The outlook for federal spending on education research continues to be grim. That became clear last month with more cutbacks to education grants and mass firings at the National Science Foundation, the independent federal agency that supports both research and education in science, engineering and math. A fourth round of cutbacks took place on May 9. National Science Foundation observers were still trying to piece together the size and scope of this wave of destruction.…
Sueli Gwiazdowski, 24, says she switched high schools three times when she was growing up. She wanted to stay at her first school because she loved being on the speech and debate team – but the campus wasn’t wheelchair accessible. Her second school forced her to learn in a separate room, away from her non-disabled friends. “I had to fight my way out of that by going to a lot of…meetings and asserting that I…
In recent years, many school districts have had to make the difficult choice to eliminate art programs (drama, music, visual arts, photography, etc.) due to budget cuts and based upon state/national academic priorities that are more focused on math and English student achievement. The budget crisis came against the backdrop of the decade-long emphasis on math and reading as mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind law and other state initiatives and acts. For…
The Trump administration says it will stop paying out $1 billion in federal grants that school districts across the country have been using for student mental health funding, including to hire mental health professionals like counselors and social workers. The Department of Education is telling impacted districts that the Biden administration, in awarding the grants, violated “the letter or purpose of Federal civil rights law.” The grants were part of the 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities…
The Trump administration says one of its primary goals in education is to expand school choice and put power back in the hands of parents. Yet it has killed the main way to track one of the most rapidly growing options – learning at home, or homeschool. The Education Department began counting the number of homeschooled children in 1999, when fewer than 2 percent of students were educated this way. Homeschooling rose by 50 percent…
The U.S. Education Department’s role in helping students with disabilities may be changing soon. President Trump has said his administration is going to move “special needs” to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), an agency that recently announced its own drastic cuts. His administration hasn’t specified exactly which programs will be moved, and whether IDEA, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, is among them. The conservative policy playbook Project 2025 does propose…
As Education Secretary Linda McMahon was busy dismantling her cabinet department, she vowed to preserve one thing: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card. In early April, she told a gathering of ed tech companies and investors that the national exam was “something we absolutely need to keep,” because it’s a “way that we keep everybody honest” about the truth of how much students across the country actually…
President Donald Trump inherited a U.S. Department of Education with 4,133 employees, according to the administration’s own numbers. Nearly 600 workers have since chosen to leave, by resigning or retiring. And this week, more than 1,300 workers were told they’re losing their jobs in a Tuesday purge. That leaves 2,183 remaining department staff, according to the administration, which means the Department of Education will soon be roughly half the size it was just a few…
An independent research arm within the U.S. Department of Education is being all but shut down, employees of the department say. The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is responsible for gathering and disseminating data on a wide range of topics, including research-backed teaching practices and the state of U.S. student achievement. Many contracts have already been canceled, according to two employees briefed on the moves. The employees said they learned of the cuts at an emergency…
America’s children have continued to lose ground on reading skills in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and have made little improvement in math, according to the latest results of an exam known as the nation’s report card. The findings are yet another setback for U.S. schools and reflect the myriad challenges that have upended education, from pandemic school closures to a youth mental health crisis and high rates of chronic absenteeism. The national exam…
