1. Family Engagement in Jeopardy
READ: The Trump administration’s executive order calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education threatens essential federal programs that support family and community engagement, often key drivers of student success for vulnerable students. Vito J. Borrello, the inaugural executive director for the National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement, argued in The 74 that well-resourced family engagement must remain a national priority:
There is a nonpartisan and common desire to better connect schools, families, and communities in authentic ways based on shared power, trust, and accountability. It is also widely agreed that schools, and the education system more broadly, can do a lot more to support these relationships.
Read more here.
2. Testing Takes a Hit
READ: As Florida weighs a decision to drop key testing requirements for high school graduation, Jessica Grose took to the pages of The New York Times to argue that eliminating standardized test requirements will widen the “honesty gap,” where grades rise but skills decline, leaving parents unaware of students’ struggles. Grose pointed to states like Mississippi, Ohio, and Louisiana, which took a pattern of failing test scores and used it to implement interventions that increased literacy rates, as rationale for keeping the tests:
It’s not magic. If we no longer have reliable federal test scores to measure states against each other and see what’s working, we won’t even have these small wins. We won’t know they’re happening in the first place.
Read more here.
3. Charters on the Rise in Colorado
READ: As overall public school enrollment declines in Colorado, charter school attendance continues to rise, growing nearly 13% since 2017, while district-run schools saw a 5.6% drop. Advocates say this shift in enrollment and rise in competition has reshaped Colorado’s school landscape to one of choice and innovation. Executive director of Vega Collegiate Academy Kate Mullins says her team’s ability to identify and respond to the school community’s greatest needs has helped spur its growth:
Many of the families they encountered were new immigrants who responded to Vega’s free busing to the school, free school supplies, before- and after-school care, a four-day school week with optional Saturday school, and shorter summer breaks.
“For our families, that provides a lot of consistency,” Mullins said.
The school didn’t have to spend much of its $50,000 marketing budget last year, because many of those migrant families spread the word to other newly arriving families, she said.
“The kids are there,” Mullins said. “They just have to believe you’re the right place for them.”
Read more from Yesenia Robles and Kae Petrin in Chalkbeat here.
4. Lawmakers Target the Attendance Crisis
READ: Evie Blad reported on the increasing number of bills making their way through state legislatures to address chronic absenteeism. The bills aim to standardize absence definitions, improve data tracking, and support early interventions. While some proposals focus on prevention and support, others introduce controversial incentives or penalties. Virginia state Rep. Jackie Glass cautioned her colleagues to remember the core purpose of these bills:
“It isn’t just about whether a student is in a seat. It’s one of the most critical indicators of academic success, intervention needs, and even economic mobility.”
Read more in Education Week here.
5. America’s Brain Drain Begins
READ: Neel V. Patel took a closer look at how the federal funding cuts under the Trump administration are dismantling the pipeline for America’s next generation of scientists. Graduate students and early-career researchers are losing fellowships, postdoctoral opportunities, and vital grant support, forcing many to consider leaving science or the U.S. altogether. Major agencies like the NIH and NSF have slashed programs, paused hiring, and withdrawn support for diversity initiatives, eroding the infrastructure that once made the U.S. a global leader in innovation:
Of 1,200 U.S. scientists who responded to a poll conducted by the journal Nature, 75 percent said they were considering leaving the country. Countries like France, China and the Netherlands are courting them. Those who are already abroad are considering staying there, like Atticus Cummings, a 24-year-old graduate student in Barcelona who is exploring how to make buildings out of carbon-reducing materials. He’d prefer to return to the United States and build sustainable, affordable housing in his home state, Montana, but wonders if that will be feasible by the time he graduates. “My heart is in the mountains at home,” he said.
Read more in The New York Times here.
6. Millions in Loan Limbo
READ: One day after Trump signed an executive order calling for the dismantling of the Department of Education, he announced that the functions of the Office of Federal Student Aid, which manages $1.6 trillion in loans for 43 million Americans, would be relocated to the Small Business Administration. Employees like Rachel Gittleman, who worked in the Ombudsman group handling hundreds of borrower complaints and scams, promptly lost their jobs. Gittleman had an open caseload of 322 complaints at the time of her firing:
“I’ll be doing something at home, and a case will pop up in my head,” Gittleman told me last week. “I had dozens of borrowers who were trying to get on income-driven repayment programs. I’d been working on one case for two years.” She was proud of having helped a public librarian who’d had to declare bankruptcy “become debt-free.” She had received a family Christmas card from a borrower with a debilitating illness. It’s unclear what will happen to the three-hundred-plus complaints that Gittleman had been working on. “I never got to transition my cases,” she told me. “My e-mail was actually shut off before I got fired.”
Read more from E. Tammy Kim in The New Yorker here.
7. Decoding Education Coverage
READ: Alexander Russo interviewed the recently retired political scientist and education researcher Jeff Henig for a wide-ranging conversation on media coverage of education and its entanglement with broader political narratives. Henig critiqued the press for overstating “new” findings and encouraged journalists to embrace historical and political context and nuance:
There’s a core of education journalists who consistently take the time to put contemporary education policies in historical context, and who try to avoid treating each new study in isolation from the broader literature. But education lacks the stature of some higher-profile beats, so often those covering the field don’t have deep background knowledge that would help them distinguish what’s new from what is not. And sometimes that means recognizing differences.
Journalists sometimes fold the more recent voucher and Education Savings Account policies into a broad phenomenon they label “choice,” without realizing that recent universal voucher programs are quite different from older programs that limited vouchers to those with greater need, and without distinguishing between programs, like charters, that include mechanisms for public accountability and newer ones that don’t require participating schools to report on what they do or what their students learn.
Read more in The Grade here.