Teaching the Prison Industrial Complex

“Harm comes from prior harm.” As Deandra says this, I am sitting in the back of my classroom, taking notes. My students are sitting in a circle in the middle […]

Chicago’s Peace Warriors

A group of students from Chicago’s North Lawndale College Preparatory High were in the middle of a weeklong summer training to become Peace Warriors—peer nonviolence leaders. Suddenly, a sophomore named […]

Teaching Haniyah

Several years ago, I taught a unit on power in my 9th-grade social studies classes at Berkeley High School in California’s Bay Area. It’s a diverse school—rich folks from the […]

Haniyah’s Story

Haniyah wrote this article as a 17-year-old participant in Project WHAT! a program of Community Works West, based in Berkeley, Calif. The young people in Project WHAT! all have family […]

The Classroom to Prison Pipeline

A master teacher faces a classroom revolt. She realizes that, no matter how imminent the high-stakes test, stopping the school-to-prison pipeline begins in the classroom with student-centered, meaningful curriculum.

Arresting Development

The author of Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse reviews the history, impact, and future of zero tolerance policies.

Schools and the New Jim Crow

The author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness applies her thought-provoking analysis to children, schools, and priorities for education activism.

Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline

“Every man in my family has been locked up. Most days I feel like it doesn’t matter what I do, how hard I try—that’s my fate, too.”—11th-grade African American student, […]

Testing Kindergarten

You may not believe how many tests kindergartners take – and what they are missing as a result.

Breaking the Silence on War

We are now in the ninth year of the U.S. war in Afghanistan and the seventh year of the current war in Iraq. In classrooms throughout the United States, as in the streets, there is little critical discussion of these events they have become part of the wallpaper of life. Why has this happened? How can we break the silence?

Reading by the Numbers

Does Accelerated Reading really promote a love of literature, or just a love of points? Harry Potter scores 44; Hamlet gets 7.

“Baghdad Burning” Heats Up World History

It’s always a struggle to work current events into history classes. A blog by a young Iraqi woman about her day-to-day life in Baghdad provides an opportunity to connect the medieval Abbasid Empire to today’s news.

The Big One

The environmental crisis requires a profound social and curricular rethinking.