Communities Struggle to Make Small Serve All
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Community-based teaching
Parents Fight School Closings
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Plotting Inequalities, Building Resistance
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Teaching the Prison Industrial Complex
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Science for the People
Ninth graders develop science literacy as they become neighborhood environmental experts and activists.
Building Teacher Solidarity
“I would really like to see a new movement that gives the kind of hope
for change that there was when I came into teaching in the late 1960s.”
Underfunded Schools Cut Past Tense from Language Programs
A part of American school curricula for more than 200 years
Living Algebra, Living Wage
Eighth graders finally get what they ask for: an algebra lesson for the real world.”
Youth Take the Lead on High School Reform Issues
Sistas and Brothas United.
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.
Small Schools Doubletalk
Small schools reform is often accompanied by familiar buzzwords that can mean different things to different people (sometimes called stakeholders”).”
How Should We Sing Happy Birthday?
A kindergarten teacher looks at birthday celebrations in her classroom and whether all of her students’ home languages and rituals are being uplifted.
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.
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.
The Struggle for Bilingual Education
Organizer and advocate Tony Báez has been fighting for improved bilingual education programs for decades. In this interview, he talks about the current state of bilingual education and describes how parents and educators won a maintenance K-12 bilingual program in the Milwaukee Public Schools.
Editorial: Making Black Lives Matter in Our Schools
As we return to our schools this fall, we need to rededicate ourselves to building an education system and a society that values Black lives.
Black is Beautiful
A kindergarten teacher uses images, literature, poetry, and collages — as well as her own history — to challenge students’ implicit bias and preconceived notions surrounding the color black and to teach the lesson that Black is beautiful.
“No One is Going to Tell Us What is Right”
A journalist explores the way Indigenous language and community is connected to the classroom in several communities in Alaska, and explores how educators there have built new frameworks to fight against Eurocentric curriculum.
The (Young) People’s Climate Conference
A teacher adapts the “Climate Change Mixer” designed for older students as a springboard for a unit on global warming and climate justice.
Teaching to the Heart
Using Marshallese poet and climate justice activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poem “Dear Matafele Peinam,” a teacher helps 7th graders think about the sacred spaces in their own lives and how they will be affected by climate change.
Mapping Childhood
A neighborhood mapping exercise helps students develop their narrative writing and storytelling skills while also building classroom community by connecting home worlds to the curriculum. Adapted from the newly-released second edition of Reading, Writing, and Rising Up.
EDITORIAL: Little Kids, Big Ideas
Recently, a Rethinking Schools editor was a chaperone on a field trip when he overheard a 2nd-grade student talking about how he wanted to “nuke the world.” Taken aback, he […]
Advocating for Arabic
The executive director of San Francisco’s Arab Resource and Organizing Center describes the successes and obstacles for a community-based campaign to offer Arabic language instruction in the district’s schools.
“I See Birds Everywhere I Go”
A science teacher in Washington, D.C., overcomes her students’ fear of nature by turning them into avid birdwatchers.
Uchinaaguchi: The Language of My Heart
Returning to her home country of Okinawa at 13, Moé Yonamine was hit by a teacher for speaking her Indigenous language. She reflects on the history of colonial oppression in Okinawa and the importance of keeping culture and language alive.