News

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:

One of the most comment complaints parents and citizens are lodging against books in public schools and libraries is that the material breaks obscenity laws. This, along with citing pornography laws, is the justification being cited in both formal and informal complaints. It’s the language being shared in social media “parents rights” groups to prop up argumentation. Several would-be censors have found this a natural lead-in to creating police reports about so-called obscene books like Gender Queer, Out of Darkness, and All Boys Aren’t Blue.

A Chattanooga mom accurately describes the approach of Moms for Liberty at a Hamilton County School Board meeting.

Teaching is our trade; also, I confess, it's our weapon." Those are the words of Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, a small private Christian college in Michigan that, in recent years, has quietly become a driving force in nearly all of the country's ongoing fights around education. During the Trump years, the college functioned as a "feeder school" sending alumni into the administration and the offices of its allies on Capitol Hill. Hillsdale officials led Trump's controversial 1776 Commission, established to create a "patriotic education" alternative to contemporary scholarship on America's racial history. The school's lecture series and magazine serve as a testing ground for the right's most ambitious and outlandish ideas: that diversity isn't a strength but a "solvent" that destroys national unity; that Vladimir Putin is a populist hero; that Republicans should aspire to lure so many children out of public schools that the entire system might collapse.

For weeks, messaging from state officials about Gov. Bill Lee's proposed new education funding formula has aimed to assure local communities they will not have to contribute more funding for schools in the first few years of the plan.

The Senate Education Committee chairman said Monday he believes county commissioners should sock away money to prepare for the effects of a new K-12 funding formula on local taxes.

Senators are trying to figure out the effect of a $9.5 billion funding formula shift on local governments, which are to be held harmless for three years, meaning the portion they pay in a 70-30% split will not force them to pay a greater share until the fourth year.