wordpress-seo domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114id was set in the arguments array for the "Homepage Content" sidebar. Defaulting to "sidebar-2". Manually set the id to "sidebar-2" to silence this notice and keep existing sidebar content. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 4.2.0.) in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114id was set in the arguments array for the "Left Sidebar" sidebar. Defaulting to "sidebar-3". Manually set the id to "sidebar-3" to silence this notice and keep existing sidebar content. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 4.2.0.) in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114id was set in the arguments array for the "Right Sidebar" sidebar. Defaulting to "sidebar-4". Manually set the id to "sidebar-4" to silence this notice and keep existing sidebar content. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 4.2.0.) in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114id was set in the arguments array for the "Forum Sidebar" sidebar. Defaulting to "sidebar-5". Manually set the id to "sidebar-5" to silence this notice and keep existing sidebar content. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 4.2.0.) in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114id was set in the arguments array for the "Footer 1" sidebar. Defaulting to "sidebar-6". Manually set the id to "sidebar-6" to silence this notice and keep existing sidebar content. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 4.2.0.) in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114id was set in the arguments array for the "Footer 2" sidebar. Defaulting to "sidebar-7". Manually set the id to "sidebar-7" to silence this notice and keep existing sidebar content. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 4.2.0.) in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114id was set in the arguments array for the "Footer 3" sidebar. Defaulting to "sidebar-8". Manually set the id to "sidebar-8" to silence this notice and keep existing sidebar content. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 4.2.0.) in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114id was set in the arguments array for the "Footer 4" sidebar. Defaulting to "sidebar-9". Manually set the id to "sidebar-9" to silence this notice and keep existing sidebar content. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 4.2.0.) in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114__construct() instead. in /home4/thesafb4/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6114<\/p>\n
President Trump has proclaimed the end<\/a> of the U.S. Department of Education and is expected to issue an executive order to dismantle it. He directed his nominee for secretary of the department, Linda McMahon, to \u201cput herself out of a job.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump directed his nominee for secretary of the department, Linda McMahon, to \u201cput herself out of a job.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1979, after more than two centuries of local and state authority for U.S. education, President Jimmy Carter signed the law creating the department; it began operating in 1980 after the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare broke up as directed by the same legislation. In its inaugural year, it employed about 450 people and had an operating budget of about $14.2 million. In 2024, the payroll had lengthened to about 4,400 and the budget expanded to $238 million. Yet, supporters never tire of repeating that it is the smallest federal department.<\/p>\n Has it been \u201cpivotal\u201d in U.S. education policy? The chief argument advanced for its creation was that only a federal department could address \u201ceducational disparities\u201d across states and promote \u201cequal access\u201d to quality education. But was it constitutional? Did the founders of the nation include education among its missions? Under the 10th<\/sup> amendment, the last in the Bill of Rights ratified in 1791, the federal government has only those powers delegated to it by the Constitution; all other powers not expressly forbidden to the states are \u201creserved\u201d to them or the people.<\/p>\n Supreme Court decisions are viewed as reinforcing the 10th<\/sup> Amendment, which, in turn, implies that the Department of Education can provide funding and enforce civil rights laws, but does not have the authority to mandate specific curricula or establish schools. For instance, in Epperson v. Arkansas<\/em> (1968), the Court invalidated an Arkansas statute that prohibited the teaching of human evolution in public schools, ruling that the statute violated the Establishment (separation of church and state) clause of the First Amendment. In effect, the Court is interpreted as having exerted its role in ensuring that state educational policies comply with constitutional protections and, by the same token, affirming the primary authority of states over educational content.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n The Department, created to support education, is not allowed to get involved in education\u2014not what is taught.<\/p>\n So, the Department, created to support education, is not allowed to get involved in education\u2014not what is taught. Its real mission is enforcing civil rights<\/em>, \u201cequal access,\u201d overcoming racial and other \u201cdisparities,\u201d and, being government, doing so by spending money. It sounds like a federal budget to promote diversity, equality, and inclusiveness (D.E.I.) in the schools.<\/p>\n \nTitle I Grants<\/strong> provide money for financial assistance to schools with high numbers of children from low-income families. [Equality?]\n Federal Pell Grants<\/strong> offer grants to low-income undergraduate and certain postbaccalaureate students. [Equality?]\n The Disabilities Education Act<\/strong> provides money for services to children with disabilities and governs how states and public agencies provide early intervention, special education, and related services. [Inclusiveness?]\n Federal TRIO Programs<\/strong> are \u201ccollege opportunity\u201d programs for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. [Diversity? Equality? Inclusion?]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The Heritage Foundation reports<\/a> the score to date:<\/p>\n \nThe achievement gap between students at the highest and lowest ends of the economic scale has stayed the same for half a century. Today, reading and math scores, on average, are near historical lows. Meanwhile, taxpayers spent some $200 billion at the federal level on schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, on top of the more than $60 billion<\/a> they spend annually just in federal school allocations (including state and local revenues, taxpayers spend some $800 billion yearly on education).\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The grants programs seem to come down to another source of government welfare under the subheading: education. But it is a supremely useful adage that \u201che who pays set the terms\u201d\u2014i.e., calls the shots. As the Department has grown, its programs, \u201cinitiatives,\u201d and directives have inventively diversified into a vast emporium of plans (all accompanied by a check) to drive every variant of diversity\u2014racial, ethnic, \u201cgender\u201d\u2014every conceivable lesson plan on equity\u2014economic, \u201cgender,\u201d sexual\u2014and an egalitarian approach to \u201cinclusion\u201d to assure that everyone is a high achiever and our \u201cintelligence\u201d cognitively, emotionally, socially, and politically “equal.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Hoover Institution economist Thomas Sowell summed up his conclusions in Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas<\/em>, <\/em>writing: “The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” And:<\/p>\n We are raising whole generations who\u2019ve come to regard facts as optional.<\/p>\n We are raising whole generations who\u2019ve come to regard facts as optional. We have kids in elementary school who are urged to take stands on political issues, to write letters to congressman and the president about nuclear energy\u2026They are taught that it\u2019s important to have views and they\u2019re not being taught that it\u2019s important to know what you\u2019re talking about, that it\u2019s important to listen to the opposite viewpoint. And more important how to distinguish how view point A and viewpoint B are different, and which one has the most evidence or logic behind it\u2026 Objections to such propaganda programs are called objections to letting children think. Anything less than a blank check for indoctrination is called \u2018censorship.<\/p>\n Here, Sowell is talking about the philosophical progeny of the 19th<\/sup>-century German \u201ctranscendental idealism\u201d of Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger that inspired both Marxism and National Socialism and that, in the 1960s, wedded with neo-Marxism, became the prevailing philosophy of the late 20th<\/sup> century: postmodernism<\/a>, which has dominated academia and increasingly the intellectual professions at large.<\/p>\n William Bennett, secretary of the Department from 1985 to 1988, assessed the results of its ever-expanding role and reach: “If you look at those numbers, you get the story for 30 years. If there’s a bottom line, it’s that we’re spending twice as much money on education as we did in ’83 and the results haven’t changed all that much.” (The Book of Virtues<\/em>, Simon & Schuster, 1993.)<\/p>\n President Trump\u2019s proposal to dismantle the Department, if approved by Congress, would fulfill a promise, pledge, and plea by Republicans almost since Jimmy Carter created the Department. The Republican Party platform of 1980 called for the elimination of the Department; in 2000, the Republican Liberty Caucus passed a resolution to abolish the Department; in 2008 and 2012, presidential candidate Ron Paul campaigned in opposition to the Department.<\/p>\n It is difficult to imagine that anyone not steeped in the doctrines of \u201cwoke\u201d education could read The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture<\/em> by Manhattan Institute scholar, Heather Mac Donald, without marveling that ideology could get such a grip on a department not involved in \u201ccurriculum\u201d and \u201ccontent.\u201d With documents, interviews, statistics, and anecdotes, she details DEI programs that have eroded academic standards under the banner of diversity and inclusion and the radical feminist agenda that has driven the wildly exaggerated claims of campus rape with policies that compromise due process and inflate the perception of danger.<\/p>\n In When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives<\/em>, Mac Donald looks at the application of \u201cdisparate-impact\u201d analysis to school-discipline policies under federal guidelines. During the Obama administration, says Mac Donald, the Education and Justice Departments had \u201cthreatened schools with litigation and the loss of federal funding if they did not bring down black and Hispanic disciplinary rates to the same level as whites and Asians.\u201d<\/p>\n That is, the Department mandated a shift from accountability for individual actions to equalizing the number of disciplinary infractions among races, regardless of behavior. Teachers became helpless when minority students acted out in class\u2014and both teachers and students knew it. The policy? \u201cRestorative-justice,\u201d to ensure that disciplinary infractions and suspensions do not \u201cdisproportionately punish students of color.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course, for ideologues, education is never an end in itself; but only a means to social change. And Mac Donald makes the urgent point that racial preferences and the entire woke agenda are rapidly extending beyond the schools into every American institution, and there reshaping America at large. A philosophy of individualism is the foundation of educational systems focused on the student\u2019s development, achievements, and preparation for life. But the ideas and ideologies that Mac Donald characterizes and traces are rooted not in the needs and best interests of the student, but in the epistemological skepticism and collectivism (systemic doubt, emotionalism, identity politics, political correctness) of postmodernism.<\/p>\n One key to understanding the fundamental philosophical revolution that the Department of Education was promptly co-opted to advance is philosopher Ayn Rand\u2019s definition<\/a> of \u201ccollectivized rights,\u201d promoted by postmodernism to supplant individual rights:<\/p>\n \nSince only an individual man can possess rights, the expression \u201cindividual rights\u201d is a redundancy (which one has to use for purposes of clarification in today\u2019s intellectual chaos). But the expression \u201ccollective rights\u201d is a contradiction in terms.<\/p>\n Any group or \u201ccollective,\u201d large or small, is only a number of individuals. A group can have no rights other than the rights of its individual members.<\/p>\n A group, as such, has no rights. A man can neither acquire new rights by joining a group nor lose the rights which he does possess. The principle of individual rights is the only moral base of all groups or associations.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\nMoney and Control<\/strong><\/h3>\n
How to Teach Johnny Postmodernist Ideology<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\u201cAnti-American, Subversive, Harmful, and False Ideologies<\/strong>\u201d<\/h3>\n