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WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump's vision for education revolves around a single goal: to rid America's schools of perceived " wokeness " and "left-wing indoctrination." The president-elect wants to forbid classroom lessons on gender identity and structural racism. He wants to abolish diversity and inclusion offices. He wants to keep transgender athletes out of girls' sports. Throughout his campaign, the Republican depicted schools as a political battleground to be won back from the left. Now that he's won the White House, he plans to use f...
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — On one side of the classroom, students circled teacher Maria Fletcher and practiced vowel sounds. In another corner, children read together from a book. Scattered elsewhere, students sat at laptop computers and got reading help from online tutors. For the third graders at Mount Vernon Community School in Virginia, it was an ordinary school day. But educators were racing to get students learning more, faster, and to overcome setbacks that have persisted since schools closed for the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago. A...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is canceling student loans for another 160,000 borrowers through a combination of existing programs. The Education Department announced the latest round of cancellation on Wednesday, saying it will erase $7.7 billion in federal student loans. With the latest action, the administration said it has canceled $167 billion in student debt for nearly 5 million Americans through several programs. "From day one of my administration, I promised to fight to ensure higher education is a ticket to the middle c...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden's latest plan for student loan cancellation is moving forward as a proposed regulation, offering him a fresh chance to deliver on a campaign promise and energize young voters ahead of the November election. The Education Department on Tuesday filed paperwork for a new regulation that would deliver the cancellation that Biden announced last week. It still has to go through a 30-day public comment period and another review before it can be finalized. It's a more targeted proposal than the one the U.S. S...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is canceling student loans for another 206,000 borrowers as part of a new repayment plan that offers a faster route to forgiveness. The Education Department announced the latest round of cancellations Friday in an update on the progress of its SAVE Plan. More people are becoming eligible for student loan cancellation as they hit 10 years of payments, a new finish line for some loans that's a decade sooner than what borrowers faced in the past. Casting a shadow over the cancellations, however, are two n...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden will announce his latest effort to broaden student loan relief next week for new categories of borrowers, according to three people familiar with the plans, nearly a year after the Supreme Court foiled his administration's first attempt to cancel debt for millions who attended college. Biden will detail the plan Monday in Madison, Wisconsin, where the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin is located. The actual federal regulations — outlining who would qualify to get their student loan debt red...
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — President Joe Biden said Monday that college graduates would see "life-changing" relief from his new plan to ease debt burdens for more than 30 million borrowers, the latest attempt by the Democratic president to make good on a campaign promise that could buoy his standing with young voters. Biden detailed the initiative, which has been in the works for months, during a trip to Wisconsin, one of a handful of battleground states that could decide the outcome of Biden's likely rematch with Donald Trump, the presumptive R...
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A group of Republican-led states is suing the Biden administration to block a new student loan repayment plan that provides a faster path to cancellation and lower monthly payments for millions of borrowers. In a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, 11 states led by Kansas argue that Biden overstepped his authority in creating the SAVE Plan, which was made available to borrowers last year and has already canceled loans for more than 150,000. It argues that the new plan is no different from Biden's first attempt at student loan c...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Education Department said it has discovered a calculation error in hundreds of thousands of student financial aid applications sent to colleges this month and will need to reprocess them — a blunder that follows a series of others and threatens further delays to this year's college applications. A vendor working for the federal government incorrectly calculated a financial aid formula for more than 200,000 students, the department said Friday. The information was sent to colleges to help them prepare financial aid...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration will start canceling student loans for some borrowers starting in February as part of a new repayment plan that's taking effect nearly six months ahead of schedule. Loan cancellation was originally set to begin in July under the new SAVE repayment plan, but it's being accelerated to provide faster relief to borrowers, President Joe Biden said Friday. It's part of an effort "to act as quickly as possible to give more borrowers breathing room" and move on from their student debt, the Democratic p...
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) — Harvard University President Claudine Gay resigned Tuesday amid plagiarism accusations and criticism over testimony at a congressional hearing where she was unable to say unequivocally that calls on campus for the genocide of Jews would violate the school's conduct policy. Gay is the second Ivy League president to resign in the past month following the congressional testimony — Liz Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, resigned Dec. 9. Gay, Harvard's first Black president, announced her departure just mont...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Hundreds of Harvard faculty members are urging the Ivy League university to keep its president, Claudine Gay, in command as she faces calls from some lawmakers and donors to step down over comments at a congressional hearing on antisemitism. A petition signed by more than 600 faculty members asks the school's governing body to resist political pressures "that are at odds with Harvard's commitment to academic freedom." Only months into her leadership, Gay came under intense scrutiny following the hearing in which she and two of...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government has opened civil rights investigations into seven schools and universities over allegations of antisemitism or Islamophobia since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war. The list includes three Ivy League institutions — Columbia, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania — along with Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Lafayette College in Pennsylvania and Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. It also includes one K-12 system, the Maize Unified School District in Kansas. The E...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The country's largest Christian university is being fined $37.7 million by the federal government amid accusations that it misled students about the cost of its graduate programs. Grand Canyon University, which has more than 100,000 students, mostly in online programs, faces the largest fine of its kind ever issued by the U.S. Education Department. The university dismissed the allegations as "lies and deceptive statements." "Grand Canyon University categorically denies every accusation in the Department of Education's statemen...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans view college campuses as far friendlier to liberals than to conservatives when it comes to free speech, with adults across the political spectrum seeing less tolerance for those on the right, according to a new poll. Overall, 47% of adults say liberals have "a lot" of freedom to express their views on college campuses, while just 20% said the same of conservatives, according to polling from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and E...
Colleges across the country will be forced to stop considering race in admissions under Thursday's Supreme Court ruling, ending affirmative action policies that date back decades. Schools that have relied on race-conscious admissions policies to build diversity will have to rethink how they admit students. It's expected to result in campuses that have more white and Asian American students and fewer Black and Hispanic students. The impact of the decision will be felt most strongly at the nation's most selective colleges, which have been more...
WASHINGTON (AP) — A Republican measure overturning President Joe Biden's student loan cancellation plan passed the Senate on Thursday and now awaits an expected veto. The vote was 52-46, with support from Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana as well as Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent. The resolution was approved last week by the GOP-controlled House by a 218-203 vote. Biden has pledged to keep in place his commitment to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loans for 43 million people. The l...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Schools and colleges across the U.S. would be forbidden from enacting outright bans on transgender athletes under a proposal released Thursday by the Biden administration, but teams could create some limits in certain cases — for example, to ensure fairness. The proposed rule sends a political counterpunch toward a wave of Republican-led states that have sought to ban trans athletes from competing in school sports that align with their gender identities. If finalized, the proposal would become enshrined as a provision of Tit...
As Republicans and Democrats fight for control of Congress this fall, a growing number of conservative political action groups are targeting their efforts closer to home: at local school boards. Their aim is to gain control of more school systems and push back against what they see as a liberal tide in public education classrooms, libraries, sports fields, even building plans. Once seen as sleepy affairs with little interest outside their communities, school board elections started to heat up last year as parents aired frustrations with...
WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 40 million Americans could see their student loan debt reduced — and in many cases eliminated — under President Joe Biden's long-awaited forgiveness plan. Biden's announcement Wednesday was a historic but politically divisive move in the run-up to the midterm elections. Fulfilling a campaign promise, Biden is moving to erase $10,000 in federal student loan debt for those with incomes below $125,000 a year, or households that earn less than $250,000. He's canceling an additional $10,000 for those who received feder...
A day after the school massacre in Texas, Ohio teacher Renee Coley thought her sixth grade students would need time to process, so she opened class with a video about the news and started a discussion. Some students said they were sad. Some were dismayed the 19 slain children were so young. After a few minutes, though, the conversation fizzled. Students were ready to move on with their day. To Coley, it was a grim reminder that the students had seen it all before, had grown accustomed to the ever-present threat of guns in school. "They have no...
Robb Elementary School had measures in place to prevent this kind of violence. A fence lined the school property. Teachers were ordered to keep classroom doors closed and locked. Students faced regular lockdown and evacuation drills. But when an 18-year-old man arrived Tuesday at the school in Uvalde, Texas, intent on killing children, none of it stopped him. Security failures allowed the shooter to massacre 19 students and two teachers, school safety experts say. The shooting already has led to calls to fortify schools further, on top of...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration plans to freeze federal student loan payments through Aug. 31, extending a moratorium that has allowed millions of Americans to postpone payments during the coronavirus pandemic, according to an administration official familiar with the White House's decision-making. Student loan payments were scheduled to resume May 1 after being halted since early in the pandemic. But following calls from Democrats in Congress, the White House plans to give borrowers additional time to prepare for payments. The a...
The Biden administration on Tuesday ordered Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey to stop using the state's federal pandemic funding on a pair of new education grants that can only be directed to schools without mask mandates. In a letter to Ducey, the Treasury Department said the grant programs are "not a permissible use" of the federal funding. It's the latest attempt by the Biden administration to push back against Republican governors who have opposed mask mandates and otherwise sought to use federal pandemic funding to advance their own agendas. Ducey,...
Hoping to prevent another school year from being upended by the pandemic, President Joe Biden visited a Washington middle school Friday to push his new COVID plan, accusing some Republican governors of being "cavalier" with the health of children. Biden's plan, announced a day earlier, would require vaccinations for up to 100 million Americans and seek to ramp up virus testing. With those measures in place, he said, schools should present little risk for transmission of the coronavirus. "I want folks to know that we're going to be OK," Biden...
