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History was made Tuesday when Vice President Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to confirm Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. But the necessity of Pence’s vote reflected another kind of history, too: The decision by all Senate Democrats to reject DeVos marked a new low for the flailing party. Democrats claim to stand for the poor, immigrants and nonwhites. Yet given a chance to actually support someone who is dedicated to improving education for all America’s children, especially those trapped in urban failing schools, the Dems’ said no, hell no. Joined by two Republicans, they stood...

In a tizzy after Betsy DeVos was confirmed as President Trump’s Sec. of Education, liberals on Twitter started considering the merits of homeschooling for the first time. The irony of invoking the freedom to choose where their kids go to school as a way to protest a pro-school choice Sec. of Education seemed lost on them. {..snip..}

NEA President Lily Eskelsen García thanks parents, students, and education activists for their relentless efforts to stop the hostile takeover of our public schools by Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration.

Senate Democrats are planning a rare all-night talkathon to protest Betsy DeVos's nomination for Education secretary ahead of an expected vote on Tuesday."Democrats will hold the floor for the next 24 hours, until the final vote, to do everything we can to persuade just one more Republican to join us," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said from the Senate floor Monday.

The nation is speaking out; senators need to listen COPYRIGHT 2002-2017 NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION

Washington (CNN)Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska both said Wednesday they would not vote to support Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump's choice for education secretary. The two women are the first sitting Republican senators to publicly say they wouldn't back one of Trump's Cabinet nominees.The stunning decision from a pair of veteran Republican lawmakers puts DeVos in a tenuous position as her final vote before the Senate nears, but top Republican aides are confident she will be confirmed.

PAWHUSKA, OKLA. Police in northern Oklahoma say they’ve arrested a substitute teacher on an indecent exposure complaint after she reportedly did a cartwheel in front of students while wearing a skirt but no undergarments.

Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp in Washington. This task is especially urgent in that large, malodorous part of the swamp known as Education. The Education Establishment makes everything murky and unproductive by an endless spew of jargon, incoherent theories, goofy methods, phony research, and new names for failed ideas. Finally, no two Americans can talk constructively about anything in education. It's as if they are talking across vast linguistic and cultural barriers, not over coffee at Starbucks. Education is now the fog-shrouded domain of dumbing down. Pervasive murkiness is a big part of the reason why so much...

Murray Votes No on Advancing Betsy DeVos Nomination

We should care who sits on the U.S. Supreme Court because court decisions affect our collective bargaining rights, the access our students have to the educational opportunities they deserve, and our children’s (and grandchildren’s) future. Justices may hold their appointments for life; that gives them ample time to impact the rights we hold dear—for better or worse.

A high school art teacher in Dallas posted an Instagram video of herself "shooting" an image of Donald Trump with a squirt gun and screaming "die" during Friday's inauguration. A copy of the video went viral on Twitter before the original source was identified.   The teacher has since deleted the video, but here's a copy:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp1A3VB6Fg8    

Thousands upon thousands took to the streets in Washington, DC, millions across the nation and the world. We are diverse, we are united and we have many, many creative signs. :)

President Donald Trump’s reported plan to gut federal spending by $10.5 trillion over the next decade includes eliminating three of iconic agencies defended as cultural mainstays by many Democrats. The next administration is working on plans to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, The Hill reported Thursday. Combined, the three departments cost around $741 million in 2016, and is a small part of a host of budget reforms needed to cut more than a trillion a year from the federal budget. Eliminating funding to the Corporation...

Speaking at an event organized to oppose President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda in Washington, D.C. Thursday, American Federation of Teachers President Elizabeth “Liz” Davis said that Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, is more frightening than the Ku Klux Klan. “Of course, you know that there are some scarier things that are coming up … one of them is Betsy DeVos,” Davis said. “That frightens me more than the Klan, because Betsy DeVos is a multi-mega millionaire who has managed to buy her way to a position of influence that could actually change the face of what we know...

Report: Schools Are Teaching Kids To Hate America Under The Guise Of ‘Civics’ The New Civics sweeping colleges and K-12 teaches that citizenship means looking for grievances, then agitating for bigger government to address them. Joy Pullmann By Joy Pullmann January 16, 2017 U.S. civics education, if it exists at all, is being transformed into a political machine to push left-wing causes, undermine American government, and incite civil unrest, finds a 525-page report from the National Association of Scholars. The “New Civics” uses attractive, bipartisan-sounding words like “civics” and “service learning” to trick Americans and their representatives into allowing progressive...

When you walk into school in the morning, you want the climate to be happy, welcoming and supportive. But what if you are unable to feel any of those things? In some schools, hostilities seethe under the surface and boil over into bullying and fights. Rather than connection there’s a sense of alienation that hangs over the school like a storm cloud. In schools with negative school climates, achievement and attendance drop,and teacher churn begins to rise.Following the tumultuous events of 2016,our schools and our young people are determined more than ever to create positive school climates. Indeed, events from...

The National Endowment for the Arts released its latest round of grants, with new taxpayer-funded art such as Macbeth with zombies, cowboy poetry, a play about privilege, and a traveling gay men’s chorus. . . . This year’s grant will support the “world premiere of Monique Jenkinson’s ‘Delicate Material,’ which questions how society views gender and misogyny.” “Fauxnique made herstory as the first cissexual female to win a major drag pageant,” according to Jenkinson’s website. Other projects on gender identity and sex include the play Trans Scripts about six men who are now women, costing $50,000.

The National Endowment for the Arts is spending $30,000 for a series of dance performances, including Doggie Hamlet. The “conceptual art” features actors yelling and running at sheep in a field in Vermont. Dartmouth College received the funding in the latest round of NEA grants released this month. . . . “Doggie Hamlet recalls the bucolic impression of a landscape painting or a 3D pastoral poem,” the group said. “The sheep, the dogs, the human performers, and the earth’s surface are at once performing as themselves and as living symbols in this work.”

The National Endowment for the Arts is helping fund the production of a play about going back in time to kill Christopher Columbus. The agency recently awarded $10,000 to the Borderlands Theater, which views people living near or on the U.S. border as “citizens of the world,” for the production entitled “Shooting Columbus.” “A collaborative effort between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Arizona artists will combine elements from interviews with tribal elders and community members with movement, media, and traditional theater for a site-based, immersive, interactive performance,” according to a grant for the project. “The guest artists are members of the Shooting...

Donald Trump has an idea about how to make art great again – by tapping ‘Rocky’ to head the National Endowment for the Arts. DailyMail.com is reporting that Stallone is the first name Trump has floated for the top arts position. Sylvester Stallone, known for his roles as Rocky Balboa and Rambo, is reportedly excited by the idea, though the job has not been formally offered to him yet.