Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

COVID-19 Vaccine for Children 5 to 11 Clears Hurdle to Emergency Approval

Ariana Prothero, Education Week

COVID-19 vaccines for children 5 to 11 cleared a major hurdle from the Food and Drug Administration Tuesday, placing a vaccine on the path to emergency approval in the near future. A key FDA advisory committee made up of independent experts has recommended that the agency grant emergency use authorization to the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee’s decision is not binding, although the FDA is expected to follow the recommendation, which would likely make the vaccine available as early as next week.

Cardona is pushing for billions more for schools. But will federal control come with it?

Lillian Momgeau, NBC News and Hechinger Report

Principal Christy Walters has big plans for her suburban elementary school this year. She wants to build on what she learned last year — better ways to stay in touch with families and help meet their needs, more effective strategies for recruiting and retaining a diverse staff, and new ideas on how to organize lessons to engage students. “I’m always excited for innovation,” she said. “I’m not too tired for that. That is energizing.” Witch Hazel Elementary, where Walters has been in charge since 2018, has a student poverty rate of 95 percent and an upbeat staff. Despite worrying about families losing their jobs, students without sufficient food and confusion about how to use remote learning technology, adults here seem proud of how well they’ve survived a difficult year.

Nikole Hannah-Jones: “Dark and scary times” for public education

Greg Childress, NC Policy Watch

After four years of President Donald Trump, a global pandemic, and a culture war fueled by the false narrative that Critical Race Theory is taught in public schools, educators and their progressive allies are exhausted and understandably so, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones told attendees of the 2021 Color of Education Virtual Summit. But America is in a “dangerous period,” Hannah-Jones warned, so educators and their allies must brush back fatigue to fight against a well-organized effort to discredit public education. “The right [conservatives] is extremely organized,” Hannah-Jones said. “We’re looking at the takeover of school boards, efforts to set state policy around curricula, what can and can’t be taught.” Progressives must become more aggressive in pushing back against conservatives’ efforts to control the nation’s schools, she said.

Language, Culture, and Power

The Power of Teaching Poetry

Renée Watson and Linda Christensen, Rethinking Schools

I always begin on day one, not with the rules, not with “thou shalt” or a class syllabus, but with a poem that starts by centering students’ lives. That’s the entry point. The poem should be an easy reach so that students learn from the first day of class that they are writers. I’m thinking “Where I’m From”; “Raised by Women”; “For My People.” When the students read their poems out loud, we also begin to learn about each other, to build community. Renée, what are your thoughts about building community? How do we create safe spaces in our classrooms for students to write and share?

Schools, colleges designated as areas protected from immigration enforcement

Zaidee Stavely, EdSource

Schools, colleges, preschools, day care centers, school bus stops and children’s playgrounds are all named as protected areas where immigration agents should not arrest, search, serve subpoenas or conduct any other enforcement action, according to a new memo from the Department of Homeland Security. The new policy announced Wednesday restricts immigration and border protection agents from conducting enforcement actions at or near places where people access essential services or activities. Medical facilities, places of worship, domestic violence shelters, food banks, emergency response centers, funerals and demonstrations are also on the list, which the department made clear was not a complete list of all places that are off-limits.

How one student got her middle school to change its name[AUDIO]

Education Beat Podcast, Ed Source

Anaya Zenad researched her school’s namesake, she uncovered a history that upset her. The school was named after Juan Crespi, a Spanish missionary who helped pave the way for the brutally oppressive California mission system in the 1700s, where Native American children were forced to work. Anaya and her peers decided they wanted their school to recognize someone who stood up for civil rights, rather than someone who played a part in taking rights away. So they renamed it after Betty Reid Soskin, a local civil rights icon and the oldest National Park ranger. This week we explore the story of how Anaya and other students made this change happen.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Why student absences aren’t the real problem in America’s ‘attendance crisis’

Jaymes Pyne, Elizabeth Vaade, Eric Grodsky, The Conversation

Nationally, one in six children miss 15 or more days of school in a year and are considered chronically absent. Education officials have lamented that all this missed instruction has for years constituted an attendance crisis in U.S. elementary, middle and high schools. The fear among policymakers is that these chronically absent students suffer academically because of all the classroom instruction they miss out on. In 2015, the U.S. secretary of education and other federal officials responded to this perceived crisis, urging communities to “support every student, every day to attend and be successful in school[.]” Their open letter stated that missing 10% of school days in a year for any reason – excused or unexcused – “is a primary cause of low academic achievement.”

COVID forced students apart. This Queens high school is using art to bring them back together.

Christina Velga, Chalkbeat

When Ryan Horodecki walks into Voyages Preparatory, a transfer high school for students who have fallen behind and are at risk of dropping out, one of the first things he sees is his self portrait. The lobby of the Elmhurst, Queens, building, a former factory with floor-to-ceiling windows, is lined with portraits students made in the first weeks of school. Horodecki’s hangs within eyeshot of the entrance. It shows his face split down the middle, with one half wearing a surgical mask, the other uncovered. In the background is the Brooklyn Bridge, representing his home borough.

Mentors help students with learning disabilities gain confidence, become self-advocates

Kara Arundel, K12 Dive

Dana Dickens likes it when her former students check in with her and when they do, several will ask if their old school — P.S. 76, the Asa Philip Randolph School for the Humanities in New York City — still offers a specific mentoring program that they remember fondly but, to others, may seem like it would have difficulty attracting participants. That’s because it meets on Fridays after school and it’s only for students with learning differences. But for 14 years, the school’s Eye to Eye program has been the desired meeting place for middle school students struggling with attention, executive functioning, dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

The racist and sexist roots of child care in America explain why the system is in shambles

Sarah Carr, Hechinger Report

A year later, Roxana Contreras would say she didn’t know what she was thinking. But in the early spring of 2020, her business in shambles and bills to pay, she decided that she had no choice but to sell her house. The building was also the site of Contreras’s business: a small in-home child-care program called Gummy Bears that she had painstakingly nurtured for 14 years. “I was so worried,” Contreras recalls, “we were running out of money … and there were no kids.” Contreras’s entire stream of income vanished on March 22, 2020, the date by which the state asked most programs to close. In Massachusetts, scores of child-care programs did not qualify for most government aid programs, including the federal CARES Act, which propped up the state’s public schools with nearly $550 million in 2020. And unlike some other providers, Contreras refused to keep charging families to hold spots for a service she could no longer provide. “The parents shouldn’t have to pay for something they were not getting,” she says. “We were all going through the same thing, struggling financially.”

Early Childhood Education Is at an Inflection Point. We’re Doubling Down on Our Coverage of the Field. 

Emily Tate, EdSurge

The early childhood education system in the United States is fundamentally broken. In a sector that rarely sees quality, affordability and availability offered in the same place, that is more a statement of fact than it is a subjective viewpoint. As is, this is how the field typically works (or doesn’t): Families are often forced to pay more than they can afford—sometimes as much or more than the mortgages on their homes—for their children’s early care and education. Yet those who do the caring and educating are among the most impoverished workers in this country—with salaries that fall in the second percentile when ranked against other professions nationally, earning an average of $11.65 an hour—and often require public assistance to make ends meet. Child care providers, meanwhile, barely break even in the best of times and end up shuttering in the worst. And children are often denied the high-quality care that they need and deserve.

“The University of Puerto Rico is not for sale!”

Rima Brusi, The Nation

“They are stealing our present. The UPR is not for sale,” read a large banner at the gates of the oldest and largest of the 11 campuses that make up the University of Puerto Rico system. Early in the morning on Monday, October 18, students gathered to join the protests in front of Puerto Rico’s Capitol in San Juan, holding colorful signs: “They violated our past”; “They are stealing our present”; “They are mortgaging our future.” On the other side of the island in the western town of Mayagüez, where the STEM flagship campus of the system is located, students were starting a one-day strike. Some had planned to join their peers in San Juan, but those who were unable to do the two-and-a-half-hour drive would attend local protests. The campus in Aguadilla organized a local march in support. Students from campuses such as Ponce and Cayey came to the Capitol in rented buses. They started with a march from the campus to the town hall and ended with plena music and an open mic. The night before, hundreds of students held a pleno—an informal, grassroots assembly—to make decisions and plan the day’s events, with thousands more joining virtually using social media. The discussion was orderly but emotional, and it went beyond the logistics of the protests and into a deeper conversation about the importance of resistance and showing up to the events of the day.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

How Minnesota’s lack of teachers of color hurts students, and what reform could look like [Video]

Fred de Sam Lazaro, PBS Newshour

Many schools across the United States are grappling with ways to close the achievement gap between white students and students of color. Special correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on those efforts in Minnesota, which has some of the worst disparities. This report is part of our ongoing “Race Matters” coverage, and the “Agents for Change” series.

U.S. News’ school rankings gain local traction, but could fuel segregation

Matt Barnum, Chalkbeat

On Twitter, the U.S. News and World Report’s new rankings for elementary and middle schools were roundly castigated. “Truly just an appalling use of your time and expertise,” wrote one commentator. “This is terrible and will reinforce and exacerbate inequalities,” said another.

Elsewhere, the reaction was more favorable. The new metrics drew an avalanche of local news coverage listing an area’s top-ranked schools, with the rankings sometimes treated as if they came from a government source. “New Report Reveals Best Elementary, High Schools in Illinois,” declared NBC Chicago. Some school districts promoted the results, too. Denver Public Schools, which serves mostly low-income students of color, heralded the rankings in a newsletter: “Several elementary and middle schools in DPS have been ranked among the top in Colorado in a brand-new ranking!” Each of its top 10 schools, according to U.S. News, serves mostly white, affluent students.

Figure of the week: Education participation rates in Africa increase, with some caveats

Tamara White, Brookings

On September 18, the African Union, in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) released the report, “Transforming Education in Africa,” an evidence-based overview of education in the region. The report highlights progress the continent has made on education indicators, such as participation rates, while also illustrating challenges that remain. As Africa has the youngest population in the world—nearly 800 million Africans are under the age of 25, with 677 million between ages 3 and 24—accelerating investment in education is vital for countries to take full benefit of their human capital. Overall, the report reveals both progress and regression when it comes to education in the region.

Democracy and the Public Interest

San Francisco Supervisors Approve Permanent Non-Citizen Voting In Board of Education Elections

CBS San Francisco

San Francisco Supervisors on Tuesday voted unanimously permanently allow non-citizens to vote in Board of Education elections, updating a voter-approved ballot measure from five years ago. Back in 2016, San Francisco voters passed Proposition N, which allowed non-citizen voting, making the city the first in the U.S. to allow immigrant parent voting. The change, however, was only temporary and set to expire next year. In addition to making immigrant voting for school board elections permanent, the newly approved ordinance, authored by Supervisor Connie Chan, also explicitly also allows for voting in school board recall elections. “Growing up as a new immigrant student and now as a parent of a public school student, I was so honored to take the lead in reauthorizing this ordinance,” Chan said in a statement. “Now as we make immigrant parent voting permanent, the hard work starts to educate and engage our immigrant families about their rights.”

How teachers adapt coursework to create resistant civics education

Mike Wolterbeek, Nevada Today

In response to various political issues such as immigration, and new policies instituted by the Trump administration, some teachers implemented new curriculum in their classrooms that resisted those changes, a study found. Teachers also strove to cultivate students’ critical awareness, political efficacy and commitment to political action. In her peer-reviewed article, “Multicultural citizenship education as resistance: Student political development in an anti-immigrant national climate,” Cristina Lash, assistant professor of Educational Leadership at the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Nevada, Reno, concludes that major political events, like elections, can be catalysts for resistance through multicultural education.

History Education, Civics, and Student Advocacy – Seeking Common Ground [Audio]

Danny Diaz, Ace Parsi, Amber Northern, Teacher Stories

Guests representing diverse political perspectives find some common on these controversial questions: What does high-quality history and civics education look like in a democratic society?

What should teachers, particularly those who teach history and civic, be teaching our children? Do new state laws, like HB3979 in Texas and SB623 in Tennessee, that restrict what teachers can talk about with their students strengthen or weaken our democracy? Should students learn about civics by solving real problems and working with government representatives?

Other News of Note

Noam Chomsky: “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way”

Stan Cox and Noam Chomsky, Jacobin

This month will mark a critical juncture in the struggle to avoid climate catastrophe. At the COP26 global climate summit kicking off next week in Glasgow, Scotland, negotiators will be faced with the urgent need to get the world economy off the business-as-usual track that will take the Earth up to and beyond 3 degrees Celsius of excess heating before the century’s end, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet so far the pledges of rich nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions have been far too weak to rein in the temperature rise. Meanwhile, the Biden administration’s climate plans hang in the balance. If Congress fails to pass the reconciliation bill, the next opportunity for the United States to take effective climate action may not arise until it’s too late.