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EduClips: Post-Parkland, Broward County Had No Armed Guards at Summer School; New LAUSD Chief Lays Out Vision For School Leaders — 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

SCOTUS — Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, in a speech last year, gave a strong hint at his views on taxpayer support for religious schools when he praised his “first judicial hero,” Justice William Rehnquist, for determining that the strict wall between church and state “was wrong as a matter of law and history.”

Mr. Rehnquist’s legacy on religious issues was most profound in “ensuring that religious schools and religious institutions could participate as equals in society and in state benefits programs,” Judge Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to succeed Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court, declared at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization.

Words like that from a Supreme Court nominee are breathing new life into the debate over public funding for sectarian education. Educators see him as crucial to answering a question left by Justice Kennedy after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for the state of Missouri to exclude a church-based preschool from competing for public funding to upgrade its playground: Can a church-school playground pave the way for taxpayer funding to flow to private and parochial schools for almost any purpose? (Read at The New York Times)

National News

MINORITIES — The State of America’s Student-Teacher Racial Gap: Our Public School System Has Been Majority-Minority for Years, but 80 Percent of Teachers Are Still White (Read at The74Million.org)

OMAROSA — Omarosa Book: Trump Derided Betsy DeVos, Said He’d ‘Get Rid of Her’ (Read at Education Week)

WISCONSIN — Wisconsin Democrats Will Run on Education Against Gov. Scott Walker (Read at HuffPost)

CHARTERS — Most New Charter Schools Were Actually Approved by School Districts. That’s Changing. (Read at Education Week)

District and State News

FLORIDA — Despite urgent focus on security, Broward had no armed guards at summer school sites (Read at the Miami Herald)

CALIFORNIA — Fewer Emails, More Power: L.A.’s New Schools Chief Lays Out Back-to-School Vision for District Leaders (Read at The74Million.org)

NEW YORK — New data show how few black and Hispanic students benefit from New York City’s specialized high school diversity program (Read at Chalkbeat)

TEXAS — U.S. education chief Betsy DeVos pledges $174M to Texas schools disrupted by Harvey (Read at Chron)

CALIFORNIA — Focusing can be hard for kids when going back to school in the summer means hot classrooms (Read at the Los Angeles Times)

ILLINOIS — District 113 scrambles to remediate mold at Highland Park High School before school starts (Read at the Chicago Tribune)

FLORIDA — First Amendment arguments rejected in Florida charter school case (Read at Orlando Weekly)

GEORGIA — Are teachers on board as Gwinnett rolls out merit pay? (Read at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

NEW YORK — Cuomo’s re-election bid gets boost from charter schools’ big (Read at the New York Post)

TEXAS — Letter Grades for Texas School Districts Released Wednesday (Read at Texas Public Radio)

NEVADA — New plan for education: Repeat the old plan (Read at the Las Vegas Review-Journal)

Think Pieces

SCHOOL SAFETY — Do metal detectors and X-ray machines belong in schools? (Read at The Washington Post)

CHARTERS — Richmond: Why School Districts Are Walking Away From Authorizing New Charter Schools — and Why That’s Both a Bad and a Good Thing (Read at The74Million.org)

CELL PHONES — Parental debate: Should your kid have a cellphone in school? (Read at USA Today)

Quote of the Day

“If we’re serious about educational equity, it seems to me that we need to get past religion in schools as a nonstarter.” —Dale Chu, a fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, on his hopes that Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, will help clear the way for greater taxpayer support of religious schools. (Read at The New York Times)

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