A courtroom can become a sort of time machine. The criminal trial of Paul Geer, a former music teacher, played out in federal court in Albany, N.Y., last week. But testimony and photographic evidence transported everyone back to the 1990s and early 2000s to a town 125 miles away, Hancock, and to the Family Foundation … Read more
Democrats on Monday blocked a Republican-written bill aimed at barring transgender women and girls from school sports teams designated for female students, thwarting consideration in the Senate of the G.O.P.’s latest move to use transgender people as leverage at the dawn of President Trump’s second term. With Democrats opposed, the measure stalled on a vote … Read more
When one of New York City’s most prestigious private schools hired Winston Nguyen in 2020, administrators knew about the felony conviction for fraud in his troubled past. But the second chance they offered him backfired. Nearly four years later, Mr. Nguyen, a math teacher, was arrested again, accused of preying on students. And the school, … Read more
Late last fall at the Hugo Newman School in Harlem, two social studies teachers handed out pages of hip-hop lyrics to their seventh graders, and then flicked off the lights. The students appeared surprised. They had been studying ancient matriarchal societies, including Iroquois communities that had women leaders. Now, their teachers were about to play … Read more
Aspiring lawyers in California are in limbo this week after taking the state’s revamped bar exam, which was rife with technical glitches and written in a style that some test takers said scarcely resembled the exam they had spent thousands of dollars and years of intense study to pass. The faulty rollout last week … Read more
The chemistry professor’s nightmare seemed to finally be over. Five years had passed since Feng Tao, also known as Franklin, was led by F.B.I. agents out of his home in Lawrence, Kansas. The first professor to be arrested under a Trump-era program aimed at fighting Chinese economic espionage, Dr. Tao was accused of hiding his … Read more
The board of Virginia Military Institute voted on Friday against extending the contract of Major General Cedric T. Wins, the college’s first Black superintendent. The school’s board of visitors, which voted 10-6 not to extend General Wins’s contract, did not give an official reason for the decision, which was made after a closed session that … Read more
When Nancy Cantor became president of Hunter College last fall, she asked faculty, students and staff what they wanted from the school. One answer was more attention to Palestinian studies. Faculty members began working on possible approaches. They came up with a plan for two tenure-track faculty positions that would cross several departments and began … Read more
At Lakenheath High School, a school for children of U.S. military members in Britain, a club for gay students and their allies can no longer meet. A Women in STEM group has also been placed on hold. At Ramstein High School in Germany, groups for students of Hispanic and Asian heritage as well as the … Read more
Dr. Bryant Lin stood before his class at Stanford in September, likely one of the last he would ever teach. Just 50 years old and a nonsmoker, he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer four months earlier. The illness is terminal, and Dr. Lin estimated that he had roughly two years left before … Read more