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| State & Local Education News |
Sen. Warner talks college, politics and the future with Chesterfield high school juniors
Richmond Times-Dispatch
March 7, 2016
U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner, D-Va., met with a group of juniors at Monacan High School this morning to talk about college, jobs and the presidential election.
For nearly an hour, Warner held court in a town hall-style meeting with about 50 students. His talk covered efforts to make higher education more affordable and to ease student loan debt as well the current state of politics.
Warner also discussed how business failures taught him better lessons than success ever could have. He also talked about balancing security and privacy in the iPhone case, finding creative ways to fund Social Security and how the future of work is changing.
Telephone bomb threats prompt numerous school evacuations and lockdowns in Va., N.J.
The Washington Post
March 4, 2016
Police in Northern Virginia and New Jersey are investigating bomb threats that were called in to dozens of schools Friday morning, threats that prompted evacuations and lockdowns.
Many of the schools received the threats via automated phone calls — known as robocalls — a method that has become increasingly common for school bomb threats nationwide and one that is difficult to track. A rash of robocalls led to evacuations and lockdowns of 13 schools in three states in January, none of which were found to be credible.
Va. SOL curriculum change approved, now includes computer science
Richmond Times-Dispatch
March 7, 2016
The state’s Board of Education soon could include computer science in its Standards of Learning curriculum.
The Virginia Senate joined the House of Delegates early last week in unanimously approving House Bill 831, designed to help prepare students for technology jobs.
The bill calls for the Board of Education to incorporate computer science, computational thinking and computer coding into existing SOL curriculum. Under the legislation, as the SOL curriculum is updated, the computer science-related materials would be integrated into existing requirements.
Home schooling booms in Virginia
CBS 6 (WTVR)
March 5, 2016
Thomas Burgess begged his mother to be home-schooled with his sister Gina, who as a kindergartner severely struggled with school anxiety.
From second to eight grade, Thomas was home-schooled, too.
When this started, in 1995, Burgess was among fewer than 10,000 home-schoolers in Virginia. Since then, the number has quadrupled – to about 39,000 students. If they constituted a school district, home-schoolers would be the eighth-largest district in the state – just behind Chesapeake and well ahead of the public school enrollments of Norfolk, Newport News, Arlington and Richmond.
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National & Federal Education News
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Donald Trump's Education Plan: Several Experts Fearful, Curious ... and Baffled
Education Week
March 7, 2016
Donald Trump's thoughts about education policy are mostly a black box. We know he doesn't like the Common Core State Standards. And he thinks American students produce lousy test scores. But the real estate developer hasn't weighed in with a comprehensive plan for public schools, or talked in much detail about education, since becoming a contender for the Republican presidential nomination.
So when education policy mavens and advocates contemplate a Donald Trump administration and its impact on K-12, what do they see? In many cases, they're confused or uncertain about what a Trump-led U.S. Department of Education would do, or not do, if it even survives. But in some cases they have clear concerns, or other thoughts about how he might significantly alter what's been happening with federal education policy.
There Is No FDA For Education. Maybe There Should Be
NPR
March 7, 2016
Has American education research mostly languished in an echo chamber for much of the last half century? Harvard's Thomas Kane thinks so.
Why have the medical and pharmaceutical industries and Silicon Valley all created clear paths to turn top research into game-changing innovations, he asks, while education research mostly remains trapped in glossy journals?
Kane, a professor of education at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, points out that there is no effective educational equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration, where medical research is rigorously vetted and translated into solutions. Maybe, he says, there should be.
Promoting innovation and maintaining high standards in teacher education through ESSA
Brookings - The Brown Center Chalkboard
March 7, 2016
On January 28th Thomas Arnett published an essay here on the Brown Center Chalkboard on changes to teacher preparation programs brought on by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). The new provision authorizing states to establish Teacher Preparation Academies will, according to Arnett, “unlock innovation” and enable the field to address its enduring problems.
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How Protected is Free Speech in Public Higher Education?
This week is Spring Break for Virginia Commonwealth University, so we bring you a shorter Compass Point focused on the most recent edition of our
Education Law Newsletter. Written by Kathleen Conn, the March edition looks at the question of freedom of speech and higher education in the evolving world of online communications.
Also be sure to check out this week's
General Assembly Update by David Blount.
We hope you have a great week!
Sincerely,
CEPI
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Regulating Professors' Online Speech: Academic Freedom or "Incivility"
Excerpted from from Kathleen Conn's
March 2016 Education Law Newsletter.
Introduction
The then-Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Phyllis Wise, polarized the higher education community in August 2014 when she orchestrated the rescinding of the tenure track position offered to Steven Salaita by the Department of American Indian Studies nine months before. Wise accused Salaita of incivility in his tweets criticizing Israel’s shelling of Palestine and the resultant killing of innocent Palestinian children. A number of Salaita’s hundreds of tweets that summer were crude and vulgar, liberally spiced with curses condemning President Obama and any others who supported him or the state of Israel. A significant number of major donors to the university had threatened to withhold support if Salaita were allowed to join the faculty, but many university departments and other groups animatedly supported Salaita’s right to First Amendment freedom of speech and academic freedom. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) censured the university.
Salaita mounted two lawsuits against the university’s administration and John Doe donors, one to force the university to release emails and other documents relevant to his case, and the other alleging substantive violations of his constitutional rights. Revelations incident to the lawsuits triggered the resignation of Chancellor Wise and a shuffling of university administration. Salaita ultimately agreed to a settlement amounting to $875,000, of which, $275,000 went to his lawyers. Salaita has moved on, and he now teaches in Beirut and continues to publish a voluminous number of tweets. The controversy that swirled around Salaita’s job loss has apparently waned, but the questions that were raised have not been put to rest. What are the free speech rights of professors at public colleges and universities when they “speak” online? Does the right of academic freedom protect professors’ online speech? And what role should “civility” play in evaluating the speech and expression of higher education faculty? Without a court decision in the Salaita case, no new judicial precedent has been established. However, a jurisprudence relating to academic freedom and professors’ First Amendment speech rights has existed for at least three generations.
Academic Freedom or Employer Regulation: Judicial Pronouncements
The U.S. Supreme Court has long championed academic freedom in public colleges and universities. In
Sweezy v. New Hampshire, Chief Justice Earl Warren authored the often-quoted paean to academic freedom stating that, “The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident . . . To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation . . . .”
Ten years later, in
Keyishian v. Board of Regents, Justice Brennan reaffirmed the Court’s support for academic freedom, stating forcefully:
"Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom."
However, the Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence has also recognized that free speech may have to yield in the face of more practical concerns. Public universities are not only academic bastions; they are also businesses, run by various administrators and Boards of Trustees who employ faculty and staff members. Alongside its pronouncements on the pre-eminence of academic freedom and the First Amendment rights of professors, the Supreme Court has also upheld the right of the state as employer to regulate the speech of its employees. In a trilogy of decisions from 1968 to 1983, roughly paralleling in time the Court’s development of its student speech jurisprudence, the Court fashioned a comprehensive analysis by which lower courts might strike a balance between the rights of public employees to freedom of speech and expression and the rights of the state as employer to regulate employee speech.
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Recommendations
Civility as a standard for employment decisions in any context, but especially in academia, is problematic. Civility can be viewed differently by different individuals at different times, and the need to be viewed as “civil” may stall or foreclose full discussion of sensitive issues. The basic premise of the First Amendment is defense of the “marketplace of ideas.”
At public institutions, contrary to Garcetti, professorial speech may be protected by the First Amendment, but at the current time that protection is jurisdiction dependent, with Circuit Courts of Appeals creating contradictory precedents for lower courts. In addition, the very different and more expansive nature of online speech may influence the outcome of any institutional disciplinary deliberation. The more controversial or profane the speech, the wider its dissemination, and the more tangential to the professor’s assigned teaching duties, the less likely is First Amendment protection. Bad publicity translates into decreased funding, alumni and otherwise. Boards of Trustees fully comprehend this reality.
A professor’s duties revolve around teaching and scholarship, with institutions of higher education known as “teaching institutions” or “research institutions.” However, the common denominator is that institutions hire certain faculty members because the institutional search committees collectively decide that the successful candidates will fulfill a need in the institution, and will be a “good fit” with the institution’s mission, goals, and colleagues. Even so, rescission of Steven Salaita’s job offer because of his tweets was unprecedented.
What should be the guiding principles for professorial speech online? First, professors are by collective reputation “smart.” Publishing controversial opinions in inflammatory rhetoric, without substantive factual support or elaboration, is not smart, and allowing those opinions to be broadcast online to the world is even less smart. Second, professors should remember the caution of the AAUP: the public, including donors to universities, may indeed interpret professorial speech as representing the university’s mission and vision.
On the other hand, civility cannot be an excuse for bad decisions. As one commentator remarked, college and university administrators must take care not to create campuses of “nice people” where professors are afraid to state well-supported, but unpopular opinions. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) recently surveyed 437 institutions of higher education and asserts that 55% maintain severely restrictive speech policies for students and faculty, prohibiting protected speech under the guise of respect for others and civility. College and university administrators must re-examine their speech policies together with their legal counsel, to make sure that protected speech rights are not abridged.
Read the full analysis and other Education Law Newsletters on
our website.
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General Assembly Update - Week 6
Excerpted from CEPI's
General Assembly Update, written by Policy Analyst David Blount. The update will be published weekly during the General Assembly session.
"State Budget Update
The House and Senate budget conferees charged with reaching an agreement on a compromise budget for the next biennium are in place and have been working to resolve differences in the competing plans. The most notable K-12 education-related items in the budget plans that must be resolved concern the following:
- Flexibility in use of funds - Both proposals include flexibility in the use of funding for K-12 educational purposes and for local match requirements. This includes flexibility with the re-establishment of the previous General Assembly policy of distributing part of the Lottery Proceeds on a per pupil amount (House plan) as well as the Additional Support for Classroom Needs program (Senate plan); and
- Teacher salaries--The House proposes funding for the state share of a 2% salary increase for SOQ-funded instructional and support positions in FY18 (effective July 10, 2017), with an allowance for school divisions that choose to provide a pay raise in FY17 to apply that action toward their local match for receiving the FY18 state funds. The Senate plan proposes the state share of a 2% increase in the first year, in addition to a similar amount that was included in the introduced budget in FY18.
Earlier this week, the Department of Education (DOE) released detailed information about the House and Senate-approved budget plans. You can click here for the
DOE memo.
Education Legislation
On Monday, Governor McAuliffe vetoed the pair of bills,
HB 131 and
SB 612, which would have allowed homeschoolers to participate in public school activities under the Virginia High School League. He noted in his veto message, identical to that in his veto of last year’s bill, that, “allowing home-schooled students to participate in interscholastic competitions would disrupt the level playing field Virginia’s public schools have developed over the past century.“ The House failed to override the gubernatorial veto of HB 131; the Senate has yet to act of the veto of SB 612.
The governor also vetoed
HB 259. This bill would have prohibited the Board of Education (BOE) from replacing the Standards of Learning (SOL) with Common Core State Standards without approval of the General Assembly. In this veto message, the governor stated that “the bill is unnecessary in light of the fact that Virginia’s SOL already exceed the rigor of the Common Core State Standards.” The Governor also objected to the limitations the bill placed on the BOE’s decision-making ability. The House will take up the veto next week.
The Senate Finance Committee (SFC) has slapped a re-enactment clause on
HB 389, requiring it to be approved again next year before taking effect. The bill permits the parents of certain disabled students to apply to their resident school division for a “Parental Choice Education Savings Account,” to consist of state education funds that could be used for certain private school expenses. The bill is on the Senate floor after being approved on a 9-5 vote in the SFC.
The Senate Education and Health Committee referred to the SFC
HB 8. The bill would establish the Virginia Virtual School program to provide full-time online educational programs and services. Beginning with the 2017-18 school year, the average state share of SOQ per pupil funding for each enrolled student would be sent to the school. The Committee advanced the bill to the Senate floor on a split vote.
The governor has signed
HB 357 and
SB 211. These identical bills require kindergartners to have at least 20 minutes of physical activity per day or an average of 100 minutes per week, effective with the 2018-19 school year."
(To read the full update, visit our
website.)
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