Author: BelieveAgain

Laura Baker/Education Week via Canva On National Girls and Women in Sports Day, Trump signs an executive order threatening to withhold federal funds from schools that allow transgender students to compete on women’s teams. Under the order, the secretary of education is told to prioritize civil rights cases against schools and athletic associations that don’t comply. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency abruptly revokes hundreds of millions of dollars in Department of Education contracts that fund key data collection and research efforts largely overseen by the agency’s Institute of Education Sciences. The contract terminations are the first of a series…

Three federal judges on Thursday significantly limited the Trump administration’s ability to enforce a series of orders it’s issued telling the nation’s schools and colleges to eliminate much of their diversity, equity, and inclusion programming or risk losing federal funds.Judges in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and New Hampshire all found the Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts didn’t pass legal muster, but for slightly different reasons. Their orders came in response to three separate lawsuits led respectively by the NAACP, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association.The judges’ orders came the same day states and school districts faced…

The first three months of the second Trump administration have brought a dizzying cascade of threats to federal investment in K-12 schools, and even bigger existential battles loom in the near future.The administration has already terminated hundreds of grants and contracts supporting teacher preparation and education research; frozen funding doled out by the Biden administration for electric school buses and other clean-energy improvements; and canceled approvals for districts and states to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in pandemic relief funds on projects and programs they’ve already committed to carry out.The cuts and chaos are far from over. In recent…

Earlier this year, Tennessee legislators introduced three sets of bills that would require K-12 schools to verify students’ immigration status upon enrollment, charge tuition to undocumented students, and, in some cases, even deny these students enrollment.Tennessee became one of at least five states to propose actions since President Donald Trump’s re-election win that defied federal statute requiring compliance with the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe, which granted undocumented students a constitutional right to a free, public education.On April 21, the state’s efforts hit a snag after state House majority leader William Lamberth, a Republican, paused the…

A federal judge on Friday cast doubt on the Trump administration’s claim that its decision to terminate hundreds of Education Department employees in recent months was separate from its broader goal of shutting down the agency—a key distinction as the judge considers whether the staff cuts overstepped the president’s authority.Judge Myong J. Joun from the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts pressed Trump administration lawyers on what the president has meant when he’s spoken in recent months about “returning education to the states”; putting Education Secretary Linda McMahon “out of a job”; and closing the Education Department “to the maximum extent…

President Donald Trump is once again changing course on federal attempts to chip away at racial disparities in student discipline, issuing an executive order this week that calls on the education secretary to develop guidance for schools instructing them not to consider race at all when dealing with student behavior.Trump’s latest action continues to take aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. He says in the order that previous administrations applying “school discipline based on discriminatory and unlawful ‘equity’ ideology” ultimately resulted in “teachers and students … suffering increased levels of classroom disorder and school violence.”The order comes as educators…

Of the three school cases the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing this month, two have drawn widespread attention for their potential to significantly reshape public education. One is about whether parents with religious objections may opt their children out of LGBTQ+ storybooks. Another is about whether public funding may be provided to a religious charter school.The third case has received far less attention, but is being watched just as closely by educators. A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, scheduled for arguments April 28, centers on whether students with disabilities must satisfy a particularly stringent legal standard to prove they faced discrimination…

Oklahoma will withhold federal funds from school districts that don’t certify they aren’t using diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, the state’s superintendent announced Tuesday, in what could be the beginning of efforts nationwide to restrict funding for public schools that disobey President Donald Trump’s orders.Superintendent Ryan Walters said the state’s education department will halt subsidies for any districts that have not yet signed a letter issued by the U.S. Department of Education earlier this month. The withholding would start Friday, April 25, the day after the deadline districts face to sign the federal certification, Walters announced.The Education Department in early…

For the second time this school year, a court has deemed a state’s private school choice program unconstitutional and forced it to halt.The Utah Fits All program, an education savings account offering that 10,000 K-12 students currently use, violates the state constitutional requirement to spend state tax revenue on public education options all students can attend, Judge Laura Scott of the Third District Court of Utah ruled on April 18. The judge’s ruling mirrors last fall’s decision by the South Carolina Supreme Court that the state’s education savings account program violated the state constitution’s prohibition on public funds for private…

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Tuesday appeared strongly inclined to support the right of religious parents to excuse their children from a Maryland school district’s use of LGBTQ+ storybooks in its elementary schools.“The plaintiffs here are not asking the school to change its curriculum. They’re just saying, ‘look, we want out,’” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. told the lawyer for the Montgomery County school district during two-and-a-half hours of arguments in Mahmoud v. Taylor. “What is the big deal about allowing them to opt out of this?”The district began using the storybooks in its English/language arts curriculum in…