Author: BelieveAgain

Vice President Kamala Harris made a formidable choice in selecting Gov. Tim Walz as a running mate in her campaign to be the next president of the United States.Political pundits have consistently spoken of the Minnesota governor’s ability to connect with everyday voters and explain democratic values and policy proposals in palatable ways.It should not be surprising why he is so good at explaining things: He’s a former social studies teacher who is married to another former teacher.Many of those political pundits are now speculating about what Walz would mean for increasing Harris’s electability among working—and middle-class—white voters. Meanwhile, education…

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, the possibility of a second Trump administration looms large over the nation’s education landscape. Enough is at stake that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has repeatedly distanced himself from the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 federal policy blueprint authored largely by the former president’s administration alumni. The 900-page document, which includes education policy recommendations for a second Trump term, has been attacked for months by Democrats.Despite the rift on the right, there is little mystery about likely education policy should Trump win in November. During his tenure, Trump and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos,…

Educators, civil rights advocates, child well-being experts, and family members of school shooting victims will help advise the federal government on school safety—part of an ongoing effort to help administrators navigate research and guidance on one of their most pressing concerns.The newly created Federal School Safety Clearinghouse External Advisory Board will provide feedback on the safety recommendations and research on SchoolSafety.gov. That federal information clearinghouse, housed in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, was created after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., and codified into law as part of the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities…

The Biden administration’s new Title IX regulation expanding protections for LGTBQ+ students goes into effect Aug. 1—in a confused and patchwork fashion as injunctions have blocked it in 26 states as well as at some schools in other states. It also takes effect as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs an emergency request from the Biden administration to partially limit those injunctions and allow most of the rule to take effect across the country.The U.S. Department of Education regulation clarifies for the first time that the 1972 federal statute, which bars sex discrimination in federally funded educational programs, protects students based…

A divided federal appeals court refused to block an Ohio school district’s rules that bar students from using pronouns that misgender their classmates. The policy, the court said, likely does not violate the First Amendment rights of students with religious beliefs that there is no such thing as a gender transition.“Transgender students experience the use of non-preferred pronouns as dehumanizing and … as a result, the repeated use of such pronouns can have severely negative effects on children and young adults,” said the majority opinion on July 29 by a 2-1 panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the…

Vice President Kamala Harris is days away from choosing her running mate in the 2024 presidential election, and a number of her top contenders have extensive K-12 policy records. So far, the vice president and likely Democratic nominee’s leading candidates for the job are elected officials who have shown an ability to win over some Republican-leaning voters in swing states or deep red areas. Already Harris’ campaign has contacted at least 12 prospects, including governors, members of Congress, and presidential Cabinet members, according to CBS News. They include a swing-state governor who has been open to vouchers and private school…

President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he’s dropping out of the 2024 presidential race and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as his replacement on the Democratic ticket.As a result, the future of the Democrats’ K-12 policy agenda will lie in the hands of his replacement.The decision followed weeks of Democratic hand-wringing over Biden’s viability and his potential to drag down the prospects of other Democrats across the nation.While Biden has endorsed Harris, his replacement will be chosen officially at the Democratic National Convention, which starts on Aug. 19 in Chicago. Some top Democrats have started calling for the party…

The U.S. Supreme Court last month overruled a landmark 1984 decision that required courts to generally defer to federal agencies’ “reasonable interpretations” of federal law. The decision in that case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, could have some major implications for regulations issued by the U.S. Department of Education, possibly leading to more challenges to such rules and giving judges greater power to interpret federal education laws.Here is a closer look at what happened and what’s at stake. What did the Supreme Court rule? In its June 28 decision in Loper Bright, the court overruled a 1984 decision, Chevron U.S.A.…

Vice President Kamala Harris focused her first campaign speech to educators on lifting up the teaching profession and attacking “extremist” conservative efforts to cut education funding and restrict teachers’ instruction in schools. Harris was the keynote speaker at the American Federation of Teacher’s national convention here on July 25, just days after President Joe Biden announced he was abandoning his reelection bid and the vice president appeared to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination.She waded into some of the culture war debates that have dominated education policymaking in many Republican-led states in recent years, but she mostly used the speech to…

Two decades after the launch of the federal What Works Clearinghouse, experts say the education project has helped drive the evidence-based policy movement, but there’s still a ways to go: Teachers and school leaders still struggle to find evidence-based interventions in schools.Begun in 2002, the clearinghouse’s goal was to help inform educators about programs and approaches with research they could use to improve student learning. But it had a rocky start, fielding widespread complaints that it was too slow to release actionable findings. Over time, though, the clearinghouse became more widely respected—the inspiration, in fact, for a host of other…