“Since our party’s inception, we have advocated for dismantling government-run schooling, insisting that parents, teachers, and communities, not federal bureaucrats, are best equipped to guide children’s educational paths.
“For decades, the Department of Education has centralized power, diverted critical funding, and imposed rigid, one-size-fits-all regulations on local schools,” said LNC Chair Steven Nekhaila.
LIBERTARIAN newsletter
President Trump has officially signed an Executive Order to begin dismantling the Department of Education, marking what the Libertarian Party views as a pivotal, though partial, victory in the fight to remove government control from America’s classrooms. Since our party’s inception, we have advocated for dismantling government-run schooling, insisting that parents, teachers, and communities, not federal bureaucrats, are best equipped to guide children’s educational paths. Help us continue to push the narrative toward true educational freedom >>> “For decades, the Department of Education has centralized power, diverted critical funding, and imposed rigid, one-size-fits-all regulations on local schools,” said LNC Chair Steven Nekhaila. “Today’s action rolls back one layer of that federal overreach, allowing states and localities to innovate and tailor education to the unique needs of their students. We applaud President Trump for taking this bold step, one that paves the way for true educational freedom.” While President Trump’s Executive Order has started the process, it still needs to pass a Congressional vote to be fully enacted (such as Thomas Massie’s H.R.899 Bill to Terminate the DOE), and even under Trump’s order the DOE will continue to function as a dealer of student loans. The Libertarian Party maintains that education should be voluntarily funded and freed from government interference.
“Fischel further argues that childless voters are less inclined to care about state-level school policy because “as long as they own homes that they can sell to someone with school-age children, childless voters are interested in the quality of schools and other local public goods…at the state level, this interest is nearly zero.”
“But if the state governments do not serve the interests of homeowners, then whom do they serve?”
Hardly a minute has gone by without the media sounding off about President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominations. However, one department has garnered more attention than others: the Department of Education).
Trump has stated that eliminating the Department of Education and devolving governance of education to the states would be one of the first actions of his second administration, and his choice for secretary, Linda McMahon, may or may not share Trump’s goal. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has also called for the elimination of the Department of Education
This alarms leaders of teacher advocacy organizations. The president of American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—the second largest teacher’s union in the country—stated, “Donald Trump and Republican elected officials have said they want to eliminate the Department of Education, which oversees programs that invest in low-income schools and help fund education for students with disabilities, but if they listen to what the voters have said, they will work to strengthen public schools, not dismantle them.”
Given Trump’s comments, the AFT has good reason to fear the incoming administration. If the Department of Education is eliminated, then the stranglehold teacher unions have on education policy would be greatly diminished. This reform promises significant benefits.
“Local funding provides a benefit-cost discipline on local voters who own homes in the district. Consider a local superintendent’s proposal to improve schools by adding more teachers. Under local property tax funding, this has a positive and a negative effect on voters. If the additional teachers raise the quality of education, home values will rise, which pleases most homeowners in the same way that capital gains please stockholders. But the additional need for funds will raise property taxes, and it is widely established that higher taxes will reduce home values. Thus local voters have an incentive to adopt cost-effective school measures, which makes their schools more efficient.”
This same effect is not felt at the state level. Fischel explains:
“State officials cannot rely on the housing market to guide them. Capitalization of the net benefits of school spending in home values, which guides (at least in part) local officials, does little to influence state officials. States are too large for the statewide housing market to give much systematic evidence about school quality compared to other states. Homeowners seldom search for homes among states like they do among the scores of local governments that characterize most metropolitan areas.”
Fischel further argues that childless voters are less inclined to care about state-level school policy because “as long as they own homes that they can sell to someone with school-age children, childless voters are interested in the quality of schools and other local public goods…at the state level, this interest is nearly zero.”
But if the state governments do not serve the interests of homeowners, then whom do they serve?
Fischel answers:
“Teachers’ unions displace homeowners as the most influential group at the state level. Unions may be effective in raising average spending per pupil, but at the same time they make that spending less efficient by insisting on work rules that they would not be able to obtain at the local level. Local boards have to deal with the union, too, but its influence is mitigated in most districts by the fact that local voters, who are mostly homeowners, monitor the board’s spending more closely. At the state level, homeowners are far less influential because state spending affects home values much less than local spending.”
Economist Ludwig von Mises made a similar argument with public enterprises in his treatise Human Action. Mises writes:
As a former CPA/Comproller/Finance Director – we used to joke about small corporations hiring their wife’s, sister’s best friend who knew someone who took a couple bookkeeping classes in high school. To save money. But we are talking about our Federal Government hiring incompetents who have never actually worked in any capacity as an accountant – running the financial apparatus of our entire COUNTRY.
The Liberal left are miserable given Trump’s statement regarding his desire to eliminate the Department of Education; children will have no schools – there will be no money for special needs – our education system will collapse… It already did.
The Department of Education: Their last audit for September 2023 financial statements was a disclaimer – “KPMG has not been able to obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence to provide a basis for an audit opinion because of unresolved errors KPMG identified in the underlying data, we do not express an opinion”.
In the world of accounting this means KPMG, the auditor, is covering their arse because the financials are ‘misleading and/or unrepresentative of truth’. The Financial Statements did NOT delineate expenditures – in any definable mode. Although it did assign $812 million to ‘unknown and improper loss to Taxpayers while identifying “Climate Related Financial Risk”
They spent $100 million on ‘equity’ K thru 12. Their largess liability is loans which is what they owe back to the Treasury for over-spending. Their largest Receivable is student loan debt which they are cancelling. Meaning they could effectively add an additional $1.3 trillion to the Treasury Deficit if they successfully write-off their entire Asset Base.
Income and expense statements typically provided in every financial report are non-existent, MIA. There is no breakdown of departmental use of funds – which could be a huge basis for KPMG refusing to grant them an audited opinion. They Are Rogue. And ANY low life accountant would fear having ANY relation with such a dervish entity given liability and LAWSUITS.
The entirety of their Assets are based on Loan Receivables to students which continue to be forgiven under the Biden Regime. In 2023 that amount was $94 billion. The Department’s appropriation of $881 billion in CoVid funds represents nearly 1/5 of the total $5 trillion. $6.4 billion of CoVid aid was sent overseas. CoVid funds cannot be traced or accounted for – by the Government Accounting Office.
The government being handed to Trump is a veritable Financial nightmare – MESS. More than we can possibly realize – it is based on fraud. Every agency tied to The West is based on Fraud (including NATO which I previously posted in a blog). The money doesn’t exist. The debt is likely 500times what is revealed as a direct result. The US is literally well beyond broke and is hoping to blame it on Trump when reality sets in.
Close the federal Department of Education? Ronald Reagan proposed abolishing the Department of Education while campaigning for president in 1980. The Republican Party platforms of 1980 and 1996 likewise called for the department’s elimination, yet, the federal education budget increased under President Reagan (with a GOP-controlled Senate) and exploded under President George W. Bush (with GOP control of the Congress for over four years). The Republican Party platform during the age of Trump (2016 and 2020) did not call for the department’s elimination.
Every four years at their convention, Republicans adopt a new party platform, but at the 2020 convention in Charlotte, the Republican National Committee (RNC) “unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement.” Instead, it resolved that “2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention.”
The 2024 Republican platform has 10 chapters. Chapter 7, which contains nine paragraphs and a preamble, covers education: “Cultivate great K-12 schools leading to great jobs and great lives for young people.” The ninth paragraph contains a proposal that on the surface seems quite radical for Republicans:
9. Return Education to the States
The United States spends more money per pupil on Education than any other Country in the World, and yet we are at the bottom of every educational list in terms of results. We are going to close the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. and send it back to the States, where it belongs, and let the States run our educational system as it should be run. Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party so that they can do the job of educating our students that they so dearly want to do. It is our goal to bring Education in the United States to the highest level, one that it has never attained before!
Close the federal Department of Education? Ronald Reagan proposed abolishing the Department of Education while campaigning for president in 1980. The Republican Party platforms of 1980 and 1996 likewise called for the department’s elimination, yet, the federal education budget increased under President Reagan (with a GOP-controlled Senate) and exploded under President George W. Bush (with GOP control of the Congress for over four years). The Republican Party platform during the age of Trump (2016 and 2020) did not call for the department’s elimination.
Because the Constitution nowhere gives authority to the federal government to have a Department of Education, however, the department should be eliminated. And because we have a federal system of government, as James Madison explained in Federalist No. 45, the powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite—any government provision of, regulation of, oversight of, or spending on education must only take place at the state level if it is to take place at all.
But Republicans can’t make up their mind on education. Before they get to their ninth paragraph in which they call for the elimination of the Department of Education, Republicans propose to do the following in their preamble and first eight paragraphs:
offer a plan to cultivate great K-12 schools.
support schools that focus on excellence and parental rights.
support ending teacher tenure, adopt merit pay, and allow various publicly supported educational models.
emphasize education to prepare students for great jobs and careers.
support project-based learning and schools that offer meaningful work experience.
expose politicized education models and fund proven career training programs.
support overhauling standards on school discipline.
support universal school choice in every state in America.
advocate for immediate suspension of violent students.
support hardening schools to help keep violence away from our places of learning.
restore parental rights in education.
enforce our civil rights laws to stop schools from discriminating on the basis of race.
ensure children are taught fundamentals like reading, history, science, and math, not leftwing propaganda.
defund schools that engage in inappropriate political indoctrination of our children.
champion the First Amendment right to pray and read the Bible in school.
reinstate the 1776 Commission to support patriotic education.
promote fair and patriotic civics education.
support schools that teach America’s founding principles and Western Civilization.
And even in the ninth paragraph in which they call for the closing of the Department of Education, Republicans propose to cherish and protect teachers and “bring Education in the United States to the highest level, one that it has never attained before!”
‘You Misspelled Parents’: Betsy DeVos Throws Down With Teachers Union Over Who Knows What’s Best For Kids
We managed to create a greatest generation and become a great country before we had a department of education. Now we have safe rooms. Long past time to get rid.
Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos tangled with the National Education Association on Twitter, arguing that parents were better equipped than anyone else to say what was best for their children.
The exchange began with the NEA — the largest labor union in the United States — claiming in a Saturday tweet that professional educators knew “better than anyone” what children needed in order to grow and learn.
“Educators love their students and know better than anyone what they need to learn and thrive,” the tweet claimed.
The First Amendment supersedes the authority and whims of the Department of Education.
The First Amendment supersedes the authority and whims of the Department of Education. Remember how the constitution was designed to protect our rights from government encroachment? This is the exact scenario the founders had in mind.
The proposed new Title IX regulations by President Biden’s Department of Education have opened the door for universities to restrict and compel student speech even more than they already do. If universities follow these guidelines, students’ First Amendment rights will be jettisoned, rigorous debate will perish, and students’ tuition dollars will be diverted to litigate the free speech issues that will surely arise.
Title IX is a 1972 federal law which bars discrimination based on sex in education. It says that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” The law empowers the Department of Education to create federal regulations implementing that directive. These regulations define discrimination “on the basis of sex,” outline how institutions should conduct investigations, and detail how they must treat all parties involved. As with many laws, presidential administrations have historically struggled to balance their federal Title IX regulations with the U.S. Constitution and the principles that govern the American way of life.
The most recent changes to Title IX regulations were made in 2020 to rectify some glaring and obvious shortcomings of previous administrations that raised multiple free speech and due process concerns. The 2020 rules were an important milestone in the history of Title IX because they employed the standard adopted by the Supreme Court in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education. Under the Davis standard, universities can punish conduct, but they cannot punish pure speech. Schools can only punish expressive activity that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it can be properly viewed as harassing conduct that effectively denies another student access to an education. This standard allows universities to regulate harassment under Title IX while complying with the First Amendment and protecting the rights of their students. Many universities, however, have disregarded the current federal guidelines and created harassment policies that shut down and chill student speech.
Universities have made it increasingly clear that they have an affinity for regulating student speech. Through various policies such as “free speech zones,” bias reporting systems, speech codes, and other restrictions, they have managed to chill student speech to a level we have never seen before. A tactic that often goes overlooked by the public, however, is when colleges and universities use harassment policies to target speech. So, before we discuss how bad it can get with these new Title IX regulations, we should understand how bad it already is.
Two things are currently happening on campuses. First, universities are disregarding the current regulations implemented in 2020. For example, New York University, has thrown out the “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” standard entirely and replaced it with “from the viewpoint of a reasonable person under all the relevant circumstances.” What’s reasonable? What are all the relevant circumstances? Who is to decide? A Diversity Equity and Inclusion administrator who’s paid to find violations?
If they’re not jettisoning Davis entirely, schools are slyly broadening it. The established standard clearly and specifically lays out the key aspects for universities to take into consideration when they are contemplating prosecution of a student for harassment: the objective severity of the incident and whether the incident is taking place often enough to detract from the victim’s education. Universities around the country will often change the “and” to an “or,” like at Yale University.
Language is important when it comes to matters of the law. A simple “and” versus an “or” can change the definition of a sentence entirely. Specifically, the reported incident can either be pervasive, offensive, or severe instead of a combination of all three. Therefore, incidents like microaggressions (which are whatever someone says they are), one-off incidents, offensive jokes, social media banter—all things that do not in actuality, prevent equal access to education—could be punished by the university and leave a black mark on a student’s permanent record.
The second and more explicit action we are seeing from universities, is their creation and enforcement of additional harassment policies which target constitutionally protected speech listing overbroad and subjective examples of what harassment is. There is no federal standard for the number of harassment policies universities can have. Therefore, many of them have implemented their Title IX policies while tacking on other “harassment” policies that target whatever they want. Oftentimes, these are lumped in with their sexual harassment policies and labeled “other forms of harassment,” like at Tulane University, but sometimes they are separate “discriminatory harassment” policies or “anti-harassment” policies that are included on their Title IX website or adjacently to their Title IX policies in their student handbook.
The results from the latest nationwide tests of student proficiency are grim. Downright depressing. For the first time in the 50-year history of these tests, the scores of 13-year-olds fell in both reading and math. Scores for 9-year-olds showed no improvement compared with 2012.
The gap in scores between white students and Black and Latino students grew.
Nor can anyone blame the pandemic for this. The tests were administered in very early 2020, before the pandemic shut down most in-person schooling.
The results come from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, well-known for its biennial tests called ‘the nation’s report card.’ But this is a different iteration of NAEP tests given to students ages 9, 13 and 17, and less frequently. The Long-Term Trend Assessment looks at progress — or lack of it — over stretches of time. Scores were last reported for the 2012 tests. (The 17-year-olds weren’t tested in this latest round because the pandemic struck before their exams were scheduled to take place.)
No single test tells the whole story of what students are learning or achieving (and these scores are not broken down by state or school district). But the long-term results shouldn’t shock anyone; they’re pretty much in keeping with what the biennial NAEP tests have found: Many students are significantly below grade level on the basics. If students had been making even incremental progress over the previous eight years, that should have added up to at least a significant improvement.
If anything, scores should have been depressed in 2012 because for the previous few years, school budgets had been squeezed to the breaking point by the Great Recession.
From that point until the pandemic, more money was available for education.
Still, many factors could have contributed to the fall-off. The No Child Left Behind Act ended in 2015, and though it was a crazily rigid, narrow and punitive law, its replacement essentially allowed states to eliminate any real consequences for schools when students were doing poorly. Once schools ended programs and laid off large numbers of teachers during the recession, it could have taken some years to rebuild.
The improved economy meant that teachers often could find more lucrative work outside the public education system.
The nation can’t afford to play guesswork with this. It’s quite possible that President Biden’s proposal for universal preschool will make a real difference down the road. There’s evidence that high-quality preschool helps disadvantaged students significantly. But lack of such preschool isn’t an excuse for the backward slide we’re seeing.
The U.S. Department of Education should be putting its research muscle behind an effort to figure out what happened to the nation’s students over those eight years.
There’s still a problem, for example, with schools not using the reading curricula that have been proven to improve literacy. Or perhaps more money needs to go toward reducing the attrition rate among teachers; somewhere between 30% to 50% of them leave within their first five years.
The test results show that going ‘back to normal’ after the pandemic isn’t going to cut it. Schools need the extra funding the American Rescue Plan is bringing in, but that funding has to be targeted in ways that work.
Between 2014 and 2019, Chinese state-owned entities donated at least $315 million to U.S. universities, the Washington Free Beacon found in a recent report. This included an astounding $88 million coming from Chinese contractors and universities that assist the Chinese military in defense research. Approximately 1,000 donations recorded in a Department of Education database revealed that almost 200 CCP-affiliated donors gave to “dozens” of American universities, the Beacon found.
This follows discoveries in December of Columbia University accepting $1 million to set up a Confucius Institute, and in August of University of Pennsylvania accepting a $3 million donation from a shell company in Hong Kong, owned by Shanghai businessman Xu Xeuqing, who has close business ties with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Some of the most alarming findings by the Washington Free Beacon include the following:
The University of California Irvine and Northwestern University accepted a combined $4 million donation for research from a company controlled by a Chinese defense contractor that reverse-engineered Chinese military planes from stolen designs of the F-35.
The University of Michigan accepted a $1.3 million donation from Harbin Engineering University, dubbed “China’s MIT,” which the U.S. Department of Treasury had put on its ban list last year.
Duke University partners with Wuhan University to run a campus in China. Wuhan University has assisted the Chinese military in conducting cyberattacks.
Department of Education Finds Universities Fail to Disclose Foreign Ties
The Washington Free Beacon notes that its findings are likely an underestimation and cites an earlier report by the Department of Education. This report, issued in October, highlighted many U.S. colleges and universities failing to disclose billions of dollars in donations from foreign sources. Congress requires U.S. colleges and universities to publicly report foreign gifts and contracts of $250,000 or more to the U.S. Department of Education under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos initiated 12 civil investigations to ensure institutional compliance with Section 117, which has resulted in $6.5 billion in “catch up” disclosures. This $6.5 billion came from foreign sources including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar.
Huawei, a major player, not disclosed. One of the Chinese entities most referenced in the report was Huawei. Huawei had been dubbed by the State Department as “an arm of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) surveillance state,” and was indicted by the Department of Justice for stealing U.S. technology, conspiracy, wire fraud, bank fraud, racketeering, and helping Iran to evade sanctions, amongst other charges. The Department of Education report cited Huawei as connected to “nearly all investigated institutions.” In a highly redacted section of the report, one redacted institution “reported nearly $1 million of agreements” with Huawei, while another redacted institution “held nearly $11 million in contracts and agreements with Huawei since 2013, ranging from research agreements to donations for specific [redacted] research projects and programs.” Huawei was also a “dues-paying member” of a redacted “official university program.”
Perhaps most disturbing was that in these investigated universities, “many of these Huawei agreements and gifts strategically concerned sensitive topics like nuclear science or those related to competitive industries like robotics, semiconductors, and online cloud services.” The report also stated that Huawei donated several hundred thousand dollars towards “applied physics research” and “cutting-edge research projects” at at least two separate universities.
Chinese Donations Compose Substantial Amounts of All Foreign Donations
While it is unclear how much of the following donations are nefarious, according to The Wire China, Chinese donations accounted for a large percent of total foreign donations from 2014 to 2019 in many top U.S. universities:
Harvard (34.7%, at $196.6 million)
Yale (51.2%, at $189.2 million)
Stanford (39.2%, at $122.2 million)
Penn (47.4%, at $95 million)
MIT (13.6%, at $76.7 million)
Columbia (33.1%, at $62.3 million)
NYU (35.5%, $56.7 million)
University of Chicago (31.9%, at $46.6 million)
University of Southern California (43%, at $43.6 million)
Cornell University (26.3%, at $42.8 million)
Caltech (44.7%, at $37.6 million)
Princeton University (36.4%, at $37.4 million)
University of California Berkeley (25.8%, at $32.3 million)
Ian Easton of the Project 2049 Institute believes that the “torrent” of money donated by the CCP and its affiliates to our universities poses a “grave” threat to our national security. He also noted that the People’s Liberation Army is able to access information obtained by CCP-affiliated groups working in U.S. universities.
State says framework includes ‘differentiated instruction’ catered to the needs of the child
The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is moving to eliminate all accelerated math options prior to 11th grade, effectively keeping higher-achieving students from advancing as they usually would in the school system.
Loudoun County school board member Ian Serotkin posted about the change via Facebook on Tuesday. According to Serotkin, he learned of the change the night prior during a briefing from staff on the Virginia Mathematics Pathway Initiative (VMPI).
“[A]s currently planned, this initiative will eliminate ALL math acceleration prior to 11th grade,” he said. “That is not an exaggeration, nor does there appear to be any discretion in how local districts implement this. All 6th graders will take Foundational Concepts 6. All 7th graders will take Foundational Concepts 7. All 10th graders will take Essential Concepts 10. Only in 11th and 12th grade is there any opportunity for choice in higher math courses.”…
MCViewPoint 