Author: BelieveAgain

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…

When Becky Pepper-Jackson entered middle school in 2021, she looked forward to trying out for the girls’ cross-country team that fall and later the track and field team because she comes from “a family of runners.” She was assigned male at birth but began transitioning to a female gender identity in 3rd grade, with solid support from her family and school.“I just think I’m a girl and I shouldn’t have to run with the boys,” she said in a deposition. “I should be able to run with the girls ‘cause I am a girl.”But that same year, West Virginia passed…

A coalition of more than 100 congressional Democrats’ vision for education policy puts a big focus on getting students ready for the workforce—even if they decide not to attend college.The document, released Friday by the New Democrat Coalition, a group of center-left Democrats, calls for steps such as exposing young people to “opportunities in the building and construction trades to destigmatize that very lucrative job pathway” and expanding partnerships with businesses and labor organizations so that prospective employees can “earn while [they] learn.”The blueprint may foreshadow how lawmakers in the coalition—some of whom represent competitive districts—will talk about education on…

Yesterday, we unveiled the 2026 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. Of course, education research involves a lot of scholars doing very different kinds of work in very different fields. Thus, each year, some readers are more interested in how scholars fared within particular fields of study than in where scholars rank overall. With that in mind, today we’ll report on the top 10 finishers for five disciplinary categories that tend to dominate educational scholarship. (For a detailed discussion of how the scoring was done, see Tuesday’s post here.)Now, there can be ambiguity when it comes to determining a given scholar’s…

At least eight states are trying to crack down on attempts to remove books in school libraries, passing legislation that gives librarians more leeway in selecting materials, sets up formal processes for responding to challenges, and bars schools from pulling books from the shelves for ideological reasons.Dubbed “freedom to read” laws by supporters, this legislation has emerged over the last two years, a response to the growing number of challenges to books for content related to race and LGBTQ+ issues in the post-pandemic period.The policies—passed in California, Delaware, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Washington—vary by jurisdiction, but…

Today, we unveil the 2026 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, ranking the 200 university-based scholars in the United States who had the biggest impact on educational practice and policy last year. The list includes scholars who auto-qualified due to last year’s rankings, as well as nominees chosen by the 27-member selection committee. Without further ado, here are the 2026 rankings (You can scroll vertically and horizontally through the chart below to see all names and scores).[Click here to open in a new tab.]For more on the selection committee, selection process, scoring, and other methodological particulars, you can check out yesterday’s…

A federal appeals court has blocked for the foreseeable future a groundbreaking decision by a federal district judge in California that said parents have a right to be informed by schools of any gender nonconformity and social transitions by their children.A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on Monday granted the state of California’s request to halt the Dec. 22 decision by U.S. District Judge Roger T. Benitez, which had ruled against state education department guidance that restrains teachers and district staff members from informing parents about a child’s gender identity at school,…

Tomorrow, I’ll unveil the 2026 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, recognizing the 200 university-based scholars who had the biggest influence on educational practice and policy last year. This will be the 16th edition of the exercise. Today, I want to run through the methodology used to generate the rankings. The list is comprised of university-based scholars who focus primarily on education (with “university-based” meaning a formal affiliation). Scholars who lack a formal affiliation on a university website are ineligible.The top 150 finishers from last year automatically qualified for a spot in this year’s Top 200, so long as they met…