Author: BelieveAgain

Less than three months after the U.S. Education Department abruptly froze the several billion dollars in pandemic relief funds schools and states had a year left to spend, the agency has restored the original spending deadline, effectively unfreezing the funds nationwide.As of Thursday, all state education agencies and school districts have until March 2026 to spend remaining pandemic relief dollars—the same deadline they had before the Trump administration changed the policy. Before this announcement, a judge had ordered that states suing the department could continue spending their funds, while those that didn’t sue were restricted. Education Secretary Linda McMahon informed…

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday ruled that parents have a religious free exercise right to have their children excused from the use of LGBTQ+-themed storybooks in schools.The 6-3 decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor is significant for schools across the nation as it will allow parents with religious concerns to remove their children or possibly raise other objections to a range of curricular decisions. The court said the school board’s refusal to allow opt-outs unconstitutionally burdened the parents’ right to direct their children’s religious upbringing.Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. emphasized that the Constitution protects parents’ rights…

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to largely enforce the president’s executive order ending birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrant parents, an issue closely watched by educators and policymakers.The 6-3 decision in Trump v. CASA emphasized that it was not ruling on the merits of the birthright citizenship question, but was instead limiting the use of universal injunctions, in which a single federal district judge blocks a policy nationwide.That alone has implications for education, as multiple courts have issued universal injunctions to block executive orders of President Donald Trump and U.S. Education Department policies…

The path to a nationwide private school choice program got steeper on Friday morning after a technicality forced Republican lawmakers to strike the proposal—for now—from a massive legislative package Congress is racing to finish as soon as next week.As part of ongoing negotiations over the sweeping package of tax cuts and budget changes pushed by President Donald Trump, lawmakers on Capitol Hill in recent weeks have been advancing proposals to annually invest either $4 billion or $5 billion in full federal tax-credit refunds for individual and corporate donors to organizations that pay for K-12 students to attend private schools.The legislation…

In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday spared the federal E-rate program for school internet connections from dismantling or major disruption by ruling against a lawsuit that challenged its funding structure.In Federal Communications Commission v. Consumers’ Research, the high court considered the constitutionality of the funding mechanism for the $9 billion Universal Service Fund, which distributes as much as $4 billion annually under the E-rate program to connect schools and libraries to the internet.“Under our nondelegation precedents, Congress sufficiently guided and constrained the discretion that it lodged with the FCC to implement the universal-service contribution scheme,” Justice…

The Trump administration is signaling that it may defy Congress and withhold billions of dollars in federal formula grants that school districts and states expect to start receiving on July 1—including funding that supports vulnerable students and ensures compliance with federal law.With the start of a new school year just weeks away, states including North Dakota, Ohio, Virginia, and Vermont, have begun warning districts that they may see delays in key funding—or, in the worst-case scenario, that they may not receive portions of their expected federal allocations at all. Districts are scrambling to develop contingency plans and bracing to implement…

The U.S. Department of Education announced Wednesday that the California Department of Education and the California Interscholastic Federation violated the civil rights of female students on the basis of sex by allowing transgender students to compete in school sports according to their gender identity.Having concluded its investigation, the U.S. Department of Education is calling on California to “voluntarily agree” to change what it determined are “unlawful practices” within 10 days or risk “imminent enforcement action.”“Although Governor Gavin Newsom admitted months ago it was ‘deeply unfair’ to allow men to compete in women’s sports, both the California Department of Education and…

President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon have called on the Republican Congress to disperse the Department of Education’s programs to other federal agencies. As described in a March 20 executive order, the president hopes to improve student outcomes by reducing the federal burden on educators and moving control of education back to states, local communities, and families.For K-12 educators who have grown accustomed to the Education Department’s existence over the past 45 years, these moves already sound scary. Those fears are heightened when politicians, district leaders, and union leaders raise doubts about how dismantling the department…

California must remove all references to gender identity from a sex education curriculum in the next two months or risk losing federal funds, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services told the state in a letter, marking yet another example of multiple agencies putting pressure on states that disagree with the Trump administration.Department officials last week notified the California Department of Public Health that mentions of gender identity in the state’s federally funded Personal Responsibility Education Program were “both unacceptable and well outside the program’s core purpose.” If the state doesn’t remove those materials from the curriculum, it could…

Road trips have become synonymous with turning points in Jane Hodgdon’s life.As a teacher in Colorado in the 1990s, she swore she would never go back to the East Coast, where she grew up, and work for the federal government, even as she often worked weekends and summers in local restaurants to make ends meet.But in 1999, she set out on a road trip with her then-husband to visit a handful of graduate programs she was considering. That trip ended in her home state of Maryland, where she had planned to stay for a while. Hodgdon and her husband decided…