The Biden-Harris administration announced the first set of resources from the U.S. Departments of Education and Justice on Monday to lawfully support and promote diversity and opportunity in colleges and universities
A new Alabama bill, “The Parent’s Choice Act” has made it out of committee and threatens to upend all of it and we’re not just talking about “charter schools,” we are talking about another run at segregation, which is bad enough with white flight.
The Biden Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah for their mask bans.
Education Sec. Miguel Cardona told Govs. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis don’t be the reason why Florida and Texas schools are interrupted.
For the last year, we’ve been focused on getting kids back to school. But even before the pandemic, American students’ reading, science, and math scores had flattened at depressingly low levels. So if our education system is failing to get the vast majority of our kids to even basic proficiency, why are we rushing to…
Will conservatives actually manage to get out ahead? Our edited conversation is below…you be the judge.
Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said at an event with First Lady Jill Biden that vaccinating teachers is his top priority.
Miguel Cardona, was sworn in on Tuesday and plans to immediately move to undo the damage that Betsy DeVos did to the department.
In the aftermath of the violent assault on the nation’s Capitol, all I heard on the cable news shows was how well-educated Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are. Cruz attended Princeton University and graduated from Harvard Law School. Hawley earned his undergraduate degree from Stanford University before completing his law degree at Yale. Brian…
“Teacher working conditions are student learning conditions.†This phrase has accompanied many a report on how to improve and reform public education in America and, of course, policy statements from education associations that support the work of teachers. To a large degree, the phrase is not just pithy but also has the ring of truth….
During his recent rallies it seems that Donald Trump has absolutely no idea of who he’s running against. Last week, it really seemed like he was running against Joe Biden’s son Hunter. And at every one of these rallies, he makes sure to throw in a dig at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As a freshman congresswoman, AOC…
Speaker Pelosi said that Trump doesn’t have the power to cut education funding and accused him of trying to unsafely open schools.
Last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell voiced strong opposition to providing any federal relief funding to assist state and local governments losing revenues hand-over-fist and facing mountains of unforeseen expenditures due to the coronavirus pandemic. Betsy DeVos, Trump’s embattled Secretary of Education, has been engaged in ongoing litigation because of her efforts to reverse…
Sanders, who dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary race this week, praised Joe Biden’s newly released healthcare and education proposals.
In his State of the Union Address, Trump took a swipe at what he called “failing government schools.†Most of us use the term “public school†or talk about “public education,†as we refer to institutions set up by, for, and of the people. Trump, of course, is talking about public schools, but his choice…
The drama of the impeachment of the nation’s president, reports indicate, simply has not captured the interest or concern of the American audience. Apparently the melodrama of daytime soap operas attracts their attention more than the antics of a corrupt president and administration actively undermining the nation’s security for personal gain at the expense of…
Back in 2004, Thomas Frank’s book What’s the Matter with Kansas? elevated the state as the textbook case of how the Republican party has been able to leverage a platform of conservative social values to sway the electorate to vote against its economic interests. Railing against abortion, affirmative action, big government, elitism, political correctness, and…
When asked about his approach to education in last Thursday’s Democratic primary debate, Pete Buttigieg’s response boiled down the difference between his approach and Donald Trump’s to its most  basic element. “Step one,†he said, would be to “appoint a secretary of education who actually believes in public education.†Buttigieg’s pithy statement put sharply into…
In an interview on Morning Joe after two nights of Democratic primary debates, Colorado Senator and Presidential candidate Michael Bennet pointed out that during those two nights not one question was asked of the twenty candidates regarding educational policy. Indeed, he continued, no question was asked of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the 2016…
Voters want their president to be an adult with substantive policy solutions, not a child with a catalog of juvenile nicknames.
We can hear the authoritarian echoes in both Trump’s and Bolsonaro’s policies to lower higher education.
Remember President Donald Trump’s State of the Union addresses last February and in particular in January 2018 amid a wave of teachers’ strikes? Can you recall the talking points he elaborated on the need to support public education? No? Well, that’s because since taking office he’s uttered barely a word about our at-risk public education…
The National Education Associaton and the California Teachers Association are suing Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and the Department of Education after they moved to delay rules that protect students who are studying in online programs.
Trump should be paying attention to what LeBron James is doing to transform education in northeast Ohio.
What if children stopped going to school until gun laws were changed to keep schools safe? That is the radical idea being proposed by former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who wrote on Twitter: “This is brilliant, and tragically necessary. What if no children went to school until gun laws changed to keep them safe?  My family…
Lesley Stahl of CBS has interviewed U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for the TV show 60 Minutes, and in the interview DeVos makes clear she is following the president’s lead when it comes to the best way to protect schoolchildren from mass murder.  As with President Trump, DeVos’s answer is: “More Guns in Schools.†During…
“The Trump administration’s reported education budget is an abomination,” Booker said.
They’re going full Trump with the budget, so DeVos is going to take an additional almost $8 million dollars over eight months for her own security away from the Department of Education, which was already underfunded and as the Trump administration is proposing cutting the budget by $9 billion dollars.
Democratic Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murry want answers after a vital educational rights resource for disabled students, and their families vanished after Education Secretary Betsy DeVos took office.
When Trump’s controversial Education Secretary Betsy DeVos tried to enter a Washington, D.C. school, protesters blocked the door and would not let her in.
Republicans rammed through the unqualified nomination of Betsy DeVos as Vice President Mike Pence was forced to break the 50-50 Senate tie, as the Trump privatization of public education has begun.
“Do you think … if your family has not made hundreds of millions of dollars of contributions to the Republican Party, that you would be sitting here today?”
DeVos has an appalling record on civil rights, no experience in or around public schools, and is intent on dismantling the American education system.
Democratic Senators Tom Udall (D-NM), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Edward J. Markey (D-MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) sent a letter to Trump’s Education Secretary nominee, Betsy DeVos, to pay the $5.3 million in fines that have been levied against her super PAC for election violations.
Efforts to undermine unions diminish democratic operations in our schools and disempower those who are most attuned to what our children need.
DeVos has the potential to undermine progress by diverting resources and failing to uphold government’s responsibility to protect the needs of students.
In one choice, Trump managed to abandon yet another campaign promise, while upsetting teachers unions and his most loyal supporters.
“We spend far more per pupil than any other country in the world. If you look at education. Out of thirty countries. We’re 30th. We’re last.â€
Clinton promises to be a champion for education by not taking advice from people interested in breaking unions and privatizing schools.
“It is just dead wrong to make teachers the scapegoats for all of society’s problems. Where I come from, teachers are the solution.”
Ted Cruz’s father says public education is a communist plot, but for the Founding Fathers, it was America’s hope for the future
The Washington state Supreme Court has ruled, in a very one-sided decision of 6 – 3 that charter schools are unconstitutional
It is obvious that the owner of a professional sports franchise, say a National Football League team, would only hire a hair-stylist who detests, and has never played, the game of football as a general manager and head coach if they wanted their team to fail miserably. That is an absurd idea, but it is precisely what two religious Republican governors who want to decimate their state’s public education system did in appointing evangelical anti-public education fanatics to run their state’s public school systems.
Here in Detroit, the worst of what many of us have long suspected about Gov. Snyder’s intentions toward our city and our schools may really be happening, because Snyder doesn’t even need to hide those intentions anymore.
Ann Coulter joined Fox and Friends on a trip down the vote-suppression rabbit hole. This time the Fox and Friends joined Coulter in her long crusade to bring back literacy tests to disenfranchise voters.
Because Republicans depend on “the widespread ignorance of objective reality,” their fascist threat to democracy is only succeeding due to the abundance of ignorance and gross stupidity of America’s uneducated citizenry. Subsequently, Republicans are building on their success and slashing education funding at a record pace to produce an entire population of stupid conservative voters.
Now that Republicans control both houses of Congress, Americans should brace themselves for a serious Koch-style assault on revenue and government agencies. Last year, Mitch McConnell told Kansas Governor Sam Brownback that Republicans were panting to enact a Koch-Kansas economic assault on America that Brownback imposed by giving the rich monumental tax breaks at…
Had the Founders heeded Moses, we would never have had a Constitution forbidding religious tests in the first place, or a First Amendment in the second
I think this may be a good time to reflect on a rather potent phrase that the late, great House Speaker Tip O’Neill used to say: “All politics is local.”
This time, an Austin judge dealt a devastating blow to Greg Abbott’s campaign against public education
The judge, Superior Court Judge Robert Hobgood, identified the Republican legislation, “Opportunity Scholarship Program,” as a scam to “siphon money from the public schools in favor of private schools and allows funding of non-public schools that discriminate on account of religion.”
Wendy Davis’ Republican opponent is planning to hold a press conference to unveil his education policy at a school district that lost the equivalent of 118 teachers because of the public education cuts Abbot continues to defend.
In a toss-up Senate race, North Carolina Senator Kay Hagan has a great opportunity to retain her seat by showcasing failed Republican public education policies.
If there is any doubt that Koch inspired Republican policies would be a disaster for America, one need only look to North Carolina, where you can see the results of these policies in real time.
Wendy Davis’ opponent’s education policy is based on a compilation of right wing assumptions about gender, race and class with intellect based in part on the mythical musings of white nationalist and misogynist Charles Murray.
Sam Brownback is one of many, many Republican governors cutting education spending to fund tax cuts for the rich and corporations.
John Kline, head of the House Education Committee, ignores his own long history of defunding public schools to claim Obamacare forces drastic cuts on education funding
Since 2011,Republican governors have taken their country back with the systematic demolition of the public education system and for Texas residents, the loss of paved roads.
Market-based educational reform is an utter failure, and yet we still can’t shake the nasty remnants of its bad policy influence
You wouldn’t think a progressive like myself would be agreeing with this governor, but I think he was on the right track.
Michigan Gov. Snyder’s Education Achievement Authority has been created for the sole purpose of establishing a workable model demonstrating how to destroy the nation’s public education system.
Who should we see sitting next to Secretary Duncan, joyfully reading stories to suitably enraptured Detroit school children but Gov. Rick Snyder.
Fox News is claiming that the education system has failed America, without realizing that they are the biggest cause of ignorance in this country,
Sarah Palin thinks that Melissa Harris-Perry’s ad calling for an investment in public education is evidence that MSNBC thinks your children don’t belong to you.
Piers was trying to have a sane discussion about gun safety measures when Dana Loesch exploded, ‘If you stab someone with a spoon it can be qualified as an assault weapon!’
An increasing number of states have passed a bill whose main component is increasing reading skills. It’s really another privatizing effort
Virginia Foxx really outdid herself when she compared regulating for profit education with the Holocaust.
The fight to save public education and retain local control of those schools against hostile takeover attempts has now attracted nationwide attention.
There is a growing movement to insert religion into the education system using taxpayer dollars.
Mitt Romney took aim at working moms today at NBC News’ Education Nation Summit, saying that it’s better if one parent can stay at home during early years.
Romney’s goal of a voucher system is taking taxpayer money and handing it directly to private corporations with less accountability and poor performance.
President Obama’s higher education plan is the Republicans’ worst nightmare because an educated population would avoid the GOP like plague.
The GOP has led a assault on higher education which has included restricting access, for-profit exploitation, and controlling curriculum.
Tea party leaders have shown their un-American roots by demanding that education be returned to an era when it was the exclusive domain of the wealthy.
Recently, Pat Buchanan cited a racist who claims that the statistics of the Paris-based OECDs Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests in reading, math and science skills of 15-year-olds in over 30 countries suggest that America’s low standing is because of the diminished learning ability of Hispanic and Black students. In other words, Buchanan believes that Black and Hispanic students have lower IQs than white and Asian students and are responsible for the decline in performance on standardized tests.
The conservative move to re-write history is not just about politics but ideology. The bogus controversy can’t exist without the bogus history conservative Christians have constructed, and the bogus history is tied into hate and intolerance and a need to justify it.
On his radio show today Glenn Beck continued to urinate all over the meaning and legacy of Martin Luther King, by claiming that King would support a new Arizona education policy that bans courses that are designed for students of a particular ethnic group, and prohibits teachers with a heavy accent from teaching English. Beck said, “This I believe Martin Luther King would be for.”
On his radio show today Rush Limbaugh tried to rally the obese against healthcare reform by claiming that if the overweight don’t lose weight, the bill will send them to reeducation camps. Limbaugh said that the government could, “send you off to some reeducation camp if you don’t lose weight.”
Recently, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) succeeded in getting passed in the Senate Finance Committee a new measure to re-fund the disastrous Abstinence Only Sex Education that clearly was so ineffective under the eight years of the Bush Administration. The measure would restore $50 million dollars in funding to what is nothing more than a failed ideological experiment.
July 4th is more than flags and firecrackers, hot dogs and apple pie. It’s even more than Independence Day. According to Founding Father, Thomas Jefferson, it is about life, liberty and the pursuit of education.
During an appearance of the Sue Jeffers show, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) claimed that the recent expansion the Americorps program is a dream comes true for those who want to rid America of capitalism because the Americorps program is really reeducation camps for young people.
This is the first installment of a five part series grading the two major party tickets for president on 5 categories: Education, Experience, Foreign Policy, Domestic Policy and Disposition. I will use an A+ through F grading scale.
Speaking by satellite to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama slammed his opponent John McCain for voting against education funding.
Barack Obama spoke via satellite to the National Education Association today, and called John McCain someone who “has a pretty slim record on education.” Obama said that when his opponent has taken a stand on education, it has been the wrong one.
President Biden announced that he will be expanding Affordable Care Act coverage to DACA recipients.Â
President Biden will give the Medal of Freedom to 19 recipients including Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn.
The Biden administration went beyond rolling back Trump’s weakening of Title IX sex discrimination protections in schools. President Biden make the protections stronger.
President Biden will be announcing a new plan that will cancel student loan debt for more than 30 million Americans.
GOP megadonor and “billionaire bully” Tim Dunn told former Texas Republican House Speaker Joe Straus that only Christians should hold leadership positions in the House.
Vice President Kamala Harris announced action by the Biden administration to protect the privacy and civil rights of the American people from government use of AI.
Democrat Marilyn Lands won a state House special in deep red Alabama by making reproductive rights the center of her campaign.
Jared Kushner praised the valuable waterfront property in Gaza but said Israel must clean it up by removing Palestinians.
Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) is facing a new ad from her likely Democratic challenger Ike McCorkle vowed to kick her out of Washington.
The Biden administration will be awarding economic grants to communities impacted by gun violence as a way to prevent crime and increase opportunity.
The Biden administration announced that President Biden will forgive another $1.2 billion in student loans, while Republicans plot to get rid of the program.
The Biden White House announced that they will be partnering with the NFL and 13 other professional sports leagues to fight child hunger and promote nutrition and exercise.
When asked what was the cause of the Civil War, Nikki Haley mentioned freedom and capitalism, but she refused to say anything about slavery.
The tragic tale of medical torture deliberately being inflicted on a U.S. citizen by Republicans in Texas is gruesome, but it also reveals that abortion ban exemptions are a very thin sham meant to appease on the surface only. They aren’t meant to actually be used.
A new survey reveals that President Biden was right and the media has been getting it wrong. Americans are warming up to the economy.
Communities rejecting MAGA hate like Moms for Liberty suggests there might be hope for the United States, which is still reeling from the divisions exploited by the efforts to get Donald Trump into the White House in 2016 that then exploded upon his win and still divide us today.
