Thomas Sowell - The Path To Better Schools

Milton Friedman on School Choice

John Stossel and Betsy Devos - Why Not School Choice?

Why Teachers Unions Don't Want School Choice

USSC reversed the 10th Circuit decision in Endrew F today.

COPAA is pleased that the USSC reversed the 10th Circuit decision in Endrew F today.  We expect this unanimous decision, authored by Chief Justice Roberts, to be transformative in the lives of the students and families for whom the law is intended to benefit.

As COPAA noted in its amicus brief, along with fellow amici Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) and the California Association of Parent Child Advocacy (CAPCA), the IDEA contains substantive requirements for appropriate programming. COPAA argued that the only way to determine whether the IEP meets these requirements is to analyze whether a school district has complied with all of the substantive obligations created by the IDEA.  Congress realized that the planning and initial offering of a particular educational program and course of study would not always lead to a program that would enable the student to make adequate educational progress.  As such, the IDEA requires that the school district make changes in the goals or the services in the IEP to enable the student to make progress.

Today's decision says: “To meet its substantive obligation under the IDEA, a school must offer an IEP reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances. Some children with disabilities will advance from grade to grade progressing smoothly through the general education curriculum. For those who cannot, their educational programs must be "appropriately ambitious." Their "goals may differ, but every child should have the chance to meet challenging objectives." 

For children being educated in the general education curriculum in the regular classroom, IDEA typically aims for grade-level advancement. For those educated in a modified general education curriculum, a school cannot satisfy its IDEA obligations by planning for "barely more than de minimis progress."  That is because when all is said and done, a student offered an educational program providing 'merely more than de minimis' progress from year to year can hardly be said to have been offered an education at all."

Today the USSC affirmed what we know to be the promise of the IDEA.

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