Following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization Supreme Court decision, reproductive rights are heading to ballots in states across the country this fall. Are states the right venue for this and other issues?
This episode’s guest, U.S. Appellate Court Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton says yes, and makes the case that state courts and constitutions are more democratic than their counterparts at the federal level.
With many students returning to school in September, educators are preparing their classes for the new year and getting ready for the standardized testing that takes place annually. These standardized tests evaluate students' performance against a set of benchmarks that students typically reach by the end of the year.
According to The Center for American Progress, “These tests measure what students know and can do against common state-developed, grade-level standards.”
A common criticism of state standardized tests is that they can be biased, which can disproportionately impact minority students.
Standardized tests have been criticized for years for being unfair to students of color and those from low-income backgrounds. Still, educators and advocates are now pushing for new approaches, such as project-based assessments and culturally responsive testing, that aim to measure students more fairly.
New York University associate professor Joshua Aronson and his colleagues have examined ways stereotypes interfere with academic performance, according to Learning For Justice.
“Stereotype threat arises in situations where a negative stereotype relates to evaluating performance. So, absolutely, standardized testing is relevant—incredibly so after passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB),” Aronson mentioned.
The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) is a federal law that mandated annual standardized testing to ensure all students met academic standards.
On some occasions, these tests often design questions that assume students have a certain level of background knowledge, and they perform poorly, given that these test questions don't account for the different cultural experiences of marginalized communities.
“A 2015 study argues that individuals interpret test questions based on their values, beliefs, and experiences; for example, Asian and Native American students use different English sentence structures than those found in school textbooks and some standardized tests. As a result, they interpret questions differently and score lower,” mentioned by Prismreports.
Solely addressing biases in these assessments is only part of the issues that these exams can have on the students. Teaching and learning extend beyond just the academic content; it also involves the students' experiences at home. Culturally responsive pedagogy is an approach that connects students’ cultural backgrounds, experiences, and prior knowledge.
“When students have access to culturally responsive pedagogy, they experience academic success and develop cultural competence and the ability to question the current social order, thereby allowing students to gain a sense of empowerment from their history and culture,” according to American Progress.
In states such as New Jersey, organizations like Save Our Schools NJ have emerged, with parents and other public education supporters advocating for every child in New Jersey to have access to a high-quality public education.
Julie Borst, executive director of Save Our Schools New Jersey, discussed the inequalities created by standardized tests, particularly for minority students. Borst highlighted the correlation between test scores and wealth.
“Unfortunately, the ones who are tend to be on the left side of the curve. Tend to be kids who are not wealthy, and kids who are immigrants and English language learners, and have to do really with experience. I think one of the things that people misunderstand when we talk about how standardized testing is not fair to those communities is that they also are thinking that, well, they can't learn, and that's not the case at all.” Borst mentioned.
Borst explained that every child starts at a different place, and so when these tests are administered, they completely disregard any factors related to what is happening in the world. In areas such as Newark, where standardized scores weren’t particularly high, students may have double schedules of English and math, and at that point, the school is primarily focused on improving test scores.
While schools in New Jersey are doing all they can to improve test scores, ChalkBeat Newark has studied where students of color and those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds have experienced the most learning setbacks.
One of the key points raised by Borst is that standardized testing offers little to no useful information for teachers or parents. Parents can’t look at their child’s test scores and identify areas of struggle. If a math score comes back low, the report does not indicate whether the student is struggling with certain concepts, problem-solving, or something else entirely.
Teachers face the same challenge. They are not involved in writing the tests, nor are they ever shown the questions. This can also play a significant factor in decoding words, comprehension, or even learning differences such as dyslexia, according to Borst.
While there are many conversations about potential alternatives to these standardized tests, much like Borst advocates for schools to focus on real-life problems and mini capstones that can prepare students for college and the workplace.
Performance assessments, such as the ones conducted in New York Performance Standards Consortium Schools, have a waiver from all the region's exams except for the English exam.
During their four years in high school, they work on mini capstones, which are performance-based assessments.
“They're doing mini capstones every single year, and they defend them. Those kids are in some of the most impoverished districts in the country, and they go on to four-year college, and they are successful there because high school looks more like what college looks like,” Borst said.
Seventy-one percent of students learning English at consortium schools graduated on time, compared to 37 percent of English learners citywide. The six-year graduation rate for English learners was 75 percent, compared to 50 percent for New York City, as noted by The Hechinger Report.
As a result, they aim to support students in accessing their skill and knowledge levels as part of a high-quality education, as opposed to relying on standardized testing.
While many reform organizations are opposing these standardized tests, there is also an ongoing conversation, as well as a focus on the erosion of the US Department of Education.
“If we're allowed to destroy public education, which is the goal, that's the stated goal, to end it, to end public education as we know it. What does this mean you're creating? You're automatically creating a subclass of people who will work for practically nothing because they can't do anything else. That's what we're creating,” Borst said.
The fight against standardized testing isn’t just about pointing out what’s wrong; it’s about figuring out what can work better for all the students. From New York’s performance-based assessments to local advocacy in New Jersey, there are already examples of schools shifting toward models that reflect students’ skills, cultures, and lived experiences. These alternatives not only prepare young people for college and careers but also provide families and teachers with the kind of meaningful information that standardized tests have long failed to offer.
Nathaly Suquinagua is a bilingual multimedia journalist with a B.A. in Journalism and a minor in Dance from Temple University and a cohort member with the Fulcrum Fellowship.
The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists. To learn about the many NextGen initiatives we are leading, click HERE.
Hands holding bars over "Se Habla Español" sign
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 decision from its “shadow docket” that reversed a lower-court injunction and gave federal immigration agents in Los Angeles the green light to resume stops based on four deeply troubling criteria:
The case, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, is still working its way through the courts. But the message from this emergency ruling is unmistakable: the constitutional protections that once shielded immigrant communities from racial profiling are now conditional—and increasingly fragile.
Es incorrecto—moral, legal y cívicamente—que ICE apunte a personas simplemente por hablar un idioma distinto al inglés. Sin embargo, eso es exactamente lo que permite la reciente decisión del Tribunal Supremo en el caso Noem v. Perdomo. Entre los cuatro factores que los agentes pueden usar para justificar detenciones migratorias en Los Ángeles se encuentra hablar español o inglés con acento—un precedente alarmante en un país donde el español es el segundo idioma más hablado, utilizado por más de 43% de los inmigrantes y casi 68 millones de personas en todo el país.
Seamos claros: esto no tiene que ver con la seguridad pública. Se trata de convertir el idioma en una herramienta de perfilamiento racial, origen y estatus migratorio percibido. Solo en el condado de Los Ángeles, más de 3.4 millones de residentes hablan español. No es una población marginal—es parte esencial del tejido cívico y cultural de la región. Tratar el español como sospechoso es criminalizar la identidad, la herencia y el sentido de pertenencia.
Como hijo de inmigrantes peruanos, crecí navegando entre dos mundos—traduciendo para mis padres, adaptándome en las aulas, y aprendiendo que el idioma podía ser tanto un puente como una barrera. Hoy, al criar a mis hijos junto a mi esposa Adriana, ciudadana naturalizada nacida en Colombia, les enseñamos a abrazar ambos idiomas. Pero ¿cómo explicarles que hablar español en público podría convertirlos en blanco de detención?
La ofensiva policial de la administración Trump comenzó en junio de 2025, con agentes del ICE realizando patrullajes itinerantes por el sur de California. Rápidamente surgieron demandas, citando más de 2300 detenciones —incluyendo ciudadanos estadounidenses y residentes legales— en lugares como estacionamientos de Home Depot, paradas de autobús y obras de construcción. La jueza Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong emitió una orden de restricción temporal en julio, prohibiendo al ICE usar la raza, el idioma, el tipo de trabajo o la ubicación como únicos factores para las detenciones. El Noveno Circuito la ratificó. Pero la orden sin firmar de la Corte Suprema ahora ha levantado esas protecciones.
La jueza Sotomayor, acompañada por los jueces Kagan y Jackson, calificó la decisión de "inadmisiblemente irreconciliable con las garantías constitucionales de nuestra nación". Tiene razón. Este fallo no solo erosiona la Cuarta Enmienda, sino que también codifica la sospecha basada en la identidad. Les dice a millones de latinos, inmigrantes y trabajadores: su idioma, su trabajo, su color de piel y su ubicación son suficientes para convertirlos en blanco.
El caso podría regresar al Tribunal Supremo para una revisión completa. Pero el daño ya está hecho. Y si periodistas, defensores y líderes cívicos no se mantienen firmes, el precedente se expandirá—primero por California, luego por todo el país.
Esta decisión no solo debilita las protecciones constitucionales—envía un mensaje de que la diversidad lingüística es una amenaza, no una fortaleza. Socava los ideales de una democracia pluralista. Les dice a millones de estadounidenses que sus voces—literalmente—no son bienvenidas.
Para familias como la mía, esto no es solo un cambio legal—es una ruptura cívica. Socava la confianza en las autoridades, desestabiliza comunidades y envía al país el mensaje de que los derechos constitucionales son negociables. Que el perfilamiento es política pública. Que la justicia es selectiva.
Estamos enseñando a nuestros hijos a sentirse orgullosos de su herencia, a hablar ambos idiomas, a conocer sus derechos. Pero también les estamos enseñando cómo mantenerse seguros en un país que cada vez más percibe su identidad como una amenaza.
Debemos rechazar la idea de que el inglés es el único idioma legítimo. Nuestra democracia es multilingüe. Nuestras comunidades son multilingües. Y nuestras leyes deben reflejar esa realidad—no castigarla.
¿Qué tipo de país somos cuando la sospecha se basa no en acciones, sino en rostros?
To read the article in English, click HERE.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum and the publisher of the Latino News Network.
Rising debt, stagnant wages, and soaring costs leave families living paycheck to paycheck in 2025.
In the late 1970s, my mom worked as a nurse and became the family's breadwinner after my dad developed serious heart disease. His doctors told him to avoid stress, even driving, for fear it would be fatal. Yet on her single income, we managed what was then considered a solidly middle-class life. Stability was assumed, even if one parent couldn’t work.
That assumption has vanished. Today, surveys show that roughly half to two-thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (People’s Policy Project). A stricter Bank of America analysis finds that about one in four households spends nearly all their income on essentials (Axios). Whether the number is one-in-two or one-in-four, millions of Americans are financially on the edge.
Credit card delinquencies are at a 13-year high, and even routine expenses—rent, groceries, childcare—are enough to push families to the brink. The lived reality of millions of households isn’t prosperity—it’s precariousness. Economist Hyman Minsky warned that booms don’t eliminate risk—they breed it. His financial instability hypothesis (Institute for New Economic Thinking) shows how debt piles up until even small shocks can trigger a crisis. By that measure, 2025 looks like a country skating on thin ice. And despite the White House’s boasts of a “booming economy,” the cracks are showing everywhere.
What once sustained a family on one income now falls short. In 2025, the math simply doesn’t add up. The Census Bureau reports that the median household income is about $74,500, but the baseline cost of a “normal” middle-class life—mortgage, car, childcare, healthcare—can easily reach $120,000 to $140,000 a year in many metro areas. Families are left plugging the gap with debt or scaling back until stability disappears.
Warning signs are piling up. Credit card delinquencies are at their highest level in 13 years, as households lean on plastic to cover rising rent, insurance, and grocery bills. The share of income consumed by essentials keeps rising, leaving little room for savings or emergencies.
Even in cities once considered affordable, the squeeze is undeniable. In places like Cleveland and St. Louis, median home prices now hover near $300,000—requiring $75,000–$100,000 in income just to avoid being house poor, a threshold already beyond many families. Families aren’t living extravagantly—they’re trapped in an economic system where wages lag behind the costs of essentials, leaving millions running faster just to stay in place.
If households are stuck, much of the reason lies in debt. Mortgages, auto loans, and credit cards eat into paychecks before families can save. Medical bills add to the burden, with insurance premiums up nearly 50% in the past decade and deductibles climbing faster than wages.
The generational squeeze is especially stark. For younger Americans, tuition at public universities has more than tripled since 1980, leaving over 43 million people owing $1.7 trillion in student loans. What was once a ladder into the middle class now delays homeownership, family formation, and savings. Millions of young adults begin life under water.
At the other end of the age spectrum, older Americans face a precarious retirement. Social Security and Medicare remain the pillars of security, but both are under pressure. Trump’s proposal to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits would blow a $1.6–$1.8 trillion hole in the trust funds, pushing insolvency up to 2032 for Social Security and 2030 for Medicare. That means steep benefit cuts just as Baby Boomers age into retirement.
Meanwhile, long-term care can cost $50,000 to $100,000 a year—far beyond what most retirees have saved.
Across generations, debt has become the silent architecture of American life. Young adults start adulthood burdened, middle-aged families juggle housing and medical bills, and seniors fear outliving their savings. Fragility isn’t confined to Wall Street—it runs through America’s households.
Households aren’t the only ones squeezed. Small businesses—the backbone of many communities—are freezing in place too. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reports that confidence has dropped to levels not seen since early 2024. Owners cite inflation and tight credit, but the deeper issue is uncertainty.
Trump’s trade wars, tariff threats, and Congress’s reliance on stopgap budgets make long-term planning nearly impossible. Unlike large corporations, small businesses don’t have legal teams or lobbyists to navigate shifting tax codes and regulatory whiplash.
Instead of hiring or expanding, many are sitting on their hands, waiting for clarity that never comes. Scaled up across the economy, that caution translates into weaker growth, fewer jobs, and less innovation—the very conditions that deepen household insecurity.
When both families and small businesses are stuck in survival mode, the broader economy becomes fragile by design. This is exactly what Minsky meant: what looks like stability is often brittleness in disguise.
Taken together, the evidence points to an economy far less stable than the White House boasts. Families are buried in debt, young adults begin life under water, retirees face shrinking safety nets, and small businesses are too cautious to invest. The result isn’t resilience—it’s fragility.
When I think back to my childhood, what stands out is how one nurse’s salary was enough to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. That sense of stability—the assumption that middle-class life was secure—was once the foundation of American society. Today, it has crumbled. What my family could manage with one income now takes two, and even then, the math rarely works.
This article is the first in a series exploring how Trump’s economic agenda is destabilizing the country. Here we’ve traced the household and community-level squeeze. In the next piece, we’ll move up the ladder—to financial markets, Wall Street excess, and executive overreach—before concluding with recommendations to restore stability. Those reforms will address issues like affordable housing, the cost of education and healthcare, and policies that could restore predictability for families and businesses alike.
For now, one point is clear: America is living on a fragile foundation. The cracks are already visible. Whether they widen into a full-blown crisis depends not just on markets, but on whether our leaders—and voters—still have the will to fight for a middle class that can thrive again.
Robert Cropf is a professor of political science at Saint Louis University.
The new academic year has started at most universities. This fall, however, an icy chill has descended on academic life.
In glaring contradiction to their mission statements, while publicly embracing academic freedom, many institutions severely limit it on one particular issue: the famine and genocide currently being perpetrated in Gaza.
In spite of the appeals of high-profile public figures, in spite of the appeals of leading Israeli human rights organizations to boycott Israel and to pressure it into stopping the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the U.S. administration continues to punish universities. Under the government’s threats, universities are punishing students and scholars for standing up for equal human and political rights of both Israelis and Palestinians and for fighting to end the war crimes supported by the U.S., militarily, financially, and diplomatically.
How has it come to this?
Universities fear the wrath of the Trump administration, which, in a number of high-profile cases, has withheld hundreds of millions of research dollars from public and private institutions. In order to restore funding, some institutions have espoused a particular definition of antisemitism, which the Trump administration imposes as the only valid one, namely the “working definition of antisemitism” proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) in 2016. The problem, however, is that this definition conflates “criticism of Zionism, Israeli state policies, and violence against Palestinians with antisemitism.”
In response to the IHRA definition and “its implications for academic freedom and freedom of expression,” almost 400 international scholars “working in Antisemitism Studies and related fields, including Jewish, Holocaust, Israel, Palestine, and Middle East Studies,” signed the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), which rejects the above-mentioned conflation and proposes “clear guidance to identify and fight antisemitism while protecting free expression.”
The scholars of the Genocide and Holocaust Studies Crisis Network (GHSCN) also reject the IHRA definition, pointing out that even its co-author, Kenneth Stern, who describes himself as a Zionist, has repudiated its current weaponization as a “blatant distortion of the definition’s purpose.”
As a scholar of the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust), I support the GHSCN’s objections and the JDA’s alternative definition.
Columbia University is a case in point of the IHRA definition’s chilling effects. As widely reported, for example by Lexi Lonas Cochran of The Hill, not only was Columbia blackmailed to pay the Trump administration $225 million, presumably to restore $400 million in funding, it also was pressured into espousing the IHRA definition.
As a consequence, one of the leading scholars of the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch, and the eminent historian of Palestine, Rashid Khalidi, have withdrawn their classes from Columbia’s fall curriculum.
“A university that treats criticism of Israel as antisemitic and threatens sanctions for those who disobey is no longer a place of open inquiry,” Hirsch was quoted in The Guardian. “I just don’t see how I can teach about genocide in that environment.”
In an open letter to Columbia’s acting president, Khalidi wrote that under the IHRA definition, “which absurdly conflates criticism of a nation-state, Israel, and a political ideology, Zionism, with the ancient evil of Jew-hatred, it is impossible with any honesty to teach about topics such as the history of the creation of Israel, and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba.”
It should be underlined, as Cochran does, that in spite of bowing to the demands of the Trump administration, many researchers at Columbia and elsewhere have actually not seen any funding restored.
Another, even more ominous, case in point is UCLA. The world-renowned public research university is battling a $1 billion fine to restore hundreds of millions of dollars in withheld research funding. UCLA’s transgression? Yet again, the Trump administration alleges that UCLA hasn’t done enough to combat antisemitism when it allowed student protests opposing the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip that followed the gruesome attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023. No consideration was given to the fact that these protests were peaceful (at UCLA, the only violent attack was carried out by pro-Israel activists), and that, just like at Columbia, many of the protesters were Jewish students and faculty.
At American universities, in the name of the IHRA definition, students have been “arrested, suspended, or expelled” for protesting what a growing number of genocide scholars and public figures, including in Israel, have been calling a genocide. Students and scholars are being doxxed, their professional outlooks or careers threatened.
Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard deplored on August 31, 2025, the “felonious, unforgivable project of Gaza’s destruction. […] Israel is destroying Gaza. Call it ethnic cleansing, call it erasure, call it genocide, call it whatever you want. I have no doubt that Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish-Polish jurist who coined the term ‘genocide,’ would declare with tears of shame that the Jewish state is committing genocide in Gaza. It is destroying the place and annihilating the human group living there.”
In the U.S., students and others are being attacked for opposing what the former speaker of the Knesset, Avrum Burg, described on August 8 as “crimes against humanity,” against which he summoned “one million Jews” to rebel, and “file a joint appeal to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.”
By adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, the U.S., in the words of the Palestinian philosopher Sami Khatib, casts its role “as the ‘rescuer’ of future victims of an imagined new genocide, while denying the existence of a real genocide as it currently unfolds in Gaza.” Khatib warns that “once a victim group is framed as terrorist or as an exponent of past evil (Palestinians as the new antisemites, as the reincarnation of Nazis), the responsibility to protect and rescue is inverted: protection becomes persecution, rescue becomes annihilation.” The IHRA definition has contributed to this inversion, and genocide and holocaust scholars should oppose it.
