Republican Assault on Public Education (3 Viewers)

[MT15]

This probably needs its own thread. It ties in with a lot of different R culture wars: Attacks on universities, attacks on CRT and “woke”. Classifying teachers and librarians as “groomers”. Pushing vouchers to send tax money to private, often religious, schools. Betsy DeVos was an advocate for all these policies that will weaken public education, and there are several billionaires who also want to dismantle public education. Public education may have its faults, but it is responsible for an amazing amount of upward mobility. Kids from poor areas can still get a college prep education in a public school.

Vouchers (sometimes disguised as “school choice”) are a particular peeve of mine. Public money is diverted from poor schools to wealthy private schools, which aren’t required to offer accommodations for special needs or challenged students. Families with special needs kids are left out. Rural areas often suffer disproportionately because there are no private schools to attend, but their public schools still see the reduction in funding. Often the families who take advantage of the voucher money are upper class and the private schools simply raise tuition knowing the families are getting taxpayer money now.

Greg Abbot is being particularly vile in this area. No surprise. Voters will have to make a statement about public education. If we want to halt the growing divide in this country between the “haves” and “have-nots”, we need to pay attention to public education.

 

[Optimus Prime]

…….Four decades later, that fantasy world lives on and finds itself reckoning with the reality of a second Donald Trump administration hellbent on rolling back diversity programs and gutting the Department of Education.

On TikTok, the hashtag HillmanTok has become a free online space where Black scholars share their expertise in subjects that the administration is trying to excise from libraries and school curricula.

Anyone who scrolls to their content on TikTok and sticks around for the lesson is part of the class. “I’m mindful of the weight of this particular teaching and this particular time,” says Leah Barlow, a liberal studies professor at North Carolina A&T, the country’s largest HBCU. “Honestly, it feels a little ancestral.”

Last fall, Barlow posted an introductory two-minute TikTok video for her African studies class; 250,000 users subscribed to the class channel overnight and within a week it hit 4m views.

“I thought it was going to be a trend for a short time, and then we’d move on to the next thing,” says Barlow, who posted the video on the same day Trump retook office and rescinded a federal TikTok ban.

But then a sixth-grade math teacher named Cierra Hinton seized on the enthusiasm and started the hashtag HillmanTok. She encouraged Black educators to post instructional videos under the banner, and was inundated with hashtagged submissions.

Like Black Twitter and Black Lives Matter, another digital social justice movement was born – the world’s first crowd-sourced HBCU. In an emotional response video, Hinton took a measure of satisfaction in helping “people come together and build something that is bigger than we ever imagined, something that means so much”.

HillmanTok class subjects run the gamut from US history to mathematics to culinary arts. There are even electives on African American food studies and Stem careers. “I am finally about to post the syllabus,” Carlotta Berry says in the greeting for her Engineering 101 HillmanTok course. “You can learn asynchronously by watching any of my videos.”…….

This is all happening against the backdrop of a Black college enrollment gap in which Black men account for 26% of the student body. All the while Maga donors add insult to injury by trashing the value of HBCU education overall.

“Howard was not Harvard,” the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel said in a dig at the former vice-president Kamala Harris’s scholarship at Howard University, the most prestigious HBCU. “You couldn’t even point this out [when she was running]. This is probably a racist thing to say.”

That’s just the start of the slights against HBCUs, which were founded to provide educational opportunities for Black students at a time when it was illegal or impossible to attend college in the US.

A 2023 investigation by the Biden administration found that HBCUs had missed out on more than $13bn in federal funding for more than three decades because state governors blocked the funds. North Carolina A&T, which has a 14,000-student enrollment, was owed more than $2bn alone.

HBCUs could well end up suffering more under Trump, who has made a U-turn from allocating $250m in funding to freezing educational grants and loans – which is how most HBCU students cover tuition.

Last month, he signed an executive order to close the Department of Education – a critical lifeline for HBCUs, which have a much harder time fundraising than predominantly white institutions……..

‘HillmanTok’: how The Cosby Show inspired resistance to Trump’s war on Black education

A riff on the university setting of A Different World, the world’s first crowd-sourced HBCU is expanding online

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

The Trump administration is considering placing Columbia University under a consent decree, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, a dramatic escalation in the federal government’s crackdown on the Ivy League institution.

The university has already accepted a series of changes demanded by the administration as a precondition for restoring $400m in federal grants and contracts the government suspended last month over allegations that the school failed to protect students from antisemitism on campus.

A consent decree – a binding agreement approved by a federal judge – would be an extraordinary move by the Trump administration, which has threatened government funding as a way to force colleges and universities to comply with Donald Trump’s political objectives on a range of issues from campus protests to transgender women in sports and diversity and inclusion initiatives.


As a party to the consent decree, Columbia would have to agree to enter it – and the Journal report states that it is unclear whether such a plan has been discussed by the university board.……..

White House may seek legally binding control over Columbia through consent decree – report

Possible escalation comes after university already accepted changes as pre-condition for restoring $400m in grants

www.theguardian.com

 

[Optimus Prime]

Over 1,300 federal employees impacted by the Department of Education's March 11 reduction in force received their official separation notices Thursday, according to copies reviewed by ABC News.

"It is with great regret that I must inform you that your position is being abolished and you have been reached for reduction in force (RIF) action," the notices read, in part.

The RIF was one of the first major steps in massively reducing the Education Department after President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to close the agency on March 20.

Both Trump and McMahon have suggested they will continue reducing the size of the agency and return education power and decisions to the states.

The president has said that the RIF'd employees either weren't showing up to work or they weren't good at their jobs. But the notices explained that the separation is not based on performance evaluations -- it is due to the "reduction in the number of positions" at the agency. The notices also said that employees have the right to appeal this reduction.

In addition, laying off people without going through the civil service protections is "illegal," according to NAACP Chief of Policy and Legislative Affairs Patrice Willoughby.

"What they're doing is illegal," Willoughby told ABC News. "They know it's illegal. It creates damage to people. They're damaging not only what they say is the deep state — really dedicated federal workers who are working professionally on behalf of education families and young people but they're also damaging these families and these kids in these communities, many of them who voted for this administration and the constituents of these senators and representatives, who are saying nothing about it."

The letter sent on Thursday is a required 60-day notice alerting federal employees of their final days, according to a source familiar with the matter. Until those 60 days are up, the affected employees are on paid administrative leave. On June 10, they will no longer be employed.

"ED appreciates the service you have rendered," the notice said, adding, "We deeply regret that this decision affects you, and we recognize the difficulty of the moment."...............

'Your position is being abolished': Education Department staff get official reduction-in-force notices

Over 1,300 federal employees impacted by the Department of Education’s March 11 reduction in force received their official separation notices Thursday.

abcnews.go.com

 

[MT15]

The Trump administration is considering placing Columbia University under a consent decree, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, a dramatic escalation in the federal government’s crackdown on the Ivy League institution.

The university has already accepted a series of changes demanded by the administration as a precondition for restoring $400m in federal grants and contracts the government suspended last month over allegations that the school failed to protect students from antisemitism on campus.

A consent decree – a binding agreement approved by a federal judge – would be an extraordinary move by the Trump administration, which has threatened government funding as a way to force colleges and universities to comply with Donald Trump’s political objectives on a range of issues from campus protests to transgender women in sports and diversity and inclusion initiatives.


As a party to the consent decree, Columbia would have to agree to enter it – and the Journal report states that it is unclear whether such a plan has been discussed by the university board.……..

White House may seek legally binding control over Columbia through consent decree – report

Possible escalation comes after university already accepted changes as pre-condition for restoring $400m in grants

www.theguardian.com

That’s what you get for cowering to a bully instead of standing up to them. I told my GOP senator, who knows better than any of this but went along with Trump’s asinine cabinet appointments, “ they’re going to primary you anyway, so you may as well do the right thing”. Columbia should have fought this tooth and nail.