TALAS E-newsletter – January 27

A watchdog group is calling for the ouster of an adviser to the State Board of Education because he has echoed a racist conspiracy theory and has described Democrat Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election as a “literal coup.”

“So damn the COVID, the president must now lead his followers into America’s streets and squares,” the adviser, Stephen Balch, former director of The Institute for the Study of Western Civilization at Texas Tech University, wrote in November 2020.

As Texas heads into what’s likely to be a contentious review of how public school students learn history, one watchdog group is already calling for the removal of an advisor charged with providing input on social studies lessons.

The State Board of Education is at the beginning of a year-long review process of social studies standards. This comes after a legislative session where debate centered around how to eliminate “critical race theory” from the classroom. The resulting laws restricted how educators could address the history of racism in schools and approach current events.

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear challenges to the admissions process at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, presenting the most serious threat in decades to the use of affirmative action by the nation’s public and private colleges and universities.

U.S. high school students will use laptops rather than pencils and paper to take the SAT college admissions exam beginning in 2024, in a move to digitize the standardized test whose use has declined during the pandemic and as many universities no longer require it for admission.

Students who take the new digitized SAT – once a stress-inducing rite of passage for nearly all college-bound Americans – will have two instead of three hours to answer questions and will face shorter reading passages, College Board said in a statement on Tuesday. Test-takers may also use a calculator for the math portion to the exam.

How educators respond to students in the cycle of emotional and behavioral crisis — including when students are calm, when concerning behaviors peak and when those behaviors subside — is critical to minimizing and preventing intense situations in classrooms, according to Reesha Adamson, an associate professor in the Department of Counseling, Leadership and Special Education at Missouri State University.

The end came unceremoniously for Superintendent Scott Baker.

At a contentious and chaotic school board meeting in Virginia’s Spotsylvania County this month, members moved into an unplanned closed session and voted to fire Baker, who had served in the role for a decade. The board probably violated Virginia open meetings law, and it failed to identify an interim superintendent. But it offered an undeniable show of strength — proof that the Spotsylvania school system, like many others around the country, is entering a new era, under new power.

Children’s publisher Lil’ Libros, created by two Los Angeles moms and friends with the goal of promoting bilingual education, has acquired worldwide rights to a series of five STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) themed books in Spanish and English written by Dr. Ellen Ochoa, the American engineer who became the first Latina woman to go to space.