Overthe past few years, a huge number of schools in the United States and around the world have banned cell phone use among their students. It's a divisive topic, and the effects are only starting to come into focus. Just look at New York State, where governor Kathy Hocul and lawmakers put a ban into the state budget last spring in an effort to give kids a break from distractions at school.
Childhood doesn't end the day you turn five, Ruth Lue-Quee said to me on the phone as she shepherded her son to the playground this half term. Playing is what children are born to do. It's innate in them. It is how they learn. The former deputy headteacher's petition to make play-based pedagogy a core part of the key stage 1 (KS1) national curriculum in England has garnered almost the required 100,000 signatures for debate in parliament.
Education Minister Paul Calandra says if an Ontario school board doesn't restore prom plans for three of its high schools that cancelled them, he will step in and do it. Three schools in the Durham District School Board decided to cancel the traditional event due to what the principals called growing liabilities and risks connected to school-run proms. Students reacted with anger and disappointment that they would not be able to celebrate in the way so many other students have
New vocational courses called V-levels will be rolled out for 16-year-olds under government plans to simplify a "confusing landscape" of qualifications in England. They are set to replace Level 3 BTecs and other post-16 technical qualifications. Ministers also plan to reduce the number of teenagers resitting maths and English GCSEs by introducing an alternative qualification. The Sixth Form Colleges Association warned that V-levels may not fill the gap left by BTecs.
Students with dyslexia will find out this month if extra time to complete state examinations will be added to the Race scheme for 2026
Recently, the Administration for Children and Families sent letters to health departments in states and territories across the United States, requiring them to remove "all references to gender ideology"from the Personal Responsibility Education Program that provides federal funding for sex education. It's a disturbing move that mirrors how, from the 1980s through the early 2000s, the Bush administrations threatened to and did cut federal funding to states and schools that refused to teach abstinence-only sex education as part of the Purity Culture Movement.
When students arrive in the morning, I.S. 27 collects the phones for the full school day, even during lunch and free periods. Kids adjusted quickly. One of Sepulveda's students, with no phone for distraction, brought a SpongeBob LEGO Set to use during recess. The activity got the girl and her classmates talking, so much so that they ran out of time to build it that first day.
I'm anticipating a teachers' strike very quickly after winning the next general election, he said during a question and answer session at the event last month. They are poisoning our kids. They are telling them to be ashamed of their country. They are telling little Johnny, who's eight, who is black, that he is a victim and little Oliver, who is white, who is eight, that he is an oppressor. They are dividing us, not uniting us. They are feeding this negative culture in.
The Trump administration can try to blackmail us, they can try to starve our schools of funding, but we will not cower or bend before them, said Councilmember Tiffany Caban, who co-chairs the LGBTQIA+ Caucus. The Trump administration sent letters demanding that New York City and other school districts rescind policies protecting transgender individuals by Sept. 23. When that deadline came and went, the White House said it would cut about $36 million in total funding for Magnet Schools Assistance Program funding in New York City alone, though cuts were also made to school districts in Chicago, Illinois, and Fairfax, Virginia.
Here are some of the worst. '27 genders' "You're not going to come in here and teach that there's 27 genders," he said in July while announcing a test to be given to teachers who come to Oklahoma from liberal states to make sure they're not "woke." Most likely, no one believes there are 27 genders - or teaches that.
For a guy in charge of local schools, Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters generates an unusual amount of national news. This week, Walters announced a plan to create chapters of Turning Point USA, the conservative organization co-founded by Charlie Kirk, at every Oklahoma high school. Earlier this month, Walters had ordered a moment of silence in honor of the death of Kirk at all Oklahoma public schools, and now the State Department of Education says it's investigating claims that some districts did not comply.
There are more than 1.7 million children and young people in England's schools who are recognised as having special educational needs and disabilities (or Send). When you factor in their parents and carers, it highlights the huge number of people who anxiously watch this area of policy. All of them know that the systems those kids depend on are dysfunctional and broken. And they are also keenly aware of something else: that whereas their experiences once tended to be ignored and overlooked, they have now crossed from the online world into Radio 4's Woman's Hour, The One Show, Good Morning Britain and all the rest, as a huge conversation about the politics of all this gets louder and louder.
One of the key figures who is credited with inspiring this movement is Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. In his book The Anxious Generation,published last year, Haidt makes the case that the rise in social media and cellphone use is a major factor behind what's making kids more anxious and depressed.
A Manhattan-based Community Education Council voted on Sept. 10 to rescind a widely-criticized anti-trans sports resolution, drawing praise from advocates who regularly protested the resolution at meetings in the aftermath of the vote. Members of Community Education Council District 2, encompassing Chinatown, Tribeca, West Village, Chelsea, Kips Bay, and the Upper East Side, voted 7-3 to nix the resolution, which called for the formation of a new committee that could review and potentially oppose trans inclusion in school sports.
McMahon began by praising those who have honored Kirk's memory and the "values he held so dearly," but she quickly turned her attention to denouncing the "small but vocal fringe" that has "sought to excuse, justify and even celebrate his murder." Many of these individuals, the secretary claimed, work at America's colleges and universities or K-12 schools. "Alarmingly, many of these advocates of political violence are teachers, professors and administrators," she said.
