Tag: Race

Texas Tech Gathers Info on Race, Gender Course Content

Once faculty submit their responses, they will be compiled into spreadsheets by college, which department chairs and deans will review.

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As promised in a memo from the chancellor earlier this month, some Texas Tech University system faculty members were asked this week to report whether any course they teach “advocates for or promotes” specific race, gender or sexual identities. It is the latest step in a sweeping curricular review focused on limiting discussion of transgender identity, racism and sexuality across the five-campus public system.

By 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 22, faculty members at Angelo State University must fill out a survey for each class they teach. In addition to the course title and reference number, the survey asks the following questions: “Does this course include any content that advocates for or promotes race- or sex-based prejudice, as defined in the Chancellor’s memorandum? Does this course include any content that recognizes or discusses more than two sexes (male and female), or addresses gender identity beyond what is recognized under state and federal law? Does this course include any content related to sexual orientation?”

If a faculty member answers yes to any of those questions, they are then prompted to answer, “What is the course material required for? Check all that apply,” and select from the options “professional licensure/certification,” “accreditation,” “patient/client care” and “other.” Faculty must also provide a justification statement to support their response and are asked to “be as specific as possible.”

Once faculty submit their responses, they will be compiled into spreadsheets by college, which department chairs and deans will review. They then must report the outcomes to the president and provost, Angelo State University provost Don Topliff said in an email to all faculty. “Faculty will be notified of outcomes after approval,” he wrote. It is unclear exactly what curricular changes the outcomes will prompt.

Faculty at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center received a similar email this week, a faculty member told Inside Higher Ed. But instead of filling out a survey, they are being asked to enter the same information directly into a spreadsheet. A faculty member at Texas Tech’s flagship campus in Lubbock said faculty there have yet to receive any information beyond the chancellor’s Dec. 1 memo. Spokespeople for the Texas Tech system did not answer Inside Higher Ed’s questions about whether faculty at the remaining two institutions—Midwestern State University and Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso—received a survey.

“Across the System, institutions are expected to follow the established course content review process. As outlined in the Chancellor’s December 1 memorandum, department chairs and deans will review any materials used locally, with outcomes shared with the Provost and President to ensure consistency moving forward,” a spokesperson wrote in an email.

In an email about the survey to his colleagues in the Angelo State history department, chair Jason Pierce encouraged them to answer no for all three questions.

“When I filled those forms out, I put ‘no’ for all of my classes, because I do not think talking about any of these issues is advocacy or promotion,” Pierce told Inside Higher Ed. “Also, in my history from the Civil War to present class, there is no way to not talk about Reconstruction, civil rights, the women’s movement. I mean, those are in every textbook … So I don’t feel like I even need to fill out a form saying that I’m going to talk about Reconstruction or civil rights or whatever, because I’m telling people what happened. I’m not advocating for a particular viewpoint.”

He linked the system’s crackdown to broader trends in the sector.

“There’s a deep distrust of higher ed right now across the political spectrum, but particularly on the right,” said Pierce. “There’s this misconception that the professors want to go out and brainwash their students, and I can say, as a history professor, I don’t want my students coming out of my class thinking like I think. I want them to come out of my class thinking for themselves.”

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December 11, 2025

Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission

by Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report
December 4, 2025

Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.

The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, even though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared to 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data show.

The Trump administration’s policies may soon end that advantage that has been enjoyed by men, admissions and higher education experts say.

While much of the president’s recent scrutiny of college admissions practices has focused on race, these experts say his ban on diversity, equity and inclusion is likely to hit another underrepresented group of applicants: men, and particularly white men — the largest subset of male college applicants.

“This drips with irony,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, or ACE, the nation’s largest association of universities and colleges, who said he expects that colleges and universities are ending consideration of gender in admission. “The idea of males, including white males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.”

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For years universities and colleges have been trying to keep the number of men and women on campuses evened out at a time when growing numbers of men have been choosing not to go to college. Some schools have tried to attract more men by adding football and other sports, promoting forestry and hunting programs and launching entrepreneurship competitions.

Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data show.

Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal anti-discrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses.

But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. The White House has so far largely not succeeded in its campaign to press a handful of elite schools to agree to the terms and sign a wide-ranging Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education in exchange for priority consideration for federal funding.

“The racial parts have gotten a lot more attention, but I know from having spoken with practitioners who work in college admissions, they have read very clearly that it says ‘race and gender,’” in the administration’s pronouncements about ending preferences in admission, said Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center.

“What I think they don’t understand is that taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of white males,” Harper said. “It is likely to impact them the most, as a matter of fact.”

At some private colleges, male applicants are more likely to get in

School	% of males admitted	% of females admitted
Brown University	7.0	4.4
University of Chicago	5.6	3.7
Yale University	4.6	3.4
University of Miami	22.5	16.5
Middlebury College	12.2	9.6
Baylor University	56.8	47.9
Pomona College	7.6	6.7
Tulane University	14.9	13.4
Vassar College	20.4	17.6

_{SOURCE: Hechinger Report calculations from universities’ Common Data Sets}

Agreements that the administration has reached with Brown, Columbia and Northwestern universities to settle allegations of antisemitism discrimination also include language about gender.

In a statement announcing the Brown deal in July, Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”

Asked if that meant male applicants would no longer be admitted at higher rates than female applicants — which has helped Brown keep its undergraduate enrollment at almost exactly 50-50, even with twice as many female applicants — spokesman Brian Clark said, “We have made no changes to our admissions practices in this regard.”

The Trump administration has also vowed to make all higher education institutions submit details about the students they admit, including their gender, to find out whether they’re “discriminating against hard working American” prospective students, McMahon said in another statement.

Spokespeople for the Department of Education did not respond to questions about whether advantages in admission based on gender will be scrutinized in the same way as purported advantages based on race.

Universities are looking at the administration’s edicts “and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’d rather be cautious than stick our neck out’” by continuing to give advantages to male applicants, said ACE’s Mitchell, who was undersecretary of education under President Barack Obama. “I think we will see people dropping gender preferences, even though it is still within the law.”

Colleges that have been accepting men at higher rates are trying to avoid a marketing problem they fear will happen if their campuses become too female, said Madeleine Rhyneer, who headed admissions offices at four private universities and colleges and is now vice president of consulting services and dean of enrollment management for the education consulting firm EAB. Colleges worry, “Will men look at that and think, ‘That’s essentially a women’s college, and I don’t want to go there’?”

“For the Browns and Columbias and highly selective and very competitive institutions, it is a problem,” Rhyneer said. “They want to create what feels like a balanced climate.”

The results of ending this practice could be dramatic, experts predict. In 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, 817,035 more women than men applied to universities and colleges, federal data show. Boys also have lower mean scores on the SAT in reading and writing, score lower overall on the ACT and have lower grade point averages in high school.

“If we were going to eliminate preferences for men, the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight,” Mitchell said.

Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the right-leaning think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that similar predictions were made after the 2023 Supreme Court decision effectively ending affirmative action based on race.

At the time, he said, colleges spoke “in apocalyptic terms of the implications for the racial composition of student bodies.” But the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled at universities and colleges the next year rose, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Then, said Hess, “there was a lot of, ‘Never mind.’”

The country’s top 50 private colleges and universities have 2 percentage points more male undergraduates than the top 50 flagship public universities, which do not consider gender in admission, according to research by Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer. He said this suggests that at least some are putting a thumb on the scale for male applicants.

Columbia took 3 percent of women applicants last year and 4 percent of men. At the University of Chicago, 5.6 percent of male applicants were accepted last year, compared to 3.7 percent of female applicants. The ratio at the University of Miami was 22.5 percent to 16.5 percent; and at Vassar College, 20.4 percent to 17.6 percent.

Besides Brown, none of these universities would respond when asked if they will continue to accept higher percentages of men than women, Neither would others that do it, including Yale, Baylor and Tulane universities and Pomona College.

Private institutions are allowed to consider gender in admission under Title IX, the federal law otherwise banning discrimination by universities and colleges that get federal funding. That’s due to a loophole dating from when the law was passed, in 1971.

At the time, the gender ratio was exactly reversed, and men outnumbered women on campuses by nearly three to two. One of the universities’ congressional allies, Rep. John Erlenborn, R-Illinois, successfully amended the measure to let private colleges and universities continue to consider gender in admission.

Erlenborn said at the time that forcing colleges to stop considering gender would be “one more giant step toward involvement by the federal government in the internal affairs of institutions of higher education.”

There’s little ambiguity for admissions offices now, said USC’s Harper.

“It says here, in writing, ‘no discrimination on the basis of race and gender,’” he noted. “It says that explicitly.”

Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

This story about men in college was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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December 4, 2025

Do male teachers make a difference? Not as much as some think

by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
November 17, 2025

The teaching profession is one of the most female-dominated in the United States. Among elementary school teachers, 89 percent are women, and in kindergarten, that number is almost 97 percent.

Many sociologists, writers and parents have questioned whether this imbalance hinders young boys at the start of their education. Are female teachers less understanding of boys’ need to horse around? Or would male role models inspire boys to learn their letters and times tables? Some advocates point to research that lays out why boys ought to do better with male teachers.

But a new national analysis finds no evidence that boys perform or behave better with male teachers in elementary school. This challenges a widespread belief that boys thrive more when taught by men, and it raises questions about efforts, such as one in New York City, to spend extra to recruit them.

“I was surprised,” said Paul Morgan, a professor at the University at Albany and a co-author of the study. “I’ve raised two boys, and my assumption would be that having male teachers is beneficial because boys tend to be more rambunctious, more active, a little less easy to direct in academic tasks.”

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“We’re not saying gender matching doesn’t work,” Morgan added. “We’re saying we’re not observing it in K through fifth grade.”

Middle and high school students might see more benefits. Earlier research is mixed and inconclusive. A 2007 analysis by Stanford professor Thomas Dee found academic benefits for eighth-grade boys and girls when taught by teachers of their same gender. And studies where researchers observe and interview a small number of students often show how students feel more supported by same-gender teachers. Yet many quantitative studies, like this newest one, have failed to detect measurable benefits for boys. At least 10 since 2014 have found zero or minimal effects. Benefits for girls are more consistent.

This latest study, “Fixed Effect Estimates of Teacher-Student Gender Matching During Elementary School,” is a working paper not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal.* Morgan and co-author Eric Hu, a research scientist at Albany, shared a draft with me.

Morgan and Hu analyzed a U.S. Education Department dataset that followed a nationally representative group of 8,000 students from kindergarten in 2010 through fifth grade in 2017. Half were boys and half were girls.

More than two-thirds — 68 percent — of the 4,000 boys never had a male teacher in those years while 32 percent had at least one. (The study focused only on main classroom teachers, not extras like gym or music.)

Among the 1,300 boys who had both male and female teachers, the researchers compared each boy’s performance and behavior across those years. For instance, if Jacob had female teachers in kindergarten, first, second and fifth grades, but male teachers in third and fourth, his average scores and behavior were compared between the teachers of different genders.

Related: Plenty of Black college students want to be teachers, but something keeps derailing them

The researchers found no differences in reading, math or science achievement — or in behavioral and social measures. Teachers rated students on traits like impulsiveness, cooperation, anxiety, empathy and self-control. The children also took annual executive function tests. The results did not vary by the teacher’s gender.

Most studies on male teachers focus on older students. The authors noted one other elementary-level study, in Florida, that also found no academic benefit for boys. This new research confirms that finding and adds that there seems to be no behavioral or social benefits either.

For students at these young ages, 11 and under, the researchers also didn’t find academic benefits for girls with female teachers. But there were two non-academic ones: Girls taught by women showed stronger interpersonal skills (getting along, helping others, caring about feelings) and a greater eagerness to learn (represented by skills such as keeping organized and following rules).

When the researchers combined race and gender, the results grew more complex. Black girls taught by women scored higher on an executive function test but lower in science. Asian boys taught by men scored higher on executive function but had lower ratings on interpersonal skills. Black boys showed no measurable differences when taught by male teachers. (Previous research has sometimes found benefits for Black students taught by Black teachers and sometimes hasn’t.)**

Related: Bright black students taught by black teachers are more likely to get into gifted-and-talented classrooms

Even if data show no academic or behavioral benefits for students, there may still be compelling reasons to diversify the teaching workforce, just as in other professions. But we shouldn’t expect these efforts to move the needle on student outcomes.

“If you had scarce resources and were trying to place your bets,” Morgan said, “then based on this study, maybe elementary school isn’t where you should focus your recruitment efforts” to hire more men.

To paraphrase Boyz II Men, it’s so hard to say goodbye — to the idea that young boys need male teachers.

*Clarification: The article has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal but has undergone some peer review.

**Correction: An earlier version incorrectly characterized how researchers analyzed what happened to students of different races. The researchers focused only on the gender of the teachers, but drilled down to see how students of different races responded to teachers of different genders.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

This story about male teachers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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November 17, 2025
Trump administration cuts canceled this college student’s career start in politics

This story was produced in partnership with Teen Vogue and reprinted with permission.

Christopher Cade wants to be president someday. His inspiration largely comes from family members, who have been involved in local politics and activism since long before he was born. But policies from the Trump administration and the Ohio Legislature are complicating his college experience — and his plans to become a politician.

Cade is a student at Ohio State University double-majoring in public policy analysis and political science with a focus on American political theory. He recalls his maternal grandmother, Maude Hill — who had a large hand in raising him — talking to him about her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. She also worked at Columbus, Ohio-based affordable housing development nonprofit, Homeport, and has gone to Capitol Hill to speak with the state delegation multiple times. His dad is the senior vice president of the housing choice voucher program at the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority, and his older brother has a degree in political science and is interested in social justice advocacy work, Cade said. Last fall, his first on campus, Cade began applying to opportunities to bolster his resume for a future career in politics.

The now 19-year-old secured an internship with the U.S. Department of Transportation and a work-study job on campus in the university’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. But the federal opportunity was scrapped when the Trump administration imposed a hiring freeze and budget cuts. His campus job ended when the university announced it would “sunset” the diversity office in response to federal and state anti-diversity, equity and inclusion orders and actions, according to Cade.

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The work-study position was with the university’s Bell National Resource Center on the African American Male, which was founded to support Black men to stay in college. It’s a cause he was excited about.

“I would help order food or speak with students or do interviews,” said Cade. “I developed a good 20 different programs for the next year.”

In February, when the university announced it was closing the office, “I was like, ‘Well, so six months of work just for no reason,’” he said.

OSU President Ted Carter released a statement on Feb. 27 saying the closure of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion was a response to both state and federal actions regarding DEI in public education. The move eliminated 17 staff positions, not including student roles, the university said. Programming and services provided by the Office of Student Life’s Center for Belonging and Social Change were also scrapped.

The change came before the Trump administration’s initial deadline for complying with a memo that threatened to cut funding for public colleges and universities, as well as K-12 schools, that offer DEI programs and initiatives. In March, the administration announced that OSU was one of roughly 50 universities under federal investigation for allegedly discriminating against white and Asian students in graduate admissions. Additionally, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed legislation in March banning DEI programs in the state’s public colleges and universities. The legislation went into effect in June.

Before the DEI office closed, Cade said, “I felt so heard and seen.” He’d attended a private, predominantly white, Catholic high school, he said. “It was not a place that supported me culturally and helped me understand more about who I am and my Blackness,” he recalled. At the university, though, “the programming we had throughout the year [was] about how to change the narrative on who a Black man is and what it means when you go out here and interact with people.

“And then for them to close down all these programs, that essentially told me that I wasn’t cared about.”

After the February announcement, students pushed back, organizing protests and a sit-in at the student union. But eventually, those efforts quieted.

Cade says students felt like there was a “cloud of darkness” hanging over them. But he also thought of his Office of Diversity and Inclusion coworkers, some of whom had spent decades working there, helping students. In particular he thought of his former colleague Chila Thomas, who celebrated her fifth anniversary last year as the executive director of the Young Scholars Program. That program, which helps low-income aspiring first-generation college students get to and through college, was one of several of the office’s programs that will continue. The day after Carter’s announcement, she and others in the office spent time giving students space to talk through their feelings, despite the uncertainties surrounding their own employment, Cade said.

Related: A case study of what’s ahead with Trump DEI crackdowns: Utah has already cut public college DEI initiatives

Since the university crackdown on DEI, Cade said he’s experienced more discomfort on campus, even outright racism. He says he was approached by a white person who said, “I’m so glad they’re getting rid of DEI” and spit on his shoe and used a racial slur.

“I don’t know how that could ever be acceptable to anyone, but that was [when] a flip switched in my head,” Cade said. “I couldn’t sit down and be sad and silent. I had to stand up and make change.”

In March, he traveled with other students to Washington, D.C., as part of the Undergraduate Student Government’s Governmental Relations Committee. They met with Ohio Rep. Troy Balderson and an aide, along with staffers from the offices of fellow Ohio lawmakers Sen. Bernie Moreno and Rep. Joyce Beatty, to discuss college affordability, DEI policies and the federal hiring freeze. Cade says he described how he was affected by the U.S. Department of Transportation canceling his internship.

In Carter’s announcement, he stated that all student employees would be “offered alternative jobs at the university,” but Cade said during a meeting with Office of Diversity and Inclusion student employees, an OSU dean clarified that they would have to apply for new opportunities. With the policy changes meaning there were fewer work-study roles and more students in need of jobs, Cade saw the market as increasingly competitive, and he began to job hunt elsewhere. This summer he secured work with the Ohio Department of Transportation as a communications and policy intern. In October he began an intake assistant role in the Office of Civil Rights Compliance at the university. (Ohio State Director of Media and PR Chris Booker told Teen Vogue that the school could not comment on the experiences of individual students but that “all student employees and graduate associates impacted by these program changes were offered the opportunity to pursue transitioning into alternative positions at the university, as well as support in navigating that change.”)

Although he was drawn to OSU for the John Glenn College of Public Affairs’ master’s program, Cade says he might have reconsidered schools had he known that the university would bend to lawmakers’ anti-DEI efforts. While he’s concerned about how education-related legislation and policies may continue to affect his college experience, he worries most about some of his peers. College is already so hard to navigate for so many young people, said Cade. “And this is just another thing that says, ‘Oh yeah, this isn’t for me.’”

This story was published in partnership with Teen Vogue.

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November 10, 2025
Zohran Mamdani addresses supporters after winning 2025 NYC mayoral race (PBS NewsHour)

Higher Education Inquirer : Zohran Mamdani addresses supporters after winning 2025 NYC mayoral race (PBS NewsHour)

Zohran Mamdani addresses supporters after winning 2025 NYC mayoral race (PBS NewsHour)

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November 5, 2025
TCU Moves Race, Gender Studies Departments to English

On June 1, Texas Christian University will close its stand-alone gender studies and race and ethnic studies departments and fold the majors and courses into the English Department, university leaders announced earlier this month.

The research university in Fort Worth is one of the first private institutions in the state to announce changes to its gender, sexuality and race-related academic programs after firings at Texas A&M University prompted the state’s public institutions to flag, censor and cut classes related to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity.

In a meeting with English Department faculty on Oct. 22, TCU provost Floyd Wormley cited financial reasons for the change, asserting that political pressure “had no influence” on the decision to merge the Women and Gender Studies and Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies Departments into the English Department. But some faculty aren’t convinced. They say the move follows a decline in institutional support for the disciplines as the university faces immense pressure to eliminate any and all programming related to gender, race and ethnicity.

“The explanation from the administration is financial, and that doesn’t necessarily track with earlier correspondence with the department,” said Brandon Manning, an associate professor of gender and sexuality and race and ethnic Studies. The university is expanding its physical footprint and its student body, and “there are new programs and departments popping up daily,” he added. “TCU has been receiving considerable criticism online, and this seems to be a way to placate that criticism.”

A TCU spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that conversations about merging the departments started more than two years ago. The two departments already share a leadership structure. The English Department wasn’t mentioned as a partner until the Oct. 17 announcement, said Alexandra Edwards, an English instructor at TCU.

The merger will affect seven faculty members, five of whom will likely follow the programs into the English Department. Other faculty and support staff will be deployed to other departments, Wormley and Sonja Watson, dean for the AddRan College of Liberal Arts, told faculty at the Oct. 22 meeting. The merger is part of a universitywide restructuring project and is primarily due to low enrollment in the two departments, they said. The Spanish and Modern Languages Departments will also be combined, and so will the Geology and Environmental Sciences Departments.

“Decisions are not based on academic content but on data,” a TCU spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed. “Students currently majoring in these programs have been notified that there will be no impact to their academic progress, meaning they will be able to complete their degrees as planned. TCU is growing and will need more faculty and staff—not less—to ensure that we meet the academic needs of students and demand for a TCU education.”

This fall, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies enrolled nine majors and minors, and Women and Gender Studies enrolled just two. The two programs have never been large; since becoming stand-alone departments in 2018, their highest combined enrollment was 31 majors and minors, in fall 2020. But using low enrollments to justify the merger is unfair, Edwards argued. The programs haven’t had a chance to flourish because of constant structural changes, she said.

“They have been through a ton of turmoil and leadership turnover and reassignment to various different colleges and units across the university, so for a long time they’ve been unable to become stable,” Edwards said. “I don’t see how gender studies or ethnic studies could become a priority in an English department that’s already … juggling a lot of competing interests and varied disciplines.”

Department chairs weren’t given any warning about the merger with the English department, and faculty were not consulted before the decision was made, according to notes from the Oct. 22 meeting shared with Inside Higher Ed. When faculty asked why, Wormley said it was within “the purview of the institution to make those decisions.”

A One-Man Campaign?

While TCU isn’t subject to the same state laws that eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at Texas’s public institutions, the university is still getting plenty of external pressure to ax its gender and race studies offerings. Faculty say the campaign to abolish related classes, programs and events at the university is led by Bo French, a TCU alum and the son of a sitting TCU board member. French is also chairman of the Tarrant County Republican Party and a conservative politician who was denounced by members of his own party for using slurs for gay people and people with disabilities.

French has berated the university online for what he described as “LGBTQ” and “radical Marxist” indoctrination. He celebrated on Oct. 10 when the university removed the “LGBTQ+” link from the “community initiatives” dropdown on its website. Three days earlier, he posted a poll on X asking followers if the university should “dismantle its entire racist DEI infrastructure and also stop offering courses in degenerate LGBTQ ideology.”

French interpreted the merger news as a partial victory. “This is simply hiding what they do in another department. Nothing changes,” he wrote on X on Oct. 22. “However, it does show that the public pressure is working. They are bending, but we have to make them break completely and eliminate these courses altogether.”

Since then, he has continued to wage a social media campaign against anything related to gender, sexuality or diversity at TCU. On Oct. 22 he also posted on X a photo of a lawn sign advertising campus Pride Month events, alongside the comment “I know a few things are happening behind the scenes at ⁦@TCU⁩ and I am now more hopeful than ever, but they haven’t happened yet and so stuff like this is still polluting the campus.”

Publicly, university officials have said little in response to criticism by French and others, Edwards said. She noted that she was harassed and doxed by conservatives in August 2024 over posts she made before she worked at TCU, and she was advised by administrators to “lay low” until the firestorm subsided. A former TCU Women and Gender Studies professor who received a threat of violence in response to a 2023 course titled The Queer Art of Drag was asked by police to leave campus for his own safety, Edwards said. More recently, a political science professor was doxed for online comments she made in the wake of conservative firebrand Charlie Kirk’s death.

Asked how the university has responded to political pressure and harassment of faculty, a spokesperson said, “The university has a thorough process to notify faculty and staff members and provide them with appropriate guidance and support to mitigate potential risks.”

In conversations with faculty, TCU leaders have acknowledged the pressures of the political landscape on the university, particularly on the gender and race studies departments, Edwards said. At the end of the Oct. 22 meeting, Watson told faculty she had been concerned about the future of the departments since Trump was inaugurated in January. During a March 28 meeting between faculty and Watson about combining the gender and race studies departments, Watson expressed concern about recent executive orders from President Trump.

“I think that we all know that the executive orders disproportionately affect [Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies], right? … As I said in the beginning, [I am] still very much committed to CRES and very much committed to growing the number of majors, and so I think the biggest challenge … is, how do we increase?” Watson said during the meeting, according to a recording obtained by Inside Higher Ed. “All liberal arts majors’ programs are having this issue for various reasons, but we see these issues manifest in a different way in both CRES and [Women and Gender Studies].”

In an all-hands meeting on April 4, TCU president Daniel Pullin and general counsel Larry Leroy Tyner explained the difficult bind the current national and state political landscapes have put the university in.

“If there’s a cliff that if you step off, there’s serious consequences, and [if] you don’t know where the edge of the cliff is, you stay way away from the edge,” Tyner said. “The combination of uncertainty and significant consequences creates the chilling effect.”

About a minute later, Pullin added that he and his cabinet are “trying to figure out how to stay as far away from that unknown cliff as possible so we can stay on mission and live our values and execute our plan.”

(This story has been updated to more accurately reflect the chronology of events precipitating the merger.)

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October 31, 2025
We’re testing preschoolers for giftedness. Experts say that doesn’t work

by Sarah Carr, The Hechinger Report
October 31, 2025

When I was a kindergartner in the 1980s, the “gifted” programming for my class could be found inside of a chest.

I don’t know what toys and learning materials lived there, since I wasn’t one of the handful of presumably more academically advanced kiddos that my kindergarten teacher invited to open the chest. My distinct impression at the time was that my teacher didn’t think I was worthy of the enrichment because I frequently spilled my chocolate milk at lunch and I had also once forgotten to hang a sheet of paper on the class easel — instead painting an elaborate and detailed picture on the stand itself. The withering look on my teacher’s face after seeing the easel assured me that, gifted, I was not.

The memory, and the enduring mystery of that chest, resurfaced recently when New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani announced that if elected on Nov. 4, he would support ending kindergarten entry to the city’s public school gifted program. While many pundits and parents debated the political fallout of the proposal — the city’s segregated gifted program has for decades been credited with keeping many white and wealthier families in the public school system — I wondered what exactly it means to be a gifted kindergartner. In New York City, the determination is made several months before kindergarten starts, but how good is a screening mechanism for 4-year-olds at predicting academic prowess years down the road?

New York is not unique for opting to send kids as young as preschool down an accelerated path, no repeat display of giftedness required. It’s common practice at many private schools to try to measure young children’s academic abilities for admissions purposes. Other communities, including Houston and Miami, start gifted or accelerated programs in public schools as early as kindergarten, according to the National Center for Research on Gifted Education. When I reported on schools in New Orleans 15 years ago, they even had a few gifted prekindergarten programs at highly sought after public schools, which enrolled 4-year-olds whose seemingly stunning intellectual abilities were determined at age 3. It’s more common, however, for gifted programs in the public schools to start between grades 2 and 4, according to the center’s surveys.

There is an assumption embedded in the persistence of gifted programs for the littles that it’s possible to assess a child’s potential, sometimes before they even start school. New York City has followed a long and winding road in its search for the best way to do this. And after more than five decades, the city’s experience offers a case study in how elusive — and, at times, distracting — that quest remains.

Three main strategies are used to assign young children to gifted programs, according to the center. The most common path is cognitive testing, which attempts to rate a child’s intelligence in relation to their peer group. Then there is achievement testing, which is supposed to measure how much and how fast a child is learning in school. And the third strategy is teacher evaluations. Some districts use the three measures in combination with each other.

For nearly four decades, New York prioritized the first strategy, deploying an ever-evolving array of cognitive and IQ tests on its would-be gifted 4-year-olds — tests that families often signed up for in search of competitive advantage as much as anything else.

Several years ago, a Brooklyn parent named Christine checked out an open house for a citywide gifted elementary school, knowing her child was likely just shy of the test score needed to get in. (Christine did not want her last name used to protect her daughter’s privacy.)

The school required her to show paperwork at the door confirming that her daughter had a relatively high score; and when Christine flashed the proof, the PTA member at the door congratulated her. That and the lack of diversity gave the school an exclusive vibe, Christine recalled.

“The resources were incredible,” she said. “The library was huge, there was a room full of blocks. It definitely made me envious, because I knew she was not getting in.” Yet years later, she feels “icky” about even visiting.

Eishika Ahmed’s parents had opportunities of all kinds in mind when they had her tested for gifted kindergarten nearly two decades ago. Ahmed, now 23, remembers an administrator in a small white room with fluorescent lights asking her which boat in a series of cartoonish pictures was “wide.” The then 4-year-old had no idea.

“She didn’t look very pleased with my answer,” Ahmed recalled. She did not get into the kindergarten program.

Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.

Equity and reliability have been long-running concerns for districts relying on cognitive tests.

In New York, public school parents in some districts were once able to pay private psychologists to evaluate their children — a permissiveness that led to “a series of alleged abuses,” wrote Norm Fruchter, a now-deceased activist, educator and school board leader in a 2019 article called “The Spoils of Whiteness: New York City’s Gifted and Talented Programs.”

In New Orleans, there was a similar disparity between the private and public testing of 3-year-olds when I lived and reported on schools there. Families could sit on a waitlist, sometimes for months, to take their children through the free process at the district central office. In 2008, the year I wrote about the issue, only five of the 153 3-year-olds tested by the district met the gifted benchmark. But families could also pay a few hundred dollars and go to a private tester who, over the same time period, identified at least 64 children as gifted. “I don’t know if everybody is paying,” one parent told me at the time, “but it defeats the purpose of a public school if you have to pay $300 to get them in.”

Even after New York City districts outlawed private testers, concerns persisted about parents paying for pricey and extensive test prep to teach them common words and concepts featured on the tests. Moreover, some researchers have worried about racial and cultural bias in cognitive tests more generally. Critics, Fruchter wrote, had long considered them at least partly to assess knowledge of the “reigning cultural milieu in which test-makers and applicants alike were immersed.”

Across the country, these concerns have led some schools and districts, including New York City, to shift to “nonverbal tests,” which try to assess innate capacity more than experience and exposure.

But those tests haven’t made cognitive testing more equitable, said Betsy McCoach, a professor of psychometrics and quantitative psychology at Fordham University and co-principal investigator at the National Center for Research on Gifted Education.

“There is no way to take prior experience out of a test,” she said. “I wish we could.” Children who’ve had more exposure to tests, problem-solving and patterns are still going to have an advantage on a nonverbal test, McCoach added.

And no test can overcome the fact that for very young children, scores can change significantly from year to year, or even week to week. In 2024, researchers analyzed more than 200 studies on the stability of cognitive abilities at different ages. They found that for 4-year-olds, cognitive test scores are not very predictive of long-term scores — or even, necessarily, short-term ones.

There’s not enough stability “to say that if we assess someone at age 4, 5, 6 or 7 that a child would or wouldn’t be well-served by being in a gifted program” for multiple years, said Moritz Breit, the lead author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher in the psychology department at the University of Trier in Germany.

Scores don’t start to become very consistent until later in elementary school, with stability peaking in late adolescence.

But for 4-year-olds? “Stability is too low for high-stakes decisions,” he said.

Eishika Ahmed is just one example of how early testing may not predict future achievement. Even though she did not enroll in the kindergarten gifted program, by third grade she was selected for an accelerated program at her school called “top class.”

Years later, still struck by the inequity of the whole process, she wrote a 2023 essay for the think tank The Century Foundation about it. “The elementary school a child attends shouldn’t have such significant influence over the trajectory of their entire life,” she wrote. “But for students in New York City public schools, there is a real pipeline effect that extends from kindergarten to college. Students who do not enter the pipeline by attending G&T programs at an early age might not have the opportunity to try again.”

Partly because of the concerns about cognitive tests, New York City dropped intelligence testing entirely in 2021 and shifted to declaring kindergartners gifted based on prekindergarten teacher recommendations. A recent article in Chalkbeat noted that after ending the testing for the youngest, diversity in the kindergarten gifted program increased: In 2023-24, 30 percent of the children were Black and Latino, compared to just 12 percent in 2020, Chalkbeat reported. Teachers in the programs also describe enrolling a broader range of students, including more neurodivergent ones.

The big problem, according to several experts, is that when hundreds of individual prekindergarten teachers evaluate 4-year-olds for giftedness, any consistency in defining it can get lost, even if the teachers are guided on what to look for.

“The word is drained of meaning because teachers are not thinking about the same thing,” said Sam Meisels, the founding executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska.

Breit said that research has found that teacher evaluations and grades for young children are less stable and predictive than the (already unstable) cognitive testing.

“People are very bad at looking at another person and inferring a lot about what’s going on under the hood,” he said. “When you say, ‘Cognitive abilities are not stable, let’s switch to something else,’ the problem is that there is nothing else to switch to when the goal is stability. Young children are changing a lot.”

Related: PROOF POINTS: How do you find a gifted child?

No one denies that access to gifted programming has been transformative for countless children. McCoach, the Fordham professor, points out that there should be something more challenging for the children who arrive at kindergarten already reading and doing arithmetic, who can be bored moving at the regular pace.

In an ideal world, experts say, there would be universal screening for giftedness (which some districts, but not New York, have embraced), using multiple measures in a thoughtful way, and there would be frequent entry — and exit — points for the programs. In the early elementary years, that would look less like separate gifted programming and a lot more like meeting every kid where they are.

“The question shouldn’t really be: Are you the ‘Big G’?” said McCoach. “That sounds so permanent and stable. The question should be: Who are the kids who need something more than what we are providing in the curriculum?”

But in the real world, individualized instruction has frequently proved elusive with underresourced schools, large class sizes and teachers who are tasked with catching up the students who are furthest behind. That persistent struggle has provided advocates of gifted education in the early elementary years with what’s perhaps their most powerful argument in sustaining such programs — but it reminds me of that old adage about treating the symptom rather than the disease.

At some point a year or two after kindergarten, I did get the chance to be among the chosen when I was selected for a pull-out program known as BEEP. I have no recollection of how we were picked, how often we met or what we did, apart from a performance the BEEP kids held of St. George and the Dragon. I played St. George and I remember uttering one line, declaring my intent to fight the dragon or die. I also remember vividly how much being in BEEP boosted my confidence in my potential — probably its greatest gift.

Forty years later, the research is clear that every kid deserves the chance — and not just one — to slay a dragon. “You want to give every child the best opportunity to learn as possible,” said Meisels. But when it comes to separate gifted programming for select early elementary school students, “Is there something out there that says their selection is valid? We don’t have that.”

“It seems,” he added, “to be a case of people just fooling themselves with the language.”

Contact contributing writer Sarah Carr at [email protected].

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

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October 31, 2025
TCU Dissolves Women and Gender Studies, Race and Ethnic Studies Departments

Texas Christian University Texas Christian University will shutter its women and gender studies department and comparative race and ethnic studies department at the end of this academic year, folding both programs into the English department in a move faculty members say reflects the institution’s response to political pressure.

The decision, announced earlier this month, comes as higher education institutions nationwide face mounting scrutiny over programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion—particularly those focusing on gender and race. TCU officials cited low enrollment as the primary rationale, though faculty members say the timing suggests otherwise.

Discussions about restructuring or renaming the departments began in February. Those conversations centered on how to address external pressure against anything perceived as related to DEI initiatives—pressure that has intensified since the Trump administration began efforts to eliminate such programs.

Faculty members report that university messaging has been inconsistent. Last spring, they were told the two departments would merge but could not include “race” or “gender” in the combined department’s name. By August, officials indicated the merged department could retain those terms. The October announcement revealed all three units would be absorbed into the English department, which will retain its original name.

University data shows undergraduate enrollment in both departments remains minimal this fall: two seniors are majoring in women and gender studies, while nine students major in comparative race and ethnic studies—five seniors, three juniors and one sophomore.

Women and gender studies at TCU traces its roots to 1979, when professors Jean Giles-Sims and Priscilla Tate began advocating for such a program. The university formally launched it in 1994. The comparative race and ethnic studies program emerged in 2017 amid student concerns about campus climate, with its founding director telling media the program would help foster cultural change and attract a more diverse student body.

In his email to English faculty, Provost Floyd Wormley Jr.said that the restructuring aims to “ensure a more efficient and effective use of faculty and administrative resources” while maintaining fiscal sustainability.

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October 26, 2025
UI Bans Considering Race, Sex in Hiring, Tenure, Student Aid

A UIC official said the system made the decision after “considering the increased risk to our faculty and to the University that these criteria present in the current climate.”

Just_Super/iStock/Getty Images Plus

The University of Illinois system is telling its institutions they can’t consider race, color, national origin or sex in hiring, tenure, promotion and student financial aid decisions—a move that’s drawn opposition from a faculty union at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Aaron Krall, president of UIC United Faculty, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, said the UI system circumvented shared governance.

“This was a directive that came down and surprised everyone,” Krall said.

The system implemented a policy saying it and its universities don’t consider race or the other factors in determining eligibility for need- or merit-based financial aid. In a statement, the system further said it “issued guidance to its universities to ensure that hiring, promotion, and tenure processes follow the same standards.”

The statement said, “There may be some variation in how and when changes are fully operationalized” across its three universities: UIC, Springfield and Urbana-Champaign. The system didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview Tuesday about why it’s making this change now.

Krall shared communications that he said UIC officials sent out last week. One, from Chancellor Marie Lynn Miranda and others, suggested the student aid change would apply to “donor-funded, college-determined and institutionally funded scholarships” and said “UIC will replace its Affirmative Action Plan with a Nondiscrimination and Merit-Based Hiring Plan.”

In another message Krall provided, a UIC official wrote that “faculty may no longer submit a Statement on Efforts to Promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the dossier, nor may faculty members be evaluated on norms related to” DEI. The official wrote that the system “made this decision after carefully considering the increased risk to our faculty and to the University that these criteria present in the current climate.”

Krall said. “The most shocking thing to me, really, is they want to change the policy and make it retroactive—so we have [affected] faculty members going up for promotion right now who have already submitted their promotion materials.” He said the union has demanded the right to bargain over these changes.

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October 22, 2025
At Moms for Liberty summit, parents urged to turn their grievances into lawsuits

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — It’s not a rebrand. But the Moms for Liberty group that introduced itself three years ago as a band of female “joyful warriors” shedding domestic modesty to make raucous public challenges to masks, books and curriculum, is trying to glow up.

The group’s national summit this past weekend at a convention center outside Orlando leaned into family (read: parental rights), faith — and youth. The latter appeared to be a bid to join the cool kids who are the new face of conservatism in America (hint: young, Christian, very male), as well as a recognition of the group’s “diversity,” which includes grandparents, men and kids.

But even as the youth — including 20- and 30-something podcasters and social media influencers, as well as student members of the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA — brought a high-energy vibe, stalwart members got a new assignment. Where past Moms for Liberty attendees were urged to run for school board, this year they were encouraged to turn their grievances into legal challenges.

Moms for Liberty CEO and co-founder Tina Descovich acknowledged that while many of them had experienced backlashes as a result of running for school board or publicly challenging books, curricula and policies, they needed to continue the fight. (The more pugnacious co-founder, Tiffany Justice, is now at Heritage Action, an arm of right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation.)

“You have lost family, you have lost friends, you have lost neighbors, you’ve lost jobs, you’ve lost whole careers,” she said. Yet she insisted that it was vital that they “shake off the shackles of fear and stand for truth or we are going to lose Western civilization as a whole.”

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

The gathering held up “the free state of Florida” as an example of Republican policies to be emulated, including around school choice and parental rights. The state’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, boasted of having created a state Office of Parental Rights last spring, describing it as “a law firm for parents.”

He trumpeted the state’s lawsuit against Target over the “market risks” of LGBTQ+ pride-themed merchandise and encouraged parents to reach out with potential legal actions. “If you’re identifying one of these wrongs that’s violating your rights and then subjecting our kids to danger and evil, then we want to know about it,” he said. “And we’re going to bring the heat in court to shut it down.”

Tina Descovich, CEO and co-founder of Moms for Liberty, was interviewed on Real America’s Voice, a conservative news and entertainment network that set up a remote studio outside of the Sun Ballroom at the Moms for Liberty national summit. Credit: Laura Pappano for The Hechinger Report

The shifting legal landscape, not just in Florida but nationally, had speakers gushing about the opportunity to file new challenges, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor in June. It gives parents broad power to object to school materials, including with LGBTQ+ themes, and the right to remove their children from public school on days when such materials are discussed.

“This is where we need to take that big Supreme Court victory and start fleshing it out,” said Matt Sharp, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law firm. He added that they were “needing warriors, joyful warriors, to file cases to start putting meat on the bones of what that does.”

The directive to file suit was not just around opt-out policies, which were the basis for the Mahmoud case. (Moms for Liberty has opt-out forms and instructions on its website.) Rather, attendees were also urged to file lawsuits in support of school prayer; against school policies that let students use different names and pronouns without parental consent (what Moms for Liberty terms “secret transitions”); and to give parents access to surveys students take at school, including around mental health.

“We need people willing to stand up legally and be, you know, named plaintiffs,” Kimberly S. Hermann, president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative policy group, said on a panel featuring two moms who sued their school districts. Winning a lawsuit or even just bringing one in one state, said Hermann, can get other school districts and states to adopt policies, presumably to avoid lawsuits themselves.

“One offensive litigation can have this amazing ripple effect,” she said. She and others made clear that there is staff to provide support. The legal groups will “stand with you,” said Sharp, “whether you’re passing the law or passing the local policy all the way to litigating these cases.”

Even as speakers criticized public schools particularly around LGBTQ+ issues, not as a form of inclusion but as foisting views into classrooms, they relished the chance to infuse their values into schools.

Filing these lawsuits is more than “just fighting for your role as parents,” Sharp told parents in a breakout session. “You’re ultimately fighting for your kids’ ability to be in their schools and make a difference, to be the salt and light in those classrooms with their friends and to take our message of freedom, of faith, of justice and to really spread it all across the schools.”

Related: America’s schools and colleges are operating under two totally different sets of rules for sex discrimination

Overall, this year’s Moms for Liberty event lacked the obvious drama of recent years. The flood of protesters in 2023 in Philadelphia required a large police presence and barricades around the hotel, along with warnings not to wear Moms for Liberty lanyards on the streets.

This year, there were no protests. That was partly because the event was held in a secluded resort convention center that could accommodate 800 (larger than the 500-ish of past hotels). But the group failed to fill the venue or attract much media attention. There was on-location broadcast by Real America’s Voice, a conservative news and entertainment network, from a set outside the Sun Ballroom. (Steve Bannon interviewed Descovich on his show, “The War Room.”)

It also didn’t draw opposition because protesters had a bigger target. Saturday saw “No Kings” rallies across the country, with thousands decrying what they see as President Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. “I forgot it was happening since they’re mostly ignored these days,” state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, (D-Orlando) and a senior advisor to LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida, said in a text message about the Moms for Liberty event. Liz Mikitarian, founder of the national group, Stop Moms for Liberty, which is based in Florida, said the moms “are still a threat” but not worth organizing a protest against.

It was also a quieter affair than last year’s in Washington, D.C. There, Trump’s appearance fed a party atmosphere with Southern rock, sequined MAGA outfits and a cash bar. (This year, Trump appeared, but only in a prerecorded video message.)

Sequined merchandise for sale at the Moms for Liberty gathering by the company Make America Sparkle Again included tops and jackets that paid tribute to Charlie Kirk, the slain founder of Turning Point USA. Credit: Laura Pappano for The Hechinger Report

The three-day event, of course, aired familiar grievances in familiarly florid language — conservative school choice activist Corey DeAngelis railed against teacher unions over the “far-left radical agenda that they’re trying to push down children’s throats in the classroom.” Other sessions covered the expected — the alleged dangers of LGBTQ+ policies, in sports, restrooms, school curricula and books — but there was also discussion of concerns (shared on left and right) over youth screen use, online predators and artificial intelligence.

The event made room for MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services. Descovich interviewed Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general who is working to eliminate all vaccine mandates for the state’s schoolchildren.

But the move by Moms for Liberty to attract young conservatives elevated the energy in the room. It was apparent not only in a tribute to Kirk, the slain founder of Turning Point USA, which trains young conservatives on high school and college campuses. About 40 Florida TPUSA members took the ballroom stage to accept the “Liberty Sword,” the group’s highest honor, posthumously awarded to Kirk.

Related: Red school boards in a blue state asked Trump for help — and got it

It also showed up in a breakout session of mostly conservative social media influencers and podcasters who offered tips on using humor and handling online trolls: Lydia Shaffer (aka the Conservative Barbie 2.0), Alex Stein, Gates Garcia, Kaitlin Bennett, Angela Belcamino (known as “The Bold Lib,” who said she was surprised to have been invited), and Jayme Franklin, who in addition to her podcast is the Gen Z founder of The Conservateur, a conservative lifestyle brand that The New Yorker called “Vogue, But for Trumpers.”

They have built huge followings based on their compulsion to provoke. “We need to go back to biblical values of what it means to be a real man and what it means to be a real woman,” urged Franklin. “People want that guidance, and that needs to begin at church. We need to push people back into the pews.”

Their inclusion, like that of conservative commentator Benny Johnson, who moderated a panel, “Fathers: The Defenders of the Family,” appeared to recognize a need to expand the base — and be edgier. Johnson charged out on stage and trumpeted that “God’s first commandment to us was, ‘Go, be fruitful, multiply.’ Go make babies!!!!” He quipped that “right-wing moms, they’re happier, right?” and asked the crowd, “Any trad wife moms out there?”

The phrase is shorthand for a woman who embraces a traditional domestic role, often with an emphasis on fashion and style. Johnson — who credited Kirk for prodding him to find Jesus, get married and become a father (he has four children) — argued that Republicans, especially those in Gen Z, should embrace the traditional nuclear family identity as a winning political move.

“We are the party of parents. We are the party of children,” he said, adding that traditional values were already dominating culture and politics. “We live in a center-right country. And I’m tired of pretending that we don’t,” he said, and showed a map of red and blue votes in the 2024 presidential election. “This is the shift. You live in a red kingdom.”

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

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

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October 21, 2025

Tag: Race

At some private colleges, male applicants are more likely to get in

Zohran Mamdani addresses supporters after winning 2025 NYC mayoral race (PBS NewsHour)

A One-Man Campaign?