TALAS E-newsletter – August 30

Before she even reached the podium to deliver remarks at the Conroe Independent School District board meeting in late July, Ginger Russell began to talk. The small-business owner and mother of two had only three minutes allotted to discuss “critical race theory.” She had spent much of the previous few months attending school board meetings across Montgomery County, north of Houston, decrying the academic framework that examines the ways in which legal, social, and cultural systems can perpetuate racial discrimination. 

Interviewing for a job is a two-way street — and it can be paved with subtle red flags. 

“The interview process is a direct line of sight into the culture of a company. The attention to detail, candidate experience, timeliness with responses, and generosity of shared information throughout the process is indicative of what will happen when you choose to join that organization,” says career expert Joe Mullings, Chairman & CEO of The Mullings Group, a talent acquisition and branding company in medtech.

Some warning signs that an organization might not provide the dream job you’re hoping for are glaring: a hiring manager letting you wait an hour in the lobby or a mention that the last two people in the role you’re applying for have left. 

As students head back to school for the fall, administrators at Hispanic-serving community colleges across the nation say they are more optimistic about student enrollment numbers, particularly compared to last year, at the height of the pandemic.

This year’s tumultous debates over whether American racism exists, who perpetuates it, and how it should be taught in K-12 classroom settings has saturated the nation’s thousands of school districts.

About 26 states now have taken steps to curb various aspects of how teachers discuss with students America’s racist past and how districts fight systemic racism. Many take effect this fall, and some of them contain penalties for teachers and administrators, including the loss of their license or fines.

Tens of millions of students may now be months or, in some cases, even a full year behind because they couldn’t attend school in person during the pandemic.

Significant setbacks are especially likely for the most vulnerable students — kids with disabilities and those living in poverty, who didn’t have a computer, a reliable internet connection or a workspace to learn at home. Educators will have to do something different for the 2021-22 school year to make up for those losses.

Every year on the first day of class, one of the authors of this piece would ask his social studies students what they considered the most dangerous thing in the classroom. They were always surprised to hear his answer: their textbook. He wanted his students to think critically about the single perspective that the commercial textbook showed—and which it didn’t. He also wanted them to think about how that one textbook too often controlled what they learned and didn’t learn.

Growing up, studios from Disney to Pixar were happy bringing us incredible stories from the ancient cultures of Greece, Egypt, and Rome, but we never got to see our ancestors on the big screen. Don’t get me wrong: Hercules to this day remains one of my favorite animated movies, what’s not to love about it?

But we are long over due for a legit representation of ancient Mesoamerican culture and now, thanks to Netflix, it looks like that is happening in the form of a nine-part animated series entitled Maya and the Three.