Tag Archives: Trump

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Trump, Musk, and Testing

Will the oligarchy kill the NAEP?

The Trump Administration may end up killing the gold standard of standardized testing – the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Peter Greene reports on the DOGE destruction at the Department of Education, including cutting off the arms that collect and analyze data:

“The U.S. Department of Education has decided not to fund the NAEP 2024-2025 Long-Term Trend Age 17 assessment,” Marcie Hickman, project director of the NAEP Support and Service Center, said in an email to state officials. “All field operations and activities will end today, February 19, 2025.”

What has actually been canceled at this point is the test for 17-year-olds that was supposed to happen in the near future. Nobody seems to really know whether this cancellation will also affect all other future NAEP testing, but since Musk has gutted financing for the Institute of Education Sciences, the data wing of the education department, it sure doesn’t look good.

Will the era of big testing finally come to an end? It’s not clear – because, well, nothing about what’s happening at the federal level is particularly clear right now.

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Trump’s March Toward Theocracy

About That 504 Lawsuit

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Waste to Jobs Act

A “Back to Basics” Agenda

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Team Trump and Charter Fraud

The Privatizer-in-Chief seeks reduced accountability for charter school operators

Charter schools are the gateway drug to full-scale school privatization by way of vouchers.

Charters are so nice and easy, even some misguided Democrats have been known to support them. By contrast, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is one of a very few prominent Democrats to support school vouchers.

The point: Charter schools ARE school privatization. Courts in Kentucky said so explicitly.

There’s a federal program that funnels money to charter schools, and under President Biden, that program was introduced to some accountability.

No surprise, then, that under Trump, the accountability for charters receiving federal funds is disappearing.

Peter Greene reports:

The federal Charter School Program has been shelling out grants to launch and expand charter schools since 1994. Analysis of the program by the Network for Public Education shows that one out of every four taxpayer dollars handed out by CSP has been wasted on fraud and/or failure. That means of the roughly 4 Billion-with-a-B dollars handed out by the feds, roughly 1 Billion-with-a-B dollars have gone to charters that closed swiftly, or never even opened in the first place.

Seems like something DOGE would be worried about.

But, um, no.

Instead:

Instead, yesterday the Department of Education issued an edict saying that the “unnecessary conditions and overly bureaucratic requests for information” would be stopped and that CPS would start handing out money more easily.

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The One About the 504 Lawsuit

Scaling Back a Runaway Voucher Scheme

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Recycling Legislation Gets Business Push

Family Dollar Pays $41 Million Settlement in Rat-Infested Food Case

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Teachers vs. Trump

In Omaha, teachers speak out against Trump agenda

Teachers are reacting to proposals by former President Donald Trump to slash federal education funding and/or eliminate the Department of Education.

In Omaha, Nebraska, teachers held a rally to call for supporting public schools:

Education has been a hot topic in Nebraska for months because of school choice legislation, now there is a microscope on it nationally, with the Trump/Vance campaign calling for the closure of the Department of Education. Teachers and education leaders in Omaha spoke out against proposed federal education cuts and elimination of the Department of Education.

In Tennessee, some lawmakers, including Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton, have proposed rejecting billions of dollars in federal education funding.

House Speaker Cameron Sexton has floated the idea of Tennessee rejecting federal education spending because he’s not a fan of the strings attached to the nearly $2 billion the state receives each year to help fund public schools.

When asked to clarify, Sexton revealed that he wasn’t suggesting “doing without,” but rather that the state would simply pick up the tab.

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