RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-department-of-education-contracts-left-activism

On February 10, the Trump administration slashed almost $900 million in U.S. Department of Education research contracts, in an effort to reduce “waste, fraud and abuse.” Education activists attacked the move, claiming that it would stifle important research.

Quality education research certainly matters. But the Institute of Education Sciences, which administers the contracts, has abandoned this mission. The IES has abused what should be a nonpartisan mandate and pushed progressive political agendas through research and training programs.

Consider the IES’s Regional Education Laboratory program. Created by the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, RELs were charged with studying effective educational practices and disseminating the latest scientific knowledge to local school authorities. Despite this noble-sounding goal, critics have complained that the RELs promote fads, waste resources, and are prone to politicization.

The Department of Education allocates nearly $60 million to run 10 RELs across the country. Each lab oversees a set of states. Within its designated region, each REL works with local schools and state education leaders.

RELs have pushed progressive identity policies in schools. REL Mid-Atlantic collaborated with the New Jersey Department of Education to promote racial preferences in teacher hiring. This laboratory developed six training sessions on “culturally responsive hiring practices” for state leaders to “build an educator workforce that more closely reflects the ethno-racial diversity of the state’s student population.” Another part of the project featured REL staff working with ten local school districts to increase the “hiring of teachers of color.”

https://jewishinsider.com/2025/02/barnard-college-expels-students-involved-in-anti-israel-class-disruption/

Barnard College has expelled two second-semester seniors who last month disrupted a History of Modern Israel class, banged on drums, chanted “free Palestine” and distributed posters to students that read “CRUSH ZIONISM” with a boot over the Star of David, Jewish Insider has learned, according to a source familiar with the matter.

During the demonstration, which occurred on Jan. 21 — the first day of the spring semester — two Barnard students, a Columbia student and a fourth person who remains unidentified also tried to plaster the walls of the classroom with a sign featuring an illustration of Hamas terrorists pointing guns and the words “THE ENEMY WILL NOT SEE TOMORROW.”

Columbia University suspended the Columbia participant on Jan. 23, “pending a full investigation and disciplinary process,” according to the university. The investigation remains ongoing. Students have the right to appeal suspensions under the guidelines to the Rules and the Anti-Discrimination and Discriminatory Harassment Policies and Procedures for Students. Barnard College is an affiliate of Columbia University.

In a statement to JI, Barnard President Laura Rosenbury declined to provide details about the expulsions. “Under federal law, we cannot comment on the academic and disciplinary records of students,” Rosenbury said.

“That said, as a matter of principle and policy, Barnard will always take decisive action to protect our community as a place where learning thrives, individuals feel safe, and higher education is celebrated,” Rosenbury continued.

“This means upholding the highest standards and acting when those standards are threatened. When rules are broken, when there is no remorse, no reflection, and no willingness to change, we must act. Expulsion is always an extraordinary measure, but so too is our commitment to respect, inclusion, and the integrity of the academic experience. At Barnard, we always fiercely defend our values. At Barnard, we always reject harassment and discrimination in all forms. And at Barnard, we always do what is right, not what is easy.”

As of Sunday, the expulsions had not been announced campus-wide. Upon learning of the crackdown from JI, Lishi Baker, a junior studying Middle East history and a student in the History of Modern Israel course, said he was “extremely happy” about Barnard’s decision and called for Columbia to do the same.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/is-the-department-of-education-dead-on-arrival/

While the federal government has spent money on education and developed education policies since the 19th century, the U.S. Department of Education didn’t become a stand-alone agency until 1980 when, courtesy of President Jimmy Carter, it split off from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Carter advocated for creating the department to fulfill a campaign promise to the National Education Association. Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act in 1979. In response, the NEA subsequently issued its first-ever endorsement in a presidential contest.

Just what is the function of the DOE?

As former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos explains, it doesn’t run a single school, employ any teachers in a single classroom, or set academic standards or curriculum. “It isn’t even the primary funder of education—quite the opposite. In most states, the federal government represents less than 10% of K–12 public education funding.”

DeVos adds that it does shuffle money around, adds unnecessary requirements and political agendas via its grants, and then passes the buck when it comes time to assess if any of that adds value. “In other words, the Department of Education is functionally a middleman. And, like most middlemen, it doesn’t add value. It merely adds cost and complexity.”

In 2024, the DOE employed over 4,000 people whose salaries and benefits came to $2.7 billion, and the department’s total budget for the year was $79 billion.

One of the purported reasons the DOE was brought into existence was to lower achievement gaps. But after spending over $1 trillion since its inception, it has done no such thing. The results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math test, given to 4th and 8th graders, were announced in January and showed that 4th graders continued to lose ground, with reading scores slightly lower, on average, than in 2022 and much lower than in 2019.

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

A recent editorial in The Washington Post, lamenting threats to close the Department of Education, referred to a “landmark” 1983 Reagan Administration report, “A Nation at Risk.” The editorial divulged “that 13 percent of American 17-year-olds – and up to 40 percent of minority youths – were functionally illiterate” at the time. The editorial claimed the United States had been falling behind its adversaries, which caused businesses and the military to spend millions of dollars on “costly remedial education and training programs.” The editorial added: “Test scores have improved (apart from an alarming slippage in recent years), and presidents from both parties have worked to make American schools more accommodating for children with disabilities, and to improve low-performing schools.” But has that been true?

Today, the Department of Education spends approximately twenty-two times as much per student as it did forty years ago, yet the results are dismal. According to the recently issued report from the U.S. Department of Education – the bi-annual National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card – 60% of fourth graders scored below what the NAEP deems a proficient level in math. 8th Graders fared worse, with 75% performing below proficiency. In reading, almost 70 percent of students scored below the NAEP proficiency level. In the report, the author Stephaan Harris quoted Governing Board member Patrick Kelly of Columbia, South Carolina: “Student academic achievement is the cornerstone of national success and security. This makes a lack of academic progress today a direct and urgent threat to our collective future.” It does; education is the foundation on which our democracy is built.

Internationally, our students are not where they should be. According to the 2022 to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, American students did best in reading, ranking 9th overall, behind Macau and Canada. In science, however, they ranked 16th, behind Slovenia and the UK. And in math, the ranked 34th, below the average and behind Norway and Malta.  The scores, according to Education GPS, “…are among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics. In reading and science, results confirm a long-term stability in result,” albeit at a mediocre level for a nation that prides itself on its schools.

These tests foretell a depressing story. We are a nation that has been the technological, medical and science leader of the world; and some might argue its cultural leader. Yet our public schools are a disgrace, with minorities and the poor suffering the most.

School choice is the obvious answer, but it is widely opposed by teachers’ unions, and therefore by most Democrat politicians. Open Secrets reported that, for the 2024 election cycle, the two largest teachers’ unions, National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), gave a combined $32 million to candidates, with 94% going to Democrats. That dollar amount was up from $4 million twenty years ago. In the meantime, a Heritage Foundation survey (2023) found that 47% of House members and 51% of Senators enroll their children in private schools. In a February 1 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Michael Bloomberg wrote: “In New York, the teachers union has fought to maintain a cap on the number of charter schools, [schools that] have dramatically raised achievement levels, even as student waiting lists grow longer.” Hypocrisy thrives.

These tests foretell a depressing story. We are a nation that has been the technological, medical and science leader of the world; and some might argue its cultural leader. Yet our public schools are a disgrace, with minorities and the poor suffering the most.

School choice is the obvious answer, but it is widely opposed by teachers’ unions, and therefore by most Democrat politicians. Open Secrets reported that, for the 2024 election cycle, the two largest teachers’ unions, National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), gave a combined $32 million to candidates, with 94% going to Democrats. That dollar amount was up from $4 million twenty years ago. In the meantime, a Heritage Foundation survey (2023) found that 47% of House members and 51% of Senators enroll their children in private schools. In a February 1 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Michael Bloomberg wrote: “In New York, the teachers union has fought to maintain a cap on the number of charter schools, [schools that] have dramatically raised achievement levels, even as student waiting lists grow longer.” Hypocrisy thrives.

The world faces many problems, and it is not simply the threat of foreign powers, like China with its Belt-and-Road initiatives, a revanchist Russia wishing to reclaim its lost empire, a Middle East under the threat of Iran and Islamic terrorism, or African Christians having to live with daily threats. Artificial intelligence and quantum computing are in their infancy. We must, as J.D. Vance warned our European partners in Munich, confront “the enemy within.” We must not allow fear of censorship prevent us from speaking out. We should, as Noah Rothman wrote in the January 2024 issue of National Review, “summon the courage to repudiate what passes for sophistication in the academy and renounce the trite moral relativism that cannot distinguish between the Western world and its enemies.” Western liberalism, which dates back two-hundred-and-fifty years to the Enlightenment, is under attack. One consequence has been the divisiveness of our political parties. Another is manifested in the current crop of political leaders from both parties.

The best antidote is an educated populace. “Education is the movement from darkness to light” is a quote attributed to Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind. Martin Luther King believed that the purpose of education was to help people “to think incisively and to think for one’s self.” This is particularly true as it applies to our roles as citizens. Our youth must read our Constitution, understand what makes our government unique, and how rare it is in the annals of mankind. All public school students should have some familiarity with the canon of classical liberal Western thought.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-fellow-to-faculty-programs-activists

In the days after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Jemma Decristo, a UC Davis professor, took to social media to express support for the violent energies that had erupted in the Middle East. “HELL YEAH,” Decristo wrote on X, responding to a report that protesters had set fire to the Israeli embassy in Jordan. Reposting news of protests at the United States embassy in Lebanon, Decristo added, “[fire icon] to the US embassy. US out of everywhere. US GO HOME. US GO HOME.”

One of her posts roused national attention: “One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation,” Decristo wrote. “they have houses w addresses, kids in school. they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.” She concluded with a series of icons: a knife, an axe, and three blood drops.

Shortly afterward, the university launched an investigation into Decristo’s comments, and in April of 2024, the StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice filed a lawsuit against the university for its inaction on anti-Semitism, putting the professor’s threats atop a list of examples in a press release. As of this writing, UC Davis has not disciplined Decristo.

Following Decristo’s comments, UC Davis chancellor Gary May said in a statement that calls for violence were inconsistent with the university’s commitment to “equity and justice.” Ironically, Decristo’s employment at UC Davis came about precisely because of the University of California’s purported commitment to social justice. Decristo, once described by UC Davis as a “scholar-artist-activist,” was recruited through the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP), which fast-tracks scholars showing a “commitment to diversity” into permanent faculty roles.

A growing number of like-minded activists are following Decristo’s path. For years, universities, federal agencies, and private foundations have worked to create well-funded career pathways for scholar-activists in higher education. The network includes undergraduate fellowships, graduate school funding, special hiring initiatives, and even administrator development programs. This constellation of “pipeline programs” is intended to hire more minorities; in practice, it heavily favors academics who view their scholarship as an extension of their political agenda.

The programs also raise legal questions. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in hiring. After President Trump’s executive order “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity,” many universities will likely reassess their pipeline programs to avoid federal scrutiny.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-oversight-investigating-underreported-foreign-funding-at-american-universities/

The House Oversight Committee is seeking information from the Department of Education about foreign funding for U.S. colleges and universities as the committee looks to dig into an investigation that had been throttled by the Biden administration.

In a letter to acting Department of Education Secretary Denise Carter obtained exclusively by National Review, committee chairman James Comer and Representative Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) note foreign nations have given more than $57 billion to U.S. institutions since 1981 and voice concern that many institutions have failed to make disclosures for funds received under the Biden administration.

Comer and Foxx accuse the Biden administration of having “rolled back investigations into foreign funding in academia that took place in the first Trump Administration.” 

The committee is now requesting documents and information regarding the department’s enforcement of reporting requirements; Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 requires institutions that receive federal financial assistance to biannually file disclosure reports with the Secretary of Education. These reports must disclose “gifts received or contracts executed with a foreign source, valued at $250,000 or more, or if an institution is owned or controlled by a foreign source.”

Just 5 percent of U.S. institutions self-report foreign funding, the letter says. The Department of Education’s Office of the General Counsel wrote in 2020 that “there is very real reason for concern that foreign money buys influence or control over teaching and research.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elon-musk-doge-department-of-education

Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, one way of measuring the success of an American presidential administration is to tally its accomplishments in its first 100 days. By this standard, President Trump’s second administration is looking quite successful.

Since January 20, the president’s cabinet has pursued decisive action on virtually every political front. But the most high-risk, high-potential initiative has been Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Established in the shell of former President Obama’s U.S. Digital Service, DOGE was charged with eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in an effort to remake the federal government. For anyone else, such an initiative would have seemed quixotic. But for Musk, who has revolutionized multiple industries and thrives in high-conflict management scenarios, a cautious hope seemed appropriate.

Over the first 30 days, Musk’s DOGE method has come to resemble a seek-and-destroy mission. Musk dispatched small teams of lawyers, engineers, and human-resources specialists to government agencies, instructing them to cut wasteful spending and needless, ideological programs. Musk seems to have identified two switches—payments and personnel—that provide the greatest leverage. The DOGE teams have quickly organized a reduction in workforce and cancelled billions of dollars in government contracts, two steps that reduce spending and reverse the process of left-wing capture.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/19/is-the-doe-doa/

While the federal government has spent money on education and developed education policies since the 19th century, the U.S. Department of Education didn’t become a stand-alone agency until 1980 when, courtesy of President Jimmy Carter, it split off from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Carter advocated for creating the department to fulfill a campaign promise to the National Education Association. Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act in 1979. In response, the NEA subsequently issued its first-ever endorsement in a presidential contest.

Just what is the function of the DOE?

As former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos explains, it doesn’t run a single school, employ any teachers in a single classroom, or set academic standards or curriculum. “It isn’t even the primary funder of education—quite the opposite. In most states, the federal government represents less than 10% of K–12 public education funding.”

DeVos adds that it does shuffle money around, adds unnecessary requirements and political agendas via its grants, and then passes the buck when it comes time to assess if any of that adds value. “In other words, the Department of Education is functionally a middleman. And, like most middlemen, it doesn’t add value. It merely adds cost and complexity.”

In 2024, the DOE employed over 4,000 people whose salaries and benefits came to $2.7 billion, and the department’s total budget for the year was $79 billion.

One of the purported reasons the DOE was brought into existence was to lower achievement gaps. But after spending over $1 trillion since its inception, it has done no such thing. The results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math test, given to 4th and 8th graders, were announced in January and showed that 4th graders continued to lose ground, with reading scores slightly lower, on average, than in 2022 and much lower than in 2019.

Teacher union leaders are in a massive snit over the possibility of the DOE’s dissolution. Reacting to Donald Trump’s attempt to get rid of it, National Education Association President Becky Pringle released a statement on Feb 3, in which she maintains that his “latest extreme action will hurt our students and public schools.”

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said on CNN on Feb. 4, “The move is not legal. There are lots of things about the Department of Education that are in statute,” she claimed, referring to funds that go out from the department to low-income families, students with disabilities, English as a Second Language learners, and to work-study programs

https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-assessment-of-educational-progress-results-student-reading-scores

The newly released 2024 results of the Nation’s Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), contain sobering implications for education policy at the national, state, and local levels. Many have pointed out that the scores appear largely unchanged from two years ago, indicating that neither the nation nor New York City and State have bounced back from the learning loss attributed to pandemic-era school closures. That’s true, but long-term trends suggest that average score improvements had already stalled by the mid-2010s, well before Covid-related disruptions. Current scores, in fact, barely differ from those seen at the turn of the century.

National reading scores in grades four and eight are concerning. The 2024 scores from public schools match levels last seen in the 1990s, before the onset of the “school reform era” (2001 to 2017) of the Bush and Obama administrations, which pursued aggressive federal efforts to improve education. Per NAEP, “In 2024 the average reading score for the nation at grade 4 was 2 points lower compared to 2022 and 5 points lower compared to 2019.” The report card concludes, “Compared to the first reading assessment in 1992, the average score in 2024 was not significantly different.”

Eighth-grade scores followed the same trend: “In 2024, the average reading score for the nation at grade 8 was 2 points lower than 2022 and 5 points lower compared to 2019.” And again: “Compared to the first reading assessment in 1992, the average score was not significantly different in 2024.”

These numbers should trigger alarm bells. First, they confirm that the Covid-era school closures have had an enormous effect on students who in 2020 were in elementary school—the years they should have been learning to read. They also demonstrate that the billions of federal dollars given to school districts in the years since have done little to mitigate the damage.