Linda McMahon’s first act as secretary of education was to instruct staff to prepare for its “final mission,” her clearest indication yet of how she will work to fulfill President Trump’s goal of shuttering the department. Ms. McMahon’s missive, sent via email shortly after she was sworn in on Monday, was just the latest thunderclap for federal workers, teachers and school administrators anticipating seismic changes to the nation’s education system. Ms. McMahon’s message broadly outlined a “disruption” to the education system that would have a “profound impact.” The changes to the status quo, she said, would be “daunting.” “This is our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service to future generations of students,” Ms. McMahon wrote. “I hope you will join me in ensuring that when our final mission is complete,” she continued, “we will all be able to say that we left American education freer, stronger and with more hope for the future.” Mr. Trump has been blunt about his desire to do away with the department entirely, including a recent remark that he hoped Ms. McMahon would effectively put herself out of a job. He told reporters last month that the Education Department was “a big con job” and that “I’d like to close it immediately.” The department is created by statute, however, and closing it would require an act of Congress. But up until Monday night, Ms. McMahon had been more nuanced in her position. At a confirmation hearing, she described to senators a bold vision for the future of education — one that pushed for more high school vocational programs, increased school options and protected families from insurmountable college debt. Ms. McMahon had watched her successful Senate confirmation vote on Monday, along with some key staff and advisers, from inside the secretary’s office at the Education Department building, just a few blocks from the Capitol. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT When the vote ended at 6:28 p.m., Ms. McMahon was sworn into office by Jacqueline Clay, the department’s chief human capital officer. By 9:29 p.m., she sent her first email to the department’s roughly 4,200 workers with the subject line, “Our Department’s Final Mission.” She used the email to explain her ambitions in stark terms. “Restoring patriotic education and classes” was among her top priorities, she wrote. The department would “restore the right role of state oversight in education,” she added. This restoration, she said, would mean significant changes for the agency’s staff, budgets and operations.“We must start thinking about our final mission at the department as an overhaul — a last chance to restore the culture of liberty and excellence that made American education great,” she wrote. Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, said she was worried that the Trump administration wanted to return to a time when there were fewer protections for students with disabilities and those from poor districts. “America is about progress,” Ms. Pringle said. “We know that we are still a work in progress, and my concern — and it is a real concern — is that we are going back to a time when certain students were left alone in a corner somewhere and not getting the services that they needed.” Ms. McMahon also cast the department as a failed experiment, noting that it had spent more than $1 trillion since opening its doors for the first time in 1980. But she did not describe how it would help to give more power to state and local school districts, which have spent exponentially more on education during that same time. Madi Biedermann, a department spokeswoman, said that Ms. McMahon would oversee a “historic overhaul” of the agency that was aligned with Mr. Trump’s goals. “He was very clear about what his vision for the department looked like, and Secretary McMahon was clear in the hearing that she is here to implement his agenda,” Ms. Biedermann said. Some agency officials said privately that the email seemed like an attempt to undermine morale within an agency already reeling from the administration’s aggressive overhaul. These officials, who requested anonymity out of fear of retribution, said they believed their new boss was delivering a not-so-subtle message to retire early or simply resign. Education workers who did not accept a resignation package offered to nearly all government employees in the first weeks of the Trump administration were offered a modest severance again on Friday, a proposal that expired on Monday. Workers who have spent 20 years at the agency and are at least 50 years old have until March 25 to apply for an early retirement package being offered. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, noted in an interview that parts of Ms. McMahon’s email seemed to contradict her testimony during the confirmation hearing. During the hearing, Ms. McMahon called for increasing vocational training in high schools to the point where new graduates have the skills to “even start a business of their own.” In her email, however, she said that “postsecondary education should be a path to a well-paying career aligned with work force needs.” “They are still trying to figure out what they can and can’t do, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up trying to do this by 1,000 cuts,” Ms. Weingarten said. “But if they make things worse, it’s going to be on their watch — because parents all across the country are saying they want help to protect their kids and don’t want to gut federal funding.” Ms. Weingarten spoke by phone while driving from Albany, N.Y., to New Haven, Conn., to speak at events on a “day of action” organized by the teachers’ union. She said that with less than three weeks of planning, there were roughly 2,000 rallies, marches and other local events on Tuesday aimed at urging lawmakers not to undermine public education. She also pointed to a series of public opinion surveys in the past month that had shown roughly two-thirds of Americans were against eliminating the agency. According to an NPR/PBS/Marist poll released Tuesday, 63 percent of respondents said they were opposed to closing the Education Department.

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 as leaders. Now, their teachers were about to play the song “Ladies First” by Queen Latifah and Monie Love. The teachers instructed their students to highlight any lyrics that reminded them of the Iroquois women, who were known as the Haudenosaunee Clan Mothers. Although they did not know it, the middle schoolers were in the midst of their first lesson of “Black Studies as the Study of the World,” a curriculum that rolled out in September and is now available to every New York City public school. Tristan Vanderhorst, 12, took notes and bobbed to the music. “I had never seen a woman rap like that,” he said afterward. The curriculum, which spans from pre-K to 12th grade, covers early African civilizations, Black American history and the achievements and contributions of the African diaspora. The curriculum emphasizes what is known as “culturally relevant” teaching, an approach meant to help students connect their own lives with what they are learning. It has been used by dozens of schools across the city since the last school year, to little fanfare. But the Trump administration has moved aggressively in its first weeks to ban programs related to diversity and equity across government, including in schools. Local school districts have traditionally been insulated from interference from the federal government. New York’s curriculum — and similar efforts to bring discussions about race and history into schools — could test those lines, and how far the Trump administration might go to enforce its edicts. Already, many K-12 educators, including the architects of New York City’s new Black studies curriculum, appear defiant. “In New York, we are trying our best to be Trump-proof,” Adrienne Adams, the speaker of the New York City Council, said in a recent interview. “We are doing everything we can to protect the curriculum.”In his second week in office, President Trump signed an executive order to withhold funding from schools that teach that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.” The order bans what it called “discriminatory equity ideology,” which “treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.”Whether New York’s curriculum or other Black history efforts violate those terms is open to interpretation. That executive order and others like it enter an ongoing debate about how schools should handle race and ethnicity. Some states, like California, have embraced ethnic studies education, a discipline born on the left that connects the experiences of people of color throughout history. Others have sought to limit or ban it. Since 2021, more than 44 states have restricted how race is discussed in public schools. Last week, the Trump administration issued guidance to schools detailing how it might pursue its orders. Officials might examine elementary schools with programs that “shame students of a particular race or ethnicity” or that “accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy.” In its guidance, the administration also suggested it would look at schools that it argued “have sought to veil discriminatory policies with terms like ‘social-emotional learning’ or ‘culturally responsive’ teaching.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Ms. Adams, who helped allocate $27 million to develop the Black studies lessons, has called New York’s curriculum a “model of fearlessness.” The curriculum offers students an “African-centered perspective that predates slavery” and is optional for schools. But about 200 have adopted it, and in early February, nearly 2,000 students gathered at the Channel View School for Research in Rockaway, Queens, for a Black studies student fair connected with the curriculum. Melissa Aviles-Ramos, the city’s schools chancellor, said the curriculum was essential in a diverse school district. “When students connect with the material, they are more engaged, develop critical thinking skills and build a deeper sense of belonging,” she said in a statement. “I am proud to lead a school system that values inclusion and the powerful truth that our diversity is our strength.”In the curriculum’s pre-K and elementary school lessons, students contemplate their identity through name study and ancestry exercises. In middle school, they are introduced to the concept of agency while studying local Black communities. They also learn about the Black media and the Black Panthers. In high school, students explore Black liberation, slavery, disenfranchisement, policing and other hot-button political issues like reparations while reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article “The Case for Reparations.”Peta-Gaye McLean, one of the seventh-grade social studies teachers who began a lesson with a hip-hop music video, said she appreciates the new material, even though she has been teaching about Black history for years. “Not only does it legitimize it, it gives the teachers a responsibility,” she said. Some of her students took personally the lesson comparing the roles of women in pre-colonial America and Africa. Tristan said his takeaways were “don’t take women for granted. Respect them highly.” His classmate, Amelia Sierra, 12, said the class taught “all these good things about women and the ladies — how helpful they were and how important they were,” she said. “So I think that shows me how important I am.” That is part of the goal. Some education experts say that making connections to students’ own lives and culture helps them master the material. One study found that students who take ethnic studies classes are more likely to graduate and go to college. “The ability to really dig into problems that kids care about is one of the things that I think sets culturally relevant pedagogy apart,” Gloria Ladson-Billings, an education scholar who coined that term in the mid-1990s, said in an interview. Not all educators agree with that approach. Ian Rowe, the founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in the Bronx that embraces the classics, urges students to “reject victimhood.” He said his school would never adopt the “Black Studies as the Study of the World” curriculum. His students, who are predominantly Black and Latino, are still exposed to Black history, Mr. Rowe said. But, he added, “We’re going at it from the human condition, a universality. So we don’t want our kids to only see themselves through the prism of race only or gender only.”Conservative and liberal educators may have more in common than they realize when it comes to teaching about Black history, said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. In both right- and left-leaning parts of the country, new standards and lessons related to African American history often emphasize teaching about the strengths of the Black community. He said that heated political rhetoric prevents both sides from appreciating some of their shared values. “Instead of trying to find common ground on antiracism or inclusive history or ways in which we can broaden the canon,” he said, partisans “have instead found it more politically beneficial to plant an extremist flag.” Alesha Smith, an English Language Arts teacher at Eagle Academy in Harlem, an all-boys school that is using the New York City curriculum, said she loved teaching about empowerment in difficult lessons about slavery, for example. “The strengths of this curriculum are in identifying the strengths of the individuals and the flaws in the system,” she said.Nevertheless, conservatives who have taken issue with ethnic studies might make similar criticisms of New York’s curriculum, which was informed by some of the issues the Trump orders condemn, like “equity.” It also does not discuss many Black conservatives. Still, in some lessons, race never comes up. Professor Sonya Douglass, who oversaw the development of the curriculum as the director of the Black Education Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, said the intention was to have students think more about “concepts like identity and empowerment, self-knowledge, culture.” In December, Ms. Smith led a lesson on how enslaved people subverted the institution of slavery. An illustration at the front of the room showed a rose climbing out of concrete, a reminder of the class’s previous discussion of Tupac Shakur’s poem that reflects on the same imagery. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Students chose from several writing prompts, including one asking how they had overcome adversity in their own lives and another about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. TriNahum Jones, 18, described how Dr. King used his platform as a minister to inspire legions of supporters. And Muhamed Toure, 17, wrote his essay about being stopped and frisked while walking home from the gym. “It kind of just showed me racism hasn’t gone away,” he said. “It has just evolved and changed throughout time.” After they put their pencils down, the class talked about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. They also spoke about quieter acts of rebellion, like learning how to read and write. “I come out of class more impressed with the resilience of my race,” TriNahum said.

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, Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn, faced a roiling crisis. On Monday, Mr. Nguyen, 38, pleaded guilty to a felony and several misdemeanors after being charged with soliciting lewd images and videos from students. When he is sentenced later this month, he faces a possible seven-year prison term. Mr. Nguyen was taken into custody after the hearing and will be held temporarily at the Rikers Island jail complex. His plea marks the latest chapter in a scandal that has marred the reputation of Saint Ann’s School and the administrators who hired him. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This is the second time Mr. Nguyen has been convicted of a felony. In 2019, he pleaded guilty to grand larceny and other charges after he was accused of stealing more than $300,000 from his employers, an older couple he worked for as a home health aide. He served four months at Rikers, and about a year later was hired by Saint Ann’s, a school that charges about $60,000 per year in tuition and caters to New York’s wealthy creative class. A nattily dressed figure who arrived at class often in a suit and sometimes with a bow tie, Mr. Nguyen transformed a felony record from a liability into a résumé-builder at a school known for embracing unconventional educators. He taught a seminar called “Crime and Punishment” and quickly become a fixture at the school. It was the kind of opportunity that few felons get. In interviews with The New York Times last week, Mr. Nguyen tried to make sense of how he squandered it all, and how he plummeted from the promise of his youth — a driven high school student, he was once honored by the mayor of Houston, his hometown, and went on to attend Columbia University — to the reality of being a 38-year-old man headed to prison for the second time in six years. “I’ve hurt so many people,” he said. Mr. Nguyen declined to directly address the students he targeted — he will do so when he is sentenced, he said — but expressed remorse for the damage he caused to the school. “It was an incredibly great community to me, and I really, really regret that my actions have painted them in a horrible light,” he said. Neither the students targeted by Mr. Nguyen nor their families have spoken publicly, and prosecutors have protected their privacy through the legal process. Sitting in the courtyard outside his Harlem apartment, Mr. Nguyen vacillated between teary recognition of his transgressions and occasional intense bursts of self-analysis. He said he suffers from a mental illness, bipolar II disorder, which he said went untreated during the Covid-19 pandemic, and that he experienced sexual abuse as a child, but he did not make excuses for his behavior. “I very much take responsibility for my actions,” he said. “I made bad decisions.” In Brooklyn criminal court on Monday, Mr. Nguyen arrived 30 minutes late, wearing an untucked T-shirt, casual slacks and a parka. He carried a large red shopping bag and a large red book, The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Mr. Nguyen agreed to plead guilty to one count of using a child in a sexual performance and five separate counts, representing five children, of “knowingly acting in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than 17 years.” Daniel Newcombe, an assistant district attorney, informed the judge of the recommended punishment: seven years in prison, 10 years supervision after his release and a requirement that he register as a sex offender for 20 years. Mr. Nguyen’s sentencing will take place in two weeks. The judge, Philip V. Tisne, asked Mr. Nguyen if he understood that after the completion of this sentence, should he be convicted of a felony a third time, he would automatically be sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. “Yes, your honor,” Mr. Nguyen said. Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney, said the plea agreement held Mr. Nguyen responsible for his “disturbing and predatory conduct” while sparing victims from having to testify. When the hearing ended, court officers cuffed Mr. Nguyen’s hands behind his back. He slung his head downward as his lawyer, Frank Rothman, patted his back. He was led out a side door. Outside the courtroom, Mr. Rothman was circled by reporters. “There is no defense one can proffer when you have images on your phone,” he said. “I don’t know what his first night is going to be like,” Mr. Rothman said. “I’m sure he is anxious. He is going to jail as a sex offender.” Mr. Nguyen was hired as an administrative aide at Saint Ann’s in the summer of 2020. He had alerted the administrator who interviewed him that he had been convicted of a felony, and at least one Saint Ann’s employee urged the school’s leaders not to hire him. He quickly became an indispensable member of the staff, helping to manage logistics during the pandemic as he integrated himself into the school community. The school promoted Mr. Nguyen to math teacher in the fall of 2021 but did not alert parents to his criminal record until after students discovered news stories about him on the internet. In October of 2021, Vince Tompkins, then the head of the school, sent parents an email about the new math teacher. “I can assure you that as with any teacher we hire, we are confident in Winston’s ability and fitness to educate and care for our students,” he wrote. Within a year, students at Saint Ann’s and other Brooklyn private schools — some as young as 13 — began to receive solicitations via Snapchat for lewd photos and videos. The user behind the anonymous Snapchat accounts sent one student a graphic video of a 16-year-old boy masturbating. By February 2024, Saint Ann’s had been notified by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office that it was investigating the continued targeting of its students by anonymous Snapchat accounts seeking sexual photographs and videos. School administrators did not notify parents. Days before the end of the school year, Mr. Nguyen was arrested near Saint Ann’s. He was charged in July with 11 felony counts, including using a child in a sexual performance, promoting a sexual performance by a child and disseminating indecent material to a minor. The news shocked parents and students and led to a torrent of media coverage. In December, Saint Ann’s released the findings of an investigation conducted by lawyers commissioned by the school’s board to determine how the school had come to employ a felon. The blistering report said that the school administration had “shamed” parents who expressed concern about Mr. Nguyen’s background and had suggested they were not in step with the school’s progressive values. “In some instances,” the report said, administrators “prioritized teachers including Nguyen over the concerns of students and their families about the teacher’s background or behavior.” In the months since his arrest, Mr. Nguyen mostly has been confined to his apartment. He takes part in video therapy sessions, including group sessions with other people accused of sexual offenses, and has attended occasional church services. Otherwise, he has remained isolated, reading and watching television. His sister recently visited him from Houston to help him clean out his apartment as he prepares to grow into middle age in prison. “I don’t deserve the family that I have,” Mr. Nguyen said. In recent weeks he has been culling his belongings. While packing, he came across a warm coat given to him during a cold winter by Bernard Stoll, the man he worked for and stole from before his employment at Saint Ann’s. “People have been very, incredibly good to me, and I betrayed their trust in a very deep way,” he said. He did not wish to stand trial, he said. “I am at a place where I know what I’ve done,” he said. “I think part of the reason I feel so horribly is I just don’t know any way I can make it better for the kids, or for their families or for the school. I accept this sentence because I know that I did something wrong and I want to answer for it.”

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 School’s secluded campus in the woods. The reform school is long closed and has settled several lawsuits by former students accusing Mr. Geer of sexual abuse over decades. But the trial brought the place back into the public spotlight. There is a photo of a large basement lined with bunks. The female students slept there, beneath Mr. Geer’s home. There is the barn, where he held practice for his young singers. Middle-age men and women sat in the witness stand and were asked the same question: “Do you see Paul Geer here today?” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT They scanned the room, resting their eyes on the stout, bald, bespectacled man hunched at the defense table. Some knew him when he was in his 20s or 30s. Now he is 57. They all pointed — him. They were asked about how he terrorized them, or worse, decades ago, when they were teenagers. In 2024, Mr. Geer was charged with six counts related to bringing three children across state lines to engage in sexual activity. The case led to a trial that began on Feb. 19. On Friday, closing arguments took place. About a dozen former students who had mostly never met before, having attended the school at different periods, watched in the gallery. The jury began deliberating soon after. Over the past week, witnesses were shown photographs of the place many have tried to forget. Their names have been redacted from public records in the case, but several have come forward in interviews and lawsuits. “This is the isolation room where I had to stay for five days,” one former student, Elizabeth Boysick, 41, testified, looking at a picture of a tiny, windowless room. “It’s very hard to look at. Nobody should be treated like this. Especially children.” The school was founded in the 1980s by Tony and Betty Argiros, a couple who had each struggled with addiction and built the place on the tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous and its 12-step program. Parents from surrounding counties and states sent their troubled children to the small campus, billed as a “therapeutic boarding school,” in the foothills of the Catskills. Upon arrival, the children were strip-searched in front of other students, and an adult watched as they rubbed lice shampoo into their hair and genitals in a shower, according to testimony. They were assigned to a “family,” with staff members playing the role of parents. Mr. Geer, who taught at the school from the early ’90s until it closed in 2014, was the “father” of Family Six. He openly described himself to students as a sex addict who hit rock bottom while driving one day and nearly crashing as he masturbated, former students testified. “This constant, returning story,” Steve Zahoroiko, 43, a former student and, later, a marine, testified. “That was the shining moment in his life, when he turned everything around.”He forced students to admit to impure thoughts and actions in front of their new family. “Talk about whatever sex lives we supposedly had,” Mr. Zahoroiko said. Mr. Geer was repeatedly described as flying into a rage when confronting a student. “Being screamed at by him very close to my face,” Ms. Boysick testified. “Red-faced, sweating.” Other students recalled being forced to run in place all day — “trotting” — or haul buckets of rocks up and down a hill as a punishment. Prosecutors called several former students who said they were sexually abused by Mr. Geer. A 39-year-old man identified as “Victim 3” testified that he had been forced by Mr. Geer to join the choir — “I wasn’t a singer” — and that the teacher had abused him on a school trip to Toronto, in a hotel room. Prosecutors showed videos of his singing in the choir, a younger Mr. Geer energetically conducting the group. “Never thought I’d be up here on the witness stand talking about this, ever again,” the former student testified. “But he was the devil.” Mike Milia, 46, another former student, testified that Mr. Geer took him on a fishing and sightseeing trip to Maine for several days in 1994, when he was 15. His parents did not know about the trip. Prosecutors showed photographs of the smiling teenager posing before roadside signs — “Brake for Moose.” “We never put a fishing rod in the water,” Mr. Milia testified. Instead, Mr. Geer bought beer and pornographic magazines and sexually abused the teen for days, he testified. Mr. Geer’s lawyers with the federal public defenders’ office sought to soften the grim portrayal of the man and the school. A former administrator, Emmanuel “Mike” Argiros — a son of the founders — testified that he had never heard complaints about Mr. Geer abusing children, and that he had sent three of his own children to the school, in part for its excellent music program. Former students were confronted with smiling yearbook photographs of their teenage selves, paired with glowing testimonials about their time there. Mr. Zahoroiko, the former marine, chuckled on the witness stand and said the students did not write those blurbs; the school did. Defense lawyers have raised inconsistencies in the students’ versions of events over the years, in F.B.I. interviews and elsewhere. Elizabeth Ianelli, a former student and an organizer of the earliest public attacks against the school, wrote a memoir of her time there, “I See You, Survivor,” published in 2023. But she was called as a witness for the defense on Wednesday, and lawyers raised contradictions between what she had written and what she testified. Throughout, Mr. Geer watched in silence, occasionally wincing in apparent physical pain and seeming to have difficulty rising from his chair when jurors entered or left the courtroom. Lauren LaCroix, 34, flew to Albany from San Diego, where she lives with her husband and young sons, to watch the trial. She had tried to put her time at the school behind her. Now, she found comfort in meeting other former students. “There’s no explaining,” she said. “They get it right away.” Listening to accounts of abuse, she thought of a female staff member who had pulled her aside shortly after her arrival at the school. “She said, ‘I never want you alone with Paul Geer,’” Ms. LaCroix recalled. On Monday, after an afternoon and a following morning of deliberations, the jurors returned with its verdict. Guilty on the two counts involving the choir singer in Toronto. Guilty on the two counts for Mr. Milia on the road trip to Maine. But jurors were unable to reach a verdict on the counts related to Ms. Boysick — the only counts without photographs to document her time with Mr. Geer. To those in the audience, Mr. Geer appeared to tear up with emotion at the verdict. He was led away in handcuffs, to remain in jail until his sentencing in July. Ms. Boysick, who was among the first students to publicly come forward, using her name in a lawsuit, felt vindication, not loss, in the verdict, despite the outcome of the counts involving her. “I’m going to totally own those guilty verdicts,” she said. “It wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for me.” She said that moments before the verdict, Mr. Geer looked at her — “Wide-eyed, pure fear, what’s about to happen to me?” she said. It was a feeling Ms. Boysick and her old classmates in the gallery once knew well.

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 party-line vote of 51 to 45, falling short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster and be brought up for consideration. The bill, which passed the House in January on a largely party-line vote, would prohibit federal funding from going to K-12 schools that include transgender students in women’s and girls’ athletic programs. It mirrors one of the goals of an executive order Mr. Trump signed last month titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports,” which charged the Education Department with changing its interpretation of civil rights laws so that schools that failed to bar transgender athletes could lose federal funding. Senate Republicans argued it was essential to protecting girls from predatory men encroaching on their private spaces and seeking to gain an unfair athletic advantage on the basis of sex, even as they hinted that the measure was intended to lay a political trap for Democrats. “Democrats can stand for women or stand with a radical transgender ideology,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said on Monday. If they opposed the legislation, he said, “they’ll have to answer to the women and girls they vote to disenfranchise.” Democrats denounced the legislation as a craven effort by Republicans to wring political advantage from a small but vulnerable population of transgender children that would ultimately put at risk the girls it purported to protect. “What Republicans are doing today is inventing a problem to stir up a culture war and divide people against each other and distract people from what they’re actually doing,” said Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii. He called the bill “totally irrelevant to 99.9 percent of all people across the country.” The measure was sponsored by Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama and a former high school girls basketball coach, who framed it as an example of how Democrats were out of touch with a mainstream point of view. On the Senate floor, G.O.P. lawmakers cited polls showing a majority of Americans, including most Democrats, believed that biological males should not be allowed to play women’s sports. Many congressional Democrats have agreed that there are real concerns about transgender athletes competing in women’s sports at the highest levels. But they have argued that athletic associations should be making those decisions, not lawmakers passing broad bills at the federal level that lump together competitive athletes and young children who simply want to participate in school activities with their friends. More than two dozen states already bar transgender athletes from participating in school sports, whether in K-12 schools or at the collegiate level. On Monday, Senate Democrats argued that the legislation was not only an attack on basic human dignity, but also a waste of time. Of more than 500,000 N.C.A.A. athletes, they noted, fewer than 10 identified as transgender. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, also noted that the bill had no enforcement mechanism and “could subject women and girls to physical inspection by an adult if someone from an opposing team accused them of being transgender.” Out of power and in the political wilderness, congressional Democrats have few levers to pull to stand in the way of the Republican governing trifecta. But the filibuster remains one of their final ways of blocking legislation that otherwise could make its way to Mr. Trump’s desk for his signature. Earlier this year, Senate Democrats also blocked a measure that would subject some doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties. They blocked a Republican bill to impose sanctions on officials affiliated with the International Criminal Court, which Republicans have wanted to rebuke for the decision of its top prosecutor to bring war crimes charges against top Israeli leaders for their military offensive against Hamas in Gaza.

Even under normal circumstances, the California bar exam is one final harrowing hurdle before aspiring lawyers can practice. But last week was worse than any other, as they were thrown into limbo by technical glitches, delays and what many said were bizarrely written questions on a revamped test that didn’t match anything in preparation. The faulty rollout last week of the new licensing test, which was approved by the California Supreme Court in October and was touted by the state bar as a way to save money, has outraged test takers and the law school community at large, and prompted an investigation by California lawmakers and a lawsuit. “You can talk to any attorney — because they have all been through the bar experience — and they will tell you how hard it is and how stressful it is to go through the bar exam,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. “To have to then take it again because of the incompetence of the bar is inexcusable,” said Mr. Chemerinsky, who had raised concerns along with other law school deans about the new exam before it was approved. The botched exam, which is administered digitally, has left test takers in a bind that puts their career aspirations and personal finances in jeopardy. Many took weeks off work and missed time with family — and have job offers contingent on passing the February exam. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “I just kind of feel ripped off,” said Zack Defazio-Farrell, who took the exam last week. He added: “You spend a lot of money preparing. You spend a lot of time not making money. And this happens.” Test takers reported a range of technological problems over the course of the two-day exam, which on Day 1 included five one-hour essay sessions and a 90-minute section that assesses the ability to carry out legal tasks, and on Day 2 involved 200 multiple choice questions over the course of four 90-minute sessions. Test takers said they had encountered delays of over an hour to gain access to the exam, and some said they could not access the test at all. Others reported chronic freezing and lags, and an unresponsive copy and paste function. Some also said the questions were written in a strange manner, were missing key facts, contained typos or simply did not make sense. And according to the state bar, there were reports that on-site proctors often did not have answers to basic questions. The technology and proctoring of the exam was provided by the company Meazure Learning, which provided the ability to take the exam remotely, a change from previous years. The company now faces a class-action lawsuit by test takers. Meazure Learning could not be reached for comment. On its website, the company says it has more than 30 years of experience successfully launching licensing programs. “We excel at developing fair, reliable and secure exams that you can trust,” it says. The state bar, which said in August that the new test would save the organization up to $3.8 million annually, said that it was examining whether the company’s performance had failed to meet its contractual obligations and that a full accounting of how many people had experienced issues was still underway on Saturday. Tom Umberg, a state senator who chairs the body’s judiciary committee, which is tasked in part with funding the state bar, said there would be an inquiry. “We are going to be doing a deep dive as to what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said. The new exam was written by Kaplan North America, a test preparation company. It replaced questions by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, which writes the exams in a majority of states. The state bar said that the questions developed by Kaplan had undergone the same reviews as previous exam questions. Russell Schaffer, a spokesman for Kaplan, said in a statement that “the portion of the exam we wrote was subjected to a rigorous quality control process.” He added that the company was unaware of any questions it was responsible for that contained typos. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT For generations, California’s bar exam was widely considered the nation’s hardest. Even elite law students often had to take it more than once to clear the high threshold for passage. Former governors Jerry Brown and Pete Wilson and former Vice President Kamala Harris are among the many famous lawmakers who failed the California bar on their first try. The threshold for passing was lowered slightly several years ago, but the test still remains exceptionally rigorous relative to exams in the rest of the United States. Some have said the bar was aware of glitches months in advance, after an experimental exam in November contained technical issues for some. But the bar said those problems were isolated. The state bar appeared to anticipate issues with the new exam before the rollout ahead of last week. Before the test, it offered people who withdrew from or failed the February exam a fee waiver for the next test date. Exams are administered twice a year, in February and July. “This new exam has not rolled out the way it should have, and we, the board, apologize along with state bar leadership and staff,” the bar’s board of trustees said in a statement on Feb 21. “The continued issues with testing locations, scheduling, technical issues and communication lapses have distracted applicants from their studies and created confusion.” Of the 5,600 people who registered for the February exam, 1,066 withdrew, the state bar said. On Friday, the state bar said it was looking into remedies for those who took the exam and experienced technical difficulties, including conducting analyses to adjust scores. Mr. Chemerinsky has called on the bar to offer provisional licenses to test takers and revert to the old exam in the future. For some of those who were not able to complete the exam, the bar offered a chance to retake the test this week. But that opportunity has been delayed to later this month after some test takers allegedly leaked the questions online. But for those who don’t get a chance to retake the test this month, it means waiting until July — which provides little comfort. Some said that may be too late to avoid devastating financial situations dependent on becoming licensed by May, when February test results are released. “If I have to take it in July, I probably will not be living in California anymore,” said Alexandra Sennet, who said she was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt from law school. She added that she has a job offer that is contingent on her becoming licensed in May. Ms. Sennet said she was also in debt paying for bills associated with a spinal injury she sustained after a car accident. That injury forced her to miss last July’s bar exam and has limited her ability to work a regular job. “I’m banking on this to pay my bills, literally,” she said, adding, “This is my livelihood.” Mr. Defazio-Farrell said he was unsure how he was going to pay off his student loans without a lawyer’s salary. “I’m not employed at the moment, and getting back into it is going to be difficult without a license,” he said. For others, the thought of committing yet more time for the test presents more than financial anxiety. Becky Hoffman, 38, said she decided to pursue becoming a lawyer in part to give her three young children a better life, and sacrificed spending time with them over the past three and half years during law school. She wrote over 45 essays and took over 1,600 multiple choice questions to prepare in the weeks leading up to the exam. After the second day of testing ran late on Wednesday because of glitches, Ms. Hoffman stepped outside the testing site where her wife and children were waiting to take her home. “I tried my hardest to just be brave and tell them that it’s over, and mommy is done, and I’m so happy to be able to spend more time with you,” she said. “And I don’t know if that’s true or not.”

The board of Virginia Military Institute voted on Friday against extending the contract of Maj. Gen. 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 lasted more than two hours. The move followed years of pushback from conservative alumni of the college who had objected to what they called General Wins’s “woke” efforts to increase campus diversity. And it followed accusations from a Virginia state senator that the effort to remove him was racially motivated. The school is the oldest state-supported military college in the country, and all students participate in reserve officers training, a pathway to leadership roles in the U.S. military. General Wins, a V.M.I. alumnus, was appointed to the job in 2021, although he began on an interim basis the previous year. He was responsible for removing the statue of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, a Confederate general, that had been prominently positioned on campus. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT He also led efforts to increase diversity on campus following reports of “relentless racism” experienced by Black cadets published by The Washington Post in 2020, shortly before he took over. A subsequent state investigation concluded that there was a racist and sexist culture at V.M.I. When the statue was removed, General Wins acknowledged Jackson’s ties to the school, where he was an instructor, and the strong opinions about the decision. General Wins said in a statement at the time, “Though change can sometimes be difficult, it is time for our beloved Institution to move forward.” In a statement, the board of visitors president, John Adams, said the group was “supremely grateful to Major General Wins for his service to the institute during some very difficult times.” For the past several years, even before General Wins’s contract was approaching renewal, an alumni group known as Spirit of V.M.I. had campaigned to end what it called a “woke” assault on the college, located in Lexington, Va. State Senator Jennifer Carroll Foy, a Black V.M.I. alumna, said in an interview that Mr. Adams, an attorney and former naval officer, told her the board no longer wanted a Black superintendent. A spokesman for Mr. Adams, another V.M.I. alumnus who also voted not to extend General Wins’s contract, said Mr. Adams denies ever saying that. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, a Republican, has appointed 13 of the board’s 17 members since taking office in 2022, but Democratic state senators recently rejected two of the governor’s appointees. (One board member did not vote on Friday.) Ms. Carroll Foy said the removal of General Wins, who served in the U.S. Army for 34 years, was particularly troubling given the Trump administration’s recent ouster of Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Brown is also Black. Virginia’s former governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat and alumnus of the school who served in the Army, also criticized the move. “Our country has purged too many patriotic military leaders this week, and now Virginia has done it too,” he said in an emailed statement. General Wins, whose contract is set to expire on June 30, could not immediately be reached for comment.

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 Pride and Ally club were among those put on pause. And worldwide, in schools attended by military families, books are under review in response to Trump administration orders cracking down on gender identity and diversity, equity and inclusion. So far, few U.S. school districts have made sweeping changes in response to Trump administration orders. Most K-12 schools operate largely under local and state control, with limited interference from the federal government. But a school system run by the Defense Department, which serves about 67,000 students in preschool through high school on military bases around the world, is an exception. As part of the federal government, Defense Department schools have hurried to respond. In addition to pauses on some affinity clubs related to gender and race and reviews of certain books, Pride decorations have been taken down and Black History Month assemblies and performances have been canceled, according to interviews with students and parents and a copy of a Defense Department memo.It is a striking change for a school system that has historically been insulated from political fights in education, and whose math and reading scores are routinely among the nation’s best. Defense schools are global, with locations on some military bases in the United States but also in countries like Belgium and Japan. The student body, like the military itself, is racially and socioeconomically diverse, a history that dates back to the school system’s creation, in part, to serve students of military families in the American South when local schools remained segregated. “Diversity is, like, the core principle of our schools,” said Kadyn, 16, a junior at Lakenheath High School, northeast of Cambridge, who asked to use only his first name because he is the child of a federal employee. At his school, he said, “All Are Welcome” signs, which included a rainbow flag and a Black Lives Matter symbol, had been taken down from classrooms. He added that some flags of foreign countries had also been removed. “I feel like we are losing the essence of what makes our schools thrive,” he said. Will Griffin, a spokesman for Defense Department schools, said that the school system was reviewing its policies to comply with orders from President Trump and his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who called for an end to cultural awareness months, such as those for Black history or women’s history, in his first weeks on the job.Students have the right to participate in student-led groups, Mr. Griffin said. But student clubs also need a teacher to supervise meetings, and teachers in Defense schools are federal employees subject to the new orders. It is possible that student affinity groups will be able to start again with employees supervising in an unpaid capacity. “We will continue to remain focused on providing a rigorous, high-quality educational experience for military-connected students to prepare them for success in college, careers and life,” he said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In a Feb. 5 memo, Defense officials instructed schools not to use certain materials, including the book “Becoming Nicole,” about the journey of a transgender girl and her family, which was listed as an independent reading novel in sixth through 12th grade. Also listed was a biography of Albert Cashier, a Union Army soldier in the Civil War who was born female but fought and lived as a man, which had been included in some elementary school material. Material in Advanced Placement Psychology courses concerning gender identity and sexuality was also off limits. But the orders have also resulted in confusion and uncertainty, as principals and teachers try to interpret guidance and librarians review books in more than 100 schools around the world.The actress Julianne Moore made headlines when she said that her book “Freckleface Strawberry,” about a 7-year-old girl who dislikes her freckles but learns to embrace her differences, had been pulled for review. “I can’t help but wonder what is so controversial about this picture book,” Ms. Moore, who attended a Defense high school in Frankfurt, wrote on Instagram. But as of this week, “Freckleface Strawberry” is available for checkout, Mr. Griffin said. He said most books under review were not part of the official curriculum but were extra books available in classrooms or libraries. “Our principal was saying she was not going to request that the library remove books about Rosa Parks or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” said Allie Allen, the mother of three children who attend Defense schools in Stuttgart, Germany. But a book mentioning Black History Month might be removed, she said. “There is not a lot of exact guidance,” she said. Students are also waiting in limbo, said Sophia Carey, 16, a junior at a Defense high school in Germany. She had wanted to create a girls club at her high school, which would have held an assembly for Women’s History Month, brought in female speakers who work in the military and science and included a community project to offer feminine products in women’s bathrooms at school and in the community. An obstacle for her club and others, she said, had been finding a teacher who could supervise. “Everything is so uncertain,” she said.

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 drafting job descriptions. The Hunter College job listing for Palestinian studies called for scholars who could “take a critical lens” to issues including “settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid” and other topics. When the listing was posted last weekend, Jewish groups protested the inclusion of words that they said are antisemitic when applied to Israel. Their objections were first reported in The New York Post. By Tuesday, Gov. Kathy Hochul demanded that the college, a part of the City University of New York, take down the listing. “Governor Hochul directed CUNY to immediately remove this posting and conduct a thorough review of the position to ensure that antisemitic theories are not promoted in the classroom,” a spokesperson said in a statement, adding, “Hateful rhetoric of any kind has no place at CUNY or anywhere in New York State.”The college, as part of the CUNY system, depends on state funding. The university’s chancellor and board chair immediately approved Governor Hochul’s directive to remove the listing. “We find this language divisive, polarizing and inappropriate and strongly agree with Governor Hochul’s direction to remove this posting, which we have ensured Hunter College has since done,” Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez and the chairman of the board of trustees, William C. Thompson Jr., said in a statement. Like that, the listing was gone. The jobs remain, awaiting a new listing. “We will be reviewing the posting process and look forward to adding scholars with expertise in this subject matter to our distinguished faculty,” a spokesman for Hunter said. For faculty members working in New York City, where hot-button topics that incite battles elsewhere spark little opposition or government scrutiny, the governor’s swift action came as a shock. “This is an act of censorship and a break from the norms of respecting academic freedom,” said Heba Gowayed, an associate professor of sociology at Hunter and the CUNY Graduate Center. “There’s always a lot of censorship and pushback when people talk about Palestine, but no one expected a Democratic governor of New York to get involved in such an egregious way in something that should be decided by the experts in the field.” She pointed out that terms like “settler colonialism,” “apartheid” and “genocide” appear in many academic fields — and thus many faculty job listings — without objection. Jeffrey Lax, a CUNY professor and founder of the group Students, Alumni and Faculty for Equality on Campus, which “advocates for Zionist Jews discriminated against and excluded on college campuses,” objected to such censorship claims, saying the listing promoted dangerous falsehoods. “It accuses Israel, falsely, of being a settler colonial state, of being an apartheid state and of committing genocide,” he said. “These are, to me, the most horrific modern antisemitic false tropes against Jewish people.” Why, he asked, was there no “critical lens” applied to Hamas, terrorism or other aspects of Palestinian life that did not include charges against Israel? Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT When he saw the listing, he distributed it to allies, calling it a “modern-day blood libel,” he said. The governor’s action comes amid a series of campus battles nationwide — mostly led by Republicans — over how issues of race, gender and other topics are taught. “It’s ironic that Democratic leaders loudly and rightly denounce Republican interference with higher ed, but then do it themselves,” said Corinna Mullin, a CUNY adjunct professor and organizer for the group CUNY4palestine. “This is part of a larger pattern of overreach and intervention into campus freedom that has accelerated since Oct. 7.”By Thursday afternoon, when Governor Hochul was scheduled to speak at the City College of New York, also part of the CUNY system, a few dozen demonstrators gathered to protest her canceling the listing, calling it an impingement on critical inquiry. “You can’t expect people to learn any truths from history if you don’t teach true history,” said Michael Loeb, 51, who has worked in the Department of Education and for CUNY for the last 25 years, and who identified himself as the son of a Holocaust survivor. The governor’s speech was canceled for security reasons. CUNY, the nation’s largest urban university system, serves 231,000 students and had a budget for 2025 of $4.3 billion. The system was rocked last May when the president of the City College of New York, which has a long history of campus activism, called in the police to end a protest for Palestinian rights. The governor had previously ordered a report on the CUNY system’s policies and practices for combating antisemitism and other discrimination. Jonathan Lippman, a former chief judge for the state of New York, who led the investigation, said the governor’s actions were “very consistent” with the report’s findings, and with free speech on campus. “Free speech doesn’t extend to violence or illegal acts,” he said. “What we don’t want on campus is an ambience that results in students feeling unsafe, because their education is disrupted.” He added: “First Amendment rights can exist simultaneously with the need to make sure students feel safe.”

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 the drug he was taking stopped working. Instead of pulling back from work, he chose to spend the fall quarter teaching a course about his own illness. Registration for the class had filled up almost immediately. Now the room was overflowing, with some students forced to sit on the floor and others turned away entirely. “It’s quite an honor for me, honestly,” Dr. Lin said, his voice catching. “The fact that you would want to sign up for my class.” He told his students he wanted to begin with a story that explained why he chose to pursue medicine. He picked up a letter he had received years earlier from a patient dying of chronic kidney disease. The man and his family had made the decision to withdraw from dialysis, knowing he would soon die. Dr. Lin adjusted his glasses and read, choking up again. “‘I wanted to thank you so much for taking such good care of me in my old age,’” he read, quoting his patient. “‘You treated me as you would treat your own father.’” Dr. Lin said this final act of gratitude had left a lasting impact on him. He explained that he had created this 10-week medical school course — “From Diagnosis to Dialogue: A Doctor’s Real-Time Battle With Cancer” — with similar intentions. “This class is part of my letter, part of what I’m doing to give back to my community as I go through this,” he said. Later, an 18-year-old freshman in his first week at Stanford caught up on a recording of the class, which was also open to students outside the medical school. The course had filled up before he could enroll, but after emailing Dr. Lin, he received permission to follow along online. He had questions that needed answers.