Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Jackie Goldberg reflects on decades in LAUSD education and public service

Mallika Seshadri, EdSource

Jackie Goldberg, the president of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s school board, announced earlier this month that she will retire in December 2024 after completing her current term. Goldberg has worked in public service for more than four decades, starting as a teacher in the 1960s, and won her first LAUSD school board election in 1983. In 1994, she was elected to the Los Angeles City Council, and she represented District 45 in the California Assembly from 2000 to 2006. She returned to the school board in 2019.

The Godfather of ‘Parental Rights’ Is a Longtime Enemy of Public Schools

Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine

“Parental rights” and “Parents matter” are Republican-blessed slogans for various forms of political warfare over what public schools teach. It sounds pretty innocuous, of course; who doesn’t think parents should have some say over what their kids are learning all day? But that’s far from what parental rights’ crusaders want. At the heart of what is driving this movement are two distinct but interrelated goals: giving organized groups of conservative (and usually Christian) parents control over what happens in public-school classrooms at the expense of education professionals, and giving these same parents control over taxpayer-provided education dollars.

Why Tulsa public schools are under threats of takeover in Oklahoma

Adam Kemp, PBS Newshour

Oklahoma’s largest school district held on to its accreditation last week after a monthslong battle with the state superintendent. State Superintendent Ryan Walters has blamed Tulsa Public Schools’ low academic performance on poor leadership and alleged financial mismanagement. He also cited “woke ideology,” using appropriate pronouns for students, and allegations of an infiltration of the Chinese Communist Party in classrooms as causes of the district’s ongoing woes. Walters has appealed to the state school board to strip the district of its accreditation to allow for a state takeover. The district, which serves nearly 34,000 students, is in the third week of its new academic year.

Language, Culture, and Power

What my 1960s U.S. history class taught me about slavery — and life

Katy Roberts, Washington Post

The heavy cardboard boxes began arriving via UPS in late spring. They were hastily taped, and the contents — a jumble of beat-up books, faded pamphlets and dusty folders — looked long overdue for the recycling bin. The paper crumbled as I sorted through it. But this was not disorganized clutter. It was a richly curated archive of teaching materials for U.S. history classes in the late 1960s. My 11th-grade teacher of the subject, Terry Friedlander, who is now 81, agreed to part with this half-century-old time capsule only because I volunteered to take it.

IF “WOKE” DIES, OUR NATION’S TRUTHS DIE WITH IT

Tera Hunter, Hammer and Hope

“My life had its beginning in the midst of the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings,” the educator Booker T. Washington recalled of his childhood in slavery in his autobiography, “Up From Slavery.” He described animal-like treatment of enslaved people enduring crude living conditions and recounted being subjected to a tough labor regime even as a child. When slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865, he was 9 and illiterate. But supporters of the “anti-woke” education agenda of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida have adopted Washington as an exemplar of a person who parlayed skills learned under slavery for his “personal benefit.” This is not just a rhetorical political game but an actual claim made about slavery that students will learn in the state’s new African American history curriculum. This flagrant distortion of the historical record reinforces the dangers of DeSantis’s ambitions to make Florida the place where “woke goes to die,” which means retrofitting stories from the past to conform to conservative ideology.

An Alaska district aligns its school year with traditional subsistence harvests

Evan Erickson, NPR

Seventy miles inland from the Bering Sea, on roadless lands beside the Kuskokwim River, three Yup’ik villages are perfect examples of the educational challenges faced in Alaska. Teacher turnover in the state runs 25% to 30% a year, and poor attendance and low test scores have been constant issues in many rural schools. In the mid-1980s, the villages of Akiachak, Akiak and Tuluksak, broke away from a bigger district to form the Yupiit School District. They wanted to provide an education that more fully embraced traditional Yup’ik Native knowledge.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

As classes resume in sweltering heat, many schools lack air conditioning [Audio]

Sequoia, Carrillo, Morning Edition, NPR

Eric Hitchner teaches English on the fourth floor of a 111-year-old high school in Philadelphia. Come September, his classroom will be packed with a new crop of teenagers, but one thing will be the same: the lack of air conditioning. It can get so hot in his room, he says, “no one wants to even move, let alone do some strenuous thinking.” He knows firsthand that even when the outside temperatures cool down, his classroom often doesn’t. Last September, when it was in the low 70s in Philadelphia, it was 86 degrees inside.

What Happens When You Give New Parents Cash Aid?

Lizzie Tribone, The Nation

A wave of new cash transfer programs that target pregnant and postpartum people is emerging across the United States, offering a lifeline to low-income families and reviving the discussion on the afterlife of pandemic-era expanded earned income and child tax credits. Six weeks after giving birth, Priscilla Rivera began receiving cash transfers from the Bridge Project, a New York City–based program launched in 2021 by the Monarch Foundation. The program provides up to $1,000 a month to pregnant people across New York City and Rochester for 36 months.

How My School Turned Tragedy Into an Opportunity for Student and Family Engagement

Keely J. Sutton, EdSurge

Imagine not only waking up to a pandemic, forced into an isolated space without the physical and emotional support you need for learning, but also discovering that the place you call home has been deemed unlivable. This was the reality for many of the students and their families at Luther J. Price Middle School (LJPMS) families after the city of Atlanta condemned property in the Forest Cove neighborhood in 2021. There were over 300 families that resided in Forest Cove, and many of the children from these households attended our school.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

The Long Reach of Campus Politics

The Boston Review

As the academic year begins, pundits continue to lament the “crisis in higher education,” although nobody seems to agree on its nature. Conservatives rage against liberal indoctrination in curricula. Meanwhile, progressives decry the consequences of austerity-driven restructuring: undemocratic university governance, precarious teaching jobs, and ballooning student debt. Are these two debates talking past each other? Both acknowledge that what happens on campus doesn’t stay there—the university plays a central role in broader struggles over economic and political power.

Consider the shifting conservative attitude toward higher education. As Marshall Steinbaum explains, formerly anti-intellectual conservatives have come to embrace the university. By cannily appealing to liberal values of openness and ideological diversity, they have advanced a narrative of rightwing marginalization on campuses that enables them to set the terms of debate.

As California community colleges struggle with transfer, some find success

Michal Burke, EdSource

When Allyson Najera enrolled at Irvine Valley College in 2021, she worried her higher education outlook was bleak. Najera was admitted to and planned to attend San Diego State University that year, but her family couldn’t afford it, and she instead enrolled in community college with the intention of transferring. She knew of family members who went to a community college and never transferred to a four-year university.

Strengthening California’s Transfer Pathway

Marisol Cuellar Mejia, Hans Johnson, Cesar Alesi Perez, and Jacob Jackson, PPIC

California’s higher education system depends heavily on community colleges. California enrolls a much larger share of recent high school graduates in community colleges than other states—but is near the bottom when it comes to enrolling in four-year colleges and universities. Transferring to four-year institutions thus plays a vital role in boosting the number of bachelor’s degree holders in the state and strengthening the economic security of California workers. In this study, we analyze current transfer trends and identify opportunities for improving transfer rates.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

The Fantasy of Integration in Shaker Heights, Ohio

Jay Caspian Kang, The New Yorker

Can the good intentions of affluent liberals create integrated and equitable communities? This is the implied question that underlies so much of the current discourse on race and education. Over the years, we’ve seen dozens of experiments, from school busing to intentionally integrated housing developments, that tell us the answer is no: even the most progressive communities can’t seem to quarantine themselves from our country’s endemic inequalities. In “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity,” the Washington Post education reporter Laura Meckler tells the story of a Cleveland suburb that appeared to be an exception.

Our kids need extra help. This is no time to slash federal funding for schools

Chris Young, Hechinger Report

As a principal for 21 years, I take pride in supporting my students. I’m the kind of principal who knows where students work, how many points or goals they scored in their last game, what part they played in the musical and how well they did on their last test. Maybe if our representatives got to know kids in their districts like this, they wouldn’t take away crucial resources that give them the chance to thrive. Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives introduced an education bill that would slash almost $15 billion from Title I funding, which supports our highest-need students. Given our post-pandemic challenges, it is time to increase funding, not impose draconian cuts that will harm our most vulnerable students.

Did School Lunch Reforms Help Curb Increases in Childhood Obesity Rates?

NEPC

School lunches shouldn’t make kids unhealthy or overweight. But they did. Now, a new study suggests that the 2010 federal Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act and the momentum leading up to it may have helped put a stop to that by reducing calories and increasing nutritional levels for the meals served via the 77-year-old National School Lunch Program. Conducted by Therese Bonomo and NEPC Fellow Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, both of Northwestern University, and published in May as a working paper of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the study examines how changes in the nutritional quality of school meals between 1991 and 2010 may have impacted obesity among students who attended kindergarten in 2010 and grade 5 in 2016.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Public Schools’ New, Uneven Landscape

Peter Greene, The Progressive

A volcano erupts, and at first there’s just chaos and destruction. Lava flows down over the landscape, and ash chokes the air. Then the dust settles, the lava cools, the sky clears. Some ground that people once trod upon has been buried, and brand-new land is now underfoot. In March 2020, COVID-19 erupted. The next fall was completely overshadowed by the virus’s destructive power and the reactions that followed. By 2022, the pandemic itself cast less of a shadow, but its effects, from struggling students to political movements kicked up in its wake, continued to make teachers feel as if the ground was unsteady beneath their feet. The smoke had not yet cleared. But now comes the fall of 2023, and with it, the hope that schools can finally settle into a new normal.

Meet the teens advising Chicago’s mayor on education

Max Lubbers, Chalkbeat Chicago

In many places, young people are shut out of governmental decision-making. But in Chicago, a group of teenagers have a seat at the table, advising the mayor on issues ranging from public safety to neighborhood development. The 32-member Mayor’s Youth Commission was started by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot in the fall of 2019 and became a formal advisory body before she ended her term. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s transition team recommended creating a youth department in the long-term.

Over 30 new LGBTQ education laws are in effect as students go back to school

Jo Yurcaba, NBC News

Brian Kerekes, a high school statistics teacher in Florida, said he froze like “a deer in headlights” when a student asked him a personal question at the beginning of the school year this month. He said the student looked around the classroom, saw a small Pride flag, then asked, “Are you gay?” Kerekes said that his identity is no secret and that he is one of a few out gay teachers in his school.

Other News of Note

Majority of Americans support labor unions, new poll finds. See what else the data shows.

Sara Chernikoff, USA Today

Widespread strikes and contract negotiations brought unions to the forefront of the news this summer, coining the term “summer of strikes.” As Labor Day approaches, strike activity remains steady and doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.

How does the public feel about labor unions and hot strike summer? More than two-thirds of Americans support unions, according to a recent poll from The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organization (AFL-CIO). That number is even higher for people younger than 30, 88% percent saying they support labor unions.

The Homestead Strike (Teaching Activity)

Bill Bigelow and Norm Diamond, Zinn Education Project

Students are often skeptical about the possibility of people genuinely working together when at least their short-term interests appear in conflict. The Homestead Strike is a historical test case that may challenge their skepticism. In this widely used role play, students become participants in one of the most famous strikes in U.S. history, the 1892 strike in Homestead, Pennsylvania. In the Homestead Strike role play, students begin to explore some of the themes that are important in understanding the relationship between workers, owners, and government, after the 19th century: different types of unions; the role of government intervention; new capital formations that stimulated industry-wide organization among workers.

Labor Union Radicals Built the US Feminist Movement

Katherine Turk, Jacobin

Women’s rights in the United States today are evaporating — especially those won by feminists since the mid-1960s. Many are wondering how to stop the regression, hold on to past gains, and push forward. We can find answers by remembering who first organized for these rights and how they did it. First, we should upend two myths about “second-wave” feminism. The first holds that the movement forged a clean break from the labor solidarities of the New Deal order. Historians often frame the 1970s as years when Americans became more individualistic. This narrative blames feminists for exploding the social consensus, even though that consensus subordinated women and men of color. The second, related myth contends that feminists were disconnected from the labor movement.