Education

This story was reported for radio by Elissa Nadworny and for the web by Jon Marcus of the Hechinger Report.

In her spotless camouflage uniform, Monica Callan stood apart from the dirty and exhausted-looking first-year cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy who had just endured nearly three hours on the obstacle course.

An Arizona law banning ethnic studies violated students' constitutional rights, a federal judge said Tuesday. His ruling made clear that the state showed discriminatory intent when it essentially shut down a Mexican-American studies program at Tucson Unified School District.

"Both enactment and enforcement were motivated by racial animus," federal Judge A. Wallace Tashima said in the ruling.

Updated August 22.

A group of alumni from one of the country's most influential evangelical Christian universities is condemning their school's president for his continued alignment with President Trump.

Most teachers these days last no more than five to 10 years in the classroom, but Paul Miller taught math for nearly 80. At one point, he was considered the "oldest active accredited teacher" in the U.S.

His career started in his hometown of Baltimore. It was 1934, the Dust Bowl was wreaking havoc in the Plains, Bonnie and Clyde were gunned down by police in Louisiana, and a thuggish politician named Adolf Hitler became president of Germany.

Miller taught elementary school kids by day, college students at night and his mother on weekends.

Children who start school at an older age do better than their younger classmates and have better odds of attending college and graduating from an elite institution. That's according to a new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

It was the year 2000 and Maine's governor at the time, Angus King, was excited about the Internet. The World Wide Web was still relatively young but King wanted every student in the state to have access to it.

"Go into history class and the teacher says, 'Open your computer. We're going to go to rome.com and we're going to watch an archaeologist explore the Catacombs this morning in real time.' What a learning tool that is!"

Immigration authorities picked up and detained a 19-year-old high school student from Long Island in New York this summer after he was suspended from school for doodling the number 504 in a textbook and drawing devil horns on a calculator.

The number is the international calling code for Honduras, where the student grew up and where the violent international street gang MS-13 has strong ties. And bull horns are a symbol used by MS-13.

In the aftermath of the white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, Va., many civil rights activists took to Twitter and shared photos of people who allegedly were at the march. The idea was to identify who they were and shame them. But identifying someone from a photo can be tricky — and the activists managed to make at least one mistake.

When Anna Neuman was applying to college, there weren't a lot of people around to help her. Students from her high school in Maryland rarely went on to competitive colleges, the school counselor worked at several schools and was hard to pin down for meetings and neither of her parents had been through the application process before.

The only thing her parents told her was that she would have to pay for it herself.

The violent racism we saw in Charlottesville, Virginia is not new.

But after last weekend’s attack, many people are looking for new ideas about how to stop extremists. On Monday’s show, our guest Jameta Barlow said “Everyone needs to do something every day.”

But what? What is the most productive response to a white nationalist rally in your town? Or on your campus? What should you do if a cousin says something racist at Thanksgiving?