JD Journal » education law

Obama Wants Education Law Rewritten Before School Starts Next Fall

aostler — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:04:02 +0000

In 2002, President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind act into law. As a requirement of that law, children in grades 3 to high school have been tested each year to track the progress they made each year. Any schools that didn’t meet the specific targets for progress set by each state would receive federal consequences.

2014 was the year prescribed under the current No Child Left Behind Act that required all students to be proficient in the current testing curriculum. Obama plans on removing that goal altogether and instead making sure that every student is able to be prepared for college after graduating from high school.

Obama wants to revise the law by the time school starts, and says that we can’t afford to cut any spending on education. He said that he wants to make education more of a priority in America and make our school systems more competitive with other countries.

Overall, his goal is to make sure that bad teachers are able to be removed and good teachers are able to be rewarded. He also wants to expand the grant program that is already in place which gives rewards to states for reforming their education programs.

Pennsylvania School District Accused of Spying on Students at Home

joshua — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 04:22:03 +0000

A class action law suit has been filed against the Lower Merion School District alleging the district violated the privacy of its students by remotely activating the webcams in laptops provided by the district to spy on students at home. The laptops contain a security feature that allows the owner of the laptop to remotely activate the embedded webcam to take a still photograph and a snapshot of the activity on the computer desktop. The lawsuit alleges that the Vice Principal of Harrington High School told a student that the district believed that he was “engaged in improper behavior at his home”. The Vice Principal is alleged to have used still pictures taken by the laptop as proof.

The lawsuit claims that students and parents were not told of the security feature before accepting use of the computers.

In a letter on the Lower Merion School District’s website, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Christopher McGinley said “This feature was only used for the narrow purpose of locating a lost, stolen or missing laptop. The District never activated the security feature for any other purpose or in any other manner whatsoever.” However, no explanation was given for the incident involving the Vice Principal of Harrington High School.

The lawsuit claims that the district violated several laws, including including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, The Computer Fraud Abuse Act, the Stored Communications Act, a section of the Civil Rights Act, the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Pennsylvania Wiretapping and Electronic Surveillance Act and Pennsylvania common law.

Students and Parents Sue the Chicago School District

joshua — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 23:07:04 +0000

On September 24th of this year, a student at Fenger High School in Chicago was beaten to death while walking home from school. The incident was caught on film. Since then, parents who have tried to transfer their children to other schools out of concern for their safety have been stonewalled by a system that makes transferring schools difficult, at best. Some parents have kept their children home from school in the mean time. Now a group of students and parents is suing the school district, claiming that their right to a public education (a property right) is being effectively denied without due process of law, in violation of the 14th amendment. The parents are seeking an immediate court order forcing the school district to permit mid year transfers out of Fenger High School. The court will take up the case on Monday in an emergency hearing.