Winter 2023

Community Building as World Building

By Cristina Paul

An early elementary teacher details an engineering unit. Students design a model community — with no police or banks — in which everyone gets what they need.


Getting to the Why: Service Learning for Social Justice

By Tanya Friedman

An equity coach argues for the importance of service learning for social justice and describes how elementary teachers she worked with developed a project around hunger.

Recent issues

Rethinking Schools is the country’s leading grassroots magazine for social and racial justice in education.

About Rethinking Schools

Rethinking Schools began in 1986, when a group of Milwaukee education activists — teachers, teacher educators, and community members — met to talk about how they could bring more critical voices into the conversation about public schools and libraries. These founding Rethinking Schools editors saw a school curriculum that was conservative, dumbed-down, and dominated by corporate-produced textbooks. Inappropriate standardized testing was rampant. Racial bias infected every level of schooling.