RIF roller-coaster, 'mug shots' of school sexual abusers, & the new guy at the Post
🏆 Best Education Journalism of the Week 🏆 (10/17/2025)
In this week’s newsletter:
📌 The shutdown continues — as does the RIF rollercoaster.
📌 How immigration affects enrollment.
📌 Mug shots are part of one organization’s effort to prevent school sex abuse.
📌 The Washington Post staffs up on education.
📌 “Was I a DEI hire?”
RIF ROLLERCOASTER
The big education story of the week:
The big education story of the week is the wave of shutdown-related layoffs in the special education office of the Department of Education — one of the few shutdown stories that could have had an immediate impact on local schools.
The feds play a particularly large role in overseeing and distributing funds for special education, and the office was hit hard by shutdown-related reductions in force (K-12 Dive, EdWeek, AP, The Guardian, PBS, AZ Central). These layoffs also hit the civil rights office and the department that distributes funds to school districts that cover federal land — funds already on hold during the shutdown (EdWeek).
The shutdown is not going as many predicted (NYT, Vox). And the USDE layoffs were put on hold Wednesday by a federal judge (The 74, K-12 Dive, USA TODAY, New York Times, Washington Post). The biggest Department of Education stories continue to be fights over funding programs specifically targeted by the Trump administration (ProPublica, Mercury News, AP).
Other big education stories of the week include colleges rejecting the Trump ‘compact’ (The Hill, New York Times, Inside Higher Ed), the withdrawal of the Des Moines school board chair from her Senate bid (Des Moines Register, KCCI), and changes in the role of religion in public schools (Baltimore Banner, New York Times, AP).
COMPLICATING THE ENROLLMENT NARRATIVE
The best education journalism of the week:
🏆 Alabama public schools down 5,000 students, but CHOOSE Act not entirely to blame adds some nuance to the conventional narrative that private school vouchers have a large effect on public school enrollment. Immigration crackdowns and demographic drops are probably contributing more to falling enrollment than vouchers, which in Alabama largely funds kids already in private schools. (Rebecca Griesbach / AL.com)
🏆 A virtual education company was a lifeline to a rural district. Now they’re at war. highlights both the promise and the pitfalls of privatized virtual education, as one New Mexico district sues to break a contract it says fails to meet the needs of students. (Tyler Kingkade / NBC News)
🏆 Are Books Really Disappearing From American Classrooms? is a useful corrective to the widespread handwringing over kids no longer reading novels in school. The piece shows that while there is some evidence fewer students are reading whole books the data is not at all conclusive. (Sarah Schwartz / Education Week)
Other stories we liked include Many Young Adults Barely Literate, Yet Earned a High School Diploma (The 74), These top Bay Area school districts attracted families for years. Why is enrollment down? (SF Chronicle), and Hawaiʻi Parents Are Hopping Fences To Sneak Into Playgrounds (Honolulu Civil Beat).
SCHOOL SECRECY
The latest from The Grade
In this week’s new commentary, Enough Abuse’s Jetta Bernier describes her efforts to encourage media coverage and the many efforts her organization is taking to persuade lawmakers to take action against school sexual misconduct— including posting ‘mug shots’ of school staff who’ve been found to have abused kids (above).
Meanwhile, a handful of journalists and outlets continue to report on the topic, including most recently the Cap Times’ Danielle DuClos, who published the first in a new series showing that hundreds of school staff in Wisconsin have been investigated for sexual misconduct of various kinds — without informing parents and the public. You can watch the replay of a webinar featuring freelance journalist Matt Drange on covering school sexual misconduct.
PEOPLE, EVENTS, & MORE
📰 New outlets: The Tulsa Flyer’s Anna Colletto tells us that the paper’s coverage will complement coverage from Tulsa World’s Lenzy Krehbiel-Burton and Andrea Eger and will center the community and highlight solutions. According to Colletto, that means talking with the full range of Tulsa families and students, and letting community members’ questions guide the work. “I’m basing the majority of my pitches on questions heard directly from Tulsans, maintaining our service-oriented mission and thinking outside the box.”
📰 Comings & goings: Todd Wallack, the Washington Post’s newest education hire, tells us that he’s new to covering the education beat full-time but helped produce education stories during previous stints at the Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle.
📰 Interviews and segments: The PBS NewsHour aired a Stephanie Sy segment on Arizona voucher schools. The Washington Post’s Laura Meckler was also on the NewsHour, talking about the shutdown and special education. WBUR’s On Point rebroadcast a segment featuring host Meghna Chakrabarti on the topic of whether education technology is actually helping students learn. The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay was interviewed on WEKU Kentucky public radio about the mystery of the millions of missing children. For more on unaccounted kids, see here.
📰 Research and reports: More than 20,000 educators are in the country on H-1B visas — the third most common occupation group for the program (NPR). According to new results from NWEA that are now scheduled to come out three times per year, students are improving in reading and stagnant in math (K12 Dive, NPR, Chalkbeat). Kids who use social media score lower on reading and memory tests, a study shows (NPR). School boards are well-aligned with local politics but often out of step on school quality and choice. (Fordham Institute, Word In Black). One out of three Black students is not attending a traditional school (Brookings/Jill Barshay).
📰 Quotes:
“If you want to determine a school board’s priorities, audit their meetings and see how much time they spend reviewing or discussing student achievement data.”
“If I were born even 10 years later, I would never have made it out.”
When teachers say they want kids to ‘love’ reading or to ‘be’ readers, they “mean a very specific, culturally-constructed type of love that looks a certain way.
“A red vs blue frame feels culture warry and unhelpful.”
“The soft bigotry of low expectations for boys is remarkable.”
“My intern was born in 2007. I have unread emails older than that.”
KICKER
Always save the best for last.
That’s all, folks. Thanks for reading!