Tag: education

AOC Pushes ‘Free’ College as Only Way to Rein in Runaway Cost of College Tuition

New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pushed the idea of ‘free’ college during a recent event at Cornell University, saying that this is the only way to rein in the ridiculous cost of tuition these days.

It is worth mentioning that this event was called ‘Students vs. Billionaires Town Hall’ so even the name of the event sets up an adversarial relationship between students and wealthy people. The message is clear. Rich people are the bad guys.

It’s also important to point out that there is no such thing as ‘free’ college. Someone is going to pay for it, usually taxpayers.

Breitbart News reports:

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) suggested “tuition-free public colleges and universities” as part of an effort to “rein in” the increased costs at private institutions.

While speaking at a “Students vs. Billionaires Town Hall” event on Sunday, hosted by the More Perfect Union, Ocasio-Cortez was asked what her team and the Democratic Party are “doing to ensure that middle and low-income families can continue to afford a quality, higher education.” The question came as Cornell University “recently broke $100,000 a year for tuition.”

Ocasio-Cortez responded by expressing shock at the tuition number, stating that it was “far more than what many households make in a year in this country.”

The congresswoman explained that what a lot of colleges and universities “do with their funds is more of a real estate investment strategy, than an educational strategy.” Ocasio-Cortez continued to state that colleges and universities put a lot of the funds toward “new buildings, and facilities that are often marketed as luxury,” while the adjunct faculty is “barely paid a living wage” and the quality of education is going downhill.

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Trump Junks Biden’s Title IX Rules, Now Defines Sex by Biology

The Department of Education said Monday it will formally remove the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations and restore rules issued during President Donald Trump’s first term.

The change takes effect Tuesday. Under the final rule issued Monday, the Education Department’s anti-discrimination policy will recognize sex as male or female at birth. It formally removes Biden-era regulations that extended protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity to students and employees at federally funded schools.

The 2024 rules also forced schools to use transgender students’ pronouns and changed how schools handle harassment complaints. A federal court struck down the rules in January 2025.

The Education Department then told schools it would enforce the 2020 rules. Monday’s action puts that change into the published federal regulations; schools have already been operating under the earlier rules.

The department said the last lawsuits over the Biden rules were dismissed in August, clearing the way for it to formally remove them. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the move would make the written regulations match the court rulings and the rules her department has been enforcing since Trump returned to office:

Today’s rulemaking clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration. Thanks to today’s action, the published Title IX regulations faithfully reflects court orders and Congressional intent—reducing confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions. We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.

The rule follows a 2025 executive order from Trump directing federal agencies to recognize only male and female as sexes and apply that definition when enforcing laws against sex discrimination.

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Woke Grad School Teacher Programs Help Explain Why The Kids Can’t Read

The New York Times featured an in-depth essay from writer Nikole Hannah-Jones last week about the lamentable state of elementary and secondary education in the United States. The essay’s contents deserve (and are receiving) much criticism, thanks in part to Hannah-Jones sacrificing her daughter’s educational outcomes on the altar of wokeness and racism. But moral failings aside, the “1619 Project” author shines a spotlight on the failures plaguing American students not just in inner cities but across the map.

The recent release of results from last year’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests confirms on a macro level what Hannah-Jones described at length from a micro perspective. The international test of 15-year-olds showed that American youths continue to lag behind those in many other peer nations — which might have something to do with the woke ideology pervading the schools that educate the next generation of teachers.

Plummeting Reading Scores 

The PISA results brought discouraging news regarding the global competitiveness of American students. The Wall Street Journal noted that since 2018, “math scores in China have improved by an impressive 21 points (equivalent to roughly one year of learning) while those in the U.S. have fallen by 15 (three quarters of a year of learning).” And whereas more than half (54 percent) of students in the four Chinese cities tested qualified as “top performers,” fewer than 1 in 10 (only 8 percent) American students did. This is not a positive development given the importance of engineering and computer science in the global economy.

If anything, the PISA reading test results proved even more worrisome. Americans’ reading scores plunged by 14 points since the last round of tests in 2022, and they now sit near their lowest point this century.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which organizes the PISA tests, noted that reading scores have declined generally since 2012. Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the blame may point in the direction of smartphones and social media shortening attention spans. The OECD notes that “the share of ‘hasty readers’ — students who rush through texts and give quick but incorrect answers — almost doubled between 2018 and 2025.”

Education Schools’ Woke Obsession

But in the United States at least, another factor may help to explain students’ poor academic performance. A separate paper by researchers at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) illustrated the ideological obsessions within graduate schools of education, which train the next generation of teachers going into American classrooms.

The AEI study examined course reading materials and syllabi for master’s programs at 10 public graduate schools of education. As the paper notes, because many school districts pay higher wages to teachers with master’s degrees, these graduate schools have a ready-built pipeline of potential students.

Consider the titles of just some of the course readings in one school’s curriculum:

  • “Is an Antiracist and Decolonizing Applied Linguistics Possible?” 
  • “Theorizing Linguistic Racisms from a Language Ideological Perspective” 
  • “Writing, Rioting, and Righting Como Negra: A Testimonio of Black Latinx Erasure in Bilingual Education”
  • “Black Languaging [sic] as Anti-Racist Pedagogy in the World Language Classroom”
  • “World Languages for Black Linguistic Reparations”
  • “Toward an Anti-Racist Linguistic Anthropology: An Indigenous Response to White Supremacy.”

Note that these are all titles from syllabi at the University of Texas, a publicly funded institution in a purportedly conservative state.

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Academic Survey Finds 35 Percent of Americans Can’t Name All Three Branches of Government

The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center recently conducted a survey that found 35% of Americans can’t name the three branches of government: executive, legislative, and judicial.

This is an amazing indictment of our education system, but it also raises questions about our national discourse.

For instance, virtually everyone has an opinion about politics, and many people these days seem to think that they are experts in the topic. How is that possible when a third of Americans lack basic civics knowledge?

Campus Reform reports:

35% of Americans cannot name all three branches of government: SURVEY

A new survey found significant gaps in Americans’ basic civic knowledge, including that more than one-third of U.S. adults cannot name all three branches of government.

The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that just 65 percent of respondents correctly named the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The survey, conducted Aug. 6-9, included a nationally representative sample of 1,034 U.S. adults and had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

The survey also examined Americans’ ability to identify the rights protected by the First Amendment.

Seventy-three percent of respondents named freedom of speech as a right protected under the First Amendment, while only 43 percent named freedom of religion, 31 percent named freedom of assembly, 29 percent named freedom of the press, and just 12 percent named the right to petition the government.

Only 9 percent could name all five protections, while 24 percent could not name a single one. Moreover, 25 percent of respondents mistakenly said the right to bear arms, protected under the Second Amendment, is a First Amendment right.

“Ignorance is costly. You can’t protect and cherish rights that you don’t know you have,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director emerita of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, said.

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Nikole Hannah-Jones’ Racism Is Why Her Daughter Can’t Do Math

Nikole Hannah-Jones has curated herself an extremely lucrative, notoriety-winning career by blaming white people for black people’s problems. In her latest article for The New York Times Magazine, she does it again. It’s titled, “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”

In it, the creator of the scholarly abomination known as the 1619 Project admits that her warped educational ideas have harmed her daughter’s future and their relationship. When her daughter finally convinced her parents to let her attend a more challenging high school, she went from getting straight As in math to “barely keeping up”: “After an assessment, the center’s director called me in and told me that Najya knew very little algebra and had huge gaps in many of the building blocks of math that she should have learned in elementary school, like mastery of long division and fractions.”

This was after Najya had gotten As in a previous algebra class and been on her middle school’s honor roll. For elementary, Hannah-Jones and her husband had deliberately enrolled their daughter in one of New York City’s worst public schools, which Hannah-Jones calls “a poor Black one.” In 2016, Hannah-Jones’ daughter was literally on the cover of NYT Magazine to flaunt her mother’s decision.

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Woke NYT, 1619 Project writer deliberately sent daughter to troubled schools as a ‘sacrifice’ — and it backfired spectacularly

The writer behind the New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project deliberately sent her daughter to poor Big Apple schools as a “sacrifice” to try to boost the education system — and no one is angrier than the kid.

The teen is now “boiling” mad — badly behind her peers after finally being allowed to enroll in a more rigorous high school, her mother revealed in a bombshell bizarre essay.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, 50, enrolled her only child in two struggling Brooklyn public schools beginning in 2015 — as part of a battle to change what she characterized as systemic racism, despite having the “connections and time and status” to get the girl into the city’s best schools, she wrote in the Times Magazine on Sunday.

That “status” included top-notch education of her own and financial security — she and her husband bought a $1.5 million Bed-Stuy brownstone in 2018.

But she said she still decided to offer up her daughter’s education for the cause of bettering the experience of black students in city schools.

By her own account, Hannah-Jones’ daughter Najya knows she was cheated by her parents.

“So you had money to send me to one of the best schools, and you chose not to?” the girl yelled in one fight, according to the essay. “Because other kids are disadvantaged, you didn’t want to put me in a great school?”

Hannah-Jones wrote of her decision, “We thought by sending Najya to a mostly low-income and Black school, we could help improve it for all the children there.

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Meloni Announces Plan to Ban Burqas in Schools, Limit Number of Migrants in Classrooms

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said her government will introduce legislation to limit the number of foreign students in classrooms and ban full-face coverings in schools.

Appearing on Sunday at the Fenix, the annual national youth festival organised by Gioventù Nazionale, the youth wing of her Brothers of Italy (FdI) party, told her student supporters that Italian children should not become a minority in their own classrooms.

“It’s unthinkable that in an Italian classroom, Italian children feel cornered because they’ve become the minority. It can’t be done,” she said, according to Corriere della Sera.
The Italian premier said her Council of Ministers would therefore “soon introduce a law on the maximum number of foreign students in classes.”

Meloni said that this would be paired with a “requirement” for parents of foreign students struggling to integrate to learn Italian. The legislation would additionally impose a ban on burqas and niqabs in schools, she declared, saying that it is a “question of civilisation”.

“We go to school with our faces uncovered, and in Italy, no one, in the name of a real or presumed tradition, can decide that a young woman must hide. Gender equality is non-negotiable,” she added.

Meloni, who recently earned the distinction of having the longest-serving government in post-war Italy, appears intent on shoring up her position on immigration prior to next year’s elections.

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How We Destroyed Community College Education for Generations of Students – and Why We Need a Reset

I went to an opportune lunch to talk about the 2018 disappearance of Arizona Junior College (JUCO) football for financial and funding reasons. Three hours later, I found the real story was Never Just About Football! We were talking about second chances, education, jobs, the minority students that community colleges are trying to reach – and what it might take to bring them back.

Sitting around the table were three candidates for the Maricopa County Community College District Governing Board: John Crow, running At-Large; Ryan Caracciolo, running in District 4; and Susan Winder, running in District 3. They are seeking three separate seats, but they have chosen to campaign together.

On paper, their explanation is fairly simple. Crow brings the business side, as the CEO focused on budgets, efficiency and accountability. Caracciolo brings the professional marketing side, focused on attracting students and growing enrollment. Winder brings the professional education side, with more than three decades as a longtime educator and administrator focused on what happens in the classroom and what students need to succeed.

But that is the résumé version. The lunch told a much more Human Story. We talked – a lot – about bringing back junior-college football and WHY. We talked about its cost, who should pay for it, whether private money should be involved, whether it could increase enrollment, and what measurable results would justify restoring it.

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SURPRISE! Study Finds Blue States With the Strongest Teacher Unions Also Have the Lowest Reading Scores

Liberals would have you believe that strong teacher unions equate with strong schools and solid results, but a new study found the exact opposite.

Of the states included in the study, blue states with the strongest teacher unions also happened to have the lowest reading scores.

Conversely, red states cited in the study, which give less attention to teacher unions, score much higher.

FOX News reports:

Powerful teachers’ unions share striking link with states struggling to teach kids to read

States with stronger teachers’ unions tend to have weaker literacy performance and have adopted fewer of the policies credited with improving reading outcomes, according to a new analysis from a center-left think tank.

Eight of the 10 states to score among the worst in the Progressive Policy Institute’s (PPI) assessment of early-literacy policies were home to powerful teachers’ unions. Among the top 60% of states in terms of early-literacy policy scores, only four had strong teachers’ unions.

Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Indiana, all Republican-leaning states with weak unions, were among the states with the best literacy outcomes. Maine, New York, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington and Rhode Island, blue states, were among the worst.

The pattern isn’t universal. Maryland, a blue state with a strong teachers’ union, has posted strong reading results, while South Dakota, a red state with a weaker union, has struggled. The differences suggest union strength and party control alone don’t explain states’ reading performance.

It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?

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California high school grads score 4.0 GPAs but can’t do basic math, professors say

California high school students are scoring more straight A’s than ever – but it’s not necessarily because they’re getting smarter, according to data and education experts. 

The number of college applicants reporting flawless GPAs of 4.0 or higher has doubled over the past decade even as state testing shows a post-pandemic plunge in reading and math comprehension — revealing a grade-inflation crisis that’s sending students who can’t even do fractions into top universities.

Over the past decade, the number of students applying to the University of California system with straight A’s skyrocketed from 52,989 in 2015 to 103,138 for the class of 2025, with a notable jump during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2022, according to UC data reviewed by The Post.

It’s part of a dangerous slide in grading standards as teachers are backhandedly encouraged to hand out inflated marks, according to critics like Glenn Sacks, who teaches social studies in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

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