Tag: education

Ed-Tech Vendors Fleece Schools Out Of Millions Of Dollars For Software That Makes Kids Dumber

After the teachers in Los Angeles nearly went on yet another strike, they may want to study a recent scandal that reveals where some of the district’s money is going. According to a report in the Westside Current, a former Los Angeles Unified School District employee and technology vendor, Gautham Sampath, just pled “not guilty” to money-laundering charges after allegedly rerouting $3 million to LAUSD technical project manager Hong Peng to land a $22 million contract for his information software.

Assuming Peng is guilty in this instance — and the hilariously illiterate texts between her and Sampath would suggest she is — it is reasonable to conclude she has probably done the same with other tech vendors, paying gargantuan sums of taxpayer money for often shoddy, useless software and pocketing large sums for it. And she is far from the only person doing it. Sampath’s company, Innive, evidently has “government contracts in California and elsewhere in the country.” This means that all over the country, local and state governments are awarding multimillion-dollar bids to conmen with few legal repercussions.

To be clear, this is money that could have gone to teachers, counselors, and administrators. This is money that could have been kept by the homeowners paying extortion-level property taxes. This is money that families could have applied to alternative schooling options. 

But instead, this kind of corruption continues to siphon away taxpayer money without anyone realizing it. Years ago, I wrote about the expenses that consume most of a school district’s budget, namely extracurriculars, special education, and disciplinary programs. What I should have added to this list was technology. 

For the past couple of decades, school districts have raided their rainy day funds, issued bonds, and gone broke paying for iPads and Chromebooks, educational software, and specially trained personnel tasked with helping faculty use these products. And aside from a few district bureaucrats safely hidden in a nondescript office building that the district somehow owns, no one really knows how much any of this costs. Naturally, this lack of transparency makes it all too easy for embezzlement, laundering, and bribery.

Moreover, in my own experience of teaching high school English, most of these programs are usually worthless. I have no clue how much local districts are paying for so many research databases, note-taking apps, informational organizers, or AI tools, but I do know I never use them, nor do any of the teachers I’ve known.

Ironically, what’s worse than this useless software is the software we actually do have to use. Whether it involves recording grades, taking attendance, referring misbehavior, or compiling standardized assessment data for each student, these programs are, as a rule, terrible. They are poorly designed, convoluted, and frequently glitch and crash. Added to this are our online textbooks, which force users to click two dozen times through two dozen dropdown menus to open a particular text — and usually require a few periodic reboots afterward. 

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What (and How) Should Our Students Be Taught Today?

In an age like the present, which is choking on the virtually exclusive valorisation of technology, what (and how) should students be taught, or putting it differently, what should they learn? Just consider the proliferating crises affecting the entire world population – the ongoing war in Ukraine, the fluctuating Iran war and its broadening ripple effect on energy prices (which is already affecting, not only availability of oil and petrol, but food supplies as well), and the social and political strife connected with ‘illegal immigrants’ in the US, Britain, and Europe, to mention only some – then it seems a daunting task to answer this question.  

There are many – too many – intellectual sources, contemporary as well as throughout the history of the world, from which I could draw to answer it in a very provisional manner, so I’ll have to be selective, but here goes. My perspective is mainly Western. 

From the ancient Greek thinker, Plato – who had assimilated the insights of his predecessors, from Thales through Empedocles, Anaxagoras, and others to Heraclitus and Parmenides, and, of course, his teacher, Socrates, who claimed that he had learned from a woman named Diotima – we learned that Being and Becoming are the two poles constituting the tension field in which things appear in the material world of the senses and of particular things, on the one hand, and the intelligible world of the universal Forms, on the other. 

Aristotle, Plato’s Macedonian pupil (who taught Alexander, destined to become The Great), argued that the universal Forms are not outside of particular things, but their intelligible part instead. Together, they comprise what he called an entelechy. Moreover, Aristotle gave us an encompassing conceptualisation of causality as a sort of ‘fourfold’ (a concept that later returns in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, denoting the touchstone for a truly human mode of living), which is far richer and more fecund in explanatory terms than its modern reduction to only one of these. The four Aristotelian causes are the material, formal, working, and final causes, respectively. 

A tree, for instance, has a material embodiment, or matter (the trunk, branches, leaves, and so on). It also has an intelligible form – not its shape, but its comprehensible essence, and a working cause, which accounts for its change, or growth. Its final cause, or telos, is perhaps the most important, insofar as it explains why the tree develops in the way that it does. 

Obviously, for a human being this schema is more complex, although easily comprehensible. We have bodies (material cause), a formal, intelligible essence which makes us what we are, as distinct from other things, a working cause which explains changes in the course of our growth, and a final cause or human telos, which instantiates that towards which we ‘grow’ or what we strive for, both as a species and as individuals. For every individual the telos or final cause is different; some work towards the ideal writer they want to become, others strive for excellence in cooking, or singing, and so on. In this sense, our future(s) is a crucial factor for understanding what we do at present.

From the above it is already apparent that learning in what Bernard Stiegler calls a ‘transindividual’ manner – where knowledge is transferred from one individual to another, or others – always involves an incremental complexification. In this way, Plato, for instance, synthesised the accumulated knowledge of his predecessors, and Aristotle took this process further, giving us a synthesis that was even more comprehensive than Plato’s.

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Leftists Are Big Mad The Education Department Is Teaching Kids American History

“History Rocks!,” a national tour led by Education Secretary Linda McMahon to honor our nation’s 250th anniversary, is expressly being promoted as a nonpartisan celebration of American greatness. Even The Washington Post has admitted that “there is no evidence that the events themselves push a political message.” And yet “parents, students and teachers” have reportedly taken issue with the tour because it enjoys sponsorship from conservative and religious organizations, leading to the cancellation of several History Rocks! events.

This left-wing backlash to History Rocks! demonstrates how deeply the left has been corrupted by an ideology that is opposed to celebrations of our nation that only a few decades ago would have elicited practically unanimous approval across America.

A Left-Wing Double Standard Over American History

One outspoken senior at a high school in Alabama described History Rocks! as “hypocritical,” because it was “very publicly supported by strongly political groups.” Similarly, after learning that an elementary school in Fairfield, Connecticut, was going to host History Rocks!, a parent voiced her displeasure to the superintendent, claiming the tour was “backed by right-wing extremist groups.” A few hours later, the district canceled the event … because of its connection to groups like The Heritage Foundation and Turning Point USA.

Meanwhile a superintendent in Massachusetts dramatically declared that her district wouldn’t participate in any event related to Turning Point. Even after the Education Department explained to the superintendent that Turning Point “was not involved in the program,” the Post reported, the official canceled the previously scheduled event. Protesters in Illinois in turn held up signs that read, “Keep hate out of our schools,” and “education not indoctrination.” The New York Times featured a mocking op-ed proclaiming, “Linda McMahon is shocked — shocked! — that there’s been a backlash to the Department of Education’s ‘History Rocks!’ tour.”

What’s actually shocking about the dustup over “extremist groups” such as Heritage and Turning Point is that we heard no complaints from such persons as the curriculum of the 1619 Project spread to more than 4,000 schools six years ago. That curriculum promotes an unapologetically leftist and racialist version of American history, claiming, as The Heritage Foundation detailed, that America was founded in order to perpetuate slavery and that there was “no tension, no debate, no struggle” over the institution at the founding. Some of the most well-respected historians in the nation have severely criticized the project. Its brainchild, purported journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, once claimed “the white race … is the biggest murderer, rapist, pillager, and thief of the modern world.”

What History Rocks! Is Actually Promoting

As The Washington Post readily acknowledged, the events for History Rocks! usually feature Secretary McMahon or another member of the Education Department speaking briefly, as well as a quiz on history. “Speeches provided by the Education Department and local coverage of the events suggest the events are a nonpartisan celebration of America and its origins,” the Post admitted. A review of the Department’s website shows absolutely nothing expressly partisan about the program.

“Some have tried to brand this tour as ‘radical,’ ‘dangerous’ and ‘partisan indoctrination.’ How absurd,” reads a statement from McMahon. “What you see is not politics — it is a shared commitment to our nation’s story. It speaks volumes about certain voices in our society that they would seek to distort a celebration of America’s 250th anniversary and deprive children of this experience.”

To prove McMahon’s point, a school member in Wisconsin went to a History Rocks! event and “found it inoffensive but also ‘very shallow.’” She asserted that the trivia questions were “kind of elementary, ” and she questioned whether “students learned anything that the school had not already taught them.”

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in 2022 determined that only 22 percent of eighth graders were proficient in civics and another 31 percent were deemed below basic, unprecedentedly low numbers. A 2024 survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation discovered that 70 percent of respondents couldn’t pass a “basic civic literacy quiz” that covered the three branches of government. Only about half of respondents “were able to correctly name the branch of government where bills become laws.” At this point, even basic refreshers about the author of the Declaration of Independence or the First Amendment are probably necessary for grade-schoolers.

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New Israeli policy targeting Christian schools in Jerusalem could threaten their future existence

The Israeli government instituted a policy prohibiting Christian Palestinian teachers who live in the West Bank from working in any of the 15 Christian schools in Jerusalem in a move that threatens to weaken the two-millennia presence of Christians in the Holy City.

School principals in Jerusalem recently received letters from the Israeli Ministry of Education stipulating that beginning in September they are required to only hire teachers who reside in the city and hold Israeli-issued qualifications.

The March 10 directive comes in the wake of a bill approved last July by the Education Committee of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament) aimed at prohibiting Palestinian teachers who earned their degrees at institutions in the West Bank from teaching in Israel or the occupied East Jerusalem.

Therefore, work permits for Christian Palestinian teachers living in the West Bank will no longer be granted despite their possessing a green card that allows individual Palestinians to work and travel within Israeli-controlled areas.

According to Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), this restriction will affect almost 230 Christian teachers at 15 schools in Jerusalem, relegating them to the financial hardship of unemployment.

A representative of the General Secretariat of Christian Schools (GSCS) in the Holy Land told ACN that the new policy threatens the future of Christian education in the Holy City.

Additionally, he said, “If this decision is truly implemented, our Christian schools will find themselves in a very difficult position, which will jeopardize their sustainability and cause them to lose their Christian mission.”

The GSCS representative, who spoke on condition of anonymity, explained, “There are not enough Christian teachers in Jerusalem to take over. In the long term, these restrictions risk permanently affecting the Christian character of our institutions and weakening the Christian faith and presence in the city.”

With most of these Christian schools having been founded in the late 19th century, they have educated hundreds of thousands of students, both Christian and Muslim, throughout the decades.

According to ACN, they were established “to promote Christian education and to preserve the Faith and the Christian presence in Jerusalem,” and “have played an essential role at national and interreligious levels.”

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Linda McMahon Threatens to Pull San Jose State University’s Funding Over Title IX Violations

According to Campus Reform, “The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights recently threatened to rescind funding from San Jose State University after becoming locked in a stalemate with the school over its Title IX violations.”

These violations were in regard to noncompliance regarding “transgender” athletes, otherwise known as Men in Women’s sports.

According to The Office For Civil Rights, “OCR concluded that SJSU’s policies allowing males to compete in women’s sports and access female-only facilities deny women equal educational opportunities and benefits,” the letter stated.

According to this department, San Jose State University caused Female athletes “significant harm.”

In addition, the release stated  the University policies have created “unfairness in competition, compromising safety, and denying women equal opportunities in athletics, including scholarships and playing time.”

The American public is overwhelmingly against Men in Female sports, but apparently, some schools continue to defy the public will and the Executive Orders of the Trump Administration.

The official from The Office for Civil Rights also stated in the press release that “This is unacceptable. We will not relent until SJSU is held to account for these abuses and commits to upholding Title IX to protect future athletes from the same indignities.”

President Trump and his administration have been consistent in opposing the Woke agenda and opposing the efforts to put biological men in women’s sports.

Also, according to Campus Reform, the Office was nice enough to offer a resolution to settle, but San Jose rejected the terms, which included restoring female athletes’ records and offering them apology letters, but the terms seem to have been rejected.

As a result of this school’s non-compliance with federal law, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon posted to X on March 11th that the university’s response was a “proactive refusal” to negotiate the proposed resolution agreement or address the Title IX concerns, concluding that “a voluntary agreement will not be reached and we are at an impasse.”

“The notice informed SJSU that the OCR will issue a Letter of Impending Enforcement Action within 10 calendar days if the university does not reach a compromise and agree to a resolution.”

Defying federal law is no small matter, especially in a matter of public safety such as this.

Possible consequences include termination of federal funding as well as referral to the DOJ.

Linda McMahon correctly argued, “protecting women’s sports is non-negotiable.”

McMahon gave the school ten days to end these practices of Men in Women’s sports.

These are all welcome measures to make sports safe and end unfair practices.

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Brutal Numbers: Schools Spent $30 Billion on Laptops… and They Seem to Have Made Kids Dumber

Technological innovation doesn’t always yield good results.

Even as electronic devices are championed as the best means of learning for youth — with a massive price tag — we aren’t seeing dramatic improvements in students’ performance.

On Feb. 23, Techspot published an article citing the beginning of the tech takeover in the classroom under former Maine Democratic Gov. Angus King.

In 2002, King created a program to put Apple laptops in middle schoolers’ repertoire. By 2024, the federal government had used a staggering $30 billion to follow his state’s plan, getting tablets and laptops to students across the country.

This seemed like an obvious shift in the right direction on paper: The world is becoming more technological. Students will use these devices in the workplace, so why not familiarize them now?

But neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath laid out the adverse impacts of this decision to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

According to Horvath, Gen Z is the first cohort to see declining test scores compared to their predecessors. He found an inverse relationship between academic performance and time using digital devices.

“This is not a debate about rejecting technology,” he told lawmakers. “It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works. Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.”

Techspot cited studies showing 3,000 university students spent two-thirds of time on their school laptops engaging in material unrelated to classwork.

Fortune found that in 2017, test scores weren’t improving after King’s program.

A study published in OxJournal made a worrying conclusion regarding technology and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

The research “established an evident correlation between digital media use and the prevalence of ADHD in contemporary society. This applies for all age demographics, depending on the setting, such as being in school or in a workplace.”

“The earlier we immerse our children’s underdeveloped minds in digital media, offering them instant fulfillment, the higher the likelihood that an attention-deficit disorder will emerge as they mature,” the study continued.

“This inhibits individuals from focusing their selective attention on a particular task, as well as reduces their divided and sustained attention.”

A traditionally minded educator — or most conservatives — could have seen this coming.

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Waste of the Day: DEI Contractors Remain in Military’s K-12 Schools

Two teachers gave a presentation about how “elementary school is the perfect time” to “show students the diversity of gender expression and gender activity.” Educators were encouraged to hold “critical conversations” about “the relationships between identity and power” and “privilege,” which were meant to result in “crying” and “explicit confrontations.”

Many DEI consultants were removed after President Donald Trump took office in 2025 and ordered a ban on federal funds being used to teach or implement DEI principles, but some of the companies hired under Biden remain.

DoDEA paid $30,175 last year to continue gym teachers’ membership in the professional society, SHAPE America, which instills its National Health Education Standards in gym classes. Board member Cara Grant said of the health standards, “We recognize that systemic disparities exist within our educational systems, disproportionately affecting marginalized communities. Our approach is not simply to level the playing field but to dismantle the structures that perpetuate inequality.”

During a DoDEA presentation on the SHAPE standards in 2021, one teacher instructed her colleagues that “talking about heterosexuality as the norm” can “inherently cause conflict.”

DoDEA also paid $141,000 last year to the curriculum development company thinkLaw.

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Florida Has Deemed All Existing Intro to Sociology Textbooks Illegal and Produced Its Own

Imagine the following scenario: You’re teaching Introduction to Sociology at a community college in Florida, and today, you’re trying to explain the well-documented pay gap between men and women in the United States. You check the guidance you just received from your dean, who received instructions via email from the executive vice chancellor of the Florida College System. The instructions state explicitly that explaining “unequal outcomes between men and women” in terms of “institutional sexism” would violate state law.

So how are you supposed to explain this disparity? The email includes guidance on just this question:

biological sex chromosomes determine … how females and males behave … So, in teaching this, one might point out that women and men with the same credentials enter different jobs such that certain jobs are occupied primarily by women (i.e., female-dominant) some are occupied primarily by men (i.e., male-dominant).

Did you misread the guidance? Your eyes scroll up on the page, which is a state-created curriculum for use in all non-elective Intro to Sociology classes taught in Florida’s community colleges. You are explicitly prohibited from discussing “systemic racism, institutional racism, [or] historical discrimination.” You cannot “state an intent of institutions today to oppress persons of color.” You cannot “describe when, how, or why individuals determine their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.”

Surely this is a mistake?

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Degraded Schools

Many students are chronically absent or have dropped out of school.

Nat Malkus, a senior fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, oversees the Return to Learn Tracker, which monitors chronic absenteeism in U.S. schools. His latest report, released in early February, includes data from 39 states and Washington, D.C.

He states that after reaching a high of 29 percent in the 2021–22 school year, the chronic absenteeism rate—missing 10 percent or more of school days in an academic year—fell by 2.6 percentage points the following school year and by 2.2 percentage points the following school year. This progress was encouraging, but it stalled last school year, with rates falling by just over one percentage point on average. This leaves the average chronic absenteeism rate for most of the country at 23 percent, roughly 50 percent higher than the pre-pandemic baseline.

This chronic absence problem is especially egregious in our large urban areas. In Los Angeles, more than 32 percent of students were chronically absent during the 2023–24 school year. Thirty-four elementary schools have fewer than 200 students, and 29 use less than half of their buildings. Chicago is even worse, with a chronic absentee rate of 41 percent.

Malkus concludes that these patterns suggest that shifts in attitudes and behavior are largely driving the across-the-board increases in post-pandemic absenteeism. Six years into the pandemic, students and their parents are placing less value on attending school each day.

One realistic way to address chronic absenteeism—and save taxpayer dollars—would be to close ineffective schools. But government educrats and teacher union bosses refuse to allow that to happen. In fact, school closures have slowed over time.

An analysis by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics shows that in 2014–15, the closure rate—the share of schools nationwide that were open one year and closed the next—was 1.3 percent, but in 2023–24, the rate was just 0.8 percent.

Another way to alleviate the problem would be to reduce the number of teachers by eliminating the lowest performers, but that will not happen. Teacher union-mandated permanence clauses make it nearly impossible to fire an incompetent teacher. In California, a 2012 court case revealed that, on average, only 2.2 of California’s 275,000 teachers (0.0008 percent) were dismissed each year for unprofessional conduct or unsatisfactory performance.

Chronic absenteeism rates would also improve if students felt a sense of purpose in going to school. Currently, many kids lack interest in showing up. A 2024 report from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation surveyed over 1,000 Gen Z students aged 12 to 18 and found that only 48 percent of those enrolled in middle or high school felt motivated to show up. Only half said they do something interesting in school every day. Similarly, a 2024 EdChoice survey indicated that 64 percent of teens said school is boring, and 30 percent view it as a waste of time.

In addition to the problem of chronically absent students, families are removing their children, especially if they are high achievers, from government-run schools in large numbers.

Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of education and economics at Boston University, authored a study that found that nationally, white and Asian parents are far more likely to withdraw their children from public schools than Hispanics and blacks.

“The question that worries me is whether this means that public schools have now cemented a reputation as not being the place where high-achieving students attend. If you’re a family that’s looking for a challenging curriculum, and you have a talented student, you’re no longer seeing public schools in quite that light,” Goodman said.

Perhaps the leader in the public school exodus is Chicago, whose numbers are particularly grim. Dwindling enrollment has left about 150 Windy City schools half-empty, while 47 operate at less than one-third capacity, leading to high costs and limited course offerings.

Worth noting is that Chicago spends about $18,700 per student. At small schools that have been losing students, per-pupil costs are double or triple that. At one 28-student school, the cost per student is $93,000. (For the sake of perspective, the Latin School of Chicago, among the city’s most expensive private schools, costs about $47,000 per year.)

Not surprisingly, as the number of students declines, school district insolvency is on the rise. Education finance experts say more districts are grappling with this problem, especially those that spent pandemic federal aid on recurring expenses or didn’t scale back their budgets in anticipation of the aid’s end.

As a result, districts are facing increased involvement from their counties and states, ranging from financial monitoring to takeovers. In rarer cases, districts may even declare bankruptcy or consider merging with other districts.

While public schools are bleeding students, school choice of all types continues to grow. Overall, there are now 75 private school choice programs in 34 states, serving more than 1.5 million students.

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Secretary Rubio ‘Parents, Not Schools, Should Raise Children’ – No Indoctrination, No Government in Education

At a Hannity town hall in Florida, Secretary Marco Rubio shared his views on education and the role of families. “It’s neither the government nor the schools’ job to raise children. They’re there to teach,” he said. “Parents raise children. Strong families raise children.” His message resonates with conservative and religious parents who believe schools should focus on academics and allow families to instill values in their children.

Rubio said he does not want the federal government to threaten schools. He argued that if the government wants to fund programs such as free school lunches, that is fine, but there should not be strings attached. “If you don’t let boys play in girls’ sports, we will take away your school lunch money,” he said, criticizing federal coercion.

“What we are doing at the federal level is ensuring that we are not bullying states into adopting policies that, at the end of the day, turn these places from schools into indoctrination centers,” Rubio added. “That’s actually the way Marxism works. They use the schools to indoctrinate and tell the kids, ‘Don’t listen to your parents. Listen to us.’ We cannot tolerate that. We won’t allow it, and that would destroy our country.”

Secretary Rubio’s education agenda centers on increasing competition through school choice and vocational training while aggressively removing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies and “woke” ideologies from public institutions. Upon becoming Secretary of State in 2025, he reversed DEI policies within the State Department, replacing them with a focus on strict meritocracy and performance, declaring that “DEI is gone, forever.”

He also supported legislation to prevent socially progressive and divisive flags, including the LGBTQ+ pride flag, from being flown at U.S. embassies, insisting that the American flag alone represents the nation’s values abroad.

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