A school inside a hate group, an NBA star’s tweet, the 2019 teacher of the year: What Education Lab is reading this week

Happy May, Ed Lab readers. We know school is out for the summer next month, but the news never sleeps — not even education news.

We’re sharing the “What We’re Reading” section from our weekly Education Lab newsletter right here.

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Here’s what we’re reading this week.

Education Lab is a Seattle Times project that spotlights promising approaches to persistent challenges in public education. The Seattle Foundation serves as the fiscal sponsor for Education Lab, which is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Ballmer Group. Learn more about Ed Lab. 

Inside a Harlem church, there’s a school classified as a hate group, but it’s still operating. Pastor James Manning runs a school inside Atlah World Missionary Church, where “he psychologically abuses kids, teaches them to hate gay people, and convinces parents to abandon their children,” former students told HuffPost. One former student was locked in a basement for eight hours over three days. HuffPost spoke with 27 people connected to the church and school in its monthslong investigation of Manning’s “web of manipulation” and how he’s avoided scrutiny for so long.

In 2014, a Georgia teacher told NBA star Jaylen Brown that she’d look him up in jail in five years. Brown’s tweet about the incident resurfaced this week as the five-year anniversary of that comment passed, and it started a conversation about how teachers everywhere talk to their black students. “Jaylen Brown’s story is a classic representation of teachers and other adults viewing a young black male through the lens of stereotypes or personal experience,” Bryant Marks, founder of the National Training Institute on Race and Equity, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “The fact that an educator uttered this statement to her student is reprehensible, disgusting, and a fireable offense. The educator’s job is to facilitate human development, not destroy it.”

This year’s National Teacher of the Year is Rodney Robinson. He’s been teaching for 19 years, most recently at a juvenile detention center in Virginia. “My kids are in survival mode 24/7,” Robinson told NPR this week. “And so a lot of times, when they come into the detention center, they’re struggling to understand it all … I try to teach them about the system and how they can better be served.” Read or listen to his entire interview here.