President and Administration
The Commerce Department issued guidelines for companies angling to receive federal funding aimed at bolstering the domestic semiconductor industry…
As fire seasons have grown more severe across the West, the federal agencies that battle the blazes are facing another problem: a workforce struggling with stress, anxiety and addiction, and not enough mental-health support to help…
On August 25, college leaders met with the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to discuss how colleges can help stop the spread of monkeypox and COVID-19 as students return to campus…
On Wednesday, 9/28, the Biden administration will host the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health and release a National Strategy with actions the federal government will take to drive solutions to these challenges…
On Wednesday, 8/31, the Biden administration announced new efforts to strengthen the teaching profession and support schools in their effort to address teacher shortages as the new school year begins…
On 8/23, the Education Department (ED) announced that it has approved more than $10 billion in debt relief for over 175,000 borrowers in 10 months through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program…
Congress
The Senate returns today, 9/6, after a month-long recess to vote on an appeals court nominee. Democratic congressional leaders are considering attaching a provision codifying same sex marriage protections onto a must-pass spending bill to keep the federal government open past September 30…
Education
On 8/25, President Biden said he will cancel up to $10,000 in student debt for Americans earning less than $125,000 per year (or $250,000 for couples filing jointly) with additional relief for low-income Pell Grant recipients…
On 8/26, President Biden signed into law the Ensuring the Best Schools for Veterans Act, exempting institutions from the 85/15 rule - which bars students from using Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) funding, such as GI Bill benefits, to pay for academic programs where more than 85 percent of students receive VA aid-if their share of students receiving VA funding is below 35 percent of their institution-wide enrollment…
The Center on Reinventing Public Education released a new “review of evidence,” which found that children whose schools were closed the longest had their learning interrupted the most—and most often, that affected low-income children and children of color in big cities…
Analyzing data from three million students assigned lessons through a widely used literacy program, the nonprofits ReadWorks and TNTP found that during the 2020-21 school year — the first full year after the start of the pandemic — students were assigned work below their grade level a third of the time…
On 8/25, the Education Department released a back to school checklist for parents and families…
Many school superintendents and district leaders are reluctant to hire full-time teachers with temporary federal pandemic relief funds, even as many schools face shortages, according to new research….
Black, Hispanic and low-income community college students who take up to half their courses online increase their odds of completing degrees, a working paper finds…
New findings on San Antonio public schools reveal that students in charter schools are in many cases outpacing their peers, both statewide and within the city — in a few cases, by as much as half of an entire school year….
In a recently published report by PDK International, a professional organization for teachers, over 1,000 adults expressed higher levels of faith in their community’s public schools than have ever been recorded in the survey’s 48-year history, with 54 percent giving them an A or B…
Since 2017, every student in grades six through 12 in Wisconsin has been required to participate in an academic career plan in order to help young people see the purpose and meaning of what they’re learning by discovering it on their own…
In a special data collection combining scores from early 2020, just before schools began to close, with additional results from the winter of 2022, the report shows average long-term math performance falling for the first time ever; in reading, scores saw the biggest drop in 30 years…
As the school year gets underway, a national teacher shortage has K-12 districts scrambling and job boards lengthening…
On 8/26, a report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that fewer than 20 percent of first-time students who enrolled part-time graduated within eight years at the institution where they started, compared to 46 percent of full-time students…
A new report from the Georgetown Center on Poverty & Inequality suggests that higher education contributes to racial and gender segregation in the labor market, because women and students of color are underrepresented in certain fields of study and concentrated in others…