Knowing your ABCs is essential to academic success, but having a last name starting with A, B or C might also help make the grade. An analysis by University of Michigan researchers of more than 30 million grading records from U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades. This is due to sequential grading biases and the default order of students' submissions in Canvas—the most widely used online learning management system—which is based on the alphabetical rank of their surnames. view article

After his Massachusetts school district tried to remove important services from his special needs son, Scott Pitta tried to record a meeting with administrators, but in doing so, he claims they shut down the meeting. Now, he is suing on the basis that school officials violated his constitutional rights.  view article

Ricci Shepherd loves working as an engagement officer for a charity, but it is very different to her previous career as a primary school teacher. She is among a growing number of teachers opting for a complete career change. "The stress involved with teaching and the amount of work, and at the time I was a mum with younger children, I found that really challenging," Ms Shepherd said. "I no longer have my registration. view article

A Rhode Island student smashed a ketchup packet with his fist, splattering an administrator. Another ripped up his school work. The district called it “destruction of school property.” A Washington student turned cartwheels while a PE teacher attempted to give instructions. view article

Election years are supposed to be the time for democracy to shine. We’ll debate, we’ll campaign and then in November we’ll come together to decide which direction we'll swim for the next two to four years. But in Texas, who’ll run the state is usually decided in the spring. And it’s a much smaller share of people who participate in those elections. We the Texans A yearlong Texas Tribune project on democracy. Read more. That’s especially true in legislative and congressional races, thanks to gerrymandering and noncompetitive elections. Let’s take a look at the 2022 race in state House District 142 in Houston as an example of why. That year, some local Democrats were angry at HD 142’s incumbent, view article

Late March 26, a federal appeals court further blocked a Texas law that would allow police officers to arrest people suspected of being in the country illegally. In a 2-1 ruling issued minutes before midnight, a panel of judges from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied Texas’ request to allow the law, known as Senate Bill 4, to take effect as a legal battle continues. The court is scheduled to hear arguments April 3 on the legality of SB 4. One week earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court briefly allowed SB 4 to take effect March 19 before it was halted by the appeals court. view article

School districts around the country are facing issues with how they handle their social media accounts, and the debate has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. Denver Public Schools recently reviewed its social media policy that doesn’t allow employees to restrict comments on social media or limit who can see them. view article

The coach of a Vermont high school girls basketball team that was banned from state athletics after forfeiting a game against a squad with a trans player defended the decision — stressing the danger of a biological male playing against girls. “I’ve got four daughters. I’ve coached them all at one point in their careers playing high school basketball,” Chris Goodwin, coach of the girls’ team at the Mid-Vermont Christian School, said Monday on “Fox & Friends.” view article

It's going to take aggressive interventions to repair the pandemic's destructive impact on kids' schooling. That's the takeaway of two big new studies that look at how America's K-12 students are doing. There's some good news in this new research, to be sure – but there's still a lot of work to do on both student achievement and absenteeism. Here's what to know: view article

This follows a Supreme Court order giving permission to federal agents to destroy Texas’ razor wire fence barricades at the border.  Amidst a military-like standoff between the Texas National Guard and U.S. Border Patrol at Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is refusing to surrender control of the park to Border Patrol.   In a January 26 letter addressed to Department of Homeland Security General Counsel Jonathan Meyer, Paxton denied Meyer’s demands to let Border Patrol agents into Shelby Park, presumably to destroy Texas’ concertina razor wire fence barricades per a Supreme Court order allowing federal agents to do so.  “As I said before, this office will continue to defend Texas’s efforts to protect its southern border against every effort by the Biden Administration to undermine the State’s constitutional right of self-defense,” Paxton’s letter reads. “You should advise your clients to join us in those efforts by doing their job and following the law.”  view article

From the Texas House to former President Donald Trump, Republicans across the country are rallying behind Gov. Greg Abbott’s legal standoff with the federal government at the southern border, intensifying concerns about a constitutional crisis amid an ongoing dispute with the Biden administration. At issue is concertina wire that the Texas National Guard has been using as a barrier between the Rio Grande River and Shelby Park, a 47-acre area in Eagle Pass. In a 5-4 decision earlier this week, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Biden Administration when it vacated a lower court’s ruling that prevented Border Patrol agents from cutting the wire to apprehend people who had crossed the river. On Wednesday — and as the Texas National Guard and state troopers continued to roll out the wire and prevent federal agents from accessing much of the park — view article

There is a growing and disturbing trend of anti-intellectual elitism in American culture. It's the dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility. Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says in an article in the Washington Post, "Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism."  view article

A Mississippi school district has been ordered to desegregate its schools after what the Justice Department called a five-decade-long legal battle. The Cleveland School District, about two hours northwest of Jackson, was told that it must consolidate its schools in order to provide real desegregation for students in the city of about 12,000. view article