Author: BelieveAgain

The U.S. Department of the Treasury this morning released long-anticipated rules for the first-of-its-kind federal school choice program it’s launching this January—offering fresh details and raising new questions about student eligibility, public school participation, and protections against fraud and abuse.Three months from the program’s start date, education experts and advocates of all stripes have had major unanswered questions about how the program will work, such as how much control states will have over how it operates, the extent to which home-school students will be able to benefit, and whether married couples will be able to claim larger tax credits.Through the…

Earlier this year, educators nationwide breathed a sigh of relief as the U.S. Department of Education began launching new competitions for grant programs the Trump administration had previously targeted with cuts and cancellations in 2025.Competition announcements said the agency expected to award, among others, 25-35 new Innovative Approaches to Literacy grants (school libraries and books for low-income students); 30 new Supporting Effective Educator Development grants (educator preparation and training); and nine new HEP and CAMP grants, which support migratory students pursuing high-school and college credentials.But in recent weeks, the department has announced it’s awarding only four new literacy grants and…

Under pressure from a federal court, the U.S. Department of Education’s research office this week narrowly finished spending more than $170 million, for now allaying concerns that the funds would revert to the U.S. Treasury after Sept. 30. But the office’s future remains uncertain, as the White House continues to withhold nearly half a billion additional dollars in fiscal 2026 funding Congress approved for it earlier this year.Congress approved more than $760 million in fiscal 2025 funds for the Institute of Education Sciences during President Donald Trump’s first months in office last year. That money was set to remain available,…

The U.S. Department of Education on Monday formally rescinded the 2024 Title IX regulations of President Joe Biden’s administration that had interpreted the statute’s protections to prohibit discrimination based on students’ sexual orientation and gender identity.In their place, the department formally reinstated 2020 regulations from President Donald Trump’s first administration, which will appear in the Sept. 29 Federal Register and take immediate effect without a notice-and-comment period.As a practical matter, the status quo is not changing. The second Trump administration in January 2025 informally returned to enforcing the 2020 rules after the Biden regulations, which were briefly in effect for…

Beginning in January, a new federal scholarship tax credit is projected to generate billions of dollars to expand educational opportunities for students across the country. Roughly 9 out of 10 American students—including the overwhelming majority of those attending public schools—will be eligible to benefit from those dollars.Last summer, when one of us (Deborah Gist) first heard about the new law, her reaction was similar to that of many public school leaders. It looked like another private school voucher initiative that offered little to the public school students she had spent her career serving. But when she read the statute itself,…

A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction request from a Florida-based organization seeking to open a Jewish online charter school in Oklahoma.In an order issued Thursday, Judge David Russell with the Western District of Oklahoma granted a request from Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation to block the Statewide Charter School Board from denying the organization’s charter school application solely because of its intent to incorporate faith-based instruction.“Because the non-sectarian provision in the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act expressly discriminates against otherwise eligible recipients solely because of their religious character, it violates the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment,”…

The Trump administration is using a mechanism widely viewed as illegal to cancel nearly $100 million Congress appropriated for expanding college-level foreign-language instruction and helping transient U.S. agricultural workers get GEDs and go to college. The White House late Friday announced a package of $810 million in “pocket rescissions”—essentially, overriding congressional appropriations so late in the fiscal year that lawmakers won’t have time to intervene before the funding expires on Sept. 30.The list includes two U.S. Department of Education line items: $70 million of the $85 million lawmakers approved in February for International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE), and $25…

OpenAI has disclosed that its artificial intelligence agents interacted with several U.S. government websites in unexpected ways, activity discovered as part of an ongoing review into its models’ unanticipated behavior.The New York Times, citing security researchers and a person familiar with the incidents, reported that one of those websites was the U.S. Department of Education. The AI giant’s models accessed publicly available information on two websites operated by the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as U.S. Census Bureau data, the company revealed Sept. 25. OpenAI did not find any use of SEC credentials, access to accounts or nonpublic information,…

To the Editor:Every education leader and school board understands that public dollars come with an obligation to use them responsibly and for their intended purpose. If I, a superintendent in a rural district, failed to put funding approved for my students to work, my school board would rightly demand answers. That same standard of accountability should apply at every level of government.That is why a recent investigation by Education Week reporter Mark Lieberman deserves attention. (“Trump’s Education Department Is Letting Tens of Millions of Dollars Expire,” Aug. 4, 2026). His review of federal spending records found that the U.S. Department…

For decades, a key principle underpinned civil rights enforcement in American schools: Not all discrimination was intentional. Even if a school policy was written without overt racial bias, it might unfairly hurt one group of students over another, the understanding went. The concept is known as systemic racism, and Republican and Democratic administrations agreed: Schools and universities that received federal funding had an obligation to address it.Under President Donald Trump’s administration, that’s no longer the case. One by one, the administration has limited the remedies schools can use to address systemic racial injustice. This summer, the Education Department rescinded a…