What's happening in public education

 Jessica Winter, New Yorker - Linda McMahon, the secretary of the rapidly disintegrating U.S. Department of Education, recently made an appearance in Oklahoma City, one stop on a nationwide listening tour titled “Returning Education to the States.” There, she told reporters that the Trump Administration wants to offer states “the most flexibility that we can give them.” As students across the country begin a new school year, let’s see how that’s going.

• The D.O.E. cancelled six hundred million dollars in grants to help recruit and retain high-performing educators in low-income and rural districts. As a result, some teachers have effectively received a pay cut—despite research showing strong correlations between merit pay systems and student achievement.

• The deep slashes to Medicaid in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act will leave schools with less money for health-related services. Public-school-district leaders are warning of layoffs of school nurses, reductions in behavioral-health resources, and fewer services for kids with disabilities.

• Trump’s bill will also reduce funding and change eligibility requirements for the SNAP food-assistance program, which authorizes children of enrolled families to receive free meals at school. Cuts to SNAP could mean that fewer schools will be able to continue universal-free-breakfast-and-lunch programs, putting more students at risk of going hungry while they’re trying to learn.

• An office of the D.O.E. that addresses complaints from student-loan borrowers—about problems receiving aid, disputes with servicers about their loan status, and more—lost about two-thirds of its staff in the spring. According to NBC News, the office has now accumulated more than twenty-seven thousand open complaints. Elizabeth Warren, the senior Democratic senator from Massachusetts, recently wrote a long and frustrated letter to McMahon demanding answers about the backlog, and also about the “unusually rapid pace at which [the D.O.E.] has been dismissing civil rights complaints.”

• California is reportedly losing more than twelve million dollars in funds for its refusal to excise what a Trump Administration official called “delusional gender ideology”—including any reference to transgender and nonbinary people—from its sex-ed curriculum.

• The D.O.E. has placed five school districts in Virginia on “high risk” status—meaning that, instead of receiving their federal funding as usual, they’ll be required to front their expenses and then plead for reimbursement later—because they permit their students to use the bathroom of their choice. “The Northern Viriginia [sic] School Divisions that are choosing to abide by woke gender ideology in place of federal law must now prove they are using every single federal dollar for a legal purpose,” McMahon said in a statement, adding that these districts “have stubbornly refused to provide a safe environment for young women in their schools.”

More Winter’s reporting on the Trump Administration’s systematic gutting of the Department of Education.