Education in Focus

The transition team for President-elect Donald Trump has said it will “deliver” on the former president's promises regarding sweeping changes to the nation’s educational system and federal agencies. On the campaign trail, Trump said he would disassemble the Department of Education and give states control of local schools as well as promoting school choice and removing improving outcomes for students. “The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail,” said Karoline Leavitt, a  spokeswoman for the Trump-Vance transition team. 

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According to a prominent free speech advocacy group, the United States experienced more than 10,000 book bans, the highest in the last three years, as the nation waits for possible changes to federal enforcement from another Trump administration. According to a new report from PEN America, the organization has found a steady increase in what it labels book bans occurring in the U.S. each year. Organizations like Moms for Liberty oppose pornographic and explicit content in school libraries and say students can still access the titles at other libraries and bookstores. 

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The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights announced Wednesday that it had come to a resolution with the Oklahoma school district where nonbinary student Nex Benedict attended before their death in February. Owasso Public School District has entered into a resolution agreement with the enforcement branch of the federal education agency that requires it to take specific actions related to the implementation of Title IX, such as meeting with Benedict’s mother and explaining how to file a Title IX complaint. The letter found the school district “generally failed to fulfill its Title IX obligations during the 2021–2022, 2022–2023, and 2023– 2024 school years” by investigating sexual harassment outside the Title IX process and procedures. 

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With the victory of Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump for president of the United States, his campaign positions on education will become focal points for parents, educators and school leaders in the coming months and years. On the campaign trail, Trump said he would abolish the U.S. Department of Education and promote school choice policies. However, scholars and actions from the previous Trump administration suggest a more complicated picture for those outcomes may be likely.

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Liam Morrison, whose Massachusetts middle school told him to remove a shirt that said “there are only two genders,” has asked the Supreme Court to take up his case, alleging the school is violating his First Amendment rights by preventing him from wearing it. The case typifies the divide between outspoken conservative families and school leaders who say they must protect and promote acceptance for all students, as Middleborough Public Schools Superintendent Carolyn Lyons said last year. The tension was also made evident in a recent report called “The Costs of Conflict,” which intended to quantify the costs of culturally divisive conflicts over topics like transgender policies and content moderation. 

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A member of the North Carolina State Board of Education is alarmed by a new academic performance report on the state’s remote learning academies. According to the report, two schools received an F, while 12 were rated with a D and 19 with Cs. Only one earned an A and one a B. By comparison, traditional schools had much higher percentages of schools rate A, B or C.

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With the rising popularity of generative artificial intelligence, which allows users to enter prompts or questions and receive text or answers, students can cheat in ways they couldn’t just a few years ago, and now they can do it even better with programs like StealthGPT. As Chalkboard has reported, cheating services have also risen in popularity. These services offer the technology to students in a gray market where cheating services are explicitly offered to students while technically prohibited in an app’s terms of service or policies. 

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After charges were announced against administrators and test proctors allegedly involved in a fraudulent teacher certification scheme, state agencies said they would follow law enforcement's lead to ensure teachers are properly licensed. The Texas Education Agency and the Arizona Department of Education have said that they will cooperate with law enforcement and state boards of education to take action if necessary after the Harris County District Attorney’s office said up to 400 teachers were fraudulently certified. As Chalkboard previously reported, the lucrative scheme allegedly involved several administrators and a basketball coach from Houston Independent School District. The administrators allegedly took teacher certification tests for teachers while bribed test proctors looked the other way.

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A new report from Reason Foundation ranks every state’s open enrollment laws, which allow students to transfer from their assigned public school to other public schools with open seats. Reason Foundation, a libertarian public policy group, found that Arizona, Idaho, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia had the best laws for students hoping to transfer to a different school. The report also examined other key areas, including inter-district transfers and which states charged students tuition.  Jude Schwalbach, the study's chief author and senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation, told Chalkboard that open enrollment is part of school choice. 

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A report released this week says that by silencing "agents of disruption" from speaking out on "culturally divisive" conflicts in schools, districts could have saved $2 billion in the 2023-24 school year. A survey of superintendents says challenges to how districts teach race and racism, LGBTQ+ policies and school library books cost taxpayers $3.2 billion last school year. In the last several years, parents have become increasingly outspoken and critical on topics like critical race theory, gender identity, parental rights and books they say are not suitable for minors, and organizations like Moms for Liberty have grown as a result.

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