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President Trump’s budget proposal uses the pretense of civil rights to further his school choice agenda—at the expense of research-based public school programming.

As dean of students, I’m sitting at my desk passing time one morning when my radio crackles. “There was just a fight in the courtyard,” says a teacher. “I’m bringing both of the students in right now.” I sigh in frustration and turn to watch the security-camera footage on my computer. Sure enough, there are two students facing off in the courtyard. Oh no, I think. Please don’t let that be who I think it is.

Mr. Franklin changed my son’s life. Alex used to hate school. He angrily questioned and resented every assignment, no matter how easy or fun it seemed. I dreaded the monumental struggle it took just getting him to do his work. Many parents fight this daily battle. Even those of us who are professional educators are not exempt from it. Then came Mr. Franklin.

The year I taught art in the dysfunctional chaos of an overcrowded urban middle school with weak administrators, practically everyone in the school—both students and teachers—needed a "safe place."

A web exclusive for "Dancing with Languages," from the September 2008 issue of Teaching Tolerance magazine.

On February 27, 1960, about 300 college students marched into downtown Nashville to confront Jim Crow segregation. Each of the marchers understood that they belonged to a larger movement of young people. Just three weeks earlier, in Greensboro, N.C., four college students staged a sit-in at the whites-only lunch counter in a Woolworth store. That action desegregated the lunch counter and triggered waves of copycat protests—like the one in Nashville.

Carol Anderson explains how, in many Southern states, Brown v. Board of Education fueled decades of resistance to school integration.

Yesterday, you needed to reassure your students and keep them safe. Today, you need to tell them the truth: Everything is not OK. We have work to do, and we can do it.