Source: https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/education_law/2014/12/index.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 04:07:54+00:00

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He later added that he wanted people, including school officials, to "more clearly understand exactly what [he] was saying" in the song. The next day disciplinary proceedings commenced against him at school. He was suspended and sent to alternative school. According to the district, "Taylor Bell did threaten, harass and intimidate school employees in violation of School Board policy and Mississippi State Law."
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals recently reversed a federal district court’s ruling granting private school reimbursement for an emotionally disabled student under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The Second Circuit held that the district court should have shown greater deference to a State Review Officer's (SRO) determination that parents seeking reimbursement for the unilateral placement of their emotionally disabled child in a private school had not shown that their placement was appropriate. In doing so, the Second Circuit deferred to the SRO’s determination that the student did not improve academically at private school. The circuit court remanded the case for the district court to affirm the decision of the State Review Officer. The takeaway from the opinion is the Second Circuit will defer to the final decision of the state authorities over conflicting IHO and SRO opinions, particularly when no objective evidence contradicts the SRO’s decision.
The case is Hardison v. Bd. of Educ. of the Oneonta City Sch. Dist., No. 13-1594-CV, 2014 WL 6778755, (2d Cir. Dec. 3, 2014), and is also available here. More details of the case after the jump.
If Congress Ends Annual Testing, How Will Teacher Evaluation Systems Continue?
Alyson Klein, at Edweek, reports that Republicans intend to introduce a bill to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act early next year. This fast track is counter to the general consensus just three months ago, which predicted reauthorization would not occur until 2016 at the earliest.
The major idea in this reauthorization is to end the federal mandate of yearly standardized testing. Testing would fall within the discretion of states. Some would surely keep it. Others would drastically reduce it. This move might split portions of the Democratic party. Teacher Unions support the move, but civil rights advocates likely would not. After all, civil rights groups were initially big supporters of NCLB because it would shine a light on achievement gaps. But if Republicans are behind the bill and Democrats split, the bill stands to garner widespread support.
Ditching annual tests, however, would create a huge practical problem for both sides. Without those tests, the teacher accountability systems that have swept the nation, and are a signature piece of NCLB waivers, will not work. Republicans, education reformers, and anti-labor forces have been staunch supporters of these systems. The administration believes these systems can transform the teaching profession. Surely Secretary Duncan and the President recognize this. Do any of the bill's drafters? Probably so, which begs the question of whether passing this bill in the House and Senate is posturing, short-term thinking, an over-reaction to NCLB waivers, or well-intended policy.
Duncan Authors Nice Op-Ed on School Funding, But Where Is the Action?
In an Op-Ed the Philadelphia Inquirer, Secretary Duncan weighed in on funding inequity in Pennsylvania and the nation in general. He wrote, "until some glaring funding injustices are fixed, in Philadelphia and in many school systems around the country, we will never live up to our nation's aspirational promises of justice." He cited heavy reliance on local property taxes to fund education as the source of our problems. The result, he said, is to make the quality of education dependent on geography, which disparately impacts the highest need, lowest-income students. "The key to a fair funding formula is quite simple: Target aid to students who need it most, and adjust current levels of state aid to the districts that are already well supported," he wrote.
This is welcome commentary to school funding advocates and scholars. It mimics what they have said for decades. Duncan penned a similarly welcome Op-Ed on school segregation a year ago. Unfortunately, although there are exceptions, Duncan's activity on these issues has larger been confined to op-eds. In the last year, the Department has issued helpful policy guidance on both issues, but that guidance only came after several years of charters, curriculum, and teacher reform. Those latter agendas might be useful, but none of them touch fundamental inequalities in regard to funding and race. In other words, op-eds and stated intentions to begin tacking discrimination pale in comparison to what the Secretary has done in other areas.
One might excuse the Secretary on race (although I do not) because of the tight rope the Supreme Court requires him to walk, but the failure to address school funding inequity begs the question of what the Department's purpose is. Title I of the ESEA--probably the most important piece of legislation the Department oversees--was designed as a remedy to resource inequity and segregation in the 1960s and 1970s. Since then it has drifted far from its mission. Scholars and advocates have documented its numerous flaws and proposed reasonable solutions. Those solutions, nor anything approximating them, have been found in any of the Secretary's recommendations for reauthorizing Title I or his competitive grant programs.
Revise and, following the office's review and approval, finalize its "interim" Title IX grievance procedures.
Create a pocket-sized card for all SMU employees with information about how to support students who report sexual misconduct and a checklist for staff members who may meet with a student to outline their rights and the resources available; clearer protections against retaliation.
Develop a procedure for sharing information between the SMU police and the school's Title IX coordinator.
Notify students and employees about the university's Title IX coordinators and their contact information in its nondiscrimination notice and in other publications.
Track harassment reports, investigations, interim measures, and resolutions.
Train staff and students on the revised university policies and procedures.
Reimburse the law student complainant for university-related expenses and counseling.
For those who missed it, the New York Times ran a story Wednesday on discipline disparities for African American females, telling the experience of two young African American girls. The first was described by teachers as very focused, but after she and a white friend scribbled some words on a bathroom stall, things fell apart. Her part was to write the word "hi." The school's response was to suspend her, accuse her of vandalism and demand $100 in restitution. When her family said it could not pay that amount, she received a visit from a police officer, who served her with papers accusing her of a trespassing misdemeanor and, potentially, a felony. The final result was a summer on probation, a 7 p.m. curfew, 16 hours of community service, and a letter of apology. Her friend was able to pay restitution and escaped juvenile justice consequences. Most poignant, however, was the emotional harm and anxiety that she experienced (as well as the girl in the second story). One girl's mother called it the equivalent of child abuse.
Should the Education Department withhold federal funds from states and school districts that are failing to comply with the conditions on the funds? As the Supreme Court noted in NFIB v. Sebelius, the 2012 case about the Affordable Care Act, federal funding for education is second only to federal funding for Medicaid. It's therefore critical to understand this important enforcement mechanism. Although funding cut-offs are a powerful tool -- think desegregating southern schools in the 1960s through the combination of Title VI and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act -- they are a controversial one. In my forthcoming article in Yale Law Journal, Agency Enforcement of Spending Clause Statutes: A Defense of the Funding Cut-Off , I unpack the controversy, focusing on federal grants more generally, not just education grants, but I use a lot of education examples throughout, given the importance of federal funding to federal education law.
[F]ederal agencies ought more frequently to use the threat of cutting off funds to state and local grantees that are not adequately complying with the terms of a grant statute. Scholars tend to offer four arguments to explain — and often to justify — agencies’ longstanding reluctance to engage in funding cut-offs: first, that funding cut-offs will hurt the grant program’s beneficiaries and so will undermine the agency’s ultimate goals; second, that federalism concerns counsel against federal agencies’ taking funds away from state and local grantees; third, that agencies are neither designed nor motivated to pursue funding cut-offs; and fourth, that political dynamics among state governments, Congress, the White House, and the agencies themselves make funding cut-offs difficult to achieve. This article argues that these critiques are deeply flawed. Among other problems, the critiques fail to account for the variety of types of grants, grant conditions, and rationales for grantee noncompliance; reflect lack of a nuanced understanding of the ways in which distinct federalism concerns play different roles at different times in the development and implementation of grant programs; and unrealistically assume static and unified agency incentives and political relationships. After debunking these critiques, the Article offers a new conception of the potential benefit of funding cut-offs in the enforcement of federal grant programs: the threat of a funding cut-off may be appropriate when it can promote change by the noncompliant grantee and when it can signal to other grantees that the agency is serious about enforcement, thereby increasing grantees’ compliance. The article concludes by assessing the implications of this argument for administrative regime design and judicial review. This work opens up new avenues for research in administrative law on the distinct features of the federal grants regime.
An Arizona school district joins Texas and Ohio in facing content-based challenges to school textbooks that Derek has discussed on this blog here and here. Arizona’s Gilbert Public Schools Governing Board has announced that it will delay deciding how to redact references to abortion in several of its textbooks, including a biology textbook used in the district’s honors classes. The Board members reportedly disagree about how to comply with an Arizona law that prohibits schools from presenting any information about elective abortion “that does not give preference, encouragement and support to childbirth and adoption as preferred options” (A.R.S. 15-115). The board voted 3-2 at an Oct. 28 meeting to redact pages from its textbooks given to students that do not offer childbirth and adoption as preferred options to elective abortions. Late in November, however, some board members challenged whether A.R.S. 15-115 requires that all abortion references be removed (including terms such as “spontaneous abortion,” an alternate term for a miscarriage), or simply those that discuss elective abortions. Gilbert’s District Superintendent Christina Kishimoto has said that schools can keep the textbooks intact and still comply with the statute by offering instruction on abortion alternatives. The school board’s decision has attracted national media interest, including a coverage by the New York Times and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show.
The Institute may very well produce a balanced curriculum. In that event, the sole sourcing of the materials may be the only question, but if the final curriculum is intentionally skewed, it will implicate the same legal issues I discussed last week in regard to Texas's recent textbook selections. North Carolina teachers, however, still question why the Department of Public Instruction is dictating specific curriculum in social studies because it does not in other areas. Moreover, local teachers indicate that they are already using the founding documents and discussing their principles in class. Thus, the Institute's curriculum will either be redundant of their current teaching practices or, they fear, impose a narrow perspective of the founding principles.
Two years after the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) ended its old Mexican-American Studies (MAS) curriculum, the district continues to be pulled between Arizona politicians’ disapproval of ethnic studies classes and TUSD’s efforts to show remedial progress in the federal desegregation case brought against the district in 1974. Arizona education officials increased the pressure on TUSD this Tuesday making a surprise visit to an ethnic studies class to determine if the district is violating a state law that prohibits any class that promotes “the overthrow of the United States government,” racial resentment, and “ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals” (HB 2281). After HB 2281 was passed and the state threatened to withhold ten percent of the district's funding, TUSD closed down the MAS program in 2012. TUSD’s school board subsequently began offering ethnic studies courses after a federal court ordered the district to develop a culturally responsive curriculum as a part of its remedial action in Fisher and Mendoza v. TUSD, the federal court desegregation case.
The state officials’ compliance visit was reportedly prompted by comments that a TUSD high school principal made at the National Association of Multicultural Educators that the district was once again offering culturally responsive classes. The Arizona education department wrote TUSD in late November, asking the district to turn over all assessments, assignments, lesson plans, student work, and materials used in classes that have a “culturally relevant” focus.
Coincidentally, the officials’ visit comes on the heels of a new study linking the MAS program to higher student achievement. The study, Missing the (Student Achievement) Forest for All the (Political) Trees: Empiricism and the Mexican American Studies Controversy in Tucson, links the defunct MAS program with increased graduation rates and standardized-testing results for students who participated in the program from 2006 to April 2012. The study by Nolan L. Cabrera, Jeffrey F. Milem, Ozan Jaquette, and Ronald W. Marx (Arizona) is available in the American Educational Research Journal here.
Meanwhile, Arizona seeks to intervene in the desegregation case in Fisher, arguing that the state has an interest in ensuring that TUSD’s current ethnic studies classes do not “foster resegregation along ethnic and racial lines.” A Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel heard Arizona’s request to intervene in Fisher this November. Counsel for the Department of Justice opposes Arizona’s intervention, arguing to the Ninth Circuit panel that “Arizona has no ‘protectable interest in this suit’” because the MAS program was ended. The video of Arizona’s oral argument before the Ninth Circuit in November is here. The Ninth Circuit is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the main case in January.
Given the size of its student population, the Texas Board of Education's decisions about which books to approve and purchase have an enormous effect on the overall market. The Board's deliberations seem to get more and more political each year. Last year, I posted on the Board's ongoing saga to select biology books that included creationism, and I referenced its 2010 decision to adopt history and economics books with a decidedly conservative slant. Late last month, they were at it again.
According to local reports, the state has approved new history textbooks with even more revisionist history in them. The Texas Freedom Network indicates, for instance, that "the new textbooks also include passages that suggest Moses influenced the writing of the Constitution and that the roots of democracy can be found in the Old Testament. Scholars from across the country have said such claims are inaccurate and mislead students about the historical record."
The Supreme Court has recognized that the state and its schools have the right to promote and inculcate values and good citizenship, but in Island Tree School District Board of Education v. Pico, 457 U.S. 853 (1982) and West Virginia v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943), the Court emphasized the authority has its limits. The state cannot forcefully indoctrinate students or intentionally subvert access to information. Deciding which side of the line educators' actions falls on can be difficult, but in Loewen v. Turnipseed, 488 F. Supp. 1138 (N.D. Miss. 1980), the district court confronted a situation analogous to the ongoing saga in Texas.
In Loewen, the state had refused to include Mississippi: Conflict and Change--which told the less than laudatory history of discrimination in Mississippi--on the state's list of approved history books, but had included another book that, according to plaintiffs, was a "symbol of resistance to integration in Mississippi schools." The court did not strike the latter book, but did find the exclusion of the first was unconstitutional based on the aforementioned cases. Key in Loewen were procedural anomalies and problematic comments on the record by the state in regard to Mississippi: Conflict and Change.
Yesterday, the ACLU of Delaware, ACLU Racial Justice Project and Community Legal Aid Society filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights asserting that Delaware’s charter school policies discriminate against students of color and students with disabilities. They also perpetuate segregation. “We hope that the Office of Civil Rights recognizes that any system of selection that has the effect of almost completely excluding children with disabilities from the ‘high-achieving’ charter schools is deeply disturbing and must constitute illegal discrimination,” says Dan Atkins, Legal Advocacy Director of the Disabilities Law Program of Community Legal Aid Society, Inc.
The complaint asserts that "over three-quarters of charter schools operating in Delaware are racially identifiable. High performing charter schools are almost entirely racially identifiable as White. Low income students and students with disabilities are disproportionately relegated to failing charter schools and charter schools that are racially identifiable as African American or Hispanic, none of which are high performing." They assert charter schools are also increasing segregation in traditional public schools.
Scott Bauries explores the contests surrounding academic freedom and how the concept relates to individual faculty concerns. He notes that the United States Supreme Court has not recognized a unique right to individual faculty academic freedom, and argues that to do so would frustrate the First Amendment.
Robert O'Neil visits First Amendment jurisprudence across a range of issues through the lens of historical treatment, deftly surveying disputes involving hate speech, offensive utterings, and their judicial outcomes over time.
Laura Rothstein focuses on the foundations and current status of disability law as it relates to students across the educational spectrum, from K-12 through higher education.
Martha McCarthy directs her inquiry toward cyber-bullying and its impact on students in K-12 schools. Her article underscores that troublesome grey areas exist in the realm of student free expression rights, and that the ambiguity is further complicated by technology and the ease with which students can now bully and harass each other remotely--but still painfully. A key issue explored in this context is the role of speech made off campus via technology and how that informs new questions regarding student expression both on and off campus.
Barbara Lee turns her attention to student conflicts and discipline in the higher education setting, specifically addressing student-professor academic disputes on the college campus and the litigation that has recently resulted. She explores the fiduciary theory of the relationship between college and student, which requires a greater standard of conduct than that of good faith and fair dealing typically required in a contractual argument, and offers sound strategies to avoid litigation and insulate institutions of higher learning from liability.
Through empirical and legal analysis, Perry Zirkel's article examines student discipline on the private college campus, noting that students at private institutions are not veiled by constitutional protections, a stark distinction between such students and their counterparts at public institutions in the context of disciplinary decisions. He concludes that previous characterizations of private college student discipline merit reexamination.
Casey McKay (University of Mississippi law student) provides a note on Fisher v. University of Texas.
Claire Stamm (University of Mississippi law student) on recent Mississippi K-12 legislation designed to end social promotion.
The skepticism I expressed in September regarding a lawsuit challenging Missouri's funding of the consortium developing Common Core standards and assessments may have been misplaced, at least, for now. Plaintiffs claimed that the state funding of the consortium amounts to an "illegal interstate compact" that cedes state sovereignty over education to the consortium. They also charged that the U.S. Department of Education's funding of the consortium was not authorized by Congress. As I have noted several times, there are plenty of legal flaws to go around with how the federal government has rolled out teacher and Common Core policy, but an unauthorized funding of a consortium did not appear to be one of them.
Nonetheless, plaintiffs in the case have secured the first victory in the nation implicating the U.S. Department of Education. Prior cases all involved purely state law issues and contests of power between the state executive and legislative branch. This current case, however, is curious in that it claims the U.S. Department of Education's action was unconstitutional, but the complaint does not name the Department as a defendant. In that respect, it seeks to keep the case state based and the feds out of it, while still claiming their unconstitutional action is central to the case.

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