Friday News Roundup

Time for the Friday News Roundup.

UT-Austin Considering Offer to Adopt Trump Priorities for Funding Advantages (The Texas Tribune)

The Texas Tribune reported late last week that The University of Texas at Austin was considering an offer by the Trump administration that would grant the university access to substantial and meaningful federal dollars in exchange for making specific policy changes. Among those changes include the enactment of a five-year tuition freeze, capping the enrollment of international undergraduate students at 15%, and adopting a stricter definition of gender.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has already rejected the offer, but reportedly UT-Austin is still mulling over the offer.

After UT-Austin lost approximately $47 million of federal grant dollars, this is nothing more than a Trump bribe to replace that money if the university rejects a liberal stance on foreign and LGBTQ students.

States Are Experimenting With Teacher Pay Again – But the Focus Isn’t Just Test Scores (EducationWeek)

If you hang around public education in this country long enough, you will learn that “what goes around, comes around.”

EducationWeek reported this week that states like Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, and Utah are working on “pay for performance” policies that will pay certain teachers more than others based on their work performance.

My school district was working on “pay for performance” policies back in 2005, and now 20 years later districts and states continue to try to figure out a better way to compensate teachers than depending on how many years they have worked in the classroom.

Our “pay for performance” program struggled under the criticism of primarily teacher unions, and eventually was discontinued by a school board vote.

It would be nice to figure out “pay for performance,” because everyone in and out of the system know that all teachers aren’t created alike.

Trump Funding Cuts Hit Particularly Hard for Deaf and Blind Children (EducationWeek)

Here is something America needs to understand, especially those of us who care about kids who are under-served and under-represented. We have a president that appears not to care about those types of kids. It appears Donald Trump doesn’t care.

Witness his decision to cut funding to deaf and blind schools across the country (EducationWeek, 10/7/25). $10 million in recent cuts, ear-marked to support efforts to support K-12 students who have vision and hearing impairments, have been cut under President Trump’s watch. And there are no plans by the current administration to replace that funding.

Months After Deep Cuts, Education Researchers See Reason for Cautious Optimism (The 74)

But it seems the Trump administration has made a few decisions to support federal programming originally cut back in February by the Department of Government Efficiency.

According to a post by The 74 (10/6/25), the Department of Education has decided to reinstate 20 of the 100 contracts originally cut, a lawsuit will force the department to keep 10 federally funded Regional Education Laboratories open (one of those played a huge role in the state of Mississippi’s recent reading and math improvements), and the department is asking experts for guidance on how it can modernize the Institute of Education Statistics.

To be fair, maybe it’s too critical to say Donald Trump doesn’t care about deaf and blind kids. Maybe what we should say, based on the recent backtracking of his Department of Education referenced above, is this:

When it comes to K-12 educational policy under President Trump’s administration, no one, inside or outside of the White House, really knows what is going on and what is going to happen – including the president himself.

Private School Choice Gets Supercharged in Trump’s 2^nd Term (EducationWeek)

But wait! One initiative Donald Trump has been doggedly consistent about is funding private schools with public dollars under the label of “school choice.” EducationWeek, in a October 9^th post, emphasized the Trump administration’s focus on this limited view of “school choice” by quoting Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research organization:

“They’re [the Trump administration] prioritizing the expansion of private school choice programs [over] the improvement of public schools.” The problem with Trump’s focus on promoting private schools at the expense of the current public school system is that the president hasn’t embraced the choice most important when it comes to our educational future – “learner choice.” If families were given education savings accounts, or vouchers, to use inside private schools or arguably more important “out of school” learning options, it would really help our kids become smarter and stronger, instead of filling the pockets of private school leaders with public money.