Tag: education

Higher Education Must Not Become a Research Arm of Militarized Power

hat happens to higher education when institutions dedicated to critical thought increasingly align themselves with the logics of war, surveillance, and national security? Unless we mount an organized resistance, we may viscerally experience the answer to this question all too soon.

We are already watching this transformation play out in both the U.S. and Canada as universities face growing pressure to align their missions, research agendas, and pedagogical practices with the values, priorities, and imperatives of a society increasingly organized around the logic of war.

Militarized policies, values, identities, and modes of governance no longer merely creep into U.S. society. Under the Trump administration, they increasingly define it. Militarization now extends far beyond the battlefield, reshaping everyday life, public institutions, and the very meaning of citizenship. War is celebrated as a moral imperative, often wrapped in the language of religious righteousness and white Christian nationalism. Due process gives way to abductions and arbitrary detention, dissent is met with threats and repression, soldiers occupy U.S. cities, and political violence is normalized through a steady stream of incendiary rhetoric and state-sponsored spectacles that glorify force, exclusion, and domination. Democratic ideals are displaced by a culture of fear, manufactured insecurity, and the belief that the nation is besieged by enemies both within and beyond its borders — largely immigrants and people of color.

In this militarized landscape, critical thought is derided, informed judgment is replaced by ideological conformity, and institutions charged with nurturing democratic agency increasingly come under attack. This fusion of militarism, toxic masculinity, religious fundamentalism, and white nationalist politics functions as a powerful form of public pedagogy, producing the authoritarian values, identities, and modes of agency that have historically provided the cultural foundations for fascist politics.

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Weingarten Blames Screens, Not Herself, For Falling Test Scores

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is sounding the alarm about the decade-long decline in student test scores, pointing to screens and devices as a culprit. She’s calling it a “call to action.”

She left out the part about how she helped cause the problem in the first place.

For two years during the COVID pandemic, Weingarten and the AFT fought aggressively to keep schools closed. In July 2020, as the Trump administration urged schools to reopen, Weingarten called the push “reckless,” “callous,” and “cruel,” and threatened the possibility of safety strikes.

Internal emails later released by a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee showed the AFT had access to draft guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control before it was made public, as well as proposed specific language that could trigger renewed closures.

Research published afterward confirmed what was already evident: Districts with stronger teachers unions were significantly less likely to reopen for in-person instruction, even after controlling for local COVID conditions.

So kids stayed home. They got on computer screens and stayed there for two years, cut off from teachers, friends, and anything resembling a normal childhood.

The consequences were not abstract. The National Assessment of Educational Progress recorded the largest declines in math and reading scores in its history. Reading results dropped to levels not seen since the early 1990s.

Researchers documented surging rates of anxiety, depression, and social developmental delays among children who spent critical years in isolation. The damage, experts say, will take a generation to undo.

In her book published last fall, Weingarten wrote that she “…led the AFT in developing a concrete plan to reopen schools as quickly and safely as possible.” That’s a remarkable claim given the documented record of what her union actually did.

Weingarten told Congress in 2023 there were “… things we really didn’t get right,” including the impact of prolonged closures. That acknowledgment was notable, but what followed it wasn’t accountability. It was a pivot.

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South Carolina Passes “GRADE FLOOR” Ban For K-12 Public Schools

In a move to protect educational excellence, consistency and standards, the State of Carolina has become the first state in the U.S. to ban “grade floor” policies in K-12 public schools.

For those who are not familiar with the “grade floor” policy, it is a practice that prevents teachers from giving a student a grade below the actual percentage the student earned.

The most common “floor” school systems adopt is the 50% minimum. Basically, a student need not do any work to earn at least a 50%. It’s part of what is called “equity grading” which should be correctly called “enabling grading” because it enables students to appoint themselves as “victims” in order to skate by without achieving educational proficiency in school. It teaches students that they can’t and don’t have to achieve, especially when they face difficult content or situations. We have published several articles on this crippling policy:

Currently, we can confirm only six districts in Maryland that have used or do use the 50% floor in grading, Anne Arundel, Calvert, Charles, Montgomery, Prince Georges and Talbot. Talbot recently removed it from their policies.

Currently, it is estimated that 18 out of South Carolina’s 22 School Districts use the 50% floor in student grading even though research concludes that the practice does not improve student achievement.

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Doing The Math: UC Faculty Urges Return To Standardized Testing After Shocking Decline In Skills

Years ago, I wrote a column denouncing the decision of the University of California system to drop standardized testing in the cause of greater racial diversity. Now, hundreds of UC mathematics faculty have called for a return to such testing after reports showing a thirtyfold increase in students with math skills below high school level.

It was heralded as a way to preserve diversity after voters in California repeatedly rejected race-based admissions and the Supreme Court appeared ready to bar such practices (commonly proven with reference to standardized test differentials among applicants).

Now, many professors in the California system have come to the same conclusion as some of us who denounced the move years ago. They have witnessed the drop in academic skills and abilities among incoming students.

These tests not only have the most significant predictive value for performance but also play an important role in the advancement of minority students. Former University of California President Janet Napolitano, however, overrode those conclusions.

Napolitano responded to such criticism with a Standardized Testing Task Force in 2019. Many people expected the task force to recommend the cessation of standardized testing. The task force did find that 59 percent of high school graduates were Latino, African-American or Native American but only 37 percent were admitted as UC freshman students.

The Task Force did not find standardized testing to be unreliable or call for its abandonment, however.

Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.”

Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.”

In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.

That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted.

So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions.

The system would go to a “test-blind” system until it developed its own test.

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The Public School Mess

For most of my life, I’ve wanted to do two things: teach and write. I’ve now done both, but I’ve been more successful at one than the other. I went to college to be a teacher. It took me five and a half years to get my degree and teacher certification. It took me a year and a half of substitute teaching to get a teaching position. I taught 9th-grade English and, later, World Geography at a majority minority high school southwest of Houston. I was teaching there on 9/11. I quit two years later. I lasted all of five years. It took me longer to get my degree and teacher certification than the time I was actually on the job. 

Why didn’t I stay longer? There is a very long list of reasons, far too many to list here. Had the public school system been the one I had graduated from 10 years before, I might have stayed in the classroom. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The public school system is a mess and has been for decades. People wonder why public school teachers today have purple hair and like to talk about their sexuality with their students. They wonder where the normal teachers are. The normal teachers quit like I did. It’s simple, really. When you chase away the people who want to be there, like me, you’re stuck with what’s left, including the purple hair people. 

Don’t believe me? The turnover rate for the state I live in, Texas, is 12%. Twelve percent of all teachers hired do not return for a second year. In the state’s largest district, the Houston Independent School District, the turnover rate is 15% higher! Nearly 30% of all teachers hired by Houston I.S.D. do not return for a second year. This absurdly high turnover rate is one of the many reasons that Houston I.S.D. is being run by the state right now and not the school district.

What is the problem? Why do so many teachers quit? What can be done to improve the public school system, if at all? The main problem, as I see it, is that teachers are no longer valued. They’re appreciated a couple of times a year, but they’re not valued. Teachers are interchangeable. Today, teachers are seen as the hired help. If one quits, you just find another. No big deal. My school district, the district I graduated from, did not see me as a teacher. I was a babysitter at a “problem school.” The district would never say that in public, but that was the very clear implication. 

Students are believed over teachers. Teachers are expected to solve all the problems thrown at them without help or backup and without stopping the lesson. If the problems aren’t solved, it’s the teacher’s fault. In fact, it’s ALWAYS the teacher’s fault, ALWAYS. Misbehaving student? Teacher’s fault, poor classroom management. Lack of supplies? Teacher’s fault, they didn’t bring enough. Not enough copies for the classroom? Teacher’s fault, they used up their allotment before the end of the month. Higher than average failure rate? Teacher’s fault, the lessons aren’t interesting enough. Do you see a pattern? I certainly do. It turns out that constantly being told you’re terrible at your job and that you’re wrong about everything is not conducive to teachers wanting to return for another year. 

I would hope that this doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this. Teachers do not teach for the money. I promise you, they don’t. I didn’t. I taught because I was good at it and I enjoyed it until I didn’t. Why complain? Teachers get the summers off. Surely that’s enough time to recover. It might be if teachers were paid during the summer. They’re not. Not unless they’re teaching summer school. Teachers are paid for nine months. They stretch nine months of pay to cover all twelve months. I know, I’ve done it. Who gets paid all twelve months? Administration. All the paper pushers sitting in their nice offices, making twice or three times what the average teacher makes, miles from any school, making sure they justify the continuation of their job, those are the ones who take an ever larger chunk of the money the school district receives. Those are the ones who need to go. Every last school district in the U.S. needs to be DOGED. Every last one. 

There has been a fundamental shift in public education in the last twenty to thirty years, moving from student accountability to permissiveness, under the guise of equity and inclusion. Everyone, from the students to the faculty to the staff, is allowed to live their truth. Now, it’s okay for students to run wild, talk back to the adults, and assault the teachers. Anything goes nowadays. It’s not even babysitting, it’s chaos with an educational imprimatur. What happened? 

Progressives happened. They rule with emotion, not logic. If they hear something they don’t like, they ignore it. Boys in the girls’ locker room? What’s the big deal? The boys identify as girls; it’s sexist to kick them out. The girls should be more understanding. It’s never a progressive’s fault, either. They mean well. They just want everyone to be happy and equal. Yes, equally miserable. 

With progressives in control, there is no one to enforce standards and accountability, so there are no standards or accountability. The agency supposedly created to enforce educational standards, the U.S. Department of Education, has been an absolute disaster. After its creation, the U.S. was no longer #1 in the world in terms of education. Today, according to the World Population Review, the U.S. is 38th in Math and 24th in Science. 

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Sex-Ed: Eighth Graders Given Class Project to Design a Brothel

A German school was forced to withdraw a sex-ed lesson after children aged 13 and 14 years old were given the classroom task of designing a “new brothel for all”.

Children in an eighth-grade class at a Catholic high school in Kevelaer, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, were assigned the classwork of designing an inclusive brothel, including floor plans. The local Rheinische Post reported on the remarkable lesson plan on Wednesday, and news quickly spread nationwide, leading to the headmistress and mayor facing demands for explanations.

The worksheet, entitled ‘The New Brothel For All!’, asked students to consider key areas of modern “house of sexual pleasure” design, including “What sexual preferences need to be addressed and catered to?” “How should a brothel be designed from the outside so that it can be visited and desired by all kinds of people?” and “What should an advertisement for such a brothel look like?”

After considering these factors, including who would work there, what it would offer, and drawing a floor plan, the class would be brought in at the end for a group discussion.

The school, Kardinal von Galen Gymnasium, was invited to offer an explanation for this extraordinary sex education lesson, and while it didn’t exactly double down, it also insisted it had been delivered for all the right reasons.

The headmistress said, reports WDR: “The material under the heading: ‘Sexual Education of Diversity: Practical Methods on Identities, Relationships, Bodies, and Prevention for Schools and Youth Work’ is deliberately designed to be provocative in order to stimulate discussion.

“It responds to developments in our society with a diversity of lifestyles and gender roles. It also addresses the heavy use of social media channels by children and young people and the associated flood of information about various forms of sexuality.”

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DEAD PEOPLE, ‘GHOST STUDENTS,’ AND BOTS? Trump Education Sec. McMahon Says Biden-Era Student Aid System Was a Fraud Magnet — Taxpayers Already Saved $1 BILLION

The federal student aid system was apparently a feeding trough for fraudsters and according to President Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon, some of the “students” cashing in weren’t even alive.

In a jaw-dropping interview on Fox News, McMahon revealed that the Department of Education uncovered widespread abuse in the federal student aid application system, including bot-driven applications, so-called “ghost students,” and even dead individuals allegedly receiving federal student aid.

Secretary McMahon laid it all out: the Trump administration has completely revamped the FAFSA program with ironclad real-time identity verification and they’re already saving taxpayers billions.

According to the Department of Education website:

The U.S. Department of Education (the Department) launched a new, real-time fraud detection capability for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA®) form, marking the largest and most comprehensive, nationwide fraud prevention effort in the agency’s history.

Effective immediately, fraud detection is built directly into the FAFSA itself, with every applicant evaluated in real-time using risk-based identity screening. Applicants who display a certain level of fraud risk will now be required to present government-issued identification before accessing federal student aid funds such as Pell Grants and federal student loans.

The Department also recently began conducting a one-time review of all previously submitted 2026-27 FAFSA forms using the new screening technology, ensuring that all federal student aid program dollars are supporting students and families, not fraudsters. The Department estimates that its efforts to identify and deny federal student aid to fraudulent students will save taxpayers over $1 billion during this year’s FAFSA cycle.

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Nebraska Professor Complains Of End Of Tuition Benefits For Illegal Aliens

After the state of Nebraska finally agreed to end in-state tuition for illegals, according to a report at Campus Reform, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor is unsurprisingly calling out state officials.

“Crystal E. Garcia, an associate professor in UNL’s Department of Educational Administration, wrote in a social media post that Nebraska students were facing “hits to supports” after state officials moved to end tuition benefits for illegal immigrants and the university dissolved its Office of Gender and Sexuality.”

In other words, DEI and pandering to Illegals or else.

“The comments came after the DOJ challenged Nebraska’s tuition policies in federal court. The DOJ argued that the state’s previous system violated federal law by allowing illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition rates and financial aid benefits unavailable to some American citizens from other states.”

It shouldn’t have taken DOJ involvement to end this illegal and immoral practice in the first place.

“Nebraskans expect that illegal aliens won’t get the benefit of in-state tuition and financial aid, and federal law forbids it,” Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen said in a statement supporting the move. ”

This should hardly be a source of friction, as they are called illegal aliens for a reason; someone breaking federal law is clearly not entitled to special treatment.

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Trump Describes Executions to Kids, While MAGA Bans Lessons Causing “Discomfort” 

Seated behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office in early May, Donald Trump delivered a disturbing lecture to a group of children huddled around him — most of them not yet even teenagers. They had been brought to the White House for what was supposed to be a celebratory event marking the reinstatement of the Presidential Fitness Test, dressed in brightly colored T-shirts bearing the government emblem of the rebooted program.

Flanked by a group including cabinet secretaries Linda McMahon, Pete Hegseth, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump turned the White House into his schoolhouse. Casting himself as a master teacher, he launched into an improvised lesson — part contemporary issues, part history, part geography, and all MAGA mythology.

During his lesson, Trump exposed a central contradiction at the heart of his politics. States and school districts across the country have enacted MAGA education policies — such as the Florida Stop WOKE Act — that prohibit teaching content that might cause students “guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress.” But Trump himself showed no such restraint. During what amounted to an advanced course in authoritarian education, he immersed children in a grotesque curriculum of graphic executions, nuclear annihilation, and the threat of entire societies being wiped out — paired with nationalist triumphalism and the scapegoating of transgender people.

The premise of the event itself rested on the fear that the U.S. has become weak and soft, which could only be remedied by making the country aggressively masculine again. Trump framed the return of the Presidential Fitness Test not merely as a health initiative, but as part of a broader struggle for national strength and power. Warning in a statement to the press that declining youth fitness weakens “our economy, military readiness, academic performance, and national morale,” he cast physical toughness as a prerequisite for a nation prepared for war.

This is not education. It is spectacle, coercion, indoctrination, and the normalization of violence.

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Harvard Weighs Major Crackdown On “Grade Inflation”

Harvard faculty begin voting Tuesday on what may be the most aggressive effort in decades to curb grade inflation, a long-running issue that has also drawn attention from the White House as it pushes broader higher-ed reforms, according to Bloomberg.

The proposal would cap A grades in undergraduate classes at 20% of students, plus four additional students. The move comes after A grades surged at Harvard: about 60% of grades were A’s in the 2024–25 academic year, more than double the rate in 2006. After administrators pushed for stricter grading last fall, that number dropped to 53%. Faculty have one week to vote, with results expected May 20.

Supporters say grade inflation has made academic distinctions less meaningful. Last year, Harvard seniors needed a 3.989 GPA to earn summa cum laude, and an award traditionally given to one student ended in a 54-way tie. As professor Jason Furman said, “It’s fundamentally dishonest to give the best students in the class the same grade as someone in the bottom half.”

Bloomberg writes that students have strongly opposed the plan, arguing it would increase stress, discourage academic risk-taking, and push students toward easier courses. Nearly 85% of undergraduates surveyed by The Harvard Crimson opposed the proposal. Student leader Caleb Thompson said “people really are against this,” while senior Summer Tan said students are already seeking easier classes instead of more challenging ones.

Some faculty members agree. Scott Duke Kominers warned the policy could discourage ambitious students and make Harvard less attractive to top applicants.

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