Reports on education reform, school choice, and classroom policies. The Daily Signal provides conservative commentary and opinion alongside education news.
Suppose you joined a local gym several years ago, but after a while you discovered that you didn’t like some of the gym’s policies. So, you tell the gym that you no longer want to be a member and ask it to stop taking your monthly membership payments. The gym confirms that you are no…
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—An Ohio teacher’s assistant who helps special needs students is suing her school district and former union because the district withheld union dues from her paycheck even after she left the union and formally asked it to cease taking her money. “Using the coercion of government to take money from a…
A high school principal in Texas slow-walked a review of nearly 200 books in the school library that parents flagged for sexually explicit material, setting a timetable of 22 years to reconsider them, according to documents and emails obtained by The Daily Signal. Parents in Llano, Texas, told The Daily Signal that they began expressing…
Families across the country are struggling with the high cost of gas, groceries, and rent. Now they can add one more financial hardship to the list: the cost of college. The Biden administration is doing everything it can to make college more expensive. President Joe Biden’s various schemes to cancel student loan debt are burdening…
The Higher Education Act, signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson, profoundly influences almost every facet of higher education in America. Today, this law governs federal student aid, including all loans and grants and work-study. It defines what constitutes an academic year and “gainful employment.” And it authorizes numerous other federal programs that…
An elementary school teacher who questioned a California school’s spending $250,000 on a teacher training program called “Woke Kindergarten” was placed on leave Thursday by his school district, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. Glassbrook Elementary School used $250,000 in federal funds for underperforming schools to pay for training for teachers on how to be “anti-racist” and…
Recently, the Legislature in my home state of Alabama told public four-year colleges to report how much they spend on “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The amount: $16.2 million. Are taxpayers getting anything for this money? DEI advocates say it’s a good investment. Paulette Granberry Russell, the president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in…
Florida long has been a pioneer in providing families with education freedom and choice. It was among the first states to enact both tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, and to expand those options to every K–12 student in the state. With 350,000 students participating in the state’s K–12 scholarship policies, Florida has both the…
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita announced, in an exclusive interview Monday with The Daily Signal, the launch of a public portal online for parents in the state’s public schools to submit and monitor content of concern to them. “This is a tool to empower parents in their dealings with their own school system so they…
Touchdown Arizona! Philanthropist Janine Yass penned a column recently that was so delightfully perfect about the importance of school choice and how we as a country seem to be more engaged in football scores than test scores that I can kick myself for not having written it myself. She referenced an NFL upset victory of…
New research estimates that some students’ grades will never catch back up after falling during the pandemic. Recently, some in the mainstream media worried that the federal taxpayer money that lawmakers sent to K-12 schools during COVID-19 may not be enough to help schools turn things around. But public schools—also known as “assigned” schools—had money…
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey this week ordered a local school district to “cease and desist” teaching students about human sexuality, including gender ideology, without parental consent ahead of time. In a letter Monday exclusively obtained by The Daily Signal, Bailey also ordered the Webster Groves School District to review all…
As students across the United States struggle to master basic reading and math skills coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, some schools are dedicating the first week of February to “Black Lives Matter at School” in a “Week of Action.” Tina Descovich, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, urges parents to see whether their school district…
It only took roughly 20 minutes for a tampon dispenser in a boys restroom at Brookfield High School in Brookfield, Connecticut, to be torn down, according to a report from CT Insider. Principal Marc Balanda sent an email out to students and their families on Jan. 24 and explained that the new dispenser had been…
Surviving college at a big leftist university as a conservative woman is no task for the faint of heart. Even years ago at the University of Virginia, Karin Lips says, she found herself frustrated by the “liberal bias” in the women’s programs and groups on campus. The message Lips said she got was that anyone…
A Missouri school district intends to double its percentage of minority teachers even as the state’s attorney general has warned that private companies that racially discriminate in hiring face legal action. Webster Groves School District’s teaching and administrative staff should match the racial demographics of its student body, according to the Missouri school system’s strategic…
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A New York school district socially transitioned a girl without her mother’s consent, repeatedly lying to the mother about the child’s mental health and social struggles, according to a new lawsuit. Represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, Jennifer Vitsaxaki of New York filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the Skaneateles Central School District…
A father is suing a Garden State school district after his daughter’s gender transition was allegedly kept a secret from him. The father, who is remaining anonymous to protect his daughter’s identity, found that New Jersey’s Delaware Valley Regional High School had been calling his daughter by a male name and male pronouns for at least two…
Virginia is a very purple state, evenly divided between conservatives and liberals, but its universities are not equally balanced ideologically. A simple way to gauge how “woke” universities are is to search for certain terms in their course catalogs. The more “woke” words that appear in the titles and descriptions of courses and programs, the…
A school choice revolution is sweeping the nation. Ten states have passed universal education choice initiatives in the past two years. In addition to private school tuition, most of these new programs allow families to use their children’s taxpayer-funded education dollars to cover certain homeschool expenses. The loudest and most influential pushback against school choice comes from…