Author: BelieveAgain

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday appeared inclined to uphold two state laws that prohibit transgender girls and women from female sports.The justices engaged in more than three hours of measured and generally respectful consideration of cases from Idaho and West Virginia, which are among the 27 states that have laws designating boys’ and girls’ athletic teams based on individuals’ sex assigned at birth.“Given that half the states are … allowing transgender girls and women to participate, about half are not, why would we at this point … jump in and try to constitutionalize a rule for the whole country…

A group of California parents has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reinstate a federal district court decision that said parents have a federal constitutional right to be informed by schools of any gender nonconformity and social transition by their children.A federal appeals court earlier this month blocked the district court decision, calling it too “sweeping” and “ambiguous” and likely wrong on the merits.The pause by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, reinstated a mandate by the California Department of Education that restrains teachers and district staff members from informing parents…

Sharie Lewis, chief financial officer for the suburban Parkrose school district in Oregon, always anxiously anticipates the outcome of her state’s annual legislative session. But this year she’s especially on edge.The state is bracing for a revenue shortfall of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, and has asked every agency—including the state education department—to prepare for budget cuts that could range from .5 percent to 5 percent and take effect for the school year that’s currently underway. Mid-year cuts of that magnitude—the first of their kind since Lewis joined the 2,800-student district a decade ago—would translate to Parkrose schools losing…

New York has joined California and Minnesota in passing a law requiring warning labels on social media platforms deemed to have addictive features.Platforms that offer feeds that the state considers addictive, and those with auto-play, or infinite scroll, will now be required to display a mental health warning when users open an app and at various points throughout the user’s experience. Social media sites can’t obscure the label or bury it in their terms of service—if they do, they face a penalty of up to $5,000, according to the legislative text.The law will apply to users in the state, though…

The public schools in St. Mary Parish have been under a federal order to desegregate longer than Tia Paul has been alive.The oversight began in 1965, barring the school board from sending Black students like Paul’s mother to different schools from White students and requiring it to eliminate the effects of segregation. It continued through Paul’s graduation from Patterson High School in 1995 and remains in place now as her daughter completes her junior year there.The orders gave Black students access to schools where they had been shut out, including formerly all-White Patterson High, which became 35% Black within several…

The Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers sued the state’s education department on Tuesday, accusing it of an improper “wave of retaliation” against public school employees over their social media comments following the killing of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk. The lawsuit says the Texas Education Agency and Commissioner Mike Morath violated the free speech rights of teachers and other school staff because they directed local school districts to document what the education agency described as “vile content” posted online after Kirk’s fatal shooting in September.Despite calls for civility, some people who criticized Kirk after his death drew…

A federal judge closed a long-running school desegregation case in DeSoto Parish on Monday, less than a week after the U.S. Department of Justice, the Louisiana attorney general, and the DeSoto Parish School Board asked the court to dismiss the case and release the schools from federal oversight.It is the second decades-old desegregation case in Louisiana brought to a swift end by the Trump administration and state Attorney General Liz Murrill, who last year had a case in Plaquemines Parish dating back to the 1960s dismissed. Murrill and Gov. Jeff Landry, both Republicans, have vowed to fight for other remaining…

The U.S. Department of Education on Tuesday touted its decision to give Iowa more control over spending federal education dollars—but the specifics of the newly approved flexibility fall far short of the Trump administration’s stated goal of converting most federal education funding to block grants.During a Jan. 7 press conference at Broadway Elementary School in Denison, Iowa, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced that she’s using her legal waiver authority to allow Iowa’s education agency to combine a small portion of the funds it receives from four separate federal grant programs into a single block grant. (See below for McMahon’s letter…

Five years ago, the University of Southern California’s Pedro Noguera and I published In Search of Common Ground. In a time of intense polarization, the two of us—from different parts of the political spectrum—sought to find points of agreement and better understand our disagreements. As we wrote, I was repeatedly struck by the outsized role of simple statistical facts (on questions like spending, achievement, or staffing) in grounding our exchange and helping us talk to—rather than past—one another.Taking trusted facts for granted is easy because we’re the fortunate heirs of institutions that do a remarkable job of producing them. Agreed-upon…

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to remake Head Start, ordering it to stop purging words it associates with diversity, equity, and inclusion from grant applications and barring it from laying off any more federal employees in the Office of Head Start.The order came this week in a lawsuit filed in April against Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials. The lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of illegally dismantling Head Start by shutting down federal Head Start offices and laying off half the staff. It also challenges the administration’s…