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“We all know that America’s immigration system is broken, but in particular by driving away highly skilled foreign workers who want to start businesses and create jobs right here in America,” he said…

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Sequestration will trigger huge education spending cuts: across-the-board cuts of more than 8 percent to federal programs.

As schools face ever-increasing budget dilemmas, education stakeholders are desperately hoping to avoid sequestration, or across-the-board cuts, to domestic spending next year—cuts that could devastate education programs and affect many of the country’s neediest students, experts say.

To avoid a government shutdown in 2011, Congress passed the Budget Control Act, which increased the national debt ceiling in exchange for a major reduction to federal deficits. Congress set limits to federal spending for 10 years and created a “supercommittee” tasked with creating legislation to reduce the deficit.

The Budget Control Act stipulates that if $1.2 trillion in savings is not approved, across-the-board cuts will go into effect in January 2013.

The so-called “Bush-era tax cuts” expire at the same time, and the timing is no coincidence—scheduling across-the-board cuts, which include defense cuts, at the same time as the Bush-era tax cuts expire was supposed to ensure that lawmakers had an incentive to come together and work toward a budget solution.

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So far, Democrats and Republicans have been unable to reach an agreement. Democrats have insisted on a balanced approach to deficit reduction that combines budget cuts with revenue increases by allowing the Bush-era tax cuts to expire for the wealthiest Americans (those making more than $250,000 per year would see their tax rate rise from 35 percent to about 39 percent, the same as under President Clinton). Republicans have refused to consider any scenario in which taxes increase.

Lawmakers’ failure to reach an agreement will trigger sequestration cuts; 50 percent of those cuts will come from defense spending, and 50 percent from non-defense spending. Those cuts will begin on Jan. 2, 2013. Aside from Impact Aid, education is forward-funded, so cuts to education funding would not actually begin until July 2013.

But once those cuts start, education will see its largest cut ever, at about 8.2 percent. Title I would lose an estimated $1.2 billion, IDEA would see a $973 million cut, and Head Start funding would lose $669 million under this scenario.

Eleven states are reviewing proposals to update or implement cyber bullying laws.

As educators and administrators prepare for another school year, they’re also getting ready to take a new stance against cyber bullying.

In Texas, for example, a law comes into effect this school year that requires schools to have policies for dealing with cyber bullying that occurs on school property or at school events. In Kansas, the education department launched a new anti-bullying hot line last week to supplement a 2008 law that mandates that schools have cyber bullying policies.

Beyond that, 11 states are reviewing proposals to update or implement cyber bullying laws.

All are attempts to bring the state’s approaches to bullying into the 21st century.

“For many people of a certain age, the word bullying tends to conjure up an image of a schoolyard skirmish, but in 2012 that’s not what bullying is at all,” said Chuck Smith, the deputy executive director at Equality Texas, a Texas advocacy group that aims to get rid of gender discrimination.

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School Safety and Security Center at eSN Online

More internet access and the widespread use of smart phones have helped lead to increases in cyber bullying, according to Catherine Bradshaw, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“In one instant they can send out thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of messages,” Bradshaw said.

High-profile suicides, such as that of 13-year-old Hope Witsell in 2009, show how damaging cyber bullying can be. The teenager from Ruskin, Fla., killed herself after a photo of her breast that she’d sent to a boy she liked leaked to the entire school and other students then taunted her and called her names, according to news reports at the time.

Policy makers have tried to counter the increased risk the only way they know how—with legislation.

According to the Cyberbullying Research Center, a collaborative online project run by professors from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Florida Atlantic University, 45 states now have laws that bar electronic harassment, although only 15 states specifically refer to “cyber bullying.”

The Texas legislation, which passed last year with bipartisan support, requires school boards to incorporate cyber bullying prevention into their school codes of conduct and policies.

Both state and federal legislators have been considering a wave of bills concerning online privacy in schools and the workplace.

Should a university be able to edit a student’s Facebook profile or check his private tweets? Absolutely not, said the Delaware state legislature, as it recently passed the first state law to forbid schools from requiring students to divulge personal social media login information.

Signed into law by Gov. Jack Markell on July 20, HB309 bans both public and private higher-education institutions from committing a range of student privacy violations.

Delaware colleges and universities cannot require or request that students turn over login information, nor can they ask students to log on to their personal social networking sites in the presence of a school representative.

The law also bars schools from tracking students’ personal online activities or requesting that the student add a school representative on a social networking site. A school could not demand, for example, that a student approve a teacher as a Facebook friend.

Originally written to include primary and secondary schools as well, the final version of the law limits its scope only to post-secondary institutions.

Legislators reconsidered the K-12 portion of the bill after hearing concerns that schools working with younger children would deal more frequently with cyber bullying problems, said Damian DeStefano, legislative aide to the bill’s sponsor, Democratic Rep. Darryl Scott.

In the wake of several high-profile cyber bullying cases, schools have been under increasing pressure to monitor instances of students bullying each other via social media.

“We wouldn’t want to handcuff a school in its ability to investigate cases of bullying,” he said.

Another factor that complicates student privacy laws in the K-12 space: the rise of “bring your own device” (BYOD) programs designed to get technology in the hands of more students.

When students are bringing their personal devices into the classroom for instruction, and teachers need to monitor those devices, “to what degree does that make everything on the student’s device available for school review?” said Nancy Willard, director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use, in a phone call with eSchool News.

“Should a student be able to password-protect access to their device? Should the school be able to demand the access password on those devices? Tricky issues,” Willard wrote in a subsequent eMail message.

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Congress could come up with a great plan for reauthorizing NCLB by adopting the best ideas from the states’ waiver applications, Duncan said at a July 6 news conference.

Although more than half the states are now exempt from the toughest requirements of the federal “No Child Left Behind” education law, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said his goal remains to help Congress fix the law, not to sidestep the stalled overhaul effort.

Still, allowing waivers has brought a level of creativity to education reform that was unexpected when Duncan and President Barack Obama opened the waiver process nearly a year ago.

The Obama administration’s July 6 announcement that Washington and Wisconsin have been granted waivers from the education law brought to 26 the number of states now free from many of its requirements.

Congress could come up with a great plan for reauthorizing the federal law by adopting the best ideas from the states’ waiver applications, Duncan said at a July 6 news conference.

Lawmakers remain at a stalemate over the long overdue rewrite of the widely criticized law, which was a signature accomplishment of the George W. Bush administration. Obama sent Congress an overhaul proposal two years ago.

Making the law, formally known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, irrelevant is not the Obama administration’s goal, Duncan said.

For more news and opinion about education reform, see:

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Beyond ‘Superman‘: Leading responsible school reform

“Our Plan A is to reauthorize. We stand ready for reauthorization if it’s on Monday or next week or six months from now,” he said.

The Education Department began granting waivers in February in exchange for promises from states to improve how they prepare and evaluate students and their teachers. The executive action by Obama is part of an ongoing effort to act on his own when Congress is rebuffing him.

“A strong, bipartisan reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act remains the best path forward in education reform, but as 26 states have now demonstrated, our kids can’t wait any longer for Congress to act,” Duncan said in a statement.

The 10-year-old law requires all students to achieve proficient math and reading scores by 2014, a goal that many educators say is impossible.

Members of both parties say No Child Left Behind is broken, but they have been unable to agree on how to fix it. While the law has been praised for focusing on the performance of minorities, low-income students, English language learners, and special-education students, it also has labeled thousands of schools as “failing” because of the stringent ways it measures success.

Critics also say the law has had the unintended effect of encouraging schools to focus too much on testing in reading and math, leading them to narrow their curricula.

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