A Guide to Equity and Antiracism for Educators

Websites like Teaching Tolerance, the NEA’s EdJustice, and KQED’s Mindshift feature resources for lesson planning as well as lessons for you as a teacher. Teaching Tolerance is the perfect place to start, whether you want to use bias-free language to teach tolerance through reading with young learners or plan a social action campaign with high school students. In addition to a rich collection of K–12 classroom resources, the website features self-guided professional development, on-demand webinars, and podcasts that may enable you to earn a certificate—check with your administration first. Those can easily be broken up into small chunks of time. And note that many of the site’s feature articles list recommended actions at the bottom.

Learning Series: Taking Educator Preparation to the Next Level

School leadership has never been more important to students and communities. School principals are navigating unprecedented changes to the way teaching and learning occur while sustaining efforts to improve equity and academic achievement for their students. Principals’ work today has ramifications for the way new principals are prepared to lead schools in the future. With support from the Wallace Foundation, the University Principal Preparation Initiative (UPPI) brings university, school district and state representatives together to redesign principal preparation.

The pandemic’s toll: nearly 500,000 public education jobs disappeared across U.S. in April

The country saw 6% of its public education jobs disappear in just a month, according to a new analysis of federal employment data, when the nation’s schools shut their doors to halt the spread of the coronavirus. In March, there were just over 8 million jobs in K-12 public education. By mid-April, that figure had dropped to just over 7.5 million — a loss of nearly 500,000 jobs. “More K–12 public education jobs were lost in April than in all of the Great Recession,” wrote Elise Gould, who analyzed the data for the Economic Policy Institute, a union-backed progressive think tank. “And that’s before any austerity measures from lost state and local revenue have been put in place.”