Author: BelieveAgain
During elementary school in Long Island, N.Y., Luisa Sanchez was thriving in a school full of English learners like herself. In particular, she excelled at math.But just before Sanchez entered 6th grade, she and her parents moved to rural Danville, Ky. Sanchez quickly realized that two American public schools could look vastly different. She was the only Hispanic student, and the only immigrant, in any of her classes. Instead of a dedicated classroom space for English learners, her school sent those students to the library for instruction.Most devastating, she said, her teachers never gave her a math placement exam. She…
A federal appeals court has declared that the Tucson, Ariz., school district, after nearly 50 years under a court-supervised desegregation plan, has reached the point where it’s considered legally desegregated.A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, in San Francisco, unanimously upheld a 2022 decision by a federal district judge in Tucson that court supervision was no longer necessary.“Today we conclude that the district court’s work is done,” the appeals court said in its Jan. 15 decision in Mendoza v. Tucson Unified School District. “We agree that the district is now operating in unitary status…
In his last week as education secretary, Miguel Cardona told a room full of Education Department staff and guests that he could sense a lot of apprehension for what may come under the incoming Trump administration.“Will the investments we made be slashed or sustained? Will the new grants we stood up be canceled or continue? Will the recovery we began be abandoned or built upon? We can’t spend too much time wallowing in uncertainty. We can’t spend too much time feeling sad,” he said on Tuesday during an event recounting the agency’s four years under President Joe Biden. “The truth…
With one week to go until Donald Trump’s inauguration for a second term, many are already looking ahead to what the president-elect’s proposed Cabinet picks could mean for K-12 education, and educators themselves are no exception. With the announcement of Linda McMahon as the presumptive nominee for education secretary, educator Robert Barnett responded with a message for the former World Wrestling Entertainment executive: “Education is not entertainment.”“When I trained to become a teacher,” he reminisced in a recent opinion essay, “I was told quite clearly that my job was to put on a show. I should stand at the board…
Later this month, President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of education will take office and confront a whirlwind of challenges. Just for starters, American students have continued to experience a worrisome decline in academic performance; meanwhile, the Department of Education is still struggling to recover from the FAFSA fiasco and has to restart student-loan payments for millions of borrowers. And that’s all before we get to programs, budgets, efforts to downsize the department, or anything else. To get a sense of the challenges awaiting the next secretary of education, I thought it worth seeking some insight from someone who’s been there—namely, Trump’s…
Private school choice has taken hold across the United States and shows few signs of slowing down. GOP lawmakers in close to a dozen states are signaling that it’s among their top legislative priorities in 2025.Even so, elected officials and education advocates across the political spectrum continue to debate these policies’ effects on state budgets, student learning, and the public school system.At the start of the year, 28 states and the District of Columbia each had at least one program that supplies public funds for parents to spend on educational options outside of public schools. Twelve of those states make,…
In my experience, what K–12 educators want from research is stuff that’s useful. They want strategies rooted in evidence and frank appraisals of whether instructional practices actually do what they say. They want researchers who kick the tires and fair-mindedly report on the strengths and weaknesses of pedagogies, practices, and policies.That’s not what educators are getting. On a range of sensitive questions—from restorative justice to social-emotional learning to culturally responsive education to gender identity to affirmative action—the education research community has, in recent years, operated as if its role is to help advance a morally correct set of nostrums.This matters…
A federal district judge in Kentucky has struck down the Biden administration’s Title IX regulation that added sexual orientation and transgender status to the definition of sexual discrimination protections. The decision—the first one to fully consider the merits of the Title IX rule—appears to apply nationwide, which would mean the end of the highly controversial regulation because the incoming Trump administration seems unlikely to appeal. The ruling—issued Jan. 9—is also the first time a court has found that the regulation interpreted by some as requiring teachers to address transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns violates the First Amendment.If…
Yesterday, we unveiled the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. Of course, education research includes a lot of people doing very different kinds of work. Thus, over the years, readers have been intensely interested in how scholars fared within particular fields of study. Where scholars rank overall may be less telling than where they rank within their field. Today, we’ll report on the top 10 finishers for five disciplinary categories. (For a detailed discussion of how the scoring was done, see Wednesday’s post here.)Now, there can be ambiguity when it comes to determining a given scholar’s discipline. For the most…
Since former President Donald Trump won the November election, educators’ concerns have centered on his politically complicated pledges to cut federal education funding and dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, and what stamp former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, whom he plans to nominate to lead the U.S. Department of Education, might put on the agency. But Trump’s vision for disruptive change crosses all Cabinet agencies, with potentially broad implications for K-12 schools. That’s because many agencies beyond the Education Department have a toehold in what schools do and the policies that affect their students.Trump’s Cabinet picks could affect…