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WASHINGTON (AP) — Already diminished by cuts by the Trump administration, the U.S. Education Department will see more of its work come to a halt due to the government shutdown. The department says many of its core operations will continue during the shutdown, which began at midnight Wednesday. Federal financial aid will keep flowing, and student loan payments will still be due. But investigations into civil rights complaints will stop, and the department will not issue new federal grants. About 87% of its workforce will be furloughed, a...
OKLAHOMA CITY – Without reading the morning headlines, one might believe Thursday’s Oklahoma State Board of Education meeting was routine, even more tame than usual. The crush of cameras and celebrations outside told a different story. State Superintendent Ryan Walters dedicated his opening remarks to the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk and went on to present a mostly flat budget proposal for public education next year. Walters did not acknowledge his impending resignation from elected office, a bombshell he revealed live on...
Thomasina Clarke has watched school after school close in her once thriving St. Louis neighborhood, which was hit by a tornado this spring and whose population has plummeted in recent decades. "It's like a hole in the community," Clarke said. She fears a new round of closure discussions could strip the historically Black community of a storm-damaged high school, whose alumni include Tina Turner and Chuck Berry. St. Louis Public Schools is among the districts nationwide weighing how many urban schools to keep open due to shrinking budgets, the...
At first, Clemson University took a stand for free speech. It condemned employees' remarks that made light of Charlie Kirk's death on social media, but the school said it was committed to protecting the Constitution. Three days later, under pressure from conservatives in the Statehouse, it fired one of the employees. As an outcry grew and the White House took interest, it fired two more. The swift developments at the public university in South Carolina reflect the intense pressure on college leaders nationwide to police insensitive comments...
The book report is now a thing of the past. Take-home tests and essays are becoming obsolete. Student use of artificial intelligence has become so prevalent, high school and college educators say, that to assign writing outside of the classroom is like asking students to cheat. "The cheating is off the charts. It's the worst I've seen in my entire career," says Casey Cuny, who has taught English for 23 years. Educators are no longer wondering if students will outsource schoolwork to AI chatbots. "Anything you send home, you have to assume is...
With the Taliban barring women from college in her native Afghanistan, Bahara Saghari set her sights on pursuing higher education in the United States. Saghari, 21, practiced English up to eight hours per day for several years, eventually winning an offer to study business administration at a private liberal arts college in Illinois. She was hoping to arrive this fall, but her plans were derailed again, this time by President Donald Trump's travel ban. "You think that finally you are going to your dream, and then something came up and like,...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Labor unions representing millions of educators and school employees are suing President Donald Trump's administration over its immigration crackdown, saying arrests near school campuses are terrorizing children and their teachers, leading some students to drop out. At the start of Trump's second term, his Republican administration said it would allow immigration arrests at schools — long considered off limits. That violated the law, argues the lawsuit from the two largest U.S. teacher unions, the National Education Ass...
WASHINGTON (AP) — A decade-long slide in high schoolers' reading and math performance persisted during the COVID-19 pandemic, with 12th graders' scores dropping to their lowest level in more than 20 years, according to results released Tuesday from an exam known as the nation's report card. Eighth-grade students also lost significant ground in science skills, according to the results from the National Assessment of Education Progress. The assessments were the first since the pandemic for eighth graders in science and 12th graders in reading a...
OKLAHOMA CITY — An Oklahoma signing bonus program, intending to fill a critical workforce shortage in public schools, will reward 151 special education teachers up to $20,000 this school year. The Oklahoma State Department of Education announced Tuesday the program will award signing bonuses to 34 experienced special education teachers who came from out of state and to 117 new teachers who recently became certified for the first time. The program exceeded the agency’s initial goal of recruiting 110 special education teachers to work with stu...
OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma higher education leaders said Wednesday that they are concerned lawmakers might not have allocated enough funding to meet demand when children of public school teachers become eligible to participate in the expansion of a state-funded scholarship program. Officials said applications are expected to open later this month, but the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education were allocated $700,000 to fund the expansion of Oklahoma’s Promise, which could cover costs for 15 students, said Colbi Beam, assistant vice cha...
IRVING, Texas (AP) — Crowded around a workshop table, four girls at de Zavala Middle School puzzled over a Lego machine they had built. As they flashed a purple card in front of a light sensor, nothing happened. The teacher at the Dallas-area school had emphasized that in the building process, there is no such thing as mistakes. Only iterations. So the girls dug back into the box of blocks and pulled out an orange card. They held it over the sensor and the machine kicked into motion. "Oh! Oh, it reacts differently to different colors," said s...
High school history teacher Katharina Matro often pulls materials from the Smithsonian Institution website as she assembles her lessons. She trusts its materials, which don't require the same level of vetting as other online resources. She uses documents and other primary sources it curates for discussions of topics like genocide and slavery. As the White House presses for changes at the Smithsonian, she's worried she may not be able to rely on it in the same way. "We don't want a partisan history," said Matro, a teacher in Bethesda, Maryland....
Denver school officials pushed back Friday against a U.S. Education Department finding that its all-gender bathrooms violate Title IX protections against sex-based discrimination, accusing the Trump administration of using that law to promote an "anti-trans agenda." In a statement, Denver Public Schools said the department did not cite any statutes or legal cases to back up its finding, announced Thursday, that multi-stall, all-gender bathrooms are unlawful, and vowed to support LGBTQ+ students, families and their supporters. However, the...
One international student after another told the University of Central Missouri this summer that they couldn't get a visa, and many struggled to even land an interview for one. Even though demand was just as high as ever, half as many new international graduate students showed up for fall classes compared to last year. The decline represents a hit to the bottom line for Central Missouri, a small public university that operates close to its margins with an endowment of only $65 million. International students typically account for nearly a...
OKLAHOMA CITY — While other leading GOP candidates for Oklahoma governor pledged to continue a campaign against the “radical left” in public schools, Attorney General and gubernatorial hopeful Gentner Drummond called for state leaders to change their tone toward teachers. In a speech Tuesday at the Edmond History Museum, Drummond urged state officials to “stop tearing down our teachers” and elevate the profession instead. He pointed his remarks at state Superintendent Ryan Walters, whose fiery brand of politics has been built on attacking...
COLORADO SPRINGS (AP) — Administrators at the state university's campus in Colorado Springs thought they stood a solid chance of dodging the Trump administration's offensive on higher education. That optimism turned out to be misplaced. An Associated Press review of thousands of pages of emails from University of Colorado-Colorado Springs officials, as well as interviews with students and professors, reveals that school leaders, teachers and students soon found themselves in the Trump administration's crosshairs, forcing them to navigate w...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration said Friday it will not defend a decades-old grant program for colleges with large numbers of Hispanic students that is being challenged in court, declaring the government believes the funding is unconstitutional. In a memo sent to Congress, the Justice Department said it agrees with a lawsuit attempting to strike down grants that are reserved for colleges and universities where at least a quarter of undergraduates are Hispanic. Congress created the program in 1998 after finding Latino students were a...
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina changed the face of education in New Orleans forever. The school system was utterly destroyed and then utterly transformed, becoming the first and only all-charter school district in the country. Ahead of the storm's anniversary, The Associated Press asked three survivors to reflect on what it was like to be a student or a teacher during that tumultuous period. For some, connections they developed with educators who helped them through the crisis inspired careers as teachers. Their experien...
The Oklahoma Department of Education wants to replace students’ state tests with benchmark assessments and allow alternatives to the ACT in high school, such as the SAT and Classical Learning Test. The agency’s four-page waiver request to the U.S. Department of Education asks the changes be approved starting this school year. The new plan represents a monumental shift in school assessments. Currently, schools administer English language arts and math exams to third through eighth graders; fifth and eighth graders are also tested in sci...
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore millions of dollars in National Science Foundation grants it has withheld from the University of California, Los Angeles, saying they were made in violation of her earlier court ruling. U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin ruled late Tuesday that the NSF must reinstate the research grants that were suspended for reasons she had already ruled "arbitrary and capricious," and gave the administration until Aug. 19 to show compliance or explain why it hasn't restored the money. It was not...
Lesley Mathis knows what her daughter said was wrong. But she never expected the 13-year-old girl would get arrested for it. The teenage girl made an offensive joke while chatting online with her classmates, triggering the school's surveillance software. Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says. Earlier in the day, her friends had teased the teen about her tanned complexion and called her "Mexican," even though she's...
NEW YORK (AP) — The Free Application for Federal Student Aid for the 2026-27 school year has opened for a limited number of students as part of a beta test, the Department of Education says. The department is rolling out two beta testing phases before the application is fully available to everyone in October. At first, the FAFSA form will be available for a small number of students and families, chosen via existing partnerships with community organizations and schools. "We're using this time to monitor a limited number of FAFSA submissions t...
PERRY, N.Y. (AP) — As a student in western New York's rural Wyoming County, Briar Townes honed an artistic streak that he hopes to make a living from one day. In high school, he clicked with a college-level drawing and painting class. But despite the college credits he earned, college isn't part of his plan. Since graduating from high school in June, he has been overseeing an art camp at the county's Arts Council. If that doesn't turn into a permanent job, there is work at Creative Food Ingredients, known as the "cookie factory" for the way i...
NEW YORK (AP) — Columbia University has reached a deal with the Trump administration to pay more than $220 million to the federal government to restore federal research money that was canceled in the name of combating antisemitism on campus, the university announced Wednesday. Under the agreement, the Ivy League school will pay a $200 million settlement over three years, the university said. It will also pay $21 million to settle investigations brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. "This agreement marks an important s...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The University of Michigan is under federal scrutiny after two Chinese scientists linked to the school were separately charged with smuggling biological materials into the United States. The Education Department on Tuesday opened an investigation into the university's foreign funding, citing the pair of cases that were announced days apart in June. It said the "highly disturbing criminal charges" raise concerns about Michigan's vulnerability to national security threats from China. "Despite the University of Michigan's h...
