Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Education unions celebrate Democracy Day by mobilising and organising to defend it

Education International

Democracy is a core value of education unions around the world. On the International Day of Democracy, 15 September, education unions from Education International came together online to reaffirm their commitment to defending and advancing democracy, sharing insights into the challenges they are facing and strategising the way forward. In a world where attacks on education, teachers, and their unions is a reality in many countries, David Edwards, Education International General Secretary, explained that “teachers and teachers’ unions are in the crosshairs of authoritarians worldwide because we teach children how to think critically, how to exercise their agency, how to work collectively, how to defend their rights. That is a threat to authoritarians who depend on a citizenry that is ignorant and compliant”.

What’s Really Behind the Right-Wing Attack on Public School Teachers

Randi Weingarten, The New Republic

In 1940, as Adolf Hitler gained more power and territory across a widening swath of Western Europe, the leaders of Norway’s democratically elected government fled Oslo and a Nazi puppet regime was installed. Among the first to protest the Nazi takeover of Norway were the country’s teachers. And since pins and badges with the likeness of the exiled king were now illegal, teachers and students used a clever, subtle signal to show their resistance. They wore paper clips.

Education Dept. partners with conservative groups for civics programming

Laura Meckler, Washington Post

The Education Department said Wednesday that it is partnering with conservative organizations to present educational programming about patriotism, liberty and what it described as American values, as part of the observation of America’s 250th anniversary next year. The initiative is led by the America First Policy Institute, a right-leaning group founded by senior veterans of President Donald Trump’s first-term administration. It convened 40 other conservative organizations on Wednesday, including Turning Point USA, Hillsdale College, the Heritage Foundation and Moms for Liberty, to begin planning. Christian evangelical groups, such as the Faith and Freedom Coalition, are also participating.

Chicago Public Schools forges ahead — cautiously — with its Black Student Success Plan amid federal inquiry

Mila Koumpilova, Chalkbeat

When Chicago school board member and longtime activist Jitu Brown heard last spring that the school district’s Black Student Success Plan was under a federal investigation after a complaint from a conservative group, he vowed that the district would stay the course. “I am not built to shrink,” said Brown, who will lead a school board committee tasked with overseeing the plan’s rollout. “It’s racism cloaked as civil rights,” he added about the investigation.

Language, Culture, and Power

The Cost Of Gun Violence On Black Life [Audio]

Tonya Mosely and Trymaine Lee, Fresh Air

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Trymaine Lee’s new memoir, A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America, is part history, and part personal. He traces the bloody history Black Americans have with firearms, recalls the gun violence in his own youth and follows his ancestors’ path back to Ghana. The book reads like a plea for people to see the humanity of those lost to gun violence — and for this country to care enough to act. Lee spoke with Tonya Mosley about the toll of writing about Black death.  

A law enforcement surge has taken a toll on children of immigrants in Washington schools

Moriah Balingit, AP News

The last time she saw her husband, the father of her three children, was when he left their Washington apartment a month ago to buy milk and diapers. Before long he called to say he had been pulled over — but not to worry, because it was just local police. The next time she heard from him, he was at a detention center in Virginia. Since that day, the 40-year-old mother of three has been too afraid to take her two sons to their nearby charter school. Like her husband, who has since been deported, she is an immigrant from Guatemala and has lived in the U.S. illegally for more than a decade. She spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear she would be targeted by immigration authorities. All three of the couple’s children were born in the nation’s capital, and the older two attend a local charter school. She planned to keep them home until a volunteer offered to drive them. Still, one of the boys was so upset over his father’s absence he missed three days of school one week.

‘They are hunting us:’ Child care workers in D.C. go underground amid ICE crackdown

Chabeli Carrazana, The 19th

From her home-based day care in Washington D.C., Alma peers out the door and down the sidewalks. If they’re clear and there are no ICE agents out, she’ll give her coworker, an undocumented Latina who lives nearby, a call letting her know it’s safe to head in for work. They have to be careful with the kids, too. Typically, she took the five children she cares for to the library on Wednesdays and out to parks throughout the week, but Alma — who is also undocumented — had to stop doing that in August, when President Donald Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the district. Now, two of the kids she cares for are being pulled out of the day care. The parents said it was because they weren’t going outside.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

This State Expelled Social Media From School. Here’s Why.

NEPC Newsletter

Homework assistance. Scheduling sports practices. Accessing assignments. These are common reasons why K-12 students use social media for school. Though typically initiated for benevolent reasons, such communications raise serious legal and privacy concerns: Student pictures on social media can end up in the hands of pedophiles; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other government agencies use social media for the purposes of surveillance; Social media platforms can impact teens’ brains, increasing the risk of depression, anxiety, and other problems; Product marketing to teens takes place on these same platforms, as those students merely attempt to comply in order to participate in school-related activities; These social media platforms are rife with data-collection and other privacy abuses.

Grandparents for Vaccines Group Gains Traction

Donna A. Gaffney and Teri Mills, The Progressive

We are grandparents. We are passionate, committed, and yes, radical. Make no mistake about what we stand for. In the 1960s and 1970s, we marched for civil rights, fought and protested wars, and demanded justice. Today, we march again. This time it’s personal: We are defending our grandchildren’s right to health, their right to vaccines. The erosion of public trust in vaccines did not happen overnight. But now we have seen the worst measles epidemic in more than three decades, with nearly 1,500 reported cases and at least three deaths so far this year. What Ohio pediatrician Arthur Lavin has called “the unfortunate rise of misinformation, disinformation, and misguided parental anxiety” about vaccines puts all Americans at risk. Including our grandkids.

How a Group of Students in the Pacific Islands Reshaped Global Climate Law

Brooke Jarvis, New York Times

The group of students who logged in to Justin Rose’s class on international environmental law in February 2019 were spread out across thousands of miles of ocean. Many were based at the Port Vila campus on Éfaté, a small but mountainous island of vivid tropical green in the middle of Vanuatu’s archipelago of volcanoes, where the University of the South Pacific’s school of law is based. But U.S.P. also had campuses in Fiji, Samoa, Tuvalu, the Cook Islands, Kiribati and other island nations — places that were experiencing some of the most pronounced impacts of the planet’s fast-changing climate.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Head Start ‘changed our lives’: A newly minted Ph.D. reflects on why this program must be saved 

Travis Reginal, Hechinger Report

The first words I uttered after successfully defending my dissertation were, “Wow, what a ride. From Head Start to Ph.D.!” Saying them reminded me where it all began: sitting cross-legged with a picture book at the Westside Head Start Center, just a few blocks from my childhood home in Jackson, Mississippi. I don’t remember every detail from those early years, but I remember the feeling: I was happy at Head Start. I remember the books, the music, the joy. That five-minute bus ride from our house to the Westside Center turned out to be the shortest distance between potential and achievement. And my story is not unique.

Dual Language Learners Make Up Half of Preschoolers: What That Means for California

Erik Saucedo, California Budget and Policy Center

Multilingual children are one of California’s greatest assets, their skills enrich communities and make the state’s economy more competitive. Supporting these children effectively is an investment in California’s future. Among this group are dual language learners (DLLs), a term used in early childhood education to refer to young children learning two or more languages. DLLs make up roughly half of all California children attending preschool. Research shows that DLL children benefit when supported by educators trained in language development and culturally responsive practices across early learning settings.

University of California students, professors and staff sue the Trump administration

Olga Rodriguez, AP News

The Trump administration is using civil rights laws to wage a campaign against the University of California in an attempt to curtail academic freedom and undermine free speech, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by faculty, staff, student organizations and every labor union representing UC workers. The lawsuit comes weeks after the Trump administration fined the University of California, Los Angeles $1.2 billion and froze research funding after accusing the school of allowing antisemitism on campus and other civil rights violations. It was the first public university to be targeted with a widespread funding freeze. The administration has frozen or paused federal funding over similar allegations against elite private colleges, including Harvard, Brown and Columbia.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Residential and school segregation are closely linked [Audio]

Leoneda Inge talks and Karen Benjamin, Due South

It began with the founding of the Federal Housing Administration, ongoing efforts by housing developers and well-meaning parents hoping to provide the best possible education for their small children. Leoneda Inge talks with Karen Benjamin, author of “Good Parents, Betters Homes & Great Schools: Selling Segregation Before the New Deal.” 

How Student Loans Became America’s Financial Catastrophe

Alan Michael Collinge, Counterpunch

With the student debt crisis spiraling out of control, some media outlets have called it a “national emergency.” Outpacing most other borrowings by consumers, Americans who owed federal student loans more than doubled between 2000 and 2020, “from 21 million to 45 million, and the total amount they owed more than quadrupled from $387 billion to $1.8 trillion,” according to a 2024 article in Brookings. A notable demographic shift has also emerged, with older borrowers now outnumbering younger ones, holding more debt despite having taken out smaller loans many years earlier.

Taliban Deny Afghan Girls’ Their Education and Future

Sahar Fetrat, Human Rights Watch

September 17 marks four years since the Taliban banned secondary education for girls in Afghanistan. It is a devastating anniversary that should make everyone angry – furious even. The ban is cruel, harmful, and unlawful. It tells girls their dreams end when the classroom door slams shut when they reach age 12, simply because of their gender. It silences Afghan girl’s voices, steals their hopes, and suffocates their imagination and potential. Without education, girls are pushed into early marriage, stripped of career opportunities, and are no longer able to shape their future. For Afghans, this ban is a direct attack on human rights and a devastating blow to the country’s future. The Taliban are not only crushing the dreams of millions of girls but locking Afghan society into a deepening cycle of inequality, poverty, and entrenched oppression. They are robbing Afghans of the opportunity to build a healthier and fairer society. 

Democracy and the Public Interest

Justice Sotomayor questions if Americans know the difference between presidents and kings

Lawrence Hurley, NBC News

Liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday warned that the poor quality of civics education means Americans may not know the difference between a president and a king.

Sotomayor bemoaned the lack of education about such issues as the rule of law, saying not enough people have a basic understanding of the power of the president and the limits imposed upon that authority by the Constitution. “Do we understand what the difference is between a king and a president?” she said at a civics conference held at New York Law School in Manhattan. “And I think if people understood these things from the beginning, they would be more informed as to what would be important in a democracy.”

Teaching About Palestine in U.S. Schools From the 1980s to Present Day: A Systematic Review of Research

Antero Garcia, Rubén A. González, Kristen Jackson, Nicole Mirra, Educational Researcher

This article shares findings from a systematic review of education research exploring the representation of Palestine in U.S. K–12 schooling. This study identified 13 peer-reviewed journal articles, from 1984 to 2024, and analyzed the studies for themes within and across the corpus of data. These findings demonstrate that (a) the reviewed scholarship focuses on small sample sizes almost entirely devoid of the experiences of Palestinian people, (b) the sociopolitical history of Palestine is often omitted and/or contextualized, and (c) Palestine is often framed as an abstract and, at times, contentious location. This article draws attention to the failure to meaningfully engage in exploration of Palestine within education research, alluding to broader gaps in the field of education research.

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, new scrutiny on what teachers can — and should — say

Erica Meltzer, Chalkbeat

America’s teachers have been put on notice. If they posted “despicable comments” about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, they could lose their state certification, Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas warned in a letter. Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters said the same. Texas says it is investigating some 180 complaints about teachers’ social media posts about Kirk’s death.

Other News of Note

From Colombo to Kathmandu, the furious youth movements toppling entrenched elites

Hannah Ellis-Petersen and Gaurav Pokharel, The Guardian

Across Kathmandu, the acrid stench of smoke still lingers. Singha Durbar, the opulent palace that housed Nepal’s parliament, stands charred and empty, its grand white columns turned a sooty black. The home of former prime minister KP Sharma Oli – who just last week seemed to have an unshakable grip on power – is among those reduced to ruins, while Oli remains in hiding, his location still unknown. They stand as symbolic monuments to the week that Nepal’s political system was brought crashing down at the hands of a leaderless, organic movement led by young people who called themselves the Gen Zs, referring to those aged between 13 and 28.