The <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/education" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Department of Education</a> (DOE) has launched a discrimination investigation into the University of Rhode Island over its use of race and sex-based scholarship programs.
The investigation from the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) comes after the Equal Protection Project (EPP) <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/university-of-rhode-island-hit-with-civil-rights-complaint-over-discriminatory-scholarships">filed a federal complaint</a> against the university over scholarship offerings that excluded would-be applicants on the basis of their race or sex.
“OCR will investigate whether the University discriminates on the basis of race, color, or national origin by administering the scholarships” and will also investigate “whether the University discriminates on the basis of sex through other scholarship programs,” the DOE said in a letter.
The announcement comes as the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda has embedded itself throughout higher education, oftentimes informing the selection criteria for scholarship programs.
The DOE’s announcement that it is investigating the university was a direct response to the complaint filed by the EPP, which highlighted specific scholarships and their selection criteria.
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“The discrimination in scholarships at URI is shocking in its breadth, far exceeding any other university we have seen at the Equal Protection Project,” the organization’s founder, William A. Jacobson, told The Daily Wire at the time of the complaint. “URI does not even try to hide the discriminatory barriers, they are all detailed on the URI website.”
One of the scholarships that will now be subject to the investigation is the Bank of America scholarship, which is designated for “two four-year scholarships for minority students, preferably one male and one female.” The Citizens Bank Scholarship, which is reserved for “minority students with financial need who live in Rhode Island,” will also be subject to the investigation.
The two are joined by the Dr. Robert L. Carothers Student Leadership Endowment, which will also be investigated and provides &#8220;annual scholarships to URI students of color who provide leadership in broad university programs.”
The EPP highlighted 51 different scholarships in the complaint to the DOE, which explained that it is starting an investigation into 35 of the scholarships while dismissing the others that were the subject of the complaint.

Dept of Education

Education Department To Investigate University Of Rhode Island’s Discriminatory Scholarships

Academia

Department of Education

Diversity

Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

Education

Equity

U.S.

The vast majority of parents oppose schools teaching their children transgender ideology, polling conducted last month by Parents Defending Education shows. 
The <a href="https://defendinged.org/press-releases/parents-defending-education-poll-parents-support-girls-only-spaces-in-schools-oppose-parental-exclusion-policies-and-grading-for-equity/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">polling</a>, first shared with The Daily Wire, shows that 75% of parents do not support teachers providing instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity to elementary school students. Additionally, a large majority of parents indicated they opposed teachers pushing transgender identity on kids behind their parents&#8217; backs, as has happened across the country. 
“This poll shows overwhelming opposition to school personnel withholding information from parents about their child&#8217;s gender identity at school,” Parents Defending Education Director of Outreach Erika Sanzi told The Daily Wire. “It&#8217;s refreshing to see even more confirmation that people think this ubiquitous trend of facilitating gender transitions behind the backs of parents is complete madness and needs to stop.&#8221;
Covering a wide range of topics from DEI to transgender policies, the polling from Parents Defending Education shows that parents want more oversight of what is happening in their children&#8217;s classrooms. 
The poll surveyed 1,000 parents across the country who have children under the age of 18. The results come as parents have become increasingly vocal about the need for schools to focus on academics and not ideology. A third of those surveyed said they leaned Republican. Thirty-eight percent said they were independent, and 24% said they leaned Democrat. 
The survey found that 80% of parents believed that schools should not “help a child change their gender identity” without parental notification while 19% said they would be fine with teachers changing a student&#8217;s pronouns or providing things like chest binders to girls without parental consent.  
Three-quarters of those surveyed said they supported legislation that would require school officials to inform parents if their child wanted to identify as a different gender at school. Just over 60% of parents said they disagreed with a Wisconsin school district policy that said parents do not have a right to know about their child’s identity.
“This matters because the policies propagated by activist groups, the National School Boards Association, and teachers&#8217; unions all allow for  — and often require — the deliberate deception of parents by school staff if that is what the minor child wants,” Sanzi said of the polling. 
When asked whether they supported teachers instructing elementary school students on topics related to sexual orientation and gender ideology, 74% said they were opposed.
Nearly 80% of parents indicated they did not believe that males who identify as females should be allowed to compete on women’s sports teams. Republican-led states across the country have passed laws in recent years requiring students to participate on the sports team aligning with their biology. 
While 21% of those surveyed said that they would be fine with allowing a male to use female bathrooms and locker rooms, 77% said they would oppose any policy that allowed that. Similarly, the poll found that 72% of parents believed that students should be housed based on biological sex during field trips.
The poll also showed that 72% of parents opposed schools implementing “grading for equity” policies, including things like eliminating the ability for a student to get a zero on an assignment that was not turned in. Over half of the parents (56%) also opposed schools sponsoring race-based clubs. 
&#8220;These results highlight that parents are dissatisfied with a number of elements of the modern American education system &#8211; and that there is broad-based consensus that it&#8217;s time for schools to get back to basics,” Parents Defending Education President Nicole Neily told The Daily Wire. 
Neily added that she was optimistic about the incoming Trump administration, which has suggested it would make major reforms at the Department of Education. 
“For far too long, federal bureaucrats have sacrificed the needs of students and families in order to appease unions&#8217; and activists&#8217; insatiable demands for money and power,” she said. “January 20th can&#8217;t come soon enough.&#8221;

Blackboard with the international flag of peace drawn on.(series)

EXCLUSIVE: Majority Of American Parents Oppose Teaching Kids Transgender Ideology

polling

Transgender Athletes

The Biden administration’s Department of Education has faced growing criticism for the enormous amount spent on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-dei" target="_blank" rel="noopener">DEI</a>) initiatives in schools across the country. <a href="https://defendinged.org/investigations/granted/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">A new report from Parents Defending Education</a> reveals that more than $1 billion in DEI grants have been distributed nationwide since 2021. Included in the report are grants that affect schools in 25 states that voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
It turns out that radical woke ideology is not just a problem in blue states.
This federal spending spree has caught the attention of state government leaders in red states, specifically Oklahoma State Superintendent Ryan Walters, who <a href="https://sde.ok.gov/press-release/2024-12-16/no-woke-agenda-here-walters-continues-protect-oklahoma-kids-bidens-radical" target="_blank" rel="noopener">denounced</a> the Biden administration for using taxpayer money to “shove DEI down the throats of Oklahomans.”
DEI has been shoved down the throats in many conservative red states through these Department of Education grants. Consider three prominent examples from <a href="https://defendinged.org/investigations/granted/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">PDE’s “GrantED” report</a>, which shows federally funded DEI initiatives in Iowa, Missouri, and South Carolina, all of which have received $89,440,558 total in grants aimed at embedding far-Left ideologies into K-12 classrooms.
First, the University of Iowa, situated in a state that voted decisively Republican in the last presidential election, <a href="https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/2023/09/S336S220023-Iowa-Abstract.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">received a grant award of $1,261,718</a>. The funding is designed to train 40 elementary teachers to “enact equity-centered education” in K-12 partner districts. What has “equity-centered education” looked like in recent years? A lower threshold for academic excellence and overall lower test scores for all students, more lenient discipline policies that have resulted in increasingly disruptive learning environments, and the implementation of <a href="https://defendinged.org/resources/affinity-groups/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">race-based groups</a> in schools that include or exclude students and teachers based on the color of their skin.
Missouri offers another telling example. The University of Missouri–St. Louis was <a href="https://defendinged.org/investigations/granted/#:~:text=The%20Curators%20of%20the%20University%20of%20Missouri%20on%20behalf%20of%20UMSL%20(MO)%3A%20%24306%2C289" target="_blank" rel="noopener">awarded a $306,209 grant</a> to train school counselors in Trauma-Informed, Antiracist Social-Emotional Learning. Antiracism sounds well-intentioned, but the author of the literal book on Antiracism, Ibram X. Kendi, describes antiracism saying, “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” As for Social Emotional Learning (SEL), another well-meaning term, in 2020, SEL was rebranded to <a href="https://defendinged.org/resources/sel101/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“Transformative SEL,”</a> embedding race and gender ideology into what had previously been neutral student competencies.
Perhaps the most striking instance comes from Laurens County School District 55 in South Carolina, which <a href="https://www.ed.gov/sites/ed/files/2023/10/Laurens-County-School-District-55-S374A230030.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">received a staggering $13.6 million</a> over three years. The grant’s stated goal is “to create schools where equity, diversity, and inclusion are embedded in the school culture.” Equity was mentioned earlier, but “inclusion” can include far-Left views of gender which manifests itself in schools in ways such as punishing students who “misgender” other students or allowing students to use the restroom that matches their “gender identity.” Reminder: Laurens County, SC <a href="https://www.enr-scvotes.org/SC/Laurens/122466/web.345435/#/summary?v=353884%2F" target="_blank" rel="noopener">voted almost 70%</a> for Donald Trump in 2024.
At Parents Defending Education, we often read comments on social media like, “Thank goodness I live in Florida!” or “Move out of California!” However, DEI funding receipts from the last 4 years of the Biden administration show that geographical location does not shield children from exposure to far-Left ideologies in their schools. Ideological activists are determined to push their propaganda beyond blue-state lines.
Parents must remain vigilant in examining their child’s coursework, attending school board meetings, and maintaining regular communication with their child’s teacher — not only to identify potential bias in education but also to prevent it. DEI has been <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/media/biden-education-department-spent-over-1-billion-dei-grants-report" target="_blank" rel="noopener">exposed</a> as a waste of taxpayer dollars that does not help students, but hurts them. Families should not hesitate to speak up and work to stop this dangerous programming in their children’s schools, even if they live in a red state.
* * *
Paul Runko is a Digital Communications Specialist for Parents Defending Education. Based in Charleston, South Carolina, he is also a proud father of two.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

interior of a traditional school classroom with wooden floor and furniture.

Biden Admin Blew Over $1 Billion On DEI In Red States

American Universities

Biden Administration

Opinion

Students

As we prepare to enter the new year, we’re taking you back to some of The Daily Wire’s best reporting from 2024. <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/heres-what-getting-rid-of-the-education-department-could-look-like" target="_blank" rel="noopener">This article</a> was originally published on November 30. 
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to eliminate the Department of Education, an ambitious goal that comes amid backlash to what critics say is the agency’s runaway spending and focus on “woke” indoctrination as American children’s grades decline.
“I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,” Trump <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/politics/department-of-education-shut-down-trump/index.html">said</a> during a September rally in Wisconsin. “We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing.”
The proposal was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zxfnqj_3XQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener">met</a> with cheers on the campaign trail. But it’s also gotten support from experts like Jim Blew, who served as Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development at the Education Department during Trump’s first term. Blew told The Daily Wire there’s no doubt in his mind that his former workplace should be eliminated.
“All of the Education Department’s core functions could and should be performed by other federal agencies,” Blew, who also co-founded the Defense of Freedom Institute, told The Daily Wire.
Blew’s proposal gets at another major criticism of the Education Department, which is that it doesn’t do much educating. Though it spends $80 billion in taxpayer dollars each year, it has no say over public school curriculum, which is decided at the state and local level. Instead, it doles out $18.4 billion annually for Title I, the low-income school district program, and $15.5 billion for special education. It also enforces certain Title IX civil rights laws and sets the rules for colleges to participate in the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program.
The Trump administration could potentially reassign some programs to other agencies while scrapping others. For example, some critics have proposed <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2024/07/11/how-project-2025-could-radically-reshape-higher-ed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">assigning</a> the student loan program to the Treasury Department, having the Justice Department enforce Title IX, and turning Title I into a state block grant program with minimal federal oversight.
But Blew acknowledged that one way of doing this — no-strings-attached block education grants to local governments — could result in worse spending decisions.
“But they would be hard pressed to do worse than the current system,” he said. “We’re betting that the local districts understand their communities better than people in D.C., that they know their students’ needs best, and that they can use the money more effectively.”
During the pandemic, even the hundreds of billions of extra COVID dollars the department doled out were not enough to keep children from failing academically. Students nationwide fell hopelessly behind in core subjects — nine-year-olds saw their average reading scores fall five points in 2022, the largest decline since 1990, and their math scores fell seven points, the first ever decline in math.
Parents lashed out at schools that kept depressed children stuck at home, struggling to learn through a laptop screen, then forced them to mask and social distance all day when they did return to the classroom. At the same time, remote learning allowed parents to catch a glimpse of the “woke” material their kids were learning.
Trump is not the first Republican to try to abolish the Education Department. Ronald Reagan also campaigned on getting rid of it, but he was <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-01-29-mn-13948-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">met</a> with resistance from Congress and backed down. However, the current frustration with public schools could be the tipping point Trump needs to nix the department.
The Education Department is also responsible for enforcing certain civil rights laws, a mandate the Biden administration has taken full advantage of with a dramatic rewrite of Title IX guidance, which redefined sex to include “gender identity,” erasing protections for biological women in schools. The new interpretation has garnered significant backlash and it has been blocked by the courts in many states.
Trump has expressed his intention to use federal leverage on education as well, including <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/president-trumps-plan-to-save-american-education-and-give-power-back-to-parents" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cutting</a> funds for schools pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or “other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.”
Jonathan Zachreson, a conservative on the Roseville City School Board near Sacramento, said that while he agrees with slashing federal bureaucracy, the Trump administration could also use the department to reign in California’s far-left education policies.
Zachreson cited California’s recent legislation <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/california-schools-gender-neutral-bathrooms-newsom-signs-lgbtq-rights-bill" target="_blank" rel="noopener">forcing</a> schools to allow trans-identifying students to use the bathroom of the opposite sex as well as <a href="https://edsource.org/2024/newsom-signs-bill-to-end-parental-notification-policies-at-schools-but-opponents-say-its-not-over-yet/715767" target="_blank" rel="noopener">prohibiting</a> schools from having parental notification policies.
“I believe both of those things are a violation of federal law, but if you get rid of the Department of Education how are you to hold California and some of these very leftist states accountable? So that’s my biggest concern,” Zachreson told The Daily Wire.
“Before you abolish the Department of Education, I think you need to fix a couple of things,” Zachreson said, including making Title IX guidance “very clear.”
Andy Smarick, an education expert and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, agreed that without a federal bureaucracy, Trump and future presidents would have less power to drive their education agenda.
“I’m fine with allowing state leaders to do more. But Mr. Trump and future presidents may like the idea of having federal power to advance their priorities,” Smarick said.
“Federal rules unquestionably create burdens for school leaders and can create headaches for state and local policymakers,” Smarick said, but he cautioned, “If we get rid of the Department of Education, we have to be comfortable with the idea of lots of federal money and reduced oversight.”
Federal funding is not always a positive, though, Zachreson observed. California’s teachers’ unions “held kids hostage” during the pandemic by refusing to open schools until the Education Department gave them federal COVID relief money, he said.
In order to eliminate the Department of Education, Trump will need to clear a couple of hurdles, first and foremost, getting Congress to agree to shutter the department. Trump would have to convince the slim Republican majorities in the House and Senate to pass legislation to close the department, and some experts have <a href="https://missouriindependent.com/2024/11/25/dc/unlikely-trump-can-actually-eliminate-education-department-experts-say/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cast</a> doubt on whether he will be able to do so since he needs a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate.
Already though, Republican lawmakers are making moves. Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) introduced a bill last week that <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5003481-south-dakota-republican-department-of-education-trump/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">would</a> abolish the Education Department and transfer its programs to other federal agencies.
And then there are teachers’ unions. Teachers’ unions and the department have always been linked. When President Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating the Cabinet agency in 1979, he was fulfilling a campaign promise to the National Education Association. And teachers’ unions still very much want the department around. This month, Randi Weingarten, the head of the country’s biggest teachers’ union <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/the-weekend/watch/head-of-america-s-biggest-teachers-union-slams-donald-trump-s-education-plans-225330245756" target="_blank" rel="noopener">slammed</a> Trump’s plans to close it.
Whatever the Trump administration is able to accomplish, it will take years to reverse the learning loss students have suffered recently. Blew, the former Education Department official, lamented that so many children are underserved by the current education system.
“The reform movement will continue until that injustice is erased,” he said.

U.S. Department of Education Headquarters

Here’s What Getting Rid Of The Education Department Could Look Like

Donald Trump

Trump Administration

The <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/biden-administration" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Biden administration</a> said Friday that it would cancel another $4.28 billion in <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/student-loans" target="_blank" rel="noopener">student loan</a> debt for nearly 55,000 people, bringing the total amount of student debt forgiven by the administration to around $180 billion. 
The Department of Education <a href="https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/biden-harris-administration-approves-additional-428-billion-student-debt-relief-nearly-55000-public-service-workers-0" target="_blank" rel="noopener">announced</a> that it was canceling the debt of 54,900 borrowers through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program. Although the Supreme Court <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/supreme-court-delivers-defeat-to-biden-admin-on-student-loan-forgiveness" target="_blank" rel="noopener">struck down</a> President Joe Biden&#8217;s broad student loan cancellation program last year, Biden has continued to cancel chunks of student loan debt through other programs. 
“Four years ago, the Biden-Harris Administration made a pledge to America’s teachers, service members, nurses, first responders, and other public servants that we would fix the broken Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, and I’m proud to say that we delivered,” said Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona. 
The loan cancellation is the latest last minute leftist policy move from Biden as he approaches the final days of his administration. Biden is also <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-biden-races-to-sell-off-border-wall-parts-before-trump-takes-office" target="_blank" rel="noopener">racing</a> to sell off border wall materials and move them away from the southern border and <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/feds-look-to-hire-up-to-1200-new-dei-bureaucrats-before-trump-takes-office" target="_blank" rel="noopener">looking</a> to hire up to 1,200 employees to work in diversity, equity, and inclusion positions.
The PSLF Program allows borrowers working in education, public health, law enforcement, and emergency response to have their debt canceled after making 120 monthly payments. 
&#8220;The U.S. Department of Education’s successful transformation of the PSLF Program is a testament to what’s possible when you have leaders, like President Biden and Vice President Harris, who are relentlessly and unapologetically focused on making government deliver for everyday working people,&#8221; Cardona added.
Republicans have challenged Biden’s student loan cancellation initiatives, saying they are an unconstitutional redistribution of wealth and a burden on the American taxpayer. 
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Earlier this month, 23 Republican attorneys general sent a <a href="https://ago.mo.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024-12-2-Student-Loan-NPRM-Interested-States-Comment-Letter.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">letter</a> to Cardona warning the administration about another proposed<a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/04/17/2024-07726/student-debt-relief-for-the-william-d-ford-federal-direct-loan-program-direct-loans-the-federal"> rule</a> that would expand the Secretary of Education’s authority to “waive” debts to the department. 
“Everyone from the Supreme Court, to President Joe Biden, to former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has publicly acknowledged that you do not have the authority to forgive debt except in the limited ways Congress clearly outlined. You must adhere to these warnings and follow the law,” the attorney generals wrote on December 3. 
In June 2023, the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s attempt to use the COVID-era HEROES Act to unilaterally forgive federally subsidized loans. 
“The Secretary asserts that the HEROES Act grants him the authority to cancel $430 billion of student loan principal. It does not,” the court majority wrote in a 6-3 opinion. “We hold today that the Act allows the Secretary to ‘waive or modify’ existing statutory or regulatory provisions applicable to financial assistance programs under the Education Act, not to rewrite that statute from the ground up.”

President Biden Hosts Hanukkah Holiday Reception At The White House

Biden Announces Cancellation Of Another $4 Billion In Student Loans

Executive

Joe Biden

Miguel Cardona

National Debt

Politics

Student Loan Cancellation

Student Loans

Supreme Court

Thanks to the overwhelming efforts of everyday American parents who have refused to bow to the radical Left, the war on Christmas seems to have gone cold.
In recent years, public fights and lawsuits over Christmas events and displays dominated the headlines every December. This season, however, they appear to have subsided.
Parents have bravely pushed back against woke propaganda in the schools, elected better leaders, and have fought for their children’s education over woke indoctrination.
Most teachers and administrators no longer want the hassle, the conflict, or the public attention and scrutiny that these disagreements bring. While in some aspects this is good news, the reality is the damage has already been done — the status quo implemented during the period of lawsuits and school board debates remains.
Students are treated to inoffensive and meaningless “holiday” and “winter” events that look more like low-octane paganism than anything actually believed by the critical mass of the student body.
Of course, this was the long-term goal all along. Even if the Left lost in the courts, in too many cases they won in the classrooms. Because most teachers and administrators don’t want the hassle, the end result has been the same as if they had actually won in the courts and the legislatures.
This is a tragedy for our children and for our culture. Instead, this should be an opportunity for educators and parents to share not only the tidings of the seasons, but also the importance of our country’s robust history of religious liberty.
Public schools, of course, are not meant to be a means of taxpayer-funded evangelization. At the same time, they should not be places where such voluntary discussions are stifled or drowned out by artificially inoffensive celebrations. They should not be an excuse for our educators to look away from the role that religious liberty played in our founding and what it means today. Many of our founders’ ancestors braved the difficult voyage across the Atlantic and carved out new lives in an uncertain and unforgiving wilderness, driven by the need to live out their beliefs in accordance with their consciences. There’s a reason the freedoms of conscience are the first to be included in our Bill of Rights, after all.
When we fail to teach children the foundational things, we do them a grave disservice. Children are going to take in values from whatever they are taught. They learn just as much from the absence of a thing as they do from the thing itself. Instead of learning that we live in a country where beliefs both matter and are respected, they learn to relegate them to the back of their minds and hearts as mere matters of taste and preference.
That’s no way to go through life, and it’s no way to form citizens who are ready to inherit the kind of republic our founders intended for them.
At the same time, America’s school children are still being instructed in values and beliefs from the front of the classroom, just not traditionally religious ones. For years, they’ve been instructed in Critical Race Theory and gender ideology, thanks to the dictates and incentives of the federal Department of Education. Now, that’s about to change.
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With a new administration, we have an opportunity to push out all of the woke, anti-American bureaucratic rot at the top of the national education system. Really, we should not have a national education system. The best way to address the problems coming from Washington would be to get rid of them altogether and eliminate the Department of Education like President Trump has promised.
In addition to creating a bureaucratic nexus to indoctrinate our kids from Washington, it has done absolutely nothing to improve education outcomes since its inception. Since Jimmy Carter established this indoctrination machine in 1980, every academic statistic has only declined. We need to return control of education back to the states, where parents are in the driver’s seat, not some D.C. bureaucrat dictating decisions from their ivory tower.
People forget this country — the greatest country in the history of the world — was built without a federal Department of Education. The minds who built this country and sustained it through its most trying times were educated in one-room schoolhouses. The generations who defeated the 20th century axis powers and put a man on the moon for the first time in human history were the product of state-run education systems. We do not need federal bureaucrats to flourish — we need parents to be empowered to help their children prosper. After all, students are the next leaders of our great nation. This Christmas season, we can start preparing them for it.
* * *
Ryan Walters is Superintendent of the Oklahoma State Department of Education. You can follow him on X: <a href="https://twitter.com/RyanWaltersSupt">@RyanWaltersSupt</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Christmas crib.

Thanks To Brave Parents, The War On Christmas Has Turned Cold 

Christmas

Critical Race Theory

Leftists

Oklahoma

Parental Rights in Education

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On February 9, 2010, Michelle Obama unveiled her ambitious initiative to combat childhood obesity through her <a href="https://letsmove.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/about" target="_blank" rel="noopener">“Let’s Move!”</a> campaign, aiming to empower children and reduce obesity rates. The <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/childhood-obesity-facts/childhood-obesity-facts.html#:~:text=This%20means%20that%20approximately%2014.7,percentile%20for%20age%20and%20sex." target="_blank" rel="noopener">CDC</a> reports that 1 in 5 children in the U.S. suffer from obesity which prompted President Obama to pass the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy,_Hunger-Free_Kids_Act_of_2010" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010</a>. This law aimed to promote healthier diets with mandated minimum servings of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains while limiting sugar, fat, and sodium. However, the program fell short of its goals and inadvertently exacerbated the problems it sought to address.
The focus of her campaign was not only to ensure that our nation’s children are being fed but also fed healthy food through the aid of the government. This could have only been a good thing until reality proved otherwise.
Within the first few years of this initiative, participation in school lunch programs across the nation fell dramatically. The United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) <a href="https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-15-656.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reports</a> that nationwide participation in the National School Lunch Program declined by 1.4 million.
Children&#8217;s decrease in participation coincided with rising lunch prices aiming to comply with new “health” standards set by the First Lady, which mandated minimum fruit, vegetable, and whole grain servings, as well as set a maximum for sodium, sugar, and fat contents.
This centralization of our children’s diets drastically harmed low-income communities. Many low-income schools faced budget shortfalls, with some completely dropping out of the federal program. Ironically, this initiative reduced access to meals for the very same children the initiative sought to help.
Michelle Obama’s &#8220;one-size-fits-all&#8221; approach to children’s diets, also did not account for dietary preferences or individual school needs. Thus, children were actively choosing not to eat the meals provided for them, calling them “gross” and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/11/24/students-are-blaming-michelle-obama-for-their-gross-school-lunches/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">posting</a> pictures of their so-called nutritious and balanced meals with the hashtag #thanksmichelleobama.
However, Michelle Obama was right: the quality and nutritional value of lunches can change and affect the current rates of childhood obesity. Unfortunately, her approach completely failed to address the real problem at hand: public health giants and their monopoly on the United States agrifood system.
The National Institute of Health (NIH) recently conducted a <a href="https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/childhood-obesity-linked-limited-food-options" target="_blank" rel="noopener">study</a> on the correlation between childhood obesity and low-income areas. Scientists found that adolescents residing in areas of low income had a greater than 50% higher risk of obesity. This statistic is the complete opposite when it comes to a majority of marginalized countries. So why does one of the wealthiest nations on the planet have the most significant rates of obesity?
Low-income communities in the United States are consuming more ultra-processed foods now than ever before. Why? Because processed foods are often cheaper than fresh produce and they are made and marketed for convenience. Mass consumption of ultra-processed foods leads to a higher risk of health dangers and diseases due to high calorific content and low nutritional value.
Students weren&#8217;t getting enough nutrition as it was and Michelle Obama’s school lunch program inadvertently replaced the traditional high-calorie, low-nutritional meals with a different form of processed foods. This change posed a significant issue for low-income students who depended on these meals, as the new options were often unappealing and failed to meet their dietary needs from the start.
This systemic problem is at the heart of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement. RFK’s bid is to fix the American agricultural system and that begins with cleaning up public health agencies like the FDA and USDA claiming, “[t]hose agencies have become sock puppets for the industries they’re supposed to regulate” in a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKSBS5v-aOc">recent video</a>. It has become abundantly clear that these agencies are solely operating for monetary gain, not for the people of America.
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In a <a href="https://www.mahanow.org/school-lunches-video" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Fox &amp; Friends interview</a>, RFK was asked what he would do to improve school lunches, and to that, he responded immediately: “I’ll get processed food out of lunches immediately. About half the school lunch program goes to processed food….We’re creating a diabetes problem in our kids, by giving them food that is poison and I’m going to stop that.”
The &#8220;Make America Healthy Again&#8221; pledge to get toxic chemicals out of the food supply addresses the real problem the way Michelle Obama never could. Rather than just treating symptoms of obesity, RFK’s plans to reform America’s agricultural policies, agencies, thereby addressing the systemic failures in our food system.
To truly combat obesity in America, we must prioritize the quality of our food. By addressing systemic failures and reforming the food supply chain, initiatives like RFK Jr.’s offer a more sustainable and realistic path to a healthier nation.
* * *
Dr. Naydeen González-De Jesús is a former college president and former U.S. public diplomacy officer who has championed student success and international collaboration. Her initiatives and contributions to the U.S.-Argentina Education Memorandum during the 2018 G20 Summit, have driven economic mobility, educational advancement, and strengthened bilateral relations.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Daily Wire.

Donald Trump Campaigns In Michigan In Final Days Before Election

RFK Jr. Could Do What Michelle Obama Actually Promised: Healthy Lunches For Low Income Students

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President-elect Donald Trump has promised to eliminate the Department of Education, an ambitious goal that comes amid backlash to what critics say is the agency&#8217;s runaway spending and focus on &#8220;woke&#8221; indoctrination as American children&#8217;s grades decline.
“I say it all the time, I’m dying to get back to do this. We will ultimately eliminate the federal Department of Education,” Trump <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/politics/department-of-education-shut-down-trump/index.html">said</a> during a September rally in Wisconsin. “We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing.”
The proposal was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zxfnqj_3XQ" target="_blank" rel="noopener">met</a> with cheers on the campaign trail. But it&#8217;s also gotten support from experts like Jim Blew, who served as Assistant Secretary for Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development at the Education Department during Trump&#8217;s first term. Blew told The Daily Wire there&#8217;s no doubt in his mind that his former workplace should be eliminated.
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&#8220;All of the Education Department’s core functions could and should be performed by other federal agencies,&#8221; Blew, who also co-founded the Defense of Freedom Institute, told The Daily Wire.
Blew&#8217;s proposal gets at another major criticism of the Education Department, which is that it doesn&#8217;t do much educating. Though it spends $80 billion in taxpayer dollars each year, it has no say over public school curriculum, which is decided at the state and local level. Instead, it doles out $18.4 billion annually for Title I, the low-income school district program, and $15.5 billion for special education. It also enforces certain Title IX civil rights laws and sets the rules for colleges to participate in the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program.
The Trump administration could potentially reassign some programs to other agencies while scrapping others. For example, some critics have proposed <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/government/politics-elections/2024/07/11/how-project-2025-could-radically-reshape-higher-ed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">assigning</a> the student loan program to the Treasury Department, having the Justice Department enforce Title IX, and turning Title I into a state block grant program with minimal federal oversight.
But Blew acknowledged that one way of doing this — no-strings-attached block education grants to local governments — could result in worse spending decisions.
&#8220;But they would be hard pressed to do worse than the current system,&#8221; he said. &#8220;We&#8217;re betting that the local districts understand their communities better than people in D.C., that they know their students&#8217; needs best, and that they can use the money more effectively.&#8221;
During the pandemic, even the hundreds of billions of extra COVID dollars the department doled out were not enough to keep children from failing academically. Students nationwide fell hopelessly behind in core subjects — nine-year-olds saw their average reading scores fall five points in 2022, the largest decline since 1990, and their math scores fell seven points, the first ever decline in math.
Parents lashed out at schools that kept depressed children stuck at home, struggling to learn through a laptop screen, then forced them to mask and social distance all day when they did return to the classroom. At the same time, remote learning allowed parents to catch a glimpse of the &#8220;woke&#8221; material their kids were learning.
Trump is not the first Republican to try to abolish the Education Department. Ronald Reagan also campaigned on getting rid of it, but he was <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-01-29-mn-13948-story.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">met</a> with resistance from Congress and backed down. However, the current frustration with public schools could be the tipping point Trump needs to nix the department.
The Education Department is also responsible for enforcing certain civil rights laws, a mandate the Biden administration has taken full advantage of with a dramatic rewrite of Title IX guidance, which redefined sex to include &#8220;gender identity,&#8221; erasing protections for biological women in schools. The new interpretation has garnered significant backlash and it has been blocked by the courts in many states.
Trump has expressed his intention to use federal leverage on education as well, including <a href="https://www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/president-trumps-plan-to-save-american-education-and-give-power-back-to-parents" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cutting</a> funds for schools pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or &#8220;other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.&#8221;
Jonathan Zachreson, a conservative on the Roseville City School Board near Sacramento, said that while he agrees with slashing federal bureaucracy, the Trump administration could also use the department to reign in California&#8217;s far-left education policies.
Zachreson cited California&#8217;s recent legislation <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-09-24/california-schools-gender-neutral-bathrooms-newsom-signs-lgbtq-rights-bill" target="_blank" rel="noopener">forcing</a> schools to allow trans-identifying students to use the bathroom of the opposite sex as well as <a href="https://edsource.org/2024/newsom-signs-bill-to-end-parental-notification-policies-at-schools-but-opponents-say-its-not-over-yet/715767" target="_blank" rel="noopener">prohibiting</a> schools from having parental notification policies.
&#8220;I believe both of those things are a violation of federal law, but if you get rid of the Department of Education how are you to hold California and some of these very leftist states accountable? So that&#8217;s my biggest concern,&#8221; Zachreson told The Daily Wire.
&#8220;Before you abolish the Department of Education, I think you need to fix a couple of things,&#8221; Zachreson said, including making Title IX guidance &#8220;very clear.&#8221;
Andy Smarick, an education expert and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, agreed that without a federal bureaucracy, Trump and future presidents would have less power to drive their education agenda.
&#8220;I&#8217;m fine with allowing state leaders to do more. But Mr. Trump and future presidents may like the idea of having federal power to advance their priorities,&#8221; Smarick said.
&#8220;Federal rules unquestionably create burdens for school leaders and can create headaches for state and local policymakers,&#8221; Smarick said, but he cautioned, &#8220;If we get rid of the Department of Education, we have to be comfortable with the idea of lots of federal money and reduced oversight.&#8221;
Federal funding is not always a positive, though, Zachreson observed. California&#8217;s teachers&#8217; unions &#8220;held kids hostage&#8221; during the pandemic by refusing to open schools until the Education Department gave them federal COVID relief money, he said.
In order to eliminate the Department of Education, Trump will need to clear a couple of hurdles, first and foremost, getting Congress to agree to shutter the department. Trump would have to convince the slim Republican majorities in the House and Senate to pass legislation to close the department, and some experts have <a href="https://missouriindependent.com/2024/11/25/dc/unlikely-trump-can-actually-eliminate-education-department-experts-say/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">cast</a> doubt on whether he will be able to do so since he needs a supermajority of 60 votes in the Senate.
Already though, Republican lawmakers are making moves. Senator Mike Rounds (R-SD) introduced a bill last week that <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5003481-south-dakota-republican-department-of-education-trump/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">would</a> abolish the Education Department and transfer its programs to other federal agencies.
And then there are teachers&#8217; unions. Teachers&#8217; unions and the department have always been linked. When President Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating the Cabinet agency in 1979, he was fulfilling a campaign promise to the National Education Association. And teachers&#8217; unions still very much want the department around. This month, Randi Weingarten, the head of the country&#8217;s biggest teachers&#8217; union <a href="https://www.msnbc.com/the-weekend/watch/head-of-america-s-biggest-teachers-union-slams-donald-trump-s-education-plans-225330245756" target="_blank" rel="noopener">slammed</a> Trump&#8217;s plans to close it.
Whatever the Trump administration is able to accomplish, it will take years to reverse the learning loss students have suffered recently. Blew, the former Education Department official, lamented that so many children are underserved by the current education system.
&#8220;The reform movement will continue until that injustice is erased,&#8221; he said.

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According to a new report, a secretive office created by the Obama administration in the Department of Education and revived by the Biden administration made repeated attempts to shut down non-woke universities and colleges — and roughly 70% of the enforcement efforts were made against Christian colleges and career schools.
In 2023, the Biden administration increased the budget of the Department of Education’s Office of Enforcement — a subsidiary of the department’s Office of Federal Student Aid — by a massive 600% and asked for another 230% increase this year.
“After being ‘deprioritized’ under the Trump-Pence administration, the Student Aid Enforcement Unit was ‘restored’ by the Biden-Harris Department of Education in October 2021 under a new moniker, the Office of Enforcement, still housed under the Office of Student Aid,” the <a href="https://americanprinciplesproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/DOE-Office-of-Enforcement-Report-Final.pdf">report</a> stated.
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“Enrollment at faith-based schools grew 82% between 1980 and 2020, about 44 percent faster than the national average,” the American Principles Project noted in its report.
&#8220;At least 12 Christian colleges have been the target of excessive penalties or banned from receiving federal student aid; by comparison, no Ivy League school has been the recipient of punitive action by the Office of Enforcement,” the report asserted.
Vice President Kamala Harris “ambushed Corinthian (Colleges) while she was California Attorney General,” The Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-reading-from-kamala-harris-to-the-corinthians-for-profit-colleges-student-debt-education-department-biden-11654204161">wrote</a> in June 2022. “She began investigating the for-profit in 2013 for allegedly misrepresenting job-placement rates, but she struggled to support her claims. The Education Department rode to her rescue by making exhaustive document demands.”
“Obama Administration officials then complained the college wasn’t producing documents fast enough, and the Education Department cut off federal student aid. This drove Corinthian into bankruptcy and stranded tens of thousands of Corinthian students,” the Journal continued.
APP Policy Director Jon Schweppe wrote, “The Office of Enforcement has been formed into a weapon to single out and penalize schools that the administration disfavors. Once focused primarily on career colleges, the Department of Education has now turned the Office of Enforcement on Christian colleges and universities, which threatens to have the same disastrous effects.”

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Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) introduced a bill on Thursday that would abolish the Department of Education, a move that has been pushed by President-elect Donald Trump and his allies.
The bill, titled &#8220;Returning Education to Our States Act,&#8221; would move the critical programs of the department to other federal government agencies, Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-senator-debuts-bill-abolish-education-department-following-trump-campaign-promise" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>. Rounds argued that local officials should be given more control over education.
&#8220;The federal Department of Education has never educated a single student, and it’s long past time to end this bureaucratic Department that causes more harm than good,&#8221; Rounds said in a statement. &#8220;We all know local control is best when it comes to education. Everyone raised in South Dakota can think of a teacher who played a big part in their educational journey. Local school boards and state Departments of Education know best what their students need, not unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.&#8221;
The Department of Education was <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/20/politics/department-of-education-shut-down-trump/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener">created</a> in 1979 when President Jimmy Carter signed legislation making it a cabinet-level agency. Rounds&#8217; bill would return the U.S. to pre-1979 practices when other federal government agencies handled education issues.
If signed into law, the &#8220;Returning Education to Our States Act&#8221; would require the Department of Health and Human Services to take over disability programs, the Department of Labor would become responsible for career programs, the State Department would take over &#8220;research and training efforts overseas,&#8221; loan and grant programs would fall under the Department of Treasury, and American Indian education programs would become the responsibility of the Department of the Interior.
Trump promised on the campaign trail to &#8220;drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing.&#8221; The president-elect <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/trump-taps-linda-mcmahon-for-education-secretary-says-she-will-fight-tirelessly-for-school-choice">tapped</a> Linda McMahon for Education Secretary earlier this week, saying she will “fight tirelessly” to expand school choice in every state and “empower parents to make the best education decisions for their families.”
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“As a strong supporter of school choice and parental rights, there is no one better to expel the woke agenda in our education system and put our children first,” Trump said of McMahon.
Since President Ronald Reagan, Republicans have <a href="https://www.cato.org/commentary/elimination-lost-what-happened-abolishing-department-education" target="_blank" rel="noopener">pledged</a> to eliminate the Department of Education with no results. While Rounds&#8217; bill likely won&#8217;t get anywhere under the current Democrat-controlled Senate, Republicans will have a chance to pass the legislation once the party takes over control of the Senate and the White House, along with keeping control of the House, in January.
&#8220;For years, I’ve worked toward removing the federal Department of Education. I’m pleased that President-elect Trump shares this vision, and I’m excited to work with him and Republican majorities in the Senate and House to make this a reality,&#8221; Rounds said. &#8220;This legislation is a roadmap to eliminating the federal Department of Education by practically rehoming these federal programs in the departments where they belong, which will be critical as we move into next year.&#8221;

Mike Rounds

Senate Republican Introduces Bill To Eliminate Department Of Education

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Former President Donald Trump was interviewed in-studio on &#8220;Fox &amp; Friends&#8221; Friday morning and discussed numerous issues, including his desire to get education &#8220;out of Washington.&#8221;
During the interview, Trump was asked questions via video from &#8220;Fox &amp; Friends&#8221; viewers across the country. One of the questions came from an autistic student in Wisconsin who is concerned about the lack of school choice for autistic children.
&#8220;I have high-functioning autism, but my autism means I am only allowed to go to public schools that teach things that promote things against my values and faith. This makes life hard and confusing,&#8221; the student said. &#8220;When you become president, what can you and JD Vance do to help other students like me to have a choice of schools?&#8221;
&#8220;Well, thank you very much. It&#8217;s all about school choice,&#8221; Trump replied. &#8220;You know, that&#8217;s one of the biggest things on my platform. It&#8217;s about school choice, and we&#8217;re also going to get it out of Washington.&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
President Trump responds to a young Wisconsin man whose autism limits the scope of schools he&#39;s allowed to attend:
&quot;It&#39;s all about school choice&#8230; We&#39;re going to get it OUT of Washington!&quot; <a href="https://t.co/rnMdEKf0sS">pic.twitter.com/rnMdEKf0sS</a>
&mdash; Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) <a href="https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1847259735705129314?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">October 18, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Trump criticized how the U.S. government spends more money per pupil than many other countries. According to the <a href="https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country" target="_blank" rel="noopener">latest data</a> from the National Center for Education Statistics, the U.S. spends $15,500 per elementary and secondary education student, which is the fifth most of any country. Despite the high spending, Trump said the U.S. education system is lagging behind other nations.
The Republican nominee said his administration would &#8220;let the states run the schools.&#8221;
&#8220;You give the schools to Iowa, they&#8217;re going to be another Norway. It&#8217;s going to be great,&#8221; he said. &#8220;You give them to so many different states, Indiana, they&#8217;re dying to do it. They can do it for less than half [the funding], and you will have those states competing with the best countries.&#8221;
Trump added that his goal for the Department of Education is to &#8220;have one person working there, maybe with a secretary.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.amiracist.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.amiracist.com/&amp;source=gmail&amp;ust=1729077615157000&amp;usg=AOvVaw17Kprl74oE9DYOLREdiBPU">MATT WALSH’S ‘AM I RACIST?’ COMING TO DAILYWIRE+ OCT. 28</a>
&#8220;Because we want to make sure they&#8217;re teaching English, right? And let&#8217;s say reading, writing, and arithmetic, not transgender[ism],&#8221; he said.
Trump said last month that, if elected, he would push to &#8220;eliminate&#8221; the Department of Education.
“We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America’s youth with all sorts of things that you don’t want to have our youth hearing,” he told supporters at a rally in Wisconsin.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Trump: We will drain the government education swamp and stop the abuse of your taxpayer dollars to indoctrinate America&#39;s youth with all sorts of things that you don&#39;t want to have our youth hearing <a href="https://t.co/vsMfBrNDgE">pic.twitter.com/vsMfBrNDgE</a>
&mdash; Acyn (@Acyn) <a href="https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1832494579985338503?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">September 7, 2024</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

‘Let The States Run The Schools’: Trump Promises Education Overhaul During ‘Fox & Friends’ Interview

'Let The States Run The Schools': Trump Promises Education Overhaul During 'Fox & Friends' Interview

2024 Election

Elections

Fox News

School Choice

A couple of weeks ago, Kamala Harris&#8217; campaign went after me because I said that the Department of Education, along with the public school system, should be burned to the ground, figuratively speaking. Kamala&#8217;s campaign didn&#8217;t make any kind of argument refuting my position. They just suggested that what I said was crazy, because how can you possibly have a functioning country without a Department of Education? It&#8217;s not like we invented the telephone, won two world wars, or landed on the moon without a Department of Education. We definitely needed a Department of Education to do all of that stuff. And I responded to Kamala Harris&#8217; campaign, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2LV0HY7ock" target="_blank" rel="noopener">outlining</a> all of the reasons why the Department of Education and our public school system are a complete disaster.
What I didn&#8217;t talk about at the time — and what almost no one ever talks about in this country — is what the alternative is. It&#8217;s one thing to point out failures. It&#8217;s another thing to suggest tangible improvements. What does it look like to have political leaders who actually care about the education system of their country, and want to make it as good as it can possibly be? What should those leaders be doing, exactly?
This week, thanks to <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-ccp-cloned-americas-leading-stem-high-school-and-u-s-educators-helped/">reporting</a> from National Review and The Daily Wire&#8217;s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/virginia-school-system-sold-china-a-handbook-on-how-to-clone-americas-top-stem-school" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Luke Rosiak</a>, we know what they&#8217;ve been doing in China. It turns out that officials in China are very serious about improving their education system — to the point that they&#8217;ve effectively cloned the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Virginia. 
If you&#8217;re not familiar with it, Thomas Jefferson — until recently — was the number-one public high school in the United States. In China, they now have 20 so-called &#8220;Thomas Schools,&#8221; all of which are clones of the Thomas Jefferson school in Fairfax. These Chinese &#8220;Thomas School&#8221; clones have copied pretty much everything from the Thomas Jefferson School in the United States, including curriculums and floor plans. Say what you will about China, but they&#8217;re in this to win. They&#8217;re playing for keeps, and they&#8217;re willing to steal from their opponents if necessary — just like, say, Bill Belichick or the Houston Astros.
Except in this case, there wasn&#8217;t actually much stealing involved. It turns out that Thomas Jefferson handed all of this information over voluntarily. The story of how exactly China managed to clone Thomas Jefferson raises a lot of obvious concerns from a national security perspective, and the word &#8220;treason&#8221; might cross your mind as you hear the details. I&#8217;ll go into that shortly.
But first, it&#8217;s important to note that there&#8217;s one aspect of our Thomas Jefferson that China hasn&#8217;t copied. They didn&#8217;t clone Thomas Jefferson&#8217;s new DEI admissions policy, which was implemented a few years ago. This DEI admissions policy <a href="https://www.fox5dc.com/news/thomas-jefferson-high-schools-admissions-policy-does-not-discriminate-against-asian-americans-court">got rid of</a> standardized tests. It also gave bonuses to applicants who couldn&#8217;t speak proper English, and implemented a quota system so that every middle school in Fairfax County got an equal number of slots in the new class at Thomas Jefferson. The result is that student quality has <a href="https://defendinged.org/incidents/thomas-jefferson-high-schools-number-of-students-named-national-merit-semifinalists-decreases-by-over-half-year-to-year/">dropped</a> by nearly 40%, as measured by the number of national merit semifinalists that Thomas Jefferson produces. Thomas Jefferson is no longer the top public high school in the United States. It was too exceptional and too impressive, so the liberals running Fairfax County, and the administrators of the school, decided to destroy it. And that&#8217;s exactly what they&#8217;ve done.
But before they ruined it, they raised a lot of money from the Communist Party of China. From 2014 to 2021, entities in China sent more than $3.5 million to something called the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund. This is a nonprofit that was set up to raise money for a renovation of Thomas Jefferson. The nonprofit was based in the school and had the school principal on its board, so there&#8217;s obviously a very close relationship there.
So what did China get in exchange for this $3.5 million? When we first learned about these payments around a year ago, we didn&#8217;t have a lot of detail on that question. Here&#8217;s a report from last year:
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Fairfax Public Schools Take Chinese Donations - FOX &amp; Friends First 3-8-23" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/dcw5ML4BZf4?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
So, we learned there were payments coming into Fairfax from China, but we didn&#8217;t know exactly what they were for. Now we do. According to National Review, in addition to course materials and outlines, Chinese officials wanted to learn about &#8220;construction and administration&#8221; at the school, as well as &#8220;extensive advice on how to manage a school like Thomas Jefferson.&#8221; 
Thomas Jefferson&#8217;s director of student services even wrote in an email that the Chinese wanted a handbook that would tell them how to &#8220;clone&#8221; the school — including research output from students. From <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/news/the-ccp-cloned-americas-leading-stem-high-school-and-u-s-educators-helped/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">National Review</a>: &#8220;Foreign &#8216;donations&#8217; came with a few requests: that [Thomas Jefferson nonprofit] hand over blueprints, floor plans, curricula, lab photographs, and thumb drives with Senior Student Research projects. &#8230; Chinese officials requested, and gained access to, examples of past student research projects, without student consent.&#8221;
Maybe the Chinese wanted these senior research projects because they involved materials that students created alongside the leading research institutes in the United States, including the NIH and George Washington University. So there are obvious espionage-related implications here as well.
To be clear, there&#8217;s no question that senior leaders at Thomas Jefferson were aware that all of this was going on. There&#8217;s even an email from Thomas Jefferson&#8217;s assistant principal, in which he says that the nonprofit has a contract with a Chinese foundation, &#8220;that they will pay $1 million in exchange for help getting their schools up and running in China, called the Thomas Schools.&#8221; Some of these Chinese officials also visited the school.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-1462-the-matt-walsh-show" target="_blank" rel="noopener">WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show</a></h3>
On top of that, there&#8217;s evidence that the Fairfax County Public School system tried to cover up what it was doing. The group that actually uncovered this scheme, and which led to the National Review&#8217;s reporting, is called Parents Defending Education, or PDE. They spent more than a year working on this story. And it only took so long because of all the roadblocks that Fairfax County put in their way. When PDE made a public records request seeking information about the schools&#8217; coordination with China, Fairfax County tried to charge them nearly $36,000 in fees in order to produce the documents. They probably expected that would scare PDE off. But it didn&#8217;t work. The group ended up paying $18,000 for some of the documents, which ultimately exposed what was going on.
The word &#8220;treason&#8221; gets thrown around a lot these days. And there&#8217;s a lot of discussion about how difficult it is to prove treason under the U.S. Constitution and so on. But if we&#8217;re speaking in the colloquial sense of the word, this seems a lot like treason. These people were orchestrating the sale of proprietary information to China, to benefit Chinese schools, while simultaneously kneecapping our own schools with DEI admissions policies. They didn&#8217;t sell those DEI admissions policies to China because everyone involved knows that they&#8217;re garbage. They&#8217;re worse than useless. And the proponents of DEI themselves seem to recognize that, at least when it comes time to make some money from the Chinese Communist Party.
The whole scam is reminiscent of how Chinese billionaires will promote transgenderism in the United States, but not in China. It&#8217;s deliberate sabotage from the people running the single most successful school district in the United States, in Fairfax County — which is also home to CIA headquarters and much of the intelligence community, along with the workforce at the Pentagon. The former principal of Thomas Jefferson, Evan Glazer, even suggested that he didn&#8217;t think twice about giving inside info to our chief foreign adversary because it would be racist to discriminate based on national origin. But when it comes to discriminating against students using affirmative action admissions policies, school administrators in Fairfax have no objection.
There have been a lot of parents speaking out at school board meetings over the past few years. They&#8217;ve been complaining about the poor quality of their childrens&#8217; education, since many schools are now graduating students who can&#8217;t even read. Parents have also been understandably furious about the deliberate efforts to indoctrinate their children with gender ideology and to expose them to explicit pornography in some cases. Some of those parents, as you might remember, were investigated by the DOJ. Meanwhile we&#8217;re allowing China to copy the blueprint of our most successful schools, and the DOJ hasn&#8217;t said a word. You won&#8217;t find a clearer illustration of why our entire education system is in a tailspin. 
Right now the government officials who are truly interested in our education system aren&#8217;t located in Washington. They probably aren&#8217;t working for your local school board either. Thanks to the work of Parents Defending Education, we know that, unfortunately for children in this country, they&#8217;re in Beijing.

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Why Did This U.S. Public School Take Millions From China? Here’s The Story That Will Shock You.

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Why Did This U.S. Public School Take Millions From China? Here’s The Story That Will Shock You.