Just News from Center X – September 25, 2026

9.25.26

Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

Judge strikes down Trump policy that cut millions in teacher-training money

AP News

A federal judge on Thursday struck down a 2025 order from the Trump administration that cut hundreds of millions of dollars in teacher-training money. U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Massachusetts wrote in her order that the Education Department’s directive violated federal law and was arbitrary and capricious. In February 2025, the Education Department cut about $600 million in grants for teacher training, characterizing them as supporting “ divisive ideologies ” such as diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. The grants were intended to address teacher shortages. The Education Department’s order was hasty, Kelley wrote. The administration did not follow requirements in the law for giving notice or accepting comments about a proposal, she said. She said they also didn’t take into account just how much the states and a wide array of students, teachers and principals rely on these grants.

Feds target school internet subsidies in ed-tech backlash even as Trump touts AI

Erica Meltzer, Chalkbeat

Like many parents, Arielle Roth has concerns about her children’s screen time at school. But unlike her peers, she’s in a position to influence the issue at nearly every school in America. Roth heads an obscure federal agency within the Commerce Department that serves as the president’s top policy adviser on telecommunications issues. In that role, she’s called for more scrutiny of federal policies that support technology in the classroom, convened listening sessions with screen-skeptic parents, and coordinated between federal agencies. She calls the struggle “deeply personal.” “It’s hard enough to manage at home,” Roth, a mom of six, said at a luncheon last year with a free-market think tank. “But it’s even harder when screens have become inescapable at school.” Now the Federal Communications Commission — citing Roth’s work and riding a broader backlash to education technology — is conducting a wide-ranging review of federal school internet subsidies that could lead to their elimination, or new requirements for schools to restrict screen time or allow parents to opt out in order to receive the money.

Schools hedge their bets on AI as concerns grow among parents

Lexi Lonas Cochran, The Hill

Schools are struggling to keep up with the evolving world of AI as concerns among parents and advocates mount regarding the use of the technology in classrooms. The two largest school districts in the country have put a one-year moratorium on generative AI usage in the classroom amid worries about privacy and its effect on learning. While there have been mixed reactions to the pause, there is consensus that schools need to find solutions quickly as students use AI at home and could eventually run into it in the workplace.

Language, Culture, and Power

Love, Study, Struggle [Audio]

Robin D.G. Kelley and George Lipsitz The Confluence: Ethnic Studies and the Public Good

In our inaugural episode, we speak with two giants of Ethnic Studies and social movement scholarship: Robin D.G. Kelley (University of California, Los Angeles) and George Lipsitz (University of California, Santa Barbara). Together, they’ve shaped how we understand the intersections of race, culture, resistance, and solidarity for nearly four decades. In this wide-ranging conversation, we explore the origins and evolution of Ethnic Studies, its role in preparing citizens for our diverse democracy, and how scholarly work connects to organizing and social movements.

Newsom again vetoes bill to allow undocumented college students to work on campus

Mikhail Zinshteyn, CalMatters

California college students without legal immigration status still cannot work at public colleges and universities after Gov. Gavin Newsom again vetoed a bill Sunday that would have given them that right. Assembly Bill 713 would have adopted an untested legal theory that argues that a 1986 federal law barring employers from hiring workers in the country without authorization doesn’t apply to state governments. The logic? That 40-year-old law doesn’t mention state governments as a type of employer that cannot hire workers without proper status. But for the second time in three years, Newsom decided that adopting that theory for California would expose the state’s higher-education system to the wrath of the federal government.

What happened when a South African school switched from English to bilingual science tests

Robyn Tyler, Daily Maverick

South African no-fee primary schools use African languages as well as English for teaching and testing. Before 2025, children started learning in their home language in the first three years and then switched to English in Grade 4 (aged 10 and 11). Now, bilingual education is extending gradually into the upper primary grades. South Africa’s public basic education system serves roughly 12.7 million learners. 80% of these learn through a language that is not their home language. I am an education researcher with a special interest in language across the curriculum in multilingual contexts. In a recent case study of a bilingual science learning intervention in a Cape Town school, I wanted to know how effective it was to teach and test in more than one language, and what parents thought of the approach.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Gaza students return to schools for first time in three years: ‘Despite all of this we will learn’

Nidal al-Mughrabi & Haseeb Alwazeer, Reuters

Hundreds of thousands of Gaza children returned to in-person instruction on Saturday for the first time in nearly three years, gathering inside damaged buildings, makeshift structures, and tents despite severe shortages that have made basic pens, notebooks, and uniforms unaffordable. The United Nations Children’s Fund reported that 98 percent of Gaza’s schools were destroyed or damaged during the war, leaving an estimated 660,000 students without regular, face-to-face education, according to local education officials. The tentative restart follows a conflict that killed roughly 22,000 pupils and more than 770 educational staff members, including 532 teachers, said Ibrahim Ramadan, director of education for East Khan Younis.

Sidewalks for Students: Google Street View Measures of Walkability Around Schools and Chronic Absenteeism Rates

Julia Burdick-Wil,, Michael D.M. Bader, and Quynh C. Nguyen, Educational Researcher

This study brings together ideas from education, public health, and urban planning to assess whether the walkability of the built environment around schools is related to their chronic absenteeism rates. We use national data from the 2018–2019 NCES Common Core of Data and the Office of Civil Rights and computer vision-derived estimates of the physical environment captured in Google Street View Images. We compare schools in the same district to one another and find that schools with a higher proportion of images with sidewalks and streetlights within 1 mile of their location tend to have lower chronic absenteeism rates. These findings support the idea that physical infrastructure can be an important structural barrier to attendance.

Toward Other Grammars: Anagrammatical Designs Beyond the American School

Ethan Chang and Ronald David Glass, AERA Open

How might education scholars (re)design places of learning to contribute to the wellbeing of young people and the natural world on which we depend? Drawing on Black, Native, and critical studies in education, we offer two conceptual interventions to studies on school reform and organizational (re)design. First, we connect Spillers’s notion of the “American grammar” to the “grammar of schooling” through a construct we call the “American grammar of schooling.” This combined concept distills how antiblack and colonial hierarchies of human being underpin what we commonly take for granted as school. Second, we connect Sharpe’s notion of “anagrammatical Blackness” to introduce “anagrammatical designs,” or learning spaces that unsettle the American grammar of schooling and (re)generate relations that sustain life, land, and kinship. We challenge how such designs are often dismissed as “gibberish” or “nonsense” and highlight examples of anagrammatical designs already-in-motion. We conclude by exploring other grammars that offer transformative possibilities for education.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Colleges Adopted ‘Systemic Suppression’ of Protesters, New Investigation Shows

Jessica Blake, Inside HigherEd

Government officials and university administrators took “heavy-handed” and “excessive” actions in response to campus protests after Oct. 7, 2023, actions that “disproportionately targeted” pro-Palestinian students and faculty members, creating a chilling effect that will stifle political expression for years to come, a new report says. Produced by the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International USA, the 287-page report documents what it calls the “systemic suppression” of anti-genocide speech at colleges and universities across the country. The “McCarthyite censorship” against individuals who exercised their right to free speech and criticized the Israeli government for the nation’s protracted war in Gaza continues to this day, the authors argue. “Universities’ responses to campus-related Palestine advocacy and pro-Palestinian demonstrations have been more punitive in comparison with their historical responses to other comparable demonstrations over decades,” the report says. As a result, “These universities directly or indirectly have made it easier for the Trump administration to crack down on student activism, causing long-term damage to higher education.”

How American Adults View Issues of Race in U.S. Education

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education

According to YouGov, some 58 percent of all adults in the U.S. believe racial inequality in U.S. education is at least a somewhat serious problem, with 29 percent believing it is a very serious problem. This pattern holds true by both gender and geographic region, but there are differences in opinion based on race, political affiliation, and age. Democrats and younger adults are more likely than Republicans and older adults to say racial inequality in U.S. education is an issue. By race, more than three-quarters of Black Americans believe racial inequality in education is a problem, with 52 percent describing it as a very serious problem. Only 3 percent of Black adults believe it is not a problem at all. While the majority of White adults believe racial inequality in education is a problem, they are the least likely group to describe it as a serious problem (23 percent) and the most likely group to say it is not a problem at all (17 percent).

Thriving After High School: A Foundation to Build On

Bruno V. Manno, Washington Monthly

The country finds itself debating what happens to young people after 12th grade. Is college worth it? Should high schoolers skip it for an apprenticeship? Is college still the ticket to the middle class or a debt trap dressed up as opportunity? A new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences characterizes our times as “a moment of great national debate about the journeys people make after they receive their high school diploma.” What makes this contribution to that debate worth taking seriously isn’t that it settles the argument, but who is making it, and how. Thriving After High School: Community, School, Service, and Work is the product of the Academy’s Commission on Opportunities After High School. Thirty leaders from K-12 and higher education, business, service, and philanthropy worked together for two years. 

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?

Nikole Hannah-Jones, New York Times

I could feel her looking at me. Her body slung in adolescent impertinence against the front passenger seat door, shoulders turned so she could face me fully. Usually when I picked up my daughter, Najya, from middle school, she’d tumble into the car and bombard me with the day’s escapades, chattering nonstop about her friend group or complaints about an annoying teacher or her wonder at the test she’d aced despite thinking she’d failed it. But not this day. “Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” she asked. My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts.

Understanding the structural and psychological bases of inequality

Nature Human Behaviour 

Inequalities are pervasive, but they do not all arise in the same way. Some emerge over the course of a lifetime, as people with similar starting points follow different trajectories. A young couple may begin their careers on equal footing but their paths may diverge once social expectations and family responsibilities shape their choices: one may go part-time while another may be promoted to greater responsibility. The ‘greedy jobs’ that demand long hours often reward those who are able to prioritize work over caregiving, while penalizing those who assume greater responsibilities at home. Over time, small differences accumulate into substantial gaps.

Other inequalities exist before individuals have any opportunity to make choices at all. No one is able to choose the family, birth country or health conditions into which they are born. But these initial circumstances profoundly influence later opportunities. 

Schooled for ruling

Dean Ashenden, Inside Story

The sociology of education got off to a flying start in the 1950s and 1960s: against the prevailing assumption that kids got on well or badly at school according to their “ability,” sociology tracked and mapped and demonstrated beyond question that where you got to depended also on where you started. Sociology boosted the demand heard across the Western world for more, and more “equal,” schooling. A major national review of schooling in Australia in the early 1970s was typical in devoting an entire chapter to “equality of opportunity” and in drawing on sociology from Australia, England and Sweden to do it. By the late 1970s sociology was falling from grace. Policy-makers had found that distributing success more evenly across social groups was harder than it looked; they relegated the struggle for “equality” to ritual incantations and palliatives for the most “disadvantaged.”

Democracy and the Public Interest

This Office Was the Best Defense Against Discrimination in Schools. Trump Destroyed It.

Chris Lewis, The American Prospect

Decades after Jim Crow battles over legal school desegregation, students continue to encounter discrimination that interferes with their ability to learn. The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration has frozen active student civil rights investigations. The Post highlighted one instance in Michigan where a Black fifth grader endured racial slurs like “monkey,” the N-word, and hearing her skin was “burnt like a piece of chicken.” As the Biden administration was winding down, the student’s parents filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the division of the Department of Education tasked with protecting the civil rights of students. But after the Trump administration took charge, the investigation was frozen, along with over 30 others, according to the Post.

No more book bans: how Florida students are pushing rightwingers out of school boards

Anna North, The Guardian

Jimmy Glover’s youngest children were in high school when he noticed their Florida school district taking an unsettling turn. Beloved books were being pulled from shelves. Teachers were scared of being targeted. “There was this culture of fear that was permeating throughout the district,” Glover said of Sarasota county. By channeling anger against mask mandates in schools, the rightwing group Moms for Liberty, founded in Florida, built an outsized influence on school boards across the country in 2022. Soon, members began pressuring schools to remake their curricula along conservative ideological lines, erasing mentions of LGBTQ+ Americans, slavery, racism and more.

Meet the teachers turning chemistry, biology and civic education into life skills health lessons

UNESCO

After more than two decades in the classroom, Diana Lomunthunzi Soko, a Civic Education teacher at Linda Secondary School in Livingstone, Zambia believed she understood what it meant to be a good teacher. But training through UNESCO’s Our Rights, Our Lives, Our Future Programme reshaped her understanding of education. Today, teaching is no longer only about preparing learners for examinations. It is about preparing them for life. Early and unintended pregnancies, child marriages, substance abuse and gender-based violence are some of the challenges young people continue to face after they leave the classroom – and also sometimes even within schools. In response, across East and Southern Africa, teachers are creatively integrating Life Skills and Health Education into subjects they already teach, transforming classrooms into spaces where learners can ask difficult questions, challenge harmful norms and build the confidence to make informed decisions.

Other News of Note

“Reading the World”: New Film Spotlights Paulo Freire’s Radical Literacy Experiment in 1960s Brazil [Video]

Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

The new documentary “Reading the World” profiles Paulo Freire, the acclaimed Brazilian educator whose revolutionary approach to teaching connected literacy to critical thinking and democratic participation. It draws on rare archival footage of 1960s Brazil and weaves together the memories of farmers, students and educators who took part in Freire’s culture circles, his method of teaching adults to read in as little as 40 hours by drawing on their own lives, communities and experiences. At the time, Brazil’s illiterate population was barred from voting, so education also opened the door to political participation. The experiment was abruptly halted in 1964 when Brazil’s military overthrew President João Goulart in a U.S.-backed coup that led to Freire’s imprisonment and exile.