Once again, it was another big week for national education news. Here's our quick take on the top stories.Senate scraps federal regulationsOn Thursday, the Senate voted to roll back Obama-era rules that clarified and elaborated on a wide range of accountability requirements in the federal education law known as The Every Student Succeeds Act.The vote was narrow, 50 to 49. To be clear, Congress is not scrapping or even changing the law itself. When it comes to school accountability, ESSA still requires that states flag schools where groups of students are "consistently underperforming." And it requires that the measurement of school performance include not just test scores and graduation rates but also some other indicator of school quality, including absenteeism or access to AP courses.After ESSA became law, the Obama administration was tasked with writing rules to clarify key sections. What the Senate voted to do this week was to scrap the previous Education Department's interpretation of the law's accountability requirements, not the requirements themselves.If that's not clear enough, here's a handy, point-by-point comparison of the law and that interpretation by Education Week's Alyson Klein.Senator Lamar Alexander, the Tennessee Republican who is himself a former Education Secretary, hailed the change. He called the vote "a victory for everyone who was fed up with Washington telling them so much about what to do about their children in 100,000 public schools, and I look forward to President Trump's signature of this resolution."The Education Trust, an advocacy group where John B. King Jr., the most recent education secretary under President Obama, is now president and CEO, called the rollback "misguided." "This resolution will cause unnecessary confusion," the group said in a statement, "disrupting the work in states and wasting time that students — particularly those who are most vulnerable — cannot afford for us to waste."New Executive Order on Immigration President Donald Trump signed a new executive order on Monday, a new version of his initial ban against the arrivals from seven majority-Muslim countries. This time, Iraq was not included because of its promises to "increase cooperation with the U.S." and share citizens' information.NPR's Eric Westervelt spoke with Esther Brimmer, executive director of the Association of International Educators, about how policies like the travel ban — and recent violent events against immigrants — could have a lasting effect on higher education if international student enrollment numbers drop.The revised ban is scheduled to go into effect on March 16.Another online resource for students goes darkFirst, the website that provides help to families of students with disabilities went down last month with little explanation. Now, it's the IRS' Data Retrieval Tool. If those words, "Data Retrieval Tool," put you to sleep, it means you're not a high school senior rushing to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.The FAFSA is the form — famously complicated and difficult to finish — that stands between many low-income high-schoolers and the federal Pell Grant that will help them pay for college.In the past, many students weren't finishing the FAFSA because it required them to manually enter their parents' tax data. That was a big hurdle for at-risk students. But there was a clear fix, and in late 2015, the Obama administration agreed to the fix, allowing most applicants to use this IRS Data Retrieval Tool to automatically answer some of the FAFSA's toughest questions.Yet students who have tried to use the IRS tool in recent days have, instead, been told: "This service will be unavailable due to system maintenance. We apologize for any inconvenience."According to a joint statement released Thursday by the IRS and the Department of Education:
