Giving Compass' Take:

•  Carolyn Phenicie takes a look back at federal education policy stories from 2018: From the government shutdown to fully funding the Education Department. 

• How can funders work to shape federal education policy for the better? How can the progress made in 2018 be built upon in 2019? 

• Learn more about the Janus decision. 

1. School safety, gun control, and student activism: The Valentine’s Day shooting in Parkland, Florida, killed 17 students and teachers and spurred a wave of student activism that lasted the rest of the year. They walked out of school and marched on Washington. They registered voters, spurring a record turnout of young people in the November midterms. And they wrote a student safety bill of rights. In response to the shooting, lawmakers at the state and federal levels poured money into school safety programs.

2. The Janus decision: The Supreme Court in June ruled that dissenting public-sector employees may no longer be compelled to pay any union dues. Requiring them to do so, as a long-standing precedent had, violated their First Amendment right to freedom of speech, a 5-4 court decided.

3. Proposal to merge the Education and Labor departments: The Trump administration in June proposed combining the Education and Labor departments into one “Department of Education and the Workforce.”

4: DACA, immigration, and the government shutdown: It’s a fading memory, but the government did shut down in early 2018, briefly, over the fate of the Dreamers, young people brought to the country illegally as children whose temporary legal protections Trump has sought to end.

 5: A new career and technical education law: Congress checked one long-overdue ed reauthorization off their list this year, overwhelmingly passing a reauthorization of the federal law that governs career and technical education, just six years late.

6: Title IX changes: Primarily, the new rules would require schools to use higher evidentiary standards to prove an assault occurred and put limits on when schools must act. The rules would apply slightly differently to higher ed and K-12, for example, requiring reports to any K-12 teacher to trigger a school response, while colleges would have to react only when certain administrators are told of an assault or harassment.

7: Full year of education funding: Congress for the first time in a decade passed a full year’s worth of Education Department funding on time.

Read the full article about federal school policy stories in 2018 by Carolyn Phenicie at The 74.