READ/LISTEN: School leaders nationwide are working to reassure immigrant families that it’s still safe to send their kids to school amidst heightened fears of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration. This week, the Department of Homeland Security revoked the “sensitive locations” policy, which previously limited immigration actions at schools and other protected spaces. While ICE operations at school remain rare, the policy change has still exacerbated concern and uncertainty among impacted communities:
There may be a few “showplace raids,” where agents swoop in to nab someone near a school, predicted Michael Lukens, executive director of the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, a nonprofit that offers legal representation across the D.C. region to adult and child immigrants placed in detention.
“That’ll stoke fear in the community,” Lukens said. “This is about trying to take away some of the last places that people can feel safe.”
He also predicted lawsuits will challenge the revocation of the sensitive locations guidance, some based on the Supreme Court ruling that all children are entitled to attend public schools. Lukens said advocates can make the case that this right is endangered by the new policy.
Read more from Laura Meckler, Kim Bellware, and Hannah Natanson in The Washington Post here.I also spoke with New York Times education reporter Dana Goldstein earlier this week after we featured her reporting in a recent edition of Imbroglio. Listen to our conversation on Lost Debatehere.
2. Creativity Requires Mastery
READ: Chad Aldeman took to the pages of Aldeman on Education to better understand why creativity is seen as an essential trait and argue that mastering a specific field is necessary for creativity to flourish. Aldeman points to research that shows creativity is a domain-specific skill that depends on deep knowledge and expertise:
In concrete terms, the most innovative chefs aren’t tossing random ingredients together in the hopes of finding some new flavor combination; they master the classics in order to update them, and they learn the styles of different cuisines in order to combine them in new ways. The same is true for the soccer player who does hours upon hours of drills so they can execute in the most high-pressure situations. And the scientist, who has to learn all the science in their field before they can make new discoveries and push the field forward.
READ: Classroom tools like Chromebooks and apps enable personalized instruction and digital skill-building, but they also lead to distractions, burnout, and over-reliance on screens. New reporting from The Wall Street Journal takes a closer look at research that offers conflicting results on the educational value of technology to better understand why even students are beginning to speak out about excessive screen time in the classroom:
“I don’t like having my eyes glued on a screen for a while,” said eighth-grader Aubrey Ortiz, in San Antonio. “It gives you a headache and I really lose my focus.”
Students in grades one through 12 now spend an average of 98 minutes on school-issued devices during the school day—more than 20% of the average instructional time—according to data that educational software company Lightspeed Systems analyzed at the request of The Wall Street Journal.
Read more from Sara Randazzo, Matt Barnum, and Julie Jargon here.
4. Blocked Content Blocks Learning
READ: Web filters in schools, designed to protect students under federal law, have increasingly come under fire for blocking access to legitimate educational content. A new report from the Center for Democracy & Technology reveals that 70% of students and teachers say the filters hinder academic work, restricting access to news sites like Telemundo and topics related to social issues, sparking concerns of bias and overreach:
Nearly one-third of teachers surveyed by the Center for Democracy & Technology said their schools block content related to the LGBTQ+ community. About half said information about sexual orientation and reproductive health is blocked. And Black and Latino students were more likely to say content related to people of color is disproportionately blocked on their school devices.
Read more from Tara García Mathewson at The 74 here.
5. Massachusetts Schools Overwhelmed by Change
READ: Massachusetts schools have seen a dramatic rise in English Learners over the last five years, with some districts reporting increases as high as 72% since 2019. Tim Daly set out to understand what happens when such a dramatic shift occurs over just a few years, and what he found was overwhelmed school systems, leading to strained resources, delayed services, and declining academic outcomes, particularly for EL students. Daly argues that families bear the brunt of these challenges and that the state must do more to innovate, provide resources, and prioritize support for its increasingly diverse student population:
The only way for diversifying states like Massachusetts to remain top performers is to lead the way with innovative models for supporting English Learners. Otherwise, the numbers just won’t work. Consider the chart below:
credit: The Education Daly
It’s the right thing to do for kids and the best strategy to deliver results.
READ: The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case involving a Catholic virtual charter school in Oklahoma later this year. The decision comes just seven months after the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that state funding for St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School violated constitutional provisions against government establishment of religion:
“Although a public charter school, St. Isidore is an instrument of the Catholic Church, operated by the Catholic Church, and will further the evangelizing mission of the Catholic Church in its educational programs,” the state supreme court said in a 6-2 ruling. “Enforcing the St. Isidore contract would create a slippery slope and what the [state constitutional] framers warned against—the destruction of Oklahomans’ freedom to practice religion without fear of governmental intervention.”
With Justice Amy Coney Barrett likely to recuse herself, the eight-member court’s decision could either uphold Oklahoma’s ruling or significantly impact the future of religious schools in state-funded education and set a precedent reshaping charter school policy nationwide. Read more from Mark Walsh at Education Week here.
7. A Broken Accountability System
READ: Alexander Russo spoke with Newsday’s Jim Baumbach about his and Joie Tyrrell’s recent investigative series exposing how New York State’s drawn-out disciplinary process has incentivized Long Island school districts to offer payouts and settlement agreements to teachers in exchange for resignations. Often, these are teachers accused of serious wrongdoing, from stealing from the district to acting inappropriately with students. Baumbach called the settlement process disturbingly secretive and questioned how far districts will go to shield teachers at the expense of students and communities:
I mean, basically the state education people and the various school district people are saying ’You have to trust us that we share this information among districts. It also goes into databases shared among states.’ But that’s not transparent from the public perspective at all. And getting it wrong once is one time too many.
We found one scenario where a teacher had a settlement agreement very early in his tenure process, which described that female students complained that he was making them feel uncomfortable. Eventually, he leaves his tenure job but then he still goes and gets another job at another district.
