Tag: News

  • Texas Bill Would Limit Uncertified Teachers in Schools – The 74

    Texas Bill Would Limit Uncertified Teachers in Schools – The 74


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    Lawmakers want to turn the tide on the growing number of unprepared and uncertified teachers by restricting who can lead Texas classrooms. But school leaders worry those limits will leave them with fewer options to refill their teacher ranks.

    Tucked inside the Texas House’s $7.6 billion school finance package is a provision that would ban uncertified teachers from instructing core classes in public schools. House Bill 2 gives districts until fall 2026 to certify their K-5 math and reading teachers and until fall 2027 to certify teachers in other academic classes.

    Texas would help uncertified teachers pay for the cost of getting credentialed. Under HB 2, those who participate in an in-school training and mentoring program would receive a one-time $10,000 payment and those who go through a traditional university or alternative certification program would get $3,000. Special education and emergent bilingual teachers would get their certification fees waived. Educator training experts say it could be the biggest financial investment Texas made in teacher preparation. Rep. Brad Buckley, the Salado Republican who authored the bill, has signaled the House Public Education Committee will vote on HB 2 on Tuesday.

    District leaders, once reluctant to hire uncertified teachers, now rely on them often to respond to the state’s growing teacher shortage. And while they agree with the spirit of the legislation, some worry the bill would ask too much too soon of districts and doesn’t offer a meaningful solution to replace uncertified teachers who leave the profession.

    “What’s going to happen when we’re no longer able to hire uncertified teachers? Class sizes have to go up, programs have to disappear…. We won’t have a choice,” said David Vroonland, the former superintendent of the Mesquite school district near Dallas and the Frenship school district near Lubbock. “There will be negative consequences if we don’t put in place serious recruitment efforts.”

    A floodgate of uncertified teachers

    Nowadays, superintendents often go to job fairs to recruit teachers and come out empty-handed. There are not as many Texans who want to be teachers as there used to be.

    The salary in Texas is about $9,000 less than the national average, so people choose better-paying careers. Teachers say they are overworked, sometimes navigating unwieldy class sizes and using weekends to catch up on grading.

    Heath Morrison started to see the pool of teacher applicants shrink years ago when he was at the helm of Montgomery ISD. Many teachers left the job during the COVID-19 pandemic, which accelerated the problem.

    “This teacher shortage is getting more and more pronounced,” said Morrison, who is now the CEO of Teachers of Tomorrow, a popular alternative teacher certification program. “The reality of most school districts across the country is you’re not making a whole lot more money 10 years into your job than you were when you first entered … And so that becomes a deterrent.”

    As the pool of certified teachers shrunk, districts found a stopgap solution: bringing on uncertified teachers. Uncertified teachers accounted for roughly 38% of newly hired instructors last year, with many concentrated in rural districts.

    The Texas Legislature facilitated the flood of uncertified teachers. A 2015 law lets public schools get exemptions from requirements like teacher certification, school start dates and class sizes — the same exemptions allowed for open enrollment charter schools.

    Usually, to teach in Texas classrooms, candidates must obtain a certification by earning a bachelor’s degree from an accredited college or university, completing an educator preparation program and passing teacher certification exams.

    Teacher preparation experts say certifications give teachers the tools to lead a high quality classroom. To pass certification tests, teaching candidates learn how to plan for lessons and manage discipline in a classroom.

    But the 2015 law allowed districts to hire uncertified teachers by presenting a so-called “district of innovation plan” to show they were struggling to meet credential requirements because of a teacher shortage. By 2018, more than 600 rural and urban districts had gotten teacher certification exemptions.

    “Now, what we’ve seen is everyone can demonstrate a shortage,” said Jacob Kirksey, a researcher at Texas Tech University. “Almost every district in Texas is a district of innovation. That is what has allowed for the influx of uncertified teachers. Everybody is getting that waiver for certification requirements.”

    This session, House lawmakers are steadfast on undoing the loophole they created after new research from Kirksey sounded the alarm on the impacts of unprepared teachers on student learning. Students with new uncertified teachers lost about four months of learning in reading and three months in math, his analysis found. They missed class more than students with certified teachers, a signal of disengagement.

    Uncertified teachers are also less likely to stick with the job long-term, disrupting school stability.

    “The state should act urgently on how to address the number of uncertified teachers in classrooms,” said Kate Greer, a policy director at Commit Partnership. The bill “rights a wrong that we’ve had in the state for a long time.”

    The price of getting certified

    Rep. Jeff Leach, a Plano Republican who sits on the House Public Education Committee, said his wife has worked as an uncertified art teacher at Allen ISD. She started a program to get certified this winter and had to pay $5,000 out of pocket.

    That cost may be “not only a hurdle but an impediment for someone who wants to teach and is called and equipped to teach,” Leach said earlier this month during a committee hearing on HB 2.

    House lawmakers are proposing to lower the financial barriers that keep Texans who want to become teachers from getting certified.

    “Quality preparation takes longer, is harder and it’s more expensive. In the past, we’ve given [uncertified candidates] an opportunity just to walk into the classroom,” said Jean Streepey, the chair of the State Board for Educator Certification. “How do we help teachers at the beginning of their journey to choose something that’s longer, harder and more expensive?”

    Streepey sat on the teacher vacancy task force that Gov. Greg Abbott established in 2022 to recommend fixes to retention and recruitment challenges at Texas schools. The task force’s recommendations, such as prioritizing raises and improving training, have fingerprints all over the Texas House’s school finance package.

    Under HB 2, districts would see money flow in when they put uncertified teachers on the path to certification. And those financial rewards would be higher depending on the quality of the certification program.

    Schools with instructors who complete yearlong teacher residencies — which include classroom training and are widely seen as the gold standard for preparing teacher candidates — would receive bigger financial rewards than those with teachers who finish traditional university or alternative certification programs.

    Even with the financial help, lawmakers are making a tall order. In two years, the more than 35,000 uncertified teachers in the state would have to get their credential or be replaced with new, certified teachers.

    “The shortages have grown to be so great that I think none of us have a really firm handle on the measures that it’s going to take to turn things around.” said Michael Marder, the executive director of UTeach, a UT-Austin teacher preparatory program. “There is financial support in HB 2 to try to move us back towards the previous situation. However, I just don’t know whether the amounts that are laid out there are sufficient.”

    Restrictions like “handcuffs”

    Only one in five uncertified teachers from 2017 to 2020 went on to get a credential within their first three years of teaching. Texas can expect a jump in uncertified teachers going through teacher preparatory programs because of the financial resources and pressure on schools through HB 2, Marder said.

    But for every teacher who does not get credentialed, school leaders will have to go out and find new teachers. And they will have to look from a smaller pool.

    The restrictions on uncertified teachers “handcuffs us,”said Gilbert Trevino, the superintendent at Floydada Collegiate ISD, which sits in a rural farming town in West Texas. In recent years, recruiters with his district have gone out to job fairs and hired uncertified teachers with a college degree and field experience in the subjects they want to teach in.

    Rural schools across the state have acutely experienced the challenges of the teacher shortage — and have leaned on uncertified teachers more heavily than their urban peers.

    “We have to recruit locally and grow our own or hire people who have connections or roots in the community,” Trevino said. “If we hire a teacher straight out of Texas Tech University, we may have them for a year. … And then they may get on at Lubbock ISD or Plainview ISD, where there’s more of a social life.”

    Floydada Collegiate ISD recruits local high school students who are working toward their associate’s degree through what is known as a Grown Your Own Teacher program. But Trevino says HB 2 does not give him the time to use this program to replace uncertified teachers. From recruitment to graduation, it takes at least three years before students can lead a classroom on their own, he said.

    School leaders fear if they can’t fill all their vacancies, they’ll be pushed to increase class sizes or ask their teachers to prepare lessons for multiple subjects.

    “Our smaller districts are already doing that, where teachers have multiple preps,” Trevino said. “Things are already hard on our teachers. So if you add more to their plate, how likely are they to remain in the profession or remain in this district?”

    At Wylie ISD in Taylor County, it’s been difficult to find teachers to keep up with student growth. Uncertified teachers in recent years have made up a large number of teacher applicants, according to Cameron Wiley, a school board trustee.

    Wiley said restrictions on uncertified teachers is a “good end goal” but would compound the district’s struggles.

    “It limits the pot of people that’s already small to a smaller pot. That’s just going to make it more difficult to recruit,” Wiley said. “And if we have a hard time finding people to come in, or we’re not allowed to hire certain people to take some of that pressure off, those class sizes are just going to get bigger.”

    Learning suffers when class sizes get too big because students are not able to get the attention they need.

    “This bill, it’s just another obstacle that we as districts are having to maneuver around and hurl over,” Wiley said. “We’re not addressing the root cause [recruitment]. We’re just putting a Band-Aid on it right now.”

    This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/03/15/texas-school-funding-uncertified-teachers-shortage/.

    The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.


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  • In Bid to Close Education Department, President Trump Looks to Rehouse Student Loans, Special Education Programs – The 74

    In Bid to Close Education Department, President Trump Looks to Rehouse Student Loans, Special Education Programs – The 74

    President Donald Trump said Friday that the U.S. Small Business Administration would handle the student loan portfolio for the slated-for-elimination Education Department, and that the Department of Health and Human Services would handle special education services and nutrition programs.

    The announcement — which raises myriad questions over the logistics to carry out these transfers of authority — came a day after Trump signed a sweeping executive order that directs Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure” of the department to the extent she is permitted to by law.

    “I do want to say that I’ve decided that the SBA, the Small Business Administration, headed by Kelly Loeffler — terrific person — will handle all of the student loan portfolio,” Trump said Friday morning.

    The White House did not provide advance notice of the announcement, which Trump made at the opening of an Oval Office appearance with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

    The Education Department manages student loans for millions of Americans, with a portfolio of more than $1.6 trillion, according to the White House.

    In his executive order, Trump said the federal student aid program is “roughly the size of one of the Nation’s largest banks, Wells Fargo,” adding that “although Wells Fargo has more than 200,000 employees, the Department of Education has fewer than 1,500 in its Office of Federal Student Aid.”

    ‘Everything else’ to HHS

    Meanwhile, Trump also said that the Department of Health and Human Services “will be handling special needs and all of the nutrition programs and everything else.”

    It is unclear what nutrition programs Trump was referencing, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture manages school meal and other major nutrition programs.

    One of the Education Department’s core functions includes supporting students with special needs. The department is also tasked with carrying out the federal guarantee of a free public education for children with disabilities Congress approved in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA.

    Trump added that the transfers will “work out very well.”

    “Those two elements will be taken out of the Department of Education,” he said Friday. “And then all we have to do is get the students to get guidance from the people that love them and cherish them, including their parents, by the way, who will be totally involved in their education, along with the boards and the governors and the states.”

    Trump’s Thursday order also directs McMahon to “return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

    SBA, HHS heads welcome extra programs

    Asked for clarification on the announcement, a White House spokesperson on Friday referred States Newsroom to comments from White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt and heads of the Small Business Administration and Health and Human Services Department.

    Leavitt noted the move was consistent with Trump’s promise to return education policy decisions to states.

    “President Trump is doing everything within his executive authority to dismantle the Department of Education and return education back to the states while safeguarding critical functions for students and families such as student loans, special needs programs, and nutrition programs,” Leavitt said. “The President has always said Congress has a role to play in this effort, and we expect them to help the President deliver.”

    Loeffler and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said their agencies were prepared to take on the Education Department programs.

    “As the government’s largest guarantor of business loans, the SBA stands ready to deploy its resources and expertise on behalf of America’s taxpayers and students,” Loeffler said.

    Kennedy, on the social media platform X, said his department was “fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs and overseeing nutrition programs that were run by @usedgov.”

    The Education Department directed States Newsroom to McMahon’s remarks on Fox News on Friday, where she said the department was discussing with other federal agencies where its programs may end up, noting she had a “good conversation” with Loeffler and that the two are “going to work on the strategic plan together.” 

    Maine Morning Star is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maine Morning Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Lauren McCauley for questions: [email protected].


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  • Small Business Administration to Take Over Student Loans

    Small Business Administration to Take Over Student Loans

    A day after White House officials said the Education Department would administer the student loan program, President Donald Trump announced that the Small Business Administration would be taking over the $1.7 trillion portfolio.

    He told White House reporters that the move would happen “immediately,” though he didn’t say how that process would work. Currently, federal law requires the Education Department to manage student loans, so the president doesn’t have the authority for the move, several experts and advocates said Friday.

    Neither the White House nor the Small Business Administration responded to requests for more information or details about the plan.

    In response to questions about how moving loans to SBA would work, the Education Department referred Inside Higher Ed to an interview that Education Secretary Linda McMahon did Friday with Fox News. McMahon said she’s working with the SBA on a strategic plan.

    The announcement follows Trump’s executive order, signed Thursday, directing McMahon to close her department “to the maximum extent of the law.” McMahon and others have said a smaller version of the department would focus on core functions, which many experts presumed to include the student loan program. (Trump also said Friday that the Department of Health and Human Services would take over programs that support students with disabilities.)

    Kelly Loeffler, who leads the SBA, wrote on social media that her agency “stands ready to take the lead on restoring accountability and integrity to America’s student loan portfolio.” Whether the department has the capacity to take on the program is an open question; Loeffler is planning to cut 43 percent of the staff, Politico and other news outlets have reported. The SBA runs several programs to support small businesses, including providing loans and helping with disaster recovery.

    The Education Department issues about $100 billion in student loans each year and disburses $30 billion in Pell Grants. That funding is crucial to students who rely on the government to help pay for college.

    But borrowers have struggled over the years to navigate the cumbersome student loan system and often have faced difficulty in repaying their loans. Meanwhile, the federal government’s growing loan portfolio has become a key issue for lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle. Former president Joe Biden’s fix was in part to make student loan forgiveness more accessible and make loan payments more affordable.

    Trump said Friday that the loan system “will be serviced much better than it has in the past,” adding, “it’s been a mess.”

    Agency Blindsided

    It wasn’t clear Friday afternoon whether SBA would also take over the Pell Grant program and the Free Application for Federal Student Aid—a form that millions of students rely on to access federal, student and institutional aid. Currently, the Office of Federal Student Aid, which is part of the Education Department, administers those programs. That office was hit hard by recent mass layoffs at the department, and experts have questioned whether it will be able to fulfill its many responsibilities, which also include overseeing colleges and rooting out fraud in the federal student aid system.

    Trump’s executive order pointed out that the Education Department manages a portfolio the size of Wells Fargo but with significantly fewer employees. “The Department of Education is not a bank, and it must return bank functions to an entity equipped to serve America’s students,” the order said.

    An official high up at Federal Student Aid said Friday that the office was blindsided by the announcement. Just a day before, the official said, the plan was to move the loans to the Treasury Department. Agency officials have yet to receive any plans or communication about handing over the reins to SBA or what that would entail, the official said.

    ‘Clear Violation’

    The federal statute that created FSA specifically gives that office authority to administer student financial assistance programs. Additionally, laws dictating how federal funding is allocated explicitly send money to the Education Department for the student aid programs. A former department staffer told Inside Higher Ed that the administration is “clearly circumventing the spirit and intent of the law if you were to move to functions.”

    Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington State, agreed, writing on social media that the announcement “is a clear violation of education [and] appropriations law.”

    Beth Maglione, interim president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators, added in a statement that only Congress can move the student loan portfolio to a different agency; if the legislative branch agreed, doing so would take time.

    “The administration would first need to articulate a definitive strategy outlining how the work of administering student aid programs would be allocated within the SBA, determine the necessary staffing and resources, and build the requisite infrastructure to facilitate the transition of these programs to another federal agency,” she said. “In the absence of any comprehensive plan, a serious concern remains: how will this restructuring be executed without disruption to students and institutions?”

    Not a ‘Crazy Idea’

    Some conservative policy experts who support shutting down the department cheered the move. Lindsey Burke, director for the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, wrote on social media that “without student loans at ED, there will be little left at the agency. Just a few programs—certainly not enough to justify a cabinet-level agency.”

    Beth Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, like the Heritage Foundation a conservative think tank, acknowledged in an email to Inside Higher Ed that there are a lot of open questions about how the SBA move would work. But she said the announcement shows that the Trump administration understands that the recent staffing cuts “will likely make it too difficult to keep these programs properly administered otherwise,” she wrote.

    Akers noted that since SBA currently manages its own loans, “it isn’t a crazy idea that they could pull this off.”

    “Frankly, the department has handled student loan administration poorly, so the bar is pretty low on what would constitute an improvement,” she added. “I expect that the existing student loan infrastructure (and remaining staff) will likely move over to SBA, and there won’t be immediate changes in how these programs are run. That’s my hope. Because if things change too quickly, I expect that students will see disruptions that could affect their enrollments and personal finances.”

    Liam Knox contributed to this report.

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  • Columbia Agrees to Trump’s Demands

    Columbia Agrees to Trump’s Demands

    Acquiescing to demands from the Trump administration to address alleged antisemitism on campus, Columbia University has agreed to overhaul disciplinary processes, ban masks at protests, add 36 officers with the authority to make arrests and appoint a new senior vice provost to oversee academic programs focused on the Middle East, among other changes.

    The decision, announced Friday afternoon, is the latest move in Columbia’s ongoing face-off with the federal government over last year’s pro-Palestinian protests, which spawned the nationwide encampment movement. Columbia yielded despite concerns about the legality of the demands, as well as of an associated effort by the Trump administration to strip the university of $400 million in research funding.

    “We have worked hard to address the legitimate concerns raised both from within and without our Columbia community, including by our regulators, with respect to the discrimination, harassment, and antisemitic acts our Jewish community has faced in the wake of October 7, 2023,” university officials said in a Friday statement.

    The acknowledgment is a rare admission of antisemitism on campus, despite the fact that a Title VI investigation by the Department of Education has not yet been completed.

    Columbia announced additional efforts that the Trump administration didn’t request, including advancing the university’s Tel Aviv Center (though initial details are sparse) and creating a K-12 curriculum “focused on topics such as how to have difficult conversations, create classrooms that foster open inquiry, dialogue across difference and topics related to antisemitism.” That curriculum will be free for schools.

    Columbia did not place the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Department into “academic receivership” for a minimum of five years, as the Trump administration demanded, but the parties appeared to reach a compromise. A new senior vice provost will review a broader range of programs, expanding beyond the department targeted by Trump to include “the Center for Palestine Studies; the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies; Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies; the Middle East Institute; the Tel Aviv and Amman global hubs; [and] the School of International and Public Affairs Middle East Policy major,” according to the university.

    The new senior provost, who has not yet been named, will review programs “to ensure the educational offerings are comprehensive and balanced” and evaluate “all aspects of leadership and curriculum” among other changes, which may include academic restructuring.

    The full list of changes can be found here.

    Interim president Katrina Armstrong announced the move in a statement titled “Sharing Progress on Our Priorities,” calling it “a privilege to share our progress and plans” after a difficult year of protests and scrutiny.

    “At all times, we are guided by our values, putting academic freedom, free expression, open inquiry, and respect for all at the fore of every decision we make,” Armstrong wrote in the message posted Friday afternoon, which she signed, “Standing together for Columbia.”

    Critics, however, have argued that yielding to the Trump administration undermines academic freedom and urged Columbia to fight the demands.

    Legal scholars at Columbia and in conservative circles have noted that the Trump administration’s demands were likely unlawful. However, it seemed the university had no desire for a protracted legal fight.

    After the news broke—first reported by The Wall Street Journal—many critics panned the move.

    In a Friday press call, American Association of University Professors President Todd Wolfson blasted Columbia for failing to stand up to Trump.

    “This is not the outcome we wanted to see we wanted to see Columbia stand up for their rights for academic freedom and freedom of speech on their campus and we did not expect for them to not only capitulate to the demands of the federal government but actually go beyond the initial demands as far as we can tell,” Wolfson said.

    “This is an unprecedented intervention into academic freedom—never before in Columbia’s 250+ years has the federal government tried to exert control over a department before. And Trump et al. are only getting started,” Columbia history professor Karl Jacoby wrote on Bluesky.

    Outside experts pointed to the likelihood that more universities will give in to Trump’s threats now that Columbia has yielded.

    “Trump gets exactly what he wants from Columbia. Next up: most of the big-name institutions in American higher education. This is a turning point in the history of our industry,” Robert Kelchen, a professor of education and head of the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, wrote in a Bluesky post.

    (Ryan Quinn contributed to this report.)

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  • Humans in an AI world

    Humans in an AI world

    Key points:

    Like it or not, AI is evolving, and it is cementing its place in education. And the CoSN 2025 Conference is preparing attendees to meet the AI challenge head-on, focusing this year’s conference theme on human leadership in an AI world.

    Register here to attend this year’s conference in Seattle.

    Ken Shelton, an independent consultant, speaker, advisor, and strategist, opens the conference on Monday, March 31 with his keynote, Reimagining Learning with AI: A Path to Empowerment. Shelton will explore the promises and perils of leveraging AI in education and will delve into strategies for maximizing AI’s benefits while addressing its risks, ensuring that AI becomes a tool for true empowerment in education.

    On Tuesday, April 1, panelists Lindsay E. Jones, CEO of CAST, Lindsay Kruse, CEO of All Means All, and Rachell Johnson, director of assistant technology at SCATP, will participate in a general session, Leadership, Not Bystanders, moderated by Sarah Radcliffe, director of Future Ready Learning in the School District of Altoona. Panelists will discuss how can to ensure that no student is overlooked as AI continues to reshape education.

    The closing keynote on Wednesday, April 2, Beyond the Algorithm–Building Trust, Access, and Purpose in AI-Enhanced Education, features Richard Culatta of ISTE + ASCD, Victor Lee of the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University, Pati Ruiz, EdD, of Digital Promise, and Kris J. Hagel of the Peninsula School District. The discussion will focus on ensuring AI enhances, rather than diminishes, human potential in education.

    Workshops include:

    • Student data privacy
    • Generative AI implementation
    • Education leadership in the digital age
    • AI and leadership
    • Organizational change management for digital transformation

    Spotlight sessions cover cybersecurity and physical security, tackling cell phones in classrooms, top edtech trends in 2025, edtech and AI quality indicators, and FERPA.

    Wondering what the CoSN conference has for you?

    Chief Technology Officers 

    • Learn proven strategies for getting the dollars you need to build the infrastructure for today and tomorrow
    • Connect with your peers and build your community of practice
    • Discover how to stretch scarce resources to make the greatest impact on teaching and learning Instructional Technology Directors

    Instructional Technology Directors 

    • Hear about new tools and models for engaging students and personalizing instruction
    • Strategize about how to bridge the gap between the technical and instructional silos
    • Improve your leadership skills and how to scale technology beyond islands of innovation

    Superintendents, District Teams, and Education Service Agencies 

    • Hear from thought leaders on how to create a vision for digital conversion and continuously improving innovative culture in your district
    • Learn tips for breaking down the silos and leveraging technology to enable a 21stcentury school system
    • Share creative and strategic solutions about how to create robust learning environments at school and at home 

    Industry, Government, and Nonprofit Representatives 

    • Understand what is keeping school system technology leaders up at night 
    • Share information on emerging tools and services for learning
    • Learn about better strategies and models for implementing, maintaining, and evaluating technology for learning
    Laura Ascione
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  • Test yourself on this week’s K-12 news

    Test yourself on this week’s K-12 news

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

    How well did you keep up with this week’s developments in K-12 education? To find out, take our five-question quiz below. Then, share your score by tagging us on social media with #K12DivePopQuiz.

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  • A way to honor the teach-in movement at 60 (opinion)

    A way to honor the teach-in movement at 60 (opinion)

    This month marks the 60th anniversary of the teach-in movement against the U.S. war in Vietnam. The first teach-in was held at the University of Michigan, March 24–25, 1965; by the end of the spring semester, teach-ins had spread to college and university campuses across the nation, educating tens of thousands of students, faculty and community members about the moral, political and strategic reasons why the escalating Vietnam War was doomed to failure.

    The teach-ins were sparked by the Johnson administration’s launch of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against North Vietnam in late February 1965. But it is less its antiwar ideas than its strategic and tactical brilliance that makes the teach-in movement so relevant today, offering a valuable model for resisting the threat that the Trump administration’s authoritarianism and hatred of the liberal university poses to academic freedom and free speech on campus, the university’s funding of scientific research, the college and university’s role in battling racial and sexual discrimination, and higher education’s cosmopolitanism and international character.

    Though we tend to think of the campus antiwar movement as led by radical students who used militant tactics, breaking university regulations and the law in their protests, the teach-in movement was initiated by faculty, not students, and it did not break any such regulations or the law. Its only tools were education—offered by knowledgeable speakers—and effective publicity and outreach. In fact, the very idea of a teach-in was the result of a tactical retreat.

    Initially, Michigan’s Faculty Committee to Stop the War in Vietnam had envisioned a work moratorium, a day when faculty did not teach their regular academic classes so that the whole university could focus on the Vietnam War. But this moratorium idea proved immensely controversial, drawing all kinds of denunciations, especially from the state’s war-hawk politicians, who labeled it an anarchist hijacking of the university that denied students access to their classes. Seeing that this controversy was distracting people from the war itself, the faculty shrewdly changed course. Instead of a work moratorium, they came up with the idea of an antiwar teach-in that would begin after classes ended and go on through the night (from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m.).

    Some on the left saw this tactical shift as unfortunate, even cowardly, and feared that few students would attend such an evening event. But they were wrong. This first teach-in drew some 3,000 students, faculty and community members. It was, in the words of one its speakers, Carl Oglesby, “like a transfigured night. It was amazing: classroom after classroom bulging with people hanging on every word of those who had something to say about Vietnam.” Michigan’s antiwar faculty then helped raise funds for more teach-ins in May, which connected with faculty and student activists on more than 100 campuses, with the movement reaching its peak at a University of California, Berkeley, weekend teach-in that drew some 30,000 participants. All this provided a major boost to the peace movement and helped make the campuses a center of antiwar activism.

    In our own era, college and university administrations have tightened campus regulations to restrict mass protest and have been quick to have even nonviolent anti-Gaza war student protesters arrested for the most minor campus rule violations. In fact, last spring there were more than 3,000 arrests nationally, for campus antiwar encampments that were quite tame compared to the disruptive student protests that erupted in the Vietnam era’s most turbulent years.

    The decline of free speech on campus since the 1960s is also evident when one reflects back on the famous case of Marxist historian Eugene Genovese. At a Rutgers University teach-in, Genovese, in 1965, provoked a huge right-wing backlash by saying that he did “not fear or regret the impending Vietcong victory in Vietnam. I welcome it.” Despite calls for Genovese’s firing from many supporters of the war, including then-former Vice President Richard Nixon, Rutgers’ administration, while disdaining Genovese’s pro-Vietcong views, defended his right to free speech and refused to fire him—though two years later Genovese, tired of the death threats and political pressure, opted to leave Rutgers. One hears no such campus administration defense of free speech today as Trump, who pardoned his J6 rioters, pursues arrests and deportations of anti-war student protestors, including the arrest and detention of recent Columbia University graduate and Green Card holder Mahmoud Khalil.

    All this repression has struck fear into the hearts of student activists. So, while direct action and civil disobedience have their place in campus protest, they are, understandably, not in vogue at this authoritarian moment. This is a time when important news outlets, such as The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, the business community, the U.S. Senate minority leader, and campus administrators cower in fear of the Trump administration. This seems like a good time for faculty to act boldly yet strategically, taking the lead, showing that their campuses can, without rule-breaking or civil disobedience, become major centers of education about Trump’s authoritarianism, his embarrassingly illiberal and predatory foreign policy, and his crude attacks on education, the courts, the press, the First Amendment and federal agencies. Faculty should use their skills as teachers and scholars, as their predecessors did in 1965, but this time help teach America about the threat Trumpism poses to democracy and education, in a new national wave of teach-ins that would honor our past and offer hope for the future.

    Robert Cohen is a professor of history and social studies at New York University. His research focuses on student protest, free speech and the Black Freedom Movement in 1960s America. His most recent book is Confronting Jim Crow: Race, Memory and the University of Georgia in the 20th Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2024).

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  • Bret Stephens Don’t Know Higher Education

    Bret Stephens Don’t Know Higher Education

    What I want to know is why The New York Times lets opinion columnist Bret Stephens lie about higher education institutions.

    I understand this is a strong charge, and perhaps it’s unfair. Maybe Stephens is merely uninformed and parroting bad information.

    I’m thinking these things because we recently had the rare occasion of a pundit (Stephens) being challenged in real time by two experts (Tressie McMillan Cottom and M. Gessen) in the form of a three-way conversation printed under the headline “‘It Is Facing a Campaign of Annihilation’: Three Columnists on Trump’s War Against Academia.”

    The conversation is moderated by Patrick Healey, another Times journalist, who gives Stephens the first word on the question “What went wrong with higher ed? How did colleges become such easy pickings?”

    Stephens hearkens to the infamous Yale Halloween incident from 2015, when students committed the grave error of speaking intemperately to university administrators about a communication that seemed to authorize racially insensitive Halloween costumes over the objections of students.

    Stephens wonders why these students weren’t expelled or at least suspended, justifying a crackdown for what may have been a break in decorum but was undeniably the exercise of free speech. Stephens ostensibly is against the threats of the Trump administration against Columbia University and others, and yet here he is essentially authorizing the administration rationale of punishing institutions that are not sufficiently punitive toward protesting students.

    The voice of reason appears in the form of Cottom, both an active professor at the University of North Carolina and a sociologist who studies higher education. In the words of Kevin Carey, “Reading Tressie McMillan Cottom debate Bret Stephens on higher education is like watching Steph Curry play H.O.R.S.E. against a barely-sentient lump of gravel.”

    Cottom counters with lived experience over Stephens’s fever dream: “I have taught the most quintessentially tense courses my entire academic career. My course names often have the words race, class and gender in them. I do this as a Black woman. I have never had a problem with students refusing to have debates. It could be that I am a uniquely gifted pedagogue but I reject that idea.”

    This becomes a pattern throughout the exchanges, where Stephens makes something up and then Cottom and/or Gessen knock it down. Later on, Stephens goes on an uninformed rant about the lack of value of degrees with the word “studies” in them before going on to extol the virtues of humanistic study in the spirit of Matthew Arnold: “It means academic rigor, it means the contestation of ideas, it means a spirit of inquiry, curiosity, questioning and skepticism. Outside of a few colleges and universities, I’m not sure that kind of education is being offered very widely.”

    That Stephens is extolling the virtues of rigorous thought and questioning while parroting ill-informed tropes about higher education does not occur to him. Cottom again corrects his misapprehension with verifiable data: “It is worth pointing out that data on labor market returns really challenge the well-worn idea that such degrees are worthless. We love the joke about your barista having a liberal arts degree, but most of the softness among those degree-holders disappears when you look at state-level data and not just starting salaries after graduation.”

    Cottom goes on to acknowledge that there are some problems with the kinds of institutions she wrote about in Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of the For-Profit College in the New Economy, after which Stephens jumps in with my favorite nonsense of the entire deal before being again, corrected—more gently than he deserves—by Cottom:

    Stephens: I’d say the lowest-quality institutions created since the 1990s have names like Columbia and Berkeley—these are essentially factories of Maoist cadres taught by professors whose political views ranged almost exclusively from the left to the far left.

    Cottom: I would counter, Bret, that the lowest-quality institutions are the for-profit colleges created as paradigmatic economic theories of exchange value that churned out millions of students in “career ready” fields who found it hard to get a job worth the debt—colleges not unlike the one that our current dear leader once ran as a purely economic enterprise.

    It is worth pausing here to consider how untethered Stephens is from the truth with saying the Columbia and Berkeley are “essentially factories of Maoist cadres.” One would think that if this were the case, they would be overwhelmingly churning out graduates in those dubious “studies” majors.

    Let’s go to the data.

    Top majors at Columbia: political science, economics, computer science, financial economics

    Top majors at Cal: computer science, economics, cellular biology, computer and information sciences, engineering

    The wokeness … it burns! Actually … it’s nonexistent.

    I don’t know if Stephens has convinced himself of a fantasy based on a selective accounting of what’s happening on campus, promulgated by his center-right anti-woke fellow travelers, or if he is simply a liar, but either way, he is demonstrably out of touch with reality.

    Stephens consistently authorizes the “logic” of the authoritarian, even if he disagrees with the specifics of the punishment. The idea that he would claim the mantle of the protector of rights is an irony beyond understanding.

    Stephens concludes, “When diffident liberal administrators fail to confront the far left, the winners ultimately tend to be on the far right.”

    I take a different lesson from all of this, namely that diffident administrators found some utility in the scolding of figures like Stephens as a rationale to crack down on student dissent and protect a status quo of administrative authority. If student demands are inherently unreasonable, they don’t need to be dealt with. I seem to recall a very popular book that invented an entire psychological pathology on the basis of a handful of campus incidents in order to delegitimize student speech people like Stephens didn’t like because it threatened authority.

    This was the core weakness, and it is coming home to roost, because the most important asset institutions have in defending themselves against the attacks of the Trump administration would be the students—provided there was a reservoir of trust between students and administrations, which, in many cases, there isn’t.

    The whole thing is a mess, and an existential one for universities. Stephens seems to think it’s possible that the current actions by Trump are “a loud shot across the bow of academia to get it to clean up its act.” This is, I fear, only additional delusion.

    I’d ask leaders of institutions who they think is going to be a bigger help in this situation, people like Stephens, who seem to believe that at least some measure of the arbitrary punishment is deserved, or the people who live and work in their communities, who understand the mission and importance of what these institutions try to do.

    Listen to the experts, particularly those on your own faculty, not the pundits.

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  • Judge Rules Drake Didn’t Defame Des Moines Community College

    Judge Rules Drake Didn’t Defame Des Moines Community College

    A federal judge recently dismissed claims that Drake University defamed Des Moines Area Community College, the latest development in a fraught trademark battle between the two institutions, the Des Moines Register reported.

    Their ongoing legal dispute, which began last summer, is over the letter “D.”

    Drake University sued the community college after it changed its logo to a simple, block-style “D.” The university has used a “D” as its logo for decades and argued the similar branding creates confusion.

    U.S. Chief District Judge Stephanie Rose concluded in November that Drake was likely to prevail, given the logos’ similar color schemes and other details, and issued a preliminary injunction that the community college stop using the new logo. The order led to two pending appeals, one from the community college to reverse the preliminary injunction and one from Drake asserting the ruling didn’t include some older logos. The community college achieved some wins in February when Rose determined DMACC tried in “good faith” to change the logo and Drake should put more money toward helping the college switch the logo if Drake ultimately wins the case.

    Meanwhile, counterclaims from DMACC accused Drake of defamation. The college dropped those claims after Drake asked the court to dismiss them but then brought defamation claims against the university again on behalf of the Des Moines Area Community College Foundation after Drake sent out an email about the case to its alumni in July.

    Rose wrote on Friday that the foundation took “giant interpretive leaps from the content of the email” such that the defamation claims were “untenable.”

    “While zealous advocacy is expected, counsel must ground their pleadings in reasonable factual and legal interpretations,” she chided.

    Drake President Marty Martin said in an email statement to The Des Moines Register that he was pleased by the outcome. But DMACC shows little sign of giving up.

    “DMACC and the DMACC Foundation continue to believe that Drake does not own the letter ‘D’ and the scope of Drake’s rights are now the subject of appeal,” spokesperson Dan Ryan said in a statement.

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  • Congress Eying More Control Over Colleges

    Congress Eying More Control Over Colleges

    American voters want to see an overhaul in higher education and Republicans are taking advantage of it. Over the course of its first 75 days, the 119th Congress introduced more than 30 pieces of legislation concerning higher education—more than half of which came from members of the GOP.

    Historically, conservative lawmakers have taken a laissez-faire approach to governing colleges and universities. But at a time when students and families are demanding greater accountability and a solution to the debt crisis, Republicans—who hold majority in both the House and the Senate—are laying the legislative groundwork to increase federal control over colleges.

    But while the bills do in some ways levy penalties against institutions, lawmakers are also aiming to advance key Trump agenda items, an Inside Higher Ed analysis tracking proposed legislation shows. For example, they’ve introduced bills to crack down on immigration and foreign influence by threatening student visas and restricting international donations; to hamper flexibility for borrowers by capping student loan amounts; and to suppress “liberal ideologies,” by establishing penalties for pro-Palestinian protests. Republicans are also escalating their ongoing attacks on wealthy colleges with proposals to significantly increase the tax on university endowments.

    Rep. Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican who chairs the House Committee on Education and Workforce, has applauded Trump’s “enormous strides” and reinforced that these efforts will be a priority. 

    “Under President Trump, common sense is returning to America, and House Republicans are committed to enacting his bold vision for the country,” he said in a statement after the President’s March 4 joint address. “I will work in lockstep with this administration to protect students, workers, and job creators to ensure every American has a chance to thrive.”

    Meanwhile, Democrats have rallied in defiance, introducing many bills that promote the exact opposite of what Republicans are trying to achieve. For example, the Republican bill that would ban transgender women from participating in female sports has a direct Democrat counterpart that would prohibit discrimination in athletics based on gender identity.  

    And all of that doesn’t even take into account the possibility that Republicans could revive parts of the College Cost Reduction Act—a comprehensive piece of legislation introduced last Congress to overhaul higher education. Although the bill itself has yet to be introduced, many of its provisions—such as requiring colleges to pay back a portion of students’ unpaid loans—could be part of the forthcoming reconciliation bill, a top priority for Congressional Republicans this spring that could mean billions in cuts to higher education. (Reconciliation is a budgetary tool which can be used once a year to quickly advance high-priority—and often controversial—pieces of legislation.)  

    Combined, the proposed legislation and potential for sweeping changes via reconciliation could lead to an unprecedented amount of federal focus on higher ed that college and university advocates say could heavily discourage international enrollment, indirectly increase the cost of attendance and cause a chilling effect on campus free speech.

    “Higher education has moved to the forefront of the minds of our policy makers,” said Emmanual Guillory, senior director of government relations at the American Council on Education. “It has become a point of contention, especially with the increased oversight over institutions themselves by the current administration.”

    But regardless of which party’s behind a bill, Guillory said he’s focused on educating lawmakers on how each piece of legislation could also have unintended consequences for institutions and the students they serve.

    “Oftentimes what we see with Republicans and Democrats is they have good intentions behind what they’re trying to do, it’s just the way that they go about doing it,” he said. “When we begin to have more detailed conversations. Then [lawmakers] are like, ‘Oh, well no, we didn’t think about that. We didn’t realize this would happen. So it’s just a matter of us still continuing to do our job in advocating and educating.”

    Given the emphasis on higher education in this session of Congress and the stakes for colleges, Inside Higher Ed is tracking higher-ed related bills. The searchable database, available here, currently includes 31 bills introduced since January, and we’ll update it regularly. Below you can find a breakdown of the legislation proposed so far.

    Legislating at the federal level is complicated, so below you can find more information about how a bill becomes a law in 2025 as well as more details about the legislation raising concerns for institutions.

    How a Bill Becomes Law

    Few of the introduced bills will ever become law, based on Congress’s recent track record. And while the process is similar to what Schoolhouse Rock! described in the 1970s, partisan divides over policy have led to much gridlock on Capitol Hill.

    A cartoon bill with a graduation hat sits on the stairs of the U.S. Capitol Building.

    An Inside Higher Ed cartoon showing a bill on the steps of Congress.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed 
    dkfielding/iStock/Getty Images

    During the 118th Congress—which ran from 2023 to 2025 with a Republican-controlled House and Democrat-controlled Senate—more than 90 percent of measures introduced died in committee and only about 3 percent became law, according to GovTrack.US. Even during the 115th Congress, the last time the Republicans held a trifecta, 85 percent of bills got stuck in committee and only 8 percent became law.

    Many pieces of legislation introduced are considered nothing more than messaging bills by which a party or lawmaker signals their priorities. For example, it’s highly unlikely the Democrats will advance either the Closing the College Hunger Gap Act or the Affordable College Textbook Act, but they demonstrate a focus on meeting students’ most basic needs.

    But if the legislation comes from Republicans on the House Committee on Education and Workforce and the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, it might be more likely to gain traction.

    The chairs of those committees hold a lot of power over whether a bill will move forward. They control the schedule for public hearings and mark up sessions—where a bill is debated, amended and then voted on—so if a bill isn’t a priority for the chairs,  it’s dead in the water.

    But once again, having support and investment from an education committee member is helpful here. If they can make a case for the bill to receive time on the floor, it will face debate, amendments and a final vote. Bills have to pass both chambers and undergo negotiations to settle legislative differences before they go to the White House to become law. And that doesn’t include potential road bumps like the Senate filibuster.

    Long story short, it’s a tedious process that can take months or even years. That’s why having support from Republicans on the education-focused committees—especially committee chairs—is critical to gaining momentum this year.

    As Guillory said, “There are other members of Congress that are introducing legislation in the higher education space, but it doesn’t mean that those bills will necessarily have legs and actually be able to move through regular order.”

    Bills Higher Ed Is Watching

    Much of lawmakers’ attention right now is on reconciliation as they work to cut billions in dollars from the federal budget in order to pay for tax cuts and Trump’s other priorities. But outside of that just a handful of bills have received a hearing and/or a markup session so far. One of the most notable and concerning to higher ed advocates is the DETERRENT Act.

    Scheduled for a vote on the House floor next week, this bill would require colleges to submit much more information about the foreign gifts and contracts that they receive. Republicans have claimed for years that colleges aren’t sufficiently complying with Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, which requires them to disclose twice a year all foreign gifts and contracts totaling $250,000 or more.

    The legislation, which supporters say would discourage foreign influence in higher education, would lower the threshold to $50,000. For gifts and contracts from countries of concern—China, Russia, Iran and North Korea—colleges would have to report gifts and contracts of any amount. Institutions that fail to comply could lose access to federal student aid.

    The House passed a nearly identical bill last Congress, but it died in the then-Democrat controlled Senate. House Republicans argued that as tensions with communist countries like China rise, universities have not taken their reporting obligations and vetting processes for international students seriously and in doing so are risking national security by granting foreign governments access to American research. 

    But institutional advocates say this bill goes well beyond what Section 117 of the Higher Education Act ever intended, making an already time consuming and confusing process more difficult.

    Sarah Spreitzer, ACE’s chief of staff for government relations, said that these added steps and the processing workload that will come with it for the shrinking Education Department could lead to major delays in launching countless research collaborations and study abroad programs

    In addition to the DETERRENT Act, Guillory said ACE is also paying attention to any measures focused on accountability, affordability and transparency of institutional data, many of which represent threads of last year’s College Cost Reduction Act (CCRA).

    For example, the Graduate Opportunity and Affordable Loans Act would put a cap on the amount of loans available to graduate students and terminate their access to PLUS loans. The Endowment Tax Fairness Act would increase the amount of excise tax private institutions pay each year. And the Ensuring Distance Education Act would reverse some components of the Education Department’s 90-10 rule.

    “In a lot of ways, CCRA is still alive, even though it has not been reintroduced this Congress,” Guillory said.

    Lastly, he noted that many of the bills echo the Trump administration’s focus on more culture war facing topics like campus protests and immigration. The Laken Riley Act, which has already been passed, could impact visa access for international students from countries with a large number of undocumented immigrants. And several bills focused on antisemitism are likely to be discussed in the HELP Committee’s first education-specific hearing, Guillory said.

    In general, he noted, a lot of the agenda is left to be determined. “I think it’s a matter of what can we accomplish in reconciliation first? Then, after that, what would we have to move through regular order?”

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