Tag: remains

  • Oklahoma religious charter remains blocked in SCOTUS split

    Oklahoma religious charter remains blocked in SCOTUS split

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    The nation’s first religious public charter school will not be able to open its doors in Oklahoma after a 4-4 split in the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday morning upheld the state supreme court’s ruling that blocked the school.

    The high court did not issue written opinions in the case.

    In its June 2024 ruling in St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, a six-justice majority of the Oklahoma Supreme Court sided with state Attorney General Genter Drummond, writing that the virtual public charter school’s creation would violate the Oklahoma Constitution and the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. St. Isidore was originally scheduled to open for the 2024-25 school year.

    “Enforcing the St. Isidore Contract would create a slippery slope and what the framers’ warned against — the destruction of Oklahomans’ freedom to practice religion without fear of governmental intervention,” the Oklahoma court’s majority wrote in the decision.

    If the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in favor of St. Isidore, the high-profile religious liberty case could have opened the door for a wave of other publicly funded religious schools. The split decision, however, leaves no national precedent on the question of whether religious schools can participate in public charter school programs without violating the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

    Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the case.

    St. Isidore is “disappointed” that the decision to block the school’s opening was upheld “without explanation” from the U.S. Supreme Court, said Archbishop of Oklahoma City Rev. Paul Coakley and Bishop of Tulsa Rev. David Konderla, in a joint statement Thursday.

    Given this latest ruling, Coakley and Konderla said they are exploring alternative options to offer a virtual Catholic education “to all persons” in Oklahoma and remain committed to parental choice in education.

    The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board, which initially approved St. Isidore’s contract in October 2023, will respect the Supreme Court’s authority following its split decision to uphold the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s ruling, said the board’s Executive Director Rebecca Wilkinson, in a Thursday statement.

    “The split decision of the court affirms this was indeed a complicated matter with a wide spectrum of views on the appropriate relationship between education, public funding, and religious institutions in our state and country,” Wilkinson said. “The Statewide Charter School Board remains committed to upholding our constitutional responsibilities and the highest standards of transparency and excellence. We will move forward in that vein, ensuring our policies and practices reflect both the rule of law and commitment to all students.”

    Drummond said in a Thursday statement that the Supreme Court’s decision is a “resounding victory for religious liberty and for the foundational principles that have guided our nation since its founding.”

    “I have always maintained that we must faithfully uphold the Constitution, even when it requires us to make difficult decisions,” Drummond said. “I will continue upholding the law, protecting our Christian values, and defending religious liberty — regardless of how difficult the battle may be.”

    Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters spoke out against the Supreme Court’s move, adding in a Thursday statement that he will always oppose “religious discrimination” and that all children in Oklahoma should be free to choose the best school to attend, whether that’s “religious or otherwise.”

    “Allowing the exclusion of religious schools from our charter school program in the name of 19th century religious bigotry is wrong,” Walters said in the statement sent by First Liberty Institute, a nonprofit law firm focused on First Amendment cases on religion.

    Still, it seems likely the issues involving the First Amendment’s religious clauses will eventually return to the U.S. Supreme Court, “perhaps in a case better suited for resolution,” said Thomas Jipping, a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation, a national conservative think tank.

    While it may not be the last time the Supreme Court takes on a case over religious charter schools, “today’s outcome offers clarity for families and educators,” said Starlee Coleman, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, in a statement.

    About 8.1% of all public schools are charters. These schools serve 3.7 million enrolled students, of whom two-thirds are from low-income, Black or Latino communities, according to NAPCS.

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  • Teacher AI training remains uneven despite uptick

    Teacher AI training remains uneven despite uptick

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    Dive Brief:

    • Disparities in artificial intelligence implementation at the school district level appear to be persisting among low- and high-poverty districts, according to a recent survey by Rand Corp. 
    • Between 2023 and 2024, the overall percentage of all districts training teachers on AI more than doubled from 23% to 48%. Still, low-poverty districts were far more likely to provide such training in fall 2024 than high-poverty districts at 67% vs. 39%.
    • Based on districts’ reported fall 2025 plans, Rand projects this gap won’t go away in the near future even as more districts provide training. This means districts serving students in high-poverty schools will “likely need additional support to prepare their teachers for AI,” researchers wrote.

    Dive Insight:

    Rand’s findings back up heightened fears that inequities will worsen when it comes to schools’ implementation of AI. These challenges come as the Trump administration has moved to shutter the U.S. Department of Education and has “abolished” the agency’s Office of Educational Technology. 

    For three decades, OET pushed at the federal level for equitable access to technology and developed resources to guide its use in schools. Those efforts included the release of several resources for schools and technology leaders on responsibly using AI in classrooms. Without the office, former OET employees said, it’s unclear how school districts with fewer resources will be able to keep up as AI continues to rapidly develop. 

    “The faster take-up of AI in historically advantaged settings raises concerns about wide disparities in teachers’ and students’ opportunities to learn with these tools — with the notable caveat that it remains unknown to what extent adoption of these generative AI tools will improve teaching and learning,” the Rand report said. 

    Even with AI’s classroom role and impact not yet clearly defined, Rand said that whatever best practices emerge from teachers’ use of the technology should be “equitably shared” through state and regional education networks. To close the teacher AI training gap, high-poverty districts will need targeted funding and support from state and federal agencies as well as from technical assistance centers and philanthropic organizations, the report suggested.

    The Rand report also stressed that AI training at the district level can help address educators’ fears and hesitancy around the technology. Still, nearly all surveyed district leaders reported their training opportunities were optional for teachers. 

    Separate from the survey, Rand interviewed 14 district leaders about what exactly those AI trainings look like. Beyond addressing teachers’ anxiety with the technology, districts said they also wanted to empower educators to effectively use AI for tasks like lesson planning. 

    Efforts to define training priorities on student AI use, however, remain slowgoing. Rand said its interviews suggested “that districts are taking a cautious approach, focusing first on educator proficiency before integrating AI into student learning experiences.”

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  • Portability within REF remains key to fairness

    Portability within REF remains key to fairness

    When a researcher produces an output and moves between HEIs, portability determines which institution can submit the output for assessment and receive the resulting long-term quality-related funding.

    However, a joint letter by the English Association, the Institute of English Studies, and University English, and subsequent interventions from other subject associations, demonstrate that unaddressed concerns over the portability of research outputs are coming to a head.

    In REF 2014, if a researcher moved HEI prior to a census date, then only the destination HEI submitted the output. In 2021, to mitigate the potential perceived inflationary transfer market of researchers, the rules were changed so that if researchers transferred, both the original and destination HEIs could return the output. This rightfully recognised the role of both HEIs, having supported the underpinning research and investing in the research of the future respectively.

    The initial decisions published in 2023 had research outputs decoupled from the authors with outputs needing to have a “substantive connection” to the submitting institution. Two years on we still don’t know the impact of this decision on portability. One of the unintended consequences of decoupling the outputs from the researchers who authored them and removing the notion of a staff list, is that only the address line of the author affiliation remains. This decoupling means that any notion of portability of outputs with a specific researcher is problematic.

    The portability of research outputs is a crucial element of the assessment process. It supports key values such as career security and development, equality, diversity, and inclusion, as well as the financial sustainability of HEIs. More importantly, linking outputs to individual researchers rather than institutions is necessary, particularly in the current Higher Education landscape, to ensure the integrity of both research and the assessment exercise itself. This approach ensures that researchers receive due credit for their work, prevents institutions from unfairly benefiting from outputs produced elsewhere or from structural changes such as departmental closures, and upholds a fairer, more transparent system that reflects actual research contributions.

    The sector is in a different place than it was even a few years ago. Many HEIs are financially challenged, with wide-spread redundancies an ongoing reality. Careers are now precarious at every career stage. Making new, or even maintaining, academic appointments is subject to strict financial scrutiny. Across all facets of research – from the medical and engineering sciences to the arts and humanities – the income derived from the REF is essential to the agility of the research landscape.

    Whether we like it or not, the decision to hire someone is in part financial. That an early career researcher could be recruited to improve a unit’s (subject) REF submission and hence income is a reality of a financially pressured system. At a different career stage, many distinguished researchers are facing financially imposed redundancy. The agility of the sector to respond is aided by the portability of the researcher’s outputs to allow them to continue their career and their contributions to the sector at a new HEI. The REF derived income is an important aspect of this agility.

    Setting aside financial considerations, separating research outputs from the researchers who created them sends a damaging message. It downplays the fundamental role of individuals in driving research and undermines the sense of agency that is crucial to its integrity and rigor.

    Auditing the future

    As researchers, we recognise the privilege of being supported in pursuing what is often both a passion and a vocation. Decoupling outputs from their creators disregards the individual researcher, their collaborations, and their stakeholders. It also oversimplifies the complex research ecosystem, where researchers work in partnership with their employing institutions, sector bodies, archives, charities, funders, and other key stakeholders.

    REF-derived income should not be seen just as a retrospective reward for an HEI’s past support of research, but rather as the nation’s forward-looking investment in the discoveries of tomorrow. To treat it merely as an audit is to overlook its transformative potential. Hence the outputs on which the assessment is based should be both the researchers who contributed to the unit while employed by the university and the researchers who are currently in the unit to contribute to the research that is ongoing, indelibly linking and interweaving past, present and future research.

    In addition to concerns over portability, decoupling outputs from the researchers that authored them risks undermining a central premise of the assessment that many of us working to improve our research culture want to see. Decoupling means there is no auditable limit to the number of outputs written by any one individual that can be submitted for assessment. Within the REF, we wish to see outputs authored by a diversity of staff within the unit, staff at different career stages and staff working in different sub areas. By decoupling the author from outputs, a future REF risks undermining the very fairness that the rule change was introduced to ensure.

    Not fair not right

    Sometimes the unintended consequences of an idea outweigh the benefits it was hoping to achieve. The decoupling of outputs from the researchers that made them possible and the knock-on consequences through restrictions to portability and reduced diversity is one of these occasions.

    There has never been a more critical time to uphold fairness in research policy.

    If the four funding bodies are to remain agile they must recognise that decoupling research outputs from the individuals who created them is not only harming those facing redundancy but also undermining HEIs’ ability to support the next generation of researchers upon whom our future depends. By the same count, ensuring the portability of outputs is essential for maintaining integrity, protecting careers, and sustaining a dynamic and equitable research environment. The need for change is both urgent and imperative.

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