RUTHFULLY YOURS

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As someone who has been writing about education issues for years, I have noticed that disinformation, misinformation, and all-around twaddle are now more ubiquitous than ever. I will cover three areas here.

Massive teacher layoffs

Various online articles report that “massive teacher layoffs” —notably in California— are “devastating, chaotic, and detrimental” to student learning conditions.” While some layoffs include other employees, including librarians and nurses, most cuts are to teachers.

Most of the hysterics don’t acknowledge that many districts are over-staffed due in part to the expiring $190 billion federal Covid relief funds. Also, a major contributor to the need for fewer teachers in California is that while there were 6.3 million students in 2006-2007, now just 5.8 million are enrolled, and the state projects that number to fall to 5.3 million by 2031.

Looking at the bigger picture, researcher Chad Aldeman reports that in the 2023-24 school year, public schools nationwide added 121,000 employees, hitting a record high, even though enrollment dropped by 110,000. He discloses that about one-third of these districts added teachers while serving fewer students. For instance, Philadelphia lost nearly 16,000 students but employed 200 more teachers, dropping its student-to-teacher ratio from about 17:1 to under 15:1.

Aldeman writes that about a quarter of all districts followed the path of California’s Capistrano Unified School District, which lowered its teaching force over time but not as fast as it lost students. Capistrano suffered a “22% decline in student enrollment but reduced its teaching staff by just 7%.”

It’s worth noting that in most of the country, where teacher union contracts are in play, layoffs are made based on seniority, not teacher quality. Hence, students suffer not because of fewer teachers but rather fewer good ones.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/reflections-on-the-dismantling-of-the-dept-of-education/

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s decision to dismantle the Department of Education, there are a few issues to bear in mind – ones which, if properly attended to, will ensure that America remains a global educational force with which to contend.

In reverting the education of our youth to the individual states that make up our nation, and against the backdrop that some states are fiscally more advanced than others, the question remains: how does the United States remain true to its commitment to provide a first-class education to its youth without compromising any of its quality, where that quality is tied to economic status on a state level? The ethical issue at stake here is that the quality of each American student ought not be constrained by an accident of birth. Students born into poor families and living in poorer states have just as much potential and cognitive capabilities as those born into affluent families living in high-income districts.

Although there are some exceptions, high-income school districts tend to spend more money on education per pupil and have better outcomes, while low-income districts tend to spend less and have worse outcomes. Without entering into a debate about the ethicality of publicly funded education, it should be fairly obvious that in order for the United States to surpass those 40 countries President Trump has identified as being ahead of us educationally, our nation needs to ensure that talented and capable students trapped in poorer states should have as much of an equal chance to matriculate through K-12 as their more affluent compatriots.

The President has derided our education system and has stated that the country performs the worst globally while spending the most per pupil. President Trump declared: “We’re last, we’re number 40 but we’re number one in cost per pupil.”

One issue that needs to be investigated is exploring how and why such funds are allocated in ways that do not increase performance. It should go without saying that if we wish to remain competitive with other nations that are outperforming our students in several domains including reading, writing and mathematics, then the government ought to ensure that dollars are spent in a way that can directly correlate to excellent outcomes.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/columbias-president-resigns-but-the-dei-battle-is-just-beginning

With the resignation of Columbia University’s interim president, the academic-diversity complex seems to have sent out a warning shot: cooperation with the Trump administration will be punished. Outgoing president Katrina Armstrong claimed in her resignation letter, submitted Friday, March 28, that she had always “planned” to return to her various bureaucratic positions in Columbia’s medical schools. Quite possibly true. But the question is: For when was that return planned?

The timing suggests that the decision was forced by external pressure. Armstrong had been facing a faculty revolt for over a week, as well as a lawsuit from eight Columbia students. The faculty objected to Armstrong’s decision to comply—more or less—with a set of Trump administration demands issued as a precondition for avoiding a $400 million cut in federal funds.

The Columbia faculty, or at least its most left-wing, pro-Palestinian bloc, had also revolted against Armstrong’s predecessor, Minouche Shafik. According to her critics, Shafik had failed in Congress to sufficiently defend Columbia’s pro-Hamas campus protests,. Then she failed to protect those illegal protesters from arrest.

Now the faculty appear to have taken another scalp.

Th irony is that Armstrong had outmaneuvered the Trump administration in some of its demands. Contrary to press reports, that outmaneuvering was not a concealed stratagem; she merely used clever drafting. In so doing, she had served a reminder that the president’s team had better start reading the fine print if it wants to secure its counterrevolution. Other recent developments in academia confirm how wily the Trump administration’s diversity-industry opposition is.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-groves-of-academe-get-some-needed-weeding/

After fifty years of pedagogical malpractice and trillions of squandered taxpayer dollars, Donald Trump has begun to rid our public schools of their destructive politicization. He’s directed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to start dismantling the Department of Education, and has commenced “pausing” funds given to rich, prestigious universities that promote transgender voodoo, tolerate anti-Semitism, and enable supporters of terrorism.

Most important, he’s acting to reverse the failures of our public schools to teach foundational skills and knowledge necessary for citizens living in a free state with unalienable rights and political equality.

And he’s starting with the exorbitant public funding of private universities flush with huge, tax-free endowments, and taxpayer subsidies distributed through government-backed student loans managed by the Department of Education–– “a student-loan boondoggle,” the Wall Street Journal writes, “with a $1.6 trillion portfolio, while harassing schools, states and districts with progressive diktats on everything from transgender bathroom use to Covid-19 mask rules.”

Moreover, universities with bulging endowments have been raising tuition costs far beyond the rate of inflation, at the same time they create politicized programs, even as completion and graduation rates decline, administrator outnumber tenured faculty, GPA inflation skyrockets, and fundamental skills and knowledge are replaced with leftist ideological fads like illiberal identity politics programs.

Trump’s cutting back on federal funds is a good way to fight back against this degradation of curricula. Taking back $400 million from Columbia is a good start. Its indulgence of violent protests against Israel, replete with anti-Semitic, genocidal slogans, swastika graffiti targeting Israel, and violence against Jewish students, epitomize the ideological corruption of our once-most prestigious universities.

But Trump also is offering a smart way to get the funds back: by requiring universities to agree to meet his nine demands, including “banning masks, empowering campus police and putting the school’s department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies under ‘academic receivership,’” the Journal writes, which means such programs would no longer be controlled by the faculty. After some grousing, Columbia has acceded to Trump’s conditions.

https://www.racket.news/p/the-angst-of-the-well-endowed
I’m sure a lot of good people are being hammered by the recent cuts, and yes, there are real speech issues in play. The reaction from academia however leads me to believe these institutions are so myopic and intrinsically exploitative that they can’t be fixed without first being taken apart. They have to be moved back to reality, but if they won’t go on their own, what is there to do?

From Thomas Edsall in the New York Times this morning:

Marc Andreessen, a billionaire venture capitalist, cryptocurrency investor and pivotal but unofficial adviser to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, made the case in a recent interview that the entire system of American higher education should be shuttered and abandoned… The American university system commands worldwide respect. What would prompt a call for its abolition?

At Johns Hopkins, the loss of $800 million in U.S.A.I.D. grants has forced the school to lay off 2,200 foreign and domestic workers… The Trump administration announced that it was cutting $400 million in grants to Columbia University “due to the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.”

Twenty years ago, maybe even ten, I’d have found these stories about Elon Von Hitler-Musk detonating thousands of campus-related jobs horrifying. But the education sob stories now flying off the presses are a Burj Khalifa of “needs context.” A gigantic lie of omission is a constant feature of these stories:

Take Johns Hopkins. NBC News was one of many to highlight the “grave consequences” the new administration’s policies have had on the famed institution, noting “the changes will also have an economic impact in Baltimore because the university is the largest private employer in Maryland.” NBC pointed out that “about half of Johns Hopkins’ funding last year came from federal research dollars, according to a letter from Ron Daniels, the university’s president.”

It seemed odd that the “largest private employer in Maryland” is half-funded by the federal “research dollars,” but I shrugged and went to the Johns Hopkins website to read the Daniels letter. When there’s money on the line and university presidents have time to compose their thoughts, expect the ultimate in soaring magniloquent resplenditude. Daniels didn’t disappoint.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/23/trumps-war-on-woke-columbia-and-big-law-fall-in-line/

The parade of capitulations to Donald Trump’s instauration of America has been breathtaking. on to the phase of grumbling, then abject acquiescence. Here are a couple of notable examples from the last several days.

Columbia University, one conspicuous home of Intifada wannabes, was dinged some $400 million in government contracts because it had conspicuously failed to follow laws prohibiting discrimination. As Secretary of Education Linda McMahon explained, since the October 7, 2023, slaughter by Hamas of some 1,200 Israelis in Gaza, “Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses—only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them.”

At first, Columbia officials attempted to mount some moderately high, if decrepit, horses to insist on their defiance. But just a few days ago, the administration completely caved, basically acceding in substance to all nine of Trump’s demands. The university agreed to ban masks and allow campus police officers to arrest unruly students. It also agreed to appoint a senior university official to oversee the Department of Middle East, South Asian, and African Studies as well as the Center for Palestine Studies. The university objected to the term “receivership” to describe this outcome. But as The Wall Street Journal noted, “the changes align with what usually happens in a receivership.”

Although The Wall Street Journal is not usually thought of as a comic publication, that column did contain one inadvertently hilarious sentence. The column noted that educational institutions across the country are watching what is happening at Columbia “with alarm.” They should be alarmed, for the same reason that John Donne advised readers not to ask for whom the bell tolls. Then came the funny bit. “Their primary concern,” the Journal intoned, was that “without freedom to follow their intellectual curiosity, the discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy will decline or even grind to a halt.”

Set the phenomenon of “intellectual curiosity” on one side of a chart. Then write down “Columbia’s Departments of Middle East and Palestine Studies.” What connects the two? It’s a baffling problem that no one has yet been able to answer.

But it is probably not as baffling as the suggestion that what goes on in those politicized, anti-Semitic redoubts has ever issued in “discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy” or that, absent such putative “discoveries and innovations,” said the economy would “decline or even grind to a halt.”

That would be like saying that Columbia’s “Women’s and Gender Studies” Department featured “intellectual curiosity,” as distinct from politicized grievance-mongering, or that any verbiage emitted from those hothouse quarters ever issued in “discoveries and innovations that fuel the U.S.’s economy.”