Author: paige laevy

There is a peculiar mixture of relief and annoyance following the Special Investigating Unit’s announcement this week that it has recovered R25 million from a group of businesses connected to the Chachulani Group. relief that the money is finally returning. frustration because many South Africans are now practically familiar with the story behind it. a pandemic. schools that are locked down. a hurry to reopen. And decisions were made on WhatsApp during that rush. The settlement stems from a 2022 Special Tribunal decision that invalidated R431 million in contracts that the Gauteng Department of Education had awarded for sanitizing, disinfecting,…

The lawsuit that Rick Sobey of the Boston Herald reported on April 17th has a peculiar quality that isn’t related to the legal wording. It’s the individuals who are responsible. Sitting in Massachusetts houses of correction, three young men, ages eighteen to twenty-two, decided they had had enough of waiting for the education the state was supposed to provide. So they filed a lawsuit. The class-action lawsuit against the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education makes the almost obvious claim that incarcerated students with disabilities aren’t receiving the special education services and instruction to which they are legally entitled. As…

As is customary, the numbers were buried in a Monday court document that hardly anyone outside of student loan circles bothered to look at. However, the Department of Education’s most recent status report reads less like bureaucratic housekeeping and more like a slow-motion drama taking place in spreadsheet form for the borrowers awaiting a decision that could eliminate tens of thousands of dollars in debt. The department reported an 88,170 PSLF buyback application backlog as of February 28. That figure was 83,370 two months prior. Therefore, despite the department’s insistence that it is making progress elsewhere, the pile is increasing…

It began in the same manner as most field trips from elementary schools. On a Monday morning, there’s a bus, a roll call, the typical rustle of little backpacks, and that specific noise only first and second graders can make. Nobody anticipated that the day would conclude with a school nurse rushing through hallways and 32 anxious sets of parents receiving phone calls they did not want to receive by the time the kids from Eugene Sires Elementary School had taken their seats at a nearby movie theater. Inside that theater, something occurred. No one has yet to say precisely…

Small-town tragedies are unique in that they never truly come to an end. They simply become silent for some time. Since July 31, 2022, when a black Toyota driven by 17-year-old Mackenzie Shirilla crashed into a brick wall at about 100 miles per hour, Strongsville, a neat suburb southwest of Cleveland, has been burdened by one such night. Both her 20-year-old boyfriend Dominic Russo and their 19-year-old friend Davion Flanagan, who had just graduated from Strongsville High School, perished. Following the conviction, the families remained silent for a considerable amount of time. Now that Netflix has removed the cover, it’s…

On a Saturday morning, take a fifteen-minute stroll through Southall and you’ll hear something that doesn’t quite happen anywhere else. A mother is reprimanding her son in Tamil, two elderly men are arguing in what sounds like Pashto but may be Dari behind her, and Punjabi spills out from the candy stores and Somali from the phone-card kiosks. No one appears shocked. Really, no one notices. Strangely enough, that’s the whole point. The majority of London’s residents haven’t really noticed that the city is becoming the most linguistically diverse in human history. Although linguists who actually knock on doors believe…

Everybody who speaks two languages has a familiar moment in their lives. When you hear a heavy, charged word in your second language, it lands a little softer than it should. You get it. You are able to define it. But there’s no punch. If you ask a Chinese speaker who studied English in school to read the word “furious,” they will understand it perfectly. It remains to be seen if they perceive it in the same manner as their Mandarin twin. Brain scans and electrical recordings are now being used in new research to provide concrete evidence for that…

A sociolinguist clicks through a slide deck that is older than the majority of her graduate students on a Tuesday morning in a stuffy seminar room at a public university in the Southwest. test results. rates of graduation. Data on wages from the late 1970s. She shrugs, almost to herself, as she stops on a chart. “We’ve been arguing about this since Du Bois,” she states. “And we still haven’t really listened to the kids.” That remark lingers. These days, a loose network of academics has been dissecting the lengthy American debate over bilingual education and coming to conclusions that…

Witnessing a child fall in love with a piece of plastic and software is a little strange. There is not much movement in the toy. It blinks. It talks. The child then begins to treat it more like a small companion who happens to know things, rather than like a gadget, at some point between the second and third interaction. That’s essentially the strange territory that ROYBI Robot has ventured into, and based on the feedback thus far, it’s a territory that more parents are willing to explore than anyone could have predicted even five years ago. Elnaz Sarraf, the…

When you enter a Queens polling place on election day, you’ll hear it before you see it. In careful Spanish, a sixty-year-old woman asks a poll worker if she is in the correct line. A young man is translating Mandarin instructions for his grandmother. A stack of four-language ballots, slightly curled at the corners due to the humidity, is located somewhere close to the sign-in table. It’s a brief scene. Most people are unaware of it. However, it is at the heart of one of the most persistent and little-discussed conflicts in American politics. Most people are unaware of how…