TALAS E-newsletter – February 14

Many of the students in Mariela Ehlers’ classroom spoke primarily Spanish at home. As a bilingual teacher at Harlingen Consolidated Independent School District, it was her job to teach them both English and Spanish.

But when she looked at these children, she saw herself. She was the kid who spoke only Spanish at home before starting school.

At once, the plight of Mexican Americans in Texas is both a figment of distant history and a bloodstain on the current day. It’s just like the old adage: To understand the present, one must look to the past. That’s what inimitable Latina author Martha Menchaca has done in her latest book, The Mexican American Experience in Texas. The title was released last month by The University of Texas Press and serves as a thorough retelling of critical events that have shaped the cultural identity in Texas all the way back to the state’s earliest days. It shouldn’t surprise you that her research is replete with details of discrimination and disinformation—nor should it surprise you that Republican elected officials are still at it today.

The School District of Philadelphia is partnering with Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania to launch a new leadership program for diverse aspiring school principals and education leaders.

Current Philly School District employees enrolled in the Pathway to Leadership Principal Preparation Program will receive traditional certification preparation classwork, coaching and mentoring, as well as a $25,000 scholarship to attend either universities. 

Dale Farran has been studying early childhood education for half a century. Yet her most recent scientific publication has made her question everything she thought she knew.

“It really has required a lot of soul-searching, a lot of reading of the literature to try to think of what were plausible reasons that might account for this.”

And by “this,” she means the outcome of a study that lasted more than a decade.

Filmmaker Todd Chandler wanted to capture snippets of routine life in America, so he followed teachers to the gun range.

Amid heightened national fear over mass school shootings, a teacher in pink earmuffs unloads a pistol’s clip into the chest of a human-shaped target. The scene in Bulletproof, Chandler’s latest documentary, highlights the lengths some teachers have gone to keep kids safe.

They said he should play soccer. They said figure skating was for girls. They said winter sports made no sense in temperate Guadalajara.

But none of those naysayers deterred Mexican figure skater Donovan Carrillo, the rare Latin American athlete at the Winter Games, who has now become an even more rare Beijing Olympics success story — however relative — from that part of the globe.