“Make Sure to Add Joy, and Take a Friend with You” — Student Organizing for Climate Justice
Students from two different high schools in Portland, Oregon organize a Student Voices for Climate Justice Summit.
Reflections
“Once I Left Here, I Began to Recognize It”:
A principal reflects on what leads to Black students being misidentified for special education.
Crying Between Crises:
An elementary school counselor searches for hope in the face of impossible demands.
A Journey Toward Biliteracy:
A principal describes the importance of developing and supporting dual language programs and biliteracy from kindergarten through high school.
An Ode to Altadena:
An administrator details efforts to rebuild community after losing his home and school in the Eaton Fire.
Learning Under Occupation:
A Minneapolis resident describes what it’s like to live under ICE’s Operation Metro Surge and the crucial role teachers and schools have played in building resistance.
Science Teaching for Social Justice
Science Teaching for Social Justice helps students and educators dig into science as a tool of oppression and means of liberation.
Trans Teacher, Detrans Student
A trans teacher draws out lessons for all educators from painful conversations with a student who has detransitioned.
Now Is the Time to Defend Our Students
Two Los Angeles educators detail how community patrols have become an essential part of their work after Trump’s immigration crackdown.
It’s a Beautiful Day in Ms. Rachel’s Neighborhood
Rethinking Schools editor Larry Miller discovers Ms. Rachel and her courageous stance on Gaza through engagement with his granddaughter.
Families Talk About Palestine
A former classroom teacher describes a series of workshops she helped put together for Jewish families interested in learning about Palestine.
From Muffins to Movements:
Sugarman and Taylor detail the challenges and successes of teachers using Teaching for Black Lives study groups to refuse isolation and defy the crackdown on anti-racist education.
Teaching the Culprits of Climate Chaos
Using his updated climate crisis trial, Bigelow shows how students explore the forces behind climate chaos.
Table Talk: An IEP Meeting — from the Other Side
A Black elementary teacher recounts her experience as a caregiver in an IEP meeting.
Teaching Palestine
Palestine has long been one of the great silences in the official curriculum. Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices provides educators with powerful tools to uncover the history and current context […]
My Struggle with Identity in a White Education System
Jackson reflects on the racist history he learned in school as a child and powerfully connects those experiences to his own incarceration.
If I Could Rewind That Morning
A former 5th-grade paraprofessional reflects on how racism shaped a student-teacher interaction in a classroom that also fostered trust, joy, and exploration.
Letter to My Asian American Students
A high school social studies teacher critiques Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in a moving letter to his students.
Let’s Stop Using Metaphors that Celebrate Extraction, Colonialism, and Violence
Too often our metaphors embed messages that are hostile to the Earth and to social justice. Metaphors can reflect — and legitimate — a violent, extractive, colonial worldview.
In the Wake of Uvalde, a Teacher’s Plea for Police-Free Schools
Braginsky argues that her students — and young people everywhere — are safer in school without police.
Fatphobia Showed Up in My Classroom
It is the noisiest time of the day at school. It’s lunchtime and I’m sitting with two of my 3rd graders in the basement cafeteria of our public school building […]
It’s a Big Fat Deal
A special education teacher tackles fatphobia in our schools head-on, pointing out how we fall far short in our efforts to rid it from the classroom and how fundamentally detrimental fatphobia is to teaching and learning.
Eugene Debs and the Idea of Socialism
This year is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the scholar-activist Howard Zinn (1922–2010), author of A People’s History of the United States. In each Rethinking Schools issue this year, we have published a “Zinn at 100” essay. This is not nostalgia. We commemorate Howard Zinn because his writing continues to provide needed context for today’s events.
Don’t Despair About the Supreme Court
The courts have never been on the side of justice, only moving a few degrees one way or the other, unless pushed by the people. Those words engraved in the marble of the Supreme Court, “Equal Justice Before the Law,” have always been a sham.
Oakland Youth to Teachers’ Retirement System: “Divest Now!”
It was a letter to the CalSTRS board, demanding that they dump the pension fund’s investments in oil and gas companies. It was signed “From the many young climate justice activists who will continue to be at every one of your meetings until you divest.”