Connect with us

Education

Student Threatened With Expulsion Over Social Posts Gets $250,000 Settlement

Published

on

Student Threatened With Expulsion Over Social Posts Gets 0,000 Settlement

A month after Kimberly Diei enrolled as a doctor of pharmacy student at the University of Tennessee, the college’s professional conduct committee received an anonymous complaint about her posts on social media.

The college reviewed her posts, which included racy rap lyrics and tight dresses, and concluded that they were vulgar and unprofessional. It threatened to expel her.

For the last four years, Ms. Diei has been fighting her school in court, arguing that her posts were fun and sex-positive, and unconnected to her status as a student. Now she has won a settlement: On either Wednesday or Thursday, she expects to receive a check for $250,000 — both vindication and relief, she said.

She has also graduated from pharmacy school at the university and is now a practicing pharmacist at a Walgreens in Memphis, a job where she says her comfort with her own sexuality has been an asset.

“Viagra, that’s a very, very big seller,” she said, chuckling. “Sexual lubricants, condoms, all of that. I can’t say every day somebody’s asking me about sexual products, but it’s fairly frequent across the age range.”

Advertisement

Her lawsuit against the university, filed in February 2021, tested the boundaries of free expression for students in the age of social media. With the pro bono help of a lawyer with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech group, Ms. Diei challenged the university’s authority to punish her for messages posted on her own account, on her own time, and not representing her as a student. The suit argued that the public university had violated her constitutional right of free expression “for no legitimate pedagogical reason.”

About a month before she sued, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case of a high school cheerleader in Pennsylvania who was removed from her school’s junior varsity squad after she posted vulgar complaints about not making the varsity team. The Supreme Court ruled in her favor, indicating that courts should be skeptical of schools’ efforts to punish students’ off-campus speech.

Ms. Diei’s complaint was initially dismissed by the district court where she filed it. She appealed, and the appellate court found last September that her speech “was clearly protected by the First Amendment,” and permitted the case to go forward.

Melissa Tindell, a spokeswoman for the university, said that in line with its general practice, it would not comment on a legal matter.

Ms. Diei acknowledges that she is an unlikely poster child for freedom of expression. “I never had a strong interest in politics,” she said in an interview.

Advertisement

Even so, she said, she never doubted that she was doing the right thing by refusing to back down.

“I knew what was happening was unfair,” she said. “Personally, I never felt shame. But I did not appreciate the fact they were wanting me to feel shame.”

She said she is too busy these days to post on social media, and her followers on Instagram have stagnated at around 18,000, about where they were when she got into trouble.

She is not sure what she will do with her settlement money: Pay off her student loans, perhaps, or invest in the stock market. But she knows she would like to take a vacation. “Somewhere tropical, with a piña colada in my hand,” she said. “That’s where I see myself in the near future.”

Advertisement

Education

Judge Extends Block on N.I.H. Medical Research Cuts

Published

on

Judge Extends Block on N.I.H. Medical Research Cuts

A federal judge on Friday agreed to extend an order blocking the National Institutes of Health from reducing grant funding to institutions conducting medical and scientific research until she could come to a more lasting decision.

Judge Angel Kelley of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts had temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s cuts from taking effect earlier this month, with that hold set to expire on Monday. That teed up an urgent hearing on Friday in which states and associations representing those institutions urged her to consider halting the cuts more permanently.

The stakes of the lawsuit were put in stark relief during one portion of Friday’s hearing that focused on “irreparable harm,” in which Judge Kelley asked both sides to explain whether the suspension of the funds amounted to an irreversible blow to the universities and hospitals across the country that depend on the funding.

The N.I.H. has proposed cutting around $4 billion in grants it provides for “indirect costs,” which it has described as tangential expenditures for things like facilities and administrators, and which it said could be better spent on directly funding research. The proposal envisioned reducing funding for those indirect costs to a 15 percent rate to all institutions that receive funds, which a lawyer for the government said was in line with that of private foundations.

But the coterie of lawyers representing the states and research institutions argued to the judge that the direct and indirect costs are often intertwined.

Advertisement

One lawyer asked Judge Kelley to consider a scenario of a researcher doing experiments directly funded through an N.I.H. grant, and a worker disposing of hazardous medical waste produced by all the experiments being run at that facility.

“It is equally important to the research that both of those people are paid to do their work,” the lawyer said. “The research couldn’t happen without that — nevertheless, one is classified as a direct cost, one is an indirect cost.”

Lawyers for the plaintiffs ticked through an array of adverse effects that could result from the pause in funding.

They asked the judge to consider the ramifications of potential layoffs of highly skilled staff members, such as veterinary technicians that oversee animal research and hospital nurses. They warned of clinical trials on new drugs being paused. They argued that many institutions would be unable to bring back employees they had lost once experiments and trials were forced to stop.

Brian Lea, a lawyer representing the government, said on Friday that the broad effects mentioned at the hearing were largely speculative, part of a “nonspecific aura of urgency” that research institutions had drummed up without showing concrete damages.

Advertisement

With universities in the middle of admissions season, the plaintiff lawyers described a chaotic environment in which both schools and Ph.D. applicants would need to reassess whether the projects they planned to pursue would be feasible. And they expressed fear for smaller universities that were not likely to be able to fill the unanticipated gap left in their budgets.

Even at larger schools with hefty endowments, the promise of government funding had already influenced big investments, the plaintiff lawyers said.

They pointed to a $200 million neuroscience lab at the California Institute of Technology, finished in 2020, that the university expected to pay for in part through the funding.

“There’s going to be a hole in the research budget at Caltech, and actually a big one,” a lawyer said.

The plaintiff lawyers said that other groups not involved in the lawsuit, such as associations of dental and nursing schools, had also become invested in the outcome, fearing disruptions to their own operations.

Advertisement

“Are you willing to agree that the plaintiffs will suffer harm?” Judge Kelley asked the government’s lawyer after hearing the long list of examples marshaled by the groups suing.

“Not irreparable,” Mr. Lea replied.

He said the states and associations suing the government had other means of recovering the lost funding, such as suing under the Tucker Act, which allows groups to sue the government in contract claims. He added that the 15 percent cap was in line with what private foundations such as the Gates Foundation often agree to.

Earlier, Mr. Lea repeated the government’s claim that capping “indirect funds,” for costs like buildings, utilities and support staff, at 15 percent was simply designed to free up more money to be allocated directly to researchers.

“I want to be clear about one thing at the outset: This is not cutting down on grant funding,” he said. “This is about changing the slices of the pie, which falls squarely in the executive’s discretion.”

Advertisement

Lawyers suing to stop the cuts said that capping indirect funds at 15 percent across the board was arbitrary, a standard for challenging agency decisions. They argued that institutions of different sizes naturally have different needs when negotiating with the government, and forcing all to adapt to a 15 percent maximum was unreasonable.

“A lot of this is driven by economies of scale, right?” one of the lawyers said. “The larger the institution you have, the bigger the building you have, the more you can house multiple projects within that one building — that’s going to change your ratio of direct costs or indirect costs,” she said.

Continue Reading

Education

New York Ends Funding for 2 Yeshivas That Fail to Teach Basic Skills

Published

on

New York Ends Funding for 2 Yeshivas That Fail to Teach Basic Skills

A decade after allegations first surfaced that schools operated by New York’s Hasidic Jewish community were denying children a basic education, the state government is for the first time cutting off funding for schools it says have refused to improve.

The New York State Education Department will no longer provide crucial funding for two all-boys Hasidic schools in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and will ensure that all of their students are enrolled in different schools by the fall. The effective closure of the two schools, which are known as yeshivas, is the strongest action taken in New York to crack down on schools over their failure to comply with education law.

And it’s a move that many Hasidic leaders and even critics of the yeshiva system doubted the state would ever make.

That’s partially because of the long and tangled process that the state created to penalize schools found to be breaking the law, which mandates that all children receive an adequate secular education, even in private schools.

Resisting outside oversight into religious education has become perhaps the top political priority for the Hasidic community, which has long maintained a significant influence in local politics and tends to vote as a bloc.

Advertisement

The insular community’s yeshivas, which rely heavily on taxpayer dollars, teach religious lessons in Yiddish and Hebrew for most of the school day, and offer little instruction in English or math.

The two schools that the state is effectively closing are part of a larger group of yeshivas that have not made sufficient progress, said Rachel Connors, a spokeswoman for the Education Department. Most of those schools have not yet faced any consequences for failing to boost their secular education.

But the leaders of the two schools, Yeshiva Talmud Torah of Kasho and Yeshiva Bnei Shimon Yisroel of Sopron, which are housed in three locations in Williamsburg, refused even to meet with education officials to work on an improvement plan.

“In December 2024, the department wrote to noncompliant schools, inviting them to meet and urging them to re-engage in the process to avoid the consequences associated with final negative determinations,” Ms. Connors said in a statement. “Schools that did not re-engage have been deemed schools that do not provide compulsory education.”

The two yeshivas were part of an investigation into Hasidic schools that began after yeshiva graduates filed a complaint with the state in 2015, claiming that the education they had received had left them unprepared to navigate the world as adults.

Advertisement

When education officials in 2019 visited one of the Sopron locations, which is now effectively being shuttered, inspectors “did not observe any instruction, taught in English, in the core academic subjects of English, history, mathematics and science,” according to a report released by the city’s Education Department.

Spokespeople for a group that represents yeshivas did not respond to requests for comment. But an article published Friday in Yeshiva World News, a Hasidic news outlet, offered some insight into the community’s reaction.

“It is always wiser to make your case to government rather than to refuse to respond,” the editorial read. “That makes it seem like they had something to hide. The yeshivas should have demonstrated pride and confidence in their students.”

The editorial also noted that the yeshivas were not being judged on their curriculum or “approach to education.” Instead, their funding was being cut off because they had not engaged with the government.

Indeed, the state’s move, which was first reported by The Jerusalem Post and not publicized by the state’s Education Department, underscores how much some yeshivas have defied government efforts to bolster secular education.

Advertisement

Scrutiny of the schools ramped up following a 2022 New York Times investigation, which found that scores of all-boys Hasidic schools in Brooklyn and the lower Hudson Valley did not provide a basic secular education despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in public funding. The report also discovered that teachers in some yeshivas had used corporal punishment.

The following year, city and state education officials determined that 18 Hasidic yeshivas were not providing a basic nonreligious education.

The state, however, provided those schools with multiple opportunities to demonstrate their commitment to improving their secular studies.

A spokeswoman for Mayor Eric Adams, a longtime political ally of the Hasidic community, said that the city would defer to the state on this issue but otherwise declined to comment.

Adina Mermelstein Konikoff, the director of Yaffed, a group of former yeshiva students that supports secular education, said in a statement that she hoped the state’s move “serves as a wake-up call for other schools that continue to disregard essential academic standards.”

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Education

Covid Learning Losses

Published

on

Covid Learning Losses

Schoolchildren in Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania are still about half a year behind typical pre-Covid reading levels. In Florida and Michigan, the gap is about three-quarters of a year. In Maine, Oregon and Vermont, it is close to a full year.

This morning, a group of academic researchers released their latest report card on pandemic learning loss, and it shows a disappointingly slow recovery in almost every state. School closures during Covid set children back, and most districts have not been able to make up the lost ground.

One reason is a rise in school absences that has continued long after Covid stopped dominating daily life. “The pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami and it’s still rolling through schools,” Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist and a member of the research team, told me.

In today’s newsletter, I will walk through four points from the report, with charts created by my colleague Ashley Wu. I’ll also tell you the researchers’ recommendations for what schools should do now.

The new report — from scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford — compares performance across states, based on math and reading tests that fourth and eighth graders take. (A separate report, on national trends, came out last month.)

Advertisement

Today’s report shows a wide variety of outcomes. In the states that have made up the most ground, fourth and eighth graders were doing nearly as well last spring as their predecessors were doing five years earlier.

But the overall picture is not good. In a typical state, students last spring were still about half a year behind where their predecessors were in 2019. In a few states, the gap approaches a full year.

Here are the changes in reading performance:

Political leaders in red and blue America made different decisions during the pandemic. Many public schools in heavily Democratic areas stayed closed for almost a year — from the spring of 2020 until the spring of 2021. In some Republican areas, by contrast, schools remained closed for only the spring of 2020.

This pattern helps explains a partisan gap in learning loss: Students in blue states have lost more ground since 2019. The differences are especially large in math. Eight of the 10 states that have lost the most ground since 2019 voted Democratic in recent presidential elections. And eight of the 10 states with the smallest math shortfalls voted Republican.

Advertisement

I know some readers may wonder if blue states had bigger declines simply because they started from a higher point. After all, the states with the best reading and math scores have long been mostly blue. But that doesn’t explain the post-pandemic patterns. For example, New Jersey (a blue state) and Utah (a red state) both had high math scores in 2019, but New Jersey has fared much worse since then.

Pandemic learning loss has exacerbated class gaps and racial gaps. Lower-income students are even further behind upper-income students than they were five years ago, and Black students and Latino students are even further behind Asian and white students. “Children, especially poor children, are paying the price for the pandemic,” Kane said.

Other research, by Rebecca Jack of the University of Nebraska and Emily Oster of Brown, points to two core reasons. First, schools with a large number of poor students and Black or Latino students were more likely to remain closed for long periods of time. Second, a day of missed school tends to have a larger effect on disadvantaged students than others.

In the years before Covid, the U.S. education system had impressive success in reducing learning inequality, as I explained in a 2022 newsletter. But Covid erased much of that progress. “Educational inequality grew during the pandemic and remains larger now than in 2019,” Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the new report, said.

The authors of the report note that some school districts, including in poorer areas, have largely recovered from Covid learning loss. Among the standouts are Compton, Calif.; Ector County, Texas, which includes Odessa; Union City, N.J.; and Rapides Parish, La. The authors urge more study of these districts to understand what they’re doing right.

Advertisement

Early evidence suggests that after-school tutoring and summer school, subsidized by federal aid, made a difference. Intensive efforts to reduce absenteeism can also help.

One problem, the authors write, is that many schools have not been honest with parents about learning loss: “Since early in the recovery, the overwhelming majority of parents have been under the false impression that their children were unaffected.”

  • A federal judge said that the White House had defied his order to unfreeze billions of dollars in federal grants. The ruling sets up a power struggle between the judicial and executive branches.

  • Many of President Trump’s orders seem to violate laws. Some legal scholars argue that the U.S. is in the early stages of a constitutional crisis.

  • Trump often muses about running for a third term, which the Constitution does not allow. He tells advisers it’s a tactic to grab attention and irritate Democrats.

  • A Manhattan jury convicted three men of murder for drugging and robbing patrons of gay bars and clubs and luring them to their deaths. They seduced the victims, stole their phones and drained their credit cards.

  • A man has been charged in the 2003 murder of an 88-year-old woman on Long Island after new technology helped match his thumbprint to one found at the scene.

  • Musk and a group of investors made a $97 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI. OpenAI’s C.E.O., whom Musk has feuded with, mocked the offer.

  • More than 150 scientists compiled a report on the state of America’s land, water and wildlife. Now they’re trying to publish it, against the White House’s wishes.

  • Two storms are set to bring snow to Chicago and the Mid-Atlantic this week.

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency will erode public trust in the Treasury if it selectively suspends payments, five former Treasury secretaries write.

Ratings are critical to the television business; they help determine how much media companies can charge for commercials. But people now watch so many programs at so many different times in so many different ways that the industry can no longer agree on the best measurement. Read about the scramble for a solution.

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending