Betsy DeVos, Chris Wallace spar over reopening schools amid COVID-19. The president and the CDC disagree on the guidelines for reopening schools.
USA TODAY Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said Sunday there was no danger in sending children back to school amid the coronavirus pandemic and stood by a threat to withhold federal funds from schools that do not resume in-person classes. "There's nothing in the data that suggests that kids being in school is in any way dangerous," DeVos told "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace. "We know that children contract and have the virus at far lower incidence than any other part of the population, and we know that other countries around the world have reopened their schools and have done so successfully and safely. " President Donald Trump has also pointed to other countries that had successfully reopened their schools, specifically citing Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden in a tweet last week.
Wallace pointed out that those countries have far fewer daily cases of COVID-19 than the U.S. Virginia Study Finds Increased School Bullying In Areas That Voted For Trump. After the 2016 presidential election, teachers across the country reported they were seeing increased name-calling and bullying in their classrooms.
Now, research shows that those stories — at least in one state — are confirmed by student surveys. Francis Huang of the University of Missouri and Dewey Cornell of the University of Virginia used data from a school climate survey taken by over 150,000 students across Virginia. They looked at student responses to questions about bullying and teasing from 2015 and 2017. Their findings were published Wednesday in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. Betsy DeVos, charter schools, choice, Education Department: What now? What exactly is a Charter School?
Let's break down the basics: what they are, where they came from and how they work. Paul Wood Jr., NorthJersey The first charter school in Nevada – I Can Do Anything High School – is set to close this spring. Ohio's largest charter, with 12,000 online students, shut down last winter after a crackdown on its suspicious attendance figures. To help pay state fines, the school auctioned off everything from ballpoint pens to a singing Big Mouth Billy Bass wall plaque. In New Jersey, the charter system is making real estate investors rich. More from New Jersey: Across the U.S., charter schools are facing a reckoning. After new charters spread rapidly for a generation, with few rules or oversight in many states, the pace of growth is slowing. DeVos Defends $18 Million Cut to Special Olympics Funding While Asking Congress for $60 Million for Charter Schools. Betsy DeVos, charter schools, choice, Education Department: What now?
DeVos Defends $18 Million Cut to Special Olympics Funding While Asking Congress for $60 Million for Charter Schools. Billionaires v teachers: the Koch brothers' plan to starve public education. Arizona has become the hotbed for an experiment rightwing activists hope will redefine America’s schools – an experiment that has pitched the conservative billionaires the Koch brothers and Donald Trump’s controversial education secretary, Betsy DeVos, against teachers’ unions, teachers and parents.
Neither side is giving up without a fight. With groups funded by the Koch brothers and DeVos nudging things along, Arizona lawmakers enacted the nation’s broadest school vouchers law, state-funded vouchers that are supposed to give parents more school choice and can be spent on private or religiously affiliated schools. For opponents, the system is not about choice but about further weakening the public school system.
A half-dozen women who had battled for months against the legislation were angry as hell. “We walked outside the Capitol Building, and we looked at each other, and said, ‘What now?” Little did they know the challenges ahead. . … we have a small favour to ask. 'My classroom has asbestos and bats': a message for Betsy DeVos. Secretary DeVos, this is what American teachers want you to know about their struggles.
In September, the Guardian invited a team of public school teachers to serve as guest editors of our site and share their stories of teaching in America. As part of the project, our teacher-editors published a manifesto entitled “We shouldn’t be on food stamps: Teachers on how to fix America’s education system”. We also invited teachers in our audience to contribute their own stories to the document, and promised to deliver their messages to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. We received responses from hundreds of teachers across the country, and today, we are publishing a representative sample of those messages. On Thursday, the Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, David Smith, paid a surprise visit to the Department of Education and delivered the original document and this new collection of messages to an official Betsy DeVos’s education department. 1. “My first classroom had asbestos and bats. 2. 3.
DeVos reinstated for-profit college accreditor despite staff objections, report shows. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos earlier this year reinstated an accreditor of for-profit colleges despite findings by her agency’s career staff that the organization failed to meet federal standards, an internal document shows.
The report, released by the Education Department on Friday in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, shows that career department analysts had serious concerns about restoring the federal recognition of the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools just a month before DeVos issued an order reinstating the accreditor’s federal status. Story Continued Below Career analysts wrote in the report that ACICS failed to meet 57 of the 93 criteria that accreditors are required to meet under federal law. The Obama administration’s termination of ACICS in 2016 was based on its findings that the accreditor had not followed 21 of the standards, though its review was more limited in scope.
Who’s Behind the Right-Wing Assault on Public Universities? Who’s Behind the Right-Wing [...]
Public universities including the University of Virginia are the targets of a new demand that they should be treated as any corporate entity, judged exclusively on its bottom line. (Photo by Stephanie Gross/FTWP) This post originally appeared at The Nation. The conservative movement in the United States has long been wary of higher education. This is understandable given the fact that survey after survey demonstrates a positive correlation between education and progressive values.
More recently, however, the far-right has turned its attention away from these elite-oriented universities to public ones. Trump and DeVos call for massive cuts to college student aid programs. A sobering look at what Betsy DeVos did to education in Michigan — and what she might do as secretary of education. Betsy DeVos, President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of education pick.
