President Trump's budget - IDEA funding remains

Despite all the rhetoric the president's IDEA funding remains the same -

Maintains approximately $13 billion in funding for IDEA programs to support students with special education needs. This funding provides States, school districts, and other grantees with the resources needed to provide high quality special education and related services to students and young adults with disabilities.

Denisha Merriweather: Expanding Educational Opportunity Through School C...

Dr. Benjamin Carson's Speech at the National Prayer Breakfast.

National Affairs FROM ISSUE NUMBER 25 ~ FALL 2015

The Real Obama Education Legacy

FREDERICK M. HESS

"Barack Obama came to office at a time of broad bipartisan support for education reform. And he managed to simultaneously exploit and fracture this goodwill. His aggressive approach politicized nearly all that it touched, leaving in its wake unnecessarily divisive national debates over issues like Common Core and sexual harassment on college campuses. Obama's team went out of its way to attack school vouchers and for-profit colleges, to dismiss "suburban moms" and Capitol Hill Republicans, and even to scorn lunch ladies worried about unrealistic mandates."



http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-real-obama-education-legacy

750000 stolen records of students and families

UT Lawsuit Puts Spotlight on 750,000 Stolen Records of Students and Families

 

A news bomb about the theft of student data exploded in Utah’s Deseret News last July, but nobody noticed, apparently.
The article’s headline — “Wrongful Termination Lawsuit Puts Spotlight on Utah Autism Rates” — focused primarily on things other than the data theft.  It highlighted former University of Utah research professor Judith Zimmerman’s allegations that university researchers were falsifying Utah’s autism rates.
But to me, the unheadlined bomb that the article dropped was the 750,000 students who had their data and their families’ data stolen by unauthorized “researchers”.  The families now have no way of knowing this happened.
Zimmerman was fired for raising concerns about protected student data that she said the researchers had “compromised and accessed without proper authority.”  She told the Deseret News that unauthorized individuals took  750,000 sensitive records with neither parental nor schools’ consent.  This private “medical and educational information”  included “names, birthdays, information about medical characteristics… special education classification and parents’ names and addresses,”  reported the Deseret News.
How would these families now be notified?  I wonder: with the whistleblower fired and with a years-long lawsuit and likely gag orders pending, the only people who now could potentially contact those families would be still employed at the university –who, being accused of the wrongdoing, certainly won’t go out of their way to inform the affected families right now.
I’m not going to discuss the ways in which the stolen records, and the children they represented, are vulnerable to potential crimes of credit card fraud, health insurance identity theft, crimes of predatory stalkers or the mandates of well-or-ill-intentioned governmental activists.
I’m here to ask –and answer– a very simple question that I hope readers are asking: how could this have happened?  How were three quarters of a million records of children just lying around under the noses of any unscrupulous university researchers?



750000 stolen records of students and families

**COMMON CORE TESTS THE HONESTY OF KIDS BEHIND THEIR PARENTS BACKS, with...

Does Black Success Matter?

Jewish World Review

Insight

By Thomas Sowell

Published August 16, 2016

"We have heard a lot about black students failing to meet academic standards. So you might think that it would be front-page news when some whole ghetto schools not only meet, but exceed, the academic standards of schools in more upscale communities."


http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell081616.php3

Supreme Court to Decide Level of “Benefit” Special Education Must Provide

On September 29^th, the U.S. Supreme Court granted review in a case about the level of education benefit a school district must provide to students with disabilities in order to provide student with a free appropriate public education. The case, Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District RE-1 raises an important question that has divided federal appeals courts: What level of educational benefit must a child receive under his or her individualized education program (IEP) to satisfy the demands of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)? 

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, ruled last year in the case of a Colorado child with autism that because the child's public school IEP had provided him with "some educational benefit," the Douglas County district had provided a "free, appropriate public education" under the IDEA. However, the 10th Circuit court panel acknowledged that several other federal courts of appeals have adopted a higher standard that requires an IEP to result in a "meaningful educational benefit," a point that was echoed in the appeal filed by the parents of Endrew F. and the Supreme Court Litigation Clinic at Stanford Law School. The petition argued that "[t]his court should use this case—which cleanly presents the legal issue on a well-developed set of facts—to resolve the conflict over this important question." 

In May, the U.S. Supreme Court invited the U.S. solicitor general to file a brief expressing the views of the Obama administration. On Aug. 18, Acting Solicitor General Ian H. Gershengorn filed a brief that urged the justices to take up the appeal, stating that the Supreme Court “should grant certiorari and overturn the 10th Circuit's erroneous holding that states must provide children with disabilities educational benefits that are 'merely ... more than de minimis' in order to comply with the IDEA …the 10th Circuit's approach is not consistent with the text, structure, or purpose of the IDEA.” Thus, the Supreme Court has granted review – one of eight cases the justices added to their docket just before the formal start of their new term on October 3^rd. The Endrew F. case is likely to be argued sometime early next year.

Another USDE OCR decision against the Seattle school distrcit

Supreme Court Agrees to Argue IDEA Case

Washington, D.C.  In response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision to place the Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District on its docket, Denise Marshall, executive director of the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates (COPPA) said the following:

“The Supreme Court has a tremendous opportunity to support the rights of this student, Endrew, as the family seeks a decision on whether he has been provided a free, appropriate, public education (FAPE) as guaranteed by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). As is the case with many students with disabilities, Endrew has not always made progress commensurate with that of his non-disabled peers, and so we remain hopeful that the Court will clarify what his rights to educational benefit are as a student with a disability.” Marshall concluded, “In support of the family, COPAA intends to file an amicus brief with the Court. We believe in the individual rights IDEA affords and are hopeful the Court will decide in favor of the child.”