Education Next

Transcript PAUL PETERSON, HOST: This is the Education Exchange with Paul Peterson. I am the Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. Thank you for joining us. In a just-released court decision, the court found no constitutional violation when states ban students from participating in sex-specific sports. That is, if they participate in those sports and they don’t have a sex that’s consistent with the defined sport, a sex so defined at birth.

There’s a lot of giddiness about the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC), which will launch January 1, 2027. The new federal program lets taxpayers give up to $1,700 to scholarship programs and get a dollar-for-dollar reduction on their federal taxes. It could mean billions each year for educational choice. The legislation even has blue states feeling pressure to open their doors to large-scale school choice. The FSTC is a clever way to do a good thing.

First of their kind: Harvard University (1636); Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-1 minicomputer (1959) Even as undergraduate enrollments have rebounded in raw numbers since the pandemic, the percentage of high school graduates choosing to enroll in college has slipped precipitously—by nearly 10 percentage points (from 70.1 to 60.4 percent) between 2009 and 2023. Broad skepticism exists that the degrees those tuition-paying young people seek are worth the time, cost, and effort.

Public schools are on a decades-long hiring spree, but little is known about what’s driving this trend. With K–12 enrollment down by about 1.4 million students since the start of Covid-19 and projected to fall by another 2.5 million students by 2032, it’s critical for policymakers to understand why public schools are adding staff to their payrolls as they make decisions about funding, school closures, and efforts to improve stagnant student outcomes.

Last week, the Trump administration issued controversial new interagency agreements moving the office for civil rights and the office overseeing special education out of the Department of Education. There’ve been a lot of questions about what this all means in practice. Well, few are better positioned to answer them than Lindsay Fryer, president of Lodestone DC, who’s worked on both the House and Senate education committees and was the Senate’s lead negotiator on the Every Student Succeeds Act.

PAUL PETERSON, HOST: This is the Education Exchange. I am Paul Peterson, Director of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance. Thank you for joining us. As the echoes from the 4th of July fireworks explosions ring in our ears, many are asking whether our schools are teaching the next generation an honest kind of patriotism that’s manifested itself at the World Cup events and throughout the country on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

As part of my preparation for America’s semiquincentennial, I have been reading about our nation’s founding and visiting as many historic revolutionary sites in my adopted home state of Virginia as possible. I am learning far more than what was in the bicentennial-era textbooks I was assigned as a child. One of the more interesting discoveries is how often our founders disagreed. They vigorously debated almost every aspect of the creation of this exceptional country.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court decisively answered the core legal question in West Virginia v. B. P. J. and Little v. Hecox: whether states could restrict athletes’ participation in school and collegiate sports based on their biological sex. The answer was a resounding yes. That conclusion was not surprising since Title IX was created to increase opportunities for females, and subsequent legislation made it clear that sex-segregated teams could be necessary to comply with the law.

During my freshman year at Harvard, I taught civics every Thursday to 5th graders. One morning, I went rogue. Before boarding the subway to Dorchester, I bought a party-size pack of Dum-Dums and brought it with me to class. I opened my lesson on voting rights with a proposal: only the students wearing blue that day could have a say in how lollipops were distributed. After their shrieks subsided, I asked them to reflect. How did they feel?

Next week, we’ll celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. To honor the occasion, our president has been busy hosting UFC fights on the White House lawn, mounting the off-and-on pursuit of a (very patriotic) $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to pay off the J6 rioters, pushing to get the U.S. Treasury to stick his mug on a new $250 bill, and planning a July 4 Trump rally on the National Mall.