#education-policy

#education-policy

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

directly lying to the parent, preventing the parent from accessing educational records of the child, or using a different set of preferred pronouns/names when speaking with the parents than is being used at school

This decline is only getting steeper. Over the past decade, American students' reading abilities have plummeted, and their reading habits have followed suit. In 2023, just 14 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day, down from 27 percent a decade earlier. A growing share of high-school and even college students struggle to read a book cover to cover.

In August of 2022, a resident of Denton, Texas, appeared before his school board to demand the removal of a salacious library book. He read aloud passages from the novel describing detailed sexual acts. But the book he was reading from, Love Lies Beneath, wasn't actually available in the school district's libraries. He had confused the sexy psychological thriller with Lies Beneath, a young-adult novel about mermaids.

We have a government that talks quite a lot about social mobility, but mainly about individuals often about [the] social mobility of themselves or their colleagues," Francis said. "But what we don't have is a coherent approach to social mobility as a useful concept that you can build a strategy around.

In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include "the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data" and "Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity." I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she'd finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment.

According to newly released research, two-thirds of high schoolers agree or strongly agree that using AI too much could make them overly dependent on the technology or less intelligent. This data reinforces how many students feel about AI: they are curious - and cautious. For all the handwringing about an "AI-fueled decline in learning," teenagers may actually understand the stakes better than adults think. What they want are more guardrails to help them use AI responsibly and fairly, and that's where schools need to catch up, quick.

"I inherited a mess, and I'm fixing it," President Donald Trump said at the start of his 20-minute Wednesday evening national address, soon adding, "We had men playing in women's sports, transgender for everybody," barely a minute into his speech. "For the last four years, the United States was ruled by politicians who fought only for insiders, illegal aliens, career criminals, corporate lobbyists, prisoners, terrorists and, above all, foreign nations," he said, "They indoctrinated your children with hate for America."

Young people across the UK will be able to study or gain work experience through the EU's Erasmus scheme for the first time since Brexit, after the government announced an agreement to rejoin at a cost of 570m. The scheme officially known as Erasmus+ will be reopened to those involved in education, training, culture and sport from 2027, after discussions in London and Brussels to fulfil a Labour election manifesto pledge.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

Proposals in a consultation launched on Thursday could see GCSEs in smaller-entry subjects, including certain languages, and most A-level exams excluding maths moved onto screens by the end of the decade. Ofqual is asking for views on allowing each of the four exam boards to propose two new specifications for on-screen assessment, replacing traditional pen and paper.

I read a story that I was unhappy with Pete because he was attacking drug dealers, Trump replied, adding: I said, That's not exactly right. I would say very much the opposite. Pete Hegseth has been phenomenal. I read a story recently I'm unhappy with Kristi [Noem]. I'm so happy with her. I mean, we have a closed border. We have a border that's the best border in the history of our country. Why would I be unhappy with that? She's fantastic, actually.

In a report conducted by the Guardian, the proposal of a four-day week for schools was met with an overwhelmingly positive response. Parents cited everything from their children's mental health to not worrying so much about absences as reasons for the four-day week to work. Teachers even loved the idea, noting that if the fifth day of the week were simply a teacher workday, it would free up their weekends from school and teaching tasks, allowing them to actually get a much-needed (and deserved) break.

Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

Missouri State Sen. Joe Nicola (R) introduced a bill that would ban "social transition" in schools and forcibly out any transgender and nonbinary students to their potentially unsupportive parents if the students ask a school staff member to address them by a name or gender identity different from the sex assigned to them at birth. The bill would also allow teachers to be fired and banned from teaching,

Can you guess which professionals in England work 26 hours of overtime a week without compensation, give up time with friends and family to deal with the workload and often find themselves on call in the holidays? Not CEOs, bankers or even doctors, but teachers. No wonder, then, that teaching vacancies are at the highest level ever. Workload is the top concern that teachers cite for leaving the profession, with almost as many quitting as those who joined last year.

The 4 Day Week Foundation has written to the education secretary calling for greater autonomy for schools to pilot shorter working weeks, saying the government will not be able to meet its manifesto pledge of recruiting 6,500 new teachers without change. It comes after the Scottish government announced new proposals last week for teachers to be able to work a flexible four-day teaching week, which would see them given one day a week to focus on work such as preparation and marking.

The crisis over special educational needs and disabilities in England is not just a question of cash. Children and parents spend months and years battling for support to which the law entitles them, schools lack the funding to meet needs, and specialist provision is inadequate. An adversarial system shunts families towards tribunals that councils almost invariably lose. Tory reforms created obligations for local authorities but did not adequately fund them allowing ministers to duck responsibility.

A wave of bills introduced this year in state legislatures across the country sought to censor Palestine-related education in public schools. Several passed with the support of pro-Israel Democratic lawmakers, a trend that educators and First Amendment advocates told Truthout reflects the alignment of pro-Israel groups with MAGA forces. As these efforts continue, many said they fear public education could be reshaped far beyond social studies classrooms and the topics of Israel and Palestine.

A new vision for the United States is being forced into place - one rooted not in liberty or justice, but in subjugation and the quiet normalization and acceptance of fascism. You can see it in the memes, the slogans, and the curated nostalgia flooding social media accounts aligned with the Trump administration. You can see it in the way frontier and 1950s iconographies have returned not as history but as aspiration.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground.

As teachers and professors reel over how generative AI is ruining education, one expert is suggesting that the true technological menace in the classroom has been staring us in the face for decades: laptops. It would explain, writes psychology professor at San Diego State University Jean M. Twenge in an opinion piece for The New York Times, why standardized test scores for American students have plunged to their lowest point in twenty years in 2023 and 2024.

This week, the Education Department said it would break off several of its main offices and hand over their responsibilities to agencies like the Department of Labor and the Department of the Interior. Under the plan, those two agencies will run several programs that fund and oversee the education of Native American children and college students. Tribal leaders and Native education organizations said the move will add to budgetary confusion and a possible breakdown ins services.

Days after U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the government shutdown proved how unnecessary the Department of Education is, the Trump administration announced plans to transition key department responsibilities to other government agencies - another step closer to eliminating the education department completely. In an opinion piece for USA Today earlier this week, McMahon said the 43-day shutdown showed "every family how unnecessary" the department is to their children's education.

The Trump administration says its plan to dismantle the Education Department offers a fix for the nation's lagging academics - a solution that could free schools from the strictures of federal influence. Yet to some school and state officials, the plan appears to add more bureaucracy, with no clear benefit for students who struggle with math or reading.

The Trump administration has sued California for providing in-state college tuition, scholarships, and state-funded financial aid to students who aren't legally in the United States. The lawsuit, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California, alleges the practice harms U.S. citizens and encourages illegal immigration. Among the defendants are the state, top state officials, and the state's two public university systems, the University of California and California State.

Overthe past few years, a huge number of schools in the United States and around the world have banned cell phone use among their students. It's a divisive topic, and the effects are only starting to come into focus. Just look at New York State, where governor Kathy Hocul and lawmakers put a ban into the state budget last spring in an effort to give kids a break from distractions at school.

I don't know what toys and learning materials lived there, since I wasn't one of the handful of presumably more academically advanced kiddos that my kindergarten teacher invited to open the chest. My distinct impression at the time was that my teacher didn't think I was worthy of the enrichment because I frequently spilled my chocolate milk at lunch and I had also once forgotten to hang a sheet of paper on the class easel-instead painting an elaborate and detailed picture on the stand itself.

Bridget Phillipson has said she is ready to take on the unions in a battle over compulsory reading tests for 13-year-olds and more extracurricular activities for all children to prevent them becoming stuck in a doom loop of detachment from school. The education secretary said that teaching unions, who have argued the tests were unnecessary and distracting, should really think carefully about whether they could justify standing in the way of tackling the shocking outcomes that exist for many working-class children.

Childhood doesn't end the day you turn five, Ruth Lue-Quee said to me on the phone as she shepherded her son to the playground this half term. Playing is what children are born to do. It's innate in them. It is how they learn. The former deputy headteacher's petition to make play-based pedagogy a core part of the key stage 1 (KS1) national curriculum in England has garnered almost the required 100,000 signatures for debate in parliament.

Education Minister Paul Calandra says if an Ontario school board doesn't restore prom plans for three of its high schools that cancelled them, he will step in and do it. Three schools in the Durham District School Board decided to cancel the traditional event due to what the principals called growing liabilities and risks connected to school-run proms. Students reacted with anger and disappointment that they would not be able to celebrate in the way so many other students have