In the News

Across the country, new laws targeting critical race theory and debated books are influencing the small but pivotal decisions educators make every day: how to answer a student’s question, what texts to read as a class, and how to prepare for a lesson.

The House passed a bill Monday that lets school boards deem books “obscene," and threatens to withhold education funding. It could also slap school librarians with criminal penalties if orders to remove books aren't followed.

Days after Gov. Bill Lee signed a law requiring school libraries to screen their materials for “age appropriateness,” Tennessee lawmakers advanced a harsher bill that could slap school librarians with criminal penalties over books some might label obscene.

If you are wondering what it looks like when school privatizers are close to total victory, Tennessee is a prime example. Here, the forces that want to take public money and hand it over to private entities are on the verge of completing their conquest.

The Tennessee House on Monday passed a bill that lets school boards deem books "obscene" and threatens to withhold education funding and slap school librarians with criminal penalties if orders to remove them aren't followed.

Administrators in Minnesota’s Anoka-Hennepin School District were already looking for ways to support students’ mental well-being before the pandemic, driven in part by a string of student deaths, including some suicides. Then covid-19 and remote schooling inflicted fresh emotional damage.

Local nonpartisan political action committee Williamson Strong released its school board candidate endorsements Tuesday.

The Feb. 21 Williamson County, Tennessee, school board meeting opened with far less commotion than the raucous gatherings that came before it: Gone were the hecklers, sign wavers, screamers and air pokers who made headlines around the world for threatening doctors and nurses who spoke out in favor last summer of reinstating a mask mandate for young children.

Two years of pandemic living — whether or not best practices were followed — has left an entire generation trying to navigate what life looks like as we try to shift from pandemic to endemic. We’re not there yet and we won’t be for a while, but the changes in our social lives have absolutely made an impact on how we engage with others.

The Tennessee Department of Education released its final set of explainer resources about the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement (TISA) Monday.

Gov. Bill Lee is proposing a significant change to the way the state funds public schools. His proposal would replace the decades old BEP formula with something he calls TISA – Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement.

Tucked into a New Yorker article by Jill Lepore about the spate of school board fights over just about everything was a statistic that caught my eye. Despite all the ink spilled lately about clashes over masking, critical race theory and which books to assign (or ban), American parents are happy overall with their children’s education. Lepore explains: