Author: BelieveAgain

Penny Schwinn is withdrawing from consideration to serve in the No. 2 position at the U.S. Department of Education.The decision, announced in a Thursday webinar on education funding and policy, comes as the former Tennessee education commissioner’s nomination has stalled after a U.S. Senate committee sent it to the full chamber for approval in late June. There was concern that she would not clear the necessary votes in the Senate, after her record and past comments on battles regarding gender and race in classrooms alienated some conservative lawmakers.“It’s been her choice. She secured the votes that would have been necessary…

Key U.S. senators from both parties on Thursday decisively rejected virtually all the Trump administration’s proposals to slash K-12 education investments—and pushed back against its efforts to shrink the Department of Education and move its functions to other agencies.Fourteen Republicans and twelve Democrats voted on July 31 to advance a federal budget bill for education, labor, and health to a full floor vote, tentatively slated for September. Two Democrats and one Republican voted against the measure.The bill and its accompanying Senate committee report spell out modest increases over current funding levels for key education programs like Title I for low-income…

An Oklahoma sheriff’s office Monday opened an investigation over reports that images of nude women were displayed on the state school superintendent’s office television during a meeting with education board members.Top Oklahoma lawmakers have sought answers over accounts given by two State Board of Education members, who said they saw the images during a meeting in Ryan Walters‘s office Thursday. Another board member, Chris Van Denhende, said he was not in a position to see the television but that “something was on the screen that should not have been,” based on Walters’ reaction.The investigation is in the early stages, said…

Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Edward Markey, D-Mass., have reintroduced education bills that would increase minimum salaries for teachers to $60,000 and the minimum wage for support staff to $45,000 or $30 per hour. “You are the champions of the students of our nation. It’s now time for us to be the champions for you,” said Markey, during a town hall held July 24.Sanders, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, or HELP, committee, first introduced the Pay Teachers Act in 2023, which would outline the new minimum salaries, allocate approximately $1,000 per teacher for classroom supplies, and…

The Trump administration will temporarily pause enforcement of a new policy that prohibits undocumented children from attending Head Start and keeps undocumented high schoolers out of dual enrollment and early college programs after 21 Democratic attorneys general sued over the new rules.In an agreement filed in federal court in Rhode Island on Friday, four federal agencies agreed not to enforce the policy through Sept. 3 as the lawsuit plays out. The pause will apply in 20 states and the District of Columbia, which jointly filed the lawsuit. The four agencies are the U.S. departments of Education, Health and Human Services,…

The Trump administration next week will unfreeze billions of K-12 education dollars it has withheld from states since July 1, the Education Department told states Friday afternoon.Roughly $5 billion will flow beginning the week of July 28 to states through four K-12 education grant programs, according to a July 25 Department of Education letter obtained by Education Week.The affected grant programs, according to the letter, are Title I-C for migrant education ($375 million); Title II-A for professional development and teacher training ($2.2 billion); Title III-A for English-learner services ($890 million); and Title IV-A for academic enrichment ($1.3 billion).The administration last…

What makes a good public school—and how would we know it?While these questions may appear simple to answer—given all the publicly available data and the growing number of online school-rating sites—they remain enormously difficult to resolve. Information is scattered across disconnected sources, and many rating systems are themselves poorly designed, obscuring more than they reveal.Why measure a school’s quality? Because parents need to know whether their child will learn to read confidently; policymakers must see whether students are truly prepared for college and the workforce; and taxpayers deserve evidence that public dollars are invested well.Can you infer the quality of…

Head Start programs across the country were providing summer services to young children when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a surprise notice on July 10 saying that, effective immediately, undocumented students are no longer eligible to enroll in the federal preschool program designed for children from families living in poverty.The notice—a sharp departure from decades of precedent—reclassifies Head Start and more than a dozen federally funded services as welfare, which makes immigration status a potential barrier to access. But the agency offered no clear guidance, leaving school districts and nonprofit grantees uncertain about how to proceed.“These…

Some Head Start programs could be forced to close because of the steep cost of complying with a new Trump administration policy that requires them to verify the immigration status of students and parents, 21 Democratic attorneys general argue in a new lawsuit.The top legal officials in 20 states and the District of Columbia on Monday asked a judge to halt the new policy, which reclassified more than a dozen federally funded services, including Head Start and dual enrollment for high school students, as benefits similar to welfare so the Trump administration can bar undocumented immigrants from accessing them.The reclassification…

The Trump administration violated federal laws and the U.S. Constitution when it abruptly withheld $6.8 billion in federal education funding that was required by law to flow July 1, 22 Democratic attorneys general and two Democratic governors allege in a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court.The lawsuit, filed July 14 in the U.S. District Court of Rhode Island, characterizes the Trump administration’s unprecedented withholding of billions of dollars Congress appropriated for education in March as a brazen attack on the constitutional separation of powers. The move, it contends, also violates federal laws governing education programming, administrative procedures, and executive branch…