Blog

  • Sleepwalking into criminal liability? Accessibility and the future of universities

    Sleepwalking into criminal liability? Accessibility and the future of universities

    If accessibility was being treated as an afterthought in higher education, then that ended in June 2025.

    The European Accessibility Act (EAA) came into force on 28 June 2025, and it applies to all UK universities that serve EU disabled students, sell into EU markets, or run EU-based partnerships and enterprises.

    Meanwhile, for those universities looking to expand operations into other international markets, India has gone further.

    Its Supreme Court has declared accessibility a constitutional right, new standards are enforceable in law, and fines are already being issued.

    Global convergence is happening. Universities that think they can ignore it may be sleepwalking into criminal liability.

    Beyond PSBAR

    The UK already has the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (PSBAR), which legal eagles will recall came into force in 2019 across public-sector bodies in Europe and the UK. PSBAR already monitors the accessibility of digital products such as websites and apps, and sanctions are civil.

    The EAA goes further and extends the remit of what’s covered. While some member states are still determining their sanctions, Ireland issues fines of up to €60,000, with the possibility of time in prison. France issues fines of €20,000 per non-compliant website, per year. Germany’s Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (BFSG) or “Accessibility Strengthening Act” includes fines of up to €100,000.

    For vice chancellors and chief operating officers, this is no longer a compliance box to tick. It’s a personal risk.

    Both PSBAR and EAA cover:

    • Virtual Learning Environments, Continuing Professional Development platforms, and publishing systems
    • Websites, apps, digital documents, and email attachments
    • Audiovisual media and cultural collections

    Now hardware is also in scope for EAA, from smartphones to laboratory kit. That means every corner of the institution must be born accessible – IT, procurement, estates, marketing, research, teaching, enterprise, and the university press. And don’t forget the sector’s elephant in the room – legacy systems. Retrofitting is messy, costly, and in many cases unworkable.

    Faced with ageing platforms and the difficulty of retrofitting legacy systems and content, many institutions are turning to so-called “quick-fix” tools such as overlays that promise to make websites accessible and compliant at the flick of a switch.

    While these can appear to improve surface-level usability, regulators have made clear that they do not replace compliance with core standards such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

    For leaders, the risk is assuming that bolt-ons have solved the problem – when in reality, only intentional design, governance, and testing with disabled people will stand up to regulatory scrutiny.

    Who owns accessibility?

    The uncomfortable truth is that many universities don’t know who owns accessibility. Governance is weak, responsibilities diffuse, and decisions are made without the right expertise in the room.

    Too often, a shiny new rebrand is unveiled before anyone realises it isn’t accessible. By then, fixes are expensive and reputationally embarrassing. The solution? Put digital experience and accessibility specialists at the table from the start, to help with scoping, strategy, procurement, governance, and sign-off. These governance challenges have been raised across the sector.

    Fans of Cartesian dualism may suggest the sector faces a choice:

    • Basic compliance – scramble to patch systems, pray regulators don’t look too closely.
    • Inclusive excellence – embed accessibility in governance, procurement, and culture.

    The second option unlocks real gains – improved student experience with a knock-on for NSS scores, stronger international recruitment, efficiencies in procurement, and staff upskilling. It can also help secure routes to research funding, given Research Council and Horizon priorities for EDIA (Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and… Accessibility).

    Some universities are deploying accessibility apprenticeships and paid accessibility internships, as well as disabled student panels for accessibility. This is the kind of initiative that could give the UK sector a genuine competitive edge, and is testament to the great work taking place at a grassroots level across the sector.

    For those teams managing universities’ sprawling and complex digital estates, clear plans and roadmaps are needed to guide procurement, commissioning, audits, and improvements.

    Having a well-defined strategy, proper planning, and good digital governance can make the process much smoother. However, without sustained backing from the top, and the mandate or authority to decommission ineffective systems and websites, these teams are limited in what they can achieve.

    The global direction of travel

    If Europe feels far away, look at India. In 2025, over 150 organisations were fined under new accessibility rules. Educational institutions are explicitly in scope. Early adoption of EAA standards positions UK universities ahead of this regulatory convergence. While UK laws may differ in some respects from India’s, they are all pointing in the same direction – accessibility is an essential requirement for the physical environment, digital systems, documents, media, hardware, and services.

    Accessibility is about disabled students. It’s also a test of digital maturity, institutional leadership, and international credibility. The European Accessibility Act is a wake-up call. The only real choice left is whether universities treat it as a burden or seize it as an opportunity for inclusive excellence.

    Global accessibility standards are coming. The only question is whether the UK sector will be ahead of the curve or behind it.

    Source link

  • Fear, arrests and know-your-rights: How one school district is grappling with ICE coming to town

    Fear, arrests and know-your-rights: How one school district is grappling with ICE coming to town

    by Alexandra Villarreal, The Hechinger Report
    January 23, 2026

    NEW HAVEN, Conn. — “They took her, they took her, they took her.”  

    Those were some of the words Assistant Principal Cora Muñoz could discern while on the phone with the guardian of one of her students. As the caller sobbed and struggled to speak, Muñoz realized that immigration enforcement agents had detained a kid from Wilbur Cross, the high school she helps lead. 

    Again.

    There was a reason why Muñoz was a go-to contact for the student and her guardian: She — and New Haven public schools more broadly — have worked hard to earn the trust of immigrant families in their diverse district, even as the second Trump administration has made it easier for immigration officers to enter schools and launched a mass deportation campaign.

    The district’s teachers and administrators have nurtured deep relationships with immigrant-serving organizations and helped kids access resources — attorneys, social workers, food — when needed. They’ve hosted sessions to inform students about their rights, and sent home cards with legal information in case of an encounter with immigration officers. And when the worst has happened — when someone’s child or parent has been detained, which has occurred over and over in recent months — they have taken immediate action, writing letters in support of the family member’s freedom and raising money alongside a larger coalition of advocates trying to bring that person home. 

    “In these moments where it’s hard, you show up,” said Muñoz, “and you do what you can.”

    Yet nothing has been able to entirely snuff out the fear of deportation inside the city’s schools, say students and educators. That may have contributed to a decline this October in the number of English language learner students enrolling; their numbers dropped by more than 2,000, or nearly 3.8 percent, across Connecticut between fall 2024 and fall 2025, and by hundreds — or 7.3 percent — in New Haven, with many immigrant families who were expected to return to school simply disappearing. 

    Chronic absenteeism rates fell in New Haven during the 2024-25 academic year. But after President Donald Trump took office, students said their families told them to skip extracurriculars or early college courses at a university campus in case immigration enforcement was around. For some, a college degree has started to feel more out of reach, as they adjust their dreams to fit within a new anti-immigrant reality. Teachers have seen kids stop participating in class after friends have been detained and they wonder if they could be next. 

    “I live with fear,” said Darwin, an 18-year-old student from Guatemala who has lived in New Haven for two years. His last name, like those of others in this story, is being withheld for safety reasons. “Sometimes I don’t even want to attend school because it makes me afraid to go out of the house.”

    In many school districts around the country, immigrant enrollment is down, as far fewer asylum seekers are able to reach the United States and some immigrants have chosen to self-deport to avoid the specter of detention. That said, the consequences of Trump’s mass deportation campaign on immigrants’ education vary greatly depending on the community, its demographics and the level of enforcement activity there, said Julie Sugarman, associate director for K-12 education research at the D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy. 

    In the Minneapolis area, for instance, where a federal officer shot and killed Renee Good after she dropped off her 6-year-old child at school, districts are offering a virtual learning option for the many kids who are staying home in fear.  

    “We are definitely hearing anecdotally that there are kids not going to school,” Sugarman said. “Obviously, losing a whole year of education or however long they’re not in school, they are missing out on opportunities to develop their content knowledge, to learn literacy, to develop English, and also to develop academic skills in their native language.” 

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

    With seven institutions of higher learning in the area, New Haven is known as a college town. But it is also a city of immigrants: More than one in six New Haven residents are foreign-born, a statistic that underscores a point of pride for many who welcome the city’s diversity. Families in the public school system speak more than 70 languages. 

    At the Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy, a K-8 school with around 430 students, notices go home in English, Spanish, Pashto and Arabic. The school’s front doors have welcome signs posted in multiple languages. And on a bright red poster in the hallway, photos of beaming children surround a message: “We all smile in the same language.”  

    When Trump, who has argued that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” nixed guidance in January that had generally restricted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from going into schools to arrest people, New Haven Public Schools Superintendent Madeline Negrón was prepared. Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, her team reviewed how the district had protected students during his first term and in what ways they could fortify their response. They developed a district-wide policy on how to act if ICE officers sought to enter their buildings. It involves a series of steps — including legal counsel’s verification of a valid warrant — before immigration agents would ever be allowed in. 

    “Without that, nobody, no one, is going to walk through my doors. Because my obligation is to keep every single one of my children safe,” said Negrón, who also shared the policy in a letter to parents. 

    Negrón led an effort to train all administrators in the protocol, and then those staff helped to train all 2,900 district employees — including custodians, cafeteria workers, teachers, security guards and secretaries.

    Some schools went even further, holding know-your-rights presentations for students and their families. “Things like a judicial versus administrative warrant — you know, I wish that no kid in New Haven needed to know that,” said Ben Scudder, a social studies teacher at High School in the Community. “But we live in a world where they do, and their families do, and so we’re gonna make sure that they get the training they need to do that.” 

    Related: Immigration enforcement is driving away early childhood educators 

    So far, ICE hasn’t tried to enter New Haven’s public schools. But outside of the classroom, arrests and family separations abound.

    In June, a mother and her two children — an 8-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl, both U.S. citizens — were in their car going to school when vehicles on the street surrounded them and men in ski masks approached. The kids watched, crying, as the immigration agents handcuffed their mom and led her away. 

    Staff members at the Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy, which the kids attend, fundraised for gift cards to grocery stores and delivery services to help their two students. They wrote support letters for the mother’s immigration case, asking for her release. But around a month later, she was deported to Mexico. 

    Now, whenever the younger sibling sees someone in uniform at school — a security guard, a police officer — he asks them why they took his mom, said Adela Jorge, Clemente’s principal. 

    “He’s not able to understand what happened,” Jorge said. “All he knows is that his mother was taken.”

    Soon after that, two Wilbur Cross students were nabbed one after the other. First was an 18-year-old named Esdras, arrested at his summer job, shuffled to detention facilities around the country, and almost put on a removal flight to Guatemala. 

    After more than a month — with the help of advocacy groups, his attorney, the teachers union, government officials and school employees who came together during summer break — Esdras was released. When he returned to Wilbur Cross, he told staff members all he wanted was to be normal, a request they have tried to honor by quietly reintegrating him into classes.

    Then, shortly after the start of the new academic year, another student — the one whose guardian had called Muñoz in a panic — was detained.

    “At first I thought she was mad at me or something,” said 17-year-old Melany, recalling when her friend suddenly stopped responding to phone messages. “But when she didn’t come to school, it really scared me. And I asked the teachers, but they couldn’t tell me anything.”

    Her friend was eventually freed, too. But teachers and administrators say they’re fed up that their students keep being targeted and treated so poorly.  

    “They’re our kids, and they’re being detained in these cages. And the day before, they were eating pizza in our cafeteria,” said Matt Brown, the Wilbur Cross principal. 

    Rumors and fears at times disrupt learning. One day in mid-October, around 10:20 a.m., immigration agents in tactical gear were seemingly staging in a park near a New Haven area college, setting off concerns that students were their targets. But about twenty minutes later, the agents instead hit a car wash in Hamden, Connecticut, arresting its workers. 

    “I don’t know what rights they had in those moments. It didn’t seem like they had any. There were no rights there,” said Laurie Sweet, a state representative whose district includes Hamden. “I think the intention is to cause chaos and make people feel destabilized, and that definitely is what happened.”

    ICE took eight people into custody that day, some of them parents of school-aged children. Tabitha Sookdeo, executive director of Connecticut Students for a Dream, said her organization searched school records for the kids, trying to ensure they were okay. But no one could find them.

    “We just hope and pray to God that they were able to have someone to pick them up from school,” Sookdeo said. 

    Related: What’s happened since Texas killed in-state tuition for undocumented students

    Teachers say all of this has made immigrant students quieter, more reserved, more observant — and more hopeless. Kids who used to exchange greetings with their teachers in the halls now trudge around like the walking dead, or ask for passes to leave the classroom more often. 

    “I’ve seen a lot more sadness, and I’ve seen a lot more students who are good students skipping classes. And it’s for no reason except that they just, you know, they have too much going on emotionally to make them go to their classes,” said Fatima Nouchkioui, a teacher of English as a second language at Wilbur Cross’ International Academy. 

    Sookdeo has noticed a drop in students at her organization’s college access program, as they question why they would try to get a college degree when they don’t know whether they’ll be in the U.S. tomorrow.

    “You’re sitting next to them,” she said of the high schoolers she works with. “And they’re literally shaking.”

    Many of the kids already have a pile of pressures to navigate. In some cases, they are living in the country by themselves, balancing school with jobs that allow them to send money home to parents and siblings. Darwin, for example, came to the U.S., leaving behind his mom and three younger siblings, and lives in New Haven alone — all to give his family members who remain abroad a better life. 

    And then there’s always the next arrest, constantly looming. 

    “Do we anticipate having kids detained again?” said Brown. “I haven’t seen anything that would make me think we shouldn’t.” 

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].

    This story about fear of deportation was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/know-your-rights-new-haven-school-district-ice/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=114453&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/know-your-rights-new-haven-school-district-ice/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • Explain it in 100 Words: Say Less, Engage More – Faculty Focus

    Explain it in 100 Words: Say Less, Engage More – Faculty Focus

    Source link

  • Regulation builds walls between different levels of education, but universities can build bridges

    Regulation builds walls between different levels of education, but universities can build bridges

    Education in England remains segmented by regulation.

    Schools operate within Ofsted’s education inspection framework and the statutory regimes of the DfE. FE colleges navigate the new suite of Ofsted frameworks alongside funding and skills accountability structures. Universities face OfS oversight, TEF metrics, and the expectations of the professional standards framework (PSF).

    Even within universities, initial teacher training (ITT) can sit slightly apart. It is tightly regulated, operationally complex, and often detached from wider higher education teaching development.

    This fragmentation undermines the very professional identity that all sectors claim to cultivate. Educators, whether in early years, FE, HE or the workplace, share core capabilities: pedagogical reasoning, reflective practice, evidence-informed decision-making and relational skill. Yet current inspection and quality structures often privilege compliance over coherence. The new regulatory climate – with Ofsted’s expanded reach and the Office for Students’ growing emphasis on outcomes – risks hardening rather than healing these divides.

    Connected teacher formation

    The development of educators should be understood as a connected professional landscape spanning all phases of education. Early-years practitioners cultivate curiosity and foundational learning; FE teachers integrate academic knowledge with technical and vocational practice; HE staff foster critical inquiry and disciplinary expertise; workplace trainers translate theory into competence and innovation.

    These contexts differ, yet the core professional capabilities – reflective practice, relational pedagogy, and evidence-informed judgement – are deeply aligned. It is this alignment that offers the potential for genuine coherence across the system.

    Yet policy and regulation often pull in the opposite direction. Current agendas, including the post-16 white paper and recent ITT reforms, prioritise measurable outcomes and workforce supply. While these imperatives matter, they risk reducing professional formation to a compliance exercise they privilege evidence collection over reflection and credentials over capability. Entrenching directive, overly prescribed curricula that constrain professional judgement rather than deepen it.

    The challenge for higher education is not to reject accountability, but to reclaim its meaning: to own, shape, and model what intelligent, developmental regulation could look like in practice for our educational professionals.

    Connecting silos

    Higher education institutions are uniquely positioned to reconcile accountability with professional growth across sectors. They already engage in ITT partnerships with schools, support FE teacher education through validated programmes, and offer HE teaching qualifications, from PGCerts to Advance HE fellowships.

    Yet in practice these streams often operate in splendid isolation, reinforcing sector barriers, constraining professional mobility, and limiting opportunities for genuine cross-sector learning.

    Recognising teacher formation as relational and interconnected allows universities to model genuine professional coherence. QTS, QTLS and HE-specific qualifications should not be seen as separate territories – but as mutually informing frameworks that share a commitment to learning, reflection and the public good. At their best, reflective and research-informed practices become the collaborative engine that drives dialogue and professional mobility to connect schools, FE and HE teaching, fostering shared inquiry, and generating innovation that travels across boundaries rather than staying within them.

    The central challenge is one of narrative and ownership. Policy discourse too often frames teacher education as a workforce pipeline and a mechanism for filling vacancies, meeting recruitment targets whilst delivering standardised outputs. While workforce priorities matter, they must not be allowed to define the profession. The new Ofsted frameworks for ITT and FE, and the emerging regulatory language in HE, offer a moment of reckoning: will these instruments shape teachers, or will teachers and universities shape them?

    Universities have the intellectual capital, research capacity, and civic role to do the latter. They can reposition teacher education as the means by which professional agency is restored. They can demonstrate that robust accountability can coexist with autonomy, and that inspection need not stifle innovation.

    As I’ve set out, ITT, education and training, and HE teaching frameworks share a foundational logic: reflective practice, evidence-informed professionalism, and a commitment to learner outcomes. Treating these frameworks as interdependent rather than siloed gives HEIs the permission to shape, not just satisfy, regulation.

    Bridging the gaps

    The spaces between sectors – the school-to-FE transition, FE-to-HE pathways, and workplace interfaces – are where professional formation is most fragile. Policy and inspection regimes often treat these spaces as administrative handovers, yet they are precisely where higher education can add value.

    Universities can convene cross-sector networks, support shared professional learning, and promote collaborative research that spans education from the early years to lifelong learning. In doing so, teacher education becomes both the hub and the bridge: a central space where insight, evidence and practice converge, and a connective route through which ideas, people and purpose move freely.

    When universities play this role with intent, they enable knowledge, skill and reflective practice to travel with educators, strengthening the coherence of teaching as a truly lifelong, connected profession.

    Looking forward

    Teaching is the connective tissue of education, yet current regulatory and inspection frameworks continue to partition the profession into sector-specific silos, limiting transitions and weakening shared professional identity. The post-16 white paper, ITT reforms, and evolving HE teaching frameworks present more than compliance obligations – they offer a pivotal moment to restructure teacher education towards collaborative, cross-sector and shared professional agency.

    HEIs are uniquely positioned to seize this opportunity. By bringing schools, FE, and HE into constructive dialogue, aligning teaching pathways, and engaging inspection regimes strategically, universities can model a profession that is both coherent and adaptive. In doing so, they can collectively lead the sector in addressing complex challenges, ensuring teacher education supports not just quality, but innovation, inquiry, and resilience across the system.

    The pressing question is this: if teaching is the thread that binds the system, will higher education step forward to unite the sectors, shape regulation, and demonstrate what it truly means to teach without borders?

    Source link

  • Higher education postcard: University of Sunderland

    Higher education postcard: University of Sunderland

    Greetings from Sunderland!

    By the 1850s Sunderland’s main industries were shipping, coal and glass. And in common with other industrial towns, the need for colleges to teach beyond basic school level had been felt and addressed. There had been a mechanics’ institute, which had failed; and then the creation of a school of science and art, funded through the government scheme. There’s a most learned discussion of the Sunderland School of Science and Art in this article by W G Hall from 1966 – it was published in The Vocational Aspect of Secondary and Further Education and drew upon Hall’s Durham MEd thesis.

    But the School of Science and Art was wound up in 1902. For the reason that the town council had in 1901 created a technical college to meet the town’s needs. The technical side of the School of Science and Art was transferred to the new college after it had been running for a year; the art side was hived off into a newly established Sunderland School of Art.

    The technical college was absolutely geared to the town’s industrial needs. Alan Smithers reports that in 1903 “heavy engineering and shipbuilding industries in Sunderland tried an arrangement whereby apprentices were released to the local technical college for six months each year over a period of several years.” While this was not the very first sandwich course – which may have been in Glasgow or in Bristol, 60 or 25 years previously, depending – it was a new model for technical colleges, and was soon copied in Wolverhampton, Cardiff, and at the Northampton Polytechnic, London.

    From 1930 students were able to study for degrees: in applied sciences, from Durham University; in pharmacy, from the University of London. And in 1934 London also recognised the college for the BEng degree.

    In 1969 the technical college, the school of art, and the Sunderland Training College (which had been established in 1908 and which operated from Langham Tower) were amalgamated to form the Sunderland Polytechnic. Educational innovation continued, with the country’s first part-time, in-service BEd degree being offered.

    In 1989 the polytechnic – along with all others, it wasn’t just a Sunderland thing – moved out of local authority control to become a self-governing corporation, following the 1988 Education Reform Act. The Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette ran an eight page supplement on Monday 3 April to celebrate. Features included:

    • a foreword from the Polytechnic’s Rector, Dr Peter Hart. (You can see a picture of him below, sat at his desk. 1989 and no computers. Sic transit gloria mundi.)
    • a sport-council funded project to promote inclusion of people with disabilities in sports
    • the polytechnic’s autism research
    • a photo of the polytechnic’s switchboard operators, with their new computerised system which enabled direct lines to extensions within the poly
    • the polytechnic’s knowledge exchange work
    • a picture of an Olympic athlete (Christina Cahill, fourth at the Seoul Olympics women’s 1500m) joining student services
    • the faculty of technology
    • an article written by the dean of the new faculty of business, management and education
    • pharmacy and art
    • the Japanese language centre at the polytechnic
    • a charity based at the polytechnic looking at medicines for tropical diseases.

    There’s a variety of stuff here, and what strikes me is the fact itself that the local paper regards the poly as a local amenity. There was clearly a felt connection between the local paper and this very big local institution, and pride at what it did.

    Image: Shutterstock

    In 1992 the polytechnic became the University of Sunderland. It now has campuses in London and Hong Kong as well as in Sunderland, and since 2018 has had a medical school.

    Alumni include Olympic athlete Steve Cram and current Guyanese President Irfaan Ali.

    Here’s a jigsaw of the postcard – it’s unsent and undated but I would guess it is from before the first world war, as it was printed in Berlin.

    Source link

  • Education Department halts effort to implement controversial anti-DEI letter

    Education Department halts effort to implement controversial anti-DEI letter

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    The U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday stepped back from its attempts to enforce a controversial and sweeping anti-DEI Dear Colleague letter issued nearly a year ago. In that policy letter, the Education Department said some race-based equity programs at colleges and schools discriminate against White and Asian students and could result in their federal funding being withdrawn. 

    The Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter cited the U.S. Supreme Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard — which banned race-conscious college admissions practices — as a reason to pare back other diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in education.

    “Such programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes,” the department’s letter said. “The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions. The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.” 

    On Wednesday, however, the Education Department signed a joint motion to dismiss an appeal in a lawsuit that would have allowed the agency to push forward with its anti-DEI policy. In abandoning its appeal, the agency signaled that it’s effectively stepping back from trying to enforce the policy. 

    “In this case, with the stroke of a pen, the administration tried to take a hatchet to 60 years of civil rights laws that were meant to create educational opportunity” for all kids, said AFT President Randi Weingarten in a statement on Wednesday. AFT, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging the letter. “They attempted to rewrite and redefine opportunity to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion and threatened schools and districts with penalties if they failed to comply.” 

    The U.S. Education Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment in time for publication. 

    In American Federation of Teachers v. U.S. Department of Education, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland’s Baltimore Division, Judge Stephanie Gallagher last August issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the anti-DEI letter and a subsequent letter requiring school districts to certify that they do not incorporate DEI in their schools. 

    Gallagher did not rule on the contents of the letters but said the manner in which the department changed its policies violated decision-making procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act. 

    The anti-DEI letter was also on hold because of rulings in at least two other lawsuits challenging the Education Department’s broader anti-DEI measures, including an anti-DEI complaint portal and the anti-DEI certification requirement for districts.

    Those lawsuits are still pending. 

    In the AFT case, the Education Department in October appealed the temporary block to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in an attempt to proceed with its anti-DEI measure. 

    Now, however, its decision this week to abandon that appeal could impact a slew of Title VI investigations into universities that were based on the letter. 

    In the Maryland district court’s preliminary injunction, Gallagher said the department specifically cited the letter in launching 51 Title VI investigations on March 14, 2025. After the letter was paused in earlier rulings, the department continued to launch investigations — based on legal interpretations barring DEI that were contained within the letter, but without explicitly citing it, according to Gallagher.

    The department’s decision to abandon its appeal comes after it jettisoned its appeal in another case closely watched by the education community. 

    In that case, the Trump administration on Jan. 2, without explanation, did an about-face and halted its efforts to push through layoffs affecting more than 400 Education Department staffers. The agency had originally appealed the court order requiring the agency to bring back the laid-off personnel.

    Source link

  • ICE Fears Keeping Minneapolis Kids Home From School

    ICE Fears Keeping Minneapolis Kids Home From School

    Source link

  • Education Department halts effort to implement controversial anti-DEI letter

    Education Department halts effort to implement controversial anti-DEI letter

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    The U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday stepped back from its attempts to enforce a controversial and sweeping anti-DEI Dear Colleague letter issued nearly a year ago. In that policy letter, the Education Department said some schools’ race-based equity programs discriminate against White and Asian students and could result in their federal funding being withdrawn. 

    The Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter cited the U.S. Supreme Court decision in SFFA v. Harvard — which banned race-conscious college admissions practices — as a reason to pare back other diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in education.

    “Such programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes,” the department’s letter said. “The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions. The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.” 

    On Wednesday, however, the Education Department signed a joint motion to dismiss an appeal in a lawsuit that would have allowed the agency to push forward with its anti-DEI policy. In abandoning its appeal, the agency signaled that it’s effectively stepping back from trying to enforce the policy. 

    “In this case, with the stroke of a pen, the administration tried to take a hatchet to 60 years of civil rights laws that were meant to create educational opportunity” for all kids, said AFT President Randi Weingarten in a statement on Wednesday. AFT, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, was the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging the letter. “They attempted to rewrite and redefine opportunity to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion and threatened schools and districts with penalties if they failed to comply.” 

    The U.S. Education Department of Education did not respond to multiple requests for comment in time for publication. 

    In American Federation of Teachers v. U.S. Department of Education, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland’s Baltimore Division, Judge Stephanie Gallagher last August issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the anti-DEI letter and a subsequent letter requiring school districts to certify that they do not incorporate DEI in their schools. 

    Gallagher did not rule on the contents of the letters but said the manner in which the department changed its policies violated decision-making procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act. 

    The anti-DEI letter was also on hold because of rulings in at least two other lawsuits challenging the Education Department’s broader anti-DEI measures, including an anti-DEI complaint portal and the anti-DEI certification requirement for districts.

    Those lawsuits are still pending. 

    In the AFT case, the Education Department in October appealed the temporary block to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in an attempt to proceed with its anti-DEI measure. 

    Now, however, its decision this week to abandon that appeal could impact a slew of Title VI investigations into universities that were based on the letter. 

    In the Maryland district court’s preliminary injunction, Gallagher said the department specifically cited the letter in launching 51 Title VI investigations on March 14, 2025. After the letter was paused in earlier rulings, the department continued to launch investigations — based on legal interpretations barring DEI that were contained within the letter, but without explicitly citing it, according to Gallagher.

    The department’s decision to abandon its appeal comes after it jettisoned its appeal in another case closely watched by the education community. 

    In that case, the Trump administration on Jan. 2, without explanation, did an about-face and halted its efforts to push through layoffs affecting more than 400 Education Department staffers. The agency had originally appealed the court order requiring the agency to bring back the laid-off personnel.

    Source link

  • Florida proposal seeks 1-year pause on H-1B hires at public universities

    Florida proposal seeks 1-year pause on H-1B hires at public universities

    This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

    Dive Brief: 

    • Florida’s public universities could be barred from hiring any new employees through the H-1B visa program this year under a policy the system’s leaders are considering this month. 
    • The university system’s Board of Governors plans to vote on introducing the proposed policy change for public comment during its meeting on Jan. 29. The proposal says trustee boards “shall not utilize the H-1B program” for new hires through Jan. 5, 2027. 
    • The policy would carry out the wishes of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who directed the system’s governing board in October to end what he described as “H-1B abuse” at Florida universities. DeSantis argued that Florida’s universities were hiring foreign workers through the program over qualified Americans. 

    Dive Insight: 

    The H-1B visa program is intended to allow U.S. employers to hire highly educated foreign workers for specialized positions, such as software development or research. Many high-profile universities, including those in Florida, rely on the program to hire researchers. 

    The University of Florida, the state’s flagship, employed 253 workers through the H-1B visa program in fiscal 2025, according to federal data. Statewide, it was followed by Florida State University, with 110 H-1B workers, and the University of South Florida, with 107. 

    Officials from those universities did not immediately respond to Higher Ed Dive’s request for comment on the policy proposal. 

    In October, DeSantis directed the state’s university system during a press conference to “pull the plug on the use of these H-1B visas in our universities.” With the new proposed policy, the governing board would carry that out through a roughly one-year pause on H-1B hiring. 

    DeSantis’ views on the H-1B program are in line with the Trump administration’s. In September, President Donald Trump issued a proclamation creating a $100,000 fee on new applications for H-1B visas, setting off alarms in the higher education world and other sectors that rely on these workers. 

    Nearly three dozen higher education groups have asked U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for a sectorwide exemption to the fee. 

    In an October letter to Noem, American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell argued that carving out an exemption for higher ed would be similar to the sector’s current exemption from the nationwide annual cap on new H-1B awards, set at 85,000 per year. 

    The $100,000 policy has also drawn several lawsuits. However, a federal judge sided with the federal government last month on one of those legal challenges, ruling that Trump did not exceed his authority by issuing the proclamation. 

    The groups who sued, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Association of American Universities, appealed the ruling on Dec. 29.

    Source link

  • Anti-ICE protesters disrupted worship in a Minnesota church. Here’s why the First Amendment doesn’t protect their actions.

    Anti-ICE protesters disrupted worship in a Minnesota church. Here’s why the First Amendment doesn’t protect their actions.

    Recent events in Minnesota — where anti-ICE protesters interrupted a service at Cities Church in St. Paul, targeted pastor David Easterwood (who is apparently also an ICE official), then defended the disruption as an exercise of First Amendment rights — reflect a growing confusion about what the Constitution does and does not protect. Similar incidents have occurred in recent years, affecting churches, synagogues, and other religious services across the country. Whatever one thinks of the protesters’ underlying cause, the constitutional question here is not a close one.

    “This is what the First Amendment is about,” said journalist Don Lemon, who entered the church with the protesters and defended their actions to a pastor who was asking them to leave. Organizers Nekima Levy Armstrong and Chauntyll Louisa Allen have since been arrested for allegedly violating the FACE Act, which prohibits using force, threats, or physical obstruction to interfere with religious services.

    There is no First Amendment right to enter a house of worship and engage in conduct that effectively shuts down a religious service, even as part of a protest. Nor does anybody have the right to remain on private property after being asked by its owner or authorized representatives to leave.

    The First Amendment offers its strongest protection to speech in traditional public forums — streets, sidewalks, and parks — while also protecting freedom of association, religious exercise, and freedom of conscience. A society committed to free expression depends not only on protecting speech, but on maintaining a clear delineation between protected speech, on the one hand, and unprotected civil or criminal conduct on the other.

    The First Amendment restrains government action, not private individuals or institutions. Courts have long distinguished between public spaces, including those that must remain open to expressive activity, and private spaces where those who control them retain the right to exclude unwanted speech. Private property owners are not required to open their spaces to expressive activity simply because the message is political or morally urgent.

    Treating the First Amendment as a roaming permission slip for disruption misstates both the law and the logic of free expression.

    A worship service held inside a church is not a public forum. It is a private religious gathering, typically held on private property, convened for a specific and constitutionally protected purpose: religious exercise.

    This distinction matters because the First Amendment is often misunderstood as an affirmative license to protest anywhere. It is not. It protects individuals from government suppression of speech; it does not compel private institutions to host expression they do not invite. Treating the First Amendment as a roaming permission slip for disruption misstates both the law and the logic of free expression.

    Religious liberty under the First Amendment includes more than the freedom to hold beliefs. It includes the right to gather in a house of worship without facing threats of violence or intrusive disruption from others. While houses of worship are not identical to homes or hospitals, worship services involve deeply personal practices — prayer, ritual, reflection — that the Constitution has long treated as deserving of solicitude.

    Entering a house of worship or violating trespass or noise ordinances to interrupt services is not merely expressive conduct. It is also disruptive conduct that prevents others from exercising their rights. It interferes with religious exercise and compels an audience to listen and respond against its will. The First Amendment does not require that outcome. A free-speech culture depends on the right to gather with likeminded others in private spaces without outsiders hijacking the space for their own purposes, just as much as it depends on protection from censorship.

    None of this diminishes the importance of protest. The First Amendment robustly protects the right to criticize religious institutions and oppose their teachings. Protesters may lawfully assemble on public sidewalks outside a church, distribute literature, chant, or hold signs, subject to the same content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions that apply to all speakers. Those protections are strong, and they must remain strong.

    What the First Amendment does not protect is the commandeering of a worship service or any other private event. That principle is viewpoint neutral. The constitutional analysis would be the same if protesters took over a mosque during prayer or a synagogue during Shabbat — or, for that matter, a university classroom during a lecture or a private theater during a performance. Indeed, many Americans intuitively recognize that such conduct would be unlawful in those contexts. That intuition is correct, and it applies regardless of ideology or religion. As constitutional lawyer David French recently observed in response to these events, interrupting a church service interferes with the rights of fellow citizens and calls for the protection of peaceful worship. That observation reflects settled constitutional doctrine rather than partisan preference.

    Speech is not a crime — even if it complicates ICE’s job

    Aaron Terr explains why alerting others to law enforcement activity, or reporting on it, is protected by the First Amendment.


    Read More

    Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop some from defending conduct like the Cities Church protest as constitutionally protected activity. As political polarization intensifies, disruptive protests must not continue to spill into religious services, classrooms, and other settings built on voluntary participation and shared purpose.

    A society committed to free expression must distinguish between public forums, where the government must protect speech without regard to viewpoint, and private institutions, where individuals may assemble and set their own rules about what speech will and will not be welcomed. When every space becomes contestable, it erodes rather than sustains free speech.

    Houses of worship occupy a distinctive place in civil society. They are voluntary associations operating outside the state and outside partisan politics. They are among the institutions that allow Americans with deep disagreements to coexist without constant confrontation. When they are treated as spaces anyone can take over for their own ends, the harm extends beyond religious liberty. It weakens the pluralistic framework that allows disagreement without domination.

    The First Amendment was never designed to eliminate all boundaries between protest and private life. It was designed to protect speech while preserving the freedom to associate, worship, and assemble without being commandeered by others. Those principles rise and fall together.

    The constitutional line here remains clear. Protest in public forums is protected. Preventing others from engaging in private religious worship is not. Understanding and reaffirming that distinction is important, not in an effort to suppress dissent, but because we must preserve the conditions under which free expression, religious liberty, and civil society can endure together.



    Source link