RUTHFULLY YOURS

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A recent editorial in The Washington Post, lamenting threats to close the Department of Education, referred to a “landmark” 1983 Reagan Administration report, “A Nation at Risk.” The editorial divulged “that 13 percent of American 17-year-olds – and up to 40 percent of minority youths – were functionally illiterate” at the time. The editorial claimed the United States had been falling behind its adversaries, which caused businesses and the military to spend millions of dollars on “costly remedial education and training programs.” The editorial added: “Test scores have improved (apart from an alarming slippage in recent years), and presidents from both parties have worked to make American schools more accommodating for children with disabilities, and to improve low-performing schools.” But has that been true?

Today, the Department of Education spends approximately twenty-two times as much per student as it did forty years ago, yet the results are dismal. According to the recently issued report from the U.S. Department of Education – the bi-annual National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card – 60% of fourth graders scored below what the NAEP deems a proficient level in math. 8th Graders fared worse, with 75% performing below proficiency. In reading, almost 70 percent of students scored below the NAEP proficiency level. In the report, the author Stephaan Harris quoted Governing Board member Patrick Kelly of Columbia, South Carolina: “Student academic achievement is the cornerstone of national success and security. This makes a lack of academic progress today a direct and urgent threat to our collective future.” It does; education is the foundation on which our democracy is built.

Internationally, our students are not where they should be. According to the 2022 to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, American students did best in reading, ranking 9th overall, behind Macau and Canada. In science, however, they ranked 16th, behind Slovenia and the UK. And in math, the ranked 34th, below the average and behind Norway and Malta.  The scores, according to Education GPS, “…are among the lowest ever measured by PISA in mathematics. In reading and science, results confirm a long-term stability in result,” albeit at a mediocre level for a nation that prides itself on its schools.

These tests foretell a depressing story. We are a nation that has been the technological, medical and science leader of the world; and some might argue its cultural leader. Yet our public schools are a disgrace, with minorities and the poor suffering the most.

School choice is the obvious answer, but it is widely opposed by teachers’ unions, and therefore by most Democrat politicians. Open Secrets reported that, for the 2024 election cycle, the two largest teachers’ unions, National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), gave a combined $32 million to candidates, with 94% going to Democrats. That dollar amount was up from $4 million twenty years ago. In the meantime, a Heritage Foundation survey (2023) found that 47% of House members and 51% of Senators enroll their children in private schools. In a February 1 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Michael Bloomberg wrote: “In New York, the teachers union has fought to maintain a cap on the number of charter schools, [schools that] have dramatically raised achievement levels, even as student waiting lists grow longer.” Hypocrisy thrives.

These tests foretell a depressing story. We are a nation that has been the technological, medical and science leader of the world; and some might argue its cultural leader. Yet our public schools are a disgrace, with minorities and the poor suffering the most.

School choice is the obvious answer, but it is widely opposed by teachers’ unions, and therefore by most Democrat politicians. Open Secrets reported that, for the 2024 election cycle, the two largest teachers’ unions, National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), gave a combined $32 million to candidates, with 94% going to Democrats. That dollar amount was up from $4 million twenty years ago. In the meantime, a Heritage Foundation survey (2023) found that 47% of House members and 51% of Senators enroll their children in private schools. In a February 1 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Michael Bloomberg wrote: “In New York, the teachers union has fought to maintain a cap on the number of charter schools, [schools that] have dramatically raised achievement levels, even as student waiting lists grow longer.” Hypocrisy thrives.

The world faces many problems, and it is not simply the threat of foreign powers, like China with its Belt-and-Road initiatives, a revanchist Russia wishing to reclaim its lost empire, a Middle East under the threat of Iran and Islamic terrorism, or African Christians having to live with daily threats. Artificial intelligence and quantum computing are in their infancy. We must, as J.D. Vance warned our European partners in Munich, confront “the enemy within.” We must not allow fear of censorship prevent us from speaking out. We should, as Noah Rothman wrote in the January 2024 issue of National Review, “summon the courage to repudiate what passes for sophistication in the academy and renounce the trite moral relativism that cannot distinguish between the Western world and its enemies.” Western liberalism, which dates back two-hundred-and-fifty years to the Enlightenment, is under attack. One consequence has been the divisiveness of our political parties. Another is manifested in the current crop of political leaders from both parties.

The best antidote is an educated populace. “Education is the movement from darkness to light” is a quote attributed to Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind. Martin Luther King believed that the purpose of education was to help people “to think incisively and to think for one’s self.” This is particularly true as it applies to our roles as citizens. Our youth must read our Constitution, understand what makes our government unique, and how rare it is in the annals of mankind. All public school students should have some familiarity with the canon of classical liberal Western thought.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/universities-fellow-to-faculty-programs-activists

In the days after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Jemma Decristo, a UC Davis professor, took to social media to express support for the violent energies that had erupted in the Middle East. “HELL YEAH,” Decristo wrote on X, responding to a report that protesters had set fire to the Israeli embassy in Jordan. Reposting news of protests at the United States embassy in Lebanon, Decristo added, “[fire icon] to the US embassy. US out of everywhere. US GO HOME. US GO HOME.”

One of her posts roused national attention: “One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation,” Decristo wrote. “they have houses w addresses, kids in school. they can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.” She concluded with a series of icons: a knife, an axe, and three blood drops.

Shortly afterward, the university launched an investigation into Decristo’s comments, and in April of 2024, the StandWithUs Center for Legal Justice filed a lawsuit against the university for its inaction on anti-Semitism, putting the professor’s threats atop a list of examples in a press release. As of this writing, UC Davis has not disciplined Decristo.

Following Decristo’s comments, UC Davis chancellor Gary May said in a statement that calls for violence were inconsistent with the university’s commitment to “equity and justice.” Ironically, Decristo’s employment at UC Davis came about precisely because of the University of California’s purported commitment to social justice. Decristo, once described by UC Davis as a “scholar-artist-activist,” was recruited through the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP), which fast-tracks scholars showing a “commitment to diversity” into permanent faculty roles.

A growing number of like-minded activists are following Decristo’s path. For years, universities, federal agencies, and private foundations have worked to create well-funded career pathways for scholar-activists in higher education. The network includes undergraduate fellowships, graduate school funding, special hiring initiatives, and even administrator development programs. This constellation of “pipeline programs” is intended to hire more minorities; in practice, it heavily favors academics who view their scholarship as an extension of their political agenda.

The programs also raise legal questions. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in hiring. After President Trump’s executive order “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity,” many universities will likely reassess their pipeline programs to avoid federal scrutiny.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/house-oversight-investigating-underreported-foreign-funding-at-american-universities/

The House Oversight Committee is seeking information from the Department of Education about foreign funding for U.S. colleges and universities as the committee looks to dig into an investigation that had been throttled by the Biden administration.

In a letter to acting Department of Education Secretary Denise Carter obtained exclusively by National Review, committee chairman James Comer and Representative Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.) note foreign nations have given more than $57 billion to U.S. institutions since 1981 and voice concern that many institutions have failed to make disclosures for funds received under the Biden administration.

Comer and Foxx accuse the Biden administration of having “rolled back investigations into foreign funding in academia that took place in the first Trump Administration.” 

The committee is now requesting documents and information regarding the department’s enforcement of reporting requirements; Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 requires institutions that receive federal financial assistance to biannually file disclosure reports with the Secretary of Education. These reports must disclose “gifts received or contracts executed with a foreign source, valued at $250,000 or more, or if an institution is owned or controlled by a foreign source.”

Just 5 percent of U.S. institutions self-report foreign funding, the letter says. The Department of Education’s Office of the General Counsel wrote in 2020 that “there is very real reason for concern that foreign money buys influence or control over teaching and research.”

https://www.city-journal.org/article/elon-musk-doge-department-of-education

Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, one way of measuring the success of an American presidential administration is to tally its accomplishments in its first 100 days. By this standard, President Trump’s second administration is looking quite successful.

Since January 20, the president’s cabinet has pursued decisive action on virtually every political front. But the most high-risk, high-potential initiative has been Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Established in the shell of former President Obama’s U.S. Digital Service, DOGE was charged with eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse in an effort to remake the federal government. For anyone else, such an initiative would have seemed quixotic. But for Musk, who has revolutionized multiple industries and thrives in high-conflict management scenarios, a cautious hope seemed appropriate.

Over the first 30 days, Musk’s DOGE method has come to resemble a seek-and-destroy mission. Musk dispatched small teams of lawyers, engineers, and human-resources specialists to government agencies, instructing them to cut wasteful spending and needless, ideological programs. Musk seems to have identified two switches—payments and personnel—that provide the greatest leverage. The DOGE teams have quickly organized a reduction in workforce and cancelled billions of dollars in government contracts, two steps that reduce spending and reverse the process of left-wing capture.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/19/is-the-doe-doa/

While the federal government has spent money on education and developed education policies since the 19th century, the U.S. Department of Education didn’t become a stand-alone agency until 1980 when, courtesy of President Jimmy Carter, it split off from the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Carter advocated for creating the department to fulfill a campaign promise to the National Education Association. Congress passed the Department of Education Organization Act in 1979. In response, the NEA subsequently issued its first-ever endorsement in a presidential contest.

Just what is the function of the DOE?

As former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos explains, it doesn’t run a single school, employ any teachers in a single classroom, or set academic standards or curriculum. “It isn’t even the primary funder of education—quite the opposite. In most states, the federal government represents less than 10% of K–12 public education funding.”

DeVos adds that it does shuffle money around, adds unnecessary requirements and political agendas via its grants, and then passes the buck when it comes time to assess if any of that adds value. “In other words, the Department of Education is functionally a middleman. And, like most middlemen, it doesn’t add value. It merely adds cost and complexity.”

In 2024, the DOE employed over 4,000 people whose salaries and benefits came to $2.7 billion, and the department’s total budget for the year was $79 billion.

One of the purported reasons the DOE was brought into existence was to lower achievement gaps. But after spending over $1 trillion since its inception, it has done no such thing. The results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math test, given to 4th and 8th graders, were announced in January and showed that 4th graders continued to lose ground, with reading scores slightly lower, on average, than in 2022 and much lower than in 2019.

Teacher union leaders are in a massive snit over the possibility of the DOE’s dissolution. Reacting to Donald Trump’s attempt to get rid of it, National Education Association President Becky Pringle released a statement on Feb 3, in which she maintains that his “latest extreme action will hurt our students and public schools.”

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said on CNN on Feb. 4, “The move is not legal. There are lots of things about the Department of Education that are in statute,” she claimed, referring to funds that go out from the department to low-income families, students with disabilities, English as a Second Language learners, and to work-study programs

https://www.city-journal.org/article/national-assessment-of-educational-progress-results-student-reading-scores

The newly released 2024 results of the Nation’s Report Card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), contain sobering implications for education policy at the national, state, and local levels. Many have pointed out that the scores appear largely unchanged from two years ago, indicating that neither the nation nor New York City and State have bounced back from the learning loss attributed to pandemic-era school closures. That’s true, but long-term trends suggest that average score improvements had already stalled by the mid-2010s, well before Covid-related disruptions. Current scores, in fact, barely differ from those seen at the turn of the century.

National reading scores in grades four and eight are concerning. The 2024 scores from public schools match levels last seen in the 1990s, before the onset of the “school reform era” (2001 to 2017) of the Bush and Obama administrations, which pursued aggressive federal efforts to improve education. Per NAEP, “In 2024 the average reading score for the nation at grade 4 was 2 points lower compared to 2022 and 5 points lower compared to 2019.” The report card concludes, “Compared to the first reading assessment in 1992, the average score in 2024 was not significantly different.”

Eighth-grade scores followed the same trend: “In 2024, the average reading score for the nation at grade 8 was 2 points lower than 2022 and 5 points lower compared to 2019.” And again: “Compared to the first reading assessment in 1992, the average score was not significantly different in 2024.”

These numbers should trigger alarm bells. First, they confirm that the Covid-era school closures have had an enormous effect on students who in 2020 were in elementary school—the years they should have been learning to read. They also demonstrate that the billions of federal dollars given to school districts in the years since have done little to mitigate the damage.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-calls-education-department-a-con-job-wants-it-closed-immediately/

Could the Department of Education (DOE), a massive boondoggle that has done nothing but oversee a decline in the quality of American education and the substitution of wokeism for readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic, really go away? If Donald Trump wins yet another victory, it will.

Fox News reported Wednesday that reporters asked Trump how soon he wanted the department closed. “Oh, I’d like it to be closed immediately,” the president replied. “Look at the Department of Education. It’s a big con job. They ranked the top countries in the world. We’re ranked No. 40, but we’re ranked No. 1 in one department: cost per pupil. So, we spend more per pupil than any other country in the world, but we’re ranked No. 40.” Trump also “said the last time he looked at where the U.S. ranked in education, it was 38th, but then he looked two days ago, and the country had fallen to No. 40.”

Trump also noted that China’s educational system appears to be in fine condition: “As big as it is, it’s ranked in the top five, and that’s our… primary competitor. So, if we’re ranked No. 40, that means something’s really wrong.”

Yes. And it has been wrong for a very long time. Jimmy Carter established the Department of Education, and one of Ronald Reagan’s campaign promises was that he would close it, as it was an unnecessary centralization and bureaucratization of an educational system that had been getting along fine without a Cabinet-level federal agency. When Reagan took office, he appointed Terrel Bell to be his secretary of education, with the explicit task of dismantling the department. In this case, however, the swamp beat the Gipper, and the Education department stayed open.

https://www.thefp.com/p/high-schooler-graduates-illiterate-sues-tennessee-school?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Now, the Tennessee teen is suing his school district.

When William graduated high school in 2024 in Clarksville, Tennessee, he couldn’t read the words on his diploma. Despite ending the school year with a 3.4 GPA, he couldn’t even spell his own name.

That’s why William sued his school district, claiming it had left him “illiterate” and that he was denied the “free appropriate public education” guaranteed to all students by federal law.

On February 3, a federal appeals court sided with William, concluding that he was “capable of learning to read,” and agreeing with his claim that his lack of education had caused him “broad irreparable harm.”

William, whose last name is listed only as A. in the suit, first enrolled in the Clarksville-Montgomery County school district in 2016 when he was in the fifth grade. For the next seven years, he scored mostly in the bottom first, second, or third percentiles of his reading fluency assessment tests compared to national standards. In 2019 and 2020, he scored in the bottom ninth and sixth percentiles, respectively. But, a year before he graduated, his reading had regressed so much he was scoring below the first percentile.

That same year, William took a simple writing test asking him to spell 31 words in three minutes. According to his suit, he couldn’t spell half of them, including the word school, which he wrote as shcool.

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/lancet-study-flaws?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_

In this post, we show why the recent Lancet study’s assertions that restrictive phone policies in schools yield no benefits are unfounded. For example, the phone-policies in the ‘permissive’ vs ‘restrictive’ schools did not differ very much, their measure of academic performance was crude, and their measures of screen time were unreliable.

A recent study published in The Lancet (Goodyear et al., 2025) has generated news headlines suggesting that restricting phone use in schools has no effect on the wellbeing or academic performance of students. This contradicts several previous studies that did find such benefits.

In this post, we lay out several flaws in the design and interpretation of the Lancet study, and several oddities in the data that we believe render its “no benefit” conclusion unjustified.

The authors of the study claimed to have

[E]valuated the impact of school phone policies by comparing outcomes in adolescents who attended schools that restrict and permit phone use.

The word “impact” implies the ability to discern causality. The authors then assert that,

[T]here is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents

and conclude that

[T]here is no evidence to support that restrictive school phone policies, in their current forms, have a beneficial effect on adolescents’ mental health and wellbeing or related outcomes, indicating that the intentions of these policies to improve adolescent health, wellbeing, and educational engagement are not realised.

The authors note that they do find substantial associations between time spent using phones or social media and worsened mental health and wellbeing, physical activity and sleep, and attainment and disruptive behavior:

[T]he negative associations found between increasing time spent on phones/social media and worsened mental health and wellbeing do provide evidence on the need to address phone and social media use in adolescents, and school policies should be developed as part of a more holistic approach.