Author: BelieveAgain
In his last week as education secretary, Miguel Cardona told a room full of Education Department staff and guests that he could sense a lot of apprehension for what may come under the incoming Trump administration.“Will the investments we made be slashed or sustained? Will the new grants we stood up be canceled or continue? Will the recovery we began be abandoned or built upon? We can’t spend too much time wallowing in uncertainty. We can’t spend too much time feeling sad,” he said on Tuesday during an event recounting the agency’s four years under President Joe Biden. “The truth…
With one week to go until Donald Trump’s inauguration for a second term, many are already looking ahead to what the president-elect’s proposed Cabinet picks could mean for K-12 education, and educators themselves are no exception. With the announcement of Linda McMahon as the presumptive nominee for education secretary, educator Robert Barnett responded with a message for the former World Wrestling Entertainment executive: “Education is not entertainment.”“When I trained to become a teacher,” he reminisced in a recent opinion essay, “I was told quite clearly that my job was to put on a show. I should stand at the board…
Later this month, President-elect Donald Trump’s secretary of education will take office and confront a whirlwind of challenges. Just for starters, American students have continued to experience a worrisome decline in academic performance; meanwhile, the Department of Education is still struggling to recover from the FAFSA fiasco and has to restart student-loan payments for millions of borrowers. And that’s all before we get to programs, budgets, efforts to downsize the department, or anything else. To get a sense of the challenges awaiting the next secretary of education, I thought it worth seeking some insight from someone who’s been there—namely, Trump’s…
Private school choice has taken hold across the United States and shows few signs of slowing down. GOP lawmakers in close to a dozen states are signaling that it’s among their top legislative priorities in 2025.Even so, elected officials and education advocates across the political spectrum continue to debate these policies’ effects on state budgets, student learning, and the public school system.At the start of the year, 28 states and the District of Columbia each had at least one program that supplies public funds for parents to spend on educational options outside of public schools. Twelve of those states make,…
In my experience, what K–12 educators want from research is stuff that’s useful. They want strategies rooted in evidence and frank appraisals of whether instructional practices actually do what they say. They want researchers who kick the tires and fair-mindedly report on the strengths and weaknesses of pedagogies, practices, and policies.That’s not what educators are getting. On a range of sensitive questions—from restorative justice to social-emotional learning to culturally responsive education to gender identity to affirmative action—the education research community has, in recent years, operated as if its role is to help advance a morally correct set of nostrums.This matters…
A federal district judge in Kentucky has struck down the Biden administration’s Title IX regulation that added sexual orientation and transgender status to the definition of sexual discrimination protections. The decision—the first one to fully consider the merits of the Title IX rule—appears to apply nationwide, which would mean the end of the highly controversial regulation because the incoming Trump administration seems unlikely to appeal. The ruling—issued Jan. 9—is also the first time a court has found that the regulation interpreted by some as requiring teachers to address transgender students by their preferred names and pronouns violates the First Amendment.If…
Yesterday, we unveiled the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings. Of course, education research includes a lot of people doing very different kinds of work. Thus, over the years, readers have been intensely interested in how scholars fared within particular fields of study. Where scholars rank overall may be less telling than where they rank within their field. Today, we’ll report on the top 10 finishers for five disciplinary categories. (For a detailed discussion of how the scoring was done, see Wednesday’s post here.)Now, there can be ambiguity when it comes to determining a given scholar’s discipline. For the most…
Since former President Donald Trump won the November election, educators’ concerns have centered on his politically complicated pledges to cut federal education funding and dismantle the U.S. Department of Education, and what stamp former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, whom he plans to nominate to lead the U.S. Department of Education, might put on the agency. But Trump’s vision for disruptive change crosses all Cabinet agencies, with potentially broad implications for K-12 schools. That’s because many agencies beyond the Education Department have a toehold in what schools do and the policies that affect their students.Trump’s Cabinet picks could affect…
Today, we unveil the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, ranking the 200 university-based scholars in the United States who did the most last year to shape educational practice and policy. The list includes the top 150 finishers from the 2024 rankings, augmented by at-large nominees chosen by the 24-member Selection Committee. So, without further ado, here are the 2025 rankings (scroll through the chart to see all names and scores).[Click here to open in a new tab.]For more on the committee, selection process, and methodological particulars, you can check out yesterday’s post here.The top scorers are all familiar names…
Tomorrow, I’ll be unveiling the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, recognizing the 200 university-based scholars who had the biggest influence on educational practice and policy last year. This will be the 15th annual edition of the rankings. Today, I want to run through the methodology used to generate those rankings.The list is comprised of university-based scholars who focus primarily on educational questions (with “university-based” meaning a formal university affiliation). Scholars who do not have a formal affiliation on a university website are ineligible.The 150 finishers from last year automatically qualified for a spot in this year’s Top 200, so…