Friday News Roundup

It’s Friday. Time for the News Roundup.

A Fight to Save An Austin Middle School Puts Families at Odds with Texas Over How to Rate Schools (The Texas Tribune)

What happens when a neighborhood loves their school, but that public school is judged to be “under-performing” by their state’s evaluation system?

That question is on the minds of parents and community associated with Dobie Middle School, located in Austin, Texas.

As The Texas Tribune reported recently:

“Dobie’s uncertain fate underscores a core issue brewing across the state: What happens when the state’s metrics used to measure success and failure in education are fundamentally at odds with how a community views their schools? The question comes as Governor Greg Abbott has called state legislators back to the Texas Capitol with marching orders to eliminate STAAR [Texas’s standardized test] and revisit how testing shapes the state’s school accountability system. While the test is controversial throughout the state, it’s not yet clear what may replace it.”

So, who knows better about a school’s performance? State officials paying attention to reading and math scores? Or parents and a community that is in contact with the school each and every day?

Merged Schools: A Growing Strategy to Integrate Classrooms (EducationWeek)

Take it from me, drawing school boundaries is a miserable job. Making the decision where kids go to school is filled with political debate, financial considerations, and sometimes just plain racism.

But recently, according to EducationWeek, school districts have re-introduced the concept of “merged schools.”

“Merged schools – sometimes called ‘paired,’ ‘center,’ or ‘cluster’ schools – are created by combining the student populations of two or more neighboring schools and splitting them into separate campuses, typically by grade band.”

…

“The practice was common during the desegregation era following the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision but faded in subsequent decades.”

…

“Experts say this strategy offers unique advantaged for instruction and school culture that simple boundary shifts do not.”

“When there are more teachers working at the same grade level, collaboration improves, and veteran teachers can more easily mentor newcomers.”

Texas Passed a Bible-Themed Curriculum. But Many Districts Aren’t Using It (The 74)

The separation of church and state continues to erode.

According to a recent article in The 74,

“This coming school year, the Fairfield, Texas school district, about halfway between Dallas and Houston, will roll out a new K-5 reading program that includes multiple biblical references.”

“But the staff, hoping to avoid debates over families’ religious beliefs, has chopped roughly 30 sections out of the curriculum, including a kindergarten lesson on the Golden Rule featuring Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and several excerpts about a Christian prayer the governor of Plymouth Colony said at the first Thanksgiving.”

“The district’s elementary teachers ‘went through the materials looking for things that may be controversial,’ said Superintendent Joe Craig. They didn’t feel those parts of the curriculum ‘were in line with what we wanted the lesson to focus on.’”

“Fairfield’s process reflects the kind of selective approach that many districts have taken toward Bluebonnet Learning – the state-developed materials that prominently feature the Bible and Christianity. With feedback from 300 teachers, Fort Worth, the fifth largest district in the state, adopted the phonics portion of the curriculum, but turned down the units with religious material. Some districts ordered just a few books, likely for review purposes, while the Houston and Dallas districts opted to keep what they currently use.”

State legislators thinking something is going to happen in a school district because of a law they passed, and then that school district doing something totally different happens all the time in public education. This situation will be no different.

But the erosion between church and state continues to be a concern, if not a crisis.

Why the White House Backed Down From Its First Big Education Cuts (The Atlantic)

“The email arrived at 10:55 P.M. on Friday, July 25, with an upbeat subject line: ‘Big News: Key Federal Title Funds Set to Release Next Week.’ It was sent by North Dakota’s schools superintendent, Kirsten Baesler, who is awaiting confirmation to become an assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, the very agency that had been holding back the funds in question – more than $5 billion – from school districts for weeks.”

“’Thank you for your advocacy, patience, professionalism, and persistence as we’ve waited for these essential funds to flow,’ Baesler wrote to local school leaders. Like their peers across the country, North Dakota educators had grown dismayed as the congressionally approved money, one of the largest federal-grant programs for K-12 students, had been held up. Some had spent the summer pondering layoffs and sweating over spreadsheets. ‘Hopefully, this development will provide greater clarity as you move forward with budget planning for the upcoming year,’ Baesler reassured them. She signed the message, ‘With relief and gratitude.’

“That an incoming official of the Department of Education was touting the importance of federal dollars for a heavily Republican state underscores the conundrum that President Donald Trump faces in his attempt to dismantle the agency. On the campaign trail, Trump’s promise to ‘send education back to the states’ was often greeted with applause, and the Supreme Court has allowed the president to go ahead with his plans to gut the Education Department. But the four-week funding freeze – and the backlash it sparked – showed that cutting popular programs for schoolkids can be as unwelcome in Trump country as it is in coastal cities.”

This is just one example of a strange phenomenon sweeping the country – Americans directly struggling from the decisions of the man they voted for as President of the United States. But dissatisfaction leads to motivation, so let’s see what happens in the 2026 midterms.

Will New AI Academy Help Teachers or Just Improve Tech’s Bottom Line? (The 74)

According to a recent article in The 74,

“AFT [American Federation of Teachers] says it’ll open the National Academy for AI Instruction in Manhattan this fall, offering hands-on workshops for teachers. Over five years, it said, the academy will train 400,000 educators, or one in 10 U.S. teachers, effectively reaching the more than 7.2 million students they teach.”

“When she announced the academy in early July, AFT President Randi Weingarten said teachers face ‘huge challenges,’ including navigating AI wisely, ethically and safely. ‘The question was whether we would be chasing it – or whether we would be trying to harness it.’”

I’m not a big fan of Randi Weingarten or the American Federation of Teachers, but “harnessing” AI as educators versus “chasing it” makes sense to me. Right now, there are too many learning organizations running away from AI, and that needs to stop.

COVID Money Helped Pay for Summer School Across Vermont. What Are Schools Doing Now? (Vermont Public)

According to Vermont Public,

“During the pandemic, Vermont schools received $31 million in COVID relief funding, which a number of districts used to set up, or expand, summer programs.”

“The Agency of Education did not track how many programs were started with the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, fund, but Emanueal Betz, who manages the state’s federal after-school and summer program fund, said districts across the state were able to start summer programs.”

…

“That pot of money, however, ran out at the beginning of this year, leaving districts to cobble together other sources of funding – or in some cases scale back or even shut down their programs.”

With the end to ESSER funds, and the unpredictability of federal funding currently, school districts would be wise to stop depending on support from our federal government when it comes to grants and other types of funding.

Decide what your plan is, and then find money to support that plan.

“What Teachers Think They Should Make vs. What They’re Actually Paid (EducationWeek)

According to a survey completed by the EdWeek Research Center, teachers think they should make on average $85,000 for their work compared to their actual median salary of $68,000.

I’m all for paying adult learning leaders more money, but to do that requires a complete revision of what we expect adult learning leaders to do and the responsibilities they will accept for their outcomes.

I don’t think our current K-12 system is equipped for that type of transformation. It might require a new type of learning system.

Trump Revives the Presidential Fitness Test. Will It Look the Same? (EducationWeek)

Part of our current president’s shortcomings is that he often appears to be trapped in late 20^th century thinking. Let’s face it, he’s not very creative, and his visions are often merely repetitive of something in our past – something he thinks worked well in our past.

For example, take his revival of the presidential fitness test, a test that served its time and ended in 2013. The fitness test was replaced by the Obama administration in favor of a fitness program focused on a students’ health with a less competitive spin.

“’It’s going to be a very big thing,’ Trump said at the signing of an executive order July 31 reviving the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition and the associated President Fitness Test, surrounded by professional athletes. ‘This was a wonderful tradition, and we’re bringing it back…It’s turned out to be very popular to do.’”

For my money, let’s continue to focus our youth on physical and emotional wellness versus how fast you can run a mile, or how many push-ups you can muster.

After an extended summer break, ABPTL will be back September 2^nd. Til then, stay cool out there. SVB