Education Briefs
When a 7th-grade teacher in a small Colorado town dropped EdTech from his classroom, students became more self-reliant and their energy increased. Leadville teacher, Dylan Kane, told Chalkbeat that removing screens for the month of January 2026 as an experiment “to see what would happen,” has been a success.
Chalkbeat reports that “he has not brought screens back,” even though he admits that dropping technology “has turned out to be a lot more work for him and his students,” which “might be why it’s succeeding.” Kane told Chalkbeat: “I don’t find myself saying, ‘wow, these things I used to do with technology are totally irreplaceable.’” While he does miss some perks of technology, he notes that there are “just so many fewer little logistical challenges,” such as dead Chromebooks, cracked screens, and internet interruptions. “All those things are out the window,” Kane says. “We have pencils, we have paper, we have whiteboards, we have markers.” He adds that his classroom is now “more interactive,” and that he is seeing “a slight increase in effort across the board” among his students. He confesses to feeling much more “in touch” now with their thinking, and is better able to recognize when his students are confused and need extra help. He has found that some kids love the change, others say schoolwork on Chromebooks “is easier” and that they like the instant feedback technology provides. For now, Kane plans to stick to his paper-and-pencil teaching as much as possible. “But if some new tools do come along that I think are doing a much better job than what I had access to before, I’m open to it.”
The Rutherford County, TN, library board has fired its top librarian for refusing to relocate “more than 100 LGBTQ books” from the children’s section of the county’s libraries to the adult section. The board voted to move the books because they promote “gender confusion.” According to the Associated Press (AP), after head librarian, Luanne James, complained that “relocating the books would violate
her and county residents’ First Amendment rights and compromise her professional obligation against government-mandated viewpoint discrimination,” the board voted 8-3 to send her packing. The AP reported that last year, the Tennessee Secretary of State’s office “sent letters to library systems across the state requesting immediate reviews of what was in their children’s sections.” The letters explained that libraries must comply with applicable laws in order to continue receiving federal and state funding, and cited President Trump’s executive order on gender ideology. Opponents of the firing whined that it was “emblematic of the fight against censorship and suppression.” They failed to note that the books were merely being moved, not removed from library shelves and thus still available, but concerned parents wonder if the fact that they won’t be so easily accessible to children is the real problem and poses a setback for the LGBT grooming agenda.
The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is continuing to discriminate against students of other races by funding programs for black students only. Last month, the group, Defending Education, asked the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to again investigate the LAUSD, charging that “the district has allocated tens of millions of dollars for services that only Black students can use.” The LAUSD started the “Black Student Achievement Plan” (BSAP) in 2021, and the allocation for the 2025-26 school year is reportedly $50 million, on top of the $125 million the
district has already spent on the program. According to Fox News, one use of the money is to pay for “staffing support specifically dedicated to addressing the academic and social-emotional needs of Black students.” Defending Education filed a similar complaint in 2023, asserting that the program “violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.” That complaint was dismissed in 2024, after LAUSD claimed it had “substantially changed its criteria for resource allocation to a race-neutral standard and that BSAP’s resources would be available to all students regardless of race.” After the complaint was thrown out, however, LAUSD board president Jackie Goldberg and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho were caught on a hot mic agreeing that “nothing has changed” for the benefit of activists who were protesting changes to the BSAP. Defending Education’s senior communication director, Erika Sanzi, said: “It’s concerning when a board of education member and the superintendent both promise in a public meeting that nothing has changed in the context of a race-based program that the district knows is in violation of federal law. It’s an admission that they have knowingly lied to the federal government about what is actually going on in the district as it relates to race-based programming.” She added that the new complaint will hopefully compel school districts to finally accept the fact that “it is against the law to include and exclude students from programs on the basis of race.”
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