Webinar: Welcome to the Fight Back! National Movements for Racial Justice in Education

Wednesday, October 25, 2017 at 2:00 pm EDT

The struggles for racial justice and educational justice have been interlinked from the beginning of our nation’s history. It was under Black leadership during Reconstruction that the South saw the first state-funded public schools. The long, arduous work to win and maintain school integration was a keystone struggle during the Civil Rights movement. And today, the most powerful and energetic movements for education justice — fighting for fair funding, strong neighborhood public schools, and restorative justice — are those that take an intersectional approach to organizing.
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High Profile: Richard Alan Huddleston

Rich Huddleston is more of a "glass half full" than "glass half empty" kind of guy. In his job as executive director of the Little Rock-based Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families, he's relentlessly optimistic about improving the lives of children — the most vulnerable segment of society. Arkansas Advocates is a statewide, private nonprofit child advocacy organization that conducts extensive research and lobbies at the state level to fund programs that help better the lives of children and families.
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School District Leaders Say Early Education Needed, But Underfunded

More than three-quarters of American public school superintendents say that early-childhood care and education means "a great deal" to a child's future success—but that they work in states that are investing too little in it.

The majority of superintendents surveyed said that quality care was hard to find—63 percent said they "strongly disagreed" or "disagreed" with the statement that high-quality care was "available to every family in my state."
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New Report Gives Miami-Dade County Public Schools Failing Grade on School Climate

On October 18, the Power U Center for Social Change, in collaboration with local, state and national civil rights organizations including Advancement Project, hosted a direct action releasing a new report Miami-Dade County Public Schools: The Hidden Truth. The report gives the District failing marks on key school climate indicators including school discipline practices, student supports and reproductive health programming.
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In Disasters’ Wake, Public Schools And Educators Defy DeVos’s Attacks On The ‘System’

A favorite talking point of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is to say that conversations about education should not be about “systems and buildings” but about “individual students.” It’s a skillfully crafted soundbite designed to cast schools as oppressive bureaucracies that limit the education opportunities available to children and families. It also differentiates schools from other essential public infrastructure such as fire and police protection, sanitation, and roads.
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Florida Private Schools Rake in Nearly $1 Billion in State Scholarships with Little Oversight

Private schools in Florida will collect nearly $1 billion in state-backed scholarships this year through a system so weakly regulated that some schools hire teachers without college degrees, hold classes in aging strip malls and falsify fire-safety and health records.
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