Author: BelieveAgain

The Trump administration has begun canceling dozens of competitive federal education grants years before they were set to expire—and the educators behind hundreds more in-progress projects are worried that funding delays mean their grants could be next.More than $1 billion for current recipients of grants under at least seven distinct U.S. Department of Education programs—including for school desegregration, disability services, higher-education preparation, teacher training, and academic research—has yet to materialize just weeks before the new fiscal year begins, according to interviews with grant recipients, state education agencies, and advocacy organizations. In previous years, the grant recipients said, they would have…

Sign up for Chalkbeat Detroit’s free newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and Michigan education policy.Michigan third grade students had the lowest performance in English language arts in the 11-year history of the state test. Only 38.9% of the third graders were proficient in ELA in the assessments taken last spring, down from 39.6% a year earlier, according to results from the Michigan Student Test of Educational Progress, known as the M-STEP.There are some positive trends: Test scores are up in four out of six grades in both English language arts and math. Still, overall proficiency…

When the U.S. Department of Education opened investigations into four Kansas school districts earlier this month, the call had come from inside the house: the state’s Republican attorney general was among those asking the federal agency to deploy its office for civil rights to look into the alleged wrongdoing.Since January, the Education Department has wielded its investigative arm, the office for civil rights, to open dozens of probes into states and school districts with policies that allow transgender students to play on athletic teams, use restrooms or locker rooms that align with their gender identity, and change names and pronouns…

Civil rights staff laid off by the U.S. Department of Education will begin returning to work in September, the department told a federal judge this week.Roughly 25 employees from its office for civil rights are slated to return starting Sept. 8, in the first wave of reinstatements set to run through early November, department leaders revealed in a filing submitted to a Massachusetts federal court on Tuesday.The reinstatement schedule comes two months after U.S. District Judge Myong Joun told the agency to bring the staff back—and days after he said the department wasn’t complying with that directive.It’s the first time…

A federal judge has temporarily blocked a new Texas law requiring classrooms to display the Ten Commandments—at least in 11 school districts for now.The law was due to take effect Sept. 1, but the preliminary injunction issued Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Fred Biery of San Antonio blocks the requirement in the Austin and Houston school districts, as well as in nine others across the state.The law, known as S.B. 10, “impermissibly takes sides on theological questions and officially favors Christian denominations over others,” said Biery, an appointee of President Bill Clinton.The ruling means all three states that have passed…

No zeros. No late penalties for late work. Unlimited retakes on tests and quizzes. No credit for turning in homework or participation in class.These policies are among those associated with “equitable grading,” an approach popularized by author and former educator Joe Feldman. Advocates say that equitable grading policies make assessing students’ work more accurate by prioritizing summative over formative assessments, separating academic from behavioral performance, and subsequently reducing subjectivity in the overall grading process. But skeptics argue the approach can compromise rigor and lead to grade inflation.While educational pundits have debated the practice’s pros and cons, teachers’ voices have largely…

Five northern Virginia school districts will have to request reimbursement to receive all their federal funds following a U.S. Department of Education finding that the districts violated Title IX, the department announced Tuesday.It’s a new lever for the Education Department to use federal dollars to corral schools into falling in line with President Donald Trump’s agenda of cracking down on transgender students’ participation in athletics.The five districts—Alexandria City, Arlington, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, and Prince William County public schools—will now have extra hoops to jump through to get their subsidies after the department found them each in violation of the…

The Trump administration must restore two sets of centers that help state education departments and schools with improvement strategies and the use of education research, after two companies involved in the programs sued over the abrupt cancellations of their contracts earlier this year.A federal judge in Maryland on Friday concluded that the administration violated federal law and the Constitution’s separation of powers by effectively shuttering the U.S. Department of Education’s Comprehensive Centers and Regional Educational Laboratories programs.By 5 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 20, lawyers for the federal government and the companies that sued must provide the judge, Brendan Hurson, with a…

The Trump administration ran “into serious constitutional problems” by asking states to certify their school districts don’t use diversity, equity, and inclusion practices, a federal judge ruled this week.Maryland District Judge Stephanie Gallagher on Thursday sided with a coalition of plaintiffs—including the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, and the Eugene, Ore., school district—that sued in an effort to strike down several efforts made by the U.S. Department of Education to curb educators’ use of what it called “illegal DEI practices” without defining the term.The plaintiffs were challenging a Feb. 14 department memo, sent to K-12 schools…

A federal appeals court has upheld an Indiana school district’s decision to limit the scope of flyers that a “Students for Life” club could post on school walls to only time and place details for meetings, excluding broader anti-abortion messaging.A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, in Chicago, rejected a claim on behalf of the club’s founder, a 9th grader at Noblesville High School, that the school’s decision violated her First Amendment free speech rights.“This is not a case about tolerating private student speech,” the court said in its Aug. 14 decision in…