Free Republic

Republicans may be congratulating each other over their show of outrage at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s data snatches and repression of free speech during Senate and House hearings, but a leading conservative commentator says they missed the boat in failing to address the tech giant’s intrusive grabs into the private data of America’s schoolchildren. Michelle Malkin – host of Michelle Malkin Investigates on CRTV.com – writes at Creators.com about the cozy relationship between Facebook and other technology titans with the U.S. Education Department. Using comforting-sounding buzz phrases such as “personalized,” “individualized,” and “social and emotional” learning, the federal education behemoth...

Department of Education Inspector General Kathleen Tighe revealed to Congress last week that the Federal Student Aid office (FSA) had made over $6 billion in improper payments last year in federal student aid programs. These improper payments included sending money in the wrong amount, making unnecessary disbursements, and sending payments to the wrong recipients entirely, reported the government watchdog group Judicial Watch. There were $2.21 billion in improper Pell Grant payments and $3.86 billion in the Direct Loan program, according to Inspector General Tighe in her May 25 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Government Operations. {..snip..}

JW Goes to Court for Accountability over Hillary Clinton’s Mishandling of Classified Emails JW Sues Over Obama Student Loan Scandal Special Presentation: Government Oversight Challenges’ JW Goes to Court for Accountability over Hillary Clinton’s Mishandling of Classified Emails Lawlessness was the modus operandi of the Obama administration. If it felt a law stood in the way of its intentions, it ignored the law. Seems the Obama intelligence agencies learned this lesson well. In the critical matter of Hillary Clinton’s illegal email practices, the Director of National Intelligence simply ignored a directive requiring a damage assessment and a report. So...

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos watched a transgender girl eat apple sauce and draw and listened to another student’s emotional story of feeling marginalized at school, as activists pressed DeVos to make good on her promise to protect all students. Parents and activists who met with DeVos on Wednesday said they thought she was moved by their stories, but they still left with little hope that she would be a strong advocate for transgender children. […] Attending the meeting were Ellie Ford, a 5-year-old transgender girl, and high school student Grace Dolan-Sandrino, who told DeVos the middle school she attended did...

The Department of Education wants to bolster minority enrollment at the city’s elite high schools with a set of new reforms slated to kick off this summer. Officials said black and Hispanic students comprise 68 percent of city school students but only make up 11 percent of specialized high school enrollment.

To accommodate the perceived wishes of a very small number of people, the federal government and many states are placing women and girls at risk of rape and assault in restrooms. There are about a mere 700,000 transgender individuals in the U.S., or 0.3% of the adult population. As John Hinderaker correctly notes -- that makes them almost as rare as unicorns. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that allowing men who decide they really want to be women to use women’s restrooms is a dangerous idea: not to the wise men of Charlotte, North Carolina who passed an...

Presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) sure does want to shut down a lot of the federal agencies he hopes to one day run.The firebrand conservative and GOP presidential candidate has defined his young Senate career by almost reflexively opposing increased government spending and programs . . ."I think we should shrink the size and power of the federal government by every and any means possible," he told the Daily Caller in 2012. -- snip -- The State DepartmentMost recently, Cruz threatened in a letter to President Obama to hold up State Department nominees and hold all bills that fund...

In the race to the future, education is key. Everyone knows that. And yet, if that's so, America may be in big trouble.

The U.S. Department of Education’s report, “Succeeding Globally Through International Education and Engagement” tries to show how American students will gain more international experience. The report features six quotes by the department secretary Arne Duncan, with phrases such as “recipe for protectionism and global strife,” “grow the pie for all” or “compassionate neighbors” and “global society.” Here are the six quotes, with the corresponding dates, in full: “The economic future of the United States rests not only on its ability to strengthen our education system but also on citizens in other nations raising their living standards. Thinking of the future...

Under a new program implemented by education czar Arne Duncan, employees from the federal department of education will be placed in schools throughout the nation to oversee their operations and ensure they’re following federal guidelines and procedures. This doesn’t sound so horrible, until you remember that the federal government isn’t supposed to have any hand in education and they’re continually telling us that their role is ‘limited’.

Excerpt of the face off between Rand Paul and David Axelrod at the University of Chicago: RAND PAUL: Education historically was a state and local subject and I think that what we've seen is since we've spent about a hundred billion dollars in the Department of Education each year and that's been going on since 1980. I'm not so sure we're better off than we were before. You see, the one thing -- DAVID AXELROD: So you would vote for a budget that would eliminate most of that. RAND PAUL: Well what I would do is I would have its...

I’m still waiting for the Hitler quote. Or is there a minimum number of people that a dictator has to murder before he gets placement on a part of the Department of Education website devoted to kids. This isn’t a generic quote about education being a good thing. It’s actually a quote about the need for Communist indoctrination among Communist Party members. The full quote that the Department of Education cut down comes at the end of an essay on “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War” “Whoever refuses to study these problems seriously and carefully...

Today, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that 10 states will receive funding to turn around their persistently lowest-achieving schools through the Department's School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. Four of the states will receive awards to run a new competition for previously unfunded schools, and six states will receive continuation funds for the third year of implementing a SIG model. The states receiving new awards are: Indiana—$9.2 million; Nebraska—$2.6 million; Colorado—$5.2 million; and Louisiana—$9.6 million. The states receiving continuation awards are: Alaska—$1.5 million; Iowa—$3.0 million; North Dakota—$1.2 million; Oklahoma—$5.5 million; Texas—$49.7 million; and Wyoming—$1.1 million. "When schools fail, our...

How did the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania get along from the beginning of the Republic in 1787 until 1978 — 191 years — and yet manage to educate its kids without the existence of the U.S. Department of Education? And, being one who is a graduate of both a Pennsylvania public high school and a Pennsylvania private college (Franklin and Marshall College, as it happens, dates from 1787) — how did the Commonwealth manage to educate the bulk of those kids well? Kids from all economic backgrounds, all races and both genders? The response will surely come — as it does...

From the indoctrination specialists and propagandists at the Department of Education (which doesn't really educate children, but I digress. Emphasis added where appropriate, snarky comments in [brackets].) *** "Program Description Program Office: Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) CFDA Number: 84.215P (Planning) and 84.215N (Implementation) Program Type: Discretionary/Competitive Grants [Kiss your money goodbye, prole!] Program Description: Promise Neighborhoods, established under the legislative authority of the Fund for the Improvement of Education Program (FIE), [also known as "not Congress"] provides funding to support eligible entities, including (1) nonprofit organizations, which may include faith-based nonprofit organizations, (2) institutions of higher education, and...

The Department of Education has partnered with billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Institute to promote a global education initiative that seeks “a world where each and every person on Earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.” Education Secretary Arne Duncan kicked off a $25,000 “Why Open Education Matters” competition that will give a cash prize for the best short video explaining the benefits of what is known as Open Educational Resources, or O.E.R., for students, teachers and schools.

This is scary: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/10/21/president-obama-it-gets-better

I've long suspected that the federal government is consciously subverting American education. Deep inside the Department of Education, there must exist a top-secret Bureau of Educational Disasters (BED) whose mission is to concoct alluring but guaranteed-to-fail, academic achievement-killing policies whose sole benefits are more jobs and mindless paperwork. These would be the folks who recently bribed states to retain academically troublesome students whose behavior hindered decent students so as to make America "better educated," i.e., a nation of high school "graduates" barely able to read their diplomas. Well, like all industrious Washington bureaucrats, BED, with Department of Justice support, soldiers...

When I was a boy, I took one of my first newspaper jobs in the back of the press room, standing next to a rotary letterpress of the general size and aspect of a steam locomotive, where I "stuffed papers." That is, I assembled one section of the paper inside another. Heavy, inky work for a whole crew of us junior high schoolers and part-timing moms. And we all got a stern warning the first day. "You can't call any want ads before the paper comes out to the general public. You do it, we catch you, you're fired," Wayne,...

It stinks. From USA Today: Seeking to build support among black families for its education reform law, the Bush administration paid a prominent black pundit $240,000 to promote the law on his nationally syndicated television show and to urge other black journalists to do the same. The campaign, part of an effort to promote No Child Left Behind (NCLB), required commentator Armstrong Williams "to regularly comment on NCLB during the course of his broadcasts," and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during the show in 2004. Williams said Thursday he understands that critics...