Li Feng, an economist at Texas State University, presented findings this year from a four-university study of the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program, funded by a National Science Foundation grant and built on nearly three decades of national survey data. The headline number: out-of-field teaching rates in high-poverty schools reach 45% in physical sciences and 58% in computer science, compared with 22% in math and 34% in biology. Schools near Noyce-funded university partnerships saw real relief, an 8% drop in math vacancies and smaller but real drops in physical science and biology vacancies, but the underlying driver of the shortage is money. STEM teachers in high-poverty schools earn 18.3% less than counterparts in low-poverty schools, a gap large enough to erase any pay bump from holding an advanced degree.
If you teach physics or chemistry in a high-need school, the odds are real that the teacher covering the same subject across town, in a lower-poverty building, has more content-specific training than you do. That's not a comment on your ability. It's a wage and resource gap that Feng's team measured directly, and it's the reason out-of-field physical science teaching has stayed stubbornly high even as math staffing has improved. The one lever her research found that actually moves the number is a Noyce-funded university partnership operating nearby.
ETS announced its acquisition of ACT on June 30, with the deal expected to close July 1. It is the second time ACT has changed ownership since 2024, when Nexus Capital Management, a Los Angeles private equity firm, acquired it. Terms were not disclosed. Combined, ETS and ACT will reach roughly 35 million people a year, the largest scale any single organization has held in U.S. testing. The deal lands as several universities reinstate standardized testing requirements for admissions after years of test-optional policy.
Your juniors and seniors now prep for two exams, the SAT and the ACT, that sit under one parent company for the first time. That does not change anything about this fall's test dates or content, but it puts both product lines under one roof at the exact moment more colleges are requiring scores again after years of test-optional admissions. Counselors advising students on which test to take, or whether to take both, should expect the calculus behind that advice to shift as ETS decides how much of ACT's operation it keeps running independently.
A coalition of disability and education organizations, including the Knowledge Alliance and the Massachusetts Teachers Association, filed suit June 30 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts against the Education Department and the White House Office of Management and Budget. The complaint alleges the agencies are withholding roughly $1.9 billion Congress appropriated for the Institute of Education Sciences, covering the National Center for Education Statistics, the National Center for Education Research, and the National Center for Special Education Research, across fiscal years 2025 and 2026. Some of that funding expires later this year and into 2027 if it is never obligated. Plaintiffs argue the failure to apportion the funds violates the Administrative Procedures Act, the Antideficiency Act, and the constitutional separation of powers.
IES is the federal engine behind most of the research your district cites when it calls a reading program or a math intervention "evidence-based." A frozen budget does not show up in your classroom this year. It shows up in three years, when the next round of research you are asked to implement turns out to be thinner than the last, because the studies that should have been funded now never happened. Special education staff should note the National Center for Special Education Research is named directly in the complaint.
The Supreme Court ruled June 30 in a pair of consolidated cases, West Virginia v. B.P.J. and Little v. Hecox, that Title IX and the Constitution permit states to separate school and college sports teams by biological sex. Justice Brett Kavanaugh's majority opinion, joined by five colleagues, found that physical differences between biological men and women justify the separation, even where a transgender athlete has used puberty blockers or hormone therapy. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson partly agreed but dissented from how categorically the ruling applied. The decision upholds the roughly 27 state laws, more than half the states in the country, that already ban transgender students from teams matching their gender identity, and will likely resolve a wave of Education Department investigations now open in states including Minnesota, Kentucky, and California.
If your state already has one of these laws, the constitutional question behind it is now settled, at least for the foreseeable future. If your district has been handling this case-by-case in a state without a law, expect pressure to formalize a policy, since the ruling removes the ambiguity that supported a wait-and-see approach. Athletic directors and coaches should expect this decision to surface directly in conversations with parents and students this fall.