Author: BelieveAgain

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…

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…