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…
Read More »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…
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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…
Read More »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…
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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…
Read More »in Mathematics, News, Reading
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…
Read More »A new $2.5 billion plan will modernize public universities and colleges across Massachusetts, Gov. Maura Healey announced January 1st, 2025. An Act to Build Resilient Infrastructure to Generate Higher Education Transformation, known as The BRIGHT Act, will modernize the UMass system, state universities, and community colleges. It will create approximately 15,000 construction-related jobs, Healey said in a statement. The $2.5 billion bond bill represents the largest proposed investments in capital improvements in Massachusetts’ public higher…
Read More »in Mental Health, News
As anti-LGBTQ+ legislation skyrockets across the country, so do suicide attempts and other mental-health concerns among LGBTQ+ youth. A 2022 national survey of nearly 34,000 LGBTQ+ youth, ages 13-24, paints a clear, distressing picture of the trauma endured by LGBTQ+ students in America. Nearly three-quarters reported symptoms of anxiety; 58 percent reported symptoms of depression; and 45 percent said they had seriously considered committing suicide within the past year. However, the survey also shows that…
Read More »Youth mental health has steadily declined in the years prior to and following the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the worst affected are pre-teen boys and teenage girls, according to the August 2024 report, “A Nation’s Children At Risk,” published by the Center for Applied Research in Education at the University of Southern California. According to the study, teen girls were more than three times as likely to experience abnormal levels of emotional symptoms compared to the…
Read More »Four years after the pandemic shuttered schools, we all want to be done with COVID, but the latest analyses from three assessment companies paint a grim picture of where U.S. children are academically. While there are isolated bright spots, the general trend is stagnation. One report documented that U.S. students did not make progress in catching up in the most recent 2023-24 school year and slid even further behind in math and reading, exacerbating pandemic…
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