Education in Focus

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 with members who share information about what is inside books, where they have been located and strategies for challenging them. For Stephens and other parents in the groups, removing books with sexually explicit content is their chief concern because they don’t want their children interacting with material that posits different values than what they are taught at home.

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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 Danny C. Reeves wrote in Thursday's order that the administration’s final rule overstepped its congressionally given boundaries. 

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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 promise for new programs in states like Texas, where school-choice advocates won seats in the legislature. Ed Tarnowski, policy and advocacy director at EdChoice, told Chalkboard in an interview that in 2024, five states created new school choice programs and six expanded existing ones.

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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 3.2 million students. The parental organization said many of the grants funded projects that “had an explicit goal of improving school climate for ‘disproportionately impacted’ groups, singling out LGBTQ+ and [Black, Indigenous, people of color].” 

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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 threat where a bad actor says there is an active threat in order to initiate a response from law enforcement officers. Typical swatting hoaxes at a school often involve telling police there is an active shooter or bomb threat. 

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As the battle over allowing certain classroom curricula continues into 2025, two opposing groups shared milestones and failures from the past year regarding explicit books in the classroom. The debate over what kinds of books should be allowed in school libraries has roiled school board meetings for years, with those critical of sexually explicit material saying it has no place in taxpayer-funded schools. Their opponents, however, say such moderation is synonymous with censorship and book bans. 

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Despite the high-profile headlines around school shootings in 2024 and more incidents from 2023, schools are one of the safest places for young people, according to safety experts. Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director for the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, said that while the group doesn’t have a generally accepted data source to track the number of mass shootings at K-12 schools, it found only one in 2023 — the Nashville Covenant School shooting. Schildkraut told Chalkboard News that 2024 had three such mass school shootings: one at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa, another at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia and, most recently, the shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin.

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With all the money from the federal government’s COVID-19 relief, states received a huge influx of funds in 2022 for schools. But how much did an increase in taxpayer dollars toward school districts affect student performance? According to data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress and the United States Census Bureau, despite the largest increase in per-pupil funding in two decades, student academic achievement in the top-spending states sometimes trailed that of their lower-spending counterparts. According to the Census Bureau, schools received the largest increase in per-pupil funding year over year in 2022. 

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Chalkboard News' 2024 Year in Review including the changes to Title IX and its legal challenges, continued struggles to improve student performance, and the increasing use of online credit recovery programs.

Keep up with all education related news in 2025 at Chalkboard News: https://www.chalkboardnews.com/

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According to research conducted by the nation’s education data agency, the number of teaching positions did not increase or decrease compared to the 2022-23 school year. Meanwhile, half of school leaders reported feeling like their school was understaffed. It also said 40% of students in the nation’s public schools were behind grade level in one or more subjects at the beginning of the school year. 

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Full stories: 

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https://www.chalkboardnews.com/issues/funding-spending/article_985c6626-b997-11ef-a037-6be2bbaeb084.html

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