From Norway, eyes and ears for sick students: In 2015, Karen Dolva learned from a friend who’d worked briefly in a pediatric hospital ward of the loneliness that afflicts children during long-term hospital stays. The conversation inspired Ms. Dolva, who was working as a digital consultant at the time, to research the effects of social isolation on young people. Within weeks, she and two tech industry colleagues, Marius Aabel and Matias Doyle, had formed No Isolation, a tech start-up that aims to develop technological solutions to societal problems like loneliness. New York Times. Continue >>
What counts as a school shooting? The answer to that question shapes safety debates: After shots rang out at a high school football game in Florida Friday night, law enforcement quickly concerned themselves with how the public characterized the event. "This is not a school shooting," said Teri Barbera, a spokeswoman for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. Perhaps she wanted to ensure the event didn't stir up visions of a mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Fla., earlier this year. Education Week. Continue >>
Teachers are winning public support for pay raises, survey finds: This spring, thousands of teachers walked out of their classrooms in a half-dozen states, protesting low salaries and cuts to school funding. Their activism likely made a difference in boosting support for raising teacher salaries, shows a new poll from the journal Education Next. EdNext surveyed a nationally representative sample of 4,601 adults during the first three weeks of May. The survey included representative oversamples of parents of school-age children and teachers. Education Week. Continue >>
What the DeVos-led school safety commission did this summer: It’s been a busy summer for the Federal School Safety Commission, set up by President Donald Trump in the wake of the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., which left 17 people dead. Headed by U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, the commission is charged with coming up with recommendations by the end of this year on how to improve school safety and prevent future incidents of mass violence. Education Week. Continue >>
Trump’s immigrant family separation strategy 2.0 targets children as they return to school: There was great public outcry over the Trump administration’s separation of thousands of minor children from their immigrant parents, many of whom were legally pursuing asylum here in the United States when they were apprehended. The move has been widely condemned as inhumane and likely a violation of international law. Salon. Continue >>
Teachers are winning public support for pay raises, survey finds: This spring, thousands of teachers walked out of their classrooms in a half-dozen states, protesting low salaries and cuts to school funding. Their activism likely made a difference in boosting support for raising teacher salaries, shows a new poll from the journal Education Next. EdNext surveyed a nationally representative sample of 4,601 adults during the first three weeks of May. Education Week. Continue >>
How do you get better schools? Take the state to court, more advocates say: By his own account, Alejandro Cruz-Guzman’s five children have received a good education at public schools in St. Paul. His two oldest daughters are starting careers in finance and teaching. Another daughter, a high-school student, plans to become a doctor. But their success, Mr. Cruz-Guzman said, flows partly from the fact that he and his wife fought for their children to attend racially integrated schools outside their neighborhood. New York Times. Continue >>
Charter schools: 7 common questions, answered: Are charter schools public or private? Do they pick and choose who can enroll? Who oversees them? And are they better at educating students than regular public schools? We answer these questions and more about charter schools in this explainer. A charter school is a tuition-free school of choice that is publicly funded but independently run. Conceived over 25 years ago in Minnesota as a means to loosen red tape around public schools and free up educators to innovate, charters have since grown into a national movement that spans 44 states. Education Week. Continue >>
Related:
Omarosa: DeVos said black students lack ‘capacity to understand’ her agenda: According to former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos chalked up her panned commencement speech at the historically black Bethune-Cookman University to the students’ lack of “capacity to understand” her goals. Talking Points Memo. Continue >>
Related:
7 things teachers can quit doing this year: Teachers, your well-earned summer is winding down and school is starting up again. Right now, you might be focused on turning your empty classroom into a supportive learning environment. But before you know it, you’ll have fallen into a teaching routine: lesson planning, classroom management, grading, and everything in between. Education Week. Continue >>
The myth of ‘school choice’ in North Carolina: It’s a common refrain among charter school and voucher advocates: “We need to provide families with choice.” And on its face, it sounds pretty good: We all expect choice when we go to the store for peanut butter, don’t we? But what happens when all my peanut butter options are equally unpalatable, except for the ones that are priced beyond my means? Does the fact that I have a choice really make much of a difference at that point? Washington Post. Continue >>
Swastikas on bathroom stalls. Chants of 'Build the wall.' Notes that say 'Go back to Mexico.' Education Week found hundreds of reports of hate and bias in schools: Three swastikas were scrawled on the note found in the girls' restroom, along with a homophobic comment and a declaration: “I Love Trump.” Found inside the backpack of a Latina student, a note that said: Go back to Mexico. Two other hate-filled incidents—invoking Donald Trump’s name and using swastikas—were also reported that same day. Education Week. Continue >>
School-security companies are thriving in the era of mass shootings: In late June, inside an underground meeting room attached to the U.S. Capitol, past guards and metal detectors, lawmakers and representatives from multiple large security companies discussed the threat of mass school shootings and the need to, in their words, “harden” campuses before someone else gets killed. “If you think this cannot happen to you, I’m here to tell you I used to think the same exact thing,” said Noel Glacer, a Florida-based security professional. Atlantic. Continue >>
Arne Duncan: ‘everyone says they value education, but their actions don’t follow’: Arne Duncan, the former education secretary under President Barack Obama, has always been more candid than others who’ve served in that role. He’s often used his platform to talk about what he sees as the persistent socioeconomic and racial disparities in access to quality schools. His new book, How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success From One of the Nation’s Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education, further cements that reputation. How Schools Work’s first chapter is titled “Lies, Lies Everywhere.” Atlantic. Continue >>
The information on school websites is not as safe as you think: The home page of Pinellas County Schools in Florida is brimming with information for families, students, staff members and the public: an easy-to-use dashboard of news, shortcuts and links to the district’s Facebook page, Twitter feed and YouTube channel. But Pinellas’s home page has been supplying information to another audience, an unseen one, as well this year. New York Times. Continue >>
The 'hidden provocateurs' behind the fight for desegregation: For 25 years, the Emory University professor Vanessa Siddle Walker has studied and written about the segregated schooling of black children. In her latest book, The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools, Walker tells the little-known story of how black educators in the South—courageously and covertly—laid the groundwork for 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education and weathered its aftermath. Atlantic. Continue >>
Asbestos in a crayon, benzene in a marker: a school supply study’s toxic results: A public interest group said this week that it had found toxic substances in a number of school supplies, including asbestos in a Playskool crayon and another carcinogen, benzene, in a dry-erase marker. The findings were detailed in a report published Tuesday by the group, the United States Public Interest Research Group Education Fund, which had an independent laboratory test 27 back-to-school products. Four tested positive for dangerous chemicals. New York Times. Continue >>
The saga of Ohio's embattled e-school is coming to an end: The Ohio Supreme Court ruled against the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow on Wednesday, upholding lower court rulings allowing the state department of education to seek repayment of tens of millions of dollars from Ohio’s largest full-time online charter school after it was unable to verify its claims of student enrollment. The 4-2 decision in favor of the state education department likely signals the final end of ECOT, which once claimed 15,000 students, but closed in the middle of last school year. Education Week. Continue >>
Donald Trump signs first major education policy bill of his presidency: In a watershed moment for his administration on education policy, President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, according to senators who attended the signing, the first legislation Trump’s signed that makes significant changes to federal education law itself. The legislation is a reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, a $1.2 billion program last overhauled by Congress in 2006. Education Week. Continue >>
Related:
Amazon’s footprint grows in K-12 purchasing. Should we be worried? Amazon could receive up to $5.5 billion over the next 11 years through a cooperative purchasing contract used by cities, counties, and school districts alike—and that’s got some people fired up. They’re concerned that if Amazon wins government and school purchases for everything from paper products to musical instruments, it will mean that other businesses selling directly to public entities will suffer, possibly eroding local economies. Education Week. Continue >>
A South Carolina school district just abolished snow days — and will make students learn online: Sorry kids, no more all-day pajama parties, cartoon marathons and snowball fights when you’re really supposed to be in school. A school district in South Carolina has done away with the much-loved snow days — requiring students to do classwork online. Washington Post. Continue >>
How many seats do teachers get on the state board of ed.? In most places, none: State boards of education craft policies on curriculum, assessment, and other areas that directly affect day-to-day classroom life. But the professionals most affected by those decisions—teachers—often don’t have a seat at the boardroom table. And when they do have a seat, they don’t always have a vote. Just eight states specifically set aside a seat for teachers on their appointed state board of education, according to preliminary research conducted by the National Association of State Boards of Education. Education Week. Continue >>
Candidates in midterms spar over school funding vs. taxes: How—or whether—to pour more money into public school coffers has emerged as one of the most divisive issues for states in this year’s midterm elections. In at least nine states, voters this fall will consider ambitious ballot measures that seek to increase, or in some cases curtail, how much legislatures distribute to schools. Similarly, those running for governor in states including Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin have sparred over the dynamics of their states’ public school spending habits and over plans to upend how their states fund schools. Education Week. Continue >>
Can Richard Carranza integrate the most segregated school system in the country? It was just a hair past 7 o’clock in the evening at Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem, and Richard Carranza was a little late to the party. The cafeteria was bulging with parents, translators, and a handful of staff. The recently minted chancellor of the New York City public-school system had planned to arrive at 6 to talk to a handful of community activists in advance of a town-hall-style meeting. The topic at hand: diversity in the city’s public schools. Or, to put it more pointedly, desegregating them. Atlantic. Continue >>
Donald Trump went to private schools. Should we blame them for the mess America’s in? It’s been called the “Sputnik effect” (which, at the moment, has new resonance). It refers to the tendency to blame U.S. public schools for many of the major problems the nation has faced since the Soviet Union became the first nation to send a satellite into orbit, in 1957. How could the Soviet Union beat the technologically superior United States into space? A national debate over that question landed on this answer: Soviet schools must be better than American public schools. Washington Post. Continue >>
Related:
To stop school shootings, Fla. will merge government data, social media posts: As part of their efforts to prevent school shootings, Florida lawmakers mandated the creation of a centralized database that will combine individual-level records from the state’s law-enforcement and social-services agencies with information from people’s personal social media accounts. The provision, tucked within the 105-page law passed in March following the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, marks a potentially dramatic increase in the state’s collection and sharing of data on individuals. Education Week. Continue >>
The cost of not educating girls: $30 trillion: The failure to provide girls with education through secondary school comes at a high cost to their health and well-being—and at a staggering cost to the world economy, to the tune of $15 trillion to $30 trillion in lost earnings and productivity. That’s the calculation of the World Bank, which in a new study gauges the benefits of education not only in higher wages for women over their lifetimes, but also in areas such as girls not having children as teenagers, lower infant mortality, and girls’ avoidance of violent relationships. Education Week. Continue >>
