On Tuesday, employees at the US Department of Education were told not to come into work the next day, and shortly thereafter layoffs that will bring the total employees to half of what there were in January were announced.

Chalkbeat - U.S. Department of Education to lay off one-third of staff

Although shutting down the Department altogether would require a vote from Congress, slashing the staff will achieve a similar result. Already last month, hundreds of millions in research grants funded by USED were cut and thousands of hearings on discrimination in the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) were cancelled as well.

The legality of all of these moves is under dispute, but the negative impact is not.

Late Friday afternoon Chicago Public Schools families learned that CPS students were (once again!) victims of a massive data breach, one that impacts all current and former students back to 2017—700,000 people. Read more about that here. While we don’t yet know if the software vendor, Cleo, was at fault for insecurely holding data, what we do know is that, even if Cleo is at fault, most families impacted by this breach likely have no recourse under Illinois law to sue the vendor.

The attacks on public education—and public goods of all kinds—by the Presidential administration continue and continue to escalate. We’ll cover a few of these below, but also include ways you can pitch in to the fight.

It’s been a long first week of presidential executive orders targeting the public good and our neighbors, our families, ourselves. Monday’s late night illegal federal spending freeze​ was halted by a court challenge on Tuesday. For now the memo instigating that freeze has been rescinded​ (although not the orders it was meant to implement) due to widespread public outrage and pushback.

Last fall, pro-public school advocates successfully pushed the Illinois General Assembly to sunset the state’s school voucher program (aka “Invest in Kids”). A broad coalition of more than 60 local, state and national orgs made this victory possible. Rather than devoting tens of millions of dollars a year to private schools that discriminate, those dollars now go back to the state’s General Revenue Fund to support the public good—including funding our public schools.

The General Assembly’s Spring Session wrapped up last week in a flurry of votes on budget legislation. Here’s where some of the bills and issues on our legislative agenda ended up.

Last week the Illinois State Board of Education announced that it is now official, the state will be switching back to ACT for the high school test for 11th graders, and it will be a graduation requirement for public schools. Other ACT, Inc. tests will be administered for 9th and 10th grades. 

The General Assembly's Spring Session scheduled end date is May 24th. While that deadline may get extended as the budget gets hammered out, there are a lot of non-budget bills that are poised to keep moving in each chamber. Here are status updates on a few that we've been telling you about this session and actions for you to take.

The deadline for passing bills out of the Illinois House and over to the Senate is this Friday 4/19. Here are two bills that IL-FPS has been following closely, and we encourage you to call your state rep about both of them.

[Update: HB 303 Amendment 1 passed in committee 11-0 on Tue 4/16, and another amendment was filed Tuesday pm. See below for details. HB 303 could have a floor vote in the House before the end of the week. Please ask your state rep to OPPOSE HB 303.]