Education

Last semester, as the COVID-19 pandemic closed all UNC System campuses, Samantha Pilot welcomed her son home early from his freshman year at UNC-Chapel Hill. At the time, she felt like the university was on her side. It was expensive and complicated to close the campuses and shift to online-only education for the balance of the spring semester. The fact that the UNC System did it anyway made her feel proud to be part of a Carolina family.

As COVID-19 cases continue to reach new record highs in North Carolina, students at UNC system schools are about a month away from returning to their dorms and classrooms to resume on-campus instruction.

Firebrand conservative academic opts for early retirement in light of latest controversies and provocations Combative, confrontational and litigious, UNC-Wilmington professor Mike Adams has long aggressively courted controversy, seeming to revel in contradictions.

While the North Carolina General Assembly tries again and again to reopen gyms and bars, there is another type of business that has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and is struggling to rebound: child care centers. Thirty-three percent of all child care facilities remain closed, according to a presentation NC Early Education Coalition policy director Michele Rivest gave to the House Health Committee on June 24.

Governor Roy Cooper, top health officials and the Department of Public Instruction are expected to announce on Wednesday which of three plans should be implemented to reopen schools most safely this fall. Depending on the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, officials will decide on a plan that includes...

Art Pope — Raleigh millionaire, ex-state budget director, former House member and financial underwriter of controversial arch-conservative and libertarian causes — has been appointed to a seat on the UNC Board of Governors.

WASHINGTON — The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated racial inequities in education, a disparity that Congress needs to help rectify, the former education chief under President Barack Obama told lawmakers Monday. “Our education system is fraught with inequities that existed before COVID-19,” John King Jr., who served as Secretary of Education in 2016-2017, told lawmakers on the House Education and Labor Committee. He is president and CEO of The Education Trust, a nonprofit organization that focuses on opportunity and achievement gaps in education.

The UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted Wednesday to lift its self-imposed moratorium on the renaming of buildings and historic places on campus, setting the stage to remove the names of Confederate and white supremacist historic figures from places of honor there. The vote comes after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, which sparked weeks of international protest against police violence against Black people and systemic racism in America.

Since Mark Jewell was first elected to be president of the North Carolina Association of Educators in 2016, he has been an outspoken leader of the 60,000-member teacher advocacy organization. He led two high-profile marches on the General Assembly that brought thousands of North Carolina educators to downtown Raleigh to demand better pay teachers and increased funding for public schools.

WASHINGTON — North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx voiced strong opposition Monday to calls for more federal funding to help the nation’s schools as they prepare to reopen this fall. The Republican lawmaker said it would be “irresponsible” to provide more federal education aid without first assessing the effectiveness of funds Congress has already spent.

Questions about racial and ethnic equity, as well as safety, were included in this year’s North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey, reflecting public schools’ heightened priorities. The state Department of Public Instruction invited 121,424 educators to participate in the 2020 survey. It received responses from 102,545 educators, a response rate of 84.5%.

Lt. Gov. Forest is the lone "no" vote on plan developed by state health experts School districts in counties where the threat of coronavirus infection is low should be allowed to operate differently than those in counties where the threat is greater, says Lt. Gov. Dan Forest.

As the 17 schools in the UNC System prepare to bring students back to campuses this fall, each is making its own plans on how to do so as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. Much of the focus, however, is on UNC-Chapel Hill, the system’s flagship campus, which last month launched launched the “Carolina Together” website to share details from its “Roadmap for Fall 2020.”

Classes start in just over two months, and Eric Muller, a professor in UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Law, should be consumed with textbook choices, syllabi and lesson plans. Instead, he’s thinking about his wife, who cares for her 90-year-old mother. To just how much risk will be exposing his family each day when he comes home from work?

A confidential letter delivered to the State Board of Education alleges that the school management firm Achievement for All Children has failed to meet its contractual obligations in running Southside-Ashpole Elementary, to the detriment of its students. The letter, obtained by Policy Watch, recommends that state education officials terminate the contract — three years early — under which the firm oversees Southside-Ashpole, the lone school in the state’s controversial Innovative School District.

At the end of an hour-long question-and-answer session with UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz Wednesday, English professor Florence Dore gave voice to what many faculty were thinking about a planned return to campus August 10. “All the data suggest people are going to get sick,” Dore said. “I guess I just don’t understand why we’re not staying online until things improve.”