Education news and discussion

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More on that by Reuters:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump- ... 024-09-05/

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[caltrek]

Linda McMahon Nominated for Secretary of Education
by Michael Mechanic
November 21, 2024

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) Educators are flipping out over Donald Trump’s choice of pro wrestling exec and longtime donor Linda McMahon for secretary of education. Predictably so, since experts in just about every field are flipping out when Trump chooses some poorly qualified (yet very loyal) hack to oversee their specialty—or selects another fox to guard the henhouse.

America’s biggest union, the National Education Association, for instance, slammed McMahon as unqualified and bent on a privatization agenda:
Her chief goal for education is to promote vouchers, which drain resources from public schools and send taxpayer money to unaccountable private schools that are permitted to discriminate against students and educators. The policies she promotes are aligned with Trump’s Project 2025 plan.

McMahon, who served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump’s initial term, has scant education experience. She earned a teaching certificate in college and was a student teacher for a semester, but resigned from the Connecticut Board of Education in 2010, according to the Washington Post, after the Hartford Courant found that she’d claimed an education degree she never obtained. More recently, a lawsuit accused McMahon and her estranged husband, Vince, of tolerating the sexual abuse of children by an employee of their company, World Wrestling Entertainment. (A lawyer for McMahon told CNN the allegations are “baseless.”)

But hey, she likes vouchers.

Voucher-esque programs, speaking of discrimination, were first deployed across the South during desegregation so authorities could shutter public schools—the white parents didn’t want their kids mixing with Black kids—and instead provide grants to fund the private education of exclusively white children at hundreds of new private schools that popped up to serve them. This was a sordid and horribly racist enterprise, as you will glean from this history compiled by the Center for American Progress.

Read more of the Mother Jones article here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... e-schools

For the cited history compiled by the Center for American Progress: https://www.americanprogress.org/artic ... ouchers/

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Race-blind college admissions harm diversity without improving quality, study finds

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-college-a ... ality.html

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Trump team eyes quick rollback of Biden student debt relief
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-team-e ... 14517.html

President-elect Donald Trump is poised to pull the plug on President Joe Biden’s yearslong push to cancel student debt for tens of millions of people as Republicans sweep into power in the coming months.

Trump transition advisers and outside allies have been discussing ways to quickly unwind the various Biden-era initiatives that offered new or easier paths to loan forgiveness for borrowers, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

The move would be the culmination of nearly four years of attacks by GOP lawmakers and attorneys general on Biden’s student debt relief policies. On the campaign trail, Trump slammed the loan forgiveness efforts — which total hundreds of billions of dollars — as “vile” and illegal. Yet his team faces a daunting challenge: A series of recent court decisions has left the federal government’s $1.6 trillion student loan portfolio in disarray, with millions of borrowers stuck in limbo.

Trump has nominated Linda McMahon, the former head of the Small Business Administration, to be Education secretary. McMahon has been co-leading the presidential transition and chairs the America First Policy Institute, an outside group that's been preparing for a second term. The group has blasted Biden’s loan policies as “unlawful, counterproductive, and deeply unfair.”

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No-Limit Vouchers Are Blowing Up Arizona’s Budget. This Woman Is Leading the Way.
by Rowan Moore Gerety
November 24 , 2024

Introduction:

(Politico) PHOENIX, Arizona — On a scorching Sunday afternoon in August, Jenny Clark, who runs the non-profit Love Your School AZ, stood in the cool atrium of the Phoenix Art Museum, offering swag to families passing by on their way to story time and collage-making. “Do you want a pin?” she asked. Bright blue and pink buttons with slogans in block letters beckoned to children at eye-level: You Rock. Too Cool. And, for parents, I love my kids — “On certain days,” Clark joked, as she held out a sample to a mother with two young children draped around her waist. The largest pins — and not by accident — said “Ask me about ESAs.”

ESAs are Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, the school voucher program that in 2022 opened to every family in Arizona. Originally created for students with disabilities who needed services they could not get at their neighborhood public schools, ESAs have morphed over the last two years into a budget-busting free-for-all used by more than 50,000 students — nearly 1 in 20 school-age children in the state — many of whom were already enrolled in private and religious schools or home-schooled. Families, mostly from high-income zip codes, have applied the taxpayer funds for everything from ski lift passes to visits to trampoline parks, a $4,000 grand piano, more than a million dollars in Legos, online ballet lessons, horse therapy and cookie-baking kits. Proponents justify expenditures like these in the name of parents’ prerogative to shape their children’s education or by pointing to wasteful spending by public schools. As a result, ESA costs have ballooned from the legislature’s original estimated price tag of $100 million over two years, to more than $400 million a year — a figure, critics have noted, that would explain more than half of Arizona’s projected budget deficit in 2024 and 2025.

And the person most responsible for organizing this growing cohort of parents, and steering their newfound interest in the minutiae of state education funding, is Jenny Clark.

Read more here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine ... -00191201

caltrek's comment: Funny how Republicans are fiscal conservatives, except when they are not.

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Elon Musk’s Team Decimates Education Department Arm That Tracks National School Performance
by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards
February 11, 2025

Introduction:

(ProPublica) The Trump administration has terminated more than $900 million in Education Department contracts, taking away a key source of data on the quality and performance of the nation’s schools.

The cuts were made at the behest of Elon Musk’s cost-cutting crew, the Department of Government Efficiency, and were disclosed on X, the social media platform Musk owns, shortly after ProPublica posed questions to U.S. Department of Education staff about the decision to decimate the agency’s research and statistics arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.

A spokesperson for the department, Madi Biedermann, said that the standardized test known as the nation’s report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, would not be affected. Neither would the College Scorecard, which allows people to search for and compare information about colleges, she said.

IES is one of the country’s largest funders of education research, and the slashing of contracts could mean a significant loss of public knowledge about schools. The institute maintains a massive database of education statistics and contracts with scientists and education companies to compile and make data public about schools each year, such as information about school crime and safety and high school science course completion.

Its total annual budget is about $815 million, or roughly 1% of the Education Department’s overall budget of $82 billion this fiscal year. The $900 million in contracts the department is canceling includes multiyear agreement

Read more here: https://www.propublica.org/article/dep ... cts-doge

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Trump Threatens To Cut 'All Federal Funding' to Universities That Allow 'Illegal Protests'

Source: MEDIAite

Mar 4th, 2025, 8:39 am

President Donald Trump declared through Truth Social on Tuesday that funding for universities that allow “illegal protests” will be pulled under his administration.

In his Truth Social post, the president warned there should be “no masks” at university protests and that “agitators” will be “imprisoned” or deported to “the country from which they came.”

“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter,” he wrote.

Trump’s announcement followed his Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of Education (ED), and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) announcing a potential stop to $51.4 million in contracts between Columbia University and the federal government.

Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/news/trump-thr ... -protests/

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'Another Unqualified Billionaire': Senate Confirms McMahon as Education Secretary
by Brett Wilkins
March 3, 2025

Introduction:

(Common Dreams) Continuing what one watchdog called "their pattern of rubber-stamping deeply flawed and unqualified" Cabinet nominees of President Donald Trump, Senate Republicans on Monday confirmed sports entertainment billionaire and prolific GOP fundraiser Linda McMahon to head the U.S. Department of Education—an agency the president has repeatedly vowed to abolish.

Senators confirmed McMahon in a 51-45 vote. The loyal Trump ally and top fundraiser previously led the Small Business Administration during the president's first term. However, other than serving one year on the Connecticut Board of Education and as a trustee for Sacred Heart University, she has little experience in the field.

Republicans—many of whom share Trump's desire to end the Department of Education—didn't seem to care, with Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa asserting that "education is still mostly a state and local responsibility."

(See link for Blue Sky feed from Senator Patty Murray)

McMahon gained a more dubious reputation for what one campaigner called her "documented history of enabling sexual abuse of children and sweeping sexual violence under the rug" during her tenure as World Wrestling Entertainment CEO.

The 76-year-old finds herself in the position of being simultaneously tasked with dismantling the DOE and ramping up attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; "woke" education; transgender students; and other right-wing bugaboos. She is also expected to promote expanded voucher programs, which supporters call "school choice."

Read more here: https://www.commondreams.org/news/lind ... onfirmed

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[firestar464]

https://bsky.app/profile/jackiantonovic ... eg5cpfxs23

New "investigation" just dropped. My hot take: If the DoE is drastically cutting staff while launching investigations into hundreds of schools, they won’t have the manpower or legal power to enforce them if all the schools push back.

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Trump to sign order to shut down Department of Education, White House says

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/tr ... r-AA1BgC5P

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And it is done...

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump- ... 025-03-20/

Lawsuit time

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Columbia University to comply with Trump administration demands for mask ban, special officers, more

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/co ... n-demands/

[Vakanai]

Columbia University to comply with Trump administration demands for mask ban, special officers, more

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/co ... n-demands/

And so freedom of education slowly begins to concede to death by a thousand cuts...

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Efforts to save Department of Education move to courts

Source: The Hill

03/22/25 6:00 AM ET

Defenders of the Department of Education are turning to the courts to save it after President Trump signed an executive order to abolish it and on Friday said he would move some of its most critical loan programs to the Small Business Administration (SBA). Trump cannot abolish the department without an act of Congress, and it is not clear that legislation doing so could get through Congress.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) nonetheless on Friday said he would seek legislation to end the department, even as Trump through executive action attempts to hollow out a government agency that had more than 4,000 employees just months ago. “I expect that any actions to shutter the agency or to dismantle it will be challenged in the courts, and those challenges will prevail,” Julie Margetta Morgan, a former deputy under secretary of Education during the Biden administration, told The Hill earlier this month.

“I think the other thing to think about here is that the decision to dismantle the Department of Education is incredibly unpopular, and people need to continue to voice their concerns about that and their displeasure with the Trump administration’s efforts and to hold policymakers accountable,” she added.

“See you in court” was a common theme among opponents as Trump ordered Education Secretary Linda McMahon to dismantle the department as far as she is legally allowed without an act of Congress.

Read more: https://thehill.com/homenews/education/ ... e-mcmahon/