Hi! It’s Lily and Erica on the national desk. You hit the jackpot with today’s newsletter … and the jackpot is: compelling education journalism. Today’s big story is about the latest way students think they can get rich quick. And don’t fold early — keep reading for a flurry of activity from the U.S. Department of Education and a dive into private school tuition in Indiana.

And don’t forget, Chalkbeat’s on a hot streak: Ideas Editor Matt Barnum is hosting a must-see event on teacher turnover. He has new data on teacher attrition to share, plus a classroom-level view on how to bolster the profession. When you register for the event, leave any questions you have, and we’ll do our best to answer.

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Diane Thole’s financial literacy class is a hot commodity among students at School of the Future in New York City — in recent years, there’s been a waitlist.

But the expectations students have for the class and her actual lessons don’t always line up. Students coming in, she explained, are looking to live out their “Wolf of Wall Street”-inspired dreams, while Thole is more focused on topics like financial planning, retirement, and paying off student loan debt.

And there’s one expectation she’s hearing more and more often: Students want to know more about sports betting and online gambling. Some think they can master stats and win millions by the time they’re 18.

They know terms like “parlay” and “over-under.” Moreover, it’s clear that some of them are betting themselves and easily evading age restrictions every state imposes on online gambling. 

Data that Chalkbeat obtained this week bears this out: GoGuardian, an education software company, reports that the rate of sites blocked in its gambling, betting and fantasy sports category has increased nearly 30% since the company started tracking it in 2022.

In other words: Kids are gambling, and they’re trying to do it in school. Financial literacy educators said this is something they’re talking about a lot both with students and with each other. They’re developing lessons to show students the unpredictable nature of sports and gambling.

Gambling is surely not a new problem, but the accessibility of the online platforms like DraftKings and prediction market juggernaut Kalshi (where folks are betting on the odds that it will rain today in Denver and if Bad Bunny will be People’s sexiest man this year) is fairly new.

Thole sees the rise of gambling among young people like the rise of cellphones. Teachers are still trying to figure out how to address it, but she thinks they should, and not just in financial literacy courses, but in health class, too.

“This is totally intertwined with their like mental and emotional health,” she said. “Because it's a dopamine hit.”

Read the full story here

There’s a possible link between teachers anxious about their own math abilities and students who struggle in math. A recent study looked at math anxiety among Indiana teachers and found that teachers with math anxiety were more likely to be assigned to students with disabilities, low-achieving students, and from low-income backgrounds. Those students learned less. The differences were modest — but real. 

The U.S. Department of Education is ditching a civil rights enforcement tool that allowed investigators to identify more subtle forms of discrimination against people of color. The rule change bypassed some of the usual procedures, including a step that gives members of the public a chance to weigh in. Federal investigators had cited the tool, known as disparate impact, in numerous previous discrimination investigations into everything from advanced course access to English learner enrollment at charter schools.

The Education Department is also launching a series of investigations into alleged inappropriate content related to sexual topics and gender identity. The administration is tying this to National Parents Day and demanding school districts show that parents have had the opportunity to opt out or to inspect curriculum. One of the first cases involves Denver Public Schools and appears tied to an incident in which a French teacher was accused of making students kiss as part of skits in class. The school board fired the teacher months ago.

When a conservative education leader in Colorado announced last fall that he had helped open the first “public Christian school” in the state, it set off shockwaves. Many wondered how such a school could operate when the state constitution requires that public schools be nonsectarian — meaning not religious. 

State education officials said they had “recently learned” about the school’s opening and were looking into it. In reality, according to public records obtained by Chalkbeat, officials had known for months that Riverstone Academy was religious and discussed at length whether to give Riverstone a public school code, an identifier that allowed the school to draw public money. 

Ultimately, after seeking advice from the state attorney general’s office, the education department issued a public school code. The legal reasoning was withheld from the public records released to Chalkbeat due to attorney-client privilege, but a spokesperson said the department had no choice but to issue a school code. The legislature had not given the department the authority to enforce any constitutional prohibitions on public funding for religious schools, and the department feared it would end up on the wrong side of a lawsuit.

“Based on the current U.S. Supreme Court caselaw, the department likely would have lost a lawsuit challenging the denial of a school code solely based on the religious status” of the contractor running the school, Colorado Department of Education Chief External Relations Officer Emma Garrett-Nelson wrote in an email.

This is a notable statement. While it’s true that the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly found in favor of public funding for private religious schools, the court has not ruled that public schools can be religious. And state officials also knew Riverstone planned to include some religious curriculum. 

The court’s 2025 decision involving a proposed religious charter school in Oklahoma actually turned on whether charter schools are public schools, not whether public schools can be religious. Even in that case, the justices deadlocked, leaving the big questions for another day.

In the aftermath of that decision, conservative activists have looked for the next test case — though Riverstone turned out not to be it.

Steven Green, a constitutional scholar and expert on church-state separation, likened Colorado’s approach to an ostrich putting its head in the sand. 

“To think, oh, if we give them just a little bit, or maybe it won’t manifest itself in the way we think it will … or maybe it will just go away, that’s pie in the sky,” he said.

Colorado’s decision to let Riverstone open as a public school is also notable because it’s a blue state. It’s less surprising that Tennessee’s Republican attorney general issued a legal opinion in support of a religious charter school proposal there — though Oklahoma’s Republican AG has taken the opposite approach. 

But Colorado has also been on the losing end of a whole series of Supreme Court cases related to religious freedom. The next test is coming up this fall, when the high court will hear arguments about whether the state’s public preschool program can require religious preschools to abide by nondiscrimination requirements.

That’s the proportion of students scoring a 3, 4, or 5 on the A.P. U.S. History exam in 2023, compared with 49.2% in 2022. The College Board, which owns Advanced Placement exams, made significant changes to its scoring methodology in 2022. Leaders said the changes would make the scores more reliable. But, as The 74 reports, some critics argue the changes simply made it easier to pass the tests.

That’s Curtis Lavarello, of the School Safety Advocacy Council, speaking to the Washington Post about the pepper-spraying drones planned for at least nine schools across the country. The drones are meant to take down active school shooters within the first moments of an incident. But there’s a lot of ways this could go wrong, some have pointed out.