Articles

Rose Mary Gilliam just wants to speak her peace and find enlightenment. The 18-year-old New Orleans resident has been a volunteer in the public schools. She’s trained in non-violent protest. She talks with youngsters about making positive life choices. And this week, she’s joining a group of her peers in a reverse “freedom ride” to Washington, D.C., to join a national conversation and to protest inequities in education.

U.S. public schools are not branch offices of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That’s the message the Obama administration sent out in a letter to the nation’s school districts last week.

Sometime in the next week or so, the Senate of the state of Tennessee will probably approve the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. It’s a proposed law that states, “No public elementary or middle school shall provide any instruction or material that discusses sexual orientation other than heterosexuality” in grades K-8.

Scattered across the cinderblocks of our middle school walls are some new faces, photographs of kids who have been silenced. Lee Simpson on Oct. 10, 2008. Scotty Weaver on July 22, 2004. Lawrence King on Feb. 12, 2008. Carl Walker-Hoover on April 9, 2009. All silent. They are dead.

Thursday and Friday mornings, I have cafeteria duty at my elementary school. I always smile when our younger students come through the breakfast line. Their heads are at the level of the serving racks, so they have to hold their hands up to get their trays of food. I have to help them or we will have pancakes and syrup everywhere.

In today’s anti-government, anti-union environment, it’s important to illustrate what happens when the powerful hold all the cards. The Triangle shirtwaist fire presents an opportunity to do just that.

Religious topics have long been a touchy subject in public schools and none of them touchier than atheism. For young people though, the taboo surrounding unbelief appears to be disappearing. Recent surveys have found that younger Americans are the least likely to be religious. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, 29 percent of 18-29 year olds are religiously unaffiliated, compared with 15 percent of the population as a whole. And a 2006 Pew Research poll found that 1 in 5 young people said they have no religious affiliation, nearly double the proportion of the late 1980s.

Every morning at 7:15, the doors of our school open wide to a line of bus riders ready to come inside. "Hello, Jaheem. Hi, Kiara. Hey, Imani. Hope you're having a good day, Omar," I call out as the students walk past me to the cafeteria for breakfast. I stand at the doors for a moment and watch the big, yellow buses puff their diesel exhaust and chug their way to the garage until it's time for their afternoon run. Is there a more universal symbol for public schools than a big, yellow school bus?

There are three questions students of history should always ask: What’s the context?What’s the context?What’s the context? Yes, I know, it’s a play on the old real estate joke (location, location, location), but the importance of understanding how a quote or an event sits in terms of what’s happening around it cannot be overstated.

Last weekend, the Southern Poverty Law Center and two partners struck a legal agreement with the Anoka-Hennepin School District in Minnesota. Amid revolution in Egypt and fears of a monster snowstorm in the Midwest, this was hardly top-shelf news. But the agreement really was a big deal for LGBT students.