By Ranita Ray
Over the past year, our most vulnerable students across the United States have been under attack. While the current administration systematically dismantles the U.S. Department of Education, these students still show up at school every day.
They come to school even as they hear of threats to oust African American history from the classroom and restrict LGBTQ+ curriculum. They sit in their classrooms as the ever-present danger of ICE raids looms large.
Teachers are already on the frontline of this battle as they think about how to protect their students while teaching honestly about United States history. But these ongoing traumas are unlike anything teachers have been trained for, and it can be difficult—next to impossible, even—to know how best to support students right now.
I am a sociology professor and education researcher with nearly two decades of experience studying educators, schools, and children. I’m also a parent and university-level educator. As a researcher, I spent three years inside 15 different classrooms in public elementary and middle schools and interviewed teachers in one of the largest urban majority-minority school districts in the United States to understand the everyday experiences of children inside the classroom during the first Trump era.
Based on what I learned from that experience, here are four steps I believe all teachers can take to support our most vulnerable children today.
1. Ensure Trauma-Informed and Culturally Responsive Support
Every child carries a story. And in times of intensifying attacks on vulnerable students, it is necessary to understand the trauma caused by the current political climate. Teachers can’t be therapists, but they can be mindful of the realities shaping their students’ lives.
While educators are no doubt always working under pressure, some leeway in the classroom is possible. This could mean acknowledging a child’s pain and giving them extra time for the work or even just being more understanding if they misbehave.
2. Acknowledge and Make Visible Everyday Harms
Teachers are a trusted adult in the lives of many children. As such, it is imperative to understand that teachers are also humans who, research has found, can have racial bias.
Now is the time to confront these biases and how they cause harm. In order to do so, not only should teachers discuss current politics with each other, they must also acknowledge the myriad attacks on vulnerable children and maybe even replace behaviours of talking about students with discussions of structural harm on them and their families instead.
3. Reimagine Teacher Training and Professional Development
Efforts to promote anti-racism or cultural awareness in schools, research shows, often fail when they become superficial or when teachers become defensive. There is a growing body of research that has been evaluating decades of multicultural and anti-racist trainings. It is well-known among researchers that these teacher trainings fall short. In fact, they are often detrimental to students and can actually cause hostility, rather than eradicate it.
In an almost counterintuitive move, as DEI is under attack, we educators must take conversations of inequality more seriously than ever and go beyond largely ineffective one-off trainings. We need to introspect on our role in perpetuating inequality and accept the responsibility of unlearning our own biases.
Professional development should be continuous, reflective, and collaborative and consider the varied political ideologies among teachers. Teachers need space to confront their own biases, exhaustion, and power dynamics—not in punitive ways, but through honest dialogue and peer accountability. Schools should also focus on supporting and retaining teachers, because their well-being directly shapes the climate of the classroom.
4. Share Power with Students, Families, and Communities
Finally, educators must think of making their classrooms more democratic—by sharing power with students as well as their families and communities—even if it may seemingly pose a challenge to legitimate and expert teacher authority in the classroom. Research shows that discipline and order, no matter how we look at it, reproduces harm against Black, brown, and Indigenous students.
Perhaps, if a student doesn’t turn in their homework or disrupts class by talking to their peer during a lesson, educators can show empathy or try collaborating with their guardians to reach the child, instead of embracing a complaint culture that relies on outreach to guardians or state authorities as threats to both students and their families. Now is the time to replace the educational achievement imperative with wholesome well-being of children, which, research shows, is equally as fundamental to learning.
Sharing power with families and communities can also look like judgement-free parental involvement inside our schools.
We already know about the mounting burdens on children today. Along with school safety drills, academic competition, and the stress of extracurriculars, our most vulnerable students are also now facing deportation and erasure of their histories and realities—these are big burdens for their small shoulders.
As educators, we do have some power, at least in the safety of our classroom. We must begin by acknowledging that what we read in the newspapers everyday has real, human victims. And sometimes, those victims can be our own students.
Ranita Ray is an associate professor in sociology at The University of New Mexico, and author of the award-winning book Slow Violence: Confronting Dark Truths in the American Classroom (MacMillan 2025).
