Just News 5.22.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

San Diego Killings Follow Rising Anti-Muslim Rhetoric

Shaila Dewan and Jill Cowan, New York Times

The young men who killed three people outside a San Diego mosque complex this week had expressed hatred for all types of people, inspired by vitriol and conspiracy theories they found online, law enforcement officials said. But it was Muslims they chose to target. To some, the killings seemed like an inevitable result of a swell of Islamophobia in the United States and around the globe. Anti-Muslim rhetoric on the right has become louder, with Republican politicians raising concerns about new Muslim schools and growing Muslim communities, and at the most extreme, suggesting Muslims don’t belong here. Muslema Purmul, 43, whose children attended school on the mosque campus, said her 12-year-old son was feeling gloomy, angry and sad. “Then he said something that really hurt us,” Ms. Purmul said, her voice breaking. “He said, ‘I feel unwanted.’”

Could More States Try to Keep Islamic Schools Out of Their Choice Programs?

Arianna Prothero, Education Week

Private school choice programs have boomed across the country in recent years. But a case in Texas has surfaced a potential fault line in the private school choice movement over whether all types of private schools should be able to receive public funds. It’s also resurrecting a tension over public funding for religious schools that drove changes in American education funding policy more than a century ago. Texas was sued this spring for excluding Islamic private schools from its massive new Texas Education Freedom Accounts program, which gives school students roughly $10,500 a year—and more for students with disabilities—to put toward tuition, tutoring, books and other approved private education costs. The state has since reversed course and allowed those schools to participate, but litigation is ongoing. But it’s the state’s legal argument, that the schools’ accrediting agency had ties to a Muslim group that Gov. Greg Abbott designated a foreign terrorist organization, that has some school choice watchers wondering if this is only the beginning of policies barring some types of schools from otherwise lightly regulated private school choice programs.

Chevron Wants a School District Tax Break for a Data Center Power Plant

Molly Taft, Wired

A major oil company is seeking a state tax break in Texas worth hundreds of millions of dollars to build a massive power plant. The energy won’t be going to residential customers, though. Instead, the gas plant will be used to power a data center whose eventual tenant could be Microsoft. Chevron subsidiary Energy Forge One has filed an application with the State Comptroller’s board to obtain a tax abatement for a power plant it’s building in West Texas. In late January, the comptroller’s office made a recommendation to support the application’s approval—the first such approval under the program for a power plant intended solely for data center use.

Language, Culture, and Power

The Enduring Legacy of Rudy Acuña

Theresa Montaño and Oriel María Siu, The Nation

They told us this was history. From elementary school through college, it arrived printed in textbooks, laced with authority, taught as truth: European settlers came escaping hardships, Native people welcomed them, and the nation expanded. “Progress” followed. The Mexican-American War became a “shifted border.” Conquest became destiny; settlement fact.

And we were left to learn their story, not our own. That narrative held until Dr. Rodolfo “Rudy” Acuña intervened in 1972, reshaping the writing of history and a generation’s historical awareness.

Translanguaging to Learn and Play: Young Children’s Bilingual Communicative Competence in a Chinese Rural Preschool

Xiao Yin, Anthropology and Education

This year-long ethnography of a rural Chinese preschool examines how Longlinghua-speaking children develop bilingual communicative competence as they learn Putonghua. Integrating language socialization and translanguaging, the analysis of classroom and playground interactions reveals that children creatively mobilize repertoires—shifting footing, adjusting pitch contours, and revoicing roles—to secure uptake, regulate peers, and belong. Findings challenge deficit narratives, reframing bilingualism as an interactional achievement and advocating recognition-based, inclusive pedagogy that values local dialects alongside the national standard.

‘We’re Leaving’: Choosing to Self-Deport Under Trump 2.0 [Audio]

Reynaldo Leaños Jr. and Maria Hinojosa, Latino USA

Caitlin Dickerson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Atlantic. She has become one of the leading voices on immigration coverage for more than a decade. In this episode, Caitlin talks about her recent reporting exploring why some mixed-status families are choosing to “self-deport,” what that actually looks like and why we should all consider the impact of what gets left behind. Later, she breaks down the latest on what children and their parents are experiencing in the troubled Dilley family detention facility in Texas.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Community Schools Are at the Forefront of a ‘Neighborism’ Movement

Jeff Bryant, The Progressive

I don’t see how kids can focus on learning if they are hungry or their clothing smells because their families don’t have access to laundry facilities,” says Mikala Everett. She is a community school director at United Community Schools, a local nonprofit organization created by the United Federation of Teachers that operates the largest network of community schools in New York City. She currently works on-site at PS 196K the Williamsburg Bridge Magnet School in Brooklyn, where she routinely encounters obstacles that get in the way of learning, such as poverty, food insecurity, and family joblessness. “We have a lot of homelessness and food insecurity in the neighborhood,” Everett tells The Progressive, describing a section of East Williamsburg that is undergoing rapid gentrification.

School Theater Program Tackles Teen Mental Health

Cindy Long, NEA Today

The tragedy of losing a student to suicide is heartbreaking and, unfortunately, all too familiar, says Joanna Fellows, a theater arts teacher at Seneca High School in Germantown, Maryland. “It’s really difficult as an educator to know how to be a rock for students in those times because we, too, are human beings and we, too, are impacted and affected by these tragedies.” It’s also hard to find ways to reach students in a personal, meaningful way on topics like suicide, depression, and mental health. But a recent play performed at the high school did just that.

Pediatrics group issues new guidance on recess for the first time in 13 years

Laura Ungar, AP News

Recess isn’t just a fun break for grade schoolers. It’s crucial to good health and good grades for kids of all ages. That’s the message from a leading pediatricians group, which just released the first new guidance in 13 years about this unstructured time at school and how it needs to be protected. The updated policy statement by the American Academy of Pediatrics comes after years of shrinking recesses and worsening children’s health. The group “has always supported play – free play for kids – but it’s been increasingly threatened over time,” partly by the drive for higher test scores, said Dr. Robert Murray, a lead author. “It has a very powerful benefit if it’s used to the fullest.”

Access, Assessment, Advancement

NAACP calls for Black student-athletes to boycott Southern schools amid redistricting backlash

Bracey Harris, NBC News

The NAACP launched a campaign Tuesday calling on Black student-athletes to boycott Southern colleges in the wake of a Supreme Court decision last month that weakened the Voting Rights Act, leading to the dismantling of one majority-Black congressional district and a push to scrap others. “The NAACP will not watch the same institutions that depend on Black athletic prowess to fill their stadiums and their bank accounts remain silent while their states strip Black communities of their voice,” NAACP National President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement. The group is urging Black recruits to withhold their commitments from a list of universities primarily in the NCAA’s Southeastern Conference.

Justice Department attack on UCLA and other med schools shows it has no idea what makes a good doctor

Michael Hilzik, Los Angeles Times

The Trump administration has stepped up its assault on U.S. medical schools in recent days with stern letters to the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA on May 6 and a similar missive to the Yale School of Medicine on Thursday. Both letters from the Department of Justice allege that the schools have quietly allowed the race of applicants to be a consideration in admissions, which the DOJ asserts to be a violation of a 2023 Supreme Court decision that found racial preferences in university admission policies to be unlawful. But these claims — and a legal filing the DOJ made in February to join a lawsuit accusing UCLA of illicit discrimination against white and Asian applicants — raise questions about its campaign against elite medical schools that the DOJ may not wish to answer.

Asylum seeker’s college journey: From Nicaragua to Sacramento State

Raina Dent, EdSource

As an asylum seeker from Nicaragua, Andrea Baltadano’s college journey has been anything but typical. Under an increasingly repressive political regime back home, coupled with being a student journalist and protester, she found herself scared of being on the receiving end of retaliation from a government not known for protecting its citizens. With few options, she left her home country in April 2024, immigrating to the United States and putting her goal of completing a journalism degree on the back burner. Given her vocal opposition to the government, Baltadano knew that returning to Nicaragua was improbable. However, she hoped to return to school in a safer place. That time came in August 2024. 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Lawsuit accuses Massachusetts schools of segregating students of color in low-opportunity districts

Annie Ma, AP News

A lawsuit filed Wednesday on behalf of students and community organizations in Massachusetts argues the state is illegally maintaining schools that are racially segregated, concentrating Black and Latino students in high-poverty districts with fewer opportunities. The lawsuit challenges the state’s practice of assigning students to schools based solely on where they live, which can lead to patterns of housing segregation being replicated in school systems. The case is the latest example of efforts to address segregation and funding inequities through state-level litigation. Even before the Trump administration began taking steps to release districts in the Deep South from court-ordered desegregation efforts, integration efforts had fallen far from their peak decades ago when the federal government intervened in school systems around the U.S.

Butter (and Schools), Not Guns (and Warfare)

Frida Berrigan, Tom Dispatch

Guns or butter. Butter or guns. Can we have both? If not, which should come first? Consider it one of those chicken-and-egg conundrums of modern society. “Guns” is the stand-in for a well-funded military and “butter” for all the human goods, comforts, and needs of a society. Economists, politicians, and generals have long considered the balance of guns and butter. Wage too many wars, produce too many arms, and there won’t be enough money to keep a nation decently fed and comfortable. Produce too many consumer goods, meet everyone’s needs, and a nation might find itself ill-prepared and vulnerable in the face of a possible attack or even invasion. Everyone from Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has had something to say about the balance of guns and butter (or, more likely, the lack of it).

Who Benefits from Urban Poverty

Helen Andrews, Compact

Beryl Satter is one of the most influential historians in the country, even if you don’t recognize her name. Her book Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (2009) was a major influence on Ta-Nehisi Coates’s blockbuster essay “The Case for Reparations,” published in The Atlantic in 2014. The book’s subject, contract lending to black homebuyers in Chicago, formed the basis of Coates’s case that white wealth is based on “plunder.” Coates first learned about Clyde Ross, the black Chicago man who lost his home in an unscrupulous contract deal, around whom the “Reparations” essay is structured, from Satter’s book. Now Satter is back with a new book on a similar theme. Cash on the Block applies the thesis of the earlier book—that the racial wealth gap is the deliberate result of government policy—to a wider range of anti-poverty programs, from the Great Society to subprime mortgage lending. 

Democracy and the Public Interest

Gen Z’s political gender divide is now showing up in schools

Kevin Mahnken, The 19th

On November 5, 2024, men and women around the U.S. headed to the polls to decide a race hyped as a battle of the sexes. By evening’s end, Kamala Harris’ quest to punch through the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” and become America’s first female president lay in shambles. Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s undisputed alpha male since 2015, would return to the White House. And voters, especially the youngest ones, were starkly divided along gender lines.

As in each of the three previous federal elections, women’s support for the Democratic ticket considerably exceeded men’s. But the gulf separating Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 was historically wide: According to an analysis by Catalist, a data and analytics company that contracts with progressive organizations, Harris won the backing of 63 percent of women and just 46 percent of men.

How Can Schools Best Serve the Common Good?

Sonja Santelises, Mike Matsuda, Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka, Stanford Social Innovation Review

On March 30, 2026, Sonja Santelises and Mike Matsuda joined Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka, the authors of “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools,” for a discussion about leading school districts toward a more democratic purpose. Sonja serves as the CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools in Baltimore, Md., a post she has held since 2016. Mike recently retired as the Superintendent of Anaheim Union High School in Anaheim, Calif., a district that he led for 11 years. Both Sonja and Mike are nationally esteemed education system leaders, with unique perspectives on how to bridge the school system of the future with the realities of the schools we have today.

Local Control in a Time of Change: The Work of California School Board Members

Julie Marsh, Beth Schueler, James Bridgeforth, Jacob Alonso, Jeimee Estrada, Amanda Pickett, Akunna Uka, Mariana De Franca Steil, Vandeka Rodgers, Laura Mulfinger, Miguel Casar, Getting Down to Facts

K-12 school boards have historically served as key institutions for establishing school district goals, strategies, and policies that reflect community needs. In California, they hold a particularly central role in a governance system that values local control, particularly around the allocation of resources. As political institutions, boards frequently face tensions in how to balance diverse stakeholder interests, electoral pressures, and systemic challenges within the educational landscape. Prior research and media narratives have demonstrated the many ways that boards are experiencing escalating conflicts and polarized educational environments in recent years, including the influence of national groups (e.g., Moms for Liberty) alongside longstanding internal challenges (e.g., labor-management conflicts and declining enrollment). Yet, there has been relatively limited research on the experiences of board members themselves, how they are navigating the current climate, and what if anything can be done to better support them. 

Other News of Note

Celebrate Harvey Milk Day – Using The Harvey Milk Story in schools

The Harvey Milk Foundation

Harvey Milk’s radical vision of equality [Video]

Lillian Faderman, Ted-Ed Animation

Let’s Begin… By 1973, Harvey Milk had already been many things: naval officer, high school teacher, bit-part actor and wandering hippie. Starting fresh in San Francisco, his belief in a more personal approach to local government led him to run for office in the heart of American gay culture, the Castro. Lillian Faderman details the tenacity and courage of California’s first openly gay public official.

Harvey Milk speech in Los Angeles, 1978 [Video]

Pat Rocco, UCLA Film & Television Archive

Short documentary footage of Harvey Milk (1930-1979), California’s first openly gay elected official, at the 8th annual Gay Pride Parade in Los Angeles on July 2, 1978, several months before his assassination. Milk gives a speech at De Longpre Park, railing against Anita Bryant and religious leaders who use religion to support discrimination, as well as the Briggs Initiative. Milk further states that if homosexuals are barred from being teachers (the goal of the Initiative), they will soon be barred from any profession requiring a license or degree. Milk admonishes the crowd to come out to everyone they know. Finally, he asks Jimmy Carter to step forward and defend gay and lesbian rights.