InformED Report 10/26/16

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09/21/16 | Washington, DC | The Washington Post

Congress to hear arguments on Obama administration’s proposed education spending rule

Emma Brown | The Washington Post Twitter

Members of Congress will have a chance Wednesday morning to hear arguments for and against the Obama administration’s proposal for how school districts spend billions of dollars meant to educate poor children, perhaps the most hotly contested education issue in Washington since Congress passed a federal education law late last year.

The Education Department and its allies in the civil rights movement say that the rules will ensure that children in high-poverty schools get the federal aid they are due, while a wide range of opponents have argued that the administration has overreached its authority with a proposal that would wreak havoc on classrooms nationwide.

The hearing Wednesday before a subcommittee of the House Education Committee — “Supplanting the Law and Local Education Authority Through Regulatory Fiat” — should offer a sense of how the majority Republican Congress views the administration’s proposal.

To read more visit The Washington Post

John King: We’ve Got Unfinished Education Business

Lauren Camera | U.S. News | Twitter

The education landscape has undergone a sea change under the Obama administration, but Education Secretary John King sees a handful of pressing issues he considers unfinished business, with early childhood education being chief among them.

“There is a very large number of students in this country who don’t have access to high-quality early learning,” King said Wednesday morning at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

“We have a lot of work to do to make sure we have universal access to high-quality early learning, and not just for 4-year-olds, for 3-year-olds, too,” he said. “The vision is to make universal pre-K universal for all low- and middle-income families.”

To read more visit U.S. News

On The Issues: Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump urge more school funding, differ in use

Eric DuVall | UPI | Twitter

On the issue of education, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump call for greater federal spending. The difference is in how they would use it.

Trump advocates greater accountability for schools and teachers and the ability for families to choose any school, many with government support while returning more control to states and school district

Clinton, allied with teachers’ unions, calls for greater pay for teachers, a reduced role for charter schools, universal prekindergarten and rethinking how students, especially minorities, are disciplined.

Both plans call for significant federal investment but in different ways.

Here is a look at how the candidates plan to address primary and secondary education.

To read more visit UPI

Third Parties on Higher Ed

Andrew Kreighbaum | Inside Higher Ed | Twitter

The presidential campaign has featured a considerable debate about free public higher education, student debt and other issues related to the cost of college. But Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump aren’t the only ones talking. The Green Party presidential candidate is making a play for Bernie Sanders supporters with a plan to cancel all student debt, while the Libertarian Party nominee has promised to end the Department of Education.

Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, has said she wants to be the “plan B” for Sanders supporters. For voters excited by Sanders’s proposal for free tuition at public universities, Stein made even more ambitious promises: free college, yes, but also the elimination of existing student debt. So far, Johnson is attracting more support in the polls than is Stein. Third-party support tends to drop as Election Day gets closer, but this is in any number of ways an unusual election year.

To read more visit Inside Higher Ed

Over 100 Education Groups Want to Kick Cops Out of Schools

Law enforcement officers were regularly stationed in 10 percent of schools in 1997. By 2014, school resource officers were stationed in about one-third of schools. Now, two decades since the number of school-based police officers started to explode, a coalition of over 100 education and social justice organizations are calling for a course correction.

The Dignity in Schools Campaign ― a coalition of organizations, parents, and students from 27 states ― wants heavily policed campuses to be a thing of the past. It released a set of recommendations on Wednesday to promote alternatives to harsh school discipline and youth criminalization. DSC members plan to present the guidance to lawmakers during congressional briefings later in the day.

The new recommendations are the strongest that DSC member organizations ― groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund ― have ever made collectively on the issue of school policing.

To read more visit The Huffington Post

Obama Administration Pushes to Limit Police In Schools

The Obama administration is pushing school districts to ensure that school discipline is being handled by trained educators, not by law enforcement officers – the most recent in a series of efforts to curb the school-to-prison pipeline.

The Department of Education and Department of Justice on Thursday sent letters to states and school districts emphasizing the importance of well-designed training programs for school resource officers – law enforcement officials who work inside schools.

“We must ensure that school discipline is being handled by trained educators, not by law enforcement officers,” said Secretary of Education John King on a press call Wednesday. “Some schools are simply turning misbehaving students over to SROs. This can set students on a path to dropping out or even to prison.”

The departments also sent letters to colleges and universities asking them to implement recommendations from the president’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing as it pertains to campus policing, though the main focus of the new effort is on K-12 schools.

The number of federally-funded school resource officers is small compared to the overall number at work in public schools, roughly. On the whole, it’s able to fund about 100 to 150 each year of a three-year tenure, meaning at any one time there are about 400 to 500 federally funded school resource officers nationwide. That’s out of the approximately 17,000 in place in schools around the country, or between two and three percent

To read more visit U.S. News

With police in schools, more children in court

As school districts across the country consider placing more police officers in schools, youth advocates, and judges are raising the alarm about what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed: a surge in criminal charges against children for misbehavior that many believe is better handled in the principal’s office.

Since the early 1990s, thousands of districts, often with federal subsidies, have paid local police agencies to provide armed “school resource officers” for high schools, middle schools and sometimes even elementary schools. Hundreds of additional districts, including those in Houston, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, have created police forces of their own, employing thousands of sworn officers.

To read more visit The New York Times

09/22/2016 | Washington, DC | Chronicle of Higher Education

Education Dept. Revokes Recognition of Embattled Accreditor of For-Profit Colleges

Andy Thomason | Chronicle of Higher Education | Twitter

The U.S. Education Department has decided to revoke the federal recognition of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, the much-maligned accreditor of many for-profit colleges.

Emma Vadehra, chief of staff to the secretary of education, wrote in a letter on Thursday that she agreed with the recommendations of Education Department analysts and the National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, which were issued in June.

The accreditor has been accused of lax oversight of for-profit colleges, including the now-defunct ITT Educational Services Inc. and Corinthian Colleges.

Ms. Vadehra’s decision was not unexpected, and it does not represent the end of the road for the accreditor, which plans to appeal the ruling to the secretary of education, John B. King Jr.

To read more visit The Chronicle of Higher Education

Education Department Strips Authority of Largest For-Profit Accreditor

Lauren Camera | U.S. News | Twitter

The Department of Education officially stripped the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools – the largest accrediting agency of for-profit colleges and universities – of its authority Thursday, handing down the final blow in a long controversy over the council’s ability to be an effective watchdog for students and billions of taxpayer dollars.

“I am terminating the department’s recognition of ACICS as a national recognized accrediting agency,” Emma Vadehra, chief of staff to the education secretary, wrote in a letter to the organization. “ACICS’s track record does not inspire confidence that it can address all of the problems effectively.”

The decision comes after a federal panel voted to shut ACICS down in June amid intense criticism of the council for its loose oversight of educational institutions. ACICS was the accrediting agency for now-shuttered Corinthian Colleges and ITT Technical Institute campuses.

The Department of Education also issued a formal recommendation to eliminate the accrediting agency, which currently oversees about 725 institutions and last year oversaw $3.3 billion in federal financial aid.

To read more visit U.S. News

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