for the upcoming school year were awarded to higher-income families, despite new income rankings meant to prioritize lower-income families.

In February, the Tennessee Department of Education said nearly 17,500 new families applied for income-based Education Freedom Scholarship vouchers for private schools for the upcoming school year. New data shows that only 3,970 vouchers — just one-quarter of newly available vouchers — were awarded to those in the lowest income category, indicating that relatively few lower-income families applied or were eligible to participate in the program.

Other News of Note

Firearm Storage in Households With Children

Matthew Miller, Samuel Fischer, Eliot Nelson, Deborah Azrael, JAMA Network Open

How many children younger than 18 years live in homes with firearms, and how are the guns in these homes stored? Based on results from a nationally representative survey study of 879 adult gun owners living in households with children, conducted in December 2024, an estimated 32.3 million US children live in homes with firearms; 6.7 million live in a home where at least 1 firearm is loaded and unlocked. These findings suggest that improving firearm storage practices in homes with children should be a high priority.