Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Biden administration takes steps to protect DACA as universities call for path to citizenship

Zaidee Stavely, Ed Source

After a long, drawn-out game of tug of war over Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, the Biden administration is trying to make the policy resistant to any future court battles in a proposed regulation published Tuesday. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals offers temporary protection from deportation and permission to work for about 650,000 young people who came to the U.S. as children. It began in 2012, but former President Donald Trump ordered immigration officials to stop accepting new applications in 2017. After years in court, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that the Trump administration’s decision to stop the program was “arbitrary and capricious,” but did not decide whether it was illegal for former President Barack Obama to have started the program.

Analysis of 20 large districts finds 90% began school year with teacher shortages

Shawna De La Rosa, K-12 Dive

While teacher shortages predate the pandemic, COVID-19 has exacerbated the problem by driving an increase in early retirements and exits from the profession due to burnout and other concerns. In 2020, a nationwide National Education Association survey indicated 28% of educators were more likely to leave the profession early because of the pandemic. The results also showed Black teachers are 43% more likely to exit the industry early now. There are also fewer college students pursuing a career in teaching and low pay is thought to be part of the problem. Sixty-seven percent of teachers say they need a second job to make ends meet. The situation isn’t expected to improve any time soon.

Students Sought Changes at Their Middle School. Their Principal Listened

Denisa R. Superville, Education Week

Natalie Armstrong wore leggings all through elementary school. But she had to adjust her go-to wardrobe when she started 6th grade at Western Branch Middle School in Chesapeake, Va., because the dress code policy required girls to wear tops that fell past their buttocks if they were wearing leggings. Cold-shoulder tops also were banned, along with shorts that ended above the knees and jeans with rips or holes. Boys couldn’t wear sagging pants. And students who repeatedly violated those rules could face an in-school suspension. “I literally had to wear a dress over my leggings,” said Armstrong, 14, now a freshman at Western Branch High School, who added that she spent more time in the morning worrying about whether her clothes would get her into trouble than about what she’d learn in school that day. “I was so annoyed with it—since the day I got into 6th grade.”

Language, Culture, and Power

A family separated and their education derailed [AUDIO]

Education Beat, EdSource

About 1 in 8 of California’s school children have an undocumented parent. This week, we take a look at three siblings, all U.S. citizens, who had to put their college plans on hold, when their stepfather took steps to obtain a green card – only to be separated from his loved ones for more than two years. Also, a school board member and advocate for students from immigrant families shares how schools can support these students.

Indiana ACLU Files Lawsuit On Behalf Of LGBTQ Student Club Alleging Unfair Treatment [Audio]

Jeanie Lindsay, WFYI

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana is suing a high school in central Indiana on behalf of an LGBTQ+-focused student club, alleging unfair treatment by the school principal.

The newly filed suit claims the Gay-Straight Alliance club at Pendleton Heights High School has been prevented from advertising on the school’s radio station and bulletin boards. Court documents also say the school principal has prevented the club from fundraising on school property.

In a California Desert, Sheriff’s Deputies Settle Schoolyard Disputes. Black Teens Bear the Brunt

Emily Elena Dugdale and Irena Hwang, ProPublica

Barron Gardner, a high school history teacher in Southern California’s Antelope Valley, stared down Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies during an online meeting in April, trying to keep his composure. Gardner, 41, had become a reluctant spokesperson for a growing movement, driven primarily by Black and Latino residents, to get LASD deputies off school campuses. His wife, a nurse, worried about the repercussions for their family. What if he lost his job? What if he became a target of discrimination or worse? After all, this valley at the western edge of the Mojave Desert, population roughly 500,000, has a long history of racial tension, including white supremacist attacks on Black community members. But Gardner felt obligated to speak up during the meeting, which had been called by school district administrators. Some of his Black students had complained that they were treated differently than white kids caught doing the same things, like fighting, disrupting class or smoking cigarettes.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Back to High School, After Missing So Much

Dana Goldstein, New York Times

This fall, there is a surreal swirl of newness and oldness in the hallways of John F. Kennedy High School: Black Lives Matter face masks and exhortations to pull them up — “Over your nose, please!” — but also ribbing and laughter, bells ringing, hall passes being checked and loudspeaker reminders about the dress code (collared black or navy shirts and khaki or black bottoms). Kennedy was open for in-person learning most of last school year. But families in this working-class, majority Hispanic and Black school district in Waterbury, Conn., opted out in large numbers, with two-thirds of high school students ending last year fully online. This year, only students with severe health concerns can qualify for remote learning, and so far, no Kennedy families have been approved. That means most juniors and seniors have returned to the building for the first time in 18 months. They are taller and more mature — sometimes physically unrecognizable, a counselor noted — but often reeling from what the coronavirus pandemic has wrought: anxiety, economic precarity and academic struggle.

Stress and Short Tempers: Schools Struggle with Behavior as Students Return

Kalyn Belsha, Chalkbeat

Alyssa Rodriguez expected a rocky readjustment this school year. The Chicago social worker figured she’d see more students who felt anxious, frustrated by their schoolwork, or disoriented by unfamiliar routines. A month into school, she says she underestimated the challenge ahead. Student behavior referrals are up, as middle schoolers hurt each others’ feelings with comments they’d usually only be bold enough to say online. She and other social workers have seen more verbal and physical fights, and worried parents are calling with concerns about their child’s shorter-than-usual temper. “It’s definitely a lot more than I think any of us were mentally prepared for, even though we tried to prepare for it,” Rodriguez said.

Schools across the country say they’re seeing an uptick in disruptive behaviors. Some are obvious and visible, like students trashing bathrooms, fighting over social media posts, or running out of classrooms. Others are quieter calls for help, like students putting their head down and refusing to talk.

Healthy Food Hard To Come By At Schools Across The U.S. Amid Supply Chain Crisis [AUDIO]

WBUR

Schools are having trouble putting food on the table for thousands of kids. Many have resorted to raiding nearby stores for frozen foods just to get by. Host Robin Young hears about the deepening crisis from Jenna Knuth, director of food and nutrition at North Kansas City Schools in Missouri.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Rich kids and poor kids face different rules when it comes to bringing personal items to school

Casey Stocksill, The Conversation

Poor preschoolers get fewer chances than wealthier children to bring their prized personal possessions to school. That’s what I found in my two-year comparative ethnographic study of two preschools in Madison, Wisconsin. One of the preschools primarily serves middle-class white children and the other primarily serves poor children of color. In the preschool that served mostly poor kids, the teachers made a rule that kids could not bring toys, games, stuffed animals or other personal items to school. The stakes felt too high to these teachers. Some students’ families were recently evicted and had few toys. Other students’ families did buy them toys but at great financial cost, and families didn’t want these items broken. Teachers also worried about toys being stolen. The items that I observed children try to bring in ranged from expensive action figures to random board game pieces to sparkly ponytail holders.

#121 History Test: the Tangled Roots of Standardized Testing [Audio]

Have You Heard

The claim that standardized testing has racist – even eugenicist – roots is oft repeated these days. But is it true? In an episode guaranteed to please no one, friend of the show Ethan Hutt walks us through the multiple and tangled histories of testing. And special guest Akil Bello does a dramatic reading of headlines foretelling doom and disaster should testing wither away.

Math Is Personal

Jessica Nordelld, The Atlantic

The mathematician Federico Ardila-Mantilla grew up in Colombia, an indifferent student but gifted in math. He was failing most of his classes at his high school in Bogotá when someone suggested he apply to MIT. He had not heard of the school. To his surprise, he got in, and he went on scholarship. Mathematically, he did well. One of his professors—an acid-tongued theoretician known to compare his audience to a herd of cows—routinely tucked “open” math problems into homework assignments, without telling the students. These had never been solved by anyone. Ardila solved one. He went on to receive his bachelor’s and Ph.D. in math from MIT. But his academic experience was also one of isolation. Part of it had to do with his own introversion. (An outgoing mathematician, the joke goes, is someone who looks at your shoes when talking to you instead of their own.) Part of it was cultural. As a Latino, he was very much in the minority in the department, and he did not feel comfortable in American mathematical spaces. No one had tried to explicitly exclude him, yet he felt alone. In math, collaborating with others opens up new kinds of learning and thinking. But in his nine years at MIT, Ardila worked with others only twice.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Why lockdown and distance learning during the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to increase the social class achievement gap

Sébastien Goudeau, Camille Sanrey, Arnaud Stanczak, Antony Manstead & Céline Darnon, Nature

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced teachers and parents to quickly adapt to a new educational context: distance learning. Teachers developed online academic material while parents taught the exercises and lessons provided by teachers to their children at home. Considering that the use of digital tools in education has dramatically increased during this crisis, and it is set to continue, there is a pressing need to understand the impact of distance learning. Taking a multidisciplinary view, we argue that by making the learning process rely more than ever on families, rather than on teachers, and by getting students to work predominantly via digital resources, school closures exacerbate social class academic disparities. To address this burning issue, we propose an agenda for future research and outline recommendations to help parents, teachers and policymakers to limit the impact of the lockdown on social-class-based academic inequality.

UCLA internet studies and race scholar Safiya Noble awarded MacArthur Fellowship

Jessica Wolf, UCLA Newsroom

Professor Safiya Noble, director of an interdisciplinary research center at UCLA focused on the intersection of human rights, social justice, democracy, and technology — was announced today as a recipient of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. In 2019, Noble, an associate professor of gender studies and African American studies, co-founded the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, with Sarah T. Roberts, associate professor of gender studies and information studies. Noble’s scholarship focuses on digital media and its impact on society, as well as how digital technology and artificial intelligence converge with questions of race, gender, culture and power. She is the author of the bestselling book “Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism,” which examines racist and sexist bias in the algorithms used by commercial search engines.

Support for Black Lives Matter declined after George Floyd protests, but has remained unchanged since

Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Pew Research Center

Support for the Black Lives Matter movement, which declined between June and September 2020, has remained stable. Currently, 55% of U.S. adults express at least some support for the movement, unchanged from a year ago, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. In June 2020, amid nationwide demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd, two-thirds of Americans said they strongly or somewhat supported the Black Lives Matter movement. Support for the Black Lives Matter movement remains particularly widespread among Black Americans: 83% currently express at least some support, with 58% saying they strongly support the movement. Smaller majorities of Asian (68%) and Hispanic (60%) adults also express support, compared with 47% of White adults.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Understanding the Attacks on Critical Race Theory

Francesca López, Alex Molnar, Royel Johnson, Ashley Patterson, LaWanda Ward, and Kevin K. Kumashiro, National Education Policy Center

Attacks on Critical Race Theory have been in the news for over a year. Rallies have been organized, school board meetings disrupted, executive orders issued, and legislation introduced to remove or exclude CRT from school curriculum. Since early 2021, eight states have passed legislation that, broadly speaking, seeks to ban historical information and critical analysis related to race and racism in public school classrooms, and additional legislation is being considered. Advocates of these administrative and legislative actions argue that providing students with information on race and racism is un-American, divisive, and itself racist. This policy memo reviews the contemporary attacks against CRT, describes the political objectives of these attacks, explores historical examples of similar tactics, and provides resources on evidence-based strategies to counter the propaganda.

Critical Race Theory and the Misappropriating of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tyler Parry, Black Perspectives

During a July 12, 2021 episode of The Rubin Report, a conservative-leaning talk show where the host, Dave Rubin, uses long-form interviews to examine current social and political issues, Republican politician Kevin McCarthy evoked a rather tiresome talking point about Martin Luther King that set off a proverbial firestorm on social media. In less than 20 seconds, McCarthy pronounced the supposed inconsistencies between MLK’s “dream” and the tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT). Citing school boards as the battleground for the next conservative campaign, the California Republican hoped to spark the ire of conservative parents by making a sweeping generalization of King’s legacy, claiming that proponents of CRT were “against everything Martin Luther King has ever told us: ‘Don’t judge us by the color of our skin,’ and “now they’re embracing it…they’re going backwards.” McCarthy’s claim trended on Twitter, as it was either criticized or embraced by those in the public square, oftentimes demarcated by one’s political self-identification as “right” or “left.”

The sacred and the profane: A former D.C. charter school board member calls for change

Valerie Strauss, Washington Post

Steve Bumbaugh is a former member of the D.C. Public Charter School Board, having served on the seven-member volunteer panel from 2015 until early this year. During that time, Bumbaugh visited numerous charter schools and attended many board meetings where questions of whether schools should be authorized, sanctioned or closed were discussed. Charter schools are publicly funded but operate independently from the school systems in the areas where they are located. In the nation’s capital, charters enroll nearly as many of the city’s schoolchildren as the system does. Supporters of charters say that they provide families with a necessary alternative to schools in traditional districts. Critics say they do not, on average, provide better student outcomes than traditional districts and steer public money away from districts that educate most schoolchildren.

Other News of Note

‘A vocal and spectacular response’ | Hispanic students’ 1968 walkout led to long-lasting change in education [Video]

Audrey Castoreno, Alex Castillo, KENS5

In 1968, Mexican-American students across the country walked out of their classrooms in protests of discrimination and inequities on school campuses. Director of UTSA’s Mexico Center and an Associate Professor of History, Jerry B. Gonzalez, Ph.D., spoke with KENS 5 about the ‘Chicano Blowouts’ or ‘1968 Walkouts’ and their historical context. “The ’68 Walkouts were a dramatic expression of the unrest in the barrios throughout the southwest; California, Texas, Colorado and even up into Chicago and the northwest. It was a vocal and spectacular response to generations of racism, poverty, illiteracy and hunger,” Dr. Gonzalez said. The movement reached Texas and San Antonio. On May 16th, Edgewood High School students, many of them Hispanic,  organized and walked out of school.

Meet the New Generation of “Sidewalk Socialists”

Rebecca Burns, In These Times

“They say I ​‘came out of nowhere,’” India Walton, 39, said at the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention in August. She was referring to the political establishment and media punditry that had dismissed her underdog campaign for mayor in the Democratic primary in Buffalo, N.Y. “What they really mean is that people like me aren’t supposed to become the Democratic nominee and presumptive mayor-elect of a major American city,” she went on.

Walton, a community organizer who has never held elected office, defeated four-term incumbent Mayor Byron Brown (who didn’t even bother to campaign against her). Running openly as a democratic socialist, Walton spoke candidly about the circumstances that propelled her toward politics. The alienating treatment she received from a ​“racist, sexist, for-profit healthcare system” as a 19-year-old mother of premature twins inspired her to become a nurse, for example, then a staff organizer for her union.