Sara Mead on Acela Corridor bias and charter schools. Here’s a video explaining the Michigan teacher pension situation.

This discussion tomorrow featuring Mike Feinberg and KIPP alums should be an interesting and atypical DC education event. RSVP via the link.

As expected, the Trump Administration is taking steps to change the federal approach on education civil rights. Not surprisingly, with those words – Trump, civil rights, federal – in the same sentence people are alarmed. And this administration certainly warrants skepticism. But there is actually a basket of different issues here that are best considered individually. For instance, on school discipline the evidence seems to point toward racial disparities of the kind that are germane to federal civil rights protections – though there is room for disagreement about specific policies to remedy that.

On campus sexual assault, the Obama administration lowered the standard of proof for what sexual assault claims on campus to more likely than not. Even for those concerned about the prevalence of sexual assault on campus, it’s a standard that raises legitimate concerns about due process and federal courts are sorting through the issue now. Again, room for disagreement on the best policies. That issue is especially complicated because in many instances the alleged perpetrator, victim, and the witnesses were all impaired at the time of the incident and college administrators are often not well equipped to address these sorts of incidents. (One solution that has been proposed – and should alarm anyone concerned about civil liberties – is to lower the standard of proof for all campus offenses to “more likely than not” so that sexual assaults are not treated differently from a procedural point of view.)

And then OCR does a bunch of other work on behalf of parents, often low-profile but often quite important.

Bottom line: This is important stuff, so important that thoughtful people should disaggregate and approach each issue independently.

This should be standard practice to give teachers more information about retirement.

Here’s a trend worth watching. This new Florida law bears watching, too.

Here’s Ian Rowe on family structure and a long running debate.

The NEA is inadvertently debating personalized learning.

The charter politics in Massachusetts didn’t stop with November’s vote.

And here’s a teacher picture you might have missed. 

132 year old lobster turned loose. And ‘little did they know” is an underused literary device: “Little did she know she was about to be attacked by a rabid raccoon she would end up killing with her bare hands.”