1. Can Equitable Grading Work?
READ: Matt Barnum spoke with Joe Feldman, a former principal turned consultant, about his “Grading for Equity” model, which focuses solely on demonstrated learning without grades or penalties for late work, homework, behavior, or attendance. Feldman argues that traditional grading is biased and punishes disadvantaged students, and while it’s gained traction in some urban school systems like New York and Los Angeles, it also faces skepticism from teachers:
When Jake Johnson, a high-school math teacher in Rochester, Minn., learned about equitable grading several years ago, he was eager to give it a shot.
He quickly ran into practical challenges. When students realized they could retake tests as often as they wanted, they began putting off studying, Johnson said. As the year went on, students fell behind.
Rochester made equitable grading mandatory for all teachers in 2020. Many came to resent it, Johnson and others said. Teachers had to grade and regrade assignments, and even create new work for students to retake.
“It was really toxic. It was really bad for student learning,” Johnson said.
Read more in the Wall Street Journal here.
2. New Fund for Civil Rights
READ: Shaheena Simons resigned from the Department of Justice in protest of the Trump administration’s decision to defund efforts to fight educational discrimination. She’s now co-chairing a new Public Education Defense Fund that will support families the Fund says have been abandoned by the weakening of the Office for Civil Rights. The fund will connect families with pro-bono attorneys and former Office for Civil Rights lawyers to investigate violations at schools:
“The administration has been very clear that resources are going to be allocated to certain identified priorities,” [Simons] said — primarily keeping trans students out of women’s sports and punishing universities it accuses of tolerating anti-semitism. But that agenda, she said, “is leaving a lot of parents and kids with nowhere to turn.”
Read more from Linda Jacobson in The 74 here.
3. GOP Eyes National School Choice Push
READ: A major Republican-backed budget bill in Congress could establish a $5 billion federal tax-credit scholarship program, effectively creating a national private school choice initiative. Supporters see it as a breakthrough opportunity for educational access, while critics argue that it undermines public education and allows discrimination with little oversight:
Tax credits would be distributed on a first-come, first-serve basis, up to $5 billion a year. Each state would be guaranteed at least $20 million.
Scholarship-granting organizations would distribute the money to eligible students, who could use scholarships not just for tuition but also for books, homeschooling supplies, fees, and educational therapies. These organizations might support certain types of schools, for example Catholic or Jewish religious schools, or serve certain student groups.
Families earning more than 300% of their region’s gross median income would not be eligible. That excludes the most well-to-do families. But an analysis from the Brookings Institution found that threshold would mean wealthy families in areas with high median income would still qualify, while middle-class families in poorer areas might be excluded.
Read more from Erika Meltzer in Chalkbeat here.
4. Rural Teachers at Risk
READ: Federal cuts to teacher-training grants have left rural programs like Jaci Grado’s, a first-generation college student training to become a teacher in rural Nebraska, scrambling to survive, threatening efforts to grow and retain local educators. Lawsuits to restore funding have failed, putting students, schools, and the future of rural teaching pipelines at serious risk:
Elizabeth City Superintendent Keith Parker said federal funding has been essential to districts like his with smaller populations and lower tax revenues. He credited the support for helping him attract applicants and reduce vacancies from more than 40 in the summer of 2022 to only four today. (Parker noted that vacancies peak in the summer and said he anticipated them to tick up before the next academic year.)
“These grants have allowed us to be competitive,” he said. “We’ve been able to say to a young college graduate, ‘Come here and teach, commit to us, because there are opportunities for you to grow here.’”
In addition, Parker said the terminated grants paid the salaries of at least four teachers, and the district needed to find a couple hundred thousand dollars immediately to pay them for the remainder of this academic year, requiring the cancellation or postponement of several dozen school maintenance projects, such as repairing leaky roofs.
Read more from Chris Berdik in The Hechinger Report here.
5. Chaos Threatens Head Start
READ: In early April, a suspicious-sounding email from “defendthespend@hhs.gov,” later confirmed as legitimate by the Department of Health and Human Services, upended funding for Head Start child-care centers. Providers have faced delayed payments, administrative confusion, staff departures, and rising fear among families about whether centers will remain open. A federal lawsuit led by the ACLU argues these efforts violate the separation of powers and unlawfully target equity-based programs. Despite bipartisan historical support, Head Start is now caught in the crosshairs of ideological warfare, threatening a program that serves over 800,000 low-income children nationwide:
In my conversations with Head Start providers, advocates, and program specialists across seven states in the last few weeks, the mood has been a mix of anger, sadness, hope, and trepidation. “We always lose staff in the summer,” Haimowitz, of the Massachusetts association, told me. “We’re really nervous this year about how many of our staff will be looking for jobs in public schools, although that’s not our only competition. We also compete with Amazon and Target.” Some families, she went on, “think their child’s school might not be there tomorrow. They may be considering putting their children in less safe environments that may feel more stable, so that they can keep their jobs. Or they may be considering leaving the workforce altogether.”
Read more from Jessica Winter in The New Yorker here.
6. The Kindergarten Crisis
READ: Kindergarteners now have the highest chronic absenteeism rate of any elementary grade in many states. Patrick O’Donnell at The 74 spoke with experts who warn that early absences can set harmful academic, behavioral, and attendance habits that can snowball over time:
“Kids who missed school in kindergarten do less well academically in terms of things like counting, letters, word identification, language skills.., they do less well in terms of their executive function skills, and they do less well socially and behaviorally,” [Ohio State University professor Arya] Ansari said.
Read more from Patrick O’Donnell in The 74 here.
7. Kid Books Under Adult Rules
READ: For over 150 years, Americans have debated what kids should read and why. But as reading declines, Shirley Li argues that rigid rules and over-analysis have squashed kids’ love of books - and maybe the best fix is to give them more freedom:
In 1888, the librarian C. M. Hewins argued that the last thing adults should do is oversimplify stories for children; they’ll “know nothing in later years of great originals” if they start out reading watered-down tales. Wellman, a decade-plus afterward, insisted that children’s books should impart on kids “the standards of right and wrong.” More than a century later, the Goosebumps author R. L. Stine would refute the notion that there should be any rules at all for kids’ literature. “Adults are allowed to read anything they want. Adults don’t have to have characters learn and grow. Adults can read all kinds of trash and no one criticizes them. Why do kids have to have that?” he told my colleague Adrienne LaFrance in 2018. “I thought it would be great to write a bunch of kids’ books where no one learns and no one grows.” The result, for Stine, has been a massively successful series of novels that has spawned a hit show and multiple film adaptations.
Read more in The Atlantic here.