Extra Credit: School resegregation, expelled principal, FAFSA data blunder - SmartBrief

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Extra Credit: School resegregation, expelled principal, FAFSA data blunder

Extra Credit: Resegregation, FAFSA data blunder, expelled teacher

4 min read

Updates

schools resegregation, expelled teacher, FAFSA data blunder

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How America’s school integration mission is rolling backward. A disdain for legal tradition may be threatening Roe v. Wade, but it’s been laying waste to Brown v. BOE for quite some time. Retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer’s new book, “Breaking the Promise of Brown: The Resegregation of America’s Schools,” shares his “blistering” dissent of Parents Involved v. Seattle in 2007, which he says effectively reversed Brown and wasn’t the first “resegregation case” to chip away at it. 

School’s founder expelled from campus in diss heard ’round the country. Nadia Lopez — who founded Mott Hall Bridges Academy middle school in a violence-filled, low-income New York City neighborhood “to defy mediocrity and the status quo” and who has been honored by Michelle Obama, Black Girls Rock, and educators and students galore — was told after visiting the school recently that she’s not welcome anymore (though she didn’t crumble, break down or die).

school resegregation, expelled teacher, FAFSA data blunder
Lopez with Change Agent award. (Bennett Raglin/BET/Getty Images)

Lopez left her role as principal just prior to the pandemic for health reasons but stops by the school occasionally. She  popped by this March to catch up with colleagues and students and embrace the new principal. She sent an email to teachers after her visit, thanking them and lamenting a direction from above that she says veers from the school’s original mission and is creating low teacher morale. The superintendent heard about it. When Lopez stopped again at the school in April with a former student, the superintendent reportedly told her not to return

Many FAFSA-connected students now in Facebook’s database. Even students without Facebook accounts are on file at the social media giant after coding from its Meta Pixel tool allowed the harvesting of an unknown number of first and last names, email addresses and zip codes from January through March from students who visited FAFSA’s website. Logging in wasn’t even necessary. Good news: FAFSA has since removed the coding tool Facebook offers advertisers to help them track visitors to their own websites. Bad news: Neither party was especially forthcoming about the alleged mix-up, but it appears Facebook can target advertising to these students for years to come.   

School culture wars apparently driven by super-squeaky wheels. At least in Utah, the majority of parents are neither filled with vitriol nor want to micromanage (or fire) teachers and administrators, nor take over school boards. A whopping 91% of 64,000 parents surveyed in the state are happy with their children’s schools, and their concerns run more to bullying, smoking and vaping than the more sensational topics breathing so much of the media’s oxygen. “[P]arents notice that schools are going forward and doing their best for students despite all of this other stuff going on,” school district data specialist Brooke Anderson says.

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Diane Benson Harrington is an education writer at SmartBrief. Reach out to her via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.

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