This story was originally reported by Nadra Nittle of The 19th. Meet Nadra and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

President Donald Trump’s approval ratings are underwater a year into his second term, amid voter frustration over the economy, immigration enforcement and foreign-policy tensions. A Quinnipiac poll released last week found that just 37 percent of registered voters approve of his job performance. The signs of discontent are clear in Democrats’ success edging out Republicans in special elections since Trump’s return to the White House — and in the progressive candidates who won school board races last November.

A recent analysis by Red Wine & Blue, a left-leaning network of over 700,000 suburban women working to influence politics at the grassroots level, found that 62 percent of candidates it labeled as “extremist” lost their elections. Meanwhile, 71 percent of the candidates it characterized as “common sense” won competitive school board races in states like Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania, which remains a key battleground in 2026.

Two-thirds of those winners were challengers, the analysis shows, and more than half were women, including many first-time contenders. It’s a departure from previous election cycles, when culture war themes like face masks, book bans and critical race theory propelled conservative sweeps of these boards.

“Being a culture warrior did not sell in 2025 because it was such a signal of being out of touch with people’s everyday concerns,” said Red Wine & Blue founder and CEO Katie Paris. “Folks are worried and feeling stressed from all angles, so to have these candidates come in and say the No. 1 thing we should be concerned about are transgender children and what bathroom they use or what sports they play feels incredibly out of touch with the day-to-day realities of people’s lives.”

While some experts attribute the success of liberal school board candidates to an electorate that craves local stability and has grown tired of the culture wars shaping education, others see it as a result of a lower conservative turnout at the polls.

“We know, in general, particularly in the last few years, Trump voters generally turn out in presidential years, but do so at much lower rates during off years,” said Vladimir Kogan, a political science professor at The Ohio State University who has researched school boards nationwide and their impact on communities. “So just compositionally, it could be a different set of voters that was just more aligned with Democrats. So even in those conservative areas, it’s likely that the people who turned out in 2025 were different from the people that turned out in 2024.”

Still, if the progressive shift repeats itself in the high-stakes midterms, school board policies may well move away from polarizing issues like critical race theory, gender identity and parental rights back to the fundamentals of education, such as curriculum and instruction and professional development for teachers.

Last November — across swing states, the Houston suburbs and the historically red city of Colorado Springs, Colorado — candidates associated with right-wing groups lost to their more progressive counterparts who promised to prioritize academics, support educators and reduce political meddling in schools. The parental rights group Moms for Liberty, once influential in school board politics, saw limited success in 2025, with just 17 of its candidates winning their races nationwide.

Political organizers say the results are more of a delayed backlash against a right-wing agenda than an abrupt ideological change.

In Texas’ Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District — one of the largest in the state, with roughly 118,000 students — organizers say policy changes fueled a backlash. Backed by national political groups, the district’s far-right board majority spent years banning books, eliminating librarian positions and implementing policies that targeted LGBTQ+ students, including those that could force schools to “out” transgender youth to their parents.

But voters flipped control of the board in November, electing three educators — Lesley Guilmart, Cleveland Lane Jr. and Kendra Camarena — endorsed by the Texas Freedom Network (TFN), a nonpartisan organization advocating for religious freedom, civil liberties and public education. During their campaigns, these candidates emphasized their desire to listen to families, support teachers and make schools safe and inclusive.

“When Texas voters actually experience these policies firsthand, they reject them,” TFN Political Director Rocío Fierro-Pérez said of right-wing school board platforms. “This is signaling that people are rejecting far-right ideology, and they’re rejecting elected officials who put politics over kids.”

The Cypress-Fairbanks results, she added, reflect a broader pattern across Texas, where communities have grown wary of outside influences interfering in local elections and distorting school boards. In the Cypress-Fairbanks district, incumbents backed by conservative groups like Patriot Mobile Action, a Christian Super PAC, lost to challengers who emphasized their backgrounds as educators and parents.

“These are parents from their community that were affected directly by these policies that the far right was implementing at the school board level,” Fierro-Pérez said. “All three of them oppose these book bans. All three of them are focusing on educational outcomes and not these culture war battles that the right is so focused on. They’re committed to serving all students.”

In previous years, right-wing candidates won with well-funded campaigns. Last year, though, Fierro-Pérez said that money couldn’t stave off a community fed up with candidates prioritizing political agendas over children’s education.

Paris agrees that it angers people when billionaires try to sway local elections and ignore the concerns of parents and educators.

“Relationships matter when it comes to organizing, and you cannot buy relationships with thousands of moms who are working together to protect their children’s schools.”

In Colorado Springs, two out of three candidates affiliated with the teachers union won their school board races despite facing well-funded opponents. The victories followed a series of board actions that inflamed the culture wars in a city that has become a magnet for conservative causes over the decades.

“We have a church on every corner of every street in this town,” said Kevin Coughlin, president of the Colorado Springs Education Association. “Focus on the Family, James Dobson. This town has been inundated with Christian right-wing agendas. And we have 90,000 active duty and retired military. So, you’ve got a lot of those folks here, and we don’t always see them fully engaged in the work of our schools because of separation of church and state, but they’re always making decisions for us that we have to follow or abide by, which is uncomfortable at times.”

In recent years, the school board ended collective bargaining, suspended a teacher over social media comments, censored pages from health textbooks and removed curriculum related to Frederick Douglass. The board also scheduled discussions of new book bans immediately after Election Day.

“People are nervous and worried, and rightfully so,” Coughlin said. “They’ve attacked our free speech, they’ve attacked our voice, they’ve attacked our leaders, and we’re nervous because we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next.”

The wins by the union-backed candidates undid previous defeats that allowed Moms for Liberty-backed candidates to assume control of the board. While not a complete transformation —  there are still conservative members on the school board — Coughlin called the recent victories “a step in the right direction.”

Whether other cities will see similar results in 2026 depends on midterm turnout. Kogan suspects that Democrats will show up at higher rates than Republicans across the country, just as they did in 2018 and 2022.

“Some of the Trump voters do also sit out the midterm elections, so I think in general, it’s probably the case that it’s going to be a more hospitable electorate for more center-left candidates,” he said.

Outrage over immigration enforcement could have an impact, since school attendance is down in areas with large populations of students without legal status. While those families aren’t eligible to vote, Kogan said, their treatment by the federal government could “change the types of issues that are salient in those communities.”

If there is a nationwide backlash to Trump, it will likely follow candidates down the ballot, Kogan said. “So, really, anybody with an R next to their name or anybody perceived to be affiliated with the Republican Party is probably going to pay a price to the extent that public opinion in November is where it is now. That would be my prediction, and that’s what historical data shows us.”

Paris credits something other than voter turnout for the progressive gains on school boards: organizing to effect change.

“There are thousands of people, primarily women, on the ground, who know how to do this,” she said. “They know how to create change in their communities, and I think that we’re going to see the impact of that filter up.”

The post Moms vs. culture wars: How suburban women flipped school boards appeared first on Salon.com.

In the aftermath, most commentators have pointed to what is looking very much like a national turn away from Republicans and toward Democrats after a year of Trump’s failures and scandals. That’s certainly a big part of the story, but it’s still probably not enough to explain such a shocking result in a district that has been deeply red for decades. To fill out the picture, it’s important to look at that most local of issues: education.

There are strong signs that Rehmet won in no small part because suburban Fort Worth has long been on the frontline in the culture war over book banning. Wambsganss built her political career advocating for strict censorship in schools and libraries, and her loss signals that, even in this very conservative district, people are getting sick of the far-right telling them what they cannot read.

Oscar-nominated director Kim Snyder was not as surprised as the pundits over Rehmet’s win. She has spent a lot of time in Texas in recent years, both to shoot and promote her documentary “The Librarians,” which premieres on PBS on Feb. 9. The film follows the struggles of school librarians who are facing off against Moms for Liberty and other far-right organizations attempting to purge library shelves of books that portray LGBTQ characters or contain historical information about racism or fascism. Snyder told Salon that the screenings of her movie, even in conservative areas, have been selling out.

“It’s showing that people really care about the issue of censorship,” she explained.

Snyder’s film follows the journey of a Courtney Gore, a Texas mom who initially supported Moms for Liberty, believing their falsehoods about “pornography” in school libraries. She “felt hoodwinked,” however, when she educated herself on the books being banned and realized they were not what she’d been led to believe. Soon, Gore discovered that the book banning campaign was the tip of the spear for what was a larger effort to dismantle public education in Texas that was funded by actors like Wambsganss and shady far-right billionaire donors like the Wilks brothers.

Gore is not alone, Snyder suggested. “A lot of moms were finding” they were being tricked into backing groups intent on “tearing down public education” and ending “separation of church and state,” she explained.

Audrey Wilson-Youngblood is a librarian in Rehmet’s district who used to work for a local school district but was driven out after Wambsganss and her political action committee, Patriot Mobile, helped elect a huge swath of pro-book banning candidates to the school board. Wilson-Youngblood is also featured in “The Librarians,” recounting her story of trying to fend off an all-out war of harassment and censorship aimed at the library staff in her district.

She agreed there is a “relationship” between Rehmet’s win and the backlash to the book bans. Wilson-Youngblood told Salon that screenings of “The Librarians” in the north Texas area have turned into de facto community organizing events due to the “conversations and connections that are formed.” At least one screening, she said, “turned into a candidate forum.” And Democrats aren’t the only ones turning out. She has met both moderates and “staunch generational Texas Republicans” who are “coming because they’re unhappy” with the assault on public schools.

“It can feel very lonely sometimes here in Texas,” Wilson-Youngblood said, but learning that large numbers of other Texans share a distaste for Moms for Liberty’s book-banning agenda has been “emboldening” people and driving them to get organized and vote.

Rehmet, a union leader and first time candidate, credited his win to issues like “lowering costs, health care and focusing on working people.” But he also notably told ABC News that “people are tired of campaigns of outrage.”

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics?  Sign up for her free newsletter, Standing Room Only, now also on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Wambsganss was every inch the wild-eyed book-banning culture warrior he’s obliquely referring to. When the Republican spoke at the 2023 Moms for Liberty summit in Philadelphia, which Patriot Mobile sponsored, she declared “Our children belong to the Lord, not the government.” Wambsganss added that their school board takeover efforts are “a spiritual war.”

On Steve Bannon’s show in 2022, she argued that all books with LGBTQ characters should be banned on the grounds that it’s “normalizing a lifestyle that is a sexual choice,” even if there’s no sexual content in the books themselves. But Wambsganss’ efforts weren’t just restricted to homophobic censorship. The fear of crossing swords with authoritarian forces in the community got so bad that one school official was recorded saying that if a teacher had a book saying the Holocaust is wrong, they needed to balance it with a book that offered “opposing” views and “other perspectives.” If that sounds paranoid, it’s worth remembering that in 2020, Wambsganss posted that Black Lives Matter protesters “need to die.” With that in mind, it’s not ridiculous for educators to worry that she and her allies would get mad at criticism of historical fascist movements.

Far from running away from so-called “culture war” issues, as overpaid political consultants often prescribe, Rehmet’s victory suggests that anger over MAGA excesses can be harnessed to help Democrats win — including in improbable places. A J. David Goodman of the New York Times wrote before the election, Republicans in Texas have been trying to cede control of local school boards in places like Houston and Fort Worth over to the state. Progressives correctly believe this is part of a larger, radical agenda backed by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to decimate public schools entirely, forcing parents to enroll their kids in religious private schools — or go without a decent education altogether. Even a lot of Republican voters do not want to lose robust public education, which is likely why Rehmet got a last minute surge of votes to propel him into a position to protect Texas schools.

As someone who grew up in the Lone Star State, it’s not a surprise to me that a lot of voters somehow found a way to back Trump but not Wambsganss. A lot of voters, especially those who don’t pay close attention to the news, saw the president’s playboy persona and crassness as reassurance that he’s not on board with the religious right’s book-banning agenda. Trump encouraged the false view that he’s a libertarian with campaign lies about how he would protect “free speech.” In reality, his first year in office has seen an all-out war on the First Amendment coming from the White House that includes banning books, destroying museum exhibits, trying to push comedians who mock Trump or MAGA off-air, and suing or even arresting journalists for reporting the news. Still, for people who don’t read real news, which unfortunately includes many Republican voters, the president’s loathing of free speech may not penetrate their consciousness.

Wambsganss, though, is a type of woman who is instantly recognizable to anyone who has lived in the Bible Belt: the crazy church lady who wants total control over the lives of her neighbors, dictating what they read, who they socialize with, how they spend their free time and who they have sex with. While most Republicans in the MAGA era either support or at least tolerate giving miserable theocrats that much power, there are still some holdouts who believe in personal liberty and separation of church and state. As Wilson-Youngblood pointed out, some of them out there want Patriot Mobile and Moms for Liberty to go away — and they may have even been willing to cross party lines in this election to make that happen.

The lesson from Texas’ ninth district certainly won’t apply to every Democrat running in this year’s midterms. Plenty of districts were untouched by the Moms for Liberty nonsense, while others, like Bucks County in Pennsylvania, displaced far-right candidates a couple election cycles ago, draining the issue of some salience.

But Rehmet’s win shows that, at least in some places, MAGA’s threats to peace and freedom on the local level remain a pressing concern. A lot of voters want the culture war chaos to go away, especially when it comes to schools, so the kids can concentrate on learning. In many places, Democrats can win with a message of protecting the right of kids to learn in peace, instead of being the targets of a mind control project run by Bible-thumpers. If it worked in suburban Fort Worth, it’s a strategy that could rack up Democratic wins in other red districts.

The post Shock Democratic upset in Texas shows voters still hate book bans appeared first on Salon.com.

For a campus screening, the email’s copy was unusually compelling. It was itself cinematic. Peck’s film, too, isn’t like the film society’s usual offerings; it’s not a dazzling Hollywood blockbuster. The screening brought something different: A confrontation with Orwell’s words and their lasting resonance, rather than a typical celebration of a premiering film. 

Given Yale’s silence on matters worthy of speech, the event was timely. Orwell’s warnings about the corruption of language felt suddenly relevant.

As a sophomore at Yale, I’m concerned, as so many are, about the Trump administration’s efforts to seize autonomy from universities across the country. On Friday, Cornell University announced it would pay a $30 million fine to the federal government and devote another $30 million to fund agriculture and farming programs on its campus after the administration accused the institution of antisemitism and discrimination in admissions. In return, the government will restore hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and research grants, which had been frozen since April. 

Cornell’s announcement follows similar agreements between the administration and at least five other institutions. In September, President Donald Trump announced that Harvard University had agreed to pay $500 million to settle the federal government’s barrage of attacks against it. Columbia University had hundreds of millions in grants frozen, which were released only after the university agreed in July to federal policy changes. Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia have also reached agreements with the administration, and according to the New York Times, the University of California has entered negotiations with the government.

So far, Yale’s federal funding has not been explicitly targeted by the Trump administration, making it the only Ivy League university to evade being singled out.

But the evasion of direct funding cuts and the ominous threats of administration directives comes at a different expense, one that is perhaps costlier than any financial sum. Like other universities, Yale has adopted a policy of “institutional neutrality” in all but name. 

The screening of “Orwell: 2+2=5” presented me with the chance to ask Peck, an Orwell scholar, what a term like “institutional neutrality” might mean in the context of the late writer’s words.

I decided to attend.

The origins of institutional neutrality

When Hamas attacked concertgoers in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, institutional neutrality was already around. Anthropologist Peter W. Wood wrote about the origin of the term in the aftermath of those events, underscoring why a century-old concept had reentered the lexicon at that particular moment. The concept, he explained, was first framed by Arthur O. Lovejoy in 1915, as a “principle aimed at curtailing the readiness of academic administrations to take sides in disputes in which some of their faculty members were on the other side” and was “intended to protect academic freedom.”

In 1967, institutional neutrality reemerged when the University of Chicago issued its “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action,” subsequently dubbed the Kalven Report after a professor at the law school. The document contains passages that remain pertinent, including one that I recalled as I watched the film: “There is no mechanism by which [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives.”

The report’s principal idea — that universities should not comment on political issues unless they threaten “the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry” — read as honorable restraint in 1967. Now it sounds more like paralysis.

“The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity,” the report reads, in a passage that was written nearly two years before President Richard Nixon took office in 1969 — and more than a half century before the days of President Donald Trump’s unprecedented, sustained assault on universities and intellectual life.

While reflecting the time in which it was written, the Kalven Report has been misinterpreted — its important contingency about threats to a university’s existence has been largely discarded and gone unheeded. But if institutions of higher learning are to preserve the freedom of dissent among its students and community — let alone ensure that such dissent continues to thrive — then they must respond when these very values are under attack.

Doublespeak

After the screening I wasn’t sure how to pose my question to Peck, but I was curious how he might view the policy that Yale adopted one year ago: “Institutional voice,” which many of us here know to be institutional neutrality. 

The policy emerged from a committee appointed by Yale President Maurie McInnis during her first few months at the university as president. Its co-chairs, in a Yale Daily News op-ed, wrote that the committee “did not recommend that University leaders adopt a position of neutrality.” But their report did state that Yale, and particularly university leaders such as deans and department heads, should not make statements on matters of public importance.

In her first year, McInnis has faced broad threats to federal research funding, such as research cost reimbursements from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and growing skepticism about higher education. She formed committees on “institutional voice” and “trust,” increased lobbying in Washington and signed a joint statement condemning federal interference — but she declined to comment on Harvard’s defiance of the Trump administration. McInnis has said she prefers “behind-the-scenes work” to public pronouncements and believes it “respectful” to refrain from commenting on peer institutions.

But not everyone at Yale agrees with McInnis’ silence. 

In a blog post titled “The Institutional Neutrality Trap,” Amy Kapczynski, who serves as the John Thomas Smith Professor of Law at Yale Law School, wrote that the committee’s report had been wrongly interpreted as establishing “institutional neutrality.” But Kapczynski conceded that the report “does too much to encourage silence” and “too broadly casts forms of collective speech as problematic.”

For its part, the committee has insisted its recommendation that the faculty and administrators of the university refrain from making public statements is not institutional neutrality. But the distinction feels like a retreat into semantics — or what Orwell might refer to as “doublespeak.” The writer of “Politics and the English Language” recognized such convoluted reasoning and the dangers associated with it:

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.

I thought about those words, and the committee’s actions, as the closing credits of Peck’s film crawled up the screen. Whether acknowledged overtly or not, Yale has, in fact, adopted a policy of institutional neutrality — and the committee’s deliberate efforts to evade being accused of doing so are dangerous. 

The report seems to want to have it both ways: Deciding that institutional neutrality should be effectively instated at Yale, while allowing the university, at the same time and with deceptive accuracy, to dismiss accusations of institutional neutrality.

Orwell had something to say in his famous essay about such verbal gymnastics. “Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way,” he wrote. “That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.”

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

At the screening, I stood up to speak. “This year,” I told Peck and the audience, “Yale decided to become institutionally neutral, which means it now says nothing of importance about anything of importance. Would you consider a term like ‘institutional neutrality’ to be ‘Newspeak’?” (Orwell explains newspeak as a language that uses English grammar but with a shrinking vocabulary that reduces complex thoughts to simplistic terms.)

Peck smiled and joked, “Can you assure my getaway?”

He answered my question, telling the largely student and faculty audience, “To be neutral is to have a political position. There is no such thing as ‘neutral’ in a society. Neutrality is not an option. How can you be satisfied with the state of the world? It’s a position of fear — especially in a place of education. That is the only place where you can have real discussion. If that space becomes ‘neutral,’ I don’t know what it is.”

In April, Variety reported that Peck spoke before a sold-out masterclass at Visions du Réel, a Swiss film festival. Before ever being asked about institutional neutrality, Peck said, “Words don’t mean anything anymore. Science doesn’t mean anything. There’s no truth — there are ‘alternative facts.’ We’re living in a world that’s upside down, where no one says anything.”

“Terror,” he said, “comes slowly.”

Boots on New Haven Green?

Yale has a proud legacy of addressing events of the day and defending the principles of civility in a free society. University presidents such as Kingman Brewster Jr. and A. Bartlett Giamatti, for example, spoke out about the Vietnam War, the Black Panthers and May Day protests.

But with its silence this past year, Yale has abandoned its local and national responsibility.

Last fall, “YaleNews,” the university’s press arm, published an article about Yale’s relationship with the town of New Haven, Connecticut. The story celebrated the number of my classmates who had graduated from local high schools, called one of its own programs an “outrageously awesome concept” and insisted that Yale and New Haven share an “interwoven interdependency.”

But this summer, when a Wilbur Cross High School student was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, the university said nothing. Three weeks ago, when ICE abducted eight people at a car wash two miles from campus, Yale said nothing.

Orwell warned us about the power of abbreviations like ICE, words that sound neutral but that conceal violence. In his novel “1984,” political contractions such as Ingsoc, Minitrue and Miniplenty echo the clipped speech of Nazi and Soviet regimes, like “Gestapo” and “Comintern.” Each was designed to mask ideology in plain sight. Today, “ICE” bears the same chill: An acronym that flattens cruelty into three clean letters. 

The university hasn’t spoken about Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s assault on more than a century of medical progress either — even the advances that Yale itself helped to shape. Its researchers produced the first medical X-ray images, introduced penicillin and chemotherapy to the United States in the 1940s, developed the first artificial heart pump, discovered melatonin, identified Lyme disease, built the first insulin pump and were the first to use DNA sequencing to diagnose a disease. As the Trump administration cuts funding for scientific research, Yale’s scientists continue their groundbreaking work despite the tightening budgetary constraints.

The university has said nothing about Trump’s recommendation that military generals use U.S. cities as training grounds for war. Will Yale wait until there are boots stomping across the New Haven Green? As Orwell wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.”

The results of silence and cowardice

Each time Yale absents itself from public discourse, it makes a political decision. Perhaps the university fears that, just like Harvard and Columbia, it could become a target for the Trump administration.

In recent weeks, after the administration offered a compact for preferential federal funding to nine universities in exchange for policy changes, Brown University — after settling with the government in July — and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first institutions to reject the demands outright. (Five of the other universities have since rejected it, but the University of Texas and Vanderbilt University have remained open to signing it.) The compact offer, which requires colleges to agree that “academic freedom is not absolute,” was later expanded by Trump himself via Truth Social to include any university. Yale’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) urged the university not to comply, according to the Yale Daily News. 

The AAUP’s own history illustrates how far interpretations of institutional neutrality have strayed from the phrase’s origins. Formed in 1915, the same year that Lovejoy coined the term, the AAUP now finds itself a vital voice speaking into the void left by the universities it represents.

Only a month ago, President McInnis and Dean Pericles Lewis speculated, half-jokingly during parents weekend, that Yale has been spared only because “Y” came at the end of the alphabet. It’s never that simple, of course. Believing so — or poking fun at threats to academic freedom — causes concerned students to wonder whether university leaders are, in fact, prepared to meet this moment. After all, our four years of college overlaps with Donald Trump’s second four years in office.

We already know the results of silence and cowardice in the face of totalitarianism. There are far too many examples.

When Peck was growing up he “had a very physical relationship with fear from growing up in Haiti,” under François Duvalier’s dictatorship, he told writer Cian Traynor. “My father was arrested under the dictatorship of Duvalier, so I know the fear of disappearing; I know the fear of roadblocks where you feel there are people in uniforms, armed in the dark, who can do whatever they want to you. That prudence in front of uniforms has never left me.” His father was later arrested a second time, and Peck said authoritarianism always starts the same way: One by one, journalists, judges, academics are picked off and isolated. 

Once you are alone, they have you.

It’s Orwellian how the Trump administration bends storied institutions that are older than the country to its will. The government announces it is “cautiously encouraged” by certain conduct and promises to “keep an eye on the situation and aftermath” — when the “situation” happens at a private university and the “encouraging conduct” is capitulation to the government’s overreach. In “1984,” Big Brother survives by wielding absolute power; freedom is flattened by the thudding steps of a goose-stepping soldier and by language that makes those steps seem necessary.

Trump says “it doesn’t matter” when he jokes about fixing elections. He spews contradictions that leave words meaningless. “I’m saying you don’t have to vote — it doesn’t mean we’re not gonna have elections!” He reverses a post-World War II decision that renamed the War Department the Department of Defense, returning its meaning to “war.”

Some institutions, including Yale, say nothing. That’s their policy.

Solidarity

After the screening, Peck joked about his getaway. ICE has already targeted or taken students and professors from Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard and Georgetown. Institutional neutrality, I thought, might be why they haven’t yet come for Yale.

But it’s hard to believe that it will be silence that saves us. So I said to Peck, “I’ll walk out with you.”

The post At Yale University, things are getting Orwellian appeared first on Salon.com.

Oklahoma has become a testing ground for reshaping public school curriculum to reflect conservative viewpoints, Make America Great Again priorities and a push for Christian nationalism in the classroom.

Oklahoma’s former state education Superintendent Ryan Walters oversaw several controversial education policies in recent years, including mandating in 2024 that all Oklahoma public teachers incorporate the Bible into their lesson plans.

Walters resigned from his position in September 2025 to lead Teacher Freedom Alliance, a conservative advocacy group that opposes teachers unions.

One unprecedented move Walters made was adopting a teacher assessment called The America-First Assessment, designed by PragerU, a conservative nonprofit media company. Walters said the purpose of this exam, which went live in August 2025, was to screen out “woke indoctrination.”

By authorizing this assessment, Walters signed off on a conservative and far-right political organization having a say in which prospective teachers from out of state receive their Oklahoma teaching licenses.

The exam was short-lived. Walters’ replacement, Lindel Fields, announced at the end of October 2025 that Oklahoma would no longer use this assessment. Fields also rescinded the Bible mandate for Oklahoma schools.

But other states could still adopt the exam, free of charge. The exam and its controversy offers a window into the current politicization of state education systems, this time with respect to the licensing of teachers.

As an education researcher, I have written about other teacher assessments and some of the issues surrounding them, such as screening out Black teachers.

Walter’s “anti-woke” teacher exam is a unique kind of experiment. The test was not made by a professional assessment company and does not legitimately assess professional knowledge related to the subjects teachers teach.

A politicized test for teachers

The America-First exam consists of 34 multiple-choice questions that ask about the U.S. Constitution, government, religious liberty, history and Supreme Court cases. One question asks, “What are the first three words of the Constitution?” Another question asks, “What does the Second Amendment protect?” Other questions inquire about gender and sex, with questions like, “What is the fundamental biological distinction between males and females?” and “Which chromosome pair determines biological sex in humans?”

Walters made the political purpose of the exam clear.

“We have to make sure that the teachers in our classrooms, as we’re recruiting these individuals, aren’t a bunch of woke, Marxist activists,” Walters said in August 2025.

Walters has also said the exam was designed to specifically root out liberal teacher applicants who might fill teacher vacancies in Oklahoma and bring progressive training on race and gender with them, or what Walters called “blue state indoctrination.”

When the test went live in August, it expanded to all teachers from other states trying to get a license to teach in Oklahoma.

An exam you cannot fail

The America-First Assessment is not like the typical licensure exams made by professional assessment companies. These other exams cover the specific subject matter teachers should know to do their job: math for math teachers, science for science teachers, and so on.

Instead of a subject-specific focus, the America-First Assessment is mostly aligned with President Donald Trump’s “America first” talking points, particularly through its focus on gender and sex.

The most striking aspect of the exam, however, is that it is impossible to fail. If you don’t know the first three words of the U.S. Constitution, you can guess answers until you get it right. In fact, the test will advance to the next question only after you register a correct answer. Everyone who finishes the test will get 100% correct.

As a result, as some observers have pointed out, the exam resembles a political ideology test and not a legitimate assessment of professional knowledge.

Unlike the SAT, which considers its content proprietary, legally protected information, many of the America-First Assessment questions are publicly available.

Further, unlike established exams such as the SAT and GRE, the America-First exam has no technical information about how it was designed or what the questions are supposed to measure. As a result, the exam resembles a “MAGA loyalty test,” according to American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

A conservative media company expands into teacher assessment

The America-First Assessment’s unique format and political content reflect the priorities of PragerU, the conservative media company that created it.

Conservative radio host Dennis Prager founded PragerU in 2009. The company produces educational and entertainment videos rooted in conservative ideology.

PragerU’s more than 5,000 online videos include short segments such as “Make Men Masculine Again,” “How Many Radical Islam Sleepers are in the United States?” and “America Was Founded on Freedom Not Slavery.” Prominent far-right influencers including Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk have appeared in videos.

PragerU’s primary YouTube page has more than 3.4 million subscribers.

Scholarly analysis of PragerU videos have found the content minimizes the impact of slavery and promotes misinformation on topics including climate change.

In its children’s video “Frederick Douglass: The Outspoken Abolitionist,” the fictionalized cartoon of Douglass warns children to “stay away from radicals” who want to change the American system rather than work within it. “Our system is wonderful, and our Constitution is a glorious liberty document. We just need to convince enough Americans to be true to it,” he concludes.

In 2021, the company launched PragerU Kids, an offshoot targeting school-age children and educators with lesson plans, worksheets and other learning materials tied to its videos. Some other states, including Florida, New Hampshire and Montana, have approved PragerU’s videos as curriculum for their public schools to consider using since 2023.

The company’s move into teacher assessments in 2025 expands its influence beyond curriculum into who can earn a teaching license.

A possible strategy for other states

Both Walters and PragerU CEO Marissa Streit pitched the exam as an option for all “pro-America” states at its launch in August 2025. Some conservative policy analysts have also praised this strategy’s goals of ridding public schools of all “woke” teachers.

As a result, it is unlikely this is the last people will hear of PragerU or other private media companies trying to screen teachers.

Emery Petchauer, Visiting Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The post Oklahoma’s short-lived “woke-proof” classroom could still leave a mark appeared first on Salon.com.

The post This is ground zero in the conservative quest for more patriotic and Christian public schools appeared first on Salon.com.

This story was originally reported by Sara Luterman of The 19th. Meet Sara and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.

The Trump administration’s decision to lay off most employees within the U.S. Department of Education’s special education office was described by the president this week as part of cuts to “Democrat programs that we were opposed to.” This was news to many conservative parents of disabled children, as well as disability policy experts.

More than 7.3 million children in all 50 states rely on special education services, which are partially funded and enforced by the federal government.

“Special education is a nonpartisan program. Special education services are provided to any student with a disability, regardless of political party,” said Maria Town, executive director of the nonpartisan American Association of People with Disabilities.

A federal district court judge in Northern California on Wednesday granted an emergency order to temporarily pause the mass layoffs that occurred throughout the federal government. If the gutting of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS, proceeds, Town and other disability advocates said there is no way the Department of Education can continue to fulfill its responsibilities to enforce the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The act — known by its acronym, IDEA —  guarantees students with disabilities the same right to public education as students without disabilities.

Town pointed out that during the first term of President Donald Trump, a Republican, the office determined that Texas, a Republican-led state, had illegally placed a cap on the number of students who could receive special education services in each district. Texas lawmakers lifted the cap in 2017, after receiving pressure from the Department of Education.

Many of the biggest legislative victories for students with disabilities happened under Republican administrations.

“Education for people with disabilities goes hand in hand with conservative ideals,” wrote disabled journalist Eric Garcia in a recent MSNBC column. “While that may seem counterintuitive, having people with disabilities integrated into larger society is a way to reduce the chance that they have to depend on the government.”.

Former Republican President Gerald Ford signed the first iteration of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, then-called the Handicapped Children Act. It required that students with disabilities receive “individualized education plans” and established that they have a right to a “free, appropriate public education.” Republican President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law in 1990. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was later expanded and reauthorized by a Republican-majority Congress and signed by Republican President George W. Bush in 2004.

Across some of the largest special education and parent groups on Facebook, debate has raged about what this recent move will mean for disabled children.  Among conservative-leaning parents, opinions roughly fell into three categories: denial, hopefulness and a sense of betrayal.

Some parents were certain that the change would not affect their children and that the people who had been laid off were just overpaid government bureaucrats. One mother to a child on the autism spectrum from West Virginia wrote in a private parent group with over 100,000 members: “Good grief people. Nobody is throwing our kids to the wolves. They will be given the supports [sic] that they need.”

This, Town said, is most likely not the case.

“There is a perception that because IDEA, the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act technically remain the law of the land, that enforcement from the Department of Education is redundant and that is simply not the case,” she said. “Although these laws remain on the books, students and children and families still have rights that need to be enforced.”

Other parents praised the layoffs, believing that it would be better for special education services to be moved either to the Department of Health and Human Services or for individual states to hold more responsibility. Many believed that such a change had already happened. This is not the case.

“Love it! Gives us more control! Having it under the HHS is so much better. I think we will see better changes and resources than ever before,” wrote one Texan mother in Special Education Community, a public Facebook group with over 400,000 members.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has previously suggested that she would like special education to be managed by the Department of Health and Human Services. In a Fox News interview in March, McMahon said, “IDEA funding for our children with disabilities and special needs was in place before there was a Department of Education and it managed to work incredibly well.”

However, that change cannot legally happen without an act of Congress, and the office managing special education funding and enforcement is not being moved to Health and Human Services. Instead, most of the staff were laid off.

Reducing the Department of Education has long been a stated goal for some on the right.

“Republicans generally are seeing education as mostly a state and local project, and that the increase in the federalization of education programs and dollars is not a step in the right direction,” said Rachel Barkley, director of Able Americans.

Able Americans is one of the only conservative think tank projects dedicated entirely to disability policy. It is housed within the National Center for Public Policy Research, one of the many conservative organizations that contributed to the development of Project 2025.

But Barkley said that this does not mean a lack of support among conservatives for special education services. She pointed to President Trump’s previous fiscal year 2026 discretionary budget request. While it proposes zeroing out or reducing many federal programs’ funding, that was not the case for special education funding.

“The President’s budget is a kind of ideological statement — a wish list that never gets enacted. His budget level funded IDEA, kept it at the same level, despite other programs having a 15% drop,” Barkley said. While she and some other conservatives oppose having a Department of Education, she says they do not oppose support for disabled students.

Republican Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota has repeatedly introduced legislation that would abolish the Department of Education while keeping special education funding and enforcement, which would move to other departments. A previous iteration of the bill died before making it to committee; no legislation will move while the government is shut down.

Other conservative and right-leaning parents online felt less hope and certainty about the future.

In a private group for parents of children with Down syndrome, one Indiana mother wrote that while she agrees with others who feel the federal bureaucracy is bloated and big changes are needed, “gutting the entire department with no replacement or plan isn’t help. It doesn’t help us.”

The post Trump’s attempt to gut special education office has some conservative parents on edge appeared first on Salon.com.

The post Trump’s Education Department is working to erode the public school system appeared first on Salon.com.

Since the 2023 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, researchers have been scrambling to collect data on how many students are using AI regularly, what they’re using it for and how it’s impacting their education. In a May 2025 report, the Chronicle of Higher Education estimated that 86% of students in 16 countries use AI, 56% of American college students, and a whopping 92% of UK students. The year-over-year increase has been dramatic: A survey of K–12 students conducted in 2024 found that use of LLMs doubled since the year before. A study of 558 college students conducted by Intelligent revealed that three out of every four college students believe that using AI to find answers to test questions, write essays and summarize textbooks is cheating — and that about 69% do it anyway.

Teachers are calling in the cavalry, and the cavalry is blue books. The folks at Roaring Spring, a family-owned company that’s been printing paper products since 1887, are probably tired of being on the blower all day with people like me wanting to know how many units they’ve moved this month. But the company is also taking a well-deserved victory lap: A huge banner on the landing page of the Roaring Spring website enthuses, “The Blue Book is Making Headlines.” And come on — a humble exam notebook becoming one of the biggest stories in U.S. manufacturing seems like the kind of feel-good story we could all use.

The advent of widespread LLM use among students has put educators in a difficult place: On the one hand, they’re aware that it’s a tool that can help students do research, draft outlines, and consolidate data; on the other, they also know that many students are going well beyond that. The trick is to discourage students from becoming dependent on the tools to do their work without forcing themselves to moonlight as AI cops, and for many, blue books are the first line of defense.

Very few educators seem to want to demonize AI tools wholesale; rather, what they want is for students to understand what they lose by outsourcing their thinking, writing and imagination to it. And currently, many of them feel like they’re trying to hold the ocean back with a broom. “I hate that I’m teaching from a defensive place,” admits one adjunct professor I spoke with, who preferred not to be named. “It feels hopeless. You suspect your students are using ChatGPT or Copilot for their assignments, so you run their work through AI-detection software, which is also AI, and not always accurate.” Building more in-class discussions into the schedule has helped develop what she believes is a generally accurate AI-dar: “You start recognizing student work where different papers will have things in common — certain words, certain sentence constructions. You get a sense for it. I’m not grading on vibes.” But that doesn’t mean it’s not tiring and even demoralizing. “I just don’t think they care,” she says. “And I don’t want to get worn down to a place where I stop caring.”

It’s a sentiment that pervades listservs, Reddit forums and other places where classroom professionals vent their frustrations. “I’m not some sort of sorcerer, I cannot magically force my students to put the effort in,” complains one Reddit user in the r/professor subreddit. “Not when the crack-cocaine of LLMs is just right next to them on the table.” And for the most part, professors are on their own; most institutions have not established blanket policies about AI use, which means that teachers create and enforce their own. Becca Andrews, a writer who teaches journalism at Western Kentucky State University, had “a wake-up call” when she had to fail a student who used an LLM to write a significant amount of a final project. She’s since reworked classes to include more in-person writing and workshopping, and notes that her students — most of whom have jobs — seem grateful to have that time to complete assignments. Andrews also talks to her students about AI’s drawbacks, like its documented impact on critical-thinking faculties: “I tell them that their brains are still cooking, so it’s doubly important to think of their minds as a muscle and work on developing it.”

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Last spring’s bleakest read on the landscape was New York Magazine’s article, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” which included a number of deeply unsettling revelations from reporter James D. Walsh — not just about how widespread AI dependence has already become, but about the speed with which it is changing what education means on an empirical level. (One example Walsh cites: a professor who “caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt ‘Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.’”) The piece is bookended with the story of a Columbia student who invented a tool that allowed engineers to cheat on coding interviews, who recorded himself using the tool in interviews with companies, and was subsequently put on academic leave. During that time, he invented another app that makes it easy to cheat on everything. He raised $5.3 million in venture capital.

Educators are at cross-purposes with AI companies because, well, they want students to actually learn. AI companies, by contrast, want to blanket every aspect of young people’s lives with AI products. When students are asked about AI use, one of the benefits they reliably point to is time efficiency; the research and writing LLMs let them avoid work that they consider a waste of time. The problem is that the more AI can do, the more assignments and processes students might decide are a waste of time.

It’s not coincidental that the biggest booster of LLMs as a blanket good is a man who, like many a Silicon Valley wunderkind who preceded him, dropped out of college, invented an app and hopped aboard the venture-capital train. As a leading booster of AI, Sam Altman has been particularly vocal in encouraging students to adopt AI tools and prioritize “the meta ability to learn” over sustained study of any one subject. If that sounds like a line of bull, that’s because it is. And it’s galling that the opinion of someone who dropped out of college — because why would you keep learning when there’s money to be made and businesses to found? — is constantly sought out for comment on what tools students should and shouldn’t be using. Altman has brushed off educators’ concerns about the drawbacks of AI use in academia and has even suggested that the definition of cheating needs to evolve.

But Altman also regularly speaks out of both sides of his mouth, enthusing to media outlets that Gen Z is “the luckiest generation in all of history,” despite confessing his own reservations about the technology to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law in 2023. In encouraging regulation of AI, he warned of AI’s potential to cause “significant harm to the world,” including by generating massive amounts of disinformation: “If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.” In more recent congressional testimony, he admitted, “I worry that as the models get better and better, the users can have sort of less and less of their own discriminating process.”

Founders like Altman have told us, implicitly and explicitly, that they see money as more valuable than education, and they have a lot invested in conflating the newness of the technology with the necessity of it; framing AI as a revolution rather than a product is their stock in trade. Suggesting that unethical behavior is suddenly not really unethical because it’s in service to this revolution isn’t about what’s good for students, but about what’s good for business. (Then again, should we really be surprised when tools that would not exist without the theft of copyrighted content are used to enable and justify further unethical behavior?)

Cheat-code culture is real, and students who see their peers using AI to get assignments done in a fraction of the time they spend on research, organization and writing are likely to end up feeling like suckers. But there’s also evidence that students recognize that they learn and retain more when the process is as important as the outcome. In a Substack piece titled “Blue Books Reimagined,” Danielle Kane, a professor of Sociology at Purdue University, recalls the semester she decided to open her mind to AI and let her students use it for drafting writing assignments. “It turned out to be my worst semester of teaching,” she wrote. “Whether due to the use of AI or unchecked device usage during class, students were completely disengaged, making meaningful discussions nearly impossible.”

Meeting a fellow professor who was using blue books less as exam repositories than as classwork and process journals was transformative for Kane: “[S]tudents were encouraged to see the blue books as a creative outlet to demonstrate their mastery of course readings, ideas and practice writing in a loosely structured format . . . This step away from specific writing conventions was intended to encourage students to focus on thoughts and to trust their own ideas and creativity.” Blue books led them to understand the difference between accumulating information and deciding what information is useful to their specific needs. When class ended for the semester, many students chose to keep their blue books.

The blue-book renaissance is a Band-Aid on what educators see as much deeper and entrenched rot, but it’s a start. And there is something satisfying about the return of blue books as a bulwark against AI tools: a David-and-Goliath moment where a small, family-run paper company is embraced as a corrective to the noisy, showboating industry that’s invaded our lives with nonconsensual force. Maybe the blue book is the tangible reminder that technology in the classroom isn’t an either/or proposition, but a both/and one. One Reddit user sums it up: “I went back to blue book exams last year and am so happy I did. My students learn and they appreciate having to learn. And it’s like . . . you know you could learn all the time if you didn’t use ChatGPT, right?”

The post Writing by hand!?: Teachers are going old-school in the fight against AI appeared first on Salon.com.

At first, I wondered if I was simply noticing them more — a trick of confirmation bias, maybe, because I spend my workdays steeped in stories about hunger and the policies meant to address it. Maybe the algorithm was nudging me, too, serving these headlines into my semi-regular doomscroll. But no: this has become a subgenre of its own, a kind of folk tale the news loves to tell.

And yet what these stories omit is as striking as what they highlight.

In Sioux City, Iowa, for instance, the Community School District is facing nearly $80,000 in unpaid lunch bills. Last week, the school board voted to send those debts to a third-party collections agency. Thousands of families now risk calls from debt collectors — but officials say their hands were tied: unpaid balances were straining the district’s food service fund, which is federally required to be self-sustaining.

“It’s not what we want to do, but at this point in time, if you look at the budget or at the bill, it was like $79,000,” said Jan George, School Board President of the Sioux City Community School District. “We have to try to do something, and it’s one of the things that’s kind of our last resort.”

Sioux City is hardly alone: A School Nutrition Association survey in early 2023 found that 96% of school districts not offering universal free meals faced challenges with unpaid meal debt, a trend exacerbated by the end of federal pandemic-era programs that provided free meals for all students. And while there is no official national record, thousands of schools,  especially those in larger districts and in states with looser regulation, now regularly send unpaid lunch debt to collections.

It’s a reality that no single sword enthusiast, no matter how generous, can resolve.

The contrast is stark. On one side of the screen, a retired cop or a newlywed couple steps in as savior. On the other, a school board president explains why families in their district will be sent to collections over squares of cafeteria pizza. One story celebrates generosity; the other exposes a systemic problem no single act of charity can fix. These feel-good features function almost like folk tales: a recognizable parable in which a benevolent stranger swoops in to resolve a community’s shameful problem, restoring order before the credits roll. But that narrative is also a sleight of hand.

Media scholars call it episodic framing: a focus on individuals rather than systems. By spotlighting the donor instead of the debt, these stories offer the satisfying closure of charity — the fairy-tale ending — and spare us the harder reckoning with why unpaid lunch balances exist in the first place.

The school lunch program has been around since 1946, but school lunch debt didn’t really enter the public conversation until 2010, when the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act required districts to adopt policies for handling unpaid meals. The catch? There were no national standards. Each state, even each district, was left to invent its own approach — tallying debts, cutting off charges or swapping hot meals for cheaper alternatives.

On paper, that sounds like local control. In practice, it led to some of the most demeaning tactics schools have ever deployed against their own students. “Lunch shaming,” as it came to be called, was no longer a whisper — it was headline news.

Consider the story of Kyrie Jones, reported by Jessica Fu for The New Food Economy in 2019. Kyrie’s mother, Candice, had filed the paperwork for free lunch after her husband was sidelined by a car accident and she was patching together part-time jobs. She qualified and she trusted the system had worked. Every day, Kyrie punched his number into the keypad, ate in the cafeteria with his friends and got on with his school day.

Except it hadn’t worked. A year later, Candice discovered that the application had been processed incorrectly. Instead of receiving free meals, Kyrie had been quietly accumulating debt — almost $1,000 of it.

“It’s almost a thousand dollars,” she said at the time. “I don’t even have it.”

The district eventually fixed the application, but the debt stuck. Kyrie, by then in high school, found himself barred from homecoming and other events until his family paid down the balance. While his friends went to dances, he stayed home and watched via FaceTime. A bureaucratic error had metastasized into a kind of social sentence.

Other examples of lunch shaming have been more immediate and more public. In 2019, cafeteria workers at a Minnesota high school confiscated the hot meals of about 40 students with lunch balances over $15, dumping the trays and handing out cold sandwiches instead.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

“We deeply regret our actions today and the embarrassment that it caused,” the district later said. The superintendent added, with some understatement: “A hot lunch should never be taken from a child.”

That year, the district’s unpaid balances hovered around $20,000. It was enough to trigger an embarrassing spectacle — children losing their meals mid-lunch — but not enough to cover the gap in a system designed to make schools responsible for costs they can’t control.

Public outrage eventually prompted reforms. New Mexico became the first state to ban lunch shaming in 2017, and others followed with laws against tactics like throwing away food, stamping students’ hands or making them work off debt with “chores.” A federal Anti-Lunch Shaming Act was introduced in 2019 but never passed. Like so much of school food policy, the solution has been piecemeal: some protections here, none there and the debt continuing to pile up in the background.

Today, the problem is both bigger and simpler. The median unpaid school meal debt kept climbing in 2024, reaching $6,900 per district nationwide, a 26%  jump from the year before, according to the School Nutrition Association. Ask hunger experts why, and they’ll tell you: the end of pandemic-era universal free meals put the tab back on families.

Some states, it turns out, are trying to flip the script. Eight—California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico and Vermont—have enacted permanent universal school meal programs, covering every student regardless of income. Lawmakers in places like New York are pushing similar initiatives this year, signaling a slow but notable shift toward treating meals as a right, not a privilege. Yet even with these advances, gaps remain as most districts nationwide still tie lunch access to family wallets. And when those wallets are stretched thin by inflation and rising food costs, the dominoes fall; more students slide behind, more schools absorb the unpaid tab.

And you can see the math play out in real time. When NPR interviewed Rich Luze, who oversees nutrition for the Sioux City Community School District in Iowa, he worried the government had bungled the way it ended the pandemic’s free meal benefits. “Giving it for two years, or whatever, and then abruptly stopping it, instead of phasing it down… that could have helped families prepare to readjust and rethink,” he said in 2023. At the time, Sioux City students had accrued about $22,000 in debt.

Two years later, when the district voted to send families to collections, the balance had swelled to nearly $80,000. A staggering sum, yes, but also a familiar pattern: a real, systemic problem quietly stacking up, while local news cycles fixate on the heroic interventions that never actually solve it.

The retired cop, the newlyweds, the sword enthusiast — they return every school year like clockwork. The repetition of these headlines isn’t neutral; it performs cultural work. Like fairy tales that once taught children to behave or fear the woods, the lunch-debt redemption story teaches us to see charity as the natural solution, not universal access. It soothes public discomfort, offering a savior archetype instead of a policy fix.

But in 2025, as school districts escalate their tactics for recovering meal debt, it’s worth asking what this genre of feel-good coverage is distracting us from — and what would happen if we stopped treating kids’ right to eat as a matter of luck or largesse.

The post School lunch debt: A fairy tale appeared first on Salon.com.

US District Judge Allison Burroughs did not buy the Trump administration’s argument that its ongoing attacks on universities were motivated by a need to fight antisemitism on college campuses. In her ruling, she said that President Donald Trump and his appointees were using the idea as a “smokescreen” to hide a “targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”

The Trump administration issued a freeze order in April, pausing billions in grants as part of a larger fight against notable colleges that were the site of protests against the ongoing war in Gaza. Burroughs ruled that the protection of free speech must be weighed against the “fight against antisemitism…and neither goal should nor needs to be sacrificed on the altar of the other.” She added that the funding freeze made no distinction between the projects it halted and whether there was antisemitic activity occurring in those labs.

“The funding freezes could and likely will harm the very people Defendants professed to be protecting,” she wrote.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

The appointee of former President Barack Obama called on her fellow judges to hold the line on campus speech protections.

“It is the job of the courts to similarly step up, to act to safeguard academic freedom and freedom of speech as required by the Constitution, and to ensure that important research is not improperly subjected to arbitrary and procedurally infirm grant terminations, even if doing so risks the wrath of a government committed to its agenda no matter the cost,” she wrote.

A defiant statement from White House spokesperson Liz Huston made it clear that the Trump admin plans to continue their fight against the Ivy.

“Just as President Trump correctly predicted on the day of the hearing, this activist Obama-appointed judge was always going to rule in Harvard’s favor, regardless of the facts,” she said. “Harvard does not have a constitutional right to taxpayer dollars and remains ineligible for grants in the future.”

The post Trump’s fight against Harvard used antisemitism as “smokescreen,” judge says appeared first on Salon.com.

Endemic racism is often put forward as a rationale. That’s clearly true to some extent, but isn’t quite a sufficient explanation. Racism has been a feature of American history since the first slave ship hove to off Jamestown in 1619. But persistent as that has been, racism did not cause half the electorate suddenly to opt for authoritarian rule. Nor does it explain the shift of many nonwhite voters toward Donald Trump.

A more likely era than the present for a seismic political shift caused by racism would have been the mid-1960s, when the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act became law. There was, to be sure, a boomlet for George Wallace, but his popular vote share in 1968 was only 13.5 percent. (Wallace did carry five states in the Deep South, marking the last time a third-party presidential candidate won any electoral votes.) And shortly thereafter, when Nixon attempted to act as dictator, the entire establishment of both major parties, along with popular opinion, rose up to force his resignation.

Neither do facile excuses like “economic anxiety” cut it. The Great Depression of the 1930s was incomparably worse than anything the country has experienced since then, and it did not cause voting majorities to opt for a dictator. The US in fact has done better economically than most developed countries over the last two decades, yet Freedom House now rates America lower in political freedom than most countries in Europe, and lower than nations like Belize, Mauritius or Argentina.

How can economics possibly explain why those groups who fare worst under a would-be dictator’s economic policies are precisely the ones who support him most strongly? The percentage of farmers voting for Trump has steadily increased in the last three presidential elections to almost 80 percent, yet his tariff and immigration policies have devastated both their foreign markets and their labor supply.

Much of the Midwest, where American manufacturing is concentrated, appears to have moved from political swing status to Republican, in spite of the fact that Trump’s tariffs on commodities like steel and aluminum have made American-manufactured products less competitive internationally. Auto manufacturers and other major industrial producers must now pay a premium for aluminum of $900 per metric ton above the international price. How does that make the U.S. auto industry more competitive? No, the “economic anxiety” dog won’t hunt.

Racial animosity and dysfunctional economic choices at the ballot box are better understood, in fact, as symptoms of an underlying mindset that is more difficult to define. Many of the same people who howled that Biden was wrecking the country because gasoline went up by a nickel a gallon, but praise Trump to the skies even as his tariffs damage their business and threaten to leave them unemployed, are clearly not operating according to the rational choice theory beloved by economists and political scientists.

Even a straightforward racism theory becomes more complicated in the face of a Trump-supporting immigrant, detained by ICE for a prior criminal conviction, who still spouts MAGA slogans. Every small town in America, it seems, has its Trump boosters who want to rid the country of immigrants while gushing over “their” favorite local immigrant handyman or friendly 7-Eleven clerk.

A long-standing cliché has it that politics lies downstream of culture, and if conventional political or economic rationales fail to explain our current crisis, then perhaps culture — using that word in its broader sense — is the place to find answers. The course of American culture over the last 50 to 60 years has some surprising resonances with the decay of our democratic institutions.

Is there anyone who still remembers the release of the film “West Side Story” in 1961? Aside from being a hit, it was artistically groundbreaking: The music was daringly polyphonic. Leonard Bernstein’s score represented a significant and “difficult” departure from standard, hummable melodic show tunes of the Rodgers and Hammerstein variety. Yet the broad popular audience ate it up, as they did the avant-garde dance choreography. It was both a critical and popular success.

Fast forward four or five years, and “West Side Story” already seemed embarrassingly outdated. The idea of teenage delinquents in ducktail haircuts strolling through the Manhattan slums, clicking their fingers in unison and protecting their turf, was already quaint lore from the half-forgotten Eisenhower era. The Vietnam War was raging, American cities were burning, university campuses were stirring with protest. The Jets and Sharks seemed pretty pointless after a presidential assassination, a war, Black Power and nascent feminism. What was contemporary and cutting edge in 1961 seemed, by the mid-’60s, as a pre-World War II Fred Astaire musical.

By about 1966, even the early 1960s folk revival, which brought us Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, was being rendered obsolete by the British invasion led by the Beatles and Rolling Stones, which in turn gave way to acid rock, blues rock, heavy metal and their numerous offshoots. Each genre reflected the rapid evolution of political and social events in the larger society. All was constant churn and movement; there was considerable dross, but also genuine, spontaneous creativity. One can look at documentary footage of the era and often tell, within a year or two, when it was shot by the evolving dress, style and turns of phrase, so quickly did the culture change.

By contrast, consider the TV sitcom “Seinfeld.” Its huge success, critically and in ratings, is well known, and it has garnered numerous awards. One reviewer went so far as to say, “It may be the first situation comedy truly to achieve the status of art.”  Its final episode aired in 1998, but the series has been broadcast continuously since then, first in syndication and then through streaming. “Seinfeld” is, in relative terms, nearly as popular now (considering the fragmentation of entertainment media and its viewership) as it was when it was a first-run show.

What is so culturally significant about “Seinfeld”? One can view an episode that is three decades old and, except for the shoebox-sized mobile phones, nearly everything in the dress, slang and behavior of the characters looks contemporary with 2025. The street scenes in New York could almost have been filmed today, as do the interiors. Consider this  contrast: If we had viewed “The Maltese Falcon” or “Sullivan’s Travels” in 1971, we would immediately have been conscious of how different the physical appearance and texture of the American scene was in 1941.

It has become that way across the board. Once upon a time, each decade had its own distinctive look in dress and music, and the appearance of architecture, cars, furnishings and appliances changed noticeably, about every 20 years. Now, except for electronic gadgetry, the physical façade of American life, as well as its cultural manifestation in popular entertainment, is roughly the same as it was in about 1985.

Author Kurt Andersen already noticed this phenomenon in 2012:

New York’s amazing new buildings of the 1930s (the Chrysler, the Empire State) look nothing like the amazing new buildings of the 1910s (Grand Central, Woolworth) or of the 1950s (the Seagram, U.N. headquarters). Anyone can instantly identify a 50s movie (“On the Waterfront,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai”) versus one from 20 years before (“Grand Hotel,” “It Happened One Night”) or 20 years after (“Klute,” “A Clockwork Orange”), or tell the difference between hit songs from 1992 (Sir Mix-a-Lot) and 1972 (Neil Young) and 1952 (Patti Page) and 1932 (Duke Ellington).

He contrasted earlier decades of the 20th century with the recent past:

Now try to spot the big, obvious, defining differences between 2012 and 1992. Movies and literature and music have never changed less over a 20-year period. Lady Gaga has replaced Madonna, Adele has replaced Mariah Carey — both distinctions without a real difference — and Jay-Z and Wilco are still Jay-Z and Wilco.

Andersen goes on, rather self-indulgently, to name-check every cultural totem from Aeron chairs and Alessi teakettles to “Mad Men,” and somewhat underplays the political significance of his own findings. Perhaps in 2012, with Barack Obama in the White House and MAGA a yet-to-be-devised acronym, the political ramifications were less than obvious.

With the benefit of hindsight, I propose a more uncompromising thesis: American culture has become incurious, unwelcoming, backward-looking and fearful. It does not seek the new, but demands endless repetition of the same themes, merely with greater elaboration, gaudier technical effects and greater expense. The culture industry (now synonymous with billion-dollar mega-corporations) does little more than regurgitate stereotyped forms and simulacra. Its symbiosis with a political era that is reactionary, anti-intellectual and xenophobic should be clear.

The fulcrum of a cultural transition from vibrancy to stagnation was the 1970s. An era remembered now, if at all, for leisure suits, burnt-orange shag carpeting and muttonchop sideburns, it marked the passage from progress to reaction. Perhaps the largest events were the Watergate scandal and Nixon’s resignation, a putative victory for democracy and constitutionalism. Another memorable event was the final, inglorious end of America’s two-decade-long intervention in Vietnam, a bitter vindication for those who had always said it was a pointless and bloody mistake.

In his two histories of the political passage from Nixon to Ronald Reagan, “The Invisible Bridge” and “Reaganland,” Rick Perlstein writes that deposing Nixon and withdrawing from Vietnam ought to have been an occasion for the American people to grow up and take a more mature view of their country’s place in the world and their responsibility for democratic self-government.

Instead, a backlash against the turbulent 1960s and a nostalgia-tinged desire for a simpler America fueled a reactionary political movement that gained traction even as the Congress elected in 1974 (the “Watergate babies”) passed progressive legislation on election reform, the environment, personal privacy and consumer protection. Just as politics in Washington moved left, the stirrings of a countermovement began: politicized Christian fundamentalism, the founding of right-wing think tanks, Phyllis Schlafly’s jihad against the Equal Rights Amendment, a property tax revolt in California and sputtering fury that gasoline would not remain at 30 cents a gallon for all eternity.

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only by Amanda Marcotte, also a weekly show on YouTube — or wherever you get your podcasts.

These crosscurrents were visible in popular culture. New Hollywood was in full flower, as the fall of the studio system and the end of censorship led to more creative and daring movies with darker themes. But exactly the moment when the genre peaked in the mid-1970s with films like “Chinatown,” “Taxi Driver” and “Network,” a countermovement hit the screens: the blockbuster. “Jaws,” which premiered 50 years ago this summer, was the first of the big-budget action pictures that spawned a near-infinite series of remakes, sequels and franchises. These drove New Hollywood and arthouse movies into the shadows.

The blockbuster formula hasn’t changed in five decades: entertain cinema-goers; don’t present anything that might induce that dreaded experience, thought. At least a plurality of the recent high-budget, big-box office movies coming out of Hollywood involve action heroes derived from comic books. In the 1950s and ‘60s, comics were fodder for pre-adolescent boys; even a high school kid still reading them would have been regarded as backward.

Popular music soldiered on and continued to develop during the 1970s, but tailed off at the end of the decade. A sure sign that contemporary music was running out of creative steam was the 1980s proliferation of “classic rock” radio stations that endlessly replayed standards from the previous two decades. By the new millennium, as the boomers began to reach the end of their shelf life, acts like the Rolling Stones became a nostalgia fetish, much as the music of Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey had been for the World War II generation.

Since then, the music scene has ossified to the point where journalist and popular music critic David Masciotra writes, “It is the culture of the pre-packaged interview, the ‘social media consultant,’ the Instagram filter, the carefully parsed public relations-penned announcement, statement, or apology, the focus group tested product, and the imperialistic, hegemonic algorithm, forever directing people what to consume, when to feel, and how to think.”

As an example, we need only to think of the interminable reign of Taylor Swift (even the Beatles lasted barely half a decade as a live act at the top of the charts): innumerable dance-pop songs with seemingly identical beat and dynamics, glitzed up with ever gaudier and costlier visual pyrotechnics. And “country,” the hands-down favorite music of “real Americans,” has long been a production-line item with as much idiosyncrasy in the songs as Olive Garden breadsticks. A decade ago, one writer (who wasn’t even being critical) discovered that every hit country song sounded exactly the same.

Whether or not he’s getting any satisfaction, Mick Jagger is still on stage at 82, performing to what is largely his own demographic. Could that, and the fact that Harrison Ford still played Indiana Jones at 80 (using digital de-aging), have anything to do with our seeming preference for geriatric politicians? The 2024 presidential election was a contest in which the octogenarian incumbent had to drop out, but his 60-year-old replacement lost to a late septuagenarian.

The current Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, is a sprightly 74. Mitch McConnell recently stepped down as Senate Republican leader for appearance reasons (he kept freezing up in public and on camera), but at 83 still holds his Senate seat and strategizes as the Professor Moriarty of Republican schemes. The president pro tempore of the Senate, Chuck Grassley of Iowa, is 91, and third in line for succession to the presidency.

The fossils the American people keep on electing seem to reflect the public’s habits and preferences. Americans move less frequently than they used to. They stay at home more, socialize less and read less. The U.S., once the premier country of upward social mobility as well as geographic mobility, is now less upwardly mobile than many other developed countries. Indeed, the reactionary codgers whom Americans vote for tend to enact social policies that guarantee low social mobility, thus empowering a vicious cycle.

Life expectancy, probably the best surrogate for quality of life, has stagnated as well, while other countries have improved: The U.S. is now 55th in life expectancy, behind Panama and Albania. In GOP strongholds like West Virginia and Kentucky, life is shorter. The residents of Owsley County, Kentucky, have a typical lifespan almost 10 years below the American average. Shockingly, it has declined by almost two years since 1980, the year Reagan was elected. In 2024, Owsley County went 88 percent for Trump.

Stagnation feeds upon itself. In Weirton, West Virginia, a steel town fallen on hard times, a battery manufacturer came to establish a new industrial basis for the community. The problem was that the company couldn’t tout it as green energy, because the phrase provoked too much knee-jerk negativity. While some residents understood that steel wasn’t coming back and that the town should embrace new opportunities, others denounced it as some sort of woke Democratic plot to undermine the community. Predictably, the stupidest comment came from Weirton’s Republican state delegate; the new company, he said, was “a joke and not the future. The facility will probably be vacant in two or three years.” Cultural stagnation is a form of willed self-destruction at the popular level.

At the more exalted level of national politics, cultural stagnation is a dive into tackiness and kitsch. Trump has been busy (when not otherwise occupied ruining the country) desecrating the White House: bulldozing the Rose Garden and slathering everything that doesn’t move with faux-rococo gold leaf, transforming a once-restrained neoclassical structure into something like one of Saddam Hussein’s Tikrit palaces or a 19th-century Naples bordello. Which, upon consideration of the president’s current Jeffrey Epstein-related difficulties, is grimly appropriate. He even intends to deface the entire White House complex with a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, Versailles as reimagined by Tony Soprano.

Its estimated $200 million price tag (which is likely to double) is supposed to be paid for by donations. I am sure billionaires will happily line up to contribute, confident that their bribes will gain them business subsidies and pay them back a hundredfold. Trump being Trump, he will surely stick the taxpayer for the cost, just out of stubborn principle, and his budget director, Christian warrior Russ Vought, will find a way to conceal all this in the federal budget, perhaps in the classified intelligence funding line.

When culture stagnates, and the degradation of political life feeds back into that culture, it doesn’t merely stay the same; it degenerates into a hideous pastiche of itself. Where have we seen Trump’s megalomania before? Hitler’s plan to transform Berlin into Germania? Stalin’s wedding-cake architecture? The extravagant kitsch monument in Rome, finished under Mussolini’s rule?

There is of course no firm one-to-one correspondence between a stagnant, decaying culture and the collapse of civic politics into dictatorship-as-reality TV. But as with pornography, we know it when we see it.

The post How did we get from the ’60s to Trump’s kitsch White House? appeared first on Salon.com.

In its agreement, Columbia will pay $220 million in legal fees to the Trump administration, along with implementing several policy changes regarding speech and student protections on campus. Following this, they will receive $400 million in withheld federal funds.

Some critics of the decision argue that it will affect the independence of the university and will effectively silence pro-Palestinian speech. Others say the decision does not go far enough in protecting Jewish students on campus.

David Hozen, a law professor at Columbia, criticized the reforms, calling them “as unprincipled as they are unprecedented” and arguing that the deal was a “legal form to an extortion scheme.” 

Elisha Baker, co-chair of the pro-Israel student group Aryeh, was also critical, writing to the Columbia University Spectator that the reported deal “would completely ignore the structural and cultural reforms we need and effectively tell the world of higher education that discrimination is okay if they can afford it.” 

Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, chastised Columbia for “choosing to pander to a lawless administration” and not protecting students and staff who “are bravely speaking out against a genocide.” 

Ahamed, who has worked with several Columbia students facing disciplinary measures, also accused the university of “agreeing to operate like an arm of the state to censor and punish speech the Trump administration doesn’t like.” 

Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., chairman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, blamed Columbia for the deal existing at all. “The need for a federal settlement underscores Columbia’s lack of institutional willingness to effectively respond to antisemitism,” Walberg said in a statement.

Walberg said the committee will “closely monitor Columbia’s purported commitment” to the deal and would “develop legislative solutions to address antisemitism.”

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., meanwhile, called the decision an “outrageous and embarrassing $200 million capitulation” and a “repugnant extortion scheme” in a post on X. 

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Nadler said that “Columbia needs to do a better job at protecting its students against antisemitism on campus,” but said the deal “will not, in any way, improve the situation on campus for Jewish students. Columbia’s students, faculty, staff, and larger community deserve better than this cowardly decision.”  

One voice of support for the deal came from economist and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who called it an “excellent template for agreements with other institutions including Harvard,” in a social media post.

Summers said the deal lets Columbia keep its “academic autonomy,” praised its “ongoing reform with respect to anti-Semitism,” and claimed that “normality is restored” at the campus.

Acting school President Claire Shipman, in an email sent last week to the university community, suggested that any such deal with the Trump administration would be the beginning of a broader effort to address issues on campus.

“In my view, any government agreement we reach is only a starting point for change,” she wrote.

The post Few seem to love Columbia’s deal with Trump appeared first on Salon.com.

The Departments of Education and of Health and Human Services issued a letter to the New England Commission of Higher Education on Wednesday, saying the school may no longer meet their standards.

In a statement about the move, Education Secretary Linda McMahon said Harvard had “failed in its obligation to students, educators, and American taxpayers” by “allowing antisemitic harassment and discrimination to persist unchecked.” The Trump administration has consistently leveled charges of antisemitism against universities and other institutions it hopes to bring to heel. Harvard would be ineligible for federal student aid if it lost its accreditation.

“Accrediting bodies play a significant role in preserving academic integrity and a campus culture conducive to truth-seeking and learning. Part of that is ensuring students are safe on campus and abiding federal laws that guarantee educational opportunities to all students,” McMahon said in a statement.

Also on Wednesday, the Department of Homeland Security issued administrative subpoenas to Harvard, which would require the university to deliver records, communications and other documents related to the enforcement of immigration laws as far back as January 1, 2020. In May, DHS revoked Harvard’s right to enroll international students, but a judge blocked the order.

“We tried to do things the easy way with Harvard. Now, through their refusal to cooperate, we have to do things the hard way,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Harvard, like other universities, has allowed foreign students to abuse their visa privileges and advocate for violence and terrorism on campus. If Harvard won’t defend the interests of its students, then we will.”

The Trump administration and Harvard have been at odds since this spring. In April, the administration issued a letter to the university detailing provisions the university must comply with or risk losing federal funding. Harvard rejected the administration’s demands. In turn, the administration announced more than $2.2 billion in cuts to grants. Harvard responded by filing a lawsuit, alleging the funding freeze violated the institution’s constitutional rights.

The post Trump admin comes for Harvard’s accreditation appeared first on Salon.com.

But for Mark Vopat, Cryshanna Jackson Leftwich and Mandy Fehlbaum, three faculty union leaders at Youngstown State University who spearheaded the ballot referendum effort aiming to repeal the new law, that means doing absolutely nothing at all.

“I’m not changing anything,” Vopat, a YSU professor of philosophy, told Salon. “I don’t accept the premise that our classrooms have been indoctrinating or biased in a way that is inappropriate in any way.” So he sees no reason to make any changes, he said.

“I read through the bill, and honestly, it doesn’t say that as faculty, we’re required to do anything,” added Jackson Leftwich, a YSU professor of political science. It’s up to campus administrators at Youngstown State, she said. “It’s their responsibility.”

The professors’ grassroots attempt to get Senate Bill 1 on the November ballot came to a disappointing end one day before the law’s June 27 enactment date, with the announcement that they had not collected enough signatures. In the seven weeks from their petition’s certification in May to the June 25 deadline, organizers and volunteers gathered 195,157 signatures across all 88 Ohio counties. That, however, fell short of the roughly 250,000 signatures from 44 counties required by the secretary of state’s office to pause the law and put it to a vote.

Fehlbaum, Vopat and Jackson Leftwich contend that if they’d had a little more time — Vopat estimated another 10 to 14 days — and greater support from other, larger organizations, they would be telling a different story.

Fehlbaum, who teaches sociology at YSU, said the petition drive was delayed by two weeks while “waiting for another group to come forward that had infrastructure and funding,” which ultimately did not happen. Other groups, she suggested, did not take the ballot referendum push seriously, sought to prioritize challenging the legislation in the courts instead, or concluded that a ballot initiative would be too difficult and too expensive.

In addition to ending DEI programs at the state’s public colleges and universities, SB 1 limits faculty unions, places new requirements on faculty and tenure reviews, and regulates classroom discussion around “controversial beliefs,” including climate policy, marriage, immigration and electoral politics.

A number of Ohio institutions began to comply with the law in the spring, shuttering DEI offices, eliminating a number of majors in the humanities and social sciences, and postponing racial affinity events.

The YSU professors said they want to see how students will react to the rollback in resources when they return to campus in the fall. They also voiced concerns for the future of higher education in the state, warning that this law is likely to drive students away from Ohio’s schools, fuel grade inflation — as faculty attempt to assuage accusations of bias — and create a pathway for the Republican-dominated state legislature to attack K-12 education next.

“When you allow the state legislature to dictate how your colleges and universities run, you take away a lot of integrity, you take away best practices, you take away what universities stand for,” Jackson Leftwich said.

While they’re still regrouping from their defeat, Vopat and Felhlbaum said they have taken one important lesson away from the effort: They’re not alone.

“There are worse things than failing, and that’s being alone. No one is alone here,” Vopat said, retooling a “Ted Lasso” quote. “One thing that I really got out of this is that there are a whole bunch of people in this state who are very unhappy with the way things are going. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people out there who are saying we’re going in the wrong direction.”

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Their fight isn’t over, the activist professors say. The trio told Salon that they are pursuing new strategies, along with their network of more than 1,700 volunteers, about other legislative avenues they can pursue to stave off the effects of the bill. They’re not yet ready to discuss details about next steps and further options, but said that with the infrastructure they’ve built and the support they’ve garnered, the petition’s failure is a setback but not a final defeat.

“If anything, it just shows me how wrong-headed some individuals are about how much it takes,” Fehlbaum said, pointing to the mass of volunteers who used their own resources to print the pre-certification petitions, and then spent days collecting signatures and many hours scanning completed petitions, all on their own personal time. “It doesn’t take hiring paid petitioners. It doesn’t take hiring paid staff. We can do this on our own. That’s what real democracy looks like.”

The post Activists failed to repeal Ohio’s GOP education overhaul — but the fight isn’t over appeared first on Salon.com.

In messages sent to state education officials on Monday, the U.S. Department of Education said “decisions have not yet been made concerning submissions and awards for this upcoming year.” The funding, already appropriated by Congress and approved by President Donald Trump in March, was expected to be available on Tuesday, July 1.

The funds in question include five different grants which largely fund summer and after-school programs that serve millions of students across the country. Of the $6.8 billion halted, the programs impacted include $375 million for migrant education, $2.2 billion for professional development, $890 million for English-learner services, $1.3 billion for academic enrichment and $1.4 billion for before- and after-school programs.

National Education Association President Becky Pringle called the move to block the funding is “shocking, but not surprising.”

“Withholding billions in promised federal education funding that students need—and states had planned to use to support children in their states—is a cruel betrayal of students, especially those who rely on critical support services,” Pringle said. “Schools are already grappling with severe teacher shortages, burnout, and under-resourced classrooms, and here comes the federal government ripping resources away from public schools. It is outrageous and unconscionable.”

Tony Carrk, executive director of watchdog group Accountable.US called the funding freeze an “all-out betrayal of working families.”

“Trump’s education funding freeze will shutter after-school programs, rob classrooms of resources, and set students struggling with years of learning loss back even further,” Carrk said. “It’s an all-out betrayal of working families who rely on access to public education for a fair shot at the American dream.”

Trump’s FY 2026 budget proposal highlighted the administration’s plans to target these programs. In the prospective budget, they have been fully eliminated. According to the Learning Policy Institute, all states and territories can expect to feel the brunt of the funding loss. In at least 17 states and territories, the funds account for 15 percent or more of their overall K-12 school funding.

The Trump administration has made its intent to scale back the federal government’s role in education known, starting with plans to fully dismantle the Department of Education.

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., criticized the administration’s decision to yank the funding that Trump had approved.

“President Trump himself signed this funding into law—but that isn’t stopping him from choking off resources to support before and after school programs, help students learn, support teachers in the classroom, and a lot more,” Murray said in a statement. 

In a post on X, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said this is a “huge crisis” made worse by the recent Supreme Court decision on national injunctions

“This is a CLEAR AS DAY violation of federal law. The appropriations law passed by Congress REQUIRES this money to be spent,” Murphy wrote.

The post “All-out betrayal”: Trump halts nearly $7 billion in federal funding for schools appeared first on Salon.com.

Under the Trump regime, ignorance has been manufactured and weaponized, twisted into a force that shrouds lies as truth and redefines education as an act of violence. In the U.S. and across other authoritarian regimes, a culture of lies along with the deliberate erasure of reality serves as a mask for tyranny. Trump, with his grotesque parade of over 30,000 lies during his first term, continues to poison the public mind, even now refusing to concede his loss in 2020. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, in a monstrous distortion, somehow blamed Marxists for the murder of a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota and her husband, a crime committed by a Trump supporter. This was no mere falsehood but a sickening expression of a deeper, unspeakable evil.

The right-wing media, spearheaded by Rupert Murdoch’s empire, lost a legal battle with Dominion Voting Systems over their lies about the election. Yet such lies and conspiratorial rhetoric continues to spread unchecked, drowning reason in its wake. The mainstream media is largely silent about Benjamin Netanyahu’s war crimes in Gaza, until they become too obvious to ignore. For the most part, it has also avoided discussing Donald Trump’s bombing of Iran as a violation of international and a reckless act of militarized violence. In the hands of the far-right and MAGA mobs, truth has become a dangerous weapon to be destroyed. Critical thinking, once a hallmark of an informed society, is now suspicious, and largely exiled from our libraries, schools and mainstream media.

The American public is sinking into a pit of civic illiteracy, a curse that will only grow as the complicity of so many feeds the machine of violence. This is not merely a crisis of knowledge; it is a catastrophe of reason, politics and morality, a national surrender to the forces of darkness and destruction. The growing threat of fascism thrives on the deliberate cultivation of ignorance, where lies are paraded as truth and a public all too willing to surrender to conspiracy theories finds solace in the comfort of unquestioned illiteracy. At stake is what David Levi Strauss, citing Jerome Kohn, calls “the public spirit” — the essence of democracy, where citizens engage in dialogue, debate and struggle, working together to promote the common good. In this perilous alliance, the very foundations of democracy are being torn asunder, and with them, any hope for a future brave enough to confront the truth.

The death of civic consciousness and the erosion of culture pave the way for a chilling fusion: the Disneyfication of society, where sanitized illusions mask brutal truths, and the rise of a zombie politics, ruled by the living dead — soulless figures with blood on their lips. As Chris Hedges has observed, America is a decaying regime, its vitality drained, clinging to spectacles like Trump’s grotesque military parade that serve only to feed the pathologies of a diseased society. Culture, under the grip of gangster capitalism, has become a vehicle for magical thinking, a tool for distracting the masses from the cruel realities of economic stagnation and social inequality.

In this world, the population is increasingly conditioned by a mass culture dominated by sexual commodification, mindless entertainment and graphic depictions of violence, and is taught to blame itself for its own failure. Thoughtlessness has not only been normalized but has become the very precondition for the rise of authoritarianism. This is the terrifying terrain we now occupy, where the loss of critical consciousness has created fertile ground for the spread of cruelty and control.

The first casualty of authoritarianism is the critical mind. This is not only a political issue but an educational one. As Paulo Freire understood, education is never neutral. It either functions as an instrument to reproduce the existing order or becomes a tool for liberation. In the face of escalating fascism, education demands reclamation as a moral and political project whose task is to cultivate the knowledge, skills, values and civic courage necessary to challenge injustice and imagine alternative futures. It must be rooted in critical pedagogy, a moral and political practice that enables students to speak, write and act from positions of agency and empowerment.

In the age of the neoliberal university, many educational institutions have abandoned these responsibilities. Under the weight of privatization, standardization and corporate influence, their democratic purpose has been hollowed out or abandoned entirely. Universities have become sites of credentialing, training and conformity, rather than inquiry and critique. Driven by the ideological and instrumental dictates of gangster capitalism, the logic of the market has reduced students to consumers, faculty to managed labor serfs and knowledge to a commodity.

Ranking systems, performance metrics and austerity budgets have supplanted public investment, intellectual freedom and pedagogical citizenship. As universities submit to far-right ideological pressure, chase corporate funding and refuse to define themselves as defenders of democracy, they abandon the mission of cultivating critical, engaged citizens capable of imagining a radically different future. Aligned with the forces of predatory capitalism, they erode public conscience “while celebrating unrestrained self-interest, extreme individualism, deregulation, and privatization.”

Yet an even more insidious force is at work. In addition to market-driven logic, higher education is being re-engineered to serve authoritarian control. In both subtle and overt forms, universities are increasingly being transformed into an apparatus of white Christian nationalist indoctrination and citadels of fear. They have been criminalized by the Trump administration and collectively transformed into an enormous crime scene. What we witness across the country is not merely the erosion of democratic education, but its replacement by a theocratic and ethnonationalist vision rooted in exclusion, historical erasure and moral authoritarianism. Curricula are being purged of “divisive concepts,” anti-racist scholarship is demonized, and educators who teach about settler colonialism, gender or Palestinian liberation are being censored, surveilled or fired.

In the New Republic, Indigo Olivier argues that Trump’s war on education extends beyond the suppression of campus dissent. It is a concerted effort to seize the essence of higher learning, reshaping it in the image of authoritarian ideology, an ideology built on power, control and the erasure of critical thought:

In recent months, Trump has: signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, suspended student loan repayment programs and $400 million in funding to Columbia University, and threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status after freezing over $2 billion in federal funds. Dozens of universities now face federal investigations as part of Trump’s anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion campaign. Perhaps most disturbingly, he has encouraged U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to target international students involved in Gaza solidarity protests for deportation; several are currently being held in a processing facility in Louisiana…. Taken together, these actions have been widely seen as a chilling assault on academic freedom and institutional self-governance that threatens to undermine the character of American higher education itself.

This project mirrors, with chilling precision, the ideological reengineering of higher education under past fascist regimes. In Nazi Germany, universities were purged of Jewish professors and political dissidents, while academic disciplines were reshaped to propagate racial pseudoscience and Aryan supremacy. In Mussolini’s Italy, intellectuals were coerced into swearing loyalty to the fascist state, and scholarship became a tool of nationalist propaganda, intertwining classical myths with imperial ambition.

As Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, “Leftists, liberals, and anyone who spoke out against the Fascists were sent to prison or forced into exile.” In Franco’s Spain, the university was subjected to Catholic authoritarianism, with philosophy, history and literature marshaled to serve an ultra-conservative, patriarchal order. In Chile, as Ben-Ghiat writes, under the brutal regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet, universities were condemned as “hotbeds of Marxism and targeted…for ‘cleansing.’ She notes that by 1975, 24,000 students, faculty, and staff had been dismissed, thousands imprisoned and tortured, and entire philosophy and social science departments disbanded.

In an article at The Conversation, education scholar Iveta Silova notes how swiftly and systematically German universities were transformed under Hitler: “Within a few years, German universities no longer served knowledge, they served power.” The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle DEI programs, censor dissenting faculty and freeze funding to elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard echo this dangerous legacy. These are not random acts but part of a calculated attempt to remake higher education into an instrument of ideological control. The pattern is clear: Authoritarian leaders understand that universities must either serve the state or be silenced.

In each case, fascist regimes recognized what many Americans understand: Education is a powerful site for shaping memory, constructing identity and legitimizing power. Today’s attacks on academic freedom in Florida, Texas and beyond, where bills ban courses on systemic racism, rewrite histories of slavery and Indigenous genocide, and promote “patriotic education,” are not aberrations but continuities in a long history of authoritarian attempts to control the imagination of the future by erasing the truths of the past.

Under Trump, this war on education has reached a fever pitch, with the attacks on Columbia and Harvard  serving as key elements of a broader strategy. By branding campus protesters as “terrorists,” labeling faculty as “enemies of America,” invoking false allegations of antisemitism against any vestige of dissent and threatening to revoke federal funding, Trump is mobilizing state power to crush intellectual resistance and remake the university in the image of racial purity, blind obedience, and de facto white and Christian nationalist mythology.

Yet even amid this reactionary onslaught, resistance is burgeoning. Across campuses in the U.S., Canada and around the world, students and educators are refusing to be conscripted into authoritarian narratives. From the pro-Palestinian encampments protesting genocide in Gaza to the nationwide student walkouts opposing book bans and censorship, young people are transforming educational spaces into laboratories of dissent and collective imagination. These acts of defiance recall earlier waves of resistance, from the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley to the student uprisings in 1968 Paris, from the Black campus revolts of the 1970s to the anti-apartheid university occupations of the 1980s, as well as a historical moment when women, refusing to be confined by patriarchal norms, broke through the walls of misogyny to demand autonomy, equality and liberation.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Resonating with past movements, today’s students are reclaiming education as an act of resistance, not a preparation for conformity and ideological indoctrination. They are forming assemblies, teach-ins and counter-courses, horizontal spaces where knowledge is co-created, solidarity is forged and the university is reimagined as a site of justice rather than domination. Faculty, too, are pushing back, filing lawsuits, penning public letters, creating sanctuary classrooms and insisting that pedagogy must serve not power but freedom. This is why fascists hate higher education and are waging a full-fledged attack on it.

In this context, critical pedagogy transcends mere academic method; it becomes a political act, a refusal to surrender the university to fascism and a commitment to making it a space where new forms of collective life can be imagined and fought for. In cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, students are joining with immigrants, workers, artists, activists and some politicians to resist Trump’s ruthless immigration policies, the criminalization of dissent “and his unfolding conspiracy to establish a military dictatorship under his personal control.” This convergence of struggles signals a growing recognition that education cannot be separated from the broader fight for human rights, sanctuary and democratic life — resistance movements now under threat from the unfolding authoritarianism of Trump’s regime. It is through these alliances that a new critical pedagogy of resistance is emerging, one rooted in memory, insurgent hope and an unshakable belief in the possibility of a different future.

Drawing upon the lessons of history and the radical value of critical education, the Foro de Sevilla collective writes, “Auschwitz was much more than a concentration camp, it was a laboratory of dehumanization.” Gaza, too, has become such a site, where children, schools and entire futures are being systematically annihilated. Education, in this context, is not just about knowledge transmission but about moral reckoning. It must preserve memory as a living force, capable of shaping civic courage and alerting us to the dangers of silence, complicity and ideological manipulation. From Auschwitz to Gaza, from Nazi Germany to Trump’s America, we see the same dangerous arc: a politics of exclusion that depends on erasure, that turns classrooms into sites of fear rather than freedom.

To meet this moment, educators must embrace a form of pedagogy that is inseparable from politics. Critical pedagogy begins not with answers, but with probing questions about history, justice, identity, power and possibility. It refuses the notion that teaching is a technical act, a homage to an empty instrumentalism divorced from context, insisting instead that education is always implicated in the struggle over meaning and memory. As Pierre Bourdieu warned, some of the most powerful forms of domination are symbolic and pedagogical. If authoritarian regimes aim to control not only public institutions but the public imagination, then our task as educators is to illuminate, disrupt, protest and reimagine. In this struggle, education and culture are not peripheral. They are central to politics, for shaping mass consciousness is the bedrock of any genuine resistance.

Education does not exist in a vacuum, but on a battleground for identities, values and power. As such, it carries the potential to either suppress or empower — or often, to be a complex mix of both. Freire warns us that pedagogy can become a tool of oppression when it reinforces entrenched power structures. Yet he powerfully extends this argument by emphasizing that education is a site of struggle, where its potential for both oppression and liberation is constantly negotiated. It can awaken consciousness, empower individuals and resist the forces of injustice. In this sense, education becomes a critical site where the struggle for freedom, dignity and transformation is waged.

Let us be clear: the relentless attacks on higher education by authoritarians like Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey and the Trump regime at home expose a deeper truth: Universities have always been incubators of resistance to authoritarianism and its ever-shifting forms of fascist politics. This is precisely why they are viewed as a threat. As public institutions, their core mission is to defend and nurture democracy, however fragile or imperfect, making them a formidable challenge to those who seek to dismantle it.

This means embracing education as a public good and a site of collective responsibility. It requires curricula that foster a culture of inquiry, equip students with the knowledge and skills to hold power accountable, challenge dominant narratives, and cultivate a historical literacy that can dismantle the myths sustaining fascist ideologies. It calls for defending the university not as a corporate entity or site of theocratic indoctrination but as a democratic commons — a space where a culture of critique and academic freedom can thrive, and where students are empowered to define themselves and break free from the continuum of manufactured ignorance. It demands a language that links freedom with social responsibility, agency with solidarity and critical thought with civic engagement.

As Homi Bhabha once said, civic education must disrupt the consensus of common sense. It must fracture the settled order of things to make space for the not-yet-imagined. In an age where language is stripped of meaning and culture is weaponized by the far right, education must reclaim its capacity to name injustice and summon hope. We need a language of critique and a language of possibility. One that refuses both fatalism and false neutrality.

As the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis has observed, there is no democracy without an educated public and no justice without a language to critique injustice. In dark times, education must do more than transmit knowledge; it must cultivate the political and moral imagination necessary to resist tyranny and build a future rooted in equality, dignity and shared responsibility. To make education central to politics is to insist that the fight for democracy begins not only in the streets or at the ballot box, but in the classroom, in the slow, transformative work of teaching people to think otherwise, so they might act otherwise.

As Castoriadis reminds us, democracy is not merely the absence of censorship or the formal guarantee of rights, it is the collective power of the people to shape the conditions of their own existence. Its antithesis is unfolding before our eyes under Trump: a regime that wields power not to serve the public good but to impose a form of internal military occupation, hollowing out the very foundations of democracy and replacing them with fear, surveillance and authoritarian control. From Nazi Germany to Mussolini’s Italy to Orbán’s Hungary and Trump’s America, the pattern is disturbingly familiar: The attack on education always precedes the broader collapse of democratic life. The classroom is one of the last spaces where the future can still be imagined differently. That is why it is under siege, and why we must defend it with everything we have.

The stakes of resisting fascism and fighting for radical democracy — both in the U.S. and globally — could not be more dire. In an age when authoritarianism works to erase memory, dismantle agency and extinguish the very conditions for democratic life, education must be reclaimed as a radical act of hope and resistance. We must reject the cynical belief that schools are mere sites of economic, social and political reproduction, powerless in the face of capital and coercion. We must reclaim them instead as contested spaces where the struggle over meaning, history and possibility is ongoing.

As Stuart Hall has insisted, culture and, by extension, education “is a critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled.” The task before us is not simply to critique the fascist drift of our institutions, but to organize, teach and fight for an emancipatory vision of education, one rooted in historical memory, ethical responsibility and collective imagination. Against the politics of cruelty and Trump’s empire of ugliness, cruelty and communities of racial hatred, we need a pedagogy of solidarity. Against the forces that would erase the past, malign the present and cancel the future, we must teach, and live, as if the future depends on our refusal to forget, our capacity to dream and our courage to act. Because it does.

The post We can still save education — and that’s the key to saving democracy appeared first on Salon.com.

That would be Republican state Rep. Stan Gerdes, author of the FURRIES Act, an embarrassing acronym that unpacks into the "Forbidding Unlawful Representation of Roleplaying in Education Act." Gerdes claims to believe that children in elementary schools are "identifying" as animals, and that the schools are indulging this supposedly dangerous delusion by letting kids eat out of dog bowls or use litter boxes instead of regular bathrooms. Absolutely no part of that true, and it is indeed "a little creepy" for Republicans to obsess over an entirely imaginary problem. 

"Texas schools are for educating kids, not indulging in radical trends," declared Gerdes in an X post announcing the bill, which has the support of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott. The bill purports to ban "non-human behaviors" in school, a list that includes "using a litter box for the passing of stool," "barking, meowing, hissing, or other animal noises," "licking oneself" and an "outward display" of "features that are non-human." There's also a helpful list of such features, including fake tails, "animal-like" ears and fur, whether fake or real, which could certainly cramp the style of those who enjoy fuzzy outerwear in cold weather. 

Careful readers may already notice that wearing costumes, which is what Gerdes is trying to describe with this overwrought pseudo-legal language, is not "non-human behavior." Indeed, it is exclusively human behavior. Sure, some folks put little outfits on their pet cats and dogs, but that's not the animal's doing. At least on this planet, only members of homo sapiens are freaky enough to be entertained by a cat dressed as an avocado. I'll note that most cats look annoyed, rather than joyful, when forced to don human-made lewks.

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

Everything about this bill is based on false claims and absolute nonsense. Young children are not "identifying" as animals in school. The superintendent of the school that was accused of letting kids use litter boxes told the Houston Chronicle that no such thing was happening, and that she'd made an "extra effort" to investigate classrooms herself. "Furries" are real people, mind you, but they're adults — and they don't "identify" as animals, either. They are hobbyists who enjoy dressing up as cartoon characters and stuffed animals, create elaborate artworks involving anthropomorphic animals and sometimes attend conventions while wearing homemade animal costumes.

As for child "furries," that's not a thing because it's both impossible and redundant. Enjoying cartoons, playing games where you sometimes pretend to be an animal and sleeping with your "stuffie" are nearly universal interests for the playground set. "Furries," by definition, are people who still do that stuff after growing up. Yes, some adult furries engage in sexual activity wearing their animal costumes, which is a big part of the moral panic here. But let's get real: Consider the random woman (or man, or whomever) you saw dressed as "sexy cat" last Halloween. 

None of this, to be clear, is about animals or about the fiction that some people "identify" as animals. This nonsense is ultimately a backdoor assault on the rights of LGBTQ people. For decades, Christian conservatives have been pushing the myth that LGTBQ identities aren't real; they're just a "trend" pushed by nefarious forces onto gullible young people. That narrative isn't applied quite as loudly to gay people in recent years, but the notion that being trans is a "social contagion" has blossomed into a full-blown moral panic, widely accepted by credulous mainstream media, author J.K. Rowling and even the British Supreme Court. The "furry" urban legend just adds more fuel to the fire. The implicit message here is: "We let the kids be trans and now they think they can be animals." It's a reworked version of a scare tactic the right formerly used to demonize same-sex marriage, by claiming it opened the door to human-pet marriage. 

"They have to create more and more absurd examples in order to keep justifying the oppression," explained Imara Jones, a journalist who founded TransLash Media, which seeks to tell the truth about trans people's lives as a counterweight to nonsense like the "furry" narrative. The far-right's goal is to "eliminate trans people from public life completely," Jones argued, and maybe even to force trans people into institutions. With a goal that extreme, she added, "They have to transform trans people into an extreme threat to themselves and others." 

Jones compares this to the anti-immigration strategy used by Donald Trump's administration. Both during the campaign and in the White House, Trump and his staff have lied repeatedly about immigrants, claiming they eat pets, they're being used as bioweapons to spread disease, and they are secretly an invading army sent to destroy America. Vice President JD Vance has admitted that these stories are false, claiming that right-wingers are entitled to "create stories" to get the media to "pay attention." 

As Jones explains it, once the right has transformed all immigrants into "dangerous predators," that creates political justification to "do all sorts of things," including illegally arresting them and sending them to foreign prison camps with no pretense of due process. The "furry" hoax, she suggests, is a "parallel effort" to justify human rights abuses against trans people. So far, Republicans have not tried to use this ginned-up moral panic to arrest trans people en masse, but we're clearly seeing escalating attacks. Trump signed a series of executive orders meant to make it harder for trans people to move about in public, work, get an education or even use a public bathroom. So far, the biggest impact has been in the U.S. military, after the Supreme Court allowed Trump's ban on trans service members to remain in place. The Defense Department wants to discharge more than 4,000 trans service members who have done nothing wrong.

Despite their claims to be defending humankind from this imaginary animalistic incursion, Texas Republicans are being deeply anti-human with this "furry" bill. The behaviors that Gerdes' bill seeks to stigmatize are — as any person who has ever met a child or been a child could tell you — entirely normal forms of play. Kids love animals! The love to pretend to be animals, which is why so many children's books, movies, TV shows and toys feature human-like animal characters as often as human ones. Older kids and adults — even those who aren't furries — also love some animal-themed goofing off: Consider the mascots associated wity many college sports teams. Cultures from every corner of the planet have holidays and festivals where people dress up in colorful animal masks or costumes. 

Gerdes' bill includes some "exceptions" to his draconian ban on this universal human behavior, but those only serve to underscore the bizarre misanthropy of the MAGA movement. Schools are allowed to celebrate Halloween or "school dress-up or activity days" that feature costumes — but only if "there are not more than five such days in a school year." Exceptions are made for school plays and sports mascots. That's it, though. If a group of second-graders want to play "My Little Pony" during recess, or act out an episode of "Paw Patrol," they'd better do it on one of their allotted five days a year! This is an especially ludicrous example of how anti-trans panic serves as a pretext for stripping away creativity and free expression from virtually everybody, regardless of their gender or sexual identity. 

The post Texas GOP wants to ban kids from playing dress-up: Yes, really appeared first on Salon.com.

But around the same time her benefits decreased, FlexRide started to become harder to access, too, she told Salon in a phone interview. She is concerned that cuts being debated at the federal government could make these services even less accessible.

“It’s very, very difficult to reach anybody,” Annie, who is using her first name only for privacy reasons, said about FlexRide. “The apps aren’t working a lot of the time, so I have to ask my folks to pay for Lyft, which is expensive.”

As the Trump administration continues to make sweeping cuts to federal agencies, people with disabilities are concerned that programs they need to survive will be caught in the crosshairs. Advocates are concerned that terminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives will make “disability” a word like “gender” or “race” that can make grants ineligible for government funding. They also emphasize that closing the Department of Education could remove protections for students with disabilities. Many say dismantling the Administration for Community Living (ACL), which provides support for people with disabilities and aging populations, will make it harder for people to stay in their communities.

Although the administration said cutting ACL would not impact Medicaid, many are concerned that Medicaid cuts being proposed by Congressional Republicans will take away their health care, leaving them unable to pay for expensive services. Annie said she is already stockpiling some of her medications because she is afraid that she won’t be able to afford them if Medicaid is cut. One of her primary medications for Crohn’s costs roughly $4,000, she said.

“A lot of times with disabilities come chronic health issues, and so this can even be a life and death kind of thing,” said Dr. Joseph Stramondo, a philosophy professor at San Diego State University who specializes in bioethics and disabilities. “If we start cutting Medicaid … and defunding all these programs, that is a recipe for disaster when it comes to disabled people being able to access this sort of basic health care.”

Advocacy by people with disabilities is largely responsible for many of the laws designed to increase accessibility and equity that are currently in place. When people gathered across more than 1,400 "Hands Off" protests this weekend to resist some of the changes proposed by the Trump administration, advocates in the disability community who couldn’t attend met online. Then this week, hundreds of disability advocates protested the proposed cuts to Medicaid outside of the Capitol building.

A coalition of disability rights organizations including the American Association of People with Disabilities filed a lawsuit last week against the Social Security Administration, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, which is not a government agency), and other government agencies alleging that these cuts unlawfully harm Americans with disabilities.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes.

“Americans with disabilities deserve a functioning Social Security system, not arbitrary shutdowns and inaccessible service,” said AAPD president and CEO Maria Town in a statement. “We filed this lawsuit because disabled Americans are already suffering — and without urgent court intervention, the harm will only grow.”

Last month, President Donald Trump said the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will handle “special needs” moving forward. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a social media post that the agency is “fully prepared to take on the responsibility of supporting individuals with special needs” and would “make the care of our most vulnerable citizens our highest national priority.”

During his last term, Trump invested millions of dollars in services for people with disabilities and launched a task force focused on creating more employment for people with disabilities. However, sources say this term is different.

According to Trump, the goal of DOGE is to "slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies." Yet disability advocates say some of the decisions made to reduce spending are being made at the expense of some of the country’s most vulnerable.

“It’s about shifting priorities and moving away from social support and things that people need to live their lives toward other priorities,” said Dr. Michael Rembis, a history professor and director of the Center for Disability Studies at the University at Buffalo. “The rhetoric is all in the name of cost-savings and efficiency, but it hasn't really been shown through any studies that I'm aware of that this is a more efficient or cost effective way to manage care.”

Before his last term even began, Trump mocked a reporter with disabilities. In January, he cast blame on people with disabilities employed at the Federal Aviation Administration after a plane crash in Washington D.C. killed 67 people. Kennedy has repeatedly touted misinformation linking autism to vaccines, and many fear his proposed plan to bring back mental health farms would lead many people with disabilities to be reinstitutionalized.

“[Kennedy’s] idea about creating these sort of mental health care farms is really a retrograde idea,” Rembis told Salon in a phone interview. “If we start … removing people from the community and sending them to institutions, that is a real concern for disabled people and for people with mental health conditions.”

It remains unclear how HHS will handle the additional responsibility of providing services for people with disabilities, especially considering the 10,000 jobs that were recently cut.

Since it was created in 1979, the Department of Education has been responsible for making sure states are compliant with educational standards. It also handles civil rights complaints that families with children with disabilities may file against local school districts, said Michael Gilberg, a special education attorney in New York and Connecticut. Abolishing the DOE could remove those federal protections, he said.

“As somebody who grew up with undiagnosed autism, I feel like this is going to hurt a lot of other children who are in the position I was in, who aren't going to get the chance to go to get services and get what they need to graduate,” Gilberg told Salon in a phone interview.

Before the DOE was established, many children with disabilities did not receive an education and were institutionalized and siloed from the community. In 1975, Congress passed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that requires children with disabilities to be given educational opportunities tailored to their needs. The DOE plays a critical role in ensuring IDEA funding for children with disabilities is delivered to schools.

“Part of the reason the DOE was created was to uphold the mainstreaming of disabled kids after the passage of the [IDEA] in 1975,” Rembis said. “If they move all education concerns related to disabled people under HHS, then they're medicalizing kids in school, rather than treating them like other students and that is problematic as well.”

The responsibilities of ACL, the agency that distributes funding to more than 2,500 programs designed to help older Americans and people with disabilities live in the community, will be divvied up between the Administration for Children and Families, the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to HHS.

Jill Jacobs, the executive director of the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities and a Biden-era commissioner of ACL's Administration on Disabilities, said she is concerned that there won’t be enough staff and resources available after the funding cuts to deliver funding to these programs.

These include services like Meals on Wheels, which serves 260 million meals to 2 million people each year. ACL also distributes funding to over 400 Centers for Independent Living across the country that help people with disabilities get jobs through employment training and similar programs. Meals on Wheels fate is still uncertain.

Laws like IDEA that require services to be delivered to people with disabilities have not been changed by these decisions announced by the Trump administration, but the question that remains is: How are those mandatory services going to be delivered without the agencies and staff that have been put in place to handle them?

“What I’m struggling with and what people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families … are struggling with and want to understand is: What is the plan?” Jacobs told Salon in a phone interview. “People with disabilities and their families and the folks that support them need to be a part of that plan because we cannot have people make decisions about the lives of disabled people without consulting them.” 

It is unclear how exactly many of the changes announced by the Trump administration will be implemented. Trump can propose plans to reorganize federal agencies, but changes need to go through Congress. On the other hand, Trump has repeatedly bypassed Congress with little pushback.

In some cases a lawsuit can reach federal court and effectively block President Donald Trump’s orders. However, the Supreme Court can still side with the Republican administration if one of these cases reaches them, which is what happened this week with a case involving the reinstatement of thousands of federal workers who were fired.

Nevertheless, people with disabilities say the actions that have been taken, including the massive staff layoffs in federal offices, are already impacting them. Daniel Davis, a policy analyst at ACL, was terminated from his position this week after working there for 15 years, he said.

Although he is concerned about losing his health insurance with his employment, as Davis has disabilities that require medical treatment, he said he is more concerned that the restructuring of the ACL will disrupt services for the Americans with disabilities and older adults that it serves.

"It feels like we're just not a priority," Davis told Salon in a phone interview. "Like they didn't even bother to come up with a reason for pushing us aside."

Annie can feel a flare-up coming on and has some new neurological symptoms she is getting checked out this week. The last thing she needs is more stress on her system, yet she doesn’t have the luxury of tuning out the news when programs she needs to live are on the chopping block.

“How do you balance staying informed and not eating away at your own mental health?” she said. “I get told by my doctors that I have to manage my stress levels if I want to prevent a flare-up, so things are already super stressful and they’re just pouring gasoline on it.”

Yet she emphasized that she felt privileged compared to many other people with disabilities who do not have family there to help them care for themselves and navigate these administrative changes.

“I know that it is a million times worse for a lot of other people, and I think about that every day to put things in perspective,” she said. “It’s crazy to think that somebody in my situation is sleeping out on the street. That’s not okay.”

The post As DOGE slashes services, disability advocates fight to maintain government lifelines appeared first on Salon.com.

Kelly Berg, an educator at Dobson High School and local union leader who’s spent nearly 30 years teaching in the state, told Salon that cuts like these will have dire consequences for public schools.

“Just slightly over half [of the 42 Mesa Public Schools employees] were counselors. So that's a big impact. We no longer are going to have full-time counselors in our elementary schools,”  Berg told Salon. “Having that extra layer of support for when a student needs some extra support is going to be detrimental because now that's gonna fall on the teachers.”

Berg, who is also concerned about losing federal funding as the Trump administration dismantles the Department of Education, says the impacts on students and faculty will be sweeping.

“It might be that we have fewer instructional assistants for those [special education] classrooms… [or] instead of having a dedicated instructional assistant for the classroom, they now have to share that person,” Berg said. “So it's gonna impact student behavior and the workload for the teacher. The students might not get one-on-one assistance like they used to get if we have to spread ourselves thinner and thinner.”

Programs like Arizona’s allow parents to claim more than $7,000 in vouchers for educational expenses – like private school tuition, homeschooling costs, even a piano or ski resort visit – if their kids exit the public school system. The purported goal is to give parents more flexibility over their students’ education and enable working-class families to attend non-public schools.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January prioritizing federal government support for “educational choice” initiatives in the states, many of which have taken action to create voucher programs since.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy manifesto for the second Trump term, called for the Trump administration to follow in the footsteps of Arizona’s education voucher program and pave a path for universal school choice, a policy the document calls “a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue.”

But educators, advocates and officials in Arizona say the White House and other state governments should heed their warnings on the massive costs to taxpayers, students and public school employees that voucher programs can have.

Marisol Garcia, the president of the Arizona Education Association, the state’s labor union for public school teachers, told Salon in an interview that the state had become known as the “chemistry lab of terrible ideas.” 

“We hit a head last year when we got to spending almost $700 million out of the general fund to the universal voucher system,” she said. “That's money that could be going to not just education – because our general fund provides for education – but healthcare, transportation, housing, a lot of the money that goes to state-funded wildfire protection. The impact is now broader than just education and students, and it keeps getting bigger.”

In addition to the $900 million that the state paid out to support the voucher program in 2024, far surpassing the $64 million estimate from the state’s budget committee, Economic Policy Institute economist Hilary Wething told Salon there was another indirect cost plaguing public school students.

“It's the cost to public schools from students who were previously attending public school and then take up the voucher and leave and go to private school,” Wething said. “The cost of providing that same level of education to the remaining students in public school is this second indirect cost of vouchers.”

Certain school expenses – physical real estate, equipment, desks, even some staff – are difficult or impossible to scale back on a year-to-year basis, so planning ahead requires accurate headcounts of students for years into the future. However, voucher programs have made estimating enrollment more difficult.

“What we have continued to find is that a lot of students who do go to a charter school using the voucher monies may or may not find what they're looking for and then they'll return to the public schools,” Berg told Salon, adding that students in need of special resources are especially likely to make the switch back into public schools. “When there's a constant ebb and flow of students and parents moving in and out of the public school systems, it's incredibly challenging to come up with a budget.”

Wething agrees, adding that schools “can't effectively educate children if they can't plan.” 

“In the long run, all of these costs are variable, right? In the long run, you can actually close a building down,” she told Salon. The problems really stem from the short-run unpredictability of enrollment due to voucher programs.”

This uncertainty means that per-student variable expenses are often the first to get cut. For public school students, that means less equipment, fewer books and even larger class sizes as more districts are forced to make cuts to educator and support staffing and keep teacher pay stagnant.

“We're having to do more with the same amount of pay… if a position goes unfilled, someone has to pick up the work from that position,” Berg told Salon. 

“It’s not good for morale. It never is. As long as I’ve been teaching in Arizona – and next year, I’ll reach my 30th year of teaching in Arizona. – we have always been underpaid compared to the rest of the nation,” Berg said. “It's a labor of love that we do what we do, we would just like to be paid what we're worth.”

And while cuts could mean bigger class sizes, experts also worry the impacts are disproportionately harmful to lower-income Arizonans.

Studies conducted since the program went universal suggest that the vast majority of voucher beneficiaries are those who could already afford a private education. A Brookings Institute analysis last year found that those in the state’s highest-income ZIP codes were the most frequent voucher users, while the lowest-income areas were approximately a fourth as likely to make use of the program. 

With COVID-era federal funds drying up and a 2016 voter-approved funding measure expiring this summer, the state's public schools face an impending crisis, despite already ranking near last place in per-pupil spending.

“Public schools should be public for every single student,” Garcia told Salon. “Over 70% of the students that are utilizing the ESA voucher programs never attended a public school… We are now essentially giving these families a $7,000 almost tax break for sending their child to this private school.”

And while just about one-third of the recipients of vouchers are leaving public schools, reducing headcounts by a small margin, the funds exiting the public system can have a dramatic effect on education quality. 

“If I had a class size of 32, and it goes down to 29, I still have 29 kids in my classroom, so I still have to provide everything for those kids,” Garcia explained. “If you're not investing in salaries, investing in upkeep, investing in resources, the strain on the workforce, the strain on the district becomes untenable.”

While wealthier families can choose to opt out of a public school system with rapidly dwindling funding, not all students in the state can. Wething told Salon that “school choice” is a “false dichotomy” for many students in low-income neighborhoods or rural areas, who don’t have access to charter or private school options anyway.

“Public school students who are not enrolling in voucher programs, they are bearing the brunt of the cost in terms of, one, fewer dollars to spend on their educational needs,” Wething said. “Many students, particularly students in rural areas, public schools are the only option. So when a state invokes these voucher programs, they're getting stuck in terms of risking having fewer costs, fewer resources coming to their districts for a choice that doesn't exist for them.”

As for the private schools that students are moving to, advocates say they’re a black box. 

“Private schools have very little accountability, standards or transparency in how they provide education, who they provide education for, and what that looks like,” Wething told Salon. That lack of transparency doesn’t just hurt students, it makes long-term planning more difficult for public schools, too, she added. 

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Families receiving vouchers frequently jump back into the public school system, either because of disappointment with instruction quality or unexpected disruptions to their students’ enrollment. Wething says non-public schools in the state have “very low accountability and transparency on how they select students, how they keep students and how they retain students.”

Berg, too, worries that students outside of public schools are working with unvetted and unevaluated educators.

"A lot of charter schools and private schools that can now use the voucher money aren't held to the same standards that public schools are held to in terms of funding in terms of state testing that they have to take, so it's just not equitable," she said.

And there aren’t many guidelines for who can take state dollars and work with kids outside the public school system, either.

“There is a huge concern for the safety of these students. There is no mandatory reporting [for private entities],” Garcia said, warning that there aren’t any safety measures for voucher students. “Anyone who is around children under 18 and any sort of educational capacity, so receiving an ESA voucher, even a karate class, a bouncy house or Catholic church, they should all be fingerprinted. That's not happening.”

Garcia added that Governor Katie Hobbs’ proposals to add fingerprint requirements and tighten the rules on what expenses funds could be put towards in the last budget session went nowhere in the GOP-controlled legislature.

With momentum building in state legislatures across the country to implement their own voucher programs and an ongoing dismantling of the Department of Education, Garcia’s advice to Americans is to keep schools public.

“At least once a week I'm on the phone with leaders, public school champions throughout the country on why not to be Arizona,” Garcia told Salon. “This is a privatization scam. The intent of this is to help privatize public education.”

The post Arizona’s “privatization scam” is starving public schools. Trump wants to take it national appeared first on Salon.com.

No, this is not a threat from President Donald Trump in 2025.

It is an excerpt from an August 1967 letter from Ronald Reagan, who had been elected the governor of California six months prior, to Glenn Dumke, the chancellor of the California State University system.

Trump's ongoing attacks on higher education echo the right-wing playbook that Reagan created nearly six decades ago. In a 2024 campaign video, Trump declared that "We are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our institutions once and for all. We are going to have real education in America." The goal, he said, would be to take back "our once-great educational institutions from the radical left."

In recent weeks, Trump has threatened to withhold $9 billion in federal money from Harvard and another $575 million from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Both Reagan and Trump knew they were tapping into popular discontent with elite universities. For Reagan, it was the mass protests and arrests resulting from the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. For Trump, the source of public anger came from the pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments held at dozens of universities in early 2024.

A dissatisfied American public

Trump, like Reagan, sees political dividends in his attacks. In 2012, 26% of Americans said in a survey by the Pew Research Center that colleges had a negative effect on the way things were going in the country. Last year, Pew revealed those negative views had climbed to 45%.

In 1966, Reagan won an upset election against incumbent Gov. Pat Brown by vowing to "clean up the mess at Berkeley." Once in office, he acted on his verbal threats by firing Clark Kerr, the president of the multi-campus University of California system. Kerr was widely admired in academic circles, but to Reagan, he was "soft" and had "appeased" campus protesters. The next year, when the Black Students Union lead a campus-wide strike that shut down San Francisco State College, Reagan called for police intervention and said the campus should be kept open "at the point of a bayonet if necessary."

In February 1970, five days of noisy anti-war protests erupted when local police arrested a student carrying a wine bottle. A full-scale riot ensued, with buildings and police cars set on fire. The police confronted the rioters with guns and shot and killed a university student (ironically, not one of the protesters). Reagan later defended the police response, saying anti-war campus protests had to be stopped. "If it takes a bloodbath, let's get it over with," he said. "No more appeasement."

Steve Brint, a historian at the University of California, Riverside, observed that by repeatedly cracking down on university protests, "Reagan created a blueprint for the long-term success of the Republican Party as the voice of conservative 'middle America' and 'the silent majority.'"

While Reagan was the first Republican candidate to score a major political win by assailing higher education, the party's animosity to the liberal atmosphere on many college campuses can be traced back to the 1951 publication of William F. Buckley's "God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom."

Caste rule at Yale

Buckley, a devout Catholic from a wealthy Connecticut family, graduated from Yale in 1950. Buckley's book became a surprise best-seller. He would go on to publish the National Review and host the PBS interview program, "Firing Line."

In an introduction to the book, John Chamberlain, a conservative editorial writer for Life magazine, endorsed Buckley's accusation that Yale had set-up "an elite of professional untouchables . . . The elite would perpetuate itself as it chose. Departments would select their staffs without reference to alumni or parental or undergraduate opinion . . . This is caste rule as applied to education, it might be unkind to call it 'Fascism,' but it certainly is not democracy."

Chamberlain said he endorsed Buckley's criticism that Yale faculty was "skeptical of any religion and interventionist and Keynesian as to economics and collectivist as applied to the relation of the individual and government."

While many conservative Republicans agreed with this condemnation, they found little traction with the public in the 1950s. Universities were filled with veterans on the G.I. Bill. President Eisenhower, who had briefly served as the president of Columbia University before the election, believed American colleges were important to a rising middle class and endorsed generous funding for them.

While running for president in 1980, Reagan vowed to eliminate the Department of Education, decades before Trump. Reagan could not get a Democratic-led Congress to accept that pitch. During his two terms, however, he cut the federal budget for education, both primary and higher, by 25%. He ended a number of federal grants for college students and pushed for private loans.

Since then, every Republican presidential candidate has vowed to reform higher education, with numerous attacking "Marxist" or "radical left" university faculty.

So far, the Trump administration has not deployed law enforcement to tamp down on student protests, but it has detained nearly a dozen students and faculty members on college campuses, individuals with student or work visas, who are alleged to have participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

The State Department has revoked at least 300 student visas, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. "It might be more than 300 at this point. We do it every day," he said at a recent press conference in Guyana. "Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas."

Universities on the defense

Trump's attacks on "radical left" universities have taken a toll on their leadership. Since the spring 2024 pro-Palestinian protests, six college presidents have resigned, including two at Columbia.

Universities are not without resources, however, and many have begun to fight back. University leaders have started meeting directly with members of Congress, as well as hiring lobbyists. Some 50 institutions, including Harvard, Columbia, Yale and Stanford, have hired lobbying firms since the election.

A February poll of some 100 college and university presidents by the Yale School of Management found that 100% of respondents agreed that their schools needed "to do a much better job of conveying their value proposition."

Perhaps they will invoke the advice of one founding father, Benjamin Franklin, who wrote that "An investment in knowledge pays the best interest."

The post The right’s 60-year war on higher education appeared first on Salon.com.

By the very nature of how power is concentrated around the Leader and their inner circle, autocracies and authoritarian regimes are almost always kleptocracies and plutocracies. Here, corrupt political power is a means to amass even more corrupt financial and economic power. The United States in the Age of Trump is closely following this model as well. The plutocrats and kleptocrats will also need compliant subjects who see themselves first as consumers and workers — most of whom will be stuck in a state of perpetual survival mode and economic precarity as they try to endure cannibal capitalism — and not primarily as citizens and responsible members of a humane society with any obligation or responsibility to other human beings beyond their immediate family and “community.”

In total, the new MAGA America that the Trump administration and its forces are trying to impose on the American people will need “citizens” who lack the ability to imagine other possibilities and a better and more just society and fulfilled life, cannot tell the difference between fact and fiction, truth and lies or good and evil. Control over America’s educational system and schools is essential for creating compliant subjects who will internalize and normalize these autocratic and authoritarian (and outright fascist) values, beliefs, and ways of living and thinking. Control over the country’s schools and education system will also mean denying young people and the larger public the means to understand and contextualize the present by distorting the past.

In an attempt to better understand how America’s educational system is under siege in the Age of Trump and how the lessons of the long Black Freedom Struggle can be applied today in the struggle to defend American democracy and freedom, I recently spoke with Derek W. Black. He is the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina and one of the country’s leading experts in education, law and public policy. Derek Black’s essays and other writing have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, The Atlantic and elsewhere. His research has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review and dozens of others. His new book is “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.”

This is the second part of a two-part conversation. 

The Trump administration is trying to destroy the Department of Education. Why does the right-wing hate the Department of Education so much?

Most people think of the Department of Education and the federal role in education as an invention of 1979. The truth is that the federal government has been instrumental in getting public education off the ground since the nation’s founding. Before we even had a Constitution, Congress was putting structures in place to ensure that all new territories and states provided public education. Congress redoubled that effort following the Civil War, requiring the states to guarantee public education in their state constitutions and establish the first Department of Education. Those post-war efforts brought public education to a region that previously had very little. White illiteracy rates, for instance, were four times higher in the South than in the North. Jim Crow and objections to federal overreach, of course, cut that legacy short.

Modern objections are not too far detached from that legacy. It was the Department of Justice and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that forced southern schools to desegregate. That office would later move to the Department of Education. It has been instrumental in ensuring equal opportunity based on race, sex, disability, language status, and other categories. And the general Department of Education’s testing and accountability standards are likewise focused on closing achievement gaps for those students. In short, the Department has always stood for expanding opportunity and closing equity gaps.

It, however, has never stood for curriculum, never dictated what is on the tests, how the teachers are trained or any of that stuff. Those things have always remained with the states. In fact, federal law specifically prohibits the department from dictating curriculum to states. So, when the current administration talks about returning education decision-making to states, you have to ask what exactly is being returned to states, because as we currently stand, anti-discrimination is the only real area where the federal government plays a huge decision-making role.

This past week the administration sadly made good on its promises, firing half of the Department of Education’s staff. OCR was actually among the hardest hit at the Department, seeing over half of its regional offices closed. Those offices were already overworked and begging for more staff for the last decade. With these new losses, families hoping to secure equal access for their children in school may find that when they reach out to the federal government there is simply no one on the other end to help them anymore.

The move to give public money to private charter schools — and in particular Christian schools is central to the right wing’s decades-long war on America’s public schools. What does the empirical research tell us about the comparative outcomes of charter schools versus public schools?

There is a lot of misguided, fanciful thinking around these topics. When you compare apples to apples, public schools, on average, have long outperformed charter schools. The difference between private and public schools is only marginal, with public schools just slightly outperforming private schools. People don’t understand this because all they see is that the average SAT at a private school may be higher than the average SAT at the local public school. This doesn’t tell you much, however, because the “average” student doesn’t attend private school. You have to look at whether the child from a high-income family, both of whose parents have advanced degrees, is performing better at the private school than the public school. The truth is that that student does very well in either school, so the private school is not actually improving education for that student.

The reason why some private schools have higher average scores isn’t because they are teaching something special but because they don’t have any or many low-income students. And even if there was something special about those schools, they do not actually want to enroll more low-income or harder-to-teach students. Vouchers are not going to open those schools up to a new set of students.

If you understand this, you understand that private school vouchers are really about breaking up public schools, giving rebates to private school families who don’t need them, and further facilitating the fracturing of public schools that serve everyone into demographic private silos. Vouchers came into existence in the 1960s as a way to avoid racial desegregation.

Poor and working-class Black and brown parents whose children attend “failing urban schools” have been made the spokespeople and symbols of the school privatization and school charter movement. The school privatization industry and its public relations and marketing people are very skilled. What would you tell those parents who just want the best for their kids?

I have always said that I am in no position to tell Black and brown parents what to do. Many live in communities that have never for one moment in this nation’s history fully met the needs of students of color. I get it when those families say they feel compelled to try something new, that they are tired of waiting. I can’t second-guess that. However, with that said, I am confident that we as a society will not find our educational promised land anywhere but in our public schools. And if we give up on public schools, that land will only become more and more distant. I think the onus, however, cannot fall just on students of color to get us there. White families have to see our common interests with families of color and their children and step up — in a hurry.

Even in the 21st century, the pernicious lie that Black Americans do not value education still persists. What are some of the broad strokes of this lie and myth?

It was illegal for Black enslaved people to learn to read. As a practical matter, it was official state policy for Black people to remain an illiterate population through the end of Jim Crow (and beyond). Black people resisted this at every turn.

As I detail in my new book, the Black struggle for literacy is the closest thing we have to a holy testament to the connection between literacy and our humanity. People were willing to risk their lives to learn to read and write long before they ever thought about voting, and they protected literacy over the course of decades, passing it on in the dark of the night to their children and friends. That passion then fueled the fire of public education after slavery. As Du Bois wrote, public education in the South was a Black idea.

I think David Walker’s words are as true today as they were in 1829. He saw Black people and democracy itself laboring under the burden of oppression, delusion and ignorance. He called on Black people to rise up and seize their freedom. At the time, the ultimate goal was physical freedom. But he was very clear that the first step to physical freedom was mental freedom and that would be had through education. Those words still ring true today. He also called on America to live up to its highest ideals, which required a hard look in the mirror and an unvarnished appreciation of facts.

To borrow from Faulkner, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." That certainly resonates today as we are seeing the decades of hard-won progress along the color line being literally whitewashed and erased by the Trump administration, the MAGA movement and the larger White Right. They are attempting to push American society back to the Gilded Age if not before with all of the horrors that will be bring, not just for Black and brown people but for anyone who is not a rich white heterosexual man.

I think that we have gotten to this moment of imperiled democracy not because the forces of regression are so much stronger than those of the past. I would posit that they may very well be weaker. We have gotten to this point because our society recently pushed for more justice, particularly in our schools, and that push summoned our demons and now they are lashing out more violently. Yet, I do believe our democracy is more imperiled than in the past because we fail to take the moment seriously and those sleepwalking alongside the assault on democracy think our institutions are immune to collapse.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Many of our elected officials and leaders see the current moment as simply a policy dispute over vouchers, charters, or curricular topics. They do not appreciate how these issues are tied to a long war on equality and opportunity in education, nor do they appreciate how our public schools have always been tied to the health of our democracy. As a result, they are willing to tinker with a sacred public institution, not realizing that if they break the one institution that pulls us together, we may never pull ourselves together again — or as I often say, if public schools become the place where only low-income students go, the public education project as we know it is over and it is hard to imagine it coming back. And if you think our democracy is struggling now, imagine a day when our schools are segregated by race, religion, wealth, and political party. I don’t know how we move forward as a people at that point.

In doing the research for “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy”, what surprised you the most about the role of education as resistance in the long Black Freedom Struggle?

This book is first and foremost in honor of the Black heroes who used literacy to propel freedom. The secret schools that managed to operate under white people’s noses for decades impressed and inspired me the most. But maybe I was most surprised by the diversity of thought in the South in the early 1800s. I had always assumed that the South was of one simple mind on questions of slavery. I found that there were more than just a few enslavers who questioned the system. There were more than just a couple of religious leaders who resisted the status quo. I am not suggesting that those folks would have ever turned the South in a different direction, but I do know that when the South silenced those folks in the 30s and 40s, the South radicalized and became unsafe for anyone who did not espouse the new party line. In the 1820s, for instance, the North Carolina Manumission Society had 1,600 members.

Eight years later, only twelve people attended the annual meeting, the last it would ever hold. In 1831-32, the Virginia General Assembly debated the abolition of slavery for several weeks. A year later it had ended that debate and turned toward a more repressive agenda. No serious talk of abolition would ever be uttered in polite company again.

What will America’s schools, including colleges and universities, look like if the Trump administration and larger right-wing’s “reforms” as detailed in Project 2025, Agenda 47, and elsewhere are put in place?

They clearly want to dramatically expand private school choice and end what they call the “public school monopoly.” The result will be the end of public education as we know it. Kids will sort into socioeconomic, religious, racial, and other enclaves. And if our public schools become the place where only low-income students attend school, the public education project is over. We tried a system like that in the 1800s. It never worked and we abandoned it for common schools that would serve everyone. That is the backbone upon which we moved to a more perfect union.

At the higher education level, they are also going directly after universities and colleges that remain committed to diverse and inclusive environments. I believe that some of our higher education leaders are going to stand their ground and ultimately prevail in court. But in the meantime, I fear that a lot of others are going to be afraid and the composition of our college campuses and the instruction they offer may dramatically change.

What role does America’s schools and educational system play in what will be a very long struggle in defense of and to rehabilitate and renew America’s democracy in the aftermath of the Trump years (and the years and decades prior that spawned the disaster)?

The expansion of public education and access to the ballot box have walked hand in hand across the long arc of American history. Each time one expanded, so did the other. At the same time, attempts to restrict democracy have run through the ballot box and education. I think this is, again, what people miss. I am hoping that relatively few Americans think it is a good idea to deny people the right to vote or to intentionally make it hard for particular people to vote. That same group should be equally concerned about policies that will shrink the one institution perpetually committed to the expansion of educational opportunity and equality — and that is our public schools.

There are many models of schooling and education that exist outside of the formal public school system. Black and brown and other marginalized communities have created these parallel institutions for centuries. How can those models and lessons be applied today?

I think we should look back at our secret schools and freedmen schools for inspiration. Those communities did not allow larger circumstances to define the stories they would tell or the opportunities they would share. So now may very well be the time for our religious and other communities of good faith to start freedom schools, or whatever they want to call them, to keep the flames of freedom and truth alive and well. I know some communities in Florida did exactly that in the aftermath of the first anti-CRT bills.

Your new book will likely be banned by Trump’s administration per its thoughtcrime regime. How does that feel?

I honestly had never considered that until you and a few others mentioned it. I tried to tell as honest and complete a story as I could. While the introduction and conclusion involve some editorializing, the 15 internal chapters of the book are straight historical facts that leave the readers to draw whatever conclusions they like. If we start banning historical facts, I don’t know what is left of American freedom. I suppose that would put us back to something close to the censorship of the 19th century that I write about in the book.

Where do we go from here? 

I will just say that we have seen worse than this. When I say I believe we can get past this moment, it is not just wishful thinking. But those before us came at the challenge with a level of determination. They didn’t overcome it by sitting on the sideline. Those of us who believe in public education must be active and in the game. I will leave the plays we call for another day.

The post How our public schools are tied to the health of our democracy appeared first on Salon.com.

The pending order directs Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, a former WWE executive, to take "all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States," while also ensuring "uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely," according to a White House summary of the order. 

"President Trump's executive order to expand educational opportunities will empower parents, states, and communities to take control and improve outcomes for all students," White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement Wednesday. 

The order's signing will be marked by a ceremony in the White House's East Room, which will be attended by several Republican governors, including Ron DeSantis of Florida, Glenn Youngkin of Virginia, Greg Abbott of Texas, Kim Reynolds of Iowa and Mike DeWine of Ohio. Republican lawmakers and leaders from groups like the Heritage Foundation and Moms for Liberty, a group seeking to remake schools in a reactionary image, will also be present to celebrate the death of a department that has long been a target of conservative activists.

Hours after McMahon was confirmed as education secretary, she issued a memo with the subject line: "Our Department's Final Mission." The memo said that "this is our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service to future generations of students," which would supposedly leave "American education freer, stronger, and with more hope for the future."

Trump administration officials have said that student loans, Title I, which provides funding for low-income families, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act will not be affected. It's unclear, however, to which federal department these programs will be outsourced and how effective they will be in helping high-need students if the Department of Education no longer exists.

The post Trump to sign executive order that purports to dismantle the Department of Education appeared first on Salon.com.

Following the authoritarian model(s) of Viktor Orban’s Hungary and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Trump and his allies and enablers are attempting to take control of the country's political, social, economic, religious, cultural and scientific reas of public life, government and society. The White Christian nationalists have parallel and intersecting goals which are described as the “Seven Mountains Mandate.” Given their shared authoritarian values, public opinion polls have repeatedly shown that White Christian nationalists are consistently among Donald Trump’s most loyal and enthusiastic supporters.

The campaign to end America’s multiracial pluralistic democracy and to replace it with a form of competitive authoritarianism (or something much worse) will require training and conditioning the thinking, emotions and other behavior of the American people. Through this process, the distinction between private and public will be increasingly erased; MAGA and American neofascism are “whole life systems.” These changes will happen both quickly and over time.

America’s educational system is a central target in this revolutionary antidemocratic project. If Trumpism and the larger neofascist project, as detailed in Project 2025 and Agenda 47 and elsewhere, can turn America’s educational system into a machine for right-wing authoritarian political indoctrination (under the guise of “patriotic education” and “free market values”) then such forces will literally have won the future by influencing the young people of today.

On this, the New York Times Editorial Board warns:

When a political leader wants to move a democracy toward a more authoritarian form of government, he often sets out to undermine independent sources of information and accountability. The leader tries to delegitimize judges, sideline autonomous government agencies and muzzle the media. President Vladimir Putin of Russia has done so over the past quarter-century. To lesser degrees, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey recently have as well.

The weakening of higher education tends to be an important part of this strategy. Academic researchers are supposed to pursue the truth, and budding autocrats recognize that empirical truth can present a threat to their authority. “Wars are won by teachers,” Mr. Putin has said. He and Mr. Erdogan have closed universities. Mr. Modi’s government has arrested dissident scholars, and Mr. Orban has appointed loyal foundations to run universities.

President Trump has not yet gone as far to impede democracy as these other leaders, but it would be naïve to ignore his early moves to mimic their approach. …

Mr. Trump’s multifaceted campaign against higher education is core to this effort to weaken institutions that do not parrot his version of reality.

In an attempt to better understand how America’s educational system is under siege in the Age of Trump, the role of the country’s schools and educational system in the democracy crisis and the historical continuities from the White racial authoritarian regime of Jim Crow (and chattel slavery) against Black Americans to Trumpism, I recently spoke with Derek W. Black. He is the Ernest F. Hollings Chair in Constitutional Law at the University of South Carolina and one of the country’s leading experts in education, law and public policy. Derek Black’s essays and other writing have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, The Atlantic and elsewhere. His research has been published in the Yale Law Journal, Stanford Law Review, NYU Law Review, California Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review and the Vanderbilt Law Review. His new book is “Dangerous Learning: The South’s Long War on Black Literacy.”

This is the first part of a two-part conversation. 

How are you feeling, given the rapid decline of America’s democracy with Trump’s return to power? How are you managing on a day-to-day basis?

My default predisposition is to find silver linings, not overreact and stay calm while others are screaming. I don’t recall ever struggling with that default in the past, but in the last several weeks there have been days when deep feelings of dread set in because I was seeing things I never thought I would live to see and I could not explain them away. Given time, however, I can usually find my way back. 

The classroom and educational system are inherently political spaces. Authoritarians and autocrats know this, which is why they target schools and colleges and universities — and educational systems more broadly. 

I think this is the space where a lot of our leaders and regular voters are sleepwalking. A pillar of our democracy, our schools, is being targeted in a way that seeds and reinforces autocratic populism, but many people have convinced themselves that this detonation at the highest level is just normal politics. All the while, the common ground that public education has represented throughout this nation’s history is eroding underneath our feet.

Anxiety levels are very high right now, higher than they were during Trump’s first administration. It is the first and last thing on people’s minds when they meet. In public spaces, they find it hard to have a serious conversation — probably for fear of losing decorum. Even in private spaces, people have to manage and tamp down the emotions they are experiencing lest it overwhelm their entire life. People still have to put their kids to bed, make lunches, get ready for work and pay the bills.

The personal is the political. Power acts on people. I have several friends who work in higher education who tell me how these attacks by the Trump administration and their forces have driven them to quit. Others have shared how their emotional health is suffering, and it is very difficult for them to do their jobs. Students are suffering great anxiety and uncertainty too. This trauma is by design. How will the Trump years impact our schools and educators (and this generation of students) in the long term?

I can’t predict the future, but what I can tell you is that we are losing some of our best and brightest, and I don’t expect they will come back any time soon. So, the net result is that we are running off a critical mass of generational talent right now. That’s a gap I don’t see us filling. It’s the same thing at the U.S. Department of Education. We have people with decades of experience who are being run out the door. Many of these people are irreplaceable. No future election is going to fix the problem.

What would a system of high-quality education that teaches the meaning of good citizenship in a democracy look like?

Over the last two decades, our infatuation with test scores and standardized curricula has squeezed out civics and the democratic function of schools. People began to take note of the problem around 2016. Even a bipartisan group of US senators started pushing a civics bill. Unfortunately, you can’t just plug civics and democracy into a system based on standardization and expect meaningful results. Sure, we might have more young people able to pass the equivalent of the citizenship test, but does that mean they are prepared to engage with the real problems our democracy faces? I don’t think so. We need to create the time and space in schools for young people to learn to wrestle with hard issues, to debate one another, to learn how to be wrong and change their minds and to come to appreciate those values that have held this democracy together for two and a half centuries.

How and why did civics and social studies education atrophy in America’s schools?

Starting with the No Child Left Behind Act and then the Every Student Succeeds Act, we have mandated annual testing in reading and math. Science gets tested once in elementary, once in middle and once in high school. Those are the tests we hold schools accountable for, so states and schools understandably have ramped up the amount of time and credits devoted to those subjects. Those increases often came at the expense of social studies. Only 10% of instruction time goes to social studies in elementary school. Things are better in higher grades, but still too low. To be clear, this is not just the fault of lawmakers. I saw the Great Recession really change parents’ and young people’s outlook on their education; jobs were tough to land, so they only wanted to take courses with a clear runway into professional jobs. So again, your liberal arts and “perspective” type courses took an enormous hit.

America’s literacy crisis cannot be reasonably separated from America’s democracy crisis. Most Americans read below a 6th-grade level. Authoritarians and other such malign actors take advantage of desperate people who want simple solutions to complex problems.

I have been shouting about this for well over a decade and did a TEDx talk on it in 2018. People’s ability to participate in the political process and hold elected officials accountable is almost entirely dependent on literacy. But basic literacy is not enough. People actually need critical literacy — and critical media literacy. It is not enough to simply be able to decode words at a high school or college level. People have to also be able to evaluate those words, spotting the half-truths, hyperbole, ambiguities, inaccuracies, and values behind those words — and those skills go back to social studies. I actually think that critical media studies may be one of the most important things schools can teach, and of course, basic literacy and foundational knowledge are prerequisites to that type of learning.

But critical literacy needs basic information too. A mere ten percent of instructional time in elementary school goes to social studies — about the same as art and music. Unsurprisingly, national tests show that only one in five students are reaching “proficiency” in civics. Only two percent are “advanced.” Adults’ civic knowledge is no better. Less than half of adults can name all three branches of government. Only a third can pass the U.S. Citizenship test. Similarly, small percentages can “identify the Constitution as the supreme law of the land,” the length of a U.S. Senator’s term in office, or the “number of justices on the Supreme Court.”

In his 2019 annual report, Chief Justice John Roberts offered a sobering account: “We have come to take democracy for granted.” He explained that our democracy is not self-perpetuating but is a “continuing enterprise and conversation” that depends on civic education. The current “generation has an obligation to pass on to the next, not only a fully functioning government responsive to the needs of the people, but the tools to understand and improve it.” Unfortunately, the powers that be are not listening. They are attacking and undermining our education system, making the collapse of democracy all the more likely.

We are literally in a place where people struggle to sort fact from fiction, legal from illegal, democratic from authoritarian. As a result, a president can unilaterally seize control of nearly the entire federal budget, and make arbitrary decisions about what should or should not be funded, and a large chunk of the American public thinks that is good policy. They don't understand that every single dollar that is being spent has been signed off on by a majority in both houses of Congress and the president. At that point, it became law. If there was some defect in that law, it would have been the role of the judiciary to strike it down. But no one claimed that. To allow the president to wake up one morning and override those duly enacted laws turns the balance of power upon which our democracy rests upside down.

How are America’s schools a battlefield and a target for Trump and the MAGA movement's and the larger right-wing's attempts to end multiracial democracy?

I think there are a few different things going on. First, the path to power often lies in eroding trust in institutions. Schools used to be out of bounds. When Congress and the Obama administration could not agree on the time of day, well over 80% of Congress came together to pass the Every Student Succeeds Act. The same was true of the No Child Left Behind Act. Those laws had plenty of flaws, but they were never partisan affairs. The same things have long happened at the state level. Mike Huckabee, for goodness sake, was the governor who signed off on hundreds of millions of dollars of new annual funding to help equalize funding in Arkansas.

Those things feel like distant memories now. As the most important institution to most families, ideologues now believe that if they erode faith in schools, they can motivate people in ways that had not been possible before. The anti-CRT (critical race theory) movement got supercharged when the Republican National Committee (RNC) decided to use it to drive turnout during the Biden congressional midterms. The irony is that Congress has no control over any of the things that the RNC was complaining about. That manufactured crisis definitely drove people to the polls, but it took a corrosive toll on our schools.

The second thing to understand is that the privatization movement has been trying to break up public education for three decades and has almost nothing to show for it. The bipartisan commitment to public education had effectively immunized it. But after Jan. 6, 2021, the attack shifted. It was no longer just about whether it made sense to spend public dollars on private education. Vouchers got tied up in the culture war and became a litmus test for which side of the culture war a legislator stands on. Republicans who oppose vouchers, and there are a lot of rural Republicans who oppose them, are being driven out of the party.

COVID also helped rest these dynamics. It understandably created a lot of anxiety and frustration. In that context, politicians played with people’s emotions on issues of race and gender to put the attack on public schools over the top. I think there was just a lot of opportunism and exploitation, where people know that what they are saying isn’t true but they wield the language anyway. Very few teachers had even heard of critical race theory, yet they were accused of teaching it. And most of the books being banned had been in schools for decades. A lot of those books were ones that parents grew up on — books written before a single law professor even imagined the term critical race theory.

What do we see and understand more clearly when today’s attempts by the Trump administration and larger White right to control American education are put in a larger historical context?

My new book "Dangerous Learning" paints a straight throughline from the criminalization of Black literacy in the 1820s and 30s to Jim Crow to the backlash against civil rights in the 1970s to the anti-CRT craze of the 2020s. Of course, each of those moments is different, and today’s censorship is nowhere near as violent or twisted as yesterday’s, but some version of yesterday’s demons still haunt us.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Literacy and public education have served as freedom’s line for Black people in America for 200 years. They have been fighting for it — while others fight against it — for far too long. That much ought to be relatively clear. I think what is less obvious to many is how deeply and easily reactionary paranoia seems to grip the country and the damage it can do along the way.

Most people don't know it, but schools for Black people — free and enslaved — operated out in the open in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It wasn't until the 1820s and 1830s when men like Denmark Vesey, David Walker, and Nat Turner demonstrated the full power of literacy that things changed. Vesey, for instance, was born into slavery, but literally won the lottery in 1799 and used the proceeds to purchase his freedom. He spent the next two decades honing his literacy. He interpreted the Bible for himself and shared it with his community, followed congressional debates on slavery, drew on the morals in classic literature and invoked American ideas of liberty embedded in texts like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He leveraged that literacy to inspire what local authorities believed were thousands of Black people to prepare for revolt in 1822. Only a last-minute leak of information thwarted him. At his trial, the role that literacy had played in his life and leadership became clear. That's when the Southern response to Black literacy shifted. After David Walker and Nat Turner took that power of literacy to yet another level, the entire region began criminalizing Black literacy.

The South, however, didn't just limit Black freedom. It also began censorship of what white people could read, breaking into post offices, looting newspapers and burning them in the town square. Vigilance committees formed across the entire South to ensure that nothing seditious was circulating. State legislatures literally criminalized the possession of things like David Walker's "Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World."

They were so paranoid that they began reviewing textbooks for northern bias. Just as today's educators don't have to teach critical race theory to be fired or see their books ripped from the classroom, yesterday's schools didn't have to teach anti-slavery. The South was so paranoid that it went after geography books that supposedly devoted disproportionate attention to northern crops.

Eventually, silence and censorship were not even enough. The South began to fill the void with propaganda, insisting they needed southern authors to write southern books for southern readers from a southern perspective. This mantra completely rebalanced the publishing industry.

As I write in "Dangerous Learning", the South sealed the nation’s fate on the march to Civil War not when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter but in the 1830s when the South would no longer tolerate open debate and discussion around slavery. At that point, it lost its ability to see straight and began to propagandize itself.

The post “No future election is going to fix the problem”: Trump’s war on education is worse than it looks appeared first on Salon.com.

A press release from the DOE said that nearly 2,000 employees of the department would be placed on administrative leave on March 21. The mass layoffs will leave the department with 2,183 employees, down from 4,133 at the beginning of President Donald Trump's term. 

"Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” McMahon shared in a statement. "I appreciate the work of the dedicated public servants and their contributions to the Department. This is a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system.”

The department head struck a much harsher tone while speaking on Fox News Tuesday night. McMahon agreed with host Laura Ingraham that the layoffs were an opening salvo in the Trump administration's attempts to shutter the department and called the soon-to-be jobless employees as "bureaucratic bloat."

"The president's mandate as directed to me clearly is to shut down the Department of Education," she said. "We'll have to work with Congress to get that accomplished."

Ingraham: Is this the first step on the road to a total shutdown?

McMahon: Yes. That was the president’s mandate as directed to me… to shut down the Department of Education… pic.twitter.com/cwEJpJAhiC

— Acyn (@Acyn) March 11, 2025

The shocking move to cut the Department of Education in half drew immediate condemnation from elected Democrats. 

"The president is letting unelected billionaires like Elon Musk and Linda McMahon eliminate the Department of Education," Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colo., shared on X. "Taking away opportunities from students in low-income or rural schools in order to give massive tax breaks to the wealthy is wrong."

Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, said the Trump administration was "stealing from our children to pay for tax cuts for billionaires," a sentiment that Bill Clinton Cabinet member Robert Reich agreed with.

"As Trump guts the Department of Education, remember that his plan to cut the corporate tax rate to 15% would give the 100 largest corporations a tax cut larger than the entire department's K-12 budget," Reich wrote on X. "Really think about how twisted this all is."

The post “The first step”: Department of Education to lay off half of workforce, McMahon promises “shutdown” appeared first on Salon.com.

On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that Trump is preparing to sign an executive order directing his new education secretary, Linda McMahon, to “take all necessary steps” to close her department “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”

While the department was created by Congress and can only be closed by Congress, the aim of the order appears to be to cut many of the programs administered by the department under the guise of returning “authority over education to the states and local communities.”

There are, however, some programs the department is required to maintain by law, namely the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Office of Civil Rights. The Office of Civil Rights was created in order to ensure compliance with civil rights laws in federally funded schools, most prominently Title VI and Title IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial and sex discrimination respectively.

In order to ensure compliance, the office conducts investigations and reviews into areas like grading, financial aid, admission and recruitment. However, the Trump administration had paused investigations conducted by the office up until Thursday, when they lifted the pause for disability investigations. The pause remains in place when it comes to investigations concerning sex and racial discrimination.

Rachel Perera, a fellow at the Brookings Institute, told Salon that while the department is neglecting its duty to enforce civil rights laws, it's also twisting the meaning of those laws in pursuit of its own ideological ends.

“They’ve put a pause on all typical civil rights work like responding to civil rights complaints from parents and advocates,” Perera said. “All of that work has been put on pause and instead they’re suing civil rights law to try to further their right wing agenda.”

Specifically, the Trump administration is using the department’s power to go after diversity, equity and inclusion programs as well as transgender students. Perera notes that they’ve been using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits racial discrimination, to attack inclusion programs, while claiming that they amount to “anti-white discrimination.” 

As it stands, it’s somewhat unclear as to what exactly qualifies as a diversity program according to the Trump administration. Recent directives from the department have neglected to define what qualifies as DEI, which has created confusion as to whether things like clubs surrounding a specific ethnicity or a Black history course might violate the administration’s new edict. They’ve also stated that race-based programs “would not in and of themselves violate Title VI.” The new policies have already drawn lawsuits claiming that the policies are problematically vague. 

Despite the vagueness of the order, some schools are moving to preemptively comply with the untested order, scrubbing their websites of mentions of diversity and changing programming.

Perera added that the administration has been leveraging Title IX of the act, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools, to attack transgender Americans over issues like their participation in sports, while “At the same time, they won’t be using Title IX to address issues of sexual discrimination or sexual assault on college campuses.” She said she expects this to continue after Trump's anticipated executive order.

For example, the Trump administration has claimed that Maine is violating federal law by allowing transgender athletes to participate in sports and has used the Office of Civil Rights to initiate a review of the Maine Department of Education. Indeed, a letter sent to state officials charged that the state was violating Title IX "by denying female student athletes in the State of Maine an equal opportunity to participate in, and obtain the benefits of participation, ‘in any interscholastic, intercollegiate, club or intramural athletics’ offered by the state by allowing male athletes to compete against female athletes in current and future athletic events."

Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, responded, saying: "I imagine that the outcome of this politically directed investigation is all but predetermined.”

All of this amounts to “a dramatic expansion” of the federal government’s role in education, in Perera’s words.

“A point I want to make here is that this use of the Office for Civil Rights to promote their right-wing agenda contradicts their stated intention of sending education back to the states,” Perera said. In the process, she added, they are “upending the meaning of these civil rights laws.”

The post Trump may want to close the Department of Education, but for now he’s exploiting its power appeared first on Salon.com.

All of these news stories are linked by one assumption: The idea that IQ is synonymous with a person’s intelligence. This is a widespread belief, but is it based on scientific evidence? Like an emperor has no clothes situation, do we fearfully accept IQ tests as the primary means of measuring intelligence so we will not have our own intelligence challenged?

Psychologist Howard Gardner, a research professor at Harvard University, argues that the famous so-called “intelligence quotient” tests pioneered by French psychologist Alfred Binet and French psychiatrist Théodore Simon do not capture the full breadth of humanity’s cognitive abilities. He also says his ideas are more relevant today than ever — especially as Americans develop an anti-science culture that, among other things, drastically overrates the significance of IQ tests.

The original IQ test tried to measure memory, attention and problem solving, while modern versions focus on spatial perception, language abilities and mathematical skills, which sounds pretty thorough. But as demonstrated in two recently published collections of papers — “The Essential Howard Gardner on Education” and “The Essential Howard Gardner on Mind,” both from Teachers College Press — Gardner shows we need more than that to truly understand human intelligence, especially as artificial intelligence enters the classroom.

IQ tests assess human intelligence in much the same way that a Polaroid captures human beauty; it captures objective details, but only from a single snapshot in time and mitigated by the eye of the beholder. In contrast to this simplistic method for measuring the mind, Gardner identifies seven distinct types of intelligence: Linguistic intelligence, which is utility of language; logical-mathematical intelligences; spatial intelligence, which is used to shape the physical world; musical intelligence; bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, such as the physical skills displayed by surgeons, athletes and dancers; interpersonal intelligence, or the ability to understand others; and intrapersonal intelligence, or the ability to honestly and accurately understand one’s self.

Not everyone agrees with Gardner. Conservative commentator and psychologist Dr. Jordan Peterson has dismissed the concept of multiple intelligences as being a “fad” and “rubbish,” and in his own popular videos seems to take for granted that IQ tests accurately measure intelligence. Even though scientific evidence consistently shows IQ tests are not reliable, the notion that IQ equates with high intelligence seems to be embedded in our political and educational culture. If nothing else, Gardner hopes his books can stem that tide. Salon spoke with Gardner about how to make that a reality.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

People commonly associate IQ with intelligence. How do you feel about our culture's obsession with this particular test as a metric for measuring intellect?

[Alfred] Binet had no interest in anything genetic. He was interested in predicting who would do well at a certain kind of school. If you and I were parents, and we wanted to know how our kid would do, the IQ test does as well as anything else you can do in 15 minutes or an hour. But at schools, where AI [artificial intelligence] will be much more important every month, the less good an instrument we have [in IQ tests]. We need to develop different ways of assessing people's intelligence or talents.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes.

I gave an important talk to colleagues less than a month ago, and I said, “Look, we all use the word ‘smart’, but if you're trying to decide whether somebody in physics should get tenure, you're going to have entirely different criteria then when it's somebody who's teaching Shakespeare or Homer. “

Even within the university, and even within an Ivy League school like Harvard, we distinguish between different kinds of intelligence. Everybody distinguishes between different kinds of talents.

Some people like Jordan Peterson say that IQ predicts "success" and has described your ideas as rubbish.

I don't use words like that, and the answer is if you want to predict who will do well in a certain setting in a certain time, and you only have a few minutes to do it, an IQ test will do as well as anything.

Here is the important point: I don't think that my theory can ever be tested by a short-answer kind of test, a short-answer kind of instrument. In the late ‘80s, we created a preschool environment which provided food — that is, intellectual food — for the range of intelligences. We watched the kids over the course of a year to see what they were interested in, where they spent time, and importantly what they got better at. A useful analogy for you is if you take a kid to a children's museum, you see his or her interests once, but if you take them there a number of times, you see what really interests them.

I can't count how many letters and emails I've gotten over the last decades from people who say, "I thought I was dumb, or the teachers told me my kids were dumb, or I applied for Mensa and I didn't get it. But then I learned about your theory and I explored things to find out what I was good at, what I was average at, what I was not good at. And that's been liberating for me or for my children or my grandchildren or whatever."

If Jordan Peterson were here, I would say to him, what do you do with the people who aren't smart on your testing day? Do you just throw them away? Do you pitch them away or do you say, and here we get to the important educational stuff, the kid may not do well in a certain kind of test given in a certain way, but how can I reach that child who wants a child to understand science? What are the right experiences? What are the right teachings? What is the right media? What are the right games to play with?

I've written many times, if you just tell people they're smart or dumb, you've crippled them. But if you say, this is what your profile of strengths and weaknesses are, how should we work on them, you get people to work on them. That's where you progress, and that’s the humane thing to do.

Let’s talk about the widespread scientific illiteracy in this country. People in the public seem to not be able to understand concepts like climate change, evolution and vaccines in an educated way. Based on your theory of multiple intelligences, what suggestions do you have to promote scientific literacy within the public?

Number one, we don't actually know whether scientific literacy is worse in this country than in other countries. It may be or may not be, but I'm not sure that it's scientific ignorance that is at the heart of the problem. Just take the current Congress, which is turning quite right wing. There are many people there who have very good education and they could certainly pass tests of scientific literacy. But to be technical about it, they don't give in politically because they would rather make it anti-scientific. 

Let's use Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as an example. They'd rather embrace him because it fulfills their political goals. 

As a scholar, and especially an interdisciplinary scholar, I want everybody to love and want to increase their knowledge and to respect knowledge. Ever since the 16th and 17th century, scientific knowledge has grown exponentially. If your question implies the fact that we have more knowledge than ever and it can be approached and picked up in many ways, it doesn't mean that people care about it when they want to achieve certain political goals. 

Now let's get to the heart of your question. I think it's important, number one, for everybody to have some experience doing science. And that means finding a problem, guessing how it can be answered or solved, and then mucking around. I went to the schools in Scranton, Pennsylvania and then I went to college, and having some experience in actually doing experiments and seeing how they come out and sometimes changing your mind on the basis of how they come out, I think is very important.

Certainly in any affluent country like America, there's no reason why everybody can't have some experience in puzzling about something. Does this projectile fall more quickly than this one? And if not, why not?

Here is where I think the new technologies have profound effects for teachers and learners. I’m going to use a word, which unfortunately isn't perfect if you can come up with a better one, and it has the double disadvantage that it's also what Facebook is called now, and that is meta. I think teachers and students, all of us will need to have less technical and specific knowledge and more meta knowledge. “Meta” here means it's knowledge about knowledge and it's understanding how something got found out, and whether it's reliable, and how we could test whether it's reliable or not, and what might enable us to change our mind about this.

The post Is IQ overrated? Why some psychologists say it’s better to measure intelligence differently appeared first on Salon.com.

Education and economic success are two sides of the same coin. If we want to build strong economic opportunities, we must focus on making education more relevant, accessible and career-connected beginning as early as elementary school.

The average American student spends roughly 15,000 hours in school between kindergarten and 12th grade. That’s well above the 10,000 hours needed to achieve mastery in almost anything according to Malcolm Gladwell’s research. It's a priceless opportunity to shape a young mind. With a little innovation and conviction, these hours can prepare the next generation of leaders in any field.

The connection to the economy is not just clear; it's critical. K-12 education uniquely holds the keys to cultivating a skilled workforce and knowledgeable citizenry capable of tackling society's most pressing problems, including economic challenges. Career-connected learning, which integrates real-world skills and experiences into curricula, is proving to be a powerful tool for economic development and workforce preparation.

At Transcend, we’ve worked with schools across the country that have launched career-focused innovation through “community-based design journeys,” a process that gets the entire school community involved in listening to student needs and building new strategies to meet them. Communities can build new options or redesign an existing school to provide robust career-centered experiences for students. The old 20th century version of school doesn’t have to be the reality for our kids and school communities often implement changes faster than you might think.

Take The Brooklyn STEAM Center, which set out to transform the “school to prison pipeline” into “school to career.” Eleventh and 12th grade students from across the borough spend their afternoons “learning by doing” at the Brooklyn Navy Yard — a robust industry ecosystem with over 400 businesses. Students engage in professional work and develop robust industry networks. 83% of STEAM’s first graduating class earned a credential in one of six high-demand industries, 100% had a fully-developed post-secondary plan, and 95% enrolled in a 4-year college.

Or IDEA Round Rock Tech just outside Austin, Texas. In a region noted for its growing tech sector, only a small number of high school students take one or more CS courses. To give more students futures in local jobs, IDEA Round Rock leads all students on a computational thinking, computer science, and computing (COMP 3) progression from pre-kindergarten through high school. Regardless of whether they choose a college-prep or industry-ready pathway, all high school students take AP Computer Science Principles and learn modern, in-demand programming languages such as Python and JavaScript. 

These schools aren’t anomalies. Career-connected learning can take root in any community —red or blue, urban or rural — willing to come together to design learning that responds to the demands and opportunities of the 21st century. 

In Rugby, North Dakota, education and community leaders are partnering to design new experiences that pair the authentic challenges that local businesses are facing with projects that guide young people to solve them. And in Denver, Colorado, students at micro-middle school Embark work out of a coffee and bicycle shop to meet unmet demand and experience learning that is grounded in their broader community. Students developed the second highest-selling seasonal drink at North Denver’s Pinwheel Coffee, with the lemon lavender latte now a constant fixture in the spring menu.

American students are in the midst of an absenteeism crisis. More than a quarter of students missed 10% or more of the past two years of school. When we ask students, they tell us why: school isn’t challenging, relevant or engaging. At Transcend, we recently surveyed more than 100,000 students; nearly two thirds said that school feels irrelevant and offers them few opportunities for agency and choice.

Disengagement from school is often accompanied by disengagement from employment systems and narrowing life opportunities. Career-connected learning changes the game by infusing school with learning experiences students want to show up for. That’s one of the big shifts we need to make for our children. We need to provide school experiences that get them excited about learning and building toward their future career.

Whatever economic or social issues we care about, the 55 million young people in schools across this country will one day determine how we solve them as a society. Keeping them in school is the bare minimum. If we want them to thrive in and transform the world, we must reimagine education with career, community, and young people’s passions at the center.

The post Career-connected learning addresses our top political, social and economic issues appeared first on Salon.com.

Christian nationalists aren't even waiting for Trump to be sworn in for a second time before they make their move. Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host who Trump tapped to be Defense Secretary, was on a Christian nationalist podcast last week that described the vision. "I think we need to be thinking in terms of these classical Christian schools are boot camps for winning back America," explained the host, who is closely linked with Douglas Wilson, a far-right pastor who advocates for theocracy. Hegseth, who is facing scrutiny after it was revealed he settled out of court with a woman who accused him of rape in 2017, concurred. He called for an "educational insurgency" where "you build your army underground" of children, so they can grow up to be the next generation of fundamentalist culture warriors. 

Oklahoma's state superintendent, Ryan Walters, wasted no time in harnessing the taxpayer-funded school system to push the Christian nationalist agenda. Mere days after Trump's election, Walters announced a new public department with an Orwellian name: "Office of Religious Liberty and Patriotism." Unsurprisingly, the goal is to attack religious liberty, by forcing his brand of Christianity on students. Walters then mandated all schools show kids a video where he lambasted the "radical left" and the "woke teachers unions." He also attempted to lead a prayer, saying, "I pray in particular for Donald Trump." Trump probably cares less about the prayers and more that Walters lines his pockets. The superintendent has used the public education budget to purchase Trump-branded Bibles for Oklahoma classrooms.  

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics? Subscribe to her newsletter Standing Room Only.

So far, this flagrant violation of the Constitution hasn't worked. The state attorney general stepped in and declared that Walters cannot mandate the viewing of his propaganda. Some school districts refused, though it's quite possible others gave in out of an unwillingness to fight with Walters to defend their students. More importantly, this is just an escalation of an all-out effort by Walters to turn Oklahoma's public schools into exactly the "boot camps" building up the "army" of Christian nationalists that Hegseth and his cronies imagine. 

Walters is the biggest showboat, but there are already signs that Christian nationalists are ramping up this "educational insurgency" across the country. Last week, the Texas state school board voted to replace traditional reading materials for elementary kids with Bible study. This is not hyperbole. The Dallas Morning News ran excerpts from the curriculum, which includes lessons on the Sermon on the Mount, the "prodigal son" Bible story, and explicitly teaches that "Jesus rose from the dead," treating the myth of the resurrection as historical fact. Lest there be any doubt this is about anything but using schools to proselytize, the school board meeting was crushed with evangelicals praying for this opportunity to push their faith on the captive audience of school children.

Advocates for the Bible-infused curriculum @TXSBOE claim to support religious literacy, but today's prayer rally reveals their true aim: to turn public schools into Christian Sunday schools and use taxpayer dollars to evangelize students, regardless of their families' beliefs. pic.twitter.com/KVESzhej2U

— Texas Freedom Network (@TFN) November 18, 2024

The school board justified this decision by making the curriculum "optional," but that's misleading. For one thing, it's only "optional" for school districts. If those are the books a district chooses, then that's what students and teachers must live with. Worse, the state is bribing districts who pick it up by paying them $40 a student if they adopt the curriculum. For poorer, often rural districts, that money can be hard to pass up. "The board’s vote represents a troubling attempt to turn public schools into Sunday schools," Carisa Lopez, Texas Freedom Network Deputy Director, said in a statement. And even though the GOP talks a big game about "parents' rights," she pointed out this undermines "the freedom of families to direct the religious education of their own children."

In Arizona, the Christian nationalist war on education has grown so aggressive that it's threatening to tank the state's budget. As Politico reported Sunday, a government program that was originally "created for students with disabilities who needed services they could not get at their neighborhood public schools" has become "a budget-busting free-for-all used by more than 50,000 students." That's because anti-public education Christian organizers have been encouraging people to abuse the program to lavishly fund religious schools or even homeschooling. "Families, mostly from high-income zip codes, have applied the taxpayer funds for everything from ski lift passes to visits to trampoline parks, a $4,000 grand piano, more than a million dollars in Legos, online ballet lessons, horse therapy and cookie-baking kits."

The goal appears to be to suck so much money out of public school systems that they collapse. As Kathryn Joyce revealed in an investigative report at Salon, the masterminds behind this scheme envision religious schools and Christian homeschooling as a replacement — which implies, though they will rarely admit it, no school at all for people who don't want or can't afford those options. It's a different strategy than those in Oklahoma and Texas pushing Bible study directly into public classrooms. They're all working towards the same goal, however: Making sure that most, if not all American students are taught that the only "real" Americans are fundamentalist Christians. 

It's also an assault on one of the most crucial aspects of a real education: critical thinking skills.

Authoritarians are notoriously hostile to teaching kids intellectual autonomy, preferring children to exhibit mindless obedience. Southern Methodist University religious studies professor Mark Chancey, who has been speaking out against the Texas curriculum, worries that "when the lesson has a teacher read that Jesus was resurrected from the dead," students "are going to hear their teacher promoting that as a factual claim." That is, of course, very much the point. Trump's election showed that the MAGA right's power depends largely on supporters who can't separate fact from fiction, mythology from science, or conspiracy theory from truth. That's why Hegseth wants to reimagine schools as "boot camps": not places where children learn to think for themselves, but where they are unquestioning right-wing soldiers, following MAGA orders.

The post Trump opens up a new war on public schools appeared first on Salon.com.

At my STEM high school in Dallas, boys outnumbered girls four to one in the class of 2024. And my male math and science teachers significantly outnumbered their female counterparts. I was the only girl in my senior year AP physics class, and that environment, where I felt like the boys were always judging and doubting me, made me feel so uncomfortable to even ask questions. I soon transferred to a different physics class with more girls.

Disparities like these are a function of our society's continued discouragement of girls pursuing studies and careers in STEM. That needs to end — not just for the sake of equality but for the health of our economy.

Consider one study of more than 11,000 girls across 12 countries in Europe. It found that girls are interested in STEM from a young age, but typically abandon that interest by age 15.

I can understand why. Self-confidence can be hard to build — and maintain. During one physics class in high school, I asked a friend a question on a topic I was confused about. A boy near me butted in: "Wow, you don't get this?"

"No, I don't. But I want to," I replied. Later, when I was accepted into my top-choice college, I heard boys in my grade ask, "How did she get in? She didn't work as hard as us."

I beg to differ. I'm proud to be the first person in my family to attend college, and ignorant comments won't stop me from pursuing a degree in the sciences.

The world certainly needs more science grads. By 2032, the United States is projected to add more than 1.1 million STEM jobs.

Women can do these jobs and fill this looming gap in the workforce. From 2011 to 2021, the number of women in STEM increased 31%, to 12.3 million. The share of women in the STEM workforce is also growing, from 32% in 2011 to 35% in 2021.

Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes.

But there's a long way to go. Fewer than one in five information security analysts are women. Just under 12% of electrical engineers are women. And less than 6% of computer hardware engineers are women.

Research shows that a major reason women tend not to pursue studies or careers in STEM fields is a lack of "self-efficacy." Girls and women believe they're less capable of succeeding.

We can address these doubts by investing in efforts to show girls that they can make it in the sciences. I've found that support through peer groups, teachers, and internships where I'm surrounded by girls with similar interests — and where I don't think twice about sharing ideas or asking for help.

Many of the STEM interns in my program at Abbott, a global healthcare company, are women. I see women at Abbott making life-changing contributions to healthcare on a daily basis. I don't have to guess what women in science leadership positions look like. I see it.

All girls ought to have this kind of exposure beginning in school. Strong role models are essential for encouraging girls to pursue STEM. So we must encourage more women to become science and math teachers. We can do so by providing more college scholarships and mentorship programs for women who plan on becoming STEM educators.

High school teachers and career advisors also need to be more proactive about encouraging girls to enroll in STEM classes, extracurriculars, and internships. Research has shown that extracurriculars in high school are among the deciding factors for women in college who stick with STEM.

Encouragement isn't enough on its own, however. High schools also need to do a better job highlighting the broad spectrum of career options available in STEM.

A recent Pew Research Center poll found most Americans believe STEM jobs offer less flexibility than careers in other industries. This isn't true. Entering STEM doesn't mean committing to a life of 80-hour workweeks. Work-life balance has a place as well. At my current internship, I've gotten to see just how many interesting, fulfilling roles there are within a healthcare company — and they don't all require an advanced degree.

Soon "women in STEM" won't be its own category anymore, because it'll just be normal. Until then, I'll continue following in the footsteps of the women ahead of me — and hopefully leave a trail for those who come after.

The post How to ensure girls start — and stay — in STEM appeared first on Salon.com.

Teaching digital literacy can begin as early as preschool, fostering responsible online citizenship and empowering children. Before starting the process, parents should be aware of the risks in today's online realm. They include a multitude of threats, from cyberbullying and exposure to inappropriate content to the perils of online predators. The advent of global gaming and AI only makes these dangers more acute.

Understanding the risks

According to Javelin Strategy and Research, approximately 1.7 million children fell victim to data breaches in 2022. With human error accounting for many of these cybersecurity incidents, educating children about potential dangers is crucial.

Engage your child in conversations about real-life scenarios, like the risks associated with sharing personal information online or clicking on suspicious links. It's possible that posts shared by their friends and looking for information like school mascots, hometowns or favorite bands were created by "bad actors" with fake accounts to gather information, said Anna Ganse, a cybersecurity engineer. 

"This type of information not only provides clues to a challenge/response question or weak passwords but can also assist a stranger in befriending your child by pretending to share a common interest or friend," Ganse said. "The bottom line is that if something is being forwarded around social media asking to share personal information, don't."

Identifying red flags can help kids avoid falling victim to scams. Gamified activities can make lessons interactive and engaging — for example, turn spotting phishing emails into a treasure hunt or host a "password showdown" to see who can create the most secure login.  

Instilling strong password hygiene

One of the cornerstones of online safety is strong passwords. Password managers simplify the process, allowing children to create and store complex passwords without memorization.

Regularly update passwords, avoid easily guessable information like birthdays and enable two-factor authentication. Provide practical examples to illustrate how these practices protect their accounts. For instance, if a child's password is "fluffy123," walk them through how effortless it would be for a hacker to guess. Then demonstrate how a password manager can generate a more secure alternative like "Xj2!Qm8$"—significantly more challenging to crack.

"If they pass a note in class, they fold it over so no one else can see it," Ganse said. "Teach them to take the same level of care with their online presence."

Navigating social media safely

With social media playing a central role in many children's lives, educating them about its risks is essential. Guide them in setting strict privacy controls and encourage critical thinking before accepting friend requests or sharing personal details. Emphasize that even a seemingly innocent message could be malicious.

Discuss the lasting impact of online posts, remembering that digital footprints are forever. Introduce the mantra "Think before you click" to instill the habit of assessing the credibility of content before engaging with it. Balance safety lessons with examples of children using social media platforms for positive change, such as online activism, to illustrate the power of responsible connectivity.

Establishing open communication 

Parents must cultivate an open dialogue about online experiences to create a safe environment where children feel comfortable discussing digital interactions. They must know they can confide in you without fear of punishment. Emphasize the importance of reporting suspicious behavior to a trusted adult. Ask hypothetical scenarios: "If a stranger messaged you asking to meet up, what would you do?" Let your children know you are always available to help handle tricky situations. Regular discussions about privacy, safety and online ethics help ingrain these lessons.

Deb Radcliffe, cybersecurity author, noted, "Education is a two-way street. Begin by learning what your kids do online through open discussions rather than spyware. Keep communication open, and share personal, relatable experiences and lessons with them. If they get into trouble, cultivate a safe place to share with you or their educators or even police if it comes to that — somewhere where they feel safe talking without judgment or retaliation."

Leveraging educational resources

Numerous organizations offer resources to help teach cybersecurity principles. Savvy Cyber Kids, for example, provides free materials suitable for all ages. For younger audiences, engaging books like "The Savvy Cyber Kids at Home" introduce safety concepts. They are leveraging platforms like online workshops and interactive games to make learning fun and effective.

1. Collaborate with your child's school to advocate for a comprehensive online safety curriculum.  
2. Providing consistent messaging from both school and home reinforces lessons. 
3. Seek out teachable moments in everyday life—when setting up a new device, for instance, walk through the privacy settings together. 

Experiential learning helps cement good habits. Radcliffe recommends lesson planning by age group at commonsense.org.

Implementing device protection measures

Protect your child's devices by updating them with the latest software and security patches. Install reputable antivirus software and enable parental controls. However, don't rely solely on technological solutions—educate your child about safe browsing practices, such as checking for HTTPS before entering sensitive information and avoiding suspicious links.

Review installed apps together regularly to ensure they are secure and age appropriate. Frame it as a collaborative safeguarding activity rather than an invasion of privacy. Forthright communication around device usage builds trust and keeps lines of dialogue open.

Start the conversation early and engage to help your kids claim their capes as the cyber-savvy citizens our interconnected world needs. 

The post How to teach kids about cybersecurity appeared first on Salon.com.