Author: BelieveAgain

Lynne Graziano is a senior analyst at Bellwether Education Partners. Earlier this year, she co-authored the report “The Edge of Seventeen: What Does It Mean To Be a Young Adult in America in 2024?” The report explores the notion of “legal coherence”: How the nation’s various states define legal adulthood in various realms, and what the results mean for youth and young adults. Given intense concern about the mental health and behavior of youth and young adults, this seemed a timely topic—especially for educators, who interact with this age group daily and might wonder how the legal limits of adulthood…

Last month, Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, introduced a bill to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. In a public statement explaining his rationale for the legislation, Rounds decried federal control of education. “Any grants or funding from the Department are only given to states and educational institutions in exchange for adopting the one-size-fits-all standards put forth by the Department,” the statement says in part.President-elect Donald Trump has voiced support for this idea, such as when he announced former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon as his selection for secretary of education. “We will send Education BACK…

President Donald Trump’s proposal to axe the U.S. Department of Education appears unlikely to find sufficient support to clear procedural hurdles, even in an incoming Congress under Republican control.But the steps Trump—and his first education secretary, Betsy DeVos—took to diminish the agency during the president’s first term had a real impact on states and districts.Experts expect Trump and his incoming education secretary, former wrestling executive Linda McMahon, to make similar moves this time around—and perhaps go even further.In fact, Trump signaled that he will make reshaping the federal bureaucracy a major priority of this second term by appointing two billionaires—Elon…

President Donald Trump might not be able to fulfill his oft-repeated campaign promise to obliterate the U.S. Department of Education.But there is plenty the incoming administration can do to kneecap the main federal agency responsible for K-12 schools, both critics and supporters of scaling back the department say.When Trump and his allies say they want to get rid of the Education Department, they’re really talking about the underlying principle of “shifting control and power away from the federal bureaucracy, back to local schools and back to families,” said Jim Blew, who served as an assistant secretary in the department during…

President-elect Donald Trump hasn’t even taken the oath of office yet, but already supporters and opponents of his promise to make it easier for families to use public dollars to pay for private schools a big focus of his second-term K-12 agenda are previewing their arguments.Supporters of more choice—both within private and public education—contend that the policy has strong public support. The yes. every kid. foundation, a nonprofit that backs expanding all types of school choice, released a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults on Dec. 12 that showed a majority of Americans—and even higher percentages of K-12 parents—favor tax…

President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to serve as the secretary of the Department of Education is an unconventional one. Linda McMahon, who for more than 25 years held key executive positions with World Wrestling Entertainment, has little formal experience in education. She has not been a teacher, a school administrator, or an elected official with responsibility for schools (though she did serve for a little more than a year on the Connecticut state school board). What she does have, on the other hand, is extensive management and business-leadership experience, including as the head of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first…

Is TikTok actually going to get banned? The threat that the wildly popular social media platform will be banned in the United States has been lurking for more than a year.Now, though, it seems a ban is on the verge of happening after a ruling by a federal appeals court panel has cleared the way.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Dec. 6 denied TikTok’s petition to overturn the law that requires TikTok to break ties with its China-based parent company ByteDance Ltd. or be banned by mid-January.In response, TikTok on Dec. 9 asked the…

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, over a strong dissent by two justices, declined to take up a case about a school district’s facially race-neutral admissions policy for selective magnet high schools that sought to increase the schools’ racial, socioeconomic, and geographic diversity.In a case involving Boston’s three competitive “exam” schools, the court declined to disturb a ruling last year by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, in Boston, that the coalition of parents and students challenging the admissions plan that was in effect for one school year had failed to show that it had discriminatory effects…

I’ve been getting a surprising number of stressed-out emails from college students and teachers asking about what’ll happen to them if President-elect Donald Trump shuts down the U.S. Department of Education. They want to know what’ll happen to their Pell Grants, their schools, or their retirement benefits. The level of concern is remarkable for a 44-year-old Republican promise to close a big, distant federal bureaucracy. Given such reactions, it’s worth explaining what’s going on with Trump’s promise to abolish the department—and why a lot of the breathless coverage may be missing the forest for the trees.First, yes, Sen. Mike Rounds…

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a case about a school district’s policy to support students undergoing gender transitions. But three justices said they would have taken up the challenge by a group of parents who contend the policy unconstitutionally excludes them from important decisions about their children.Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in a dissent from the denial of review joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, said the case “presents a question of great and growing national importance: whether a public school district violates parents’ fundamental constitutional right to make decisions concerning the rearing of their children ……