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    Can Rahm Emanuel Flip the Script Again?

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    There’s a buzz around Rahm Emanuel — the former Bill Clinton adviser, former Illinois congressman, former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, former mayor of Chicago — possibly becoming the next head of the Democratic National Committee. The progressive left despises his pragmatism and liberal centrism. He has a reputation for abrasiveness. And his current job, as ambassador to Japan, has traditionally served as a posting for high-level political has-beens like Walter Mondale and Howard Baker.But he also has a gift for constructing winning coalitions with difficult, unexpected partners.More on that in a moment. When I meet him for breakfast this week at a New York City hotel, what he wants to talk about is a looming crisis in Asia. “What started as two wars in two theaters is now one war in two separate theaters,” he says of the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. “We need to ensure that it does not expand into a third theater.”How soon might that happen? I mention 2027, a year that’s often seen as China’s target date for reunification with Taiwan, if necessary by force.“I think it’s actually 2025,” he answers.What Emanuel has in mind are Asia’s other flashpoints, including along the 38th parallel that divides North and South Korea, where Russia is “poking” Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, “to do something” and where South Korea’s president briefly declared martial law, and also in the South China Sea, where China and the Philippines are coming to blows over Beijing’s illegal maritime claims. Unlike with Taipei, to which America’s obligations are deliberately ambiguous, with Manila and Seoul our defense commitments are ironclad.That could mean war for the United States on multiple unexpected fronts. Emanuel’s tenure as ambassador was distinguished by his role in engineering two historic rapprochements — last year between Japan and South Korea and this year between Japan and the Philippines — that, along with the AUKUS defense pact with Britain and Australia, form part of a broad diplomatic effort by the Biden administration to contain China.The Chinese, Emanuel says, “have a theory of the case in the Indo-Pacific. We have a theory of the case. Their attempt is to isolate Australia, isolate the Philippines and put all the pressure on that country,” often through abusive trade practices. “Our job is to flip the script and isolate China through their actions.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      California Educator Is Charged With Molesting 8 Children

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      David Braff was first accused of misconduct years ago but has since held a series of school jobs. The authorities are investigating the possibility of additional victims. A Los Angeles assistant principal was arrested on Friday and charged with molesting eight children between 2015 and 2019, while he was working as an elementary school counselor in Ventura County. The defendant, David Lane Braff Jr., 42, of Thousand Oaks, Calif., is accused of molesting children aged 6 to 10 in an office at McKevett Elementary School in the Santa Paula Unified School District, roughly 70 miles west of Los Angeles. The charges emerged out of a cold case sexual abuse unit, Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko said. He noted that officials at McKevett Elementary had reached out to authorities at the time of the alleged incidents.Nevertheless, Mr. Braff has held several jobs in public education since and has also volunteered in a number of programs for children.Mr. Nasarenko described an “extensive search for the possibility of other victims at other school sites and locations.” “This shakes the very foundation of the notion of a school site as a safe learning environment,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Chooses Linda McMahon, a Longtime Ally, for Education Secretary

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      President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tapped Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive who ran the Small Business Administration for much of his first term, to lead the Education Department, an agency he has routinely singled out for elimination in his upcoming term.A close friend of Mr. Trump’s and a longtime booster of his political career, Ms. McMahon had been among his early donors leading up to his electoral victory in 2016 and has been one of the leaders of his transition team, vetting other potential appointees and drafting potential executive orders since August.In Ms. McMahon, 76, Mr. Trump has elevated someone far outside the mold of traditional candidates for the role, an executive with no teaching background or professional experience steering education policy, other than an appointment in 2009 to the Connecticut State Board of Education, where she served for just over a year.But Ms. McMahon is likely to be assigned the fraught task of carrying out what is widely expected to be a thorough and determined dismantling of the department’s core functions. And she would assume the role at a time when school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, many students are not making up ground lost during the pandemic in reading and math, and many colleges and universities are shrinking and closing amid a larger loss of faith in the value of higher education.“We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort,” Mr. Trump said in a statement announcing the decision on Tuesday.Ms. McMahon led the Small Business Administration during Mr. Trump’s first term and resigned in 2019 without a public fallout or rift with Mr. Trump, who praised her at her departure as “one of our all-time favorites” and a “superstar.” She stepped down from that role to help with Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign and became the chairwoman of the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Doesn’t Care Enough About K-12 Education to Break It

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      When it comes to education, I consider myself a normie parent. What I want is for my children to have a strong foundation in the core subjects: reading, math, science and history. I want my kids to be challenged to the best of their abilities and be prepared for the future. I want to be guaranteed that they will be physically safe. I don’t want monthslong school board fights over book bans or school renaming. I just want my children to read books and go to school.People disagree about how best to meet these goals (roughly, liberals think the worst public schools should be made better, conservatives think parents should be given more choices outside the public system, though there are some heterodox advocates). But the depressing fact is that neither party has delivered on the basics. As I argued last month, neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris had a plan for increasing test scores, fixing Covid learning loss, working on the student absentee crisis or addressing the fact that the teacher pipeline is drying up.Though education is not a top -five issue for voters, I don’t think Democrats on the city and state levels have done a good job as leaders on K-12 schools under President Biden. And on the federal level, he also has struggled. To name one, there’s the ongoing FAFSA debacle — the federal student aid application form was delayed for a second year in a row after last year’s disastrous rollout of a new form.A lot of students are still suffering from the prolonged school closings of 2020-2021, and schools in blue cities and suburbs were closed the longest. While the Biden-Harris administration isn’t responsible for these decisions made on the local level, I don’t think they did enough to push back on the districts that were completely closed for in-person learning after adults could be vaccinated. The federal government pumped a lot of money into Covid education relief, but that funding expired in September. As a public school parent, I can feel it: My third grader’s class has 30 kids in it, more than we’ve ever experienced since my older child entered the system in 2017.In Trump’s first term, he proposed billions of dollars of cuts to the Department of Education that did not get through Congress. His secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, was a huge proponent of school choice. “But for all her efforts, DeVos has little to show for it,” NPR’s Cory Turner said in 2020.Despite Trump’s lackluster record, his ability to gain voters in urban areas might have had to do with how much voters were fed up with Democratic leadership on things like education. As Politico’s Charlie Mahtesian explained, he was able to win in part because “In big, diverse urban places — like Houston’s Harris County or Chicago’s Cook County — he pared down traditionally large Democratic margins.” Trump also increased support in blue places like New York, San Francisco and the densely populated Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. And a lot of city-dwelling Democrats stayed home.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s 2nd-Term Agenda Could Transform Government and Foreign Affairs

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      The president-elect could reshape government and may dramatically transform foreign and domestic policy in a second term.As he declared victory, President-elect Donald J. Trump said that his mission now was nothing less than to “save our country.” His version of doing that involves an expansive agenda that would reshape government, foreign policy, national security, economics and domestic affairs as dramatically as any president in modern times.Over the course of the campaign, Mr. Trump outlined a set of policies for his second term that would be far more sweeping than what he enacted in his first. Without establishment Republicans and military veterans surrounding him to resist his more drastic ideas, Mr. Trump may find it easier to move ahead, particularly if his party completes its sweep by winning the House.Many of his policy prescriptions remain vague or change in detail depending on his mood or the day. But if he follows through on his campaign trail talk, he would restructure the government to make it more partisan, further cut taxes while imposing punishing tariffs on foreign goods, expand energy production, pull the United States back from overseas alliances, reverse longstanding health rules, prosecute his adversaries and round up theoretically millions of people living in the country illegally.“We’re going to do the best job,” Mr. Trump said in his victory speech. “We’re going to turn it around. It’s got to be turned around. It’s got to be turned around fast, and we’re going to turn it around. We’re going to do it in every way with so many ways, but we’re going to do it in every way. This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country.”Having promised to devote his next four years in office to “retribution,” Mr. Trump plans to quickly shield himself from legal scrutiny, end criminal investigations against himself, pardon supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and turn the power of federal law enforcement against his adversaries.He has said he will fire Jack Smith, the special counsel who has brought indictments against him for mishandling classified documents and trying to overturn the 2020 election, and he has threatened to investigate President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and others who have angered him, including Republicans like Liz Cheney, the former congresswoman from Wyoming.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Leadership Failures Helped Lead to FAFSA Debacle, Watchdog Finds

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      Two reports by the Government Accountability Office found that mismanagement and wildly unrealistic projections derailed the student aid application process this year.Leaders in the Education Department systematically failed to manage deadlines and badly underestimated technical shortcomings while overhauling the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, according to a pair of damaging reports released by the Government Accountability Office on Tuesday.The reports provide new insight into a breakdown that is already painfully familiar to thousands of students and families, who struggled for much of this year to get an accurate estimate of how much they would need to pay for college because of glitches in the application form, known as FAFSA.Signs of trouble with FAFSA started around this time last year, when students typically can begin to submit their household’s financial data to the government, which in turn helps calculate financial aid offers.By January, many students found themselves running into a variety of bugs and data entry problems that locked them out of the form, produced an inaccurate summary of their finances or otherwise prevented them from applying.Many findings in the reports released on Tuesday, including how the Education Department struggled to manage contractors it hired to help build the form, have been publicly known for some time through reporting and several congressional inquiries.But the accountability office’s findings highlighted startling details about just how poorly the department underestimated the problems that would affect families and force college administrators to sort out discrepancies through much of this summer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Where Does Biden’s Student Loan Debt Plan Stand? Here’s What to Know.

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      The Supreme Court refused to allow a key part of President Biden’s student debt plan to move forward. Here’s what’s left of it, and who could still benefit.President Biden’s latest effort to wipe out student loan debt for millions of Americans is in jeopardy.The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to allow a key component of the policy, known as the SAVE plan, to move forward after an emergency application by the Biden administration.Until Republican-led states sued to block the plan over the summer, SAVE had been the main way for borrowers to apply for loan forgiveness. The program allowed people to make payments based on income and family size; some borrowers ended up having their remaining debt canceled altogether.Other elements of Mr. Biden’s loan forgiveness plan remain in effect for now. And over the course of Mr. Biden’s presidency, his administration has canceled about $167 billion in loans for 4.75 million people, or roughly one in 10 federal loan holders.But Wednesday’s decision leaves millions of Americans in limbo.Here is a look at what the ruling means for borrowers and what happens next:Who was eligible for SAVE?Most people with federal undergraduate or graduate loans could apply for forgiveness under SAVE, which stands for Saving on a Valuable Education.But the amount of relief it provided varied depending on factors such as income and family size. More than eight million people enrolled in the program during the roughly 10 months that it was available, and about 400,000 of them got some amount of debt canceled.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Supreme Court, for Now, Blocks Protections for Transgender Students in Some States

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      The order maintained halts by lower courts on federal rules prohibiting discrimination against transgender people in schools.The Supreme Court on Friday temporarily continued to block Education Department rules intended to protect transgender students from discrimination based on their gender identity in several Republican states that had mounted challenges.The emergency order allowed rulings by lower courts in Louisiana and Kentucky to remain in effect in about 10 states as litigation moves forward, maintaining a pause on new federal guidelines expanding protections for transgender students that had been enacted in nearly half the country on Aug. 1.The order came in response to a challenge by the Biden administration, which asked the Supreme Court to intervene after a number of Republican-led states sought to overturn the new rules.The decision was unsigned, as is typical in such emergency petitions. But all nine members of the court said that parts of the new rules — including the protections for transgender students — should not go into effect until the legal challenges are resolved.“Importantly,” the unsigned order said, “all members of the court today accept that the plaintiffs were entitled to preliminary injunctive relief as to three provisions of the rule, including the central provision that newly defines sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.”The decision handed a victory to the Republican-led states that had challenged the rules. A patchwork of lower court decisions means that the rules are temporarily paused in about 26 states.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Happens to Biden’s Student Loan Repayment Plan After Court Rulings?

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      More than eight million borrowers are enrolled in the income-driven plan known as SAVE. The Education Department is assessing the rulings.President Biden’s new student loan repayment plan was hobbled on Monday after two federal judges in Kansas and Missouri issued separate rulings that temporarily blocked some of the plan’s benefits, leaving questions about its fate.The preliminary injunctions, which suspend parts of the program known as SAVE, leave millions of borrowers in limbo until lawsuits filed by two groups of Republican-led states challenging the legality of the plan are decided.That means the Biden administration cannot reduce borrowers’ monthly bills by as much as half starting July 1, as had been scheduled, and it must pause debt forgiveness to SAVE enrollees. The administration has canceled $5.5 billion in debt for more than 414,000 borrowers through the plan, which opened in August.If you’re among the eight million borrowers making payments through SAVE — the Saving on a Valuable Education plan — you probably have many questions. Here’s what we know so far, though the Education Department has yet to release its official guidance.Let’s back up for a minute. What does SAVE do?Like the income-driven repayment plans that came before it, the SAVE program ties borrowers’ monthly payments to their income and household size. After payments are made for a certain period of years, generally 20 or 25, any remaining debt is canceled. But the SAVE plan — which replaced the Revised Pay as You Earn program, or REPAYE — is more generous than its predecessor plans in several ways.Ask us your questions about the SAVE student loan repayment plan.

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