“When a mother in Tennessee reached out to ProPublica last year to share that her 10-year-old had been kicked out of school for making a finger gun, she wondered how many other kids had experienced the same thing.
The state had recently passed laws heightening penalties for making threats of mass violence at school, including requiring yearlong expulsions. There was a lot of speculation among advocates and lawyers about how broadly schools and law enforcement would apply the law. As a longtime education reporter with experience reporting on student discipline, I assumed I would be able to get meaningful data to help me understand whether this 10-year-old’s experience was a fluke or a trend.
After several months of investigating, I found that the state laws had resulted in a wave of expulsions and arrests for children accused of making threats of mass violence, sometimes stemming from rumors and misunderstandings.
But in the course of publishing stories on that 10-year-old and other children ensnared by these laws, I realized that the process of determining just how many students were affected was more frustrating than illuminating. I learned that Tennessee gives public agencies wide latitude to refuse to release data, which could reveal whether the laws were working as intended or needed to be fixed. And due to inconsistencies in how school districts collect and report information, lawmakers themselves are sometimes as in the dark as the public.”
“In 2019, the average girl scored a 517 on the assessment, which is measured on a 1000-point scale, and boys scored a 514, just a three-point difference. In 2023, boys’ scores had dropped 19 points on average, while girls’ scores dropped an astonishing 36 points on average.
“Since 2019, girls’ test scores have dropped sharply, often to the lowest point in decades. Boys’ scores have also fallen during that time, but the decline among girls has been more severe,” writes education reporter Matt Barnum. “Boys now consistently outperform girls in math, after being roughly even or slightly ahead in the years before 2020. Girls still tend to perform better in reading, but their scores have dropped closer to boys.”
Why is this happening? Researchers aren’t sure. One theory is that girls may have taken on more domestic tasks than boys during pandemic lockdowns (for example, taking care of younger siblings) and thus may have missed out on more learning. Another is that girls tend to have fewer behavioral issues, meaning that struggling girls weren’t called to educators’ attention in the same way many boys were.”
“The idea that one type of lawyer can meet all legal needs is as outdated now as it was in 1935. Law schools and the legal academy must adjust accordingly.”
“The Agriculture Department has axed two programs that gave schools and food banks money to buy food from local farms and ranchers, halting more than $1 billion in federal spending.
Roughly $660 million that schools and child care facilities were counting on to purchase food from nearby farms through the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program in 2025 has been canceled, according to the School Nutrition Association.”
“The Education Department will begin cutting more than 1,300 people from its workforce and terminating some of its office leases across the country this week, as part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to cull the size of the U.S. government’s smallest Cabinet agency.
An agency official told reporters Tuesday that the job cuts being finalized over the coming weeks are expected to affect roughly half of the agency’s workforce.”
“Trump’s anti-DEI orders have—mostly—stuck to signaling that the Education Department would enforce existing civil rights laws and Supreme Court precedents banning racial discrimination. But Martin’s attempt to go after a private religious institution on such vague grounds indicates the Trump administration will attempt to censor speech they perceive as left-wing or “woke,” rather than simply attacking illegal discrimination.”
“Today the Department of Education oversees a budget of $268 billion. Its role, according to the DOE itself, is to “establish policy for, administer and coordinate most federal assistance to education.”
That assistance takes two forms. The first is loans and grants. A full 60% of the Education Department’s 2024 budget (or $160 billion) went to the Office of Federal Student Aid, which administers Pell Grants, federal direct subsidized loans, federal direct unsubsidized loans and the federal work-study program. Pell Grants help roughly one-third of U.S. undergraduates — all from lower-income families — pay for college, with an average award of about $4,500. At the same time, more than half of undergraduates in the United States receive federal loans to make college more affordable.
The second form of DOE assistance is spending on public elementary and secondary education. The largest federal fund for K-12 schools is Title I, which supplements state and local funding for low-achieving children, especially in poor areas ($18.4 billion in 2023). The next largest is the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which helps schools cover special-education costs ($14.2 billion in 2023). Through these programs and others like them — Title IX, Title VI, the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 — the Department of Education holds schools accountable for complying with federal nondiscrimination laws.”
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“The department was established by an act of Congress, meaning that Congress would need to pass another law to abolish it. Trump cannot just dissolve a cabinet-level agency with the stroke of his pen — and he’s extremely unlikely to find 60 votes in the U.S. Senate to eliminate the department either. Even if every Republican senator voted yes — a big if — Trump would still fall seven votes short.
At her confirmation hearing last month, McMahon admitted as much.
“Yes or no: Do you agree that since the department was created by Congress, it would need an act of Congress to actually close the Department of Education?” asked Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.
“President Trump understands that we’ll be working with Congress,” McMahon replied. “We’d like to do this right.”
The longer answer, however, is that the Trump White House can do a lot to alter the Department of Education without congressional approval. Already, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has cut dozens of contracts it dismissed as “woke” and wasteful, firing or suspending scores of employees while gutting the Institute of Education Sciences, which gathers data on America’s academic progress.”
“Physicians elsewhere do not bear the same financial burden. I traveled in 2019 to the Netherlands, Australia, and Taiwan, which have three distinct health care systems that still manage to cover all of their citizens: universal private insurance, a public-private hybrid, and single payer, respectively.
In the Netherlands, physicians take three years of undergraduate studies, three years of master’s studies, and complete a one- to two-year internship before being licensed; certain specialties then require further training. Dutch university students typically graduate with much less debt (less than 25,000 euros on average, or about $26,200) than their American counterparts. In Australia, the training requirements would look familiar to US doctors — a decade or so of education and then on-the-job training — but the tuition would not, with annual medical school costs capped at less than $10,000 per year. Taiwanese doctors likewise spend significantly less money on their education, even relative to differences in cost of living, than US doctors.
What all of those countries have in common is more robust public support for higher education and generous loan repayment programs. The high cost of college is a longstanding issue in the US, and that contributes to the prohibitive cost of a medical education for reasons that have little to do with health care itself.”
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“There is another way in which the US health system places an unusual burden on doctors: the headaches of health insurance paperwork. As left-leaning policy analyst Matt Bruenig wrote on the recent brouhaha over insurers and doctors after the killing of Brian Thompson, at least some of the excess pricing of US medical services can be attributed to the administrative costs that providers incur while dealing with private insurers.
The demands of insurance claims on doctors’ time and attention not only make for a less pleasant working experience, they also take them away from patients, which can contribute to worse health outcomes.
Here is perhaps the most telling statistic, from the Commonwealth Fund’s 2024 international survey of doctors: 20 percent of US doctors said they spend “a lot” of time on paperwork or disputes over medical bills. That was nearly double the rate in the country with the next highest share; 12 percent of Swiss doctors said the same working in their country’s system, which also relies on private insurers to oversee benefits.
Only 5 percent of Dutch doctors and 9 percent of Australian doctors said paperwork and billing took up a large chunk of their time.
This wasteful activity affects both the cost and quality of our health system. Among wealthy countries, US patients have the fewest number of consultations with a doctor in a given year, with the exception of Sweden, and spend the least time with their physicians. Time and money spent on administrative work, for both insurers and providers, account for about 30 percent of the excess medical spending in the United States.”
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“The average physician salary in the US ranges from about $260,000 (for endocrinologists and pediatricians) to $550,000 (for certain surgeons). The most elite providers earn more than $1 million annually.
Dutch general practitioners, by contrast, make about 120,000 euros ($126,000). Even senior hospital surgeons typically earn about 250,000 euros. Australia, with a more robust private market, can be more generous: While primary care doctors earn between AUD$100,000 and $150,000 ($60,000 to $93,000) on average, senior practitioners make more and specialized surgeons can rake in as much as AUD$750,000 ($460,000) — much closer to the American norms.
Doctors in Taiwan — where, it should be noted, nationwide average incomes are about half of what you find in the United States — can make between $60,000 and $100,000 per year. The policy experts I spoke to there agreed that doctors are underpaid relative to the high number of patients they see, substantially more than a typical American physician will see in a day.
Whatever complaints American physicians may have, doctors in those countries feel undercompensated.”
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“The blame game between insurers and doctors is ultimately a distraction. Other countries have private health plans and private providers and yet don’t experience nearly the same waste and out-of-control price increases as the US has. The whole system — the prices and how they’re paid — will need to be addressed in the long run. As one landmark health economics paper put it 20 years ago: “It’s the prices, stupid.””