Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

This week, U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, testified before the Appropriations Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. His words and outlook for the future of special education funding were bleak.

New! February 3, 2014 - The 2014 Autism Speaks Baker Summer Camp Grant application is now open! The Autism Speaks Baker Summer Camp Program selects eligible camps in the United States to identify qualified campers and offer scholarship funds for financially disadvantaged children with Autism Spectrum Disorder to attend a summer camp. Note: Individuals may not apply for the program. If you are an individual interested in obtaining a scholarship for your child, please encourage your local camp to apply for a scholarship fund.

An effort by the Obama administration to overhaul the troubled federal agency that is responsible for the education of tens of thousands of American Indian children is getting major pushback from some tribal leaders and educators, who see the plan as an infringement on their sovereignty and a one-size-fits-all approach that will fail to improve student achievement in Indian Country. As Barack Obama makes his first visit to Indian Country as president this week, the federal Bureau of Indian Education—which directly operates 57 schools for Native Americans and oversees 126 others run by tribes under contract with the agency—is moving ahead with plans to remake itself into an entity akin to a state department of education that would focus on improving services for tribally operated schools. A revamped BIE, as envisioned in the proposal, would eventually give up direct operations of schools and push for a menu of education reforms that is strikingly similar to some championed in initiatives such as Race to the Top, including competitive-grant funding to entice tribal schools to adopt teacher-evaluation systems that are linked to student performance. The proposed reorganization of the BIE comes after years of scathing reports from watchdog groups, including the U.S. Government Accountability Office, and chronic complaints from tribal educators about the agency’s financial and academic mismanagement and failure to advocate more effectively for the needs of schools that serve Native American students. It also comes a year after U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell called the federally funded Indian education system “an embarrassment.” The BIE is overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which is housed within the U.S. Interior Department. Pushback From Tribes The proposal, released in April, was drafted by a seven-person “study group” appointed jointly by Ms. Jewell and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Five of the panel’s members currently serve in the Obama administration. Some of the nation’s largest tribes, however, are staunchly opposed to the proposal, including the 16 tribes that make up the Great Plains Tribal Chairmans Association, which represents tribal leaders in South Dakota, North Dakota, and Nebraska. “It’s time for us to decide what our children will learn and how they will learn it because [BIE] has been a failure so far,” Bryan V. Brewer, the chairman of the 40,000-member Oglala Sioux tribe in Pine Ridge, S.D., said last month in a congressional hearing on the BIE. In the same hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Charles M. Roessel, the director of the BIE and a member of the panel that drafted the plan, said the agency’s reorganization “would allow the BIE to achieve improved results in the form of higher student scores, improved school operations, and increased tribal control over schools.” (Despite multiple requests from Education Week, the BIE did not make Mr. Roessel or any other agency official available for an interview.)

For the first time in IDEA’s nearly 40-year history, the U.S. Department of Education has included the performance of students with disabilities on state and NAEP assessments as part of determining how states are implementing IDEA.  And the results are humbling. 35 states and the District of Columbia were found to “need assistance” or “need intervention” after outcome data was combined with compliance measures that demonstrate adherence to the law. To be clear, the overwhelming majority of states “meet requirements” when just looking at compliance with IDEA, in fact only 9 were deemed as “needs assistance”. 

Congress passed a bill today(!) that would help fund school efforts to fight allergy attacks. The U.S. Department of Education currently offers grant money to states in which schools are taking steps to prepare for asthma attacks. Under the newly passed H.R. 2094, though, the department would prioritize those funds to benefit states wherein schools also prepare for allergy attacks by having a stock of epinephrine (EpiPen), and staff trained to use it.

The National Institutes of Health is awarding nearly $100 million in grants — the most ever — to research the causes of autism and look for treatments. The funding is part of $5 billion that’s being awarded by the NIH to study autism, cancer and heart disease, among other conditions. The grants represent half of the NIH funding allotment from the federal economic stimulus package enacted earlier this year. Collectively, the grants are “the single largest boost to biomedical research in history,” President Barack Obama said at the NIH Wednesday.

A newly updated strategic plan guiding federally-funded autism research places new emphasis on adults with the disorder, while leaving the door open for further research on vaccines. The 2010 strategic plan released this week by the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, or IACC, provides a blueprint for the type of autism research that will likely be approved for federal funding during the course of the year. The IACC is an advisory committee established by the Combating Autism Act of 2006, which is comprised of government officials and members of the autism community.