Pressuring the Gap
Ohio attempts to close achievement gap by focusing on 9th-grade males
Anti-racist
Acting In and On the World
Oregon students and teachers learn life lessons by participating in the ‘Theater of the Oppressed’.
Following The Flame
Teacher and students discover that even critically acclaimed literature can disenfranchise as well as empower.
The Morning After The Morning After
Michelle Fine describes the issues faced by U.S. Muslim-American youth following not only 9/11 but the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Elephants in the Room
When mainstream media report on urban schools, the real story is often what goes unsaid.
Still Rethinking Our Classrooms
Rethinking Schools rolls out an updated and expanded version of our bestselling guide to teaching for social justice.
Rethinking Agatha Christie
The strange and offensive history of Ten Little Indians” (Hint: They weren’t always called “Indians.”)
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A Little School in a Little Chinatown
One of the founders of a folk arts-based school slated to open in Philadelphia this fall hopes small schools can create possibilities for reclaiming communities.
California’s Grassroots Grow
Sacramento On Aug. 13, 2004, the California Supreme Court settled a historic case— Williams v. the State of California. The Williams decision validated the concerns of many Californians that the state had fallen […]
See You When We Get There
Profiling an African American teacher on Chicago’s south side.
Losing Ground
Budget cuts threaten one of the nation’s best multicultural institutions.
Teaching About Toxins
A Rethinking Schools editor explores the environment’s effects on her students’ health in the classroom.
Creating Bias Detectives, Blowing Up Stereotypes, and Writing Essays that Matter
“Part of the work of teaching students to read is teaching them to question not only the written word, but also the author,” Christensen writes in her article about teaching students how to confront writers whose stories erase the full truth and misrepresent people and places.
Why We Should Teach Reconstruction
Unfortunately, the transformative history of Reconstruction has been buried. First by a racist tale masquerading as history and now under a top-down narrative focused on white elites. It’s long overdue we unearth the groundswell of activity that brought down the slavers of the South and set a new standard for freedom we are still struggling to achieve today.
When Showing Up Isn’t Showing Up
A language arts teacher describes a school board debate in which she merely showed up, instead of showing up and fighting for communities of color.
Our picks for books, videos, websites, and other social justice resources 33.3
Check out these valuable resources, reviewed by Rethinking Schools editors and Teaching for Change colleagues.
Children Deserve Classrooms, Not Cages
The same mid-February weekend that Trump declared his manufactured emergency, I traveled to El Paso on behalf of the Massachusetts Teachers Association to take part in a “Teach-In for Freedom” organized by Teachers Against Child Detention. This event, among other demands, “called on the U.S. government to end the detention and criminalization of immigrant children and their families.”
Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action
In an era when a U.S. president calls Haiti and African nations shithole countries; a time when hate crimes are on the rise; a time when Black students are suspended at four times the rate of white students; and a time when we have lost 26,000 Black teachers since 2002, building a movement for racial justice in the schools is an urgent task. Black lives will matter at schools only when this movement becomes a mass uprising that unites the power of educator unions and families to transform public education.
The 2020 Presidential Election: Educators Speak Out
We asked a group of radical educators to weigh in on what they hoped would be part of any 2020 presidential candidate’s education platform.
Welcome Poems Trump Hate
A teacher creates a welcome poems lesson to celebrate the diversity of students — and with students.
“We Did What Had to Be Done”
I worked with ArtXpress — a program for teens through the Milwaukee Art Museum — as an intern for three weeks over the summer. Our mission was to choose a […]
The Constant Testing of Black Brilliance
An educator reflects on how the education system has continually tested her Blackness from grade school through professional development, and argues that we need more Black spaces to nurture brilliance.
Nurturing Student Activists in the Time of Trump
How we seed and support student activism will vary from community to community, school to school, and grade level to grade level. But this is a crucial moment in history, and what we do as educators matters. When we help students explore and analyze exploitation, injustice, and danger in the world, we can also help them develop the knowledge and skills to change it.
Pushing Past Hate, Pushing Past Paladino
Trump supporter Carl Paladino’s racism, misogyny, and transphobia galvanized community members to oust him from the Buffalo School Board. Their struggle also laid the groundwork for new coalitions and progressive change.
Howling at the Ocean
A first-year teacher struggles with what it means to be a social justice educator.