A new report shows wealthy school districts are increasingly splitting from poorer, more racially diverse ones, reports Emmanuel Felton for The Hechinger Report.
The lack of diversity on one North Texas school district’s board is the subject of a voting rights lawsuit filed this week, reports Eva-Marie Ayala for The Dallas Morning News.
Frisco is one of the few places in Texas where Asians makeup a majority of students on some campuses. But the school board is not diverse. A lawsuit aims to change that. #TellEWAhttps://t.co/1yGR2haqHf
As 3 p.m. approached on Monday, the editors of The Eagle Eye student newspaper at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., huddled around their adviser’s desk for the announcement of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes.
They watched not as journalism groupies, but as award contenders.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on measures to harden public schools in an attempt to make students safer from gun violence, but a new report says there is no evidence those measures have worked. Instead, it says, they have created “a false sense of security.”
A series of stories this week from education reporters describe the challenges some places face in attracting and keeping teachers. For USA Today, Erin Richards explains how soaring housing prices are fueling a chronic teacher shortage in Hawaii.
In response to #tellEWA: Me and my @USATODAY colleagues are working on another big piece about teacher salaries and affordability, but for now, here's what's happening out in 'paradise:' https://t.co/snGiDJDZmf
In Colorado, officials are trying a novel strategy to attract teachers to rural communities. Colorado Public Radio’s Jenny Brundin reports on the “rural immersion” program.
When it came time for Kristina and Jason Salguero to send their son Austin to daycare, they were shocked to learn that it could cost as much as it would to send him to college.
They enrolled Austin, but decided to put off their plans to have a second child. “It’s like they don’t want us to have children,” Kristina says.
This led her to write to WAMU’s What’s With Washington. “Why is daycare so expensive in the D.C. area, particularly in Montgomery County?” she asked.
Bruising political fights are usual business in Becky Debowski’s eighth-grade social studies classroom. From a model Constitutional Convention to a bare-knuckle debate in Congress over slavery, she regularly has students assume roles of partisans throughout American history, like Abraham Lincoln and John C. Calhoun.
After the exercises, the class comes back together to debate whether the nation lived up to what the state of Michigan calls “core democratic values,” such as equality, liberty and diversity.
A bald eagle in flight is elegance to behold. The sudden, violent flaps of its wings are broken by sublime extension as it locks onto a breeze and glides. Occasionally, 10 blocks north of the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan, you can spot a bald eagle overhead in Fort Tryon Park. There, Thea Hunter could often be counted among the bird’s admirers—typically while walking her dog, Cooper, a black Labrador retriever.
To be a perennial adjunct professor is to hear the constant tone of higher education’s death knell. The story is well known—the long hours, the heavy workload, the insufficient pay—as academia relies on adjunct professors, non-tenured faculty members, who are often paid pennies on the dollar to do the same work required of their tenured colleagues.
It was a modest house by this town’s standards, a center-entrance colonial, three bedrooms and a two-car garage on a quarter-acre lot. The inside hadn’t welcomed a renovator in many, many years, and the outside didn’t wear its age particularly well. Its owner: Peter Brand, Harvard University’s legendary fencing coach.
Its assessed value: $549,300.
So when the house sold to a wealthy Maryland businessman for close to a million dollars in May 2016, the town’s top assessor was so dumbfounded that he wrote the following in his notes: “Makes no sense.”
For Education Week, Madeline Will examines how a lack of paid parental leave forces many teachers to return to the classroom before they’re ready.
“I don’t want to not teach anymore, but I also want to be a mother and have my family as well. ... When do teachers get to be humans?” Many teachers don't receive paid parental leave, forcing them to return to class before they're ready. #tellEWAhttps://t.co/9LMzbQTpqk
As the scandal grows concerning the lucrative children’s book deal by Baltimore’s mayor, Liz Bowie and Talia Richman of The Baltimore Sunask: “Where did all the books go?”
My pick for this week's #tellEWA: The @baltimoresun is delivering master class in investigative reporting. @lizbowie & @TaliRichman even took time to check literary merits of mayor's picture book at heart of widening scandal. Local. Journalism. Matters. https://t.co/hnE89a6hZ8
Adam NorthamMississippi Center for Investigative Reporting
More than six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated schools unconstitutional, one Mississippi school district has largely segregated classrooms — some all-black, some majority white.
That continuing segregation is made possible by an informal “parental request” policy that allows parents to ask for specific teachers for their elementary-aged children at the 2,800-student Brookhaven School District, a 65 percent black district in southwest Mississippi.
Food pantries are appearing more frequently in a surprising type of location: colleges and universities. More than 700 educational institutions belong to a national nonprofit aiming to alleviate food insecurity among college students. From PBS station WTTW in Chicago, Brandis Friedman reports on how City Colleges and the Greater Chicago Food Depository are providing nutrition along with knowledge.
When Antroine Anderson started kindergarten in this close-knit rural town last August, he knew just three words by sight. He mistook H for G, confused L and I and identified M as F.5
Accustomed to being called AJ by his family, Antroine didn’t recognize his name in print. His mother, Janice Barton, felt ashamed when she learned some of his peers were already writing their names — until she learned many others weren’t prepared for kindergarten either.
Free speech is being tested on college campuses by rising numbers of hate crimes and deepening racial tensions, according to a report released today by PEN America, a human-rights association of writers and editors. But the Trump administration’s warnings of a “crisis” overstate the problem, it says, and risk further polarizing colleges.
Teachers spend their days taking care of other people’s children. But what happens when they have babies of their own?
Unlike other developed nations, the United States does not mandate paid parental leave. And the K-12 education sector is no exception, despite being dominated by women in their childbearing years. Just a handful of states, including Washington state and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia, provide paid parental leave for teachers. And some individual school districts offer it, too.
The Norfolk School Board met last week to evaluate the superintendent without giving notice to the public, a violation of the state’s Freedom of Information Act.
Wednesday’s meeting marks at least the fourth time in six months that the board has met without providing sufficient notice of meetings. Two of those times, they provided no notice at all.
A Connecticut school district’s decision to hire security guards while laying off mental health professionals has sparked a debate about school safety, reports Brian Zahn for the New Haven Register.
Meanwhile, an Indiana elementary school received national attention after teachers there were shot with plastic pellets as part of an active-shooter drill, reports Arika Herron for the Indianapolis Star.
And, ICYMI, here's the incident that prompted the proposed amendment. Teachers at an Indiana elementary said they were left with welts, bruises and abrasions after the training. #TellEWAhttps://t.co/CKHtjmFSId via @indystar
Serious violence is both an everyday occurrence and an open secret at Glen Mills, and has been for decades, an Inquirer investigation has found. Internal documents, court records, incident reports, and more than 40 interviews with students, staff, and others show top leaders turn a blind eye to the beatings and insulate themselves from reports while failing to properly vet or train the school’s counselors.
Implicit in the argument made by Students for Fair Admissions is that ending racial considerations in admissions would ultimately benefit the kids at Burbank High. And yet, in the coverage of the Harvard lawsuit, and indeed in almost any story on affirmative action, you rarely hear from this group — the ones without the Tiger Moms and the private SAT tutors — or from the high school counselors like Spilman and Bell who worry less about whether their students will appear “too Asian” and more about whether they even know how to apply to college.
As Tennessee considers a private school voucher program, Chalkbeat’s Laura Faith Kebede explores how a history of racism and distrust could affect families’ willingness to participate.
An active-shooter training exercise at an Indiana elementary school in January left teachers with welts, bruises and abrasions after they were shot with plastic pellets by the local sheriff’s office conducting the session.
The incident, acknowledged in testimony this week before state lawmakers, was confirmed by two elementary school teachers in Monticello, who described an exercise in which teachers were asked by local law enforcement to kneel down against a classroom wall before being sprayed across their backs with plastic pellets without warning.
Families of at least six children and staff members who died in Texas’ deadliest K-12 school shooting, and two injured survivors, still are searching for answers 10 months after a teenage gunman blasted his way through the Galveston County school. Each time they have requested records — including medical examiner and autopsy reports — they have been denied.
What happened when a charter school in Tennessee replaced in-school suspensions with something called a reflection room? Chalkbeat’s Caroline Bauman examines one effort to rethink discipline.
For The Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Vasquez explains how a major chain of for-profit colleges “came crashing down” this month.
This is the worst for-profit college closure that I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot. They literally took money that belonged to students. #tellEWAhttps://t.co/e0ldVXTVTs
John Eligon and Audra D. S. BurchThe New York Times
They studied into the wee hours and agonized line by line over their personal essays. They took standardized tests three, four, five times to increase their scores. And last fall, after years of preparation and anxiety, the students at Ewing Marion Kauffman School, a predominantly black school in Kansas City, submitted their college applications, hoping all their hard work would pay off.
What many are calling the worst admissions scandal in higher education emerged Tuesday, with federal authorities announcing 50 indictments in a scheme that allegedly involved faux athletes, coaches who could be bribed, cheating on the SAT and ACT, million-dollar bribes and “guarantees” that certain applicants would be admitted to highly competitive colleges.
For years, Fairfax County Public Schools reported to the federal government that not a single student was physically restrained or trapped in an isolating space.
But documents obtained by WAMU reveal hundreds of cases where children, some as young as 6 years old, were restrained or put in seclusion multiple times. In some cases, a single child was confined to a room almost 100 times in a school year.
In what some are calling “The Trump Effect,” an increasing number of students are considering H.B.C.U.s and single-sex colleges, reports Alina Tugend of The New York Times.
As New York City seeks to diversify its prestigious high schools, some see an opportunity to challenge affirmative action before the U.S. Supreme Court, writes Mark Keierleber for The 74.
About 14 million students attend schools across the U.S. where they walk the halls alongside police officers but don’t have access to counselors, nurses, psychologists or social workers, according to an ACLU report released Monday.
President Trump’s announcement of an executive order that threatens to cut off federal research money from colleges that do not support free speech has drawn criticism from college leaders and legal scholars on two fronts. First, they say, it might not be legal. Second, they argue, it’s a terrible idea.
When the small Oakland private school received the donation of four Chinese paintings, valued at $2.8 million, administrators were gobsmacked.
After relying on bake sales to stay fiscally afloat for the past two decades, the Pacific Boychoir Academy and its elite after-school music program were sitting on a relative fortune.
The University of Missouri’s sole victim advocate was prepared to leave her post last spring but was convinced to stay. A week later Taylor Yeagle was forced out of her role after she gave a media interview criticizing how the university’s Title IX appeals officials handled a client’s case.
By Susan Carroll and David HunnThe Houston Chronicle
AUSTIN— It was a grand promise, one our forefathers made 165 years ago to all Texas children, to theirs and ours and those not yet born.
With $2 million and the state’s most abundant and precious resource — its land — they created the Texas Permanent School Fund to forever support public education. It was called a “sacred trust.”
That trust, dedicated to K-12 schools, is now valued at $44 billion, bigger than even Harvard University’s endowment.
Of the 209 new teachers hired for the 2017-2018 school year, 33 of them identified themselves as teachers of color, a number that’s been increasing the last three years as Harford schools focus on increasing their diversity.
Most Americans support affirmative action for racial minorities as a broad concept, a new survey says. Yet a majority opposes the consideration of applicants’ race in college admissions.
Confusing? Not really. It’s all a matter of how specifically you pose the question.
As higher education awaits a federal judge’s ruling in a case challenging Harvard University’s race-conscious admissions policy, it’s a good time to ask what the public thinks of this contentious issue.
Michael D. Cohen, a former personal lawyer for President Trump, said in testimony on Wednesday before the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee that, at Trump’s direction, he had threatened legal action against the College Board, Trump’s former high school, and the universities he attended if they released the president’s academic records.
Trump spent two years at Fordham University, in New York, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania’s business school for his undergraduate degree.
Two weeks after a shooting in a Baltimore high school, the city’s school board reversed its position on whether school police should be allowed to carry weapons, voting 8-2 in support of legislation that would amend state law to authorize officers to patrol schools with guns.
I remember as a young reporter for The State newspaper in South Carolina’s capital, Columbia, driving with a colleague in 1999 to the old Bishopville High School in rural Lee County.
The school was still in operation, despite having been condemned. (Its main lobby ceiling had collapsed in an incident that could have killed someone.) Some of the classroom windows were missing panes of glass, open to the wind.
I returned to the car after the visit, profoundly startled by this and other evidence of chronic neglect. My colleague literally wept.
Chalkbeat’s Christina Veiga reports on how the deteriorating conditions of New York City’s public housing buildings are affecting the child care centers nestled within them.
Despite an injection of nearly $1 billion into Washington’s public school system, a majority of the state’s districts are projecting budget shortfalls, reports Neal Morton and Dahlia Bazzaz for The Seattle Times.
A) it’s excellent and v. important B) his handling of its reviews #perfection href="https://twitter.com/alexanderrusso?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@alexanderrusso @EWAEmilyhttps://t.co/UeGtBM6Ny3
Jaleyah Collier had just said goodbye to Kevin Cleveland outside a doughnut shop a few blocks from Hawkins High School on a spring afternoon in 2017. Get home safe, she told him before walking away.
Minutes later someone drove into an alley nearby, got out of the car and asked Kevin, 17, and two others about their gang affiliation. The gunman then sprayed them with at least 10 rounds, killing Kevin and injuring the others.
Last month, the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) published a report arguing schools and districts should go the way of other industries and hire a Chief Privacy Officer to oversee their organization’s privacy policies and practices.
The story of our communities can in many ways be told through the lens of the school districts that serve our children. More than organizations that enable learning, school districts are geographic boundaries that serve as magnifying lenses that allow us to focus on issues of race and wealth. They are both a statement of “what is” and “what could be” in our society.
Overwhelmingly white school districts received $23 billion more than predominantly nonwhite school districts in state and local funding in 2016, despite serving roughly the same number of children, a new report finds.
Nearly three-fourths of those surveyed by Pew oppose consideration of race in admissions. Only 7 percent say it should be a major factor – and 8 percent each say legacy status or athletic ability should be a major factor.
When a small-town Arizona cop stopped a 12-year-old reporter who was chasing down a story tip on Monday, he probably had no idea what he was getting himself into.
The Houston Chronicle’s Jacob Carpenter explores how a new Texas law is creating tension between state and local school accountability systems.
On today's A1: A new law allows Texas school districts to grade their campuses, with scores counting for up to 50% of state-issued ratings. Educators say it reduces emphasis on STAAR. But can districts be trusted to critically grade themselves? #tellewahttps://t.co/gOE8iyIqLd
Teaching in the United States was once considered a career for men. Then the profession’s gender composition shifted dramatically around the mid-19th century, when the country’s public-school system was born. As schoolhouse doors opened to children of all social classes and genders, so too did the education profession. By the late 1880s, women made up a majority—63 percent—of all the country’s teachers (though men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s).
April 12 – April 18
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week
A new report shows wealthy school districts are increasingly splitting from poorer, more racially diverse ones, reports Emmanuel Felton for The Hechinger Report.
The lack of diversity on one North Texas school district’s board is the subject of a voting rights lawsuit filed this week, reports Eva-Marie Ayala for The Dallas Morning News.
Parkland Students Bask in Pulitzer Mention: ‘They Took Us Seriously’
As 3 p.m. approached on Monday, the editors of The Eagle Eye student newspaper at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., huddled around their adviser’s desk for the announcement of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes.
They watched not as journalism groupies, but as award contenders.
Study: There’s No Evidence That Hardening Schools to Make Kids Safer From Gun Violence Actually Works
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on measures to harden public schools in an attempt to make students safer from gun violence, but a new report says there is no evidence those measures have worked. Instead, it says, they have created “a false sense of security.”
April 5 – April 11
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week
A series of stories this week from education reporters describe the challenges some places face in attracting and keeping teachers. For USA Today, Erin Richards explains how soaring housing prices are fueling a chronic teacher shortage in Hawaii.
In Colorado, officials are trying a novel strategy to attract teachers to rural communities. Colorado Public Radio’s Jenny Brundin reports on the “rural immersion” program.
Why Is Child Care So Expensive? Costs Leave Washington-Area Millennials Hesitant to Have Kids
When it came time for Kristina and Jason Salguero to send their son Austin to daycare, they were shocked to learn that it could cost as much as it would to send him to college.
They enrolled Austin, but decided to put off their plans to have a second child. “It’s like they don’t want us to have children,” Kristina says.
This led her to write to WAMU’s What’s With Washington. “Why is daycare so expensive in the D.C. area, particularly in Montgomery County?” she asked.
Study: Per-Student Public Spending Recovers Halfway Since Recession
A decade after the 2008 recession, fewer than one in five states has fully recovered when it comes to per-student appropriations for higher education.
Is the U.S. a Democracy? A Social Studies Battle Turns on the Nation’s Values
Bruising political fights are usual business in Becky Debowski’s eighth-grade social studies classroom. From a model Constitutional Convention to a bare-knuckle debate in Congress over slavery, she regularly has students assume roles of partisans throughout American history, like Abraham Lincoln and John C. Calhoun.
After the exercises, the class comes back together to debate whether the nation lived up to what the state of Michigan calls “core democratic values,” such as equality, liberty and diversity.
The Human Cost of Higher Education’s Adjunct Shift
A bald eagle in flight is elegance to behold. The sudden, violent flaps of its wings are broken by sublime extension as it locks onto a breeze and glides. Occasionally, 10 blocks north of the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan, you can spot a bald eagle overhead in Fort Tryon Park. There, Thea Hunter could often be counted among the bird’s admirers—typically while walking her dog, Cooper, a black Labrador retriever.
The Human Cost of Higher Education’s Adjunct Shift
To be a perennial adjunct professor is to hear the constant tone of higher education’s death knell. The story is well known—the long hours, the heavy workload, the insufficient pay—as academia relies on adjunct professors, non-tenured faculty members, who are often paid pennies on the dollar to do the same work required of their tenured colleagues.
He Bought the Fencing Coach’s House. Then His Son Got Into Harvard
It was a modest house by this town’s standards, a center-entrance colonial, three bedrooms and a two-car garage on a quarter-acre lot. The inside hadn’t welcomed a renovator in many, many years, and the outside didn’t wear its age particularly well. Its owner: Peter Brand, Harvard University’s legendary fencing coach.
Its assessed value: $549,300.
So when the house sold to a wealthy Maryland businessman for close to a million dollars in May 2016, the town’s top assessor was so dumbfounded that he wrote the following in his notes: “Makes no sense.”
Mar. 29 – April 4
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week
For Education Week, Madeline Will examines how a lack of paid parental leave forces many teachers to return to the classroom before they’re ready.
As the scandal grows concerning the lucrative children’s book deal by Baltimore’s mayor, Liz Bowie and Talia Richman of The Baltimore Sun ask: “Where did all the books go?”
63 Years After Brown, Segregated Classrooms Persist In One Mississippi School District
More than six decades after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated schools unconstitutional, one Mississippi school district has largely segregated classrooms — some all-black, some majority white.
That continuing segregation is made possible by an informal “parental request” policy that allows parents to ask for specific teachers for their elementary-aged children at the 2,800-student Brookhaven School District, a 65 percent black district in southwest Mississippi.
Pop-up Pantries Aim To Reduce Food Insecurity For College Students
Food pantries are appearing more frequently in a surprising type of location: colleges and universities. More than 700 educational institutions belong to a national nonprofit aiming to alleviate food insecurity among college students. From PBS station WTTW in Chicago, Brandis Friedman reports on how City Colleges and the Greater Chicago Food Depository are providing nutrition along with knowledge.
Fighting for Mississippi’s Struggling 5-Year-Olds, One Student at a Time
When Antroine Anderson started kindergarten in this close-knit rural town last August, he knew just three words by sight. He mistook H for G, confused L and I and identified M as F.5
Accustomed to being called AJ by his family, Antroine didn’t recognize his name in print. His mother, Janice Barton, felt ashamed when she learned some of his peers were already writing their names — until she learned many others weren’t prepared for kindergarten either.
If There Is a Free-Speech ‘Crisis’ on Campus, PEN America Says, Lawmakers Are Making It Worse
Free speech is being tested on college campuses by rising numbers of hate crimes and deepening racial tensions, according to a report released today by PEN America, a human-rights association of writers and editors. But the Trump administration’s warnings of a “crisis” overstate the problem, it says, and risk further polarizing colleges.
With No Paid Parental Leave, Many Teachers Return to Class Before They’re Ready
Teachers spend their days taking care of other people’s children. But what happens when they have babies of their own?
Unlike other developed nations, the United States does not mandate paid parental leave. And the K-12 education sector is no exception, despite being dominated by women in their childbearing years. Just a handful of states, including Washington state and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia, provide paid parental leave for teachers. And some individual school districts offer it, too.
Norfolk School Board Holds 4th Illegal Meeting in 6 Months
The Norfolk School Board met last week to evaluate the superintendent without giving notice to the public, a violation of the state’s Freedom of Information Act.
Wednesday’s meeting marks at least the fourth time in six months that the board has met without providing sufficient notice of meetings. Two of those times, they provided no notice at all.
Mar. 22 – Mar. 28
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week
A Connecticut school district’s decision to hire security guards while laying off mental health professionals has sparked a debate about school safety, reports Brian Zahn for the New Haven Register.
Meanwhile, an Indiana elementary school received national attention after teachers there were shot with plastic pellets as part of an active-shooter drill, reports Arika Herron for the Indianapolis Star.
At Glen Mills Schools, Boys Are Beaten, Then Silenced
Serious violence is both an everyday occurrence and an open secret at Glen Mills, and has been for decades, an Inquirer investigation has found. Internal documents, court records, incident reports, and more than 40 interviews with students, staff, and others show top leaders turn a blind eye to the beatings and insulate themselves from reports while failing to properly vet or train the school’s counselors.
Repeated Scandals Stymie USC’s Efforts to Improve its Image
After a series of embarrassing scandals and divisive controversies at the University of Southern California over the past two years, students, alumni and faculty hoped 2019 would be different.
It’s not.
Does Affirmative Action Help or Hurt Asians Who Don’t Fit the Model-Minority Stereotype?
Implicit in the argument made by Students for Fair Admissions is that ending racial considerations in admissions would ultimately benefit the kids at Burbank High. And yet, in the coverage of the Harvard lawsuit, and indeed in almost any story on affirmative action, you rarely hear from this group — the ones without the Tiger Moms and the private SAT tutors — or from the high school counselors like Spilman and Bell who worry less about whether their students will appear “too Asian” and more about whether they even know how to apply to college.
Mar. 15 – Mar. 21
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week
For Oregon Public Broadcasting, Rob Manning examines schools’ use of seclusion and restraint for students with disabilities.
As Tennessee considers a private school voucher program, Chalkbeat’s Laura Faith Kebede explores how a history of racism and distrust could affect families’ willingness to participate.
Active Shooter Training For Schools: Teachers Shot With Plastic Pellets
An active-shooter training exercise at an Indiana elementary school in January left teachers with welts, bruises and abrasions after they were shot with plastic pellets by the local sheriff’s office conducting the session.
The incident, acknowledged in testimony this week before state lawmakers, was confirmed by two elementary school teachers in Monticello, who described an exercise in which teachers were asked by local law enforcement to kneel down against a classroom wall before being sprayed across their backs with plastic pellets without warning.
Ten Months After Santa Fe High Shooting, Families Still Seek Answers
Families of at least six children and staff members who died in Texas’ deadliest K-12 school shooting, and two injured survivors, still are searching for answers 10 months after a teenage gunman blasted his way through the Galveston County school. Each time they have requested records — including medical examiner and autopsy reports — they have been denied.
Mar. 8 – Mar. 14
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week
What happened when a charter school in Tennessee replaced in-school suspensions with something called a reflection room? Chalkbeat’s Caroline Bauman examines one effort to rethink discipline.
For The Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Vasquez explains how a major chain of for-profit colleges “came crashing down” this month.
‘What Does It Take?’: Admissions Scandal Is a Harsh Lesson in Racial Disparities
They studied into the wee hours and agonized line by line over their personal essays. They took standardized tests three, four, five times to increase their scores. And last fall, after years of preparation and anxiety, the students at Ewing Marion Kauffman School, a predominantly black school in Kansas City, submitted their college applications, hoping all their hard work would pay off.
Dozens Indicted In Alleged Massive Case Of Admissions Fraud
What many are calling the worst admissions scandal in higher education emerged Tuesday, with federal authorities announcing 50 indictments in a scheme that allegedly involved faux athletes, coaches who could be bribed, cheating on the SAT and ACT, million-dollar bribes and “guarantees” that certain applicants would be admitted to highly competitive colleges.
Children Are Routinely Isolated In Some Fairfax County Schools. The District Didn’t Report It.
For years, Fairfax County Public Schools reported to the federal government that not a single student was physically restrained or trapped in an isolating space.
But documents obtained by WAMU reveal hundreds of cases where children, some as young as 6 years old, were restrained or put in seclusion multiple times. In some cases, a single child was confined to a room almost 100 times in a school year.
Mar. 1 – Mar. 7
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week
In what some are calling “The Trump Effect,” an increasing number of students are considering H.B.C.U.s and single-sex colleges, reports Alina Tugend of The New York Times.
As New York City seeks to diversify its prestigious high schools, some see an opportunity to challenge affirmative action before the U.S. Supreme Court, writes Mark Keierleber for The 74.
Schools Getting More Police but at the Expense of Counselors, Nurses
About 14 million students attend schools across the U.S. where they walk the halls alongside police officers but don’t have access to counselors, nurses, psychologists or social workers, according to an ACLU report released Monday.
Legal Scholars Don’t Know the Details of Trump’s Order on Campus Speech. But They Think It’s a Mistake
President Trump’s announcement of an executive order that threatens to cut off federal research money from colleges that do not support free speech has drawn criticism from college leaders and legal scholars on two fronts. First, they say, it might not be legal. Second, they argue, it’s a terrible idea.
An Oakland School Upped Spending After A $2.8m Donation Of Chinese Paintings. Then Came The Appraisal
When the small Oakland private school received the donation of four Chinese paintings, valued at $2.8 million, administrators were gobsmacked.
After relying on bake sales to stay fiscally afloat for the past two decades, the Pacific Boychoir Academy and its elite after-school music program were sitting on a relative fortune.
MU Sexual Assault Advocates Speak Up, Get Pushed Out
The University of Missouri’s sole victim advocate was prepared to leave her post last spring but was convinced to stay. A week later Taylor Yeagle was forced out of her role after she gave a media interview criticizing how the university’s Title IX appeals officials handled a client’s case.
Broken Trust: Texas’ Huge School Endowment Pays Out Less And Less For Schoolchildren
AUSTIN— It was a grand promise, one our forefathers made 165 years ago to all Texas children, to theirs and ours and those not yet born.
With $2 million and the state’s most abundant and precious resource — its land — they created the Texas Permanent School Fund to forever support public education. It was called a “sacred trust.”
That trust, dedicated to K-12 schools, is now valued at $44 billion, bigger than even Harvard University’s endowment.
It is also broken.
Number Of Teachers Of Color Hired By Harford Schools Continues To Increase
Of the 209 new teachers hired for the 2017-2018 school year, 33 of them identified themselves as teachers of color, a number that’s been increasing the last three years as Harford schools focus on increasing their diversity.
What Do Americans Think About Affirmative Action? It Depends on How You Ask
Most Americans support affirmative action for racial minorities as a broad concept, a new survey says. Yet a majority opposes the consideration of applicants’ race in college admissions.
Confusing? Not really. It’s all a matter of how specifically you pose the question.
As higher education awaits a federal judge’s ruling in a case challenging Harvard University’s race-conscious admissions policy, it’s a good time to ask what the public thinks of this contentious issue.
Michael Cohen Testifies That He Threatened Colleges and College Board if They Released Trump’s Records
Michael D. Cohen, a former personal lawyer for President Trump, said in testimony on Wednesday before the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Committee that, at Trump’s direction, he had threatened legal action against the College Board, Trump’s former high school, and the universities he attended if they released the president’s academic records.
Trump spent two years at Fordham University, in New York, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania’s business school for his undergraduate degree.
After Douglass Shooting, Baltimore School Board Reverses Position, Supports Bill Allowing Officers To Be Armed
Two weeks after a shooting in a Baltimore high school, the city’s school board reversed its position on whether school police should be allowed to carry weapons, voting 8-2 in support of legislation that would amend state law to authorize officers to patrol schools with guns.
Opinion: Many Rural Schools Have Been ‘Minimally Adequate’ For Too Long
I remember as a young reporter for The State newspaper in South Carolina’s capital, Columbia, driving with a colleague in 1999 to the old Bishopville High School in rural Lee County.
The school was still in operation, despite having been condemned. (Its main lobby ceiling had collapsed in an incident that could have killed someone.) Some of the classroom windows were missing panes of glass, open to the wind.
I returned to the car after the visit, profoundly startled by this and other evidence of chronic neglect. My colleague literally wept.
Feb. 22 – Feb. 28
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week
Chalkbeat’s Christina Veiga reports on how the deteriorating conditions of New York City’s public housing buildings are affecting the child care centers nestled within them.
Despite an injection of nearly $1 billion into Washington’s public school system, a majority of the state’s districts are projecting budget shortfalls, reports Neal Morton and Dahlia Bazzaz for The Seattle Times.
What It’s Like To Go To School When Dozens Have Been Killed Nearby
Jaleyah Collier had just said goodbye to Kevin Cleveland outside a doughnut shop a few blocks from Hawkins High School on a spring afternoon in 2017. Get home safe, she told him before walking away.
Minutes later someone drove into an alley nearby, got out of the car and asked Kevin, 17, and two others about their gang affiliation. The gunman then sprayed them with at least 10 rounds, killing Kevin and injuring the others.
Chief Privacy Officers: The Unicorns of K-12 Education
Last month, the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) published a report arguing schools and districts should go the way of other industries and hire a Chief Privacy Officer to oversee their organization’s privacy policies and practices.
(Report) Nonwhite School Districts Get $23 Billion Less Than White Districts Despite Serving the Same Number of Students
The story of our communities can in many ways be told through the lens of the school districts that serve our children. More than organizations that enable learning, school districts are geographic boundaries that serve as magnifying lenses that allow us to focus on issues of race and wealth. They are both a statement of “what is” and “what could be” in our society.
Report Finds $23 Billion Racial Funding Gap For Schools
Overwhelmingly white school districts received $23 billion more than predominantly nonwhite school districts in state and local funding in 2016, despite serving roughly the same number of children, a new report finds.
Survey Finds That Most Americans Say Colleges Shouldn’t Consider Race in Admissions
Nearly three-fourths of those surveyed by Pew oppose consideration of race in admissions. Only 7 percent say it should be a major factor – and 8 percent each say legacy status or athletic ability should be a major factor.
An Arizona Cop Threatened to Arrest a 12-Year-Old Journalist. She Wasn’t Backing Down.
When a small-town Arizona cop stopped a 12-year-old reporter who was chasing down a story tip on Monday, he probably had no idea what he was getting himself into.
Feb. 15 – Feb. 21
Here's what we're reading by EWA members this week
As a teachers strike begins in Oakland, principals struggle with decision to cross picket line or not, reports Chalkbeat’s Sharon Noguchi.
For The Denver Post, Elizabeth Hernandez details the dramatic back-and-forth that helped end the city’s teachers strike.
The Houston Chronicle’s Jacob Carpenter explores how a new Texas law is creating tension between state and local school accountability systems.
The Growing Gender Divide Among U.S. Teachers
Teaching in the United States was once considered a career for men. Then the profession’s gender composition shifted dramatically around the mid-19th century, when the country’s public-school system was born. As schoolhouse doors opened to children of all social classes and genders, so too did the education profession. By the late 1880s, women made up a majority—63 percent—of all the country’s teachers (though men continued to make up most of the high-school teaching force until the late 1970s).