Jake Tapper asked Kristi Noem about the tape of the killing of Renee Good.

Tapper tried to pin down Stephen Miller about whether the U.S. would rule out using military force to “take Greenland” and whether there might be elections in Venezuela. Miller’s view: might makes right.

Gal Beckerman wrote in The Atlantic:

If you want to know a political leader’s governing philosophy, you could cut through a lot of bluster by just asking them who their guy is: John Locke or Thomas Hobbes? Anyone who’s taken Poli Sci 101 will understand what this means. The 17th-century philosophers each offered a picture of human nature in its rawest form, and they came to different conclusions. Locke, whose ideas were central to the birth of modern democracy, thought that people were capable of reason and moral judgment. Hobbes, on the other hand, believed that we were vicious creatures who needed to be protected from ourselves by a powerful king. Whether a leader is Lockean or Hobbesian really does set the table for the kind of government they want.

One way to understand the head-spinning nature of being an American over the past couple of decades is that this debate—one that history seemed to have settled in Locke’s favor—is alive again. Barack Obama was a Lockean through and through—insisting, repeatedly, that if citizens were just given accurate information and a fair hearing, they would converge on something like the common good. Then came Donald Trump, Hobbesian extraordinaire, who has often portrayed life under anyone’s leadership but his own much as Hobbes describes the state of nature: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” (Nasty is even one of Trump’s favorite words.)

Comments this week from Stephen Miller, the influential deputy chief of staff often cast as the president’s “brain,” only reinforced this impression. Miller might have been Hobbes in a skinny tie as he confidently articulated what he understood to be the “iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” His monologue was like something out of the English philosopher’s 1651 political treatise,Leviathan: “We live in a world, in the real world,” he said, “that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

Miller’s might-makes-right declaration came after Trump’s decision to overthrow the president of Venezuela, and in anticipation of the United States possibly acquiring Greenland from Denmark, perhaps by any means necessary (a notion that Miller’s wife found fit to turn into a meme). The will to dominate, seize other countries’ resources because you can, and generally bully those that can’t fight back is nothing to worry about, Miller reassured Americans: This is the natural state of things. This is how it all works. Power does what it wants. The rest is commentary and toothless United Nations resolutions—or, as he put it, “international niceties.”

Kevin Bolling is executive director of the Secular Student Alliance, which advocates for schools free of religious ideology. Bolling writes here about the attack on public schools in Colorado.

In Colorado, a quiet revolution is underway, one that threatens the very idea of public education.

The Colorado Schools Fund, launched in 2024 with $50 million in philanthropic support, is not simply financing new charter and microschools. It is reshaping the public narrative about education itself. Through a strategic mix of capital, ideology and political influence, CSF and its allies are advancing a powerful message: that market-driven “choice” is the only remedy for supposedly irredeemable public schools.

Once public schools are cast as broken beyond repair, charters and microschools become steppingstones toward something far more consequential: a broad voucher system that redirects public money to private and religious education. The Daniels Fund, whose donation seeded CSF, has long championed vouchers. Their investment signals the next phase, a push to convince parents that privatization is not only desirable, but inevitable.

The consequences are profound. This approach doesn’t merely siphon resources away from neighborhood schools; it erodes their legitimacy. When foundations and political operatives rebrand public education as a failure, they create the very conditions they claim to solve. And as public confidence collapses, the argument for taxpayer-funded private schooling becomes easier to sell.

That dynamic is already playing out in Pueblo, where Riverstone Academy presents an alarming test case. Operating under Education reEnvisioned BOCES, the school has marketed itself as a public elementary school while pushing a Christian curriculum. Ken Witt, head of the BOCES, even described Riverstone as “Colorado’s first public Christian school” during a board meeting last fall. Yet the school’s official paperwork made no mention of religious instruction. Was the omission accidental or intentional?

The backstory suggests the latter. Emails show Brad Miller, a lawyer for Pueblo County School District 70, requesting permission to establish a new school inside the district’s boundaries but governed by neighboring District 49. The arrangement, he wrote, would allow the group to work with Alliance Defending Freedom, the conservative legal organization known for high-profile religious liberty cases to test “the legalities around the issue of whether a public school may provide religious education.”

Riverstone Academy appears designed as a legal provocation: a taxpayer-funded public school created to force a battle over whether public dollars can support explicitly Christian instruction. This is not a misunderstanding. It is a strategy, one aimed at normalizing religious schools operating with public funds.

This local experiment unfolds alongside a national effort to redefine public education. The Trump administration’s recently passed federal voucher bill casts public schools as a “monopoly” in need of disruption, echoing decades of market rhetoric. But as Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center warns, the supposed “flexibility” states gain under the bill is illusory. Instead, it invites federal overreach, weakens student protections and replicates the academic declines already associated with large-scale voucher expansion.

Those protections matter, especially for LGBTQ+ students and families. Behind the lofty language of empowerment lie schools that quietly, and sometimes openly, exclude them. Across the country, private schools participating in voucher programs deny admission to LGBTQ students or the children of LGBTQ parents. Some embed exclusion in handbooks or “morality clauses”; others teach explicitly anti-LGBTQ doctrine. Yet taxpayer dollars increasingly subsidize these institutions under the banner of choice.

The Douglas County School District’s “Choice Scholarship” program, a voucher initiative struck down in court, would have funneled public funds to religious schools with documented histories of exclusion. As Gregory M. Lipper of Americans United for Separation of Church and State put it, “Taxpayer money can’t be used to fund religious schools or religious education.” Voucher systems blur that principle, and families who accept vouchers lose crucial federal civil rights protections, including those guaranteed by Titles VI and IX, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and even constitutional rights to free expression and due process.

When a Colorado district court ruled in 2011 that Douglas County’s program violated the state constitution it reaffirmed a moral commitment: that public education, however imperfect, rests on the promise that every child, regardless of identity, belongs.

If we abandon that promise in pursuit of “choice,” we are not expanding opportunity. We are narrowing it. And for LGBTQ+ students, the cost of that illusion may be nothing less than their place in America’s classrooms.

Peter Greene has the great advantage of classroom experience when he evaluates shiny new ideas. The latest in Ohio is an unfounded mandate concocted by Andrew Brenner, the chairman of the Ohio House Education and Career Readiness Committee in the state legislature. Brenner previously called public schools “socialist” and is a strong supporter of privatization. In this post, Peter shows the underside of the latest “reform.”

He writes:

The Ohio legislature is considering a bill that will require schools to provide students with free “high-dosage tutoring” that will be subject to Department of Education and Workforce auditing along with a new professional development program for math teachers. The legislators have not included funding for any of this. Not a cent. It is the very definition of an unfunded mandate.

As reported by Laura Hancock at Cleveland.com:

“Our educational system must be responsive to the needs of our students,” bill sponsor Sen. Andrew Brenner, a Delaware County Republican, said earlier this year during bill testimony. “In this last year alone, we have significantly increased the amount of funding each student receives for their education, provided resources for tutoring services, and made high quality instructional materials available while identifying methods of instruction that most benefit students. If we are unable to say that our students who need the most help are in fact receiving that assistance from their school, then we are putting the interests of adults ahead of the needs of children.”

Lordy, it’s like a word salad made out of some of the most popular baloney talking points. “Putting the interests of adults ahead of the needs of children.” You know, like teachers with their need to be paid for extra hours of work. Mind you, putting the needs of adult politicians to look like they’re bravely Doing Something about education ahead of actually supporting that education– that kind of adults-first posturing is perfectly okay.

Brenner was a realtor and insurance salesman before he ascended to the legislature in 2019. He has a Masters in Ed in Leadership from far-right Christian nationalist Liberty University. In 2020, he warned that the state was going to become Nazi Germany over the Covid rules.

The bill at least exempts schools from providing these services for IEP students.

But it assumes that high-dosage tutoring is a real thing, without noting that it is hard and expensive to scale up.

This is the story of education a million times– some legislator gets a bright idea and declares “Let’s require schools to fix this” while waving vaguely in the direction of schools. And while this bright idea may require more resources and human-hours, that lawmaker will be confident that this whole new program can be implemented for free. Rick Hess has often said that you can force folks to do something, but you can’t force them to do it well. That is doubly true when you make zero effort to provide them with the resources needed to implement the program.

Doesn’t matter. Lawmakers will sign the bill (already through the Senate and headed through the House) and congratulate themselves on solving an education problem. For those who, like many Ohio legislators, would like to gut public education, the school’s failure to do a great job implementing the unfunded mandate is just more fodder for the “We gave them money and they didn’t perform magical pedagogical feats” argument used to discredit and dismantle public schools.

Would more no-cost tutoring be great? Sure, though I’d rather it were employed in a more useful cause than raising Big Standardized Test scores. And if you are undertaking a program that essentially increases the number of teacher hours in a day while simultaneously lowering the student-teacher ratio–well, if you are at all serious about it, you come armed with a big pile of money.

The Ohio legislature is not serious about this, but it will be a serious problem for schools.

But hey– they’re probably pre-occupied with the question of whether or not the state will be allowed to buy the obscenely wealthy owners of the Browns a new stadium with $600 million of taxpayer money. Gotta focus on important stuff that deals with the real interests of adults.

Elizabeth Huebeck of Education Week reported on an exciting development: the return of play-based learning in Connecticut.

Since the passage of No Child Left Behind more than twenty years ago, play has been pushed out of the curriculum in the early years, replaced by test-based, standardized accountability.

But Mansfield Elementary School in northeastern Connecticut provides a demonstration of the power of play. The children are motivated, engaged in play, and learning.

Huebeck wrote:

When the doors to Mansfield Elementary School in northeastern Connecticut officially opened to students in the 2023-24 school year, Principal Kate McCoy had a lot to be excited about.

She looked forward to building a new school community for the estimated 550 students coming together from three former area schools that had closed due to aging infrastructures and declining enrollment. And she appreciated how the building’s features—abundant natural light, a patio for outdoor learning, a dedicated LEGO room, and the neighboring Mansfield Hollow State Park, whose 250-plus acres allow for easy access to class hikes and other outdoor activities—would support her primary goal as an elementary school leader: to create a culture of joy for students.

The timing was right. 

In 2023, Connecticut passed legislation mandating a return to a teaching approach for young learners that has eroded across the country in the wake of more rigorous academic expectations: guided play.

“I believe elementary schools need to be places where we build joy, and play is how we can get there,” said McCoy. “Pushing play was part of our dialogue from the get-go.”

McCoy’s message, and the state’s newly implemented legislation, are a part of the growing pushback to the “academization” of kindergarten. Over the past couple decades, educators in the early grades have increasingly introduced literacy and math standards with an eye toward preparing students for the grades, and standardized tests, ahead. Explorative, imaginative play that once dominated early-elementary classrooms has been de-emphasized, teachers say. 

But while rigorous academic standards in the early grades may be here to stay, how schools best support students in reaching these standards isn’t set in stone.

“The academic rigor of kindergarten has changed, but that does not mean that play should be removed,” McCoy said. “When children find joy at school, they are more willing to take risks, persevere, and engage in challenging learning.”

Connecticut educators pushed for legislation that reintegrates play in early grades

Members of the Connecticut Education Association pushed hard for the 2023 legislation that reinstated play in early-elementary classrooms. To bolster its argument, the association surveyed the state’s K-3 teachers and found that the teachers reported dramatic declines in play, coinciding with a rise in direct instruction and test preparation. The survey also noted a significant increase in behavioral problems and more anxiety in the early grades in recent years.

Joslyn DeLancey, who taught elementary school in Connecticut public schools for 15 years before joining the state teachers’ union as vice president in 2021, witnessed firsthand such changes sweep through kindergarten programs. The school day went from a half day to a full day. Teachers were told by school leaders to remove from their classrooms blocks, dress-up materials, and other sources of imaginative play. 

“Then they really started pushing these forced scripted curriculums and teaching to the test and really just took all of the play out of the classroom,” she said.

That’s starting to change. The Constitution State’s law, which went into effect July 2024, requires public elementary schools to provide play-based learning for kindergarten and preschool students and permits teachers in grades 1-5 to incorporate play-based learning. 

DeLancey continues to support the law’s implementation, offering professional development workshops for elementary school educators on play-based learning.

The Mansfield school system has emerged as a key partner in the association’s efforts to educate teachers on how to incorporate guided play into the curricula. In the summer of 2024, the district, which serves just under 1,000 students, collaborated with the union to host two days of professional learning on developmentally appropriate guided play aligned to academic standards.

That professional learning continues. “Through ongoing professional development, coaching, and collaboration, play-based learning continues to deepen across our school,” McCoy said.

Teachers at Manchester Elementary report that, in the brief time that they’ve been encouraged to deliberately weave guided play into academic lessons, they’re seeing how it benefits their young students—namely, igniting their innate curiosity and reducing feelings of academic pressure.

Using imaginative, playful lessons to make learning stick

For veteran teachers at Mansfield Elementary like Erika LaBella, the changes couldn’t come soon enough.

“What I’m teaching kindergartners now is what I was teaching 1st graders many moons ago,” LaBella said. “We were slowly watching ourselves move away from play. Then Kate brought this [new instruction] back to us and said, ‘We can incorporate play into our academics,’ and that’s what we’ve all been able to do—find a way to have the kids be joyful throughout the whole day, instead of just having one little isolated time to go play.”

That joyfulness can extend even to the more mundane lessons, like learning new vocabulary, which historically has involved word lists and rote memorization. Courtney Ramsdell, a kindergarten teacher at Mansfield Elementary, has found a better way to get new vocabulary to stick for her young students.

She starts with a focus wall that relates to a specific lesson. In the fall, for instance, Ramsdell’s focus wall centered on a pumpkin patch that doubled as an interactive learning board. The soil for the pumpkin patch required nutrients—a vocabulary word whose meaning made sense to students in the context of growing pumpkins. These nutrients made the soil fertile, another vocabulary word. The students labeled the different parts of the pumpkin patch with their newly acquired vocabulary and added to it throughout the fall. 

“It continued to grow so far above and beyond what the actual curriculum required,” Ramsdell said.

In Kate Harbec’s 2nd grade class at Mansfield Elementary, students in December learned both math principles and vocabulary while building gingerbread people. She first introduced to students the concept of polygons, then, quadrilaterals. She then tested students’ knowledge by spreading out dozens of polygons made out of felt and having students form gingerbread people using only the quadrilateral-shaped pieces.

“They had to think about what the attributes of a quadrilateral were. And by the end of 15 minutes, every kid could tell you that a quadrilateral had four sides,” Harbec said. “It was just a fun, engaging way for them to apply it right away.”

Learning through play takes the pressure away

In most school settings, students learn from a young age that there is a right and a wrong answer. This knowledge can quickly become a source of stress or anxiety. 

Students might become fixated with getting the right answer and the best grades. Getting the answer wrong often enough can lead students to lose confidence, become convinced that they’re not good at school, and even stop trying altogether. On the contrary, teaching concepts via playful exploration encourages academic inquiry and stamina, Harbec said.

In science, her 2nd graders are learning about matter and properties by building toys. 

“Because it’s playful, when things fall apart, they’re like, ‘OK, I can fix it,’” Harbec said. “It’s a natural way to work on growth mindset and learning, because they don’t feel like they’re right or wrong. It’s all about the process along the way.”

Fixating on getting the “right” answer can derail the learning progress for even very young students. So too can hyperawareness of one’s rank within a classroom. Harbec uses games to circumvent this issue as her students strengthen their math skills.

“One group might be playing with cards or dice with higher numbers to make it more challenging for them. The kids are all just thinking they’re playing this game. And if you come into the room, you think everybody is doing exactly the same thing, but you actually have groups of kids working at their best level,” Harbec said. “It’s a natural way to differentiate.”

Early reports show strong performance at Mansfield Elementary

Mansfield Elementary teachers consistently report high student engagement, collaboration, oral language, and confidence, said McCoy, the school’s principal.

In 2023-24, the school’s first full year, Connecticut’s School Performance Index (SPI) showed that Mansfield Elementary students, outperformed state averages in English/language arts by 10.5 percentage points—74.4% compared with 63.9%. The following year, the school’s SPI score in ELA rose to 77.5%, the highest in both the district and the state. 

Thirty-two percent of the school’s students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, and 10% identify as English learners. 

Meanwhile, in 2023-24, the school’s math SPI score was 74.4%, compared with the district’s overall score of 72.2% and the state’s average score of 60.2%. In 2024-25, the school again outperformed all other schools in the state, with a math SPI score of 75.5%.

Based on state assessment results, Mansfield Elementary has been recognized as a School of Distinction for the past two years. 

“This reinforces that centering joy and play does not mean lowering expectations,” McCoy said. “It means creating the conditions where students can do the hard work of learning.”

One year ago, Ann Telnaes quit her job at The Washington Post.

Her editor refused to print a cartoon she had drawn showing tech billionaires bowing at Trump’s feet. One of them was Jeff Bezos, the owner of the newspaper. Her editor said that the topic duplicated stories. Ann didn’t agree. She quit, not knowing where she would go next.

Like many other suddenly homeless writes, she started a blog at Substack, where she has a large following and no editor to shut her down.

She wrote about the past year:

On January 3, 2025 I published “Why I’m quitting the Washington Post” on Substack. When I made my decision to leave, I knew this would be the end of my thirty year career as an editorial cartoonist – but that’s not what happened. For whatever reason the news went viral, not just in the United States but in many countries throughout the world.  Because of you and your incredible support, I continue to draw cartoons and try to shine a light on the criminal behavior of this administration and the ongoing threats to our democracy. Thank you.

Throughout this year I received many invitations to speak about the free press and editorial cartooning, here in the US and internationally. As I’ve mentioned before, public speaking isn’t in my comfort zone but I tried to accept as many as I could because of Trump’s escalating attacks on the free press and also to talk about my profession and hopefully make people more aware of the importance of editorial cartooning.

In February the documentary I appeared in, “Democracy Under Siege”, was screened in Santa Barbara, and then again in New York City at the Doc NYC Selects film festival. In April I traveled to The Hague in the Netherlands, in May to Bergen, Norway, and then on to Switzerland with stops in Geneva, Morges, and Lucerne . 

And in May, to my complete surprise I won the Pulitzer Prize for Illustrative Reporting and Commentary.

Announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes at the Washington Post (where I obviously was not in attendence)

While I visited Geneva,  Patrick Chappatte and I began our collaboration on a book, Censure en Amérique.

Then a few more trips nationally for presentations and panels in DC, University of Kentucky, Ohio State University, University of Minnesota, San Jose State University, ending my year with a speech in Landau, Germany to accept the Thomas Nast Prize. 

The people I talked to while overseas are mystified at what is happening to a country which seems to be willingly letting its democratic principles be hijacked by an immoral conman and his corrupt enablers. After my speech in Landau, I met several expats in the audience who are shocked at how their country has fallen so fast and so far. I share their feelings.

(from my Landau speech)

Every American editorial cartoonist is familiar with Thomas Nast and how he exposed the corrupt 19th century New York politician Boss Tweed through his cartoons. We all have seen the drawing of Tweed and his accomplices depicted as vultures, sitting on a ledge with bones and skulls scattered around them… and also the iconic image of Tweed’s unmistakable portly figure with a large bag of money representing his head. One can only imagine the cartoons Nast would be doing right now about President Donald Trump and his grifting family and cronies. Nast also created the political symbol of the elephant to represent the Republican Party, although I’d like to think that he would have chosen something more reptilian to represent the current spineless GOP.

And I’m sure Thomas Nast would have been outraged at what is happening in his adopted homeland. I too have German roots on my late mother’s side. My late father was Norwegian and I became a naturalized U.S. citizen as a young teenager. Although I am proud of my heritage, I have always considered myself an American. A proud American. So it pains me to see what has happened this past year, with democracy under attack and the principles and ideals which the country was founded on being threatened- including a Free Press, which is an essential part of a democracy. 

Thank you again for all your support and comments. Yes, I read all of them and truly appreciate your insights, humor, and our Substack community. Wishing each of you a happy and healthy New Year.

In an airport (not sure which one)

How do bullies get away with belittling and dehumanizing other people? This video explains the present moment.

Now, in case you want to reduce the amount of pet hair in your home, I recommend a pet vacuum called Oneisall. For tips on how to vacuum your cat, I give a demonstration in this clip.

This is what kindergarten teachers do!

This is a shelter where dogs choose their owners.

If you have favorite videos, especially ones that make you smile, please share them.

And….HAVE A HAPPY 2026!!

🍾🍾🍾🍾❤️❤️❤️❤️😁😁

Jan Resseger is a wonderful woman who spent most of her career advocating for social justice on behalf of the United Church of Christ. She is now retired but she never stops caring and acting. Here she summarizes the Trump administration’s accelerated retreat from enforcing civil rights laws.

One hint about Trump’s view of civil rights was his appointment of Harmeet K. Dhillon to lead the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Dhillon is a prominent opponent of civil rights and has litigated many cases to oppose policies that she believes are unfair to white men.

She wrote recently:

Nothing, except growing tariffs and the failure to mitigate the damage of the wars in Gaza and the Ukraine, has defined Donald Trump’s second term more than the administration’s attempt to undermine civil rights protection for students and educators in our nation’s 13,000 public school districts and the nation’s colleges and universities.

We watched an attack on Maine’s public schools where trans students compete in women’s sports. We watched the Department of Education withhold funds from the Chicago Public Schools because the district has a Black student student success plan that promotes what the Trump administration considers the dangerous principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And just this week, Education Week reported that the Department of Education is cancelling many grants for Full Service Community Schools and the Promise Neighborhoods program where funds are being spent on services the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Many of the Department of Education’s efforts to curtail the protection of the civil rights of historically marginalized groups of students have been temporarily stayed by Federal District Courts, but a lot of these cases linger in temporary, local decisions without any legal resolution.

Some colleges and universities have felt enough pressure that they’ve signed agreements to share with the federal government admissions information including high school grades, test scores and family income of all applicants to prove they are not selecting their students based on proxy data that substitutes for race-based affirmative action. Others have lost federal research grants as a punishment for maintaining programs and policies the Trump administration believes promote diversity, equity, and inclusion and thereby discriminate against the white majority.

Is there any chance the Trump administration’s effort to stamp out civil rights will wind down in 2026?  Here are three events in December that indicate the attacks are likely to continue.

The Trump administration just ended the disparate impact test in civil rights enforcement.  For years the federal government has held schools accountable when data proves, for example, their discipline systems are discriminatory by race or ethnicity or disability status. Evidence of disparate impact has been used for decades to protect students and others from discrimination in institutions that receive government funding including education, law enforcement and fair housing. But that ended abruptly on Wednesday, December 9.

The Washington Post‘s Laura Meckler reported: “(T)he Justice Department moved Tuesday to kill a decades-old provision of civil rights law that allows statistical disparities to be used as proof of racial discrimination. The new regulations reinterpret a key plank of the Civil Rights Act and were issued without an opportunity for public comment, which is unusual for major regulatory action… Conservatives have long argued that proving discrimination should require proof that someone intended to treat people differently. And they say that when people are being judged by data, they feel pressure to make decisions based on racial quotas. In that way, the Trump administration argues, a policy meant to fight discrimination is actually fostering it… Supporters of disparate impact analysis say it is a critical tool because finding ‘smoking gun’ evidence to prove someone intended to discriminate is difficult.” Meckler notes that the way the new guidance was immediately implemented breaks federal precedent: “Federal agencies typically would allow time for public comment before publishing a final rule like this.”

Politico adds that Harmeet Dhillon, the Trump Justice Department’s Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, provided her particular justification for stamping out the disparate impact test: “Harmeet Dhillon, DOJ’s civil rights chief, highlighted that the rule change will lead to fewer civil rights lawsuits…. The prior ‘disparate impact’ regulations encouraged people to file lawsuits challenging racially neutral policies, without evidence of intentional discrimination… Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions.”

By contrast, last spring when President Trump released an executive order trying to end “disparate impact,” the NY Times Erica Green considered disparate impact’s role in the history of enforcement of the Civil Rights Act: “The disparate impact test has been crucial to enforcing key portions of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funding from discriminating based on race, color or national origin. For decades, it has been relied upon by the government and attorneys to root out discrimination in areas of employment, housing, policing, education and more. Civil rights prosecutors say the disparate-impact test is one of their most important tools for uncovering discrimination because it shows how a seemingly neutral policy or law has different outcomes for different demographic groups, revealing inequities.”

Trump’s DOJ just sued Minneapolis Public Schools to end the district’s effort to increase the number of teachers of color.  The Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Anthony Lonetree reported last week: “The U.S. Department of Justice has filed suit against Minneapolis Public Schools, accusing the state’s third-largest district of providing discriminatory protections to teachers of color in layoff and reassignment decisions.  The lawsuit… marks the latest salvo against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—in this case, the district’s efforts to bolster its minority teaching ranks. At issue is a contract agreement with educators that includes language shielding teachers of color from ‘last-in, first-out’ layoff practices and prioritizing the hiring of Black male educators at a north Minneapolis elementary school.”

Lonetree quotes Attorney General Pam Bondi justifying the lawsuit: “Discrimination is unacceptable in all forms especially when it comes to hiring decisions… Our public education system in Minnesota and across the country must be a bastion of merit and equal opportunity—not DEI.”  Here are words from DOJ’s lawsuit itself: “While defendants claim that these provisions are to stop discrimination, they require defendants to blatantly discriminate against teachers based on their race, color, sex, and national origin.”

Lonetree explains the purpose of the school district’s hiring policy: “Students of color comprise nearly two-thirds of the district’s total student population, and Minneapolis Public Schools, like many districts around the state, has sought to place teachers whom students can relate to and aspire to be like.”

Is the Trump Department of Education making the Office for Civil Rights viable again? Will the December 5th recall of furloughed staff help families who have filed civil rights complaints?  After a year of massive layoffs and the closure of seven of the twelve regional offices of the Office for Civil Rights, for CNN last week, Sunlen Serfaty described what might have seemed like exciting news: “Beleaguered employees in the civil rights office got what they thought was welcome news last week. The Department of Education informed employees who had been terminated earlier this year, then placed on administrative leave in an ongoing court battle, that they are to return to work later this month. The email to about 250 employees noted they are needed to address the existing caseload.”

However, in the details in the Department of Education’s December 5th recall notice, there are some serious questions about what is happening: For the Associated Press, Collin Binkley explains: “The Trump administration is bringing back dozens of Education Department staffers who were slated to be laid off, saying their help is needed to tackle a mounting backlog of discrimination complaints from students and families. The staffers had been on administrative leave while the department faced lawsuits challenging layoffs in the agency’s Office for Civil Rights, which investigates possible discrimination in the nation’s schools and colleges. But in a Friday (December 5) letter, department officials ordered the workers back to duty starting Dec. 15 to help clear civil rights cases.”  (The emphasis is mine.)

And K-12 Dive‘s Anna Merod quotes Julie Hartman, the Office for Civil Rights’ press secretary for legal affairs emphasizing “in a Dec. 8 email that… (the agency) is  temporarily bringing back OCR staff from administrative leave starting Dec. 15.” (The emphasis is mine.)

Let’s be clear. The Office for Civil Rights has never enforced the 1964 Civil Rights Act merely by charging school districts with violations, getting court orders that school district staff be fired, or imposing fines. OCR’s staff have been known for decades to work with school district teachers, counselors and administrators to develop programs and policies ensuring that children’s civil rights are no longer violated.

There is currently a serious problem at the Office for Civil Rights because all year while more than half the agency’s staff have been laid off, a huge backlog of uninvestigated complaints has built up. Reporters confirm that 2,500 complaints await investigation. NPR’s Cory Turner reports: “(P)ublic data show that OCR has reached resolution agreements in 73 cases involving alleged disability discrimination. Compare that to 2024, when OCR resolved 390, or 2017, the year Trump took office during his first term, when OCR reached agreements in more than 1,000 cases.”  CNN‘s Serfaty adds that this year  OCR has been “dismissing cases at an increasing pace, court documents reveal. About 7,000 cases have been dismissed under the Trump administration—hundreds more than in the same period last year under Biden.”

All this makes one question whether the furloughed staff are really being recalled to work with school districts to overcome the issues that have stimulated 2,500 complaints filed by families. Kimberly Richey emphasized that the recall of staff on leave is temporary, that the e-mail to staff emphasized the need to clear the backlog of complaints.  What percentage of the complaints processed by returning staff will be pursued with efforts to mitigate civil rights problems, and what percentage will be merely dismissed without further work?

There are additional questions about how utterly temporary the recall of staff might actually be. It is important to recall that Congress passed a continuing resolution to end the October government shutdown and also to delay the massive staff firings launched during the shutdown  by Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.  That continuing resolution ends on January 30, 2026.  Are staff at OCR being recalled to work from December 15, 2025 only until January 30, 2026, when they will be permanently terminated?

The future of civil rights enforcement by the Trump administration continues to look bleak. Will the OCR be shut down? Will its work be shunted to the Department of Justice as Linda McMahon continues to dismantle the Department of Education?  The Trump administration has persisted in abandoning what have been—for 71 years since Brown v. Board of Education—historic efforts to expand educational opportunity for groups of children who were historically marginalized.  As 2025 ends, the attack on academic freedom and civil rights does not seem to be winding down.

Once again, Donald Trump posted a derogatory attack on his political enemies. He seems to say that only Democrats were friends and clients of Jeffrey Epstein.

As usual, he sounds like he is ranting and raving. Really, his staff should review what he writes before he posts his vitriolic screeds.

Honestly, the man sounds unwell.

On the afternoon of Christmas Day, he was definitely not sounding presidential, not sounding like a good Christian, not sounding like a family man enjoying a joyous holiday.

He wrote: