students

WASHINGTON  — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider outlawing school diversity policies that limit Asian American students at magnet programs and selective high schools.

Three years ago, the court ruled that Harvard and other universities may not discriminate on whom they admit based on the race of their applicants. Evidence in that case showed that Asian applicants with very high test scores were often turned down.

But the justices have been divided over admissions rules for highly selective high schools in Boston, New York and Fairfax County, Va., as well as magnet programs for gifted middle school students.

In most instances, judges have said school officials may use “race-neutral” policies to achieve racial diversity. For example, giving an automatic admission to the top 5% of the students in all of a big city’s high schools or its middle schools could achieve greater racial and ethnic diversity.

But the court’s conservatives, led by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito, have condemned such policies as thinly disguised racial discrimination.

Magnet programs exist across the country, including in California and Los Angeles, and were conceived as a form of voluntary integration — a way to get white students to attend the same schools as nonwhite students, without having to resort to forced busing.

The idea was that a special school program would be attractive enough to serve as a “magnet” for white students to enroll at a school they might not otherwise attend. A mix of white and nonwhite students was seen as a benefit to the nonwhite students, because white students would be sharing the fate of the nonwhite students.

Asian students were frequently part of that original equation on the nonwhite side of the ledger and counted with other students classified as nonwhite, such as Black or Latino students. But in terms of student achievement, Asian students have performed more like white students, frequently surpassing white students academically.

One subset of magnet schools requires a selective admissions process, and these are at the center of the current dispute.

The court agreed to hear an appeal from parents in Montgomery County, Md., who were upset by a sharp drop in Asian students at its four magnet schools for gifted students.

For a decade, the school board had been troubled that fewer than 15% of the students at its magnet schools were Black or Latino, even though they made up about half of the student population.

In contrast, Asian students were less than 15% of the county’s student population but made up about half of the enrolees at the magnet programs.

After several years of debate, school officials dropped the use of a countywide competitive test and chose top performing students at all of its middle schools using a lottery.

That prompted a lawsuit that reached the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Fairfax County in northern Virginia had adopted a somewhat similar policy for the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology. A federal judge ruled for Asian parents and said their students had been deprived of a “level playing field” in competing for admission.

But the 4th Circuit, by a 2-1 vote, disagreed and said Asian American students were still winning more seats than their percentage of the school population.

The Assn. for Education Fairness, the parents group in Montgomery County, lost for the same reason in the 4th Circuit. The number of admitted Asian students had declined, but their percentage remained well above their share of school population.

They appealed and urged the Supreme Court to rule on their case and to clarify the law.

“School districts across the country have overhauled admissions criteria for competitive public schools after concluding that existing systems produced undesirable racial enrollment patterns,” they said.

They said the court should end this type of racial discrimination against Asian students.

However, a longtime champion of admissions policies that rely on social and economic fairness said he hoped the court would side with Montgomery County.

“The Supreme Court has long disfavored racial preferences and pointed to race-neutral programs that look at factors like socioeconomic disadvantage as the right way to do affirmative action,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.

He said the Maryland school board followed that rule.

“It essentially provided an admissions break to students based not on race, but on the economic disadvantage of the elementary school they attended. The question now opened is whether the court will stand by precedent or move the goal posts. Is the court opposed to racial preferences, or to racial diversity itself?”

Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest school system, has an extensive magnet system, with 66 whole-school magnets and 268 magnet centers within a larger campus.

At this point, many of the magnets provide no discernible integration benefit and are viewed instead as inducements for any student to enroll. Many magnets are nearly all students of color because few white students apply.

A few schools, however, have more applicants than spaces, and the district relies on “the Magnet Priority Point System and the need to maintain a racially balanced enrollment, and by available space.”

Parents must mark one federally recognized race or ethnicity on the application, or it won’t be processed. A family gets points, for example, if a student applied unsuccessfully for a magnet in the past.

In L.A. Unified, 53 schools are designated for students rated as “gifted,” and there are four campuses with programs for highly gifted students, typically identified by a professional evaluator.

Available recent data for the highly gifted program at North Hollywood High indicated that the largest percentage of students, about 38%, were Asian. Overall, the district’s enrollment is about 3.5% Asian.

The justices will hear arguments in the case early next year.

Savage reported from Washington and Blume from Los Angeles.

Judge fines government for failing to fund universities as protests over Milei’s cuts turn violent.

“This cannot go on!” students shout during an assembly in the middle of the central hall of the University of Buenos Aires Exact and Natural Sciences building.

It is part of Argentina’s prestigious public university system.

The faculty’s central hall is covered with dozens of banners protesting President Javier Milei’s spending cuts. Students have called an assembly to announce the occupation of the university, a traditional form of protest in Argentina meant to raise public awareness and pressure the government.

They say they will take over the building for a day. Many students and professors here are concerned about the impact of Milei’s austerity policies on public universities and say the future of free higher education is at risk.

“Our best professors are leaving en masse. With salaries that cannot cover their basic needs, they are leaving for private universities,” Emiliano Gato, a physics student who is part of the group, told Al Jazeera.

“I dream of doing research and teaching at the public University of Buenos Aires. It’s a prestigious school. But now, with this austerity plan, I don’t know what will happen.”

Public universities in Argentina have become a major battleground of Milei’s austerity plan. Students and professors are protesting the lack of funding and the erosion of salaries, which they say is a major threat to the country’s public education.

Milei is implementing one of the harshest austerity plans in Argentina’s history.

Since taking office in 2023, he has laid off thousands of state employees, shut down ministries, reduced subsidies and cut government-funded programmes. The measures were meant to fight high inflation, which was a major problem in Argentina. Almost three years later, inflation has fallen to around 2 percent a month. Milei says his plan is going well.

“Argentina is growing at a remarkable pace. We have now recorded 27 consecutive months of sustained growth, and today the country is expanding at four times its historical rate. This growth is being felt across almost every sector of the economy,” said Milei during a recent visit to Washington.

Ripple effects

But not everyone agrees. His plan is also having a profound impact on public education, welfare plans for people with disabilities, pensioners and others who depend on state support. The opposition has tried to block many of Milei’s reforms.

Last year, Congress overturned presidential vetoes and approved two laws, one increasing funding for public universities and another declaring a disability emergency. But Milei’s government has refused to implement them, arguing that Congress failed to identify how they would be financed.

A federal judge has now begun fining the government 100,000 pesos (around $70) a day for failing to implement parts of the financing law, which requires Milei’s government to restore university salaries and student scholarships lost to inflation, regularly update budgets and provide funding for research, hospitals and infrastructure.

And that’s why thousands of people took to the streets on Thursday to demand that the government implement it. All around Buenos Aires, long columns of people blocked the centre of the city as they called for a general strike. Although the protest was meant to be peaceful, it soon turned violent. Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets as protesters threw rocks.

The plaza in front of Congress resembled a battleground. At least 25 people were detained, and several others were injured, including members of the security forces.

Maria Teresa de Jesus is a professor in the University of Buenos Aires chemistry department. She says she makes around $700 a month and it has become difficult to make ends meet. “I have come to this protest as a last resort. I am professor. I love teaching, doing research. I shouldn’t be here,” she told Al Jazeera. “Public education is crucial in this country, to make education accessible to all. And the government is ignoring it.”

Many in Argentina continue to support Milei’s economic plan. They are hoping the government’s plan to exploit the country’s vast natural resources will pay off and translate into more jobs, higher wages and improved living standards.

But many others have stopped believing and are prepared to raise the stakes. They accuse Milei’s government of protecting the interests of a privileged few while asking the rest of the country to bear the cost of his economic plan.

French Football Federation’s ethics body calls on fans to keep politics out of stadiums amid student protests.

The ethics body of the French football federation is urging fans to stay neutral amid the nationwide student protests that are drawing international attention.

The police response to the largely peaceful demonstrations has prompted widespread accusations of brutality, and football fans in stadiums have expressed their support for students.

Officers have made extensive use of tear gas and batons to disperse crowds. More than 6,600 arrests were made nationwide as of last week, an unusually high number for a French protest movement.

A police tear gas grenade shattered a 14-year-old’s jaw and many of his teeth, while a 15-year-old lost a hand in an incident involving a stun grenade. Other teenagers have also suffered life-changing injuries blamed on police weaponry during protests.

During a Ligue 1 match between Lens and Lyon last week, the home fans unfurled a banner calling for an end to the “disproportionate and systematic police violence,” according to the National Council for Football Ethics (CNE).

The CNE also noted that at the half-hour mark of the match between PSG and Le Mans, supporters displayed a banner reading: “Your militias repress; our youth resists.”

The ethics body said in a statement that it was easy to understand why young supporters, who are often students, might take advantage of matches to publicly express their support for the demonstrators.

However, it added that the principle of political neutrality is “enshrined” in the laws of sport, both internationally through the Olympic Charter and FIFA statutes, and at a national level.

The CNE recalled that any speech or display of a political, ideological, religious or trade union nature are prohibited, as is the wearing of symbols or clothing that expresses political, philosophical, religious or trade union affiliation.

“Sport should unite, not divide,” it said. “The National Council for Football Ethics therefore calls on all supporters, who are an integral part of the football family, to uphold the principle of neutrality in all circumstances.

“The aim is to ensure that the stadium does not become a political or trade union battleground, but remains a place of celebration and shared enjoyment centred on sport.”

Student protests against poor conditions in Albania’s education system have continued for a third day in the capital, Tirana, as Prime Minister Edi Rama insists he will not resign.

Demonstrators have called on Rama to quit in often violent protests since Tuesday. They have set fire to several buildings across the city, including the prime minister’s office, ministry buildings and branches of several banks.

Dozens of police officers and protesters have been injured amid attempts to disperse the crowds using water cannon and tear gas.

“What you are seeing is the boiling point of months of suppressed grievances,” Albanian journalist Arlis Alikaj told Al Jazeera.

Students have complained for months about the high cost of education and their limited employment prospects after graduation.

Afrim Krasniqi, a professor and researcher at the Institute for Political Studies in Tirana, told Al Jazeera that students and young people protested peacefully for nearly three months, “yet their demands were largely ignored, while the government often responded with discrediting campaigns rather than genuine dialogue”.

He added that the current escalation reflects “frustration not only with the government itself, but also with the lack of institutional accountability and responsiveness.”

The protests represent one of the most serious waves of public discontent directed at Rama, who won a fourth term last May but has since faced public anger over corruption allegations involving senior officials.

The unrest in Tirana coincides with a broader wave of student protests across Europe. In France, secondary school students have spent weeks protesting and blockading schools, demanding more teachers and better learning facilities. They have warned that deteriorating school buildings and overcrowded classrooms are undermining the quality of education.

Protests against Rama’s government began a few months ago, fuelled by plans to build a luxury resort along Albania’s largely unspoilt southern coast. Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son in law, is involved in the project.

Local media reported that the protests spread from Tirana to universities in Elbasan and Shkoder on Wednesday.

Albania is among the economies of the Western Balkans seeking to catch up with European living standards. However, the gap with the European Union average remains evident in purchasing power, wages, productivity and the quality of public services. Despite economic progress, the country continues to face challenges including emigration, regional inequalities and the need for stronger institutions and the rule of law.

After Montenegro, Albania stands out as one of the countries that has made the most progress towards full EU membership. However, behind the optimistic political rhetoric, frustration is growing among citizens over the slow pace of European integration and the lack of tangible improvements in their daily lives.

While opposition groups seek to support the demonstrators and capitalise on the moment to strengthen their own position, Alikaj said the protests are being driven by young people and students demanding systemic change.

On Thursday, Rama – who has been PM since 2013 – told Reuters, “As for calls for my resignation, governments change through democratic elections. Last year, we had elections, not a revolution.”

Sokol Lleshi, a lecturer at the University of New York Tirana specialising in political science and international relations, said social change is more likely to emerge from a broader coalition of different social groups, rather than mass mobilisation limited to university and secondary school students.

“Elite defection from the current ruling political elite could enable the institutional means to channel societal dissatisfaction or resentment into political and policy changes. Yet, the current student protest does not seem to replicate the December 2018 mass movement of university students and its effects”, Lleshi said.

The student protests that shook Albania in December 2018 began over rising education costs and forced Rama to dismiss eight ministers as part of a cabinet reshuffle and announce a package of measures known as the “Pact for the University”.

But some of the students’ demands remained unmet.

Lleshi drew some more positive conclusions from Albania’s past experience of social unrest.

Albanian society is polarised and unequal, “with hollowed intermediary political institutions”, he said, but the legacy of unrest and political confrontation will serve as a “warning to avoid destabilisation”, he said.

San ​Antonio Spurs player Victor Wembanyama offers solidarity to students protesting conditions at schools in France.

France’s ‌basketball star Victor Wembanyama voiced his support on Thursday ⁠for French ⁠teenagers protesting conditions in the country’s schools.

The Ministry of the Interior said 71,500 people took part in Thursday’s demonstrations, ⁠including 24,500 in the main Paris march centred on Place de la Bastille.

“These are systemic inequalities – problems so deep-rooted ⁠that, in fact, I’m glad that high-school students and young people in general are speaking up,” Wembanyama told a news conference on Thursday night.

“I hear them, and I support them, and ‌I hope the people all over there will do the same.”

The San Antonio Spurs player had previously replied “I would love to” when a fan asked him in an Instagram post to join the protest with the French teenagers.

“I have a lot of interest. I meant it,” Wembanyama ⁠added at the news conference. “I was in ⁠that position not so long ago.

“I’ve had the chance to escape this system, to escape these problems. But it’s chance, it’s luck. So I ⁠want to show my support.

“It’s not something that’s completely unfamiliar to me. I went ⁠to high school in Nanterre, which was ⁠already a stronghold of ‘blocages’ back then,” he said, referring to student-led school blockades.

Concerns about state schools have helped prompt a number of France’s most significant protests ‌in decades.

They began last month at high schools in the poor northern suburbs of Paris, where anger over teacher absences ‌and ‌shabby facilities quickly evolved into a nationwide movement against inequality, weak public spending and falling standards.

Education Minister Edouard Geffray said on Sunday about 500 schools likely to be fully or partially closed on Monday.

Hundreds of high schools in France are closed as student protests continue against rundown schools and teacher shortages.

Government spokesperson Maud Bregeon told CNews television on Monday that the priority was to “restore order”.

Earlier, National Education Minister Edouard Geffray said on Sunday evening, of the 3,700 schools, 400 to 500 were likely to be closed fully or partially on Monday.

Geffray said 24 schools had been burned or ransacked, while 78 teaching staff had been injured since the beginning of the protests.

Nationwide demonstrations erupted at the end of last month at a high school in a Parisian suburb over teacher shortages, before spreading nationwide.

Reporting from a high school in Paris, Al Jazeera’s Natacha Butler said students had set up a barricade in front of the building’s entrance using dustbins and fences.

“We’ve been talking to many of the students who have come out here, and what they say is that they are here to have their demands heard by the government. They say they are fed up with teacher shortages and often don’t have teachers for subjects like maths and English,” she said.

“They also tell us that they’re here to demonstrate to show solidarity with other high school students who are in perhaps poorer areas in France with less adequate facilities or in France’s overseas territories. They say all young people should have an equal right to education,” Butler added.

French news channel BFMTV showed images of police and students clashing in Lille, northern France, tear gas being used in Toulouse in the southwest and of a fire being set alight as people tried to break into a school in central Paris.

Carole Zerbib, head of the vandalised Lycee Vauquelin in Paris’s 13th district, said a “very determined” group wearing hoods and masks attacked her school.

While police and firefighters quickly put out the fire and the school was evacuated, suspending classes, Zerbib said it was “very violent and happened very quickly”, adding that the attack lasted 15-20 minutes.

Since September 28, about 5,000 people, mostly teenagers, have been arrested across the country and dozens have been injured.

French newspaper La Voix du Nord reported on Monday that a teenager lost a hand after picking up a police stun grenade.

Teachers and members of the public have also been attacked, while estimated costs of property damage are in the tens of millions of euros.

Student unions have called for a national day of demonstration on Tuesday.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Frankie Llerandi, 21, has been unable to land a single internship in his three years at Michigan State University.

He will graduate in the spring with an economics degree and an interest in data analytics, but true adulthood seems maddeningly far away. Most of his cousins have not been able to buy a house or start a family deep into their 30s.

Kira Saiti, a 19-year-old sophomore, is more upset about the broader world than her own future. Every time she looks at her phone she sees images of violence and horror, both in the Middle East and closer to home.

“It’s kind of hard to look at that and say, ‘This world is a great place,’” she said.

Julian Bautista, 20, saw his chosen profession of environmental work decimated by Trump administration cuts, pushing the junior to decide he will leave the United States to find work in the Netherlands when he graduates. He considers what remains his home country for the next 18 months to be a failure of democracy led by what he sees as corrupt politicians.

“Throughout my life, we’ve either stagnated or declined; we haven’t improved,” Bautista said.

For many of their classmates on campus and elsewhere around the country, the present looks bleak and the future uncertain at best. Their anxiety is fueling a restlessness with a national political system that they worry is no longer capable of improving their lives or no longer interested in helping.

Two years ago, grim economic vibes helped Donald Trump win a far larger share of young voters than is typical for a Republican — 47%, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive survey of the electorate. Now, anxiety about artificial intelligence and the Iran war has been added to the mix, powering a wave of disruptive candidates on the opposite end of the political spectrum who have been embraced by college students.

Llerandi, Saiti and Bautista all support a slate of progressive, anti-establishment Democratic candidates in Michigan who are pledging to shake up the status quo. Among them are Abdul El-Sayed, a former public health official running for U.S. Senate, and Will Lawrence, a liberal activist trying to unseat Tom Barrett, the Republican congressman who represents the swing district that includes the university.

A similar trend has been playing out in Los Angeles in recent years. Four Democratic Socialists of America members are on the L.A. City Council, and one of them — Nithya Raman — is polling strongly in her campaign to unseat the more establishment Democratic mayor, Karen Bass. The city’s dearth of affordable housing has been a leading issue in the race.

The future looks bleak for many students

Anxieties about the job market, homeownership and adulthood are widespread across the East Lansing campus, even among those who are not deeply involved in politics.

“It’s just something to laugh at, but, you know, I really do want a house when I’m older,” said Praveen Amunugama, a 21-year-old biochemistry major who plans to go to graduate school in hopes the job market improves over the next two years.

His friends feel the same way.

“They want to be able to afford things, raise a good family,” he said.

Despite the economic angst among young people, at first blush the picture does not look that bad for them. The unemployment rate for those age 22 to 27 is 7.2%, higher than the broader rate of 4.1% but lower than in some moments of economic calm.

A 2024 study found members of the younger generation known as Generation Z are poised to be wealthier than millennials, who themselves are wealthier than the prior generation despite the persistent sense of economic doom that accompanied their entry into the job market during the Great Recession.

Kevin Corinth, the economist who co-wrote that study, said he understands Gen Z angst, given modern uncertainties, especially the prospect of AI reshaping various industries and data showing younger people are taking longer to leave home and start families.

“For previous generations, if you took certain paths you were likely to succeed, to do better than your parents,” said Corinth, who is at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank. For young people now, he acknowledged, that path is not as clear.

Kathryn Edwards, a Texas-based economist, noted that unemployment among recent college graduates is at 5.6%, higher than at most other times in recent history other than the Great Recession. Combined with historically high housing prices and rising costs for essentials such as food and healthcare, that is a challenging environment for young people.

“It’s pretty bad for them,” Edwards said, adding that young people are picking up on broader warning signs in the economy. “So many aspects of our current economy, I think young people have gotten right.”

They are also fully exposed to the new form of job hunting: AI-powered, digital and done almost exclusively online, where it is hard to discern real job openings from fake ones.

“Think about the amount they get spammed and scammed, and there are tons of fake jobs out there,” said Marla McGraw, assistant dean of career management in Michigan State’s business school. “They’re always coming in here going, ‘Is this real?’”

She spends a lot of time trying to buck up disenchanted students.

“Our message right now is the job market is tough, but you’re tougher,” McGraw said.

Students say political leaders are falling short

Young Americans’ optimism about the job market has plummeted since 2024, and the gap between their view of the economy and those of their elders is greater than almost anywhere in the world, according to a Gallup survey earlier this year.

They are less likely to be engaged in politics and less likely to think it is important to vote, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found. They also are less likely to be concerned about political violence.

That dissolution of beliefs in traditional political values worries Karlee VanAntwerp.

The 21-year-old Michigan State senior is also head of the local chapter of Turning Point, the group for young conservatives whose founder, Charlie Kirk, was killed by a gunman last year. VanAntwerp has been horrified to see Kirk’s killing mocked online, sometimes menacingly.

“Gen Z tends to be more extreme with their views,” VanAntwerp said. “It makes it hard to work with people of different political beliefs, because even if you’re in the middle, they assume you’re crazy.”

VanAntwerp sees that feeding into the despair many of her generation feel about real change ever happening.

“One administration does a bunch of stuff, another administration comes in and wipes it all out,” said VanAntwerp, who is also working for Barrett’s campaign. “It feels like we always go in circles. That contributes to the political temperature being so high, because people feel nothing changes.”

Her politics are the polar opposite of many liberal students who gathered to hear Lawrence, Barrett’s Democratic challenger, talk in a classroom one recent evening, but there was a similar desire for dramatic change. Lawrence sympathized with the glum feelings of early adulthood and urged the students not to succumb to despair.

“When I was a little younger I wanted to drop out of society, and it was organizing that gave me a path in life,” Lawrence said.

After the candidate left, however, Bautista still sounded on the verge of despair. He talked about how online influencers he trusts deride Democrats such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York as “mini-me’s” because, in Bautista’s view, they are just watered-down versions of Trump.

“Our leaders are representing us less,” Bautista said. “People are desperate for big stuff.”

Ganun and Riccardi write for the Associated Press.

Jason Eaton faces up to life in prison after a jury rejected his insanity defence.

A jury in the US state of Vermont has convicted a man of attempted murder for shooting three Palestinian college students in 2023, rejecting his defence that he was not guilty by reason of insanity.

Jason Eaton, 51, faces up to life in prison for the attack near the University of Vermont campus in Burlington. It left Hisham Awartani paralysed from the waist down and wounded his friends Tahseen Aliahmad and Kinnan Abdalhamid.

The jury deliberated for several hours on Monday before reaching its verdict after a week-long trial that included testimony from the three men and psychiatric experts called by both the defence and prosecution.

Eaton was ordered jailed pending sentencing, which has yet to be scheduled.

Awartani and Aliahmad, who were sitting in the front row of the courtroom, smiled and hugged people around them as the verdict was read.

Eaton did not dispute that he shot the three men in November 2023. Instead, his lawyers argued that he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.

The defence said Eaton was suffering from a delusional psychotic disorder and believed the CIA and Israel’s Mossad were transmitting messages to him through FM radio.

Joshua O’Hara, the supervising attorney at the Chittenden County Public Defender Office, told jurors that Eaton believed the intelligence agencies had enlisted him to “overwatch duty” to protect a Jewish family living across the street and that God was commanding him to act.

Prosecutors rejected the insanity defence, telling jurors that a state psychiatrist had concluded Eaton did not have a mental disease or defect and that the evidence showed he intended to kill the three men.

‘He pulled out a handgun and started shooting’

Awartani, Aliahmad and Abdalhamid, now 23, grew up together in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank before moving to the US for university.

They were visiting Awartani’s grandmother in Burlington over the Thanksgiving holiday when they went for a walk near the University of Vermont campus after dark.

Awartani testified that the friends were smoking cigarettes and speaking a mix of English and Arabic. Two of them were wearing keffiyehs.

He said Eaton was standing on the porch of the apartment building where he lived before approaching the friends without saying anything.

When Eaton was about five to 10 feet (1.5 to three metres) away, Awartani testified, he pulled out a handgun and began shooting.

Awartani, then a student at Brown University, was shot in the chest and left paralysed from the waist down. Aliahmad, who attended Trinity College, was shot in the collarbone, while Abdalhamid, a Haverford College student, was shot in the right buttock.

The shooting prompted calls for a hate crime investigation, but no hate crime charges were filed.

Police later found three shotguns in Eaton’s apartment as well as a Ruger .380-calibre handgun that crime laboratory testing identified as the weapon used in the shooting.