Author: BelieveAgain
The threats to cut off schools’ federal funds have come at a dizzying pace in the past month, since President Donald Trump was sworn into office for his second term.The president signed an executive order in his second week telling top administration officials to figure out how to withhold federal funds from schools that he says indoctrinate kids based on “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology.” Then he signed an order threatening funding if schools and colleges allow transgender girls to compete on girls’ sports teams. An order last week threatens money to schools and colleges with COVID-19 vaccine mandates.…
Over 80 percent of America’s children attend one of the nearly 100,000 public schools across the country. Nearly 16 million students are pursuing their American dream by seeking a college degree. Dismantling the U.S. Department of Education would harm them all and put America at risk.As former secretaries of education, we have traveled the nation’s highways, city streets, and rural roads across all 50 states to witness firsthand what is and is not working in our schools. We saw amazing students achieve miracles in classrooms and vulnerable students conquer learning challenges under the guidance of brilliant educators. We visited Title…
A federal appeals court has rejected a parental rights-based objection to a Massachusetts school district’s policy of allowing students to determine whether their parents should be notified about gender transitions and their choice of new names and pronouns.The policy “plausibly creates a space for students to express their identity without worrying about parental backlash,” said a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, in Boston. “By cultivating an environment where students may feel safe in expressing their gender identity, the protocol endeavors to remove psychological barriers for transgender students and equalizes educational opportunities.”The Feb.…
School district leaders should consult with their lawyers over new guidance from the U.S. Department of Education that threatens the loss of federal funding to schools that don’t end essentially any sort of race-based programming, education experts say.The sweeping “dear colleague” letter from the head of the Education Department’s office for civil rights, sent to K-12 schools and universities that receive federal dollars on Feb. 14, is the latest effort from President Donald Trump’s administration to weed out what he labels diversity, equity, and inclusion, using the threat of cutting funds as a way to exert the federal government’s muscle…
Electric school bus purchases. School-based composting programs. Education programs for aspiring teachers. Services for students with disabilities transitioning out of high school. These are a few of the activities affecting K-12 schools that remain paused or have been halted as President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to freeze spending and cancel scores of contracts backed by funding appropriated by Congress. The administration in the last month has moved to terminate grants, excise contracts, and freeze funding streams worth billions of dollars for efforts that don’t align with its priorities—defying decades of constitutional precedent and prompting multiple court orders from federal…
Linda McMahon, President Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Education, declined Thursday to say definitively that classes on subjects like African American history would be permissible under President Trump’s executive order on “radical indoctrination.”McMahon also said schools with clubs for groups of students from a particular racial or ethnic identity could be at risk of violating the order and lose federal funding as a result.In his second week in office, Trump signed an executive order for federal officials to develop plans for withholding money from K-12 schools that engage in what he calls “discriminatory equity ideology” and “gender…
Denver Public Schools became the first U.S. school district Wednesday to sue the Trump administration challenging its policy allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in schools.Colorado’s largest public school district argued in the federal lawsuit that the policy forced schools to divert vital educational resources and caused attendance to plummet.“DPS is hindered in fulfilling its mission of providing education and life services to the students who are refraining from attending DPS schools for fear of immigration enforcement actions occurring on DPS school grounds,” the lawsuit states.The federal lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem…
During a Feb. 5 Congressional hearing, Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., used a graph on an easel behind his chair to make a dramatic point about the last decade of American education.“We’ve just received the latest test scores for students across this country, and they are absolutely alarming,” said Kiley, the newly minted House subcommittee chair for K-12 and early-childhood education. He pointed to a chart with upward-facing curves above the x-axis showing increased education funding, and downward-facing curves showing declining test scores.“This is a steady growth in spending in real dollars which is proceeding in tandem with a steady decline…
One thing Linda McMahon was certain of: The president received a clear directive from voters to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, and she was willing to see that through from the helm, she told lawmakers during her confirmation hearing on Thursday.For more than two hours, McMahon confronted lawmaker’s questions—and protestors’ disruptions—about the turbulent operation already underway to shrink the Education Department during her hearing before the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee. Even in the absence of permanent leadership, the agency has already been subject to staff downsizing, probes into its functions and spending, and calls for its…
Federally funded education research is in a state of flux, and that’s certainly an understatement as the U.S. Department of Education has canceled nearly a billion dollars worth of research contracts.What does this mean for schools, and how should researchers respond? Don’t ‘Surrender’ Morgan Polikoff, Ph.D., is a professor at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education and a director of the USC EdPolicy Hub:“What’s the resistance strategy? How do we shut it down? I’m just so at a loss.”This was a message I received from a friend—an assistant professor at another institution who’s suddenly lost access to…