Education

For the better part of a year, a group of more than 50 residents in the Glenvar Heights area of Miami-Dade County say they’ve been trapped living next to off-campus dormitories and frat houses illegally housing trash-spewing, beer-chugging University of Miami students. As New Times reported last week, the predicament in which these residents find themselves bears an extremely striking resemblance to the 2014 Seth Rogen comedy Neighbors.

Earlier this year, a Florida International University student broke news that FIU’s Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity members were secretly joking about rape and sending nude photographs stolen from women to one another on secret group chats. In October, a school spokesperson confirmed that the university had launched an investigation into the…

Attorney Stephanie Langer has a saying for the enormous challenge of taking on a school district that’s failed a special-needs student: It’s like being “a gnat on the side of a cruise ship.” Even with a strong case, a parent is in for a gruelingly long and expensive battle against a heavily lawyered system.

The New York Times yesterday chronicled how conservative megadonors such as the Koch brothers are funding so-called grassroots, door-to-door campaigns to drum up support for the GOP tax bill, which will hand billions of dollars to the nation’s richest at the expense of the poor and middle class. The Times followed volunteers in Miami…

At Florida International University, the fallout over a leaked group chat from the school’s College Republicans is still spreading. After New Times first reported Friday about the chats — which show the young GOP students joking about deporting classmates and making light of the attack by a white supremacist in Charlottesville — the school announced it was investigating the group.

College bros are terrible. Florida college bros are particularly terrible. And particularly terrible Florida bros have committed a really heinous list of offenses in the last 30 days — from getting caught joking about rape to sharing memes making fun of the victims of the Charlottesville Nazi attack to saying…

Thursday morning, dozens of Florida International University students walked out of class in protest. They urged the government to protect young immigrants who might be kicked out of the United States by the Trump administration. While they were demonstrating, their classmates in the FIU College Republicans were cracking jokes about trying to get the students deported. The exchange happened in a private group chat provided to New Times.

Greek life remains massive at huge schools like Florida State University. But lately, Greek life seems to generate nothing but nightmares for the institutions. The latest terrible frat-related headlines came three days ago in Tallahassee, where Andrew Coffey, a 20-year old Pi Kappa Phi fraternity pledge from Pompano Beach, died at…

Since 2015, Miami-Dade’s school district has been sending suspended students to off-campus sites, where they allegedly receive one-on-one instruction and counseling as an alternative to out-of-school suspensions. Two years later, district officials praise the program’s success, though little data is available to confirm it. However, this past month, local nonprofit Power U released a report that discredits these centers, calling them enablers of the school-to-prison pipeline. In most cases, students — predominantly black and Hispanic youth — were not only forced to sit in silence for hours every day but also struggled upon returning to the classroom.

If the Harvey Weinstein case has taught America anything about sexual assault and rape culture, it’s that the Hollywood stories are only the tip of the iceberg. Consider the latest uproar at Florida International University, where someone leaked a fraternity’s group chat full of nude photos of female students, derisive messages about a deceased FIU sorority member, and jokes about anti-Semitism and rape.

More than 60 years after the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling that desegregated American education, schools are still so racially divided that experts use terms like “apartheid” to describe the situation. Over the last 20 years, Florida — like the nation as a whole — has managed to…

When you sign up to become a schoolteacher, no one hands you a book of names you shouldn’t call your students. That’s because most educators have good enough sense to know referring to their kids as terrorists is almost certainly a bad idea. Unfortunately, not everyone has good sense. This…

Over the past few years, Miami-Dade County Public Schools began phasing out hard-line discipline in favor of more effective policies. Thanks in part to the efforts of local advocacy groups, the district found alternatives to arrests, stopped issuing out-of-school suspensions, eased its zero-tolerance stance on drugs, and embraced a restorative justice approach.

Some very rich people would like Gov. Rick Scott to sign HB 7069, a hastily passed school funding bill that provides huge incentives to charter schools at the expense of public ones. And those billionaires — namely the Koch brothers, Betsy DeVos, and a slew of other wealthy right-wingers — are willing to mobilize their shell corporations and think tanks to ensure HB 7069 becomes law.

When Sean Gallagan was named Miami-Dade’s principal of the year in 2011, administrators lauded the leader of George T. Baker Aviation Technical College for his humanitarian work in Haiti and resourcefulness in getting American Airlines to donate a $6 million plane to the district. Clearly pleased with his abilities, the district…

Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s uniquely unqualified secretary of education, isn’t particularly good at thinking on her feet. Asked why there ought to be guns in school during her confirmation hearing this year, she infamously opined that schools might need to protect themselves from bears.

Two years ago, parents in Naples clashed over the books being taught at their kids’ schools. Members of a conservative group found fault with classics such as The Catcher in the Rye for including “homosexual themes” and The Great Gatsby for highlighting the “moral decay of the wealthy.” Those kinds of debates could now happen statewide if a bill by Republican Rep. Byron Donalds, of Naples, becomes law.

Betsey DeVos, President-Elect Donald Trump’s choice to run the U.S Department of Education, said this week she believes the biggest threat facing the nation’s schools might be bears. Teachers, meanwhile, believe the biggest threat facing America’s public education system is actually Betsy DeVos. “During her confirmation hearing, she could not…

Fabricated rape allegations — the type where someone falsely accuses another person of rape just to hurt that person — are statistically rare. The National Sexual Violence Resource Center estimates that between 2 and 10 percent of sexual assault allegations are made up, and women’s rights activists say the few high-profile fake accusations discourage real survivors of sexual assault from reporting crimes.