Education in Focus

After recent escalations, Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma will use a state financial agency to investigate Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters and the state’s Department of Education. State Rep. Kevin Wallace said he would ask the Legislative Office of Fiscal Transparency (LOFT) to look into Walters and the Department of Education after lawmakers signed a petition calling for a committee in the House to look at six recent issues earlier this week. Walters told a local TV station that those calling for an investigation are “liberal Republicans” who are “flat-out wrong” and are a “lackey of the teachers union.” 

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As millions of students across the country prepare to go back to traditional public school, some estimates are that over three million K-12 students will soon begin their semesters at home for various reasons. Brian D. Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) — a non-profit group that collects data regarding homeschooling — shared with Chalkboard News that his “best estimate” is that there are “slightly more” kids learning at home in 2022-2023 than 2021-2022. He caveated that while his estimates for 2022-23 were not yet finalized, the initial estimates for the total number of homeschooled K-12 students “might have barely moved up to 3.2 million.” 

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Full story: https://www.chalkboardnews.com/issues/parental-rights/article_980a1cc6-5c0a-11ef-8eb8-7b6907695073.html 

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A district court in California ruled that teachers and parents in the state may try to create a statewide class action lawsuit against school districts with policies requiring them to conceal a student’s gender or name change from parents. The proposed class action lawsuit allowed to continue by Judge Roger T. Benitez stems out of litigation brought by two substitute teachers against Escondido Union School District, alleging the school and state-level leaders violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to withhold information from parents.

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A California school district says parents have the right to review the sex education their students receive, but it is silent about whether that policy applies to one high school’s student-created materials that reportedly discuss polyamory and gender identity. At Berkeley High School, students do teach other students about sex, according to a description of the school’s Sexual Health Information from Teens (SHIFT) program. They are overseen by unlicensed “educators” who are paid by the federal agency AmeriCorps. 

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A Rhode Island mother is suing her child’s former school district after the school initially denied her public records requests about her child’s curriculum and other school policies, and the local teachers union sued her to try to get her to stop. Nicole Solas, who had a kindergartener enrolled in the South Kingstown School District in 2021, wanted to know more about what was being taught at her child’s school and policies, but as she began asking questions, she was met with resistance. Soon, Solas began filing hundreds of public records requests requesting curriculum and emails from school leaders in an attempt to obtain answers. 

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Students at a Detroit combined virtual school took their online credit recovery courses 20 times faster than the courseware provider suggests in the 2023-24 school year. According to a public records request filed with Detroit Public Community School District, students took their 11th and 12th-grade English language arts classes in about four hours, while the courseware provider Edgenuity recommends students spend 80 hours on such courses. All 23 students who took the 11th-grade ELA online credit recovery class at Detroit Lions Academy completed the course in four hours, 14 minutes and 20 seconds of active time, with an average grade of 86%. 

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A Maryland school district says it will have to walk back its bold goals for an all-electric bus fleet after a highly critical watchdog report revealed wasteful spending and a lack of oversight with a clean-energy transportation vendor. Montgomery County Public Schools said it will likely fall short of its goals to have an emissions-free bus fleet after delays and setbacks highlighted in a recent report from the Montgomery County Inspector General. The district has asked the state board of education for millions to cover the cost of standard diesel buses and said it would need an exemption for the vehicles because of a state law prohibiting the acquisition of non-electric vehicles.

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As the presidential election heats up heading into the fall, experts say local school board races are becoming more politicized and partisan, eliciting various responses from states and districts. In Indiana, for example, a district ruled that a school board candidate who wanted to appear on the ballot with a Trump-themed nickname is disqualified. In Florida, however, voters are faced with an amendment that, if passed, would allow school board candidates to appear on the ballot with their party affiliation. Julie Marsh, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, said that in recent years, school board elections have seen higher spending and are “more politicized…more partisan, more nationally oriented, more contested.”

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A federal appeals court has ruled that the Biden administration can’t implement its Title IX rules in an additional four states, bringing the total number of statewide injunctions to 26. With a recent block awarded in Oklahoma on Wednesday and then an emergency appeal granted by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, over half of the United States will be exempt from the Thursday deadline. The new Biden administration rules add gender identity to prohibitions on sexual discrimination in Title IX, including requiring schools to allow students to use a bathroom and locker room that aligns with their gender identity.

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An education organization that administers a nationwide assessment has found that students are still not performing as well as they were immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic and that students' achievement gap worsened in the 2023-24 school year as compared to before COVID. NWEA, which issues the Measures of Academic Progress, said in a report this week that some middle school students are still an entire school year behind where they were before the pandemic in almost every grade as schools are slated to run out of federal relief this fall. The organization estimated that eighth-grade students would require nine months of additional schooling to reach pre-pandemic achievement levels in reading and 9.3 months of extra schooling to reach the same in math.

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