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Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: The Lead the Change Interview with Paul Campbell

Posted on May 11, 2026 by | Leave a comment

In the first part of this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Dr. Paul Campbell discusses his experiences researching educational change, leadership, and policy. Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Educational Administration and Leadership at The University of Hong Kong and President-Elect of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI). His research focuses on how diverse approaches to knowledge production and research engagement shape reform, and offer new ways for understanding what it means to lead, be a leader, and exercise leadership. Dr. Campbell is a recipient of the Emerging Scholar Award. The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call? 

Paul Campbell: The 2026 AERA theme invites us to remember the histories that have shaped our field while imagining futures that are more inclusive, equitable, and transformative. My scholarship begins with the belief that we cannot imagine new futures without first acknowledging the epistemic closures of the past. Educational leadership and change have long been dominated by Anglo-American traditions, privileging certain ways of knowing while marginalising others. To move forward, we must confront this history directly and commit to advancing epistemic diversity.

Source: The University of Hong Kong website

In my recent paper with Sefika Mertkan (Campbell & Mertkan, 2025), we argue that while geographical diversification of scholarship is a foundational step, it is insufficient on its own. What is more critical is epistemic diversity; the recognition and mobilisation of multiple epistemological traditions. This requires interrogating who produces knowledge, what epistemologies are applied, how knowledge is circulated and cited, and whose voices are solicited. As we wrote, “advancing epistemic diversity is more critical than geographical diversification in liberating the educational leadership knowledge base from the Anglo-American hegemony.” Remembering this history of epistemic dominance is essential if we are to imagine futures where pluriversal perspectives thrive. Only then can new possibilities emerge for how we understand the nature and purpose of leading educational change, and only then can more just realities for learners and communities thrive.

“Advancing epistemic diversity is more critical than geographical diversification in liberating the educational leadership knowledge base from the Anglo-American hegemony.”

My work also examines how supranational discourses shape our understanding of leaders, leading, and leadership in policy, research, and practice. In ‘Leadership for Learning: A Policy Analysis of the GEM Report 2024’ (Campbell & Sum, 2026), Nicola Sum and I show how global accountability frameworks often fail to take local realities into account. By applying a leadership-for-learning lens, we highlight pathways to reimagine futures where global frameworks are translated into contextually responsive practices. This reflects a desire to bridge histories of epistemic dominance with futures of inclusive, situated knowledge.

Taken together, this body of work reflects both optimism and frustration. Optimism, because there are genuine opportunities to rethink how educational change is understood and enacted. Frustration, because leaders are often positioned within policy-saturated environments that constrain their agency, and because knowledge production practices too often reproduce dominant paradigms rather than center the voices of educators and leaders themselves. The increasingly complex realities facing school leaders, shaped by global norms and demands, local contexts, and broader socio-political realities, require us to rethink not only what leadership and change are, but also how we study and support them.

Heeding the call of the 2026 AERA theme, therefore, means committing to a dual task: remembering the exclusions and closures of the past, while actively constructing futures that are plural, inclusive, and transformative. My scholarship seeks to contribute to this by interrogating the structures that sustain epistemic hegemony, amplifying diverse voices and thinking, and reimagining leadership and the leadership of educational change as a relational, educative, and contextually grounded practice. In doing so, I hope to support a field of educational change that is globally relevant and locally meaningful; one that ultimately serves the needs of students, educators, and communities in more just, equitable, and necessarily diverse ways.

LtC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

PC:  “I’m working on the margins in order to shake the core” was how one principal, in my study of principals’ life histories in relation to education reform, described the theme of their professional life and work. This articulation captures the complex realities of how leaders, their leadership, and change are positioned within systems, and the consequences this has for the enactment and possibilities of educational change. From this and related work, several lessons emerge for both scholars and practitioners.

Collaboration must be understood as socially and culturally situated. In ‘Leading Collaborative Educational Change: A Critical Policy Analysis of Leadership and Governance in Hong Kong Schools’ (Campbell & Kam, 2026), I show how hierarchical traditions, accountability demands, and conflict avoidance complicate the intentions and enactment of collaboration. Principals navigate tensions between policy ideals and lived realities, revealing that meaningful collaboration requires relational trust, cultural sensitivity, and reflexive leadership. This highlights the participatory dynamics of collaboration: who is involved, how power is exercised, and how goals are negotiated. Collaboration cannot, therefore, be reduced to structural arrangements or compliance mechanisms; it must be cultivated through participatory processes that respect cultural norms and empower diverse voices.

Agency is central to reimagining leadership in complex systems. In ‘“I’m Working on the Margins in Order to Shake the Core”: Educational Leadership, Agency, and the Reimagining of the Principalship’ (Campbell & Kam, 2026), principals describe how they enact agency through temporal, experiential, and relational dynamics. The agency framework articulated in this work, temporal (drawing on reform histories and aspirations), experiential (learning through practice and mentorship), and relational (building trust and mobilising communities) dynamics, offers a lens for understanding how leaders navigate, reinforce, or resist systemic constraints. For scholars, this challenges dominant conceptions of leaders’ positioning within and against system structures and constraints, and for leaders and educators in sites of practice, it underscores the need to support leaders in exercising agency within, with, and against systemic structures.

Organisational and socio-cultural dynamics must also be foregrounded. Accountability regimes, governance arrangements, and resource allocation shape the possibilities for collaboration and agency. At the same time, socio-cultural dynamics, comprised of hierarchical traditions, community expectations, and cultural dispositions toward conflict avoidance, mediate how leadership is enacted. Leaders must constantly negotiate these forces, balancing compliance with innovation and authority with relational trust. For educators, this means recognising that leadership is enacted within layered organisational and cultural contexts. For scholars, it calls for analyses that move beyond abstract models to examine how leadership is lived and contested in specific contexts.

Innovation in processes of change must also be conceptualised as situated and contested. In ‘Conceptualizing Innovation in Education: Implications for School Leadership and Change’ (Campbell et al., 2026), our editorial team and authors identified five themes requiring consideration for the leadership of innovation: innovation as relational, leadership as enabler or constraint, tensions between policy and practice, supportive cultures, and equity. Innovation is not a neutral construct; it reflects power relations and dominant epistemologies. For policymakers and professionals in sites of practice, this means developing organisational cultures of trust and inclusion. For scholars, it requires interrogating whose knowledge is valued and how innovation intersects with equity and justice.

Together, these insights highlight that educational change is shaped by participatory dynamics, organisational structures, socio-cultural contexts, and the agency of leaders. To reach better systems for all students, we must support leaders as active agents of change who navigate this dynamic complexity and are appropriately prepared and supported to do so.

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

PC: Despite persistent challenges, and what seems like a relentless intensification of complexity in education systems, I find hope in several directions.

First, epistemic diversity. Scholars are increasingly interrogating citational practices, editorial structures, and epistemic injustices, creating space for alternative epistemologies to shape the theoretical core of our fields. This movement holds promise for dismantling universalist narratives and cultivating pluriversal perspectives. It also signals a shift toward valuing multiple ways of knowing and being, and toward scholarship that is globally open but locally meaningful.

Second, leadership is reframed as educative, relational, and political. By moving beyond managerial and compliance-driven framings, we can reimagine school leaders as agents of justice, democratic ideals, and community empowerment. My work with school leaders in Hong Kong demonstrates that even within high-accountability systems, leaders exercise agency to sustain trust, adapt practices, and preserve professional identity. These acts of agency, often enacted “on the margins,” provide seeds of transformation that can “shake the core” of entrenched structures. They remind us that leadership is so much more than positional authority; it is a practice of agency, enacted through relationships and values.

Third, innovation as relational and inclusive. As our editorial in School Leadership & Management (Campbell, MacGregor & Sum, 2026) argued, innovation must be understood as a situated process of change rather than a discrete product. It is inherently political, reflecting epistemologies, power relations, and assumptions about whose knowledge counts. Equity and inclusion cannot be treated as add-ons; they must be central to how innovation is defined, led, and legitimised. When innovation is framed this way, it becomes a vehicle for addressing systemic inequities and fostering cultures of collaboration. This is where I see the field heading: toward a more nuanced, contextually grounded, and justice-oriented understanding of educational change.

Fourth, collective capacity. Ultimately, my hope lies in the collective capacity of scholars, policymakers, and professionals in sites of practice to remember histories of exclusion, interrogate present structures of dominance, and imagine futures of inclusivity and equity. The provocations we posed in the editorial mentioned earlier, innovation as process, leadership as dilemma space, and innovation as political, are invitations to debate, but also to act. They call for research and practice that is conceptually plural, empirically grounded, and ethically serious.

By centering agency, collaboration, and epistemic diversity, educational change can become truly transformative. The future of the field depends on our willingness to embrace complexity, to resist reductive framings, and to cultivate leadership and change that are relational, inclusive, and equity-oriented. In this, I find hope: that even amid constraints, leaders and scholars can work on the margins to shake the core and, in doing so, reimagine futures that are more just and humane.

References

Campbell, P. & Kam, Y. C. (2026). Leading Collaborative Educational Change: A Critical Policy Analysis of Leadership and Governance in Hong Kong Schools, Leadership and Policy in Schools, 1-21, https://doi.org/10.1080/15700763.2026.2636612 

Campbell, P., Macgregor, S. & Sum, N. (2026). Editorial: Conceptualizing Innovation in Education: Implications for School Leadership and Change, School Leadership and Management, 1-5. https://doi.org/10.1080/13632434.2026.2631919

Campbell, P. & Sum, N. (2026). Leadership for Learning: A Policy Analysis of the Global Education Monitoring Report 2024 and Its Local Implications for School Leadership, Management in Education, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1177/08920206261430580

Campbell, P. & Kam, Y. C. (2026). “I’m Working on the Margins in Order to Shake the Core”:  Educational Leadership, Agency, and the Reimagining of the Principalship, Journal of Educational Administration, 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1108%2FJEA-06-2025-0246

Campbell, P. & Mertkan, S. (2025). Geographical Diversification of Educational Leadership Research: Gaps in Our Understanding, Management in Education, 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/08920206251407030

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Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: The Lead the Change Interview with David Osworth

Posted on May 6, 2026 by | Leave a comment

In the first part of this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Dr. David Osworth discusses his experiences researching the intersections of educational policy and leadership for equity. Osworth is an Assistant Professor of Educational and Cultural Foundations at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. His research focuses on anti-LGBTQ+ policy, school discipline disparity, and neoliberal educational policy. The LtC series is produced by co-editors Dr. Soobin Choi and Dr. Jackie Pedota and their colleagues at the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call? 

David Osworth: My scholarship—both at AERA 2026 and beyond—critically examines oppressive structures in education through a historical lens with the express intent of supporting progressive reform that is humanizing and liberatory. I do this, for example, in my recent scholarship on the political hostility toward LGBTQ+ communities. In a critical policy analysis of anti-transgender legislation in North Carolina, I situate the present hostility toward transgender communities against the backdrop of the histories of LGBTQ+ communities within the United States over the 20th century (Osworth & Edlin, 2025). This focus on history not only allows us to understand the current political moment as form of retrenchment (see McQuillan et al., 2022) but also provides a road map to highlight resistance movements that have found purchase in the struggle for equity and how to learn from those strategies to inform present-day policies and politics. 

Source: University of North Carolina at Greensboro website

While this is a throughline of my scholarship, it is exemplified by the work I am presenting at this year’s annual conference. Continuing my work surrounding LGBTQ+ issues in education, I am presenting from a larger study on LGBTQ+ educational leaders. This study examines the experiences of 23 LGBTQ+ educational leaders from across the United States as they navigate the current political climate. In this paper, I specifically examine how support—or a lack of support—plays a role in how LGBTQ+ leaders navigate their work. The findings of this paper are set against the history of LGBTQ+ educators in the United States. This paper concludes by outlining how leaders envision the future for other LGBTQ+ leaders and how schools can be made more supportive spaces for LGBTQ+ communities. 

Another presentation at this year’s annual conference also engages with history to interrogate the present state of charter schools in New Jersey. Building from previous work that conceptualizes charter schools as a form of racialized enclosure that continues the neoliberal disinvest in public goods (Osworth & Tanner, 2025), my coauthors and I present a spatial analysis of charter schools using census data. We find that charter schools in New Jersey are almost exclusively located in geographies that are urban, lower-income, and predominantly serve non-white families. We situate this finding within the work of Marxist and racial capitalism scholars. We underscore that this exploitative pattern of charter proliferation in the state is directly ties to the history of federal redlining and opportunity hoarding of affluent, white communities (Cashin, 2021; Rothstein, 2017). 

LtC:What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

DO: My work aims to take a critical and interdisciplinary approach to educational research. I think that this is a major takeaway for the field as well as a commitment of the Educational Change SIG. In my recent work on school takeover in a rural school district, I interviewed Parents to better understand how they experienced the State’s intervention (Osworth, 2025, 2024). In this study, parents’ experiences illuminated counter-narratives about the takeover and complicated the State’s narrative about its progress. I think that these studies encapsulate a major takeaway from my scholarship as a whole. If we want to implement and enact change that meets the needs of the communities our schools serve, those communities must be included in the process. Too often, changes in our educational system relegate parents and communities to the periphery in the planning process while simultaneously relying on them to help implement the latest reforms. The findings from my scholarship point toward this reality. While the state education agency may say it includes parent feedback, parents’ experiences point in the opposite direction and demonstrate that trust and goodwill were destroyed in the process.

“Too often, changes in our educational system relegate parents and communities to the periphery in the planning process…”

Scholars and practitioners in educational change should therefore look toward centering community and family knowledge in the process of planning for change—not simply relegating them to be a tool to leverage in the journey for change. This moves from a more transactional view toward a more community-engaged and dialogic approach (see Freire, 1970/2018). My scholarship draws on the work of critical philosophers and thinkers, and I believe that those engaged in educational change need to prioritize the use of these theories, as bell hooks (1994) called for, making theory the cornerstone of liberatory practice.

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

DO: More than ever, the field of educational change must remain firmly grounded in a commitment to equity. Current resistance to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts disproportionately affects individuals from non-dominant identity groups, including—but not limited to—those marginalized by ability, socioeconomic status, gender, language, race, and sexuality. This contemporary moment of retrenchment (see Crenshaw, 1988) poses significant obstacles to efforts aimed at fostering socially just learning environments for all students. I view both my own scholarly work and the broader field as continuing to advance a justice-centered agenda—one that prioritizes the well-being of children and works toward realizing the democratic ideals upon which public education is founded.

At the same time, I am energized by the possibilities for engaging in theoretically robust scholarship within educational change. Concerns are often raised about a perceived disconnect between theory and practice, or about theory-driven research that lacks practical applicability. Yet I see the field at an especially promising juncture for meaningful praxis. Critical theoretical frameworks that offer important analytical tools for addressing today’s equity challenges also explicitly call for action. What is particularly compelling is the opportunity to pursue intellectually rigorous work that simultaneously informs how we act upon research insights. As educators and scholars continue to confront the complex, “wicked” problems facing education, it will be essential to do so through collaborative, community-engaged approaches that integrate theory and practice in purposeful ways. As we respond to the current political moment, I hope to see the field of educational change to keep these commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion as political pressure continues to mount for us to abandon these lines of inquiry and practice.

References

Cashin, S. (2021). White space, Black hood: Opportunity hoarding and segregation in the age of inequality. Beacon Press. 

Crenshaw, K. (1988). Race, reform, and retrenchment: Transformation and legitimation in antidiscrimination law. Harvard Law Review, 101(7), 1331-1387.

hooks, b. (1993). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

Freire, P. (1970/2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury. 

McQuillan, M. T., Eckes, S., Lewis, M. (2022). A solution in search of a problem: Justice demands more for trans student-athletes to fulfill the promise of Title IX. Marquette Sports Law Review, 33(1), 195-228.

Osworth, D. (2024). Cooperation or conquest: A case study of school takeover. Power and Education, 18(1), 50-64. https://doi.org/10.1177/17577438241304391 

Osworth, D. (2025). “Prepare yourself for the change”: Counternarratives of parents experiencing state takeover. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2025.2601552 

Osworth, D. & Edlin, M. (2025). The Political Construction of Anti-Transgender Policy: A Critical Policy Analysis of North Carolina State Legislators’ Discursive Formations. Journal of Queer and Trans Studies in Education, 2(2). 1-11. https://doi.org/10.60808/ren9-ak07

Osworth, D. & Tanner, M.N. (2025). From public good to private gain: Charter schools and the racialized enclosure of public education. The Urban Review, 57(4), 833-854. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-025-00744-w 

Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Publishing Company.

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When disruption replaces support: Scanning the headlines for recent developments in US education policy

Posted on February 5, 2026 by | Leave a comment

This week, IEN rounds up a wave of articles over the past 2 months about the effects of the policy changes in the first year of the current US administration. Firings, slashed budgets, lawsuits, immigration raids dominate the headlines. Despite the challenges, Congress just passed a 2026 budget that rejected the administration’s proposals to cut billions of dollars in education funding. For recent related posts see AI, Cellphones, Literacy, Students’ Mental Health, Political Turmoil and More: Scanning the Headlines for the Top Education Stories for 2025and Reform, Resistance, and More Turbulence? Scanning the Headlines for Predictions for Education in 2026

President Trump’s First Year: Education in America, U.S. Department of Education

8 takeaways from the first year of this Trump administration, EducationNC

‘“In one year, the Trump Administration has ended business as usual in education,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon in a press release issued on the anniversary. “As we enter year two: buckle up, because our foot is on the gas.”’  

What’s the Trump administration’s theory of action for improving schools? ChalkBeat

Trump 2.0: A sea change for K-12, K-12 Dive

Education has seen unprecedented changes in Trump’s second term, WPR

Brown Center scholars reflect on education after 1 year of the Trump administration, Brookings

“Within the first two weeks of his second term, President Trump issued three executive orders ending diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives across the government and in schools. Over the last year, the Trump administration has followed through by canceling federal research projects, withholding funds, and strong-arming universities into compliance. Yet, the administration’s actions on diversity, equity, and inclusion do not overturn the wealth of empirical evidence supporting it.“

11 numbers that capture the Trump effect on education, Hechinger Report

From head start to civil rights, 8 ways Trump reshaped education in just 1 Year, The74

Protesters demonstrated outside the U.S. Department of Education in March after the first round of layoffs affecting over 1,300 staff. (Bryan Dozier / Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP)

See all the lawsuits Filed Over Trump’s Education Policies, Education Week

Funding cuts & other disruptions

The Education Department’s efforts to fire staff cost over $28 million, watchdog says (NPR)

In Trump’s First Year, at Least $12 Billion in School Funding Disruptions, EducationWeek

Trump Slashed Billions for Education in 2025: See a List of Affected Grants, EducationWeek

Investigations and a Billion-Dollar ‘Shakedown’: How Trump Targeted Higher Education, The New York Times

See Which Schools Trump’s Education Department Is Investigating and Why, Education Week

What Trump’s $100,000 Visa Fee Could Mean for Schools, EducationWeek

Trump administration drops appeal in D.E.I. schools lawsuit, New York Times

Education Department doubles down on anti-DEI efforts, K-12 Dive

“The agency said it would continue to target DEI programs “with or without” a policy letter that set its interpretation of Title VI but was blocked in court.” 

Expanded Private School Choice

Federal Program Will Bring Private School Choice to At Least 4 New States, EducationWeek

Federal Private School Choice: Which States Are Opting In? EducationWeek

Trump administration pushes for school choice expansion amid declining test scores, ABC3340

What you need to know about private school choice, K-12 Dive

As School Choice Goes Universal, What New Research Is Showing, EducationWeek

“The number of students using public funds to enroll in private school or pay for home-school expenses has been growing rapidly following a wave of state policies that have launched new private school choice programs or expanded existing ones.“

Private school choice could ‘undermine’ special education gains, COPAA says, K-12 Dive

Trump’s national school voucher program could mean a boom in Christian education, The Hechinger Report

Anti-immigration & ICE in schools 

Tracker: ICE activity on K-12 school grounds, K-12 Dive

Minneapolis Public Schools community members demonstrate in Minneapolis, Minn., on Jan. 9, 2026, following reports of federal immigration agents on school grounds in the city..Kerem Yücel/Minnesota Public Radio/AP

Immigration enforcement gets closer and closer to schools. The effects are wide-reaching, Chalkbeat

Federal immigration enforcement near schools disrupts attendance, traumatizes students and damages their academic performance, The Conversation


Parental stress, raids, and isolation: How immigration raids traumatize even the youngest children, The Hechinger Report

 ‘Band-Aid Virtual Learning’: How Some Schools Respond When ICE Comes to Town, EducationWeek 

“Districts nationwide are increasingly weighing virtual learning as families express concern about the growing presence of federal immigration agents in communities and near schools.”

Kids, staff, parents detained: How federal activity in Minnesota is affecting schools and students, MPR News

U.S. Border Patrol agents detain a person on the ground near Roosevelt High School during dismissal time on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis. Kerem Yücel | MPR News

ICE’S assault on a Minnesota school district, The New Yorker

Whistles and walkie-talkies: Minneapolis keeps guard over schools amid ICE arrests, Reuters

Twin Cities Parents and Educators Describe Terror of ICE Raids, Call for Help, The74

ICE detained a 5-year old Minnesota boy. School leader says agents used him as ‘bait’, MPR News

The ICE surge is fueling fear and anxiety among Twin Cities children, NPR

As ICE Targets Twin Cities Schools & Bus Stops: Even Citizens Keep Kids Home, The74

Minneapolis Schools Shut Down for 2 Days in Wake of ICE Clashes, Fatal Shooting, The74

Twin Cities Schools Offer Online Classes, The74

St. Paul schools leader: 1 in 4 students in virtual learning amid ICE surge; district tweaks grading, K-12 Dive

‘There are kids not going to school’: fear of ICE is keeping children from classes in Connecticut, The Guardian

Portland Public Schools says attendance has dropped since start of ICE operation, WGME 13

‘People shouldn’t live in fear’: Denver students protest ICE actions under Trump, ChalkBeat

“More than 1,000 Denver teachers called out of work Friday, with some joining students to march around the Colorado Capitol on a day of nationwide protests.”

Hundreds of Texas public school students walk out to protest ICE killings The Texas Tribune

Utah students walk out to protest ICE tactics: ‘Fascism has got to go’, The Salt Lake City Tribune

Thousands of students walk out of Arizona schools to protest ICE, Arizona’s Family 5

Indiana students hold ICE walkouts, Indiana Star

Thousands of students across the Bay Area walked out of schools in protest of ICE, ABC 7

Students walk out of schools in Knoxville to protest ICE, NBC 10

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Centering Equity Through Historical Grounding and Collective Educational Change with Latrice Marianno

Posted on December 21, 2025 by | Leave a comment

In December’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Dr. Latrice Marianno argues that meaningful educational improvement must be historically grounded and explicitly centered on equity and justice, not treated as a side effort within school improvement. Despite current challenges, she calls for collective, systems-focused approaches that dismantle structural barriers and urges educators and scholars to continually act as if radical transformation in education is possible. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A PDF of the fully formatted interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2026 AERA Annual Meeting theme is “Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures: Constructing a New Vision for Educational Research.” This theme calls us to consider how to leverage our diverse knowledge and experiences to engage in futuring for education and education research, involving looking back to remember our histories so that we can look forward to imagine better futures. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call? 

Dr. Latrice Marianno (LM): Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Association for the Study of Higher Education’s (ASHE) annual conference in Denver. During my time there, I visited the Museum for Black Girls and encountered this quote from Angela Davis above one of the exhibits: “You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” For me, this quote embodies the work before all of us. To heed this year’s call, I am continuing to deepen my work around equitable school improvement in a few ways.

Latrice Marianno, Ph.D.

First, I am ensuring that my work is continually grounded in the historical context that has produced and/or maintained the inequities we continually see in education. Critical policy genealogy, which focuses on understanding the origin and evolution of policies (Brewer, 2014; Meadmore et al., 2000), is something I have been drawn toward and intend to engage with more deeply. I find it critically important to understand how policies came to be and the issues those policies were intended to address as that insight can shed light on how educational policies create or maintain inequities. One example that illustrates the importance of understanding the histories of educational policies is the history of state teacher certification policies. While characterized as a policy aimed to enhance the professionalization of teachers (e.g., Hutt et al., 2018), requirements for teachers to pass exams to become certified have long reinforced inequities in access to entering the teaching profession (e.g., Carver-Thomas, 2018). Understanding the history of these policies means an awareness that these certification policies were popularized as a way to justify lower pay for Black educators and later the displacement of Black educators (e.g., Fultz, 2004; Tillman, 2004). Remembering our histories is a necessary foundation if we are to reimagine educational systems.

Second, I will continue focusing on interrogating systems, policies, and practices in educational spaces both in my teaching and scholarship. My work focuses on examining how school improvement systems can be reimagined and redesigned to better support educational leaders to engage in meaningful and justice-centered improvement. For example, Marianno et al. (2024) focuses on state-influenced school improvement plan templates and the extent to which educational leaders are prompted to think about and address inequities. This work opens a conversation regarding how this tool (i.e., school improvement templates) might be redesigned to support educational leaders to center equity in the school improvement planning process. Currently, I teach in a principal preparation program which has allowed me to continually engage with educators and aspiring educational leaders around what this could look like in practice. My teaching allows opportunities for me to learn from and alongside my students as we collectively think about the supports, tools, and professional learning that support educational leaders to think critically about equitable school improvement and act on those commitments in sustainable ways. For example, in my course on data-driven school improvement, we use Bernhardt’s (2017) program and process evaluation tool to prompt them to think about ways school policies and practices create or maintain inequities – an activity they have found useful in prompting them to notice and reflect on inequities within their schools and districts.

Featured Exhibit at the Museum for Black Girls

Finally, I am committed to supporting and engaging in collective futuring in educational spaces. This commitment means sharing my work in practitioner-friendly formats (e.g., policy reports, and/or practitioner journals like Educational Leadership or Phi Delta Kappan), rather than solely academic journals. This commitment also means continuing to challenge assumptions about what it means to improve a school and supporting educators and educational leaders to think critically about school improvement and educational justice as intertwined endeavors. To envision beyond our current system and imagine what could be. To “act as if it were possible to radically transform the world” and “to do it all the time.”

LiC: What are some key lessons that practitioners and scholars might take from your work to foster better educational systems for all students?

LM: Recently, my work has focused on understanding school improvement planning (SIP) processes and how educational leaders think about and work toward redressing inequities through those processes (Marianno, 2024; additional work forthcoming). Through this research, I found that educational leaders viewed equity as either an implicit part of school improvement planning or absent from that process, and that school leaders were not prompted to think about equity within the SIP process. These views and approaches undermined the district’s expressed equity focus by creating a disconnect between their policy intent and implementation. In my work, I argue for the need to explicitly connect equity with school improvement and begin to identify opportunities to center equity within a process that can often be thought of as parallel to school improvement rather than an integral part of those efforts. 

“I argue for the need to explicitly connect equity with school improvement.”

Ultimately, I hope my work inspires folks to be transgressive – to push against the boundaries of what is typically considered improvement within the current educational system (e.g., lack of explicit focus on redressing inequities within improvement efforts). To continually question the assumptions that undergird our collective work in improving education for all students, especially those from historically marginalized backgrounds. To believe in radical transformation and work toward it in our pursuit of educational justice. Toward this end, there are a few key lessons I hope folks can take from my work which collectively emphasizes the importance of being systems-focused, centering the knowledge and experiences of marginalized students and communities, and then leveraging that knowledge to design more just futures. 

First, there can be no educational improvement without a focus on redressing inequities. Too often equity is treated or understood like a side project rather than integral to the work of educational improvement (Marianno, 2024). However, as scholars like Gloria Ladson-Billings and Michael Dumas have argued, substantively improving education requires explicitly attending to the racism and antiblackness that shape the current educational system (Dumas, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2006). 

“Too often equity is treated or understood like a side project rather than integral to the work of educational improvement.”

Second, we must focus on reimagining our systems, policies, and practices toward educational justice (Welton et al., 2018). There has been a popular illustration that people, particularly in education, have used to describe equity. This illustration shows three individuals of varying heights standing outside of a fence watching a baseball game. One individual is tall enough to see over the fence without additional support while the other two need additional and varied support. While this illustration has multiple iterations, there is often a comparison between equality and equity in which equality represents everyone getting the same number of boxes to stand on, and equity representing everyone getting what they need to, in fact, see over the fence. The version that most resonates with me includes a visual representation of liberation as the removal of the fence. For me, this representation highlights how education broadly and schools specifically have been designed with particular people in mind (in this case the individual tall enough to see without additional support) and how the removal of the fence would serve everyone. I firmly believe that to ensure marginalized students have equitable and just educational opportunities, experiences, and outcomes, it is critical that our collective work (practitioners and scholars alike) focuses on removing the fences (i.e., barriers) that marginalize students and lead to inequities. Engaging in educational improvement in this way centers the experiences of marginalized students, such that educational spaces are designed with them in mind.

Finally, we must recognize the value of collective knowledge and experiences. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford (2020) notes that we need to “intentionally harvest the collective wisdom of many” to “envision better and plot a course for how to get there” (p. 43). That is, futuring for education requires honoring and valuing the knowledge and expertise of diverse stakeholders – teachers, educational leaders, students, and caregivers. In particular, we need to view students and caregivers as valuable partners who can aid in both addressing the educational problems schools are facing and support imagining an otherwise. 

LtC: What do you see the field of Educational Change heading, and where do you find hope for this field for the future?

LM: Honestly, I’m not sure where I see the field of educational change heading. The current climate makes that picture a bit hazy for me. We’re in such a significant period of retrenchment with attacks on academic freedom in higher education, undermining of public education through funding cuts and dismantling the Department of Education, and backlash for anything remotely equitable or inclusive. It is disheartening, though unsurprising. This moment in our history reflects longstanding patterns in American history where movements toward justice are met with resistance and retrenchment. As Decoteau Irby’s (2021) work and the Angela Davis quote shared earlier both remind us, the current moment is a reminder that systems of oppression are constantly at work. We have to act as if we can radically transform the world all the time because systems of oppression are constantly mutating and reinventing. With that in mind, I do have hopes for the field moving forward. 

I hope we move toward deeper recognition that equity and justice must be central to educational improvement, not a side project or parallel effort. This is the work. There is no meaningful school improvement work divorced from a focus on educational justice. In my own work, I’ve seen how educational leaders are often unclear about how to integrate equity into improvement work or treat equity as an implied focus undergirding their improvement efforts but in ways that actually undermine those efforts (Marianno, 2024). Specifically, district leaders viewed equity as an implied focus and foundation of all of their school improvement efforts. However, this approach led school leaders in that district to believe that equity was absent from the process altogether and left them unsure of where and how to integrate equity in their improvement efforts because it was not explicitly discussed. Moving forward, I hope we regard equity and justice as non-negotiables that guide how we define problems, reorganize educational systems, and measure the success of educational improvement efforts. 

I hope we move toward a more historically grounded approach to school and systems improvement. To meaningfully redress inequities, we must understand how past policies and practices created the systems we currently have. Tracing policy histories, such as the racialized roots of teacher certification requirements or gifted education (e.g., Mansfield, 2016), reveal that many present-day inequities are not accidental, and reinforces the understanding that policies are not neutral. I hope the field continues to deepen its engagement with historical analysis, recognizing that remembering the past is essential for imagining futures that depart from it. 

I hope the field continues to shift toward more systemic and collective approaches to educational improvement. When working with aspiring educational leaders in my course on data-driven school improvement and building on the work of scholars like Brandi Hinnant-Crawford (2020), I find they often leave the course with a better understanding of how school systems, policies, and practices shape disparities within their schools and districts and the importance and value of collective approaches to their improvement work. This is my hope for the field – that we engage these ideas not just intellectually but as part of our praxis. 

Despite the current moment we’re in, I hope that both scholars and practitioners act as if radically transforming education is possible – and that they do it all the time. 

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New Policies, New mandates, Uncertainty and Chaos: Scanning the Back-To-School Headlines in the US for 25-26 (Part 2)

Posted on September 17, 2025 by | Leave a comment

This second part of IEN’s annual scan of the back-to-school stories brings together some of the headlines that focused on the effects of a flurry of executive orders and policy changes from Washington. The first part of the scan shared stories from outside the US, and, next week, we’ll review some of the other back-to-school headlines in the national and local press in the US. 

For back-to school headlines from Fall 24: Politics, Policies, and Polarization: Scanning the 2024-25 Back-To-School Headlines in the US (Part 1); Supplies, Shortages, and Other Disruptions? Scanning the Back-to-School Headlines for 2024-25 (Part 2); Banning Cell Phones Around the World? Scanning the Back-to-School Headlines for 2024-25 (Part 3); Fall 23: Crises and Concerns: Scanning the Back-to-School Headlines (Part 1), (Part 2), (Part 3). Fall 22: Hope and trepidation: Scanning the back-to-school headlines in 2022 (Part 1), (Part 2) , (Part 3); Fall 21: Going back to school has never been quite like this (Part 1), (Part 2), (Part 3); Fall 20: What does it look like to go back to school? It’s different all around the world…; Fall 19: Headlines around the world: Back to school 2019 edition.

Tracking Trump: His actions on education, The Hechinger Report 

Introducing the Trump K-12 education litigation tracker, Brookings

As Students Return to School, Educators Grapple With Chaos From Washington, The74

“As 47 million students return to school in the coming weeks, district leaders say they’re experiencing an uncertainty they haven’t felt since the pandemic. It’s “the amount of information that’s coming to you all at once,” said Jeremy Vidito of the Detroit schools. He laid out a litany of hardships, including figuring out “what’s true, what’s not. Emergency orders. Budget cuts.” But this time, the federal government is the source of the unease, as the Trump administration seeks to reduce more spending.” — The74

Funding

Your Guide to the Evolving Federal Budget and What It Means for Schools, Education Week

State Funding for Schools Is a Mess This Year, Too. Here’s Why, Education Week

$5 Billion in Federal Funding for Nine K–12 Formula Grant Programs Hangs in the Balance Between White House and Senate Proposals, LPI

“The Trump administration’s budget request for FY 2026 would cut overall education funding by nearly 16% compared to current funding levels” — LPI

House panel approves 26% cut to Title I funding for FY26, K-12 Dive

The House meets to vote on the bill that would cut the U.S. Department of Education’s budget by 15% for fiscal year 2026. Source: K-12 Dive

House Lawmakers Endorse Some—But Not All—of Trump’s Education Cuts, Education Week

Trump administration cancels dozens more grants, hitting civics, art, and higher ed, Education Week

Trump shifts millions of dollars to HBCUs and tribal schools amid deep education cuts, USA Today

Trump administration boosts HBCU funding after cutting grants for Hispanic-serving colleges, CNN

Trump Department of Education rolls out latest step to expand school choice nationwide, Fox News

“Department of Education sends guidance on private school kids obtaining federally-funded benefits, including one-on-one tutoring, counseling,” Fox News

Half of the states won’t comply with Trump’s push to defund schools over DEI, The74

Nation’s Report Card at risk, researchers say, The Hechinger Report

“While the Trump administration has vowed to preserve NAEP, it has overseen major cuts to staff who work on it and the elimination of more than a dozen tests” — Hechinger Report

How At-Risk Federal Data Is Being Rescued and Preserved, New America

Trump Admin. Wants to Scale Back Data Collection on Career and Technical Programs, Education Week

“The Trump administration wants to roll back rules for collecting data on state career and technical education programs instituted in the final days of the Biden administration and align the largest federal CTE program with the president’s first-day executive order making it federal policy to recognize only two sexes.” — Education Week

How Schools Will Feel the Federal Funding Cuts to Libraries and Museums, Education Week

Trump administration axes federal Blue Ribbon program that recognized high-achieving schools, Chalkbeat

FCC proposal would disconnect school bus Wi-Fi, hotspots from E-rate coverage, K-12 Dive

Students, schools race to save clean energy projects in face of Trump deadline, The Hechinger Report

 Colorado state capitol rally in support of “The Green New Deal for Colorado Schools.” Source: Emma Weber, The Hechinger Report

Most—But Not All—Imperiled Federal Grants for Special Education Will Continue, Education Week

“The U.S. Department of Education says it wants projects aligned with Trump administration priorities.” — Education Week

Trump Canceled Millions for Special Education Teacher Training. What’s Next?, Education Week

Health

Schools prepare for the worst as RFK Jr. reshapes the vaccine landscape, The Hill

Confusion as Kids Head Back to School and RFK Jr. Calls the Shots on Vaccines, The74

Decreasing immunization rates among kindergarteners, Source: The74

Childhood Vaccinations Are Down. Schools Are Bracing for Outbreaks, Education Week

Schools brace for federal changes to lunch, The Hill

Trump law will cut food stamps for 2.4 million people as work rules widen, The Guardian

Civil Rights

How the Education Department is using civil rights laws to bring schools to heel, NPR

Trump’s Civil Rights Agenda Comes for Public Schools, Education Next

See Which Schools Trump’s Education Department Is Investigating and Why, Education Week

Some State Leaders Cheer as Trump’s Ed. Dept. Investigates Their Schools, Education Week

Schools Sue Trump, But It’s Getting Harder for Them to Recoup Money, Education Week

Trump administration targets race-focused school programs, The New York Times

“The Trump administration has launched investigations into school districts in Chicago and Evanston over programs aimed at supporting Black students, saying that efforts such as hiring Black teachers, expanding Black history and antiracism training may violate civil rights law. Supporters say the initiatives address systemic inequities and improve student outcomes, while critics warn they could be dismantled in court battles likely to reach the Supreme Court.” — NYT

Programs for vision and hearing loss harmed by Trump’s anti-diversity push, ProPublica

40 states could lose federal funds for sex ed if they keep gender identity in curriculum, ChalkBeat

“Posters are displayed in a Los Angeles Unified high school health education classroom in 2018. The Trump administration told 40 states to remove references to gender identity from a federally funded sex ed program and stripped California of its funding when it refused to do so.” Source: ChalkBeat

Ed. Dept. Will Release New Guidance on School Prayer, Trump Says, Education Week

Trump administration rolls back pivotal guidance about educational rights of English learners, Chalkbeat

For mixed status families, deportation fears cast shadow over new academic year, NPR

Next Week: Supplies, Support, Lunch and Fear: Scanning the National and Local Back-To-School Headlines in the US for 25-26 (Part 3)

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Mel Ainscow on reforming education systems for inclusion and equity

Posted on July 30, 2025 by | Leave a comment

This week, Mel Ainscow discusses some of the key insights from his new book Reforming Education Systems for Inclusion and Equity. Ainscow is Emeritus Professor, University of Manchester, Professor of Education, University of Glasgow, and Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology.

What’s the greatest challenge facing education systems around the world? Finding ways of including and ensuring the progress of all children in schools. In economically poorer countries this is mainly about the millions of children who are not able to attend formal education. Meanwhile, in wealthier countries many young people leave school with no worthwhile qualifications, whilst others are placed in special provision away from mainstream education and some choose to drop out since the lessons seem irrelevant. Faced with these challenges, there is evidence of an increased interest internationally in the idea of making education more inclusive and equitable. However, the field remains confused as to the actions needed in order to move policy and practice forward. 

What’s the greatest challenge facing education systems around the world? Finding ways of including and ensuring the progress of all children in schools.

Reforming Education Systems for Inclusion and Equity book cover

Reforming education systems

Over the last thirty years or so I have had the privilege of working on projects aimed at the promotion of inclusion and equity within education systems, in my own country and internationally. This leads me to propose a radical way of addressing this important policy challenge. This thinking calls for coordinated and sustained efforts within schools and across education systems, recognising that improving outcomes for vulnerable learners is unlikely to be achieved unless there are changes in the attitudes, beliefs and actions of adults. All of this echoes the views of Michael Fullan, an internationally recognised expert on educational change, who argues: “If you want system change you have to change the system!”

“If you want system change you have to change the system!”

In Reforming Education Systems for Inclusion and Equity, I suggest six key ideas that can be used to guide reform efforts:

  1. Inclusion and equity should be seen as principles that inform educational policies. These principles should influence all educational policies, particularly those that are concerned with the curriculum, assessment processes, teacher education, accountability and funding.
  2. Barriers to the presence, participation and achievement of learners should be identified and addressed. Progress in relation to inclusion and equity requires a move away from explanations of educational failure that focus on the characteristics of individual children and their families, towards an analysis of contextual barriers to participation and learning experienced by learners within schools. In this way, those students who do not respond to existing arrangements come to be regarded as ‘hidden voices’ who can encourage the improvement of schools. 
  3. Schools should become learning communities where the development of all members is encouraged and supported. Reforming education systems in relation to inclusion and equity requires coordinated and sustained efforts within schools. Therefore, the starting point must be with practitioners: enlarging their capacity to imagine what might be achieved and increasing their sense of accountability for bringing this about. The role of school leaders is to create the organisational conditions where all of this can happen.
  4. Partnerships between schools should be developed in order to provide mutual challenge and support. School-to-school collaboration can strengthen improvement processes by adding to the range of expertise made available. In particular, partnerships between schools have an enormous potential for fostering the capacity of education systems to respond to learner diversity. More specifically, they can help to reduce the polarisation of schools, to the particular benefit of those students who are marginalised at the edges of the system, and whose progress and attitudes are a cause for concern. 
  5. Families and other community partners should be encouraged to support the work of schools. The development of education systems that are effective for all children will only happen when what happens outside as well as inside a school changes. Area-based partnerships are a means of facilitating these forms of cooperation. School leaders have a crucial role in coordinating such arrangements, although other agencies can have important leadership roles. 
  6. Locally coordinated support and challenge should be provided based on the principles of inclusion and equity. The presence of experienced advisers who can support and challenge school-led improvement is crucial. There is an important role for governments in creating the conditions for making such locally led improvements happen and providing the political mandate for ensuring their implementation. This also means that those who administer local education systems have to adjust their priorities and ways of working in response to improvement efforts that are led from within schools.
Mel Ainscow, Source: Alchetron

Using evidence

Evidence is the life-blood of inclusive educational development. Therefore, deciding what kinds of evidence to collect and how to use it requires considerable care, since, within education systems, what gets measured gets done. This trend is widely recognised as a double-edged sword precisely because it is such a potent lever for change. On the one hand, data are required in order to monitor the progress of children, evaluate the impact of interventions, review the effectiveness of policies, plan new initiatives, and so on. On the other hand, if effectiveness is evaluated on the basis of narrow, even inappropriate, performance indicators, then the impact can be deeply damaging. 

The challenge, therefore, is to harness the potential of evidence as a lever for change, whilst avoiding these potential problems. This means that the starting point for making decisions about the evidence to collect should be with agreed definitions of inclusion and equity. In other words, we must measure what we value, rather than valuing what can more easily be measured. Therefore, evidence collected within the education system needs to relate to the presence, participation and achievement of all students.

“[I]nclusion and equity should not be seen as a separate policy. Rather, they should be viewed as principles that inform all national policies”

Implications

These ideas are guided by a belief that inclusion and equity should not be seen as a separate policy. Rather, they should be viewed as principles that inform all national policies, particularly those that deal with the curriculum, assessment, school evaluation, teacher education and budgets. They must also inform all stages of education, from early years through to higher education. In this way inclusion and equity must not be seen as somebody’s job. Rather, it is reform agenda that must be the responsibility of everyone involved in providing education.

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From foundational learning to colleges and careers: Critical educational issues in India post-pandemic (Part 1)

Posted on July 2, 2025 by | Leave a comment

The pandemic disrupted educational services and exacerbated inequalities in India, but did it also create opportunities to improve education more broadly? In this 2-part series, Haakon Huynh explores some of the initiatives that aim to deliver more inclusive, high-quality education for the next generation in the world’s most populous nation. This week, part 1 outlines some of the enduring issues in education in India and shares a few examples of the programs and practices trying to address them. A second post will focus on some of the efforts to address concerns that are taking on increasing importance in India post-pandemic including chronic absence, mental health, nutrition, and sustainability.  For previous posts related to education in India see: From a “wide portfolio” to systemic support for foundational learning: The evolution of the Central Square Foundation’s work on education in India (Part 1 and Part 2); and Sameer Sampat on the context of leadership & the evolution of the India School Leadership Institute. 

Foundational learning and academics

With 248 million people enrolled in the education system, no single description can capture all the educational issues being pursued in India. But by almost any measure, foundational learning has been one of India’s major concerns for the government and funders for some time. According to India’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) in 2018, approximately 80% of grade 3 students in rural areas could not read a grade 2 text or solve basic subtraction problems. 

A diagram of a group of people AI-generated content may be incorrect.

On top of long-standing concerns about improving foundational learning, the school closures also heightened concerns about academic learning overall. The National Achievement Survey, for example, showed a significant decline in test scores, particularly in high school, as class 10 scores fell by about 13% in Mathematics, 18% in Science, and 9% in Social Science. A survey of students in 200 schools in Assam between 2018 – 2022 showed that, during the pandemic, students had lost the equivalent of nine months of learning in math and eleven months in language. A study in Tamil Nadu, in 2021 also found significant learning deficits (or about .7 standard deviations in math and almost .4 standard deviations in language) compared to similar students tested in 2019; however, in contrast to other countries like the US, some recovery took place relatively rapidly, as two-thirds of the deficit was made up within six months after school reopening.

To address these long-standing academic concerns, the Indian government has launched education policies such as the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN Bharat). Major efforts to develop and scale-up effective approaches for foundational learning are also supported by groups based in India like the Central Square Foundation and international donors like the Gates Foundation. 

A screen shot of a chart AI-generated content may be incorrect.
NIPUN Bharat, Department of School Education & Literacy

Within this context, states and schools in India are pursuing a host of specific innovations aiming to support students’ ability to read, write and count. These include tech-enabled approaches supported by the Central Square Foundation like digital microlearning video modules delivered weekly to teachers and school leaders in Bihar and a Mentor mobile app used for real-time classroom observations. The HundrED collection of global innovations also features a number of resources and practices that have demonstrated some effectiveness in supporting foundational learning in India. Among them, Building Blocks, a maths app, provides over four hundred interactive games that children from grades 1 – 8 can explore at their own pace to supplement their instruction in school. 

At the same time, limited access to computers and the internet in India – where just 4% of rural households own a computer – continue to constrain the reach of tech-dependent efforts to support foundational learning. As a result, other initiatives recognized as part of HundrED’s collection of global innovations are trying to develop approaches that do not rely on the internet. Building on the fact that a billion Indians watch nearly four hours of TV every day, BIRD (the Billion Reader’s Initiative) adds Same Language Subtitling (SLS) on mainstream entertainment on television & streaming platforms.  TicTacLearn (TTL) endeavors to increase access to educational content through a free digital education platform that provides over 14,000 curriculum-aligned videos and assessments in seven Indian languages. While the videos are available on YouTube, TTL also distributes them via pen drives, making it possible to load the content onto school computers in remote areas with limited internet. 

A group of children playing on a tablet AI-generated content may be incorrect.

HundrED’s Global Collection this year also features the Raster Master Three-Generational (3G) Learning Model which shows what’s possible without reliance on the internet, television or other technologies. This initiative transforms unused walls in streets and courtyards into learning spaces for the “Teachers of the Street.” Painted with chalkboard paint, these walls provide a cost-effective, visible, and accessible platform for teaching letters, numbers, and basic lessons, which are often led by children themselves. Like the Hope House project in Rwanda where secondary school students paint educational murals featuring world maps, alphabets, numbers in English and Kinyarwanda, these low-tech approaches are particularly well-suited to lowering the barrier to participation for first-generation learners and out-of-school children. 

A group of people sitting on a wall AI-generated content may be incorrect.

Increasing access to college and careers 

Although India has rapidly expanded access to higher education, the pandemic has also intensified concerns about future readiness in India and helped to drive efforts to create new pathways into college and careers. In terms of access, a recent government press release highlights that between 2011–12 and 2021–22, enrollment in state public universities rose from 23.4 million to 32.4 million students, while private universities experienced a staggering 497% increase in enrollment.  

A graph on a white background AI-generated content may be incorrect.

These increases included significant gains in access to higher education among marginalized groups. According to the Ministry of Education, enrollment among indigenous communities rose by over 100%, among protected castes by more than 75%, and among Muslim minorities by 60%. The Gender Parity Index also improved from 0.87 in 2011–12 to 1.01 in 2021–22, meaning 1.01 women were enrolled for every man. At the same time, concerns about equity remain, particularly in private institutions that now account for over a quarter of all higher education enrollment. Private universities are not legally required to follow affirmative action mandates even though they often benefit from public support like land grants and tax exemptions. Under these conditions, the share of historically marginalized students in private higher education has increased moderately, but hasn’t kept pace with the increased access in public institutions. Furthermore, although increasing the diversity of the faculty might help to build the enrollment of students from historically marginalized backgrounds, only 4.1% of faculty in top-ranked private universities belong to protected caste communities; and faculty positions reserved for such communities in public institutions like Indian Institutes of Managements remain largely vacant with over 83% of these posts unfilled.  

In addition to issues surrounding equity, as in other countries, there is a disconnect between the skills taught in academia and what’s in demand in industry. This has contributed to high levels of youth unemployment and estimates that only about half (51%) of Indian graduates are considered employable. This underemployment crisis is especially acute among highly educated youth. Two-thirds of India’s unemployed are young people with secondary or higher education, many of whom delay entering the job market while holding out for “white-collar” roles. Correspondingly, in sectors like healthcare and engineering a lack of alignment between curricula and labor market needs contributes to a situation where millions of trained graduates are unable to find meaningful employment. The current education system, critics argue, emphasizes degrees over real-world skills, leading to large pools of underutilized talent at a time when India is on the cusp of its so-called demographic dividend – the time where the largest part of its population is in working age.

Output image

The paradox of educated unemployment has become one of India’s most pressing post-pandemic challenges. According to the Periodic Labour Force Survey (2023–24), the unemployment rate among those with secondary education or higher stands at 6.5%, significantly higher than among those with less education, which is just about 1% for middle school graduates and just 0.2% for those with no formal education. The situation is especially dire for educated urban women, who face an unemployment rate of about 13%, more than double that of their male counterparts at 6%. Despite small year-on-year improvements, these figures show that more education no longer translates to better economic outcomes, and in fact, often exacerbates social inequality. 

In one effort to address these challenges following the disruptions of the pandemic, The 2020 National Education Policy (NEP) introduced several innovations including academic credit banks, digital systems that allow students to accumulate and transfer credits earned across different institutions. By enabling learners to pause, resume, and combine coursework flexibly, these kinds of innovations could support more personalized pathways to completing degrees. The policy also places greater emphasis on vocational education aiming to expose at least 50% of learners to vocational education by 2025. Of course, putting these elements into policies is only one step, and it remains to be seen to what extent these policies will be implemented and exactly who might benefit. 

Next week:  New Frontiers for Educational Improvements in India? Critical educational issues in India post-pandemic (Part 2)

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Tracking Trump: His actions on education 

Posted on March 5, 2025 by | Leave a comment

With so much disinformation and deliberate disruption, it can be difficult to assess the impact of the raft of statements, policy changes and edicts issued since Trump took over the Federal government in January, particularly for an international readership. This week, IEN reposts the Hechinger Report‘s week-by-week list of actions aimed at reshaping education in the US, including the latest declaration from the just-confirmed Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, that the Department of Education’ was preparing for its “final mission”, “a ‘disruption’ to the education system that would have a ‘profound impact.’” This post was published originally by the Hechinger Report on February 19th and updated on March 5th.

Since taking office in late January, President Donald Trump has unleashed a flurry of orders and actions designed to reshape the federal government’s role in education. He has called the Education Department a “con job” and said he wants to close it “immediately.” That would take an act of Congress; but in the meantime, the administration has taken steps to transform the agency, overseeing what it said were hundreds of millions in cuts to education research, teacher training programs and other projects. The agency has also begun laying off employees, including in its Office for Civil Rights.

At the same time, the Trump administration is attempting to redefine what the federal government considers discrimination in schools and on college campuses. In letters and orders, the administration has tried to eliminate policies it describes as “woke” and to punish academic institutions it says discriminate against white and Asian people and others by taking into account race in hiring, housing, admissions and other practices. The Department of Education under Trump has also issued orders to ban transgender athletes from sports competitions and root out practices inclusive of transgender students.

In addition, the administration directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement that schools and colleges are no longer off-limits for its agents and threatened to punish education institutions for requiring Covid vaccinations. Many of the Trump administration’s actions are being challenged in court, and their impact on the education system remains uncertain.

We’ve compiled these actions below and will update this list as Trump’s second term unfolds. Let us know how the effects of these executive actions are unfolding in communities, child care centers, schools and colleges. Email us: editor@hechingerreport.org. Learn how to reach us securely here.

Week Seven (March 3)

Linda McMahon, the former wrestling executive and head of the Small Business Administration, was confirmed as Trump’s education secretary. At least one report says with her confirmation complete, the president will issue an order about “a plan to reallocate and reassign functions of the Department of Education.”

The Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Education and the U.S. General Services Administration, as part of the newly created Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, announced a review of Columbia University’s federal contracts for what the agencies described as possible Title VI violations. (Editor’s note: The Hechinger Report, which produced this article, is an independent unit of Columbia University’s Teachers College.

The Education Department said it was investigating a Washington State school district for allegedly permitting transgender male athletes to compete in girls’ sports.

Week Six (Feb. 24)

President Trump, in an executive order, designated English as the official language of the United States. More than 30 states have already passed legislation making English their official language, according to reporting from the Associated Press. Immigration advocates told The Washington Post they worried that the order could be used against schools that provide instruction in other languages to immigrant students.

The Department of Education released a “frequently asked questions” document following up on its earlier “Dear Colleague” letter threatening to pull funding from schools that engage in race-conscious practices. The letter notes, among other points, that the department does not control school curricula and states that celebrations of events such as Black History Month do not run afoul of the guidance as long as they are open to all.

The Education Department sent an email to employees offering buyouts ahead of what the agency described as a “very significant” reduction in force, several news outlets reported. Some employees noted that the offer of up to $25,000 amounted to less than they would receive in severance and unused leave compensation through a reduction in force order.

The Education Department unveiled its “End DEI” portal, which it described as a public portal for parents, students, teachers and others to submit complaints about diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and other activities it said amounted to discrimination on the basis of race or sex.

Peggy Carr, who led testing at the Department of Education, was put on leave, The Washington Post and other outlets reported. Carr had been appointed to a six-year term as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the landmark test known as NAEP, in 2021.

The Department of Agriculture reinstated the 1890 National Scholars Program, a scholarship for rural students to attend historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, after outcry over its suspension the previous week.

The Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has cut some $18 million in grants from the Department of Labor’s Office of Apprenticeships, reports The Job newsletter. The grants were to provide employers with technical assistance on apprenticeships, among other work. The Labor Department also terminated its Advisory Committee on Apprenticeships.

Week Five (Feb. 17)

The Education Department announced more than $600 million in cuts to teacher training programs it said were educating teachers in “divisive ideologies.”

The department also canceled 18 grants totaling $226 million to a network of regional and national centers that provides materials and support to states and education systems. It accused the centers of promoting “race-based discrimination and gender-identity ideology.”

The department eliminated a Biden-era rule requiring federal review of how states approve and monitor certain authorizers of charter schools. Under the old rule, South Carolina had faced the loss of federal money because of what the Education Department had said was inadequate oversight of charter schools.

Also canceled was a long-term trend assessment for 17-year-olds, part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, or NAEP. A department spokesperson told the 74, which first reported the news, that that portion of the test had not been conducted since 2012 and was therefore not a “very effective longitudinal study.”

The department’s Office for Civil Rights initiated an investigation into the Maine Department of Education, and Maine School Administrative District #51, over allegations of transgender athletes competing in sports that align with their gender identity.

Read more: A dismal report card in math and reading

Week Four (Feb. 10)

An Education Department “Dear Colleague” letter threatened to withhold federal funds from schools, colleges and other education institutions that take into account race in their programs, training, admissions and other practices. The letter, which cited the 2023 Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action in college admissions, said academic institutions that consider race in their practices are engaging in discrimination.

Trump, in a briefing, said, “The Department of Education is a big con job,” and “I’d like it to be closed immediately.” In her confirmation hearing the next day, Linda McMahon, the nominee for education secretary, seemed to support Trump’s calls to dismantle the Education Department. But she said funding for most programs would remain intact.

Read more: What might happen if the Department of Education were closed

The Education Department rescinded guidance from the Biden administration that name, image and likeness payments to college athletes had to comply with Title IX and be proportionate between men and women.

The department also sent letters to a collegiate and a high school athletic association urging them to strip awards it said had been “wrongfully credited” to transgender athletes. It further announced two investigations into other school athletic associations it said were in violation of Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletes from competition, and said it would investigate five Virginia school districts for permitting transgender students to use bathrooms and other facilities that align with their gender identity.

The Institute of Education Sciences, the Education Department’s research arm, saw major cuts, including the termination of 89 contracts it said totaled nearly $900 million. The actual total may be significantly smaller, as some of the grants, which included evaluations of how the government spends education funds and efforts to improve math and reading instruction, had already been paid out. Also canceled were census-like data collections that track student progress.

Read more: DOGE’s death blow to education research

In addition, the Education Department canceled $350 million in contracts and grants for regional educational laboratories, which provide technical assistance to schools, and four equity assistance centers. The department said those grants and contracts supported “wasteful and ideologically driven spending.”

The Trump administration’s efforts to lay off probationary employees hit agencies including the Department of Education and the Bureau of Indian Education. Education Department staff who lost their jobs reportedly included those in the Office for Civil Rights, communications, financial aid and the legal department.

The administration laid off dozens of employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, including those responsible for responding to complaints from student borrowers. Staff had been set to start a new process for more efficiently getting students the help they needed.

Read more: Student loan borrowers misled by colleges were about to get relief. Trump fired people poised to help

Schools and universities that require students to be vaccinated against Covid face the loss of federal funding, under a new executive order.

The Education Department reversed Biden-era reporting requirements under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006 that it said were overly burdensome and subjected school districts to “bureaucratic red tape.”

The White House created the “Make America Healthy Again” commission, to be led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and charged it with evaluating the “prevalence of and threat posed” to children by antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, stimulants and weight-loss drugs.

Read more: How the science of vaccines is taught (or not) in U.S. schools

Week Three (Feb. 3)

Trump signed an executive order barring trans girls and women from participating in women’s sports, and withholding federal funding from entities that refuse to comply.

The Education Department announced it would investigate San Jose State University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association for allowing trans athletes to participate on sports teams for women or girls.

Read more: ‘Just let me play sports’

The administration announced it would reduce to 15 percent the “indirect cost payments” that the National Institutes of Health includes in its research grants to universities, hospitals and research institutes. Those overhead costs help cover facilities and administrative expenses; some institutions said the cuts would cripple research.

The Education Department opened investigations into five universities where it said widespread antisemitic harassment had been reported: Columbia University; Northwestern University; Portland State University; The University of California, Berkeley; and the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

The Defense Department began restricting access to books and learning materials in the school system it oversees for the children of military families, citing the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion programs, according to The Washington Post.

The Education Department updated the Free Application For Student Aid (FAFSA), which high school and college students use to apply for federal money to pay for college, to remove the ability to mark anything but male or female as a student’s gender. Students who have to make any correction to a form already submitted for the 2024-25 or 2025-26 academic year will have to also update this piece of the form, the Federal Student Aid office said.

Week Two (Jan. 27)

A far-reaching pause on the distribution of federal grants and loans across agencies, including the Education Department and Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start, quickly led to confusion. Court orders have blocked the effort, and the White House said it had pulled back the memo, but some Head Start providers, among other entities, reported they still had limited or no access to federal funds weeks later.

The Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into Denver Public Schools over a gender-inclusive bathroom. The school board voted in 2020 to require all district schools to have at least one all-gender bathroom.

Read more: At Moms for Liberty’s national summit, a singular focus on anti-trans issues

Notices were sent to about 50 Education Department staffers that they had been put on leave. The employees were reportedly dismissed because of their connection, however limited, to DEI work.   

Trump issued an executive order to eliminate what the White House called radical indoctrination in K-12 schools. The order said federal dollars would be stripped from schools where there is “illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination, including based on gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology.”

In a collection of actions to tackle antisemitism, including cataloging complaints about the issue against K-12 schools and colleges and universities, the president said he “will quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses” and order the Department of Justice to “quell pro-Hamas vandalism and intimidation, and investigate and punish anti-Jewish racism in leftist, anti-American colleges and universities.”

On school choice, an executive order directed the education secretary to issue guidance within 60 days about how states can use federal dollars to support K-12 educational choice initiatives. It also orders the heads of other agencies, including the Labor Department; Health and Human Services; the Department of Defense; and the Interior Department, which houses the Bureau of Indian Education, to review how grants and funding in their control can be used to send students to private or charter schools.

Read more: Arizona gave families public money for private schools. Then private schools raised tuition

The Education Department withdrew Biden administration rules about applications for federal charter school grant programs that it said “included excessive regulatory burdens and promoted discriminatory practices.” The agency also said it would quickly make available $33 million in federal grants for charter management organizations that it said had been stalled by the Biden administration.

Race-conscious admissions policies at military academies, explicitly left intact by the Supreme Court affirmative action ruling, were banned by the Defense Department. The agency also said it would ban the use of its resources and its employees’ time to host celebrations or events related to cultural awareness months, such as Black History Month or National Disability Employment Awareness Month, and identity-based clubs.

Read more: The Supreme Court affirmative action decision left a head-scratching exemption for military academies. Here’s why it matters

Rules governing how cases of sexual assault and harassment are handled at K-12 schools and colleges will revert to a version created in the first Trump administration, the Education Department said. Unlike rules set by the Biden administration, the 2020 rules set by then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos did not extend Title IX protection to gender identity.

Data from across government websites was removed to comply with Trump’s executive order recognizing only two sexes, male and female. The Office of Personnel Management ordered agencies to remove websites and social media accounts that “inculcate or promote gender ideology.” Among the information removed was data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The wide-ranging survey includes questions about youth sexual orientation and gender identity.

Week One (Jan. 20)

Trump issued a sweeping executive order banning DEI efforts in all federal agencies, covering personnel policies, federal contracting and grant-making processes, among other things. He also instructed federal institutions to investigate DEI “compliance” at colleges with endowments of more than $1 billion, giving them 120 days to complete their investigations. 

Read more: Facing legal threats, colleges back off race-based programs

He issued an executive order reversing Title IX protections for transgender people and declaring that the government recognizes only two sexes, male and female, assigned at birth. 

The Office for Civil Rights declared an end to investigations of book bans, dismissing 11 complaints from schools alleging that removing “age-inappropriate, sexually explicit, or obscene materials from their school libraries created a hostile environment for students.”

Read more: The magic pebble and a lazy bull: The book ban movement has a long timeline

Schools and colleges are no longer off-limits to ICE and other immigration enforcement agents, according to a directive from the Department of Homeland Security.

Read more: 1 in 5 child care workers is an immigrant. Trump’s deportations and raids have many terrified

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Politics, Policies, and Polarization: Scanning the 2024-25 Back-To-School Headlines in the US (Part 1)

Posted on September 4, 2024 by | 2 comments

As students in many parts of the northern hemisphere start a new school year, IEN begins our annual scan of the back-to-school headlines. This year, with the surge of interest in the presidential election since Kamala Harris became the democratic nominee, a number of news stories have focused on the election, the candidates, and their education policies. Harris’ choice of Tim Walz – a former teacher – to be her candidate for Vice-President contributed to a wave of stories about Walz and his record and even spawned stories about his wife Gwen Walz – also a former teacher – and other educators who are running for office. Several stories, most from Education Week, also explore whether and how teachers might try to address in their classrooms the election and the many controversial issues that divide and polarize Americans today.  Part 1 of our 2024-25 Back-to-School scan pulls together some of these election-related stories. Next week’s scan will provide a round-up of stories about many of the other issues that are in the news in the education sources that we follow as classes resume.

For some historical perspective on how the issues have evolved since the school closures of the COVID-19 pandemic, explore the back-to-school headlines from previous years:

Policies, Platforms & Issues

Decision Guide: What happens to education under Trump v. Harris, U.S. News

From transgender student rights to ‘woke’ curriculum, Harris and Trump offer two starkly different views on the federal government’s role in education.

Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance tickets offer radically different visions of public education, EdSource

Education Policy: How Harris and Trump Differ on K-12, Higher Education and More, ABC News

4 Takeaways on What VP Picks Vance and Walz Mean for the Race to Come, PBS Newshour

Education Debates You’ll Likely Hear About in the Election, Explained, Education Week

Public education reform missing from 2024 presidential platforms, Axios

What education could look like under Trump and Vance, Hechinger Report

Trump’s Agenda47 on education: Abolish teacher tenure, universal school choice, patriotism, USA Today

Trump’s VP Pick: What We Know About JD Vance’s Record on Education, Education Week

Vance vs. Pence: How Trump’s VP picks compare on education,Thomas B. Fordham Institute

What Would Happen to K-12 in a 2nd Trump Term? A Detailed Policy Agenda Offers Clues, Education Week

The Great Project 2025 Freakout, Rick Hess, Education Week

Trump Vows Historic Cuts to Education Department in Second Term, Washington Examiner

Why ending the U.S. Department of Education is so alluring to the GOP — and so difficult, Chalkbeat

Republicans’ missing policy issue: Education, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

At Moms for Liberty National Summit, Trump Hardly Mentions Education, Education Week

Harris Could Set Democrats’ K-12 Agenda: By Reviving Ideas from 2020, The74

Where Does Kamala Harris Stand on Education? Inside the 2024 Democratic Platform, Education Week

What We Know About Kamala Harris’ Education Record, Education Week

Veep, Candidate, brat: Kamala Harris Fires Up Gen Z on Social Media, The74


Kamala Harris’s presidential race is taking on a life of its own on social media, particularly with Gen Z followers, who are responding to her perceived energy and authenticity with viral videos of her dancing, laughing and recounting her mother’s lessons.

Kamala Harris’ Potential VP Picks: Where They Stand on Education, Education Week

What education could look like under Harris and Walz, Hechinger Report

The Education Issue Americans Agree on That’s Not Good News for Teaching, Education Week

Long a Stranger to the Spotlight, Child Tax Credit Earns Embrace of Both Parties, The74


A technocrat’s dream, the Child Tax Credit isn’t a subject you’d expect would receive much attention in the middle of a heated presidential race. But both the Harris and Trump campaigns have recently embraced proposals to expand the program, which offers relief to parents of kids under 17 years old. Democrats and Republicans both see the credit’s political appeal, but depending on the election outcome, neither party may hold enough power to enact its vision.

Millions of campaign dollars aimed at tilting school voucher battle are flowing into state races, AP

The Future of Property Taxes Is on Ballots This Fall. Why It Matters for Schools,  Education Week

What Role Should the Federal Government Play in Education Policy? NEPC

Educators/Candidates

Harris chooses Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former educator, as running mate, K-12 Dive

A Teacher in the White House: What Harris-Walz Could Mean for Education, Education Week

Tim Walz is Kamala Harris’ running mate. Here’s what he’s done for education in Minnesota, Chalkbeat)

Tim Walz, a Former Teacher, Is Kamala Harris’ Running Mate

The Freshman: How Tim Walz Went From the Classroom to Congress (from 2007), Education Week

Tim Walz was a high school teacher and football coach from southern Minnesota. He had no political experience whatsoever, but he didn’t like the choices being made on Capitol Hill, and struggled to explain them to his social studies students. So Walz made a decision: He would run for Congress as a Democrat.

8 Things to Know About Tim Walz, the Democratic Ticket’s Top Teacher, The74

Harris Pick Tim Walz Would Be First K-12 Teacher Since Lyndon Johnson to be VP, The74

How Teaching Shaped Tim Walz’ Politics, The Nation

‘Coaching and Politics’: What Coaches See in Tim Walz’s VP Candidacy, Education Week

Gwen Walz, wife of Harris’s VP pick Tim Walz, is also a longtime teacher, Washington Post

Tim Walz’s wife Gwen, a former teacher, is a ‘champion’ of college behind bars, USA Today

Are Educators a Natural Fit for Public Office? These Candidates Think So, EdSurge

Tim Walz isn’t the only former educator running for elected office this year. In fact, a number of current teachers and school leaders will be on the ballot in November.

Jan. 6 Protester, Former Supe Vie to Lead North Carolina’s Schools, The74

Teaching the election

Schools Are Now Political Battlegrounds. We’ve Been Here Before, Education Week

Why Most Teachers Won’t Be Talking About the Election in Their Classrooms, Education Week

Teaching the 2024 Election: Learning Opportunity or Landmine? Education Week

Big Ideas for Upending Polarization, Education Week

How Teachers Tackle 2024 Election Discussions, Education Week

11 Ways to Teach the 2024 Election With The New York Times, New York Times

Teaching Presidential Elections Isn’t Easy. How One Teacher Manages, Education Week

How Should Educators Approach the 2024 Election? Rick Hess, Education Week

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Aligning research with action and reflection: The Lead the Change Interview with Jackie Pedota

Posted on July 18, 2024 by | Leave a comment

In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview, Jackie Pelota discusses the role of research in remdying education inequality. Pelota is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Educational Leadership and policy department at the University of Texas at Austin. The LtC series is produced by Elizabeth Zumpe and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the full interview will be available on the LtC website.

Lead the Change (LtC): The 2025 AERA theme is “Research, Remedy, and Repair: Toward Just Education Renewal.”  This theme urges scholars to consider the role that research can play in remedying educational inequality, repairing harm to communities and institutions, and contributing to a more just future in education. What steps are you taking, or do you plan to take, to heed this call?

Jackie Pedota (JP): At this pivotal moment, it is more crucial than ever to align our research with action and reflection, bridging the gap between theory and practice. Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7th, 2023, Israel’s counterattack and invasion of Gaza has led to the death of over 30,000 mostly civilian Palestinians, including young children. Students, faculty, and others across campuses have shown their support for the Palestinian people in the aftermath. These overwhelmingly peaceful campus protests took a turn for the worse in April 2024 when they were met with aggressive tactics, retaliation by administrators (e.g., withholding degrees), and police violence. On April 24th, 2024, I witnessed this police violence against students and faculty first-hand at my own campus of the University of Texas at Austin, and it was horrifying.

Jackie Pedota

Students, primarily Arab, Muslim, Jewish, and other minoritized students, bravely stand at the forefront of ongoing protests, actively participating in democratic processes and demanding justice for the Palestinian people. These students work tirelessly to posit alternative futures, repair harm, and alleviate suffering. Yet, they have been met with unprecedented violence and harsh resistance from the very leaders and administrators who promised to support them–and who likely urged them to “change the world” in speeches when they first stepped onto campus at orientation. As an early career scholar and someone who aspires to hold a faculty position one day, it has been disheartening to witness this decoupling of academic researchers’ ideas from their everyday actions.

We in the Educational Change field can learn so much from these students if we listen to them. They are applying what they have learned. They are putting theory into practice to push for substantive change.  

Thus, we must ask ourselves: How can we, as scholars, produce research that creates more just, equitable, and liberatory educational systems? To better align these research aims with everyday actions, I think the bare minimum we all can do is to hold space to hear from these students, taking their concerns seriously and advocating via our institutional channels for leaders to drop disciplinary charges. I also believe it is important for me to use my privilege as a scholar to uplift these students’ experiences and, in my research, draw attention to the underlying driving force behind these institutional actions—the well-funded right-wing political infrastructure that is increasingly shaping policies and practices within higher education.

“There is an urgent need to affirm, support, and empower faculty, especially faculty of color, to uphold principles of academic freedom and racial inclusion.”

In the months leading up to the 2025 AERA annual meeting, I hope to see more students, faculty, scholars, and leaders stand in solidarity. If we truly believe in higher education’s role in sustaining a multi-racial democracy, we all should be finding ways to support these students—working with, not against them. We will be working for decades to repair the trust that has been shattered for so many students at colleges and universities across the country. However, we can start this work now. At AERA and beyond, there is hope that we, as Educational Change scholars, will answer the call to produce research while actively repairing our educational systems for those who have been most marginalized by these very systems.

LtC: Your work has involved examining increasing pressures from state legislation restricting teaching and scholarship focused on race and racial inclusion in higher education. What are some of the major lessons that practitioners and scholars of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?

JP: Currently, I am studying how faculty are changing their practices in response to a wave of legislative efforts to curtail the curriculum, research, policies, and practices focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education. As of May 24th, 2024, 85 bills have been introduced to state legislatures across the country, with 14 successfully passing into law, limiting racial inclusion efforts, free expression, and academic freedom (Lu et al., 2024). Ongoing efforts spearheaded by external right-wing organizations and think tanks, like the Manhattan Institute, represent a coordinated campaign to roll back long-fought civil rights advancements within higher education via the erosion of academic freedom (Kamola, 2024). 

Through interviews and observations over the last three years, my colleagues and I have found that, without adequate institutional support, many faculty change their teaching and research on race to protect themselves even when laws are not yet in effect (Pedota, 2023). In response to political and legal threats, faculty, particularly faculty of color, find themselves navigating a complex and shifting landscape with little to no guidance from senior leaders and department-level administrators (Pedota, 2023). Moreover, the communication and guidance faculty receive from higher education administration often reflect an overinterpretation of vague bill language (Reilly, 2024). This results in guidance that is more restrictive than necessary, a dynamic called repressive legalism (Garces et al., 2021). These overly cautious responses are partly driven by public university leaders fearing political backlash and funding cuts (Moody, 2023). 

“Without adequate institutional support, many faculty change their teaching and research on race to protect themselves even when laws are not yet in effect.”

When faculty are left alone to interpret and respond to these legal pressures, many act from a place of self-preservation and safety to ultimately suppress racial inclusion work otherwise protected under academic freedom (Pedota, 2023). As faculty of color are the most visible of targets for potential disciplinary action or professional attacks, they feel even more pressure to change their teaching approaches, cancel courses, remove course content, and pause research (Golden, 2023). Ultimately, proposed bills targeting race scholarship and DEI work, even when not enacted into laws, are taking a psychological toll, resulting in poor working environments and the loss of faculty from impacted states (Melhado, 2023; Pedota, 2023). These curricular impacts and departures substantially threaten higher education and democracy, as faculty of color play a vital role in cultivating critical thinking, innovation, and democratic participation (Milem et al., 2005).

Thus, there is an urgent need to affirm, support, and empower faculty, especially faculty of color, to uphold principles of academic freedom and racial inclusion. It is imperative for all faculty to be in solidarity and work as a collective to leverage and uphold academic freedom. My work thus offers timely insights that will benefit faculty as they navigate the current sociopolitical context. Notably, my prior and ongoing work demonstrates the need to create long-term ongoing structures and processes to better educate not just faculty but also college-level administrators on their rights and protections under academic freedom (Pedota, 2023). Previous studies confirm faculty’s uncertainties around academic freedom, highlighting the need to specifically bolster faculty of color’s understandings and access to its rights and protections (Hutchens & Miller, 2023; Kateeb et al., 2012; Rangel, 2020). 

The research also illuminates how external actors (e.g., advocacy organizations, civil rights groups, professional associations) are essential for bolstering faculty’s work. However, many faculty are unsure how to begin cultivating these connections, and faculty of color largely feel unsupported and unacknowledged by external actors’ efforts (Pedota, 2023). These external organizations should proactively work with faculty on the ground in impacted states to share information and build organizing capacity.

LtC: Your research has used participatory methods, including oral history, to examine dynamics of organizational change focused on racial equity in higher education institutions. What might practitioners and scholars take from this work to foster better school systems for all students?

JP: I have long been drawn to oral history as a methodology for transformational change. Oral history is the practice of gathering, preserving, and interpreting the unique, first-hand experiences and memories of individual people and communities involved in past events (Oral History Association, n.d.). Many organizations, like Voice of Witness, have pushed the field of oral history further with the goal to democratize storytelling, allowing communities to share their stories in their own words, illuminating contemporary issues in a deeply personal and impactful manner. This approach to oral history, which aligns most with my own, challenges harmful stereotypes, showcases the diversity of experiences, and positions those with lived experiences as experts on racial equity issues, fostering a greater understanding and empathy among listeners.

I have been involved with many local and national oral history projects over the past six years that mostly focused on the experiences of Latino/a/x individuals and communities. For instance, when the Black and Latino cultural centers at my undergraduate institution were at risk of being consolidated into one multicultural center, folks within the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program sprang into action to document and archive the rich and important histories of these spaces to combat this proposed erasure. These efforts amplified the voices of those who had experienced injustice firsthand at a predominantly white institution and underscored the essential role of these cultural centers in ensuring their histories and communities ultimately survive and thrive. In this way, deeply personal narratives, like those gathered through oral history, can be effective in highlighting and humanizing systemic issues within education.

Through my work, I have seen how oral history can promote racial equity by demonstrating storytelling as a powerful tool for social change. This approach to research promotes deeply listening to and learning from marginalized communities—communities that have been deliberately silenced or remain unheard. From my experience with the Voces of a Pandemic Oral History project through the Voces Oral History Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I learned that oral history requires an ethics-driven approach to storytelling to ensure narrators have power and choice in the storytelling process, viewing them as collaborators rather than subjects. 

In this oral history project, many narrators were still processing the hardship and trauma experienced during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Listening and learning from communities in this context required me to create and maintain a safe and brave space for folks and employ a trauma-informed approach to interviewing. For instance, interviewers must be cognizant of how trauma can manifest and be vigilant as they interview narrators, providing moments to breathe and be attentive to what that person needs at that moment. Voice of Witness’s Ethical Storytelling Principles and other resources like “Say It Forward: A Guide to Social Justice Storytelling” can provide guidance on these issues, ensuring that stories are told responsibly and respectfully. 

Ultimately, by using oral history to document and share powerful first-person testimonies, we can foster a more inclusive and equitable society, where the experiences and insights of those impacted by injustice are not only heard but valued and acted upon to promote change within education. As such, I believe that the many principles that undergird oral history have much to offer practitioners and scholars.

LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?

JP: Through my work with student affairs practitioners, college students, alumni, and advocacy organizations, I have learned that disrupting and transforming historically inequitable educational systems requires broad collaborative networks. It is not enough to solely work with people inside of P-20 educational systems, like students and administrators. Transformational work requires coalition building, brave leadership, and redistribution of resources to minoritized groups who remain disadvantaged by current organizational arrangements. To organize for transformational work, scholars must develop and leverage the influence and expertise of those within the broader community, such as families, community leaders, local non-profits, faith-based organizations, and national advocacy and civil rights groups.  

On January 1st, 2024, both HB 1 and SB 17 went into effect in Texas, banning the use of state funds for DEI-related efforts, including designated offices, trainings, and diversity statements in faculty hiring. Within this current restrictive context, I have seen the power that the broader community can have to pressure and influence policymakers and institutional leaders. I am part of a coalition of students, alums, faculty, unions, civil rights groups, advocacy organizations, professional associations, and grassroots collectives who work across Texas to combat the legislative efforts by state policymakers to undo decades of racial progress in an increasingly diverse state. In this work, I have witnessed how establishing networks and coalitions outside of formal educational spaces allows those working within these constrained and often oppressive systems to more freely exchange ideas, share experiences, and provide mutual support. Such spaces are especially important during a time when many students, staff, and faculty are receiving little to no information. This coalition has also fostered a sense of community and collective responsibility, making advocating for educational change less challenging and more empowering by knowing you have a group of committed folks behind you. 

I believe that scholars within the field of Educational Change should be seeking out and engaging in these kinds of civil rights coalitions and other similar community-based grassroots collectives. Scholars have an important role to play in such coalitions, sharing insights from their scholarship that could inform strategies and approaches for systems change. Transforming educational systems in our deeply divided and inequitable society is a long-term and ongoing process that will require fervent research-informed advocacy and activism for years to come. Ultimately, such change depends upon building a community and a critical mass of stakeholders invested in racial equity.

LtC: Where do you find hope and inspiration for the possibilities of Educational Change going forward?

JP: As someone who studies DEI efforts at this moment, I often feel like my work is a continual uphill battle just to end up in the same place I started. It requires constant effort just to hold our ground, leaving less time and energy for transformational advancements. Those who have been engaged in Educational Change work for a while likely understand these sentiments and can relate. And yet, there is always hope.

During times when Educational Change work feels particularly daunting and almost impossible, I draw hope and inspiration for grassroots activists in the South. I was born and raised in Miami and have lived in South and North Florida for most of my life. I have seen how media outlets and those on social media have characterized politics and policies in the state of Florida with little to no attention to the brave grassroots activism historically led by People of Color.

In the most difficult and dehumanizing of conditions, grassroots organizations like Dream Defenders have persevered to fight for change across Florida. Despite passed anti-DEI legislation, the folks at Dream Defenders remain steadfast in their #Cantbanus campaign, organizing school walkouts and legislative advocacy days to fight against political attacks on public education. Even within the current environment, the Dream Defenders believe change is possible. If they can believe this in the most challenging of environments, then so can I. Their efforts help me see change as a long-term project—where the movement for racial equity is about both the short and long game. The unwavering commitment of Southern activists reminds me that, despite the difficulties, our collective efforts in DEI and educational change can and will pave the way for a more equitable future.

References

Garces, L. M., Johnson, B., Ambriz, E., & Bradley, D. (2021). Repressive legalism: How postsecondary administrators’ responses to on-campus hate speech undermine a focus on inclusion. American Educational Research Journal, 58(5), 10321069.https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312211027586

Golden, D. (2023, January 3). ‘It’s making us more ignorant’. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/ron-desantis-florida-critical-race-theory-professors/672507/ 

Hutchens, N. H., & Miller, V. (2023). Florida’s stop WOKE act: A wake-up call for faculty academic freedom. Journal of College and University Law, 48(1).  

Kamola, I. (2024, May). Manufacturing backlash: Right-Wing think tanks and legislative attacks on higher education, 2021-2023. American Association of University Professors. https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/Manufacturing_Backlash_final.pdf

Kateeb, I., Lewis, M., & Hamoush, S. (2012). Understanding the concept of academic freedom in North Carolina A&T State University. International Journal of Science in Society, 3(2), 9–22. https://doi.org/10.18848/1836-6236/CGP/v03i02/51322  Lu, A., Elias, J., June, A. W., Marijolovic, K., Roberts-Grmela, J., & Surovell, E. (2024, March 8). DEI legislation tracker. The Chronicle of Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/here-are-the-states-where-lawmakers-are-seeking-to-ban-colleges-dei-efforts

Melhado, W. (2023, September 7). Texas’ political environment driving faculty to leave, survey finds. The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/07/texas-higher-education-faculty-dei-tenure/

Milem, J. F., Chang, M. J., & Antonio, A. L. (2005). Making diversity work on campus: A research-based perspective (pp.1–39). Association American Colleges and University.   

Moody, J. (2023, March 30). The silence of Florida’s presidents. Inside Higher Ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2023/03/30/silence-floridas-presidents 

Pedota, J. (2023). How faculty contend with threats to academic freedom and racial inclusion. UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement. https://freespeechcenter.universityofcalifornia.edu/fellows-22-23/how-faculty-contend-with-threats-to-academic-freedom-and-racial-inclusion/  

Rangel, N. (2020). The stratification of freedom: An intersectional analysis of activist-scholars and academic freedom at U.S. public universities. Equity & Excellence in Education, 53(3), 365–381. https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2020.1775158   

Reilly, M.L. (2024, March 5). Anti-DEI bills rely

on vague language and self-censorship. Forbes.https://www.forbes.com/sites/meglittlereilly/2024/03/05/anti-dei-bills-rely-on-vague-language-and-self-censorship/?sh=287256fd1742

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