EduClips: Chicago Schools’ Fingerprinting Requirements Scaring Away Undocumented Parents; Study: CA Children Enter School Unprepared and Never Catch Up — and More Must-Reads From America’s 15 Biggest School Districts

EduClips is a roundup of the day’s top education headlines from America’s largest school districts, where more than 4 million students across eight states attend class every day. Read previous EduClips installments here. Get the day’s top school and policy news delivered straight to your inbox by signing up for the TopSheet Education Newsletter.

Top Story

NYC INVESTIGATION — Seventy-five tenured teachers found guilty of abuse or incompetence — many of them male, veteran educators assigned to struggling New York City schools — were fired over 16 months in 2015 and 2016, an analysis of disciplinary records obtained by The 74 has found.

Educators were terminated for choking students, publicly taunting children who couldn’t read, and, in the case of one Brooklyn technology teacher in 2011, threatening to “shoot up everyone” at a school. But the majority were found by their schools to be inadequate as instructors.

Department of Education lawyers prosecuted 154 schoolteachers in all during this period — a tiny fraction of the city’s 58,000 school staff with tenure. For critics, the total suggests that many who are unfit have been allowed to remain in classrooms. Others believe relatively few teachers merit termination. (Read at The74Million.org)

National News

ESSA — Betsy DeVos Reopens Application Process for ESSA’s Innovative Assessment Pilot (Read at Politics K-12)

SCHOOL SECURITY — Light, Stylish … and Bulletproof: A Look at the Post-Parkland Marketing of Security-Conscious School Supplies (Read at The74Million.org)

DEVOS — DeVos’s Strong Words on Suppression of Speech, State of Civics Education (Read at Politics K-12)

District and State News

ILLINOIS — How Chicago schools’ fingerprinting requirements are scaring away undocumented parents (Read at Chalkbeat)

CALIFORNIA — California children enter school unprepared and never catch up, landmark research finds (Read at the Los Angeles Times)

FLORIDA — You asked: Should charter schools be allowed to hire teachers who are not certified? (Read at the Miami Herald)

PUERTO RICO — Puerto Rican students still without power at school one year after Hurricane Maria (Read at ClickOrlando.com)

NEW YORK — Regents support a new way of evaluating charter schools and soften penalties for schools with high opt-out rates (Read at Chalkbeat)

FLORIDA — Watchdog group slams state leaders for using public funds for charter schools (Read at News 13)

CALIFORNIA — Spending on California schools chief race expected to set records again (Read at EdSource)

NEVADA — Parents may have say in future of Clark County’s failing schools (Read at the Las Vegas Review-Journal)

NEW YORK — Rise & Shine: No ABCs but the education is “more than adequate”: What New York city parents have to say about one yeshiva (Read at Chalkbeat)

HAWAII — Hawaii high school students tapped to fill medical assistant shortage (Read at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

Think Pieces

SCHOOL CALENDAR — Think year-round school calendars increase achievement? Think again. (Read at USA Today)

VOUCHERS — The voucher program we really need is not for school — it’s for after (Read at The Hechinger Report)

HOMESCHOOLING — Nunes: The Pros and Cons of Homeschooling a Child With Special Needs — and Some Resources That Can Help (Read at The74Million.org)

DIVERSITY — OPINION: Making campus diversity real — starting in kindergarten (Read at The Hechinger Report)

Quote of the Day

“You get really egregious behavior because the steps to be taken for dismissal are just so lengthy, so expensive, and so rarely successful that most principals are reluctant to even initiate the process. The challenge and problem is that before they had tenure and due process, teachers were treated badly in terms of hiring, firing, sexism, racism — you name it.” —Patrick McGuinn, a professor of political science and education at Drew University, on the difficulty of firing teachers in the New York City schools. (Read at The74Million.org)

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