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    Climate Change Made South Sudan Heat Wave More Likely, Study Finds

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    Years of war and food insecurity in the region made the extreme heat especially dangerous.After a blistering February heat wave in South Sudan’s capital city caused dozens of students to collapse from heat stroke, officials closed schools for two weeks. It was the second time in less than a year that the country’s schools closed to protect young people from the deadly effects of extreme heat.Climate change, largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels in rich nations, made at least one week of that heat wave 10 times as likely, and 2 degrees Celsius hotter, according to a new study by World Weather Attribution. Temperatures in some parts of the region soared above 42 degrees Celsius, or 107 degrees Fahrenheit, in the last week of February.The analysis used weather data, observations and climate models to get the results, which have not been peer reviewed but are based on standardized methods.South Sudan, in the tropical band of East Africa, was torn apart by a civil war that led to independence from Sudan in 2011. It’s also one of the countries least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that are heating up the globe. “The continent has contributed a tiny fraction of global emissions, but is bearing the brunt of climate change,” said Joyce Kimutai, a researcher at the Center for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London.Heat waves are one of the deadliest extreme weather events and have become more frequent and more severe on a warming planet. But analysis methods connecting heat to mortality vary between and within countries, and death tolls can be underreported and are often unknown for months after an event.Prolonged heat is particularly dangerous for children, older adults and pregnant women. For the last three weeks, extreme heat has settled over a large region of continental Eastern Africa, including parts of Kenya and Uganda. Residents have been told to stay indoors and drink water, a difficult directive for countries where many people work outdoors, electricity is sporadic, access to clean water is difficult and modest housing means there are few cooling systems.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Do Republicans Want to Dismantle the Education Department?

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      President Trump’s fixation reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, and created a powerful point of unity between the factions of his party.Two months after the Education Department officially opened its doors in 1980, Republicans approved a policy platform calling on Congress to shut it down.Now, more than four decades later, President Trump may come closer than any other Republican president to making that dream a reality.Though doing away with the agency would require an act of Congress, Mr. Trump has devoted himself to the goal, and is said to be preparing an executive order with the aim of dismantling it.Mr. Trump’s fixation has reinvigorated the debate over the role of the federal government in education, creating a powerful point of unity between the ideological factions of his party: traditional establishment Republicans and die-hard adherents of his Make America Great Again movement.“This is a counterrevolution against a hostile and nihilistic bureaucracy,” said Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank and a trustee of New College of Florida.Here is how the party got to this moment.Conservatives make their argument.During his 1982 State of the Union address, President Ronald Reagan called on Congress to eliminate both the Energy Department and the Education Department.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Let Students Finish the Whole Book. It Could Change Their Lives.

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      Veronyka JelinekIn her memoir, Dorothy Allison writes, “Two or three things I know for sure and one of them is that telling the story all the way through is an act of love.”Throughout my teaching career at independent schools, which began during the Clinton administration, I’ve also been telling students that reading a story all the way through is an act of love. It takes stillness and receptivity to realize this, it takes a willingness to enter the life of someone you’ll never meet, and it requires great practice.It’s easy to join the hand-wringing chorus, blaming TikTok’s corn drill challenge, Jake Paul and their ilk for the diminuendo of Dickens. But we cannot let reading become another bygone practice. In their more than eight hours of screen time a day, on average, students navigate a galaxy of mediated experiences; schools need to be a bastion of the analog experience of the physical book.The study of English involves more than reading. It includes written expression and the cultivation of an authentic voice. But the comprehension of literature, on which the study of English is based, is rooted in the pleasure of reading. Sometimes there will be a beam of light that falls on a room of students collectively leaning into a story, with only the scuffing sounds of pages, and it’s as though all our heartbeats have slowed. But we have introduced so many antagonists to scrape against this stillness that reading seems to be impractical.The test scores released at the end of last month by the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal disturbing trend lines for the future of literacy in our country. Thirty-three percent of eighth graders scored “below basic” on reading skills, meaning they were unable to determine the main idea of a text or identify differing sides of an argument. This was the worst result in the exam’s 32-year history. To make matters worse, or perhaps to explain how we got here, the assessment reported that in 2023 only 14 percent of students said they read for fun almost every day, a drop of 13 percentage points since 2012.In its attempt to make English more relevant, the National Council of Teachers of English — devoted to the improvement of language arts instruction — announced in 2022 that it would widen its doors to the digital and mediated world. The aim was to retreat from the primacy of the written word and invite more ideas to be represented by images and multimedia. “It behooves our profession, as stewards of the communication arts, to confront and challenge the tacit and implicit ways in which print media is valorized above the full range of literacy competencies students should master,” the council said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Excruciating Wait for Abundant Life Christian School Families After Shooting

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      Inside Abundant Life Christian School, a chilling message came over the intercom late Monday morning: “Lockdown. This is not a drill.”Teachers herded students out of view, a sixth-grader recalled. Then there was banging, and screaming. “Everybody started freaking out,” said the student, Breken Ives.The sirens came minutes later.“Police car after police car,” said John Diaz de Leon, a retiree in his 60s who lives near the school in Madison, Wis., and who soon headed outside to see what was bringing so many squad cars to usually quiet Buckeye Road.It would be hours before anyone knew any of the details that the police disclosed in a series of news conferences — including that the shooter was a student at the small private school, and that a teacher and a fellow student had been killed and six others injured.Mr. Diaz de Leon had tuned into a police scanner and heard the words “triage” and “D.O.A.” — dead on arrival. Outside the school, he watched as two police officers with long guns drawn approached the school building, leading a police dog. Soon, groups of students began running out, some coatless and holding hands.All around Madison, parents began to rush toward the school. One father, Mike Brube, was blocks away at work, he said, when he saw the police cruisers screaming by, sirens blaring.He drove straight to the school where his seventh-grader, Angel, had been enrolled throughout childhood. “The school is Christian, and it’s like a family place,” Mr. Brube said.Viktoriya Gonzales was among the parents who waited anxiously near the school for hours to be reunited with their children. Some of the students were held back to talk with police officers as the authorities began to investigate.Ms. Gonzales had heard from other students that her son, 12, was safe but “severely traumatized, because he was right by the shooter.”“That’s all I know,” she said. More

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      Review: In ‘Eureka Day,’ Holding Space for Those You Hate

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      A hilarious new Broadway production asks: Can the superwoke vaxxers and anti-vaxxers at an elite private school learn to get along?Just in time, laughter is making a big comeback on Broadway. Better yet, it comes in several varieties.For catty yowling, check out Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard, wringing necks in “Death Becomes Her.” For helpless giggles, there’s Cole Escola as that cabaret legend Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!” And if you enjoy the hysteria of family fireworks, “Cult of Love” should leave you gasping.But the funniest character now on Broadway isn’t even a human being — or not exactly. Getting the biggest belly laughs in Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day,” which opened on Monday at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, is a yellow thumbs-up emoji.The emoji appears — chipper then aggravating then weirdly insidious — in a livestream meeting of parents and executive board members at Eureka Day, an upscale private school in Berkeley, Calif. As Don, the principal, tries to handle a looming crisis, using every banality at his new-age disposal, the conversation in the chat veers correspondingly out of control. His attempt to “unpack” issues calmly has instead disgorged a torrent of personal attacks, vulgar language and childish invective. By the end of the scene, the third of the play’s quick seven, the thumb seems like a different finger entirely.Spector’s hilarious poison-pen satire of educational wokeism has led us to that point with great care. A Manhattan Theater Club production, directed bracingly by Anna D. Shapiro, it begins, in 2018, with a kind of dramaturgical canapé to whet our appetites for the main dish. As the lights come up on the school’s bright library, prominently featuring a social justice collection, Don (Bill Irwin) is leading the board in a discussion about a proposed addition to the drop-down menu on the prospective parent application. Should it include “transracial adoptee” as an option among the many other ethnic identities offered?The point is argued with elaborate courtesy bordering on incomprehensibility. Meiko (Chelsea Yakura-Kurtz) says “the term itself is not offensive,” but Suzanne (Jessica Hecht) thinks it might be offensive “when you contextualize it in that way.” Eli (Thomas Middleditch) feels that failing to add the term would amount to a kind of erasure, given that “our Core Operating Principle here is that everyone should Feel Seen by this community.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Breaking the Cycle of Childhood Poverty in New York

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      This is part of an Opinion series on The New York Times Communities Fund, which assists nonprofits that provide direct support to people and communities facing hardship. Donate to the fund here. .g-goldbergseriesinfo a { text-decoration: underline; color: inherit; text-decoration-thickness: 1px; text-underline-offset: 2px; } .g-goldbergseriesinfo{ position: relative; display: flex; overflow: hidden; box-sizing: border-box; padding: 1.125rem […] More

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      Special Education Services With a Catch: Parents Are Asked Not to Sue

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      New York City school officials want families seeking such services to waive their right to sue the Education Department in exchange for receiving them. New York City parents who missed a rarely enforced deadline to apply for their children’s special education services can now receive those services, but only if they agree not to sue the Education Department.The requirement affects about 3,500 families whose children attend private or religious schools or are home-schooled and receive resources such as teacher aides who attend class with them, speech therapy and occupational therapy.About 17,000 families successfully filed to participate in the system this year by the June 1 deadline, which had not been enforced in previous years. The families who missed the cutoff were left in limbo.Because they missed the deadline, their children have not gotten the services so far this school year. The waiver, which the Education Department sent to affected parents on Thursday, would provide the families expedited services in about three days, said Nicole Brownstein, a spokeswoman for the city Education Department.But one lawyer who specializes in education issues described the waiver as “highly problematic” because of its vague wording, and another said such a pre-emptive move was extremely unusual. City Council members learned about the new waiver program during a briefing on Thursday.“I think it’s outrageous,” said Councilman Keith Powers, who attended the meeting with the Education Department. He added, “It feels wrong, and the whole process has been a mess from the very beginning.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Linda McMahon Was Questioned About WWE in Previous Connecticut Education Role

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      Linda McMahon, whose résumé mainly rests on running World Wrestling Entertainment, has faced questions for years over whether she is suitable for important education posts.Appointees to the State Board of Education usually sail through the confirmation process in Connecticut’s House of Representatives, but a 2009 choice, Linda E. McMahon, drew intense pushback.Andrew Fleischmann, who then chaired the House Education Committee, remembers being offended by her selection and leading the opposition.“She had no involvement whatsoever in education,” Mr. Fleischmann, a Democrat, said in a recent interview. “She’s made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars pushing violence and sexualization of young women. She was a real force for doing ill to kids in our country.”Ms. McMahon’s company, World Wrestling Entertainment, was criticized for promoting violence, steroid use and sexualized content. In the early 2000s, Ms. McMahon would go so far as to engage in the W.W.E.’s theatrics herself. She kicked her husband, Vince McMahon, the company’s co-founder, in the groin in one routine. In another, she appeared to slap her daughter, Stephanie, and knock her to the floor.After a contentious floor debate, the House voted to approve Ms. McMahon by a vote of 96-45, an unusual split for a minor appointment in Connecticut.Ms. McMahon may soon face another confirmation, this time as President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      California Educator Is Charged With Molesting 8 Children

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      David Braff was first accused of misconduct years ago but has since held a series of school jobs. The authorities are investigating the possibility of additional victims. A Los Angeles assistant principal was arrested on Friday and charged with molesting eight children between 2015 and 2019, while he was working as an elementary school counselor in Ventura County. The defendant, David Lane Braff Jr., 42, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., is accused of molesting children aged 6 to 10 in an office at McKevett Elementary School in the Santa Paula Unified School District, roughly 70 miles west of Los Angeles. The charges emerged out of a cold case sexual abuse unit, Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said. He noted that officials at McKevett Elementary had reached out to authorities at the time of the alleged incidents.Nevertheless, Mr. Braff has held several jobs in public education since and has also volunteered in a number of programs for children.Mr. Nasarenko described an “extensive search for the possibility of other victims at other school sites and locations.” “This shakes the very foundation of the notion of a school site as a safe learning environment,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More