Child Welfare
As deportations increase in the United States, reports Vikki Ortiz Healy of the Chicago Tribune, thousands of children who are U.S. citizens lose an everyday connection with parents.
Florida child welfare director David Wilkins, speaking to Ana Valdes of the Palm Beach Post Staff about the changes afoot after the high-profile death of an adopted child in the state, said measuring risk should be a standardized process in state child welfare.
Education/Jobs
Student loan default rates are on the rise, reports Kyle Young of the Daily News Pulse, citing a new study from the Institute for Higher Education Policy.
The Washington Post Co. took a flier in 1984 and bought Kaplan, a for-profit provider of education, for $40 million. The company fuels a huge share of the news company’s profits, Post reporters Steven Mufson and Jia Lynn Yang write, and poses a significant challenge to its journalistic principles as Kaplan and other for-profit providers face intense public scrutiny for their recruitment practices and effective use of government money.
Nancy Pelosi, whose Congressional district includes a number of large for-profit colleges, recently announced her opposition to the “gainful employment” rule that the Obama administration wants to impose on the industry, reports Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Robert Shireman spoke about for-profit regulation and accreditation at a conference of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges last week, his first public comments since leaving the U.S. Department of Education nine months ago, reports Doug Lederman of Inside Higher Ed.
At a conference of community colleges, reports Inside Higher Ed’s David Moltz, a few college leaders shared their experiences of competing with local for-profits.
A nice breakdown here of the for-profit debate by Jane Bennett Clark of Kiplinger.
Juvenile Justice
Ana Campoy of the Wall Street Journal reports states resisting the federal sex-offender registry mandated by the Adam Walsh Act. Campoy does a nice job explaining the two major points of wariness for states: the cost involved in compliance, and the philosophical clashes between the federal standards and states who believe in the current way they operate a registry. Click here to read additional coverage of this issue from Youth Today.
Also on the Walsh Act: nice piece here from Beth Warren of Tennessee’s The Commercial Appeal on Tennessee’s current plan to comply with the law, which will create the state’s first juvenile sex offender registry and take advantage of the federal concession to allow juvenile registrants to be shielded from the public registry.
And a great nuts-and-bolts breakdown of the Tennessee plan from Sparta Expositor’s Kim Swindell Wood, who explains that juvenile offenders would become part of the public registry once they turned 18, although there would be a mandatory review (every five years starting at age 19) of the need to keep the offender on the registry.
Miscellaneous
The White House announced on Friday that Jonathan Hatfield, who was nominated to serve as inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service, has withdrawn from the nomination process. Hatfield would have replaced Gerald Walpin, who was controversially fired by the administration in 2009.
