Author: BelieveAgain
President Donald Trump, in the first month-and-a-half of his second term, has issued a flurry of executive orders, frozen or terminated federal spending in unprecedented ways, and empowered the world’s richest man to pursue a sweeping and fast-moving campaign of disruption and downsizing across the federal government.School districts and policymakers across the political spectrum have struggled to keep up with the dizzying pace of news developments, including newly announced actions followed swiftly by rebukes, rebuttals, and revisions. District leaders are nervously rejiggering their budgets, updating their policies, fielding anxious questions from staffers and parents, and scrambling for elusive clarity.Many of…
A federal judge on Monday evening ordered the Trump administration to temporarily reinstate some of the grant funding for teacher-preparation programs that the U.S. Department of Education terminated last month—but nearly a day later, it remains to be seen whether the federal government has moved to restore the money.This week’s temporary order affected federal grant funding awarded to teacher-preparation efforts in California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Wisconsin. Programs in those states that had received federal grant money in recent years through the competitive Seeking Effective Educator Development (SEED) and Teacher Quality Partnerships (TQP) programs must have…
Recent actions by President Donald Trump’s administration and conservative activists could reinvigorate political pushback to social-emotional learning, with potentially long-term consequences on how schools teach the concept.While earlier political arguments during the waning days of the pandemic claimed SEL was a way to inject progressive ideology into classrooms, a new missive from the U.S. Department of Education is homing in on SEL as a means of discrimination. At the same time, a prominent conservative activist group has launched a campaign to animate parent activism around SEL.Although limited in scope, the actions have put proponents of social-emotional learning on edge.“I think…
The Trump administration is joining two major U.S. Supreme Court cases on public education and religion, filing briefs this week in support of state funding for a Catholic charter school and the right of parents to opt their children out of LGBTQ+ lessons.The friend-of-the-court briefs were not a surprise, but they come in widely watched cases that could transform public education. One case could lead to requiring states to open their charter school programs and funding to religious schools on a significant scale. The other could give parents with religious objections to class materials the right to keep their children…
The U.S. Department of Education’s massive firing of staff is an illegal overreach of the Trump administration’s authority because the move seeks to incapacitate the agency, argues a lawsuit filed Thursday by nearly two dozen Democratic attorneys general.The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts by 21 Democratic attorneys general from across the nation, asks a judge to halt the Education Department’s effort to halve its staff, a move that the attorneys argue is “causing immense damage” to state education systems.The filing comes just days after the Education Department announced it would shrink its staff of more than 4,000 employees…
Parents whose discrimination complaints have gone unresolved and have been further delayed are suing the U.S. Department of Education over its mass layoffs, which cut deeply into the agency’s civil rights investigation arm.The lawsuit—filed in federal court in Washington on Friday by two parents and The Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, which advocates for students with disabilities—argues that the dismissal of nearly half of the agency’s staff has “decimated” the Education Department’s office for civil rights, “leaving students and families with little chance of their complaints being processed and investigated and sabotaging OCR’s ability to fulfil its statutory and…
The mass layoffs that touched virtually every division of the U.S. Department of Education cut deeper into some offices than others, particularly affecting the agency’s civil rights investigation and research arms, according to an Education Week analysis of documents detailing the cuts.The firings, which the department announced on Tuesday, will shrink the already diminished federal agency’s footprint by over half as a “first step” toward abolishing it, should Congress approve such an effort, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a Fox News interview Tuesday night. President Donald Trump is also considering an executive order that would direct McMahon to prepare…
A federal appeals court has ruled against two Florida parents who allege a school district aided their child’s “secret” gender transition in a case highlighted by President Donald Trump in his address to Congress last week.A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, ruled 2-1 on March 12 that January and Jeffrey Littlejohn could not prevail on their parental-rights claim under the 14th Amendment’s due-process clause because school officials’ actions did not “shock the conscience.”The story of the Littlejohns and their child, who was assigned female at birth and sought to transition at age…
Every major education strategy in America hinges on one fundamental question: Is it working? Yet, the vital infrastructure that allows policymakers to evaluate charter school expansion, address achievement gaps, allocate billions in federal funding, and much more is severely at risk, especially in light of workforce cuts to the U.S. Department of Education.State and local policymakers depend on comprehensive data about student outcomes, teacher effectiveness, and systemwide performance. As executive director of the American Statistical Association, I know this evidence—meticulously gathered by the National Center for Education Statistics—shapes decisions that impact nearly 50 million public school students. However, policymakers cannot…
Use these buttons to jump to a specific section of this article The seismic dismissal of employees at the U.S. Department of Education this week represents a “first step” toward abolishing the federal agency, Education Secretary Linda McMahon confirmed shortly after reduction-in-force notices went out to hundreds of employees Tuesday evening. In the meantime, the slashes further diminish the department’s capacity to carry out its key functions of funding and disseminating research, enforcing the nation’s school accountability laws, investigating discrimination claims and bringing schools into compliance with anti-discrimination statutes, and more.The department will shrink to just about 2,200 employees by…