Free Republic

A senior official in the Pentagon's education wing who has written books on anti-racism has a history of mocking white people on Twitter, recently-resurfaced posts revealed on Tuesday. Kelisa Wing is the chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer in the Department of Defense's Education Activity office, which oversees schooling for children of Pentagon employees including active duty service members. But before she landed the role, Wing made a few controversial social media posts including one that disparaged a woman for stating that black people 'can be racist too.' She's also listed as an author on several progressive children's books in...

Modern-day historians look back at the Soviet criminal system with a mixture of sorrow and disbelief. For example, Lavrentiy Beria, head of Stalin's secret police, often boasted, "Show me the man, and I'll show you the crime." Beria was bragging that he possessed a fearsome array of tools that could banish any political opponent to the gulag. An accusation became the legal equivalent of a conviction. Decades later, a similar philosophy began to take hold on college campuses across the United States. For example, a lawsuit against Oberlin College in Ohio revealed that every male accused of a sexual peccadillo...

Former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Brian Harrison, will send out a release Wednesday, saying he has support from over 100 former Trump officials, the Daily Caller has learned. According to a press release first obtained by the Caller, Harrison says he has picked up the endorsements or donations from over 100 former senior Trump officials who served with him in Trump’s administration. Harrison is running for the vacant House seat in Texas’ 6th district. In the release, Harrison’s campaign touts the endorsement of Ambassador Andrew Bremberg, a former domestic...

Before her exit from the Trump administration, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had one last warning for members of Congress. In a farewell letter addressed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Jan. 4, DeVos warned of the dangers of forgiving student loan debt. The Democratic Party has made student loan forgiveness one of its top policy priorities. With control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, the party would have the power to pursue such a policy in the next few years. “Importantly, I hope you also reject misguided calls to make college ‘free’ and require the two-thirds...

President Trump plans to assign a New York billionaire to lead a broad review of American intelligence agencies, according to administration officials, an effort that members of the intelligence community fear could curtail their independence and reduce the flow of information that contradicts the president’s worldview. The possible role for Stephen A. Feinberg, a co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, has met fierce resistance among intelligence officials already on edge because of the criticism the intelligence community has received from Mr. Trump during the campaign and since he became president. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump blamed leaks from the intelligence community for...

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos just got to the official end of the line with her efforts to divert $16 million in public school COVID-relief funding to private schools. U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of California James Donato signed a permanent injunction–made public Monday–that will formally end litigation begun last summer against the Department of Education (DOE). In July, Judge Donato, a Barack Obama appointee, quoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia when he called DeVos’s justification of the DOE’s pro-private school policy “interpretive jiggery-pokery in the extreme.” The Congressional CARES Act earmarked approximately $16 billion to help elementary...

WASHINGTON — Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents. One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly...

Universities in the United States reported $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed gifts and contracts from foreign sources as a result of an investigation by the Department of Education. Federal law requires universities to disclose substantial foreign gifts and contracts to the Department of Education (DOE) twice a year. Many have for years failed to do so, while others have underreported. After the department opened an investigation into the matter in 2019, 60 schools that had never complied with the law disclosed $350 million in previously unreported foreign funds, according to a report (pdf) released by the DOE on Oct. 20....

In a speech at Hillsdale College, Sec. DeVos conveyed that in American education, the fight has just begun to restore choice and freedom to every family. As most of the nation is transfixed on the looming presidential election, Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos remains laser-focused on the job at hand. “Education is the means by which we secure the God-given blessings of liberty,” DeVos told a gathering of more than 250 at Hillsdale College, in her home state of Michigan. Whether she has three months at her post, or the possibility of another four years, will be determined in the...

In all the perfervid reporting this week (Victor Davis Hanson calls this “concocted melodramas”) there are only three big stories to my mind: The President’s stunning success in the Middle East, Secretary of Education Betsy De Vos’ brilliant parlay to Princeton’s virtue-signaling president and the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Each of these are likely to further tip Trump toward an election victory in which according to Rasmussen he’s already reached 53% approval among likely voters.No one has better described the significance of the Abraham Accord than Spengler (David Goldman). The President, defying the conventional wisdom of decades of...

Hollywood despises President Donald Trump for dozens of reasons, but one stands out. He’s too crude and rude to be our commander in chief. Tinsel Town has a point. While Trump’s admirers relish his pugnacious spirit, only the most ardent Trump Train passengers cheer his worst rhetoric. So why can’t Hollywood stop upping the ante on it? How can we forget Robert De Niro, one of the greatest actors of his generation, crying “F-word Trump” at the last Tony Awards? It doesn’t get more crude than that. Even Hollywood’s “activists” embrace profanity to smite the commander in chief. Kathy Griffin...

The pandemic has left everyone with lots of give and take. In educating our children, however, don't let teachers' unions take from our children to give to themselves. As the Wuhan virus pandemic persists and wild rhetoric along with it, teachers unions are threatening to strike if schools reopen, but they’re also pushing to limit online teaching. These unions have long incentivized all the wrong things in education, but demanding teachers be paid to do virtually nothing is a new low. As a New York Times headline announced this week, teachers are “Wary of Returning to Class, and Online Instruction...

“[Betsy DeVos,] you have no plan,” tweeted Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) on Sunday afternoon. “I wouldn’t trust you to care for a house plant let alone my child.”

Today, Vice President Mike Pence led a discussion with the chief executives of approximately 50 States, territories, and the city of Washington, DC, and the White House Coronavirus Task Force to discuss local, State, and Federal COVID-19 response and best practices on safely reopening America’s schools. The discussion centered on addressing both the holistic health and the learning objective of our Nation’s students.Vice President Pence discussed best practices with our Nation’s governors on limiting the COVID-19 spread while keeping America open, including encouraging Americans to adhere to state and local guidelines and to wear face coverings when social distancing...

Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said she's "frankly disgusted" by presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden's political shift when it comes to women who claim to have been the victims of sexual misconduct. In a Friday interview, DeVos told me she thought Biden was a "total hypocrite" for demanding more due process in vetting accusations than he wants to provide to others. DeVos recently announced a new and highly consequential rule change regarding sexual harassment in public schools. It came as the former vice president was defending himself from an accusation by Tara Reade, who in the early 1990s worked...

Critics say there were 'parallels between the treatment of black men accused of rape during the infamous Jim Crow period and the adjudication of sexual assault cases in the current [Obama] era.' Critics say black men were disproportionately hit by Obama-Biden campus sexual assault rules denying due process and are cheering the Trump administration's reversal of those policies. On Wednesday, the Department of Education released new Title IX regulations that codify the obligation of schools to investigate claims of sexual assault and harassment. Previous rules under the Obama administration laid the groundwork for what exists today on many campuses: byzantine...

... Student loans are a growing fact of American life, topping $1.6 trillion in outstanding balances this year. Loans can be valuable — if students are able to pay them back. But every year, one million people default on their student loans for the first time. Often, it’s because they didn’t graduate, and so lacked the diploma needed to get a well-paying job. Last year, 231 four-year colleges graduated less than 25 percent of their first-time-in-college, full-time students within eight years of enrollment. An additional 615 colleges reported rates below 50 percent. ... The proposed new version of the Higher...

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Wednesday the speech SWAT teams are at 200 schools and 'interfere with learning' and helping students interact with ideas they might not agree with. The education secretary said that free speech must be protected on campuses, even if it hurts feelings. “Feelings are important, but 'learning isn’t about feelings.... It’s about thinking.... And it’s a willingness to engage with any and all ideas — even ones with which you disagree or ones that aren’t your own,” she said according to a copy of her speech shared with Secrets. “This administration won’t let students be silenced....

Republicans cheered Tuesday's historic confirmation vote for Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary — Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote — slamming Democrats as obstructionists and saying that President Donald Trump was entitled to his Cabinet picks. "President Trump has assembled a first-class team for his Cabinet, and obstructing all of these confirmation votes is only delaying the important work that needs to be done," Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton said. "In my conversation with Betsy DeVos, I found her to have a deep appreciation for the value of public schools and a special concern for the needs of the...

Years after Common Core made its debut in many state education systems, the disastrous long-term results of the program are finally being seen. The students’ reading assessment paints a grim picture of educational readiness, with tested fourth and eighth graders failing to best the previous test’s results. This year’s results were only marginally better than those from 1992. The mathematics scores show the most damning results — an upward trend until the year 2015, when the momentum seemed to grind to a halt. Although there were double-digit gains since the ’90s, fourth graders only managed to score a single point...