Beth’s Briefings (6-1-16)

Here are news and opinion stories educators, advocates, policy wonks and makers are talking about today:

 

One of the newest education policy disputes in Washington is beginning to mix with one of its oldest. Discussions about inequitable resources between well-resourced schools and their poorer counterparts overlap with fresh calls to address the growing share of schools that are both economically and racially segregated. (Education Week)

 

If you follow the railroad tracks about an hour southwest of Richmond, beyond rolling green fields dotted with yellow buds of spring, down wide and winding country roads, past faded barns, some overgrown with climbing weeds and others slumping towards earth, you’ll find the Nottoway County School Board Office. (U.S. News)

 

Vermont is in the midst of the largest reorganization of public schools it has seen in the last 125 years. As many other rural states have already done, Vermont wants to consolidate its many small school districts. But it’s not happening without a fight. (PBS)

 

The inequalities that afflict Connecticut’s largest city have been evident since 1961, when the veteran journalist Nancy Hendrick wrote a blistering column in the Bridgeport Sunday Herald. (The Atlantic)

 

A $1 million federal grant will send 50 future early-childhood special education teachers to Minnesota State University free of charge. The future teachers must already have a bachelor’s degree and must commit to teaching young children with disabilities after they complete the mostly online Project PREP program. The university’s department of special education received a $1.06 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education with an objective of helping reduce the shortage of early childhood special education (ECSE) teachers in the state. (Twin Cities)

 

When Juan Carlos Pérez told his friends he was going to study to be a teacher, they dismissed his intentions: “They told me: ‘What’s the point? You’re not going to be able to teach.’” He was an undocumented immigrant who crossed the border from Mexico and arrived in New York at age 11, with his younger brother and his mother. (The New York Times)

 

Last week a long-simmering debate about which kinds of diversity—ideological, political, socioeconomic, racial or ethnic—should matter most in our education reform community boiled over into public view. (Education Post)