Author: BelieveAgain

President Donald Trump’s barrage of first-week policies has already begun to set the tone for schools and education policy in his second term.Late into his first day, the president signed dozens of his own executive orders and rescinded nearly 80 of his predecessor’s, while his administration began to lay the groundwork for its own initiatives and built out its team. Other first-day policy changes and actions came out of individual Cabinet agencies.None of these orders deals with schools exclusively, but they signal how the Trump administration will approach protections for LGBTQ+ students that the Biden administration tried to institute and…

The 2024 election may have been a polarizing one, but there’s at least one point of agreement between voters who backed Republican President Donald Trump and supporters of his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris: Neither candidate talked enough about education on the campaign trail.Overall, 55 percent of voters feel they heard too little from both candidates about education, including 54 percent of Harris voters and 56 percent of Trump voters. That’s according to a poll released earlier this month by All4Ed, a policy and advocacy organization that promotes college and workforce readiness, particularly for students of color and…

The U.S. Supreme Court will take up a potentially momentous case about religious charter schools, involving issues that could radically alter the character of American education, both in terms of school choice and state funding of public education.The court on Jan. 24 granted review of two related appeals stemming from the effort to establish a state-funded Catholic virtual charter school in Oklahoma. That state’s supreme court last year ruled that the proposed St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School—which would be sponsored and controlled by the Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa but would receive state per-pupil…

The Trump administration has disbanded a school safety board that was recently assembled to advise federal agencies on best practices to protect students.The Federal School Safety Clearinghouse External Advisory Board, which held its first meeting in October, included school safety experts, alongside the parents of children who died in school shootings, advocates for civil rights and disability rights, superintendents, and leaders of organizations that represent school and district administrators.Three board members confirmed they’d received notice that the Department of Homeland Security planned to terminate current members of the board under an inauguration day directive that applies to all external advisory…

The rollback of protections for transgender students and fresh legal developments over whether teachers can refuse to use students’ chosen names and pronouns on religious grounds have thrust the fight over transgender rights in schools into a new era.The new Trump administration has removed Biden-era guidance supporting transgender students and the U.S. Supreme Court will take up a case about whether parents may raise religious objections to LGBTQ+ lessons in public schools. And now, a related issue that has been percolating for years—whether public school teachers may refuse to use transgender students’ names and pronouns that don’t align with their…

Immigration agents can now more easily make arrests and carry out raids on school property, after the Trump administration overturned a 13-year-old policy aimed at preventing immigration enforcement from getting in the way of people accessing essential services.Under a directive announced Tuesday night, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol agents no longer have to honor “sensitive locations” when conducting enforcement activities.For more than a decade, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has had an internal policy that has generally prevented agents from making arrests at schools, places of worship, and hospitals without permission from agency headquarters.…

A majority of voters don’t want the U.S. Department of Education abolished, a recent poll found, signaling tenuous support for President Donald Trump’s signature education campaign pledge.What’s more, voters favor boosting funding for education, though they don’t want to see tax hikes to pay for education programs, according to the poll, a nationally representative sample of 1,000 voters. The poll also found deep support for career-and-technical education across a wide swath of the electorate. The poll was conducted last fall, from Oct. 30 to Nov. 5, by Lake Research Partners, a Democratic polling organization, and the Tarrance Group, a Republican…

President Donald Trump kick-started his second presidential term by issuing a slew of executive orders taking aim at federal career civil servants, including those at the U.S. Department of Education.The first-day directives seek to freeze hiring at agencies including the Education Department, crack down on telework among federal employees, and make it easier to terminate career civil servants.The legality of these executive orders is an open question. Federal workers’ unions are expected be challenge them in court. But their mere existence may create enough concern among federal workers that a significant portion of the Education Department’s roughly 4,000 career staffers…

Amid growing calls—and even some early legislation—to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education, three former secretaries who ran the agency under a Republican and a Democratic president agreed that while some reform could be warranted, its work remained crucial, particularly as the nation’s students struggle to regain academic ground lost in recent years and schools report stubbornly high absenteeism.Though President Donald Trump’s attempt in his first term to end the department—through a merger with the Department of Labor—eventually dissipated, he breathed new life into longstanding Republican calls to eliminate the agency during his 2024 campaign.But, in a wide-ranging discussion hosted…

If you follow what’s going on in Washington, you know that the Trump administration is primed to pursue big changes in federal taxes and spending through a process called “budget reconciliation” (most recently used to pass the Biden administration’s “Inflation Reduction Act”). Budget reconciliation, used 23 times since it was created by the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act, could have enormous implications for school spending, student lending, and school choice. But what exactly is it? How does it work? And what’s this mean for schools? There are few who can answer these questions better than Lindsay Fryer, the president…