Teaching, Leading, and Social Justice

California’s Democratic leaders escalate fights with conservative school boards

Tyler Kingkade, NBC News

Democratic state officials in California are taking a leading role in fighting the education culture wars at the local level, just as conservatives launch an effort to take the same issues directly to voters. Three of the top elected officials in the state — Gov. Gavin Newsom, Attorney General Rob Bonta and Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond — are pulling a variety of levers to fight back against conservative school board policies banning books and restricting support for LGBTQ students. They’ve threatened to fine a school district $1.5 million for refusing to purchase curriculum materials that mentioned gay rights leader Harvey Milk, written legislation to penalize schools that ban books and opened investigations into board decisions by conservatives. Over the past four months, they’ve entered the local frays to a far greater and more public extent than leaders in any other blue state.

Biden fights back against GOP onslaught on education — cautiously

Toluse Olorunnipa and Laura Meckler, Washington Post

As students settle into classrooms and the Republican presidential campaign kicks into high gear, President Biden has begun pushing back on hot-button issues related to education — but in an often-indirect way while trying to stay focused on issues his campaign believes matter more to voters. Keeping up with politics is easy with The 5-Minute Fix Newsletter, in your inbox weekdays. Biden regularly denounces Republican efforts to remove or restrict certain books in schools, but he has opted against fully engaging in the culture wars being waged by many Republicans. Instead, Biden and his administration are emphasizing areas they see as more resonant: increasing school funding, combating pandemic-era learning loss and addressing students’ mental health.

The Real Crisis Driving America’s Teacher Shortage

Emily Tate Sullivan, Mother Jones

Carrie Rodgers gestures toward the silver medallion sitting atop her fridge, then waves it off. It’s nothing really, she shrugs. Still, she reaches for the disc and sets it on the kitchen counter for a closer look. Two roofs and a pair of windows are etched into its center. Encircling the outline of those homes, the badge reads, “MAKE COLORADO AFFORDABLE 2022,” and below it, “IN GRATITUDE FOR YOUR LEADERSHIP.” Rodgers hands it over, almost scoffing at the inscription. Perhaps if things had gone differently for her, the token would register pride rather than bitterness. Instead, its presence in her home is like one of those trite souvenirs that says, “I went to the Bahamas and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

Language, Culture, and Power

The Native American Boarding School System [Graphic Explainer]

New York Times

For more than 150 years, spurred by federal assimilation policies beginning in the early 19th century, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were sent to boarding schools across the country. In many cases, they were forcibly removed from their homes. A new accounting shows that at least 523 institutions were part of the sprawling network of boarding schools for Native American children. At least 408 received federal funding. Renewed attention to the system by the U.S. government, researchers and Indigenous communities is revealing a deeper understanding of the difficult, sometimes deadly, experiences of children in the schools.

‘There is an attack on Black literacy’: Why education and activism go together

Tinashe Chingarande and Justin Hansford, The Real News Network

A 2022 report from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, dubbed the nation’s report card, reported that 33% of Maryland’s eighth graders could not read at a basic level. For Black students, this number was an alarming 46%. Furthermore, 82% of Black students could not read at a proficient level, according to the report. As reading levels fall, Black Baltimoreans are slipping further away from their ability to liberate themselves. Particularly during a time where socioeconomic barriers, further pronounced by the COVID-19 pandemic, and draconian legislation actively bar Black children from accessing wholesome education. “Reading is a fundamental human right,” said movement lawyer Justin Hansford. “Wherever people are oppressed or marginalized, they need to have the power of education to be able to organize politically, advance economically, build their own businesses, to be able to do anything—fight against stigma, build strong, healthy families.”

American Education Hurt Black Students. We Deserve Reparations

Bettina L. Love, Education Week

My generation, the Black children of the 1980s and 90s, grew up on the shoulders of the civil rights generation. They were our mothers, fathers, uncles, aunties, and grandparents. We shared the dream of integration that our parents had fought to make real for us, but education reform merged with crime reform to put targets on our backs. Instead of living as the children of the dream, we were labeled “crack babies,” “superpredators,” and “thugs” by politicians, law enforcement, first ladies, and the media. And it didn’t stop with labels. Those characterizations were used to justify punishing us inside the walls of our own public schools.

Whole Children and Strong Communities

Keeping it Real: How Do We Explain the Death of 12-Year-Old Yahshua Robinson in Lake Elsinore?

S.E. Williams, Black Voice News

The death of 12-year-old middle schooler, Yahshua Robinson, while running during gym class at Canyon Lake Middle School in Lake Elsinore last week was devastating to his family, the school and the community. According to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department report, deputies were called to the school at 11 a.m. Tuesday, August 29. A sheriff’s department’s press release shows Yahshua’s time of death as 12:25 pm. By around 10:45 am that day the temperature in Lake Elsinore was projected to be at or near 90 degrees, by 12:30 the temperature was expected to soar to 100 degrees and by 2:30 pm temperatures were expected to reach 102 degrees according to an hourly forecast by worldweather.info.com. Of course, we must withhold judgment regarding Yahshua’s death as the incident remains under investigation. However, early reports state young Yahshua was basically being punished because he had not dressed appropriately for his physical education class and was told by his teacher to run for not doing so. It certainly begs the question, Why would a teacher instruct a child to run when temperatures were dangerously high?

Illinois parent mentors kick off the school year, ready to get back into classrooms

Samantha Smylie, Chalkbeat Chicago

Last year, Pearlie Aaron volunteered as a parent mentor at the school her 10-year-old daughter attends — McKinley Elementary in Bellwood School District 88. Aaron got a chance to work with students on classroom assignments and receive professional development with other parent mentors for about two hours a day. Now, Aaron is a program coordinator at McKinley for the Parent Mentor Program, a state-funded initiative run by Palenque Liberating Spaces through Neighborhood Action and the Southwest Organizing Project.

How an elite music school is increasing access for students with disabilities [Video]

Jeffrey Brown, PBS Newshour

In a series of reports, Jeffrey Brown has looked at the intersection of arts and health. Recently, he traveled to the Berklee Institute for Accessible Arts Education in Boston to see a program bringing music into the lives of people with disabilities.

Access, Assessment, Advancement

Gov. Gavin Newsom signs executive order for a master plan for career education

Emma Gallegos, EdSource

In recent years, the state has poured billions of dollars into a dizzying array of programs under the banner of career education. The only problem, said Gov. Gavin Newsom, is that there is no cohesion between these programs. “Tens of billions of dollars invested in the last few years, 12 different agencies, but not a cohesive, connective tissue, not a compelling narrative that drives a vision and drives a focus forward,” Newsom said Thursday, during a news conference at River City High in West Sacramento.

Erasing the “Black Spot”: How a Virginia College Expanded by Uprooting a Black Neighborhood

Brandi Kellam and Louis Hansen, ProPublica

Katie Luck was sitting in her yard under a magnolia tree one afternoon in April when a school bus passed by. A white elementary school student shouted at her from a window, “You don’t belong here.” The 81-year-old grandmother and retired teacher, who is Black, was so distressed that she called James and Barbara Johnson, who live down the road from her on Shoe Lane in Newport News, Virginia. The Johnsons, perhaps better than anyone, knew just how wrong the elementary schooler was. The stacks of files and photo albums on their dining room table are a shrine to what the Shoe Lane area used to be — and what it might have become. Around 1960, in the last gasp of the Jim Crow era, the Shoe Lane community consisted of a church and about 20 Black families, including teachers, dentists, a high school principal and a NASA engineer. They owned ranch-style houses along Shoe Lane and three other streets, which formed a trapezoid enclosing woods and farmland. The Johnsons were planning to sell some of the farmland to Black people who aspired to the American dream of homeownership but were shut out of white neighborhoods by racist banking and zoning policies. The enclave’s population was about to grow.

How University of California Workers Won the Biggest Higher-Ed Strike in US History

Rafael Jaime and Yunyi Li, Jacobin

In the United States, the percentage of workers who belong to a union has declined to an all-time low since the height of labor militancy in the 1930s. Despite this historic weakness, or perhaps because of it, the labor movement is experiencing a historic moment of dynamism and reform. After decades of wage stagnation, neoliberalism can no longer credibly claim to be delivering the goods. Workers are fighting back. And where union leaderships have been reluctant to lead the charge, workers have taken matters into their own hands. Starting in the teachers’ unions in the early 2010s, with reform slates leading the first major strikes from Chicago and Los Angeles teachers in decades, and moving now to the Teamsters and United Auto Workers unions where, thanks to direct elections of top international union officers, reformers now occupy some of the top officer positions, the labor movement is embracing change.

Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Two Documentaries on School Integration Offer New Views of an Old Problem

Chris Vogner, New York Times

You most likely know that the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public schools was unconstitutional. You may also know that the decision ordered states to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”

Less talked about is the 1969 decision in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, which, after years of obstruction by many states through the 1950s and ’60s, ordered that racially segregated schools must immediately desegregate. In other words: You know what we said back in 1954? We actually meant it.

Segregation in our schools [Audio]

Erica Frankenberg, No Jargon

According to a recent federal report, while racial diversity is at an all time high in the K-12 public school system, racial inequality and segregation on school campuses persists, and continues to increase. Professor Erica Frankenberg broke down what racial segregation has looked like for marginalized students over the past few decades, what needs to be done to combat ongoing segregation, and how the recent Supreme Court decision on college admissions directly impacts this pressing issue.

Dependence on Tech Caused ‘Staggering’ Education Inequality, U.N. Agency Says

Natasha Singer, NY Times

In early 2020, as the coronavirus spread, schools around the world abruptly halted in-person education. To many governments and parents, moving classes online seemed the obvious stopgap solution. In the United States, school districts scrambled to secure digital devices for students. Almost overnight, videoconferencing software like Zoom became the main platform teachers used to deliver real-time instruction to students at home.

Democracy and the Public Interest

What Does It Actually Mean for Schools to Be Public?

Mark Lieberman, Education Week

Over years of covering school finance, I keep running up against one nagging question: Does the way we pay for public schools inherently contradict what we understand the goal of public education to be? For that matter, what do we want it to be? “Open and welcoming to all, committed to providing a quality education to everyone,” wrote one educator in a recent EdWeek Research Center survey. “Something that is supported by everyone and helps or benefits everyone,” wrote another. “The foundation of our modern society,” according to a third. With more frequency in recent years, however, state lawmakers have directed significant sums of money not exclusively to the greatest education needs of the public school system we’ve established—fixing crumbling school buildings, closing massive academic-achievement gaps along racial and socioeconomic lines, providing services to vulnerable students with disabilities and English-learners—but also to private schools or to parents for private decisionmaking on the educational options they choose for their children.

How anti-government ideologues targeted Wisconsin public schools

Ruth Coniff, Wisconsin Examiner

Now that the new school year has started, I’ve been volunteering on the Madison East High School cross-country team, trying to keep up with 80 or so kids as they run through Madison’s east side neighborhoods and around the fields behind the school. A former East runner myself, I’ve always been a Purgolder partisan. All three of my kids have been shaped by the down-to-earth culture of East High School, with its hallmark quirkiness, warmth and inclusive ethic that, to me, captures the social value of public school. To be sure, there are glaring inequities among public schools in Wisconsin. These are on display to East kids whenever they travel for meets away from their school, with its aging facilities and World War II-era cinder track, to the groomed fields and gleaming stadiums of some of their competitors. Still, the inequities among public schools in richer and poorer property tax districts are nothing compared to the existential threat to public education from a parallel system of publicly funded private schools that has been nurtured and promoted by a national network of right-wing think tanks, well funded lobbyists and anti-government ideologues.

Should we abolish school boards?

Jonathan E. Collins, Phi Delta Kappan

Is it time to abolish school boards? If you’ve seen the recent news about protests turning violent at school board meetings, you’d no doubt wonder if there’s any value to them anymore. In early June, a literal brawl broke out at a school board meeting in Glendale, California, over the school board’s plan to pass a resolution proclaiming June as LGBTQ+ month. In New Haven, Connecticut, a disagreement over a new superintendent appointment led to personal attacks that escalated into an affray. In Fort Myers, Florida, anti-masking protesters attacked medical professionals who spoke at a school board meeting on the importance of COVID-19 safety measures. In Cottage Grove, Oregon, two security guards accosted a woman protesting in support of transgender students at a school board candidate forum. We are seeing the wounds of the “culture war.”

Other News of Note

You Can’t Be a Socialist Alone

Astra Taylor and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, In These Times

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Astra Taylor — no relation, except their friendship — are two of the Gen X socialist intellectuals and movement leaders bridging the ​“Boomer” activists, radicalized in the 1960s, with the millennials and zoomers politically educated in the internet age. Keeanga, a professor at Northwestern University and New Yorker columnist, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in History and won a prestigious MacArthur ​“genius” award while also an unabashed socialist. (She was a committed member of the International Socialist Organization until just before its dissolution in 2019). Astra is a co-founder of the Debt Collective, a socialist debtors’ union whose decade-long organizing effort took student debt cancellation — one of the most audacious demands made upon capitalism — to the doorstep of the White House and the pen of President Joe Biden. The two comrades held a freewheeling hour-long conversation about the complexities of organizing through the death throes of neoliberalism, a flailing Democratic establishment and a rising authoritarian Right. They shared their journeys to socialism, took on tough questions from reform and revolution to identity politics and electoral politics, and spoke candidly about organizing fatigue and their personal visions of human liberation under socialism.

The Movement for Public Schools Isn’t Dead

Jacob Goodwin, The Progressive

Where does the spirit of Red for Ed, the teacher-led labor movement that began in 2018, stand today? Red for Ed began that February when educators and staff at schools across West Virginia went on strike to demand better pay. Their direct action inspired strikes in other states, especially those with majority Republican legislatures (hence the name “Red for Ed”). Educators in Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma went on illegal wildcat strikes to fight against the poverty wages and chronically underfunded schools that were resulting in both intolerable working conditions and learning conditions. Since then, the movement has seen ebbs and flows. But that’s the nature of organizing. There is no straight line of progress, but instead waves that slowly and determinedly wash against the shores—little by little changing the landscape.