Tag: News

Hawai’i DOE Spending More on Buses for Fewer Students – The 74

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

The number of bus drivers serving Hawaiʻi schools has reached its highest point in four years, but the Department of Education is still falling short of meeting families’ transportation needs.

This year, 545 bus drivers are serving Hawaiʻi schools, up from 436 last fall, according to recent datafrom the DOE. The department is still short 130 drivers, who are primarily provided through the bus companies Ground Transport Inc. and Roberts Hawaiʻi.

The department sparked widespread criticism from parents and lawmakers last August when it abruptly cancelled over 100 bus routes for students days before the new school year. To avoid severe shortages this year, DOE consolidated some bus routes with low ridership and launched a new carpooling initiative for parents, according to a recent memo from Deputy Superintendent Jesse Souki.

Last year, nearly half of Hawaiʻi students didn’t qualify for bus transportation because they lived within walking distance to their local schools or received a geographic exception to attend a campus outside of their neighborhood. This fall, nearly 13% of students rely on the bus services available to regular education students, down from roughly 16% in the 2023-24 academic year.

Special education students receive their own bus services that are required under federal law.

Demand for bus drivers has fallen over the past two years, with DOE contracting for 694 drivers in 2023, compared to 675 this fall. Bus companies were better able to keep up with DOE’s demands before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the state was only short 28 drivers in 2019.

Despite the decline in DOE’s need for drivers, the costs of transporting kids has increased over the past several years. Last school year, the department spent a total of $76 million in state and federal funds on student transportation, compared to $60 million in 2022.

To reduce families’ reliance on buses, the department has offered free city bus passes to middle and high school students on Oʻahu and Kauaʻi. In the first quarter of the school year, roughly 6,200 Oʻahu students and 99 Kauaʻi students took advantage of the bus passes, according to the DOE, with the majority of participants from Oʻahu schools.

Maui and Hawaiʻi County already offer free bus services to students.

This fall, DOE also introduced a carpool pilot program, which allows parents in the Mililani and Kekaulike complexes to connect with nearby families who can transport their kids between school and home.

Only 3% of families in the complexes have registered for the program, according to the DOE.

The department will give more updates on student transportation during Thursday’s Board of Education meeting.

Did you use this article in your work?

We’d love to hear how The 74’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers. Tell us how

Source link

November 29, 2025
Northwestern Settles With Trump Administration

Northwestern University is the sixth to cut a deal with the administration.

pabradyphoto/Getty Images

Northwestern University has reached an agreement with the Trump administration to restore federal research funding. The university will pay the federal government $75 million and enact various changes. In return, the federal government will lift a freeze on millions in research funding.

As part of the settlement, Northwestern agreed to adhere to federal antidiscrimination laws and to not give preferences in admissions, scholarships, hiring or promotion that are based on race, color or national origin; to maintain clear free speech policies; and to mandate antisemitism training for all students, faculty and staff. University officials will also reverse a 2024 deal made with pro-Palestinian student protesters in which Northwestern agreed to provide more support for Muslim, Middle Eastern and North African students and greater financial transparency.

The settlement also bars Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine from performing “hormonal interventions and transgender surgeries” on minor patients, according to language in the agreement. However, university officials have said that does not reflect a change in practice. Instead the agreement merely codifies that Northwestern will not provide such services.

Northwestern is now the sixth university to strike a deal with the Trump administration, following settlements with the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, Brown University, the University of Virginia and Cornell University. Of those settlements, Northwestern has the second-highest financial payout at $75 million, trailing only Columbia, which agreed to pay $221 million. Unlike the Brown and Cornell settlements, all of the money will go directly to U.S. government.

A Path Forward

Northwestern leadership cast the settlement as a win, despite the $75 million payout.

“It was the best and most certain method to restore our federal funding both now and in the future,” interim president Henry Bienen said in a video message following the settlement.

The Trump administration froze $790 million in federal research funding earlier this year amid concerns about alleged antisemitism on campus following pro-Palestinian demonstrations in 2024. Last year, at the height of the protests, then-president Michael Schill struck a deal with pro-Palestinian students, known as the Dearing Meadow agreement, which has now been scuttled. That deal was heavily scrutinized by Congress when Schill testified in May 2024. (Schill would later resign, stepping down this fall amid the standoff over frozen federal research funding.)

Though Harvard University brought a successful lawsuit against the federal government, prompting a judge to rule in July that a similar funding freeze there was illegal, Northwestern aimed to avoid a costly and protracted legal battle in an effort to quickly restore research dollars.

Bienen argued in the video that “suing would have cost time and money that we believe the university could not risk” and the settlement was “the best path forward for us to be able to turn the page.” Despite an endowment valued at more than $14 billion, Bienen said, the university could not afford to sustain its research mission on its own. Had that freeze continued, Bienen said it would “gut our labs, drive away faculty, and set back entire fields of discovery.”

Northwestern, like other wealthy institutions hit with federal funding freezes, has made a number of cost-cutting moves as it navigated sudden financial challenges related to the research enterprise. Earlier this year Northwestern eliminated 425 jobs as part of overall budget reductions.

Now the federal funding spigot is set to be turned back on, though officials noted on the university website that “some terminated grants will not be reinstated, specifically those the federal government has cut” and that “these decisions were not specific to Northwestern.”

The university did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement.

Northwestern also answered a question that has been hanging over numerous other universities in its settlement communications, stating that it will not sign the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.” Originally floated to only a few universities before it was opened to all, the compact would provide preferential treatment in federal funding in return for various changes, many of which experts warn would undermine academic freedom. So far, few institutions have expressed interest in the proposal.

A Landmark Deal

Federal officials also hailed the settlement with Northwestern as a win.

“Universities that receive federal funding have a responsibility to comply with the law, including protecting against racial discrimination and antisemitism,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a news release. “We appreciate the significant improvements Northwestern has made and are gratified to reach an agreement that safeguards of rights [sic] of all the university’s applicants, students, and employees.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon called the settlement a landmark deal.

“The deal cements policy changes that ‘will protect students and other members of the campus from harassment and discrimination,’ and it recommits the school to merit-based hiring and admissions. The reforms reflect bold leadership at Northwestern, and they are a roadmap for institutional leaders around the country that will help rebuild public trust in our colleges and universities,” McMahon said in the DOJ news release that announced the settlement.

Source link

November 29, 2025
3,000 Children Repeating Third Grade Under New Indiana Literacy Requirement – The 74

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

About 3,000 Indiana students are repeating third grade this school year for not meeting the state’s reading proficiency standards.

Data released Wednesday by the Indiana Department of Education showed 3.6% of the 84,000 children who took the statewide IREAD exam were retained in third grade under the first enforcement of a requirement approved by the Legislature in 2024.

Those 3,040 retained students are more than seven times the 412 children held back in third grade two years ago.

Education Secretary Katie Jenner credited improved performance by students in the IREAD exam given last school year with the retention figure being lower than anticipated when the literacy requirement was being debated.

“The numbers that were being thrown out is that it would be 7,000 to 10,000 that this law would trigger retention,” Jenner told State Board of Education members. “But, in fact, a huge shout out to our teachers and our people, we have thousands of kids who are now readers.”

Education officials announced in August that 87.3% of third graders — about 73,500 out of more than 84,000 students statewide — demonstrated proficient reading skills in 2024-25. They hailed the nearly five percentage point improvement from the previous school year as the largest year-to-year jump since the state began IREAD testing in 2013.

That left about 10,600 children who didn’t meet the standard, with almost 7,000 being given “good cause exemptions” to avoid retention. Nearly 75% of those given exemptions were special education students and about 24% are English learners with less than two years of specific literacy services.

Anna Shults, the Department of Education’s chief academic officer, said the new retention requirement was having its intended effect.

“We are now ensuring that students that are promoted on to grade four are doing so with an ability to read and show mastery of key foundational reading skills,” Shults told the State Board of Education.

The Department of Education will have an online dashboard providing breakdowns of the Indiana Reading Evaluation and Determination assessment, or IREAD, by school district and individual schools, including charter schools and nonpublic schools.

Officials noted about 670 children who didn’t meet the literacy standards were not enrolled in Indiana schools this year, saying they likely moved out of state or were being homeschooled.

Jenner said a determination would need to be made about those students if they returned to Indiana schools.

“That’s a question that we’ll need to sort through, because some may move back into Indiana, or if they left for homeschool may come back in,” Jenner said. “Because we’re looking at every unique student, I think we’ll try to figure out exactly where they are.”

According to 2023 data, 13,840 third-graders did not pass I-READ-3. Of those, 5,503 received an exemption and 8,337 did not. Of those without an exemption, 95% moved onto 4th grade while only 412 were retained.

Indiana Capital Chronicle is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: [email protected].

Did you use this article in your work?

We’d love to hear how The 74’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers. Tell us how

Source link

November 29, 2025
School Admissions Anxiety Hits Parents of Young Children, Too – The 74

A few factors have made selecting an elementary school particularly challenging in recent years. For one, there are simply more schools for parents to pick from over the past few decades, ranging from traditional public and private to a growing number of magnet and charter programs. There are also new policies in some places, such as New York City, that allow parents to select not just their closest neighborhood public school but schools across and outside of the districts where they live.

As a scholar of sociology and education, I have seen how the expanding range of school options – sometimes called school choice – has spread nationwide and is particularly a prominent factor in New York City.

I spoke with a diverse range of more than 100 New York City parents across income levels and racial and ethnic backgrounds from 2014 to 2019 as part of research for my 2025 book, “Kindergarten Panic: Parental Anxiety and School Choice Inequality.”

All of these parents felt pressure trying to select a school for their elementary school-age children, and school choice options post-COVID-19 have only increased.

Some parents experience this pressure a bit more acutely than others.

Women often see their choice of school as a reflection of whether they are good moms, my interviews show. Parents of color feel pressure to find a racially inclusive school. Other parents worry about finding niche schools that offer dual-language programs, for example, or other specialties.

Navigating schools in New York City

Every year, about 65,000 New York City kindergartners are matched to more than 700 public schools.

New York City kindergartners typically attend their nearest public school in the neighborhood and get a priority place at this school. This school is often called someone’s zoned school.

Even so, a spot at your local school isn’t guaranteed – students get priority if they apply on time.

While most kindergartners still attend their zoned schools, their attendance rate is decreasing. While 72% of kindergartners in the city attended their zoned school in the 2007-08 school year, 60% did so in the 2016-17 school year.

One reason is that since 2003, New York City parents have been able to apply to out-of-zone schools when seats were available. And in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, all public school applications moved entirely online. This shift allowed parents to easily rank 12 different school options they liked, in and outside of their zones.

Still, New York City public schools remain one of the most segregated in the country, divided by race and class.

Pressure to be a good mom

Many of the mothers I interviewed from 2015 through 2019 said that getting their child into what they considered a “good” school reflected good mothering.

Mothers took the primary responsibility for their school search, whether they had partners or not, and regardless of their social class, as well as racial and ethnic background.

In 2017, I spoke with Janet, a white, married mother who at the time was 41 years old and had an infant and a 3-year-old. Janet worked as a web designer and lived in Queens. She explained that she started a group in 2016 to connect with other mothers, in part to discuss schools.

Though Janet’s children were a few years away from kindergarten, she believed that she had started her research for public schools too late. She spent multiple hours each week looking up information during her limited spare time. She learned that other moms were talking to other parents, researching test results, analyzing school reviews and visiting schools in person.

Janet said she wished she had started looking for schools when her son was was 1 or 2 years old, like other mothers she knew. She expressed fear that she was failing as a mother. Eventually, Janet enrolled her son in a nonzoned public school in another Queens neighborhood.

Pressure to find an inclusive school

Regardless of their incomes, Black, Latino and immigrant families I interviewed also felt pressure to evaluate whether the public schools they considered were racially and ethnically inclusive.

Parents worried that racially insensitive policies related to bullying, curriculum and discipline would negatively affect their children.

In 2015, I spoke with Fumi, a Black, immigrant mother of two young children. At the time, Fumi was 37 years old and living in Washington Heights in north Manhattan. She described her uncertain search for a public school.

Fumi thought that New York City’s gifted and talented programs at public schools might be a better option academically than other public schools that don’t offer an advanced track for some students. But the gifted and talented programs often lacked racial diversity, and Fumi did not want her son to be the only Black student in his class.

Still, Fumi had her son tested for the 2015 gifted and talented exam and enrolled him in one of these programs for kindergarten.

Once Fumi’s son began attending the gifted and talented school, Fumi worried that the constant bullying he experienced was racially motivated.

Though Fumi remained uneasy about the bullying and lack of diversity, she decided to keep him at the school because of the school’s strong academic quality.

Pressure to find a niche school

Many of the parents I interviewed who earned more than US$50,000 a year wanted to find specialty schools that offered advanced courses, dual-language programs and progressive-oriented curriculum.

Parents like Renata, a 44-year-old Asian mother of four, and Stella, a 39-year-old Black mother of one, sent their kids to out-of-neighborhood public schools.

In 2016, Renata described visiting multiple schools and researching options so she could potentially enroll her four children in different schools that met each of their particular needs.

Stella, meanwhile, searched for schools that would de-emphasize testing, nurture her son’s creativity and provide flexible learning options.

In contrast, the working-class parents I interviewed who made less than $50,000 annually often sought schools that mirrored their own school experiences.

Few working-class parents I spoke with selected out-of-neighborhood and high academically performing schools.

New York City data points to similar results – low-income families are less likely than people earning more than them to attend schools outside of their neighborhoods.

For instance, Black working-class parents like 47-year-old Risha, a mother of four, and 53-year-old Jeffery, a father of three, who attended New York City neighborhood public schools themselves as children told me in 2016 that they decided to send their children to local public schools.

Based on state performance indicators, students at these particular schools performed lower on standard assessments than schools on average.

Cracks in the system

The parents I spoke with all live in New York City, which has a uniquely complicated education system. Yet the pressures they face are reflective of the evolving public school choice landscape for parents across the country.

Parents nationwide are searching for schools with vastly different resources and concerns about their children’s future well-being and success.

When parents panic about kindergarten, they reveal cracks in the foundation of American schooling. In my view, parental anxiety about kindergarten is a response to an unequal, high-stakes education system.

Bailey A. Brown, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Spelman College

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Source link

November 28, 2025
Fewer New International Students Enroll at U.S. Colleges Amid Trump Restrictions – The 74

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

New international students enrolling at U.S. colleges declined sharply this fall, a concerning development for universities that rely on those students for research, tuition revenue and the diversity they bring to campus culture. It could, however, create more space for U.S. residents at those campuses.

Enrollments of new international students were down 17% compared to fall 2024, according to a report released Monday by the Institute of International Education, which surveyed more than 800 colleges about their fall 2025 enrollments. The institute, a nonprofit organization based in New York, publishes an annual report that examines the enrollment of international students.

The fall data was not broken down by state, so the scale of decline in California is unclear. At USC, which enrolls more international students than any other California college, overall enrollment of international students is down 3% this fall, according to a campus spokesperson. That includes returning and first-time students, so the drop could be much higher for new arrivals. USC this fall enrolls about 12,000 international students, or 26% of its total student population, according to the college. About half of those students are from China.

The declines come amid a changing landscape for international students under the Trump administration, which has delayed visa processing, created travel restrictions and pressured some campuses to recruit and admit fewer students from other countries. The colleges surveyed this fall by the institute cited visa application concerns and travel restrictions as top factors in the decline.

“We are confronting major headwinds with what I would say are poor policy decisions that the administration is taking. And that is creating a climate for international students that signals that you’re not welcome here,” said Fanta Aw, CEO of NAFSA, a nonprofit for international education and exchange.

President Donald Trump has said that he wants to lower the number of international students at U.S. colleges to leave more room at those campuses for U.S. students. “It’s too much because we have Americans that want to go there and to other places, and they can’t go there,” he said earlier this year, referencing the number of international students at Harvard and other universities.

For the full 2024-25 academic year, new international student enrollments were down by 7%, driven by a 15% drop among new international graduate students, compared to 2023-24. However, the number of new undergraduates was up by 5%. Trump took office in January, just before the start of the spring semester at most colleges.

In the U.S., students from India were the largest group of international students, accounting for 30.8% of all international students, followed by students from China, with 22.6% of enrollments.

In the 2024-25 academic year in California, the largest share of international students were from China, and they made up 35.4% of enrollments, followed by students from India at 20.9%. Overall enrollment of international students in California was down 1.1% in 2024-25.

USC enrolled the most international students of any California university, followed by four University of California campuses: Berkeley, Los Angeles, San Diego and Irvine. According to the report, the total number of enrolled international students were: 12,020 at Berkeley, 10,769 at UCLA, 10,545 at San Diego, and 7,638 at Irvine.

Across the state, international students make up about 7% of enrollments at four-year colleges, according to the Public Policy Institute of California. They make up a large share of graduate students, accounting for 31% of graduate students at UC campuses, 15% at private nonprofit universities, and 12% at California State University campuses.

Freya Vijay, 20, a third-year student from Canada studying business administration at USC, said she always planned to come to the United States for college.

“In terms of business and just the economy, you have Wall Street, you have New York, Chicago, L.A., and San Francisco, all these big cities that dominate what’s going on in the world,” she said. “So immediately, in terms of opportunity, my mind was set on the States.”

In addition to visa and travel restrictions, the Trump administration has directly requested — or threatened, as some have called it — California campuses to limit enrollments of international students. The administration’s compact offer to USC last month would have forced the university to cap international enrollment at 15% for undergraduates and limit enrollment from any one country to 5%.

USC has since rejected the compact, which also would have required the university to make a number of other changes, including committing to “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

Separately, in a settlement proposal to UCLA, the Trump administration calls on the campus to ensure that “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment” are not admitted. UCLA is still in negotiations with the administration and has not yet reached a deal. The Trump administration has charged the campus with antisemitism and civil rights violations.

Even amid the turmoil, experts say they expect California universities to continue recruiting international students. Julie Posselt, a professor of education at USC’s Rossier School of Education, noted that at research universities, much of the research is being carried out by international graduate students.

“Especially in STEM fields, international students are really central to the research functions of universities,” Posselt said. “Enrolling international students is not optional. It is absolutely a part of the fabric of what makes universities great.”

On top of that, colleges have financial incentives to enroll international students. That’s especially true at UC campuses, which charge international students and students from other states much higher rates of tuition than California residents. In the 2026-27 academic year, new international and out-of-state undergraduates at UC will pay nearly $52,000 in tuition, more than triple what in-state students will be charged. Nonresidents in graduate programs also generally pay higher rates than residents.

Facing pressure from the state Legislature to make more room for California residents, UC in 2017 passed a policy to cap nonresident enrollment at 18%, with a higher percentage allowed for campuses that were already above that mark. But the system still gets significant tuition revenue from nonresidents, including international students, which UC says supports the system’s core operations and helps to lower the cost of attendance for California residents.

In a Nov. 10 interview with Fox News, Trump seemed to acknowledge the importance of international students, saying colleges might “go out of business” without them.

“You don’t want to cut half of the people, half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country — destroy our entire university and college system — I don’t want to do that,” he said.

International students also bring diverse perspectives and “a richness to the campus culture,” said Stett Holbrook, a spokesperson for the University of California system. “That’s something we really appreciate and try to cultivate.”

At USC, the presence of international students from more than 130 countries means there are “innumerable opportunities at USC to encounter different perspectives” and “experience new cultures,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Vijay, the USC student from Canada, said she regularly boasts about USC to friends, adding that she hopes attending remains an option for other international students.

“I always think it’s just such a great opportunity and that no international student should ever take it for granted,” she said. “I wish other internationals could experience it.”

This story was originally published on EdSource.

Did you use this article in your work?

We’d love to hear how The 74’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers. Tell us how

Source link

November 28, 2025
Most Americans Believe in the Effectiveness of Childhood Vaccines — But There’s a Catch – The 74

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

This story was originally reported by Barbara Rodriguez of The 19th. Meet Barbara and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Although a majority of Americans are confident that childhood vaccines are highly effective against serious illness, Republicans’ trust in vaccine safety and support of school requirements is dropping, according to new polling from Pew Research Center.

Sixty-three percent of Americans are extremely or very confident in the effectiveness of childhood vaccines, according to a survey published Tuesday. But Democrats and those who lean Democrat are much more likely than Republicans and Republican-leaners to hold that view — 80 percent versus 48 percent.

And while the majority of Americans believe in the safety of vaccines — 53 percent believe childhood vaccines have been tested enough for safety and 51 percent agree that the childhood vaccine schedule is safe — there is significantly more uncertainty among Republicans. For Democrats, 74 percent show high confidence in the safety testing of vaccines and 71 percent believe the childhood vaccine schedule is safe. For Republicans, those numbers are 35 percent and 32 percent, respectively.

“Both things can be true, that people believe in vaccines’ effectiveness overall and the confidence is a little softer on safety,” said Eileen Yam, director of science and society research at Pew who was part of the primary research team. “But writ large, that’s been pretty stable to see confidence in vaccines. But at the same time, when it comes to things like school requirements, or ‘telling me what to do,’ or requiring me to do something — that’s where you see the bristling on the Republican side.”

Americans have become more skeptical of requiring that children get the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine to attend public school. Sixty-nine percent support it, a decline from 82 percent in 2016. Most of the drop can be attributed to Republicans — with just 52 percent believing in the requirement, compared to 79 percent in 2016. For Democrats, that support was 83 percent in 2016 and actually climbed to 86 percent this year.

This all comes amid a major measles outbreak in the United States that started in Texas and has spread to multiple other states. And while students are required in each state to get the MMR vaccine to attend public school, officials in Florida have indicated a willingness to drop that requirement.

Pew found broad and consistent support for the MMR vaccine: 84 percent believe its benefits outweigh its risks (of which there are minor side effects). When Pew first started asking about this in 2016, support was at 88 percent. Yam said the findings show some agreement on the benefits of the MMR vaccine. While 92 percent of Democrats believe the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks, 78 percent of Republicans do, too.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, an anti-vaccine activist who has revamped a key panel that helps decide vaccine policy, has questioned the safety of the MMR vaccine without evidence. He has the backing of President Donald Trump, who has perpetuated misinformation this year about childhood vaccines.

Pew surveyed parents and found a majority with minor children (57 percent) say they are extremely or very confident in childhood vaccines’ effectiveness. Republican parents are far less likely than Democratic parents to have that confidence (45 percent versus 71 percent), belief in safety testing (29 percent versus 63 percent) and the childhood vaccine schedule (27 percent versus 58 percent).

Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say medical scientists should have a major role in decisions about childhood vaccines (85 percent vs. 62 percent). There are more partisan fissures on the role of parents: 71 percent of Republicans say that parents of young children should have a major role in policy decisions about childhood vaccines. For Democrats, it’s 46 percent.

“That speaks to just a divergence in trust in science that we’ve been tracking since before the pandemic,” Yam said. “Just Republicans since the pandemic, their confidence in scientists, the way they look at the CDC has just dropped off much more than on the Democrat side. Democrats have had fairly stable views on scientists and on the CDC, in contrast to Republicans.”

Pew also examined how recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations have influenced Americans’ decisions around getting a COVID-19 shot. The agency recently agreed with Kennedy’s new vaccine panel to stop recommending the shot to everyone and to instead leave the choice up to people. Forty-four percent say they have heard nothing at all about the CDC’s changes to recommendations. Among those who have heard at least a little, 63 percent say it has had no influence on whether they got an updated vaccine.

“The one big takeaway there is that policies really can’t influence behaviors if people haven’t heard about the policies or the recommendations,” Yam said. “And in this case, a lot of people haven’t heard about it, and some when they have, their minds were made up. They’ve already kind of decided, and it really didn’t influence their behavior one way or the other.”

This story was originally published on The 19th.

Did you use this article in your work?

We’d love to hear how The 74’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers. Tell us how

Source link

November 26, 2025
With News Decoder, students explore their role in the world

Back in 2020, during the height of the Covid epidemic, high school students in the U.S. state of Connecticut sat down with News Decoder founder Nelson Graves to explore a number of thorny topics that ranged from the death penalty to whether animals should be kept in zoos.

The students in “American Voices & Choices: Ethics in Modern Society” at Westover School had been working with News Decoder since the start of that academic year, mastering the process we call Pitch, Report, Draft and Revise — or PRDR — to identify topical issues at the intersection of ethics and public policy.

They pitched ideas they wanted to report on: teen health; police brutality; abortion; economic privilege in the environmental movement; the risks of experimental vaccines; the impact of alcohol on youth.

Later, each student received detailed feedback from a News Decoder editor, aimed at helping them narrow their research and produce original reporting.

Westover was an early News Decoder school partner. Since our founding 10 years ago, News Decoder has worked with high school and university students in 89 schools across 23 countries.

Decoding news in school

Teachers have used us as part of their course curricula, as extra credit assignments and as standalone learning opportunities for their students.

At Realgymnasium Rämibühl Zürich in Switzerland, teacher Martin Bott brings News Decoder in each year. In one weeklong workshop, students produced podcasts. Over five days, they pitched News Decoder stories about a problem they identified in their local communities, identified an expert to interview, found how that problem was relevant to people in other countries and then wrote a podcast script, revised it and recorded it. “[News Decoder] enabled me to do a few projects which really open up perspectives for the students, give them a taste of life beyond the classroom and of the world of journalism,” Bott said.

In another workshop for RGZH, News Decoder turned students into “foreign correspondents.” They were tasked with finding stories in Zurich that people in other countries would find interesting. Like the students in the podcasting workshop, they then found an expert to interview, wrote a draft and revised it with the goal of publishing it on News Decoder.

One student in the workshop noticed a demonstration of people with dogs and got up the nerve to talk to one of them. They were from an organization that rescued Spanish greyhounds and she decided it would be a good idea for a News Decoder story. The story she wrote ended up as one of News Decoder’s most-read stories of all time.

Not only have Bott’s students been able to publish stories on News Decoder, many of these stories, including the article about the greyhounds, have won awards in our twice yearly global storytelling competition.

“We’ve been delighted to get so many of those stories published on News Decoder,” Bott said. “That’s very, very motivating for the students. And it’s a wonderful learning process for them because they realise it’s not just about school rules and so on out there.”

Challenging students to do more

Bott said that working with professionals at News Decoder gets the students to step up. “When you’re a journalist, you’ve got a responsibility,” he said. “That’s something we’ve been able to talk about with journalists who’ve met us from various parts of the world through News Decoder. And you’ve got real pressure as well. And they’re not, I think they’re not quite used to that. So it really opens their eyes.”

At The Hewitt School in New York, 15 teens at the all-girls school meet once a month as a club. They read and discuss News Decoder stories and pitch their own stories. They also prepare for a cross-border webinar; each year they join with students from a News Decoder partner school in another country, and decide with those students on a topic to explore.

They then research the topic, interview experts and come together with the students from the other school to present their findings live in a video conference before an audience of people from the two schools.

In 2024, students from The Thacher School in California worked with peers at the European School of Brussels II on a webinar on consumerism and the human impacts of climate change.

Russell Spinney is faculty adviser for News Decoder at Thacher. “The webinars really were kind of ways just to get to know each other, discover that we actually do have some common interests. But not only that, that we also have problems that are similar,” he said.

“News Decoder’s workshops,” he said, “get students to think of ways to communicate their research beyond the classroom and connect with what’s going on in the world.” News Decoder has partnered schools this way in some 50 school-school webinars.

Source link

November 26, 2025
Indiana’s Attack on Intellectual Diversity

Indiana’s new Act 202, which advocates of free inquiry have feared would suppress academic freedom despite its claims to promote intellectual diversity, now has been implemented in real life: Citing Act 202, Indiana University (IU) officials suspended Social Work professor Jessica Adams from teaching a class called “Diversity, Human Rights and Social Justice” because U.S. Senator Jim Banks complained that she showed a chart in class that included “Make America Great Again” as a slogan that can be used as covert white supremacy.

Senator Banks declared, “At least one student in the classroom was uncomfortable, and I’m sure there are more. This type of hateful rhetoric has no place in the classroom.” He is wrong. Hateful rhetoric has every place in the classroom, and bans on all ideas deemed “hateful” by someone would require massive repression. The goal of a challenging university must be to make students uncomfortable at times.

Although Act 202 is a terrible law, it’s important to point out that this law does not allow Adams to be suspended. Act 202 only allows colleges to do two things in response to complaints: Provide the information to the trustees, and “refer” them “for consideration in employee reviews and other tenure and promotion decisions.”

It does not authorize censoring classes or removing teachers on the grounds of intellectual diversity. In fact, Act 202 specifically prohibits this action because it says that institutions cannot “Limit or restrict the academic freedom of faculty members or prevent faculty members from teaching, researching, or writing publications about diversity, equity, and inclusion or other topics.”

Obviously, banning a professor from teaching because they used a chart about white supremacy is a direct violation of this provision of Act 202. By suspending a professor from a class and invoking this law, the Indiana University administration is going far beyond the requirements and the authority of the law, and Indiana officials are violating the Bill of Rights, Act 202 and their own policies.

The unjustifiable, illegal suspension of Adams without due process is yet another act of repression by Indiana University officials.

But the attack from Act 202 in the name of intellectual diversity has a long history. The right has taken the language of the left, mockingly imitating the words and then turning them into tools of repression.

In 2003, David Horowitz urged conservatives to “use the language that the left has deployed” and declare that there is “a lack of ‘intellectual diversity’ on college faculties.” Horowitz tried to invoke “academic freedom” to justify suppressing it, creating the Academic Bill of Rights and his “Students for Academic Freedom,” claiming that protecting the rights of students meant banning professors from expressing political views.

Horowitz’s terrible idea is implemented in Act 202, where one fireable offense is the crime of being deemed by trustees “likely” while teaching “to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.” One problem is that no evidence of any misconduct is needed, simply a feeling that a professor might be “likely” to say something forbidden. But the deeper flaw is the belief that professors should not be allowed to say anything unrelated to their classes.

The AAUP’s standard is for “teachers to avoid persistently intruding material which has no relation to their subject.” It’s not the presence of any ideas unrelated to a class that violates academic norms, but only persistently intruding material. And this rule must be applied in a viewpoint neutral manner. Colleges cannot punish unrelated speech about politics more than they punish unrelated speech about football or the weather or any other topic. By targeting political viewpoints alone for penalties, SB 202 clearly violates the First Amendment.

Heterodox Academy, an organization that advocates for viewpoint diversity, spoke out strongly against these repressive aspects of Act 202. Joe Cohn warned: “The trustees’ guess that the faculty member is likely to ever express a political or ideological view that isn’t germane to the class is sufficient to justify the denial of promotion or tenure.”

These kinds of massive, totalistic bans on speech have an enormous chilling effect in practice, since no one knows what ideas could be deemed “unrelated” to a professor’s field by a trustee who knows nothing about that field.

Indiana has legislated Horowitz’s old dream of banning politics from the classroom, which in practice is meant to be a targeted attack on the expression of left-wing viewpoints.

When we resist bad laws like Act 202 by attacking intellectual diversity, we end up undermining the values we’re trying to protect and undercutting public support. Instead of denouncing the concept of intellectual diversity, we ought to say instead that we are defending intellectual diversity against those who cynically or misguidedly invoke it in order to destroy it.

In the past century, no concept has done more to protect intellectual diversity than tenure. Act 202, by creating a post-tenure review by trustees with no competence to judge academic work, undermines tenure and endangers intellectual diversity rather than defending it.

The Indiana law, by weakening tenure protections, is one of the greatest threats to intellectual diversity in the state. We need to attack the “intellectual diversity” law not because we oppose intellectual diversity, but because we support it. We want professors to be judged by their academic work, not by their political views, and we want academic work to be judged by academic experts rather than unqualified political appointees, because intellectual diversity is endangered when academic freedom and shared governance are attacked.

This week, I spoke about Indiana’s intellectual diversity law as part of a panel on academic freedom at Purdue University Northwest (an event funded by the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression as part of its Academic Freedom Institute). And while attacks on academic freedom can inspire some people to mobilize against the threat, the far more common response is fear and silence.

In an atmosphere of budget cuts, no one is safe. We’re all contingent now, even the diminishingly few faculty with tenure in places where tenure still means something, because entire departments can be whacked to pieces as easily as a controversial adjunct professor is not rehired.

Indiana’s Act 202 attacks intellectual diversity. And when administrators violate the law to suspend faculty for presenting controversial views, academic freedom is under even greater threat.

Source link

November 26, 2025
What to Know About the Definition of Professional Degree

The Trump administration is soon expected to propose a plan that would cap loans for a number of advanced degrees—including master’s and doctoral degrees in nursing—and it’s gone viral on social media.

From TikTok to Instagram, to local news headlines, the plan set off a storm of online criticism as influencers and advocacy groups take issue with the supposed declassification of certain degrees. But defining programs as professional or graduate isn’t a debate about social prestige or cultural characterization; it’s a debate about access to student loans, and now the Education Department is saying it’s time to “set the record straight.”

“Certain progressive voices have been fear mongering about the Department of Education supposedly excluding nursing degrees from being eligible for graduate student loans,” the department said in a news release Monday. “This is misinformation.”

The commentators are concerned about an upcoming federal rule, prompted by Congress’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that could limit student loan access depending on what post-baccalaureate program a student enrolls in. Certain advanced degrees like dentistry, law or a masters in divinity will be eligible for higher student loans. (An advisory committee approved a draft of the rule in early November, which is slated to be formally proposed on the Federal Register in early 2026.)

Inside Higher Ed has been reporting on the new loan limits for months and closely followed the negotiations over which programs should be considered as professional. So, here’s what you need to know about how the loan limits really work.

Graduate v. Professional Is a Technical Term

Many public critics of the proposal argue that not considering careers like nursing, speech pathology, teaching and social work as professionals would be a disrespectful blow to the dignity of students, many of whom are women, and the perceived value of the pathways they are pursuing. Some have even made uninformed suggestions that this could interfere with a students’ ability to gain licensure or a job after graduation. But those arguments imply that the terms have to do with a student’s level of competency or the capacity of a degree program, which they don’t.

@vickichanmd

Starting July 2026, “professional” students will be eligible for 50K a year in federal loans, while “nonprofessional” students $20,500. Coincidence that the fields chosen to get less than half the support are predominantly female? 🤔 ETA: I know I forgot some degrees, especially public health. So sorry for the oversight, 😥 should have been at the top of the list after the pandem¡c.

♬ original sound – dj auxlord

Instead, the department would use the labels of professional and graduate, as defined in the department’s draft rule, to determine how much students can borrow.

Here’s how that will work. If a degree falls in one of the 11 main categories deemed professional, a student pursuing it can take out up to $50,000 a year for four years or $200,000 total. Meanwhile, a student in any other graduate degree program can only borrow $20,500 per year or $100,000.

The lifelong limit for all borrowers is $257,500 and that includes any loans from a bachelor’s degree. So, if a student were to pursue both a Master’s in public health and a medical degree, or any other combination of degrees from the two categories, they would not be able to combine the loan limits to access $300,000 total.

Before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, students in any post-baccalaureate program could borrow up to the cost of attendance through a program known as Grad PLUS. Students in a master’s or doctoral program who already took out a Grad PLUS loan prior to July 1, 2026 will maintain access to loans for up to the full cost of attendance as long as they stay within the same program, under the draft plan.

And prior to the legislation, the term professional had little substantial meaning. The federal definition in the Higher Education Act served more as a guideline for colleges as they decided whether to self-identify their doctoral programs as professional and to distinguish between degrees that led to a career in the field or in academia. Master’s degrees, like a master’s of science in nursing, had no reason to call themselves professional.

It’s not clear how the loan caps will affect students. Critics of the plan argue they’ll make financing education more difficult and lead to a shortage of employees, and some research has suggested that students will have to turn to private loans to pay for the program. However, suggesting that certain job titles are being “declassified” or will “no longer” be deemed credible is misleading.

@reygantawney Replying to @Kayla Perkins NP programs are NOT included in the DOEs proposed “professional degree” definition, meaning NP students fall under lower loan caps. This proposal isn’t final, but the implications could be massive for students and the healthcare workforce. #departmentofeducation #nursepractitionerstudent #nursepractitioner #healthcare #healthcareworker ♬ original sound – REYGAN TAWNEY

What Programs Count as Professional?

So, the real question then becomes which programs count as professional and how did the Trump administration decide that definition?

Currently, 11 main degrees would be considered professional under the draft rule. Those degrees, almost all of which are doctoral, include: medicine, osteopathic medicine, podiatry, chiropractic, optometry, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, law, theology, and clinical psychology. All but one—clinical psychology—were noted in the HEA definition.

Clinical psychology was added during the negotiating process, which wrapped up in early November. One member of the negotiating committee argued that there was a high demand for medical providers to treat patients with mental health challenges, particularly veterans diagnosed with PTSD.

@urnurseguru NPs weren’t ‘removed’ from anything except a loan bucket they never belonged in 😂💅 Stop confusing LOAN categories with your PROFESSIONAL status. #nursingtiktok #nursepractitioner #studentloans #npschool #urnurseguru ♬ original sound – URNurseGuru

Similar arguments were made for other health care roles like nurses, audiologists and occupational therapists and some committee members warned that adding one category and not others could make the proposal vulnerable to legal challenges. But the Trump administration wanted to keep the new legal definition almost as narrow as possible.

Multiple sources familiar with the negotiation process told Inside Higher Ed that committee members warned the department that certain industry groups would push back.

“I was absolutely expecting something like this,” one source said. “The only question was which profession would break through. But among the politically savvy people I talked to we were betting nurses.”

Why Did ED Define Professional This Way?

Education Department officials repeatedly said during the negotiations that the narrow definition reflected Congress’s intent—to limit federal spending on graduate student loans.

Between 2000 and 2020, the number of Americans who had taken out federal student loans doubled from about 21 million to about 45 million and the amount they owed skyrocketed from $387 billion to $1.8 trillion, according to a 2024 report from the Brookings Institute, a nonpartisan D.C. think tank.

And research from multiple sources shows that much of that increase in debt can be traced back to graduate students. A 2023 report from the Department of Education showed that while the amount of undergraduate loans decreased between 2010 and 2021, the amount of graduate student loans steadily grew. And though individual graduate students only make up about 21 percent of all borrowers, they could soon be responsible for the majority of all outstanding debt.

Another study from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce shows that between 2000 and 2024, the median net tuition and fees among graduate degree programs have more than tripled and the median debt principal among graduate borrowers has grown from $34,000 to $50,000.

The Trump administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill say that results from a lack of limits on federal loans. They argue that with essentially unlimited graduate loans, colleges and universities have no incentive to keep costs low and students are convinced to take out more debt than they can handle. By ending Grad PLUS and limiting larger loans to a narrow group of degrees, they say, the goal is to drive down college costs and lower government spending.

“Placing a cap on loans will push the remaining graduate nursing programs to reduce their program costs, ensuring that nurses will not be saddled with unmanageable student loan debt,” the department’s fact sheet noted.

What Consequences Could It Cause?

But the online critics and other advocates question whether the loan caps will actually reduce student debt and drive down college costs.

They are worried that instead of lowering college costs, it will force more students—particularly low-income, first generation students and students of color—to depend on the private loan market.

For many of those borrowers, depending on private lenders could mean higher interest rates and more debt to be paid off. But some, especially those with low credit scores or no credit history, might not be able to access any loan and then wouldn’t be able to pursue certain degrees.

Critics also argue that the loan cap will not only limit opportunities for socioeconomic mobility, but also cause workforce shortages in high-demand, high-cost careers such as nursing, physical therapy and audiology as well as high-demand, low-return careers such as social work and education.

@addieruckman The US Department of Education is considering new rules that would significantly change the definition of what is deemed a “professional degree,” affecting graduate programs and potentially capping federal loan amounts for those not meeting the new definition. This debate over which programs qualify for “professional” status could likely impact students’ access and ability to afford their education. What we do is so important, even if the government doesn’t recognize it!! #departmentofeducation #slp #slpsoftiktok #CapCut ♬ original sound – ｃａｓｅｙ

“At a time when healthcare in our country faces a historic nurse shortage and rising demands, limiting nurses’ access to funding for graduate education threatens the very foundation of patient care,” said Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association, which is a vocal critic of the draft rule. “In many communities across the country, particularly in rural and underserved areas, advanced practice registered nurses ensure access to essential, high-quality care that would otherwise be unavailable.”

The Education Department countered that internal data indicates 95 percent of nursing students borrow below the $20,500 annual loan limit and wouldn’t be affected by the new cap. They also added that this loan cap only applies to post-baccalaureate degrees; about 80 percent of the nursing workforce just has an associate’s degree in nursing or a bachelor’s of science in nursing—both of which can lead to certification as a registered nurse.

The department’s proposal could still be amended before it takes effect. The public will have at least 30 days to comment on the plan once it’s posted to the Federal Register. After the public comment period ends, ED officials will have to review and respond to the comments before issuing a final rule. But most higher ed experts don’t expect anything in the proposal to change no matter how many critiques ED receives.

After that, Congress could still make changes to the law or a new administration could opt to rewrite the definition. But that would take time and likely more Democrats in office, so significant change isn’t anticipated any time soon.

Source link

November 26, 2025
At Nassau CC, Rejected Presidential Pick Prompts Lawsuit Threat

Trustees at Nassau Community College are poised to file a lawsuit after the State University of New York’s Board of Trustees denied their presidential pick.

At a special meeting on Sunday, the Nassau Community College Board of Trustees unanimously voted to allow the board chair to file a lawsuit challenging the SUNY board’s decision, with one board member absent, Newsday reported. Earlier this month, SUNY trustees voted unanimously, with three members absent, to reject Maria Conzatti, who has run the college as interim or acting president for almost four years. A SUNY official told Newsday it was the first time the system’s board disapproved a presidential nominee.

The resolution voted on asked that Conzatti’s appointment by Nassau Community College’s board be “disapproved” with no further explanation.

“SUNY is committed to excellent leadership for all of our campuses and the success of our students, and we will vigorously defend ourselves against any frivolous lawsuit,” a spokesperson for the system said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed.

The college’s Student Government Association also passed a measure on Monday expressing “gratitude and appreciation” for Conzatti while also acknowledging the SUNY board vote and encouraging the college to “conduct an equitable, transparent and expeditious search for a new permanent president.”

The conflict comes amid broader tensions between the college’s faculty union and the administration over the consolidation of academic departments and a union contract that expired in August, among other issues. The union sued the college last year arguing the elimination of 15 department chairs violated state regulations, but a judge dismissed the case. The union has since appealed.

Nassau has also reported less-than-optimal student outcomes in recent years. It has the lowest two-year graduation rate and second lowest three-year graduation rate among community colleges in the SUNY system, 9.4 percent and 23.6 percent respectively.

Source link

November 26, 2025