Skip to content

Education

I Faced Censorship And Attacks For Trying To Teach About Palestine

At MIT, I have witnessed firsthand how institutional priorities shift under the weight of political pressures and personal allegiances. My proposal for a course that critically engages via language and linguistics with the realities of settler colonialism vs. decolonization was not simply met with skepticism; it was censored and actively surveilled, doxed, and it is still being delegitimized. My experience is not an isolated incident, but part of a larger, systemic issue that permeates education across the United States. It is a symptom of what I have come to understand as the “Palestine exception,” where conversations surrounding Israel/Palestine are subjected to unique levels of scrutiny and suppression, from academic units, to students’ newspapers and faculty newsletters, to Executive Orders and Homeland Security.

Chicago Teachers Approve Contract With Remarkable Gains

This month, 85 percent of the Chicago Teachers Union’s 27,000 active members voted on a tentative agreement covering 500 public schools across the city. A record 97 percent voted yes. The contract will run from 2024 to 2028, expiring at the same time as the UAW’s contracts with the Big Three. The negotiation drew the greatest level of member participation and support in the CTU’s history and was achieved without a strike or a strike vote. The new contract addresses both bread and butter concerns and common-good demands. Said CTU president Stacy Davis Gates, a member of the union’s Caucus of Rank and File Educators: “It was the whole buffet.”

Trump Guts Support For Disabled Students; Families Are Fighting Back

If the Trump administration and the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) have their way, the basic educational and human rights of students with disabilities will soon be eviscerated. Due to the planned demolition of the Department of Education, the rights of students with disabilities to “a free, appropriate public education” — guaranteed by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) — are under fire. For nearly 50 years, the Department of Education (DOE) has been responsible for distributing funds — $14.2 billion in fiscal year 2025 — to state and local school districts to enable them to educate students with a range of disabilities.

Chicago Teachers Win Greener Schools

The Chicago Teachers Union won a tentative agreement in December that, for the first time, addresses climate and environmental justice demands—making healthy green schools a priority in our city. We achieved this breakthrough even while broader contract negotiations stalled. Finally, in April, we ratified the full agreement, which also includes big raises and lower class sizes. Our environmental justice victory stems from a collaboration between teachers and environmental activists to expose urgent problems facing us and our students—and link those problems to larger struggles.

Response To Trump’s Order To Restore ‘Truth’ To American History

I have now read almost a dozen of President Trump’s executive orders issued since January. It has been an experience I will remember. They all begin with the same statement, “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered…” So, I feel I have a right to respond similarly: By the authority vested in me as a citizen of the United States, protected by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, I hereby respond to the Executive Order of March 27, 2025 on Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.

Restoring Lies And Insanity To American History

President Donald Trump’s latest executive order titled “RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY” replicates a tactic used by all authoritarian regimes. In the name of countering bias, they distort the nation’s history into self-serving mythology. History will be used to justify the power of the ruling elites in the present by deifying the ruling elites of the past. It will disappear the suffering of the victims of genocide, enslavement, discrimination and institutional racism. The repression and violence during our labor wars — hundreds of workers were killed by gun thugs, company goons, police and soldiers from National Guard units in the struggle to unionize — will be untold.

Natural Disasters Are Driving A School Crisis

Adrinda Kelly watched from New York as Hurricane Katrina swallowed her hometown of New Orleans in 2005. Floodwaters rose, neighborhoods disappeared underwater, and she felt a familiar ache deepen. Her family was safe, but devastation quickly compounded a painful realization: Black children were portrayed as disposable, and New Orleans’ education system was almost completely privatized. Black students’ test scores faltered. Almost two decades later and nearly 2,000 miles away, similar echoes reverberated in Altadena, California, as wildfires swept through Los Angeles County in January.

Puerto Rico Protests Against Higher Education Cuts

This February, President Luis A. Ferrao Delgado of the University of Puerto Rico resigned after attempting to suspend 64 educational programs. The measure targeted core disciplines such as history, philosophy and comparative literature, stunning the university community and provoking bitter opposition. Eleven days of protests followed, compelling Ferrao to reverse the decision before stepping down. The university showdown is the latest chapter in a two-decade struggle against austerity, as Puerto Rico grapples with a debt crisis and economic stagnation.

Trump’s War On Education

The attacks on colleges and universities — Donald Trump’s administration has warned some 60 colleges that they could lose federal money if they fail to make campuses safe for Jewish students and is already pulling $400 million from Columbia University — has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism. Antisemitism is a smoke screen, a cover for a much broader and more insidious agenda. The goal, which includes plans to abolish the Department of Education and terminate all programs of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), is to turn the educational system, from kindergarten to graduate school, into an indoctrination machine.

Trump Denies Student Loan Relief To Nonprofit Workers

Trump signed an executive order on Friday, March 7, which directs the Education Department to exclude student loan forgiveness for workers at certain organizations which “engage in activities that have a substantial illegal purpose,” appearing to target some nonprofit groups at odds with his political agenda. Under the new order, workers would be disqualified from the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program if the Trump administration deems that their employers violated federal immigration laws, supported “terrorism”, or engaged in so-called “child abuse,” which includes “the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children or the trafficking of children to so-called transgender sanctuary States for purposes of emancipation from their lawful parents” – a clear attack on organizations that may support transgender rights.

The US Has Never Been More Divided On Climate

In the autumn of 2014, I was sitting in a tiny shed at a writing residency in Point Reyes, Northern California. I was there to write my book about the psychology of facing planetary crises. One particularly warm afternoon, I was looking out at Tomales Bay, teeming with bird life, when my phone rang with an unknown Washington DC number. Grateful for any distraction, I took the call. The fast-talking man on the other end of the line introduced himself as a senior advisor to the Republican Party. Let’s call him “Bob” (not his real name).

California Teachers Fight Palestine Censorship

As the Trump administration engages in a frontal assault on the teaching of race and ethnicity at the K-12 level, a quieter but no less important battle is shaping up in deep blue California. Communities of color are mobilizing statewide to defeat AB 1468, the latest bill to emerge from the CA Legislative Jewish Caucus (LJC) in its campaign to censor Palestinian voices in ethnic studies classes, and police all ethnic studies content along with it. Although the words “Gaza,” “Palestine” and “Israel” are nowhere to be found in the proposed legislation, the language of AB 1468 restricts the discipline to the “domestic experience” of “marginalized people” to discourage teachers from developing lessons on the impact of Israeli settler colonialism on Palestinian American and Muslim communities.

We Want To Build Communities Of Readers

There are days when the dusk of events settles heavily on me, and I try to find a way to retreat into a quiet corner and throw myself into the world of a book. It does not matter if it is a novel or a history book, as long as the author is able to conjure up a world that transports me from the flood of brutalities to an island of imagination. In recent months, I have been reading more and more novels – including Japanese crime fiction, a notable favourite – and finding in them characters with whom I can sometimes laugh and sometimes frown in bewilderment. Madness is not new to our world. It has been there before.

Teaching Without Fear

More than four years ago I wrote a piece entitled “Patriotic History is Fake History,” in which I reported that then-President Donald Trump had insisted that we must teach our children “that they are the citizens of the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.” At the same time, he signed an executive order to establish a “national commission to promote patriotic education” calling it the “1776 Commission.” It would be based on the 1776 Report that was  released by the commission to promote “patriotic education.”

Trump’s Reign Of Terror On Schools And How We Fight Back

The new presidential administration is enacting an education agenda the same way it is doing everything else: in a blitzkrieg, implementing sweeping measures as hastily as possible with little regard to their legality or feasibility. This rapid-fire assault — on trans youth who need gender-affirming care, on teachers who convey the basic facts of American history, on Head Start educators who need to make payroll—has a devastating material impact on countless individuals’ ability to teach, learn and feel safe in schools. Beyond these tangible consequences, the hailstorm of actions has a broader effect.
assetto corsa mods

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.