Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman write: By now, it’s obvious that the reactionary culture warriors who want to reshape American education are inspiring a serious liberal counter-mobilization in response. Remarkably, this backlash to the backlash is gaining momentum in some of the reddest parts of the country. A raucous school board meeting in Hernando County,… Read More »
Ashley Ingle writes: The alarm blares, and I wake up with a renewed vigor to indoctrinate America’s youth. I ride my bike to work, smugly turning up my nose at real Americans who drive trucks. As I pedal, my thoughts are preoccupied with how I will infect children with my liberal agenda. No other ideas… Read More »
A high school student in California holds a sign in protest of her school district’s ban on critical race theory curriculum. Watchara Phomicinda/The Press-Enterprise via Getty Images By Boaz Dvir, Penn State The Florida Department of Education announced on April 10, 2023, that it had rejected 35% of the social studies books publishers submitted for… Read More »
The Guardian reports: Adam Tritt, a high school English teacher in Palm Bay, Florida, was shocked when his school’s librarian – eager to comply with Florida’s new law restricting “inappropriate” books in schools – removed one-third of the books on his classroom shelves, including a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry that was not on her… Read More »
Michelle Goldberg writes: When I first met Matthew Lepinski, the faculty chair of New College of Florida, he was willing to give the right-wingers sent to remake his embattled progressive public school a chance. This was in January, a few weeks after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida appointed six activist conservatives, including the culture war… Read More »
Doug Sosnik writes: The legal imbroglios of Donald Trump have lately dominated conversation about the 2024 election. As primary season grinds on, campaign activity will wax and wane, and issues of the moment — like the first Trump indictment and potentially others to come — will blaze into focus and then disappear. Yet certain fundamentals… Read More »
Politico reports: Amid all the attention on this month’s elections in Wisconsin and Illinois, one outcome with major implications for 2024 flew under the national radar: School board candidates who ran culture-war campaigns flamed out. Democrats and teachers’ unions boasted candidates they backed in Midwestern suburbs trounced their opponents in the once-sleepy races. The winning… Read More »
Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent write: It isn’t every day that the ruminations of local bureaucrats in a small rural Texas county become national news. But when commissioners in Llano County — population 21,000 — voted Thursday to keep its three-branch library system open, the moment was closely monitored by the biggest news organizations in the country. That’s because Llano County has become… Read More »
Shutterstock By Shireen Daft, Macquarie University Recent media attention has drawn global focus on an escalating number of Iranian schoolgirls falling ill over the past few months because of suspected chemical attacks. Accounts differ, but many reports cite more than 1,000 cases of poisoning at schools across Iran. At least 58 schools in ten provinces… Read More »
Vanity Fair reports: It took New College president Patricia Okker three attempts to deliver her farewell remarks. She kept being interrupted during last week’s board meeting in Sarasota, Florida, including once by a member of the school’s board of trustees, making a motion to terminate her without cause. Okker had been addressing the dozens of… Read More »
Adam Laats writes: When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) blocked the first draft of an Advanced Placement African American studies course, he insisted he did not want to eliminate Black history, but only to control it. It might seem that his campaign has succeeded: The College Board announced a new watered-down curriculum that transformed resistance… Read More »
Eric Levitz writes: Blue America is an increasingly wealthy and well-educated place. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Americans without college degrees were more likely than university graduates to vote Democratic. But that gap began narrowing in the late 1960s before finally flipping in 2004. John F. Kennedy lost college-educated voters by a… Read More »
The New York Times reports: The Hasidic Jewish community has long operated one of New York’s largest private schools on its own terms, resisting any outside scrutiny of how its students are faring. But in 2019, the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, agreed to give state standardized tests in reading and math to more… Read More »
The New York Times reports: National test results released on Thursday showed in stark terms the pandemic’s devastating effects on American schoolchildren, with the performance of 9-year-olds in math and reading dropping to the levels from two decades ago. This year, for the first time since the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests began tracking… Read More »
Santul Nerkar wrote in May: America’s racial wealth gap is well-documented, even if many continue to underestimate its existence. Black Americans’ net worth is, on average, less than 15 percent of white Americans’, the legacy of centuries of systemic anti-Black racism. Moreover, both political parties have failed time and again to address the inequities facing… Read More »
ProPublica reports: [Celia] Lewis was beginning to prepare for her move South, spending as much time with friends and family as possible, when she got a strange call from an official in her new school district. The person on the line — Lewis won’t say who — asked if she had ever heard of CRT.… Read More »