Nancy Bailey: School Reforms That Succeed

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2025 //
10

Nancy Bailey frames her latest post as a program to end truancy. But in fact, she lays out a bullet list of reforms that would make school what it’s supposed to be: a welcoming place to learn, to make friends, to expand your world, to learn how to work with others.

She writes:

School starts for students whose families rely on public education, which the Trump administration is trying to end. For years, however, school reforms have made schools less personable; as a result, school attendance has decreased, especially since the pandemic.

Why do kids reject school? Bullying, harassment, family problems, parental work schedules, mental health, illnesses, transportation, and residual effects of COVID might be issues that school districts must address.

Another reason is disengagement; public education has become impersonal, due to terrible school policies over the years, which may overlook the unique capabilities of individual students. If no welcome mat is rolled out to show children they’re valued, why would they care?

It wouldn’t be hard to fix the issues discouraging students from going to school. Teachers do their best, but poor schools, lacking resources or following poorly devised reforms, face a greater challenge in attracting students.

Here are a few considerations.

Provide safe schools with smaller class sizes.

School officials and communities must ensure student safety. Children and teens should not fear school.

Smaller class sizes (at least one homeroom) allow teachers to know students, enabling friendships, ending bullying, and better welcoming families.

Every school leader, teacher, and staff member should know the warning signs of students. Here’s one checklist. There are more online.

School gatherings like sports, plays, art exhibits, concerts, etc., help bring families and students together and show school pride in students’ achievements. The motto: Know and Care About Every Student!

Teachers and students need support.

Teachers and students also require support, counselors, school psychologists, social workers, and outside specialists to help when a child is facing trauma or a crisis. Resources and placement settings for children must be available.

End poor and over-assessment.

Pushing privatization, high-stakes standardized testing has been a tool used against public schools and teachers. Students aligned to tests focus on the same information, but much is excluded, and individual strengths may be overlooked. Parents have understood this for years!

Children judged harshly for poor test performance are left without options and safety nets, made to feel like failures.

Want to excite students about school? End repetitive high-stakes standardized tests!

Focus on child development.

Students are pushed to perform beyond their age and development. Kindergartners are expected to read earlier. High school studentsare expected to do college work.

Reduce pressure with a focus on what’s appropriate for the age and development of students.

Increase community support.

Community businesses supporting local public schools help students, teachers, and families. Too often, the focus is on the future workforce, getting students to do what companies want.

What’s most important is the student focus, helping young people to know that they belong, businesses are behind them, and that they have the freedom to choose what they do based on their interests and abilities.

Businesses can sponsor concessions at sports events, high school plays, or art shows, or they might work with teachers to tutor students. Acts like this tell students that the community believes in them and their achievements. They are proud of their public schools.

Offer a variety of extracurricular activities.

Extracurricular activities encompass a wide range of topics. (Prep Scholar (scroll) lists activities.)

In the Abbott Elementary episode “Wishlist,” the teacher Jacob tries to find what interests a student who seems disengaged. Most teachers work to unearth what students care about. This student eventually shares his interest in golf.

Extracurricular activities can bridge the gap between academic pursuits and leisure.

Insist that students have qualified teachers and staff.

Well-prepared teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, psychologists, nurses, librarians, media specialists (including educational technologists), and administrators, fairly paid, comprise a school well-equipped to teach subjects and provide the support students need to learn effectively. These professionals should understand how to engage students in learning.

When school districts show disdain for teachers, water down credentials, or teachers face cuts or staff shortages, children don’t get the assistance they need. Students may learn incorrect information, or critical subjects essential for their future success may be omitted.

Establish school libraries with real librarians in everyschool. 

Research indicates that children who attend public schools with school libraries tend to perform better academically. Sadly, many poor school districts have closed their school libraries.

How do children learn to read if a school doesn’t provide them access to books and enjoyable reading material?

Offer students socialization opportunities.

Understanding how to care for others essentially begins in school with integration, during school recess, where kids learn through free, supervised play and opportunities to interact with those who may look different and hold different beliefs.

We want students not to fear their fellow students, but to like them, not merely to tolerate them.

Develop innovative, nonstigmatizing special education programs. 

Since 1975, public school teachers have worked to address the needs of students with disabilities. Ensuring that children have access to quality programs and well-qualified teachers who communicate effectively with parents is key.

Welcoming children with differences and embracing diversity is a strength of America’s public school system.

Reduce technology.

Over the years, a significant portion of school funding has been allocated to technology, yet we’re told that learning outcomes have not improved. Now, serious questions surround the implementation of AI in public schools.

Most parents want their children to rely less on screens and more on beneficial human connections, whether it be with their families or friends. It seems prudent to proceed slowly with AI and any technology. Help students work on human relationships.

Run a vibrant arts program.

Since NCLB, and even before, school districts cut art programs; yet, music, acting, dance, drawing, painting, and chorus give children a creative outlet to explore their interests. These classes are both fun and critical for learning, and they shouldn’t be made tougher or used for assessment. Nor should they be eliminated. The arts can lead to careers for many.

Children with mental health difficulties and the poor may thrive with the arts, and the arts can keep children in school.

Welcome students with lovely school facilities.

Studies have shown that clean, efficiently run school buildingswith a positive school climate can make a significant difference in student progress. Students don’t want to attend buildings that resemble prisons. The school should be clean, safe, and welcoming.

Schools should also ensure that there are few interruptions and that classrooms are conducive to learning with comfortable temperatures and quietness.

Ensure that students have a whole curriculum.

Public schools should offer a variety of instructional options starting at a young age to pique a child’s curiosity. Reading and math are important, but so are geography, science, history, civics, life skills, and the arts, all of which should have a place in public education.

Public schools have never been perfect, but they have educated the masses, and it’s reckless and irresponsible to dismantle them without proof that whatever replaces them will be better. If you want students to come to school, end harsh school reforms, and make public schools a personable, exciting place to be.

Categories Education Reform

Becky Pringle: Hungry Children Can’t Learn

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2025 //
6

Trump and his compliant allies in Congress took pride in the One Big Ugly Bill that they passed in early July. But it offers reasons for shame, not pride. The Trump bill finances tax cuts for the richest Americans by cutting food for schoolchildren and Medicaid for millions of children.

The Republican budget bill locks in benefits for the rich and hunger for children of the poor.

Imagine laughing, applauding, and feeling proud of this heartless bill! I

President Trump Signs His "Big, Beautiful Bill" Into Law And Celebrates Independence Day At The White House

President Donald Trump, joined by Republican lawmakers, signs the One, Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 04, 2025 in Washington, DC. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the bill will cut federal spending on SNAP by around $186 billion over the next decade. Samuel Corum—Getty Images

Becky Pringle, President of the NEA, writes in TIME magazine about the shamefulness of this legislation.

She writes:

Hunger in America’s public schools is a real problem, and it is heartbreaking. As the head of the largest union of educators in the country, I hear stories almost daily of how kids struggle and how schools and teachers step up to fill the gaps. It’s the school community in Kentucky filling a Blessing Box with foods to help fellow students and families who don’t have enough. It’s the teacher in Rhode Island who started a food “recycling” program to ensure no food goes to waste and to give students access to healthy snacks like cheese sticks, apples, yogurt, and milk.

School meals are more than a budget line item. They are lifelines that help millions of students learn and grow. But as families across America prepare for the new school year, millions of children face the threat of returning to classrooms without access to school meals.

President Donald Trump’s newly-signed tax bill, which Republicans overwhelmingly voted to pass, slashes food assistance benefits via the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by an estimated $186 billion over the next decade—thelargest cut in American history. These devastating reductions will result in an estimated 18 million children losing access to free school meals.

The cuts shift the cost of school lunches to the states, costing them more than they can afford when they are already grappling with tighter budgets and substantial Republican-led Medicaid cuts.Twenty-three governors warned these cuts will lead to millions of Americans losing vital food assistance.

It’s hard to understand if you’ve never faced hunger, but millions of American children do not have access to enough food each day. In a recent survey of 1,000 teachers nationwide, three out of every four reported that their students are already coming to school hungry. 

Our children can’t learn if they are hungry. As a middle-school science teacher for more than 30 years, I have seen the pain that hunger creates. It’s the student who skips breakfast so she can give it to her little brother. It’s the student who misbehaves because his stomach is rumbling. It’s the students who struggle in class after a weekend where they didn’t have a single full meal. Educators see this pain everyday, and that’s why they go above and beyond—buying classroom snacks with their own money—to support their students. 

Free school meals represent commonsense and cost-effective public policy. They don’t just prevent hunger, they help kids succeed. Decades of research reviewed by the Food Research & Action Center shows that when students participate in school breakfast programs, behavior, academic performance, and academic achievement go up and tardiness goes down. When I stand in a room of bright and curious children, it breaks my heart that some of them are going without the food they need to learn and thrive—not because America can’t afford to feed them, but because adults in Washington decided they’d rather spend the money on tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy.

The cuts from the Republican tax bill will hit hardest in places where families are already struggling the most, especially in rural and Southern states where school nutrition programs are a lifeline to many. In Texas, 3.4 million kids, nearly two-thirds of students, are eligible for free and reduced lunch. In Mississippi, 439,000 kids, 99.7% of the student population, were eligible for free and reduced lunch during the 2022-2023 school year.

These are not abstract numbers. These are real children who show up to school eager to learn but are instead distracted by hunger and uncertainty about when they will eat again. America’s kids deserve better. 

The National School Lunch Act of 1946 laid the foundation that public schools are places where children can receive a free breakfast and lunch each day. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. For decades, Republican and Democratic administrations alike expanded school lunch programs, operating under the shared understanding that no child should go hungry at school in the richest country in the world.

But the extreme right wing of today’s Republican Party has walked away from that moral consensus—ripping away these programs to give another tax break to billionaires.

The Trump Administration’s authoritarian blueprint outlined in Project 2025 takes the anti-public education attacks even further by attempting to gut the Department of Education and to send tax dollars to private schools, and promoting ideologically-driven book bans and classroom censorship.

And now, as the Trump Administration and its allies work to destroy public education, they also have attempted tointimidate the National Education Association and our 3 million educators. They know we are powerful and vocal advocates for students and a formidable opponent to their attacks on public education. Last month, the relentless efforts of organized educators and our allies got the Trump Administration to release $7 billion in education funds it had tried to withhold.

Together, we will fight forward: for our vision where every student attends a safe, inclusive, supportive, and well-resourced public school, which includes nutritious meals for all students regardless of race or place. 

We are educators. We don’t quit. We will continue to engage with school boards, town halls, state legislatures, and Congress to fight for students. Public education does not belong to politicians trying to dismantle it. It is for every student, parent, and educator who understands it has the power to transform lives.”

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Budget Cuts, Cruelty, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Funding, Health, Poverty, Trump

Trump Orders Review of Smithsonian Museums to Remove Unpatriotic Exhibits

By dianeravitch
August 13, 2025 //
12

The Trump administration has announced plans to review the contents of exhibitions at several Smithsonian institutions. Trump has made clear that he wants all exhibits purged of negative or unpatriotic content. He wants exhibits to show only the positive aspects of American history. This is called censorship. When Trump is gone, the full story of American history will be restored the good, the inspiring but also the dark episodes where people were treated unfairly.

The Washington Post reported::

The White House will launch a sweeping review of Smithsonian exhibitions, collections and operations ahead of America’s 250th-birthday celebrations next year — the first time the Trump administration has detailed steps to scrutinize the institution, which officials say should reflect the president’s call to restore “truth and sanity” to American history.

The vetting process would include reviewing public-facing and online content, curatorial processes and guidelines, exhibition planning and collection use, according to a letter sent to Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III on Tuesday and signed by White House senior associate Lindsey Halligan, Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Hale and White House Office of Management and Budget chief Russell Vought.

A White House official confirmed the plan, which was posted on the White House website Tuesday and first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

“The Smithsonian’s work is grounded in a deep commitment to scholarly excellence, rigorous research, and the accurate, factual presentation of history,” a Smithsonian spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday afternoon. “We are reviewing the letter with this commitment in mind and will continue to collaborate constructively with the White House, Congress, and our governing Board of Regents.”

The institution already planned its own content review, ordered by the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents in June amid pressure from President Donald Trump. The regents instructed Bunch “to ensure unbiased content” across the institution and report back on “any needed personnel changes.”

The board at that time affirmed Bunch’s authority amid a high-stakes standoff between the White House and Kim Sajet, whom Trump had attempted to fire as director of the National Portrait Gallery. Sajet later resigned, saying her presence had become a distraction from the Smithsonian’s mission.

It is not immediately clear whether the White House’s action will supersede the Smithsonian’s review.

The letter states that the initial review will focus on eight museums: the National Museum of American History, the National Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Museum of the American Indian, the National Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

To begin the process, officials requested that the museums provide information within 30 days concerning 250th-anniversary programming, current and future exhibition content, and other material.

The White House added that museums were expected to start making changes within 120 days.

“Museums should begin implementing content corrections where necessary, replacing divisive or ideologically driven language with unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions across placards, wall didactics, digital displays, and other public-facing materials,” the letter read.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has moved quickly to overhaul the country’s most prominent arts and cultural institutions. His focus on the Smithsonian has stoked concerns about political interference at the institution, which is not a traditional government agency and is historically considered nonpartisan.
In July, painter Amy Sherald withdrew her upcoming exhibition “American Sublime” from the National Portrait Gallery, citing concerns that the museum discussed removing from the show her painting of a transgender woman posing as the Statue of Liberty. (The Smithsonian said it discussed pairing the work with a video, not removing it.)

That same month, The Washington Post reported that a temporary placard containing references to Trump had been removed from an impeachment exhibit at the National Museum of American History as part of the Smithsonian content review. The museum later updated the display to restore context about Trump’s impeachments following swift outcry from members of the public and several Democratic leaders.

In March, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate “divisive narratives” across the Smithsonian museums and “restore the Smithsonian Institution to its rightful place as a symbol of inspiration and American greatness.”
The order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” directs Halligan and Vice President JD Vance to remove “improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution, including its museums, education and research centers and the National Zoo.

Categories Bigotry, Censorship, History, Trump

Did Trump’s Hiring Freeze Raise the Death Toll in Texas Floods?

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2025 //
5

The Texas Monthly points out that the state was supposed to get an emergency coordinator for its weather service. But that person was never hired because Trump ordered a freeze on all federal hiring the day he took office.

The Texas Monthly reported:

The prospective hire was meant to help solve a persistent problem in dealing with Texas’s many natural disasters: translating warnings about extreme weather into appropriate action. By late January, the National Weather Service’s Fort Worth office had selected a meteorologist to serve as an “emergency response specialist” within the Texas Division of Emergency Management, which coordinates the state’s emergency-management program. The new hire, part of a nationwide reorganization of the National Weather Service, would have “embedded” at the TDEM to help decision-makers prepare for and respond to extreme weather. If all had gone according to plan, the federal meteorologist would have been working elbow to elbow with state emergency responders during the July flooding in Central Texas that killed at least 135.

But when Donald Trump took office on January 20 and announced a federal hiring freeze that day, the new hire hadn’t yet started. The role was left unfilled. “We just couldn’t quite dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s before the federal hiring freeze hit,” said Victor Murphy, the climate-service program manager in the Fort Worth office who took early retirement in April after 45 years with the NWS. “Lives may have been saved or could have been saved, but we’ll never know.”

In the aftermath of the floods in Kerr County and others parts of Central Texas, officials questioned whether staffing shortages in the National Weather Service—the result of the hiring freeze as well as DOGE-led early retirements and firings—had damaged the federal agency’s ability to accurately forecast the extreme rainfall and warn about the extraordinary flooding that would quickly follow. Many meteorologists pushed backhard on this narrative. They said the Austin/San Antonio office, which covers much of the Hill Country, performed adequately despite the cuts, with reasonably accurate forecasting and timely flood watches and warnings. Still, others have asked whether the NWS’s messaging to the public and to emergency responders could have been more aggressive. 

The axed TDEM role would have worked to make sure the NWS’s forecasts and warnings were understood and heeded, serving as a liaison between the local, state, and federal governments, according to a job description and interviews with those involved in the hiring process. The emergency specialist would’ve “provided TDEM with eye-to-eye, one-on-one expert analysis,” including during weather emergencies, Murphy said. Texas gets a lot of wild weather. Residents and even decision-makers may need help distinguishing between a typical gully washer and extremely dangerous flooding, between a hard freeze and a life-threatening winter storm. 

The TDEM job was part of a sweeping reorganization of the National Weather Service that began under the Biden administration. As part of the modernization effort, NWS officials were in the process of placing meteorologists in each state emergency-management office to help decision-makers. But the Trump administration effectively scuttled the project and decimated the agency’s existing workforce. NWS staffing levels were reduced by roughly 600 employees, to fewer than 4,000, in just a few months, according to Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a labor union. Texas weather offices lost between 25 and 30 employees—a count that doesn’t include positions left unfilled because of the hiring freeze. “The arbitrariness and capriciousness of it is just really, really sad,” said Murphy. “This TDEM job getting axed is an example of that.” 

This week, media outlets reported that the Trump administration is planning to fill up to 450 jobs at the federal agency. It’s unclear whether the TDEM position is included.

Hindsight is 20/20. We will never know.

Categories Funding, Texas, Trump

National Science Foundation Absorbed Deep Cuts in Staff and Funding

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2025 //
13

The National Science Foundation was a target for Elon Musk’s DOGE boys. Trump seemed to dislike science, so he went along with deep cuts. We can hope that historians will one day explain Trump’s disdain for science. At the moment, it’s inexplicable.

Only days ago, Trump released an executive order that places political appointees in charge of grantmaking, with the power to ignore peer reviews.

Science magazine reported:

Research advocates are expressing alarm over a White House directive on federal grantmakingreleased yesterday that they say threatens to enhance President Donald Trump’s control over science agency decisions on what to fund. It would, among other changes, require political appointees to sign off on new grant solicitations, allow them to overrule advice from peer reviewers on award decisions, and let them more easily terminate ongoing grants.

Although many changes described in the order are already underway at research agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation (NSF), its existence could strengthen the hand of Trump appointees, says Carrie Wolinetz, a former senior administrator at NIH.

“We’ve already seen this administration take steps to exert its authority that have resulted in delays, freezes, and termination of billions of dollars in grants,” says Wolinetz, now a lobbyist for Lewis-Burke Associates. “This would codify those actions in a way that represents the true politicization of science, which would be a really bad idea.”

Government Executive recently reported:

149 NSF employees, all members of the American Federation of Government Employees chapter that represents the agency’s workforce, sent a letter to Congress warning staffing cuts and other disruptions to NSF operations were threatening the agency’s mission and independence. Jesus Soriano, president of the chapter, said NSF has lost one-third of its staff—or nearly 600 employees—since January. The agency also began canceling hundreds of its research grants in April and has now scrapped 1,600 active grants, employees said. 

Last month, the Trump administration announced it is going to evict NSF from its headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, to make room for the Housing and Urban Development Department, and has yet to unveil a plan detailing where the agency will relocate. President Trump proposed slashing NSF’s budget by 56% in fiscal 2026. 

“What’s happening at NSF is unlike anything we’ve faced before,” Soriano said at a press conference held last week by Democrats on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. “Our members—scientists, program officers, and staff—have been targeted for doing their jobs with integrity. They’ve faced retaliation, mass terminations, and the illegal withholding of billions in research funding.”

Categories Disruption, Extremism, Musk, Elon, Science, Trump

New Hampshire: Governor Selects Nonpartisan Bureaucrat as Superintendent

By dianeravitch
August 12, 2025 //
5

Former Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire made a horrible choice for state school superintendent. He picked Frank Edelblut, after beating him in the election. Edelblut is a homeschooler of his 10 children with a low opinion of public schools. He successfully promoted vouchers and every other kind of school choice. He didn’t see the point of public schools.

The overwhelming majority of students in New Hampshire attend public schools. As soon as vouchers passed, most of them were used by families whose children never attended public schools. In other words, the state is spending many millions of dollars to subsidize the tuition of students already enrolled in private schools, whose families could afford the tuition.

Sununu was replaced by Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte. She did not reappoint Edelblut. Instead, she selected Caitlin Davis, a 15-year veteran of the state Department of Education. The selection of Davis was cheered by members of both parties, as well as the teachers’ union, no doubt thrilled to be rid of Edelblut.

Unlike Edelblut, she is unlikely to attack public schools but will collaborate with all sectors.

Davis, who most recently served as the director of education analytics and resources, had worked in the department for 15 years. She built a reputation as a neutral, data-driven financial expert, often sitting before lawmakers on the Joint Legislative Fiscal Committee or Finance Committee to brief them on complicated budget spreadsheets. And she vowed to lead the department as a nonpartisan executive, carrying out both lawmakers’ and the governor’s policies without injecting her own politics…

In seeking the job, Davis styled herself as an experienced administrator. Near the start of a multi-hour confirmation hearing Tuesday, Executive Councilor Joseph Kenney, a Wakefield Republican, asked Davis whether she considered herself a “passionate educator” or a “passionate bureaucrat.”

“I suppose I’m a passionate bureaucrat, but I don’t like the term bureaucrat,” Davis replied. “… When you use the term bureaucrat, I think you take away all of the effort that state employees and the legislators and the citizens are putting into the system.”

. 

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Home Schooling, New Hampshire, Privatization, School Choice, Vouchers

Trump Administration is Extorting Hundreds of Millions from Universities

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2025 //
11

Donald Trump hates higher education. He hates education. He loves “the poorly educated.” Of course. It is the poorly educated who believe his lies. They vote against their self-interest when they vote for him. The poorly educated vote for a tax break for billionaires. The poorly educated vote to eliminate their own health insurance.

Trump’s vendetta against elite universities punishes them and extracts huge fines, which were asserted, never proven. He is swaggering about his ability to bring down universities that would never have admitted him.

Where is the money going? The Boston Gkobe reports:

With Harvard University’s negotiations with the Trump administration still underway, the White House’s recent deals with other elite institutions suggest the nation’s oldest university may have to pay a large sum of money to make its problems go away.

Columbia University and Brown University in the last month both came to arrangements with the White House that involved paying millions of dollars and making a wide swath of changes in order to restore billions in lost research funding and end ongoing investigations and lawsuits. 

The Trump administration proposed a $1 billion settlement with UCLA, several news outlets reported Friday, after freezing more than $500 million in federal funds to the school last week.

Both deals with the Ivy League schools came as they faced complaints they had allowed antisemitism to proliferate on campus during protests against the war in Gaza, as well as allegations they had discriminated against students via diversity-related policies and programs. 

Neither Brown nor Columbia in their agreements admitted any wrongdoing — something Harvard has indicated in court fights with the federal government it is also unwilling to do.

The measures the schools adopted to get the government off their backs differ wildly.

Both Columbia and Brown are paying millions to resolve their disputes

Columbia agreed to pay about $200 million to the US Treasury Department over the next three years, as well as another $21 million to address alleged civil rights violations of its Jewish employees. 

Congress will then have the power to appropriate those funds — though it’s unclear what they will be used for.

In exchange, Columbia will receive many of the research grants the government had previously canceled as early as March, and resolve violations of the law alleged by the federal government. The administration had frozen “the majority” of the school’s $1.3 billion in federal funding, Columbia’s president said.

Brown, meanwhile, pledged to give $50 million to state workforce development organizations in Rhode Island that are “operating in compliance with anti-discrimination laws” over the next 10 years, avoiding making a direct payment to the Trump administration. 

In exchange, the federal government would restore Brown’s funding — the government had put about $510 million on hold — and close all pending investigations over Brown’s compliance with anti-discrimination laws.

The schools agreed to other changes

Columbia agreed to implement an outside monitor to oversee whether it was complying with the changes it had promised the government, such as to reform disciplinary measures for student protesters and remove diversity-related policies.

Brown said it would not perform gender-affirming surgeries on minors — which Brown’s medical school has never done — or prescribe puberty blockers. It adopted the Trump administration’s definitions of “male” and “female,” sparking outrage among current and former students who say that change harms transgender and nonbinary students who are excluded from those definitions.

The two schools also took different approaches to addressing antisemitism: Columbia’s measures included adopting a controversial definition of antisemitism and a review of its programs related to the Middle East. Brown, meanwhile, said it would commit resources to support programs related to Jewish students, as well as conduct a campus climate survey in 2025 that would include information about the climate for Jewish students on campus.

Both schools also said they would share admissions data about applicants’ standardized test scores and grade point averages, as well as demographic data such as their race. On Thursday, the administration made that a requirement of all schools that receive federal aid.

Neither agreement, however, appeared to place any restrictions on what or how the school teaches, avoiding infringement on academic freedom many critics of the Trump administration had feared.

The schools negotiated under different circumstances

Many critics of Trump’s war on higher education viewed Brown’s agreement to invest in local education as more aligned with its mission as a university, rather than simply paying a fine for the government to use as it sees fit. Some have also voiced concerns the implementation of an outside monitor at Columbia could allow the federal government to infringe on its independence, despite the deal they had reached.

The arrangements reflect differences in the amount of pressure the administration had applied to each school, down to the number of pages in the deal — Columbia’s deal was 22 pages long, while Brown’s was nine.

Columbia had seen among the most high-profile protests against the war in Gaza and was the first institution to face government sanctions, beginning in March with the cancellation of more than $400 million in funding. The federal government has since found it in violation of civil rights law for allegedly acting with “deliberate indifference” to harassment of Jewish students.

The administration’s investigation into Brown’s alleged civil rights violations, however, was ongoing at the time the deal was struck.

What the Trump deals could mean for Harvard

The Trump administration has quickly touted each agreement as a victory. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon called the Columbia settlement a “roadmap for elite universities” and President Trump declared on Truth Social “woke is officially DEAD at Brown” after announcing that deal.

Still, some worry any agreement with the administration only opens the door to further coercion if the federal government finds something else it doesn’t like at any of the schools it is dealing with.

Trump and his allies have long seen Harvard, the nation’s wealthiest university, as its best opportunity to influence higher education and have aimed to force an agreement by canceling more than $3 billion in funding, threatening international students’ statuses, and levying a number of civil rights complaints against the school. 

In response, the school has put up the most forceful legal and public relations fight against the federal government, meaning any agreement it reaches could reverberate further than that of its peers.

Categories Cruelty, Democracy, Evil, Extremism, Funding, Higher Education, Trump

Rachel Maddow: Our Worst Fears Have Come True

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2025 //
5

This is one of Rachel Maddow’s best clips. She says that we worried about what Trump might do if he won re-election. Wonder no more. It is happening. He is a full-fledged authoritarian, intent on smashing the Constitution and our rights. what can we do? She has some ideas.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Disruption, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Funding, Immigration, Trump

Thomas Friedman: The World As We Knew It Is Rapidly Slipping Away

By dianeravitch
August 11, 2025 //
6

Thomas Friedman writes a regular column for The New York Times. This one is unusually perspicacious. I was deeply moved by its candor. And I agree with him. Trump and his enablers are turning the Presidency into a monarchy, giving him more power than any President ever had and more power than the Founders imagined. Checks and balances have been wiped out. The Supreme Court’s rightwing majority approves of all his power grabs. He is imposing heavy fines on universities without regard to basic principles of academic freedom. He has made it criminal to support policies that advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. He is waging war on science. He is forcing the news media to pay him tribute. He fires veteran data scientists unless they report good news.

In his first term, his most notable achievement was the funding of “Operation Warp Speed,” which invested in the rapid production of mNRA vaccines. These vaccines dramatically reduced COVID, which killed one million people in the U.S. Yet just days ago, Trump’s Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cancelled $500 million in research grants for mNRA vaccines. RFK killed further development of Trump’s greatest triumph. When asked about it at a press conference, Trump took pride in what RFK was doing. Did he understand the question?

His actions are unprecedented. They are the actions of a dictator.

He writes:

Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.

He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.

What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.

As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, “we’ve seen positive job growth.” But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very B.L.S. director who reports to her, she wrote on X: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”

As The Journal asked: “So were the jobs data that were ‘positive’ in the morning rigged by the afternoon?” Of course not.

The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.

The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.

Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett; Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer; and the U.S. trade representative, Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?

Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”

He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”

If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.

In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.

And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.

One of America’s premier cyberwarriors, Jen Easterly, who was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration, had her appointment to a senior teaching position at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point revoked last week by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll after Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist, posted that Easterly was a Biden-era mole.

Read that sentence again very slowly. The Army secretary, acting on the guidance of a loony Trump acolyte, revoked the teaching appointment of — anyone will tell you — one of America’s most skilled nonpartisan cyberwarriors, herself a graduate of West Point.

And when you are done reading that, read Easterly’s response on LinkedIn: “As a lifelong independent, I’ve served our nation in peacetime and combat under Republican and Democratic administrations. I’ve led missions at home and abroad to protect all Americans from vicious terrorists …. I’ve worked my entire career not as a partisan, but as a patriot — not in pursuit of power, but in service to the country I love and in loyalty to the Constitution I swore to protect and defend, against all enemies.”

And then she added this advice to the young West Pointers she will not have the honor of teaching: “Every member of the Long Gray Line knows the Cadet Prayer. It asks that we ‘choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ That line — so simple, yet so powerful — has been my North Star for more than three decades. In boardrooms and war rooms. In quiet moments of doubt and in public acts of leadership. The harder right is never easy. That’s the whole point.”

That is the woman Trump did not want teaching our next generation of fighters.

And that ethic — always choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong — is the ethic that Bessent, Hassett, Chavez-DeRemer and Greer know nothing of — not to mention Trump himself.

That is why, dear reader, though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don’t know how we will get it back.

Categories Censorship, Corruption, Democracy, Disruption, Economy, Elections, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Fascism, Injustice, Lies, Trump

Jennifer Frey: College Students Are Eager to Engage in the Liberal Arts

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2025 //
22

Jennifer Frey served as Dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College. It required students to read deeply in classic tests and to converse vigorously with each other.

More than a quarter of the student body signed up for this rigorous class.

Yet two years after the Honor College opened, it was closed. Its leadrs said that students didn’t want this kind of education, the heavy focus on the liberal arts and the Great Cobversation about the meaning of truth goodness, and beauty. Dean Frey thinks the administrators were wrong.

She wrote in The New York Times.

University students, we’re told, are in crisis. Even at our most elite institutions, they have emaciated attention spans. They can’t — or just won’t — read books. They use artificial intelligence to write their essays. They lack resilience and are beset by mental healthcrises. They complain that they can’t speak their minds, hobbled by an oppressive ideological monoculture and censorship regimes. As a philosopher, I am most distressed by reports that students have no appetite to study the traditional liberal arts; they understand their coursework only as a step toward specific careers.

Over the past two years as the inaugural dean of the University of Tulsa’s Honors College, focused on studying the classic texts of the Western tradition, I’ve seen little evidence of these trends. The curriculum I helped build and teach required students to read thousands of pages of difficult material every semester, decipher historical texts across disciplines and genres and debate ideas vigorously and civilly in small, Socratic seminars. It was tremendously popular among students, who not only do the reading but also engage in rigorous and lively conversations across deep differences in seminars, hallways and dorms. For the past two years, we attracted over a quarter of each freshman class to this reading-heavy, humanities-focused curriculum.

Our success in Tulsa derives from our old-fashioned approach to liberal learning, which does not attempt to prepare students for any career but equips them to fashion meaningful and deeply fulfilling lives. This classical model of education, found in the work of both Plato and Aristotle, asks students to seek to discover what is true, good and beautiful, and to understand why. It is a truly liberating education because it requires deep and sustained reflection about the ultimate questions of human life. The goal is to achieve a modicum of self-knowledge and wisdom about our own humanity. It certainly captured the hearts and minds of our students.

Sadly, this education has fared less well with my university’s new administration. After the former president and provost departed this year, the newly installed provost informed me that the Honors College must “go in a different direction.” That meant eliminating the entire dean’s office and associated staff positions as well as many of our distinctive programs and — through increased class sizes — effectively ending our small seminars. (A representative of the university told The Times that while it had “restructured” the Honors College, the university believes that academics and student experiences will “remain the same.”)

The stated reason for these cuts was to save money — the same reason the University of Tulsa gave in 2019 when it targeted many of the same traditional forms of liberal learning for elimination. Back then, the administration attempted to turn the university into a vocational school. Those efforts largely failed, in part because of lack of student support for the new model.

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An unpleasant truth has emerged in Tulsa over the years. It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education, and an administrative class that won’t fight for the liberal arts even when it attracts both students and major financial gifts. The tragedy of the contemporary academy is that even when traditional liberal learning clearly wins with students and donors, it loses with those in power.

For those who do care to see liberal learning thrive on our campuses, the work my colleagues and I did at Tulsa should be a model. How did we do it? We created an intentional community where our students lived in the same dorm and studied the same texts. We shared wisdom, virtue and friendship as our goals. When a university education is truly rooted in the liberal arts, it can cultivate the interior habits of freedom that young people need to live well. Material success alone cannot help a person who lacks the ability to form a clear, informed vision of what is true, good and beautiful. But this vision is something our students both want and need.

At Tulsa, we invited our students to enter “the great conversation” with some of the most influential thinkers of our inherited intellectual tradition. For their first two years they encountered a set curriculum of texts from Homer to Hannah Arendt. These texts were carefully chosen by an interdisciplinary faculty because they transcend their time and place in two senses: They influenced a broader tradition, and they had the potential to help our students reflect in a sustained way on what it means to be a good human being and citizen. Our seminars were led by faculty members who did not lecture or use secondary sources. Rather, the role of the faculty members was to foster and guide conversations among our students that allowed them to think through these questions for and among themselves.

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That our students threw themselves into the task of reading and discussing the great works with one another should not shock. When we — students and teachers alike — share wisdom as a common goal, we will want to do the reading, to dispute one another, to exchange ideas and arguments, to propose amendments and to offer our personal insights. Liberal learning occurs in dialogue with those who object to us, who offer a different perspective or experience — who read the same book as we do in a completely different light.

At the Honors College, we taught our students that wisdom is a distant goal, and that we need to work on ourselves as we try to approach it. We need to cultivate what our college called “the virtues of liberal learning.” For example, we need to cultivate the humility to recognize that we have much to learn from the past and from one another. We need to cultivate a love of truth for its own sake and the courage to speak our minds and to follow the truth wherever it may lead us — even when it leads us into difficult waters where our disagreements are deep and unsettling.

When students realize their own humanity is at stake in their education, they are deeply invested in it. The problem with liberal education in today’s academy does not lie with our students. The real threat to liberal learning is from an administrative class that is content to offer students far less than their own humanity calls for — and deserves.

Categories Class size, Curriculum, Education Reform, Higher Education, Joy
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