Education in Focus

The Georgia Senate passed a bill 54-2 on Tuesday that would require K-8 schools to have a policy on cellphone use. House Bill 340 bans electronic devices from "bell to bell," with some exceptions for students with learning disabilities or medical issues. School systems can decide how they want to store the devices, according to the bill. High schools are not addressed in the legislation, but it do...

(The Center Square) – A bill that would change the academic standards used on Wisconsin’s state report cards back to prior levels passed the Senate and now will head to Gov. Tony Evers. The Senate voted 18-14 to approve the bill, which would reset the K-12 school report card standards of 2019-20, makes grades 3-8 standards the same as those set by the National Assessment of Education Progress and...

(The Center Square) – U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said Tuesday that as part of the Department of Education's "final mission," it would cut its workforce by half. Affected employees will be placed on administrative leave beginning March 21. McMahon said the department would "continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency's purview, including formula funding,...

(The Center Square) – The U.S. Senate confirmed President Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Education, even as the department’s future existence remains uncertain. Lawmakers voted 51-45 to approve Linda McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first term and is a long-time advocate of school choice. McMahon's background in education includes her appointment to Connecticut’s...

Nearly $1 billion in contracts for the Institute of Education Sciences has been cut by the Department of Government Efficiency. Proponents say it is another step toward efficiency and eliminating waste; critics say the slash could cripple the nation’s objective assessors of academic achievement. Linda McMahon's confirmation hearing to lead the Department of Education proceeded Thursday, with conve...

The Palo Alto Unified School District Board voted this week not to censure a board member who previously voted against a measure to approve a controversial “liberated” ethnic studies curriculum for the district. Tuesday’s roughly five-hour PAUSD meeting saw the board vote on a resolution stripping Trustee Rowena Chiu of her committee assignments after her vote at a previous meeting and reposting a...

A peer-to-peer sex education program at a public high school in California funded by taxpayers nationwide may be on the chopping block after President Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting federal funds from going toward what he called gender ideology “indoctrination” for K-12 students. The federally funded AmeriCorps program at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California, told stude...

The Texas Attorney General’s office is demanding documentation from two school districts over concerns that they are allowing male students to play on female sports teams in violation of state law H.B. 25.  Attorney General Ken Paxton’s letters to Dallas and Irving Independent School Districts requested training materials, communications over student eligibility for sports teams, and other informa...

The Department of Education will support charter schools by withdrawing a federal award program initially issued by the Biden administration and directing over $30 million to the nontraditional public schools, the department said. The Department of Education said it had withdrawn two “notices inviting application” for the State Entity Charter School Grant Program and the Charter Management Organiz...

The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania is asking school leaders in the state to resist federal immigration enforcement agency actions on school grounds after the Trump administration rescinded guidance preventing enforcement efforts near schools. While While President Donald Trump's directives would allow ICE agents to enter school property, there have been no reported cases of them do...

President Donald Trump signed an executive order this week outlawing what the White House termed “radical indoctrination” in K-12 schools. Wednesday's order calls on agency secretaries to submit an “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” to eliminate “federal funding or support for illegal and discriminatory treatment and indoctrination in K-12 schools, including [sic] based on gender ideology and discri...

A forthcoming Supreme Court case will determine the legality of the religious charter schools that operate with public taxpayer dollars. The United States Supreme Court decided to hear the case last week, seven months after the Oklahoma Supreme Court struck down St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School’s application to operate as a religious charter school in the state. Michael J. Petrilli,...

The New York City Department of Education has received multiple recommendations from its watchdog organization to stop allowing teachers to contact students directly after it was found that two teachers had behaved inappropriately with students. In reports published on its website Monday, the Special Commissioner of Investigation for the New York City School District said the city’s education agen...

The Trump administration’s Department of Education announced Thursday that it was working on eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) from its website and workforce. The agency said staff leading DEI initiatives have been placed on administrative leave, and over 200 web pages with DEI resources that “promote or endorse harmful ideological programs” have been deleted. It also killed over $...

While tense school board meetings over cultural and other issues have dominated education news headlines, instances of culture war battles in schools have declined by 42% according to a new report from the CATO Institute. For more than a decade, the think tank has been collecting data on culture war trends in public schooling according to Neal McCluskey, director of CATO’s Center for Educational F...

A new report from a nonprofit organization that ranks states by educational freedom found large differences between them based on their efforts to improve the school choices families have for their children. The American Legislative Exchange Council's Index of State Education Freedom, released Thursday, ranks states based on the school choice options and funding programs they offer students and th...

President Donald Trump signed an executive order to limit the government’s recognition to two sexes based on male and female biology, a reversal of the Biden administration’s attempts to expand the definition of sex discrimination to include gender identity. The order Trump signed on Monday after his inauguration said the executive branch of the government would reaffirm “the biological reality of...

PowerSchool, a large education technology company that provides services to public school districts, says it has been hacked and that the FBI is investigating the student data breach. Hanover County Public Schools in Ashland, Virginia, told parents on Jan. 9 that the hack included student names and addresses, parent contact information, teacher names and schedules. Parental advocates said the brea...

The Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction says the Biden administration failed to secure the southwest border, leading to rising education costs in the state. Superintendent Ryan Walters filed a lawsuit in federal court on Tuesday. Walters and the Oklahoma Department of Education say the federal government should cover the additional costs incurred due to the influx of immigrant students....

A California lawsuit alleging a school district’s parental notification policy for student gender identity violates teachers’ First Amendment rights will continue after a judge denied motions to dismiss the case on Tuesday. U.S. District Court Judge Roger T. Benitez said Mirabelli v. Olson would continue after California Attorney General Rob Bonta, members of the California Department of Education...

Mary in the Library may not have the same recognition as Moms for Liberty, but parents in the Facebook group and other state-focused online communities have the same goal in mind: Getting sexually explicit books out of school libraries and away from kids. Chalkboard News spoke with Brooke Stephens, a Utah parent and grassroots activist who is behind some of the loosely connected social media pages...

A federal court in Kentucky ruled Thursday that the Biden administration’s rulemaking expanding Title IX to include gender identity is “unlawful.” The judgment from the United States District Court from the Eastern District of Kentucky sided with Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, West Virginia and private organizations and individuals. Critics of the rule lauded the court’s decisions. Chief Judge Dann...

While many states expanded and adopted school choice programs in 2024, some advocates are excited about new education options for families in 2025 – made possible because of this year’s election results. According to EdChoice, a nonprofit dedicated to expanding school choice options, five states created new school choice programs, and six states expanded their programs in 2024. And 2025 holds prom...

A parental advocacy organization says the Department of Justice spent over $100 million on restorative justice, social-emotional learning programs and diversity, equity and inclusion programs since 2021. Parents Defending Education released a report Thursday that says the federal law enforcement agency gave the money through 102 grants to nearly 1,000 school districts in 36 states and an estimated...

The FBI says it will not release the total number of swatting calls for the 2024 year despite the persistence of calls that shut down schools and alarmed communities. The federal law enforcement agency previously provided Chalkboard News with a count of the total number of swatting incidents, which are reported by local law enforcement to a virtual command center. "Swatting" is a type of hoax thre...