Education Policy & School Reform News

The Pentagon school system appears to have misinterpreted the Trump administration's directive against diversity, equity, and inclusion to require ending lessons on Martin Luther King Jr., Susan B. Anthony, the Holocaust, and even Valentine's Day. On his first days in office, Trump issued executive orders prohibiting federal funding of radical gender ideology, critical race theory,…

The National Center for Education Statistics gives academic exams to random samples of students in all 50 states, producing what is known as the annual “Nation’s Report Card.” The latest release of fourth and eighth grade mathematics and reading results from the report card, officially known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, show that…

The Nation’s Report Card recently went public. It’s the kind of thing that kids hide from their parents.  The National Assessment of Educational Progress offers a grim view of America’s classrooms. Between 2022 and 2024, the share of fourth graders reading below basic level grew from 37% to 40%; among eighth graders, from 30% to 33%. Fourth grade math improved…

One of Pam Bondi's clients says the newly-confirmed U.S. attorney general took her case suing the school district that tried to secretly transition her daughter when no one else would consider it. In 2021, Erin Lee’s 12-year-old daughter was invited by her art teacher to come to art club after school in the Poudre School…

A decade ago, charter schools were heralded as the crowning achievement of bipartisan education reform efforts. But during last week’s National School Choice Week observations, charters were barely an afterthought, their political energy having been largely reappropriated to newer, more robust systems of school choice. The future of the charter school movement is likely to be…

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Rep. Mark Harris, R-N.C., introduced a bill Tuesday to require universities to disclose any contracts they have with foreign adversaries to the federal Department of Education. The No Contracts for Foreign Adversaries Act would mandate that universities alert the Education Department of relationships with China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran in…

Military families exemplify the best of America—sacrifice, service, and dedication to our nation’s security. Yet, too often, their children are shortchanged by an education system that fails to meet their needs. As President Donald Trump begins his second term, we have an unprecedented opportunity to fix that. It’s time to empower military families with true education freedom…

A day of reckoning has come for higher education. In the past four years, acolytes from America’s most prestigious universities not only continued their project of indoctrination on their own campuses, they also attempted to transform the whole country into a grander version of the higher education insane asylum. From tearing down history to defunding the…

The policies coming out of Washington, D.C., have the potential to affect Americans who have not even been born yet, whether for good or bad.  The latest National Report Card from the National Assessment of Educational Progress paints an abysmal picture of education across the U.S. The report card is published every two years and…

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Tim Scott of South Carolina are celebrating National School Choice Week by introducing a bill to empower businesses and individuals to fund education choice for students. Introduced Wednesday, the Educational Choice for Children Act provides a charitable donation incentive for individuals and businesses to…

Later today, Sen. Mike Lee will introduce in the Senate the Achieving Choice in Education (ACE) Act, legislation that will bolster parental rights. The ACE Act increases tax exemptions for families to make private school or homeschooling more affordable for parents and encourages states to adopt school choice programs. The move comes as more states…

President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that there are two sexes, male and female, and the federal government will operate by that truth. Yet the Department of Education is still hosting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid with options for students to select a “nonbinary" gender identity. A source sent The Daily…

As the nation celebrates National School Choice Week, the school choice movement is on the cusp of hitting a major milestone. By the end of 2025, it is likely that more than half of K-12 students nationwide will be eligible for private school choice. In the past five years, the number of students benefitting from…

Americans have forgotten how to form families. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that the U.S. population will begin to shrink in eight years, which The Wall Street Journal noted is seven years earlier than the CBO projected in 2024. Radical social interest groups and the outgoing Joe Biden administration have been steering youth away from…

For the past three years, I was a substitute teacher in the public schools of Warren County, Virginia. I served both as an aide in classrooms with a regular full-time teacher and as a substitute alone in the classroom.  Warren County schools are probably typical of public schools everywhere: Most teachers love the students and…

The U.S. Department of Education announced that it will be withdrawing both parts of its Plan C for student loan cancellation. One part involves various ways the department would have declared that a borrower has a “hardship” deserving of complete loan cancellation. The other part would have identified additional categories for waivers of loan repayments,…

ProPublica recently published “Segregation Academies Across the South Are Getting Millions in Taxpayer Dollars.” The article focuses on 20 private schools in North Carolina founded during the civil rights era with student bodies that are 85% or more white. “Segregation academies that remain vastly white continue to play an integral role in perpetuating school segregation—and,…

A recent study showing that test-score-driven school turnaround models fail to yield long-term improvements may be the final nail in the coffin for technocratic education reform strategies. Going forward, education reform will thrive by empowering parents with choices, rather than by ordering them to obey self-appointed experts. Technocratic reform strategies typically rely upon experts using…

In August, the nation’s second-largest school district announced a major policy shift that caused the soon-to-be-unemployed minds at the Los Angeles Times editorial board to collectively explode last month. Why? Because in the wake of a federal civil rights complaint filed by Parents Defending Education in 2023, the U.S. Department of Education forced the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to open up its $120 million…