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Here are news and opinion stories educators, advocates, policy wonks and makers are talking about today:
News and Analysis
Today, more than 1 million students are trapped in an education system that wasn’t built for them. That system wasn’t designed to accommodate their disabilities—the kinds of intellectual, cognitive, communicative, and physical conditions that often conjure images of people reliant on wheelchairs and aides, of individuals consigned to dreary, isolated lives. Many of the public schools they attend rest on the assumption that those stereotypes are inevitable truths. (The Atlantic)
The Los Angeles school system is improperly diverting money meant for students who need it most, including those from low-income families, according to a coalition of local groups. (Los Angeles Times)
As Utah lawmakers are asking for research into why 2 in 5 public-school teachers leave the profession within five years, the state school board is trying to put people — not necessarily teachers — at the front of classrooms as soon as possible. (The Salt Lake Tribune)
The Metro Nashville Public Schools board voted Tuesday evening to sue the state for a greater share of education funding, saying Tennessee is not providing enough money to help teach English to children for whom it is a second language. (The Tennessean)
New York
During an environmental-geology class about 100 miles north of New York City, college students in forest-green uniforms pored over photocopied maps of Waco, Texas. Eager hands shot up when the professor asked what factors the students might consider in developing the land. She scribbled their answers on a blackboard: location, population, land use, crime. (The Wall Street Journal)