- The feds must have been in a festive mood in the days leading up to Christmas, when they finally closed a four-year-old investigation into Wisconsin’s school voucher program. The probe was triggered by a 2011 complaint, jointly filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and local group Disability Rights Wisconsin, alleging that private schools were discriminating against students with disabilities. This was always a spurious charge on a few grounds. For one thing, private institutions aren’t bound by the same mandates as public ones under the Americans with Disabilities Act, making the case a tough sell from the start. For another, the few accommodations they are required to make for the disabled are difficult to achieve, since private schools receive much less federal funding than public ones. In an effort to negate the problem, state legislators have already inserted additional outlays for disability vouchers into future budgets. With any luck, the investigation’s death will help restore the reputation of a useful tool for expanded school choice.
- Not all anti-reform agitation starts with Uncle Sam, though. In Tennessee, the Achievement School District is again weathering attacks from local lawmakers and activists—and while the criticism is still emanating mostly from partisan sources, some observers wonder how long the embattled turnaround entity can continue taking shots. Members of the Black Caucus of State Legislators have announced their intention to introduce bills this session that will either eliminate the ASD or trim its sails significantly. It’s hard to foresee whether their efforts will bear fruit: State government is dominated by Republicans like Governor Phil Bryant, who remains bullish about the initiative’s potential for rescuing underperforming schools, and past efforts to rein in the ASD have sputtered. But the history of state-led turnarounds in Tennessee is long and undistinguished, and this situation bears watching.
- New York Times reporter Kyle Spencer painted a singularly unattractive portrait of parents near Princeton, New Jersey a few weeks back. Pointing to scores of student hospitalizations over academic stress, as well as the local superintendent’s urgent attempts to tamp down pressures on elementary schoolers, Spencer observed a “fissure” between families “that broke down largely on racial lines”: Between white parents who wanted relaxed school requirements and Asian Americans who sought to drive their little scholars as strenuously as possible. It’s a bracing read and well worth your time, but so is Patrick Riccards’s trenchant counterpoint. Riccards, the writer and Princeton-area parent behind the Eduflack blog, argues that the paper’s race- and class-based lens was reductive. Beneath the headline-friendly framing, there’s an important debate here on how to keep kids happy, healthy, and successful in schools.
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