Just News from Center X – September 18, 2026

9.18.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Microsoft commits to sweeping AI privacy rules for students. Will other tech giants follow?

Jocelyn Gecker, AP News

Millions of students every day turn to AI chatbots for help with schoolwork, emotional support and personal advice — often unaware of where their conversations and other personal information end up. How that data is used — and schools’ role in protecting it — is a growing concern for educators, parents and kids as artificial intelligence becomes a ubiquitous part of the school day, embedded in many of the classroom tools students are required to use. As the school year started, the country’s two largest school districts, New York City and Los Angeles, announced they were putting the brakes on student use of AI for one year, as they study how to best incorporate the technology into education. In response to a growing AI and screentime backlash, Microsoft announced last week it had agreed to adopt guardrails and privacy standards for its AI in schools, as negotiated with the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union.

Why Are Data Centers Being Built So Close to Public Schools?

Tim Walker, NEA Today

When Saddle View Elementary School in Palm Beach County, Florida, opened its doors in 2025, the staff was excited and energized about being part of a brand-new school, the 183rd in the district. The school was a state-of-the-art campus featuring an innovative e-sports program, solar panels, even a hydroponic school garden. Midway through the school year, however, Saddle View educators and their neighbors were stunned to learn about plans for another brand-new facility in their community. The Palm Beach County Commissioner was on the verge of greenlighting “Project Tango,” a massive 202-acre “hyperscale” data center. The development consisted of 4 million square feet of buildings—some seven stories tall—and containing over 600 industrial cooling fans. 

I Grew Up Under Bombs in Iran. I Know What Children Will Remember

Eiman Jahangir, Newsweek

According to Iranian officials, a recent American strike hit a house in Kuhestak where a wedding was underway. More than 60 people were wounded and five were killed. Two of them were children. Somewhere in Iran today, other children are hearing the sound of war above them. Some may be running with their parents to whatever place feels safest, and years from now, long after today’s arguments over military strategy have faded, they may still remember exactly what that sounded like. I know because I was one of those children. My first memories are of a Pinocchio-themed tent and a siren. It was 1984. My brother and I were young boys in Tehran, and Iran had been at war with Iraq for three years, my whole life at that point. We played in that tent, and when the sirens went off our parents carried us down to the basement. I did not know yet that people flew to space, or that rockets could take them there. I knew only that things came out of the sky, and that when they did, the adults were afraid.

Language, Culture, and Power

What The Fight For Mexican American Studies Can Teach Us About Justice

Marybeth Gasman, Forbes

When political leaders attack ethnic studies, they often claim that they are protecting students from division. However, these attacks usually end up restricting who history can be taught about, whose experiences deserve recognition, and who is permitted to feel fully American. In Banned: The Fight for Mexican American Studies in the Streets and in the Courts, Nolan Cabrera and Robert Chang examine the campaign against the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, Arizona, and the community and legal resistance that followed. Banned is both a history and a guide for communities facing similar battles today.

School choice proponents say it offers families more options – but those don’t always extend to immigrant students

William McCorkle and Beth Lloyd, The Conversation

Educators, politicians and education observers have long debated school choice. This controversial policy approach lets families pick alternatives to their assigned neighborhood public schools and, in some cases, allows them to use government funds to pay for private school tuition or other educational expenses. Some of the school choice debate has focused on whether charter schools – meaning publicly funded, independently operated schools – offer students more equitable educational opportunities and better academic outcomes than traditional public schools. Not much of the debate has focused on how school choice can affect immigrant students.

After 10 years of bilingual education in California, demand is high but teacher supply low

Adolfo Guzman Lopez, LAist

In 2017, only about 400 public schools in the state offered bilingual education. But in the 10 years since voters approved Prop 58 overturning the ban on bilingual teaching, that number has now grown to more than 1,000. It’s still not enough to meet the demand from parents and caregivers who want their kids to have the advantages of bilingualism, as well as academic support for Spanish and other languages spoken at home. California officials now want to increase the number of public schools to 1,600 by 2030. “These programs have expanded quickly, but these schools continue to really struggle to find and retain the teachers to teach in them,” said Cati de los Rios, an associate professor of language, literacy, and culture at UC Berkeley. She said the lag in the teacher pipeline is the main problem. The bilingual education ban, approved by voters in 1998 through Prop. 227, also shriveled up university training programs for bilingual teachers.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Heat, Fires, Hurricanes, Floods: How Climate Change Is Keeping Kids From School

Wayne D’Orio, The 74

With five simple words last year, Maine issued guidance that speaks volumes about how extreme weather is changing school. The law, Temperature Standards for School Buildings, clearly calls for each district in the state to set minimum and maximum temperature limits under which schools can operate. What’s left unsaid in this bill is what any Mainer has experienced recently: The weather is changing drastically. “My daughter’s classroom was 96 degrees” a few years ago, said Jeremy Ray, the superintendent of both the Biddeford and Dayton school departments in Maine. “Thirty-five years ago, no one had heard of a heat day,” he added. Maine is far from alone.

Climate disasters disrupt education for 171m students worldwide in 2025

Khadija Akter, The Climate Watch

More than 1.1 million students affected by floods in Bangladesh, while 569 educational institutions were damaged in Chattogram Division Climate change is no longer only an environmental and livelihood crisis. It has also become a major threat to the education of hundreds of millions of children worldwide. In 2025, climate-related disasters disrupted the education of at least 171 million students in 106 countries and territories. The figure was revealed in a new analysis by the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF. The report, “Learning interrupted: Global snapshot of climate-related school disruptions in 2025,” said nearly one in 10 students globally had their education disrupted in some way because of climate disasters. The report identified storms, floods, heatwaves, droughts and wildfires as major climate risks to education systems. Because of these disasters, schools had to be closed in some places, educational institutions were damaged in others and classroom teaching in many areas had to be shifted temporarily to online or distance learning. As a result, teaching time was reduced, student attendance declined and the risk of millions of children dropping out increased.

One L.A. school trades asphalt for trees and grass

Hanna Kang, Los Angeles Times

Fourth-grader Landon Gonzalez and one of his classmates ran the 5K at the L.A. Chinatown Firecracker Run last year. They plan to do it again in the spring — only this time, they have a new place to train at their school in Westlake. About 30,000 square feet of asphalt was removed, and 35 trees were planted at Esperanza Elementary School, increasing green space across the campus from 9% to 37%, according to the Los Angeles Unified School District. “Now we have this bright blue track to get in shape,” Gonzalez, a student council member, said recently. “Actually, all the students are healthier because we’ve been running on the track.” The track is one piece of a major greening project at the Westlake school that students, teachers and community leaders celebrated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Record high waitlists for childcare assistance have shut women out of work and promotions

Sarah Carr, The 19th

The morning after Edythe Smith gave birth to her daughter, she got some bad news. State funding for a government program that helps low- and moderate-income families pay for childcare had just been frozen in Syracuse, New York, where she lives. Smith is a single parent who works full time from home as an auto claims insurance adjuster. When her maternity leave ended last fall, she had no choice but to return to work while continuing to care full time for an increasingly mobile — sometimes perilously curious — baby. “It’s super disruptive to my job,” she said. And it became even more disruptive as the months wore on and the child wasn’t content anymore to spend much of the day confined to a playpen by her mother’s desk. At moments, Smith had to juggle intense work phone calls with keeping her daughter out of serious mischief. 

A historically Black college in Oakland? A task force is dreaming

Ashley McBride, Oaklandside

A task force is quietly working to expand higher education offerings in Oakland by bringing a historically Black college or university here. And Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee is central to the effort. There are a little over 100 recognized HBCUs in the country, but they are concentrated in the southeast since many were established in the years following the Civil War, when African Americans were barred from most colleges and universities. The West Coast has only one historically Black educational institution — the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, one of only a handful of historically Black medical schools in the nation. If an HBCU lands in Oakland, it could offer the first opportunity for undergraduate students in California to get a culturally relevant education closer to home.

This California Educational Juggernaut Doesn’t Need the SAT

Miriam Pawal, New York Times

When the University of California eliminated the SAT requirement for admission in 2021, U.C.L.A. saw a significant jump in applications from high-achieving Black and Latino students, for whom the standardized tests had been a barrier. “We are enrolling one of the most academically accomplished and diverse classes in our history,” the admissions director wrote. Since then, applications have risen at all nine undergraduate campuses, the most prestigious have become increasingly selective, and the university retains and graduates students at record rates. Yet just five years later, the University of California is embroiled again in a very public battle over whether to reinstate the SAT.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Unequal Foundations: Racial Disparities in School Building Conditions in New York State

Sodiq Ambali, Miyeun Jung , and Lucy C. Sorensen, Educational Researcher

School infrastructure is a critical yet often overlooked factor shaping student health, learning, and well-being. This study examines racial disparities in public school building conditions across New York State using building inspection data linked to demographic and fiscal data. Schools serving more students of color are significantly more likely to have poor overall conditions, inadequate ventilation, mold exposure, and reduced access to athletic fields, gymnasiums, and health offices. A Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition shows that local property taxes are the largest contributor to racial gaps in building quality, while progressive state building aid helps reduce these disparities. These findings highlight persistent infrastructure inequities and the need for targeted investments to ensure all students have access to safe and healthy learning environments.

A Tiny 3% Tax on Global Billionaires Could Save 30 Million Lives by 2030: Lancet Study

Brad Reed, Common Dreams

With international aid programs facing an unprecedented cash crunch thanks in large part to foreign aid cuts ordered by US President Donald Trump, a recent study published in The Lancet suggests that taxing the ultrarich would be the simplest way to plug funding gaps faced by crucial life-saving programs. Specifically, the peer-reviewed study found that hitting the world’s billionaires with a 3% wealth tax would raise enough money to save up to 29.5 million lives in the world’s most vulnerable populations over the next four years leading into 2030.

Why the Trump administration’s bid to end diversity efforts at nonprofit schools is likely to get tied up in court

Elizabeth Schmidt, The Conversation

The Trump administration wants to strip all nonprofit colleges, universities and private K-12 schools of their tax-exempt status if any of their programs designed to help students uses race as a criterion for eligibility. This change is included in a rule the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service proposed on Sept. 3, 2026. The rule could take effect after May 31, 2027, following a two-month-long comment period – as long as it’s not blocked or delayed by the legal challenges likely to arise. As a nonprofit law scholar who helps nonprofit leaders understand the legal issues they face, I believe this latest salvo in the Trump administration’s attempt to end racial preferences stretches U.S. law so far that it will likely be tied up in court for years.

Democracy and the Public Interest

Teachers must not be neutral: taking a professional stance is part of the job

Maike Finnern and Elina Stock, Education International

What does it mean for teachers to take a professional stance on democracy? This question is becoming increasingly important in schools facing racism, discrimination, disinformation, and anti-democratic tendencies. In Germany, a broad alliance of education and civil society organisations is calling for stronger civic education and better support for teachers addressing these challenges. More than 260,000 people have signed the petition “Schule zeigt Haltung – Lehrkräfte stärken gegen Hass und Hetze”(“Schools take a stand – Strengthening teachers against hate and agitation”). Launched in November 2025 by the German Education Union , Greenpeace, Teachers for Future Germany, the Federal Student Conference, the German Association for Civic Education, and Parents Against the Far Right, the petition calls for better conditions for teachers to uphold democratic principles in their daily work. In Berlin, representatives of the alliance have now handed the petition to the Secretary-General of the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs.

Planting the Seeds of Civic Engagement

LaShonda Bradberry and Karissa O’Reilly, American Educator

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, our democracy is at risk. We face increased polarization—often arising from misinformation and disinformation that instill fear, anger, and distrust—as the Trump administration draws the nation ever closer to authoritarianism. But change is possible. Our voices still matter, and the people still have power. This fall, we need to not only get out the vote but also ensure our students and their families understand the stakes. To learn how teachers are addressing civics education and empowering their students to help heal our democracy, we spoke with two New York educators who are deeply involved in this work through their schools and unions. LaShonda Bradberry is a high school special education and social studies teacher at Cheektowaga Central High School and a member of the Cheektowaga Central Teachers Association. She is also a New York State United Teachers delegate and political action coordinator. Karissa O’Reilly is a high school library media specialist at Carmel High School and a member of the Carmel Teachers’ Association who advocates for media literacy education at the local and state levels.

Vouchers Promise Students With Disabilities a Path to Private School. Parents Say That’s Not the Reality.

Jennifer Berry Hawes and Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica

It’s after 6 p.m. by the time Angela Johnson hurries home from work. Her 12-year-old daughter, Amelia, is at their house outside of Pensacola, Florida, with a nurse trained to care for medically fragile children. Amelia, who was born with a rare genetic anomaly, has endured many surgeries and requires a brain shunt and a feeding tube. The nurse starts caring for Amelia as soon as a bus from the public school drops her off. Johnson loves much about the school. But as a physical therapist, she also recognizes its limitations. The district’s physical and occupational therapists have to travel from school to school. The classroom teacher can become overburdened. For all of Amelia’s life, Johnson has had to fight for the education and the school resources her daughter is entitled to receive under federal law. It has exhausted her.

Other News of Note

A school banned all clubs rather than allow a gay-straight alliance. Students sued & won.

John Russell, LGBTQ Nation

A school board in Virginia voted late last week to reverse a policy banning extracurricular clubs at the middle school level following a settlement in a lawsuit brought on behalf of students who wanted to start a Gay-Straight Alliance. On Friday, the King George County School Board unanimously approved changes to its student organizations policy, the Fredericksburg Free Press reports. The updated policy removes restrictions approved last November on non-curricular student organizations at all but the high school level. The board’s vote came a week after a federal judge halted proceedings in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia against the King George County School Board on behalf of two King George Middle School students and their parents, accusing the board of illegally barring the formation of a GSA in violation of the students’ rights under the First Amendment and the federal Equal Access Act.