Hello from Erica and Lily on the national desk. Our hearts have been heavy at Chalkbeat over the loss of a dear colleague and fearless journalist, Mónica Rhor. As a story editor, she shaped many of the stories you’ve read here with care and empathy. She passed away on the eve of the election after a battle with brain cancer, leaving two daughters and an incredible legacy. You can read more about what she meant to us here.

This week’s big story picks up another election thread: Blue-state voters approved measures barring transgender athletes’ from girls’ sports, and elected officials aren’t just accepting the result. Keep reading for a truly enormous amount of news — cut scores changing midstream, the real upside to third grade retention policies, charter politics, voucher politics, and more.

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The same voters who handed Democrats big wins this year also voted to restrict transgender rights.

Ballot measures to bar transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams passed easily in Colorado and Washington, progressive states that have been havens of inclusive policy. Voters in Arizona expanded an existing ban on school sports participation to include recreational leagues — while also flipping control of the state legislature to Democrats. 

Large majorities of Americans, including many Democrats, believe that transgender athletes should compete on teams that match their birth sex, and that sports for female athletes should be reserved for those assigned female at birth.

Supporters of these policies see them as common sense measures that protect fairness and recognize innate biological differences. Opponents say the ability to participate in sports helps trans students feel like they belong at school and supports other values, like teamwork and developing skills through practice.

Supporters of restrictions say the outcome at the polls should be a wakeup call.

“The midterm results proved — despite deep-pocketed interest groups efforts to label the initiatives as ‘right wing’ and ‘bigoted’ — that protecting girls’ sports was never about right versus left; it’s about right versus wrong,” Jennifer Sey, a backer of the Colorado measure, said in an emailed statement. “Now party leaders must take heed: Your own base has spoken decisively.” 

Elected officials in Colorado and Washington say that’s not the whole story. State laws protect student privacy and guarantee equal access to education. Colorado Governor-elect Phil Weiser said ballot measures passed there may need “adjustments.” And the Seattle school board is among the entities suing over Washington’s ballot measure.

“Those laws didn’t come out of nowhere,” board member Joe Mizrahi said. “They came from the democratic process, from representatives, from votes, and from our constitutional principles. So those protections also reflect the will of the people.”

Read the full story.

Grade retention policies might work without actually holding students back. Holding students back is controversial and comes with serious trade-offs. But two new studies suggest the threat of retention can motivate teachers and students. Students who were flagged as at-risk on benchmark assessments made more reading progress by the end of the school year than students who barely passed the test, and the gains persisted for at least a few years. 

Can Indianapolis’ charter school model work in Connecticut? A federal grant is allowing The Mind Trust, an influential education nonprofit that has launched more than 50 charter schools, to take its show on the road. The goal is to more than double the number of students in Connecticut charter schools, but that state’s charter laws are very different and much more centralized. While vouchers get a lot more attention, The Mind Trust move is an example of how the Trump administration has increased investment in public school choice.

Last school year, 1 in 8 New York City students experienced homelessness. That’s a staggering number, but represents a 10% drop from the previous year, driven by a decline in families living in shelters, according to a new report from the nonprofit Advocates for Children.

Students living in shelters and other kinds of temporary housing struggle enormously in just getting to school, a struggle that spills into how they fare academically. Part of the problem is that shelters are often just too far from the schools where students are enrolled, leading to high rates of chronic absenteeism among these students. It can take as much as a month or even longer for students to get assigned a bus route to get to school. And even then, homeless students experience delays and missed buses. 

Children experiencing homelessness are protected under the federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, which requires states and districts to eliminate the barriers students face in enrolling and getting to school. But the systems around McKinney-Vento, particularly in a city as vast as New York, are very complex. And it can be hard to avoid far-flung shelter placements.

It’s a crisis that districts experience across the country. In Los Angeles County schools, student homelessness increased 30% between the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years, according to a University of California Los Angeles study. About 21,000 students in Oregon experienced homelessness in 2024-25, according to The Oregonian.

Oregon has one of the highest concentrations of unsheltered youth and families in the country. In Portland Public Schools, a program meant to help students into more stable housing so they can focus on education is expanding. The program, administered by a nonprofit, helps place students with host families who volunteer to take in a young person. Proponents of this kind of a housing solution say the environment of a family home can be more peaceful for young people than the chaos that can come with life in a shelter.

Just this month, New Mexico officials announced that the state will invest $7.8 million on a program that makes schools a hub for assistance for families for everything from rent and utilities to vehicle repairs. Rural parts of New Mexico were ravaged by flooding this fall, so the money is coming at a time when more families need help, officials told Source New Mexico. 

That’s how much funding the federal government sent to schools to support English learner students in 2025. But while English language programs in American schools can be easy to enter, a new study found they can be difficult to exit, with students wrongly held back.

That’s Brandon Enos, superintendent of the school district in Gunter, Texas and a U.S. Army veteran, in an opinion piece to honor Veteran’s Day, which is today. Enos writes about the barriers that military families encounter in education because they often have to move frequently.