How do schools handle tech? Are they appropriately serving students with disabilities? Are they integrating students from different ethnic groups?
As kids go back to school this week, you might be wondering about these questions and more — and luckily, we’ve found some stories that begin to answer them.
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A referendum on ed tech
Baltimore County Public Schools in Maryland invested heavily in technology, asking students to not use pencils and paper in class — but grades largely slipped. The Wall Street Journal reports on research showing that all this screen time might not be helping students learn, and the parents who are pushing back on districts that go all-in on tech.
A mom’s fight for special-education services
Liz Brazile at Crosscut followed a Seattle mom seeking special-education services, and found that an internal district investigation determined that the mother “was the target of a retaliatory bullying campaign” led by school staff, caused by some staffers’ efforts to get the assistant principal promoted.
The new school segregation
A new study from the American Educational Research Association’s journal highlights yet another way school districts are becoming more segregated: secession. Thirty states let communities secede, or draw new school-district boundaries, often creating white enclaves. The nonprofit EdBuild found that only six of those states “are required to look at the socioeconomic and racial effects of these decisions,” reports HuffPost’s Rebecca Klein. And, according to U.S. News & World Report’s Lauren Camera, southern states “have increasingly filtered white and black students, and white and Hispanic students, into separate school systems” through this process.
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