All posts tagged "Education"

The Trump administration's threat to a program meant to pull kids out of poverty is alarming advocates, the New York Times reported.

According to reporting by The Times, the Trump administration is teeing up a "major rollback" of the federal requirements for Head Start, an early education and antipoverty program created in 1965. Advocates and experts told The Times that the rollback threatens to upend the 60-year-old program.

Ruth Friedman, a child care policy expert, told The Times that the proposed changes to Head Start are a "massive gutting." The Times noted that the program currently serves about 700,000 kids under the age of 6 and has served more than 30 million children since 1965....

Federal judges Tuesday smacked down a controversial Florida law that aimed to control what professors discuss in their classrooms.

In a blistering 2-1 decision, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals torched Florida's "Individual Freedom Act," a law barring public university instructors from "endorsing" a list of eight banned concepts about race, sex, and privilege, ruling it violates the First Amendment.

The law sought to prohibit specific concepts, including that one race or sex is morally superior to others, a person is inherently racist or sexist, or that a person is an oppressor or is privileged based on their race or sex....

Charlie Kirk never graduated college. He also wrote a book called The College Scam: How America's Universities are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth.

Nonetheless, after the right-wing activist was killed last month, shot dead aged 31, administrators at the Illinois community college where he enrolled for five semesters fielded calls to both honor Kirk and discipline an employee who criticized his views, records obtained by Raw Story show.

Kirk attended Harper College in Palatine, Illinois, a northwest Chicago suburb, from 2013 to 2014, before dropping out to co-found Turning Point USA, a national student group. ...

The White House has backed a right-wing educational partner to replace PBS after congressional Republicans effectively killed off the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The publicly funded entity will shut down after Congress clawed back $500 million of federal funding in President Donald Trump's massive tax-and-spending law, but the White House announced a new partnership with the nonprofit PragerU, which specializes in right-leaning educational videos for adults and children, reported Vox.

"Since its founding in 2009, PragerU has become a juggernaut in the conservative educational media space, with their videos reaching millions of followers across social media," the website reported. "The organization has helped launch the media careers of right-wing figures like Candace Owens. Their popular videos elevate narratives that have been sharply criticized as climate denialist, Islamophobic, and 'misleading' about slavery."...

President Donald Trump's executive order titled "Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling" may get enough pushback from parents to render it null and void, according to a new article in Salon.

The order, which promises to stop schools from "compelling" children to question their gender, among other things, is "devoted to solving a 'problem' that exists only in the imaginations of right-wing activists," according to senior writer Amanda Marcotte.

"'In recent years, however, parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti-American ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight,' the document breathlessly claims," Marcotte writes. "It goes on to allege that 'innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color' and even that 'young men and women are made to question whether they were born in the wrong body.' Yep, they are accusing your local schoolteacher of badgering your cis kid until they turn trans, which is not how any of this works."...

Donald Trump made a campaign promise to eliminate the Department of Education, but that will never come to fruition, an expert said Saturday.

Former President Barack Obama's Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, appeared on MSNBC over the weekend to discuss Trump's vow to end the department Duncan once led.

The host, Alex Witt, noted that a bill to accomplish that goal "would require support from Democrats to get these 60 Senate votes needed to pass it, which is extremely unlikely."...