Hi! Lily and Erica here, writing from the national desk. Today’s big story is about the barriers that undocumented high school seniors are encountering this year in trying to afford — or even attend — college. Stick around for some piping hot discourse and the latest Democratic governor considering the federal education tax credit.

How do you support recently-incarcerated students returning to school? If you want answers, 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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When Martinez considered college, the then-undocumented high school senior’s options to pay for an education were limited. She didn’t qualify for certain types of financial aid or scholarships, but she did qualify for in-state tuition in Texas.

Now Martinez counsels prospective college students in Texas, many of whom are undocumented. She asked that Chalkbeat only use her last name because she is in the process of gaining citizenship and is concerned about immigration enforcement.

But those students now have far fewer options. Last year, Texas backtracked on in-state tuition eligibility for undocumented students after the Trump administration sued the state and conservative state leaders agreed almost immediately to abandon the policy.

So the students Martinez counsels are frustrated, she said. One top-ranked student hasn’t opened their college applications because they are so discouraged by the higher education doors the state has slammed shut for young immigrants, many of whom have spent nearly their whole lives in Texas schools.

“I acknowledge the hurt, the frustration, the disappointment, and I acknowledge that what they're going through is not something easy,” Martinez said she tells them, even as she tries to get them to strategize about a backup plan.

The Trump administration has sued two dozen states to end in-state tuition policies and pressured states to end access to career and technical education for undocumented students. While some states are fighting the U.S. Department of Justice, others, including Texas and Kansas, have instead agreed to end their policies that expanded access.

Some Republicans once championed in-state tuition policies for undocumented students. But now a conservative-led backlash is creating one of the most difficult college admissions seasons for these students.

Read the full story.

Teachers Pay Teachers is banning AI-generated teaching resources from its marketplace. After a Chalkbeat story uncovered sellers hawking what appeared to be low-quality AI-generated content — known as AI slop ‘round the internet — TPT announced it plans to roll out an “AI-free” policy for creators. Some TPT sellers argued that an all-out ban is too harsh. 

The U.S. Supreme Court will consider a case that could change how school districts choose students for magnet programs and other selective schools. The legal question hinges on whether Asian American parents in Montgomery County, Maryland, must show their children experienced disparate impact from changes to magnet school admissions in order to challenge those changes in court. The larger question is whether school districts can use factors like ZIP code or family income or change their test criteria to open magnet school spots to a wider range of students — a practice that has been legal for decades under existing precedent.

Strong gun laws can be effective, but they can’t entirely prevent gun violence when gun laws vary across states and at the federal level. The tragic shooting at Silver Rail Elementary in Bend, Oregon, left a community reeling and gun control groups lamenting weak federal laws. Gun rights proponents, meanwhile, argued that Oregon’s laws, which include universal background checks, didn’t prevent the shooting. Experts say that while states with the most lax gun laws have the highest rates of gun deaths, states with more restrictive laws aren’t immune.

The Nikole Hannah-Jones discourse is not even cold, and there is already some piping hot new discourse, fresh out of the oven. Season 2 of the Sold a Story podcast dropped last week, and it has everyone in the education world talking about direct instruction — what it is, what it isn’t, and what American students really need from their teachers. 

As readers of this newsletter surely know, education journalist Emily Hanford took on reading instruction — and how balanced literacy gained such a grip on American schools — in Season 1 of Sold a Story. The series contributed to dozens of state legislatures passing new literacy laws. 

Season 2 is about the act of teaching itself. It opens with a recording of a preschool classroom in 1966, where a group of 4-year-olds excitedly work through addition, subtraction, multiplication, and even simple algebra. The series follows the work of Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann, the educator who developed direct instruction. His work was driven by a deep commitment to the idea that all children can learn and an obsession with how that learning happens.

Direct instruction showed the strongest results in a massive federal research initiative called Project Follow Through. But detractors viewed the approach as authoritarian and disrespectful of teachers’ autonomy and professionalism. Their opposition prevailed, and the federal government never strongly promoted the method. 

Direct instruction is generally contrasted with inquiry-based approaches, and these debates can be particularly acute in math and science instruction.

The podcast started getting cheers and jeers even before it was released. Some educators on social media said that no one has ever opposed direct instruction, but that it needs to be paired with other approaches. A science teacher who goes by Ms. Sam online pushed back, writing on X that she had been consistently pushed toward inquiry-based methods and to say otherwise felt like “gaslighting.” 

Robert Pondiscio, a former teacher and senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said Season 2 will be more challenging to teachers than Season 1 because it strongly suggests that “an entire set of ideas and values many teachers admire and believe makes them good at their jobs might actually make them less effective.” 

Educators Trevor Aleo and Nick Covington, in a conversation shared via Substack, lamented what they see as the “true crime” framing of Sold a Story, the idea that powerful interest groups are keeping something from us. They find Engelmann a compelling figure, but they contrast his engaging teaching style with how students in Dallas schools say they experience direct instruction today: bored teachers reading from slides to bored students. 

Dylan Kane, in his teaching Substack, cautioned against falling for a “simple story.” American schools never adopted Engelmann’s methods at scale. Nor can the recent decline in American test scores be clearly traced back to the spread of inquiry-based instruction. 

But education researcher Conor P. Williams said the podcast is especially important in an era when education policy debate seems to touch on every issue except instruction. 

The season’s “real, insistent lesson,” he wrote for The 74, “is this: schools matter, and students do better when educators teach more effectively.” 

That’s the number of programs Colorado approved as eligible for Workforce Pell grants, after seven institutions submitted a total of 20 applications. Community college officials said they encountered a series of hurdles in matching workforce training programs to the feds’ requirements. — signaling a need to temper expectations for the Trump administration’s revamp of Pell grants.

That’s NYC schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels, in conversation with New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones during a town hall Tuesday evening to discuss the aftermath of Hannah-Jones’ widely-debated essay about her decision to send her daughter to segregated schools. The journalist pressed Samuels for more than 30 minutes for specific plans to meaningfully integrate New York City schools.