In the fourth school year since book bans proliferated on local school board levels, districts are now also facing federal and state pressures to ban books, according to a report released Oct. 1 by PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for free speech.
The organization noted that federal efforts to influence education issues are repeating state and local book banning rhetoric, which it calls a “a new vector of book banning pressure.” For example, the parental rights movement behind book banning is being repeated at the federal level in executive orders leading to the reversal of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and LGBTQ+ inclusion.
The escalating book censorship campaigns usurp educators’ time that would otherwise be used for instruction, can subject them to harassment, and also leads to them spending long hours cataloging books and dedicating more administrative time to comply with bans, the report said. Districts are also incurring “significant” legal costs navigating lawsuits.
Dive Insight:
There were 6,870 instances of book bans across 23 states and 87 public school districts in the 2024-25 school year, according to PEN America. That totals 22,810 cases of book bans across 45 states and 451 public school districts since the organization began tracking the issue in July 2021.
PEN America’s definition of “bans” includes books that have been taken off the shelf pending investigation, and any other steps taken against books as a result of parent, community or government pushback leading to limited student access.
“From a birds’ eye view, school districts today are surrounded by multiple and persistent local, state, and now federal pressures to ban books, with diminishing reasons not to,” the report said.
At the federal level, the Trump administration’s U.S. Department of Education in January rescinded Biden-era guidance. That guidance had warned school districts that they could violate civil rights law by implementing book bans, and it said that removing “age-inappropriate” books from schools is a parent and community decision that the federal government “has no role in.”
At the same time, the department dismissed 11 civil rights complaints related to book bans.
It also eliminated the position of a book ban coordinator, created by the Biden administration in 2023 to develop training for schools on navigating book bans.
Four years after the initial wave of book bans swept localities, communities and educators “have been conditioned to expect book challenges and bans as part of the U.S. education system,” PEN America said in a statement.
“A disturbing ‘everyday banning’ and normalization of censorship has worsened and spread over the last four years,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Read program, in an Oct. 1 statement. “The result is unprecedented.”
Districts are responding by removing books to comply out of fear of losing funding, staff being fired or harassed, and sometimes having police involvement, the organization said.
In an August 2024 report, the Knight Foundation found in a survey of over 4,500 adults that two-thirds of Americans oppose book restrictions in schools and even more are confident in public schools’ book selection. More Americans said in that survey that it was more concerning to restrict students’ access to books with educational value than it was to provide them with access to books that have inappropriate content.
However, a majority (6 in 10) also said that age appropriateness — as opposed to parents’ political views, religious beliefs or moral values — was a legitimate reason to restrict students’ book access. The survey included responses from over 1,100 pre-K-12 parents.
Some 16,100 international students could be deterred from studying in the UK in the first year universities are levied 6% of all their international student fees, comes the stark warning from a new report from the think tank Public First.
Should the government make good on the proposal – outlined in the immigration white paper earlier this year – this figure could rocket to more than 77,000 students in the first five years of its implementation, the report predicts.
The government expects universities to pass the increased costs onto international students themselves by raising fees. But Public First cautioned that such a move would have catastrophic consequences by driving international students away, hitting the UK’s economy by £2.2 billion over five years and leading to a reduction of 135,000 university places for domestic students.
The think tank projected that a 6.38% international student fee increase – necessary for universities to pass on the entire cost of the levy – would have a far greater impact on students’ decision to study in the UK than the government has anticipated.
This is because the government’s forecasts were based on data for EU students. However, Public First noted that price elasticity of demand for non-EU students is greater than their EU counterparts – meaning they would be more likely to be look elsewhere if they found UK fees too expensive.
Jonathan Simons, partner at Public First and author of the report, noted that the projected impact of the levy “is much more severe than had been predicted previously”.
It is not widely understood just how much our economy is supported by international students and it’s really crucial that any policy that could affect international student numbers is considered through this lens
Jonathan Simons, Public First
“This, of course, will hit our universities, around 40% of whom are already in deficit, and that could lead to a further loss of jobs, a loss of university places for UK students and a loss of vital research investment,” he added.
“Perhaps even more significant, though, is the hit an international student levy could cause to local, regional and national economies across the UK. It is not widely understood just how much our economy is supported by international students and it’s really crucial that any policy that could affect international student numbers is considered through this lens.”
Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership and chair of the Growing Together Alliance, said that the levy was opposed by all of England’s major regional employer organisations “because the resulting decline in international students would be hugely damaging to all the regions of the country”.
“The Chancellor should take note of the economic damage of this policy which undermines a critical UK export and we have requested an urgent meeting to raise our concerns,” he said.
The proposed levy has been widely criticised by higher education institutions.
Last month, a HEPI analysis predicted that UK universities could take a £621m hit if the policy goes ahead, with those situated in big metropolitan cities set to be the worst affected.
A new report from the Center for American Progress and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund shows that historically Black colleges and universities receive a disproportionately low percentage of federal research and development funding.
While HBCUs make up roughly 3 percent of all four-year higher ed institutions, they’ve received less than 3 percent of R&D funding since at least 2010, according to the report. In recent years, between 2018 and 2023, they were awarded less than 1 percent of R&D expenditures.
Some agencies have given HBCUs a relatively high proportion of R&D funding, including the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration and the Department of Agriculture, which has required allotments for land-grant HBCUs. But the two federal agencies that award the most R&D funding annually, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense, have doled out especially low shares of those funds to HBCUs; in 2023, they awarded 0.54 percent and 0.40 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, 17 of the 43 federal agencies that supply research funding didn’t give HBCUs any R&D funds at all that year.
Sara Partridge, associate director of higher education policy at CAP and co-author of the report, said both Republicans and Democrats have sought to address inequities in R&D funding, but their efforts have been insufficient.
“In order to support these key drivers of scientific achievement and upward mobility, we need federal policymakers to commit to measurable benchmarks for the share of funds awarded to these institutions,” she said in a press release.
A new report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement found that even though parenting students are especially dedicated to their studies, they face significant obstacles in college.
The report, based on a 2024 survey of students from 164 community colleges, found that parenting students were more engaged than nonparenting students across multiple benchmarks, including coming to class prepared and never skipping classes, despite their additional responsibilities. These students were also more likely than nonparents to have earned an associate degree or certificate or to mention changing careers as a goal.
But even with such strong drive, 71 percent of student parents reported caring for dependents could cause them to withdraw from college; 73 percent said financial circumstances might make them stop out. Student parents were also more likely than nonparents to face food and housing insecurity, but only small fractions of students reported receiving food or housing support from their college in the last month. In a similar vein, a third of students with children say that their colleges don’t adequately support them as parents. Meanwhile, these students say underutilized supports that could help them, including campus childcare services, financial advising and career counseling, the report found.
The report also offers examples of higher ed institutions that have put in place effective supports for student parents. For example, Lee College in Texas offers weekly financial assistance for childcare and family-friendly study areas. Monroe Community College in New York created a designated student success coach role to serve single mothers.
“Parenting students are among the most engaged learners on our campuses, but they face barriers that too often derail their progress,” Linda García, CCCSE’s executive director, said in a news release. “But when colleges take intentional steps to support them, the impact is not only on students, but on their children and communities.”
Yesterday, HEPI and Cambridge University Press and Assessment jointly hosted the UK launch of the OECD’s Education at a Glance. You can see the OECD’s slides here.
Here we publish a response to the OECD from Professor Sir Chris Husbands, who is a former Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University and also former Chair of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) Panel. Chris is a Trustee of HEPI and spoke at the launch.
There is one line in the 2025 OECD Education at a Glance report which should be in bright flashing lights for this and all governments. The supporting data is on page 112 of the main report. It is this: Individuals with greater educational attainment generally face a lower risk of unemployment and earn higher wages. Race, gender, deprivation, place, subjects studied all impact outcomes in different ways, but the overall conclusion is clear, and in his HEPI briefing on the report, the OECD’s chief analyst Andreas Schleicher got the summary down to just two words: education pays.
The 2025 OECD Education at a Glance report comes in at 541 pages, and the annual appearance of the report has made it the definitive guide to education system performance and policy dynamics all around the world: in the now familiar graphs of compelling clarity, and crisp text judgements, the OECD team have made themselves indispensable to institutional leaders, policy analysts and decision makers.
This year’s report has a specific focus on tertiary education, which in OECD terms includes, but stretches a bit further than, higher education. There are some familiar and unsurprising themes in the 2025 report, but they are nonetheless important for being set out so clearly. A few key findings stood out for me, all of them speaking clearly to the English and UK policy agendas.
First, advantages are inherited: those who have at least one tertiary-educated parent are more than twice as likely to attain a tertiary qualification than those whose parents have below upper secondary attainment, though the gap is smaller in the UK than elsewhere (p.56).
Secondly, life is getting tougher for those without qualifications: the employment rate for young adults without upper secondary qualifications fell by 6 points since 2019, and by 9 points for men (pp.82-3).
Thirdly, at the same it’s getting better for the better qualified: the nearly one-in-six with a Master’s degree have higher employment rates and earnings than those with an undergraduate degree (p48).
Fourthly, education is losing the battle for public funding as the costs of health, pensions and defence rise: between 2015 and 2022, government spending on education declined from nearly 11% of budgets to just over 10% (p.278).
And fifthly, despite that decline, R&D is strengthening to drive growth and competitiveness. Where it is highest, government drives it: in the UK, Israel and Switzerland, government R&D expenditure is more than twice private expenditure (p.329).
There is more fine-grained analysis about English higher education. England, on the OECD data, is an outlier in important respects.
First: English HE is well-funded by comparison with the OECD, whatever it feels like in the sector just now. The finding is important: total tertiary expenditure per student, including R&D, is $35,000, among the highest in the OECD and 65% above the average (p.327).
Secondly, however, in the UK government tertiary expenditure is $8,000, 48% below the OECD average (p.331). This is a result of high tuition fees: undergraduate fees are three times the OECD average.
The third way in which England is an outlier is that access to higher education and completion rates within it are high – fourteen percentage points above the OECD average (p.246): access to higher education is far more a consequence of maintenance support than fee levels, but high fee levels almost certainly disincentivise non-completion. Finally, while there is a gap between economic returns to science and technology disciplines on the one hand and arts and humanities on the other in all OECD countries, the gap is much higher in the UK than in almost all other countries (p.111).
Putting all this together poses some knotty challenges. England has a successful, relatively accessible higher education system, but one which is very expensive when budgets for education are getting tighter. And this is happening when the economic returns to high levels of qualification are strengthening: masters and doctoral graduates enjoy higher returns than those with undergraduate degrees, while the least qualified face more intense difficulties. These challenges go beyond the voluminous data in Education at a Glance.
First, and painful for English higher education, the challenge is not simply the level of current funding, but funding in relation to what is a high-cost operating and delivery model. That model secures strong results in terms of access for disadvantaged students and high completion rates, but it is relatively inflexible. It’s unclear whether a lower-cost and potentially more flexible operating model would put some of the successes of the English system at risk.
Secondly, it is the economic, social and increasingly political costs of the plight of the lowest attaining young people, and especially young males without qualifications, which is attracting political attention. If money is tight, it’s more likely to go towards that problem, and the London government’s decision to move skills funding into the Department of Work and Pensions appears to be a signal of intent.
These are the leadership challenges which emerge from this year’s report: how to reshape our successful HE system so that its strengths remain, but it can be more responsive and flexible. It needs to adapt to a changing labour market and to a society in which division and inequality are being reinforced with greater ferocity.
This story was reported by and originally published by APM Reports in connection with its podcast Sold a Story: How Teach Kids to Read Went So Wrong.
When voters elected Donald Trump in November, most people who worked at the U.S. Department of Education weren’t scared for their jobs. They had been through a Trump presidency before, and they hadn’t seen big changes in their department then. They saw their work as essential, mandated by law, nonpartisan and, as a result, insulated from politics.
Then, in early February, the Department of Government Efficiency showed up. Led at the time by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, and known by the cheeky acronym DOGE, it gutted the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, posting on X that the effort would ferret out “waste, fraud and abuse.”
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A post from the Department of Government Efficiency.
When it was done, DOGE had cut approximately $900 million in research contracts and more than 90 percent of the institute’s workforce had been laid off. (The current value of the contracts was closer to $820 million, data compiled by APM Reports shows, and the actual savings to the government was substantially less, because in some cases large amounts of money had been spent already.)
Among staff cast aside were those who worked on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — also known as the Nation’s Report Card — which is one of the few federal education initiatives the Trump administration says it sees as valuable and wants to preserve.
The assessment is a series of tests administered nearly every year to a national sample of more than 10,000 students in grades 4, 8 and 12. The tests regularly measure what students across the country know in reading, math and other subjects. They allow the government to track how well America’s students are learning overall. Researchers can also combine the national data with the results of tests administered by states to draw comparisons between schools and districts in different states.
The assessment is “something we absolutely need to keep,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said at an education and technology summit in San Diego earlier this year. “If we don’t, states can be a little manipulative with their own results and their own testing. I think it’s a way that we keep everybody honest.”
But researchers and former Department of Education employees say they worry that the test will become less and less reliable over time, because the deep cuts will cause its quality to slip — and some already see signs of trouble.
“The main indication is that there just aren’t the staff,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford University professor who uses the testing data to research gaps in learning between students of different income levels.
All but one of the experts who make sure the questions in the assessment are fair and accurate — called psychometricians — have been laid off from the National Center for Education Statistics. These specialists play a key role in updating the test and making sure it accurately measures what students know.
“These are extremely sophisticated test assessments that required a team of researchers to make them as good as they are,” said Mark Seidenberg, a researcher known for his significant contributions to the science of reading. Seidenberg added that “a half-baked” assessment would undermine public confidence in the results, which he described as “essentially another way of killing” the assessment.
The Department of Education defended its management of the assessment in an email: “Every member of the team is working toward the same goal of maintaining NAEP’s gold-standard status,” it read in part.
The National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policies for the national test, said in a statement that it had temporarily assigned “five staff members who have appropriate technical expertise (in psychometrics, assessment operations, and statistics) and federal contract management experience” to work at the National Center for Education Statistics. No one from DOGE responded to a request for comment.
Harvard education professor Andrew Ho, a former member of the governing board, said the remaining staff are capable, but he’s concerned that there aren’t enough of them to prevent errors.
“In order to put a good product up, you need a certain number of person-hours, and a certain amount of continuity and experience doing exactly this kind of job, and that’s what we lost,” Ho said.
The Trump administration has already delayed the release of some testing data following the cutbacks. The Department of Education had previously planned to announce the results of the tests for 8th grade science, 12th grade math and 12th grade reading this summer; now that won’t happen until September. The board voted earlier this year to eliminate more than a dozen tests over the next seven years, including fourth grade science in 2028 and U.S. history for 12th graders in 2030. The governing board has also asked Congress to postpone the 2028 tests to 2029, citing a desire to avoid releasing test results in an election year.
“Today’s actions reflect what assessments the Governing Board believes are most valuable to stakeholders and can be best assessed by NAEP at this time, given the imperative for cost efficiencies,” board chair and former North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue said earlier this year in a press release.
The National Assessment Governing Board canceled more than a dozen tests when it revised the schedule for the National Assessment of Educational Progress in April. This annotated version of the previous schedule, adopted in 2023, shows which tests were canceled. Topics shown in all caps were scheduled for a potential overhaul; those annotated with a red star are no longer scheduled for such a revision.
Recent estimates peg the annual cost to keep the national assessment running at about $190 million per year, a fraction of the department’s 2025 budget of approximately $195 billion.
Adam Gamoran, president of the William T. Grant Foundation, said multiple contracts with private firms — overseen by Department of Education staff with “substantial expertise” — are the backbone of the national test.
“You need a staff,” said Gamoran, who was nominated last year to lead the Institute of Education Sciences. He was never confirmed by the Senate. “The fact that NCES now only has three employees indicates that they can’t possibly implement NAEP at a high level of quality, because they lack the in-house expertise to oversee that work. So that is deeply troubling.”
The cutbacks were widespread — and far outside of what most former employees had expected under the new administration.
“I don’t think any of us imagined this in our worst nightmares,” said a former Education Department employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. “We weren’t concerned about the utter destruction of this national resource of data.”
“At what point does it break?” the former employee asked.
Every state has its own test for reading, math and other subjects. But state tests vary in difficulty and content, which makes it tricky to compare results in Minnesota to Mississippi or Montana.
“They’re totally different tests with different scales,” Reardon said. “So NAEP is the Rosetta stone that lets them all be connected.”
Reardon and his team at Stanford used statistical techniques to combine the federal assessment results with state test scores and other data sets to create the Educational Opportunity Project. The project, first released in 2016 and updated periodically in the years that followed, shows which schools and districts are getting the best results — especially for kids from poor families. Since the project’s release, Reardon said, the data has been downloaded 50,000 times and is used by researchers, teachers, parents, school boards and state education leaders to inform their decisions.
For instance, the U.S. military used the data to measure school quality when weighing base closures, and superintendents used it to find demographically similar but higher-performing districts to learn from, Reardon said.
If the quality of the data slips, those comparisons will be more difficult to make.
“My worry is we just have less-good information on which to base educational decisions at the district, state and school level,” Reardon said. “We would be in the position of trying to improve the education system with no information. Sort of like, ‘Well, let’s hope this works. We won’t know, but it sounds like a good idea.’”
Seidenberg, the reading researcher, said the national assessment “provided extraordinarily important, reliable information about how we’re doing in terms of teaching kids to read and how literacy is faring in the culture at large.”
Producing a test without keeping the quality up, Seidenberg said, “would be almost as bad as not collecting the data at all.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
A large majority of financial aid administrators, 72%, say they’ve experienced “noticeable changes” in the Federal Student Aid office’s communications, responsiveness and processing timelines since the U.S. Department of Education’s mass layoffs in March.
That’s according to a July survey conducted by the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. The results also show that “federal support channels for students are breaking down,” including through issues with call centers, NASFAA said.
These disruptions are hampering colleges’ ability to assist students, it said. “Unless federal service channels stabilize, the aid system risks becoming less accessible, less predictable, and less trusted by the very students it is intended to serve,” it added.
Dive Insight:
When the Education Department moved to lay off roughly half its staff in March, student advocates voiced concerns that the agency wouldn’t have enough workers to carry out core functions, including financial aid services.
NASFAA’s survey builds on those concerns. The survey found that higher shares of financial aid administrators surveyed in July said they are experiencing delays and a lack of communication from the Education Department than those polled just two months before.
For instance, 59% of officials surveyed in May said they had experienced disruptions in the Federal Student Aid office’s responsiveness, communication and processing timelines — a number that has since jumped to 72%.
Ellen Keast, deputy press secretary at the Education Department, sharply rebuked the survey.
“It is an embarrassment for NASFAA to release a ‘survey’ that blatantly parrots falsehoods and is not representative of the higher education community nor the American people’s overwhelming charge for change,” Keast said in an emailed statement Wednesday. “Clearly, NASFAA is peddling a false narrative to preserve the status quo.”
An Education Department official accused the survey of having methodological shortcomings. The official pointed to the survey’s response rate — completed by over 549 institutions — saying that represents less than 10% of the roughly 5,800 colleges that work with Federal Student Aid.
The official also said questions spurred respondents to report negative experiences and that those polled were overrepresented by administrators working at nonprofit and public four-year colleges, which the agency accused as being the most likely to oppose the Trump administration.
Additionally, the official said the mass layoffs did not impact FAFSA staff or Federal Student Aid’s ability to serve customers.
Melanie Storey, president and CEO of NASFAA, said in a statement that the survey reflects “the real, everyday experiences of financial aid professionals.”
“To dismiss these concerns as fabricated or political undermines the expertise of those working directly with students every day, eager to deliver on the promise of postsecondary education, and shows that the administration is not interested in working with experts in the field to achieve the best results for students; instead, it is focused on advancing its own agenda,” Storey said.
In the survey, 32% of respondents said they’ve experienced processing delays for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid since May.
Earlier this month, the Education Department began beta-testing for the 2026-27 FAFSA form. So far, more than 1,000 students have completed the form, according to a department official.
Meanwhile, 49% of financial aid administrators have experienced processing delays with the e-App, the application colleges submit to the Education Department to participate in federal financial aid programs. Among colleges that submitted the e-App, 63% said in July that it still had not been processed.
More students are reaching out to their financial aid offices, according to the survey. Sixty percent of administrators said they’ve seen spikes in student questions about the Education Department’s services in the July poll, compared with 45% who said the same in May.
While several respondents said students were confused about the FAFSA process or federal aid, not all officials specified whether the inquiries were related to the Education Department’s mass layoffs or other recent federal changes.
Republicans recently made sweeping changes to the student loan system through their massive domestic policy bill signed into law in July. That includes consolidating the student loan repayment programs into just two options and phasing out Grad PLUS loans, which allow graduate and professional students to borrow up to the cost of attendance.
Critics have noted that the Education Department will have to carry out the vast policy changes mandated by the bill with about half the workforce it had before President Donald Trump retook office.
U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon has framed the layoffs as the first step to Trump’s goal of eliminating the Education Department and shifting its duties elsewhere — a change that would require congressional approval.
A federal judge initially blocked the Education Department’s mass layoffs, but the U.S. Supreme Court lifted that order in July while litigation challenging their legality proceeds.
It’s the latest in a series of data privacy incidents affecting L.A. schools, including a high-profile 2022 ransomware attack exposing students’ sensitive mental health records and last year’s collapse of a much-lauded $6 million artificial intelligence chatbot project.
In the news
Students at the center of Trump’s D.C. police takeover: In an unprecedented federal power grab, the Trump administration’s seizure of the D.C. police department and National Guard deployment is designed to target several vulnerable groups — including kids. | NPR
The move comes at a time when crime in the nation’s capital is on the decline. But a deep-dive from June explores how the district’s failure to prevent student absences has contributed to “the biggest youth crime surge in a generation.” | The Washington Post
Here’s what young people have to say about Trump’s D.C. takeover. | NBC 4
City police will roll out a youth-specific curfew Friday in the Navy Yard neighborhood. | Fox 5
A new Ohio law requires school districts to implement basic cybersecurity measures in response to heightened cyberattacks. What the law doesn’t do, however, is provide any money to carry out the new mandate. | WBNS
News in Trump’s immigration crackdown: A federal judge in Minnesota has released from immigration detention a nursing 25-year-old mother, allowing her to return to her children as her case works its way through the court. | The Minnesota Star Tribune
The Trump administration has revived one of its most controversial immigration policies from the president’s first term: Separating families. | The New York Times
Federal immigration officials quizzed an Idaho school resource officer about an unaccompanied migrant student, part of a broader national effort to conduct “welfare checks” on immigrant youth who came to the U.S. without their parents. | InvestigateWest
Leading Oklahoma Republican lawmakers have partnered with the Trump administration in a lawsuit challenging a state law allowing undocumented students to receive in-state college tuition. | InsideHigherEd
Los Angeles community members have organized to create protective perimeters around the city’s campuses after immigration agents reportedly drew their guns on a student outside a high school. | Los Angeles Times
The district announced new bus routes designed to improve student safety while commuting to school during heightened immigration enforcement. | NBC 4
The nonprofit Southwest Key, which for years has been the federal government’s largest provider of shelters for unaccompanied migrant children, has laid off thousands in Texas and Arizona after losing federal grants. The Trump administration dropped a lawsuit in March over allegations the nonprofit subjected migrant children to widespread sexual abuse. | ABC 15
A Texas court blocked the state attorney general’s request to depose and question a nun who leads Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, one of the largest migrant aid groups in the region. | The Texas Tribune
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Microphone-equipped sensors installed in school bathrooms to crack down on student vaping could be hacked, researchers revealed, and turned into secret listening devices. | Wired
‘These are innocent children, sir’: New video of the delayed police response to the 2022 mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, shows the campus police chief attempting to negotiate with the gunman for more than 30 minutes. | The New York Times
Kansas schools have become the latest target in the Trump administration’s campaign against districts that permit transgender students to participate in school athletics. | KCTV
The Loudoun County, Virginia, school board has refused to comply with an Education Department order to end a policy allowing transgender students to use restroom facilities that match their gender identity. | LoudounNow
The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has opened an investigation into allegations the Baltimore school district ignored antisemetic harassment by students and educators. | The Baltimore Banner
Lots of drills — little evidence: A congressionally mandated report finds that active shooter drills vary widely across the country — making it difficult to understand their effect on mental and emotional health. | National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
A federal judge has blocked a new Arkansas law requiring that public schools display the Ten Commandments in all classrooms. It’s the second state Ten Commandments law to be halted this year. | Axios
ICYMI: I did a deep-dive into the far-right Christian nationalists behind more than two dozen state Ten Commandments-in-schools bills nationally — each of which are inherently identical. | The 74
Is Texas up next? Civil rights groups will ask a judge on Friday to prevent a similar law from going into effect. | Houston Chronicle
As K-12 leaders look for ways to strengthen trust, engagement, and belonging, a growing number of districts are turning to a key partner in the work: their students.
A new national report from the National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) and SchoolStatus reveals that districts that incorporate student voice into their communication strategies–through videos, messaging, and peer-created content–are seeing real results: stronger family engagement, increased student confidence, and more authentic school-community connection.
The report, Elevating Student Voice in School Communications: A Data-Informed Look at Emerging Practices in School PR, is based on a spring 2025 survey, which received 185 responses from K-12 communications professionals. It includes real-world examples from school districts to explore how student perspectives are being incorporated into communication strategies. It highlights the growing use of first-person student storytelling, direct-to-student messaging, and student internships as strategies to build trust, improve engagement, and strengthen school-community relationships.
“School communicators do more than share information. They help build connection, trust, and belonging in our communities,” said Barbara M. Hunter, APR, Executive Director of NSPRA. “Elevating student voice is not just a feel-good initiative. It is a powerful strategy to engage families, strengthen relationships, and improve student outcomes.”
Key findings include:
Video storytelling leads the way: 81 percent of districts using student voice strategies rely on video as their primary format.
Direct communication with students is growing, but there is room for improvement in this area: 65 percent of districts report at least some direct communication with students about matters that are also shared with families, such as academic updates, behavioral expectations or attendance
However, just 39 percent of districts copy students on email messages to families, and just 37 percent include students in family-teacher conferences, allowing them to be active participants
Internships on the rise: 30 percent of districts now involve students as interns or communication ambassadors, helping create content and amplify student perspectives
Equity efforts around student storytelling vary significantly. While some districts say they intentionally recruit students with diverse perspectives, fewer encourage multilingual storytelling or provide structured support to help students share their stories
Early results are promising: Districts report improved engagement, stronger student confidence, and more authentic communication when students are involved.
61 percent of districts that track comparisons report student-led content generates higher engagement than staff-created communications
80 percent of respondents observe that student voice positively impacts family engagement
A majority (55 percent) said direct communication with students improves academic outcomes
Building Inclusive Student Voice Strategies The report outlines a three-part approach for districts to strengthen student voice efforts:
Start with student presence by incorporating quotes, videos, and creative work into everyday communications to build trust and visibility
Develop shared ownership through internships, ambassador programs, and student participation in content creation and feedback
Build sustainable systems by aligning student voice efforts with district communications plans and regularly tracking engagement
The report also highlights inclusive practices, such as prioritizing student consent, offering mentorship and support for underrepresented students, featuring diverse stories, involving student panels in review processes and expanding multilingual and accessible communications.
“When districts invite students to take an active role in communication, it helps create stronger connections across the entire school community,” said Dr. Kara Stern, Director of Education for SchoolStatus. “This research shows the value of giving students meaningful opportunities to share their experiences in ways that build trust and engagement.”
The report also explores common challenges, including limited staff time and capacity, privacy considerations and hesitancy around addressing sensitive topics. To address these barriers and others, it offers practical strategies and scalable examples to help districts start or expand student voice initiatives, regardless of size or resources.
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
