Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Teachers unions sue over Trump immigration crackdown

Lexi Lonas Cochran, The Hill

Two of the biggest teachers unions in the country are suing the Trump administration over its immigration crackdown, saying schools are suffering because of it. The National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers joined a federal lawsuit Tuesday after the Trump administration took away the directive for immigration officials to stay away from school grounds.  Although no Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) officials are known to have entered a school for enforcement, the lawsuit alleges people have been arrested while dropping off students and other parents have pulled students from school or certain activities due to fear of deportation.

The status of litigation against the Trump administration’s K-12 education agenda: A guide for education leaders

Rachel M. Perera, Thalia González, and Aidan Tomlinson, Brookings

Since January 2025, the Trump administration has actively worked to reshape the federal role in K-12 education. This includes executive orders directing the dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education (ED), threatening to withhold federal funding from schools that support DEI (or DEIA) or recognize transgender students’ rights, and calling for the return to so-called “common-sense” school discipline policies. This is unfolding amid the implementation of the administration’s efforts, sure to create untold harms, to shrink the size of the federal government (including ED). Given the limited role of the federal government in education, many of these actions exceed the executive’s authority to dictate state and local K-12 school policy. As a result, several of them have been challenged in federal courts.

How the Education Department is using civil rights laws to bring schools to heel [Audio]

Cory Turner, NPR

In April, the U.S. Department of Education used a landmark law intended, in part, to end racial discrimination to investigate Chicago Public Schools over a “Black Students Success Plan,” after a complaint that the program discriminated against students of other races. In July, the department ruled five Virginia school districts had violated another civil rights law, intended to protect women and girls from sex discrimination and harassment, by allowing transgender students to use school facilities based on gender identity, not biological sex.

Language, Culture, and Power

The Trauma Immigration Raids Leave in Classrooms

Brenda Alvarez, NEA Today

In January 2025, during the middle of a school day in Texas, a mother waited anxiously outside an elementary school for her fifth-grade son. He didn’t walk out with the rest of the class. “She panicked,” says Maricruz Martínez, a second-grade teacher at Vestal Elementary School in San Antonio. “She was so upset, asking: ‘Where is he? Who took him? Why is he not here?’ You could tell where her mind was going.” Maricruz Martínez (bottom, right) is a second-grade teacher and president of the Harlandale Education Association. Where did her son go? The child had simply stopped at the restroom.But in a climate where elected officials are choosing fear, families and communities pay the price immigration raids, abductions, disappearing people, and deportations have on them; and the absence of a child—even for a few minutes—can feel like a nightmare come true.

Judge pauses Trump policy cutting off schools, shelters to certain immigrants

Adam Echelman, CalMatters

California’s soup kitchens, homeless shelters and preschools can continue to serve those without legal status, at least temporarily, according to a decision today by a U.S. district court judge in Rhode Island.  In July, four federal departments — Education, Justice, Health and Human Services and Labor — directed California to deny many immigrants access to federally funded public services, including health care, education and job training. The new policies apply to certain classes of immigrants, including those without legal status as well as those who have it, such as asylum seekers or those with student visas. California quickly joined 20 other states and the District of Columbia in a lawsuit, arguing that the policy changes were illegal. The ruling today, which is a preliminary injunction, means that the federal government can’t enforce the new policies in these states until the lawsuit is decided, which could take months or years to resolve.

At Risk and A Risk: Disrupting Anti-Black Hate Toward Black Males in K-12 Schools

Jaleel Howard, Gene McAdoo, and Tyrone C. Howard, Urban Education

There is compelling evidence that the proliferation of demeaning discourse, dehumanizing policy, and violence targeting marginalized populations in the U.S. has contributed to rising hate in K-12 schools. This manuscript provides a theoretical framing of antiblack hate, specifically analyzing its distinct implications for Black males in K-12 schools. Our analysis specifically focuses on Black males because being raced Black and being gendered male results in Black males being both deemed unworthy of and not in need of, protection. Finally, we offer recommendations for future research, policy, and practice aimed at addressing and disrupting antiblack male hate in schools.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

The school shooting industry is worth billions — and it keeps growing [Aidop]

Meg Anderson, All Things Considered

On a sunny day in Grapevine, Texas, three drones are buzzing around the head of a test dummy balanced on a pedestal. It’s part of a demonstration outside the National School Safety Conference. “We use drones to stop school shootings,” says Justin Marston, the CEO of Campus Guardian Angel, the company selling the drones. In the event of a shooting, remote pilots fly the drones, housed at the school, at the shooter. They shoot pepper balls and run the drones into the shooter to debilitate them. The technology is one example on a long list of products schools can buy to deter a shooter.

Silicon Valley Community Colleges Launch First Universal Free Meal Program in US for Students

Izzy Bloom, KQED

When Sophia Cuevas leaves for school at 7 a.m., like many students, she frequently runs out of time to eat breakfast or pack food. “Usually I skip lunch if I’m on campus, because we had to pay for meals,” the 19-year-old West Valley College student said. “But now that there’s something that I can eat [for free] every day, I am no longer skipping lunch.” Starting this fall, students enrolled in Santa Clara County’s West Valley-Mission Community College District are receiving one no-cost meal per school day. The new universal free meal program aims to lower barriers to higher education by addressing student food insecurity.

‘Something can be done about this’: New plan aims to stop sex abuse in California schools

Matt Drange, CalMatters

A beloved teacher arrested for soliciting a minor. A coach convicted of sexual abuse. A school district hit with a multi-million-dollar jury verdict for failing to protect students. The steady drumbeat of stories in recent years about educator sexual abuse in K-12 school districts across California shows the scope of misconduct is much wider than previously known. Yet the stories only hint at how common sexual harassment and grooming behavior has become in schools, with the best available data from the U.S. Education Department suggesting that 1 in 10 children is targeted for grooming at some point in their K-12 education. 

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Trump administration cuts grants for minority-serving colleges, declaring them unconstitutional

Collin Binkley, AP News

The Trump administration is ending several grant programs reserved for colleges that have large numbers of minority students, saying they amount to illegal discrimination by tying federal money to racial quotas. In a shift upending decades of precedent, the Education Department said Wednesday it now believes it’s unconstitutional to award federal grants using eligibility requirements based on racial or ethnic enrollment levels. The agency said it’s holding back a total of $350 million in grants budgeted for this year and called on Congress to “re-envision” the programs for future years. More than $250 million of that figure was budgeted for the government’s Hispanic-Serving Institution program, which offers grants to colleges and universities where at least a quarter of undergraduates are Hispanic. Congress created the program in 1998 after finding that Latino students were going to college and graduating at far lower rates than white students.

At George Mason University, Trump Has Found an Unbending Adversary

Stephanie Saul, New York Times

Gregory N. Washington, the first Black president of George Mason University, remembers the tumult on campus as he began his new job in 2020. It was the era of Black Lives Matter, and students were protesting over the man the school is named after, a complicated Virginia historical figure and slaveholder. Demonstrators were demanding that a statue of Mason on campus be torn down, Dr. Washington said. Five years later, George Mason’s statue remains intact, and politics are once again convulsing college campuses. But instead of contending with student protests, today Dr. Washington — who made it his mission to reduce racial tensions at George Mason — is in the cross hairs of the Trump administration, accused of violating the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against white academics in hiring and promotions.

I’m one of the Ph.D. students caught up in the cancellation of ‘diversity’ grants. I’m heartbroken

Marissa Russo, STAT

Four pages and 50 words. That was how much I had to remove from my F31 application to submit it again. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, right? But those four pages and 50 words were the parts of my application that I was most proud of. As a queer Hispanic woman, I was eligible to apply for a predoctoral grant through what is — sorry, what was — called an NIH F31 diversity grant. These grants were meant to support Ph.D. students from marginalized and underrepresented backgrounds, including race, disability, socioeconomic status, and geographic area. The F31 grant can provide funding for up to five years to help the student, the academic institution, and their adviser pay for things like tuition, stipends, and conference travel expenses. But thanks to the Trump administration’s purge of anything “woke,” the NIH F31 diversity grant no longer exists.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

School Finance Reforms Fail to Close Racial Funding Gaps, New Study Finds

Jamal Watson, Diverse Education

State school finance reforms designed to address funding inequities between rich and poor districts have not reduced racial and ethnic disparities in school funding, and in some cases have made them worse, according to new research published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. Dr. Emily RauscherDr. Emily RauscherThe study by Drs. Emily Rauscher of Brown University and Jeremy E. Fiel of Rice University examined the effects of school finance reforms across the United States from 1990 to 2022, finding that while these reforms reduced funding gaps by income by over $1,300 per pupil on average, they increased the spending advantage of districts with low percentages of Black and Hispanic students by $900 and $1,000 per pupil, respectively.

How and why racial isolation affects education costs and the provision of equal educational opportunity

Bruce D. Baker, EPAA

This article provides a review of prior empirical work exploring whether and to what extent school district racial composition affects the costs associated with providing equal educational opportunity to achieve a common set of outcomes. This prior work mainly involves education cost function modeling on several states and in an earlier version of our national education cost model. Here, I update the national education cost model and apply a series of tests for selecting the optimal cost model and determining a) whether it is necessary to retain measures of racial composition in the model and b) the effect those measures have on the estimated costs to achieve common outcomes. We find that the optimal model includes an interaction term between % enrollment that is Black and population density and that for majority Black enrollment urban districts, the predicted costs per pupil are 20 to 50% higher when using models with this measure than when using models with race neutral alternatives. While changes in cost estimates for these districts are large, aggregate national cost increases from including racial composition are 1.3 to 2.7% in most years.

Programs for Students With Hearing and Vision Loss Harmed by Trump’s Anti-Diversity Push

Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica

The U.S. Department of Education has pulled funding for programs in eight states aimed at supporting students who have both hearing and vision loss, a move that could affect some of the country’s most vulnerable students. The programs are considered vital in those states but represent only a little over $1 million a year in federal money. Nonetheless, they got caught in the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, with an Education Department spokesperson citing concerns about “divisive concepts” and “fairness” in acknowledging the decision to withhold the funding.

Democracy and the Public Interest

New school year brings book removals, religion and revisions to these states

Zulekha Nathoo, USA TODAY

As some states battle over what teachers should teach and what materials should be removed from classrooms, students starting a new school year may be caught in the middle. The Oklahoma Supreme Court is allowing controversial educational changes to move forward in the state, denying a stay in July to a group of parents, teachers and religious leaders who asked to halt to the implementation of new standards. Among revisions to the K-12 curriculum, high school students will be asked to “identify discrepancies” in 2020 election results.

How Texas A&M Sacrificed a Children’s Lit Professor to the MAGA Cult

Aaron Hanlon, The New Republic

Texas A&M University President Mark A. Welsh III announced Tuesday the firing of Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer whose mention of “gender and sexuality” in a children’s literature course was videotaped by a student. The full details of the incident are not yet clear, but the reasons given for the swift decision to fire McCoul—and to remove English Department Head Emily Johansen and College of Arts and Sciences Dean Mark Zoran from their leadership roles—are preposterous and clearly manufactured in the hopes of satisfying the bad-faith MAGA zealots who have been demanding scalps.

Moms for Liberty foe announces Senate bid against Florida Republican Ashley Moody

Matt Dixon, NBC News

Democrat Jennifer Jenkins has beaten high-profile political opponents in the past. During her 2020 run for a school board seat in a conservative-leaning southeast Florida county, Jenkins won by 10 percentage points over Republican Tina Descovich, who would go on to become a co-founder of Moms for Liberty, an influential national education group focused on parental choice. The win, especially by a double-digit margin, was considered a significant upset at the time. 

Other News of Note

A General Air of Anxiety

Joan Wallach Scott, Boston Review

The personal is the political” was a reality for me long before it became the mantra of Second Wave feminism in the United States. In 1951, when I was ten years old, my father, Samuel Wallach, a New York City high school teacher, was suspended from his job for refusing to cooperate with an investigation into communism in the public schools. He was fired for insubordination two years later—one of some 350 teachers who were fired or resigned in those years. The history of my family was deeply affected by that event. I learned early about the intrusive operations of state power in the daily routines of domestic life: there were unexpected visits from the FBI, subpoenas served, telephones tapped, subversive books wrapped in brown paper and stuffed in the back of closets, hushed conversations (in Yiddish, the household language of secrecy) between my parents.