Author: BelieveAgain

Schools should be designed as welcoming spaces, tailor-made for each student, so they feel a sense of belonging and excitement for the day ahead.Instead, many kids feel like guests in someone else’s space. Students are expected to show up, do the work, and figure out how to fit in.Some kids can acclimate to the system. Unfortunately, many don’t.But if we changed every child’s experience? What if they walked into school each morning and thought, “This place feels like me.”As superintendent of the Eastern Hancock schools in Indiana, I do a lot of talking to students. I hear the same story…

The U.S. Department of Education said Tuesday it’s developed six agreements to send many of its key functions to other federal agencies.A majority of the Education Department’s funding for K-12 schools—more than $20 billion a year—will be administered instead by the U.S. Department of Labor, for example. The Labor Department will also assume management of many programs overseen by the office of postsecondary education. Other education programs will end up at the departments of Health and Human Services, the Interior, and State. See the chart below for a guide on where the agreements send many of the agency’s programs. 2025-11-18…

The U.S. Department of Education appears poised to move much of its portfolio to other federal agencies, according to several people invited to a flurry of meetings with department and White House officials and told about some of the changes Tuesday.As many as seven key agency offices—including divisions that oversee services and funding for students with disabilities, school safety programs, grants for the education of Native American students, and some of the agency’s core funding streams for elementary and secondary education—could be dispersed to other departments, advocates for potentially affected programs said.A spokesperson for the agency didn’t immediately respond to…

The longest federal government shutdown in American history came to an end earlier this week—but education will be feeling its effects for months and years to come.K-12 schools, which derive most of their funding from state and local revenue sources, were largely able to carry on as usual during the shutdown. But the congressional standoff did disrupt some education funding, and could lead to further disruption because of work that didn’t happen during the lapse in funding. At the federal level, the reopening of the government after 43 days means a tentative return to some degree of normalcy for hundreds…

The reopening of the federal government promises to return hundreds of laid-off U.S. Department of Education staff to work—but employees fear that’s no guarantee they’ll return to business as usual.The sprawling bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday and signed by President Donald Trump concludes the longest government shutdown in history and funds the federal government through Jan. 30. It also contains a provision reversing the early October layoffs of thousands of federal workers across numerous agencies, and preventing further federal layoffs until the bill’s expiration.At the Education Department, that means 465 staff members given reduction-in-force notices…

A federal judge agreed with the Trump administration that she can’t order the restoration of millions of dollars in funding for teacher-training grants the administration prematurely cut earlier this year. But, the judge concluded, she retains the ability to decide if the administration broke the law in terminating them.U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley, based in Massachusetts, decided Thursday that she would hear the case from eight states challenging the U.S. Department of Education’s termination of millions of dollars in grant funding that supported teacher-training programs, but agreed the restoration of funding belonged in the hands of a different federal court.It’s…

Mike Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, recently launched a new Substack, SCHOOLED, that he hopes might help foster common ground on issues like accountability, charter schooling, gifted education, and school discipline. He explains that his not-so-secret agenda is to help reenergize the bipartisan “school reform” coalition. A one-time official in the Bush Department of Education and a co-founder of the Policy Innovators in Education Network, Mike has seen the ups and downs of “school reform” up close. Given that, I thought it’d be interesting to hear about this new endeavor and how he sees the broader…

When the U.S. Department of Education closed the office for civil rights’ regional outpost in Philadelphia, the complaints investigators there would have handled from schools in Pennsylvania and four neighboring states were instead shuffled to one of five remaining offices—in Georgia.The Philadelphia office was among seven that were shuttered when nearly half the Education Department’s civil rights investigation staff was laid off in March. Since then, the federal agency has announced 137 more layoffs from the civil rights office, which investigates discrimination complaints at schools and colleges and works to bring them into compliance with federal civil rights laws.Though the…

A divided federal appeals court in Ohio ruled against the state’s fourth largest school district in a case that pitted its gender pronoun policies against the rights of students who believe there are only two genders.The full Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Nov. 6 that the suburban Olentangy Local School District, in the Columbus area, cannot prohibit students from using gender-related language deemed offensive by others, siding with Parents Defending Education, which had argued the policies were unconstitutional.The national membership organization first filed suit against Olentangy in 2023, saying the district’s policies requiring the use of peers’ “preferred…

The U.S. Department of Education violated employees’ freedom of speech rights when it inserted language to their out-of-office emails blaming “Democrat Senators” for the federal government shutdown, a judge in Washington decided Friday.Calling the Trump administration’s conduct a “multifront campaign to assign blame for the government shutdown,” U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper sided with the union representing furloughed Education Department staff in his late Friday opinion, which sued in early October over the partisan language.“Nonpartisanship is the bedrock of the federal civil service; it ensures that career government employees serve the public, not the politicians. But by commandeering its employees’…