Friday News Roundup

Here’s your Friday News Roundup.

Play-Based Learning in Kindergarten Is Making a Comeback. Here’s What It Means (EducationWeek) Play-Based Learning Yields More Joy, Higher Scores at This Elementary School (EducationWeek)

Play has returned to America’s kindergartens. EducationWeek ran two articles (originally printed in 2025) last week highlighting play-based learning and its reappearance in American elementary schools.

“’What I was noticing as a kindergarten teacher is that the opportunities for kids to come in and have chances to play, to experiment and test how the world works, were being pushed out for more academic instruction that wasn’t necessarily aligned with where their skill levels were or the experiences they had,’ said Christopher Brown, the associate dean for teacher education at the University of Buffalo’s Graduate School of Education and a former kindergarten teacher who taught in the late 1990s. ‘That’s continued to be a concern with teachers that I’ve talked to for the past 20 years.’”

“Decisionmakers in some states and districts have begun to heed concerns raised by Brown and other education experts about the direction kindergarten has taken. As a result, some schools are returning play to its prominent role in kindergarten.”

One such school, covered previously by ABPTL, is Mansfield Elementary School in northeastern Connecticut. Mansfield’s teacher leaders have embraced a recent Connecticut law that has reintroduced a return to a teaching approach for young learners that has eroded across the country in the wake of more rigorous academic expectations: guided play.

“’I believe elementary schools need to be places where we build joy, and play is how we can get there,’ said Mansfield principal Kate McCoy. ‘Pushing play was part of our dialogue from the get-go.’”

In Trump’s First Year, at Least $12 Billion in School Funding Disruptions (EducationWeek)

Kids suffer when money stops flowing from any source, and that includes the federal government. Right or wrong, the system is built on the money approved by politicians. There is probably an argument that we are spending too much money on K-12 education these days, but until we figure out a more efficient system of learning, cutting or disrupting program funding already approved by the United States Congress is just wrong.

According to EducationWeek Donald Trump’s administration permanently cut, delayed, or halted and then reinstated over $12 billion already earmarked for public school use by Congress.

From experience as an urban school leader, every time the feds would disrupt funding (whether it was a Democratic or Republican administration), kids would suffer.

Sometimes it was just an unintentional error. It doesn’t appear that that’s the case this time. $12 billion is just $3 billion shy of the entire amount Congress allocates annually for special education nationwide – or equal to two-thirds of all the Title I money that annually flows to schools.

In this case, one should probably question the Trump administration’s reasoning (or non-reasoning) associated with the numerous disruptions experienced.

Does our President really care about those kids inside our public education system right now?

Vermont’s Student Count Keeps Falling; Washington Central Enrollment Decline is Steeper Than Average (The Bridge)

This is a little story about a big topic – falling enrollment in an area that historically has shown support for and developed top-performing schools.

This week Montpelier, Vermont’s town newspaper The Bridge announced that all four local school districts experienced declining enrollment during this school year. Three of the four’s declining enrollment outpaced the state of Vermont’s decrease. And this is happening in central Vermont, a place where citizens have supported their public schools and demonstrated pride for what those schools did for their children for over 100 years.

And Montpelier, Vermont is not alone. Declining public school enrollment has been a problem for over 50 years, but now it’s impacting towns that currently have high-performing schools and schools the town’s citizens have been pleased with for years.

Urban school districts have faced declining enrollment for too long, but now families are voting with their feet in districts that would have been unimaginable even ten years ago.

Houston ISD has seen sharper enrollment decline, workforce shifts under state takeover, UH report shows (Houston Public Media)

Another report from Houston, Texas tells of declining student enrollment and teachers leaving the district, while Houston ISD touts high test scores and improving academic achievement.

There needs to be a study done on exactly who is leaving the district and what their academic performance looked like while they were enrolled in Houston ISD.

When I was a district administrator in Houston ISD, we learned of principals that would intentionally tell low-performing kids not to show up for test day, thereby increasing the school’s opportunity to earn a higher academic ranking because low-performing students missed the test.

Could the same game be going on at a district level in Houston?

Defund Science, Distort Culture, Mock Education (The Atlantic)

“Joan Brugge has worked for nearly 50 years as a cancer scientist, studying the earliest signs that someone might become sick. Then the Trump administration canceled her lab’s funding.”

“’I was actually at a breast-cancer retreat. And during the coffee break, I looked at my emails to see, you know, if there’s anything that I had to deal with. And I got this email from the university and it was a real gut punch. My knees basically buckled, and I had to sit down.” – Joan Brugge

This is happening in America. And it’s because of Donald Trump and his weak, confused leadership.

And this is bad.

Okay, we can’t end a Roundup with Donald Trump. So let’s end it like this:

One day the first grade teacher was reading the story of the Three Little Pigs to her class.

She came to the part of the story where the first pig was trying to accumulate the building materials for his home.

She read, “…and so the pig went up to the man with the wheelbarrow full of straw and said, ‘Pardon me sir, but may I have some of that straw to build my house?’”

The teacher paused then and asked the class, “And what do you think that man said?”

One little boy raised his hand and said, “I think he said ‘Holy shit! A talking pig?’”

The teacher was unable to continue teaching for 10 minutes.

Have a good, and hopefully warm, weekend. Til Monday. SVB