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    The right wants Charlie Kirk memorials across the US – but is it just an attempt to capitalize on his killing?

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    Republicans and conservatives are campaigning to quickly build statues and other memorials across the United States for the slain rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination at a college event in Utah last month.Political leaders in states such as Florida, Michigan and Oklahoma have not only called for construction of memorials but in some cases also threatened to penalize colleges that refuse to publicly honor Kirk, who was killed on 10 September.The heavy-handed push to honor Kirk, who held views that many see as racist and sexist, follows Donald Trump’s moves to restore monuments of Confederate leaders that were removed in recent years, which appear to be part of a broad effort to impose rightwing views on the country.“The way in which you keep the culture war going – or the way that you win it – is to have religious icons like Charlie and use their face and their name and their likeness to further your cause,” said Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia who has studied Christian nationalism.Kirk, who co-founded the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was killed at Utah State University during one of his signature events in which he debated students.Since then, Trump and others in his administration, such as Stephen Miller, have blamed the shooting – without producing any evidence – on a coordinated violent effort by the “radical left” and threatened to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” the left’s “terrorism and terror networks”.Kirk often criticized gay and transgender rights and made Islamophobic statements and once suggested that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake”. However, at the state and local level, Republican lawmakers have described Kirk as a “modern civil rights leader” who stood for “allowing everybody to voice their opinion respectfully”.Just a week after Kirk’s murder, Ohio Republican state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto introduced legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to build a “Charlie Kirk memorial plaza” with a statue “that features the conservative leader sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk “and his wife standing and holding their children in their arms”.A few weeks later, in Florida, Kevin Steele, a state house Republican, also proposed legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to rename roads for Kirk.“The Florida State University shall redesignate Chieftain Way as Charlie James Kirk Road,” the bill states. “Pasco-Hernando State College shall redesignate Mrs Prameela Musunuru Health and Wellness Trail as Charlie James Kirk Trail.”In Florida, if the schools do not establish the memorials by stated deadline, the state would withhold funding from the institutions, and in Oklahoma, the state would fine the schools, according to the legislation.Boedy, the University of North Georgia professor, likened the lawmakers’ threats to withhold state money to Trump’s moves to cut off federal funding to universities unless they met his list of demands.“State funding for education should be based upon students’ interest in majors, in enrollment and in science, in objective criteria, and honoring a single person is not part of that,” said Boedy, who has been on Turning Point’s watchlist of “professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom”.Jett, Prieto and Steele did not respond to requests for comment.Kirk was critical of higher education and wrote a book titled The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth.“I find it really ironic that the state of Oklahoma is demanding that every public university have a Charlie Kirk memorial plaza,” said Erika Doss, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.While the states have not approved the legislation requiring the memorials, at least one Florida county has installed a sign for a Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway, despite some public opposition.And less than a week after the murder, New College of Florida, a liberal arts university that has been the subject of a conservative takeover, also posted on X an AI-generated image of a bronze sculpture of Kirk at a table and stated that it would build the statue on campus “to defend and fight for free speech and civil discourse in American life”.That may not be easy. After events like 9/11, the Vietnam war, and the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, public monuments were often not built for years, sometimes decades.Quickly sharing a fake image of a Kirk memorial “is a lie”, Doss said. “It matters because it doesn’t tell the truth about how complicated and necessarily complicated making public art should be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy waiting years to build a memorial, you can see how time really changes the “emotional tenor and the perspective on the event”, said Gabriel Reich, a professor of history and social studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied collective memories of the US civil war and emancipation.“How people feel about [Kirk’s killing] five years from now may be different, and it may depend on what happens between now and then,” said Reich. “Does the political violence escalate and continue? Does it get tamped down?”It’s not a foregone conclusion that the schools will build the monuments.In Michigan, the Mecosta county board of commissioners wanted Ferris State University to build a statue for Kirk and offered to split the funding, but the school president declined, citing a “a longstanding practice that limits statues on campus to individuals who have made significant, direct contributions to Ferris State University itself”, according to the Detroit Free-Press.At New College, alum William Rosenberg sees the proposed statue as an attempt by the administration to distract from problems at the school, which was once a highly ranked institution considered among the most liberal in the country.“New College was a welcoming environment for people who were motivated and wanted to learn and wanted to do it on their own terms,” said Rosenberg, who graduated in 1980 with a degree in medieval studies.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has tried in recent years to transform the school by appointing political allies such as the conservative activist Christopher Rufo to its board of trustees, firing its president and revamping its curriculum.Since then, the school has seen its national ranking and graduation and retention rates plummet, while the state now spends significantly more on each student than those at its other public universities, according to Inside Higher Ed.After posting the AI image of the statue, New College’s president, Richard Corcoran, touted the public response in a weekly email.“In the first 72 hours of the announcement, New College of Florida was mentioned nearly 3 billion times (including traditional media in the graph below, and reposts on social media),” the email stated. “Normally, New College receives about 100 million impressions a month. In 72 hours, New College received about 2 1/2 years of media coverage.”A New College spokesperson, James Miller, declined an interview request.Rosenberg, a semi-retired computer engineer, doubts the school will actually build the statue because of Corcoran’s “history of promising the world and delivering nothing”.“A lot of alumni feel it was a gross PR move to capitalize on Charlie Kirk’s murder,” Rosenberg said. “New College of Florida has now become a political pawn whose real mission is about making political headlines while the on-the-ground education has nosedived.” More

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      How rightwing groups help Trump’s education department target school districts

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      In late March, the education secretary, Linda McMahon, recorded a video to announce an investigation into Maine school districts that allow students to change their gender identity without their parents’ permission – a key target of the Trump administration.But she didn’t face the camera alone.She was joined by Nicole Neily, a longtime conservative advocate and president of Defending Education. It was Neily’s organization that scoured district websites for evidence of gender plans – what they call “parental exclusion policies”. In a letter to Maine’s education commissioner, Pender Makin, McMahon gave Defending Education credit for gathering the documents through public records requests and referenced two conservative websites, The Federalist and Maine Wire, that published the group’s findings.“We’re proud to stand with you and President Trump as you ensure that the law is being followed and that the school districts do not infringe on parents’ rights,” Neily said.Neily offered similar quotes when the Department of Education’s office for civil rights (OCR) opened investigations into school district equity policies in Chicago and Fairfax, Virginia. In February, Defending Education filed a complaint about Chicago’s Black Student Success Plan, which aims to increase the number of Black teachers, improve student behavior and make instruction more culturally relevant. Neily argues the initiative denies other students “educational opportunity because of the color of their skin”.Julie Hartman, a department spokesperson, defended the inclusion of advocates in press statements. She said the agency “welcomes support from – and has often worked with – outside groups who want to advocate for students and families and help those who believe that their civil rights have been violated”. Neily did not respond to questions about the department’s communications strategy.But she is just one of several activists working with the department to advance the Trump administration’s education agenda. Since February, at least 10 department press releases announcing investigations have featured quotes from advocates representing eight organizations. They all echo the administration’s position and, like the secretary, stake out conclusions before the OCR team has begun investigating.In July, McMahon announced an investigation into transgender students playing on girls’ sports teams in Oregon. The investigation, the press release said, was prompted by a complaint from the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) – the conservative thinktank she chaired for four years before she became secretary.In the release, Jessica Hart Steinmann, the thinktank’s executive general counsel, said: “Thanks to Secretary McMahon’s leadership, this investigation is moving forward as a vital step toward restoring equal opportunity in women’s athletics.”The organization helped set the agenda for Trump’s return to the White House and the president appointed several of its leaders to cabinet-level positions. At least six former AFPI staffers work at the education department. Former staffer Craig Trainor served as acting assistant secretary for civil rights until last week, when he was confirmed to a top position at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.The press releases create “a significant pressure point on educational institutions because they’re presumed to have violated the law from the get-go,” said Jackie Wernz, an attorney who worked in the civil rights office during the Obama and first Trump administrations. The department, she said, “has changed from a neutral arbiter of civil rights disputes to an advocacy organization”.Those who have worked at the department during both Democratic and Republican administrations, including in Trump’s first term, say such tactics could hinder investigators’ ability to gather evidence fairly.When OCR opens investigations, it assures subjects that a complaint is just the beginning of the process and doesn’t mean the department has reached a decision. In one case from 2020, for example, Kimberly Richey, acting assistant secretary for civil rights during Trump’s first term, committed in a letter to a school district that OCR would act as a “neutral fact-finder”.“Historically … on both sides of the aisle, the department has been extremely cautious about making public statements about open investigations,” said Jill Siegelbaum, who spent 20 years in the department’s general counsel’s office before she was let go as part of McMahon’s mass layoffs.Richey, who was confirmed last week to once again lead OCR, did not respond to requests for comment.Administration allies downplayed the significance of the relationships with advocacy groups, comparing them to former first lady Jill Biden’s decision to host Randi Weingarten, the America Federation of Teachers president, and Becky Pringle, the National Education Association president, as the first official White House guests when President Joe Biden took office in 2021. A former community college professor, Jill Biden is an NEA member.“It’s far better for the secretary to engage with Defending Education, which champions parents and students, than with Randi Weingarten’s AFT, a mouthpiece for the Democratic party’s progressive elite,” said Ginny Gentles, an education and parental rights advocate at the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute. “Nicki Neily and Defending Education have aggressively challenged the corrupt status quo, amplifying parents’ voices and demanding accountability.”The actions by the department are among several designed to radically repurpose and drastically downsize a civil rights office that McMahon said had been focused on “transgender ideology and other progressive causes” and that “muddled the enforcement of laws designed to protect students”. In March, she laid off roughly 250 employees and shuttered seven of 12 regional offices, moves that are still being challenged in court. Over the weekend, after another round of layoffs, one attorney who received notice that she had lost her job said three more offices had been closed, affecting roughly 45 additional staff members.Catherine Lhamon, who ran OCR during the Obama and Biden administrations, dismissed the comparisons. She likened the warm welcome for the teachers union presidents to a political event. OCR, by contrast, is supposed to be neutral. By opening investigations with accusatory quotations from department officials and their allies, she said, the Trump administration is putting its thumb on the scale. Under Biden, she recalled, investigations frequently led to outcomes that disappointed the advocates who brought the initial complaints.“There were lots of cases during my time where the complaints were appalling. Then we’d investigate and find that they weren’t,” she said. “You might think at the beginning of a case you’re going in one direction and then when you investigate, you find you’re going in another. That’s the job of an investigator.”

      This story was produced by the 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in the US More

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      Majority of special education staff in US education department laid off – report

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      The majority of staff in the education department handling special education has been laid off, according to multiple reports.Friday’s total of 466 layoffs across the education department also impacted the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, which oversees programs that support millions of children and adults with disabilities nationwide, according to sources speaking to various outlets.“Despite extensive efforts to minimize impact on employees and programs during the ongoing government shutdown, the continued lapse in funding has made it necessary to implement the RIF (reduction in force),” according to a letter issued to workers that CNN reviewed.The Guardian has contacted the education department for comment.One department employee told NPR: “This is decimating the office responsible for safeguarding the rights of infants, toddlers, children and youth with disabilities.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSimilarly, the National Association of State Directors of Special Education said that if the layoffs are true, “there is significant risk that not only will federal funding lapse, but children with disabilities will be deprived” of free and proper education, K-12 Dive reports.Chad Rummel, executive director of the Council for Exceptional Children, told the outlet: “The rumored near elimination of the Office for Special Education Programs is absolutely devastating to the education of people with disabilities.”“Eliminating federal capacity to support Idea is harmful to people with disabilities, their families, and the professionals who serve them, and it runs counter to everything our members work toward every day,” Rummel added, referring to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act which ensures a free and appropriate public education to eligible children with disabilities throughout the country.In March, the education department announced layoffs of 1,300 employees, or nearly 50% of the department’s workforce, which the education secretary Linda McMahon described as a “significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system”. More

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      US universities must reject Trump’s ‘compact’. It is full of traps | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Sticks are bad, but sometimes corruption through carrots is worse. The Trump administration – after having brutally cut federal funding earlier this year – is now trying to make nine universities an offer that they seemingly cannot refuse. In exchange for preferential treatment in funding and bonuses like “invitations to White House events” – apparently the same logic as a fancy credit card that promises you backstage access at concerts – the universities are expected to sign a “compact” with the government. All nine institutions must reject this proposal: it is a thinly veiled attack on academic freedom; it is a test case for whether Trumpists can get away with demanding loyalty oaths; it exceeds the president’s powers to begin with; and it is bound to achieve the opposite of its stated goal of “academic excellence in higher education” (as opposed to what kind of excellence in education, one is tempted to ask).Some features of the compact might look reasonable at first sight. No one is against addressing ever-rising tuition fees (never mind that the Republican party at the same time is capping federal loan programs and shoveling money to high-cost private lenders). And some might welcome the Stephen Miller-lite version of xenophobia: capping the number of foreign students at 15% and forcing foreigners to take American “civics” (it is unclear who would decide the content of lessons “about how great our country is”).But the document also functions as a kind of rap sheet for institutions portrayed as single-mindedly focused on discriminating against white males. Formulations such as “signatories shall adopt policies prohibiting incitement to violence” would make one believe that, as of now, universities encourage terrorist agitators to run rampant on campus; the demand to “transform or abolish institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas” suggests that, as of now, anyone saying the wrong thing about abortion is beaten up by progressive vigilantes (never mind the question what it means to treat an idea as such “violently”).It is no small irony that one of the strategists of the assault on higher education, May Mailman, charges universities with having committed to a “culture of victimhood” in an interview with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; obviously, it is the Trumpist grievance-industrial complex which mass-produces resentment among supposed “real Americans” held down by nefarious liberal elites. For all the talk of fostering open debate, the goal appears to be the creation of safe spaces for the fragile egos of Maga students suffering from universities’ supposed culture of “negativity”.The clearest attack on academic freedom consists in the demand to ensure “a broad spectrum of viewpoints … within every field, department, school, and teaching unit”. Faculty, students “and staff at all levels” will first have to be tested for ideology; once “empirical assessments” have been completed, the diversity of viewpoints judged appropriate will have to be engineered, presumably by a bureaucracy that can also guarantee consistent viewpoints over time (for what if our new conservative colleague starts to hold different views?). In theory, the result would not just be affirmative action for the right, but forcing the economics department to employ Marxists.To be sure, some Trumpists themselves insist that the government should not be in the business of micromanaging the distribution of political attitudes. But the rejection is not a principled one centered on a proper understanding of academic freedom. It is simply the fear of setting a precedent with what they openly call “policing” and one fine day having the Democrats flood universities with leftists.As with other aspects of Donald Trump’s emerging mafia state, there is no guarantee that those bending the knee will not be bullied again. The government can always come back to universities and accuse them of having violated the agreement (still too many courses in victimhood studies; still too much “violence” – as defined by bureaucrats – vis-a-vis someone’s cherished ideas). The government will also encourage donors to claim back their cash. Since the compact’s criteria are exceedingly vague, those who take the offer will probably overdo compliance.At the risk of sounding like one of those dreadful self-styled victims: universities are fragile institutions. Many American ones are excellent precisely because people trust each other and cooperate successfully without over-regulation (some Europeans can tell you what it means to be subject to constant assessments – and how a Soviet-style bureaucracy constantly distracts from research and teaching). Of course there is always plenty of academic infighting, but what the Trumpists are doing is consciously trying to create divisions by setting potential Trump administration collaborators against those determined to resist it. As has become apparent with other autocrats’ assaults on universities, even if institutions escape (sometimes literally, as they have to relocate to other countries) the worst, much damage has been done. This is why the nine universities should not only reject the compact, but also publicly explain what is wrong with it (otherwise they will be immediately charged with wanting to protect their tuition-racket, helping foreigners and “importing radicalism” to undermine American greatness).Precisely because they have been losing court cases over free speech and visas for foreign students, Trumpists now seek to entrap universities in a deal that effectively removes the protections of federal law and gives the administration arbitrary power over them. The carrots serve to lure institutions of higher learning into a dark alley where, rather than just waiting with a big stick, the government can put a gun to their heads at any time.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University More

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      Small US college towns reel amid Trump immigration crackdown: ‘They need international students’

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      For a town of 20,000 residents a few miles from the Indiana state line in rural Ohio, the city of Oxford boasts an outsized number of international eateries.On High Street, the Phan Shin Chinese restaurant sits a few doors down from the Happy Kitchen, another Chinese food joint, which is next door to the Krishna Indian restaurant. There’s a French bakery and even a Uyghur restaurant selling central Asian fare.The diversity of international restaurants mirrors the student population attending Miami University, which in 2019 had a student body including more than 3,000 international students.But in recent years, the number of international students coming to study at US colleges has plummeted, a trend that could have devastating consequences for small college towns.It was the large number of Chinese students attending Miami University that prompted Fei Yang to open the MImian Chinese restaurant in Oxford, a full 60 miles from his home, in 2018.“There used to be 2,000 to 3,000 [Chinese] students but now there is like 300, 400 maybe,” says Yang. “Covid-19 stopped a lot of people coming. Before we used to make real Chinese food, now we make the American versions.”In fall 2019, Miami University admitted 2,895 international students, mainly from China, Vietnam, India, and elsewhere – last year, the number plummeted to 750. Since international students at Miami University are not receiving scholarships, they typically pay more than $65,000 in tuition, fees, housing and food, according to 2024-25 estimated cost of attendance figures, which represents a potential loss of about $140m for the university, local businesses and the thousands of workers they collectively employ.Across the US, an estimated 150,000 fewer international students are expected to study at US colleges and universities this fall compared to last year, a 40% drop.While the reasons are varied, the Trump administration’s response to protests on campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza has played a major role in fueling the falloff by driving fear of arrest and deportation into many would-be incoming international students.In June, the state department announced more severe screening and vetting processes for international students intending on studying in the US, including ordering applicants to turn their social media profiles public.Students from Turkey, Palestine, and Iran have been detained, imprisoned and deported or self-deported for expressing their first amendment rights, rights that are protected by the US constitution, regardless of whether they are citizens of the country or not. About 6,000 student visas have been revoked this year with some students seeing their visas revoked for alleged minor wrongdoings such as speeding.International student enrolment, however, has been in decline since before the current administration’s crackdown. The tariffs regime initiated on China during the first Trump administration, as well as Covid-19 pandemic travel restrictions in 2020, prompted a massive fall in students traveling to the US for higher education five years ago. In the years since, Chinese students have increasingly chosen to study in the UK and Australia in place of the US.While mid-sized and large cities and wealthy small towns such as Ithaca, New York, – home to Cornell University – can typically take the financial hit from the loss of thousands of international students due to their diversified economies, less affluent towns, whose economies have never fully recovered from the loss of students on-site during the pandemic, remain imperiled.According to the US Department of Commerce, international students are thought to have contributed around $50bn to the US economy in 2023 in tuition, rent, food, taxes and a host of other ways. In Ohio, Kentucky, and Iowa, which rank among the lowest states for GDP growth in the country, and which are Trump strongholds, their economies are set to lose as much as $200m, $45m and nearly $43m respectively. Florida’s economy could see losses reaching as much as $243m.“We tend to think that foreign students only go to big Ivy League schools in big cities. But if you look at a recent Brookings Institution report, it is clear that every school, small, medium and large, in every town or city – small, medium or large need income from international students,” says Tara Sonenshine, Edward R Murrow professor of practice in public diplomacy at Tufts University.In West Lafayette, Indiana, the 50,000 students who attend Purdue University make up the overwhelming majority of the city’s population. Almost one in four of those at Purdue in 2024 were international students, most paying full tuition and board costs. These students, many who attend to learn cutting-edge agriculture practices, help employ more than 10,000 people, making Purdue University the largest employer in the region.It’s a similar story for rural Illinois, where one-quarter of students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus are from overseas – one of the highest ratios of any private or public college in the country. There, an international student studying for a four-year undergraduate degree can net the college and offshoot businesses about $200,000 in tuition and other fees.In Oxford, Ohio, one of the biggest issues international students help local businesses with is providing custom during the six-week period from mid-December to the end of January when there are no classes at Miami University. At that time, other than permanent residents, the only people in town are international students.“Our business community is very dependent on Miami University students. Oxford’s population is about 20,000, of which 17,000 or more are Miami University students,” says Oxford city manager Doug Elliott.“We have a lot of homes that were converted into student housing. That’s typical for small college towns like us.”Elliott notes that aside from the financial benefit, international students bring energy and diversity in the form of festivals and gatherings to parts of the US that would otherwise never get to experience the wider world.“Cutting off visas for international students, combined with demographic shifts in America and the declining enrolment in college, in addition to the general disdain for immigrant populations coming here,” says Sonenshine, “would all add up to chaos and potential closures of small schools who rely on a broader pool on enrolment.” More

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      ‘These results are sobering’: US high school seniors’ reading and math scores plummet

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      The average reading and math scores of American high school seniors fell to their lowest levels in two decades in 2024, according to new national data released last week.The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), found that, on average, reading scores for 12th graders were 10 points lower in 2024 than they were in 1992, when the test was first administered, and that math scores fell to their lowest levels since 2005, when the math assessment began.The test, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is part of the US Department of Education, assessed roughly 19,300 12th-graders in math, 24,300 in reading and 23,000 eighth-graders in science between January and March of last year.The report found that 35% of seniors “performed at or above” the NAEP’s “proficient” level in reading, and 22% were at or above that level in math.It also stated that 45% of 12th graders scored below the NAEP’s “basic” level in math, marking a five percentage-point increase from 2019. In reading, 32% of students scored below the basic level, which was a two-point increase from 2019.“These results are sobering,” said NCES acting commissioner Matthew Soldner. “The drop in overall scores coincides with significant declines in achievement among our lowest-performing students, continuing a downward trend that began before the Covid pandemic.“Among our nation’s high-school seniors, we’re now seeing a larger percentage of students scoring below the NAEP basic achievement level in mathematics and reading than in any previous assessment.”One lingering effect of the pandemic present in the report was chronic absenteeism. The report found that about a third of 12th-graders reported missing three or more days of school in the month before the test, up from 25% in 2019.“Students are spending less time learning,” said Thomas Kane, an education economist at Harvard. “And when they are present, instruction is less efficient because teachers are constantly reteaching material.”Robert Balfanz, a professor at John Hopkins University School of Education, said easy access to information online and the use of online assignments may also be leading some students to treat in-person school attendance as optional.“In their minds, they tell their parents, ‘Look, all my assignments are online, I can do them even if I’m not at school,’” Balfanz said.But while the Covid pandemic and school closures had major effects on learning, experts say the academic decline began before 2020.“The uncomfortable truth is that American students have been significantly losing ground for more than a decade,” Eric Hanushek, an education economist, wrote in an opinion piece last week. “The pandemic didn’t break American education – it was already broken.”Kane said the decline among lower-achieving students began some time around 2015 and has continued.“It’s clearly not just the pandemic,” Kane said. “It should be troubling to everyone, and we need to find a solution.”Experts point to a range of potential factors beyond absenteeism that could be contributing to the decline, including increased screen time and smartphone use, declining student engagement, and the rollback of test-based accountability since the expiration of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2015.Carol Jago, a longtime English teacher and literacy expert at UCLA, told the Associated Press last week that students today read fewer books and spend less time with longer texts.“To be a good reader, you have to have the stamina to stay on the page, even when the going gets tough,” Jago said. “You have to build those muscles, and we’re not building those muscles in kids.”Balfanz added that the constant exposure to short-form and visual media in students’ daily lives may be making academic focus more difficult.One potential solution, he said, could be to add more dedicated reading time into school days – and restricting smartphones in classrooms.Kane noted that academic declines are appearing in other countries as well, which suggests a broader global trend that could be linked to increased screen use.Some US states have already passed laws restricting phone use in schools. Kane believes that there needs to be a national effort to assess the impact and effectiveness of those policies to see whether they work and ought to be implemented in more areas.The role of smart phones and social media in academic performance came up this week during a Senate hearing on the NAEP results.Martin West, the vice-chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees policy for the NAEP, told lawmakers that the rise of “smartphones and social media platforms targeting youth” is one area they should investigate.“We lack direct evidence of a causal link between smartphones and learning, but I’m convinced that this technology is a key driver of youth mental health challenges, a distraction from learning, both inside and outside of schools, and a deterrent to reading,” West said.Rebecca Winthrop, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, testified that student disengagement was exacerbated by the pandemic and is being amplified by social media. She endorsed actions such as smart phone bans, higher academic expectations, and adopting more engaging teaching styles.The NAEP results also reignited the debate around the federal government’s role in education, with US education secretary Linda McMahon saying last week that the lesson from the results “is clear”.“Success isn’t about how much money we spend, but who controls the money and where that money is invested,” she said. “That’s why President Trump and I are committed to returning control of education to the states so they can innovate and meet each school and students’ unique needs.”Representative Tim Walberg, a Republican who chairs the House education committee, agreed and said that “by returning education to the states, we can empower parents and local communities and ensure every child gains the skills necessary to succeed”.But Democratic representative Bobby Scott pushed back, writing that the NAEP results “reinforce the urgent need for sustained federal investment in academic recovery and educational equity”.“Now is not the time to retreat from our responsibility to provide every child, regardless of zip code, with the opportunity to succeed,” he added.Balfanz believes that “some collective effort at the national level” is needed to support states and districts in implementing proven solutions. He emphasized the need to “set targets and goals and strategies” and help build the capacity at the local level to be able to achieve them.Kane said that he agrees that states need to take a “more aggressive role in helping to reverse these trends” but that the federal government also needs to prioritize partnering with states “in a concerted, coordinated effort to answer two questions: finding effective ways to lower absenteeism and measuring the impact of the cellphone bans”.“Something fundamental in US schools is broken,” Kane warned. “And we need to fix it.” More

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      Texas A&M University president resigns after ‘gender ideology’ controversy

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      The president of Texas A&M University’s main campus is stepping down less than two weeks after a student’s viral complaint about “gender ideology” in the classroom set off a chain of repercussions, including the firing of the teacher as well as the dismissal of a dean and department chair.Mark A Welsh III, a retired air force four-star general, has been leading the university since 2022. His career before higher education included time as a fighter pilot, service on the joint chiefs of staff, work as the CIA’s associate director for military affairs, a term as commandant of cadets at the Air Force Academy, and a stint as dean of the Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M.“President Welsh is a man of honor who has led Texas A&M with selfless dedication,” the university’s chancellor, Glenn Hegar, said in a statement. “We are grateful for his service and contributions. At the same time, we agree that now is the right moment to make a change and to position Texas A&M for continued excellence in the years ahead.”Welsh has not offered a specific reason for why he is leaving his position or clarified whether it is a result of the viral incident, instead simply saying: “Over the past few days, it’s become clear that now is that time” to step down, in a Friday statement.Welsh became president following the 2023 departure of Margaret Katherine Banks, who left amid uproar over the mishandled hiring of a journalism professor, Kathleen McElroy. That controversy drew fire from Texas Republicans because of McElroy’s ties to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, which are now prohibited in the state.According to the Thursday evening announcement, Welsh’s resignation will take effect on Friday.“Today, President Welsh has submitted his resignation, and both the Board of Regents and I agree that this is the right moment for change,” Hegar said in a post on X.Brian Harrison, a Republican state representative who circulated the viral footage and pressed for Welsh’s removal, applauded the outcome.“As the first elected official to call for him to be fired, this news is welcome, although overdue,” Harrison wrote on X. “Now… END ALL DEI AND LGBTQ INDOCTRINATION IN TEXAS!!”The video clip at the center of the controversy, which Harrison shared on 8 September, was originally filmed in July during a children’s literature course. The student who spoke out, whose identity Harrison withheld at their request, and the instructor, Melissa McCoul, are not visible in the footage.In another recording Harrison shared on social media, the same student can be heard speaking with Welsh. She asks Welsh if he approves of LGBTQ+ content being taught at Texas A&M, to which Welsh replies that the courses are typically for students entering fields such as psychiatry, counseling, education and non-profit work.“Those people don’t get to pick who their clients are, what citizens they serve, and they want to understand the issues affecting the people they’re going to treat,” Welsh tells the student. “So there is a professional reason to teach some of these courses.”The Texas governor, Greg Abbott, had threatened to fire Welsh in January after the university’s business school invited advanced PhD students and faculty to a conference designed to recruit Black, Hispanic and Indigenous graduate students.Though Abbott cannot fire university presidents, he appoints the members of the Texas A&M University System board of regents, who do have that authority. Following the threat, Welsh said Texas A&M would pull out of the conference completely. More

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      Trump cuts threaten futures of 250,000 children of migrant farm workers: ‘We felt like crying’

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      When Regina Zarate-Garcia was a child, she recalled being uprooted from one school district and planted in another as often as the seasons changed.Zarate-Garcia, now 18, was born in Salinas, California, to farm workers from Mexicali, a city just south of California on the US-Mexico border. “I remember my parents getting home and seeing their pants splashed in strawberries, mixed with that familiar smell of pesticides,” she recalls.Her family’s life followed California’s planting and harvest seasons: starting school in Monterey county, where her parents worked April through November in the strawberry fields, then moving to Inyo county near the Nevada border – or sometimes back to Mexico – while her parents chased winter jobs or tried to live frugally while unemployed.It took a toll on her. She described the isolation of struggling through a disrupted school curriculum alone, while her parents, exhausted from long days in the fields, and unable to read English, could offer no help. “My kindergarten teacher told my mom that I was gonna flunk,” Zarate-Garcia said.Then came a turning point: her mother learned about the Migrant Education Program (MEP), a federal initiative that supports children whose families move from place to place for seasonal agricultural work.From first grade onward, Zarate-Garcia went to after-school tutoring, Saturday school, summer enrichment, speech and debate tournaments, college readiness workshops, and was provided lunch, snacks, mentors and a community of kids who were navigating similar educational disruptions, cultural and language barriers, as well as social isolation.“I didn’t feel like I had two different worlds coming against each other, and I felt more like a cohesive world that we were building together,” said Zarate-Garcia. The MEP opened up the doors that got her where she is now: studying biology as a freshman at University of California San Diego.But the future of this safe haven for the more than 250,000 eligible migratory children and youth, like Zarate-Garcia, is now in jeopardy and could be slashed under the Trump administration. If this happens, Zarate-Garcia fears the American dream will be out of reach for future generations of kids whose parents’ labor forms the backbone of the country’s economy and food system.View image in fullscreenTrump’s 2026 budget, which is set to be debated by Congress this fall, proposes eliminating all funding for the MEP, a program that has been in place for nearly 60 years. (This budget is separate from the Republican budget bill passed this summer, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.)‘The migrant program changes lives’The MEP was also thrown into chaos this summer, when the Trump administration abruptly froze nearly $7bn in congressionally approved education funds from the 2025 budget. The funds were eventually released in late July after a coalition of 24 states, including California, sued the Trump administration, and 10 Senate Republicans signed a public letter urging the White House to release them.Nowhere would the impact of these proposed cuts be felt more than in California, where one out of three migrant students in the US lives. In California, the MEP serves nearly 80,000 youth ages three to 21, most of whom live in rural areas. In Monterey county, an agricultural region about two hours south of San Francisco where Zarate-Garcia was born, there are more than 10,000 students who are eligible for this support.“The migrant program changes lives,” said Constantino Silva, senior director of migrant education services at the Monterey county office of education in Salinas.He knows this firsthand; Silva too went through the program. Born in Michoacán, Mexico, Silva remembers his family traveling to the US embassy in Mexico City when he was six to obtain green cards before resettling in King City, California, where his father laid the pipes to irrigate crops.“We have the misfortune of having the word ‘migrant’ in our title,” Silva said of the cuts to the MEP.The justification for targeting the migrant program’s funding is that it is deemed costly, ineffective and harmful to students’ stability, arguing it encourages mobility and allows ineligible non-citizens to strip resources from US university students.But that’s not true, Silva says, explaining that agricultural work is by its nature seasonal and migratory.“Being migratory is really difficult,” Silva said, describing the toll on children who are always “the new kid”, out of place, and struggling with disrupted schooling. Families often live two or three families to a house, moving whenever work dries up. Farm labor, he added, is grueling, low-paid and unpredictable, leaving entire families at the mercy of the weather and crop cycles.Food insecurity, inadequate or nonexistent healthcare, and chronic absenteeism combined with inconsistent credit transfers from one school district to another often puts these kids at high risk of school failure or dropout. A number of studies have found migrant children and youth to have high rates of grade repetition and about 50% drop out of high school.The US Department of Education doesn’t track graduation rates for students in the Migrant Education Program, so it’s hard to get accurate data on how many kids follow their parents into the fields versus moving on to better-paying jobs. US federal labor law allows farm worker children to pick crops with their parents’ consent, outside school hours, from as young as age 12.The program was set up to address some of these disadvantages. Silva said he flourished in the program and runs through a list of teachers, vice-principals, principals, program directors, assistant superintendents and a superintendent, all of whom found success in education because of their childhood experience in the program.“We look back on it and say: ‘Had it not been for that, I don’t know that I would be where I am today.’” said Silva. “‘This is where I can be myself and not feel out of place, where I’m safe to say that I don’t know, that I’m not sure, that I have questions.’ That’s the type of environment that we create for the migrant students.”Support beyond the classroomSilva says the key part of the program – along with all the tutoring, socializing and yummy snacks he got – was that his mother also received parent education services that helped her advocate for him as they navigated the US education system, even after he no longer qualified for the program.Starting at three years old, Silva’s team visits children’s houses to get parents reading bilingual books to their children, empowering “parents to be the first teacher”.Silva said they don’t check children’s legal status before providing services, but said that many students are US citizens, like Zarate-Garcia, or residents with legal status, like him.“It’s worth investing in these children’s future, because it’s America’s future,” said Silva, whose own job is now on the line due to the cuts.In Salinas, many children of farm workers assume they will follow their parents into the fields; becoming an attorney or doctor seem beyond their possible horizons. But starting in third or fourth grade, Zarate-Garcia said the MEP drew a different path – literally – on the floor out of chalk to change these narratives.Each summer, MEP staff sketched a giant game of hopscotch in chalk, each square a milestone: grades one through five, middle and high school and graduation. A student volunteered to stand there in a cap and gown waving at Zarate-Garcia as she hopped across a milestone, living proof of what was possible. Beyond that, new boxes branched out – college, university, trade school, the military – options that once felt out of reach.For Zarate-Garcia this unlocked possibilities: “It showed you the timeline of everything and really put it into perspective for the kids.”View image in fullscreenAfter-school tutoring provides students with academic support, meals like flautas and burritos, and a safe place to be while parents work, while also engaging parents through monthly activities and parent-teacher nights.Zarate-Garcia spent seven years doing speech and debate tournaments, which taught her about teamwork, how to write argumentative essays, do research backed by credible sources, defend her claims, enunciate, project her voice and debate in a way that is respectful.Zarate-Garcia found that she loved public speaking, storytelling and improvising speeches on the spot: “I could make my voice into something powerful. I could make a language that I always struggled in, into something powerful.”The program also helped students buy presentable outfits for their debate tournaments.Her team even won second and third place at county and state level speech and debate tournaments over the years. Now, Zarate-Garcia aspires to become a pediatric oncologist.“The power of your voice is something that nobody else can take away,” she said. Once you have an education, nobody can take that away from you.”When Zarate-Garcia found out about the budget cuts, she was volunteering in the MEP’s summer program and the kids were all practising a dance to show their parents. “Honestly, we felt like crying,” she said, realizing that all the kids she coaches in speech and debate – kids who look up to her – may never thrive without the crucial support that she benefited from.“You meet these kids that have so much potential, but their potential can’t be tapped into because they don’t have that support at home … It’s just so disappointing.” More

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      ‘I had teachers crying’: the schools trying to plug million-dollar funding holes after Trump cuts

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      In the time it took to read an email, the federal money vanished before Eisa Cox’s eyes: dollars that supported the Ashe county, North Carolina, school district’s after-school program, training for its teachers and salaries for some jobs.The email from the US Department of Education arrived 30 June, a day before the money – $1.1m in total – was set to materialize for the rural western district. Instead, the dollars were frozen pending a review to make sure the money was spent “in accordance with the president’s priorities”, the email said.In a community still recovering from Hurricane Helene, where more than half of students are considered economically disadvantaged, Cox said there was no way they could replace that federal funding for the school system she oversees as superintendent. “It is scary to think about it,” she said. “You’re getting ready to open school and not have a significant pot of funds.”School leaders across the country were reeling from the same news. The $1.1m was one small piece of a nearly $7bn pot of federal funding for thousands of school districts that the Trump administration froze – money approved by Congress and that schools were scheduled to receive on 1 July. For weeks, leaders in Ashe county and around the country scrambled to figure out how they could avoid layoffs and fill financial holes – until the money was freed on 25 July, after an outcry from legislators and a lawsuit joined by two dozen states.“I had teachers crying, staff members crying. They thought they were going to lose their jobs a week before school,” said Curtis Finch, superintendent of Deer Valley unified school district in Phoenix, Arizona.View image in fullscreenNow, as students are back in classrooms, their school systems can no longer count on federal dollars as they once did. They must learn to plan without a playbook under a president intent on cutting education spending. For many districts, federal money is a small but crucial sliver of their budgets, potentially touching every part of a school’s operations, from teacher salaries to textbooks. Nationally, it accounts for about 14% of public school funding; in Ashe county, it’s 17%. School administrators are examining their resources now and budgeting for losses to funding that was frozen this summer, for English learners and for after-school and other programs.So far, the Trump administration has not proposed cutting the largest pots of federal money for schools, which go to services for students with disabilities and to schools with large numbers of low-income students. But the current budget proposal from the US House of Representatives would do just that.At the same time, forthcoming cuts to other federal support for low-income families under the Republican One Big, Beautiful Bill Act – including Medicaid and Snap, previously known as food stamps – will also hammer schools that have many students living in poverty. Some school districts are also grappling with the elimination of Department of Education grants announced earlier this year, such as those designed to address teacher shortages and disability services. In politically conservative communities like this one, there’s an added tension for schools that rely on federal money to operate: how to sound the alarm while staying out of partisan politics.For Ashe county, the federal spending freeze collided with the district’s attempt at a fresh start after the devastation of Helene, which demolished roads and homes, damaged school buildings and knocked power and cell service out for weeks. Between the storm and snow days, students here missed 47 days of instruction.Cox worries this school year might bring more missed days. That first week of school, she found herself counting the number of foggy mornings: an old Appalachian wives’ tale says to put a bean in a jar for every morning of fog in August. The number of beans at the end of the month is how many snow days will come in winter.“We’ve had 21 so far,” Cox said with a nervous laugh on 21 August.A funding freeze rollercoasterFragrant evergreen trees blanket Ashe county’s hills, a region that bills itself as America’s Christmas tree capital because of the millions of Fraser firs grown for sale at the holidays. Yet this picturesque area still shows scars of Hurricane Helene’s destruction: fallen trees, damaged homes and rocky new paths cut through the mountainsides by mudslides. Nearly a year after the storm, the lone grocery store in one of its small towns is still being rebuilt. A sinkhole that formed during the flooding remains, splitting open the ground behind an elementary school.As students walked into classrooms for the first time since spring, Julie Taylor – the district’s director of federal programs – was reworking district budget spreadsheets. When federal funds were frozen, and then unfrozen, her plans and calculations from months prior became meaningless.Federal and state funding stretches far in this district of 2,700 students and six schools, where administrators do a lot with a little. Even before this summer, they worked hard to supplement that funding in any way possible – applying for state and federal grants, like one last year that provided money for a few mobile hotspots for families who don’t have internet access. Such opportunities are also narrowing: the Federal Communications Commission, for example, recently proposed ending its mobile hotspot grant program for school buses and libraries.View image in fullscreen“We’re very fiscally responsible because we have to be. We’re small and rural. We don’t have a large tax base,” Taylor said.When the money was frozen this summer, administrators’ minds went to the educators and kids who would be most affected. Some of it was meant to pay for a program through Appalachian State University that connects the district’s three dozen early career teachers with a mentor, helping them learn how to schedule their school days and manage classroom behavior.The program is part of the reason the district’s retention rate for early career teachers is 92%, Taylor said, noting the teachers have said how much the mentoring meant to them.Also frozen: free after-school care the district provides for about 250 children throughout the school year – the only after-school option in the community. Without the money, Cox said, schools would have had to cancel their after-school care or start charging families, a significant burden in a county with a median household income of about $50,000.Will assistance for immigrant students go away?The salary for Michelle Pelayo, the district’s migrant education program coordinator for nearly two decades, was also tied up in that pot of funding. Because agriculture is the county’s biggest industry, Pelayo’s work extends far beyond the students at the school. Each year, she works with the families of dozens of immigrant students who move to the county for seasonal work on farms, which generally involves tagging and bundling Christmas trees and harvesting pumpkins. Pelayo helps the families enroll their students, connects them with supplies for school and home, and serves as a Spanish translator for parent-teacher meetings – “whatever they need”, she said.Kitty Honeycutt, executive director of the Ashe county chamber of commerce, doesn’t know how the county’s agriculture industry would survive without the immigrant families Pelayo works with. “The need for guest workers is crucial for the agriculture industry. We have to have them,” she said.A couple of years ago, Pelayo had the idea to drive to Boone, North Carolina, where Appalachian State University’s campus sits, to gather unwanted appliances and supplies from students moving out of their dorm rooms at the end of the year to donate to immigrant families. She’s a “find a way or make a way” type of person, Honeycutt said.Cox is searching for how to keep Pelayo on if Ashe county loses these federal funds next year. She’s talked with county officials to see whether they could pay Pelayo’s salary, and has begun calculating how much the district would need to charge families to keep the after-school program running. Ideally, she’d know ahead of time and not the night before the district is set to receive the money.Around the nationDistricts across the country are grappling with similar questions. In Detroit, school leaders are preparing, at a minimum, to lose Title III money to teach English learners; more than 7,200 Detroit students received services funded by Title III in 2023.In Wyoming, the small, rural Sheridan county school district 3 is trying to budget without Title II, IV and V money – funding for improving teacher quality, updating technology and resources for rural and low-income schools, among other uses, the superintendent Chase Christensen said.Schools are trying to budget for cuts to other federal programs, too, such as Medicaid and food stamps. In Harrison school district 2, an urban district in Colorado Springs, schools rely on Medicaid to provide students with counseling, nursing and other services.The district projects that it could lose half the $15m it receives in Medicaid next school year.“It’s very, very stressful,” said Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison school district 2. “For a while, it was every day you were hearing something different. And you couldn’t even keep up with: ‘What’s the latest information today?’ That’s another thing we told our staff: if you can, just don’t watch the news about education right now.”There’s another calculation for school leaders to make in conservative counties like Ashe, where 72% of the vote last year went to Donald Trump: objecting to the cuts without angering voters. When North Carolina’s attorney general, a Democrat, joined the lawsuit against the administration over the frozen funds this summer, some school administrators told state officials they couldn’t publicly sign on, fearing local backlash, said Jack Hoke, executive director of the North Carolina School Superintendents’ Association.Cox sees the effort to slash federal funds as a chance to show her community how Ashe county schools uses this money. She believes people are misguided in thinking their schools don’t need it, not malicious.“I know who our congresspeople are. I know they care about this area,” Cox said, adding that they care even if they do not fully grasp how the money is used. “It’s an opportunity for me to educate them.”If the education department is shuttered – which Trump said he plans to do in order to give more authority over education to states – she wants to be included in state-level discussions of how federal money flows to schools through North Carolina. Importantly, she also wants to know ahead of time what her schools might lose.As she made her rounds to each of the schools that first week back, Cox glanced down at her phone and looked up with a smile. “We have hot water,” she said while walking in the hall of Blue Ridge elementary school. It had lost hot water a few weeks earlier, but to Cox, this crisis was minor – one of many first-of-the-year hiccups she has come to expect.Still, it’s one worry she can put out of her mind as she looks ahead to a year of uncertainties.Marina Villeneuve contributed data analysis to this story, which was originally produced and published by the Hechinger Report. More