Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

PEN America warns of rise in books ‘systematically removed from school libraries’

Anastasia Tsioulcas, NPR

PEN America released its list of the most-banned books of the 2024-2025 school year on Wednesday – and warned that the number of books challenged or banned in public school districts across the country has risen exponentially in the past two years. The group dedicated to free expression counted 6,870 bans during the past academic year. While that’s down from a total of 10,046 bans imposed during the 2023-24 school year, it’s still a sharp rise from the period of 2021-2023, which averaged just under 3,000 incidents of book banning each year, in what it calls a “disturbing normalization of censorship” in public schools.

John Rogers: The Future of Education Depends on Democracy [Audio]

Peter Stiepleman, An Imperfect Leader:  The Superintendents and Leadership Podcast

What does it really mean to lead for democracy in our schools today? This week on An Imperfect Leader: The Superintendents and Leadership Podcast, I sit down with Dr. John Rogers of UCLA’s School of Education and Information Studies for a powerful conversation on one of the biggest drains on schools today: culturally divisive conflict. Dr. Rogers makes a clear distinction between healthy political debate and the anti-democratic conflict fueled by violent rhetoric and misinformation. His research reveals both the financial and human toll: One midsize district spent $1M in staff time grappling with divisive conflicts. Another saw public records requests quadruple, eating up thousands of wasted hours. In high-conflict districts, 94% of superintendents said staff health (mental and physical) was negatively impacted. So what can school leaders do when the attacks often come from outside their circle of influence?

The teacher pay penalty reached a record high in 2024

Sylvia Allegretto, Economic Policy Institute

Over the past three decades, stagnant weekly wages of public school teachers have fallen further and further behind those of college graduates who chose other careers, resulting in an ever increasing teacher pay gap that hit a record high in 2024.

Language, Culture, and Power

A student deported and a summer of raids leave a school reeling

Betty Márquez Rosales And Zaidee Stavely, EdSource

As students at Maywood Academy High School in Los Angeles County prepared their backpacks to return to school, some packed additional items they never had before — government-issued documents verifying their legal immigration status and cards listing their legal rights. These small details are signs of growing anxiety after deportations started hitting close to home. Johanna, a student at the school, was arrested in June, alongside her mother and younger sister, while attending a scheduled immigration court appearance for their legal asylum case. News of her arrest sent shock waves through the school, already on edge because of the omnipresent presence of immigration agents in and around their neighborhoods.

Peer Victimization Among English Learners: The Protective Impact of Dual Language Programs

Daman Chhikara, Educational Researcher

This study examines the relationship between English Learner classification, language program type, and peer victimization using U.S. nationally representative data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Class of 2011. Leveraging a sample of 9,562 children, this study investigates whether dual language programs serve as a protective factor against peer victimization compared to English-only programs. Participation in dual language programs reduces peer victimization among ELs relative to those in English-only programs. These results highlight the importance of expanding access to linguistically inclusive programs that affirm students’ home languages and fostering school environments that support holistic development for ELs.

‘We survived, we are resilient’: Remembering U.S. Indian boarding schools [Audio]

Kadin Mills, NPR’s Morning Edition

“When I went to boarding school, I was 7,” said Ramona Klein, speaking to a group clad in orange shirts at a vigil earlier this month in Washington, D.C. “My parents didn’t see me — other than a little while during the summer — for four years. Some parents didn’t see their children for 12 years.” Klein attended the Fort Totten Indian Industrial School in North Dakota from 1954 to 1958. She said being cut off from her family was just one of the many hardships she faced as a student at a federal Indian boarding school, in addition to abuse and neglect.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Autism Has Always Existed. We Haven’t Always Called It Autism.

Roy Richard Grinker, New York Times

When I look back at home videos of my daughter Isabel, I see the signs of autism clearly. But at the time, in 1992, I couldn’t. Autism was still considered rare. In one video, when Isabel was 15 months old, she sits quietly, putting coins in a piggy bank. She doesn’t respond to her name or look at us. My wife and I marvel at her focus and precision and predict she will be a scientist.

In a widely anticipated news conference on Monday, President Trump declared that there was “nothing more important” in his presidency than reducing the prevalence of autism. He claimed that his administration would virtually eliminate the condition, which he called a “horrible crisis” and which a top federal health official suggested might be “entirely preventable.”

Bringing LGBTQ+ Voices into the Classroom

Brenda Alvarez, NEA Today

When students hear the voices of people who lived through history, something shifts. That’s the core idea behind the Making Gay History podcast, which draws from host Eric Marcus’s 1980s and 1990s interviews with LGBTQ+ activists, leaders, and everyday people. The podcast has since become the foundation for classroom lesson plans that help educators connect their students with history in authentic and personal ways. As part of a partnership with Making Gay History, NEA and educators across a range of disciplines developed classroom-ready lesson plans and supporting resources centered on podcast episodes. The lessons provide educators with the context and tools to bring archival LGBTQ+ history into the classroom.

Fires, floods and other disasters are multiplying. Schools are adding training for workers to combat them

Kavitha Cardoza, Hechinger Report

Gavin Abundis watched as firefighter Adrian Chairez demonstrated how he uses pulleys and harnesses to rappel down buildings. “You’ve probably seen it in the movies where they’re going down ‘Mission: Impossible’ style,” Chairez said with a laugh one day this past winter as he prepared to step off a tower. “We get to do that.” Abundis, a then-senior at Aptos High School in Santa Cruz County’s Pajaro Valley Unified School District, has a friend whose home burned down a few years ago in a fire sparked by lightning. He said it’s pretty common to know someone who has been affected by fires in California, especially as they become more frequent and intense because of climate change. That drew him to this class on fire technology, and may steer his career.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Federal judge criticizes Trump over free speech in ruling for student protesters

Lawrence Hurley and Chloe Atkins, NBC News

A federal judge on Tuesday heavily criticized the Trump administration’s crackdown on free speech as he ruled in favor of foreign students the government has targeted for their support of Palestinian rights. Massachusetts-based U.S. District Judge William Young, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, ruled that foreign students enjoy the same free speech protections under the Constitution’s First Amendment as American citizens do. He found that government officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, “deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble.”

What’s at stake as USC and LMU push back against untenured faculty unions?

Julia Barajas, LAist

Last summer, after nearly two years of organizing, hundreds of untenured faculty at Loyola Marymount University celebrated the certification of their newly formed union. In a message to the campus community, Thomas Poon, who served as LMU’s executive vice president and provost, wrote: “We honor the will of our [non-tenure track] faculty and the perspectives they expressed throughout the election campaign.” The university, he added, “will continue to engage the union in good faith and with transparency.” Poon is now president of LMU and, earlier this month, he changed his tune. Poon announced Sept. 12 that the university’s board of directors decided to invoke a religious exemption to the National Labor Relations Board’s jurisdiction. That board guides unionization efforts and protects the rights of private sector employees. In practice, Poon added, LMU’s exemption means the school will no longer recognize unions or participate in collective bargaining.

A student ‘womb service’ works covertly to deliver contraception at a Catholic college

Christine Fernando, AP News

College student Maya Roman has the handoff down to a science: a text message, a walk to a designated site, and a paper bag delivered with condoms and Plan B emergency contraception. At DePaul University, it’s the only way students can get a sliver of sexual health support, she said. DePaul, a Catholic school in Chicago, prohibits distribution of any kind of birth control on its campus. To get around that, a student group runs a covert contraceptive delivery network called “the womb service.” The group was once the university’s chapter of Planned Parenthood Generation Action, but it has been operating off campus since DePaul in June revoked its status as a student organization.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Educational Equity for Street Youth: Examining Street Schools through the Lense of Rightful Presence

Matthias Fischer and Angela Calabrese Barton, AERA Open

Street youth experience similar exclusionary tendencies in German regular schools as in the society at large. These negative schooling experiences push many street youth out of school, leading to graduation gaps and causing street careers to emerge. Street schools have responded to these inequalities, offering street youth more humanizing alternatives. Drawing upon a rightful presence framework, dialogic interviews with 14 educators and 10 school leaders, mission statements, and websites of street schools, we sought to understand how street schools may foster equitable educational opportunities for their students. Analysis focused on how street schools’ educators and leaders engage in an ongoing political struggle to support their students’ educational rights. Findings reveal that street schools not only criticize existing structures of the educational system, but also consciously reject them—despite consequences. The findings accentuate where and how the systems of schooling need to change to facilitate educational equity for street youth.

We Desperately Need Maximum Wage Laws

Celeste Pepitone-Nahas, Jacobin

In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the power of the extremely wealthy over public policy has never been more evident. As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has asserted, ​“Trump has . . . said it loudly and clearly: we are a government of billionaires.” The troubling extent to which we are ruled by the rich is hardly debatable. The real question is: What can we do about it? One solution that has been proposed in the past is implementing a ​“maximum wage.” Such a cap would limit the amount any individual can earn over a given period. There are a couple different ways that this limit could be accomplished.

How Lemon Grove fought school segregation 23 years before Brown v. Board of Education [Video]

Adam Campos, 10 News 

San Diego’s Latino community has been at the forefront of the fight for social justice for decades, and one of those historic moments happened in Lemon Grove. To celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, 10News reporter Adam Campos takes you through the history of a case that helped lead to desegregation across the United States. Alvarez v. the Board of Trustees of the Lemon Grove School District is a case that dates back nearly 95 years. Laura Hook from the Lemon Grove Historical Society calls it one of the most unique she has learned of.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Fit for Purpose? How Today’s Commercial Digital Platforms Subvert Key Goals of Public Faith

Boninger and T. Philip Nichols, NEPC

Digital educational platforms have become ubiquitous in American classrooms, with tools like Google Workspace for Education, Kahoot!, Zearn, Khan Academy, and many others now structuring curriculum, instruction, collaboration, assessment, and communication. This policy brief highlights how these platforms are not neutral “tools” but complex ecosystems shaped by technical architectures, commercial imperatives, and political-economic interests. While educators tend to view them as aids for instruction, platforms extract and monetize data, linking schools into broader markets of advertisers and data brokers. For educators and policymakers, this reality calls for an ecological perspective that asks not only how platforms function in classrooms but also whose interests they serve, what values they embed, and whether nondigital means might better achieve educational goals. To guard against overreliance on industry marketing and the amplified risks of emerging AI systems, schools must articulate their own needs and values first, adopt platforms selectively, and seek policy safeguards that protect their educational mission.

Youth Are Taking Civic Action, But Need Opportunities and Support to Overcome Socioeconomic Barriers

Ruby Belle Booth and Alberto Medina, CIRCLE

The past decade has been an era of high youth civic engagement. The 2018 and 2020 election cycles featured historic highs in youth voter turnout. Electoral participation decreased slightly in 2022 and 2024, but remained among the highest on record for young people ages 18-29. Youth have also been civically active outside the voting booth: participating in protests and leading social movements. From the gun violence prevention protests after the Parkland shooting in 2018, to the racial justice movement following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, to more recent activism related to the Israel-Palestine conflict, youth have often been at the forefront of action on some of the most critical issues facing the country. In this new analysis, we examine whether young people have remained engaged in various forms of civic action, the issues that motivate their participation, and some of the barriers that may be standing in the way of increased engagement. 

The Republican Effort To Remake Schools In God’s Image

Nathalie Baptiste, Huffington Post

Before the school year started, teachers in Texas began their typical process of preparing to welcome students back to class. They hung decorations to give their rooms a personal touch, picked out which books they’d have on their shelves and stocked up on supplies. But there was one new thing they also had to do, thanks to Texas lawmakers: hang a copy of the Ten Commandments where every student in the class could see it. In late May, the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 10, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott then signed into law. It said that each public school classroom must display the Ten Commandments, religious directives found in the Hebrew and Christian bibles, in a “conspicuous space” by Sept.1.

Other News of Note

The Art of the Impersonal Essay

Zadie Smith, The New Yorker

The first essay anybody writes is for school. Same here. But the only examples I remember are the ones I wrote at the end, in my A-level exams. One compared Hitler to Stalin. Another, Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X. I was proudest of the essay that considered whether the poet John Milton—pace William Blake—was “of the devil’s party without knowing it.” I did well on those standardized tests, but even passing was far from a foregone conclusion. I’d screwed up my mocks, the year before, smoking too much weed and studying rarely. Since then, I’d cleaned up my act—a bit—but was still overwhelmed by the task before me. My entire future rested on a few essays written in the school hall under a three-hour time constraint? Really? In the nineties, this was what we called “the meritocracy.” As a system of evaluation, it favored the bold and the brash, laid waste to the rest, and was irrelevant to the rich, whose schools drilled essay technique into the student body from Day One. In a school like mine, exams came as a surprise.