More than 60 years after the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that desegregated American education, schools are still so racially divided that experts use terms like “apartheid” to describe the situation. Over the last 20 years, Florida — like the nation as a whole — has managed to…
When a University of Miami student told a dean in 2013 that she’d been raped and was now being stalked by the rapist, the dean offered no help and told her to “avoid those situations” where she’d run into her assailant. Later, that same dean told the victim to “feel bad” for her rapist because he “did not have many friends”…
When you sign up to become a schoolteacher, no one hands you a book of names you shouldn’t call your students. That’s because most educators have good enough sense to know referring to their kids as terrorists is almost certainly a bad idea. Unfortunately, not everyone has good sense. This…
Over the past few years, Miami-Dade County Public Schools began phasing out hard-line discipline in favor of more effective policies. Thanks in part to the efforts of local advocacy groups, the district found alternatives to arrests, stopped issuing out-of-school suspensions, eased its zero-tolerance stance on drugs, and embraced a restorative justice approach.
Some very rich people would like Gov. Rick Scott to sign HB 7069, a hastily passed school funding bill that provides huge incentives to charter schools at the expense of public ones. And those billionaires — namely the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos, and a slew of other wealthy right-wingers — are willing to mobilize their shell corporations and think tanks to ensure HB 7069 becomes law.
When Sean Gallagan was named Miami-Dade’s principal of the year in 2011, administrators lauded the leader of George T. Baker Aviation Technical College for his humanitarian work in Haiti and resourcefulness in getting American Airlines to donate a $6 million plane to the district. Clearly pleased with his abilities, the district…
Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s uniquely unqualified secretary of education, isn’t particularly good at thinking on her feet. Asked why there ought to be guns in school during her confirmation hearing this year, she infamously opined that schools might need to protect themselves from bears.
Two years ago, parents in Naples clashed over the books being taught at their kids’ schools. Members of a conservative group found fault with classics such as The Catcher in the Rye for including “homosexual themes” and The Great Gatsby for highlighting the “moral decay of the wealthy.” Those kinds of debates could now happen statewide if a bill by Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, of Naples, becomes law.
Betsey DeVos, President-Elect Donald Trump’s choice to run the U.S Department of Education, said this week she believes the biggest threat facing the nation’s schools might be bears. Teachers, meanwhile, believe the biggest threat facing America’s public education system is actually Betsy DeVos. “During her confirmation hearing, she could not…
Fabricated rape allegations — the type where someone falsely accuses another person of rape just to hurt that person — are statistically rare. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center estimates that between 2 and 10 percent of sexual assault allegations are made up, and women’s rights activists say the few high-profile fake accusations discourage real survivors of sexual assault from reporting crimes.
One January day last year, a North Miami Beach science teacher allegedly used his school computer for some R-rated research. His sixth-grade students saw the results when he projected his screen onto the classroom whiteboard — presumably by accident. Among the things that showed up on the board, according to the…
Long ago, Archbishop Curley Notre-Dame High School diffused a potentially explosive situation. I was the young, aggressive Miami-Dade County beat reporter for Miami Today. I had lunch with Norman Powell, at the time a high-powered downtown Miami attorney who represented individuals and companies doing business at County Hall. We didn’t fight or…
Former Miami Springs High School employee Rodolfo “Rudy” Camejo, Jr. housed four teenage baseball players from Mexico and Puerto Rico in a rented Virginia Gardens home. He regularly told colleagues he was “sponsoring” the boys. No one seemed to mind. But there’s a problem, say Miami-Dade County Public Schools investigators. Housing…
Everyone sends nude photographs. That includes women, men, married people, singles, adults, teens — everyone. Flirty photos are a standard part of a relationship in the smartphone age. But posting someone’s naked picture on the internet against his or her will constitutes sexual harassment, period. As one might expect, digital…
Since classes started this year, Miami Dade schools have tried desperately to keep kids away from the deadly Zika virus. They’ve handed out bug spray, encouraged long pants and shirts, and monitored for mosquito breeding grounds. So it was curious to see a proposal from school board member and county…
Roughly a year ago today, U.S. News and World Report, the oft-criticized college-ranking news magazine, booted the University of Miami from its list of the top 50 national universities for the first time in six years. Until then, the school had been neck-and-neck with the University of Florida in the…
Five years ago, the principal and assistant principal of Neva King Cooper Educational Center in Homestead decided that their students, all of whom are severely disabled, might be better off if their school became a charter. They presented the idea to the school’s advisory committee, which supported looking into it. But…
Summer break is over, and if you’re a female student at Miami Arts Charter, you might want to stock up on pants. That’s because all skirts and dresses are now banned. But even pants options are tightly limited: No leggings, yoga pants or ripped jeans are allowed this year. Shorts are…
Not every child who walks into Maria Sanabria’s first-grade classroom at Orange Brook Elementary in Hollywood can read well. The kids are mostly from poor families, and roughly half of Orange Brook’s students don’t pass state standardized tests. Even at age 6, many have fallen behind. So Sanabria was excited…
An English-speaking teacher says Miami-Dade County School Board discriminated against her by not hiring her for a job. The position? Teaching an hour of Spanish per day. Tracy Rosner, a third-grade teacher at Coral Reef Elementary, filed a federal lawsuit in the Southern District of Florida last week claiming employment…
Among Miami’s most prestigious high schools is the Marine Academy of Science and Technology, which is dedicated to giving gifted kids a rigorous education in the marine sciences. But according to one set of triplets who attended the school’s FIU campus in North Miami, MAST takes education so seriously that if…
There’s some bad news and some good news for debt-saddled graduates who paid a company called the Student Aid Center to help reduce their student loan debt. The bad news first: the Federal Trade Commission says the business was a scam. The good news? The FTC and Florida’s Attorney General…
