Tag: probes

  • Amazon Doc Probes Student Surveillance Harms – The 74

    Amazon Doc Probes Student Surveillance Harms – The 74

    School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here.

    It all began when school officials mistook a blurry image of a Mike and Ike candy for pills. 

    Pennsylvania teenager Blake Robbins found himself at the center of a digital surveillance controversy that gave rise to student privacy debates amid schools’ growing reliance on ed tech. 

    Spy High, a four-part documentary series streaming now on Amazon Prime, puts the focus on a lawsuit filed in 2010 after Robbins’ affluent Pennsylvania school district accused him of dealing drugs — a conclusion officials reached after they surreptitiously snapped a photo of him at home with the chewy candy in hand. 

    Blake Robbins, then a high school student in Pennsylvania’s affluent Lower Merion School District, speaks to the press about his 2010 lawsuit alleging covert digital surveillance by educators. (Unrealistic Ideas)

    The moment had been captured on the webcam of his school-issued laptop — one of some 66,000 covert student images collected by the district, including one of Robbins asleep in his bed. 

    I caught up with Spy High Director Jody McVeigh-Schultz to discuss why the 15-year-old case offers cautionary lessons about student surveillance gone awry and how it informs contemporary student privacy debates. 

    How student surveillance plays out today: Meet the gatekeepers of students’ private lives. | The 74

    In the news

    Courts block DEI directive: Three federal courts ordered temporary halts on Thursday to Trump’s efforts to cancel student diversity initiatives — and demands for states to pledge allegiance to the administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws. | The 74

    President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday that called for school discipline models “rooted in American values and traditional virtues,” taking aim at Obama- and Biden-era efforts to reduce racial disparities in suspensions and expulsions. | Politico

    U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks about a new autism study during a news conference on April 16, 2025. (Getty Images)

    ‘The history there is deeply, deeply disturbed’: Disability-rights advocates have decried plans at the National Institutes of Health to compile Amerians’ private medical records in a “disease registry” to track children and other people with autism. | The 74

    • Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., faced criticism for recent comments that many kids “were fully functional and regressed because of some environmental exposure into autism when they’re 2 years old.” | ABC News

    A new lawsuit filed by students at military-run schools accuses the Defense Department of harming their learning opportunities by banning books related to “gender ideology” or “divisive equity ideology,” including texts that refer to slavery and sexual harassment prevention. | Military Times

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    California lawmakers are demanding answers after Department of Homeland Security agents visited two Los Angeles elementary schools and asked to speak with five students who the federal agency said “arrived unaccompanied at the border.” | LAist

    ‘We all deserve reparations’: White House aide Stephen Miller said in an interview last week the country “used to have a functioning public school system” until it was destroyed by “open borders.” | The New Republic

    The Justice Department seized thousands of photos and videos in an investigation of a former University of Michigan assistant football coach who was indicted on allegations he hacked into student athletes’ private accounts to steal intimate images. | CBS Sports

    A 48-year-old mother was arrested and accused of bringing a gun to her daughter’s Indiana elementary school and threatening the girl’s teacher over a classroom assignment about flags. While discussing flags, the teacher reportedly referred to a rainbow flag in the classroom with the words “be kind.” | NBC News

    Banning ‘frontal nudity’: A Texas school district has removed lessons on Virginia history from an online learning platform for elementary school students because the commonwealth’s flag depicts the Roman goddess Virtus with an exposed breast. | Axios

    The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month to weigh Trump’s executive order eliminating birthright citizenship, bringing into question a 127-year-old court precedent. | NPR

    A class-action lawsuit accuses tech giant Google of amassing “thousands of data points that span a child’s life” without the consent of students or their parents. | Bloomberg Law

    A Florida teacher is out of a job after she called a student by their preferred name, allegedly violating a 2023 Florida law that requires schools to receive parental permission to refer to students by anything other than their legal names. | Click Orlando

    The vice president of the Buffalo, New York, chapter of Bikers Against Child Abuse was arrested and accused of sex crimes against children. | WIVB

    ICYMI @The74

    Supreme Court Shows Support for Parents Who Want Opt-Outs from LGBTQ Storybooks

    ‘There Goes My Son’s Help:’ Wave of Washington Head Starts Shut Down as Chaos Engulfs Federal Program

    State Officials Sue Trump Administration for Halting COVID School Aid

    Protecting Children Online Takes Technology, Human Oversight and Accountability

    Emotional Support

    Don’t even think about touching Matilda’s cactus.


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  • This week in 5 numbers: Education Department opens probes into over 50 colleges

    This week in 5 numbers: Education Department opens probes into over 50 colleges

    The number of colleges being investigated by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights over allegations their programs and scholarships have race-based restrictions. The agency opened the probes after issuing guidance last month that said colleges are barred from considering race in any of their policies.

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  • Education Department launches probes into over 50 colleges after anti-DEI guidance

    Education Department launches probes into over 50 colleges after anti-DEI guidance

    Dive Brief: 

    • The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched investigations into more than 50 colleges Friday over allegations that their programs and scholarships have race-based restrictions, a move in line with the agency’s broad crackdown on diversity initiatives. 
    • The civil rights investigations include prominent private colleges, such as Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as dozens of large public institutions, including Arizona State University and University of California, Berkeley. 
    • The investigations follow the Education Department’s Dear Colleague letter last month that says colleges are barred from considering race in their programs and policies. The guidance has drawn at least two lawsuits that accuse the letter of being unconstitutional. 

    Dive Insight: 

    The new investigations are just one of the aggressive moves the Education Department has taken to carry out President Donald Trump’s policy priorities to reshape higher education. 

    Trump and his administration’s top officials have not only threatened to pull funding from colleges over their diversity initiatives but also over the way they handle student protests and if they allow transgender women to play on teams corresponding with their gender identity. 

    Friday’s announcement escalates the Trump administration’s threats to pull federal funding over diversity efforts. 

    The Education Department said it is investigating allegations that 45 colleges have partnered with an organization for doctoral students that has race-based eligibility criteria. It is also looking into allegations that six have race-based scholarships and that one has a “program that segregates students on the basis of race.”

    The probes follow the Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter, which interpreted the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision against race-conscious admissions to also mean that colleges were prohibited from considering race in their policies and programs, including scholarships and housing. 

    The letter panned diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, describing them as discriminatory practices aimed at “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline.” The guidance threatened to pull federal funding from colleges that didn’t comply with the Education Department’s interpretation of civil rights law. 

    At least two lawsuits have challenged the legality of the guidance, arguing that the letter is unconstitutionally vague, undermines academic freedom and violates free speech rights. 

    The plaintiffs and other critics have pointed out that the 2023 Supreme Court decision only touched on admissions. 

    “OCR’s letter goes beyond that in a way that is simply off-base, encompassing virtually all programs at schools and universities, including race-neutral policies,” researchers at The Century Foundation, a left-leaning think tank, said in a post this week. 

    Both The Century Foundation and some legal scholars have cautioned colleges to not overly comply with the letter.

    “It is important to ensure that educational policy is not changed based on a letter that oversteps legal boundaries,” Liliana Garces, an educational leadership and policy professor at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote in a February op-ed for The Chronicle for Education.

    Two weeks later after the Education Department issued the Dear Colleague letter — amid widespread outcry — the agency appeared to walk back some of the most contested provisions of the guidance in a Q&A. 

    For instance, the Education Department said using words like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” would not necessarily mean colleges are violating civil rights law. The agency also noted that it doesn’t have the power to control classroom instruction. 

    Yet the American Federation of Teachers, one of the groups suing over the guidance, said the Q&A only made the letter “murkier.”

    The Education Department’s new round of investigations also follow dramatic cuts at the agency, which eliminated nearly half its workforce through mass firings and voluntary buyouts. Department leaders concentrated many of the cuts in OCR, the very division responsible for carrying out the new civil rights investigations.

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