Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Democrats Hammer Linda McMahon Over Education Department Cuts

Michael Bender, New York Times

Linda McMahon, the secretary of education, received a frosty welcome on Wednesday from Democrats who hammered her relentlessly over President Trump’s directive to dismantle the agency. Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, accused her of “unlawfully freezing and stealing congressionally appropriated funds” by slashing grants, programs and staff, reducing its overall footprint and authority. “By recklessly incapacitating the department you lead, you are usurping Congress’s authority and infringing on Congress’s power of the purse,” Ms. DeLauro said. “And you will continue to lose these battles in court.”

California teachers rally in opposition to federal government, cuts to funding

EdSource

Roughly 15,000 teachers and supporters of public education rallied up and down the state Saturday — voicing their opposition to the current federal administration and any cuts to funding for public schools.  This year, California received roughly $16 billion in federal funding for public schools. And the rally’s participants demanded that federal funding for public schools be protected. “We can’t afford to CUT funding. It’s time to INCREASE funding for public education — not give tax breaks to billionaires! Fighting back against the cuts proposed by the federal administration is OUR fight, and one we must lead as educators and leaders in public education,” said CTA President David Goldberg, who addressed participants in San Diego’s Balboa Park.

As Federal Education Cuts Loom, Future Teachers are Caught in the Crosshairs

Brianna Nargiso Newton, The Progressive

When the Trump Administration announced its decision to terminate $600 million in federal education funding in February, it claimed that the funds were being used to train teachers on “divisive ideologies” such as “diversity, equity, and inclusion and “anti-racism.” But educators say that the programs jeopardized by these funding cuts have for years served as the backbone of teacher preparation, professional development, and diversity recruitment in public schools.  “We should be doing more—not less—to make education a welcoming, supportive, and feasible career,” says Paul Lemle, president of the Maryland State Education Association , the state’s teachers union. “Federal actions are going in the wrong direction and will make the educator shortage worse.” Research has shown that having a more diverse teaching workforce, particularly more Black teachers, can lead to improved academic, social-emotional, and behavioral outcomes for all students. These factors have especially significant benefits for Black students, including higher graduation rates and increased college aspirations.

Language, Culture, and Power

They crossed the border for better schools. Now, some families are leaving the US

Bianca Vázquez Toness, Neal Morton, Ariel Gilreath, Sarah Whites-Koditschek and Rebecca Griesbach, Alabama.com

For the last two months of their life in the United States, José Alberto González and his family spent nearly all their time in their one-bedroom Denver apartment. They didn’t speak to anyone except their roommates, another family from Venezuela. They consulted WhatsApp messages for warnings of immigration agents in the area before leaving for the rare landscaping job or to buy groceries. But most days at 7:20 a.m., González’s wife took their children to school. The appeal of their children learning English in American schools, and the desire to make money, had compelled González and his wife to bring their 6- and 3-year-old on the monthslong journey to the United States.

Stuck Between a Rock and a Hard Place? Disentangling the Intersections of Student Behavior, School Discipline, and School Safety in the Post-COVID Era

Richard O. Welsh and Kathryn James McGraw, NEPC

This policy brief explores the growing concern around student behavior and school discipline, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which exacerbated existing inequities and increased trauma for students and educators. It highlights the long-standing conflation of school safety and school discipline—distinct but often treated as one—by policymakers, a trend dating back to the 1990s and intensified by federal laws that introduced securitized responses to student misbehavior. These responses, including increased surveillance and exclusionary discipline, have disproportionately harmed students of color without making schools safer. The brief emphasizes the need to separate discipline from safety in policy conversations and advocates for evidence-based, supportive strategies that address root causes of behavior while reducing disparities and fostering safer, more inclusive school environments.

Does the United States Need an Official Language?

Graciela Mochkofsky, The New Yorker

Of all the reasons my husband and I decided to make New York our home twelve years ago, when we first arrived from Argentina, the city’s linguistic diversity was a major consideration. Spanish, our mother tongue, was ubiquitous, and dual-language education for our then two-year-old son was easily available in preschools; he is now learning his third language, in middle school. We soon built a community of friends in which almost everyone was bi- or multilingual, speaking, at home, many varieties of Spanish, from Peruvian to Colombian, from Mexican to Dominican, along with Russian, Hebrew, Mandarin, French, Turkish, Hindi, and Arabic—and English was our lingua franca. Hanging from a wall in our home office is a framed map of Queens, titled “MOTHER TONGUES AND QUEENS: THE WORLD’S LANGUAGES CAPITAL,” which a friend (whose mother tongue is Jamaican Patois) printed out for us from the book “Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas.” I

Whole Children and Strong Communities

In Mali, USAID funding cuts hit a local language learning program that empowered thousands

Baba Ahmed, AP News

For Aminata Doumbia, an 18-year-old Malian, the “Shifin ni Tagne” project was a path for her life dreams. A phrase meaning “our future” in the country’s main local language, it refers to a yearslong program aimed at teaching around 20,000 young Malians to read and write in their local languages. Backed by $25 million in funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, over five years, the project has now shut down following the Trump administration’s decision to cut 90% of the agency’s foreign aid. “The joy I felt when I was selected for this project has been replaced by sadness,” said Doumbia in Mali’s capital, Bamako.

She had hoped to take advantage of the empowerment program to train as a pastry chef. ”I don’t have any hope of realizing my dream (again),” Doumbia said.

RFK Jr. demands healthier school meals as Trump cancels program that funded them

Renee Hickman, Reuters

First-graders at John B. Wright elementary school in Tucson bounced into the brightly lit lunchroom, chattering with friends as they grabbed trays featuring juicy mandarin oranges, cherry tomatoes and butter lettuce, all grown at nearby farms that coax fresh produce from the Sonoran Desert. Those fruit and vegetables were supplied with the help of the federal Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program, or LFS, which was set to distribute $660 million to school systems and child care facilities in 2025, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The USDA abruptly canceled the program in March as part of President Donald Trump’s plans to gut the federal government.

I’m a pediatric heart doctor. Medicaid cuts put half of Kentucky kids at risk. 

Allison Black, Courier Journal

As a pediatric cardiologist, my specialty is treating children’s hearts, but as a pediatrician, I also recognize that surrounding each heart is a child. My job is to take care of both. Part of my job includes having hard conversations with expecting families about their child’s abnormal heart, often trying to describe the complex heart diagnosis with a poorly drawn sketch on a sheet of printer paper. Through teary eyes and tissues in a claustrophobic exam room, I watch as plans for baby showers and nursery décor are quickly replaced by talk of heart surgery and hospital stays.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

A critical fight over “quality” child care could shape millions of kids

Rachel Cohen, Vox

America’s lack of affordable child care has brought a long-simmering question to a boil: What exactly makes child care “good”? Everyone wants quality care for kids, and the need for child care or preschool to be considered “high quality” has been embraced by researchers, providers, parents, and policymakers for years. But with rising costs and uneven availability, parents, providers, and policymakers find themselves increasingly divided over whether “quality” should be measured by caregivers’ credentials or by toddlers’ happiness, by structured learning outcomes, or by parent preference.

Uncertainty over Head Start funding puts parents and teachers on edge [Audio]

Jackie Stephens, Timeisha Seymore, Annabel Stofer, Diana Lambert, EdSource

Jackie Stephens’ daughters Mercy and Hope both attended free child care and preschool through Head Start, and she says they’ve thrived. Jackie has gotten help herself through the program, with breastfeeding, nutritional advice and parenting. But now Jackie’s worried. Because earlier this year, President Donald Trump indicated he wanted to eliminate all funding – $12.3 billion – for Head Start.

Colleges report widespread problems with financial aid since Education Department layoffs

Zachary Schermele, USA TODAY

When the U.S. Department of Education abruptly dismissed half its workforce earlier this year, college officials worried the layoffs and buyouts would create a bottleneck that would hamper their ability to help students. A few months later, that scenario is no longer hypothetical. A survey published May 21 of roughly 900 colleges offers some of the first official indications that the federal financial aid system has started to buckle. The results revealed that many of the millions of students who rely on federal assistance to pay for college each year are having issues getting the support they need.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The chronic miseducation of working class children in the UK

Diane Reay, London School of Economics

A tsunami of unhappiness is sweeping over British schools. According to international research surrounding children and young people’s sense of well-being in school, the UK was ranked 24th out of the 29 richest countries. While the research did not look at social class differences among British children, The Children’s Society found that the UK was the European country with the largest gap in average life satisfaction between the 25% most advantaged and the 25% most disadvantaged 15-year-olds. Children and young people in the UK are generally unhappy at school but it is working class pupils who are the most unhappy. My book, Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Class examines why schools continue to fail working class children, neglecting to provide them with either a meaningful education or the opportunity to realise their potential.

The secret division keeping Americans apart

Katherine J. Cramer and Jason Mangone, The Hill

When asked earlier this year to choose a word to describe their country, Americans across the political spectrum most frequently chose “divided.” This should come as no surprise — Americans feel divided, especially when it comes to politics. But underneath these often-emphasized political divisions lies another division: Americans are deeply disconnected across socioeconomic lines. The rich and poor live increasingly separate lives, a fact that has profound consequences for the nation’s economic and political systems. While Americans and their leaders are often fixated on political polarization, addressing class disconnection offers an overlooked way to bring Americans together, regardless of their politics.

When Will We Be Equal?

Akilah Monifa, The Progressive

I’m a sixty-eight-year-old baby boomer. I was born colored, then Negro, then African American, and now Black. Oh, and I am a Blesbian too.  I attended segregated schools more than a decade after Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954, which was ruled three years before my birth. Thus, I was not surprised by the recent Pew Research Center survey finding that almost half of U.S. adults have come to doubt whether there will ever be racial equality in this country. According to the survey, only 51 percent of Americans believe Black people will “eventually” have rights equal to white people. That means 49 percent of those surveyed, up from 39 percent in 2020, think Black folks will never have equal rights.

Democracy and the Public Interest

With a massive ark and museum, he spreads creationism a century after Scopes trial. He’s not alone

Peter Smith, AP News

As the colossal replica of the biblical Noah’s Ark rises incongruously from the countryside of northern Kentucky, Ken Ham gives the presentation he’s often repeated. The ark stretches one and a half football fields long — “the biggest freestanding timber-frame structure in the world,” Ham says. It holds three massive decks with wooden cages, food-storage urns, life-size animal models and other exhibits. It’s all designed to argue that the biblical story was literally true — that an ancient Noah really could have built such a sophisticated ship. That Noah and a handful of family members really could have sustained thousands of animals for months, floating above a global flood that drowned everyone else in the wicked world.

Despite federal backlash, Albemarle County teaching students ‘whole truth history’

Steven Yoder, Charlottesville Tomorrow

“Remember, your listeners are from Mars,” teacher Susan Greenwood told one of her fifth graders at Brownsville Elementary. “They know nothing about slavery, they know nothing about the Civil War.” Greenwood was circulating the classroom on February 4, giving pointed feedback on students’ writing for an assignment in her Virginia Studies class. The goal was to develop arguments to answer the core question in this unit on the Civil War: Was violence justified to resist slavery?  Educators in Albemarle County, such as Greenwood, are practicing a new approach to teaching social studies that requires students to think critically and understand key events from a range of perspectives, including those whose voices are often omitted from standard accounts. In early 2019, the Albemarle County School Board adopted an anti-racism policy, which the board directed staff to develop starting in July 2018 after numerous parents and community members affiliated with the Hate-Free Schools Coalition of Albemarle County demanded a ban on Confederate imagery on school property.

Appeals court halts Temecula school district ban on critical race theory

Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times

A California appeals court has ruled that the Temecula school district must immediately set aside its ban on critical race theory while litigation over it plays out in the California court system. The Temecula Valley Board of Education adopted the resolution prohibiting what it defined as critical race theory in December 2022. The field of critical race theory, known widely as CRT, examines the extent to which racial inequality and racism are systemically embedded in American institutions. A group of parents, students and teachers had sought a preliminary injunction to block enforcement of the conservative school board’s policy, alleging the ban on the topic, in part, was “unconstitutionally vague” and has confused and intimidated teachers about what they could discuss in class.

Other News of Note

How School-Based “Pockets of Humanity” Can Promote Student Well-Being: Youth Perspectives on Justice and Well-Being in School

Kate Somerville, AERA Open

This study examines how youth activists perceive the impact of school conditions on their well-being in current political contexts. Focusing on qualitative interviews with twelve high school student activists from the organizing base of a digital youth advocacy organization, I explore the relationship between youth’s experiences of justice or injustice and perceptions of their own well-being in educational settings. Participants experienced diminished well-being when schools mirrored broader injustices, but they experienced increased well-being in school-based “pockets of humanity” that countered injustices. This analysis highlights how external community conditions influence student well-being and how schools can exacerbate or mitigate the well-being effects of broader injustices. Implications include a discussion of research, practice, and policy avenues for creating school-based pockets of humanity in today’s political context.