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Education

Teaching Hatred And Normalizing Violence Against Palestinians

Since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, there have been numerous Western officials publicly decrying school textbooks in Palestine (West Bank and Gaza) and how they instill violence against settlers, occupiers, and the Zionist entity. The officials rely in their outcries on reports by a liberal institute that defames Palestinian textbooks, while aggrandizing Zionist entity’s textbooks as harbingers for peace. Simultaneously, since the Al-Aqsa Flood, there have been numerous videos circulating showing young settlers not only being apathetic to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza (when the time of writing, it has surpassed 20,000 civilians killed) but also celebrating such atrocity.

Teachers Push For Ceasefire, With Education, Agitation, Resolutions

When Becky Pringle, president of the 3-million-member National Education Association (NEA), the largest union in the country, tweeted, “We join our partner organizations along with Jewish and Muslim leaders across the globe in an urgent call for an end to the violence,” it was one more step in the growing movement among union activists demanding a ceasefire in Palestine. Teachers unions including the Chicago Teachers Union, the San Antonio Alliance of Teachers and Support Professionals, and the Massachusetts Teachers Association were some of the first unions to sign on to a ceasefire resolution spearheaded by the United Electrical Workers and Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 3000.

Conservatives Want To Destroy Public Schools

Tulsa, Oklahoma — Ashley Daly still gets angry thinking about the first Oklahoma state board of education meeting she attended. It was August 2022 and the board was preparing to downgrade the accreditation for two school districts, including Tulsa, where Daly’s daughter attends school, over alleged violations of Oklahoma’s new law banning critical race theory. As the board penalized the district for a diversity training that predated the law, the realization struck her: ​“They were punishing a school district of 33,000 kids for political reasons, and I was the only parent from Tulsa in the room.”

The Right’s Persecution Of Palestine Supporters Looks Like A New Red Scare

I attended the Janazah and burial of Wadea Al-Fayoume on October 16. In the first weeks of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the six-year old Palestinian American boy, from a suburb of Chicago, was stabbed 26 times by his family’s landlord in a hate crime. The United States is currently awash in rhetoric justifying Muslim and Arab deaths. Joseph Czuba, 71, the landlord charged with killing Wadea and gravely injuring his mother, was on the receiving end of that rhetoric. Czuba was reportedly an avid listener of conservative talk radio. According to Czuba’s wife, he’d grown irate over supposed plans for a ​“national day of jihad,” a mistranslated call for mass protests that was weaponized by rightwing media to cause panic.

These Indigenous Leaders Started Rapid City’s First Lakota School

After the 30 documented boarding schools that operated in South Dakota until the 1970s stripped the state’s Indigenous Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people of their culture, language, history and human rights, Indigenous students have floundered in the state’s public school system. With high school graduation rates for Native American students hovering around 50%, some communities have sought to right educational wrongs through charter schools. But their proposals have repeatedly been stalled: A bill proposed by Native American legislators and communities to create state-funded charter schools focused on teaching Lakota language, culture and history failed for the third time last year.

How Students Are Leading The Movement For Palestine

New York City, New York - Students and educators from hundreds of schools across New York City converged in Bryant Park on Thursday afternoon. This was part of a national day of mobilizations to “shut it down” in solidarity with the Palestinian people who are suffering a genocide at Israel’s hands; a genocide that is being backed by the United States. As this action and countless others over the past weeks have shown, the world is witnessing the emergence of a massive movement against Zionism and imperialism, with student activists at the forefront. 20 minutes before the official start of the rally at 3pm, hundreds had already crowded the stairs of the New York Public Library chanting “Free free free Palestine!” and “One two three four, we don’t want your bloody war!”

First-Ever Strike For Portland Teachers Tackles Student Needs

The Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) walked out on strike today, closing 81 schools. The 4,500-member union is demanding more counselors, more planning time for teachers, more support for special education students, smaller class sizes, and increased salaries and cost-of-living adjustments. The union’s demands “are a paradigm shift for the state of Oregon,” said ninth grade teacher Sarah Mykkanen. “We aren’t just reacting to something negative, we are demanding a whole new view of what schools do, of how schools give students what they need.” The union represents classroom teachers in the Portland Public Schools.

Harvard Students Stand Strong For Palestine Despite Intimidation

Shortly following the historic Palestinian resistance offensive into Israel and the beginning of the bombing campaign of Gaza by Israeli forces, dozens of student organizations at one of the most elite universities in the world took a bold stance—unequivocally citing the state of Israel as responsible for all violence in the region. “We, the undersigned student organizations, hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence,” read the first sentence of a student solidarity statement at Harvard University, spearheaded by the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee. “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame,” reads the letter.

School Turmoil Grows As Moms For Liberty Spreads

Carl Kalauokalani has no children, no background in education and no experience in political or community organizing. Yet a year ago, the San Jose resident started the Santa Clara County chapter of Moms for Liberty, the far-right “parental rights” group stoking the nation’s red-hot culture wars. Why? Kalauokalani, who works for a software support group and lives in one of the bluest counties in California, says he liked Moms for Liberty’s stated mission — the protection of “parental rights at all levels of government” — when he looked for a way to change “a dysfunctional education system.” He’d heard stories.

Education, Science, And Sovereignty: PROINPA Vs. The US Blockade

High up in Venezuela’s Andes, the township of Mucuchies is home to a campesino-led initiative striving for sustainable agricultural production. Integral Producers of the Highlands [PROINPA, for the organization’s Spanish-language initials] is widely recognized not only for its top-notch seed potatoes but also for its scientific initiatives such as a state-of-the-art biotechnology lab, a germplasm bank, and, most recently, an aeroponic seed production facility. One of the secrets to PROINPA’s success is its democratic organization and its emphasis on education. Founded 24 years ago, the organization’s structure has an assembly of associated producers as its topmost level of decision-making, meaning that the producers themselves are in charge.

University Of Maine Graduate Students Win Union Recognition

The Maine Labor Relations Board last week certified the Maine Graduate Workers Union-UAW after an independent arbitrator determined it had a majority support among graduate workers, according to the Maine AFL-CIO. The university system said in August it would recognize the union and began bargaining if an independent analysis found it had a majority support. The graduate workers union will represent about 1,000 graduate assistants, research assistants and teaching assistants who make up a large percentage of the teaching and research workforce across the system’s seven campuses, according to the Maine AFL-CIO, which announced the certification on Friday afternoon.

Conservatives Can’t Stop Waging War On Schools

Florida is fertile ground for the long-standing Republican war on education. Florida’s Advanced Placement (AP) psychology courses — college-level courses taught in high schools — were temporarily banned because of content related to sex and gender, and the state’s AP African American studies curriculum has removed such topics as Black Lives Matter. The Florida Board of Education even adopted the right-wing misinformation platform PragerU into its curriculum, which downplays slavery and colonialism. This landscape isn’t new. Some 15 years ago, Kate Sheppard reported on one widely used textbook littered with factual misrepresentations, making students ​“choose between hard facts and the answers that their official curriculum [deemed] correct.”

Students Across The US Launch Green New Deal For Schools

Students at more than 50 high schools across the United States are launching a Green New Deal for Schools campaign, with the hope of getting climate policies enacted that will require school districts to add climate education to their curriculums and plan for climate disasters. The ultimate goal of the initiative, organized by the youth climate justice organization Sunrise Movement, is for federal legislation to be enacted to implement climate education policies in schools nationwide. “The Green New Deal for Schools will transform public schools in America to face the climate crisis and ensure all students receive safe and high-quality education – no matter their zip code or the color of their skin,” said 17-year-old Adah Crandall.

From Education To Incarceration: One School’s Missing History

Not long after moving to Topeka, Kansas, in the early 1980s, community organizer Curtis Pitts learned about a hidden slice of that city’s history that would come to shape his life’s work over the next four decades. He was introduced to the Kansas Technical Institute, or KTI, a Black vocational college that had prospered throughout the early twentieth century, only to close in the mid-1950s. Founded in 1895, KTI enjoyed the distinction of being the second Black college established west of the Mississippi. Built in part by its own students, the school became a self-sustaining campus, training them in agriculture, nursing, printing, tailoring, and theology, among other subjects.

The Pedagogy Of Power

I am standing in a classroom in a maximum security prison. It is the first class of the semester. I am facing 20 students. They have spent years, sometimes decades, incarcerated. They come from some of the poorest cities and communities in the country. Most of them are people of color. During the next four months they will study political philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, Niccolò Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and John Locke, those often dismissed as anachronistic by the cultural left. It is not that the criticisms leveled against these philosophers are incorrect. They were blinded by their prejudices, as we are blinded by our prejudices. They had a habit of elevating their own cultures above others.

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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.

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