Incoming freshmen to the University of California system will no longer need to complete the ACT or SAT after the UC Board of Regents unanimously approved to suspend the requirement on May 21.  The policy, which will last until fall 2024, will allow the UC to create a new test that better aligns with the content the UC expects students to have mastered for college readiness. However, if a new test does not meet specified criteria in time for fall 2025 admission, UC will eliminate the standardized testing requirement for California students.  “Today’s decision by the Board marks a significant change for the University’s undergraduate admissions,” said UC President Janet Napolitano. “We are removing the ACT/SAT requirement for California students and developing a new test that more closely aligns with what we expect incoming students to know to demonstrate their preparedness for UC.”  In March, UC temporarily suspended the current standardized test requirement for fall 2021 applicants to mitigate impacts of COVID-19 on students and schools, effectively making UC “test-optional” for that year. UC will now keep tests optional for an additional year through 2022. For 2023 and 2024, UC will be test-blind, which means students will still have the option of submitting a test score, but that score can only be considered for purposes such as course placement, certain scholarships and eligibility for the statewide admissions guarantee.   The changes are aimed at making available a properly designed and administered test that adds value to the admissions decision process and improves educational quality and equity in California, even in these challenging times. During this period, UC will learn what it can about how its policies affect student achievement and access. 

The number of children experiencing food insecurity has risen dramatically this spring during the COVID-19 closure of schools, according to a recent article from the Public Policy Institute of California.  Nationally, food insecurity among children age 12 and under has increased from 3 percent in 2018 to 17 percent in April 2020. In California, 60 percent (or 3.7 million) students qualify for free or reduced-price meals that are provided during school.   Since the school closures in March, districts have set up more than 4,700 grab-and-go sites to continue providing meals to students. However, the authors of the May 28 article noted that school sites seem to be distributing fewer meals now than they did before campus closures.  “In Los Angeles Unified, only 40,000 meals were served daily when schools first closed. The number has risen since to 374,000 — but [in April 2019], students had eaten roughly 600,000 meals,” the authors write.  California has received approval to distribute Pandemic EBT cards so families with children eligible for free or reduced-price meals can purchase food in grocery stores. Cards were automatically mailed in May, but an additional 1.5 million students without ties to CalFresh or other state programs may need to apply for the cards online, according to the article.  Read the full article at .

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has announced the selection of Matthew Allana, a senior at Beverly Hills High School, as a 2020 U.S. Presidential Scholar. He is one of 161 American high school seniors who have demonstrated outstanding academic achievement, artistic excellence, technical expertise, leadership, citizenship, service, and contribution to school and community.   “It is my honor to congratulate Matthew on this outstanding achievement,” said Beverly Hills USD Superintendent Michael Bregy. “We wish Matthew every success as he embarks on this next chapter at Harvard University.”  Allana is senior class president and previously served as a DECA state officer and sat on the California Career Technical Education Advisory Committee. After covering multiple national events and interviewing politicians as a youth reporter, he founded The Emperor’s New Clothes (www.tenc.us), an online network of high-school clubs dedicated to increasing teen awareness of the facts behind major issues. 

At a time when there’s been a sharp uptick in partisan critiques of the credibility of the news media and growing concern among educators about student media literacy, a new study finds a strong connection between high school social studies teachers’ political ideology and how credible they find various mainstream news outlets. The finding, the study authors say, debunks any notion that social studies teachers are “above the fray” in how they present and discuss the credibility of news sources in their classrooms. The study was published in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association.  “We find that social studies teachers are just as likely to be influenced by the current controversies and debates about news media credibility as the general public,” said study coauthor Christopher H. Clark, an assistant professor at Northeastern State University in Oklahoma. “Social studies teachers are the educators most likely to bring the news into their classrooms on a regular basis, so understanding their choices and perceptions of news media is particularly important.”  The study, conducted by Clark and University of Georgia researchers Mardi Schmeichel and H. James Garrett, drew from a survey of 1,065 high school social studies teachers from across six states — Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, and Texas. The study is the first to document the relationship between the ideology and media preferences of social studies teachers, despite the importance of linking to current events in social studies classrooms and using news media to help students understand political and social issues.  Teachers identifying as “very conservative” rated Fox News as the most credible news source from a set of 12 mainstream news sources, with a 2.03 credibility rating on a 0-to-3 scale. The only other news sources that these teachers gave an above-average credibility rating were the BBC and the Wall Street Journal.  On the other end of the political spectrum, liberals at all points on the continuum rated Fox News as least credible. “Very liberal” teachers gave Fox News a 0.39 rating, the lowest average credibility rating of any resource among the results. MSNBC received the next lowest rating from the “very liberal” group, but still earned an above-average rating 1.61.  When the researchers compared teachers who self-identified broadly as conservative to those who self-identified broadly as liberal — looking beyond those in very conservative or very liberal categories — they found some commonality. Both groups rated the BBC and NPR/PBS among the top three most trusted news sources, although liberals rated both higher on the credibility scale.  “Overall, however, there’s a great deal of divergence between liberal and conservative teachers,” said Clark.