Shape-Shifting Segregation Policies
A teacher educator helps preservice teachers understand the history of how Mexican Americans have been racialized as Black and white at different times to keep them out of white schools.
Policy Articles
Education and Social Justice: A Global View
Rethinking Schools editor Bob Peterson interviews Angelo Gavrielatos, president of Australia’s New South Wales Teachers Union.
Save Arab American Studies!
At first it seemed that ethnic studies advocates had won a major victory in California, but then a backlash targeted Arab American studies.
Reparations Can Be Won — and Must Be Taught
The story of how activists, teachers, and, organizers won mandatory curriculum in the Chicago Public Schools for 8th and 10th grades about one the darkest chapters in the city’s history — the widespread torture of Black men under Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge.
“It’s Not Magic. It’s Organizing!”
The inspiring story of how the social justice caucus of North Carolina’s teacher union grew to power.
Moving Past the Trump Presidency — The Promise of Social Justice Teacher Unions
The editors of the new book Teacher Unions and Social Justice: Organizing for the Schools and Communities Our Students Deserve argue that teacher unions must move beyond strategies of the past to put social justice and anti-racism at the center of their work.
Who’s to Blame?
A middle school teacher organizes a tribunal for her students on responsibility for the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. Among those on trial are Mother Nature, Gen Z/Millennials, the Healthcare Industry, Racism and White Supremacy, the Chinese Government, the U.S. Government, and the Capitalist System.
Cops Don’t Keep Kids Safe at School: The Case Against School Police
Before I was taught a single teaching technique, I was taught to fight school shooters. At the start of the Stanford Teacher Education Program, we took a seat in the […]
Schools Reopen — and Teachers Fight for Their Lives, Their Students, and the Future of Public Education
As schools begin to reopen, within teacher unions around the country, teachers have been coming together to discuss the risks they’re willing to take — both to protect public health […]
Coronavirus, Sick-Outs, and the Fight to Close New York City Schools
New York City has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, and its public schools, which serve 1.1 million students and employ nearly 135,000 people, officially closed on March 17. […]
How Google Classroom Erases Trans Students
There are so many voices right now grieving what we have lost with the school closure — our relationships with students and co-workers, the laughter and energy that echo down […]
“I Don’t Like China or Chinese People Because They Started This Quarantine”
On April 20, 2020, blogger LittleGrayThread made a Facebook post of a note her daughter had written. She reported that in a Zoom class meeting, one of her daughter’s 2nd-grade […]
Crisis, Change, and Canceling the Teacher Performance Assessment
As former K–12 teachers who are now teacher educators in California, we share grave concern regarding the expectation for preservice teachers to complete their Teacher Performance Assessment (TPA) in order […]
Teachers and the Struggle for Paid Family Leave
Last fall, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, signed a sweeping array of progressive legislation into law. Among the many bills he enacted included legislation granting collective bargaining rights to the […]
Paid Leave in the Time of a Pandemic
Educators know firsthand what lack of paid family and medical leave means for their students and families — and for themselves. Now, the pandemic has dramatically elevated the need for […]
From the Race to the Top to the Plunge to the Bottom
Horror movie sequels are notoriously bad. This one may be the worst. In 2009, federal intervention during the last financial crisis gave rise to the Obama administration’s signature education initiative: […]
Short Stuff 26.2
International Movement for Public Education Privatization, standardized tests, funding cuts, attacks on teachers’ unions and contracts—the issues that are central to teacher activism in the United States are international. In […]
Youth vs. Apocalypse
A high school English teacher reorients his classroom to be a space for student organizing for climate justice.
We Need to Ask Our Students to Dream — and to Dream Big
Back in the 1980s, I taught an elective class at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon, called Literature and Social Change. It centered around the questions “What is a good […]
Communities Struggle to Make Small Serve All
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Parents Fight School Closings
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War Is Fun as Hell
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Testing Our Limits
First graders, three at a time, use classroom computers to take standardized tests. Their teacher explains the impact on the students and herself.
Playing Smart
Scripted curriculum de-skills teachers and rewards students for passivity, not critical thinking. A teacher educator urges teachers to organize and fight back.
Challenging Corporate Ed Reform
The failures of the corporate education “reform” movement leave it vulnerable to genuine grassroots school transformation.