High Schools

Betsy DeVos is gone — but ‘DeVosism’ sure isn’t. Look at what Florida, New Hampshire and other states are doing.

3 weeks ago Jennifer

She made no secret of her disdain for traditional public schools — calling them “a dead end” in 2015 and derogatorily referring to them as “government schools.” Her selection as education secretary was applauded by religious conservatives and detractors of public schools — and decried by those who opposed her evangelism for the privatization of public education.

While she was education secretary, she unsuccessfully tried for years to persuade Congress to pass a $5 billion tax-credit program that would have funded scholarships to private and religious schools. Some said her failure to pass education legislation limited her impact —

… Read More

Debunking anti-vaxxer RFK Jr.’s claim about ‘suspicious’ coronavirus vaccine deaths, a phony Elon Musk tweet and more news literacy lessons

3 weeks ago Jennifer

The News Literacy Project also offers a program called Checkology, a browser-based platform designed for students in grades six through 12 that helps prepare the next generation to easily identify misinformation. Checkology is available free to educators, students, school districts and parents. Since 2016, more than 29,000 educators and parents in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., have registered to use the platform. Since August, more than 1,000 educators and parents, and more than 34,000 students, have used Checkology.

You can learn more about the News Literacy Project and all of the educational resources it provides in this piece,

… Read More

Five key moments from education secretary nominee Miguel Cardona’s confirmation hearing

3 weeks ago Jennifer

The most charged conversation at the hearing was started and fueled by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who raised the issue of whether transgender athletes should be able to compete in school sports.

“What do you think about boys in girls’ track meets like in Connecticut?” Paul asked Cardona, referring to transgender girls as boys. Connecticut, where Cardona is state education commissioner, allows students to join sports teams based on their gender identity, and last year, the U.S. Education Department under Betsy DeVos threatened to withhold federal funding from the state because of that position.

Cardona was clear in backing Biden’s

… Read More

How to start ending the school-to-prison pipeline — by an educator just elected to the U.S. House

4 weeks ago Jennifer

Biden’s choice for education secretary, Miguel Cardona, the state superintendent of Connecticut, goes before a Senate committee on Wednesday for his confirmation hearing, and is expected to be approved by the full Senate.

Bowman addresses his comments to Cardona as well as to his legislative colleagues, writing: “We can no longer watch children be brutalized on school grounds and wait for justice while we have the policy tools to legislate it.”

By Jamaal Bowman

Last week, a video surfaced of a Black 16-year-old girl being slammed to the floor by a cop at Liberty High School in Osceola County, Fla.

… Read More

Teachers to Biden: What we want from your administration

4 weeks ago Jennifer

The three are Jenna Fournel, Cosby Hunt and Aleta Margolis — all of them from the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Inspired Teaching, a nonprofit that provides innovative professional learning programs for teachers and seeks to transform the school experience for students from compliance-based to engagement-based.

In their following letter to Biden, Vice President Harris, and Miguel Cardona, who is expected to be confirmed by the Senate as education secretary, they urge a focus on “support of inquiry-based teaching and learning, media literacy, anti-racist pedagogy, prioritizing social studies and science, and centering teachers in our democracy.”

Fournel is director of

… Read More

Report: California ‘wasting’ millions of dollars funding online charter schools

4 weeks ago Jennifer

“In a time when school districts everywhere face the heartbreak of knowing they cannot provide all the services their students need and deserve, it is critical that lawmakers act as conservative stewards of the state’s tax collars by focusing funding on the schools where it can do the greatest good for the greatest number of the state’s students,” the report says.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated. About 10 percent of public school students in California attend charter schools — both brick-and-mortar and online. According to the report, nearly 175,000 California students in 2018-19 were enrolled in online

… Read More

Teacher: What Americans keep getting wrong about our unions during the pandemic

4 weeks ago Jennifer

But teachers and their unions say that in some districts the safety measures taken are not adequate to protect educators, staff members or students, and educators are refusing to return to classrooms. Chicago is in the middle of a confrontation between city officials and the powerful teachers union over whether to return to in-person classes.

The Washington Post published a story last month by my colleagues Perry Stein and Laura Meckler chronicling the difficulty that D.C. officials and the Washington Teachers Union were having reaching an agreement to resume in-person learning, revealing just how complicated reopening schools can be. They

… Read More

Biden seeks key school data to reopen schools — but the agency that collects it needs resources to do it

4 weeks ago Jennifer

Dozens of organizations concerned about the NCES sent a letter (see below) Monday to key U.S. legislators asking them to give $10 million to the agency so that it can do the data collecting that Biden is seeking.

“Essential to reopening schools and returning students and teachers to the classroom safely and securely is taking rapid steps based on accurate, timely, and objective statistics,” says the letter.

Its signatories include the American Statistical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Sociological Association, the National Center for Learning Disabilities and the two national teachers unions: the National Education Association and the

… Read More

What you need to know about standardized testing

4 weeks ago Jennifer

Ravitch worked from 1991 to 1993 as assistant secretary in charge of research and improvement in the Education Department of President George H.W. Bush, and she served as counselor to then-Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, who had just left the Senate where he had served as chairman of the Senate Education Committee. She was at the White House as part of a select group when George W. Bush first outlined No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a moment that at the time she said made her “excited and optimistic” about the future of public education.

But her opinion changed as NCLB was

… Read More

Other News

Celebrate Black Changemakers Year-round with New Resources

3 weeks ago Jennifer

This Week at DE: Week of February 7

3 weeks ago Jennifer

Betsy DeVos is gone — but ‘DeVosism’ sure isn’t. Look at what Florida, New Hampshire and other states are doing.

3 weeks ago Jennifer

Debunking anti-vaxxer RFK Jr.’s claim about ‘suspicious’ coronavirus vaccine deaths, a phony Elon Musk tweet and more news literacy lessons

3 weeks ago Jennifer

Five key moments from education secretary nominee Miguel Cardona’s confirmation hearing

3 weeks ago Jennifer