Judge Restores Time for Schools to Spend COVID-19 Relief Funds
School officials are sighing in relief after a federal judge stopped the Trump administration from canceling COVID-19 relief funds—at least temporarily.
Judge Edgardo Ramos halted the administration’s decision to effectively cancel more than $1 billion in K-12 education funding for more than a dozen states— but left the door open for the U.S. Department of Education to again terminate the funding after giving states advance notice.
The May 6 order affects only the 16 states, and the District of Columbia, whose Democratic officials had sued. Ramos said they had shown sufficient reason to halt a March 28 letter from U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon abruptly announcing that the administration had moved up the due date for spending their remaining funds.
In their lawsuit, the states argued that the abrupt termination of the extensions was causing budget shortfalls.
In her March 28 letter, McMahon told states that, by failing to meet earlier deadlines for spending COVID-19 relief funding, states “ran the risk that the Department would deny your extension request.” The letter was sent after 5 p.m. on a Friday; the deadline for spending the funds had passed that same day at 5 p.m.
“Extending deadlines for COVID-related grants, which are in fact taxpayer funds, years after the COVID pandemic ended is not consistent with the Department’s priorities and thus not a worthwhile exercise of its discretion,” she wrote, adding the department would consider extensions on “an individual project-specific basis.”
Ramos said the reasoning in McMahon’s letter was “not a reasonable explanation” and that Congress didn’t intend for the funding to end when the federal government declared the COVID-19 emergency to be over, Courthouse News Service reported.
Along with the District of Columbia, the states that sued were Arizona, California, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.
Several state chiefs, including in GOP-led ones, pushed back on the abrupt rule change, arguing that schools would be forced to default on contracts and cut vital services. But only Democratic state officials sued, meaning only their states are affected for now.
Colleges Will Give a Leg Up in Admissions to Students Who Can Demonstrate Civility
A new pilot program shows that it might be possible to instill an ability to disagree productively in adolescents—and some of the nation’s top universities want to consider proof of that skill in admissions.
As part of Dialogues, a pilot by the peer-tutoring platform Schoolhouse.world, students ages 14 to 18 built portfolios showcasing their ability to disagree respectfully with other peers on hot-button topics.
Last week, eight selective colleges, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, and Vanderbilt University announced they will accept these “civility transcripts” among the factors they weigh in college-admissions decisions.
“I don’t want brittle students,” said Jim Nondorf, the dean of admissions and financial aid for the University of Chicago, one of the colleges that plans to use civility as a consideration during admission decisions. “I want students who can come here and add to the conversation on campus but do it in the right way.”
Studies have found that adolescents need guidance and opportunities to practice difficult conversations and respond to criticism without falling into “outrage cycles.” In particular, students may have more difficulty picking up social cues and understanding nuance in virtual arguments compared to in-person disagreements.
“It’s very easy in anonymous or asynchronous forums to just completely ‘other’ the other party—to think they’re idiots, think they’re evil, whatever,” said Salman Khan, the founder of the virtual education platform Khan Academy and co-founder of Schoolhouse.world. “That’s very hard to do in this [face-to-face] setting.”
Many school- and community-based programs focus on argument and discourse, but it can be difficult to measure nonacademic aspects of these skills. There are no standard assessments of students’ civility, but a few other projects are trying to look at some of the necessary components—such as listening and considering feedback from partners.
Girls Had Nearly Closed the Achievement Gap in STEM Subjects. It May Be Widening Again
The gap between middle school girls’ and boys’ performance in math and science may be widening anew.
Boys are pulling ahead again, finds a new analysis from researchers at the testing group NWEA.
Results from several national assessments show that, in some of the first large-scale tests students took after the disruptions of the pandemic, 8th grade boys scored slightly higher in these subjects than 8th grade girls, gaining a small but growing edge.
Some of the data find that the gaps are fueled by higher-achieving boys—they outperform high-scoring girls—while among lower-scoring students, girls outpace boys.
It’s hard to know exactly what’s causing this trend, said Megan Kuhfeld, the lead author of the report. Reading scores didn’t show the same patterns. Girls continue to do better on national reading tests than boys, a phenomenon that long predates the pandemic.
“It’s potentially something more specific to how girls are learning in STEM fields,” Kuhfeld said.
For the past three decades, in response to vast gender inequities in science, technology, engineering, and math professions, policymakers and advocacy groups led a campaign to get more girls involved in the subjects.
But as these performance gaps reopen, support for efforts to boost girls’ participation in math and science fields are dwindling.
Last month, the National Science Foundation cut more than 400 grants aimed at improving STEM teaching, targeting projects that were designed to promote diversity, equity, or inclusion.
To compare girls’ and boys’ performance, the NWEA researchers looked at 8th grade performance across the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, and the NWEA MAP Growth test.
They used statistical methods to put the tests on the same scale so that they could compare findings across assessments. All three tests showed the gaps in math and science widening in favor of boys.
These findings aligned with other recent analyses. A January report from The Wall Street Journal found that girls lost ground to boys in state test results, an outcome driven by girls’ performance falling more sharply than boys’ during the pandemic.
School Desegregation Order Lifted; More Likely to End
The U.S. Department of Justice lifted a school desegregation order in Louisiana this month, calling its continued existence a “historical wrong.” It’s not likely to be the last.
The end of the 1966 legal agreement with the Plaquemines Parish schools shows the Trump administration is “getting America refocused on our bright future,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said.
Inside the Justice Department, officials appointed by President Donald Trump have expressed desire to withdraw from other desegregation orders they see as an unnecessary burden on schools.
Dozens of districts across the South remain under court-enforced agreements dictating steps to work toward integration, decades after the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation in education. Some see the court orders’ endurance as a sign the government never eradicated segregation, while others see them as bygone relics that should be wiped away.
The Trump administration calls the Plaquemines case an example of administrative neglect. The district was found to have integrated in 1975, but apparently no legal activity has taken place since then. From that, the Justice Department deduced, “the United States’ claims have been fully resolved.”
Plaquemines Superintendent Shelley Ritz said Justice Department officials still visited every year as recently as 2023 and requested data on topics including hiring and discipline.
Many orders have been only loosely enforced in recent decades, but that doesn’t mean problems are solved, said Johnathan Smith, who worked in the Justice Department’s civil rights division during the Biden administration.
“It probably means the opposite—that the school district remains segregated. And in fact, most of these districts are now more segregated today than they were in 1954,” said Smith.
Texas Mulls Bill to Ease Vaccine Opt-Out Rules
Lawmakers in the state with the highest number of measles cases are trying to make it easier for parents to opt their children out of public school vaccine requirements.
A bill tentatively passed by the Texas House last week would allow anyone to access and download the form needed to exempt children from vaccine requirements that include polio, hepatitis A and B, and measles.
Currently, parents must request a vaccine-exemption form from the state for a reason of conscience, including religious beliefs. They then must get the form notarized before submitting it to their school district.
Rep. Lacey Hull, the bill’s sponsor, has said her proposal would increase government efficiency and save the state about $177,000.
Vaccine advocates worry that it will further erode confidence in safe vaccines and create public health risks for children who cannot take vaccines because of preexisting health conditions.
Other advocates worry that the move could lead to outbreaks of contagious diseases that could have been thwarted by child immunizations.
During debate, Hull questioned the relevance of questions related to the ongoing measles outbreak or vaccines in general. “This bill is about where a form is printed,” the Republican said.
“While this bill is about a form, the cause and effect, the consequences of this bill will be more kids opting out of immunization, more kids opting out of vaccines,” said Rep. John Bucy III, a Democrat.
The U.S. has surpassed 1,000 measles cases, with Texas accounting for the vast majority of them.
As the virus takes hold in U.S. communities with low vaccination rates, health experts fear that spread could stretch on for a year.
The measles outbreak has also spread to New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas. as well as Indiana, Michigan, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.
