University disciplines instructor over denial of recommendation letter for study in Israel

The University of Michigan is disciplining American Culture professor John Cheney-Lippold for rescinding his offer to write a letter of recommendation for a student as part of a boycott against the state of Israel, a letter obtained by The Michigan Daily confirmed. In the letter, dated Oct. 3, interim LSA Dean Elizabeth Cole criticized his actions and reaffirmed the University does not support this boycott.

“To be clear, there are no University departments participating in the boycott and in fact, the University formally and publicly opposes a boycott of Israeli academic institutions,” Cole wrote. “Your conduct has fallen far short of the University’s and College’s expectations for how LSA faculty interact with and treat students.”

The letter conveyed a strong warning that his behavior would not be tolerated in the future, in addition to imposing several academic sanctions. According to the letter, Cheney-Lippold will not be eligible for a salary increase for the 2018-2019 academic year, and his sabbatical eligibility and credits will be frozen for two years until the Fall 2020 semester.

“Please be advised that further conduct of this nature is subject to additional discipline, up to and including initiation of dismissal proceedings under Regents Bylaw 5.09,” Cole wrote. “Nothing in this letter is intended to discourage you from speaking on or advocating for matters that are of concern to you, which you are free to do. But interfering with a student’s academic aspirations, as you have done here, is not acceptable and will not be tolerated.”

This response comes a month after John Cheney-Lippold, a professor in the American Culture Department, rescinded his offer to write a letter of recommendation for LSA junior Abigail Ingber after realizing the letter would be used in an application to a study abroad program in Israel as well. Cheney-Lippold was accused of anti-Semitism and received death threats for his response.

However, Cheney-Lippold quickly affirmed he holds no ill will towards the student in question, and the boycott is about holding institutions accountable to better human rights abroad.

“The perennial claim of anti-Semitism I fully deny,” Cheney-Lippold said. “I have no bad will against the student, and I would have very gladly written a letter for any other graduate program or study abroad. The idea is that I am just one person, and by refusing to write that letter or at least rescinding it, I tried to keep to my conscious and to the fact that I believe that the boycott is a good tactic to enhance human rights and to get everyone in Israel-Palestine to have what international criminal court and the U.N. in general has requested, which is equal rights for everybody.”

SOURCE 






Mother who confronted her teenage daughter's bully before pulling her by the hair and repeatedly punching her in the face walks free

A mother who attacked her teenage daughter's bully avoided a conviction recorded against her name.

Nicola-Jane Jenks assaulted a 17-year-old girl near Mount Albert Grammar School in Auckland after she received a phone call from her daughter, who was terrified and upset.

She grabbed the teenager and repeatedly smacked her in the face, but a Magistrate at a District Court said the 'bad decision' shouldn't impact the rest of her life.

While Ms Jenks is apologetic for her actions, she told the NZ Herald her actions were the product of unrelenting bullying.

Her young daughter had been suffering panic attacks and avoiding school due to the verbal and physical abuse the bully was inflicting on her, and Ms Jenks was fed up with the school's inaction.

The teenager suffered some bruising and spent some time in hospital to monitor for internal injuries. The teenage victim claims she has been left feeling frightened and required counselling to get over the trauma of being attacked in front of her peers.

Judge Tony Fitzgerald said the close proximity to the school was a worrying factor in the case, as both girls should have felt safe in that environment, but noted there were a lot of redeeming qualities in Ms Jenks.

'You are 50 years old and you should have handled it a lot better than you did,' said Judge Fitzgerald. '[But] your remorse is deep and genuine.'

He chose to grant Ms Jenks a release without conviction, due to complications for future similar cases and for Ms Jenks own wellbeing. He said he believed it was proportionate to her offending. 

SOURCE 






DeVos tackles top-down federal education regs

Betsy DeVos understands that education is best handled when handled locally. Time after time, we have seen big government policies make it more difficult for teachers to teach their students, including the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act and the 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act.

Under the Trump Administration, the tide is turning. DeVos is using legal loopholes to turn the law against itself in order to give schools more latitude to teach their students based on what they know works rather than what the federal government wants to work. On DeVos’ “Rethink Schools” tour, she highlights the need for local, individualized curriculum rather than federal intervention. Now, Congress needs to match her energy and remove federal education regulations.

On DeVos’ “Rethink Schools” tour, she highlighted the need for local, individualized curriculum rather than federal intervention.

At the beginning of the year, the Department of Education (DoE) provided parents and schools with a guide to help them understand how to navigate a child’s education under ESSA, legislation that like its No Child Left Behind predecessor requires states to develop challenging academic standards.

The critical component of DeVos’ 2018 ESSA guide was not teaching parents and students how to conform to the ESSA, but instead how to work around it.

The ESSA was signed into law by President Obama in Dec. 2015 despite bodies of research which conclude that standardized tests don’t work. Cookie cutter formulas for teaching children have been proven ineffective and don’t allow teachers to teach how they know is best, instead creating a system where teachers just teach to the test.

DeVos’ new guide explains how parents can seek charter school and alternative public school admissions through ESSA grants. Perhaps most importantly, the guide outlines how states, with approval from the DoE, can waive certain ESSA requirements to meet individual student academic needs.

Under DeVos’ leadership more and more states are seeking these waivers. Her latest “Rethink Schools” campaign, takes her around the country to see how individual schools and districts are waiving their ESSA requirements in favor of policies that better cater to their student’s needs.

Last year, the tour began in the Midwest, where DeVos sought out schools in Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, and Indiana who took “out of the box” approaches toward education. This year, the tour continued through the South with visits to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, according to Education Week.

DeVos has met with schools helping students recover from addiction, a school based in a zoo for interactive learning, and rural school districts working together to Advanced Placement classes to their campuses.

DeVos has been providing parents with the guide discussed earlier in each of her visits.

DeVos noted in an Oct. 2018 press release, “Our focus is on returning power to the hands of parents, states and local educators, where it belongs. Parents should not have to parse through a 500-page legal document to understand how a law or policy affects their children’s education. Because states and districts have significant flexibility in how they meet the requirements of the law, parents should know and have a voice in how they use that flexibility to best help their children. These new resources will help empower those closest to students with information they need to be informed advocates as education decisions are made at the state and local level.”

DeVos has already granted New Hampshire and Louisiana permission to implement pilot programs that will assess students English language arts and social studies progress not based on randomly-selected texts in a test administered once during the school year but, instead, by assessing students on passages from books used in daily classroom instruction at regular intervals.

While these waivers and the “Rethink Schools” campaign are helping move control over education from the federal government back to teachers, parents, and local districts, the fact that these waivers are even necessary is part of the problem.

DeVos is approving these waivers and pilot programs now, but the next administration might not be so generous.

Congress must act to repeal the elements of the ESSA which force states into molds and prevent individualized learning. We already know this model does not work, so reforming it through Congress is the only way to ensure change sticks. DeVos has begun a great system that truly has allowed us to rethink schooling, but without Congressional action some might miss out on the lesson.

SOURCE