RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://tomklingenstein.com/how-trump-can-reform-american-education/

President Trump has a crack team this time around. The president has come out swinging on parental rights, protecting girls in schools and sports, and stomping out CRT, DEI, and the rest of the insane woke agenda. 

With the White House’s statements on the disastrous new National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, President Trump has even shocked  and received heavily caveated approval from many in the education punditry class, an almost exclusively left-of-center crowd. On top it all, Trump publicly directed Linda McMahon, his Secretary of Education, to prepare for the controlled demolition and hollowing-out of the Department of Education, whose workforce has now been reduced by roughly half.

Yes, we’re off to a great start. But there be dragons.

New to the Party

Republicans have long neglected education, partly because the teacher’s union arm of the Democratic Party controlled the space, but often because conservatives simply were not interested. Education was “boring” compared to fighting communism and bombing third-world peasants; curriculum reform didn’t get you invited to Wall Street soirees. After all, Jeb Bush — who admittedly did a tremendous amount to reform education in Florida — was the face of conservative education policy, and we know what Trump did to Jeb. School choice was about as daring as Republicans would get on the issue, and even that was tepid. Many still viewed local schools as a quaint bit of Americana, a trustworthy and decidedly small-c conservative system. The Left traded on that goodwill and trust for decades, quietly pushing their garbage down from on high, even as achievement eroded.

Then came the lockdowns, the remote schooling, the wokeness, and the National School Board Association collusion with the Biden administration to blacklist concerned parents as terrorists. 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-columbia-funding-anti-semitism-bias-universities

The federal government has some “legitimate concerns,” said Columbia University interim president Katrina Armstrong last week, after the Trump administration announced the withdrawal of $400 million in federal grants because, it claimed, Columbia had not addressed rampant anti-Semitism on its campus. Armstrong’s words suggest that Columbia received the message. But have other institutions of higher education?

A recent survey of university presidents suggests not. Unless they take steps to address not just anti-Semitism but also the profound ideological bias that has facilitated it and other forms of radicalism on campus, they may be in line for similar sanctions. If they fail to act, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.

The poll, conducted by Inside Higher Ed, reveals the extent to which higher ed is in denial about its predicament. It asked university presidents about the causes of declining public confidence in higher ed. Only 11 percent identified “ideological bias” as the biggest cause of public mistrust (though twice as many acknowledged it as a “valid concern”).

The vast majority are clearly misreading the public mood. A decade ago, 56 percent of Republicans expressed confidence in higher education; by last year, that number had dropped to just 19 percent. A 2018 Pew poll found that 73 percent of Republicans believed higher education was headed in the wrong direction—and of that group, 79 percent cited politicization of the classroom and curriculum as a major reason. Among those voters, higher ed has been in free-fall for some time.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/03/13/is-the-jig-up-for-elite-higher-education/

Over the last three decades, elite American universities have engaged in economic, political, social, and cultural practices that were often unethical, illegal—and suicidal.

They did so with impunity.

Apparently, confident administrators assumed that the brand of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and other elite universities was so precious to the nation’s elite movers and shakers that they could always do almost anything they wished.

By the 1970s, non-profit universities had dropped pretenses that they were apolitical and non-partisan.

Instead, they customarily violated the corpus of iconic civil rights legislation by weighing race, gender, and sexual orientation in biased admissions, hiring, and promotions.

Graduation ceremonies became overtly racially and ethnically segregated. The same was true for dorms and “theme houses.”

So-called “safe spaces,” in the spirit of the Jim Crow South, reserved areas of campus solely for particular races.

Affluent foreign students often openly protested on behalf of designated terrorist groups like Hamas.

First-Amendment-protected free speech all but vanished on elite campuses. Any guest speaker who dared to critique abortion on demand, Middle East orthodoxy, biological males dominating women’s sports, or diversity/equity/inclusion dogmas was likely to be shouted down, or on occasion roughed up.

University administrators either ignored the violence done to the Bill of Rights or quietly approved when their rowdy students were turned loose on supposed conservatives.

But in their hubris, the universities began a series of blunders that may now end them as they once were.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/03/a_former_columbia_professor_applauds_the_defunding.html

I almost cheered out loud when I read that the Trump administration has cancelled $400 million in funding for Columbia University, despite the fact that when I taught there about three and a half decades ago, I no doubt directly benefitted from federal money flowing in, enjoyed my colleagues, and was treated very well. My animus and support for the cuts derives from the reluctant conclusion that as an institution, it has been corrupted, and nothing less than traumatic levels of change are required. The level of change required includes firing administrators, faculty, and admissions officers, expelling students, and revising hiring and admissions criteria. Only fear of financial catastrophe will suffice to strengthen sufficiently the spines of trustees and the administration.

Consider this abuse:

Some Columbia University professors canceled in-person classes on Monday in support of Mahmoud Khalil, the student activist and foreign national whom the Trump administration moved to deport over his pro-Hamas campus organizing. The cancellations — which came amid a pressure campaign from the school’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter — put the professors at odds with Columbia’s provost, who emailed “faculty colleagues” Monday morning to issue “a reminder that faculty must meet all scheduled classes.”

Faculty who cheat their students in order to make a political point should be immediately fired. They are defrauding the young minds whose families have coughed up the exorbitant tuition Columbia (and every other prestige college) charges: $71,170 per year. That works out to a quasi “ticket price” per hour of classroom instruction of $182 to $228, depending on whether a student takes 4 or 5 courses per semester. (See Columbia’s requirements, regulations and costs posted online for the underlying data.)

Imagine a theatre cancelling a performance that people spent over $200 to attend and refusing to refund the tickets.

It’s obvious that deeply politicized faculty, staff, and students are so numerous that they dominate the campus and poison the atmosphere, making the campus unsafe for Jews and any other minority that they may decide to target. They can’t be “reformed” because, as ideologues, they will resist.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/the-department-of-educations-time-has-come/

President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has terminated nearly $1 billion in contracts with the federal Department of Education (ED) and cut 29 DEI programs costing taxpayers $101 million. While further revelations await, the people should know that ED has no constitutional foundation – education is the purview of the states – and has existed only since 1979.

In 1976, the National Education Association, the nation’s most powerful teacher union, endorsed Jimmy Carter for president. The Georgia Democrat returned the favor by establishing the federal Department of Education, which did nothing to improve student achievement. That was confirmed in 1983 by A Nation at Risk, which contended that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”

ED was more about fattening the government payroll and boosting government power. Consider the actions of Biden education secretary Dr. Miguel Cardona, for example. Cardona’s “doctoral degree,” like Jill Biden’s, is in education, a non-discipline most useful as a bureaucratic credential. A classic zealot, Cardona used new Title IX regulations to impose gender junkthought.

“In a nutshell, the new rewrite means: – men can take academic AND athletic scholarships from women,” Riley Gaines explained. “Men will have FULL access to bathrooms, locker rooms, etc – men could be housed in dorm rooms with women – students and faculty MUST compel their speech by requiring the use of preferred pronouns If the guidelines above are ignored or even questioned, then YOU can be charged with harassment.” Cardona also deployed ED against schools congressional Democrats don’t like.

Grand Canyon University is an independent college that “reaches a broad variety of like-minded Christian congregations and organizations,” and many students want to attend. By contrast, Connecticut Democrat Rosa DeLauro called GCU a “predatory for-profit school.” The dutiful Cardona told her ED was aiming “to shut them down” and hit GCU for $37.7 million, the “largest fine in history against a school that lied about costs,” and so on. Compare Cardona’s predations with Obama ED boss Arne Duncan.