Casey Smith of Indiana Capital Chronicle reported on data that the Indiana Commission on Higher Education quietly posted on its website, without issuing a press release, perhaps hoping that no one would notice. The percentage of high-school graduates who entered college declined to only 51.7%. As recently as 2015, the rate of students going from high school to college was 65%.
The figures, posted to the agency’s website earlier this month, reflect concerns state leaders have long expressed about Indiana’s declining college-going culture, especially as the state shifts focus toward career credentials and work-based learning.
“The startling drop in our college-going rate yet again can be credited to the lack of two things: money and morale,” said Rep. Ed DeLaney, D-Indianapolis, in a statement released Wednesday.
“While our governor has been taking a victory lap for getting our state universities to freeze tuition, he has failed to guarantee that his move will not decrease financial aid and scholarship opportunities,” DeLaney continued. “Any lack of opportunity for tuition support will lead to more Hoosiers not being able to afford college and being forced to choose a different path.”
The 2023 numbers come just six months after the State Board of Education commission approved sweeping changes to Indiana’s high school diploma, set to take effect statewide in 2029, that emphasize work-based learning and career readiness over traditional college preparation…
DeLaney maintained that Republican leaders “have been devaluing the opportunities that our colleges and universities can offer students.”
“At the same time, the supermajority has made attacking colleges and universities the centerpiece of their culture war agenda — from policing what can be taught in the classroom, to forcing institutions to eliminate hundreds of degree options, to creating an entirely new high school diploma that emphasizes the path directly into the workforce,” the lawmaker said.
“Trying to bury this report in a website and not send a press release is a telling sign that the Commission on Higher Education knows this does not look good, and does not act to fix it,” DeLaney added. “It simply isn’t important enough to them. They are busy eliminating college courses and creating new tests. This is what the legislature has asked them to do….”
Indiana’s college-going rate has dropped more than any other state tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics over the past 15 years.
Previously, Indiana reached a college-going rate of 65%.
“We set a goal to get it back when it slumped,” DeLaney recalled. “Now, it doesn’t seem like we care to address the issue. That is a shame for our students, a shame for our economy, and a shame for our state.”
“The supermajority has been in power for 20 years and this is their achievement,” DeLaney said. “At some point we have to ask ourselves: is a declining college-going rate not the result they want?”
After the Brown decision of 1954, after years of delay, the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson cracked down on districts that refused to desegregate their schools. The Department of Justice negotiated consent decrees with recalcitrant districts, mostly (but not only) in the South.
More that 100 such consent decrees are still in effect.
The Trump Department of Justice recently canceled the consent decree with Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana.
The head of the Department’s Civil Rights Division hailed this reversal of longstanding policy.
Expect more such rulings from the Civil Rights Division, dismantling protections for racial minorities, LGBT, and women. The only protected group in the Trump era is white men.
In late April, the Department of Justice announced that it was ending a decades-long consent decree in Plaquemines parish, Louisiana, in a school district that has been under a desegregation order since the Johnson administration in the 1960s.
The Plaquemines parish desegregation order, one of more than 130 such orders nationwide, was in place to ensure that the school district, which initially refused to integrate, followed the law. Many consent decrees of the era are still in existence because school districts are not in compliance with the law.
Some experts, including former justice department employees, say the change in direction for the department could be worrying.
These orders “provide students with really important protections against discrimination”, said Shaheena Simons, who was the chief of the educational opportunities section of the civil rights division at the justice department for nearly a decade. “They require school districts to continue to actively work to eliminate all the remaining vestiges of the state-mandated segregation system. That means that students have protections in terms of what schools they’re assigned to, in terms of the facilities and equipment in the schools that they attend. They have protection from discrimination in terms of barriers to accessing advanced programs, gifted programs. And it means that a court is there to protect them and to enforce their rights when they’re violated and to ensure that school districts are continuing to actively desegregate.”
The justice department ended the Plaquemines parish desegregation order in an unusual process, one that some fear will be replicated elsewhere. The case was dismissed through a “joint stipulated dismissal”. Previously, courts have followed a specific process for ending similar cases, one in which school districts prove that they are complying with the court orders. That did not happen this time. Instead, the Louisiana state attorney general’s office worked with the justice department in reaching the dismissal.
“I’m not aware of anyone, any case, that has [ended] that way before,” said Deuel Ross, the deputy director of litigation of the Legal Defense Fund (LDF); the LDF was not specifically involved with the Plaquemines parish case. “The government as a plaintiff who represents the American people, the people of that parish, has an obligation to make sure that the district has done everything that it’s supposed to have done to comply with the federal court order in the case before it gets released, and the court itself has its own independent obligation to confirm that there’s no vestiges of discrimination left in the school district that are traceable to either present or past discrimination.”
Despite the district not proving that it is compliant with the order, the justice department has celebrated the end of the consent decree.
“No longer will the Plaquemines Parish School Board have to devote precious local resources over an integration issue that ended two generations ago,” Harmeet K Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a statement announcing the decision. “This is a prime example of neglect by past administrations, and we’re now getting America refocused on our bright future.”
But focusing on the age of the case implies that it was obsolete, according to Simons, who is now the senior adviser of programs and strategist at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “The administration is trying to paint these cases as ancient history and no longer relevant.”
In 1966, the Johnson administration sued school districts across the country, particularly in the South, that refused to comply with desegregation demands. At the time, Plaquemines parish was led by Leander Perez, a staunch segregationist and white supremacist.
Perez had played a large role in trying to keep nearby New Orleans from desegregating, and once that effort failed, he invited 1,000 white students from the Ninth Ward to enroll in Plaquemines parish schools. By 1960, nearly 600 had accepted the offer. Perez was excommunicated by Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel for ignoring his warning to stop trying to prevent schools run by the archdiocese of New Orleans from integrating.
Perez attempted to close the public schools in Plaquemines parish, and instead open all-white private academies, or, segregation academies, which became a feature of the post-integration south. An estimated 300 segregation academies, which, as private schools, are not governed by the same rules and regulations as public schools, are still in operation and majority white.
Students and teachers working in school districts today might be decades removed from the people who led the push for desegregation in their districts, but they still benefit from the protections that were long ago put in place. Without court oversight, school districts that were already begrudgingly complying might have no incentive to continue to do so.
According to the Century Foundation, as of 2020, 185 districts and charters consider race and/or socioeconomic status in their student assignment or admissions policies, while 722 districts and charters are subject to a legal desegregation order or voluntary agreement. The justice department currently has about 135 desegregation cases on its docket, the majority of which are in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.skip past newsletter promotion
“Separate but equal doesn’t work,” said Johnathan Smith, former deputy assistant attorney general in the civil rights division at the justice department. “The reality is that students of color do better when they are in integrated classrooms … We know that the amount of resources that are devoted to schools are greater when there are a higher number of white students. So to have students attend majority-minority school districts means that they’re going to be shut out, whether that’s from AP classes, whether that’s from extracurricular activities. All the activities that make it possible for students to fully achieve occur when you have more integrated classrooms.”
“Public education isn’t just about education for the sake of education,” he added. “It’s about preparing people to be citizens of our democracy and to be fully engaged in our democratic institutions. When you have students that are being shut out from quality public education, the impact is not just on those communities. It’s on our democracy writ large.”
Smith, the current chief of staff and general counsel for the National Center for Youth Law, said that the decision “signals utter contempt for communities of color by the administration, and a lack of awareness of the history of segregation that has plagued our nation’s schools”.
Expect more reversals from the Civil rights Division of the Justice Department. Harmeet K Dhillon has spent years litigating against civil rights of minorities.
Trump’s hatred of universities continues to wreak vengeance, especially on elite institutions. Columbia University was the first to feel his wrath and the first to capitulate. The administration cut off $2 billion in research grants, allegedly as punishment for Columbia’s failure to police anti-Semitism. Columbia negotiated and agreed to pay the federal government $200 million as a fine and accept a federal “monitor.”.
This agreement threatened the independence of the university.
Columbia University agreed to pay more than $200 million to settle allegations of civil rights violations from the Trump administration. It agreed to a long list of changes on campus. But one concession struck some observers as particularly troubling: an outside monitor to ensure the school complies.
To critics, the deal represents an unprecedented governmental intrusion into the affairs of a private university that could erode the independence of universities across the country. The White House has said it sees this agreement as a template for other schools that it is investigating for allegations of antisemitism and racial discrimination.
Much of the oversight will relate to diversity, equity and inclusion, as the Trump administration seeks to stamp out any effort by Columbia to increase racial diversity in its student body, faculty or staff. The monitor will also be charged with assuring that university programs do not promote “unlawful DEI goals” — a term that is not defined.
This agreement clarifies the administration’s goal: to stamp out any efforts by the university to increase racial diversity. Every appointment of a nonwhite or female faculty member will set off alarm bells. Every student who increases diversity will be suspected of being DEI.
Trump continues his unpredicted assault on Harvard, threatening to remove its accreditation, threatening to bar foreign students, withholding billions in research grants. It has been rumored in the press that Harvard is close to making a deal to pay $500 million to settle with the Trump administration.
Other colleges and universities are under investigation and subject to painful cuts. John’s Hopkins has been threatened. The latest is Duke University and its health center. What sense does it make to stop funding research on deadly diseases to punish anti-Semitism? None. Zero. Zilch.
Make no mistake: these demands and payoffs have nothing to do with anti-Semitism. if anything, they increase anti-Semitism as “the Jews” are seen as a Trump-favored, protected class and as complicit with Trump’s vicious war on DEI.
What Trump really wants is to narrow the path to higher education for students of color.
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, decided it was time to change the political orientation of the opinion section of the newspaper. The purge actually began shortly before the 2024 election, when Bezos forbade the editorial board from publishing an endorsement. The board had already written its endorsement of Kamala Harris. It never was published.
Some members of the editorial board quit. Over 200,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions. Some of the Post’s best-known columnists quit, including Jennifer Rubin, Eugene Robinson, and Ruth Marcus. Some of its leading reporters quit and were quickly hired by other journals, including Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, senior national political correspondents, who left to join The Atlantic; Tyler Pager, White House reporter, who moved to The New York Times; Josh Dawsey, investigative politics reporter, joined The Wall Street Journal;Philip Rucker, National Editor at The Post, joined CNN as Senior VP of Editorial Strategy; Matea Gold, managing editor, was hired by The New York Times.
The Post had a reputation for journalistic excellence and defense of democratic values. When Trump was first elected in 2016, the Post adopted the motto “Democracy dies in darkness.” The motto proclaimed its defiance of any efforts by Trump to stifle democratic values and institutions.
Nine years later, democracy is under threat, and the defiant tone of 2016 is gone. Bezos now says he wants the editorial section to champion personal liberties and economic freedom. Those vague words mean different things to different people. They are by no means defiant.
With Trump determined to monopolize power, to rewrite the Constitution or ignore it, to crush academic freedom, to break democratic norms and laws, the threats to democracy have never been greater.
Over the past several days, an astonishing exodus from The Post’s opinion section has taken shape. Jonathan Capehart, Philip Bump, Catherine Rampell, Perry Bacon, and Eduardo Porterhave all—in one way or another—announced their departures. Separately, Dana Milbank and Karen Tumulty have opted to return to the newsroom. While the circumstances of their moves differ (they had been in motion prior to O’Neal’s entrance), the cumulative effect has been unmistakable: a significant brain drain inside one of the paper’s most high-profile departments.
Even Monica Hesse, a columnist focused on gender and society—whose role, I’m told, was requested by Bezos himself during the height of the #MeToo movement—is no longer on solid footing. O’Neal informed her over the last several days that her column does not align with his editorial vision, according to people familiar with the matter. Whether she will remain at The Post in some capacity or accepts a buyout remains unclear. But the fact that her column is no longer desired by management is yet another marker reflecting the shifting nature of Bezos as well as the newspaper he leads.
And it’s not just the columnists heading for the exits. Editors, too, are taking the hint. Michael Larabee, a deputy opinion editor who has worked at the newspaper for two decades, is departing, according to people familiar with the matter. Alyssa Rosenberg, who has overseen letters and community engagement, is also leaving. Stephen Stromberg, another deputy opinion editor, is said to be weighing his options, though his plans have yet to be finalized.
John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes about the latest effort to impose MAGA ideology on the students of Oklahoma by State Superintendent Ryan Walters. Walters is worried that Oklahoma might be flooded with teachers from “woke” states like California and New York, who would bring their “leftist ideology” with them. To guard against that possibility, he has hired PragerU to create a test for teachers to determine whether they have the correct patriotic ideology.
I’ve been wondering how recent events, like the attacks on Iranian nuclear plants, will be taught in History classes. Will state standards require teaching that President Trump was “right about everything,” and thus deserved the Nobel Peace Prize because he completely “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capacity?
Rules for how the Israel-Iran war should be taught were immediately issued by Oklahoma schools Superintendent Ryan Walters. In a memo about teaching about the ongoing Israel-Iran conflict, (which, confusingly, initially had the subject line of “Student Transfer Page Now Open”), Walters wrote, “There will be zero tolerance for a Liberal, pro-terrorist agenda indoctrinating Oklahoma students.”
The Oklahoman reported on Superintendent Walters’ demands:
“Oklahoma kids will be taught facts, not indoctrination,” reads the memo, issued via email on Tuesday, June 24. “That means presenting the history of Israel and their fight to rightly exist in the world, including the atrocities of the Holocaust and the current struggle with Iran, in a way that is historically grounded, intellectually honest, and free from antisemitic bias.”
Walters had been explicit in protecting public school students from the “indoctrination” higher education students supposedly received in terms of equivalency between Israel and Hamas. He thus made it clear that the K-12 curriculum would teach that Hamas is a terrorist organization.
Of course, Iranian and Hamas leaders are terrorists who I would never defend. But Walters has previously made it clear that a teachers’ union is a “terrorist group.”
It must be remembered when studying the historic differences between democracies and terrorists that Walters doesn’t believe that our system is perfect. After all, he snuck this into the state’s history standards:
Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities and in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.
But, how will Walters make sure that “woke” teachers don’t defy his mandates?
The Oklahoman reported that a month before the school year will start, and despite the teacher shortage, most teachers have been hired, Walters says that a PragerU-backed assessment, will be completed and given to teachers from California and states with “progressive education policies.” And as KOSU reported, “Walters did not disclose which other states would apply to the mandate.”
But, “the assessment will test educators’ knowledge on the U.S. Constitution, American exceptionalism and the ‘fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.’”
Walters further explained, “’As long as I am superintendent, Oklahoma classrooms will be safe guarded [sic] from radical leftist ideology that California and New York have fostered.’” And, “’teacher’s [sic] who move from these states will not be receiving a teaching certificate unless they pass our new assessment.’”
Granted, Walters’ education mandates are completely unhinged, but at least his two recent orders show that he is thinking ahead, preparing for rapid historical and economic changes. After all, what would happen in Oklahoma schools, where teachers’ starting salaries are 45th in the nation, if they are flooded with California teachers whose average pay was $101,084, or $40,000 more that the Oklahoma average? If that were to happen, how could Oklahoma raise “a generation of patriots, not activists?”
Jennifer Berkshire sums up the malicious goals that are embedded in Trump’s One Big Ugly Budget Bill. It will widen the distance between those at the bottom and those at the top. It will reduce the number of students who can pay for graduate degrees. All to assure that the very rich get a a tax break.
While the media may have moved on from the big awful bill that is now the law of the land, I continue to mull over its mess and malice. The single best description I’ve come across of the legislation’s logic comes from the ACLU’s Stefan Smith, who reminds us that the endless culture warring is all a big distraction. The real agenda when you add up all of the elements is “creating more friction for those climbing up the economic ladder in order to ease competition for those already there.” In the future that this legislation entrenches, rich kids will have an even greater advantage over their poor peers, of whom there will be now be many more. Smith calls this “reordering pipelines;” moving the rungs on the ladder further apart or kicking the ladder away works too. However you phrase it, our ugly class chasm just got wider by design.
This is why, for instance, the legislation includes seemingly arbitrary caps on how much aspiring lawyers and doctors can borrow in order to pay for school. By lowering that amount, the GOP just narrowed the pipeline of who can, say, go to med school. As Virginia Caine, president of the National Medical Association, bluntly put it: “Only rich students will survive.” Indeed, college just got more expensive and a lot less accessible for anyone who isn’t a rich student. Meanwhile, cuts to federal Medicaid funding will lead to further cuts in spending on higher education—the sitting ducks of state budgets—meaning higher tuition and fewer faculty and programs at the state schools and community colleges that the vast majority of American students attend. All so that the wealthiest among us can enjoy a tax cut.
This is also the story of the federal school voucher program that has now been foisted upon us. While the final version was an improvement over the egregious tax-shelter-for-wealthy-donors that the school choice lobby wanted, the logic remains the same, as Citizen Stewart pointedly points out:
It’s a redistribution of public dollars upward. And it’s happening at the exact moment many of the same politicians championing school choice are cutting food assistance, slashing Medicaid, gutting student loan relief, and questioning whether children deserve meals at school.
In their coverage of the new program, the education reporters at the New York Times, who’ve been pretty awful on this beat of late, cite a highly-questionable study finding that students who avail themselves a voucher are more likely to go to college. In other words, maybe vouchers aren’t so bad! Except that this sunny view misses the fast-darkening bigger picture: as states divest from the schools that the vast majority of students still attend, the odds of many of those students attending college just got steeper. That’s because as voucher programs balloon in cost, states confront a math problem with no easy answer, namely that there isn’t enough money to fund two parallel education systems. (For the latest on where the money is and isn’t going, check out this eye-opening report from FutureEd.)
Add in the Trump Administration’s decision to withhold some $7 billion from school districts and you can see where this is headed. In fact, when the folks at New America crunched the numbers, they turned up the somewhat surprising finding that the schools that stand to lose the most due to the Trump hatchet are concentrated in red states. Take West Virginia, for example, which is home to 15 of the hardest-hit districts in the land. The state’s public schools must 1) reckon with $30 + million in federal cuts even as 2) a universal voucher program is hoovering up a growing portion of state resources while 3) said resources are shrinking dramatically due to repeated rounds of tax cuts for the wealthiest West Virginians. That same dynamic is playing out in other red states too. Florida, which is increasingly straining to pay for vouchers and public schools, just lost $398 million. Texas, where voucher costs are estimated to reach $5 billion by 2030, just lost $738 million. While 28 states are now suing the administration over the funding freeze, no red state has spoken up.
Shrinking chances
On paper, budget cuts can seem bloodless. Part of the Trump Administration’s strategy is to bury the true cost of what’s being lost in acronyms and edu-lingo, trusting that pundits will shrug at the damage. But as states struggle with a rising tide of red ink, what’s lost are the very things that inspire kids to go to school and graduate: extra curriculars, special classes, a favorite teacher, the individualized attention that comes from not being in a class with 35 other kids. That’s why I’ve been heartened to see that even some long-time critics of traditional public schools are now voicing concern over what their destabilization is going to mean for students. Here’s Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, warning that the explosion of vouchers in red states is going to have dire consequences, not just for students in public schools but for the states themselves:
Enrollment loss will likely reduce the quality of schools that will continue to educate most children in the state. States will be left with large numbers of students who are unprepared for college and career success.
David Osborne, who has been banging the drum for charter schools since the Clinton era, sounds even more worried.
Over time, as more and more people use vouchers, the education market in Republican states will stratify by income far more than it does today. It will come to resemble any other market: for housing, automobiles or anything else. The affluent will buy schools that are the equivalent of BMWs and Mercedes; the merely comfortable will choose Toyotas and Acuras; the scraping-by middle class will buy Fords and Chevrolets; and the majority, lacking spare cash, will settle for the equivalent of used cars — mostly public schools.
Meanwhile, the billions spent on vouchers will be subtracted from public school budgets, and the political constituency for public education will atrophy, leading to further cuts.
We’ve seen this movie before
Well, maybe not the exact same movie but a similar one. Anybody recall Kansas’ radical experiment in tax cutting? Roughly a decade ago, GOP pols slashed taxes on the wealthiest Kansans and cut the tax rate on some business profits to zero. Alas, the cuts failed to deliver the promised “trickle-down” economic renaissance. What they did bring was savage cuts in spending on public schools. As school funds dried up, programs were cut, teachers were pink slipped, and class sizes soared, all of which led to a dramatic increase in the number of students who dropped out. Meanwhile, the percentage of high schoolers going to college plunged.
Young people in the state “became cannon fodder in the fight to redistribute wealth upward,” argues Jonathan Metzl, a scholar and medical doctor, who chronicled the impact of Kansas’s tax-cutting experiment in Dying of Whiteness. Just four years of school budget cuts was enough to narrow the possibilities for a generation of young Kansans.
But by taking a chainsaw to the public schools, the GOP also gave rise to a bipartisan parent uprising. And not only were lawmakers forced to reverse the tax cuts and restore funding for schools, but voters, who could see with their own eyes what the cuts had meant for their own kids and kids in their communities, threw the bums out the next time they had a chance. Today we’re watching as a growing number of states, with the aid of the federal government and the ‘big beautiful bill,’ embark on their own version of the Kansas experiment—slashing spending, destabilizing public schools, and limiting what’s possible for kids. They’re betting that red state voters will fall in line, sacrificing their own schools, and even their own kids, to ‘own the libs.’ That’s what the ideologues in Kansas thought too.
As I’ve been arguing in these pages, Trump’s education ‘action items’ represent the least popular parts of his agenda. Eliminating the Department of Education is a loser with voters, while cutting funds to schools fares even worse. The idea of cutting funds in order to further enrich the already rich has exactly one constituency: the rich. As the MAGA coalition begins to fragment and fall apart, we should keep reminding voters of all colors and stripes of this fact.
During his campaign, Trump was outspoken about his determination to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education. He blamed the Department for imposing DEI ideology on the nation’s schools, for teaching students “to hate America,” to indoctrinate students to believe whatever he opposes. He even blamed the Department for low test scores.
Never once did he acknowledge that federal law prohibits any federal official from influencing curriculum or instructional materials.
The vast majority of employees of the Department are career civil servants who manage grants, process applications, oversee procurements, and perform necessary tasks to maintain the flow of federal funds to states, school districts, and schools. They have nothing whatever to do with curriculum or test scores.
Trump’s ultimate goal is to withdraw federal funding from public schools. The purpose of federal funding, when the Elementary and Secondary Act was first passed in 1965, was equity, specifically, raising education spending in the poorest states.
To cover the Supreme Court these days is to catalogue its lawlessness. The conservative justices’ latest decision in McMahon v. New York allows the president to effectively demolish the Department of Education—a Cabinet-level department that was created by Congress, given duties and responsibilities by Congress, and funded by Congress to carry them out.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, a pro-wrestling promoter and sexual-abuse lawsuit defendant, made no secret of her goals after taking up her current job. In a speech in March, she declared that the department was to carry out its “final mission”: executing a mandate from President Donald Trump to shutter the department and transfer some of its functions to other agencies. Project 2025, the administration’s de facto policy blueprint, also said the department “should be eliminated.”
A week after taking up her post, McMahon put that plan into action by ordering a “reduction in force,” or RIF, of roughly half of the agency’s employees. The state of New York and other plaintiffs sued McMahon to stop the RIF by arguing that it was a back-door means to end the department’s statutory responsibilities by eliminating the staff responsible for carrying them out.
This was not particularly difficult for the plaintiffs to prove: Trump administration officials publicly described the RIF as part of the “final mission” in alignment with an executive order that directed McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education” while also “ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely”—two obviously contradictory goals.
Unsurprisingly, a federal district-court judge granted the plaintiffs a temporary restraining order shortly thereafter. The lower court concluded from the record that the RIF’s actual goal was to “effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute.” When the Trump administration appealed that restraining order to the Supreme Court, it pled ignorance. The district court, the Trump Justice Department argued, “[lacked] jurisdiction to second-guess the executive [branch]’s internal management decisions” and that the order was about “streamlining” the department.
“The government has been crystal clear in acknowledging that only Congress can eliminate the Department of Education,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices in his filing. “And the government has acknowledged the need to retain sufficient staff to continue fulfilling statutorily mandated functions and has kept the personnel that, in its judgment, are necessary for those tasks. The challenged RIF is fully consistent with that approach.”
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority was gullible enough to believe that. As with almost any other shadow-docket ruling, the court did not bother to explain itself. It fell to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent alongside Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, to explain the gravity of the court’s error. For one thing, Sotomayor noted that black-letter federal law prohibits the Trump administration from doing exactly what it says it is doing.
Congress has prohibited the Secretary of Education from “aboli[shing] organizational entities established” in the Department’s organic statute. 20 U. S. C. §3473(a)(2). As for statutory entities “transferred to the Department,” the Secretary may only “consolidate, alter, or discontinue” a subset of entities specifically identified, after providing Congress with 90 days’ advance notice and a “statement of the action proposed . . . and the facts and circumstances relied upon in support of such proposed action.”
She also emphasized the damage that would result from the court’s decision. “Lifting the district court’s injunction will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended,” she explained. “The majority apparently deems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fire than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues….”
Ford contrasts this decision with SCOTUS refusal to allow Biden to forgive student debt during a national emergency–the COVID pandemic.
To sum up: In Robertsworld, a Democratic president can’t use a federal law that lets the Department of Education “waive and modify” student loans during a national emergency—in this particular case, the COVID-19 pandemic—because Congress was too vague about it for the chief justice’s liking. (The trick here is to selectively treat broad statutes as vague ones.) But when Congress says, “Hey, we’re going to create a bunch of programs for the executive branch to carry out, we’re going to house them in the Department of Education, and we’re also going to create strict limits on how you can reorganize them,” those laws are…merely advisory for Republican presidents, I guess?
The theme of this Supreme Court, he concludes, is lawlessness. Trump can break laws with impunity, anticipating that this Court will approve.
What about the rule of law? A casualty of the Trump regime.
Oklahoma’s Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters continues to make news, usually for trying to inject the Bible and the Ten Commandments into every classroom.
Two members of the Oklahoma State Board of Education were “shocked and mad” when they saw a video featuring “naked women” on the television screen in Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters’ office during the executive session portion of Thursday’s meeting.
While neither Becky Carson nor Ryan Deatherage could tell what video was displaying nude women on Walters’ office TV, each told NonDoc they were the only people seated in a position to see the screen. Deatherage said he noticed the video first while a parent was speaking about her appeal of a district transfer denial. As Deatherage weighed his options about how to bring the video to the room’s attention, Carson noticed the nudity.
“I was like, ‘What am I seeing?’ I kind of was in shock, honestly. I started to question whether I was actually seeing what I was seeing,” Carson said. “I was like, ‘Is that woman naked?’ And then I was like, ‘No, she’s got a body suit on.’ And it happened very quickly, I was like, ‘That is not a body suit.’ And I hate to even use these terms, but I said, ‘Those are her nipples.’ And then I was looking closer, and I got a full-body view, and I was like, ‘That is pubic hair.’ Even right now, I couldn’t even tell you what I was watching….”
The State Board of Education regularly reviews complaints made against teachers and school staff members that involve allegations of misconduct. With that in mind, Deatherage and Carson each said Thursday’s bizarre scenario demands some sort of action toward Walters.
“Besides the shock value and the disturbance of it all and how it affected me as a woman, I think it’s the double standard,” Carson said. “The accountability we are putting on teachers — and we should, I’m not saying we shouldn’t hold teachers accountable — but we’re looking at teachers sometimes with lesser offenses.”
Deatherage said he believes that any other educator who accidentally displayed a nude video at their workplace would face a complaint, investigation and possibly ramifications.
Nothing quite as stunning as a Bible-thumper caught in the act as a hypocrite.
From ‘A Book, an Idea and a Goat,’ Andru Volinsky’s weekly newsletter on Substack is primarily devoted to writing about the national movement for fair school funding and other means of effecting social change. Here’s the link: https://substack.com/@andruvolinsky?utm_source=profile-page
By ANDRU VOLINSKY
Last week I wrote about Trump and the Freestaters’ War on Children. You can find that post here.
At the same time that the MAGA Right pushes to expand taxpayer-funded school vouchers in NH and elsewhere, it also presses to relax child labor laws. Remember, these nasties coordinate their efforts to undermine the public good through forums like ALEC. This same tandem of legislation is happening in state legislatures across the country. Twenty-eight states introduced legislation in the last few terms to turn back the clock on child labor protections. Thirty states have some form of taxpayer-funded school voucher program. Project 2025, the Trumpian roadmap, includes a provision to reverse protections against children working in inherently hazardous jobs and justifies this rollback as a way of respecting “parental choice” in the matter.
The bill was sponsored by Senators Hennessey (R) and Guida (R) and was roughly passed on party lines with the exception of Manchester’s then two senators, Donna Soucy (D) and Kevin Cavanaugh (D), who voted to support the less restrictive child labor laws that affect restaurants and bars not owned by the parents of the working child.
Is this where we are heading?
Abuse and Neglect in NH’s Home Schooled Population
Is abuse or neglect in home schooled children a problem? Is it more prevalent in families who home school their children than in families where children are in regular contact with educators and other staff at public or private schools? I classify families who home school but who have their children regularly participate in some public school programming as traditional school families.
My post last week mentioned that I filed a public information request seeking documents that concern NH Department of Education studies of abuse or neglect in the vulnerable population of children who are home schooled. Most states have mechanisms for querying public officials about the existence of documents. NH’s law is called, “Right to Know.“ The federal law is called the “Freedom of Information Act” (or FOIA).
Since NH will now pay any family in the state a bounty of $2500 to take their kids out of public school, it would be good to know that we, as a state, are meeting our responsibility to protect these children from abuse and neglect. That’s why I asked for access to relevant documents of the NH Department of Education.
Drumroll please….
The state’s responses show that during the eight years that Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut and State Education Board Chair Drew Cline were in charge and pushed for expanding taxpayer-funded vouchers to remove children from public schools, they did nothing to determine if home schooled children are abused, neglected or, for that matter, if they learn.
1. The NH Department of Education did not collect any information about children who are withdrawn from public school including even those children who school personnel specifically identified as being potentially abused or neglected.
The above is true even though a parent or guardian need only fill out a form to remove a child from school and can fill out the form retroactively. The home schooling initiation process is ready made to protect a parent or guardian when s/he gets wind of an abuse or neglect investigation. Simply keep the kid home and fill out a form after the fact.
2. While public schools are subject to all kinds of regulations and assessments, NH has not collected any data about the “efficacy” of home schooling in New Hampshire. I defined “efficacy” as “how well or poorly a child is prepared to pursue higher education or move into the work force or join the military after completing the equivalent of a high school degree.“
In NH, home schooling is defined by statute as “Instruction shall be deemed home education if it consists of instruction in science, mathematics, language, government, history, health, reading, writing, spelling, the history of the constitutions of New Hampshire and the United States, and an exposure to and appreciation of art and music. Home education shall be provided, coordinated, or directed by a parent for his or her own child.” The NH Education Department, the local school district or a non-public school may work with parents to meet these requirements, but only if the parents ask.
There is also no required, meaningful assessment process, evaluation of the home school curriculum or even review of a home schooler’s portfolio, unless the parent specifically asks for it and then the parent chooses the evaluator, who need not be a credentialed educator. The home school portfolio is expressly made property of the parents, I assume, so it cannot be reviewed without a search warrant. Certification of the completion of a program of home schooling is accomplished by the parent filing a form saying the kid is done. NH law absolves school districts from any liability if a home schooled fails to receive a free appropriate public education (FAPE) which is the requirement for a proper program of studies for children with disabilities who qualify for special ed.
The NH Department of Education produced some basic survey data about home schooling and private education. The data come from a report commissioned by the NH Department of Education and released January 2, 2024 entitled, “Key Findings From New Hampshire Department of Education Study of Non-Public-Schooling Parents.” The 15-page study asked private school and home schooled families their views of public schools.
Two notes about the report. First, the sample size was minuscule and self-selected.
Just over 165,000 children attended public school in NH during the target year for the survey. These families’ opinions were not part of the survey. About 10-12 percent of school-aged children in NH attend private schools or are home schooled. That’s 16,000 to about 20,000 children. Since NH doesn’t keep track of these kids, there was no list to contact these families. The surveyors instead used various opt-in methods and only managed to get 334 responses, about one third from home schoolers. Yet, Edelblut published the report.
Second, to hide the minuscule survey size, all responses in the report are presented only in a percentage format. A whopping 73 percent of home school parents reported that they believe their child would be emotionally or mentally safer at home than in public school. What a condemnation of the public school system! But, as there were just over 100 home school parents that participated, this means about 75 people (+/- 10 percent) felt this way.
My educator friends can comment on whether Frank Edelblut’s study would have been acceptable as a homework assignment. For my part, I think it’s a hit job by a bunch of hacks.
I also asked about the NH Department efforts to determine how many home schooled children lack adult supervision during the school day and learned there was no effort to examine this concern.
Kids at work aren’t supervised by parents. This is the part that provides a direct tie-in to relaxation of child labor laws.
Finally, since it is our good legislators who voted to drastically expand taxpayer-funded voucher bounties, I asked if the legislature requested the Department of Education to study any of these subjects and was informed no requests were made.
So much for the law enforcement types interested in protecting children.
The Clawback of Public Education Funding
Some newer estimates put the Trump administration’s withholding of public education funds previously authorized by Congress at more than $8 billion, not $6.2 billion as previously thought. These are havoc-wrecking clawbacks, not cuts in future funding.
The NH political operatives who occupy the positions of Attorney General and Governor have still not joined the twenty-four attorneys general who have challenged Trump’s illegal action in court even though to do so would be in the obvious better interests of the state.
Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education has shared a good set of tools for demanding action. The Network for Public Education was founded by Diane Ravitch, a NYU education historian. Carol is a retired public school principal and executive director of the Network. Here is what Carol suggests with active links:
4. Call the U.S. Department of Education at this number: 1-800-647-8733. Press 5 to report a violation of law regarding the disbursement of federal funds by the U.S. Department of Education. You can leave a message.
When Betsy DeVos was Secretary of Education, she gifted the IDEA charter chain with $225 million to expand, mostly in Texas. She expected that they would flourish, especially in El Paso, where they intended to open 20 charter schools.
IDEA’s first charter school in El Paso recently held its graduation ceremonies. Only half the students who were enrolled in eighth grade remained to graduate. The others had returned to the public schools.
As the first graduating class of IDEA Public Schools in El Paso donned caps and gowns mid-May, it was less than half the size that were in the school system in eighth grade four years earlier.
In 2021, IDEA’s first two El Paso campuses, Edgemere and Rio Vista, had a combined 256 eighth-graders, according to data from the Texas Education Agency. Four years later, 124 seniors were enrolled in IDEA’s class of 2025 at graduation time, all set to continue their education in college.
IDEA contends that students return to public schools because IDEA’s curriculum is too rigorous. But IDEA students do not consistently outperform those in public schools.
IDEA boasts that all its graduates enroll in college. They do not mention that many students attend colleges that accept all applicants.
Diane Ravitch's blog 