Students Bring Problems of Trump’s America with Them When They Come to School
Mike Rose, the education writer and UCLA professor of education who has profiled vital and challenging American classrooms, the work of teachers, and the role of public schools to extend opportunity, added a post to his blog this week about new research from a group of his colleagues at UCLA: School and Society in the Age of Trump.
Rose explains why he believes this report is so important: “Schools are porous institutions—what happens in society at large plays out in classrooms and hallways—so the disturbing findings of a masterful new report, School and Society in the Age of Trump should not surprise us. But they do, in their scope and severity. John Rogers and his colleagues (Michael Ishimoto, Alexander Kwako, Anthony Berryman, and Claudia Diera) at UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access surveyed a representative sample of over 500 public high school principals from across the country and found that 89% report that ‘incivility and contentiousness in the broader political environment has considerably affected their school community.'”
The report isolates current social issues and problems that are increasing pressure across American high schools for students, teachers, and school administrators:
- political division, incivility, and hostility;
- disputes over truth, facts, and the reliability of sources;
- the impact of the opioid crisis on families;
- the threat of immigration enforcement; and
- the threat of gun violence in schools and neighborhoods.
When the researchers surveyed high school principals and compiled the data, they discovered that today’s political atmosphere is undermining the climate inside the school: “In eighty-three CONTINUE READING: Students Bring Problems of Trump’s America with Them When They Come to School | janresseger
