Tag: students

Michigan State University Student Governor Calls on Administration to Hire Employee Dedicated to Illegal Immigrant Students

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Michigan State University

At Michigan State University (MSU), a student government bill aims to pressure university administration to hire an “undocumented student affairs” position.

Passed on March 4, Bill 57-78 calls on the Associated Students of Michigan State University (ASMSU) to “Advocate for the Hiring of a Full-Time Employee for Undocumented Student Affairs.”

“This employee shall have a designated area in order to create a safe space for undocumented students to seek support,” states the bill.

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Minnesota Senate OKs COVID-19 Learning Loss Recovery Bills

The Center Square
Roger Chamberlain and Chuck Wige

The GOP-led Minnesota Senate recently approved several bills that aim to support families and teachers in recovering from learning loss suffered during COVID-19-related school closures.

Senate File 628 seeks to require the Department of Education to administer in-person statewide Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments during the spring of 2021, regardless of the current learning format. MCAs measure student progress in core academic subjects and were canceled last year.

“At this point, we are all familiar with the pain and hardship that school closures have caused students,” Sen. Roger Chamberlain, R-Lino Lakes, said in a statement. “The Senate is taking the smart steps necessary to help students catch their breath and recover from some of the worst side effects of COVID.”

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Tennessee Governments Spend an Average of $9,619 Per Public-School Student

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State and local governments in Tennessee spend on average a little more than $9,600 for each student in public school, according to a report by the Tennessee comptroller’s office, but per-pupil spending varies widely based on the type of school district and the population it serves.

School-level data reporting on per-student spending is available to the public this week for the first time. An interactive map and dashboard displays data from across the state. The comptroller’s Office of Research and Education Accountability created the resources in response to a federal law that requires states to report school-level data on per-student spending.

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Metro Nashville Schools Sending All Students to Distance-Learning After Thanksgiving

Jason M. Reynolds

Citing the “the alarming increase in the spread of COVID-19,” Metro Nashville Public Schools will move all students to distance-learning after the Thanksgiving break.

The district on Monday evening tweeted, “Metro Schools is returning to all-virtual learning following the Thanksgiving break on November 30 through the end of the semester, December 17.”

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Cumberland County Board of Education Chairman Shrugs off Question About Lifting Mask Mandates in Schools

Jason M. Reynolds

Cumberland County students and teachers are stuck wearing facial coverings for the foreseeable future after the local school board chairman cited procedure as a reason not to reconsider their mask mandates.

During an October 22 Board of Education meeting, member Anita Hale asked if the body would ever reconsider its mask mandate. A recording of the board’s videoconference meeting is available on the Cumberland County Board of Education’s Facebook page here.

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Ohio State University Students Furious After the School Reports Black-on-White Hate Crime

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Ohio State University students are upset after the school published information about two Black hate crime suspects, as it is required to do under federal law. On September 3, the Ohio State University sent a public safety notice to students, which mentioned a “hate crime” perpetrated by two African-American suspects near Ohio State’s campus. The first correspondence did not mention the victims’ race.

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California Mothers Sue California Gov. Newsom, Saying His Partial Reopening of Schools Hurts Special Needs Students, Causes Anxiety Over Grades

Jason M. Reynolds

Four mothers have filed a lawsuit against California Gov. Gavin Newsom over his coronavirus education plan, claiming adverse effects including anxiety over poor grades and lack of special education access.

The lawsuit was filed Sept. 10 in Shasta County Superior Court by the Freedom Foundation on behalf of the northern California families. The complaint is available here.

The plaintiffs allege the plan that requires students to be in classes part-time denies them their constitutional right to a quality education as enshrined in the California Constitution.

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Michigan Becomes First State to Offer Emergency Food Assistance for Students Through EBT

Jordyn Pair

Michigan has become the first state to gain federal approval for a program that helps families feed students who were previously relying on schools for meals.

Through the Pandemic Electronic Benefit Transfer Program, food assistance benefits will be given to students ages 5 to 18 who would normally be eligible for free or reduced-price school meals.

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Commentary: Students Love the ‘Green New Deal’ Until They Hear What’s In It

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by CHQ Staff   We’ve told CHQ readers about the deleterious effects of the “Green New Deal,” a Socialist plan aimed at taking hold of American economic life under the guise of drastically reducing carbon emissions in the next ten years. One of the principle reasons Democrats have launched the “Green New Deal” is because they think climate change hysteria among young people has reached critical mass politically and it is time to capture those votes. “Climate change is the biggest threat to my future. And just because I can’t vote right now, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a voice. I’m speaking from the perspective of someone who is scared and afraid for their future,” Lily Gardner, a 15-year-old student from Eastern Kentucky, told Refinery29 of why she joined a protest outside Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office. “It’s not a question of who knows more or who has been in the business for longer, it’s the question of who is going to be disproportionately impacted by climate change. When people don’t take me seriously, they are not taking my future seriously.” The “Green New Deal” has already received the endorsements of Democrat presidential candidates, like Senators Cory Booker…

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Metro Nashville Students So Out of Control Teachers Fear for Their Lives, SROs Fleeing from Alternative Schools, Educators, Officials Say

Jason M. Reynolds

“Chaos” is one word used by a teacher to describe student behavior in Metro Nashville Schools during a shocking town hall discussion hosted by Phil Williams of NewsChannel 5. A story about the town hall discussion is available here. “There’s no accountability for the students,” one teacher said. Metro Nashville Schools Superintendent Dr. Shawn Joseph is trying to reduce the number of students who receive suspensions. His policy, especially aimed at minorities, is blamed. Retired teacher Karen Gordon told Williams one of her former students was one of the youths who was arrested in connection to the murder of musician Kyle Yorlets. The district does not respect teachers’ opinions and does not give them resources to handle troubled students, they said. One shared how her principal laughed over her receiving a death threat. Joseph has generated his own controversy. The Tennessee Star reported last May that his playing explicit rap music during a principals meeting led to a civil rights complaint by a female school board member because the song “Blow the Whistle” degrades women. The Star also reported on a NewsChannel 5 story last August that Joseph ducked a reporter’s questions about alleged sexual harassment and coverups in the…

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Commentary: Pulling Young Americans Back From the Brink

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by Daniel Davis   During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton often delivered the line: “America is great, because she is good.” It was a feel-good line, deployed then as code for “America is too good to elect Donald Trump.” Notwithstanding the thick irony of Clinton claiming to be the virtuous alternative, her statement on its own terms made sense: If a nation would be great, it must be morally upright—and America, despite all its flaws, is fundamentally good. This view puts Clinton increasingly on the fringes within her own movement. In 2018, the prophets of wokeness are calling progressives to “wake up” to the reality that America, at its core, is racist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, and economically unjust. The system, they say, is “rigged.” [The liberal Left continue to push their radical agenda against American values. The good news is there is a solution. Find out more. ] And today’s young adults are heeding those voices and increasingly embracing their viewpoint. A recent study showed that 1 out of 5 Americans under the age of 37 do not think Americans should be proud of their history. One out of 5 millennial Americans see the flag as a sign of intolerance…

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Broward County School Pulls Assignment Asking if Parkland Shooter Deserves to Die

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by Neetu Chandak   A Broward County high school pulled an assignment that asked students whether the suspected Parkland shooter deserves to die. The assignment, “Does Nikolas Cruz Deserve to Die?,” was given to freshmen at Coral Glades High School, ABC News reported Sunday. The school is about five miles away from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where Cruz allegedly killed 17 students on Feb. 14. The worksheets included questions involving the shooting and the death penalty. It was offered as part of a subscription service from Scholastic Corporation, according to ABC. One multiple choice question referenced March for Our Lives co-founder Cameron Kasky, who The New York Times’ quoted in an October Upfront magazine article about death penalty, ABC reported. “In the article, Cameron Kasky says, ‘Let him rot forever.’ His tone can best be described as ___,” the question reads. Answers include “angry,” “fearful,” “gloomy” and “truthful.” https://twitter.com/cameron_kasky/status/1071151056309100546 Upfront is a current events magazine that provides high school students ‘balanced, age-appropriate information that can be used as teaching resources in the classroom,” Scholastic Inc. Vice President of corporate communications Anne Sparkman told The Daily Caller News Foundation over email. “The article and the quiz were intended only to…

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Commentary: Making Law Professors and Law Students Great Again

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by Stephen B. Presser   It was little noticed, and of little effect, but more than 2,000 professors signed a letter urging the U.S. Senate not to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court. Given that he is the best qualified nominee in some time, having graduated from Yale and Yale Law School and having served a clerkship with Justice Anthony Kennedy and for more than a decade on the nation’s second highest court as the author of opinions embraced by the Supreme Court itself, this is curious. This cri de coeur from the professors tells us more about them than about Kavanaugh, and it tells us about the diseased state of jurisprudence in the law schools. The ostensible reason for the letter was Kavanaugh’s defense before the Senate Judiciary Committee against the charges brought by Christine Blasey Ford. He vehemently denied her claims that when he was a wastrel youth at Georgetown Prep, in a drunken stupor, he sought to remove her clothes, and forcibly to detain her in a bedroom with an equally inebriated comrade. There was no substantiation for that assertion, nor was there for any of the other slanders perpetrated as part of the…

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Obama’s Anti-Discipline Policies Set Our Students Up for Failure

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by Walter E. Williams   President Barack Obama’s first education secretary, Arne Duncan, gave a speech on the 45th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where, in 1965, state troopers beat and tear-gassed hundreds of peaceful civil rights marchers who were demanding voting rights. Later that year, as a result of widespread support across the nation, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. Duncan titled his speech “Crossing the Next Bridge.” Duncan told the crowd that black students “are more than three times as likely to be expelled as their white peers,” adding that Martin Luther King would be “dismayed.” Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and her special assistant and counselor, Alison Somin, have written an important article in the Texas Review of Law and Politics, titled “The Department of Education’s Obama-Era Initiative on Racial Disparities in School Discipline” (Spring 2018). The article is about the departments of Education and Justice’s “disparate impact” vision, wherein they see racial discrimination as the factor that explains why black male students face suspension and expulsion more often than other students. Faced with threats…

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School Discipline Policy Belongs at the Local Level, Not Washington

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classroom

by Jonathan Butcher   Teacher unions and progressive special-interest groups cried foul earlier this year when the White House suggested that federal directives on school safety could be rescinded. But if a recent hearing held by the Federal Commission on School Safety is any indication, state and local policymakers don’t need Washington to micromanage student discipline policies. These state and community leaders’ testimonies indicate they are acting on their own to try and make students and schools safer. In 2014, the Obama administration’s departments of Education and Justice issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to public schools that contained specific instructions on how schools should deal with school safety and student discipline. The letter says schools should limit student engagement with law enforcement and says suspensions and expulsions (exclusionary discipline) should only be used as a last resort. The agencies also said school personnel should sign a memorandum of agreement with local law enforcement indicating that all involved will try to limit exclusionary discipline. The letter has attracted public attention after the tragic events of Feb. 14 in Broward County, Florida. The gunman that took the lives of 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had been subject to disciplinary rules that mirror…

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MSM’s Exaggeration of School Shootings Not in Line With Reality

Julie Carr
Steve Gill

On Monday’s Gill Report – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 1510 WLAC weekdays at 7:30 am – Tennessee Star Political Editor Steve Gill explained how the media’s overblown commentary and emotional stirring of paranoia regarding school shootings is unrealistic in comparison to the death of children in common day bike, helmet, and car wrecks.  Gill goes on to comment that “ten times more kids are killed each year walking to school than are killed in these school shootings.” He continued: A new US Department of Education study is not getting a lot of media attention. But it did get a little bit of attention from NPR. Not exactly a bastion of conservative news media. Now they examined the US Department of Education’s study and discovered that over sixty six percent of reported school shootings for the 2015 and 2016 school year, never occurred. Yet the education department claims there were nearly two hundered and forty schools which reported at least one incident involving a school reported, or school related shooting. But when NPR contacted the schools in the districts, they were able to substantiate that one hundred and sixty-one, of the  two hundred and forty incidents quote, ‘never happened’. NEVER…

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Reports: US to Change Visa Policy for Chinese Students

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Students from China

U.S. news reports said Friday that the State Department was expected to change its policy later this month for some visas issued to Chinese students. The Associated Press reported this week that under the new policy, U.S. consular officers may limit how long visas are valid for Chinese students, rather than the usual practice of issuing them for the maximum possible length. When contacted by Voice of America, State Department spokesman Richard Buangan, offered no details about the reported changes, but said, “All visa cases are adjudicated on a case-by-case basis according to U.S. law and applicable regulations.” “As always, although the majority of visa applicants receive full validity visas, consular officers have the right to limit visas as appropriate for the specific case,” he said. According to the Associated Press, under the new policy, Chinese graduate students will be limited to one-year visas if they are studying in fields like robotics, aviation and high-tech manufacturing. The report said Chinese citizens seeking visas would also need special clearance from multiple U.S. agencies if they worked in companies that require higher scrutiny. Buangan, who is managing director for International Media Engagement, and former spokesman of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, told…

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JC Bowman Commentary: Mandates Must Include Funding

JC Bowman
US Capitol

State mandates must include funding, and if districts use their own resources then they should be free to create their own program, modify the RTI2 program or discontinue it all together. The question legislators must answer: Does the RTI2 program work? If the answer is yes the program is working, then the state should indeed fully fund it. If the answer is no, then that message will also be sent by the Tennessee General Assembly.

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