In just the last month, the Supreme Court has heard three important religion cases, culminating in yesterday’s argument over a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma. Judging from the justices’ questioning, the side pressing religious-freedom claims seemed likely to prevail in all three. That would extend a remarkable winning streak for religion at the Supreme Court. Since 2012, the pro-religion side has won all but one of 16 First Amendment cases about the government’s relationship with faith. (The exception: The court rejected a challenge to the first Trump administration’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries.) The court has been especially active in cases involving religious education. It said if the government was helping private schools, it couldn’t exclude religious ones. It exempted religious schools from anti-discrimination laws. In one pending case, the justices seemed poised to let parents with religious objections withdraw their children during discussions of gay and transgender themes. Yesterday they seemed likely to let a Catholic organization start a charter school in Oklahoma — which would make it the first religious school to get state charter funds. A 2021 study of religion rulings since Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court in 2005 found that the Roberts court ruled in favor of religious people and groups over 83 percent of the time, compared with about 50 percent of the time for other courts since 1953. “In most of these cases, the winning religion was a mainstream Christian organization, whereas in the past pro-religion outcomes more frequently favored minority or marginal religious organizations,” the study’s authors — Lee Epstein, of Washington University in St. Louis, and Eric Posner, of the University of Chicago — wrote. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT If the court rules in favor of religious claims in all three of the pending cases, that figure will rise to 88 percent.Regardless of what the justices decide about yesterday’s Oklahoma case, state money is already helping faith bloom in American education. The main vehicle is via school vouchers, which have proliferated in Republican-led states. Vouchers allow you to use taxpayer money — funds the government would have spent on a public school — to pay for your kid’s private school (or home-school supplies). More than half of states have such programs, and more than one million students use them, double the number in 2019. The Supreme Court blessed vouchers for religious schools in a 2002 case, but their use took off after the pandemic as more states embraced them widely. In states like Florida, where vouchers have expanded to be available to all students, some religious schools now receive nearly all of their funding from state dollars, said Doug Tuthill, who helps manage Florida’s program. States are looking for other ways to expand religion in public schools, too. Oklahoma wants to put Bibles in its classrooms. Louisiana is in a legal battle to get the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Texas is considering a similar move.State lawmakers pushing to expand religion in public schools sometimes cite the Supreme Court rulings that my colleague Adam mentions above, such as a 2022 decision siding with a football coach who prayed at the 50-yard line after games. “There is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in our Constitution, and recent Supreme Court decisions by President Trump’s appointees reaffirmed this,” said a lawmaker in Texas, who put forth a bill proposing prayer in schools.In public, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador is full MAGA. He swoons about President Trump. He trolls American judges who impede Trump’s immigration crackdown. He lets Trump ship deportees to a prison in his country designed for terrorists. He says he will not hand over a Maryland resident wrongly sent there. But in private, Bukele was more equivocal. My colleagues and I reported a big new story about the Salvadoran deportations and found that there are limits to his willingness to host Trump’s penal colony. During negotiations with the United States, Bukele told Trump’s advisers he would jail “convicted criminals” but not non-Salvadorans whose only crime was being in the United States illegally. Bukele worried about how that would look at home. He could not convince Salvadorans he was prioritizing their national interests if he turned their country into a dumping ground for U.S. deportees, he explained to Trump aides. This caused a problem almost immediately. The Trump administration sent 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador, saying they were members of Tren de Aragua, a gang. Bukele wanted to see the evidence. U.S. officials scrambled to gather evidence. They sent the Salvadorans a scorecard created by the Homeland Security Department in which the men were assigned points for different attributes. Having a lot of tattoos was worth four points, for instance. If a deportee got a score of eight points or more, he was considered a gang member. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT That — and a coveted trip to the Oval Office — appeared to satisfy Bukele. The Salvadoran leader continued to accept U.S. deportees, whom the U.S. labels “violent criminals,” and he still enjoys a close bond with Trump.

A top Trump appointee in the Justice Department ordered an aggressive investigation in the last several months of student protesters at Columbia University, raising anger and alarm among career prosecutors and investigators who saw the demand as politically motivated and lacking legal merit, people familiar with the episode said. The demand for the inquiry into students who protested Israel’s conduct of the conflict in Gaza also prompted pushback from a federal magistrate judge, who believed some of the steps being sought by the official, Emil Bove III, were unjustified and might violate the First Amendment, the people said. The breadth of the investigation, conducted by the Justice Department’s civil rights division, has not been previously reported. The ensuing clash highlights the tensions roiling the department as administration officials seek to enact President Trump’s agenda. That bid includes redirecting the civil rights division away from its traditional approach of protecting the rights of minority groups to a new mission of fulfilling a campaign promise to crack down on student protesters amid accusations of rampant antisemitism on college campuses. Those types of demands from political appointees at the Justice Department are part of the reason there has been an exodus of lawyers from the division in recent weeks, according to current and former officials. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The federal investigation into student protesters at Columbia appears to have stalled for now, but it represents one of the most contentious episodes yet inside the Justice Department during Mr. Trump’s second term. The dispute has left lingering ill will within the department, as well as the courts and the F.B.I., the people said. Asked for comment, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said, “This is a false story fabricated by a group of people who allowed antisemitism and support of Hamas terrorists to fester for several years, standing by but doing nothing.” The Trump administration has vowed to take on campus protests against Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip, saying they reflect antisemitism that must be punished. Those efforts are aimed at both college administrators, who Trump officials say should have done more to rein in campus protests, and student activists themselves, some of whom immigration officials have detained. Activists, in turn, accuse the authorities of conflating criticism of Israeli and U.S. policy with antisemitism. The investigation began shortly after masked protesters barged into Milbank Hall, a building at the Columbia-affiliated Barnard College, on Feb. 26 to demonstrate against the expulsion of students who had been accused of disrupting a “History of Modern Israel” class. Video shows students pushing past a security guard and occupying a hallway. School officials said at the time that the guard was assaulted and taken to the hospital for minor injuries. Mr. Bove, a senior Justice Department official, ordered an immediate investigation, primarily of one particular student group, Columbia University Apartheid Divest, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details intended to remain private.Prodded by Mr. Bove, prosecutors in the civil rights division were told to obtain a membership list of the group. Investigators, however, pushed back on those instructions because they were skeptical such a list even existed, given the amorphous nature of online forums, and even if it did, scrutinizing people for their membership seemed like a possible violation of their First Amendment rights, these people said. One of the Justice Department lawyers assigned to the case was Samantha Trepel, an experienced civil rights prosecutor who secured a federal conviction against Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd in 2020, these people said.The prosecutors were told by superiors that Mr. Bove was seeking a list so the information could be shared with immigration agents, these people said. Inside the civil rights division, prosecutors came to fear that their criminal investigation was a pretext to facilitate an intimidation and deportation campaign by the Trump administration against student protesters, these people said. Prosecutors refused to compile such a list that could be given to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, these people said. Mr. Bove then shifted his focus to obtaining a search warrant for the group’s Instagram account, these people said. He ordered prosecutors to apply for a search warrant for the nonpublic data associated with the account, these people said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The premise of the application was also contentious within the department. Mr. Bove insisted that the Instagram account in question had been used to make a threat, while line prosecutors said the statement at issue did not meet the legal definition of a threat, these people said. In late March, the social media company suspended the group’s account for failing to meet its “community standards.” Mr. Blanche, in his statement, added that the warrant application focused on Columbia University Apartheid Divest “included a photograph from C.U.A.D.’s social media of an inverted triangle symbol used by Hamas to designate targets for violence, which was spray-painted on Columbia property along with red paint designed to look like blood.” He said the investigation was “ongoing,” appearing to point to a related criminal investigation that the federal authorities have pursued, one that “included an independent magistrate judge finding probable cause to believe that there was evidence on Columbia property of harboring and concealing illegal aliens.” Before Mr. Trump delivered a speech to the Justice Department on March 14, Mr. Blanche told the audience that the department was investigating whether anyone involved in the campus protests at Columbia violated civil rights laws and antiterrorism laws. Mr. Blanche projected unwavering certainty about the wisdom of such an investigation. But behind the scenes, career lawyers had profound doubts about the merits of the case they were assigned, and deep concerns about the potential consequences if they refused. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Mr. Bove’s demands frustrated people in the civil rights division, but many of the managers were afraid to push back, having watched a month earlier as Mr. Bove pressed prosecutors in a different division, the public integrity section, to drop criminal charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York, the three people said. That section, which once had about 30 lawyers, now has only a handful. Bennett Gershman, a Pace University law professor who specializes in prosecutorial ethics, said the described conduct of Mr. Bove was “staggering.” “He did something that prosecutors are absolutely forbidden to do — use the law enforcement powers of the government to try to intimidate these individuals or destroy their rights,” Mr. Gershman said. “This is so far past the line of prosecutorial professionalism and the commitment to principles of justice.” In his statement, Mr. Blanche said that “unethical and inaccurate claims from deep state terrorist sympathizers who stood by as members of the Jewish faith were targeted across the country” would not deter Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and the Justice Department from “aggressively investigating criminal conduct and rooting out antisemitism.” When the federal prosecutors involved in the investigation of student protesters applied for a search warrant, a magistrate judge in New York rejected the request, finding that the government did not have sufficient probable cause, these people said. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In an unusual move, Mr. Bove insisted that the prosecutors appeal the ruling to a district court judge, these people said. After weighing the request, Judge John G. Koeltl of Federal District Court of the Southern District of New York instructed the chief magistrate judge, Sarah Netburn, to reconsider the application, the people said. But the second time, the government lawyers fared even worse. Judge Netburn not only rejected the request for a search warrant, but she also ordered the government to abide by a special condition: Should prosecutors ever try to refile such an application before another federal judge, they had to include a transcript of the sealed discussions in her court, these people said. Part of the judge’s skepticism, these people said, stemmed from the absence from the case of lawyers with the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office. But prosecutors in the Southern District of New York were wary of signing onto the effort and had minimal involvement with it, these people said. A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan declined to comment. While civil rights prosecutors conducted the investigation that Mr. Bove had demanded, they often pushed back against specific steps that he wanted taken, these people said, arguing that they were either not justified by the available facts or contrary to law and past practice, or both. At one point, Mr. Bove instructed F.B.I. agents on the joint terrorism task force in New York to put on their raid jackets, go to Columbia’s campus and stand in a phalanx near any protesters. Within the civil rights division, the instruction was viewed as deeply improper and a blatant attempt to intimidate students, these people said. The F.B.I. agents did not make any such show of force. By early April, the investigation seemed to have largely died, but nothing prevents Mr. Bove or others from reviving it. In its wake, however, people familiar with the case said it had only exacerbated the ill will and distrust between political appointees at the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington and the prosecutor’s office in New York, as well as between those political appointees and veterans of the civil rights division.

The conversation between two Rutgers University professors that lit a fire in U.S. higher education circles lasted only about 10 minutes. The professors — one teaches chemistry in Camden, N.J., the other psychology in Newark — said they were frustrated by the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to research funding and its efforts to dictate policy on some campuses. They were also troubled by the lack of a unified response by university leaders. “We needed to write something that had some meat,” said David Salas-de la Cruz, who directs the chemistry graduate program at Rutgers University-Camden. He likened the effort to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, a military alliance of 32 countries. “This is not just about money,” he said. “This is about the essence of education.” So late last month, Professor Salas-de la Cruz and Paul Boxer, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University-Newark, drafted a one-page “mutual defense compact.” It was a one-for-all, all-for-one statement of solidarity among schools in the Big Ten athletic and academic conference — 18 large, predominantly public universities that together enroll roughly 600,000 students each year. “An infringement against one member university,” they wrote, “shall be considered an infringement against all.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Participating schools would be asked to commit to making a “unified and vigorous response” when member universities were “under direct political or legal infringement.” Faculty members might, for example, be asked to provide legal services, strategic communication or expert testimony. The compact, now approved by faculty at more than a dozen universities, does not come with a commitment by school administrators to provide financial backing for a joint defense fund, and detractors have criticized the initiative as largely toothless. Still, the Rutgers resolution, and the professors’ effort to galvanize a collective response, reflected a shift in strategy. “Higher education, as an entity, is definitely worth fighting for,” Professor Boxer said. “The idea of a country where generative research gets cut down to the point where it’s under the thumb of the federal government,” he added, “is contrary to everything I believe in.”Throughout March, elite universities had been targeted, one by one, for large funding cuts as the Trump administration opened investigations into diversity policies and whether administrators were doing enough to protect Jewish students from harassment. Federal immigration agents began making a show of moving to deport international students who had spoken out against Israel’s war in Gaza. Under President Trump, the National Science Foundation has canceled more than 400 awards that commonly fuel university research. And the National Institutes of Health, a major source of biomedical research funding in the United States, terminated roughly 780 grants, according to an analysis by KFF Health News. Rutgers itself was among 60 colleges and universities to receive a warning in March that federal officials had begun an inquiry into whether it had violated Jewish students’ civil rights by failing to safeguard them from discrimination. Schools were struggling to navigate the broadside when Columbia University, in a remarkable concession to Mr. Trump, agreed to overhaul its protest policies, security practices and Middle Eastern studies department as it sought to avoid a $400 million federal funding cut. It was against this backdrop that the faculty senate at Rutgers, New Jersey’s flagship state university, came together to vote on the professors’ hastily drafted resolution. No member of the Rutgers senate criticized the compact publicly before it was approved on March 28, by a vote of 62 to 17, Professor Boxer said. But in emails, some employees expressed concern that it risked making Rutgers an even bigger target for the Trump administration. “We had to accept,” Professor Boxer said, “that somebody had to be first.” Since then, nine additional Big Ten schools, including the University of Michigan, Michigan State, Ohio State and the University of Washington, have passed resolutions nearly identical to the one Rutgers adopted. Outside the Big Ten, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the State University of New York, and at least three City University of New York schools — Hunter, Hostos and City College — have also adopted similar statements of solidarity. Faculty senates at several other colleges are expected to vote in the coming weeks. Some faculty members are skeptical that the resolutions will make much of a difference. “At most universities, faculty senates have very little power, if any,” said Keith Riles, a physics professor who was one of 214 employees at the University of Michigan who voted against that school’s compact. “I do not expect these motions to have much effect on what administrations choose to do.” And, he said, he does not believe that President Trump’s critique of higher education is completely misguided. Professor Riles said he had long opposed university hiring policies that were based on diversity, equity and inclusion goals, which he believes are illegal and discriminate against white and Asian men. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Choose your battles and your allies wisely,” he urged colleagues before Michigan’s faculty vote began on April 17, according to a written summary of his comments. “It is not a very sound strategy to die on a D.E.I. hill in a legal, mutual suicide pact.” About 2,760 of his colleagues disagreed, and the resolution passed with 93 percent support. Rutgers’s president, Jonathan Holloway, has said that while he supports the “ethos” of the initiative, he could not provide additional support because he was stepping down at the end of the academic year, according to the Rutgers student news outlet. In a statement this week, a university spokeswoman reiterated Dr. Holloway’s “appreciation for the resolution” and said Rutgers would continue to support efforts to “reverse federal actions that are detrimental to our mission.” Even without overt buy-in from administrators, supporters said the clear goals first laid out by the Rutgers faculty had already been instrumental in helping to shift the tone of the national debate. Last week, Harvard University sued the Trump administration over billions of dollars in proposed cuts rather than accede to the president’s demands. And after months of silence, more than 500 university administrators have now signed a statement opposing “government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” John Verzani, chairman of CUNY’s faculty senate, credited Rutgers with having an “enormous” role in the evolving narrative. “It definitely set off a rush within faculty senates to create this sort of alliance,” Professor Verzani said.Todd Wolfson, a journalism professor, leads Rutgers’s faculty union. He is also president of the American Association of University Professors, a national organization. He said he considered the effort to protect academic freedom and the independence of research institutions an existential battle. “As goes higher ed,” Professor Wolfson said, “so goes the U.S.” Michael Yarbrough, who contributes to a website called We Are Higher Ed, which has been tracking university responses to the Trump administration, noted that officials from community colleges, large research universities and Ivy League schools are now sharing information in a 60-person group chat. Professor Yarbrough, who teaches about law and society at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, likened the value of the group chat, and the networks now forming among faculty members at far-flung schools with mutual defense compacts in place, to a sociology theory known as the “strength of weak ties.” “It’s understandable that some people may be fearful,” Professor Yarbrough said. “But what we’ve done is to focus on something that’s within our control: to ally with each other.”

Thousands of people took the new California bar exam in February, ready to the join the ranks of the state’s 195,000 lawyers. But a series of missteps by the institution responsible for licensing lawyers has thrown thousands of nascent legal careers into a frustrating limbo. First, there was the faulty testing software used during the exam. Test takers had trouble logging in. The software often crashed or was missing critical functions like copy and paste, leaving many unable to complete the exam. The organization that administers the test, the State Bar of California, had to offer adjustments of test-takers’ scores and other remedies. Then came the news that at least a handful of the multiple-choice questions had been developed with the help of artificial intelligence. To many of those who took the exam, it was hardly shocking — they already had suspicions that A.I. had been used, based on a few questions that they said had struck them as bizarrely worded or legally unsound. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT And now, California’s future lawyers are likely to have to wait a little longer to find out if they made the cut. The state bar said it would need more time to obtain approval from the Supreme Court of California to adjust test scores in light of the problems. The results of the February exam had been slated to be released on Friday, but that is likely to be delayed. “I just wanted a fair chance to be an attorney,” Edward Brickell, a 32-year-old graduate of Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles who took the test, said in an interview. “And it just feels like every week there’s another thing that comes out and says, like, ‘We didn’t give you a fair chance.’” Mr. Brickell and others who took the test have flooded Reddit and other social media sites with horror stories and with plans to organize protests and demand accountability. On Tuesday at a state bar committee meeting, a handful of test-takers used the public-comment period to voice their displeasure and frustration. “You guys are the body that is determining if we are competent to earn a living,” one test-taker, Dan Molina, told the state bar’s contracts committee at the virtual meeting. “Finances are being destroyed. Lives are being destroyed, and are about to be destroyed even more.” With a high threshold for passage, California’s bar exam had long been considered one of the hardest in the nation. That threshold had been lowered in recent years. In October, the state bar obtained approval from the California Supreme Court to introduce a reworked exam, with questions developed by a new contractor and the option to allow the test to be taken remotely. The state bar made the change to save money. The state bar had previously used exams developed and prepared by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, the organization behind the exams used by most states that are considered the gold standard in the field. The N.C.B.E. does not allow remote testing.Test takers in California were told that the new exam would not require any substantive changes in preparation, so many of them prepared the same way they would have for the N.C.B.E. version of the test. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT In November, the state bar administered an experimental exam that functioned as a test run. Those who took it reported technical difficulties. Then, test-takers said a study guide was rife with errors. That guide was quietly corrected and rereleased in the weeks before the exam in February. Kaplan, the new contractor for exam development, disputed that the study guide contained a significant number of errors. In a sign that the state bar had anticipated some difficulties, it offered more than 5,000 registered test-takers the option to defer taking the exam until July, the next test date. After the February exam, the state bar acknowledged the widespread technical failures. “We know and have stated that these issues were, and continue to be for those still testing, unacceptable in their range and severity,” the State Bar of California said in a statement. “We apologize again, and we make no excuses for the failures that have occurred.” The state bar added that it would evaluate whether Meazure Learning, the vendor that provided the technology and proctoring services to administer the exam, had failed to meet its contractual obligations. It also said it would enlist a psychometrician — a specialist who focuses on measuring intangible qualities such as knowledge or intelligence — to come up with score adjustments for test-takers who had experienced difficulties. The state bar’s proposed test score adjustment was announced last week. The proposal lowered the raw passing score considerably. That recommendation was filed with a request for approval from the State Supreme Court on Tuesday — three days before the results were set to be released. Given the late filing, the state bar told test-takers that the release of the exam results could be delayed, prolonging a dizzying stretch of uncertainty for many. Buried deep in the announcement about the scoring adjustment was the new development: Some of the multiple-choice exam questions were developed not by Kaplan but by the state bar’s psychometrics provider, ACS Ventures, with the assistance of artificial intelligence. ACS Ventures did not respond to a request for comment. The state bar said that its Committee of Bar Examiners, the body that oversees the exam, had not previously been made aware of the use of A.I. The committee had been instructed by the State Supreme Court last year to explore changes to make the exam less expensive to administer, including the potential use of A.I. “But the court has not endorsed, nor authorized, the broader use of A.I.,” Alex Chan, the chairman of the Committee of Bar Examiners, said in a statement. “While A.I. may eventually play a role in the future of exam development, absent specific judicial guidance, the Committee has neither considered nor approved its use to date.” The Supreme Court said it had not been aware that the technology was used in the development of the exam and called for an investigation. In a petition filed to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, the state bar said ACS Ventures fed prompts to an A.I. chatbot to produce multiple-choice questions. ACS Ventures did not check the questions generated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT for accuracy. But those and other questions were sent to a state bar panel for review.For Mr. Brickell and others, the disclosure that A.I. was used at all seemed to offer an explanation for some of their confusion. Some questions, he and others who took the test said, did not read as though they had been drafted by a human and listed only incorrect multiple-choice answers. Ceren Aytekin, an aspiring entertainment lawyer, said she had also noticed peculiarities in some of the questions, but she at first refused to believe A.I. had been used. “I initially thought, ‘Maybe I’m the wrong one,’” Ms. Aytekin said. “Maybe I’m putting blame on a organization that would never do this to their examinees.” She added: “All the issues I spotted make so much sense with A.I. being involved. We just didn’t want to believe it.” Two other large state bar associations, in New York and Illinois, said they had never used A.I. to develop questions on their exams. The N.C.B.E., which prepares the exams for New York, Illinois and most other states, said it had never used A.I. for that purpose. April Dawson, an associate dean at the Technology Law and Policy Center at the North Carolina Central University School of Law, said the use of A.I. in developing test questions was not an issue on its own. She said the problem was in the fact that it had been done without transparency. “That you would have a licensing body engage in such irresponsible conduct, it really is kind of baffling,” she said. If he doesn’t pass, Mr. Brickell is likely to take the exam in July. Those who fail the February exam will be able to take it then for free. The state bar has said it will not use any questions that have been developed with A.I. on the July exam. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Had the exam not been offered for free in July, Mr. Brickell had contemplated taking it in another state. “I don’t want to give them my bar dues as an attorney for the rest of my life,” Mr. Brickell said of California’s state bar. “This has soured me so much.”

The very identity of the nation’s 8,100 charter schools is on the line on Wednesday, as the Supreme Court considers whether they are fundamentally public or private institutions. If they are public, there is little room for religious instruction, as proposed by the school at the center of the case, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which seeks to open in Oklahoma as the nation’s first religious charter school. But if they are private, as St. Isidore’s lawyers will argue, banning a religious group from operating a charter school when other nonprofits are free to do so would be religious discrimination. If the Supreme Court decides charter schools are private, it would most likely allow St. Isidore to open, and potentially pave the way for religious charter schools in other states. Charter schools, which were created in the 1990s to give families more options, have long occupied a hybrid space in education. They are like traditional public schools in many ways because they are paid for by taxpayers and free to attend. But charter schools are also run by private entities, often nonprofits, and are not zoned, allowing students to attend regardless of their ZIP codes. And unlike at many public schools, their teachers typically are not unionized. Today, about 3.7 million students attend charter schools, in 44 states and Washington, D.C., representing about 7 percent of the public school sector. But in some cities, like Detroit and Philadelphia, enrollment is far greater, representing a third to half of all students. Whether they should be classified as public or private may hinge on the specifics of Oklahoma state law.Justices will most likely consider technical issues, like how charter schools are created. In Oklahoma, a state board must approve new charter schools, a fact that many in the mainstream charter school movement argue places them firmly in the public realm. “A charter school doesn’t exist unless the government gives it reason to open,” said Starlee Coleman, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which opposes allowing religious institutions to operate charter schools. Lawyers for St. Isidore say that it was created by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and the Diocese of Tulsa and that it is operated by a board of private citizens. They will argue that St. Isidore is a private school with a government contract. Any ruling in favor of St. Isidore could have broad implications. Twelve Republican-leaning states filed an amicus brief in support of St. Isidore’s petition, while 18 states, mostly Democratic-leaning, opposed.

On April 1, the Trump administration’s effort to slash government funding arrived in Morgantown, W.Va., where federal scientists spent their days studying health and safety threats to American workers. That morning, hundreds of employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health were notified that they were being terminated and would lose access to the building. Left behind were more than 900 lab animals. The institute ultimately managed to relocate about two-thirds of them — primarily mice, as well as a handful of rats — sending them to university labs, according to two facility employees who were recently terminated. The remaining 300 animals, however, were euthanized last week. Over the last few months, the Trump administration has taken aim at the American research enterprise, firing scores of federal scientists, rescinding active research grants and proposing drastic cuts to the funding that helps labs keep their lights on. These moves, which have left many of scientists out of work and disrupted clinical research, have profound ramifications for the lab animals that serve as the basis for much of the nation’s biomedical research. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “There are going to be a lot of animals that are going to end up being sacrificed — killed,” said Paul Locke, an expert in laboratory animal law and the use of non-animal alternatives in research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The ultimate toll is difficult to predict, experts said, in part because many of the administration’s actions are embroiled in legal battles. Animal research is also shrouded in secrecy; there are no definitive numbers on how many animals live in U.S. laboratories. Many scientists were reluctant to speak openly about what might become of their lab animals, fearing backlash from animal rights activists or retaliation from their employers or the Trump administration. Dozens of interview requests to animal research facilities and researchers went unanswered. “I think they’re not talking about it because it’s a situation that, for them, is just a parade of horribles,” Dr. Locke said. “If they are going to keep the animals up, it’s going to be massively expensive. If they’re going to sacrifice the animals, it’s going to cause public outrage.” Some animal rights activists are cheering the disruption, even if it means euthanizing animals. But many researchers said they were devastated by what they considered to be the worst of both worlds: the deaths of a lot of animals without any gain in scientific knowledge.“We don’t take using animals lightly,” said Kyle Mandler, a pulmonary toxicologist who was among the scientists recently terminated from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the time, he was in the middle of a study on the hazardous dusts produced in the manufacturing of certain construction materials. About two dozen of his mice were euthanized last week — the study unfinished, the data uncollected. “The fact that their lives and sacrifice will just be a complete waste is equal parts depressing and infuriating,” he said. The Department of Health and Human Services did not directly answer questions about the fate of the Morgantown animals. But in an emailed statement, an unnamed H.H.S. official said that the changes at NIOSH were part of a “broader realignment,” in which multiple programs were being consolidated into the new Administration for a Healthy America. “Staffing and operational adjustments are occurring in phases,” the statement said. “Animal care operations remain active, and H.H.S. is committed to maintaining compliance with all federal animal welfare standards throughout this transition.”Sudden stops In recent years, many countries, including the United States, have begun to move away from animal research, which is expensive, ethically fraught and not always a good predictor of what might happen in humans. This month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it planned to “phase out” animal testing for certain kinds of drugs and promote the use of alternatives, such as organoids or “organs on chips,” three-dimensional models of human organs made from lab-grown cells. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Experts agree that these emerging technologies hold enormous promise. But some say that, for now at least, lab animals remain a critical part of biomedical research and that certain kinds of data can’t be gathered any other way. “We want to drive ourselves out of this work,” said Naomi Charalambakis, the director of science policy and communications at Americans for Medical Progress, a nonprofit that advocates the continued use of animals in biomedical research. “But we’re not quite there yet.” Lab animal research, which often takes years to plan and conduct, requires steady, predictable funding and experienced veterinarians and technicians to provide day-to-day care. Moves by the Trump administration have thrown all of that into question. At the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Morgantown facility, for instance, the abrupt terminations initially included the animal care staff. “But they fought back and said they were not leaving while animals were in the facility,” said a former lab technician, who asked not to be identified to preserve future employment options. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT After the Trump administration began freezing funding to Harvard this month, researchers developing a new tuberculosis vaccine faced the prospect of having to euthanize their rhesus macaques. The study, and the monkeys, were spared only after a private donor stepped in to provide funding. Some animals on shuttered projects could be moved to other labs or institutions, but others may have already received experimental treatments or been exposed to pathogens or toxins. Lab animals, many of which are bred to display certain behaviors or health vulnerabilities, are not wild and cannot simply be released. And the sudden surge of surplus lab animals may be more than the nation’s animal sanctuaries can absorb, experts said. Ann Linder, an associate director at the animal law and policy program at Harvard Law School, worries that the fate of many lab animals will come down to the “whims and temperaments” of individual researchers and lab employees. “Without oversight, some of those decisions will be poor ones, and many will be made out of callous necessity, without regard for the welfare of the animals in question,” she said in an email.Cost cutting Many researchers said that they also worried about the National Institutes of Health’s effort to sharply limit funding for “indirect costs” associated with scientific research, including those related to maintaining animal care facilities. A federal judge has barred the N.I.H. from putting these funding caps into place, but the agency has appealed. If the policy goes through, it could be devastating for institutions that do research with nonhuman primates, which are long-lived and expensive to care for. The Washington National Primate Research Center, based at the University of Washington, has more than 800 nonhuman primates. A cap on indirect funding would cost the center roughly $5 million a year, forcing it to downsize its colony, said Deborah Fuller, the center’s director. It “could destroy the entire infrastructure that we have built,” she said. If that happened, the center would make every effort to find new homes for its animals, she added. But other research centers would be facing the same challenges, and primate sanctuaries may not be able to absorb the influx. As a last resort, primates may need to be euthanized. “It’s a worst-case scenario,” said Sally Thompson-Iritani, an assistant vice provost at the university’s office of research. “Even though none of us likes to think about it or have to talk about it, it could happen.” For some animal rights activists, downsizing the federal animal research enterprise is something to celebrate. “For a lot of these animals, being euthanized before being experimented on is probably a best-case scenario,” said Justin Goodman, a senior vice president at the White Coat Waste Project, a nonprofit that advocates the end of federally funded animal research. (The organization would prefer to see lab animals placed in new homes, he noted.) Delcianna Winders, who directs the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said she hoped these cuts would spell the end of the national primate centers. But she said she was concerned that cuts and layoffs at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which enforces the federal Animal Welfare Act, would weaken the nation’s “already extremely lax oversight” of lab animal welfare. Dr. Locke hopes that this crisis might be a “wake up call” for the nation to move further toward alternatives to animal research. But that transition should happen in a thoughtful way, he said. “I don’t think it’s OK to cull millions of animals from research,” Dr. Locke said. “I don’t think that’s societally acceptable. I don’t think it’s scientifically acceptable, and I think we need to recognize that that is a likely outcome.”

The Mellon Foundation on Tuesday announced $15 million in emergency funding for state humanities councils across the country, throwing what advocates say is a crucial lifeline after the cancellation of federal support had left some in danger of collapse. The new funding, which will support humanities councils in all 50 states and six jurisdictions, comes a month after the National Endowment for the Humanities abruptly cut off federal funding for the councils, as well as most of its existing grants. The endowment, which had a budget of $207 million last fiscal year, is the nation’s largest public funder of the humanities, providing crucial support to museums, historical sites, cultural festivals and community projects. The $15 million from the Mellon Foundation will offset only a portion of the $65 million the state councils were set to receive this year from the humanities endowment, as appropriated by Congress. But Elizabeth Alexander, the foundation’s president, said it would help preserve humanities programs, particularly in rural states without a robust base of private philanthropy. “The projects that fall under the rubric of the humanities are of an extraordinary range,” she said. “It would be terrible if countless people across the country lost access to all the things that help us understand what it is to be human, in history and in a contemporary community.” Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The money from the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of arts and humanities projects overall, with an annual grant-making budget of about $550 million, is a one-time infusion. Every council will get $200,000 in immediate operational support. Most of the remainder will come in the form of $50,000 challenge grants, which must be matched by other sources. When the humanities endowment canceled virtually all of its existing grants earlier this month, after a review by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, it told recipients that it was redirecting its funding toward “the President’s priorities.” Last week, the agency announced it was committing $17 million to support the National Garden of American Heroes, a patriotic sculpture park that President Trump first called for during his first term. (Another $17 million will come from the National Endowment of the Arts.)While humanities councils may have a low profile, they support book festivals, literary events, local history projects and historical sites. They are also drivers of local economies, including tourism; according to the federation, every $1 of federal support results in $2 in private investment. The Mellon Foundation, whose assets totaled about $7.9 billion at the end of 2023, has taken emergency action before. In 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic threatened the survival of many cultural organizations, it increased its annual grant making, to $500 million from about $300 million. In June of that year, it also announced a “major strategic evolution” that would prioritize social justice. Alexander, a poet and literary scholar who has led the foundation since 2018, said that recent cuts across the federal government, not just at the humanities endowment, had inflicted devastating impacts on many of its grant recipients. The foundation was considering other emergency aid, she said, but it could not replace all lost federal support. “Philanthropy itself is not able to plug all of those holes,” Alexander said. “For the humanities in particular, we thought this was someplace we had a responsibility to do what we could.”

A former athletic director at a Baltimore area high school who was accused of using artificial intelligence to create a racist and antisemitic audio clip impersonating the school’s principal was sentenced on Monday to four months in jail as part of a plea deal, according to prosecutors. The former director, Dazhon Darien, 32, pleaded guilty to disturbing school operations, a misdemeanor charge, according to the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office. Mr. Darien had previously faced additional charges, including theft, stalking and retaliating against a witness. According to The Associated Press, Mr. Darien entered an Alford plea to the disturbing school operations charge, which allows defendants to maintain their innocence while pleading guilty. Mr. Darien, the former athletic director of Pikesville High School, fabricated an audio clip that included a rant about “ungrateful Black kids who can’t test their way out of a paper bag” and disparaging comments about Jewish students, according to a statement of facts in the case used to support the guilty plea. According to police records, the audio was an attempt to smear the school’s principal, Eric Eiswert. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT According to the statement of facts, Mr. Eiswert said that there had been “conversations” with Mr. Darien about his contract not being renewed because of “his poor performance at the school, his inability to follow clearly laid out procedures and his unwillingness to follow the chain of command.” Problems with Mr. Darien began in late 2023, leading up to the audio’s release, according to the statement. A lawyer listed for Mr. Darien did not respond to calls and messages on Tuesday. The Baltimore County Public Schools district declined to comment on the case. Efforts to reach Mr. Eiswert on Tuesday were unsuccessful. After his sentencing, Mr. Darien was returned to federal custody as he is facing charges that he sexually exploited children and received child pornography. The fabricated recording, which was posted on Instagram in January 2024, quickly spread, roiling Baltimore County Public Schools, which serves more than 100,000 students. While the district investigated, Mr. Eiswert, who denied making the comments, had multiple threats to his safety, the police said. He was also placed on administrative leave, the school district said. According to police documents, Mr. Darien developed a grievance against Mr. Eiswert in December after the principal began investigating him. Mr. Darien had authorized a district payment of $1,916 to his roommate, the police said, “under the pretense” that the roommate was working as an assistant coach for the Pikesville girls’ soccer team.Soon after, the police said, Mr. Darien used the school district’s internet services to search for artificial intelligence tools, including from OpenAI, the developer of the ChatGPT chatbot, and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, in December 2023, for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.) A public defender representing Mr. Darien declined to comment on the case. It has never been easier to make realistic fabricated videos, often called deepfakes. Where it once took elaborate software to put one person’s face onto another’s, many of those tools are now common and can be found on smartphone apps. This has put some A.I. researchers on edge about the dangers the technology poses.

Top colleges in the cross hairs of President Trump have sharply increased their spending on lobbying, according to an analysis by The New York Times. Ten universities that have been singled out by the administration for scrutiny spent a combined $2.8 million lobbying the federal government in the first three months of 2025, which is more than those institutions spent in any quarter at least since 2008, according to the analysis. A federal task force that says it is devoted to rooting out antisemitism on campuses targeted those schools in February for investigation. One of the 10, Columbia University, more than tripled its spending on lobbying in the first quarter of 2025, compared with the same quarter last year, the analysis found. Another, Harvard University, also greatly increased its lobbying outlays, spending $230,000, compared with $130,000 in the same period last year. Lobbyists generally seek meetings with White House and Congressional staff members to discuss matters that affect the institutions they represent. Public records show that for the targeted schools, those matters in the first months of 2025 included, among other things, seeking financial aid for students, promoting the value of university research and explaining efforts to combat antisemitism. Colleges that have been accused by the Trump administration of being bastions of leftism are seeking the help of firms that are in tune with conservative sensibilities. Much of the new spending on lobbying is flowing to firms with Republican bona fides. The amount the schools spent on contracted lobbying firms increased nearly 150 percent from the first quarter of 2024 to this year. The analysis found that these schools were far more reliant on lobbyists with Republican ties than a year before.

The Supreme Court appeared skeptical on Monday of a Minnesota school district’s argument that students with disabilities must prove their school acted in “bad faith” in failing to provide adequate accommodations in order to prove discrimination. A family who had sued the district, the Osseo Area School District near Minneapolis, argued that federal law required merely that the school display “deliberate indifference,” a lower standard. The two sides had argued in front of lower courts over the legal standard in schools. But in recent court filings, the school district argued that the higher standard could apply broadly to all sorts of disability rights claims under the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. That unnerved some disability rights groups, who warned that if the court accepted the school district’s argument, the higher “bad faith” standard could make it much harder for Americans with disabilities to successfully bring court challenges.The school district’s position led to an unusually tense oral argument, with lawyers for the family and the federal government arguing that the district had improperly shifted its position after the justices had agreed to hear the case. The lawyer for the school district rejected those claims, going so far as to suggest that her opponents were lying, an accusation that prompted a rebuke from one of the justices. The case, A.J.T. v. Osseo Area Schools, No. 24-249, stemmed from a dispute over whether the Minnesota school district provided reasonable accommodations for Ava Tharpe, a teenage girl with severe epilepsy that made it difficult for her to attend school during normal hours. The girl’s family said they had requested evening instruction but were told the district would not provide it, leaving Ava with only 65 percent of the instructional hours that her peers received. After the district rejected the Tharpe family’s request for evening instruction, the family filed a complaint with the Minnesota Department of Education. An administrative law judge found that the school district had violated federal law, ruling that the district’s “prevailing and paramount consideration” was not Ava’s “need for instruction,” but rather the school system’s desire “to maintain the regular hours of the school’s faculty.” The dispute then moved to federal court, where a trial judge sided, in part, with the school district, finding that under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, the Tharpe family was required to show the school district had acted with either “bad faith” or “gross misjudgment.”A panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agreed. In front of the Supreme Court, the two sides argued over both the standard that should be required to prove discrimination in schools — and whether that standard should be applied in other settings. The lawyer for the student and her family, Roman Martinez, argued that the school district’s line of reasoning would “revolutionize disability law, stripping protections from vulnerable victims and gutting the reasonable accommodations needed for equal opportunity.” A federal government lawyer, Nicole F. Reaves, assistant to the solicitor general, appeared to agree, calling the district’s position “breathtakingly broad.” The lawyer for the school district, Lisa S. Blatt, argued that, for schools, the “bad faith” standard was proper. She said lowering the bar for proving discrimination would be costly for school districts and could even jeopardize federal funding if it was determined that schools had failed to comply with federal law.Ms. Blatt argued that a ruling against the school district “would expose 46,000 public schools to liability when, for 40 years, they have trained teachers, allocated budgets and obtained insurance all in reliance” on the “bad faith” standard. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “Every good-faith disagreement would risk liability or even the nuclear option, the loss of federal funding, which is over a hundred billion dollars,” she said. Ms. Blatt conceded that her argument meant that this higher standard could apply to disability cases that do not involve public schools, potentially heightening the legal standard for all disability rights cases. Some of the justices appeared incredulous. “Your argument is that ‘bad faith’ should apply everywhere?” asked Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. When Ms. Blatt answered yes, Justice Amy Coney Barrett jumped in. “That would be a sea change, right?” Justice Barrett asked. “Well, it would be only a sea change in terms of liability,” Ms. Blatt responded. “A sea change in terms of liability is a pretty big sea change,” Justice Barrett answered. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Ms. Blatt said it was not true that the school district had shifted its position, going so far as to say the accusation was “a lie and inaccurate.” That upended the normal decorum of the court — where advocates often use the term “friend” to refer to their opponents. “You believe that Mr. Martinez and the solicitor general are lying,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said. “Is that your accusation?” “At oral argument, yes, absolutely,” Ms. Blatt responded. “It is not true that we —” Justice Gorsuch broke in before she finished, saying, “I think you should be more careful with your words, Ms. Blatt.” “OK, well, they should be more careful in character — mischaracterizing a position by an experienced advocate of the Supreme Court, with all due respect,” she said. Justice Gorsuch returned to the point later in the argument, asking Ms. Blatt to withdraw her accusation. After an extended back and forth, she agreed. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Justice Sonia Sotomayor also expressed concern over the school district’s position. She suggested Ms. Blatt might have violated a court rule that obligates lawyers to point out any perceived misstatements of law or facts in briefs arguing that the court should not hear a case. Ms. Blatt said the school system had not argued that point but said failing to do so did not violate court rules because it had not been necessary given the school district had merely been required in its filings to defend its win in the lower appeals court. A decision in the case is expected by the end of the court’s term, which typically concludes in late June or early July.