Education Briefs
In an op-ed appearing on The Daily Signal.com, Defending Education’s Paul Runko suggests schools should celebrate Title IX Month, not Pride Month. Runko, director of strategic initiatives, K-12 programming for the organization, bemoaned the fact that schools nationwide “fill their bulletin 
boards with rainbows, host Pride events, and encourage elementary school children to participate in LGBTQ-themed activities.” Rather, he argues, they should be embracing the cause of achievement and fairness, Title IX Month, which was officially recognized in 2025 by the U.S. Department of Education under President Donald Trump. The idea is to celebrate equal opportunity for all rather than the sexual lifestyle of the few. Writes Runko: “Public schools support families of all backgrounds and beliefs. They should strive to unify, not divide. Title IX Month is an opportunity to highlight a shared national value: fairness....” While for good reason not everyone supported Title IX when it was enacted in 1972, most reject the way the law has been manipulated and perverted in recent years, particularly by allowing biological men to invade women’s sports and locker rooms. As Runko points out: “Celebrating Title IX doesn’t just respect history—it affirms a timeless principle: that equality in education is worth championing. And unlike the ideological distractions that currently dominate the month of June in many schools, it keeps the focus exactly where it should be—on students, learning, and opportunity.”
Three college students are suing the state of Virginia for denying them access to public scholarship opportunities because they want to pursue religious majors. The students are all planning to attend Liberty University in Lynchburg, and say they could get the same grants that are being denied them if they were enrolled in a public college. As reported by The College Fix, 
two of the students were refused grants from the Council of Higher Education while the third had a grant request denied through the state National Guard program. The students are being represented by Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) attorney Jake Reed, who told The College Fix there is precedent for their case. He cited the 2020 Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue case, which found that “the state could not exclude parents from a school choice program just because they chose to use the money at a Christian school.” In the 2022 Carson v. Makin decision, the Supreme Court ruled that “Maine could not exclude religious schools from its own voucher program.” In 2017, the high court ruled in the Trinity Lutheran case that “a Lutheran preschool could not be excluded from a recycled tire program for playgrounds simply because of its religious nature.” While the court did rule against students who were planning to use scholarship money for a theology degree program in 2024, the ADF points out that the Virginia students “aren’t necessarily pursuing ministerial careers,” which some legal experts think may help them prove “raw religious discrimination.”
A 10th grade English teacher is quitting the classroom, citing the fact that her students ‘can’t even read’ and need to be ‘cut off’ from technology. Yahoo News cites “bad behavior” as another of Hannah Maria’s reasons for abandoning her career as an educator. But in her video on X, which went viral, she blames 
technology first and foremost for “ruining your child’s education.” She points out that most of her students grew up with iPads, and most don’t know how to read because “they’ve had things read to them or they can click a button and have something read out loud to them in seconds.” She failed to note that most of her students were likely never taught to read using phonics in elementary school, but most experts agree technology also plays a role. Maria also said students’ “attention spans are waning” as a result of “high stimulation” and rapid-fire variety on screens. Maria and teachers like her believe students’ excessive reliance “on AI-enabled devices” is leaving many of them “unprepared for life outside of school.” She is calling on “regulators and school boards to step in and solve the issue before it’s too late.” As Yahoo News opined, “if AI tools become more potent and pervasive while literacy rates continue to drop, teachers, regulators, and parents may have to rethink the way they educate the next generation.”
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