Author: BelieveAgain

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…

Vice President Kamala Harris will give one of her first speeches as a candidate for the White House to an audience of K-12 teachers here later this week.The vice president will speak at the American Federation of Teachers’ 2024 convention on Thursday, July 25, spokespeople for the White House and the AFT confirmed. The appearance will come just days after President Joe Biden announced the end of his campaign for president, and as Harris appears to have garnered the support of enough delegates to earn the Democratic nomination for president in his place.The AFT’s executive council was among the first…

If enacted, Project 2025, the conservative policy agenda that has become a centerpiece of discourse around the upcoming presidential election, could jeopardize access to an adequate education for millions of low-income students and students with disabilities through the significant funding cuts and overhauls it proposes, experts say.The 922-page document offers what its authors from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, call a “vision for a conservative administration” in its first 180 days. The detailed plan includes proposals to phase out the $16 billion Title I funding program over the next 10 years, convert the $13 billion IDEA program for…

The Biden administration moved swiftly on Monday to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to partially set aside two lower-court injunctions that block the Department of Education’s new Title IX regulation from taking effect in 10 states.Just days after two federal appeals courts had refused to intervene in separate challenges, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar asked the high court to allow most of the Title IX rule to take effect on Aug. 1 even as the administration went along with pausing the key provisions being challenged that are meant to clarify that the law bars discrimination based on gender identity…

The day after President Joe Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race, Randi Weingarten, the longtime president of the 1.8-million-member American Federation of Teachers, rallied teachers around his handpicked successor: Vice President Kamala Harris.“Vice President Harris has fought alongside Joe Biden to deliver historic accomplishments and create a better life for all Americans,” Weingarten said during her speech to AFT delegates in Houston, where the union is gathering for its biennial convention. “She has a record of fighting for us—fighting to lower the costs we pay, for reproductive rights, for worker empowerment, and to keep communities safe…

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…

President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race for the White House on Sunday and right away endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor to the top of the Democratic ticket.The announcement ends his bid for reelection following a disastrous debate with Donald Trump that raised doubts about his fitness for office just four months before the election.The decision comes after escalating pressure from Biden’s Democratic allies to step aside following the June 27 debate, in which the 81-year-old president trailed off, often gave nonsensical answers, and failed to call out the former president’s many falsehoods.Biden plans to…

The hysteria over the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is predictable. Before explaining why it’s also dishonest and misinformed, let me first try to explain why I find the many hyperbolic screeds about this 900-page policy tome so unconvincing.I recall lying in bed as a kid, listening as my mom and her feminist friends downstairs panicked about the madman seeking the White House who would do away with the Bill of Rights and turn the United States into a theocracy. That madman was Ronald Reagan, who easily won that election in 1980, the Cold War, and a 49-state reelection landslide in…

Two federal appeals courts have denied requests by the U.S. Department of Education to set aside lower court injunctions that block the new Title IX regulation from taking effect on Aug. 1 in 10 states.The procedural rulings this week by the appeals courts based in Cincinnati and New Orleans are significant because they preview how those courts might rule on the merits of the underlying challenges to the new rule. And they suggest that, barring intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court the new Title IX regulation addressing sexual orientation and gender identity, sexual harassment, and other issues will take effect…