By Amanda Menas
When Kenneth Tang retired from teaching elementary school in California’s Garvey School District, it was his mission to do all he could to continue to help his students. When a position on the school board for his district became open, his former students urged him to run.
“[My students] were telling me that they felt unheard [at to school board meetings] and about all these issues that they had in school,” said Tang, who was elected to the Alhambra Unified School District School Board this year. “They felt that I could be their voice.”
Tang was one of more than 80 educators, including many educators of color, who ran for office in 2020 and won. He used his experience as a participant in See Educators Run–NEA’s non-partisan political candidate training program designed especially for educators–to propel his campaign to victory.
“In this political environment it is even more critical now for educators to really step into the political arena, especially running for political office, because many times decisions are being made for us outside of the classroom,” said Tang.
Sue Cahill, who teaches in the Marshalltown Community School District in Iowa, knows that well as she begins to transition back to all distance learning due to the coronavirus pandemic. As a long time educator and another participant of the See Educators Run program, Cahill knew that prioritizing education issues on her campaign platform meant not only supporting her students while they were in her classroom, but throughout their entire lives.
“Education involves from early childhood, helping families of newborns and toddlers be CONTINUE READING: These educators ran for office—and won! - Education Votes
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” -Audre Lorde
After one of the most tumultuous and fraught elections of our lifetime, Joe Biden was chosen to be our next President, and Kamala Harris the next Vice President. A time for celebration in many corners, to be sure, but let’s not forget that over 70 million Americans voted the other way.
And we cannot forget that, just two weeks ago, Walter Wallace, Jr. was senselessly murdered at the hands of the Philadelphia Police Department and, before that, Breonna Taylor’s killers went unpunished and lack of accountability across the board signaled to everyone that business will go on as usual. 2020 has been punctuated with tragedy after tragedy, trauma after trauma—the ongoing convulsions of a national reckoning with racial inequity.
The election was clearly a divisive, stressful time for our country, and especially for our students. And this stress came on top of a nation already in shock and mourning from COVID-19 that is still forcing us to face the deadly racial and social inequities worsened by four long years of a discordant CONTINUE READING: The Election Is Over. How Do We Help Our Students (And Ourselves) Heal? - Philly's 7th Ward
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has spent months failing to make meaningful progress on urgent complaints of education discrimination relating to COVID-19, even as the pandemic continues to turn schools upside down and put vulnerable students at an even further disadvantage, according to multiple sources.
In September, employees in at least some of the department’s regional offices were informed that civil rights complaints specific to COVID-19 ― such as for children who have not been receiving accommodations for their disability during remote learning ― would require scrutiny from the highest levels of management, a development that would substantially slow the pace by which any of these complaints could get resolved.
A parent and an advocate have also been given the message that coronavirus-related complaints are unlikely to be addressed in the near future. After disability rights advocate Marcie Lipsitt filed several complaints on behalf of families whose children with disabilities were not receiving appropriate services from their school during shutdowns, she received a call from a department attorney informing her that complaints referencing COVID-19 were receiving greater scrutiny than non-coronavirus complaints and rewriting them without references to the pandemic could help them get processed faster.
HuffPost has also reviewed an email from regional management to a group of employees telling them that COVID-19 complaints are requiring additional review from headquarters. Still, the Education Department has denied that such levels of scrutiny are taking place.
“This information is categorically false and represents the viewpoint of a low-level employee CONTINUE READING:
The reactionary and undemocratic system by which we select our president was an insult to the urgency of the moment. Although millions more people voted for Joe Biden than for Donald Trump — the difference is now 5.4 million — it took several days to learn who won, thanks to the Electoral College. To the relief of many, it appears that this time — unlike in 2000 and 2016 — the candidate who got the most votes nationwide also won the presidential election.
If our students only learn about this exceptionally strange system from their corporate-produced history and government textbooks, they will have no clue why this is how we choose our president. More importantly, they will have a stunted sense of their own power — and little reason to believe they might have the potential to create something better.
To review: A voter in Montana gets 31 times the electoral bang for their presidential ballot than a voter in New York. A voter in Wyoming has 70 times the representation in the U.S. Senate as a voter in California, while citizens in Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. have none. The Republican Senate majority that recently confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court was elected by 14 million fewer votes than the 47 senators who voted against her confirmation.
Yet politicians and pundits regularly pronounce the United States a “democracy,” as if that designation is self-evident and incontrovertible. Textbooks and mainstream civics curricula make the same mistake, CONTINUE READING: Students deserve an explanation for the origins of the Electoral College