Each week, I gather a wide variety of links to education and education technology articles. All this feeds the review I write each December on the stories we are told about the future of education. And wow, December is right around the corner, isn’t it?!
(National) Education Politics 
Via NPR: “Education Department Announces New Rules For Sexual Assault Cases On College Campuses.” Via The New York Times: “Sex Assault Rules Under DeVos Bolster Defendants’ Rights and Ease College Liability.” Via The Atlantic: “Betsy DeVos’s Sexual-Assault Rules Would Let the Accused Cross-Examine Accusers.” “What You Need to Know About the Proposed Title IX Regulations,” according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Via NBC News: “U.S. Marshals Service spending millions on DeVos security in unusual arrangement.” $19.8 million. JFC.
Via EdWeek’s Market Brief: “Ed. Dept. Pulls Plug on ‘Learning Registry,’ an Obama-Era Tech Initiative.” The reason given: the registry used “‘rapidly aging technologies’ that do not mesh with other systems” – which is odd for what I thought was largely a metadata project.
There’s more news out of the Department of Education in the accreditation section below. There’s more news from a department audit of Navient in the financial aid section below.
(State and Local) Education Politics 
Via The Sacramento Bee: “Charter school backers spent millions on statewide races in 2018. They still lost twice.”
Here, via Edsurge, is a great example of how, instead of investing in public infrastructure, schools wield ed-tech to outsource and privatize key resources for students and communities.
Via The New York Times: “Texas Students Will Now Learn That Slavery Was ‘Central’ to the Civil War.”
Via The Washington Post: “For universities in Virginia, Amazon’s HQ2 came at the perfect moment.” More likely, the “perfect moment” will be when all the corporate tax giveaways come back to bite Virginia’s education system in the ass.
Immigration and Education 
I’m not sure what to make of this story in light of the changes (and threatened changes) to immigration under Trump, but Crunchbase wants to tell you “How Universities Are Leveraging H–1B Visas To Fuel Startup Hubs.”
Education in the Courts 
Via Buzzfeed: “MSU’s Former President Has Been Charged With Lying To Police About The Larry Nassar Sex Abuse Investigation.” More via The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Washington Post.
The Business of Financial Aid 
More on Michael Bloomberg’s donation to JHU in the “philanthropy” section below.
Via the AP: “One of the nation’s largest student loan servicing companies may have driven tens of thousands of borrowers struggling with their debts into higher-cost repayment plans. That’s the finding of a Department of Education audit of practices at Navient Corp., the nation’s third-largest student loan servicing company.”
The “New” For-Profit Higher Ed 
There’s more news about ACICS, the accreditor for most for-profit universities, in the accreditation section below.
Online Education (and the Once and Future “MOOC”) 
Via Class Central: “Udacity Increases Prices for Nanodegrees.” (I got an email from Udacity this morning offering me Black Friday deals, incidentally. Tis the season, I guess: the desperation from a “unicorn” that is struggling.)
Hamad Bin Khalifa University has joined edX.
“Congratulations to the 2018 edX Prize Winners!” from the edX blog.
There’s more data about online education enrollments in the research section at the bottom.
Meanwhile on Campus… 
Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “To Juul or Not to Juul? Colleges Weigh the Breadth of Their Tobacco Bans.”
Via NPR: “Chickenpox Outbreak Hits N.C. Private School With Low Vaccination Rates.”
More, via The Washington Post, on the protests at Brooklyn’s Secondary School for Journalism about having to use the Summit Learning Program, the LMS built for the Summit chain of charter schools by Facebook and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative: “Students protest Zuckerberg-backed digital learning program and ask him: ‘What gives you this right?’”
More on Michael Bloomberg’s donation to JHU in the “philanthropy” section below.
Yes, Guns Are Ed-Tech (and It’s So F*cked Up that I Had to Make This a Category) 
Via NBC News: “Program prepares students for mass shooting by teaching combat medicine.”
Via NPR: “Inside The Business Of School Security To Stop Active Shooters.”
Via NPR: “Parkland School Shooting Commission Calls For Code Red Alarms And Bleeding Control Kits.”
Not a school shooting, but there is a school angle here nonetheless as Sandra Parks won third place in her district’s Martin Luther King Jr essay contest a couple of years ago. Via The New York Times: “Girl, 13, Who Wrote Essay on Gun Violence Is Killed by Stray Bullet.”
Accreditations and Certifications and Competencies 
Via Inside Higher Ed: “DeVos Restores Recognition for Troubled For-Profit Accreditor.”
Go, School Sports Team! 
There’s more news from Michigan State in the legal section above.
Via The Atlantic: “In the New College Football, Alabama Is Still Out Front.”
There was a big investment in esports this week – details down in the venture capital section.
Labor and Management 
“Columbia Bends on Grad Union Issue,” says Inside Higher Ed. That is, the administration says it’s open to collective bargaining with the graduate student union.
Upgrades and Downgrades 
Techcrunch weighs in on this important topic: “LinkedIn launches its own Snapchat Stories. Here’s why it shouldn’t have.”
Via The Verge: “A Facebook patent would use your family photos to target ads.”
Robots and Other Education Science Fiction 
Via The New York Times: “Meet Zora, the Robot Caregiver.”
(Venture) Philanthropy and the Business of Education Reform 
Michael Bloomberg in The New York Times: “Why I’m Giving $1.8 Billion for College Financial Aid.” The headline is a bit off, I think. He’s not giving it for college financial aid broadly. Rather, he’s making a donation to The Johns Hopkins University. Via The Atlantic: “The Limits of a Billion-Dollar Donation to Johns Hopkins.” Sara Goldrick-Rab shared her thoughts on Twitter.
Sponsored content on Edsurge, paid for by the Gates Foundation, this week wants to tell you “How Faculty Can ‘Click’ Their Way to a More Inclusive Classroom.”
Sponsored content on Edsurge, paid for by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative this week includes this piece on surveillance-as-personalized-learning at a Montessori chain of schools.
Via Inside Higher Ed: “Charles Koch Foundation’s 2017 Giving Neared $90M.”
Venture Capital and the Business of Education 
PlayVS has raised $30.5 million from WndrCo LLC, Sean Combs (yes that Sean Combs), Science Inc., Samsung NEXT, Crosscut Ventures, Coatue Management, Adidas, Rahul Mehta, Plexo Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Michael Dubin, Elysian Park Ventures, and David Drummond. The company, which plans to expand “esports” in high schools, has raised $46 million total.
Tutoring company Knack has raised $1.5 million from TiE Angels, Thomas DiBenedetto, Precursor Ventures, Jeffrey Vinik, Gries Investment Funds, Elysium Venture Capital, Douglas Feirstein, DCS Capital Partners, Bisk Ventures, and Arizona State University.
Catapult Learning has acquired Capital Education Group.
Research, “Research,” and Reports 
Via YLE: “Finland’s digital-based curriculum impedes learning, researcher finds.”
“Teens are trying marijuana before alcohol and tobacco,” says The Verge.
“Mean Reading Level of Freshman Summer Books Is Suited to 9th Graders,” The Chronicle of Higher Education frets. I don’t subscribe, so I can’t see if the article actually explains how flawed the idea of “reading levels” actually are.
Via Chalkbeat: “In most U.S. cities, neighborhoods have grown more integrated. Their schools haven’t.”
Via The Hechinger Report: “Non-white teachers have increased 162 percent over the past 30 years, but they are also more likely to quit.”
Via e-Literate: “Fall 2017 Top 30 Largest Online Enrollments In US – With LMS Usage and Trends Since 2012.”
The latest from Pew Research Center: “Public Attitudes Toward Computer Algorithms.”
Via The Washington Post: “Historians: What kids should be learning in school right now.”
Icon credits: The Noun Project