59 issues · 2020–2023
The emphasis on higher education and degrees has shifted the labor market to where millions of workers are being filtered out.
A Study Hall discussing book bans, parent's rights, and their roles in ensuring their kids receive a quality education.
The story of the Jena Six highlights the double standard Black students experience in the educational and legal system.
Lawsuits against companies like the Fearless Fund grow following attacks on DEI efforts and the end of affirmative action.
What will come of efforts to diversify college campuses with the end of affirmative action in higher education?
Activists are mobilizing against Moms for Liberty, an organization that is one of the leading forces behind book bans and against LGBTQ+ inclusion and race curriculum.
Amid recent bans, children's book authors face pressure to censor race and racism in culturally and historically sensitive books.
As our communities continue to reel over the latest school shooting, attention to the types of victims of gun violence is left out of discussions.
Growing attacks on anti-racist education threaten Holocaust education and feed into antisemitism.
The outcome of the Perez v. Sturgis Public Schools case will affect the redress disabled students have in resolving disability rights violations from schools.
The classroom has become the battleground for the country's most polarizing and pertinent issues.
Since its publication, the 1619 Project has been challenged by conservatives for attempting to fix the historical whitewashing of American slavery.
Instead of detention, suspension, or expulsion, restorative justice addresses the root of the harm via collaboration.
While some Islamophobic attacks get media attention, everyday bigotry is normalized in many spaces, including schools.
Teachers are fundraising to get air conditioning into their classrooms due to record heat waves and inadequate educational infrastructure.
Critical race theory bans and the efforts to censor conservations about race, sexuality, and gender in the U.S. education system
As degrees become a requirement in the U.S. workforce, student loan debt becomes an unavoidable threat to financial freedom.
Thousands of educator vacancies remain open ahead of the new school year as the teacher retention crisis remains unaddressed.
The school-to-prison pipeline introduces students to the criminal legal system, affecting their mental health, academic potential, and livelihoods.
Vast disparities in public school funding make the educational system a catalyst for inequality, not a guaranteed out from a "cycle of poverty."
The expiration of a federal program that guarantees students access to free school meals has devasting effects on food-insecure children.
The Cops Off Campus Coalition is a network of students, educators, and community members working to abolish policing in the education system.
Antisemitic incidences continue to rise due to the spread of racist misinformation and lack of education on the Holocaust.
Mass student strikes over COVID safeguards continue a long history of student activism in the United States.
Book bans are escalating across the country. But banned books do little to foster a better learning environment for students.
Each school year presents an opportunity to reimagine the education system in ways proven to work and ways we know will benefit the students.
Muslim women are being harassed, fired from jobs, suspended from schools and denied access to public areas because they wear the hijab.
HBCUs are key to increasing representation of Black people in STEM. So why are they historically underfunded?
A recent decision at Harvard sets a new standard for investing in fossil fuels.
Research about issues hurting marginalized communities has skyrocketed. But is it causing more harm than good?
We surveyed educators to learn how the critical race discourse is affecting their classrooms – and how you can help.
New discoveries of unmarked graves bring ongoing injustices against Indigenous communities to the present.
Last week's Supreme Court's decision re-ignites conversations about student-athletes and the role of race and equity in collegiate sports.
Intelligence testing is rooted in racial bias and pseudoscience, which affects how Black football players were tested for brain injuries.
Less than a quarter of community college students who take remedial courses go on to complete college-level courses. At four-year colleges, just over a third of students assigned to remediation continue to take college-level courses. The majority of students assigned to remediation at two-year colleges or universities will not graduate within three years or six years, respectively (Complete College America). Students who take remedial courses pay just as much for these courses as students who begin with college-level courses and are often left with student loan debt for coursework that did not lead to a degree.
Agriculture is in full focus this year with people gaining awareness about how their foods are cultivated. As people across the country found themselves spending more time at home, home and community-based gardening started to rise (MLive). This trend is not limited to adults. It also includes the education provided for students. Agricultural education is a powerful component of racial equity that should be promoted for students across the country.
Hate crime charges serve as a sentencing enhancement when someone acts with bias while committing a crime. This bias must be against members of a protected class – such as a specific race, religion, or sexual orientation – and it must be a motivating factor for the crime (Time). It seems reasonable that a crime is more odious if it occurs solely because the victim is a member of an oppressed community.
The push to ban critical race theory in schools is a part of a broader campaign to discredit the concept of racism and its effect in the U.S.
Unpaid internships are inaccessible and further the economic inequities in education and the workplace by relying on exploitative practices.
Everyday, millions of minority students suffer in silence, struggling to cope with the formidable hurdles they face on their path to receiving a higher education. Combating direct and indirect racial discrimination is an all-encompassing battle that continually dares people of color to survive. Carrying this weight while balancing a rigorous curriculum can often come at a serious cost to the mental health and well-being of students of color. In addition to this, the pandemic and the rise in white extremist violence and police brutality has added more strain to the life of students of color. This college mental health crisis is only exacerbated by the lack of support students of color receive from their institutions who fail to provide sustained efforts for equity, and the tangible resources needed to thrive (The Steve Fund Crisis Report).
Education is a fundamental human right. But when racial and socioeconomic fences sequester millions of Black and Brown students from the resources and privileges that are required to succeed, who protects their rights? For decades, the racial stratification within the United States’ educational system has been a powerful tool to uphold intergenerational privilege and white supremacy. Standardized testing is used across the nation as a proxy for intellectual merit, even though results always correlated with race and socioeconomic background rather than academic achievement (Teachers College Press).
As an unaccompanied minor who traveled to the U.S. for refuge, Sergio shares his story and how we can support other unaccompanied youths.
As an educator who teaches courses on histories of race in the United States, I am all too aware of the deep need to address how current events impact the things we talk about in the classroom. A week before the quarter began this year, for instance, I emailed my students in order to address the January 6 insurrection. I touched on how it would likely impact the way in which we engaged with our course, as well as why learning about histories of racial formation and activism were so critical to moving forward. As writer and professor Rebecca Schuman puts it, “college, with its structured reading environment and safe discussion spaces, can give an entire generation the tools not just to begin to understand our violent, incomprehensible world—but to make it a little bit less violent, and a lot more comprehensible” (Slate). I see my courses as giving students those tools to take with them as they move beyond the university.
Right now, there are over 50 pieces of anti-trans legislation under consideration in states across the U.S. All are designed to strip away the limited rights and protections that currently exist for transgender people (LGBTQ+ Nation). Seventeen states are all considering bills that would ban transgender girls and women from school sports this year, and some of the bills also ban transgender boys and men. These states are Arizona, Connecticut, Iowa, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas.
On February 2, the School Library Journal, a publication for librarians and information specialists that reviews and recommends children’s books, released the cover of their February issue, which drew immediate criticism on social media.
Earlier this month, Twitter removed Donald Trump from their platform, citing his incitement of violence at the Capitol as against their “Glorifications of Violence” policy (Twitter). The social media platform has been abused by many, as it has provided megaphones for individuals who support policies that discriminate and enact violence upon already marginalized folks. On the other hand, it has also allowed for organizations fighting for real change to amplify their message and to a larger audience more quickly and globally than ever before.
Almost seven decades after Brown v. Board of Education, school segregation continues, often within the walls of a single school building. Black students comprise 17% of our nation’s students but represent less than 10% of gifted and talented programs – and 53% of remedial programs. (The Atlantic). The process of diverting Black students from educational opportunities is known as “racialized tracking” and is practiced in many school districts across the country. The process is simple: gifted and talented programs practice gatekeeping through admissions tests that privileged students are more prepared to take, resulting in a student body segregated by the courses they are taking (The Atlantic).
On September 22, the Trump administration signed an executive order prohibiting “divisive concepts" in diversity training programs such as systemic race and sex discrimination and implicit race and sex biases.
Conversations on student loan forgiveness sparked again Monday when President-elect Joe Biden mentioned he has plans to cancel student debt when he takes office (NYTimes). During a Q&A post-speech, Biden acknowledged how many people struggle with student loans’ burden but didn’t give specifics on his political agenda. Hopeful citizens are referencing an interview where Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, stated that Biden could cancel $50,000 in student loan debt in his first 100 days (The Ink).
When we talk about issues of diversity in higher education, we usually are referring to the student population. While it is important to work on increasing MFGLI (minority, first-generation, and low-income) student representation on college campuses, I’d like to focus on a problem commonly overlooked outside of the academy: the lack of diversity in those who research and teach at the university level.
I went to a predominantly white high school, and one thing I’ve noticed is that Black history is typically represented in the background. The Civil Rights Movement was condensed into one chapter in my American history textbook, only including the names of “peaceful” leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. In fact, in 2015, statistics showed that “1 to 2 lessons or 8–9 percent of total class time is devoted to Black history in U.S. history classrooms” (SocialStudies.org). But these narratives tend to leave out important parts of history like the Black Panther Party.
Early child care education is one of the most basic needs; however, most Black and Brown women who care for and educate the nation’s youngest minds are overlooked and discounted. As the coronavirus forced public schools and universities to transition to remote learning, some early childhood centers remained open. Absent from the conversation as essential workers in need of hazard pay were early care teachers.