RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-calls-education-department-a-con-job-wants-it-closed-immediately/

Could the Department of Education (DOE), a massive boondoggle that has done nothing but oversee a decline in the quality of American education and the substitution of wokeism for readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic, really go away? If Donald Trump wins yet another victory, it will.

Fox News reported Wednesday that reporters asked Trump how soon he wanted the department closed. “Oh, I’d like it to be closed immediately,” the president replied. “Look at the Department of Education. It’s a big con job. They ranked the top countries in the world. We’re ranked No. 40, but we’re ranked No. 1 in one department: cost per pupil. So, we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, but we’re ranked No. 40.” Trump also “said the last time he looked at where the U.S. ranked in education, it was 38th, but then he looked two days ago, and the country had fallen to No. 40.”

Trump also noted that China’s educational system appears to be in fine condition: “As big as it is, it’s ranked in the top five, and that’s our… primary competitor. So, if we’re ranked No. 40, that means something’s really wrong.”

Yes. And it has been wrong for a very long time. Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education, and one of Ronald Reagan’s campaign promises was that he would close it, as it was an unnecessary centralization and bureaucratization of an educational system that had been getting along fine without a Cabinet-level federal agency. When Reagan took office, he appointed Terrel Bell to be his secretary of education, with the explicit task of dismantling the department. In this case, however, the swamp beat the Gipper, and the Education department stayed open.

https://www.thefp.com/p/high-schooler-graduates-illiterate-sues-tennessee-school?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Now, the Tennessee teen is suing his school district.

When William graduated high school in 2024 in Clarksville, Tennessee, he couldn’t read the words on his diploma. Despite ending the school year with a 3.4 GPA, he couldn’t even spell his own name.

That’s why William sued his school district, claiming it had left him “illiterate” and that he was denied the “free appropriate public education” guaranteed to all students by federal law.

On February 3, a federal appeals court sided with William, concluding that he was “capable of learning to read,” and agreeing with his claim that his lack of education had caused him “broad irreparable harm.”

William, whose last name is listed only as A. in the suit, first enrolled in the Clarksville-Montgomery County school district in 2016 when he was in the fifth grade. For the next seven years, he scored mostly in the bottom first, second, or third percentiles of his reading fluency assessment tests compared to national standards. In 2019 and 2020, he scored in the bottom ninth and sixth percentiles, respectively. But, a year before he graduated, his reading had regressed so much he was scoring below the first percentile.

That same year, William took a simple writing test asking him to spell 31 words in three minutes. According to his suit, he couldn’t spell half of them, including the word school, which he wrote as shcool.

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/lancet-study-flaws?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

In this post, we show why the recent Lancet study’s assertions that restrictive phone policies in schools yield no benefits are unfounded. For example, the phone-policies in the ‘permissive’ vs ‘restrictive’ schools did not differ very much, their measure of academic performance was crude, and their measures of screen time were unreliable.

A recent study published in The Lancet (Goodyear et al., 2025) has generated news headlines suggesting that restricting phone use in schools has no effect on the wellbeing or academic performance of students. This contradicts several previous studies that did find such benefits.

In this post, we lay out several flaws in the design and interpretation of the Lancet study, and several oddities in the data that we believe render its “no benefit” conclusion unjustified.

The authors of the study claimed to have

[E]valuated the impact of school phone policies by comparing outcomes in adolescents who attended schools that restrict and permit phone use.

The word “impact” implies the ability to discern causality. The authors then assert that,

[T]here is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents

and conclude that

[T]here is no evidence to support that restrictive school phone policies, in their current forms, have a beneficial effect on adolescents’ mental health and wellbeing or related outcomes, indicating that the intentions of these policies to improve adolescent health, wellbeing, and educational engagement are not realised.

The authors note that they do find substantial associations between time spent using phones or social media and worsened mental health and wellbeing, physical activity and sleep, and attainment and disruptive behavior:

[T]he negative associations found between increasing time spent on phones/social media and worsened mental health and wellbeing do provide evidence on the need to address phone and social media use in adolescents, and school policies should be developed as part of a more holistic approach.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/14/isnt-46-years-of-failure-enough-time-to-kill-the-education-dept/

Americans who care deeply about education were treated to a rare sight on Thursday. In her testimony before Congress to be the head of the Department of Education, Linda McMahon openly and proudly outlined a plan to not just get rid of her job, but take the federal government out of the education business. We wish her luck.

In January, before Trump first bruited his idea to close the Education Department, I&I archly suggested that “The most successful secretary of Education will be the one who shuts it down.” Little did we know that President Donald Trump would propose just that, and let his pick to lead the department make the case for doing so to Congress.

“I’d like it to be closed immediately,” Trump said on Wednesday. “The Department of Education’s a big con job.”

He’s right. McMahon, that ultra-rare unusual appointee whose greatest desire is to close her department and put herself out of a job, outlined a day later why and how she’d do that.

While Trump’s criticism sounds harsh, in fact, even under his plan many pieces of the current Education Department would remain in place — but within other parts of government. The Ed Department has failed in its mission and needs to be dismantled, though that will require lawmakers’ approval.

“I will work with Congress to reorient the department to helping educators, not controlling them,” McMahon said, adding: “Defunding is not the goal here.” Defund, no; dismantle, yes.

McMahon noted in her questioning that, for instance, aid for disabled students would likely be better handled by the Department of Health and Human Services, rather than the Education Department. And she vowed more than once that Congress’ federal aid to low-income school districts and students would be maintained.

So does the department really need to be dismantled? You bet. And McMahon, former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment but also former head of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s previous four years in office, is just the woman to do the job.

The recent experience with COVID underscores why education is too important to be left to Big Government. Under President Joe Biden, the Ed Department presided over teacher-union-friendly school shutdowns and shoddy “remote learning” programs that caused literally millions of American school kids’ of every race and ethnicity to lose ground against previous generations.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/13/the-latest-in-dei-crt-and-gender-issues/

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Critical Race Theory. Transgenderism. Whether you consider them cults, creeds, political movements, or cultural Marxism, they have been around for some time now, but there is mounting opposition.

DEI

Many U.S. Colleges still ooze DEI dogma. For example, the University of Michigan announced in December that it would no longer require diversity statements in faculty hiring and tenure decisions, but its Board of Regents stopped short of cutting DEI spending. One regent voiced concerns about the millions of dollars the public institution is spending to embed DEI into every campus nook and cranny under its DEI 2.0 plan.

Scarily, Brown University’s Medical School now gives DEI more weight than clinical skills in its promotion criteria for faculty, raising questions about the quality of patient care at its medical school and underscoring how deeply DEI has penetrated medical education.

The criteria, which are now posted on Brown’s website, include “demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” as a “major criterion” for all positions within the Department of Medicine, which oversees the bulk of the school’s clinical units. Clinical skills, by contrast, only count as a “minor criterion” for many roles.

DEI is also still quite prevalent outside our schools. In Los Angeles, which just suffered some of the most grisly fires in the nation’s history, the fire chief is on record “highlighting her DEI agendas rather than emphasizing traditional fire department criteria like response time or keeping fire vehicles running,” writes Victor Davis Hanson.

It’s also possible that DEI played a part in the recent American Airlines crash, which killed 67 people in Washington, D.C. As revealed by The New York Post, the Federal Aviation Administration is embroiled in a class-action lawsuit brought by 1,000 would-be air traffic controllers who were allegedly turned down for jobs because of diversity hiring targets. The New York Times mentions that staffing levels were “not normal” at the time of the collision.

But there is good news on the DEI front. The Heritage Foundation reports that it has launched a new initiative to stand up against corporations targeting individuals based on political or religious beliefs.

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

There is a tingle of fear in any corporation whenever the words “restructuring,” “merger,” “acquisition,” or “hostile takeover” spread through the office. Employees work on their resumes, whisper about projected layoffs, and assess their options.

We’re seeing the same phenomenon unfold right now in our nation’s capital. Since taking over last month, President Trump has promised to blitz through federal departments to roll back waste, cut ideological programs, and return fiscal sanity to American governance. While Republican presidents have long promised to “reduce the size of government,” they have usually failed to do so—the bureaucracy always wins. This time might be different.

The second Trump administration has been surprisingly aggressive in its efforts to reform federal agencies, including a controlled demolition of USAID and an audacious buyout plan for government employees. And Elon Musk, leader of the president’s Department of Government Efficiency, has a long track record of successful, and sometimes extreme, cost-cutting. When Musk took over Twitter, for example, he fired 80 percent of the employees, and at the same time managed to improve the product and increase its profitability.

The next stage of the conflict between Trump and the bureaucracy looks to be the Department of Education, which the president has correctly identified as a hotbed of left-wing ideologies. Almost every Republican presidential candidate since 1980 has promised either to shrink or abolish the department, but its budget has only grown. When Trump made the same promise on the campaign trail last year, I was skeptical. But Musk changes the calculation: the tech entrepreneur has already routed USAID and, as I can confirm from my own reporting, dispatched his DOGE engineers to investigate the DOE. While the department, as a public entity, does not have the same kind of balance sheet as a corporation, it must nevertheless be broken apart and ultimately shut down.

What is the best way to proceed? The administration must first understand that the Department of Education administers three primary activities: college student loans and grants; K-12 funding; and ideological production, which includes an array of programs, grants, civil rights initiatives, and third-party NGOs that create left-wing content to push on local schools. It is not possible or desirable to shut down all three functions at the same time. Rather, Secretary of Education nominee Linda McMahon, in partnership with Musk and DOGE, should handle each separately.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/academia-conservatives-universities-ideological

Academia skews sharply leftward and is increasingly illiberal. Many academics have abandoned the fact/value distinction, which had long served as both a source of rigor and a sort of epistemological Peace of Westphalia. That trend is worsening, as graduate students are much likelier than faculty to support suppression of heterodox ideas. The academy’s ideological imbalance has made it easier for younger academics to define themselves around polemical, “praxis-oriented” scholar-activism.

The politicization of the university is not only an obstacle for the Right but for academia itself. Schools’ “sectarian” reputation undermines trust among those who (more or less correctly) perceive them to be hostile to their views. More important, academia’s ideological tilt presents an intellectual problem, as it gives license to theory-laden interpretations of reality and declining rigor. For instance, a 2023 article in JAMA Surgery asserted that “structural racism” may cause mass-shooting events, even though the paper’s analysis showed that plausible structural-racism measures had no effect beyond that of race itself. Likewise, a celebrated 2020 article in PNAS showed that black babies in Florida died less often under the care of black doctors—but as a 2024 replication by Manhattan Institute scholars demonstrated, that effect obtained only because the original authors had failed to control for birth weight, a variable so obvious that its omission must be considered a failure of peer review. Such a left-wing bias—and the errors that it enables—should embarrass the academy.

It also should prompt conservatives to address their human-capital problem: without right-wing academics, there are fewer experts to conduct research and staff bureaucracies. The problem is easy to see. Proposing a workable solution is much harder.

When a fire breaks out in the kitchen, the first step in stopping its spread is to turn off the stove. Likewise, a key part of the solution to the Right’s lack of representation in universities is to identify the source of the Left’s capture of the academy and put a stop to it. Manhattan Institute fellow John Sailer has thoroughly discussed the problems created by DEI statements and “cluster hires” and how trustees and state legislatures can end these anti-intellectual practices. These policies, which require applicants to profess their commitment to an ideologically oriented mission as a condition of employment, certainly contribute to the demand side of the Right’s academic-employment problem.

https://christopherrufo.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next=

Every era has its grifters, gurus, quacks, and frauds. This is an American tradition, from the snake oil salesmen to the pyramid-schemers to the New Age prophets of the twentieth century. One might be tempted to dismiss them as ethically compromised men, duping the gullible for personal benefit, but they’re something more than that: symbols of each generation’s hopes and anxieties.

The past decade’s examples, who sold us on critical race theory, transgender medicine, and other insanities, are no different. Some Americans wanted to absolve themselves of guilt about race and sexuality and liberate themselves from the shackles of history and biology. Prudent observers could have warned them about the impossibility of this enterprise, but the gurus had, for a time, seemingly unstoppable momentum.

The most significant was Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi. After the 2020 death of George Floyd, Kendi became America’s race guru, selling books, delivering speeches, lecturing corporations, advising politicians, and everywhere preaching the new gospel of “antiracism.” His key idea was that institutions must practice “antiracist discrimination” in favor of blacks and other minorities to make up for past “racist discrimination.” His ideology was rudimentary critical race theory, his agenda rudimentary DEI.

The press heralded Kendi as a genius, scholar, and the moral voice of the Black Lives Matter era. In 2021, the New York Times was particularly fawning, publishing uncritical fare like “Ibram X. Kendi Likes to Read at Bedtime,” an article about his reading habits. “You’re at the forefront of a recent wave of authors combating racism through active, sustained antiracism,” the Times opined. “Do you count any books as comfort reads, or guilty pleasures?”

Kendi cashed in. The professor signed a lucrative Netflix contract and switched to designer clothes. He secured $55 million for his “Center on Antiracist Research” at Boston University, which promised to engage in scholarship and activism.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/higher-education-trump-reform-universities-funding

Universities occupy a uniquely privileged position in American life. They enjoy tremendous prestige and billions in public subsidies, even as their costs have exploded, saddling the country with $1.7 trillion in outstanding student debt.

Do universities deserve their status? A growing number of Americans don’t think so. Far from delivering on their promises, most universities have devolved into left-wing propaganda factories. Nearly 60 percent of Republicans say that universities have a negative effect on the country, and only one in three independents has “quite a lot” of trust in higher education institutions. The trendlines suggest that the disillusionment has yet to hit bottom.

This is a crisis—and an opportunity. The Trump administration has a once-in-a-generation chance to reform higher education. The president and his prospective education secretary, Linda McMahon, should seize it.

The starting point of any serious higher-education agenda should be to recognize many universities for what they are: ideological centers that have abandoned the pursuit of knowledge for partisan activism. They have not earned their position as acclaimed credentialing institutions; rather, the schools have amassed their wealth and power from generous policy decisions bankrolled by American taxpayers, whom they have repaid mostly with contempt. These schools posture as though their position is untouchable, but their business model is nearly entirely reliant on federal largesse. Demanding that universities behave in a manner worthy of their unique financial and cultural position is long overdue.

But reform will not come easy. The Trump administration must renegotiate the deal between the citizens and the universities, conditioning federal funding on three popular demands: first, that the schools contribute to solving the student-debt crisis; second, that they adhere to the standard of colorblind equality, under both federal civil rights law and the Constitution; and third, that they pursue knowledge rather than ideological activism.

Here is how it can be done.

At the outset, we should acknowledge the dirty secret of higher education: it has become a creature, or, less charitably, a parasite, of the state. It is no stretch to say that the entire business model of higher education is fundamentally dependent on federal money.

First, consider direct grants. Universities collectively receive more than $50 billion in federal grants yearly. One-eighth of Havard’s annual budget—and two-thirds of its research funding—comes directly from the federal government. Likewise, Washington sends $900 million to Yale and $800 million to Columbia each year.

Some of this money goes to noble causes, such as cancer research. But much of it is devoted to ideological drivel, such as the $600,000 sent to Yale to study the “impacts of mobile technology on work, gender gaps, and norms”; $700,000 to the University of Pennsylvania to study how to allocate Covid vaccines on the basis of race; and $4 million to Cornell University to increase “minoritized” faculty in the medical sciences. And at some schools, administrators get the biggest cut, skimming up to 60 percent of grant funding as “indirect” overhead costs, which Congress once capped at a mere 8 percent.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/05/the-national-assessment-of-educational-regress/

The headlines last week told the sad story. The New York Times’ title read, “American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows,” while The 74 proclaimed, The New NAEP Scores Are Alarming. Hope Is Not a Strategy for Fixing Them.” The Wall Street Journal announced, “American Kids Are Getting Even Worse at Reading, Test Scores Show.

The stories shared lowlights from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given periodically to the nation’s students. The results from the 2024 reading and math test, given to 4th and 8th graders, were announced last week 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.

In 2019, 35% of 4th graders scored at or above the test’s reading proficiency standard, but that figure dropped to 33% in 2022 and, further, to 31% in 2024. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40%. Some 33% of 8th graders scored below “basic” on the exam—a record low.

The news was especially bleak for our lowest-performing students, who are “reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

Worsening reading skills have wide-ranging consequences. Poor test scores have been linked to the economic success of both the nation and individuals. Students with limited reading skills are less likely to graduate from high school, and as adults, they are more likely to be incarcerated.

Mindy Sjoblom of On Your Mark Education, a group dedicated to using the science of reading to promote literacy, asserts, “When students are not reading on grade level by third grade, their life-long choices are severely limited. One long-term study found that students who fail to meet this bar are 4 times more likely to drop out of school. In fact, 88% of these dropouts were struggling readers in third grade.”

It is worth noting that we’ve seen the same pattern recently on other tests—TIMSS, PIAAC, i-Ready, MAP, and state assessment results—explains Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.