National News - Page 3

Supreme Court declines to hear challenge to Virginia high school’s ‘race-neutral’ admissions policy

By Devan Cole  The Supreme Court declined Tuesday to hear a challenge to a top Virginia high school’s “race-neutral” admissions policy that critics say discriminates against Asian American students. The case raised several key questions about the court’s landmark ruling last year invalidating affirmative action policies at the nation’s colleges and universities. By declining to take the appeal, the Supreme Court left in place a lower-court ruling that sided with the school. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said they would have taken up the case. “The court’s willingness to swallow the aberrant decision below is hard to understand,” Alito wrote in

Supreme Court allows ‘race neutral’ Virginia high school admissions policy that bolsters diversity

By Lawrence Hurley  The Supreme Court on Tuesday avoided another contentious debate over race and education by turning away a challenge to an admissions policy aimed at encouraging diversity at a Virginia high school. The high court’s decision not to intervene in the case comes just months after the conservative court ended the consideration of race in college admissions. It leaves in doubt whether the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has the votes to strike down admissions policies that do not explicitly consider race but nevertheless lead to a more diverse class. Two conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, dissented,

Biden-Harris Administration Cancels Additional $1.2 Billion In Student Debt

By Quintessa Williams President Biden announced the approval of $1.2 billion in student debt cancellation for almost 153,000 borrowers currently enrolled in the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) repayment plan. The Biden-Harris Administration has now approved nearly $138 billion in student debt cancellation for almost 3.9 million borrowers through more than two dozen executive actions. The borrowers receiving relief are the first to benefit from a SAVE plan policy that provides debt forgiveness to borrowers who have been in repayment after as little as 10 years and took out $12,000 or less in student loans. Originally planned for July, the Biden-Harris Administration implemented

Columbia University targeted by expanding House antisemitism investigation

By Matt Egan A congressional committee probing campus antisemitism is expanding its investigation to include Columbia University and demanding the Ivy League school turn over a trove of documents to lawmakers. In a 16-page letter delivered to Columbia leaders Monday afternoon, Rep. Virginia Foxx, the Republican chairwoman of the House Education and Workforce Committee, informed the university her panel is investigating Columbia’s “failure to protect Jewish students.” “We have grave concerns regarding the inadequacy of Columbia’s response to antisemitism on its campus,” Foxx wrote in the letter, citing an “environment of pervasive antisemitism” that goes back more than two decades.

The lose-lose decision on the SAT

Opinion by Jill Filipovic Starting next year, Dartmouth College will reinstate its policy of requiring applicants to submit their SAT or ACT scores along with their admissions packages. It’s the first Ivy League school to do so, after many elite colleges and universities dropped the SAT requirement during the Covid-19 pandemic, due to a combination of student difficulties taking the test in the midst of lockdowns and longer-standing concerns that the test has reinforced racial and socioeconomic biases. Dartmouth isn’t the only school to take similar action. MIT and Georgetown have both brought back mandatory SAT or ACT scores, and other highly-selective colleges are reportedly considering the same. A few

Florida school asks parents for permission to have book by an African American author read to students

By Janelle Griffin A Florida school district is drawing fire for asking parents to consent to having their children participate in the reading of an African American author’s book to comply with state law. “I had to give permission for this or else my child would not participate???” wrote one parent, Charles Walter, who posted a photo of a Miami-Dade County Public Schools permission slip to X on Monday evening. The form describes the activity as a “read aloud” scheduled for Tuesday from 1 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. in the library. Next to “types of guest that may attend the activity or

Decades after suspected arson, a historic Black church in Pennsylvania reopens as a Black history museum

By Kaitlyn Schwanemann For the first time in nearly 30 years, Pandora Anderson Campbell stepped inside Spring Valley African Methodist Episcopal church in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and couldn’t stop smiling. “I could feel the spirit of the ancestors. I don’t know how to explain it,” Campbell told CNN. Five generations of Campbell’s relatives were christened at the church. Campbell, who also grew up in the church, said she remembers it being a haven for the local community, where parishioners could come to worship, eat the pies her grandmother baked after Sunday sermons, sing and spend time together. “It was a pillar to the community. People came from everywhere

Descendants of Black icons gather at the White House in a historic meeting

By Donna M. Owens and Sakshi Venkatraman Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the descendants of some of the most prominent civil rights leaders from the 1950s and ’60s and other foundational historic figures, who gathered at the White House on Tuesday, some convening in the same room for the first time. The families of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, among others, were scheduled to attend. Harris praised the descendants of “extraordinary American heroes” who, she said, embody the promise of the nation and the Constitution. “They’ve

After a spate of education bans, Florida churches are taking Black history into their own hands

By Char Adams Some 100 people — Black and white, from elementary school-aged children to adults in their 80s filed into the Agape Perfecting Praise and Worship Center in Orlando in October. They were there for a lesson in Black history from LaVon Bracy, the director of democracy at Faith in Florida, an Orlando-based religious nonprofit. Bracy, who has a Ph.D. in education, spoke to the crowd about the forced journey enslaved Africans took from their homeland to America during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “She’d visited Africa a couple of times and brought back soil,” Sharon Riley, a pastor at Agape,

Target pulls Black history item that misidentified Civil Rights leaders

By Ramishah Maruf As with many Target trips, Nevada US history teacher Tierra Espy left the store with more items than she intended to buy on Sunday. She added a magnetic activity book about iconic Civil Rights leaders to her cart, in time for Black History Month, she told CNN in a phone interview. But now, Target is pulling the item off shelves after a viral TikTok in which Espy pointed out inaccuracies such as misidentifying names and pictures of iconic Civil Rights leaders. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune first reported the news. The activity book had mixed up the names and images of Carter G. Woodson,

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