Following The Flame
Teacher and students discover that even critically acclaimed literature can disenfranchise as well as empower.
Curriculum/Textbooks
NCLB and the Military
California teachers take a stand against the NCLB-aided military blitz on in-school recruiting.
Still Rethinking Our Classrooms
Rethinking Schools rolls out an updated and expanded version of our bestselling guide to teaching for social justice.
Exit Strategies
Getting us out of the war in Iraq and NCLB requires challenging the premises that got us into these messes in the first place.
Lies My Spanish Textbooks Tell
Latinos dance, they sing, they happily play baseball. And what great food!
‘I Just Want to Read Frog and Toad’
Another child’s love of reading runs smack into No Child Left Behind.
Film: Inspiration From Mexico’s Rank and File
Film: Granito de Arena (Grain of Sand) by director: Jill Friedberg, Corrugated Films, 2005, DVD. 60 min.
Christopher Columbus and the Iraq War
How the myth built up around Columbus has helped condition kids to accept imperial adventures like the Iraq war.
Youth Take the Lead on High School Reform Issues
Sistas and Brothas United.
Rhetoric or Reality?
Do small schools change teaching practice?
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”).”
The Gates Foundation and Small Schools
The Gates’ $735 million have made them key players in small school reform.
Standardizing Small
How testing and top-down reform can undermine small schools.
Lessons from a Garden Spider
An ordinary spider assists a multilingual third-grade classroom.
Losing Ground
Budget cuts threaten one of the nation’s best multicultural institutions.
Head Start or Head Backwards?
Republicans deliberately undermining Head Start.
Time to Renew Movements for Justice
Encourage movements for social justice at the national level.
Teaching the Truth About Climate Change Is Up to Us, Because Textbooks Lie
The second installment of our new environmental justice column focuses on one part of a resolution passed by the Portland, Oregon, school board that mandates the school district not use text material that doubts “the severity of the climate crisis or its root in human activities.”
How My 4th-Grade Class Passed a Law on Teaching Mexican “Repatriation”
How 4th-grade students in Southern California were helped by their teachers to develop curriculum surrounding the mass deportation of U.S. citizens of Mexican heritage in the 1930s and pass a law to investigate what happened.
It’s Imperialism.
A high school teacher critiques the textbook treatment of the Cold War and U.S. imperialism. She describes her approach to the “curricular conundrum” that the Cold War presents because it lasted so long, and was so far-flung. “”If we are ever to create a different world, one in which the United States does not cast an outsized and militarized shadow across the globe, we need our students to understand how and why that shadow was created in the first place.”
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.
What We Don’t Learn About the Black Panther Party — but Should
The history of the Black Panther Party holds vital lessons for today’s movement for Black lives and all movements to confront racism, inequality, and police violence. But our textbooks distort the significance of the Panthers — or exclude them completely.
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.
Curtis Acosta on the Tucson Ethnic Studies Victory
A victory for ethnic studies in Arizona.