The People v. the Hip-Hop Industry
A high school teacher and her students question “Who owns and controls hip-hop?” — and put the hip-hop industry on trial.
Features
Listening Between the Lines
A music teacher stories her tense journey to listen to and include a parent in her child’s education.
Necessary Trouble
Wolfe-Rocca describes her mixer around the “Valve Turners,” a group of climate disobedience activists who put their bodies on the line to stop the harm of pipelines.
“We’re Just People Who Don’t Want to Be Killed”
A piece of our worth was stolen on Jan. 6, 2021. A mob brandishing the flag of the Confederacy as well as the campaign flags of the outgoing president stormed […]
Teaching A People’s History of the March on Washington
Nearly every child in the United States learns about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The March on Washington, where King delivered this speech, is one of […]
Essay Unbound
Christensen argues that the tight reliance on the format of the literary analysis hinders students’ imaginations, and that they should instead write “unbound” essays of risk-taking and experimentation.
To Find What Works in the Virtual Classroom, Many Teachers Are Adapting Old Strategies
Matt Reed, a teacher at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon, was worried about one of his 9th-grade students. Portland Public Schools, he explained, had been all-remote since March 13, […]
Activists Mobilize for Waivers and Opt Outs as Biden Mandates Tests
One month after taking office, the Biden administration faced its first major education policy test. It failed miserably. Despite a campaign promise to end standardized testing in public schools (See […]
Biden’s Broken Promise: Time to Opt Out!
On Dec. 14, 2019, I asked President Joe Biden a question about standardized testing. Seeking the Democratic nomination, he had joined other presidential candidates at a Public Education Forum hosted […]
Karen Lewis Struck a Blow for Justice
When Karen Lewis, the past president of the Chicago Teachers Union, succumbed to a long battle with brain cancer on Feb. 8, 2021, we lost one of the greatest freedom […]
Dear Educators, It Is Time to Fight for Asian America
Although the increase in anti-Asian attacks has been hard for all of us, the murderous killing spree in Atlanta had our families, our youth, and our communities spiraling. From a […]
Who Cares About Classroom Norms?
A school teacher and his students radically reimagine classroom “norms” by focusing on needs-based reflections.
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.
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.
Honoring Exonerees
A high school teacher helps her students explore how DNA testing is used to free innocent people from prison and how science can support justice.
Lessons in 2020
2020 did not make me,But neither did you break me,Separating families like cheap blinds,With the vinyl bubbling up in the middle,I still found a way to see,Determining how much light […]
Our Stories: Students Curate the Museum of Corona History
The best teachers that I’ve had are still quiet voices in my head. In college, I took Professor Phyllis Jackson’s art history course “Black Aesthetics and the Politics of (Re)presentation.” […]
A Field Trip to the Future
“What’s the point of museums?” I ask one day to kick off class. I teach English at a public high school in Fall River, a deindustrialized city on Massachusetts’ southeastern […]
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. […]
Teaching Voting Rights in the Time of Coronavirus
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th Amendment, which promised “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or […]
Wash Your Hands
I hadn’t ever planned to teach online, but the Saturday before our college campus closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, I decided to cancel our face-to-face class because one of the […]
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 […]
Showing Up for Our Students in the Pandemic
“I just want to be done. Just tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it,” Haylee wrote to me in an email. A month after school closed on […]
I Hate the Pandemic, but I’m Grateful to Be Rid of Grades
I hate this pandemic. But, I am also humbled by the little bundle of destructive protein that has put our American way of doing things on pause. And kind of like […]
My Grades Will Not Be Instruments of War
How we grade students — or whether we grade students — has always been contested terrain. The pandemic has brought new attention to the politics of grading. In the 1960s, […]