Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Trump Elevates a Conservative ‘Warrior’ on Education

Alexandra Berzon and Michael C. BenderNew York Times

In early 2021, Representative Byron Donalds, Republican of Florida, and his wife, Erika, took the stage at an event hosted by the Truth & Liberty Coalition, a group that pushes to inject Christianity into public schools and other institutions and whose leader has described homosexuality as Satan’s work. The couple was warmly welcomed as allies in the cause. Mrs. Donalds was singled out for opening a charter school in Florida. As a state legislator, Mr. Donalds had created a school voucher program that, in the words of one speaker, let children “get a biblical worldview education.”

UC student workers expand strike to two more campuses as they demand amnesty for protestors 

Mikhail ZInshtey, CalMatters

Nearly a third of the academic and graduate student workers of the University of California are on strike, after the union of 48,000 employees escalated its labor standoff by walking off the job at UCLA and UC Davis this morning. With as many as 2,000 UC Santa Cruz graduate students and academic workers picketing since last Monday, today’s job action brings 12,000 more out of classrooms and laboratories, potentially crippling the university’s mission of educating the roughly 80,000 undergraduates at the three campuses just two weeks before students begin to take their end-of-quarter finals. Workers, including teaching assistants, academic researchers and graders, are striking not over pay and benefits but instead over the UC’s response to pro-Palestinian protesters who were arrested by police or suspended from their campuses. Some union members were arrested or suspended for their role in the protests. Core to the union’s demands is that the UC offer “amnesty for those who experienced arrest or are facing University discipline,” the union’s public writings state.

In the Name of God

Dana Hedgpeth and Sari Horwitz, Emmanuel Martinez, Scott Higham and Salwan Georges, Washington Post

Clarita Vargas was 8 when she was forced to live at St. Mary’s Mission, a Catholic-run Indian boarding school in Omak, Wash., that was created under a U.S. government policy to strip Native American children of their identities. A priest took her and other girls to his office to watch a TV movie, then groped and fondled her as she sat on his lap — the beginning of three years of sexual abuse, she said. “It haunted me my entire life,” said Vargas, now 64.

Language, Culture, and Power

Most AAPI adults think the history of racism should be taught in schools, an AP-NORC poll finds

Annie MA and Lindley Sanders, AP News

U.S. schools should teach about issues related to race, most Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders believe. They also oppose efforts to restrict what subjects can be discussed in the classroom, according to a new poll. In the survey from AAPI Data and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 71% of AAPI adults favor teaching about the history of slavery, racism and segregation in K-12 public schools. The same share also said they support teaching about the history of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the United States, while about half support teaching about issues related to sex and sexuality. AAPI Democrats are more supportive of these topics being taught in classrooms than AAPI Republicans.

Suspended for ‘other’: When states don’t share why kids are being kicked out of school

Fazil Khan and Sarah Butrymowicz, Hechinger Report

Every time educators suspend students from school, they have to select a formal reason. In Texas, they have 42 options to pick from — fighting, school-related gang violence, even arson. Despite those choices, 88 percent of suspensions in Texas last year were marked in state reports as a “violation of student code of conduct” with no additional detail. That’s more than a million suspensions last school year alone. Many states have these nebulous categories, designed for behavior that isn’t captured by another, more specific, reason set by their departments of education. These categories are often used at high — and potentially problematic — rates. Texas districts reported the highest number of these vague suspensions, but a review of five years of data across 15 other states for which The Hechinger Report obtained data showed school officials citing a broad category such as “other” nearly a million times when suspending students.

DACA immigrants in the Madison area live with fear and uncertainty

Jana Rose Schleis, Cap Times

When Irma Varela was in fourth grade she checked out the same book from her elementary school library over and over again.  “I lived for that book.”  The picture book was full of scenes, landscapes and images from her home country of Mexico. When Varela was 9, her mother left an abusive home and immigrated with her children to Madison.  Varela’s world was turned upside down. She was in a new place — one with snow, which she hadn’t experienced before — and she spoke only basic English. She had to work hard to adjust to life in Wisconsin. The library book was her respite.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Grammy-winning teacher Annie Ray on the importance of music education for all [Video]

Ali Rogin and Rona Baldwin, PBS Newshour

The end of the school year often means year on concerts for student orchestras and choirs for high school music educator Annie Ray, it’s a time to look back on a year that included a Grammy Award and ahead at her vision of what education should be. Ali Rogin’s back with the latest installment of our series Weekend Spotlight.

California Bill Would Ban Schools from Outing Trans Students

Andrew Sheeler and Jenavieve Hatch, Governing

California Democrats introduced a bill in Sacramento on Wednesday that would prohibit school districts from adopting parental notification policies, which they said are harmful, “forced outing” practices that cause suffering for LGBTQ students. The policies, which several conservative-leaning school boards across the state enacted over the last year, require school staff to inform a student’s parents if the student shows signs of being transgender. Such signs can include going by a different name and using pronouns that don’t align with their biological sex. The new bill is the latest volley in a political war that’s been raging for more than a year.

Here’s how I talk to my students about pronouns, including my own

Ellie Bell, Chalkbeat

“Hi everyone,” I say excitedly as I kneel to join my young students sitting in a circle. “I’m so excited to be here. My name is Teacher Ellie … and I wanted to tell you about my pronouns.”

As a nonbinary teaching artist in New York City public schools, I have begun every residency this way for going on five years. I teach theater, puppet-making, and poetry to students in all grades, but I mostly teach kindergarten to third grade. When people talk about trans and nonbinary educators, they often assume that we’re getting in kids’ faces, correcting pronouns resentfully, talking about gender in a way inappropriate for their age, and forcing students to be who they’re not. The truth is it’s far more mundane.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Class of 2024

Katherine deCourcy and Elise Gould, Economic Policy Institute

As with young college graduates, young high school graduates are experiencing a much stronger labor market today than before the pandemic and at any point since 2000. The fast economic recovery from the pandemic shock is a direct result of the aggressive fiscal policy response that matched the scale of the problem—in stark contrast to policy responses following previous recessions. In this blog post, we start by examining employment and enrollment outcomes for young high school graduates, defined as workers ages 18 to 21. We then analyze their short- and long-run trends in unemployment, underemployment, and wages, looking at those with only a high school degree and who are not enrolled in further schooling.

State laws threaten to erode academic freedom in U.S. higher education

Isaac Kamola, The Conversation

Over the past few years, Republican state lawmakers have introduced more than 150 bills in 35 states that seek to curb academic freedom on campus. Twenty-one of these bills have been signed into law. This legislation is detailed in a new white paper published by the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, a project established by the American Association of University Professors, or AAUP. Taken together, this legislative onslaught has undermined academic freedom and institutional autonomy in five distinct and overlapping ways.

This college invited young people to shape our democracy

E.J. Dionne Jr., Washington Post

Elders have made it a popular sport to trash young people for their supposed lack of political knowledge and disengagement from our democracy. The more generous among the detractors typically lay the blame for this on inadequate civic education in the schools and the poisonous effects of social media. Having taught at university for two decades, I reject this indictment as untrue. My classrooms have been full of deeply committed, public-minded students — on all sides of politics — searching for effective ways of repairing the world.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Can Education Solve Poverty?

Eleanor Bader, The Progressive

Although education has long been thought to be an essential tool in overcoming poverty, is it actually the “great equalizer” that public education promoter Horace Mann believed it to be?

Peter W. Cookson, Jr., a senior research fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and an instructor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, has written a slim new book that addresses people living on what he calls “the outskirts of hope” due to abject poverty. “Poor and deeply poor children are treated as though they are invisible,” he writes in School Communities of Strength: Strategies for Educating Children Living in Deep Poverty. But not only are they not invisible, their numbers are enormous.

How an Alabama Town Staved Off School Resegregation

Jennifer Berry Hawes, ProPublica

When Jim Emerson arrived in rural Alabama’s Wilcox County to work as a paper mill executive, he saw opportunities for development in its rolling hills, lush riverbanks and charming small-town county seat of Camden. He tried to steer new hires toward moving there. But he hit an obstacle: The local schools were sharply divided by race. Virtually all of the public school students were Black, and most white students attended Wilcox Academy, one of the hundreds of private schools in the Deep South that researchers call “segregation academies.”

Fight for Women’s Education

Iszi Lawrence, BBC’s The Forum

Among all the talk about ‘knowledge economy’ it is easy to forget that universal schooling is a relatively new phenomenon. Mandated first in a few European countries in the 18th century, it did not reach many others until the 20th. And the idea that women have an equal right to be educated frequently encountered stiff opposition, often from the privileged who feared that knowledgeable females would upset the social status quo. Just about everywhere, the right to women’s education was hard won: for instance Bal Gangadhar Tilak, one of the influential leaders of Indian independence movement, campaigned vociferously for decades against sending girls to school, complaining that it would lead to increased competition for jobs and to women neglecting their ‘domestic duties’. Mary Carpenter, the acclaimed Victorian education reformer, maintained that neatness and needlework, rather than a full academic curriculum, were ‘essential to a woman’. Fast forward to 2024 and even though the gap between male and female educational attainment has narrowed world-wide, there are still many places where women lag behind, even in something as basic as literacy. According to UNESCO, women today account for almost two-thirds of all adults unable to read. So how did we get here? And how can we close this gap?

Democracy and the Public Interest

After A Challenging School Year, LGBTQ+ Educators Share Their Experiences [Audio]

Mariana Dale and Caitlin Hernández, LAist

For LGBTQ+ educators and students, the past school year was marked by protests, controversial gender notification policies, flag bans, and book restrictions, testing teachers’ ability to create a safe space to learn for students who are still struggling academically and psychologically in the wake of the pandemic. There’s also been some shows of support: In recent years, the Los Angeles Unified School District board has passed more than a half-dozen resolutions in support of LGBTQ+ students that recognized Pride Month, added non-discrimination training for staff and sought partnerships with nonprofits focused on queer youth.

Texas curriculum overhaul would increase biblical content in elementary schools

Linda Jacobson, The Guardian

Texas elementary school students would get a significant dose of Bible knowledge with their reading instruction under a sweeping curriculum redesign unveiled on Wednesday. From the story of Queen Esther – who convinced her husband, the Persian king, to spare the Jews – to the depiction of Christ’s last supper, the material is designed to draw connections between classroom content and religious texts. With the potential to reach over 2 million K-5 students in the nation’s second-largest state, the update marks a big step in a movement embraced by conservatives to root young people’s education in what they consider traditional values. It is also bound to raise questions about the potential for religious indoctrination in a state that has been a battleground for such disputes. Last year, for example, Texas passed a law allowing chaplains to work as school counselors.

State Support for Pre-Kindergarten Is Another Victim As Vouchers Drain State Tax Dollars

Jan Resseger, NEPC

Yesterday, the Ohio Capital Journal‘s Susan Tebben reported some troubling numbers about Ohio children’s access to early childhood education: “The National Institute for Early Education Research’s annual ‘state of preschool’ report showed nationwide disparities in access, quality, and funding for preschool, with Ohio sitting at 43rd in total reported spending on early education… Ohio has a total of 18,000 children enrolled in pre-K education, with 35% of the school districts offering a state-funded program… In terms of access, Ohio ranked 36th for 4-year-olds and 26th for 3-year-olds.”  Its overall investment is among the lowest of the states.

Other News of Note

May 31, 1819: The Birth of Walt Whitman

National Portrait Gallery

The Great City

Walt Whitman, Social Justice Poetry

The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretch’d wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce merely,
Nor the place of ceaseless salutes of new-comers or the anchor-lifters of the departing,
Nor the place of the tallest and costliest buildings or shops selling goods from the rest of the earth,
Nor the place of the best libraries and schools, nor the place where money is plentiest,
Nor the place of the most numerous population.