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Hello from Erica and Lily on Chalkbeat’s national desk. Our big story this week looks at the broader implications of the Trump administration terminating old civil rights agreements. 

We’ve also got stories on the food fight brewing over school lunch requirements, the questionable industry credentials some students are using to graduate high school in Pennsylvania, the home-school enrichment program drawing more scrutiny in Colorado, and more. Keep reading for that, plus a look at the schools disregarding the ed tech backlash and leaning into AI. 

The Trump administration’s decision to terminate civil rights agreements negotiated under previous presidents could have ripple effects well beyond the affected students and school districts.

The most recent agreements deal with the rights of transgender students under Title IX, the federal law that bars sex discrimination. The Obama and Biden administrations, as well as many federal courts, interpreted the law as covering discrimination based on gender stereotypes and gender identity. The Trump administration strongly disagrees and has targeted school districts with more inclusive policies, especially around restroom use and sports participation, in the name of protecting women and girls. 

But the Trump administration has also tossed agreements dealing with book bans and with excessive discipline meted out to Native American students.

Some observers and former employees of the Office for Civil Rights say these actions risk undermining the credibility and authority of the office. Civil rights enforcement is one of the most critical roles the federal government plays in education, but now anyone bringing a complaint has to wonder if any resolution will last longer than the next election cycle.

“How far will it go?” asked Beth Gellman-Beer, an attorney who spent 18 years with OCR under Republican and Democratic administrations. “Once you open that door to something that is unprecedented, where does it end?”

But R. Shep Melnick, a political scientist at Boston College, said these types of actions might be the inevitable result of an increasingly politicized atmosphere around civil rights enforcement.

“The combination of presidential influence and partisan polarization means you have administrations that have very different understandings of how to interpret civil rights law,” he said.

Ending a negotiated settlement doesn’t necessarily mean a school district can or should change their policies, legal experts said. But some school districts are already doing just that.

Read the full story.

The Education Department plans to dissolve the federal office serving English learners. In a letter to Congress, the department said English learners would be better served if the work of the Office of English Language Acquisition were distributed among other offices. The office already was decimated by layoffs last year. 

While red meat tops the new food pyramid, fiber — and not protein — should be the focus of any new school lunch standards, an unlikely collection of groups say. A large group of school nutrition professionals and a coalition backing a “Make America Healthy Again” agenda urged the U.S. Department of Agriculture to maintain the current meat requirement for lunches. The agency is expected to align school lunch standards to the Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines.

There are two vocal camps in the debate around technology in education at the moment. There are those who want to ban screens from the classroom. Then there are people who want to see technology go even further in education, evangelizing artificial intelligence as a way to optimize instruction and promoting humanoid-robot teachers.

That second camp is among those promoting AI-powered school models, which take a few forms. The most well known is Alpha School, a network of expensive private schools that touts a two-hour learning model, in which students complete core academic learning on an AI platform over two hours, and spend the rest of the day pursuing more experiential learning.

Alpha claims its model helps students get through core subjects faster than traditional schools, making time for education that will help them be competitive someday in the job market. At least one investigation has questioned the quality of Alpha’s AI platform. 

Still, a few offshoots of this model are emerging, and public schools are coming into the fold. Houston Independent School District, the largest district in Texas, announced in February the launch of two “Future 2” schools to open next school year. The schools will include the option for certain students to enroll in an accelerated AI-driven learning program for reading and math. 

This week the Houston Chronicle reported that the district, which the state has controlled since 2023, plans to eventually convert 100 schools to the Future 2 model.

Texas is also the home to another version of Alpha’s model, called the Texas Sports Academy that uses Alpha’s AI platform and two hour learning model so students can use the rest of the day for athletic pursuits and life skills training the school claims is tailored for future athletes, like content creation and public speaking. Parents could spend money from the state’s recently launched voucher program at Texas Sports Academy locations, but critics say taxpayer money for education shouldn’t go to schools where academics are so compressed.

That’s about how many students applied for West Virginia’s Hope Scholarship program, the state’s school voucher program, which opened up this year to all K-12 students. That’s 5,000 more students than those currently using the program, which pays families about $5,200 per student for educational expenses, though that amount is set to go up next school year.

Republicans had considered putting limits on how the money could be spent earlier this year to try to cut back on the cost to the state, but they set aside that proposal

That’s Tom Loveless, an education researcher who has been studying policy for more than 30 years. Loveless recently shared this sentiment on the social media site X. 

The lack of easy answers isn’t stopping a group of advocates from trying to reassemble the bipartisan education reform coalition whose policy agenda once held sway in Washington, D.C. Here are three reasons that might happen — and three reasons it might not.