Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

A Vision for the Future of Learning

Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Educational Researcher

In this article, based on my Presidential Address for the 2022 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Annual Meeting, I offer some thoughts on the education and learning systems we need for the future. Specifically, I take up two core questions: (1) How do we organize education and learning systems for a multicultural democracy? (2) How do we build systems that transcend and transform how we have been doing “education” and that are designed to support rich and engaging learning and critical thinking skills and to fully educate young people in ways that honor their whole humanity, their developmental needs, and their families and communities? As I take up these questions, I draw on multiple pieces of research literature and craft a vision for the future of learning rooted in the hope of what is possible.

Teacher Strikes Lead to Higher Pay, Lower Class Sizes, More State Funds

Mary Ellen Flannery, NEA Today

A first-of-its-kind study has found that teachers’ strikes lead to increased teachers’ pay. And, not only that, strikes also cause additional per-pupil spending, lower class sizes, and more investment in non-teaching employees, like nurses and social worker. Or, as Vox puts it, “U.S. teacher strikes were good, actually.” Figuring this out was an enormous task for researchers, who took nearly four years to comb through about 90,000 news articles—”which does sound insane when you say it,” acknowledges lead author Melissa Arnold Lyon—and assemble a novel database of 772 teacher strikes in 27 states between 2007-2008 and 2022-2023. Last month, the research team published their analysis of this data in a paper produced by the National Bureau of Economic Research, entitled, “The Causes and Consequences of U.S. Teacher Strikes.” 

Why Some Christians Don’t Want to Bring the Bible Into Public Schools

Troy Closson, New York Times

In Caddo, Okla., a two-block stretch of the small town contains churches of at least four denominations, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist and nondenominational. More than four in five voters in the neighboring counties went Republican in the last national election. This rural region near the border with Texas might seem an ideal testing ground for an emerging but highly contested campaign by conservative officials to expand the role of religion in children’s education and mandate that history, literature and even math classes teach the Bible to students in grades five to 12. Yet even here, the plans are not being embraced. Rather, they are finding unexpected opposition.

Language, Culture, and Power

“Flights for Freedom With Her Words”: Black, Latinx, and Polynesian Girls Co-Conspiring Against Misogynoir Through Love

Casey Philip Wong, Educational Researcher

I examine how youth racialized and gendered as Black girls co-conspired to challenge misogynoir with their peers racialized and gendered as Latina/x and Polynesian girls. I investigate how they did so within an after-school space at a public charter high school that came to be known as the “Critical Feminisms Club.” Thinking about the space alongside the girls in the club, I reveal how they politically and pedagogically engaged love to (a) (re)author the stories of Black girls and (b) challenge the material and ideological misogynoir that circumscribed Black girls’ lives, possibilities, and futurities within their lives and schooling. They (re)narrated how they should be in relation with and responsible to each other as collective, co-relational, and interdependent beings, recognizing how Black womanness/girlness was a genre of being human that was specifically targeted for enclosure, exploitation, and elimination. Their love-politics engaged pedagogy to remake the world such that the safety and protection of Black girls and gender-nonconforming youth was a necessity and priority, which they saw in turn as bound to the safety and protection of the non-Black identified Latina/x and Polynesian girls who accepted this interdependence and mutual responsibility.

Married to a ‘Dreamer’; Dreading Trump’s Nightmare

Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone

Delia Ramirez is a freshman member of Congress who represents a swath of central and west Chicago. Ramirez is also the wife of an undocumented immigrant. Her husband came to this country as a teenager, and is living under the protections of DACA — or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — an Obama-era policy that has provided work eligibility to some 600,000 who came to the United States as children. Former President Donald Trump has made the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants the centerpiece of his dark domestic agenda. And even Dreamers — as immigrants without papers raised in America, including DACA recipients, are known — are not insulated from Trump’s cruel designs.

New program will help inmates earn high school diplomas with tablets

Kte Payne, AP News

A top supplier of digital devices in U.S. prisons is launching a new program to help incarcerated individuals earn a high school diploma by using the company’s tablets. Advocates say the expansion in virtual education is promising, especially since many inmates lack basic literacy skills. But some advocates have said there are limits to what that prison technology can accomplish. The company ViaPath, which sells secure devices and telecommunications services for use in the criminal justice system, has announced that inmates across the country will soon be able to enroll in virtual classes through a partnership with Promising People, an education technology company, and American High School, a private online school based in South Florida that will grant the diplomas.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

If we don’t do more to help and educate homeless students, we will perpetuate an ongoing crisis 

Bryan Samuels, Hechinger Report

Young people experiencing family instability and trauma are at increased risk for precarious living situations and interrupted educational experiences. And students who leave school before graduation are considerably more likely to experience homelessness and less likely to enroll in college. By failing to systematically and preemptively address youth homelessness through our schools, we are increasing the chances of hundreds of thousands of young people becoming and remaining homeless. We can change this. Schools are key to intervention. Schools can and should serve as indispensable resources for students who are experiencing unstable housing or outright homelessness. Lamentably, too often, there aren’t enough staff members to carry out existing support programs, much less manage additional programs designed for youth who are at risk for or are already experiencing homelessness.

Class and race can create divides between donors and a cause they support − putting stress on those nonprofits

Abbie Cohen, The Conversation

Relying on wealthy, largely white donors for funding can lead nonprofits that run after-school programs for low-income children of color to feel pressured to skew their priorities. In part because of class and racial differences, these nonprofits can have trouble conveying how the interests of the programs’ participants are being met while also satisfying donors’ demands.

This was evident in an in-depth case study I wrote about in Children & Schools, an academic journal. The after-school program I studied supports low-income girls in a Northeastern city. The girls, who are in grades 3-5, receive free weekly mentoring sessions. The mentors are college students who volunteer to help build the girls’ self-confidence and ambition by reading and discussing stories with them about female athletes, film directors, politicians and human rights activists, among other role models. The organization is led by a Black woman who is from the local community, and the nonprofit uses its own original curriculum.

A construction project at a Los Angeles high school uncovered millions of fossils [Audio]

Mariana Dale, NPR

A construction project at a Los Angeles high school uncovered millions of marine fossils starting in 2022. The group overseeing fossil recovery made new discoveries as recently as this summer and then presented the findings to students at the school.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

For preschool educator, kids’ paintings give them a deep brush with themselves

Karen D’Souza, Ed Source

Daniel Mendoza makes his own paintbrushes. It may have started out as a way to save money, but it also reflects his aesthetic as a veteran preschool teacher who uses painting to engage pint-sized students. “The brushes happened out of a necessity of wanting to make things big,” said the child development specialist who is also a painter. “If you’re familiar with preschool teachers, we make super low salaries starting out. I had to stay on a budget.” Instead of downsizing his plans to teach small children how to create epic murals or Jackson Pollock-style canvases, Mendoza got creative. The brushes became a symbol of his DIY vibe. “I came up with this mop-style brush,” said the 44-year-old, with customary modesty. “It really allowed me to feel even more connected to this work and a part of who I am and what I’m trying to convey, down to the materials themselves.”

More Florida faculty still looking to leave the state, survey shows

Ian Hodgson and Divya Kumar, Tampa Bay Times

Florida professors are still eyeing jobs in other states, and those who remain say it’s getting harder to fill vacant positions at their universities, according to a recent survey of faculty in Southern states. The survey, administered by the state chapters of the American Association of University Professors and the United Faculty of Florida union, indicates that Florida’s political climate is a factor in the hiring and retention of university faculty. More than 3,000 faculty members across 12 states in the South — including 349 from Florida — responded to the survey, which was distributed via email and social media. More than 25,000 faculty are employed across Florida’s 12 public universities.

Homeless students can sleep safely in their cars at this California college. Other campuses say no

Briana Mendez-Padilla, Cal Matters

Pink hues adorn the horizon as the sun rises on a nondescript parking lot at Long Beach City College. The lot is quiet but not empty, with the same gray asphalt and slightly faded white lines as any other one on campus. But from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., it is much more than a place to park.  The lot is a designated area for Long Beach City College’s Safe Parking Program, an initiative from the college’s Basic Needs Center that offers safe overnight parking for students and connects them to resources like showers and Wi-Fi.  The program was created to address a particular student demographic: homeless students living in their cars. A report from the Community College League of California found that 2 out of 3 of the state’s community college students struggle to meet their basic needs and almost 3 out of 5 are housing insecure.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Why aren’t there talks with the Taliban about getting women and girls back into education?

Nature

Three years after the Taliban took over Afghanistan, systemic discrimination against girls and women, including violence, is rampant. Girls remain locked out of education once they reach the age of 12 and women are banned from most jobs, including nearly all forms of research and teaching. The list of prohibitions on women has been extended to include speaking or singing in public. Last week, some 130 women attended a conference in Tirana, Albania — the largest public gathering of Afghan women who met to discuss the crisis since the takeover. “In our country, we now live like prisoners,” one delegate told The Guardian. This shocking situation is made worse by the fact that the international community has no official mechanism or named initiative for talking with the Taliban about getting girls and women back to their lecture halls, libraries and laboratories.

Alumni of once-segregated Texas school mark its national park status

Marc Ramirez, USA TODAY

That fall morning in 1954 is a memory Jessi Silva cannot let go. At 6, she had just started first grade. The Mexican American students of Blackwell School were marched to the flagpole, kicking up clouds of dirt along the school’s barren grounds in Marfa, Texas. Moments earlier, teachers had handed out slips of paper and told them to copy the letters on the blackboard: S-P-A-N-I-S-H. Now all those slips were stuffed into a cigar box, then placed in a miniature grave in a make-believe burial. “Mr. Spanish,” they were told, was being laid to rest. “They didn’t explain why,” recalled Silva, now 76. “The only thing I remember is they said, ‘From now on you will not be allowed to speak Spanish in school.’”

The Enduring Influence of Marx’s Masterpiece

Wendy Brown, The Nation

Only a few centuries old, capitalism’s unprecedented mode of producing for human needs and generating wealth shapes present and future conditions of earthly existence more pervasively and profoundly than anything else humans have made. It affects the entirety of the planet’s surface and crafts both possibilities and challenges for all life upon it. It arrays 8 billion homo sapiens across a wildly uneven spectrum of opulence, comfort, poverty, and desperation. It contours all social relations and subjectivities, from practices of work and leisure to arrangements of kinship, intimacy, and loneliness. In addition to class, it constructs and mobilizes race and gender in continuously changing yet persistently exploitable ways. It powers technological revolutions and scatters the discarded remains of past ones everywhere on earth and in orbits circling it. It birthed the Anthropocene—the epoch in which human and “natural” histories are now permanently and dynamically entwined—and within it, the Great Acceleration: the short half-century in which fossil fuel use intensified so radically as to inaugurate what scientists term the Sixth Mass Extinction. And it incited the development of finance, artificial intelligence, and other practices animated by digital technologies that bode ever more intense and paradoxical ways to both serve and dominate the species that invented them.

Democracy and the Public Interest

High School Voter Registration Is Crucial to Increasing Voter Turnout and Forming Lifelong Habits

The New Voters Collaborative, Teen Vogue

The class of 2024 was not yet in high school when the COVID-19 pandemic pushed them into isolation and online schooling. Since then, these seniors, along with the rest of Gen-Z, have witnessed other major historical events, from Supreme Court decisions impacting reproductive rights and affirmative action to the crisis in the Middle East. To their credit, Gen Z has stepped up, leading advocacy efforts, educating their peers, and voting. Gen Z was largely responsible for the increase in youth voter turnout in the 2018 and 2022 election cycles. But now, with the 2024 elections just months away, concern has arisen over whether Gen Z’s engagement will continue at recent levels. According to the latest Harvard Youth Poll, most young Americans do not believe that their high school education taught and prepared them to understand practical aspects of civic engagement. Ava Rollino, a 17-year-old from New Jersey, shared with us, “The government [is] not doing enough to protect and promote the most important part of democracy: the right to vote. I think if our elected officials, families, and communities encouraged young voters we would see a shift in who is representing us.”

As a new citizen, I’m voting in California to honor the community that shaped me 

Itzel Maganda Chavez, Santa Ynez Valley News

When I reflect on my personal life and career, it’s evident that the two have intermingled since I entered the workforce with my first Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals work permit. I believed that my contribution to this country was through sharing my experience as a border Dreamer. I wanted to help “DACAmented” peers both feel empowered to pursue their own dreams and to persuade voters from San Diego communities similar to the ones I grew up in to use their right to vote for a better San Diego. Just in time, the stars aligned for me to join them as a first-time voter in what will be a historic election this fall. Twelve years after DACA was introduced, three years since becoming a lawful permanent resident and 25 years of calling San Diego home, I became an official U.S. citizen last month.

In an Unprecedented Move, Ohio Is Funding the Construction of Private Religious Schools

Eli Hager, ProPublica

 

The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private, religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand their campuses, which is nearly unprecedented in modern U.S. history. While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to spend on private school tuition for their kids, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state is now providing millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more. The goal in providing the grants, according to the measure’s chief architect, Matt Huffman, is to increase the capacity of private schools in part so that they can sooner absorb more voucher students.

Other News of Note

“By the Fire We Carry”: Cherokee Author Rebecca Nagle on the Ongoing Fight for Tribal Sovereignty [Video]

Amy Goodman and Nermeen Shaikh, Democracy Now!

We’re joined by award-winning Cherokee writer and journalist Rebecca Nagle, whose new book, By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land, has just been released. By taking a look at the more than a century-long fight for tribal sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma, Nagle investigates the development and future of tribal law since the beginning of  colonial relations between Indigenous peoples and European settlers, from the Trail of Tears to the “war on terror.” “A lot of times we treat Native American history like this distant chapter and the legal terrain it created as some sort of siloed backwater of American law, but actually it’s foundational,” she says.