Nearly three years after voting in a referendum to leave the European Union, and 17 days before its expected departure, Britain is no closer to a political consensus on how to leave or whether to rethink its exit.

In another stunning defeat, members of Parliament on Tuesday rejected the government’s withdrawal agreement with the EU by a margin of 149 votes. It was a setback for Prime Minister Theresa May who has spent months trying to square the circle between the promises of pro-Brexit politicians of the United Kingdom being unshackled from EU membership and the reality of a messy divorce after decades of convergence.

Tuesday’s vote in Parliament came two months after a similar crushing defeat for Ms. May, who leads a minority Conservative government that is deeply divided over Brexit. MPs voted down Ms. May’s agreement, despite a last-minute effort to secure legal tweaks to a contingency plan for intra-Ireland trade that had proved toxic last time.

Ms. May rose to speak briefly after the votes were announced. She said Parliament would vote Wednesday on a motion on blocking a no-deal Brexit on March 29, followed by another vote the following day on whether to extend the deadline. She insisted that it was still possible to reach consensus on an orderly exit.

“I’m passionate about delivering the results of the referendum but I equally passionately believe that the best way to do that is to leave in an orderly way with a deal. And I still believe that there is a majority in the house for that course of action,” she said.

Most analysts see an extension until May or June as the most likely outcome given the widespread opposition among MPs to a no-deal Brexit. But the government has said little about what it might do during any extension to break the deadlock in Parliament.

To pro-EU politicians who favor a second referendum that could overturn the results of the first, a vote to extend presents an opportunity. And while Ms. May has repeatedly scorned the idea as undemocratic, a second referendum could offer a way to muster public support for her deal as the only way to stop Brexit from being undone. It would also satisfy European leaders whose consent would be needed for any extension.

“The most likely scenario that the EU would agree to, and is in the prime minister’s best interests, is a referendum on her deal or no Brexit,” says Thom Brooks, a politics professor and the dean of Durham Law School in northeast England.

Henry Nicholls/Reuters

Anti-Brexit and pro-Brexit protesters demonstrate outside the Houses of Parliament in London on March 12.

Holding such a referendum would take a minimum of 10 weeks for the campaign and would require Parliamentary legislation, says David Hannay, a former U.K. ambassador to the EU who is a member of the House of Lords. This means a longer extension than Ms. May has indicated. “That all carries you quite a way down the track,” says Mr. Hannay, who favors a second referendum.

European leaders are holding a summit next week at which any U.K. request for an extension would likely be tabled. Still, there’s no guarantee for Britain that the EU will grant an extension, warns Alex de Ruyter, director of the Centre for Brexit Studies at Birmingham City University. And the clock is still ticking. “If the U.K. doesn’t articulate a request to EU in time, [Brexit] may still happen by default,” he says.

Speaking earlier, her hoarse voice barely audible at times, Ms. May painted a dim picture of the next steps in the event of defeat for her deal. “The choices could be bleak,” she told MPs, noting that a no-deal exit, which some in her own party favor, would significantly harm Britain’s economy.

She added that an extension to the deadline for leaving could still end in the U.K. crashing out of the EU, if no mutual deal can be reached. It would be no good blaming the EU for such a messy ending, she told MPs. “Responsibility would lie with this house.”

In a tweet sent after the vote, Michel Barnier, the EU negotiator on Brexit, seemed to concur. He tweeted, “The EU has done everything it can to help get the Withdrawal Agreement over the line. The impasse can only be solved in the #UK. Our ‘no-deal’ preparations are now more important than ever before.”

Much of Tuesday’s debate turned on legal tweaks to the deal’s so-called backstop to deal with intra-Ireland trade. In January, MPs opposed to Ms. May’s deal cited the advice of Attorney General Geoffrey Cox that the backstop – an insurance policy to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland, an EU member – could be extended indefinitely.

Mr. Cox told MPs today that the government had secured new guarantees to reduce the risk of this happening. If the EU was found to have acted in bad faith in negotiating a comprehensive trade deal with the U.K., then Britain could pull out, he said. But government critics on the Conservative benches did not seem mollified, calling it too little too late.

Boris Johnson, a former foreign secretary seen as a rival for Ms. May’s position, called the new legal documents “an apron of fig leafs” to hide a bad deal. Nor did it satisfy the DUP, the Northern Ireland party on which Ms. May depends for her parliamentary majority.

The Northern Ireland backstop was originally proposed by the U.K. as a way to avoid inflaming sectarianism two decades after the Good Friday agreement to end its conflict. But it has assumed totemic powers in the Brexit debate as Ms. May’s backbench critics saw it as a tool for the EU to trap the U.K. in a customs union without an exit.

This rhetoric has proved hard to dispel, says Mr. Hannay. “To say that it’s a trap is to presume bad faith by the EU,” he says. “I think that’s frankly a bit absurd.”

Philippe Wojazer/Reuters

People gather at the Place de la République in Paris Feb. 19 to protest anti-Semitism and the rise of anti-Semitic attacks. The banner reads: 'Muslims against anti-Semitism.'

It has set off a full-blown crisis inside Britain’s Labour Party, and the first hints of one inside the Democratic Party in the United States: Anti-Semitism, that oldest of hatreds, is proving to be, as a leading Irish writer and politician once put it, a very light sleeper.

Yet beyond the political ramifications on both sides of the Atlantic, there is also an increasingly acrimonious debate over what is, and isn’t, anti-Semitism – especially when it comes to criticism of Israel. That, in turn, has shifted the spotlight away from the familiar, in-your-face Jew-hatred of the far right and on to left-of-center groups which, with their overt commitment to fighting racism and discrimination, have long insisted that anti-Semitism is not a problem for them. 

But it is. And there are at least two reasons why that matters. The first is that, just as on the right, the stereotyping and dehumanization of Jews, once the province of fringe figures, has increasingly been given space within the mainstream. The second, sometimes obscured in the acres of op-ed space devoted to the issue over recent weeks, is that there is a real human cost. Synagogues, Jewish cemeteries, and other Jewish property have been attacked. And Jews have been assaulted, even murdered, in Western countries – on a scale that for decades after the Nazi Holocaust would have seemed unthinkable.

I am not the first columnist to try to disentangle the issues around the left’s “Jewish problem.” Nor will I be the last. But I should start by explaining where I’m coming from. I am a longtime, proud part of The Christian Science Monitor family. I am also Jewish, born in Washington, and raised in a nonobservant home, though my Jewishness has become much more a part of my life as an adult. And as a foreign correspondent, I covered both sides of the Middle East conflict, based first in Beirut and later in Jerusalem.

Anti-Semitism vs. anti-Zionism

The argument over “anti-Semitism versus anti-Zionism” has long seemed to me an intellectual fudge. A person can be critical of Israel, or even challenge the core Zionist aim of creating a Jewish state, without necessarily being anti-Semitic. Some Jews, and Israelis too, oppose many current Israeli government policies. One of the main strictly Orthodox movements in the Jewish world, the Satmar Hasidic group, is itself anti-Zionist, viewing the establishment of a Jewish state as sinful until the arrival of the messiah.

It’s true that some anti-Zionists, or strident public critics of Israeli policy, do attract accusations of anti-Semitism that are politically motivated or unfair. But many self-styled “anti-Zionists” do draw on, give oxygen to, or actively spread the very same kind of imagery and hateful, centuries-old lies and conspiracy theories about Jews that ultimately made the Holocaust possible. The image of choice: Jews are an unassimilable group of cagey, disproportionately rich people who hold no real loyalty to the nations in which they live, and who are secretly out to control the world.

I suggest a thought experiment: Test some of the more extreme rhetoric and accusations being directed at “Zionists” by seeing whether they would jar if you simply substituted the word “Jews.” Or look at the political company this brand of “anti-Zionist” keeps, often including purveyors of anti-Semitic lies like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the czarist Russian forgery alleging a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world, or the accusation that Israel and Jews were behind the attack on the twin towers.

The criticism engulfing British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is not mainly over whether his own “anti-Zionism” has strayed into anti-Semitism, although leading members of Britain’s Jewish community have argued it does. It is that he has provided space, and at times support, for increasingly influential acolytes inside Labour and beyond who do traffic in anti-Semitic stereotypes. 

The reasons that political anti-Semitism is reawakening may help explain the difficulty Labour has found in confronting its crisis, as well as the first, milder, signs of a similar challenge facing U.S. Democrats.

The first is that centuries-old European anti-Semitism, largely dormant after the Holocaust, has become intertwined with a more recent version, incubated in the Arab and Islamic world since the establishment of Israel in 1948. Mr. Corbyn spent years, before becoming Labour leader, championing his support for Palestinian and Arab groups for whom Israel’s establishment was not only unjust. It was an injustice they were determined to reverse. Any wider anti-Jewishness among some of these allies clearly paled in importance for him compared with the cause they represented.

He and many supporters also seem to share a longstanding blind spot on the socialist left, with its roots in the Marxist view of class-ordered society: that Jews are well-off. Members of the privileged class. It is that, they would suggest, rather than race or religion that makes them worthy of attack – a notion dramatically highlighted when Mr. Corbyn sided with an artist who painted an overtly anti-Semitic mural in East London that portrayed hook-nosed Jews playing Monopoly on the backs of the struggling poor.

A second reason for the resurgence of anti-Semitism may be that, despite Holocaust-education initiatives around the world, for generations now coming of age politically, the industrial murder of millions of Jews eight decades ago is becoming a more dimly present, less viscerally horrible, part of history.

When Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar suggested that congressional support for Israel was “all about the Benjamins,” or, in criticizing the pro-Israeli lobby group AIPAC, questioned how Americans could “push for allegiance to a foreign country,” it’s unlikely that she fully realized the European anti-Semitic provenance of the tropes implicit in those statements. In other words, the image of Jews using money as an underhanded weapon for political control, or the suggestion of Jewish “dual loyalty.” 

Nor may New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been fully aware of the dozens of anti-Semitism allegations swirling inside British Labour when she tweeted last month that she’d been “honored” to be able to speak by phone with Mr. Corbyn.

One thing that has now changed is that Labour is facing a political imperative to come to grips with the issue of anti-Semitism. The Democrats, in spite of the messy politics around their recent introduction of a House resolution against all forms of racism, are clearly intent on addressing the question much earlier, and more assertively, than Mr. Corbyn.

That suggests at least the beginning of a shift in the politics around anti-Semitism. As Emory University historian Deborah Lipstadt notes in her new book, both the left and the right have in recent years limited themselves to recognizing, or calling out, Jew-hatred only among their political opponents. U.S. President Donald Trump, for example, while repeatedly avoiding criticism of far-right supporters for anti-Semitism, has seized on the debate inside the Democratic Party to declare that Democrats “hate Jewish people.”

And here, in my view, is why all of this is so important. Yes, as a Jew, I find the resurgence of anti-Jewish prejudice, hate, and violence deeply upsetting. Yet it’s also worth remembering a lesson from history: Anti-Semites don’t hate only Jews. They are almost always intolerant of other groups, too – different faiths, different races, different colors. And of difference itself.

Carmen K. Sisson

Terry Freeman leaves a message on a cross at Providence Baptist Church, March 7, in Opelika, Ala. Mr. Freeman was among hundreds who showed up at the church to volunteer after an EF-4 tornado ripped through the community, March 3. The community college student knew two of the victims through his church choir.

On a windswept hillside in eastern Alabama, white crosses glimmer in the morning sun. Birds twitter in the nearby trees and a fine coating of dew sparkles on the grass like jewels. Angels’ tears, older Southerners call it. On this morning, in this place, no one would be inclined to disagree.

A week ago, an EF4 tornado ripped through Beauregard, killing 23 people and injuring nearly 100. The violent tornado was one of 39 that touched down March 3 in the deadliest tornado outbreak in the United States since 2013.

Manufactured homes were blown to pieces in 170 mph winds. Brick houses were reduced to concrete slabs. But buildings can be replaced, residents say. The victims, who ranged in age from 6 to 89, were part of the rich tapestry that made Beauregard special.

The fabric of the close-knit community has been torn asunder, and the only things they have left are their faith and each other.

At the Providence Baptist Church

Beauregard – an unincorporated area east of Auburn and south of Opelika – is made up of four-way stops and pock-marked two-lanes that wind their way through the forested hills.

It’s a place where Sundays were made for worship, flags were made for flying, and everyone gets along unless Alabama is playing Auburn in college football (when all bets are off). People salute the military, support the police, and pull over when a funeral procession approaches, whether they knew the deceased or not.

Around here, most everyone knows everyone, and right now, every heart in Lee County is broken.

The grieving has just begun, but recovery is well underway, with Providence Baptist Church – the site of the tornado memorial – serving as both the logistical and spiritual hub for disaster relief.

Ten minutes after the tornado passed, church member David Dismukes grabbed his chainsaw and headed out to clear roads. He met others who were doing the same.

Carmen K. Sisson

Cheryl Key and Gwen Shaver sort baby clothes at Providence Baptist Church, March 7 in Opelika, Ala. The women were among hundreds who showed up at the church to volunteer after an EF-4 tornado ripped through the community, March 3 killing 23 people and leaving a 70-mile long path of destruction.

When the sun rose Monday morning, people were lining up at Providence with donations, and Mr. Dismukes found himself in a new role: volunteer operations manager.

Outside the church fellowship hall, a steady stream of cars follows signs directing them toward volunteer sign-up, donation drop-off and pickup, or one of the many service agencies onsite, from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Alabama Baptist Disaster Relief and Samaritan’s Purse.

Inside is a bustling marvel of organization. Tables groan beneath the weight of donated clothing, neatly labeled by size. Cases of water and Gatorade flank the walls. Dishes are sorted and stacked. Other tables hold sleeping bags, children’s toys, paper towels, and cleaning supplies. And there is the occasional odd surprise, too, like pink ice skates in case an Alabama girl finds herself on a frozen pond someday.

At a table of baby clothes, Cheryl Key folds onesies with Gwen Shaver and Lucy Walton. Ms. Key drove down from Valley, not knowing what she would find. Ms. Shaver and Ms. Walton came from nearby La Fayette.

They felt driven by their duty as Christians to help.

“We’re all connected,” Ms. Key says. “We have to be that love and that light.”

Mr. Dismukes has been heartened by the local response as well as the people who have traveled from as far away as Texas and Pennsylvania to lend a hand.

He sits down heavily at a table in the fellowship hall, making a space between stacks of Bibles for a barbecue sandwich he probably won’t get time to eat.

Rumors that he is sleeping on a cot at the church are inaccurate, but the long hours he is devoting are not.

An hour ago, a barefooted woman stumbled into the building, crying. She told him her mother was dead and she had lost everything in the tornado.

“I don’t have anything,” she told him.

After assessing her immediate needs, he connected her with more resources. He doesn’t say it, but his worry is evident.

“The positive we take away from this is that we have grown so much closer,” Mr. Dismukes says. “Relationships that may have been frayed or weak have become stronger than ever.”

This morning, he gave a child a teddy bear, not knowing if it would help.

“She just clung to that thing,” he says, choking back tears. “It was something to hold on to.”

Mr. Dismukes draws a shaky breath, closes his eyes, then opens them and looks around the room, still dazed by the volume of contributions and volunteers.

“I think love is the only thing that can heal this,” he says slowly. “Love for one another.”

‘It didn’t sit right with my soul’

As the day draws to a close, the crowds thin out around the church and swell again at the site of the white crosses.

For some volunteers, this is where they begin and end their day.

“Mommy and Daddy love you so much,” says a note on 10-year-old Taylor Thornton’s cross.

A.J. Hernandez, 6, was remembered by his mother.

“Goodbye for now, Batman,” she wrote. “God will keep you till I see you again. I love you.”

Terry Freeman, 18, kneels in front of James Tate’s cross and writes a note, then kneels again in front of Henry Stenson’s cross and does the same.

Mr. Freeman was a star athlete at Beauregard High School and now studies business marketing at Chattahoochee Valley Community College. He knew Mr. Tate and Mr. Stenson through his church choir.

When he fills a survivor’s car with donations, he’s not just giving them paper towels and garbage bags – he’s trying to fill them with love, compassion, and empathy. He also doles out a hefty supply of hugs to anyone who seems to need one.

“I’m not just doing community service,” Mr. Freeman says. “People need others to depend on in times like this because the people they would normally depend on – they’re never going to see them again.”

He is busy with school and two jobs, but he knew he had to make the time to come back home to help the people who made him the man he is trying to become.

“It didn’t sit right with my soul, being too busy to help,” Mr. Freeman says softly. “God blessed me with two arms and two legs, and I wanted these people to feel God’s love through me.”

The anti-government protests that have convulsed Sudan over the past three months are, in many ways, a revolution told in chants.

“Just fall, that’s all,” goes the movement’s most popular slogan, directed at the 30-year-long regime of President Omar al-Bashir. It’s become a kind of refrain during the hundreds of demonstrations that have taken place since protesters first began pouring into the streets in December, as their initial anger over the rapidly rising cost of basic commodities morphed into a full-on call for regime change.

“Revolution is the people’s choice,” demonstrators have called into the dusty streets of Khartoum, Port Sudan, Wad Madani, and dozens of other cities.

“Freedom, peace, and justice!” students have yelled as they poured out of university gates. 

But in recent weeks, these chants have been joined by another refrain, this one directed at a group of demonstrators who have been, for many, the movement’s heartbeat.  

“You women, be strong,” activists have chanted at several protests. “This revolution is a women’s revolution.”

What makes it a women’s revolution, many here say, is the heavy participation of women – over half the demonstrators at many protests are women – but also their fierce urgency in ousting the president. Since Mr. Bashir came to power in a 1989 coup, few groups of Sudanese have suffered as visibly as women under his rule. And now, there seem to be few groups who want to see him gone quite as much. 

“People have been saying how excited they are to see women in the streets, but personally it doesn’t surprise me at all to see women at the forefront of these protests, because we have been the main casualties of this regime,” says Alaa Satir, a cartoonist and demonstrator in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. “Our repression has been one of its main features.” 

‘A tool for repression’ 

The protesters are taking Mr. Bashir’s regime to task for a wide range of failings, from a collapsing economy to a seemingly never-ending civil war in the region of Darfur. But for women, there is an added complaint. 

Over the last three decades, Mr. Bashir has pushed a fundamentalist version of Islam – one at odds, many here say, with the religious tolerance of Sudanese society. And many of the laws he passed, they add, have made women’s bodies a battleground. 

Today, Sudanese women are required to receive permission from male guardians to travel or work outside the home. And the country’s “public order” laws, supposedly designed to protect the country’s morality, are used primarily to harass women for crimes like wearing pants or failing to cover their heads.  

“They’re a tool for repression, rather than a reflection of what the society really thinks,” says Jehanne Henry, an associate director in Human Rights Watch’s Africa division who has conducted extensive research in Sudan.

Although the laws are applied extremely inconsistently, the result, for many Sudanese women, is a feeling that their very existence has been criminalized.  

“There’s a stereotype that Sudanese women are docile, that they stay at home, that they don’t participate in public life,” says Mayada Hassanain, a researcher and activist in Khartoum. “That has never been true. For as long as women have been on the receiving end of these really horrible laws, they have been fighting back. It isn’t something new.” 

The Sudanese woman, reimagined 

Activists, mostly women, have a long history of protesting the public order laws, for instance. And women in Sudan led anti-colonial uprisings and played a key role in every popular uprising since. Women’s movements in Sudan won women the right to vote, the right to equal pay, and the right to maternity leave – often decades before other countries in the region. 

Courtesy of Alaa Satir

An image by Sudanese cartoonist Alaa Satir depicts the crucial role of women in the anti-government uprising that began in Sudan in December.

More recently, women have been key participants in the waves of protests that have roiled Sudan since 2011, calling for Mr. Bashir to step down. 

In the past, activists say, the prominent role played by women faded from memory after the demonstrations ended.  

But this time, things are different. For one thing, these marches have continued far longer than any movements before them, making them harder to ignore. And they have been obsessively documented.  

“Social media has made it really difficult to shy away from the reality of women’s participation,” says Asma Ahmed, an activist in Khartoum. Since the demonstrations began, they have been recorded mostly by activists themselves, whose cell phone videos of protests have served as sources of both news and inspiration for fellow Sudanese. Sudanese scrolling through their social media are now subjected to a daily deluge of protest videos, many of them showing women leading chants, confronting authorities, or being herded into police vans. 

“We literally have new pictures of what a Sudanese woman looks like, how she acts, how she faces down tear gas,” says Ms. Ahmed. “These scenes of courage are going viral, and I think they’re really changing people’s minds.” 

Ms. Satir, the cartoonist, began drawing images of women protesters with their fists raised shortly after the demonstrations began, in part, she says, to remind people of women’s presence. 

“At the time, you were hearing chants at demonstrations calling Mr. Bashir weak by comparing him to a woman,” Ms. Satir says. But as she and others pushed back, calling out male demonstrators on social media, something surprising happened. The sexist chants began to recede.   

“You’re seeing people deciding in the midst of the struggle exactly what kind of change they’re aspiring to, and trying to live out the kind of Sudan they want to see in the future,” says Ms. Hassanain. “And it’s working.”  

So far, the protest movement has no unified goals beyond forcing Mr. Bashir out of office. And many worry that the unity shown by demonstrators so far – including the unity among different groups of women – may not hold after he is gone.   

“But whatever happens next,” says Ms. Hassanain, “I think the people who take power will know that they have to contend with a group of people who have already decided it’s not going to be business as usual for women in this country anymore.”

Noble Ingram/The Christian Science Monitor

Francois Agwala and Raquel Molina Fernández relax after a résumé-writing workshop at Portland Adult Education in Portland, Maine, on Feb. 25. Mr. Agwala and Ms. Molina taught in their home countries – Congo and Spain, respectively – before arriving in the U.S. Now, the city is helping them apply for teacher certification in Maine.

The small class sizes, the lack of uniforms, the heightened security – there’s a lot that feels different to Francois Agwala when he steps into a public school in Portland, Maine. The former teacher and principal spent years as an educator in Kinshasa, Congo. Now he’s picking up the chalk again, more than 6,000 miles from where he started. 

Mr. Agwala is enrolled in the Education Academy, an initiative which helps foreign-trained teachers find jobs in Portland schools. In January, the city began offering classes and mentorship to help any resident trained abroad – even those with pending asylum cases – earn teacher certification. 

Similar efforts across the country help employ immigrants and refugees in science and health care, but the focus on teaching is relatively new. It’s also a marker for a broader cultural shift: As many small cities see growing racial diversity and shortages of professionals – including teachers – local governments are turning to experienced recent immigrants to fulfill civic duties.

“Across the country fewer and fewer people are going into teaching,” says Portland Superintendent Xavier Botana. “Unless we figure out how to maximize the potential of our immigrant population, we’re looking at a demographic reality where there just aren’t enough people to fill the jobs.”

Specific needs, specific solutions

For Portland Public Schools, the demographic reality is already skewed. In 2015, students of color made up 41.1 percent of the district’s total enrollment and 65.7 percent of preschool enrollment. About 23 percent of students were listed as having limited English proficiency.

In contrast, the teacher workforce is about 97 percent white, says Dr. Botana. Few teachers come from a home where English isn’t the only language spoken.

“We’re very diverse,” but “our faculty and staff in general do not reflect that diversity,” he says. A persistent challenge for the district is changing an environment where “kids are looking around and saying, ‘Look I don’t see myself here.’ ”

It’s a problem that goes beyond Maine. Despite research suggesting having teachers of different races can benefit students, the profession nationally is still about 80 percent white. By some indications, though, incorporating immigrants into skilled jobs might be shrinking that disconnect. 

“In the last 10 or so years of research we’ve seen a number of really good initiatives that tackle one or multiple barriers” to helping trained immigrants find professional jobs, says Jeanne Batalova, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

“And now state governments and state agencies are ... really trying to figure out how can we meet the specific needs of communities,” she says.

Dr. Botana borrowed from successful programs he saw in Chicago and Portland, Oregon, in which targeted teacher training and certification resources in communities of color helped bolster a nonwhite workforce.

For Portland, Maine, he thought, the same approach could work with growing immigrant groups – especially as native-born population growth in the state slows.

In a classroom at Portland High School, Dani Scherer, curriculum designer and program navigator for Portland Adult Education, projects the word “scaffolding” on the chalkboard. The term describes the support teachers give students to tackle new topics. Her students, a half-moon of multinational adults, each explain how the idea might apply to lesson plans they’re developing. To grasp the visual of a building with support scaffolding, they translate the word into Arabic, French, and Spanish.

Mr. Agwala, who hopes to teach history, views education as a way to improve civic engagement, and he saw a more sustainable future in the United States when he moved in 2011. His assistant teaching practicum in a local high school U.S. history class might also help him prepare for a citizenship test, he says. 

“Teaching is a very important tool for our community,” he says. “We have to do a good job to train good citizens.”

Felling steep barriers

But when he arrived, Mr. Agwala didn’t meet Maine requirements for teacher certification. New arrivals to the U.S. face steep barriers when looking for professional-level jobs, but teaching is especially complicated since each state writes its own certification requirements. Maine, for example, asks most prospective teachers to complete state-specific special education training.  

“It’s not a straightforward process for an American-trained or an American-born teacher to move between states so it’s not a straightforward process for immigrants either,” says Dr. Batalova, of the Migration Policy Institute.  

Instead, often immigrants face so-called brain waste, in which the talents and experiences they accrue elsewhere aren’t put to use in their new American context.

“These college-educated people come to a country like the United States and then end up not working or they work in jobs that are significantly lower-skilled,” she says.

For several years, Mr. Agwala faced that scenario in the U.S., unable to draw on his teaching experience from Congo. But while taking English classes with Portland Adult Education last year, he heard about the Education Academy and jumped at the chance to join its pilot program.

And he wasn’t alone – the district saw a surge of interest from immigrant teachers.

“[W]e realized people didn’t understand the process by which they need to become certified as teachers,” says Sally Sutton, program coordinator for the New Mainers Resource Center, a division of Portland Public Schools.

In addition to courses covering American education concepts, the Education Academy provides major administrative legwork. Ms. Sutton and her colleagues send foreign transcripts and résumés to the Maine Department of Education to determine what standards, including tests and coursework, students still need to meet.

Seeking an entirely new U.S. teaching degree is out of the question for most participants since applying for asylum or already having a bachelor’s degree disqualifies them from federal financial aid. Taking a few additional classes at a community college as needed is a much cheaper alternative – for which the Education Academy helps students with scholarship applications. 

‘Another view of our lives’

Portland Public Schools doesn’t yet have a goal for how many teachers it hopes will graduate the program, and it may be several months before anyone in Ms. Scherer’s class is ready to apply for certification, says Dr. Botana. Even so, its existence sends a message to many participants that their experiences as immigrants are valuable.

“Integration is always a two-way street,” says Dr. Batalova. Successful organizations working to employ immigrants say, ‘You have a problem and we have a solution.’ And that solution is immigrants.”

Raquel Molina Fernández, another Education Academy student, moved to the U.S. last August after teaching and working in an education nonprofit for more than a decade in Madrid. She prizes being part of a solution for her new city.

The program “is an opportunity for all the people like us to know that there’s support for our skills and our preparation,” she says. “It’s another view of our lives.”

Correction: This story and its photo caption have been updated to reflect the correct full name of Raquel Molina Fernández.

Reuters

A lawyer in Algiers holds up her phone near a police member as she marches with others in a March 7 protest.

For the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, issued a letter of light against the dark. Despite rising doubts about whether digital systems can still be a force for good, he wrote on March 12 that it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume the web “can’t be changed for the better in the next 30 [years].”

As if on cue, the people of Algeria showed this week how all things internet – from social media apps on phones to the web on desktops – surely are a force for good.

For the past two weeks, hundreds of thousands of Algerians collaborated on Facebook and in other ways to hold protests that, on March 11, forced President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to announce he would be leaving office after 20 years in power. The netizens had found a freedom of conscience in virtual space and, in connecting to every stripe of person across society from judges to unionists, created a real bud of freedom.

The internet helped break a “wall of fear,” as one demonstrator put it. On social media, people were advised to show up with “love, faith, Algerian flags, and roses” (the latter for soldiers). They spread the word to avoid violence and take their litter with them. “Silmiya, silmiya,” (peaceful, peaceful) chanted the protesters.

The young people of Algeria, writes novelist Kamel Daoud in The Guardian, had grown up with the freedom of social media. “Today this freedom has sprung from screens into the street. The internet has been the great giver of freedom of speech in Algeria and the regime has realized it too late.”

“Algerians – hyper-connected – found out that they could have not only a Facebook page but a country,” he wrote.

One poster captured the inner liberty that the people felt at the protests. It showed the house-elf from the Harry Potter series who wins his freedom. “Algeria has no master! Algeria is a FREE country. – Dobby,” it said.

The power of the web, says its inventor, lies in its universality. It broadens thought to encompass ideas that help bind people to each other. Even with dictatorships trying to restrict access to digital tools, Mr. Berners-Lee says there are alternatives. One, he suggests, is to decentralize the internet, allowing for smaller groups to communicate. The point is that people now realize the internet is not a physical thing but an idea of a “space” for closer collaboration. They will find a way.

Algerians still have far to go to overturn a corrupt and powerful elite. A new constitution must be written. Free elections are still not assured. But in a country where rulers have little history of yielding power, the people now realize a capacity to tell the truth over the internet. Freedom lies first in demonstrating freedom of thought. Digital tools like the web only help make that possible.