The Houston public school classroom might have looked like any other, if not for an unusual feature on the whiteboard: A countdown timer. The teacher leading the English lesson allowed her fourth graders “10 more seconds to log in” for tech problems. Then she asked the class to read a passage to determine the author’s motivations, set the timer to one minute, and called out at the 25- and 15-second marks. Students took 30 seconds to share answers with a partner before their daily 10-minute quiz. The regimented structure is part of a strict new schooling model that nearly half of the 274 schools in the Houston Independent School District have adopted. Educators are required to adhere closely to the curriculum. District officials visit schools several times a week to observe classes and ensure that teachers are following the new protocols. Strict behavior policies are enforced. At one point, students were required sometimes to carry orange traffic cones to the bathroom, instead of the traditional hall passes, as part of an effort to prevent disorder. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT These ideas are not all new, but the scale, pace and force of change in Houston stands among the starkest in modern American education.Halfway through the second school year that the new model has been in use, officials argue that it is paying off. The number of schools in Houston that were rated D or F by the state dropped to 41 from 121. Math and reading scores on state standardized tests have risen. The overall gains were “largest single-year growth in the district’s history,” district officials said. The Houston schools did not make overall gains in reading last year on a federal exam that is considered the gold standard — but it did avoid the national slide in achievement in the subject. Still, the overhaul has also been deeply polarizing, infuriating many people in a district where more than 80 percent of the students are Black or Hispanic. A fierce movement of parents and teachers argue that the new model’s emphasis on test preparation damages students’ desire to learn. They have criticized the removal of novels from English lessons, and have complained that the closure of libraries is harmful to disadvantaged children. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Houston’s experience recalls previous efforts to overhaul struggling school systems in other cities: A hard-charging, high-octane leader arrives demanding change, and residents accuse the new leader of bulldozing beloved programs and shrugging off criticism. But the situation in Houston also stands apart from other cities. The school system has been taken over by the state, which appointed all new leadership. As a result, the transformation of classroom life is overlaid with a political tug of war between the conservative Republicans who run the state and the Democratic city leaders fighting for local control.In November, voters rejected a new bond to pay for improvements to Houston school facilities after Democrats, who usually support such measures, framed the vote as a referendum on the state-imposed school leadership. At the center of the changes and the controversy is Mike Miles, an unyielding superintendent installed by the Republican administration of Gov. Greg Abbott. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Miles, a former Army Ranger, short-time Dallas superintendent and founder of a charter school network, has become a lightning rod in Houston. He described the school system he took over as antiquated and backward, and argued that “incremental, piecemeal reform” would fail to meet the moment.“People talk about equity all the time, and then don’t do a damn thing about it,” Mr. Miles said. “One year doesn’t make a trend. But we’ve shown that the model already works, especially for kids who are behind.” Onlookers and local residents say that for all his ambition, the superintendent has built up too much animosity to keep the momentum going — and that his model is doomed to flame out, as others have before. “This is not an education,” said Liz Silva, whose third-grade son attends an arts magnet school in Houston under the new model. “My kid’s miserable.” A ‘New Education System’ The model, now in use at 130 schools in Houston, uses a fixed structure for students in grades three through 12. It was first introduced at a small number of schools that were performing poorly; more schools were added later or joined voluntarily.The curriculum was designed by the district. Math and English teachers spend about 45 minutes on instruction for each lesson, followed by a quiz. Students find out immediately how they did on the quiz, and then are split into two groups. Those who score well leave the classroom for independent or paired work, under the eyes of uncertified learning coaches. The rest stay behind to go over the concepts they missed. The district calls it the “New Education System.” During visits to two schools this winter, hallways and classrooms were almost always orderly; disruptive students are removed from the classroom. Posters with school test score data hung on the walls. Mr. Miles regularly visits schools himself to observe teachers. On one visit, Mr. Miles asked frequently for more student participation, telling a principal, “I would’ve liked to see a little bit more of that pair and share.” The superintendent even offered a note on the air temperature in classrooms: It was a little chilly, he said.At Hilliard Elementary School, where the timed English lesson took place, more than 97 percent of students come from economically disadvantaged households. Under the new system, the state rating for the school jumped to A from F in a single year. The principal, Erika Kimble, called the progress “mind-blowing,” but she worries about maintaining it. “As tough as last year was, it’s easier to get there and harder to stay there,” she said. There have been stumbles. At another school, Thompson Elementary, fourth grade students pointed out that a district-made slide included an incorrect solution for a math problem. Teachers and administrators appeared to still be adapting to the demands for efficiency. One of Mr. Miles’s top deputies, for example, noticed that a math teacher moved to giving students their daily quiz five minutes early, when she “could have done two more problems” in that time instead. At Hilliard, when two fifth graders reached the same right math answer by different methods, their teacher reminded students that geometry problems can often be solved in several ways. Then she quickly moved on, in an effort to stay on schedule. Amy Poerschke, a district official who supervises Ms. Kimble and watched the lesson, later suggested that the teacher might have paused to explore the idea. “That could have turned into a ‘Turn and talk to your neighbor: Why are they both right?’” Dr. Poerschke said. Ms. Kimble replied that the new system’s time strictures sometimes made it tough to do that: “What does that wiggle room look like?” ‘At what cost?’ The New Education System is all the more contentious because of how the takeover came about. In 2015, a local lawmaker, Harold V. Dutton Jr., spearheaded passage of a new law allowing the state to wrest control of school districts from local officials based on consistently poor performance at a single school. Mr. Dutton hoped the law would lead to changes at struggling Houston public schools like Wheatley High, where he was once a student. Its consistent F ratings from the state eventually led to the takeover. Though a Republican-led state government now runs the schools in the state’s largest Democratic stronghold, Mr. Dutton — a Democrat — said he had no regrets. The shake-up, he argued, was just what the district needed to force improvements in schools that had languished for too long. “The biggest thing that’s working, which people are complaining about, is just change itself,” he said in an interview. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The backlash was immediate. There were legal challenges to the takeover. Large protests assembled at the district’s headquarters. Yard signs popped up, and can still be seen around Houston, with the message “Go Away Miles.” State officials removed dozens of school administrators and hundreds of educators; many more left voluntarily. The district is also in the process of adopting a pay-for-performance system for teachers and principals, a contentious practice to reward them financially for improving student achievement, among other things, rather than on the basis of seniority. Houston’s would be the largest public school system in the country to do so. It is part of a playbook for Mr. Miles, who has brought similar salary systems — and his militarylike approach — to other districts. He oversaw a sustained rise in test scores in a small Colorado district, but his short stint in Dallas led to mixed results and a large jump in teacher turnover. Education experts see strengths in elements of Mr. Miles’s Houston plan, like adding new aides to help manage classrooms. Some experts said that uncomfortable conversations about how to evaluate, compensate and retain effective teachers are essential for school improvement.Toni Templeton, a senior research scientist at the University of Houston’s Education Research Center, said she was concerned that the long-term gains may be limited to a small cohort of lower-performing children. And she cautioned that state and district-level changes to testing practices could complicate the picture of progress. “I expect to see some improvement,” Dr. Templeton said. “‘At what cost?’ is my question.” Other state takeovers of school districts have rarely led to long-term gains in achievement. One longtime high school teacher in Houston said she had never faced a more taxing school year, including during the pandemic. A middle-school English teacher said she was so convinced that the new practices would hurt children that she felt compelled to resign. Several parents in interviews lamented the lost time in the school day for building social and emotional skills. “Children are saying that school is a prison,” said Michelle Williams, president of the Houston Education Association, a teacher’s union with about 200 members. “They hate it,” she said. Local anger was evident on Election Day, when voters were asked to approve a much-needed $4.4 billion bond to improve the crumbling infrastructure at many local schools. The measure failed by 58 percent to 42 percent.“Our schools need investment,” said Molly Cook, a Democratic state senator from Houston. “But if we can’t trust the leadership, then we simply cannot trust them with $4.4 billion.” Some teachers and parents are concerned that the overhaul will drive families away from the public schools. The district’s enrollment has been on the decline since 2016, but schools in the New Education System saw larger drops last year than others did. Seen from the outside, Houston is “one of the most fascinating stories in education,” said Jonathan Collins, an assistant professor at Teachers College who studied another state takeover, in Providence. But if the new school leaders underestimate the importance of community buy-in, he added, Houston’s effort end up like others that ultimately fell apart Even the Houston superintendent acknowledged that the success of the New Education System will not hinge on test results alone. “It has to have people who want to keep it,” Mr. Miles said.

On Jan. 22, a 17-year-old in the Antioch neighborhood of Nashville entered his high school’s lunchroom and shot two other students before fatally turning the gun on himself. One of the students escaped with a graze wound. The other, Josselin Corea Escalante, 16, died. Antioch High School was fitted with multiple safety measures intended to thwart school shootings: shatter-resistant glass, security cameras with software designed to detect a brandished weapon, two school resource officers stationed on campus. Reportedly radicalized by far-right propaganda online, the assailant was active on sites that valorized school shooters. He was suspended in the fall for threatening a student with a box cutter. One teacher called him a “walking red flag.” But none of what was known about the gunman and none of the safety measures enacted by the school were enough to save Josselin Corea Escalante. WPLN, Nashville’s NPR affiliate, put eight journalists on the story, breaking into national newscasts with live updates throughout the day of the shooting. In most other ways, response to the tragedy in Antioch, which lies southeast of downtown, has been muted — very different from the city’s passionate response to a shooting less than two years ago at the Covenant School, a private Christian academy on Nashville’s southwest side. The Covenant shooting took the lives of three 9-year-olds and three staff members, including the school principal. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Tennessee has one of the highest rates of firearm deaths in the country. A lot of us thought the Covenant shooting might shift the hopes-and-prayers contingent toward reason, if only in modest ways. Covenant’s principal was a close friend of Maria Lee, the wife of Gov. Bill Lee. Covenant offers a Christian education that aligns with what Republicans want for the state’s public schools. For them, the tragedy was personal.The protests that followed the Covenant shooting engendered several nonpartisan organizations whose explicit goal was to force the General Assembly to pass the common-sense gun legislation that a majority of Tennesseans favor. Red-flag laws. Background checks. Waiting periods. Safe gun storage. Legislators passed no such laws, so the governor hauled them back to finish the job in a special legislative session. I have harbored many fruitless hopes in my life, but I have never been more flagrantly, hideously wrong than I was in holding out hope for meaningful, reasonable action on guns from Republicans. Everybody wants to know how the underage Antioch shooter got his hands on a deadly weapon, but tracing the provenance of a gun in Tennessee is “a fool’s errand,” according to WPLN’s Paige Pfleger, whose joint investigative reporting with ProPublica has tracked the deadly ramifications of Tennessee’s lax gun laws. “State laws have made it really, really easy to possess guns here without any permitting process,” she said last week on “This Is Nashville.” “Background checks are not required for private sales, including sales online or at gun shows. That’s not to mention the ubiquity of guns — guns stolen from cars, and that’s very common.” Down here, school shootings inspire weaker gun laws. In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, when other states were tightening gun laws, Tennessee invited gun manufacturers to come on down. After a gunman killed four people at a Waffle House in Nashville in 2018, legislators proposed an open-carry law that was opposed by parents, physicians, pastors, police officers, public-health officials — just about everybody. It passed anyway. Whatever flickers of hope that Governor Lee’s call for a special session on gun safety may have stirred in 2023, the special session he convened last week inspired no such illusions. Outside the statehouse, as before, hundreds of students were chanting “Not one more!” and “Students, united, will never be divided!” But this time the governor was in lock step with his hard-line supermajority. Progress was never even an option. This special session was also concerned with schools, but not to make them safer. This time the governor wasn’t urging legislators to pass a red-flag law. This time he was cravenly using the urgent need to pass disaster relief for East Tennesseans affected by Hurricane Helene as a way to ram through the kind of school-choice and immigration legislation favored by President Trump. Equally horrible bills are being considered by statehouses across the South. Tennessee legislators allocated $447 million to get the voucher program up and running this year, but the program is designed to grow. At least one Republican legislator, Representative Jody Barrett, expects costs to balloon to $1 billion a year within a decade, even though most students currently enrolled in a voucher pilot program did not perform as well as students in public schools did. Little wonder, then, that vouchers in general don’t enjoy wide public support. Last year Kentucky voters — who, unlike Tennesseans, were given a chance to weigh in — soundly defeated a voucher measure in their state. Here in Tennessee, Governor Lee failed to corral enough Republican legislators to pass a voucher bill just last year. But political intimidation and heavy spending by out-of-state special interest groups changed the outcome this time. In a state where public schools are chronically underfunded, Tennessee is about to spend nearly half a billion public dollars to launch a program that will benefit mainly students already enrolled in private schools. The State House minority leader, John Ray Clemmons, a Nashville Democrat, called the voucher law “the best scam that money can buy.” Representative Bo Mitchell, also a Nashville Democrat, referred to it as the “Gov. Bill Lee Private School Voucher Bribery Scam Subsidy Act.” The special session’s new immigration legislation, meanwhile, is almost certainly unconstitutional: By making it a felony for local elected officials to vote in favor of “sanctuary” policies for immigrants, the law will make it harder for Tennesseans of conscience to protect diverse communities like Antioch, which has a larger Latino population than any other Nashville neighborhood. Think about that for just a minute: This law will turn elected officials into felons, and will remove them from office, when they merely vote for a policy that Republicans oppose, never mind that their own constituents elected them to do that very thing. The American Civil Liberties Union has already vowed to challenge the law in court. The Tennessee General Assembly has never cared whether its constituents support the laws it passes, and it doesn’t care now. We are on our own. With no legislative help in keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous people, the Nashville school system is piloting a new weapons-detection system at Antioch High School. We can only pray it’s more effective than the earlier system was. But it will not bring back Josselin Corea Escalante. Josselin, who celebrated her quinceañera in 2023; Josselin, who played soccer and made good grades and loved her family; Josselin, whose parents sought asylum in this country to keep her safe from violence, is gone. A GoFundMe page notes that her family will send her body back to Guatemala, “where she can rest in peace surrounded by loved ones.”

Over the last few months, University of California officials have boasted that they have admitted the most racially diverse class ever to their sprawling system. They have managed to do this, they say, despite a 28-year-old state ban on considering race in college admissions, known as Proposition 209. But a lawsuit filed on Monday by a newly formed group takes aim at the university’s efforts, accusing the California system of cheating by secretly restoring race-conscious admissions in defiance of the state law. The group, Students Against Racial Discrimination, was organized by a persistent critic of affirmative action. The lawsuit accuses the California system of harming all students by gradually bringing back racial preferences in recent years to stem public outrage over the low number of Black and Hispanic students at the state’s top universities. Stett Holbrook, a spokesman for the University of California system, said the university had not yet been served with the legal papers, so it could not reply directly to the lawsuit. But he said that after the ban, it had adjusted its admissions practices to comply with the law, and it collected undergraduate students’ race and ethnicity for statistical purposes only, not for admission. Students Against Racial Discrimination was founded last fall by a group that includes researchers and Asian American anti-affirmative action activists. Among them is Richard Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has made something of a crusade of fighting affirmative action. The group’s approach emulates the strategy of Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that defeated Harvard and the University of North Carolina in the landmark 2023 Supreme Court ruling that rejected affirmative action in college admissions nationwide. The lawsuit accuses the University of California system of violating protections against racial discrimination in Title VI of federal civil rights law and the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment. It asks the court to order the U.C. system to select students “in a color-blind manner” and to appoint a court monitor to oversee admissions decisions, to “eliminate the corrupt and unlawful race and sex preferences that subordinate academic merit to so-called diversity considerations.” Last month, the U.C. system reported that Black undergraduate enrollment was up by 4.6 percent and Latino enrollment by 3.1 percent across the 10 campuses. It contrasted those increases with the many other universities that have struggled to maintain Black and Hispanic enrollment in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.Over nearly a decade, the data show a steady but small rise in African American freshman admissions systemwide — to 7,139, or 5 percent, for the fall of 2024 from 4,358, or 4 percent, in 2016. The percentage of Hispanic students has also risen slightly, from a much bigger base. (About 6 percent of Californians are Black and 40 percent are Latino.) The university said it had increased undergraduate enrollment overall and the diversity of the incoming class last fall by capping out-of-state enrollment and through funding support from the state, especially at the most in-demand campuses. It also targeted recruitment and college preparatory courses at disadvantaged students and eliminated the SAT and ACT testing requirement. John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at Berkeley, said that while he was not an insider on admissions practices, “my sense is that admissions is highly regulated and careful to stay clear of Prop 209 restrictions, and the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action.” Much of the increase in enrollment can be explained by the demographic pool of applicants, and their growing readiness for college as they take required courses and as their high school graduation rates increase, he added. California voters adopted Proposition 209, which banned the use of race in admissions at public universities in the state in 1996, becoming the first of nine states to take similar action.The first class at Berkeley’s law school after Proposition 209 was approved had only one Black student, and he had been admitted before the referendum. The situation at Berkeley was so dire that it became the topic of a “Doonesbury” cartoon, in which Joanie Caucus, a Berkeley law graduate, arrives at her reunion to be told that not much has changed except, “Well, we no longer admit Black people.” Dr. Sander said in an interview that he believes that Berkeley reverted to race-conscious admissions almost immediately. If so, the impact has been small. The number of African American freshmen admitted to Berkeley has risen to 683, or 5 percent, in the fall of 2024 from 464, or 3 percent, in 2016. Janet Gilmore, a spokeswoman for the system’s flagship, the University of California, Berkeley, said the institution was complying with the law. “U.C. Berkeley is committed to admitting and enrolling the best and the brightest students and we do so in compliance with all state, federal and university policies and laws,” she said. In the fall of 2006, a decade after the passing of Proposition 209, only 96 of the 4,800 freshmen expected to enroll at U.C.L.A. were Black, the lowest figure since 1973. Twenty of those were athletes, according to a front-page article at the time in The Los Angeles Times. The Black students became known as “the infamous 96,” and administrators blamed the situation on the ballot measure. (Four more Black students were admitted on appeal.) U.C.L.A. also buckled to public outrage, the complaint says. U.C.L.A. referred questions about the case and its admissions to the larger university system. In the lawsuit filed on Monday, the complaint cites Tim Groseclose, a member of a faculty oversight committee for U.C.L.A. admissions during that period, who said U.C.L.A.’s chancellor had made admissions more subjective. Dr. Groseclose, now a professor of economics at George Mason University, believed that “this new policy became a subterfuge for reactivating racial preferences in admissions,” the complaint says. Dr. Sander argues that affirmative action is detrimental to Black and Latino students who are less prepared and struggle academically. His theory, known as “mismatch,” argues that students will do better on measures like grades, persistence in science and math and graduation rates at a college that better matches their preparation. The complaint says that the system has become more and more guarded about such data, shutting down websites that provided it. But many experts have disputed the mismatch theory, especially after Justice Antonin Scalia commented in 2015, during oral arguments in an affirmative action case at the Supreme Court, that Black students might be better off going to “slower-track” colleges where they could succeed. Matthew Chingos, then a vice president of the Urban Institute, challenged Justice Scalia’s comments at the time. Research has shown that students with similar credentials who attend different colleges are more likely to graduate from the more selective colleges, Dr. Chingos noted. And his analysis found that the mismatch conclusions were based on “at best very weak evidence for this claim and no evidence of any connection to affirmative action policies.” The complaint filed on Monday allows that “the effects of Proposition 209 upon U.C. and its students were complex and are still debated by academics.” And the evidence it offers is sometimes contradictory. To bolster the point that the system is cheating, the complaint says statistical analysis shows an improbable parity between the Black and Hispanic admission rates and the overall admission rate. And it says that Dr. Sander’s analysis of publicly available U.C. law school data shows that Black students with relatively low LSAT scores and grade point averages have 10 times as good a chance to be admitted as a white or Asian American student with similar credentials. But the complaint also notes that Black and Latino graduation rates across the system were “much higher” in 2006 than in 1998. It argues that is because students “cascaded” down to lesser colleges where they could compete. And it concedes that there were other factors at play that could explain the increase in Black and Hispanic students — not that they were being favored in the admissions office, but that more were applying and getting in as the university system responded to Proposition 209 by putting more resources into helping them.

Schoolchildren in Massachusetts, Ohio and Pennsylvania are still about half a year behind typical pre-Covid reading levels. In Florida and Michigan, the gap is about three-quarters of a year. In Maine, Oregon and Vermont, it is close to a full year. This morning, a group of academic researchers released their latest report card on pandemic learning loss, and it shows a disappointingly slow recovery in almost every state. School closures during Covid set children back, and most districts have not been able to make up the lost ground. One reason is a rise in school absences that has continued long after Covid stopped dominating daily life. “The pandemic may have been the earthquake, but heightened absenteeism is the tsunami and it’s still rolling through schools,” Thomas Kane, a Harvard economist and a member of the research team, told me. In today’s newsletter, I will walk through four points from the report, with charts created by my colleague Ashley Wu. I’ll also tell you the researchers’ recommendations for what schools should do now. 1. State variation The new report — from scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford — compares performance across states, based on math and reading tests that fourth and eighth graders take. (A separate report, on national trends, came out last month.) Today’s report shows a wide variety of outcomes. In the states that have made up the most ground, fourth and eighth graders were doing nearly as well last spring as their predecessors were doing five years earlier. But the overall picture is not good. In a typical state, students last spring were still about half a year behind where their predecessors were in 2019. In a few states, the gap approaches a full year.2. A blue-red divide Political leaders in red and blue America made different decisions during the pandemic. Many public schools in heavily Democratic areas stayed closed for almost a year — from the spring of 2020 until the spring of 2021. In some Republican areas, by contrast, schools remained closed for only the spring of 2020. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT This pattern helps explains a partisan gap in learning loss: Students in blue states have lost more ground since 2019. The differences are especially large in math. Eight of the 10 states that have lost the most ground since 2019 voted Democratic in recent presidential elections. And eight of the 10 states with the smallest math shortfalls voted Republican.I know some readers may wonder if blue states had bigger declines simply because they started from a higher point. After all, the states with the best reading and math scores have long been mostly blue. But that doesn’t explain the post-pandemic patterns. For example, New Jersey (a blue state) and Utah (a red state) both had high math scores in 2019, but New Jersey has fared much worse since then. 3. More inequality Pandemic learning loss has exacerbated class gaps and racial gaps. Lower-income students are even further behind upper-income students than they were five years ago, and Black students and Latino students are even further behind Asian and white students. “Children, especially poor children, are paying the price for the pandemic,” Kane said. Other research, by Rebecca Jack of the University of Nebraska and Emily Oster of Brown, points to two core reasons. First, schools with a large number of poor students and Black or Latino students were more likely to remain closed for long periods of time. Second, a day of missed school tends to have a larger effect on disadvantaged students than others. In the years before Covid, the U.S. education system had impressive success in reducing learning inequality, as I explained in a 2022 newsletter. But Covid erased much of that progress. “Educational inequality grew during the pandemic and remains larger now than in 2019,” Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist and co-author of the new report, said. 4. How to recover The authors of the report note that some school districts, including in poorer areas, have largely recovered from Covid learning loss. Among the standouts are Compton, Calif.; Ector County, Texas, which includes Odessa; Union City, N.J.; and Rapides Parish, La. The authors urge more study of these districts to understand what they’re doing right. Early evidence suggests that after-school tutoring and summer school, subsidized by federal aid, made a difference. Intensive efforts to reduce absenteeism can also help. One problem, the authors write, is that many schools have not been honest with parents about learning loss: “Since early in the recovery, the overwhelming majority of parents have been under the false impression that their children were unaffected.”

Long before Michael Jackson, the Rolling Stones and Rihanna, there was Freddie Colston. Colston was just a 20-year-old student from tiny Fairbanks, La., when he traveled to Los Angeles in January 1967. He had grown up in a home without indoor plumbing, but now he was staying in lavish accommodations with about 180 other members of the Grambling College marching band. Soon they would high-step onto the field at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to perform in the halftime show of the very first Super Bowl. “When we heard that crowd, it was like a spirit got into us, and we were walking on a cloud,” said Colston, 77, who played the cymbals. “Our step was higher, and the beat was faster.” In the decades before the National Football League recruited stars to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show — the rapper Kendrick Lamar will headline on Feb. 9 at this year’s game in New Orleans — it frequently relied on dynamic marching bands from Grambling and other historically Black colleges and universities. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT With nicknames like “Human Jukebox” (Southern University) and “Sonic Boom of the South” (Jackson State University), the musical groups are known for their creative formations and flamboyant showmanship. And the tradition has endured even as the Super Bowl has morphed into a corporate playground of advertisements, parties and spectacle. At least 13 Super Bowl halftime shows have included H.B.C.U. marching bands, including Usher’s collaboration last year with Jackson State University, and they are often part of pregame festivities. (When Beyoncé performed at halftime of a Christmas Day regular-season game on Netflix, she incorporated Texas Southern University.)Lamar has not said if he will feature an H.B.C.U. band in his nearly 15-minute performance while the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles are recuperating. But there will be a presence at the Caesars Superdome when Southern University, from Baton Rouge, La., plays before Jon Batiste sings the national anthem. Each H.B.C.U. marching band has its own style and look, with vibrant uniforms that often match the school colors. But no matter the school, spectators have come to expect a rollicking show with high-stepping choreography, dancers often at the front, and trumpeters and drummers swaying in rhythm while blowing or pounding their instruments. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “That particular style of performance has always had broad appeal, and marching bands and other musical groups have always been cultural ambassadors for Black colleges,” said Steven Lewis, the curator of music and performing arts for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington. Grambling’s band of all-Black students was invited to Los Angeles at the height of the civil rights movement, and to a city still reeling from the flames and mayhem of the Watts riots two years earlier. Some Black leaders implored university administrators to reject the invitation. “There was a feeling early on that it was an empty gesture,” Lewis said of the invitation to Grambling, which is now known as Grambling State University. “But that criticism has been going on for quite a long time, and it’s something the league still has to work on.” After the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick repeatedly knelt during the national anthem in 2016 to protest racial injustice, and a rancorous debate about patriotism and civil rights ensued, some Black stars were hesitant to perform at the Super Bowl. In 2019, the N.F.L. began a partnership with Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s entertainment and sports company, that led to recent performances by the Weeknd, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and other prominent Black artists. Marching bands carry outsize influence and pride at H.B.C.U.s, many of which were founded shortly after the Civil War and incorporated military marching in their curriculums. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The bands are student-recruitment tools, garnering attention at the Rose Parade and presidential inaugurations, including Mississippi Valley State University’s performance at President Trump’s last month. Some groups compete against one another at events such as the Battle of the Bands, giving energetic flair to contemporary songs. They also caught the attention of football executives looking to infuse entertainment in a new event. When the champions of the National Football League and the American Football League met for the first time, the Super Bowl was not yet called the Super Bowl.“You looked at those bands, and it was the fact that they were more than just a marching band,” said Jim Steeg, the N.F.L.’s former vice president of special events, who oversaw the Super Bowl for more than two decades beginning in the mid-1970s. “They were just performing different than everybody else.” After Grambling’s longtime president, Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones, decided that its band would play in the first Super Bowl halftime show, the musicians practiced through the university’s holiday break. In the 1960s, Colston said, 5 a.m. practices were not uncommon. “They said, ‘We don’t turn down no performances,’” Colston said. “‘We’re going to go anywhere.’” One day, Colston said, Jones gave a wad of cash to a drummer with instructions to dole out $2 to each band member for a spending allowance in Los Angeles. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT When the musicians flowed onto the football field at halftime, Grambling joined the marching band from the University of Arizona, a mostly white school, to depict a map of the United States. The bands played “This Is My Country” for the finale as a sea of balloons ascended. “We had to conduct ourselves in a professional way because this was a group of colored kids in a white society,” Colston said. “We were representing our schools, our churches, the towns we came from.” H.B.C.U. bands were included in the following three Super Bowl halftimes. After the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the director of the Florida A&M band created a set themed around American pride for Super Bowl III in Miami the following year. George Quillet, a clarinetist for Florida A&M, said many of his bandmates initially disagreed with the concept for the performance but later changed their minds. “We really got invigorated because our leaders guided us through the process of what we had to do,” said Quillet, now 76. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The show included them marching into a formation shaped like a flying eagle. After marching into letters resembling “U.S.A.,” the students stood still as a speaker blared portions of President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address and King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. This Super Bowl is the 11th to be held in New Orleans: Southern University took on a Mardi Gras theme at halftime of the city’s first Super Bowl, in 1970, and Grambling performed a tribute to Duke Ellington in 1975. Three years later, Southern played a 12-minute pregame routine.Kenny Ricard, a Southern clarinetist who is now 67, said that before taking the field in 1978, the band’s members recited the chant they uttered ahead of every performance: “Pick up your feet, drive and blow, start thinking about the show.” In those decades, marching bands were eager and dependable entertainment options for the N.F.L., which was concerned with the logistics of creating a show that could entertain both an in-person and television audience. The starry gates swung open in 1993, when Michael Jackson stood motionless onstage for nearly a minute of raucous applause before singing a medley of his beloved hits with the pageantry of pyrotechnics. Steeg said the N.F.L. needed to bolster the halftime show to keep fans engaged and away from counterprogramming on other networks. As A-listers took center stage — the past two Super Bowls in New Orleans were headlined by U2 and Beyoncé — H.B.C.U. bands began taking a more complementary role. In 2007, Florida A&M supported Prince’s performance, supplying background music from below an elevated platform.Shelby Chipman, who was then on the band’s staff and is now its director, said Prince’s agent had called the band, asking it to play. His team sent musical information so the band could match the notes he would sing but otherwise gave it creative liberty for its dance routines and formations. Prince’s team visited Florida A&M a few weeks before the Super Bowl to see a rehearsal. The band practiced with Prince only once, less than 24 hours before the game. “Normally with these kinds of performances, they give us the green light,” Chipman said. Colston, who has worked in customer service for the N.F.L.’s Washington Commanders, still attends homecomings at Grambling State and relives memories of the first Super Bowl. He hopes that the celebrities who now dominate the stage know their history. “We opened the door for them,” he said.

Josselin Corea Escalante was 9 when she and her mother and younger brother left Guatemala to seek asylum in the United States, believing it would offer them safety. They ended up in Tennessee, where Josselin — whose family calls her Dallana, her middle name — celebrated turning 15 in 2023 with a spring quinceañera in a Nashville ballroom. But last week, another student shot and killed Josselin, 16, in her high school cafeteria. Now her family, still waiting for an asylum decision, is questioning whether it is worth staying. The main reason they made the harrowing trip to the United States — on foot, nearly two months — was fear that Josselin and her brother would be kidnapped or killed by gangs in Guatemala. “We had a dream for a better life,” her father, German Corea, said in Spanish this week. “But the reality is that it’s not better anywhere. In Guatemala, you’ve never heard of someone killing someone in school.”He and his wife have already made one wrenching decision: to send Josselin’s body back to Guatemala for burial, a way to guarantee that they will be reunited if they decide — or are forced — to leave the United States. Mr. Corea came to the country before his wife and children and is not part of the asylum case, so he is at more risk of being deported. “This is the country that took her away from me,” Mr. Corea said. “And if one day we go back to our country, she’ll be there with us.” Josselin had been thriving in Nashville, where she loved to sing and play soccer. She had once turned down a three-day trip to make sure she did not miss school. She wanted to become a doctor, her uncle, Carlos Corea, said: “A doctor saves lives, and this was not fair to her.” On Jan. 22, a student who the police said had espoused hateful rhetoric online brought a pistol to Antioch High School in South Nashville. He opened fire, killing Josselin and injuring another student before shooting himself. The police have not said whether the shooter was targeting Josselin. A month into 2025, there have been at least 15 shootings on or near a school campus, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.The loss of Josselin, who frequently translated for her family, has driven some of them to speak out. “I am not scared — I’m telling the truth, I’m telling people how I feel,” Carlos Corea said in Spanish. That is why he and another of Josselin’s uncles, Juan Corea, found themselves on the steps of the Tennessee State Capitol on Monday, surrounded by a crowd of Democratic lawmakers, students and gun control activists. As they left the nearby church where they held a funeral service for Josselin, they saw people gathered with pictures of their niece and understood what was going on. “We never thought that we’d be in this position, but we wanted to give people our message,” Carlos Corea said later. The two men carried pictures of Josselin, in her quinceañera tiara and a glittering red gown. There have been protests for gun control in Nashville before, most notably in 2023 after three third graders and three staff members were killed at a private Christian school. But with lawmakers arriving to debate the creation of a state immigration czar, the crowd at this protest repeatedly tied together the threat of immigration enforcement with their fears of gun violence.Through a translator, Carlos Corea spoke to the crowd on behalf of his family. As they cheered, he raised a fist in the air. In the silence of the home where they gathered for weekly meals, Josselin’s relatives have been unable to rest. Her Uncle Juan has been thinking about the dance they shared during her birthday celebration, where he told Josselin he loved her. Her father is contemplating activism in her name. “We have support, but what I tell all parents that have had their children taken away in schools: Don’t let it stay that way,” German Corea said. “Continue doing what you can so that there is justice for our children. If we remain with our hands tied, this will continue to happen again.” While Antioch High School has reopened, with an additional school resource officer and new metal detectors, Josselin’s cousins who attended the school with her are too afraid to return. They will enroll soon at a new school, family members said. On Thursday, Josselin’s pink coffin was loaded onto a plane for her journey home to Guatemala. There, her grandparents and aunt were waiting for her.

The Education Department sent notice to K-12 schools and colleges on Friday that it would revert to policies put out during President Trump’s first term that limited schools’ liability in sexual misconduct cases and afforded stronger rights to students accused of sexual harassment and assault. The letter also instructed schools not to expect the department to enforce a revised interpretation of Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational programs that receive federal funding. That change, announced during the Biden administration, broadened the law’s scope to recognize harassment or exclusion based on sexual orientation and gender identity to be a form of discrimination. The revised guidance issued Friday instructed educators to once again adopt new standards for enforcing codes against sexual violence and harassment on campus, a process they have had to undertake every four years as rules have whipsawed back and forth under the last four administrations. The old rules, set in 2018, eased the standards by which the department assessed schools’ liability in sexual misconduct cases, giving schools room to follow different evidentiary standards and appeals processes in investigations. They also required schools to hold live hearings in which accusers and students accused of sexual assault could cross-examine one another, including through a lawyer. In a break from recent changes surrounding the law, formally known as Title IX of the Education Amendments Act, the letter sent Friday stated that the changes in its implementations could begin immediately, after a federal judge in Kentucky blocked the Biden administration’s revisions from taking effect. That ruling was largely based on the Biden-era rules’ increased protections for transgender students, which the judge found to be unconstitutional. The letter also leaned on Mr. Trump’s executive authority to justify the immediate return to the old standards, circumventing the more standard practice of proposing new regulations through a lengthy federal rule-making process. It stated that the employees in the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, which enforces federal law across schools receiving federal funding, essentially answer to the president. “As a constitutional matter, the president’s interpretation of the law governs because he alone controls and supervises subordinate officers who exercise discretionary executive power on his behalf,” it said. “That unified control extends to Ed and OCR; therefore, Title IX must be enforced consistent with President Trump’s order.” Similar changes put forward under former President Barack Obama were also made informally through “dear colleague” letters like the one released on Friday, but informal guidance does not traditionally carry the force of law and can be easily overturned. Students’ rights groups focused on due process celebrated the development as a restoration of fair standards for those accused of serious offenses. “The return to the 2020 rules ensures that all students — whether they are the accused or the accuser — will receive fair treatment and important procedural safeguards,” Tyler Coward, a lead counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in a statement. “That includes the right of both parties to have lawyers present during hearings, the right for both attorneys to cross-examine the other party and witnesses, and the right to receive all of the evidence in the institution’s possession.” Critics of the rules, dating to Mr. Trump’s first term, have said the requirements for live hearings force victims to relive the trauma of sexual violence and give the schools they attend more room to ignore or informally resolve many serious infractions. “This is an incredibly disappointing decision that will leave many survivors of sexual violence, LGBTQ+ students, and pregnant and parenting students without the accommodations critical to their ability to learn and attend class safely,” Emma Grasso Levine, a senior manager at Know Your IX, said in a statement. “Schools must step up to protect students in the absence of adequate federal guidance.”

An active-duty Navy SEAL who led a grueling training session for the Tufts University men’s lacrosse team last year that led to the hospitalization of nine students did not appear to be qualified for that role, according to a review commissioned by the university that was released on Friday. Twenty-four of the 61 students who participated in the voluntary workout developed rhabdomyolysis, also known as rhabdo, a serious and somewhat rare muscle condition, the review said. The president and athletics director of Tufts, which won the Division III men’s lacrosse championship a few months before the September 2024 training session, acknowledged in a statement on Friday that the session had not been appropriate. “We would like to extend our sincere apologies to the members of the men’s lacrosse team, their families, and others affected by this situation,” Sunil Kumar, the university’s president, and John Morris, the athletics director, said. The university, in Medford, Mass., outside of Boston, declined to name the Navy SEAL involved in the exercise regimen, other than to say that he had recently graduated from Tufts and was an equipment manager for the lacrosse team. He did not cooperate with two independent investigators who prepared the report, according to its executive summary. “To our knowledge, the third party who led the Navy SEAL workout did not have any credentials that qualified him to design, lead or supervise group exercises,” the summary said. The review was conducted by Rod Walters, a sports medicine consultant, and Randy J. Aliment, a lawyer who specializes in internal investigations for universities and assessments of student-athlete safety and health. The Naval Special Warfare Command, which oversees the SEAL program, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday. At the time of the episode, a spokeswoman for the command said that the SEAL was not at Tufts as part of a Navy-sanctioned event, and it was unclear if the sailor would face any disciplinary action. During the 75-minute workout, lacrosse players and two other students did a series of repetitions focused almost exclusively on upper extremity muscle groups, including about 250 burpees, according to the review. Popular with the military and in CrossFit gyms, burpees can involve quickly squatting down, jumping into a plank, performing a push-up, jumping forward into a squat, then jumping back into a standing position. But they have also been blamed for causing injuries when done incorrectly or quickly. The review found that the university’s director of sports performance approved the workout plan the same day that he received it from the Navy SEAL and did not share it with others in the athletics department in advance. The sports performance director, who was not named in the review, texted the plan to his staff about an hour before the students began the workout. In the report, the investigators found that the Navy SEAL who led the training had lacked familiarity with N.C.A.A. policies and regulations and did not follow the principles of acclimatization that are necessary to avoid injury during training. The review also faulted the university for its response to the situation, saying that there were no policies or procedures in place for transportation of students to and from hospitals, or direction of care from a medical perspective. About 40 percent of the students who participated in the training sessions completed the exercises, but the majority had to modify the routine because of its difficulty, the report’s executive summary said. “By the next morning, students began experiencing adverse effects and reported to the team athletic trainer,” the investigators wrote. “Two days later, several cases of Exertional Rhabdomyolysis had been identified.” High-intensity workouts can cause rhabdo, as can trauma like a car crash or a fall, medical experts say. It involves injuries to skeletal muscles, leading the muscles to die and release their contents into the bloodstream. Although rhabdo is an uncommon condition that affects about 26,000 people a year in the United States, according to the Cleveland Clinic, it can be life-threatening. In 2011, 13 University of Iowa football players were hospitalized with rhabdo when the team jumped back into workouts after taking some time off following a bowl game. In recent years, there have been reports of a women’s soccer team in Texas suffering from rhabdo, which left one player hospitalized. Guidelines developed several years ago by the N.C.A.A. that are aimed at preventing rhabdo said that college athletes should be given “transition periods” after a break in training or introducing new members to a team. During transition periods, the N.C.A.A. recommends, athletic trainers and coaches should ensure that intensity and volume of activity is gradually increased over time.

With a series of executive orders, President Trump has demonstrated that he has the appetite for an audacious fight to remake public education in the image of his “anti-woke,” populist political movement. But in a country unique among nations for its hyperlocal control of schools, the effort is likely to run into legal, logistical and funding trouble as it tests the limits of federal power over K-12 education. On Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump signed two executive orders. One was a 2,400-word behemoth focused mainly on race, gender and American history. It seeks to prevent schools from recognizing transgender identities or teaching about concepts such as structural racism, “white privilege” and “unconscious bias,” by threatening their federal funding. The order also promotes “patriotic” education that depicts the American founding as “unifying, inspiring and ennobling” while explaining how the United States “has admirably grown closer to its noble principles throughout its history.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The second order directs a swath of federal agencies to look for ways to expand access to private school vouchers. Both orders echo energetic conservative lawmaking in the states. Over the past five years, the number of children using taxpayer dollars for private education or home-schooling costs has doubled, to one million. More than 20 states have restricted how race, gender and American history can be discussed in schools. States and school boards have banned thousands of books. It is not clear what real-world effect the new federal orders might have in places where shifts are not already underway. States and localities provide 90 percent of the funding for public education — and have the sole power to set curriculums, tests, teaching methods and school-choice policies. The orders are likely to strain against the limits of the federal government’s role in K-12 education, a role that Mr. Trump has said should be reduced. That paradox is a “confounding” one, said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, a nonpartisan group that supports private school choice. He applauded the executive order on vouchers and said that taken together, the two orders mark a major moment in the centuries-old debate over what values the nation’s schools should impart. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “You can like it or not, but we’re not going to have values-neutral schools,” he said. Still, there are many legal questions about the administration’s ability to restrict federal funding in order to pressure schools.The major funding stream that supports public schools, known as Title I, goes out to states in a formula set by Congress, and the president has little power to restrict its flow. “It seems like a significant part of the strategy is to set priorities through executive order and make the Congress or the Supreme Court respond — as they are supposed to in a system of checks and balances,” Mr. Bradford said. The executive branch does control smaller tranches of discretionary funding, but they may not be enough to persuade school districts to change their practices.In Los Angeles, Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the nation’s second-largest school district, said last fall that regardless of who won the presidential election, his system would not change the way it handles gender identity. Transgender students are allowed to play on sports teams and use bathrooms that align with their gender identities, policies the Trump order is trying to end. On Wednesday, after it became clear that Mr. Trump would attempt to cut funding, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles public school district released a more guarded statement, saying, “Our academic standards are aligned with all state and federal mandates and we remain committed to creating and maintaining a safe and inclusive learning environment for all students.”One big limit to Mr. Trump’s agenda is that despite official federal, state and district policies, individual teachers have significant say over what gets taught and how. Even in conservative regions of Republican-run states, efforts to control the curriculum have sometimes sputtered. In Oklahoma, for example, where the state superintendent, Ryan Walters, is a Trump ally, some conservative educators have pushed back against efforts to insert the Bible into the curriculum. Nationally, surveys of teachers show that the majority did not change their classroom materials or methods in response to conservative laws. Some educators have reported that they are able to subtly resist attempts to control how subjects like racism are talked about, for example, by teaching students about the debate for and against restrictive curriculum policies. Florida has been, in many ways, an outlying case — and one that has served as a model for the Trump administration. There, Gov. Ron DeSantis created powerful incentives for teachers to embrace priorities such as emphasizing the Christian beliefs of the founding fathers and restricting discussions of gender and racism. Teachers could earn a $3,000 bonus for taking a training course on new civics learning standards. If their students performed poorly on a standardized test of the subject, their own evaluation ratings suffered. On race and gender, the DeSantis restrictions were broad and vaguely written. Schools accused of breaking the laws could be sued for financial damages, and teachers were threatened with losing their professional licenses. This led many schools and educators to interpret the laws broadly. Sometimes they interpreted them more broadly than intended, the DeSantis administration claimed. A ban on books with sexual content led one district to announce that “Romeo and Juliet” would be pulled from the curriculum. A ban on recognizing transgender identities led to schools sending home nickname permission slips to parents, which were required even if a student named William wanted to be called Will. Public school educators are often fearful of running into trouble with higher-level authorities. It is possible, and even likely, that Mr. Trump’s executive orders will lead to some measure of self-censorship. Adam Laats, an education historian at Binghamton University, said one potential historical antecedent for Mr. Trump’s executive order was the Red Scare in the mid-20th century, during which many teachers accused of Communist sympathies lost their jobs or were taken to court. “To my mind, this executive order is a blast of steam,” he said, “dangerous especially because it can encourage local aggressive activism.” But, he noted, political attempts to ban ideas from the classroom have rarely been successful.

Universities have set up task forces, tightened discipline policies and used surveillance cameras to track protesters’ movements. They have hired private investigators to examine cases of anti-Israel speech and activism. These are just a few of the measures administrators have taken to curb criticisms that they have allowed antisemitism to fester as pro-Palestinian demonstrations spread across campuses during the last academic year. On Wednesday, President Trump signed an order meant to push them to do more — to “prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.” Specifically, it directed several agencies, including the State and Education Departments, to guide colleges to “report activities by alien students and staff” that could be considered antisemitic or supportive of terrorism, so that those students or staff members could be investigated or deported as noncitizens. A fact sheet distributed with the order quotes President Trump promising: “I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before.” The order worried some students. A student activist on a visa at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she was concerned that the order was broad enough to implicate almost any student who participated in a pro-Palestinian protest. She spoke on the condition that her name not be used, for fear she would become a target of deportation. Like other international students she had spoken to, she said, she was now considering leaving the country after graduation rather than pursuing a master’s degree in the United States. Jewish organizations had mixed reactions. Amy Spitalnick, chief executive officer of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, warned against rising antisemitism but argued that the president’s order was problematic. “Everyone in the United States has basic due process rights, and when we start applying them selectively, we don’t only threaten our values, we ultimately threaten our safety, too,” she said. The Anti-Defamation League, by contrast, was more supportive. “The increased enforcement of university policies already has started to make a significant difference in the campus environment, and more should be done,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive, said, adding that individuals should be given due process and should not be targeted for constitutionally protected speech. The wave of pro-Palestinian demonstrations following the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel have mostly been nonviolent. Protesters have said they are exercising their right of free expression, by demonstrating against Israel’s conduct in the war in Gaza. But some protests have led to vandalism and clashes between pro- and anti-Israel demonstrators. The police have been called to campuses to break up encampments and protests, and in the process, hundreds of students have been arrested. Many Jewish students have said they felt unsafe or unsettled by the yelling outside their dormitory and classroom windows and threatened by the chanting of slogans that some construe as antisemitic. After several university presidents were pulled in front of congressional committees to testify about their responses to the unrest, many have taken action to quell protest activity. At Columbia, for example, administrators pledged quick disciplinary action this month after four masked protesters interrupted a “History of Modern Israel” class and handed out fliers with antisemitic themes, such as one image of a jackboot crushing a Star of David. Three of the protesters have been identified; one, a Columbia student, was suspended. The other two, students of an “affiliated school,” were barred from campus. “Disruptions to our classrooms and our academic mission and efforts to intimidate or harass our students are not acceptable, are an affront to every member of our University community, and will not be tolerated,” the institution said in a statement. At New York University, administrators updated the nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy to clarify that discriminatory or hateful language against protected groups, even if masked in “code words, like ‘Zionist,’” could be examples of potentially discriminatory speech at the school that merits punishment. “For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity,” the document states, referring to the belief that Jewish people should have a state in their ancient homeland. “For example, excluding Zionists from an open event, calling for the death of Zionists, and applying a ‘no Zionist’ litmus test for participation in any N.Y.U. activity” would all be discriminatory actions. A growing number of universities, including N.Y.U. and Harvard, are recognizing a definition of antisemitism that considers some criticism of Israel — such as calling its creation a “racist endeavor” — antisemitic. This has prompted concern among pro-Palestinian students and professors that their freedom of speech and their ability to protest Israeli actions will be severely curtailed. The presidential order comes against a backdrop of both debate over what constitutes antisemitism and Republican insinuations that foreign students have played a particular role in the protests. Foreign student visas were discussed in a December 2024 staff report on antisemitism, conducted on behalf of six House committees in coordination with the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. The report complained that three weeks after the Hamas attacks on Israel, Alejandro Mayorkas, the former homeland security secretary, declined to say whether foreign students should have their visas revoked if they “advocate for the elimination of Israel and attacks on Jewish individuals.” He said it was a matter of legal interpretation. The report said that the Biden administration had rebuffed requests from the House Judiciary Committee for documents and information, such as nationality, on “aliens on student visas who endorse Hamas’s terrorist activities.” In May, the State Department told the committee that it had not revoked any visas for students related to their on-campus protest activity. During testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce in December 2023, the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and M.I.T. were grilled on whether they had suspended or planned to suspend foreign students who violated the law or school policies. Claudine Gay, then the president of Harvard, who was later forced to resign in part over her testimony on antisemitism, replied that international students were a source of pride and that all students were held accountable in the same way. At Harvard’s commencement, hundreds of students walked out in protest over the university’s decision to bar 13 seniors from the ceremony in the wake of campus protests against the war in Gaza. Among 25 students who were punished for their participation in protests were two Rhodes scholars. One of the Rhodes scholars was an international student from Pakistan. At Cornell, Momodou Taal, a British national in his third year of Ph.D. studies, was among a group of about 100 protesters who shut down a recruitment event last fall that included weapons manufacturers. Suspended twice by the university for his pro-Palestinian activism, Mr. Taal was at risk of losing his student visa, which could lead to deportation. In the end, the Cornell provost allowed him to retain his official status as an enrolled student, although he was banned from campus.