This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
College basketball provided its annual dose of chaos during this year’s March Madness, but last month also saw the sport make a giant splash in the world of labor and employment — courtesy of a team that did not qualify for a single postseason tournament.
The team in question is Dartmouth College’s men’s basketball team, which voted 13 to 2 on March 5 to form what may become the NCAA’s first-ever athlete labor union. The election occurred less than a month after a regional director for the National Labor Relations Board held that the Dartmouth players are employees of the university and could conduct a representation election.
Hours after the union vote, Dartmouth took down rival Harvard during the team’s final game of the season. Yet the end of one chapter now gives way to a more uncertain saga both for the players and the university they represent, according to two sources who spoke to HR Dive.
The election result may not be the last word on the subject, said Tyler Sims, shareholder at employer-side firm Littler Mendelson. Dartmouth trustees filed a request for review of the regional director’s decision and direction of election on the same day as the election, which tees up a potential review by the Board. At press time, NLRB had not issued a decision on the matter.
Unanswered wage-and-hour questions
The potential wage-and-hour implications of the case are vast. For starters, it is unclear whether the players, if they are considered employees of Dartmouth for the purposes of the National Labor Relations Act, are similarly employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act, Sims said.
“That’s an unanswered question right now, but to me, if the NLRB is taking the position that they are [employees] and using the common-law employee test to state that they’re employees, I don’t see why the [U.S. Department of Labor] wouldn’t feel the same way for the FLSA,” Sims continued. “There should be no distinction there unless they’re making a carve out.”
Regardless of the statutes under which the players fall, the question of compensation may prove complicated. The NLRB regional director who issued the Dartmouth decision held that the players performed work that benefits Dartmouth in exchange for benefits such as equipment, apparel and tickets to games.
But any number of additional benefits could be on the table in the event that the players collectively bargain with the university, said Mark Conrad, associate professor of law and ethics at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business. These could include pay — for example, minimum wages and overtime pay — as well as health insurance, retirement benefits, workers’ compensation or a percentage of revenues.
Two points separate Dartmouth’s players from their counterparts at other schools. For one, Dartmouth plays in the Ivy League, a conference composed entirely of private universities. Public universities, on the other hand, are not subject to the NLRA. Second, Dartmouth’s players do not earn athletic scholarships, which are prohibited by the Ivy League.
All college sports involve extensive practice time and training, though, which could be categorized as hours worked, said Sims, a former NCAA Division I ice hockey goaltender. That potentially encompasses on-the-court practices in addition to film study and individual workouts. Time spent on these activities are often not the same for all athletes, he explained.
“When you’re a student athlete, some guys are starters, some guys don’t play a lot, some not at all,” Sims said. “What about those who don’t play a lot and so they want to get extra work in? Would the school allow them to put in the extra work? Theoretically, that could result in more compensation being owed to them.”
That is without considering the time athletes spend commuting to practices or traveling to games, or any lodging required for either activity. Academic hours also may or may not overlap with time spent for athletic purposes, Sims said, as athletes commonly must maintain a certain level of academic performance in order to remain eligible for sports participation.
“Those are all things that the university and their HR department would need to figure out,” Sims said.
What happens when NCAA athletes strike?
The question of leverage in the event of a labor strike is an interesting one, given that the right to strike is “the biggest bargaining chip that a union has,” Conrad said.
If the two sides are unable to come to an agreement and a strike is initiated, a university might react to a player strike by bringing in replacement players in the same way some professional sports leagues have done previously, he added. At the same time, the nature of college sports fandom could make this a difficult choice for universities.
“College sports tends to be a reputational winner for many schools,” Conrad said. “There’s an indirect fallout there, but we really don’t know how [fans and alumni will] react to this.”
Sims noted that some unions have certain rules and bylaws governing how members can strike, and this is something a potential Dartmouth union would need to decide. Some require that a certain percentage of members vote to strike, while some require a majority.
For those hypothetical players who decide not to strike, Sims said it’s uncertain how that decision might affect their athletic careers. NCAA athletes are usually permitted to transfer to other schools within certain parameters but not during the middle of an ongoing season, when the timing of a strike might fall. That sets aside the effects of a strike on other teams in the sport.
“To me, they wouldn’t be participating in any practices or games,” Sims said. “Would they forfeit those games? What about the postseason? A couple of wins or losses could sway the season in the wrong direction.”
The message for employers
The Dartmouth saga represents, in part, just one of the various storylines that have emerged following a 2021 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that invalidated NCAA restrictions on the kinds of education-related benefits universities could offer to athletes. Days after that ruling, the NCAA began the process of allowing athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness.
Each of these developments has chipped away at the long-running premise that student athletes are amateurs, not workers, who are given educational benefits by the universities they represent, said Conrad.
“It’s going to be an interesting few years,” Conrad added, noting shifts in the college sports landscape that followed the high court decision. “We don’t know where it’s going to end up.”
Mary Kay Henry, international president of the Service Employees International Union, which is representing the players, said in a March 5 press release that the amateurism issue is at the forefront of the Dartmouth players’ unionization efforts.
“The Ivy League is where the whole scandalous model of nearly free labor in college sports was born and that is where it is going to die,” Henry said.
But even outside the college sports world, employers may need to take note of what the Dartmouth vote represents in terms of the overall resurgence of labor movements in the U.S., Sims said. HR departments, he continued, could be tasked with becoming more educated on how to deal with unions in the workplace and potential unionization issues.
“The message is it can happen anywhere,” Sims said.
Education has had a wobbly relationship with the still-evolving presence of generative AI in schools — with some school districts banning it only to reverse course. It can save teachers time by automating tasks, while also causing headaches as an accomplice to cheating students.
So how much work would it take to come up with guidelines to help educators manage the challenges of using generative AI tools for their work? In Michigan, it was a team effort.
A coalition of 14 education organizations, helmed by the nonprofit Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute, released sample guidelines earlier this month that walk teachers and administrators through potential pitfalls to consider before using an AI tool in the classroom or for other tasks. That includes things like checking the accuracy of AI-generated content, citing AI-generated content, and judging which types of data are safe to enter into an AI program.
Ken Dirkin, senior director of the Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute, said the group wanted to create a document that was digestible, but “there’s probably 40,000 important things that could have been included.”
“What we’re experiencing when we go out and work with school districts is that there’s a general lack of knowledge, and an interest and awareness” of generative AI, Dirkin says, “but also a fear of getting in trouble, or a fear that they’re doing something wrong, because there’s not any strong guidance on what they should be exploring or doing.”
Dirkin says the group wanted the document to help school districts and educators think through the use of generative AI without defaulting to either extreme of banning it or allowing unrestricted use.
“That’s really been kind of our mode of operation: How do we just enable exploration and not disable access,” he says, “or have people say, ‘It’s the latest trend, and it’ll go away.’”
The speed at which generative AI is evolving makes this a critical time for educators and districts to have guidelines about when and how they use it, says Mark Smith, executive director of the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning.
“AI is everywhere. It’s doing everything for everyone and anyone that’s interested,” he says. “By the time we get a handle on the one-, three-, five-year plan, it’s changing right underneath our noses. If we don’t get in front of this now with a nimble, flexible, guideline policy or strategy as a collective whole, it’s gonna continue to change.”
Protecting Student Data
School principals want to know how AI can be used in the classroom beyond having students copy and paste from it, Paul Liabenow says, and are of course concerned about students using it to cheat.
But many of the questions he gets as executive director of the Michigan Elementary and Middle School Principals Association focus on AI programs and legal compliance with student privacy laws, Liabenow explains, and how they stay in line with laws like FERPA and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
“There’s a myriad of questions that come weekly, and that’s growing,” Liabenow says. Principals want guidance from organizations like Michigan Virtual “not just to avoid stepping into the black hole as a leader but to use it to effectively use it to improve student achievement.”
The AI guidance document urges educators to always assume that, unless the company that owns a generative AI tool has an agreement with their school district, the data they’re inputting is going to be made available to the public.
Liabenow says one of his confidentiality concerns is over any teacher, counselor or administrator who might want to use an AI program to manage student data about mental health or discipline — something that has the potential to end with a lawsuit.
“People are thinking they’re gonna be able to run master schedules with the AI tools, where they’re inputting individual students’ names, and that leads to some challenges both ethically and legally,” Liabenow says. “I love this guidance tool, because it reminds us of areas that we need to be sensitive to and diligent at protecting.”
Smith, of the Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning, says that the privacy pitfalls aren’t in the everyday use of generative AI but in the growing number of apps that may have weak data protection policies — one of the agreements that virtually no one reads when signing up for an online service. It may be easier to run afoul of privacy laws, he adds, considering the proposed changes to strengthen the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
“How many of us have downloaded the updated agreement for our iPhone without reading it?” Smith says. “If you magnify that to 10,000 students in a district, you can imagine how many end user agreements you’d have to read.”
Is AI Your Co-Writer?
It’s not just student use of AI that needs to be considered. Teachers use generative AI to create lesson plans, and any school district employee could use it to help write a work document.
That’s why the new guidelines include examples of how to cite the use of generative AI in educational materials, research or work documents.
“The more we disclose the use of AI and the purpose, the more we uplift everybody in the conversation,” Dirkin says. “I don’t think in two or three years people will be disclosing the use of AI — it’ll be in our workflows — but it’s important to learn from each other and tie it back to human involvement in the process. It’ll eventually go away.”
When AI Is Baked Into Everything
Generative AI is increasingly becoming integrated into software that is already widely used. Think of spell-checking programs like Grammarly, which a Georgia student says got her accused of cheating after a paper on which she used it was flagged by AI-detection software.
That growing ubiquity is going to make it easier to access AI-powered education tools and, therefore, more complicated when it comes to using it with safety in mind, Dirkin says. One important consideration about the current generative AI landscape is that people still have to copy and paste content into — and, therefore, pause for a moment — an AI program to use it.
“A lot of times, it’s the Wild West in terms of access to tools. Everybody has a Google account, and people can use their Google account to log into a ton of free services,” Dirkin says. “We wanted to make sure people had a tool to reflect on whether they’re using it in a legal or ethical [way], or if they’re violating some sort of policy before they do that. So just stop and think.”
Smith points to the section of the new guidelines that asks educators to think about how something generated by AI might be inaccurate or contain bias. Even as generative AI gets better, he says, “there are risks and limitations to all AI, no matter how good it is.”
“Sometimes the best data set for an educator is the teacher down the hall with 10 years more experience, and not an AI tool,” Smith says. “There is still a human element to this, and I think the guidance document mentioning those risks and limitations is kind of a friendly nudge. It’s a polite way of saying, ‘Hey, don’t forget about this.’”
HAZARD, Ky. — Haley Autumn Dawn Ann Crank thinks she might like to become a teacher. There’s a shortage of teachers in this corner of Kentucky, and Crank, who has eight siblings, gets kids.
“I just fit in with them,” Crank said during a shift one February day at the Big Blue Smokehouse, where she works as a waitress.
For now, the recent high school graduate is taking some education courses at the local community college. But to pursue a teaching degree at a public, comprehensive university, she’ll need to commute four hours roundtrip or leave the town she grew up in and loves.
Haley Autumn Dawn Ann Crank thinks she’d like to be a teacher, but she’s hesitant to leave home for college. Credit: Kelly Field for The Hechinger Report
Neither of those options is feasible — or even conceivable — for many residents of Hazard, a close-knit community of just over 5,000 tucked into the hills of Southeast Kentucky. Like many rural Americans, the people here are place-bound, their educational choices constrained by geography as much as by cost. With family and jobs tying them to the region, and no local four-year option, many settle for a two-year degree, or skip college altogether.
Until fairly recently, that decision made economic sense. Mining jobs were plentiful, and the money was good. But the collapse of the coal industry here and across Appalachia has made it harder to survive on a high school education. Today, just under half the residents over the age of 16 in Perry County, where Hazard sits, are employed; the national average is 63 percent. More than a quarter of the county’s residents are in poverty; the median household income is $45,000, compared to $75,000 nationally.
Now, spurred by concerns that low levels of college attainment are holding back the southeastern swath of the state, the Kentucky legislature is exploring ways to bring baccalaureate degrees to the region. The leading option calls for turning Hazard’s community and technical college into a standalone institution offering a handful of degrees in high-demand fields, like teaching and nursing.
The move to expand education here comes as many states are cutting majors at rural colleges and merging rural institutions, blaming funding shortfalls and steadily dwindling enrollments.
If successful, the new college could bring economic growth to one of the poorest and least educated parts of the country and serve as a model for the thousands of other “educational deserts” scattered across America. Proponents say it has the potential to transform the region and the lives of its battered but resilient residents.
But the proposal carries significant costs and risks. Building a residence hall alone would cost an estimated $18 million; running the new college would add millions more to the tab. Enrollment might fall short of projections, and the hoped-for jobs might not materialize. And if they didn’t, the newly-educated residents would likely take their degrees elsewhere, deepening the region’s “brain drain.”
“The hope is that if you build the institution, employers will come,” said Aaron Thompson, president of the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education, which has studied the idea on behalf of the legislature. “But it is somewhat of an experiment.”
Still, Thompson said, it’s an experiment worth exploring.
“To say you need to move to be prosperous is not a solution, and that’s pretty much been the solution since many of the coal mines disappeared,” he said.
At the airport in Lexington, Kentucky, there’s a sign greeting passengers that reads, “You’ve landed in one smart city.” Lexington, the sign proclaims, is ranked #11 among larger cities in the share of the population with a bachelor’s degree or higher.
But drive a couple hours to the southeast, and the picture changes. Only 13 percent of the residents of Perry County over the age of 25 hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, well below the national average of 34 percent.
Downtown Hazard, with one of several colorful murals added in recent years Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
Michelle Ritchie-Curtis, the co-principal of Perry County Central High School, said the problem isn’t convincing kids to go to college, it’s keeping them there. Though nearly two-thirds of the county’s high school graduates continue on to college, just over a third of those who enroll in public four-years graduate within six years, compared to close to 60 percent statewide, according to the Council on Postsecondary Education.
In Hazard, as in many rural places, kids grow up hearing the message that they need to leave to succeed. But many return after a year or two, citing homesickness or the high cost of college, Ritchie-Curtis said. Sometimes, they feel ashamed about abandoning their aspirations. They take off a semester, and it becomes years, she said.
Those who make it to graduation and leave tend to stay gone, discouraged by the region’s limited job opportunities. This exodus, and the lack of a four-year college nearby, have hampered Hazard’s ability to attract employers who might fill the void left by the decline of coal, said Zach Lawrence, executive director of the Hazard-Perry County Economic Development Alliance.
Ritchie-Curtis said that having a local option would solve the homesickness problem and could save students money in room and board. It could also help stem the region’s brain drain and alleviate a teaching shortage that has forced the school to hire a growing number of career changers, she added.
Hazard Community and Technical College president Jennifer Lindon is excited about the possibility of the college offering four-year degrees. Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
To Jennifer Lindon, the president of Hazard Community and Technical College, “it all boils down to equity.”
“If we can provide a [four-year] education, and make it affordable, perhaps we can break the cycle of poverty in Southeast Kentucky,” she said.
Converting Hazard’s two-year college into a four-year institution wasn’t among the options initially considered by the Kentucky General Assembly. When lawmakers asked the state’s Council on Postsecondary Education to study the feasibility of bringing four-year degrees to Southeast Kentucky, it offered three approaches: building a new public university; creating a satellite campus of an existing comprehensive university; or acquiring a private college to convert into a public one.
But the council concluded in its report that each of those alternatives was “in some way problematic.” A new university would be prohibitively expensive and might fail; a new branch campus could suffer the same enrollment challenges as existing satellites; and acquiring a private college would be legally complicated.
The council considered the possibility of allowing the community college to offer baccalaureate degrees — something a growing number of states permit — but worried that doing so would lead to “mission creep” and “intense competition” for the state’s dwindling number of high school graduates.
Students in the commercial truck driving program identify parts of a tractor trailer truck. Credit: Kelly Field for The Hechinger Report
Instead, the council recommended that the legislature study the idea of making Hazard’s community college a standalone institution offering both technical degrees and a few bachelor’s programs “in line with workforce demand.” Starting small, the council suggested, would allow policymakers and college leaders to gauge student demand before building out baccalaureate offerings.
That approach makes sense to Sen. Robert Stivers, the president of the Kentucky Senate, and the sponsor of the bill that commissioned the council’s study.
“I don’t think you can just jump off the cliff into the lake,” he said. “You need to be a little more measured.”
But Andrew Koricich, executive director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges at Appalachian State University, said the region’s residents deserve a comprehensive college. He likened the limited offerings envisioned by the council to former President George W. Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
“There’s this idea that rural people should be happy they have anything,” he said.
Koricich pointed to the recent merger of Martin Methodist University, a private religious college, with the University of Tennessee system as proof that the legal hurdles to acquiring a private college aren’t insurmountable.
But Thompson, the CPE president, said that the private colleges in southeast Kentucky are located too far from most residents and the schools weren’t interested in being acquired, anyway. He argued that while a comprehensive university might be “ideal,” it wasn’t realistic.
“In an ideal world, I’d be young again with a great back,” he said. “But in reality, I work with what I’ve got. And that’s what we’re doing here.”
When Stivers was growing up in southeastern Kentucky in the 60’s and 70’s, coal was king. A high school graduate could get a job paying $15 an hour — good money at the time — without ever setting foot in a college classroom, he said.
With mining jobs so abundant, “there wasn’t a value placed on education,” Stivers recalled.
Coal production peaked in eastern Kentucky in 1990, and has been on the decline ever since. Today, there are just over 400 individuals employed in coal jobs in Perry County.
The shrinking of the sector has had ripple effects across Appalachia, hurting industries that support mining and local businesses that cater to its workers. Many residents have migrated to urban centers, seeking work, and once-thriving downtowns have been hollowed out.
Colton Teague, 11, receives a guitar lesson from Luke Davis, the director of operations of the Appalachian Arts Alliance, an anchor of the revitalized downtown. Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
By the middle of the last decade, most of the buildings in downtown Hazard were either empty or occupied by attorneys and banks. The only place to gather was a hole-in-the-wall bar called the Broken Spoke Lounge, recalled Luke Glaser, a city commissioner and assistant principal at Hazard High School. When the Grand Hotel burned down, in 2015, a sense of resignation settled in, Glaser said.
The region has also been hard hit by opioids, which were aggressively marketed to rural doctors treating miners for injuries and black lung disease. In 2017, Perry County had the highest opioid abuse hospitalization rate in the nation.
Then, in 2021, and again in 2022, the region suffered severe flooding, which washed away homes and took the lives of almost 50 residents of Southeast Kentucky.
Yet Hazard is also in the midst of what Glaser calls an “Appalachian Renaissance,” a revival being led by 20- and 30-somethings who have come home or moved to the area in recent years. Though Appalachian Kentucky lost 2.2 percent of its population between 2010 and 2019, Hazard grew by 13 percent.
A decade ago, a group of long-time residents and young people began meeting with a mission to revitalize Hazard’s main street. The group, which called itself InVision Hazard, hired a downtown coordinator and brought free Wi-Fi and improved signage to the downtown area.
Over the past four-and-a-half years, close to 70 new businesses have opened within a three-mile radius of downtown, and only eight have closed, according to Betsy Clemons, executive director of the Hazard Perry County Chamber of Commerce. There’s an independent bookstore, an arts alliance that will put on seven full-length productions this year, and a toy store — all run by residents who grew up in Hazard and returned as adults.
A sign at Hazard Community and Technical College welcomes students. Credit: Austin Anthony for The Hechinger Report
The Grand Hotel, which stood as a burned-out shell for years, has finally been torn down, making way for an outdoor entertainment park with space for food trucks and a portable stage, and plans for live entertainment on Friday nights.
As the downtown has transformed, collective feelings of apathy and resignation have given way to a new sense of possibility, Glaser said. Brightly colored murals reading “We Can Do This,” and “Together” adorn the sides of two downtown buildings.
To Mandi Sheffel, the owner of Read Spotted Newt bookstore, the creation of a four-year college feels like a logical next step for a place that was recently dubbed “a hip destination for young people” (a description that both delights and amuses people here).
“In every college town I’ve been to, there’s a vibe, a pride in the community,” she said.
On the vocational campus of Hazard Community and Technical College in February, Jordan Joseph and Austin Cox, recent high school grads, stood alongside a tractor trailer truck, pointing out its parts. In as little as four weeks, they could become commercially licensed truck drivers, a career that pays close to $2,000 a week.
Both men followed dads and grandads into the profession and said they couldn’t imagine sitting in a classroom for four years after high school. Like the sign on the side of the truck they were working on said, they want to “Get in, Get Out, and Get to Work.”
Inside one of the campus’ labs, a pair of aspiring electricians said they doubted many local residents would be able to afford a four-year degree.
“I don’t think you’d get a lot of people,” said Walker Isaacs, one of the students.
Their skepticism underscores a key risk in creating a four-year college in a place that’s never had one: There’s no guarantee students will enroll. Larger forces — including a looming decline in the number of high school graduates, an improved labor market, and public doubts about the value of higher education — could dampen demand for four-year degrees, forcing the college to either cut costs or seek state funding to cover its losses.
Recognizing this risk -and the possibility that employers won’t show up, either – the Council declined to give an “unqualified endorsement” of the idea of turning the community college into a four-year institution, saying further study was needed. In February, Sen. Stivers introduced a bill that calls on the council to survey potential students and employers about the idea and to provide more detailed estimates of its potential costs and revenues.
Converting the college could also cause enrollment to fall at the state’s existing public and private four-years. Eastern Kentucky University, the hardest hit, could lose as many as 250 students in the seventh year after conversion, the council estimated in its report. While the council did not examine the possible effect on private colleges in the region, the president of Union College, Marcia Hawkins, said in a statement that, “Depending on the majors added, such a move could certainly impact enrollment at our southern and eastern Kentucky institutions.”
But on the main campus of Hazard Community and Technical College, there’s growing excitement about the prospect of the two-year college becoming a four-year.
Ashley Smith, who is studying to become a registered nurse, said the proposed conversion would make it easier for her to earn the bachelor’s degree she’s always wanted. With three kids at home, she can’t manage an hours-long commute to and from class.
Another nursing student, Lakyn Bolen, said she’d be more likely to continue her education if she could do so from home. She left Hazard once to finish a four-year degree, and is reluctant to do so again.
“It’s not fun going away,” Bolen said. “We definitely need more nursing opportunities here.”
Dylon Baker, assistant vice president of workforce initiatives for Appalachian Regional Healthcare, agrees. His nonprofit, which operates 14 hospitals in Kentucky and West Virginia, has struggled with staffing shortages and spent millions on contract workers. The shortages have forced the system to shutter some beds, reducing access to care in a region with high rates of diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
“We are taking care of the sickest of the sickest,” Baker said. “We have to give them access to quality healthcare.”
Hazard’s community college already offers some higher-level degrees, such as nursing, through partnerships with four-year public and private colleges in Kentucky. But most of the programs are online-only, and many students prefer in-person learning, said Deronda Mobelini, chief student affairs officer. Others lack access to broadband internet or can’t afford it.
If the conversion goes through, the college will continue to offer online baccalaureates and a wide range of certificates and associate degrees, said Lindon, the HCTC president. She envisions a system of “differential tuition” where students seeking four-year degrees would pay less during the first two years of their programs.
Though the college would still cater to commuters, a residence hall would attract students from a wider area and alleviate a housing shortage made more acute by the recent floods, Lindon said.
Ultimately, the future of the institution will rest with the Kentucky legislature, which must decide if it wants to spend some of its continuing budget surplus on bringing four-year degrees to an underserved corner of the state.
But Lindon is already imagining the possibilities, and the Appalachian culture course that she’d make mandatory for students seeking bachelor’s degrees.
“For too long, we’ve been taught to hide or even be ashamed of where we’re from,” she said. “We want to teach young people to be proud of our Appalachian heritage.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Listen to any group of artist-educators talking about their work and you’ll notice the slip to we in conversations about social justice education. It’s a very active we, an invitation to collective work. We engage in social justice art education (SJAE) when we come with the understanding that we will be working with other people to create activist artwork together; it is not a solitary practice, it requires the we. We cannot dismantle deep legacies of oppression alone — we need each of our perspectives, skills, dreams, vantage points, lenses, imaginations and strategies. We need the specific powers that we each bring based on our social identities, lineages and lived experiences. As Mariame Kaba reminds us, “None of us has all of the answers, or we would have ended oppression already. But if we keep building the world we want, trying new things and learning from our mistakes, new possibilities emerge.” To make artwork that has a chance at transforming the world toward justice, we need each other.
Writing about the Three Sisters — corn, beans and squash — within many Native American approaches to agriculture, educator and scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer describes the interdependent nature of these three different plants: “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship. This is how the world keeps going.” Kimmerer describes how each plant provides a necessary element that allows all three to thrive in abundance: the beans bring needed nitrogen as they climb the corn and the squash offers shade and stability. Planted together, these three plants thrive based on their specific contributions. This emphasis on relationships is echoed in nearly every discussion of social moments that prioritize justice, community and collective action. Social change happens when people work, imagine and create together, depending on collective strengths and shared visions of the world. Writing about our need for collectivity, Carla Shalaby notes that “No single one of us has the creativity, the courage or the skill enough to teach love and learn freedom alone. This work that requires an imagination developed together, the courage of a community and the combined skills of each member of that community.”
This kind of intentional commitment to community is not simple, easy or tidy. At its best it is messy, slow, complicated, challenging, hard and sometimes painful. It requires a deep and abiding form of trust between people — a trust that we can sustain our connections through conflict, disagreement and inevitable change. Tending to relationships takes time and intentionality. Kimmerer points to the challenge that we are socialized for a transactional economy. Even in education settings where we rely on relationships to teach and learn together, we are submerged in a social system that still assumes the teacher as the provider of learning, the student as the recipient and the end result as a passing grade. SJAE’s reliance on collaboration means that we must attend specifically to building and nurturing relationships rooted in mutual trust. We must, in the words of activist adrienne maree brown, “move at the speed of trust.” For educators working within the constraints of bell schedules and funder requests, this is often a very hard shift in pedagogy. To move at the speed of trust, to truly allow time and breathing room to tend to the complexity of building and sustaining relationships means we may need to readjust the scale of our artworks. While it may be controversial to state, the priority in SJAE lies with people, not artworks; we must uphold commitments to the people with whom we work above any final artwork.
To focus so intentionally on the relationships we have with others requires us to be both vulnerable and open to change—to allow ourselves to be challenged and transformed by different perspectives and ideas. As Kaba writes, “Being intentionally in relation to one another, a part of a collective, helps to not only imagine new worlds but also to imagine ourselves differently.” Relationship-building asks us each to confront the powers and positionalities we embody and to be wide open to the ways in which they intersect with, bounce off of or collide with our colleagues in art-making. This form of vigilant self-reflection can be exhausting as we hold our hearts open to the constant bumping into other people. It also requires us to know ourselves well and to be gentle to our own growth as we deepen our understanding of how we are shaped by those internalized, interpersonal and systemic forms surrounding us. In her discussion of the Three Sisters, Kimmerer reminds us that, like the plants, we must embrace “our unique gift and how to use it in the world.” She continues, highlighting how we must hold both our individual gifts and our collective work simultaneously, “Individuality is cherished and nurtured, because, in order for the whole to flourish, each of us has to be strong in who we are and carry our gifts with conviction, so they can be shared with others.” This kind of “both-and” thinking is at the crux of SJAE. Everything is both-and: we are both individuals and part of communities; we live in a world where there is both painful injustice and liberating possibility; we have both expertise to share and much to learn; we are in need of both urgent solutions and patient community consensus. These generative tensions constantly shape how we relate to each other as we shift and grow in connection to the people around us.
The Khan Kids team is made up of former preschool and early elementary educators and administrators, and we remember the hustle and bustle of the school day. Between required curriculum lessons and simply teaching students how to exist in school, it can often feel like there isn’t enough time to get to everything.
That time crunch is especially prevalent when it comes to teaching literacy in younger grades. With daunting statistics pointing to the exact days students need to display readiness in specific skills like letter recognition or blending sounds, there are never enough hours in the day to provide the support students need to practice reading.
In short, students need to read at home to be successful. But how do we ensure they will do that? With Khan Academy Kids, you can give your students’ families access to a tool full of engaging books and joyful, character-led reading lessons that don’t require adult facilitation.
Ease the burden of at-home practice
At home, our students’ families are often overloaded with competing priorities. Unfortunately, that can sometimes mean that academic practice takes a back seat. What’s worse, when faced with the critical task of building skills like literacy, parents can feel overwhelmed and under-equipped to manage the task.
With an app like Khan Academy Kids, students can complete fun reading lessons independently. Better yet, with our affordable features for districts, teachers can directly assign lessons to their students, so that students can access additional practice at their just-right level anytime.
Transform phonics instruction
Learning how to deliver effective instruction in the Science of Reading takes specialized training that many parents simply don’t have. Because of this, teachers often send home items like flash cards and other forms of rote memorization for them to fall back on in order to capitalize on at-home study time.
Our platform offers a delightful array of age-appropriate activities led by lovable characters, which makes learning engaging and enjoyable for young learners. From interactive games to captivating stories, every Khan Academy Kids experience is designed to spark curiosity and foster a love of reading.
Extend learning beyond the classroom with parent engagement
We all know the importance of parental involvement in a child’s education. With Khan Academy Kids, parents receive free app access as part of your district subscription, ensuring that learning transitions seamlessly from school to home. By empowering parents with the tools they need to practice reading with their children, we create a supportive environment where literacy skills flourish outside the classroom.
With Khan Academy Kids, families can build literacy skills at home in a joyful, science-backed way. So why wait? Take the first step toward transforming at-home learning today!
The Khan Kids team is made up of former preschool and early elementary educators and administrators, and we remember the hustle and bustle of the school day. Between required curriculum lessons and simply teaching students how to exist in school, it can often feel like there isn’t enough time to get to everything.
That time crunch is especially prevalent when it comes to teaching literacy in younger grades. With daunting statistics pointing to the exact days students need to display readiness in specific skills like letter recognition or blending sounds, there are never enough hours in the day to provide the support students need to practice reading.
In short, students need to read at home to be successful. But how do we ensure they will do that? With Khan Academy Kids, you can give your students’ families access to a tool full of engaging books and joyful, character-led reading lessons that don’t require adult facilitation.
Ease the burden of at-home practice
At home, our students’ families are often overloaded with competing priorities. Unfortunately, that can sometimes mean that academic practice takes a back seat. What’s worse, when faced with the critical task of building skills like literacy, parents can feel overwhelmed and under-equipped to manage the task.
With an app like Khan Academy Kids, students can complete fun reading lessons independently. Better yet, with our affordable features for districts, teachers can directly assign lessons to their students, so that students can access additional practice at their just-right level anytime.
Transform phonics instruction
Learning how to deliver effective instruction in the Science of Reading takes specialized training that many parents simply don’t have. Because of this, teachers often send home items like flash cards and other forms of rote memorization for them to fall back on in order to capitalize on at-home study time.
Our platform offers a delightful array of age-appropriate activities led by lovable characters, which makes learning engaging and enjoyable for young learners. From interactive games to captivating stories, every Khan Academy Kids experience is designed to spark curiosity and foster a love of reading.
Extend learning beyond the classroom with parent engagement
We all know the importance of parental involvement in a child’s education. With Khan Academy Kids, parents receive free app access as part of your district subscription, ensuring that learning transitions seamlessly from school to home. By empowering parents with the tools they need to practice reading with their children, we create a supportive environment where literacy skills flourish outside the classroom.
With Khan Academy Kids, families can build literacy skills at home in a joyful, science-backed way. So why wait? Take the first step toward transforming at-home learning today!
A VR experience created by students at The New School in New York City is designed to take viewers to an almond farm in California and illustrate the effects of pesticides on bee colonies. At first, participants wearing a VR headset can walk around the virtual stands of trees, and hear the sounds of rustling leaves and buzzing bees.
Then, with the push of a button, users can choose a different perspective.
“You get to become a bee,” explains Maya Georgieva, who runs the university’s Innovation Center, “and you have the sense of what happens to the bee colony when the pesticides go all over to protect the trees and you get to see what it is in the beehive as the bee is struggling.”
The goal is not just to create a virtual field trip to a farm that students in a classroom might not have access to. The hope is that the immersive technology will provide a shift of perspective that’s simply impossible in the physical world, but can be simulated in emerging virtual reality spaces.
“This is kind of an empathy machine, and I think it has a huge emotional power,” says Georgieva, who has become a leading voice about where VR is headed through her blogging and public speaking. Flying around like a bee, she says, helps users “really embody this moment that we are living in — of climate change and some of the choices we make.”
She says that some of the best examples of VR in education are short, intense experiences — like the student project with the bees — that are carefully placed into larger classroom lessons.
“It’s not the five, 10, 15 minutes in the headset,” she says, “it’s what happens before and what happens after this just sets the stage for more critique, for more in-depth conversation, for more curiosity.”
EdSurge sat down with Georgieva after a talk she gave last month at the SXSW EDU festival about where she sees VR headed in education, what kind of applications it’s best for, and what she sees as some limitations.
Many intervention models include Response to intervention (RTI) or Multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) frameworks. MTSS is a coherent continuum of evidence-based, systemwide practices and procedures to support a rapid response to academic and behavioral needs. RTI is a multi-tiered approach to helping struggling learners that nestles within MTSS. It focuses on academics and individual students. Within RTI, students’ progress is closely monitored at each intervention stage to determine the need for further research-based instruction or intervention in general education, special education or both.
Because intervention is individualized, it requires educators to invest much more time into identifying each student’s needs, differentiating lessons, and tracking progress. In a traditional intervention model, highly-trained instructors work 1:1 with students to provide the exact type of support they need. Many administrators turn to adaptive technology as a helpful tool to provide personalized intervention support at scale.
Which students need intervention and which students just need a little help from time to time?
Students fit into three intervention tiers; students within Tier I generally get the support they need from regular classroom instruction.
Tier III: Intensive level (1-5% of students) Learners are more than one grade level behind and require individualized, intensive skill-specific intervention with one-to-one or small-group instruction outside the classroom.
Tier II: Targeted level (5-15% of students) Learners are behind by one grade level and should receive individualized support. Educators often deliver instruction in small groups and target supplemental instruction and remediation of specific skills or concepts.
Tier I: Universal level (80-90% of students) Learners may need basic support, but they can get necessary intervention with high-quality, research-based instruction within the traditional classroom.
Developer of the sam wearable ultrasound technology launches a unique opportunity for students and healthcare professionals to support costs of education or research.
TRUMBULL, Conn., April 9, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– ZetrOZ Systems, inventor of sustained acoustic medicine and the sam® wearable ultrasound technologies, announces a $20,000 STEM scholarship opportunity for healthcare professionals and students in training. The initiative demonstrates ZetrOZ’s commitment to advancing global healthcare and innovation in medical care.
The program will provide four $5,000 scholarships to students or healthcare professionals in support of their educational or research expenses. Applications are due July 31, and ZetrOZ Systems will announce winners in August and September, showcasing the recipients’ potential to drive change in healthcare.
“We are proud to sponsor an opportunity for students and healthcare professionals to advance their education or research,” said George K. Lewis, biomedical engineer and founder and CEO of ZetrOZ Systems. “We were fortunate to receive funding that supported our development of sustained acoustic medicine, which has transformed soft tissue healing for hundreds of thousands of people to date. With this program, we hope to help the next generation of healthcare innovators to further advance the healing of soft tissue injuries.”
ZetrOZ Systems’ sam® X1 and sam® 2.0 wearable ultrasound devices accelerate injury healing and reduce the need for invasive surgical procedures and potentially addictive pain medication. The mechanobiological technology works by increasing blood vessel diameters to improve blood flow, increase oxygenated hemoglobin and remove cytokine enzymes and cellular waste. The devices have been cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for soft tissue injuries, knee osteoarthritis and other indications, and their effectiveness is confirmed in more than 40 clinical studies and in the delivery of more than 3.7 million treatments.
To apply for the sam® STEM Scholarship Program, candidates must submit a 1,200-word essay on global healthcare advancements in soft tissue healing, including a review of emerging medical technologies, mechanobiology applications, and clinical/research trends worldwide. Candidates will need to provide a current transcript for their undergraduate or graduate studies, two professional references, and a 250-word cover letter outlining how they plan to use the scholarship funds. Applicants should send submissions to info@samrecover.com by July 31.
ZetrOZ’s mission includes supporting the next generation of healthcare professionals to produce brilliant ideas and explore new advancements to benefit people of all ages. For more information on ZetrOZ Systems, please visit www.samrecover.com.
About ZetrOZ Systems
ZetrOZ Systems is leading healing innovations in sports medicine, developing wearable bioelectronic devices to deliver sustained acoustic medicine (sam®). Researched and funded by the federal government, ZetrOZ is built on the proprietary medical technology of 46 patents and is the exclusive manufacturer and developer of the sam® product line, designed to treat acute and chronic musculoskeletal conditions.
Training Umbrella was able to grow during the pandemic and continues to grow post pandemic
KANSAS CITY, Kan., April 9, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– A name that covers everything we offer. As a 100% Woman Owned small business that continues to grow, Training Umbrella recently signed a contract with the largest private healthcare provider in America for training and onboarding hospital staff such as RNs, CNAs, ICU, NICU, the lot. This company has been a client of for almost eight years renting classrooms. As of February 1st we have expanded the relationship significantly.
Changes
With an influx of student training needs this healthcare provider thought about the long term, big picture — they are wanting something more permanent, private and with a new and improved process. Committing to a partnering with Training Umbrella to offer a more streamlined processes and the space to have classes. The Education Programs team have always offered a host of fantastic programs to new students and with this new partnership they continue to invest in these new nurses to provide exceptional care to their patience as they always have. It’s exciting to see new students graduate from such exceptional programs and Training Umbrella appreciates the opportunity to be a part of that. Training Umbrella offered not only the space but also helped to provide training logistics services.
Training Umbrella is providing training support services and space including two training rooms that fit 40+ people each with medical equipment and a dedicated simulation space and simulation patience rooms dedicated for their use.
Win/Win
This new partnership has proven to be beneficial for everyone. Training Umbrella is so much more than just classroom space across the country or even corporate training. As a Microsoft training partner and Google Training Partner along with a full stack of technical classes and HR compliance related training training classes. More than just rooms or training. Just ask us.
Start a new career in as little as three weeks and get freedom of flexibility
DENVER, April 9, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– As residents of one of the most lucrative states to be a real estate agent in, Mainers can now start their real estate career with the new Salesperson Real Estate Pre-Licensing Course from The CE Shop, a trusted and established education provider. This 55-hour, online course now offers Mainers the opportunity to launch a rewarding career as a real estate agent.
With student support seven days a week, 100% online and mobile-friendly learning, and interactive content to make memorization easier, The CE Shop offers the highest pass rates in the nation to ensure confidence and ease on the path to career growth. With an average annual income of $92,793 (Indeed.com), Maine real estate agents rank higher than many states.
Starting at $399, packages are affordable and range from course-only to a value package that includes ProPath, professional development courses, to accelerate success with real-world insight.
The CE Shop has been serving the community with Continuing Education in Maine for years. For those looking to maintain their license and stay ahead of the competition, The CE Shop continues to offer a diverse set of Continuing Education courses that highlight current topics and new regulations affecting the real estate industry.
This new Pre-Licensing course from The CE Shop covers everything needed to successfully prepare for the national and state licensing exams. Learn more about Maine real estate offerings and start a free trial to see how professionals can increase their income potential today.
About The CE Shop The CE Shop is the leading provider of professional real estate education with online mortgage, real estate, home inspection, and appraisal courses available throughout the United States. The CE Shop produces and provides quality education for professionals across the nation, whether they are veterans in their industry or are looking to launch a new career. We believe that the right education can truly make a difference. Visit TheCEShop.com to learn more.
Science experiments and hands-on activities are perennial classroom favorites, and they’re a fundamental part of high school lab sciences. Before you start, though, you’ll want to make sure you have the right lab safety equipment ready to go. We’ve rounded up some of the most important items your lab might need, available at trusted science lab equipment suppliers.
Tip: Teaching students lab safety really is vital. To ensure your classes get thorough training on the subject, try a safety course like the ones designed by Flinn Scientific. They have courses for teachers too, including those needed for certifications.
Fisher Scientific
Amazon
Disposable Gloves
You can buy disposable gloves in a variety of places, but you’ll want to make sure they’re both latex-free and chemical-resistant. Consider keeping several sizes on hand to ensure a good fit for all students.
Most classrooms are already equipped with a fire extinguisher, but it’s also smart to keep a fire blanket on hand. Mount this lab safety equipment to the wall in an easily accessible location, so all students know where to find it.
It’s important for students to tie back and secure long hair when they’re working in the lab. Plain rubber bands can get stuck, so keep a supply of these basic bulk hair ties on hand for students who don’t have their own.
High school science labs should strongly consider installing pull-down safety showers, in case of a spill or other hazardous exposure. This model comes in two versions, wall-mounted and ceiling-mounted.
Keep one of these around for times when you’re performing a demo with hazardous vapors or other materials. This one is NIOSH-approved, with replaceable filters.
Various spilled substances call for different controls. This kit includes sand, acid neutralizer, and a super-absorbent material to help handle most science lab spills.
Keep dangerous chemicals safe with locking storage cabinets. Put together a set that makes the most sense for your science lab, with options for both flammable and corrosive liquids.
Top Industry Insights On Human-Centric eLearning Design
iSpring Days 2024 brings together top eLearning industry professionals with exclusive insights that will help you create, manage, and improve human-centered training. You’ll learn all about the latest industry trends and discover how to:
Q1: What is the university mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?
A: Our 2030 Strategic Plan calls on the university to expand the reach of its educational programs. Specifically, the plan states, “As the world evolves, people across the Commonwealth of Virginia and the nation will have increased needs for developing skills to help them prepare for new jobs or career advancement. As a state-supported university, we feel a particular responsibility to serve the Commonwealth by expanding educational opportunities, both in person and online, for working adults in the Commonwealth and beyond—especially the 1.1 million Virginians who have some college credits but have not yet received a degree.”
In my view, this provides a very clear mandate for the work the person filling this role will be responsible for leading. The very fact that this language is included in our strategic plan means that there is a shared sense of purpose for this work at the very highest levels of the university.
Q2: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?
A: This new role will report directly to me as part of the Office of the Provost. The Managing Director will be part of strategic discussions with deans and institute directors, with colleagues in the provost’s and president’s offices, and will work hand-in-hand with faculty and staff developing and running our online and hybrid programs.
As the team grows, the Managing Director will directly supervise a high-performing team that will add expertise and capacity to support our schools in realizing their strategic goals.
Q3: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?
A: I think that within one year, the Managing Director will have brought on several key new hires as well as engaged with outside consultants and vendors to round out the expertise and services we wish to provide our partner schools.
He or she will have developed a trusted working relationship and strong rapport with colleagues across campus (we call it Grounds) and will have significantly enhanced or helped launch one or more online or hybrid programs.
A successful Managing Director will also facilitate communities of practice that bring together key administrators, faculty, and staff engaged in the work of expanding access to our programs beyond Grounds.
In three years, I imagine we will be that much further along in our journey with this work and will have earned our place as a key part of the university’s success in meeting the goals laid out in the 2030 Plan.
Q4: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?
A: The person in this position would be preparing to step into a top leadership position in higher education, online education and digital innovation. Different universities have different titles, so it’s a bit tricky to pick just one. Assistant, Associate or Vice Provost for Online Education would be a likely title. I have a bunch of friends and colleagues in this role, and they all have different titles.
We are starting to see people in these roles step into provost and president roles, albeit in small numbers so far. Further down the road, if someone in this role had that ambition, I could see it being a real possibility at a smaller or predominately online institution.
“We forget that we’re still parents and we have permission to parent,” said Pressman, and that parents can tap into their inner authority, especially when enforcing rules for screen time.
Why rules make us uncomfortable
Parents can feel uncomfortable and guilty about implementing rules for their children, Pressman said. However, rules encompass boundaries and limits and are an essential piece in creating resilience. “As parents, it’s our job to establish those rules, and then to hold them in an authoritative way,” writes Pressman; and it takes practice.
Autonomy is important to a developing child. When a parent supports their child’s autonomy, they are ultimately helping them develop executive function skills, which help people prioritize tasks, and exercise restraint and impulse control. These skills can be taught to children as their brains mature.
Supporting a child’s autonomy requires self-reflection, according to Pressman. By paying attention to the capacity of your child, and allowing them to see their own capacity, you can exert control over what you can, but still allow your child to guide their own development. “It allows you to offer space for your child to be competent and have some ownership over their lives and their choices” and this “helps build an internal sense of worthiness” for your child, said Pressman.
This type of autonomy can be very valuable to a child navigating digital spaces that increasingly permeate our lives. Supporting a child’s autonomy isn’t lazy parenting; kids need guidance and boundaries, and they won’t always receive supervision online as they grow older. But rules are hard, and different children present parents with different challenges. According to Pressman, “you want to reflect on what kind of child you have.”
If a child craves a sense of agency and has big reactions to not being able to do something themselves, she advises parents to guide that child towards smaller, more manageable steps. Even if the child pushes back against this approach, Pressman encouraged parents to stick with it, letting the child know that they have their parent’s support.
Pressman pointed to a mock contract provided at the end of her book to set concrete and collaborative rules and limits to social media and digital technology use. This contract exercise gives the child freedom of choice, but still enforces logical and previously agreed upon consequences if they make a choice that breaks the contract. According to Pressman, a contractual agreement might also help parents navigate the differences between their children when it comes to each child’s individual capacity to interact with digital technologies in a healthy way.
It’s OK to revise the rules
Because of the addictive design of social media and digital technologies, Pressman said that children need more guardrails rather than fewer, and parents are often divided or feel helpless. Some parents view all screens as evil while others find that tech is the only way forward.
“There’s space between those two extremes, and leaning into that space is what will best serve you and your kids,” according to Pressman. Denying children access to safely discovering the many uses of digital technology only sets them up for the misuse of these digital technologies and spaces, she said. Pressman encouraged parents to be “social media mentors” who model appropriate and reasonable online and on-screen behavior that reflects that family’s predetermined set of screen rules. These situations can create opportunities for parents to be the go-to guides.
As for entering the world of technology, she recommended small incremental exposures first when the child is ready. “Know [your child’s] temperament and how they respond” to these incremental exposures to digital technology, said Pressman. Is your child a rule breaker or follower? What is a challenge for them in digital spaces and what comes easily for them? These questions allow parents to see what their child is ready for.
If your kid hates the rule, maybe it’s not a good rule for YOUR kid
If your child doesn’t respond well to the rules, then it might be time to change those rules. “We have to be there to help [our kids] as they’re navigating things that are developmentally challenging,” said Pressman.
It’s a parent’s job to reassess, and determine if rules need to be changed, said Pressman. Adding in a reminder to a child that there is room for growth after rules have been changed or established, is also part of the job, she continued. Revising the rules is part of the parenting process.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
A federal appellate court blocked the Biden administration’s borrower defense regulations last week, drawing praise from the for-profit industry and criticism from student advocates.
In issuing the injunction,the three-judge panel,all of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, found a “strong likelihood” that a lawsuit broughtby Career Colleges and Schools of Texas would succeed against the U.S. Department of Education based on the merits of the case.
Issued by the department in 2022, the regulations were designed to provide loan relief to students who were defrauded by colleges or couldn’t complete their programs because their institutions closed.
The Texas group, an industry organization for for-profits in the state, challenged the rules, arguing that they put colleges on the hook for mass loan forgiveness, and that Congress didn’t give the Education Department the authority to recoup loan forgiveness costs from colleges.
The regulations “will significantly facilitate certain student loan discharges while creating uncertainty, complexity and potentially huge liability for the association’s members,” Judge Edith Jones wrote in the opinion. “The Rule overturns recent regulations issued by the previous Administration and upends thirty years of regulatory practice.”
In a footnote, Jones also accused the administration of trying to “sidestep, to the greatest extent possible,” the U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year against the Biden administration’s plan for mass student loan forgiveness, which Jones characterized as making “Presidential student loan discharges illegal.”
An Education Department spokesperson said via email Monday that the Higher Education Act “clearly grants borrowers a path to be free from their loans in these circumstances,” and that the agency “will review the ruling.”
Student borrower advocates — who have supported the rules as widening eligibility for loan discharges and holding colleges accountable for bad behavior — fired back at the court over the regulations.
“The Fifth Circuit got it exactly backwards. Borrower Defense is a critical protection for student borrowers and has been in place for over thirty years,” Eileen Connor, president and executive director of the Project on Predatory Student Lending, said in a statement.“It’s the brazenness of for-profit schools, the scope of their greed, and the willingness of courts to accept their specious complaints that is new and unprecedented.”
Connor, whose group filed an amicus brief in the case, also called the ruling “another troubling sign of a political climate in which people are using the courts to take away people’s legal rights.”
The for-profit college sector has vocally opposed the regulations.
Its leading trade group, Career Education Colleges and Universities, applauded the 5th Circuit’s decision to block the rules.
“All schools should be pleased with this ruling, as the rule of law was upheld and the Biden administration’s extreme agency overreach was denied,” CECU President and CEO Jason Altmire said in a statement. “Hopefully, the Department of Education will take this opportunity to withdraw these excessive regulations.”
The 5th Circuit previously issued a temporary injunction against the rules ahead of hearing the case. The latest injunction, which overturned a lower court’s decision not to block the rule, will be in effect as the case returns to district court for judgment.
This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.
There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation – even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this new American Public Media podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences – children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.
Episode 9: The Aftermath
Schools around the country are changing the way they teach reading. And that is having major consequences for people who sold the flawed theory we investigated in Sold a Story. But Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell are fighting back — and fighting to stay relevant. And so are organizations that promoted their work: The Reading Recovery Council of North America and the publisher, Heinemann.
This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.
Related articles
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
SPARTANBURG, S.C., April 8, 2024 (Newswire.com)
– Upright Education, a leading provider of tech skilling programs, is excited to announce a partnership with the University of South Carolina Upstate (USC Upstate) to offer high-quality tech bootcamps for adults looking to enter the industry. This collaboration aims to address the growing demand for tech talent in South Carolina by creating advanced pathways into roles within software development, data analytics, digital product design, and digital marketing.
South Carolina has been experiencing a rebound from a labor shortage, with tech jobs emerging as a significant driver of economic growth across the state. USC Upstate has been at the forefront of initiatives to bridge the skills gap and foster workforce development. Now, with Upright Education as a partner, USC Upstate is poised to further strengthen its impact by offering industry-aligned tech bootcamps that are focused on outcomes.
“This partnership aligns with our overall mission to support our local workforce, and to ensure that Upstate businesses can find the skilled employees they need to be successful,” said USC Upstate Provost Pam Steinke. “These bootcamps are a powerful complement to our degree programs.”
Upright programs are 100% online to provide flexibility, but 50% synchronous to ensure strong comprehension and application of new skills. Learners benefit from spending time with instructors and peers working through projects, assignments, and assessments. The program structure is designed to optimize for strong completion and placement rates.
“We are excited to join forces with USC Upstate to empower individuals with the skills they need to succeed in South Carolina’s thriving tech industry,” said Benny Boas, CEO of Upright Education. “Our programs are designed to prioritize outcomes, with high-quality curriculum taught by seasoned practitioners, and a career services team that provides unlimited job support to learners, ensuring they are prepared to excel in the workforce.”
