Department of education

Thursday

Charles Lipson

Axing the Department of Education will improve education

The big education news this week is a court ruling that allows the Trump administration to begin cutting jobs at the Department of Education. A cascade of familiar voices can be heard lamenting that ruling. That’s the angry, unified message from Democrats, the Washington Blob and their Media buddies. Woe betide the students, they wail. Damn this President. They are not just wrong. They are 180 degrees wrong. Why? First, they are wrong for democratic reasons. Donald Trump campaigned on a pledge to demolish the Department of Education. He’s carrying out that pledge, not backpedaling. That’s what citizens should expect from elected leaders in a constitutional democracy. They seldom receive it. Trump is not only right democratically, he’s right educationally.

Donald Trump

Thursday

Peter Wood

Anna Peterson’s New York Times article has restored my faith

Are contemporary faculty members at risk from false accusations made by supporters of Governor DeSantis? Or more generally President Trump? Has a crackdown begun that instills fear into the hearts of classroom teachers? Is there an epidemic of self-censorship that has gripped the campus?  Anna Peterson, professor of religion at the University of Florida, believes all this is true.  She presented her testimony in a New York Times guest essay last Sunday, “Did One of My Students Hate Me Enough to Lie to Get Me in Trouble?” I am among those naturally disposed to doubt pretty much everything in the Times that has a political slant – and few of its articles don’t. Nonetheless, I’m an assiduous reader of the newspaper.

times

Friday

Teresa Mull

Trump is right to eradicate the Department of Education

Teachers’ unions have donated millions upon millions over the years almost exclusively to Democratic candidates and left-wing organizations. So it’s no wonder Dems, realizing their cash cow could be on the verge of drying up, are losing their minds over President Trump signing an executive order yesterday to begin eradicating the Department of Education. If Americans get a real taste of school choice (Trump still needs a Congressional vote to end the agency), the left knows there will be no going back. Senator Chuck Schumer called the order “one of the most destructive and devastating steps Donald Trump has ever taken.

Education

Friday

Teresa Mull

Eliminating the Education Department is the key to restoring American culture

Since the US Department of Education’s inception in 1980, the agency has proven itself to be incompetent at its principal task: teaching American children. Adding insult to injury, the agency has also earned a big, fat F when it comes to fiscal responsibility. Despite this reality, headlines announcing the Trump administration’s newly streamlined Department of Education cast a somber tone. Layoffs “gutted” the Education Department, reports the AP. Democratic attorneys general are suing over “gutting of Education Department,” echoes the New York Times. The cuts will “decimate” the agency that “compiles ‘Nation’s Report Card’ and measures student performance,” laments ABC News. Cutting, gutting, decimating.

Monday

Ben Domenech

Trump’s hundred days of shock and awe

The second Trump administration has begun as it means to go on: moving fast and breaking Washington brains. Firings commenced immediately, from inspectors general to senior FBI officials to workers who refused to go back to the office (for the federal government, the pandemic never ended). The confirmations blasted through the Senate, with even controversial figures like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth rammed through in the first week. Executive Orders flew out like a flock of war pigeons released from the battlements — forty-five in the first two weeks alone — bearing commands small and sweeping.

Trump

Monday

Peter Van Buren

The coming Supreme Court win for religious rights

The Supreme Court is poised to grant a victory to religious conservatives via the First Amendment in blocking recognition of an LGBT club at Yeshiva University. Yeshiva is a Jewish law school which objects to the club on religious grounds. This is important news for other religious schools across America facing similar legal challenges. Though the Court as an intermittent step referred the case back to the lower courts as Yeshiva University v. YU Pride Alliance, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Comey Barrett made no bones in their dissent that they would stand with the First Amendment when the full case comes before the Supreme Court, as it is expected the lower courts will demand Yeshiva recognize and fund the club.

Alito

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

Biden’s unforgivable student loan authoritarianism

The frame for virtually any discussion of American politics at the moment advanced by the hair-on-fire segment of our media elite is that democracy itself is under attack. We are surrounded, according to the likes of CNN's Brian Stelter (peace be upon him), by those who would tear down the foundations upon which the government and ordered law of the United States of America stands, in a frontal illiberal assault on the institutions that keep us free. Fear the QAnon Shaman and his Viking hat! We all remember how close he came to ruling us all astride the floor of Congress.

student

Friday

Peter Wood

Biden’s CRT plan for the schools

Once upon a time, a CRT was a Cathode Ray Tube, that bulky thing that ran old televisions. Those tubes have been replaced by sleek new liquid crystal displays, but the initialism lives again as the hottest thing in totalitarian ideology: Critical Race Theory. CRT is still an idiot box, however. It tells you what it wants and shuts out everything else. But instead of showing you I Love Lucy and Gunsmoke (or Miami Vice and Knight Rider) it shows you that America is a racist monstrosity that inculcates white supremacy at every turn. Don’t try to change the channel, CRT is at every frequency. Sit back and obey. Efforts to enforce the CRT regime just got a signal boost. On April 18, the Department of Education posted its 'Proposed Priorities' for American history and civic education.