public schools

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• 6/25/2023
  

  Was a Utah District's Decision to Remove the Bible from Shelves a Win for the Anti-Anti-Woke? History Says Maybe Not

  by Matthew Smith

  When citizens invoked Utah's new "sensitive content" law to force the district to remove the Bible from school libraries, some hoped they had achieved a coup demonstrating the folly of the law. But the Bible has long been a part of cultural conflicts focused on schools, and that's unlikely to change anytime soon. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/23/2023
  

  Texas Schools to get Chaplains and the Ten Commandments under Legislation

  After a Supreme Court ruling favored explicitly Christian prayer led by school officials at school functions, Texas conservatives feel empowered to put more religion into public schools. 

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• SOURCE: Texas Monthly
  2/16/2023
  

  Those "Local" School Battles in Texas are Part of a Decades-Long Statewide Plan to Undermine Public Schools

  Advocates of privatizing public schools have bankrolled and organized parents' groups around a range of values issues with the goal of undermining confidence in local schools. In Texas, it seems to be working to break down the longstanding opposition of rural families to voucher programs. 

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• SOURCE: The Progressive
  12/5/2022
  

  The Culture War on Public Education

  by Peter Greene

  The multifront culture war beseiging schools has one unifying principle: undermining trust in public schools so they can be privatized, without regard for the best interests of children. 

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• SOURCE: The Forum
  7/22/2022
  

  "They Want Your Children!": Right-Wing School Panics Seek to Repeal Modernity

  by Rick Perlstein

  "Reactionary panics about what children learn in school are about as old as time. And they won’t ever go away."

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• SOURCE: Phenomenal World
  5/12/2022
  

  America's School Funding is Kleptocracy in Action

  by Esther Cyna

  The American system of funding schools largely through local property taxes contributes to inequalities both obvious and subtle that amount to legal dispossession of poor and minority students by denying them access to quality education. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  5/3/2022
  

  Affluent White Parents Don't Understand the "Public" in Public Schools

  by Diana D'Amico Pawlewicz

  Are parents' rights movements aimed at ensuring quality education, or at destroying the potential of public schools to support both learning and a democratic culture across lines of race and class? 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  12/1/2021
  

  When Culture War Politics Consume School Boards, Basic Functions Suffer

  "there is a striking disconnect between the crises that have consumed school board meetings for well more than a year and the emergencies that teachers, nurses, custodians, secretaries and other staff members say they are facing when they show up at school each morning."

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  11/8/2021
  

  Can the Democrats Take Schools Out of Politics?

  by Michelle Goldberg

  Times Columnist Michelle Goldberg says that the CRT controversy is obscuring the ways that Virginia's public schools are part of a long political movement to undermine public schools that got a boost from the COVID pandemic. 

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  2/9/2021
  

  What’s at Stake in the Fight Over Reopening Schools

  by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  In cities like Chicago, parents anxious to return children to school have blamed teachers' unions. The historian and New Yorker columnist argues that some proponents of reopening are using racial equity arguments in bad faith while ignoring the gross racial inequalities that characterized schooling-as-usual before the pandemic and the work of teachers' unions to fight it.

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• SOURCE: The Root
  2/6/2021
  

  Students Protest Firing of Arkansas Teacher Who Called Lawmakers Out Over 1619 Project Curriculum

  "Your recent bill is an appalling attempt to FURTHER whitewash history. It is absolutely nothing less than an attempt to codify white supremacy in Arkansas schools. Stay the f*** out of my curriculum," teacher Josh Depner wrote. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  4/26/2020
  

  How Past Crises Changed America’s Public Schools — ‘And so too Will COVID-19’

  by Ann Marie Ryan and Charles Tocci

  While this certainly feels unprecedented, the history of American public schooling shows us it's not.

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• SOURCE: San Francisco Chronicle
  5/30/2019
  

  Open Forum: Are public schools ‘inclusive’? Not for those who oppose abortion

  by Jonathan Zimmerman

  Children need to learn how to discuss abortion — and other controversial political questions — in a fair and mutually respectful way. And that won’t happen if the adults in the room tell them the right answers, right off the bat.