Bargaining for Better Schools
One union works for meaningful small school reform.
High School
Reconstructing Race
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Teaching About Global Warming in Truck Country
Helping kids who’ve grown up in the truck culture” examine climate change.
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Rethinking Agatha Christie
The strange and offensive history of Ten Little Indians” (Hint: They weren’t always called “Indians.”)
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‘Is This Just Regular English?’
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The Recruitment Minefield
Emiliano Santiago. Not many of our students know his name. But they should. Santiago joined the Oregon Army National Guard on June 28, 1996, shortly after his high school graduation […]
Integrals and Equity
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No Child Left Untested: Closing the Door on Our Kids
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Editorial: The Small School Express
If we ignore race and money inequities, small school reform won’t help anything meaningful take root.
When Small Is Beautiful
The principal of Brooklyn’s El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice shows how art can connect students with their communities.
Tackling Tracking
A teacher finds that small school reform presents opportunities to teach about tracking and inequality.
Losing Ground
Budget cuts threaten one of the nation’s best multicultural institutions.
Stealth Recruiting
NCLB’s provisions give military recruiters access to student contact information
See You When We Get There
Profiling an African American teacher on Chicago’s south side.
Dressing Up
A principal deals with a student’s unusual request.
Houston’s ‘Zero Dropout
Texas schools report dropout rates, Enron style.
Forgive and Remember
Teaching forgiveness through poetry and art.
Unacceptable
Labelling schools low-performing” has consequences for all.”
Making Room for Death
Death happens regularly, but a special education teacher describes her own mother’s death to show how schools leave no space for grief and try to hide death from the school community.
Rethinking Our Classrooms Among Race and Education Books Censored at Illinois Prison
In late January, authorities at the Danville Correctional Center in east-central Illinois removed more than 200 titles from the prison’s library. One of the books that was confiscated was the Rethinking Schools book Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice, first published in 1994 and edited by Bill Bigelow, Linda Christensen, Stan Karp, Barbara Miner, and Bob Peterson.
The Green New Deal and Our Schools
So often, the climate crisis is presented in frightening, threatening terms: rising seas, superstorms, raging wildfires, unlivable temperatures, species extinction, disappearing glaciers, dying coral, climate refugees. These are real. But the paradox is that this dystopian possibility is forcing us to imagine an entirely different kind of society. Schools have a central role to play in devising new alternatives and equipping young people to bring those alternatives to life. This is the work we’ve been assigned.
Time to Get Off the Testing Train
While high-profile tests like the SAT are problematic, Karp argues that we need to end the routine standardized tests that plague students and teachers.
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.
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.”
Honor Their Names
Students’ names are the first thing teachers know about the young people who enter our classrooms; they can signal country of origin, gender, language. Students’ names provide the first moment when a teacher can demonstrate their warmth and humanity, their commitment to seeing and welcoming students’ languages and cultures into the classroom.