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Category: Analysis

Video: State Policies – How America Changed for Better and for Worse in 2021

Black Lives Matter movement. Presidential Executive Order on Racial Equity. Guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin. Signs that our nation is moving toward long overdue reckoning for racial justice. In the state capitols? There are inspiring wins that move us toward justice—and then backlash, anti-democracy, moves us in the opposite direction. While the pandemic—that we thought was nearing an end, but wasn’t—and the national news often dominate the headlines, it’s only by looking at what’s moving in the states that you find the optimism earned by hard-won organizing victories for justice and understand the scale of the daunting challenges that remain.

“We are the leaders we have been waiting for”: 2021 Lessons from the Movement

We asked eight education justice leaders what they’ve learned during 2021.

Against a backdrop of an ongoing pandemic and political attacks on public education, our grassroots grantee partners have achieved major education justice victories – supported by funders like Schott investing for the long term in community organizing.

Inequitable School Funding is on Trial in Pennsylvania

A lawsuit seven years in the making holds the possibility of dramatically revamping Pennsylvania’s property tax-driven system of school funding. Last week the lawsuit finally went to trial, led by the Public Interest Law Center and the Education Law Center – PA.

The Best Defense Against the Far Right: Organized Communities

The polarization around school board races this fall was an extension of the heated and conflictual board meetings we saw across the country over the past year. The understandable stress and frustration caused by extended pandemic school closures was in some places diverted to other issues more amenable to the far right. These races threatened districts with candidates who want to ban teaching about racism in schools, oppose vaccines and masking, and support privatization, largely fueled by a nationwide conservative media narrative and board-focused PACs with deep pockets. While the overall results were far from a landslide, many extreme members did get elected who otherwise wouldn’t have.

Are the 2021 School Board Elections a Wake-Up Call?

School districts across the country find themselves facing reactionary agitation focused on mask mandates, vaccines, curriculum, and the rights of transgender students. As such, it should be no surprise that such ferment would make its way to the ballot box this week. With some exceptions, these normally low-turnout school board elections saw many more voters — and candidates — than usual.

The Struggles for Racial Justice at the Ballot Box and the Schoolhouse are One and The Same

The two institutions of American life most central to the struggle for racial justice and civil rights have been, from the start, the voting booth and the schoolhouse. During Reconstruction, Federal troops ensured voting rights for Black residents in former Confederate states. The legislators those new voters elected in states across the South made the establishment of public schools their top priority. Similarly, the flurry of Federal action in the 1960s in response to a growing Civil Rights Movement produced landmark bills: the Voting Rights Act and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, both passing in the same year.

Have Students Returned to Classrooms or to the School-to-Prison Pipeline?

What good is returning to a classroom when a police officer can drag you out of it? In the face of the promise of re-opened schools, students, parents, and educators across the country are holding up the reality of the school-to-prison pipeline.

Students are Back in Schools. What Will They Be Taught?

As students return to in-person schooling across the country, the first question for many of us is: what’s in the air? But also at the heart of education discussions we find another question: what’s on the chalkboard?

Parent-led movements to improve public school curriculum — to increase the diversity of voices and provide an accurate and truthful look at our society’s present and past — have been underway for decades, but have gained new prominence and momentum over the past several years. The most promising victory for what advocates term “Culturally Responsive Sustaining Education” can be found in New York City. Thanks to the tireless efforts of groups like our grantee partner the Coalition for Educational Justice, hundreds of millions of dollars have now been allocated to completely overhaul the city’s public school curriculum.

COVID Turned a School Ventilation Crisis into a Nightmare: Here’s How We Fix It

What we do in school impacts us for the rest of our lives. But it’s not just about what we learn: it’s also the air we breathe.

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, families and educators were raising the alarm about dangerous air pollutants in U.S. schools. A 2018 report using EPA data found that of 90,000 schools tested for air quality less than one percent, only 728 schools, achieved the safest score.

How the Eviction Crisis is also an Education Crisis

Of the myriad issues brought to prominence by the pandemic, schooling and housing have been two of the most prominent. While news outlets, pundits and politicians will often treat them as separate concerns, where we live and where we learn are profoundly linked. To create a more racially just and equitable future for one, we must do so for both.