Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Pursuing a Just Transition in the Education Sector

Todd E. Vachon, AFT.org

On Sunday, October 28, 2012, teachers across the Northeast were glued to their television sets to watch the latest weather forecast about the approaching hurricane. Schools would be closed Monday. Emergencies were declared, line crews were summoned, shelters were prepared, and command centers were opened. New York City made the unprecedented decision to stop all subway service. As feared, Superstorm Sandy arrived with a vengeance the next evening, knocking out power for eight million people across 17 states, destroying countless homes, rendering the NYC subway system nonoperational, and closing all 1,750 of the city’s schools for a week. Dozens of damaged schools remained shuttered even longer, forcing students to share buildings with other schools, sometimes in distant boroughs of the city. Over 100 deaths were attributed to the storm, including at least one teacher. As with previous extreme storms such as Hurricane Katrina that hit the Gulf Coast in 2005 or later storms like Hurricane Maria that ravaged Puerto Rico in 2017, it was the working class and poor—the frontline communities—who were hit first and worst.

Teachers Are Introducing Young Learners to Climate Consciousness. Hope Is Key, They Say.

Emily Tate Sullivan, EdSurge

Extreme weather events are on the rise around the globe, from historic floods to unseasonable heat waves and raging wildfires. One doesn’t have to reach far to find fuel for climate-related fear and anxiety. Heidi Rose, an elementary school teacher in Denver, Colorado, knows that all too well. She experienced years of what she describes as “pretty intense” climate anxiety, beginning around 2015, as she watched natural disasters unfold in the news and up close.

UCLA examines barriers to racial equity for teachers of color

Diana Lambert, EdSource

The high cost of college and earning a credential are keeping teachers of color and indigenous teachers out of the classroom. Those who go on to teach often feel undervalued and underpaid, according to a new UCLA study. The study, “Barriers to Racial Equity for Teachers of Color and Indigenous Teachers in California’s Teaching Pipeline and Profession,” details the systemic barriers to diversifying the teacher workforce in the state. The study was a joint project of the UCLA Center for the Transformation of Schools and the UCLA Civil Rights Project. Teachers interviewed for the study cited teacher licensure exams, student debt and rising inflation as some of the barriers to attaining a credential.

Language, Culture, and Power

A Look Inside the Creation of a New Asian American Studies Curriculum

Kaylee Domzalski, Education Week

In the last three years, at least five states have passed legislation requiring schools to incorporate the lived experiences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders into the curriculum. Connecticut’s law, passed in May 2022, required the new curriculum be implemented by the 2025-26 school year. Throughout 2023, a group led by a University of Connecticut professor that also included high school teachers and students developed model lessons and professional development plans that set the foundation for the curriculum. They delivered it to the state in January.

Lost in translation: Migrant students are falling behind in segregated Chicago schools

Reema Amin & Mina Bloom, Chalkbeat Chicago

Gabriela Aquino Ruiz relies on a translation app to learn, but some of her teachers talk so fast in English, the software can’t keep up. The soft-spoken 12-year-old, who speaks only Spanish, loves to read, but her school — Isabelle C. O’Keeffe School on Chicago’s South Side — doesn’t have books in her native language, and she’s struggling to make friends, she said. Gabriela misses her school in Venezuela, where she and her family emigrated from in October. “I want to learn,” she said in Spanish through a translator. “I feel frustrated when I get home.”

‘Positive culture shock’ spells challenges and triumphs for Afghan teen students

Lajja Mistry, Hechinger Report

Mohammadi’s life changed overnight when she was forced to flee Afghanistan, her home country, following the Taliban’s ascension and the withdrawal of American troops from the region in August 2021. Her mother had worked with the U.S. embassy. Living in Kabul was no longer safe for them. When their refugee case was processed, Mohammadi and her family were sent to Pittsburgh. Nearly three years later, Mohammadi is preparing to enroll in an American university, something she had never planned.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Scorching schoolyards: California groups want more trees, less asphalt at schools

Alejandra Reyes-Velarde, Cal Matters

Schoolyards are hot and getting hotter, but only a tiny fraction of California’s grade school students can play in the shade. Researchers and advocates are pushing the state to allocate money for green schoolyards, which can include trees, grass or gardens in place of the flat asphalt or rubber play surfaces at most schools. With the help of more than $121 million in state grants, 164 schools already are on their way to either designing or building green schoolyards. Many more applied for the school greening grants, with requests totaling more than $350 million for projects they hoped to build.

Oakland Unified becomes first in the country to only use electric buses

Mallika Seshadri, EdSource

After partnering with an electric bus startup, Zum, the Oakland Unified School district has become the first in the country to only use fully electric buses, the Los Angeles Times reported. Oakland Unified’s fleet now includes 74 electric buses and bidirectional chargers. “The families of Oakland are disproportionately disadvantaged and affected by high rates of asthma and exposure to air pollution from diesel fuels,” Kim Raney, Oakland Unified’s executive director of transportation, told the Times.

Schools can look and feel like prisons. This project wants to change that, one mural at a time

Ashley McBride, The Oaklandside

John Leamy III wants to create a museum at Bret Harte Middle School.  As students and staff enter the hallway outside his art classroom, they’re greeted by floor-to-ceiling murals of local and national civil rights icons, including Stacey Abrams, Cesar Chavez, and Frederick Douglass. Sunlight through the windows opposite the mural walls illuminate the bright blues, greens, reds, and yellows of the portraits, which are set inside colorful geometric patterns called mandalas.  More than 100 students contributed to the Heroic Murals Pedagogy Project, a collaboration between Leamy and the Center for ArtEsteem, a 35-year-old arts education organization based in West Oakland, along with students from the California College of the Arts, where Leamy also teaches. Last week, Leamy and the center–formerly known as the Attitudinal Healing Connection–presented the paintings, the culmination of an effort that began in 2022.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Graduating seniors seek degrees in climate change and more US universities deliver

Alexa St. John, AP News

At 16, Katya Kondragunta has already lived through two disasters amped by climate change. First came wildfires in California in 2020. Ash and smoke forced her family to stay inside their home in the Bay Area city of Fremont, for weeks. Then they moved to Prosper, Texas, where she dealt with record-setting heat last summer. “We’ve had horrible heat waves and they’ve impacted my everyday life,” the high school junior said. “I’m in cross country … I’m supposed to go outside and run every single day to get my mileage in.” Kondragunta says in school she hasn’t learned about how climate change is intensifying these events, and she hopes that will change when she gets to college. Increasingly, U.S. colleges are creating climate change programs to meet demand from students who want to apply their firsthand experience to what they do after high school, and help find solutions.

Education in Gaza Has Been Decimated, but the Spirit of Refaat Alareer Will Prevail

Yousef Aljamal, In These Times

Palestinians have always been proud to have one of the lowest illiteracy rates in the world. Many Palestinian refugees, who lost their homes in the Nakba and Naksa, believe that investment in education is the way out — the way for them to survive and overcome poverty and pave the ground for a better life for their families and for future generations. Palestinian education has thrived not because of Israel, but despite it. Despite Israeli raids into schools, despite the demolitions of educational institutions, despite attacks from settlers, despite the arrests of students and staff.

UCLA’s Unholy Alliance

Robin D. G. Kelley

In December the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing on anti-Semitism on college campuses that forced University of Pennsylvania president Liz McGill and Harvard University president Claudine Gay to resign in its wake. In April the committee held another hearing, reducing Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, keen to avoid the fate of her counterparts, to a groveling mess. On May 23 it will hold yet another, under the title “Calling for Accountability: Stopping Antisemitic College Chaos.”

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

How Free School Meals Went Mainstream

Susan Shain, New York Times

Kurt Marthaller, who oversees school food programs in Butte, Mont., faces many cafeteria-related challenges: children skipping the lunch line because they fear being judged, parents fuming about surprise bills they can’t afford, unpaid meal debts of $70,000 districtwide. But at nearly half of Mr. Marthaller’s schools, these concerns have vanished. At those schools, all students get free breakfast and lunch, regardless of their family’s income. At one school, West Elementary, children grab milk cartons, cereal bars and bananas from folding tables on their way to class, with almost 80 percent of students eating breakfast there each school day. “We’ve done a lot of good things to feed kids here in Butte,” Mr. Marthaller said. But introducing universal free meals, he added, was “probably the best thing we ever did.”

Amid record high NYC homeless student population, calls grow for laundry machines in schools

Julian Shen-Berro, Chalkbeat NY

More than a decade ago, Principal Joseph Mattina noticed students at P.S. 23 Carter G. Woodson were consistently arriving at the Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, elementary school without their uniforms. Initially, Mattina grew frustrated with the students, asking why they couldn’t wear the clothes that had been supplied by the school. “One day, one of the kids turned around and said to me, ‘Well, it’s dirty, and my mom can’t wash it,’” he said. “That really resonated with me, because it was something that I had never thought of before. It was an obstacle that I didn’t realize existed.”

An End to Inequality’: Author Jonathan Kozol’s wish for a more democratic education system [AUDIO]

WBUR

On the eve of the 70th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, Here & Now’s Deepa Fernandes speaks with educator and author Jonathan Kozol about his latest book “An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America.”

Democracy and the Public Interest

The Shenandoah County School Board’s Terrible History Lesson

Sarah Kohrs and Neil Thornemay, TIME

On May 10, 2024, 161 years to the day after General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson’s last breath fighting for the Confederate insurrection intended to continue enslavement of human beings in America, the Shenandoah County School Board voted 5-1 to restore his name on a high school in rural Virginia. More than 50 concerned community members, students, and parents, including one of the first African Americans to integrate Stonewall Jackson High School in 1963, and hundreds of their supporters, continued to advocate a new reckoning of the county’s heritage of enslavement, segregation, and racial injustice. They affirmed the names a community committee selected in 2021 renaming the school as Mountain View High and another school named after Confederate generals Turner Ashby and Robert E. Lee as Honey Run Elementary.

White House aims to expand access to African American history

Naaz Modan, K-12 Dive

An interagency initiative by the Biden administration seeking to protect and increase access to literature and other resources on African American history aims to “preserve African American history” for public school students, the White House announced Friday on the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. The effort is an extension of President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on Promoting the Arts, the Humanities, and Museum and Library Services. “This effort will bolster African American history and culture as integral, indelible parts of American history,” the White House said in a press release.

Education Matters: The peace garden at a Fresno school becomes a lesson in civic engagement

Juanita Stevenson, Your Central Valley

Civic engagement projects in Fresno County schools are producing leaders of tomorrow. A senior at Edison High School, Matthew Pitcher had a big moment when United States Congressman, Jim Costa, a state legislator, and other dignitaries showed up to honor something he and his classmates accomplished. “We say thank you, thank you for setting the stage, thank you for remembering the better angels in all of us,” Costa said. The Edison High Peace Garden was established in honor of Ali Shabazz, a member of the Edison High family and beloved community leader who died in an accident.

Other News of Note

 

Developing Youth Power

National Education Policy Center

Youth organizing can spark political change. It can also help young people develop skills and connections that can help them succeed in college, in careers, and in life. The findings of a new study of leaders from 32 youth organizing groups draw upon research evidence and grassroots experience to suggest ways that organizing groups can further help young people thrive. The study focuses on California, which is home to an impressively high portion of active U.S. youth organizing groups identified by a 2020 scan of the field. California has a long history of youth organizing and philanthropic support for social justice movements.