Tag: Efforts

  • ‘A shell of itself’: Federal judge pauses efforts to wind down Education Department

    ‘A shell of itself’: Federal judge pauses efforts to wind down Education Department

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    The U.S. Department of Education is temporarily barred from carrying out an executive order to shut down the agency and must reinstate employees who were fired as part of a mass reduction in force in March, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

    In the preliminary injunction in State of New York v. McMahon, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun ordered that the department be “restored to the status quo” prior to the day President Donald Trump retook office.

    The agency’s actions since show no evidence that its workforce reductions have improved efficiency or that the agency is making progress in working with Congress to close the department, Joun said. 

    “The supporting declarations of former Department employees, educational institutions, unions, and educators paint a stark picture of the irreparable harm that will result from financial uncertainty and delay, impeded access to vital knowledge on which students and educators rely, and loss of essential services for America’s most vulnerable student populations,” his ruling stated.

    Joun also said the Education Department is prohibited from carrying out President Donald Trump’s March 21 directive to transfer management of the federal student loans portfolio and special education management and oversight out of the Education Department.

    “A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all,” Joun wrote. “This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself.”

    The preliminary injunction requires the agency to submit a report to the court within 72 hours of the order, outlining all the steps it is taking to comply, and to do so “every week thereafter until the Department is restored to the status quo prior to January 20, 2025.”

    Thursday’s ruling is a setback to the Trump administration’s goals of reducing the size and scope of the federal government. The ambitions are to give more flexibility and decision-making power to the states, supporters of the administration action said.

    Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the Education Department, said the agency will challenge the ruling “on an emergency basis.”

    “Once again, a far-left Judge has dramatically overstepped his authority, based on a complaint from biased plaintiffs, and issued an injunction against the obviously lawful efforts to make the Department of Education more efficient and functional for the American people,” Biedermann said in an emailed statement Thursday. 

    Biedermann added, “This ruling is not in the best interest of American students or families.”

    Higher education advocates, on the other hand, celebrated the ruling.

    Today, the court rightly rejected one of the administration’s very first illegal, and consequential, acts: abolishing the federal role in education,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in a Thursday statement. Most Americans and states “want to keep the education department because it ensures all kids, not just some, can get a shot at a better life,” she said.

    The legal challenge began March 13, when the attorneys general in 20 states and the District of Columbia sued the Education Department to halt the mass workforce reductions announced March 11. 

    About half of the agency’s 4,133 employees were let go or accepted buy outs. Almost a third of the affected employees had worked in one of three offices within the Education Department: Federal Student Aid, the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute for Education Sciences. 

    Later that month, Trump signed an executive order at a White House ceremony that directed U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin closing down the agency to the “maximum extent appropriate.”

    My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department,” Trump said at the March 20 signing ceremony. “We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible.”

    McMahon, during several appearances on Capitol Hill, has acknowledged that only Congress has the authority to close the agency and said she is working with lawmakers to do so.

    Source link

  • ‘A shell of itself’: Federal judge pauses efforts to wind down Education Department

    ‘A shell of itself’: Federal judge pauses efforts to wind down Education Department

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    The U.S. Department of Education is temporarily barred from carrying out an executive order to shut down the agency and must reinstate employees who were fired as part of a mass reduction in force in March, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

    In the preliminary injunction in State of New York v. McMahon, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun ordered that the department be “restored to the status quo” prior to the day President Donald Trump retook office.

    The agency’s actions since show no evidence that its workforce reductions have improved efficiency or that the agency is making progress in working with Congress to close the department, Joun said. 

    “The supporting declarations of former Department employees, educational institutions, unions, and educators paint a stark picture of the irreparable harm that will result from financial uncertainty and delay, impeded access to vital knowledge on which students and educators rely, and loss of essential services for America’s most vulnerable student populations,” his ruling stated.

    Joun also said the Education Department is prohibited from carrying out President Donald Trump’s March 21 directive to transfer management of the federal student loans portfolio and special education management and oversight out of the Education Department.

    “A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all,” Joun wrote. “This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself.”

    The preliminary injunction requires the agency to submit a report to the court within 72 hours of the order, outlining all the steps it is taking to comply, and to do so “every week thereafter until the Department is restored to the status quo prior to January 20, 2025.”

    Thursday’s ruling is a setback to the Trump administration’s goals of reducing the size and scope of the federal government. The ambitions are to give more flexibility and decision-making power to the states, supporters of the administration action said.

    Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the Education Department, said the agency will challenge the ruling “on an emergency basis.”

    “Once again, a far-left Judge has dramatically overstepped his authority, based on a complaint from biased plaintiffs, and issued an injunction against the obviously lawful efforts to make the Department of Education more efficient and functional for the American people,” Biedermann said in an emailed statement Thursday. 

    Biedermann added, “This ruling is not in the best interest of American students or families.”

    Public school supporters, on the other hand, celebrated the ruling.

    Today, the court rightly rejected one of the administration’s very first illegal, and consequential, acts: abolishing the federal role in education,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in a Thursday statement. Most Americans and states “want to keep the education department because it ensures all kids, not just some, can get a shot at a better life,” she said.

    The legal challenge began March 13, when the attorneys general in 20 states and the District of Columbia sued the Education Department to halt the mass workforce reductions announced March 11. 

    About half of the agency’s 4,133 employees were let go or accepted buy outs. Almost a third of the affected employees had worked in one of three offices within the Education Department: Federal Student Aid, the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute for Education Sciences. 

    Later that month, Trump signed an executive order at a White House ceremony that directed U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon to begin closing down the agency to the “maximum extent appropriate.”

    My administration will take all lawful steps to shut down the department,” Trump said at the March 20 signing ceremony. “We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible.”

    McMahon, during several appearances on Capitol Hill, has acknowledged that only Congress has the authority to close the agency and said she is working with lawmakers to do so.

    Source link

  • In a world of tech, human-led efforts may be the best school safety tool

    In a world of tech, human-led efforts may be the best school safety tool

    The Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms, is investigating the unintended consequences of AI-powered surveillance at schools. Members of the Collaborative are AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

    RIGBY, Idaho — Four years ago, a sixth grader in Rigby, Idaho, shot and injured two peers and a custodian at a middle school. The tragedy prompted school officials to reimagine what threat prevention looks like in the approximately 6,500-student district.

    Now, student-run Hope Squads in Rigby schools uplift peers with homemade cards and assemblies. Volunteer fathers patrol hallways as part of Dads on Duty. A team of district staff, counselors, social workers and probation officers gathers to discuss and support struggling students. Thanks to a new cellphone ban, students are off screens and talking to each other. The positive results of these combined efforts have been measurable.

    “We’ve helped change … lives,”said Brianna Vasquez, a senior at Rigby Highand member of her school’s Hope Squad. “I’ve had friends who have been pulled out of the hole of depression and suicidal thoughts because of [the Hope Squad].”

    School shootings like Rigby’s have driven America’s educatorstotry to prevent similar harm. Many districts in the U.S. have turned to technology — especially digital surveillance — as the antidote. Not everyone is sold on that approach, as there can be issues, including with privacy and security.Without broad agreement on which strategies do work best, some districts are trying a braided approach — using a combination of technology, on-the-ground threat assessment teams, and other mental health supports.

    “If you’re sitting in the shoes of a district leader, taking a multi-pronged approach is probably very sensible,” said Jennifer DePaoli, a senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute, who has studied school safety.

    Related: Schools are surveilling students to prevent gun violence or suicide. The lack of privacy comes at a cost

    In Rigby, educators lean toward human interaction. Artificial intelligence and digital surveillance systems are perhapsless likely to identify who is eating alone at lunch or withdrawing from friends.

    “It’s all about culture,” said Chad Martin, the superintendent of Jefferson County School District in Rigby. “It starts with that — just having a friend, having a group of friends, having a connection somewhere.”

    Rigby school leaders use technology to detect threats, including an app, STOPit, which allows students to anonymously report safety concerns, and surveillance software that monitors students’ keystrokes and looks out for troubling terms. Martin said those are helpful, but must be used in concert with human-led initiatives.

    The district’s version of a threat assessment team, which meets monthly, has been one of the most useful tools, Martin said. In those group conversations, school staff may realize that a student who’s been missing class has a parent who was recently arrested, for example.

    “Everybody has a little piece of information,” Martin said. “So the goal is to put those people in the same room and be able to paint a picture that can help us support kids.”

    Chad Martin, superintendent of Jefferson County School District, said student relationships remain the most powerful tool in keeping school safe. Credit: John Roark

    Although Idaho does not mandate the use of in-school threat assessment teams, 11 states in the U.S. do. In 2024, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that 71 percent of U.S. public schools have a threat assessment team in place.

    A leading model,used by thousands of school districts, is the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG). These were developed by forensic clinical psychologist Dewey Cornell after he spent years studying homicides committed by children or teens, including school shootings. He said digital surveillance technology can offer school districts “an illusion of safety and security.”

    With CSTAG, school-based teams use a five-step process when threats emerge. The team includes a school administrator, a counselor or psychologist, a social worker, a staff member focused on special education, and a school resource officer. In serious situations, the group might suspend or move a student elsewhere while conducting mental health screenings,a law enforcement investigation, and development of a safety plan. Ultimately, that plan would be put into effect.

    If implemented correctly, Cornell says, this type of approach is less punitive and more rooted in intervention. Instead of relying only on technology, Cornell and his threat assessment guidelines recommend adding humans who can make decisions with schools as situations emerge. He points to a recent study in Florida, one of the states where threat assessment teams are mandatory. Threats investigated by those teams “resulted in low rates of school removal and very low rates of law enforcement actions,” according to the report authored by Cornell and fellow University of Virginia researchers.

    “If you’re a school counselor and you can work with a troubled kid and help get them on the right track, you’re not just preventing a school shooting, but you’re more likely to be preventing a shooting that would occur somewhere else and maybe years in the future,” he said.

    Threat assessment teams — whether using the CSTAG model or another form — haven’t been immune from scrutiny. Complaints have emerged about them operating without student or parent knowledge, or without staff members to represent children with special needs. Criticism has also included concern about discrimination against Black and Hispanic students.

    DePaoli, from the Learning Policy Institute, says more research is needed to determine whether they successfully identify threats and provide students with appropriate support. She suspects it boils down to implementation.

     “If you are being required to do these, you need to be doing them with so much training and so much support,” she said.

    Related: Do protocols for school safety infringe on disability rights?

    The Jordan School District in Utah uses the CSTAG model. Travis Hamblin, director of student services, credits the “human connection” with strengthening the district’s approach to handling threats and, as a result, boosting student safety and well-being.

    Earlier this school year, the district received an alert through Bark, a digital monitoring tool that scans students’ school-issued Google suite accounts. It flagged a middle schooler’s account, which contained a hand drawn picture of a gun that had been uploaded.

    The notification mobilized the school’s threat assessment team. By using the CSTAG decision-making process, the team determined the student did not intend any harm, Hamblin says.

    Rigby High’s Hope Squad — and those like it nationwide — aim to foster connection and reduce the risk of suicide. Credit: John Roark

    The school leaders didn’t unnecessarily escalate the situation, he says. After their assessment, they chalked it up to middle school immaturity and asked the student to avoid such drawings in the future.

    “When you say, ‘Why did you do that?’ And they say, ‘I don’t know.’ That’s the truth, right? That’s the gospel truth,” Hamblin said.

    He shares this example to illustrate how the district marries technology-related monitoring with human-led threat assessment. The district employs someone — a former school administrator and counselor — to field the Bark alerts and communicate with school staff. And administrators from every school in the district have undergone threat assessment training, along with select members of their staff.

    “A digital tool for us is a tool. It’s not the solution,”  Hamblin said. “We believe that people are the solution.”

    Related: Schools are sending more kids to psychiatrists out of fears of campus violence, prompting concern from clinicians

    In Rigby, one of those solution people is Ernie Chavez, whose height makes him stick out in a hallway streaming with middle schoolers. He’s part of Dads on Duty, a program that brings in parents to help monitor and interact with students during passing periods and lunch.

    Throughout the school, students reach out to Chavez for high-fives. On one February afternoon, he was greeted with applause and cheers. “I don’t know what that was about,” he said with a smile.

    Similarly, the district’s Hope Squads, in place since 2021, have become an active presence inside the school.

    The student-led coalitions aim to foster connection and reduce the risk of suicide. Thousands of schools across the United States and in Canada have implemented Hope Squads, but in Rigby, the mission of violence prevention has become personal.

    Ernie Chavez monitors the hallways at Rigby Middle School on Feb. 5 for the Dads on Duty program. Credit: John Roark

    “We refer … students every year to counselors, and those students go from some of the worst moments in their life (to getting help),” Vasquez said. “We build the connection between adults and faculty to the student.”

    Members of the Hope Squad notice peers who seem down or isolated and reach out with a greeting, or sometimes a handmade card.

    “We just reach out and let them know that people in the community are there for them, just to show them that we care and they’re not alone,” said Dallas Waldron, a Rigby High senior and Hope Squad member.

    The groups also plan assemblies and special events, including, for example, a week of activities themed around mental health awareness.

    Emilie Raymond, a sophomore at Rigby High, said the shooting made it clear “that people need to feel included and they need to find that hope.”

    Another change at Rigby schools is a cell phone ban that was put in place this school year.

    Before the ban,students were “sitting in the corners, isolated, staring at a screen,” said Ryan Erikson, Principal at Rigby Middle School. Now, “they’re playing games, they’re goofing off … they’re actually conversing.”

    While Jefferson County School District’s approach to stemming violence is robust, “it’s not perfect,” Martin, the superintendent, said. “It’s still life. That’s just the reality of it, we’re still going to have things come up that we haven’t prepared for or weren’t on our radar. But we address them and just try to do whatever we can to support kids.”

    Carly Flandro is a reporter with Idaho Education News. Jackie Valley is a reporter with The Christian Science Monitor.

    Contact Hechinger managing editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CarolineP.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org.

    This story about school threat assessments was produced by the Education Reporting Collaborative, a coalition of eight newsrooms that includes AL.com, The Associated Press, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News, The Hechinger Report, Idaho Education News, The Post and Courier in South Carolina, and The Seattle Times.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

    Source link

  • How Trump is disrupting efforts by schools and colleges to combat climate change

    How Trump is disrupting efforts by schools and colleges to combat climate change

    This week I dug into how the Trump administration’s anti-climate blitz is hampering schools’ and colleges’ ability to green their operations, plus a new report on the California wildfires’ impact on students. Thank you for reading, and reply to this email to be in touch. — Caroline Preston

    LeeAnn Kittle helps oversee the Denver public school district’s work to reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2050.

    In January, her job got a lot tougher. 

    Denver expected to receive tax credits via the Inflation Reduction Act for an additional 25 electric school buses. President Donald Trump attempted to freeze clean energy funds through the IRA in his first days in office. Kittle, the district’s executive director of sustainability, also considered applying for tax credit-like payments for energy-efficient heat pumps for the district’s older buildings that lack air conditioning. And she’d intended to apply this spring for a nearly $12 million grant through Renew America’s Schools, a Department of Energy program to help schools become more energy efficient. Staff working on that program have left and its future is uncertain.  

    “I think we’re all in shock,” said Kittle. “It’s like someone put us in a snow globe and shook us up, and now we’re asked to stand straight. And it’s like I don’t know how to stand straight right now.”

    Since January, the Trump administration has launched a broadside against efforts to reduce gases that cause climate change, including by freezing clean energy spending, slashing environmental staff and research, scrubbing the words “climate change” from websites, and rethinking decades of science showing the harms of global warming to human health and the planet. Experts and education leaders say those actions — some of which have been challenged in court — are disrupting, but not extinguishing, efforts by schools and colleges to curtail their emissions and reduce their toll on the planet.

    Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

    At the start of the year, the State University of New York was awarded $15 million to buy 350 electric vehicle charging stations. “We have yet to see the dollars,” said its chancellor, John B. King Jr. A webinar on the Department of Transportation grant program, which is funded by the bipartisan infrastructure act, was canceled. “It’s been radio silence,” said Carter Strickland, the SUNY chief sustainability officer. 

    The SUNY system, which owns a staggering 40 percent of New York State’s public buildings, had also planned to apply for IRA payments for a variety of projects to electrify campuses, reduce pollution and improve energy efficiency. In November, it applied for approximately $1.45 million for an Oneonta campus project that uses geothermal wells to provide heating and cooling. It still expects to get that money since the project is complete and the IRA remains law, but it can no longer count on payments for newer projects, King said. 

    “What the IRA did was turbocharged everything and gave many more players the ability to see themselves as part of a clean energy economy,” said Timothy Carter, president of Second Nature, a group that supports climate work in higher education. But the confusion that the Trump administration has sowed — even though the IRA has not been repealed — means both K-12 and higher education institutions are reconsidering clean energy projects. 

    There’s no count of how many colleges have sought funding through the IRA and bipartisan infrastructure act-funded programs, said Carter, but the work is spread across red and blue states, and some education systems have dozens of projects under construction. The University of California system, for example, filed applications for more than 70 projects, including a $1 billion project to replace UC Davis’s leaky and inefficient heating and cooling system and a project at UC Berkeley to phase out an old power plant and replace it with a microgrid. 

    “We remain hopeful that funding will be provided per the program provisions,” David Phillips, associate vice president for capital programs at the University of California, wrote in an email. 

    Sara Ross, co-founder of Undaunted K12, which helps school districts green their operations, said her group tells school leaders that for now, “energy tax credits are still the law of the land.” 

    But she expects those credits could be eliminated in the new tax bill that Congress is negotiating this year. 

    In the past, entities that begin construction on projects before any changes in a new law go into effect have been grandfathered in and still received that money, she said. “No promises,” Ross said, but historically that’s how such tax credit scenarios have worked. She said some school districts are speeding up projects to beat that possible deadline, while others are abandoning them.

    There is some political movement to preserve clean energy tax credits. Roughly 85 percent of the private-sector dollars that have gone into clean energy projects are in GOP-led districts, according to a report last year. Some GOP lawmakers have advocated for maintaining that funding, which has contributed to a surge in renewable energy jobs.  

    Steven Bloom, assistant vice president of government relations with the American Council on Education, said that gives supporters of the IRA some hope. But he said that many higher education institutions are facing so much pain and uncertainty from other Trump administration actions, like the National Institutes of Health’s plan to slash overhead payments and investigations into alleged antisemitism, that unfortunately “climate investments may get pushed down the ladder of priorities in the near term.” 

    Related: How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for combating climate change

    Another important vehicle for greening schools, the Renew America’s Schools grant program, was started in 2022 with $500 million for school districts. Many of the Department of Energy staff working on that effort have left, Ross said, and some school districts have not heard back about the status of funding for their projects.    

    In Massachusetts, the Lowell school district won a prize through the Renew America program that could unlock up to $15 million to help the district improve its aged facilities. The district’s facilities for the most part lack air conditioning and schools have been closed on occasion due to high temperatures.

    Katherine Moses, the city of Lowell’s sustainability director, wrote in an email that the district had so far pocketed $300,000 that it is using for energy audits to identify inefficiencies and lay the groundwork for a larger investment. It’s unclear what could happen beyond that and if the district will receive more money. She said Lowell is proceeding according to the requirements of the grant “until we hear otherwise from DOE.” 

    More than 3,400 school districts have applied for money through programs created under the bipartisan infrastructure law and the IRA to electrify school buses. After a federal judge ruled against the administration’s freeze on clean energy spending, grants through those programs appear to have been unfrozen and districts have been able to access payments, said Sue Gander, director of the electric school bus initiative with the nonprofit World Resources Institute. 

    But rebates for electric buses are still stalled, she said. Districts are submitting forms to receive rebates, she said, “but there’s no communication coming back to them through the system about the status of their award or any indication that any payment that may have been requested is being provided.”  

    The Transportation and Energy departments and the Environmental Protection Agency, which runs the Clean School Bus Program, did not respond by deadline to requests for comment for this article.  

    King, of SUNY, noted that climate change is already negatively affecting young people and contributing to worsening disasters like floods and fires. For some faculty, staff and students, the backtracking from climate action at the federal level is stirring disappointment and fear, he said. “There is this very intense frustration that as a society we are stopping efforts to deal with what is truly an existential threat.” 

    Contact Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CPreston.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org

    This story about clean energy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our climate and education newsletter.

    What I’m reading:

    My colleague Neal Morton traveled to northwest Colorado for a story on how phasing out coal-powered plants affects school budgets and career prospects for graduates. School districts haven’t done enough to plan for those changes or prepare students for alternate careers, he writes, and renewable energy projects are not popping up fast enough to smooth the financial pain.  

    Some 725,000 students at more than 1,000 schools faced school closures during the California wildfires in January, according to a new report from Undaunted K12 and EdTrust. The fire had a disproportionate impact on students living in poverty and from underrepresented backgrounds, the report says: Three-quarters of the affected students came from low-income households, and 66 percent were Hispanic. 

    The U.S. Coast Guard Academy removed the words “climate change” from its curriculum, reports Inside Climate News. The academy falls under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, whose new director, Kristi Noem, issued a directive in February to “eliminate all climate change activities and the use of climate change terminology in DHS policies and programs.”

    Schools with satisfactory heating systems reduce student absences by 3 percent and suspensions by 6 percent, and record a 5 percent increase in math scores, according to a study by researchers at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Schools with satisfactory cooling systems see an increase of 3 percent in reading scores. 

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CPreston.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org.

    This story about clean energy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our climate and education newsletter.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

    Source link

  • Student-Athlete Unionization Efforts Withdrawn Prior to Second Trump Administration

    Student-Athlete Unionization Efforts Withdrawn Prior to Second Trump Administration

    by CUPA-HR | January 21, 2025

    Two efforts to extend collective bargaining rights to college athletes have been withdrawn in recent weeks in anticipation of the Trump administration taking control of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

    On December 31, 2024, the Dartmouth men’s basketball team withdrew their petition to unionize. Members of the team overwhelmingly voted in March 2024 to join the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). The vote came one month after an NLRB regional director ruled that the players were employees of the college and were thus eligible to unionize.

    Additionally, on January 10, 2025, the National College Players Association (NCPA) withdrew its case against the University of Southern California, the Pac-12 Conference and the NCAA. In the original complaint, the NCPA claimed the three plaintiffs violated the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) by misclassifying the student-athletes as non-employees. They also argued all three plaintiffs were joint employers of the student-athletes.

    Both of these efforts were pursued after NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo issued a memorandum arguing that student-athletes are employees under the NLRA and are therefore afforded all statutory protections as prescribed under the law. The incoming administration will likely rescind the memorandum, halting or at least hindering unionization efforts among student-athletes.

    The decision to withdraw both petitions is likely meant to avoid an unfavorable outcome and precedent from a soon-to-be Republican-controlled NLRB. The SEIU explained in a statement following their withdrawal request that they sought “to preserve the precedent set by this exceptional group of young people on the men’s varsity basketball team.”

    CUPA-HR will keep members apprised of any updates related to student-athlete employment classification and unionization.



    Source link

  • Industrious Efforts

    Industrious Efforts

    The consultation on the Industrial Strategy Green Paper closed at the end of November. Phil Ward, Director of the Eastern Arc research consortium (which comprises the universities of East Anglia, Essex, Kent and Sussex), welcomes the intentions of the Strategy, but questions some of the details.

    Since the last Industrial Strategy was launched in 2017 we have had a dozen strategies and policies seeking to steer the economy and encourage growth. Many of these have had strong research and development elements to them, including the R&D Roadmap (2020), the Plan for Growth (2021), the Integrated Review (2021), the Levelling Up White Paper (2022), and the Science and Technology Framework (2023).

    Given this, do we really need another strategy? For the Government, the answer is clear: it wants to put flesh on the bones of its central mission (to ‘secure the highest sustained growth in the G7’), but also to draw a line under the snowdrift of strategies that defined the last seven years. 

    The resulting green paper is a serious piece of work by a Government that wants to be judged on its seriousness. The authors have clearly done their homework. This is a sensible framework of growth with eight unsurprising ‘growth-driving sectors’ at its heart. 

    Having said that, there are some surprising omissions and concerning inclusions. 

    The first omission is an explicit commitment to working with universities in developing and implementing the strategy. Yes, it praises (five times) the UK’s first-class, world-class and global universities, but it doesn’t go as far as to name the sector as stakeholders with whom it will develop the strategy, despite listing others on 10 separate occasions.

    It is a small thing, and possibly an oversight – I’ve certainly talked to academics who have been involved in conversations with the authors – but in mentioning business, unions, mayors and experts, it is surprising that universities do not explicitly appear. 

    Universities are essential to the success of the Industrial Strategy; they contribute more than £265bn to the UK economy, £63bn of which is around research and knowledge exchange, and are a key part of the R&D supply chain, through their symbiotic relationship with commercial research, and their provision of a pipeline of talent to the eight growth sectors. 

    Other omissions are less surprising. There is a Nelsonian determination not to look at or recognise the positives of the strategies penned under the last Government. It would have been good to at least have acknowledged and ideally built upon the work that was previously undertaken, which provided a lodestar for businesses and universities gearing up to meet the nation’s needs. 

    It also feels like a trick is being missed: for instance, in proposing a statutory Industrial Strategy Council – a very positive move – there is no reference to the work done by the former (non-statutory) ISC that was captained by Andy Haldane and existed between 2018-21. In dismissing previous strategies as ‘too short-lived’, there is a danger of adding to the churn.

    Where the Strategy did adhere to a familiar trope was in framing the greater south east (GSE) as both a poster child and bete noire for regional success. This is too broad a view of a complex region that contains both productivity hotspots and areas of significant and entrenched deprivation. One hides the other: the M4 corridor and the Golden Triangle mask the deprivation of its coastal communities, many of which are in the top 20 in terms of indices of multiple deprivation, and one of which (Jaywick in Essex) is the most deprived in the country. There is a need for a more nuanced and granular understanding of need and potential, and recognising that in parts of the GSE there is as much need for Government investment as elsewhere in the country. 

    The most concerning inclusion, however, is an explicit commitment to devolve ‘significant powers’ to mayoral combined authorities (MCAs), ‘giving them the tools they need to grow their sectoral clusters and improve the local business environment through ambitious Local Growth Plans.’

    MCAs cover less than half the population, and none in the Eastern Arc region. What will happen to those of us outside of MCAs, including universities? Jim McMahon, the Minister for Housing, Communities and Local Government, is keen to push on ‘determined devolution’, and there is an expectation that the Devolution White Paper, which was due to be published at the end of November but has been pushed back to the end of the year, will include measures to set out a new, more directive framework to speed up devolution deals. 

    McMahon has been quoted as saying that the Government intends to create ‘foundational combined authorities’ as a precursor to regions moving to MCAs. But what will this mean in practice? The Centre for Cities has concerns that this will create ‘confused’ geographies, and risk adding to bureaucracy rather than removing it. MCAs were intended to meet the specific needs of urban geographies, and are not necessarily appropriate for those regions whose populations are a mix of urban and rural.

    Even if this framework is successful, it will take time. For now, how will universities and the 50 percent of the population outside of MCAs be affected, and how should they work to influence and implement the Strategy? As the Devolution Bill makes its way through Parliament, will a two-tier approach emerge? 

    There is much to like in the IS Green Paper, but its success will rely on ironing out some of these details. I hope that the consultation, which closed at the end of November, will be a serious step in informing this process, and that the resulting white paper will offer a clear, equitable and inclusive way forward, with universities — regardless of their geography — acknowledged and accepted to be a key part of the process, as regional agents for positive change. 

    Get our updates via email

    Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

    The post Industrious Efforts appeared first on HEPI.

    Source link