Courts have been the sites of much edu activity lately—and we don’t just mean Vergara and its copycats. Last week, the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools filed a federal lawsuit against the District of Columbia, alleging that, since 2008, charters have received $770 million less in funding than traditional public schools, a violation of D.C. law. Meanwhile, the Louisiana Board of Education joined a lawsuit against Governor Bobby Jindal, challenging his decision to rid the Pelican State of the PARCC assessment. Wisconsin’s high court upheld Act 10, legitimizing its restriction of unions’ collective-bargaining rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with a school district’s decision to reduce a tenured teacher’s hours by 50 percent without a hearing—reasoning that, under Connecticut law, the reduction didn’t trigger due-process rights. And, David Boies, who will be remembered as Al Gore’s lawyer in Bush v. Gore, Microsoft’s prosecutor in the Clinton Administration’s antitrust suit, and a lawyer that helped overturn California’s same-sex marriage ban, is joining Campbell Brown’s Partnership for Educational Justice to take up the fight against teacher tenure.
State lawmakers pushed through myriad edu bills during this year’s legislative sessions, which have now concluded in all by eight states. Pre-K, teacher evaluations, and school finance reform were the biggest topics of debate. Colorado, Ohio, New Jersey, and New York lessened the importance of test scores in teacher evaluations. Meanwhile, Illinois, California, Pennsylvania, and Nevada have changed (or plan to change) their funding allocations.
Poverty is commonly assumed to be largely a concern of urban and rural schools in the U.S. Suburban poverty, however, has risen significantly since 2000, according to a new Brookings report. Suburban families living under the federal poverty line now outnumber impoverished urban and rural families. Poverty has also clustered and concentrated in the last fourteen years, with 5 million more families now living in distressed (40 percent poor) and high-poverty (20 percent poor) neighborhoods. And, again, much of the new clustering is suburban, where the number of poor families living in distressed communities is up 139 percent—three times the growth seen in cities.
