RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/14/isnt-46-years-of-failure-enough-time-to-kill-the-education-dept/

Americans who care deeply about education were treated to a rare sight on Thursday. In her testimony before Congress to be the head of the Department of Education, Linda McMahon openly and proudly outlined a plan to not just get rid of her job, but take the federal government out of the education business. We wish her luck.

In January, before Trump first bruited his idea to close the Education Department, I&I archly suggested that “The most successful secretary of Education will be the one who shuts it down.” Little did we know that President Donald Trump would propose just that, and let his pick to lead the department make the case for doing so to Congress.

“I’d like it to be closed immediately,” Trump said on Wednesday. “The Department of Education’s a big con job.”

He’s right. McMahon, that ultra-rare unusual appointee whose greatest desire is to close her department and put herself out of a job, outlined a day later why and how she’d do that.

While Trump’s criticism sounds harsh, in fact, even under his plan many pieces of the current Education Department would remain in place — but within other parts of government. The Ed Department has failed in its mission and needs to be dismantled, though that will require lawmakers’ approval.

“I will work with Congress to reorient the department to helping educators, not controlling them,” McMahon said, adding: “Defunding is not the goal here.” Defund, no; dismantle, yes.

McMahon noted in her questioning that, for instance, aid for disabled students would likely be better handled by the Department of Health and Human Services, rather than the Education Department. And she vowed more than once that Congress’ federal aid to low-income school districts and students would be maintained.

So does the department really need to be dismantled? You bet. And McMahon, former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment but also former head of the Small Business Administration in Trump’s previous four years in office, is just the woman to do the job.

The recent experience with COVID underscores why education is too important to be left to Big Government. Under President Joe Biden, the Ed Department presided over teacher-union-friendly school shutdowns and shoddy “remote learning” programs that caused literally millions of American school kids’ of every race and ethnicity to lose ground against previous generations.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/13/the-latest-in-dei-crt-and-gender-issues/

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Critical Race Theory. Transgenderism. Whether you consider them cults, creeds, political movements, or cultural Marxism, they have been around for some time now, but there is mounting opposition.

DEI

Many U.S. Colleges still ooze DEI dogma. For example, the University of Michigan announced in December that it would no longer require diversity statements in faculty hiring and tenure decisions, but its Board of Regents stopped short of cutting DEI spending. One regent voiced concerns about the millions of dollars the public institution is spending to embed DEI into every campus nook and cranny under its DEI 2.0 plan.

Scarily, Brown University’s Medical School now gives DEI more weight than clinical skills in its promotion criteria for faculty, raising questions about the quality of patient care at its medical school and underscoring how deeply DEI has penetrated medical education.

The criteria, which are now posted on Brown’s website, include “demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion” as a “major criterion” for all positions within the Department of Medicine, which oversees the bulk of the school’s clinical units. Clinical skills, by contrast, only count as a “minor criterion” for many roles.

DEI is also still quite prevalent outside our schools. In Los Angeles, which just suffered some of the most grisly fires in the nation’s history, the fire chief is on record “highlighting her DEI agendas rather than emphasizing traditional fire department criteria like response time or keeping fire vehicles running,” writes Victor Davis Hanson.

It’s also possible that DEI played a part in the recent American Airlines crash, which killed 67 people in Washington, D.C. As revealed by The New York Post, the Federal Aviation Administration is embroiled in a class-action lawsuit brought by 1,000 would-be air traffic controllers who were allegedly turned down for jobs because of diversity hiring targets. The New York Times mentions that staffing levels were “not normal” at the time of the collision.

But there is good news on the DEI front. The Heritage Foundation reports that it has launched a new initiative to stand up against corporations targeting individuals based on political or religious beliefs.

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

There is a tingle of fear in any corporation whenever the words “restructuring,” “merger,” “acquisition,” or “hostile takeover” spread through the office. Employees work on their resumes, whisper about projected layoffs, and assess their options.

We’re seeing the same phenomenon unfold right now in our nation’s capital. Since taking over last month, President Trump has promised to blitz through federal departments to roll back waste, cut ideological programs, and return fiscal sanity to American governance. While Republican presidents have long promised to “reduce the size of government,” they have usually failed to do so—the bureaucracy always wins. This time might be different.

The second Trump administration has been surprisingly aggressive in its efforts to reform federal agencies, including a controlled demolition of USAID and an audacious buyout plan for government employees. And Elon Musk, leader of the president’s Department of Government Efficiency, has a long track record of successful, and sometimes extreme, cost-cutting. When Musk took over Twitter, for example, he fired 80 percent of the employees, and at the same time managed to improve the product and increase its profitability.

The next stage of the conflict between Trump and the bureaucracy looks to be the Department of Education, which the president has correctly identified as a hotbed of left-wing ideologies. Almost every Republican presidential candidate since 1980 has promised either to shrink or abolish the department, but its budget has only grown. When Trump made the same promise on the campaign trail last year, I was skeptical. But Musk changes the calculation: the tech entrepreneur has already routed USAID and, as I can confirm from my own reporting, dispatched his DOGE engineers to investigate the DOE. While the department, as a public entity, does not have the same kind of balance sheet as a corporation, it must nevertheless be broken apart and ultimately shut down.

What is the best way to proceed? The administration must first understand that the Department of Education administers three primary activities: college student loans and grants; K-12 funding; and ideological production, which includes an array of programs, grants, civil rights initiatives, and third-party NGOs that create left-wing content to push on local schools. It is not possible or desirable to shut down all three functions at the same time. Rather, Secretary of Education nominee Linda McMahon, in partnership with Musk and DOGE, should handle each separately.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/academia-conservatives-universities-ideological

Academia skews sharply leftward and is increasingly illiberal. Many academics have abandoned the fact/value distinction, which had long served as both a source of rigor and a sort of epistemological Peace of Westphalia. That trend is worsening, as graduate students are much likelier than faculty to support suppression of heterodox ideas. The academy’s ideological imbalance has made it easier for younger academics to define themselves around polemical, “praxis-oriented” scholar-activism.

The politicization of the university is not only an obstacle for the Right but for academia itself. Schools’ “sectarian” reputation undermines trust among those who (more or less correctly) perceive them to be hostile to their views. More important, academia’s ideological tilt presents an intellectual problem, as it gives license to theory-laden interpretations of reality and declining rigor. For instance, a 2023 article in JAMA Surgery asserted that “structural racism” may cause mass-shooting events, even though the paper’s analysis showed that plausible structural-racism measures had no effect beyond that of race itself. Likewise, a celebrated 2020 article in PNAS showed that black babies in Florida died less often under the care of black doctors—but as a 2024 replication by Manhattan Institute scholars demonstrated, that effect obtained only because the original authors had failed to control for birth weight, a variable so obvious that its omission must be considered a failure of peer review. Such a left-wing bias—and the errors that it enables—should embarrass the academy.

It also should prompt conservatives to address their human-capital problem: without right-wing academics, there are fewer experts to conduct research and staff bureaucracies. The problem is easy to see. Proposing a workable solution is much harder.

When a fire breaks out in the kitchen, the first step in stopping its spread is to turn off the stove. Likewise, a key part of the solution to the Right’s lack of representation in universities is to identify the source of the Left’s capture of the academy and put a stop to it. Manhattan Institute fellow John Sailer has thoroughly discussed the problems created by DEI statements and “cluster hires” and how trustees and state legislatures can end these anti-intellectual practices. These policies, which require applicants to profess their commitment to an ideologically oriented mission as a condition of employment, certainly contribute to the demand side of the Right’s academic-employment problem.

https://christopherrufo.com/subscribe?utm_source=email&utm_campaign=email-subscribe&r=8t06w&next=

Every era has its grifters, gurus, quacks, and frauds. This is an American tradition, from the snake oil salesmen to the pyramid-schemers to the New Age prophets of the twentieth century. One might be tempted to dismiss them as ethically compromised men, duping the gullible for personal benefit, but they’re something more than that: symbols of each generation’s hopes and anxieties.

The past decade’s examples, who sold us on critical race theory, transgender medicine, and other insanities, are no different. Some Americans wanted to absolve themselves of guilt about race and sexuality and liberate themselves from the shackles of history and biology. Prudent observers could have warned them about the impossibility of this enterprise, but the gurus had, for a time, seemingly unstoppable momentum.

The most significant was Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi. After the 2020 death of George Floyd, Kendi became America’s race guru, selling books, delivering speeches, lecturing corporations, advising politicians, and everywhere preaching the new gospel of “antiracism.” His key idea was that institutions must practice “antiracist discrimination” in favor of blacks and other minorities to make up for past “racist discrimination.” His ideology was rudimentary critical race theory, his agenda rudimentary DEI.

The press heralded Kendi as a genius, scholar, and the moral voice of the Black Lives Matter era. In 2021, the New York Times was particularly fawning, publishing uncritical fare like “Ibram X. Kendi Likes to Read at Bedtime,” an article about his reading habits. “You’re at the forefront of a recent wave of authors combating racism through active, sustained antiracism,” the Times opined. “Do you count any books as comfort reads, or guilty pleasures?”

Kendi cashed in. The professor signed a lucrative Netflix contract and switched to designer clothes. He secured $55 million for his “Center on Antiracist Research” at Boston University, which promised to engage in scholarship and activism.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/higher-education-trump-reform-universities-funding

Universities occupy a uniquely privileged position in American life. They enjoy tremendous prestige and billions in public subsidies, even as their costs have exploded, saddling the country with $1.7 trillion in outstanding student debt.

Do universities deserve their status? A growing number of Americans don’t think so. Far from delivering on their promises, most universities have devolved into left-wing propaganda factories. Nearly 60 percent of Republicans say that universities have a negative effect on the country, and only one in three independents has “quite a lot” of trust in higher education institutions. The trendlines suggest that the disillusionment has yet to hit bottom.

This is a crisis—and an opportunity. The Trump administration has a once-in-a-generation chance to reform higher education. The president and his prospective education secretary, Linda McMahon, should seize it.

The starting point of any serious higher-education agenda should be to recognize many universities for what they are: ideological centers that have abandoned the pursuit of knowledge for partisan activism. They have not earned their position as acclaimed credentialing institutions; rather, the schools have amassed their wealth and power from generous policy decisions bankrolled by American taxpayers, whom they have repaid mostly with contempt. These schools posture as though their position is untouchable, but their business model is nearly entirely reliant on federal largesse. Demanding that universities behave in a manner worthy of their unique financial and cultural position is long overdue.

But reform will not come easy. The Trump administration must renegotiate the deal between the citizens and the universities, conditioning federal funding on three popular demands: first, that the schools contribute to solving the student-debt crisis; second, that they adhere to the standard of colorblind equality, under both federal civil rights law and the Constitution; and third, that they pursue knowledge rather than ideological activism.

Here is how it can be done.

At the outset, we should acknowledge the dirty secret of higher education: it has become a creature, or, less charitably, a parasite, of the state. It is no stretch to say that the entire business model of higher education is fundamentally dependent on federal money.

First, consider direct grants. Universities collectively receive more than $50 billion in federal grants yearly. One-eighth of Havard’s annual budget—and two-thirds of its research funding—comes directly from the federal government. Likewise, Washington sends $900 million to Yale and $800 million to Columbia each year.

Some of this money goes to noble causes, such as cancer research. But much of it is devoted to ideological drivel, such as the $600,000 sent to Yale to study the “impacts of mobile technology on work, gender gaps, and norms”; $700,000 to the University of Pennsylvania to study how to allocate Covid vaccines on the basis of race; and $4 million to Cornell University to increase “minoritized” faculty in the medical sciences. And at some schools, administrators get the biggest cut, skimming up to 60 percent of grant funding as “indirect” overhead costs, which Congress once capped at a mere 8 percent.

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/05/the-national-assessment-of-educational-regress/

The headlines last week told the sad story. The New York Times’ title read, “American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows,” while The 74 proclaimed, The New NAEP Scores Are Alarming. Hope Is Not a Strategy for Fixing Them.” The Wall Street Journal announced, “American Kids Are Getting Even Worse at Reading, Test Scores Show.

The stories shared lowlights from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given periodically to the nation’s students. The results from the 2024 reading and math test, given to 4th and 8th graders, were announced last week 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.

In 2019, 35% of 4th graders scored at or above the test’s reading proficiency standard, but that figure dropped to 33% in 2022 and, further, to 31% in 2024. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40%. Some 33% of 8th graders scored below “basic” on the exam—a record low.

The news was especially bleak for our lowest-performing students, who are “reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

Worsening reading skills have wide-ranging consequences. Poor test scores have been linked to the economic success of both the nation and individuals. Students with limited reading skills are less likely to graduate from high school, and as adults, they are more likely to be incarcerated.

Mindy Sjoblom of On Your Mark Education, a group dedicated to using the science of reading to promote literacy, asserts, “When students are not reading on grade level by third grade, their life-long choices are severely limited. One long-term study found that students who fail to meet this bar are 4 times more likely to drop out of school. In fact, 88% of these dropouts were struggling readers in third grade.”

It is worth noting that we’ve seen the same pattern recently on other tests—TIMSS, PIAAC, i-Ready, MAP, and state assessment results—explains Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/balanced-literacy-lawsuit-teaching-reading
After decades of failure, the tide is turning in the battle over how American children are taught to read. School districts had long invested in methods that encouraged students to “guess” unknown words rather than break them down phonetically—a flawed strategy that left a generation of students struggling to read. Criticism of these methods has a long history. Rudolf Flesch’s 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read advocated for phonics-based instruction, followed by Jeanne Chall’s The Great Debate and the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report, which emphasized the importance of phonics instruction and challenged other approaches. Despite these efforts, Balanced Literacy gained widespread traction. But since the 2022 investigative podcast series Sold a Story amplified how influential education publishers had promoted these unproven strategies as “research-backed,” half of U.S. states have passed literacy laws changing the way their schools teach reading. Now a lawsuit targets some of these strategies’ leading proponents—potentially forcing curriculum creators and publishers to answer for years of false advertising and failed instruction.

In December, two Massachusetts mothers filed a class-action against Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas, Gay Su Pinnell, their publishers, and the board of trustees of Columbia University’s Teachers College, accusing them of promoting “deceptive” and “defective” reading programs that failed their children. The plaintiffs argued that the curriculum was misrepresented in that it relied on discredited practices, and as a result, hindered their children’s ability to learn to read. The focus on curriculum marketing frames the issue as one of consumer protection rather than educational malpractice, potentially avoiding the legal complexities of the latter allegation. In a broader sense, the case highlights curriculum developers’ ethical and legal obligation to ensure their materials align with the evidence-based practices they claim to promote.

Each of the defendants played a pivotal role in transforming America’s approach to reading education. Calkins created the “Units of Study” curriculum, adopted in public school classrooms across the country. Fountas and Pinnell developed the Leveled Literacy Intervention, a small-group reading-instruction program. Both curricula used the three-cueing system, which encourages students to guess unknown words based on pictures, context, and first letters, rather than by decoding them phonetically. This “guessing” method, long discredited by cognitive scientists, was marketed as “research-backed,” without evidence.

The lawsuit is the latest chapter in the so-called reading wars. In 2001, then-President George W. Bush signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act, which required federally funded schools to adopt Reading First, a phonics-based approach. NCLB, partially inspired by the 2000 National Reading Panel Report, mandated that students be taught to read using these scientifically grounded methods. Progressives and teachers’ unions, however, rejected Reading First. Instead, they promoted Balanced Literacy, which framed teacher-directed instruction as outdated and focused on a student-centered approach to reading.

Reading First was the superior approach. In 2008, the Institute of Education Sciences conducted an impact study on Reading First that demonstrated that students schooled in the approach showed significant gains in the program’s goal areas: phonemic awareness, decoding, and fluency. While the study found that the strategy had no impact on students’ reading comprehension, this was not among the initiative’s goals. Media coverage emphasized the reading-comprehension finding, however, ignoring Reading First’s positive effects on core competency areas. This misrepresentation of the data, combined with political pressure from teachers’ unions, a recession, and initiatives to grant local control over curricula led Congress to defund Reading First in 2009. In its place, many public school systems adopted Calkins’s Units of Study and Fountas and Pinnell’s Leveled Literacy Intervention. Calkins’s ties to Columbia University Teachers College and support from teachers’ unions played a significant role in these curricula’s national adoption.

Fast forward to 2022, when the Sold a Story podcast exposed the failures of Balanced Literacy in public education to a national audience. The series revealed how curriculum developers Calkins, Fountas, and Pinnell had marketed their flawed methods as “research-backed,” even as national proficiency from the NAEP 2022 reading assessments showed that only 32 percent of fourth-graders read at or above proficiency level. These failures resulted in the Massachusetts lawsuit, which demonstrates parents’ growing demands for accountability within the education system.

How will today’s children be taught to read? The answer to that question depends on parents and policymakers’ actions. Almost 25 years ago, President Bush blazed the path with Reading First, ensuring that every public-school student, regardless of background, was taught using proven, science-based methods. States should draw inspiration from Bush’s crusade by banning discredited teaching methods and empowering parents to challenge schools’ curriculum choices. Every child deserves access to a proven method for learning to read—not to guess.

Jennifer Weber has a Ph.D. in behavior analysis and is the cofounder and co-owner of KIT Consulting, where she specializes in behavior analysis and education. She is an adjunct professor at Teachers College Columbia University and Nicholls State University and a member of the Adam Smith Society.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/mounting-disobedience-in-our-schools/

In a December Education Week poll, teachers and administrators disclose that student behavior is worsening. Since pre-pandemic 2019, “there’s been a pronounced spike in behavior problems, ranging from minor classroom disruptions to more serious student fights broadcast on social media.”

The survey results reveal that 72% of educators say that students in their classroom, school, or district have been misbehaving either “a little” (24%) or “a lot” (48%) more than in the fall of 2019, the last semester before the COVID-19 shutdowns began.

The problem in Los Angeles is particularly grim. In the 2023-2024 school year, the district’s School Experience Survey shows that just 58.5% of elementary students, 55.2% of middle school students, and 51.6% of high school students reported feeling safe in their schools—a significant drop from previous years. Their fears are justified as “fighting and physical aggression increased by 16.8% from the 2022-2023 school year to 2023-2024, while threats surged by 28.5%.”

Nevada is ineptly dealing with the issue by moving problem kids to another school, and a former paraprofessional is suing the Washoe County School District over claims that “the system shuffles dangerous students between schools without adequately alerting staff about their behavior and terminated him in retaliation.”

A North Carolina school district tried to improve discipline by implementing a policy for which it paid a non-profit over $800,000 to help it create. Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools had fewer short and long-term suspensions for the school year and no expulsions, part of a broader shift toward “equitable discipline.”

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/01/woke-education-then-and-now/

Of all the Communist thinkers and advocates to have played a role in the reworking of Marx’s crackpot theories in the aftermath of World War I, perhaps none played a greater role yet has received less popular attention than György Lukács.

By all rights, World War I should have been the end of Marx and his utopian fantasy. The workers of the world refused to unite. They decided that they had a great deal more to lose than their chains. And contra Marx and Engels’ expectations, the workers went to war—happily, joyfully, willingly, for country, for family, and for GOD.

The working classes’ willing participation in the Great War essentially disproved Marx and thoroughly undermined his entire worldview. His conception of class consciousness and his belief in the inevitable Hegelian rise of the working class were shattered. But that was merely the prelude to the greater indignity, that which should have ended the Marxist fantasy forever.

The war itself was a deep and practically fatal wound to the Marxist weltanschauung, but the aftermath was perhaps even uglier and more painful for true believers. It was the salt that the Fates rubbed into that wound. For starters, only the backward and largely unindustrialized misfit nation on the continent’s eastern frontier could sustain a people’s “revolution.” And if that wasn’t humiliating enough, the heart of industrial Europe emerged from the war shattered and broken, not just physically but psychologically, emotionally, and most especially, spiritually. The new Europe was exhausted and scarred, increasingly frustrated with the old gods but far from enamored with the new ones. It rejected Marx openly, just as it rejected every theological ethos.

Unfortunately, Marx’s few remaining fans in Europe did not give up so easily, and they spent the next several years rehabilitating his image by revising his predictions and explaining away his failures. In Italy, Antonio Gramsci outlined the need for a “cultural revolution,” one in which anti-Christian Marxists would make what the German Marxist student leader Rudi Dutschke would later call “the long march through the institutions.” In Hungary, Lukács re-interpreted Marx’s notions of reification (a special case of alienation) and commodity fetishism (a special case of reification) and, in so doing, developed, in much greater detail, the idea that man’s consciousness is dissociated at a fundamental level from society. In Germany, Felix Weil funded the think tank that would become the Frankfurt School (the Institute for Research at Goethe University Frankfurt), which would, under the leadership of Max Horkheimer, become the spark for Cultural Marxism.