Hello from the national desk, it’s Lily and Erica. Today’s big story is another big shakeup at the U.S. Department of Education — and whether the moves on special education are actually what parents said they wanted.

Stick around for more on the alarming gender gap in recent test scores, rules for the federal tax-credit scholarship, “school avoidance liaisons,” and that viral essay on gifted education.

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The U.S. Department of Education announced it is moving special education oversight and some civil rights enforcement to other federal agencies. These new interagency agreements are perhaps the most controversial used by the Trump administration so far, and they represent yet another step in the agency’s quest to dismantle the department.

Work over in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS if you’re an education acronym aficionado, will be moved to the Department of Health and Human Services, while some civil rights enforcement will move to the Department of Justice.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon framed these changes as responsive to parent concerns about red tape and bureaucracy. “I’ve heard you,” she wrote in an op-ed for Fox News. 

But disability advocates and parents in particular say this was not the solution they asked for. In fact, they have been telling the Department of Education officials repeatedly that they didn’t want this to happen. And many especially didn’t want special education oversight to go to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who for decades has spread misinformation about autism and vaccines.

Lanya Elsa, the mother of two children who are deafblind, told us yesterday that moving special education to an agency focused on health policy risks framing disability as a medical issue.

“My kids don't need to be fixed, they just need the world to be accessible … and educators who are trained and believe in them,” she said.

Read the full story.

While many want to be influencers when they grow up, far fewer children aspire to be wind turbine service technicians. And that might be a workforce as well as an education issue, according to a new FutureEd report. The report points out a crisis in career navigation, arguing few K-12 students are being counseled to understand the vast range of careers they could pursue after graduation.

Governors likely won’t have a lot of say in how the federal education tax credit program will work in their state. The U.S. Treasury Department published remarks from an official about the rules the agency is drafting for the tax credit scholarship program. The official said states may not impose “substantive” rules over the federal program, which contradicts comments Education Secretary Linda McMahon has made in promoting the program.

Girls’ test scores fell more sharply than boys’ and are recovering at a slower pace, according to recently-released long-term NAEP data. The disparity between boys’ and girls’ math scores has never been more vast, while in reading 9-year-old boys have caught up with the girls for the first time on record. But this isn’t a battle of the sexes, writes our colleague Matt Barnum.

A bill introduced by an Illinois congressman Tuesday would give federal support to schools serving students affected by immigration enforcement. The bill’s passage would be unlikely in a Republican-controlled House, but there’s a possibility control could flip in November. Too many students are walking into school afraid, said the representative who introduced the legislation. 

There’s a joke that makes the rounds online every October: “Going as Former Gifted Child for Halloween and the whole costume is just gonna be people asking ‘What are you supposed to be?’ And me saying ‘I was supposed to be a lot of things.’” 

New York Magazine turned that gag into a feature-length article this month that went immediately viral. Katie Arnold-Ratliff explores what it even means to be gifted, whether admission to gifted and talented programs is more about parental status-seeking and perceptions about the “right” sort of school than about children’s innate abilities, and what being told you’re gifted does to a person’s self-perception. (Without spoiling the ending, the author uncovers an unwelcome truth.)

Many social media critics honed in on Arnold-Ratliff’s framing of a 2019 Psychological Science study that followed 677 highly gifted children and found that 12% of them achieved “eminence” in adulthood, which the study defined as full professors, top business executives, judges and lawyers, leading researchers, and award-winning journalists and writers.

Arnold-Ratliff suggests that isn’t very impressive. It’s much higher than the rate in the general population. Still, some people in the other 88% might be dusting off their “supposed to be a lot of things” costume. 

Arnold-Ratliff also talks to a professor and former K-12 teacher who took the curriculum she was using with her gifted kids and deployed it in her special education classroom. Her students “lit up” when exposed to creative critical-thinking activities. A lot of what passes for gifted education is stuff that could make school more engaging for lots of kids, and it’s worth asking why families have to jump through hoops to get it.

These sorts of questions undergirded the debate over gifted education in the New York City mayoral race last year. 

Against this backdrop, the center-right Thomas B. Fordham Institute for years has been banging a different drum about gifted education. Fordham has critiqued the quality of gifted education while also calling on schools to do much more to identify children who would benefit from advanced education — especially when those kids are Black or Latino or come from low-income households. 

“Each and every child deserves an education that meets their needs and enhances their futures, and advanced students are no different,” Brandon Wright wrote for Fordham in 2022. “They have their own legitimate claim on our conscience, our sense of fairness, our policy priorities, and our education budgets.”

That budget, by the way, is about half a cent of every dollar spent on education.

That’s how many boys the Trump administration said it found on the rosters of girls’ sports teams in a suburban Colorado district during an investigation in which it concluded the district had violated Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in education. The district disputed the findings and said the boys were not players, but managers, trainers, and mascots.