Hi! It’s Erica and Lily on the national desk. Today’s big story explores how one comment made by the president at a rally reverberated through California’s second-largest school district. Stick around for illuminating teacher retention data from Tennessee and the latest on the Department of Justice’s effort to end school desegregation orders around the country.

Getting back on track to graduate high school can be a challenge for any student. Getting back on track when you are exiting the juvenile justice system presents enormous challenges. If you want to know more, we’re holding a free virtual event hosted by Chalkbeat Philadelphia reporter Sammy Caiola that will feature youth advocates and people involved in the reentry process. Mark your calendar for 4 p.m. EST on Oct. 26 and sign up here.

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In all of the statements made by politicians, advocacy groups, and protesters following President Donald Trump’s controversial remarks while talking about the Iran war  — he said, “Let them take out Los Angeles; let them take out San Diego” — one statement stood out: the San Diego school district’s.

While Trump’s team argued the remark was taken out of context, San Diego Unified leaders argued that the president even implying their city could be a target for attack sparked difficult conversations with students. San Diego school officials are already feeling besieged by a surge in immigration enforcement in their communities that’s affected students and their families.

Richard Barrera, president of San Diego Unified’s school board and a candidate in November’s state superintendent race, said that while Trump “might not appreciate or care about the impact of his words,” those words and words like it scare young people.

Whitney Chase, a high school Spanish teacher in San Diego, told Chalkbeat that students have said they feel scared now when planes fly over.

The district even felt compelled to create a nine-page resource to help facilitate classroom conversations about the comments, including the Trump administration’s defense of them.

Barrera said that in encouraging candid conversations, the district has to strike a balance between presenting what the president said fairly and without political bias, while stressing the weight that words can have, particularly when they’re from someone in a position of power.

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The clock is ticking — and the pressure is on — for governors who haven’t yet opted into the federal education tax credit. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Friday that her state would join the more than two dozen that have opted into the program primarily designed to expand school choice across the nation. Other Democratic governors are still weighing the choice. Advocates have become increasingly vocal in pressuring Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker about the program. And in Michigan, where there’s a governor’s race, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s administration says the governor is reviewing rules recently unveiled by the U.S. Department of Treasury.

How can parents even be sure that the school they choose is a good school? That’s a hard question to answer, even when looking at numbers like test scores or student growth that should feel straightforward, according to our Ideas Editor Matt Barnum. There’s no simple quantitative answer to what makes a good school — but there are data points to consider.

The Justice Department has been on a spree of ending decades-old desegregation orders. In many cases, they have the support of state and local officials, who say the cases have outlived their usefulness and would force solutions that go against community interests. 

But an analysis by K-12 Dive found that in half of roughly 60 dismissed cases, schools are actually more segregated today than they were three decades ago. This is not the mandated legal segregation of the Jim Crow-era, but segregation that results from neighborhood demographics, ongoing residential segregation, and the ways school districts draw attendance boundaries. Some studies suggest that school choice policies can worsen school segregation. 

Advocates for school integration say this matters because schools serving mostly students of color from low-income backgrounds continue to get the short end of the stick in a variety of ways. “Separate truly is not equal,” Ary Amerikaner, co-founder of the advocacy group Brown’s Promise, told Chalkbeat Ideas Editor Matt Barnum earlier this year. Brown’s Promise is involved in a desegregation lawsuit in Massachusetts that seeks to address significant resource disparities between mostly white school districts and those serving mostly students of color.

But under the Trump administration, the Justice Department is skeptical of policies that take any consideration of race into account. 

In at least one South Carolina school district, school board members decided to keep the desegregation order in place, despite an offer from the Justice Department to work on winding it down. They made that decision even though some of the outstanding issues, like how teachers are assigned, are hard to address.

Local officials said they believed they still had work to do, and federal oversight represents another layer of accountability.

“We need to make sure that we show that Georgetown (County) School District is capable of moving forward,” one school board member said.

That’s the proportion of educators who believe they matter a great deal at school, according to a new Gallup poll, in concert with other organizations. As The Washington Post reports, the numbers signal flagging morale among folks leading the nation’s classrooms. 

That’s a New Hampshire middle school principal, Patrice Brown, who appears in a viral video in which students try to teach her to do the dance move. What’s the pedagogy behind this strategy, Patrice?