“We envision a vibrant community farm, a model of shared governance and co-stewardship that helps restore community resilience,” the farm’s website reads.
The Department of Education is looking into an allegation that the University of California at Berkeley is prohibiting white residents from using a community farm on Saturdays.
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Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas announced Monday that the state Department of Education was expanding its education savings program to include veteran and first responder families.
The Arkansas Education Freedom Account program, which was launched in 2023, helps fund families who wish to send their children to private schools or homeschool them and previously included “Homeless students, current or former foster care students, students with disabilities” and “first-time kindergarteners.” For the 2024-2025 school year, “veterans, military reserve members, first responders, law enforcement officers and students from D-rated schools will now be eligible, according to a press release.
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Georgia lawmakers signed off on the fiscal year 2025 budget in the final hours of this year’s legislative session but did not pass a bill to allow sports betting.
Lawmakers gave the nod to a more than $66.8 billion state budget for fiscal 2025, which starts July 1. The spending plan, which anticipates $36.1 billion in state money and $19 billion in federal taxpayer funds, includes pay raises for public school teachers and state law enforcement officers.
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Republican leaders are responding with skepticism to the Biden administration’s plans to hire students to register voters and work in polling places.
New Department of Education guidance states Federal Work-Study funds “may be used for employment by a Federal, State, local, or Tribal public agency for civic engagement work that is not associated with a particular interest or group.”
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The Biden administration announced it will pay college students to register voters and participate in get-out-the-vote activities shortly after canceling student loan debt.
It’s a move that Republicans and election integrity advocates are saying will mobilize Democratic voters with taxpayer dollars.
After canceling student loan debt the prior week, the Biden administration announced that it will pay college students to register voters and engage in GOTV efforts through a Federal Work-Study (FWS) program.
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Democratic-sponsored bills meant to inhibit censorship of books with sexually explicit content are advancing through the Virginia House of Delegates and the Senate this session — and not just along party lines.
House Bill 571, sponsored by Del. Karrie Delaney, D-Fairfax, passed the House Education Committee Wednesday 14-8, with two Republicans — Del. Carrie Coyner, R-Chesterfield, and Del. Baxter Ennis, R-Chesapeake — voting for the legislation.
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President Joe Biden on Friday announced the latest round of student debt cancellations in a statement issued by The White House.
Since the Supreme Court’s ruling on June 30 in Biden v. Nebraska that the administration’s plan to cancel up to $10,000 in student debt for all borrowers was unlawful, the administration has sought to pursue other debt cancellation measures, most notably through the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, which was finalized by the Department of Education (DOE) on the day of the court’s ruling. Biden said that borrowers enrolled in the SAVE plan who borrowed less than $12,000 in debt, and who have been in repayment for at least ten years, will have their balances canceled by February.
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The Biden administration spent millions on diversity trainings for federal agencies, including some for the armed forces, in 2023.
Taxpayers were on the hook for the more than $16.3 million the federal government spent on diversity trainings taking place in 2023, according to a government spending database. Past government diversity trainings have instructed federal workers that asking an Asian colleague for help with a math problem could be racist, that men can become pregnant and that “social pain” can be the same as physical pain.
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The Department of Education (ED) opened an investigation into a Wisconsin school Wednesday after an adult man identifying as transgender allegedly exposed himself to underaged girls, according to an ED letter.
After a swimming class in March at Sun Prairie Area High School (SPASD), four freshmen girls were exposed to the genitalia of an 18-year-old male student claiming to be transgender who allegedly undressed in front of them, and despite SPASD being informed of the incident, nothing was done. Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) demanded that the ED Office of Civil Rights (OCR) investigate SPASD after allegedly failing to address the incident.
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As Tennessee lawmakers investigate the possibility of just saying no to federal education funds and the ties that come with them, the state’s Federal Funding Working Group co-chair told The Tennessee Star that completely letting go probably isn’t going to happen.
“No, I don’t think that’s feasible,” said State Senator Jon Lundberg (R-Bristol) in an interview this week with The Star.
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Online learning has revolutionized higher education, but a recent move by the federal Department of Education is threatening to tear down systems that are helping millions of students learn.
An extremely wide diversity of students choose to take online courses or to get entire online degrees. Colleges that offer them need to be nimble as the economy changes, yet traditional colleges are slow to change, and they often lack the expertise and funding to develop and manage online courses independently.
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Today we remember the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who in October 1492 landed in the Bahamas and became the first Western European to discover what the Europeans would call the New World.
When Columbus and his crew of approximately 200 sailors left Spain in three crowded ships – the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria – they set their sails toward an unknown horizon. They expected to discover a trade route to India. (Most Europeans at the time knew the earth was round – but they were unaware of the North and South American continents.) Instead of finding a route to Southeast Asia, Columbus and his crew landed on a continent of new opportunities. Columbus’s accidental discovery opened a permanent passage across the Atlantic and redrew the known map of the world.
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The Biden administration announced nearly $9 billion in student loan relief Wednesday that will affect about 125,000 borrowers, according to a press release.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in June that the Biden administration could not cancel student loan debt for non-Pell Grant and Pell Grant recipients, and soon after on June 30 the Department of Education (ED) announced plans to expand income-driven repayment plans, which would cut payments for those making $32,800 or less annually to $0, potentially costing American taxpayers hundreds of billions. Now, the Biden administration has announced a new plan that will add $9 billion in student loan relief through additional forgiveness and income-driven-repayment programs, according to an ED press release.
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Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy knows there would be legal challenges to his sweeping plan to drastically reduce the size of the administrative state. The 38-year-old political outsider knows the big government left won’t give up the heart of the D.C swamp without a bruising fight.
Ramaswamy’s good with that.
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If elected president, political outsider Vivek Ramaswamy vows to cut 1 million jobs from a behemoth federal government workforce.
And the GOP presidential candidate’s plan to rein in the administrative state is driving the left and the mainstream media insane.
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Republican Presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy on Wednesday will lay out his plan to break the grip of power held by the administrative state.
“There is an unconstitutional, fourth branch of government that is choking American democracy, and it is called the administrative state,” Ramaswamy asserts in an advance copy of a white paper speech provided to The Star News Network by the Ohio entrepreneur’s campaign.
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U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) joined 18 of his Republican colleagues on Tuesday in introducing a Congressional Review Act resolution of disapproval.
The CRA aims to end President Joe Biden’s latest end-around to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling this summer striking down the administration’s original student loan bailout.
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The Biden Administration’s Department of Education (ED) confirmed that it is deliberately withholding federal funds from elementary and middle schools that have courses in hunting or archery.
As Fox News reports, the ED issued a statement claiming that the decision was due to an interpretation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) passed last year in response to several shootings. The agency claims that its interpretation determined that funding for any shooting-related activities will be blocked across the country, under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965.
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Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Twitter owner Elon Musk ripped the current education system in the United States Friday, saying that taxpayers were “paying people to hate America.”
Ramaswamy and Musk took part in a Twitter Spaces forum where Ramaswamy blasted the Department of Education for using funding as an incentive for schools to use certain theories in curricula. Ramaswamy outlined plans to shut down that department during a July 20 forum in New Hampshire.
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Biden’s Department of Education (DOE) officially opened an investigation Monday into Harvard to determine whether or not the university’s use of legacy admissions violate the Civil Rights Act, according to a letter from the DOE.
The DOE’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) opened the investigation to determine whether or not Harvard discriminates on the basis of race by having donor and legacy admissions preferences after a complaint was filed on behalf of several activist organizations including The Chica Project, the African Community Economic Development of New England and the Greater Boston Latino Network, according to a letter from the DOE to Lawyers for Civil Rights. The complaint follows on the heels of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down race-based affirmative action admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina.
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The recent Supreme Court ruling regarding college admissions has once again thrust America’s educational system into the spotlight. A major question that has come from this ruling is whether America’s children are being intellectually and academically prepared to even enter or succeed in these colleges and universities. The tragic answer is that America’s public education system is failing to equip our youth with the tools necessary to succeed in higher education and in their future professional lives. We are failing America’s most valuable asset—our children.
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The Department of Education (DOE) announced Friday that it will automatically forgive $39 billion of student loan debt for more than 804,000 borrowers, following a recent ruling by the Supreme Court that blocked the administration’s plan to grant forgiveness to nearly 40 million Americans.
The DOE will start notifying borrowers Friday that their federal student loans “will be automatically discharged in the coming weeks,” according to a DOE press release. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in June that the Biden administration cannot use executive power to cancel up to $10,000 in student loan debt for non-Pell Grant recipients and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
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Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed an executive order on Sunday creating a statewide LGBTQ commission to address inequality and discrimination.
The commission will advise Whitmer and the director of the Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity on policy which directly impacts the state’s LGBTQ community, the executive order reads. The commission will also identify ways to attract members of the LGBTQ community to Michigan by assuring them that the state “is a safe place where its members and their families can thrive.”
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The University of Minnesota recently held an event just for “BIPOC students” considering grad school, prompting a complaint to be filed with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights alleging racial discrimination.
As the feds review the complaint’s merits, the university scrubbed the event page and wiped information about the gathering from its website.
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Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom is demanding records from textbook publishers to determine if they have changed any content used in California’s schools to comply with Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ education laws.
The DeSantis’ administration has enacted several laws in the past year prohibiting Critical Race Theory (CRT) and certain lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation from K-12 classrooms. In addition to the textbook companies records, Newsom’s office sent a public records request Saturday to DeSantis’ office and the Florida Department of Education (DOE) asking for all communications between the governor’s administration and the textbook publishers relating to revisions made to content to ensure compliance with the Florida education laws.
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Making the case for America-first principles, Ohio entrepreneur and anti-woke crusader Vivek Ramaswamy told a campaign rally in suburban Des Moines Thursday evening that, as president, he would seek a constitutional amendment raising the voting age to 25.
Ramaswamy, the first millennial Republican candidate to seek the White House, has been known to shake things up on the campaign trail.
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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed an amicus brief on Thursday with the United States Supreme Court pushing back on federal education overreach.
Yost claimed that the most recent plan by the United States Secretary of Education to eliminate billions of dollars of student debt “is nothing more than an egregious power grab that tramples all over the separation-of-powers doctrine.”
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While the constitutionality of President Joe Biden’s student loan bailout is awaiting a Supreme Court decision, a bill re-introduced by two House members would block the Biden administration from canceling student loan debt on a mass scale.
The Student Loan Accountability Act, authored by U.S. Representatives Mike Gallagher (R-WI-08) and Drew Ferguson (R-GA-03) would also prevent forgiven loans from getting an additional tax break and it would bar the Internal Revenue Service from sharing American’s tax information for the purpose of implementing mass loan cancelation.
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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer used federal pandemic relief funds to create virtual courses for teachers about anti-racism and social justice, which encouraged teachers to engage with sources espousing critical race theory.
The CARES Act in 2020 included funds for governors to award to education-related entities via the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) Fund. Whitmer and state officials allotted $1.4 million to Michigan State University College of Education, the University of Michigan’s School of Education and Michigan Virtual to create professional learning modules for K-12 teachers.
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Tuesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed State Representative Scott Cepicky (R-TN-Culleoka) in studio to discuss working on the education committee in the Tennessee General Assembly and turning around public school education.
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Former President Donald Trump was back in Iowa Monday night and he was loaded for bear, taking aim at woke liberals, the mainstream media, the Deep State, “Paul Ryan RINOs” and the current unpopular top resident of the White House.
And Trump, arguably the leading contender for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, made the crowd packing Davenport’s 2,400-seat Adler Theatre some big promises. Chief among them: He’ll always have Iowa’s back and he’ll “stop World War III.”
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In a letter obtained by The Star News Network, four members of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) are calling upon House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to hold hearings on the Biden administration’s “radical and legally unsupported proposals to change Title IX” to require that its prohibition on sex discrimination be interpreted to bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
The letter, signed by USCCR Commissioners labor attorney Peter Kirsanow, University of San Diego law professor Gail Heriot, Public Interest Legal Foundation President J. Christian Adams, and South Carolina African American Chamber of Commerce CEO Stephen Gilchrist, asserts to McCarthy that the Biden Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has erred in its claim that the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County “requires that Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination be interpreted to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”
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Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie announced on Tuesday the proposal of a bill that would officially abolish the U.S. Department of Education.
Massie made the announcement on Twitter on Tuesday morning. “I have introduced a bill to terminate the Department of Education,” he wrote. “
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A bill introduced in Lansing aims to make it easier for Michigan schools to hire substitute teachers.
State Rep. Brad Paquette, R-Niles, introduced House Bill 4038, which aims to allow a district employee to substitute teach under certain conditions, without having 60 college credits.
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A center-right policy-research center based in Columbus, OH is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to nix President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive almost $500 billion in unpaid student loans.
Nebraska and six other states sued the Biden administration to stop the program that Congress never authorized. Last November, petitioners succeeded in getting a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit to pause implementation of the plan. The following month, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and oral arguments have been scheduled for February 28.
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A Texas congressman is asking the U.S. Department of Education (DoE) to investigate funding that foreign entities have bestowed on the University of Pennsylvania.
Last week, U.S. Representative Lance Gooden (R-TX-5) authored a letter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona in which he noted that $51 million flowed to the Philadelphia Ivy League university from non-American sources in 2021 and 2022. Of those donations, $14 million came from unnamed Chinese or Hong Kong entities and $2.4 million came from Saudi Arabia.
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“Today, Penn’s relationship with China is strong, and continues to grow.”
That’s how the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Global website still refers to the Philadelphia-based Ivy League school’s association with the communist-run nation.
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Arizona State Representative Shawnna Bolick (R-San Miguel) called on Senators Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ) to use their votes to protect charter schools around the nation from the Biden administration’s overreach.
“Will [Sinema] & [Kelly] stand with nearly 220K AZ public charter school kids and countless more families who support [school choice]? The teacher unions are using every tactic to drive a stake through [school choice],” tweeted Bolick
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The heads of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions had little to say following the release Monday of national test scores that showed massive declines in student math and reading achievement following pandemic school closures the unions insisted were necessary for teacher safety.
Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA) “remained silent,” Fox News reported Monday as results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) revealed the damage tied to school closures during the COVID crisis.
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The Biden administration plans to shutter its predecessor’s investigations into undisclosed foreign funding of U.S. colleges and universities, the subject of years of warnings from elected officials, law enforcement and academic freedom groups, according to higher education lobbyists.
The commitment was recorded in an August letter from a higher ed lobbyist recapping a June 23 virtual briefing by top Department of Education officials for the American Council on Education (ACE) and other university groups, including the Council on Governmental Relations (COGR), which includes medical centers and independent research institutes.
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In 2011, a “Dear Colleague Letter” (DCL) that required schools provide access to bathrooms, showers, and dorm rooms based on gender identity, rather than biological sex was introduced by the Obama Education Department. It defined sexual harassment as “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature”; required only that the alleged harassment potentially “interfere with or limit” access, rather than “deprive” the victim of access creating a “single-inquisitor” model where the investigator, prosecutor, and hearing officer could be the same person, and reduced the accused’s rights to a hearing to confront his accuser.
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Arizona’s Republican gubernatorial nominee Kari Lake blasted her Democrat opponent, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, for taking a week to reject a referendum to stop Arizona’s universal Empowerment Scholarship Account law from going into effect, despite evidence already showing the motion failed.
“It is shameful that Katie Hobbs aligned herself with the radical unions’ effort to permanently trap Arizona’s kids in failing schools, then hung Arizona’s parents out to dry for a week by suspending the school choice program despite overwhelming evidence the referendum failed to get enough signatures,” Lake said in a statement to the Arizona Sun Times. “Katie Hobbs is on the side of corrupt, bloated school bureaucracies, but I will never stop fighting to give Arizona’s parents more choice in their children’s schools and more control over their children’s education.”
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Ohio’s State Board of Education on Tuesday heard public comment on a proposed resolution treating biological sex as an “objective, scientific fact” and opposing school policies that seek to blur the lines on this subject.
Board member Brendan Shea (District 5) introduced the measure, which balks at regulations recently proposed by President Joe Biden. If finalized, the federal Department of Education rules would effectively force schools to call gender-dysphoric K-12 students by their preferred names and pronouns rather than their given names and biological pronouns. They would also require school athletic programs to assign children to teams based on avowed gender identity rather than physiological sex.
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The Department of Education (DOE) is giving about $25 million in grants to several universities to help them hire and train a “diverse educator workforce,” according to a Sept. 12 press release.
The DOE partnered with Teacher Quality Partnership (TQP), a group that works on preparing higher education faculty, to provide 22 new five-year grants to several universities, including three historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), according to the press release. The institutions receiving grants will work with TQP to “recruit highly qualified individuals, including individuals of color” for educator positions.
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From the feminist Women’s Liberation Front to the conservative Child & Parental Rights Campaign and Parents Defending Education, groups opposing the Biden administration’s proposal to redefine sex as “gender identity” are urging supporters to file comments in the Title IX regulatory proceeding before it closes Monday.
An 18-month-old nonprofit unexpectedly joined their ranks last week: the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), cofounded by black intellectuals including Columbia University’s John McWhorter and Brown University’s Glenn Loury, which fights identity politics in education and government and has focused mainly on race.
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Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Professional Educators of Tennessee Executive Director and CEO JC Bowman in studio to discuss the lack of local control Tennesseans have on their public school education and doing away with the federal Department of Education.
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Oversight Republicans have launched an investigation into how the U.S. Department of Education has handled billions of COVID-19 relief dollars, raising the alarm about the major learning loss experienced by students.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Department of Education Secretary Miguel Cardona demanding documents and answers as to why most of the money has reportedly remained unspent.
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Governor Bill Lee said last week that more than 2,000 families in Shelby and Davidson counties have already signed up for school vouchers. According to the Tennessee Department of Education, up to 5,000 are available this upcoming school year.
In 2019, the Tennessee General Assembly passed and Governor Bill Lee signed Public Chapter 506, which created the Tennessee Education Savings Account (ESA) program. The Tennessee Supreme Court ruled in May that the school voucher program is constitutional.
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Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed Ed Bartlett, Chairman of (SAVE) to the newsmaker line to talk about the Eastern District of Tennessee’s court ruling on Title IX and what it means.
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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed the Executive Director & CEO of Professional Educators of Tennessee, JC Bowman to explain the change of the Basic Education Program to the new TISA (Tennessee Investment and Student Achievement) and how it will create another level of bureaucracy.
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