Schooled Year in Review: Protecting girls’ spaces

In 2025, higher education continued to reckon with its responses to campus pro-Palestinian protests that resulted from the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent war. Additionally, disagreements over LGBTQ ideology popped up in classrooms and school boards across the United States. And as President Donald Trump reentered the White House and signed a shower of executive orders, it signaled the next era in federal policies that have yo-yoed over whether and how to protect girls’ spaces and sports. In this first in a special series of Year in Review Roundups, here are our picks for the top education stories of the past 12 months.

Tackling transgender ideology

Days before President Donald Trump took office in January, a federal judge struck down the Biden administration’s transgender-affirming rewrite of Title IX, effectively reverting to federal Title IX guidance finalized under Trump in 2020. Title IX prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs. The same day Trump took the oath of office, he also signed an executive order that recognized male and female as the only two sexes.

The Trump administration has pressured states and school districts to protect single-sex facilities and sports, and some districts have sued the administration in response. Some parents have sued over school district transgender policies that put male and female students together in overnight accommodations, including beds. In a case that affects all California teachers, a federal court ruled Monday that schools cannot force teachers to hide information from parents about their children’s attempts to identify as another sex at school.

Some officials and school leaders seem to be getting in line with surprisingly little resistance. In July, the University of Pennsylvania agreed to apologize to female swimmers who were disadvantaged when the school let a man compete as a woman during the 2021-22 swim season. But the Supreme Court is scheduled to weigh in on the sports issue, perhaps bringing some consistency. The justices will hear arguments in January on two cases, combined into one, that challenge state protections for girls’ and women’s sports.

Education Department deflation

Days after her confirmation in March, Education Secretary Linda McMahon got to work fulfilling the Trump’s campaign promise of shutting down the Education Department, announcing the layoffs of more than 1,300 Department of Education employees and the voluntary resignation or retirement of about 600 others. The reductions amounted to a little less than half of the agency’s staff. Trump also signed an executive order calling for the Education Department’s closure.

Two days after McMahon’s layoff announcement, 20 states and Washington, D.C., sued the agency. Education groups sued as well. Amid the subsequent legal wrangling, the agency hired back some employees but then announced 466 additional Education Department layoffs in October during the government shutdown. A federal judge stopped that plan less than a week later, ruling it was likely illegal. Litigation over the Education Department layoffs is still ongoing. Last month, McMahon said the agency would hand off several of its responsibilities to the departments of Labor, Interior, State, and Health and Human Services.

Trump is not the first Republican president to raise the idea of shutting down the Department of Education. But Congress would have to approve fully closing it.

Crackdowns and compacts

This year, the Trump administration clashed with colleges and universities over their responses to pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. The administration in February announced the launch of a federal anti-Semitism task force that prioritized investigations into colleges and universities, and it later froze federal funding to schools it said had done too little to address anti-Semitism on campus. The administration also opened investigations into schools over concerns of race-based programs.

In October, Trump offered a carrot by inviting nine schools to join his “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” an agreement offering greater access to federal funding if schools met specific requirements. Among the requirements, schools would need to protect female spaces and sports from male participation, freeze tuition for U.S. students for five years, and stop consideration of race or sex in admissions. Although the nine schools did not accept the president’s offer, Trump later opened up the compact to any interested schools. New College of Florida in October was the first to announce it would sign the compact, followed by Valley Forge Military College. Some schools, such as Northwestern University and Columbia University, reached separate deals with the administration that saw restored funding and compliance with several administration priorities.

But other schools, including Harvard University, remain at odds with the federal government, in some cases taking the disputes to court. Last Thursday, the Trump administration appealed to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals over a lower court’s ruling that required the federal government to restore more than $2 billion in frozen research funding for Harvard.

Collecting on school loans

After former President Joe Biden expanded his student loan debt cancellation programs in January, during the last days of his term, President Donald Trump quickly reversed course. The Trump administration restricted school debt forgiveness and, in May, restarted collections on past-due student loans after a five-year pause that began during the COVID-19 pandemic. Earlier this month it announced it would cancel a Biden-era program that Republican state attorneys general challenged in a lawsuit last year.

ICE effects

School districts across the country lambasted the Trump administration for its tough immigration enforcement stance. As federal authorities stepped up arrests and deportation actions against unauthorized immigrants, large districts in cities like New York and Los Angeles reported significant student enrollment drops that they attributed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations and fear. In response, some districts beefed up virtual schooling options or added bus routes in an attempt to encourage immigrant students to attend class.

School-place violence 

Schools continued to be tragic sites of violence in 2025. Just days into the new school year in August, a mass-shooting gunman murdered two young Catholic school students and injured more than a dozen others at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis. In a different sort of violence in September, a shooter assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk while he spoke with students at Utah Valley University. And earlier this month, a shooter killed two people at Brown University in Providence, R.I. Two days later, a gunman also shot to death Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro at his home: Police later said the same man, a 48-year-old former Brown University graduate student, committed both crimes.