**NEWS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY
RELEVANT TO THE CENTER'S FOCUS
Keep up with the National Initiative for Transforming Student and Learning Supports.
For details and for free access to the new work entitled: Transforming Student and Learning Supports: Developing a Unified, Comprehensive, and Equitable System,
see http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/newinitiative.html
Back to School? Any NYC Family Can Opt for Full-Time Remote
Learning This Fall. New York City families will be able to keep
their children home this fall and opt for a full remote school schedule
regardless of medical need, education department officials said [last]
Thursday… Allowing a full-time remote option is welcome news for families
who are nervous about sending students back to buildings in the fall… But it
could also exacerbate inequalities already rampant in the public school
system, with more affluent families hiring tutors or otherwise supplementing
schoolwork for children remaining home.
https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2020/7/2/21311569/nyc-opt-for-full-time-remote-learning?utm_source=ECS+Subscribers&utm_campaign=1691ad6d5c-ED_CLIPS_07_07_2020&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1a2b00b930-1691ad6d5c-53599575
A decade of research on the rich-poor divide in education.
Researchers shine light on education inequities.
School
segregation by income is worsening in the US, according to research by Sean
Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford University. Reardon asserts that efforts
to develop "high-quality schools at scale under conditions of concentrated
poverty" have been ineffective, so the "implication is that you have got to
address segregation."
https://hechingerreport.org/a-decade-of-research-on-the-rich-poor-divide-in-education/
Teachers' union wants district's police unit disbanded .The
board of United Teachers Los Angeles has voted to call for dismantling the
Los Angeles School Police Department, a shift sparked by protests after the
killing of George Floyd while in police custody in Minnesota. To become the
official position of the group, union members also must support disbanding
one of the largest school police forces in the country
http://r.smartbrief.com/resp/mAljCNzxBksitzmIfEabiAfCngVy?format=multipart
The pandemic’s toll: nearly 500,000 public education jobs
disappeared across U.S. in April. Lots of education-connected jobs
are difficult or impossible to do remotely, and some districts have
furloughed staff or eliminated positions with school buildings closed and
budget cuts looming. Gould found that the job losses were concentrated
among, tutors, teaching assistants, counselors, special education teachers,
nurses, janitors, and other building maintenance workers.
https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/6/3/21279747/pandemic-coronavirus-public-school-jobs
Students report harassment via Google Chat. A Virginia
school district has struggled with its rollout of remote learning after an
initial adoption of Blackboard was plagued by glitches, privacy concerns and
other problems. The district then switched to use Google's online learning
platform, but officials found similar issues with student harassment via
Google Chat.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/after-online-learning-flopped-fairfax-schools-switched-to-google-more-virtual-harassment-followed/2020/05/16/728ecb1e-9449-11ea-91d7-cf4423d47683_story.html?wpisrc=nl_sb_smartbrief
Labeling kids with mild disabilities can backfire, study finds.
For students with mild symptoms of disabilities, such as
attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, a diagnosis can do more harm than
good, according to a study by Jayanti Owens, a Brown University sociologist.
Owens' study shows that students without an ADHD diagnosis, who showed
similar symptoms, had better behavioral and reading scores from teachers,
than their peers diagnosed
https://hechingerreport.org/study-questions-educational-benefits-of-labeling-kids-with-mild-forms-of-adhd/
More public-school students are homeless.
More than 1.5 million public-school students in the US were
identified as homeless during the 2017-18 school year, up 11% from the year
before, according to federal data. Texas and Florida had the largest
increases.
U.S.
News & World Report
https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2020-01-30/more-students-are-homeless-than-ever-before
Child Poverty. Data released today by the U.S. Census
Bureau illustrates the failure of our government to lead on child poverty,
which remains higher in the United States than in nearly all similarly
developed countries. The U.S. Census Bureau found that 16.2 percent of
children (11.9 million) were living in poverty in 2018 and that children are
54.4 percent more likely to live in poverty than adults.
The National Academy of Sciences' landmark study on child poverty released
in February 2019 makes clear that we have the tools to eradicate child
poverty. All that is needed is the political will to deploy them. The study,
called A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty, outlines policy and program
changes that, if implemented, would reduce child poverty by half within a
decade (
http://sites.nationalacademies.org/dbasse/bcyf/reducing_child_poverty/index.htm
).
Progress is possible. It is time to act. The U.S.
Child Poverty Action Group, a partnership of child-focused organizations
dedicated to eradicating child poverty, recently launched End Child Poverty
US, a campaign to cut child poverty in half within a decade by setting a
national target. Similar approaches in peer countries have proven the impact
of targets. The United Kingdom cut its child poverty rate in half between
1999 and 2009 and Canada is on track to cut its child poverty rate in half
in less than a decade after establishing an expanded child allowance in
2016.
More States Requiring Mental Health Education.
Several states have either approved or have
legislation in the works related to mental health education. Some of them
are aimed at addressing concerns about additional workloads and teacher
training.
(Education Dive)
Nation's schools serving more students under IDEA
A New federal data shows that there are more children in special education and they are accounting for a greater percentage of public school students across the country. For the 2017-2018 school year, there were 7 million students ages 3 to 21 receiving services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. These students represented 14 percent of all kids attending public schools. The figures come from an annual report by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics that offers a snapshot of
what's happening in American education see
https://www.disabilityscoop.com/2019/06/06/nations-schools-more-idea/26733/
FOR THE LATEST FROM OUR CENTER, GO TO
http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/review.htm
September is
National Suicide Prevention Month -- See
the resource links at http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/qf/p3002_02.htm
Also access other news stories relevant to improving addressing barriers to learning through links at
http://smhp.psych.ucla.edu/whatsnew/linkstolatest.htm
We draw on a variety of standard sources to amass the above items
(e.g., ECS e-clip at
http://www.ecs.org/e-clips)
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