Author: BelieveAgain

The Trump administration next week will unfreeze billions of K-12 education dollars it has withheld from states since July 1, the Education Department told states Friday afternoon.Roughly $5 billion will flow beginning the week of July 28 to states through four K-12 education grant programs, according to a July 25 Department of Education letter obtained by Education Week.The affected grant programs, according to the letter, are Title I-C for migrant education ($375 million); Title II-A for professional development and teacher training ($2.2 billion); Title III-A for English-learner services ($890 million); and Title IV-A for academic enrichment ($1.3 billion).The administration last…

What makes a good public school—and how would we know it?While these questions may appear simple to answer—given all the publicly available data and the growing number of online school-rating sites—they remain enormously difficult to resolve. Information is scattered across disconnected sources, and many rating systems are themselves poorly designed, obscuring more than they reveal.Why measure a school’s quality? Because parents need to know whether their child will learn to read confidently; policymakers must see whether students are truly prepared for college and the workforce; and taxpayers deserve evidence that public dollars are invested well.Can you infer the quality of…

Head Start programs across the country were providing summer services to young children when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a surprise notice on July 10 saying that, effective immediately, undocumented students are no longer eligible to enroll in the federal preschool program designed for children from families living in poverty.The notice—a sharp departure from decades of precedent—reclassifies Head Start and more than a dozen federally funded services as welfare, which makes immigration status a potential barrier to access. But the agency offered no clear guidance, leaving school districts and nonprofit grantees uncertain about how to proceed.“These…

Some Head Start programs could be forced to close because of the steep cost of complying with a new Trump administration policy that requires them to verify the immigration status of students and parents, 21 Democratic attorneys general argue in a new lawsuit.The top legal officials in 20 states and the District of Columbia on Monday asked a judge to halt the new policy, which reclassified more than a dozen federally funded services, including Head Start and dual enrollment for high school students, as benefits similar to welfare so the Trump administration can bar undocumented immigrants from accessing them.The reclassification…

The Trump administration violated federal laws and the U.S. Constitution when it abruptly withheld $6.8 billion in federal education funding that was required by law to flow July 1, 22 Democratic attorneys general and two Democratic governors allege in a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court.The lawsuit, filed July 14 in the U.S. District Court of Rhode Island, characterizes the Trump administration’s unprecedented withholding of billions of dollars Congress appropriated for education in March as a brazen attack on the constitutional separation of powers. The move, it contends, also violates federal laws governing education programming, administrative procedures, and executive branch…

In March, most Congressional Republicans—and one Democrat—voted for a federal spending package that included billions of dollars for education funding. But now, they’re overwhelmingly staying silent on whether the Trump administration broke the law by withholding $6.8 billion of that money, which goes to virtually every public school district.President Donald Trump on March 15 signed into law a continuing resolution that maintained current funding levels for federal education programs in the fiscal year that starts this October. Fifty-four senators and 217 House members voted in favor of the continuing resolution.Most of the money Congress allocated in that spending package for…

A federal appeals court has ruled that Arkansas may enforce its law prohibiting teachers from “indoctrination” of students with critical race theory or other so-called “discriminatory” ideologies.A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, in St. Louis, unanimously vacated a federal district court’s preliminary injunction blocking the 2023 law, which is one of a handful nationwide that echoes anti-CRT rhetoric.Some 17 other states, including Iowa and North Dakota (which like Arkansas are part of the 8th Circuit), have similar laws, executive orders or other measures. President Donald Trump in January issued an executive order aimed…

The Trump administration confirmed Friday it will soon send states their formula funding allocations for before- and after-school programs nationwide—more than two weeks after the administration withheld those funds, and billions more dollars, for education that Congress approved in March.The federal Office of Management and Budget told states on June 30 that $6.8 billion wouldn’t flow as expected the next day due to an “ongoing programmatic review.” That review is now complete, an unnamed senior administration official told Education Week through an OMB spokesperson on Friday afternoon.“Funds will be released to the states,” the statement says. “Guardrails have been put…

The U.S. Department of Education is setting new priorities for roughly $1 billion in school mental health funding after the agency abruptly told former grant recipients their awards would end because they reflected Biden administration policies.The department, which is expected to publish the proposed priorities in the Federal Register on Thursday, will prioritize recruitment and retention incentives to increase the ranks of credentialed school psychologists and the “respecialization” of people who work in related fields so they can more quickly be certified as school psychologists.The Education Department said in the document outlining the proposed priorities that it will also prohibit…

Ten Republican senators on Wednesday joined a growing chorus of Democrats calling for the Trump administration to unfreeze $6.8 billion of money Congress allocated for education in March.Declining to give out money Congress allocated for schools runs counter to the Trump administration’s stated goal of “returning education to the states,” a group of senators led by Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., wrote in a July 16 letter to Russell Vought, director of the federal Office of Management and Budget. The letter is the highest-profile example yet of congressional Republicans challenging the Trump administration’s withholding of the funds that, by law, were…