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 doesn't keep school districts from enacting cellphone policies for grades 9-12, Hilton said during a committee meeting.

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(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 would make the high school testing standards the same as those from 2021-22. State Sen. John Jagler, R-Watertown, is a sponsor of the bill and noted the standards were changed behind closed doors and Evers has even called the decision a mistake. 

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(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, student loans, Pell Grants, funding for special needs students, and competitive grantmaking." When Trump took office in January, the Department of Education had about 4,133 workers. After Tuesday's reduction in force, the department's workforce will total about 2,183 workers.

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(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 State Board of Education in January 2009, where she served 15 months. She also served as a member of the Board of Trustees at Sacred Heart University.

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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 conversation strong on how to change it and eventually lead to its closing. In a series of posts on social media, the Department of Education defended the cuts to the federal agency's research arm, saying it hasn’t helped students and that it spent federal funds on unnecessary contracts. 

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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 social media post that caused controversy. The controversy invokes the larger debates over the appropriateness of ethnic studies curricula that have embedded ideological positions and how school board members have been treated for speaking out on divisive issues. 

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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 students in the Sexual Health Information from Teens (SHIFT) program that sex does not equal gender and featured a gender unicorn to illustrate the difference between sex, gender and attraction. Trump signed an executive order in January to "end the federal funding of gender ideology."

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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 information related to staff members who were filmed saying they would allow a biologically male student to play on the girls’ team. “The idea of school district officials turning their backs on female students and sacrificing the integrity of women’s athletics to advance the radical transgender agenda is disgusting, but that seems to be exactly what occurred here,” Paxton said in a news release Thursday.

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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 Organization Grant Program over what it called “burdensome” regulations. The Department also announced it was directing $33 million toward charter schools through the Charter School Program (CSP) competition. The department said the actions better align the agency’s work with President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for the expansion of school choice.

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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 doing so to date. The ACLU of Pennsylvania requested school superintendents, CEOS and directors in a letter this week to block Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents from entering schools, accessing information or having contact with students or staff.

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