US education

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘They are in shock’: Indian students fear Trump has ended their American dream

      by

      For weeks, Subash Devatwal’s phone has not stopped ringing. Some of the calls have been from distressed students, at other times it is their panicked parents, but all have the same question – is their dream of studying in the US still possible?Devatwal runs an education consultancy in Ahmedabad, the main city in the Indian state of Gujarat. It is one of thousands of such organisations that exist across the country, helping Indian students achieve what many consider to be the ultimate symbol of success: getting into an American university.It has long been a booming business for Devatwal. Families in India will often invest their entire life savings to send their children to study in the US and last year there were more than 330,000 Indians enrolled at American universities, more than any other foreign nationality, overtaking Chinese students in numbers for the first time in years.But this year the situation looks drastically different. As Donald Trump’s administration has taken aim at international students – first implementing draconian screening measures over political views and then last week ordering all US embassies globally to indefinitely pause all student visa interviews – many Indian students and their families have been left in limbo.Trump’s unilateral decision to block Harvard University from admitting international students, which was later blocked by the courts, also caused widespread panic and stoked fears that foreign students at other universities could get caught in the president’s crosshairs.“The students are in shock. Most of them spend several years preparing to study in the US,” said Devatwal. He said many of his clients were now hesitant to pursue a US degree, given the high levels of turmoil and uncertainty following the Trump administration’s new policies. Indian students can expect to pay between $40,000 to $80,000 (£29,500 to £59,000) a year on tuition alone to study in the US.In previous years, Devatwal’s organisation sent more than 100 students to American universities but this year he said the number had dropped to about 10. Instead, families were shifting their focus to the UK and other European countries. A recent analysis by the Hindu newspaper estimated a 28% drop in Indian students going to the US in 2025.View image in fullscreen“Families contribute their savings, take out loans from banks and borrow from relatives, all in the hope that the student will secure a good job abroad, repay the debt, and build a promising future,” said Devatwal. “In such uncertain circumstances, parents are understandably reluctant to let their children take such a risky path.”Brijesh Patel, 50, a textile trader in Surat, Gujarat, said he had been saving money for over a decade to make sure his son could go to a US university, including selling his wife’s jewellery and borrowing money from relatives.“Everyone in the family wanted our son to go to the US for his studies and make something good of his life,” said Patel. His 21-year-old son, who he asked not to be named for fear of retribution by the US authorities, had secured a place at two American universities for his master’s degree and Patel had already paid 700,000 rupees (£6,000) to consultancies who helped with the applications.But amid the turmoil under Trump, Patel said his son was being advised not to even apply for his student visa, due to the uncertainty and high probability of rejection. “We simply can’t take that risk. If our son goes now and something goes wrong, we won’t be able to save that kind of money again,” he said.However, Patel said he was not willing to give up on the family dream just yet. “I am an optimist, and my son is willing to wait a year,” he said. “We’re hoping that things improve by then. It’s not just my son who will be living the American dream, it’s all of us: my wife, our relatives and our neighbours. I’ve struggled my whole life – I don’t want my son to face the same struggles here in India.”The fear among prospective and current students was palpable. Several Indian students studying in the US declined to speak to the Guardian, fearing it could jeopardise their visas.In India, a student selected in December to be one of this year’s Fulbright-Nehru doctoral fellows – a highly competitive scholarship that pays for the brightest students to study abroad at US universities as part of their PhD thesis – said the applications of their entire cohort had recently been demoted back to “semi-finalists”.The student, who asked to remain anonymous over fears it would affect their application, said they had invitation letters from top Ivy League universities for the fellowship, which is considered one of the most prestigious scholarships in the US, but now everything was up in the air. “We are supposed to start in October and our orientation was scheduled for May, all the flights and hotels were even booked, but then it all got cancelled. Now we’ve been informed all our applications are under review by the Trump administration,” said the student.They said it had caused “huge panic and anxiety” among those accepted. “I know a lot of people are going back through their social media, deleting things and doing a lot of self-censoring.”Piyush Bhartiya, a co-founder of the educational technology company AdmitKard, said many parents who had been set on sending their children to the US were rethinking their plans. He cited one example of a student who had been admitted to New York University for the coming year but was instead planning to go to the London School of Economics after the US visa interviews were paused.Bhartiya said Indian students primarily went to the US to study Stem subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths – and so the focus had shifted to other countries strong in these areas.“Germany is the main country where students are shifting to for Stem subjects,” he said. “Other countries like Ireland, France, the Netherlands, which are also gaining substantial interest in the students. At the undergraduate level, the Middle East has also seen a lot of gain in interest given parents feel that it is close by and safer and given the current political environment they may want their kids closer to the home.”Among the Indian students forced to abandon their plans is Nihar Gokhale, 36. He had a fully funded offer for a PhD at a private university in Massachusetts, but recently received a letter saying the funding was being withdrawn, as the university faced issues under the Trump administration.“It was quite shocking. I spoke to people at the university, and they admitted it was an exceptional situation for them too,” said Gokhale.Without the funding, the US was financially “out of the question” and he said he had an offer from the UK he now intended to take up.“For at least the next three or four years, I’m not considering the US at all,” he said. More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Insidious fear’ fills universities as Trump escalates conflict during commencement season

      by

      It is graduation season in the United States and with it comes a tradition of commencement speeches to departing college students, usually from high-profile figures who seek to inspire those leaving academia.But, as with many things under Donald Trump’s second term in the White House, commencement season this year has been far from normal, especially as the US president and his allies have waged conflicts against the nation’s universities.Amid concerns about the Trump administration undermining US residents’ free speech rights, some commencement ceremonies have featured speakers who have warned about the president’s abuses of power, while others have hosted pop culture figures who have delivered more innocuous remarks. Trump himself went off script at the nation’s most famous military academy.The politically charged speeches could hold increased significance this year as university leaders grapple with how to respond to Trump’s efforts to exert more control over federal funding to schools; campus protests and curriculum; and which international students are allowed to study in the United States, according to people who study such addresses.“A lot of folks this spring will turn to these commencement speeches, especially now with the advent of social media, which allows us to distribute the clips much more widely, to see what people are saying in this critical moment, where our democracy is so fragile,” said James Peterson, a Philadelphia columnist and radio show host who has written about commencement addresses.US graduation ceremonies have long provided a forum for speakers to not only deliver a message to students but also to shape public opinion.In 1837, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a speech at Harvard University titled The American Scholar in which he argued that colleges “can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls and by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame”.The US supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr described the speech as the country’s “intellectual Declaration of Independence”.More recently, some of the most famous speeches have included those from then president John F Kennedy in 1963 at American University, David Foster Wallace in 2005 at Kenyon College and Apple founder Steve Jobs the same year at Stanford University.While plenty of commencement speakers have sparked a backlash – after delivering another speech in 1838, Emerson was banned from Harvard for 30 years – the stakes could be higher this year for universities that host speakers who criticize Trump, who has withheld federal funding from universities that didn’t agree to his demands.In recent weeks, the administration halted Harvard’s ability to enroll international students and ordered federal agencies to cancel all contracts with the school because it “continues to engage in race discrimination” and shows a “disturbing lack of concern for the safety and wellbeing of Jewish students”.A Harvard spokesperson said the ban on international students was “unlawful” and “undermines Harvard’s academic and research mission”.“This is not a time when colleges and universities are trying to attract a ton of attention,” said David Murray, the executive director of the Professional Speechwriters Association. “Nobody wants to put their head above the fray and give anybody any reason to single them out as the next Harvard.”But some speakers have delivered fiery remarks aimed at Trump. Wake Forest University hosted Scott Pelley, a longtime reporter for the famous CBS show 60 Minutes, amid turmoil at the network. The program’s executive producer resigned because he said he no longer had editorial independence. Trump had filed a lawsuit against CBS’s parent company, Paramount, over an interview with his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris.Paramount’s controlling shareholder, Shari Redstone, wants to sell the company and needs approval from federal regulators. She reportedly wants to settle the case.Pelley did not mention Trump by name but said: “Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack. An insidious fear is reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes and into our private thoughts.”The speech sparked backlash from rightwing media. Laura Ingraham, a Fox News host, said Pelley was a “a whiny liberal and still bitter”.At the University of Minnesota, Tim Walz, the state’s governor and a former vice-presidential candidate, described the president as a “tyrant” and called the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo”.The Department of Homeland Security account on X posted that Walz’s remarks were “absolutely sickening” and that Ice officers were facing a “413% increase in assaults”.The department did not respond to the Guardian’s question about how many assaults have occurred and which time periods they were comparing.Ben Krauss, the CEO of the speechwriting firm Fenway Strategies and former chief speechwriter for Walz, said he thinks commencement addresses are important because there are not many opportunities where you have “a captive audience, even if it’s for 10 minutes”.For speakers to “break through to society is probably a tall order, but I think the goal of a good commencement should be just to break through to the people in the room”, said Krauss, who shared that his agency worked on more than a dozen commencements this year but did not disclose which ones.Still, Murray isn’t sure the speeches from Pelley and Walz will have a big impact.“Pelley’s speech made a lot of people mad on the right, and I don’t know how much it did on the left or in the center,” Murray said. “It’s really hard to give a speech that really unites everyone, and giving a speech that divides everyone just seems to make the problems worse.”Trump also took political shots during his address to graduating cadets at the United States military academy at West Point. He said past leaders “subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes, while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars”.He also spoke about postwar housing developer William Levitt, who married “a trophy wife”.“I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work out,” Trump said.“It’s great to hear someone speak truth to power,” Peterson said of Pelley’s address. “It’s also sobering to hear a president be, as I think, in many folks’ perspectives, disrespectful of a longstanding American institution.”Earlier this week, Trump ordered federal agencies to cancel all contracts with Harvard. On Thursday, the school held its commencement ceremony. Meanwhile, a federal judge issued an injunction blocking the administration’s efforts to prevent the school from enrolling international students.Many speakers at the school’s events over the last week addressed Trump’s impact on the school and worldwide.Yurong “Luanna” Jiang, a Chinese graduate who studied international development, said she grew up believing that the “world was becoming a small village” and that she found a global community at Harvard, the Associated Press reported.These days, her worldview has changed.“We’re starting to believe those who think differently, vote differently or pray differently, whether they are across the ocean or sitting right next to us, are not just wrong – we mistakenly see them as evil,” she said. “But it doesn’t have to be this way.”Other commencement speakers included actor Elizabeth Banks, who at alma mater University of Pennsylvania argued that the main problem affecting the world was not race, religion, ability or gender but the extreme concentration of money, and encouraged graduates to “wrap it up and keep abortion legal”.At Emory University, the artist Usher argued that a college degree still matters “in a world where credentials can feel overshadowed by clicks and followers and algorithms”.“But it’s not the paper that gives the power – it’s you,” Usher said.Then there was Kermit the Frog at the University of Maryland, the alma mater of the Muppets’ creator, Jim Henson. The frog, voiced by Matt Vogel, told graduates that life is “like a movie. Write your own ending. Keep believing. Keep pretending.”He then closed by asking the crowd to join him in singing his classic tune, Rainbow Connection.“Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection,” they sang. “The lovers, the dreamers and me.” More

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Former Harvard president urges people to ‘speak out’ against threats to US democracy

      by

      A recent former president of Harvard University urged people to “speak out” in defense of “foundational threats” to values such as freedom, autonomy and democracy in the US, as those whose deaths for such causes in war were being honored on Memorial Day.Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard, also warned on Monday of US constitutional checks and the rule of law being “at risk” under the current administration, even as Donald Trump issued a fresh threat against the elite university as it seeks to repel his assaults on its independence and funding.“We are being asked not to charge into … artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats to the principles for which [the US civil war dead] gave the last full measure of devotion. We have been entrusted with their legacy. Can we trust ourselves to uphold it?” Faust wrote in a guest opinion essay for the New York Times.She highlighted, in particular, the principles fought and died for by Union soldiers in the US civil war and the roles played by assassinated US president Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and leading Black civil rights leader of the 19th century.“We must honor these men,” she wrote.Faust, who led Harvard between 2007 and 2018 and still teaches there, did not mention the US president by name but she referred to his position and made a direct link between the civil war and now.Noting that about 2.7 million men, mostly volunteers, in 1861-1865 “took up arms to preserve the Union as a beacon of democracy at a time when representative government seemed to be fading from the earth”, she went on to warn: “Today democracy is once again under worldwide threat, assailed as disorderly and inefficient by autocratic leaders from Budapest to Moscow to Beijing, leaders our own president openly admires.”View image in fullscreenFaust said that Lincoln regarded the Confederacy’s split from the Union, when southern states seceded in order to defend slavery and evade federal government intervention, as a “direct assault” on government by the majority “held in restraint” by constitutional checks.“Those structured checks and the rule of law that embodies and enacts them are once again at risk as we confront the subservience of Congress, the defiance of judicial mandates and the arrogation of presidential power in a deluge of unlawful executive orders,” she wrote in her essay.Critics of Trump lament congressional Republicans’ acquiescence to the president’s expansions of his authority and challenges to constitutional constraints, Democrats’ lackluster resistance, and the administration’s defiance of court orders over various anti-immigration extremes and partisan firings of federal officials and watchdogs without cause.Meanwhile, Trump has repeatedly accused Harvard of antisemitism and bias against Jewish students and attacked its efforts towards greater diversity on campus, and the administration has further demanded cooperation with federal immigration authorities, while harnessing federal powers to try to punish the university.Last Friday, Harvard sued prominent government departments and cabinet secretaries for what it said was a “blatant violation” of the US constitution when the Trump administration announced it would revoke federal permission for the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based institution to enroll international students. A federal judge issued an injunction within hours, temporarily blocking such a ban.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHarvard had previously sued in April over what it said was Trump’s attempt to “gain control of academic decision-making” at the university and the administration’s threat to review about $9bn in federal funding.On Monday, Trump posted on his social media platform: “I am considering taking Three Billion Dollars of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,” adding: “What a great investment that would be for the USA.”By Monday afternoon the president had not followed up with action or further explanation or statements.Harvard’s current president, Alan Garber, who is Jewish, has called the Trump demands “illegal” and said the administration was trying “to control whom we hire and what we teach”.Faust, a historian and research professor at Harvard, who was also its first president to have been raised in the US south, concluded her essay by acknowledging that those who fought in the US civil war did, in fact, save the nation and subsequently gave opportunities to the generations that followed.“They were impelled to risk all by a sense of obligation to the future,” she wrote, adding that “we possess a reciprocal obligation to the past” and that “we must not squander what they bequeathed to us”. More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s West Point graduation address veers from US-first doctrine to politics

      by

      Donald Trump told graduating West Point military academy cadets on Saturday that they were entering the officer corps at a “defining moment in the army’s history”, in a commencement address that included political attacks and a discourse on the folly of older men marrying “trophy wives”.Referring to US political leaders of the past two decades who “had dragged our military into missions” that people questioned as “wasting our time, money and souls in some case”, Trump told the young leaders that “as much as you want to fight, I’d rather do it without having to fight”. He predicted that, through a policy of “peace through strength”, the US’s adversaries would back down. “I just want to look at them and have them fold,” he said.The president also said US soldiers had been sent “on nation-building crusades to nations that wanted nothing to do with us, led by leaders that didn’t have a clue about distant lands while abusing our soldiers with absurd ideological experiments here and at home”.“All of that’s ended, strongly ended. They’re not even allowed to think about it anymore,” Trump added.Making apparent reference to diversity, equity and inclusion programs that defense secretary Pete Hegseth has cancelled, Trump weaved together criticism of his predecessors with a new focus on curbing illegal immigration.“They subjected the armed forces to all manner of social projects and political causes, while leaving our borders undefended and depleting our arsenals to fight other countries’ wars. We fought for other countries’ borders but we didn’t fight for our own borders, but now we do like we have never fought before,” he said.He later said that “the job of the US armed forces is not to host drag shows or transform foreign cultures”, a reference to drag shows on military bases that his predecessor Joe Biden halted in 2023 after Republican criticism.Wearing a red “Make America great again” campaign hat throughout, the president told the 1,002 graduating cadets that the US is the “hottest country in the world”, and boasted of his administration’s achievements.The president also returned, once again, to a cautionary tale he often tells young people about the danger of losing momentum in life, illustrated by an anecdote about what he called the unhappy retirement of the post-war housing developer William Levitt, the creator of Levittowns, planned communities on Long Island, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.Repeating a story he told at a Boy Scout jamboree in 2017, and at the University of Alabama three weeks ago, the president said that Levitt was unsatisfied by life without work, even though he married “a trophy wife” and bought a yacht. “It didn’t work out too well, and that doesn’t work out too well, I must tell you, a lot of trophy wives, it doesn’t work out,” the president told the young women and men. “But it made him happy for a little while at least.”Trump also used the occasion to repeat an unfounded accusation he first made in 2020: the claim that Russia had stolen US hypersonic missile technology during Barack Obama’s presidency. “The Russians stole it, something bad happened. But we’re now building them, lots of them,” Trump said, praising eight cadets who had built their own. “We are building them right now. We had ours stolen. We are the designers of it. We had it stolen during the Obama administration.”Outside the gates of West Point, protesters gathered with drums, banners and signs to condemn what they called the president’s attack on American democracy.At points during Trump’s address, he veered between praising the graduating military cadets and maintaining political criticism of the Biden administration.The graduation address, which ran to almost an hour long, comes before an expansive military parade in Washington on 14 June to celebrate the 250th anniversary celebration of the nation. The date is also the president’s birthday.Alongside the military parade featuring more than 6,700 soldiers, it will include concerts, fireworks, NFL players, fitness competitions and displays all over the National Mall for daylong festivities. The army expects that as many as 200,000 people could attend and that putting on the celebration will cost an estimated $25m to $45m.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      California school district must halt ban on critical race theory, court rules

      by

      A small southern California school district must immediately pause its ban on critical race theory (CRT), a California appeals court ruled on Thursday morning .The 4th district court of appeals ruling put a halt to the Temecula Valley unified school district ban until its litigation is settled in the California legal system. The decision is the latest in a long-running legal battle over the CRT ban, which was first adopted as a resolution by the Temecula Valley Board of Education in December 2022 as they attempted to purge elementary school textbooks that reference gay rights icon Harvey Milk.The recent decision, authored by Judge Kathleen O’Leary, and concurred by the panel’s other two judges, said that the vague nature and lack of legal or academic terminology in the resolution jeopardized its constitutionality.“The Resolution defined CRT as ‘a divisive ideology that assigns moral fault to individuals solely on the basis of an individual’s race’ and, therefore, is itself a racist ideology,” O’Leary’s ruling said. “The Resolution operates as if this definition is universally accepted, but the text does not indicate where this definition is derived, or whether it is shared with anyone else besides the Board.”The ruling pointed to the resolution’s lack of examples of CRT, and lack of guidance for teachers looking to modify their curriculum.O’Leary’s other primary concern revolved around “confusion and fear” from educators due to the policy, and negative impacts on education provided. One fourth grade teacher submitted a letter of evidence stating that under the doctrine, “she did not know what a permissible response was when her students asked her how and why slavery happened.”“Teachers are left to self-censor and potentially overcorrect, depriving the students of a fully informed education and further exacerbating the teachers’ discomfort in the classroom,” O’Leary wrote. “Rather than lead the classroom and moderate healthy discussion, the teachers are forced to leave children’s questions unanswered.”The conflict over CRT in education has been divisive in Temecula, a historically conservative southern California city of just more than 100,000 people. The battle has followed familiar lines, with three conservative school board members elected in 2022 after running in opposition to mask and vaccine mandates, as well as “sexualized” material in school curriculums. The school board president also famously labeled Milk as a “pedophile” and originally rejected a state-issued social studies textbook including the assassinated gay rights activist. Gavin Newsom, the California governor, threatened a $1.5m fine in response.While the school district may have run into opposition in their community and at the appeals court, headwinds at the federal level are in their favor. In late January, Donald Trump signed executive orders to promote school choice, or the use of public dollars for private education, and to remove funding from schools accused of “radical indoctrination”. Trump also revived a “1776 commission” to “promote patriotic education”. More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      Oklahoma high schools to teach 2020 election conspiracy theories as fact

      by

      As part of the latest Republican push in red states to promote ideologies sympathetic to Donald Trump, Oklahoma’s new social studies curriculum will ask high school students to identify “discrepancies” in the 2020 election results.The previous standard for studying the 2020 election merely said: “Examine issues related to the election of 2020 and its outcome.” The new version is more expansive: “Identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellwether county’ trends.”The revised curriculum standard comes at the behest of Ryan Walters, the state school superintendent, who has publicly voiced his support for Trump. In October, Walters lauded Trump in an interview, saying that “Trump’s won the argument on education”.Walters, who has also advocated for ending “wokeness” in public schools, went on to say: “We have education bureaucrats that are left-wing, elitist, that think they know best for families, and they have become so radicalized that our families are going: ‘What is going on here?’”Oklahoma’s new social studies standards for K-12 public school students, already infused with references to the Bible and national pride, were revised at Walters’ direction. The Republican official has spent much of his first term in office not only lauding Trump but also feuding with teachers’ unions and local school superintendents.“The left has been pushing left-wing indoctrination in the classroom,” Walters said. “We’re moving it back to actually understanding history … and I’m unapologetic about that.”As part of his revisions, Walters also proposed removing education about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd’s murder, Tulsa’s NBC affiliate KJRH reports.The outlet further reported that the revisions were expected to cost the state’s taxpayers $33m in new textbooks and related material.Other efforts by Walters includepromoting Trump-endorsed Bibles across classrooms, as well as supporting an attempt to establish the US’s first public religious charter school – a case the conservative-majority supreme court seems open to siding with.The new standard raised red flags even among Walters’ fellow Republicans, including the governor and legislative leaders. They were concerned that several last-minute changes, including the language about the 2020 election and a provision stating the source of the Covid-19 virus was a Chinese lab, were added just hours before the state school board voted on them.A group of parents and educators have filed a lawsuit asking a judge to reject the standards, arguing they were not reviewed properly and that they “represent a distorted view of social studies that intentionally favors an outdated and blatantly biased perspective”.While many Oklahoma teachers have expressed outrage at the change in the standards, others say they leave plenty of room for an effective teacher to instruct students about the results of the 2020 election without misinforming them.Aaron Baker, who has taught US government in high schools in Oklahoma City for more than a decade, said he’s most concerned about teachers in rural, conservative parts of the state who might feel encouraged to impose their own beliefs on students.“If someone is welcoming the influence of these far-right organizations in our standards and is interested in inserting more of Christianity into our practices as teachers, then they’ve become emboldened,” Baker said. “For me, that is the major concern.”Leaders in the Republican-led Oklahoma legislature introduced a resolution to reject the standards, but there wasn’t enough GOP support to pass it.Part of that hesitation likely stemmed from a flurry of last-minute opposition organized by pro-Trump conservative groups such as Moms for Liberty, which has a large presence in Oklahoma and threatened lawmakers who reject the standards with a primary opponent.“In the last few election cycles, grassroots conservative organizations have flipped seats across Oklahoma by holding weak Republicans accountable,” the group wrote in a letter signed by several other conservative groups and GOP activists. “If you choose to side with the liberal media and make backroom deals with Democrats to block conservative reform, you will be next.”After a group of parents, educators and other Oklahoma school officials worked to develop the new social studies standards, Walters assembled an executive committee consisting mostly of out-of-state pundits from conservative thinktanks to revise them. He said he wanted to focus more on American exceptionalism and incorporate the Bible as an instructional resource.Among those Walters appointed to the review committee were Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a key figure in its Project 2025 blueprint for a conservative presidential administration, and Dennis Prager, a radio talkshow host who founded Prager U, a conservative non-profit that offers “pro-American” educational materials for children that some critics say are not accurate or objective.In a statement to the Associated Press, Walters defended teaching students about “unprecedented and historically significant” elements of the 2020 presidential election.Recounts, reviews and audits in the battleground states where Trump contested his loss all confirmed Democrat Joe Biden’s victory, and Trump lost dozens of court cases challenging the results.In addition to the curriculum revisions, a proposed rule approved by the state board of education in January mandates that parents enrolling their children in the state’s public schools show proof of immigration status.Describing the rule, which has been met with widespread outrage among parents, students and immigration advocates, Walters said: “Our rule around illegal immigration accounting is simply that … It is to account for how many students of illegal immigrants are in our schools.” More

    • 225 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Head Start avoids Trump’s cuts, but advocates are ready to defend it: ‘There’s too much good in this’

      by

      Tanya Stanton felt a sense of relief when she heard last week that the Trump administration seems to have reversed course on eliminating the Head Start early education program. She directs early learning programs at You Thrive, a Florida non-profit that provides Head Start services to approximately 1,100 children in the central part of the state.On Friday, the Trump administration released an updated “skinny budget”, which lays out the executive office’s discretionary spending priorities. It doesn’t contain a proposal to shut down Head Start, as mentioned in an administration memo obtained by the Associated Press in April. And that means thousands of families can breathe easier; the program served 833,000 low-income students nationwide in fiscal year 2022.Relief, however, does not mean that Stanton wants to lessen the pace of the advocacy that followed the announcement. “If anything, this has taught us that you can’t sit idle,” she said. Too much is at stake.Florida currently has over 45,000 children enrolled in 860 Head Start sites, the third highest number of students in the country behind California and Texas. In 2024, it received over $544m in federal funds. The budget may no longer target Head Start funding, but the administration closed half of the program’s 10 regional offices and federal funding freezes have affected its programs, and it does propose eliminating other programs that Head Start families rely upon, including preschool development grants and community block grants.“Until Congress passes and the president signs a final funding bill, we urge all Head Start supporters to continue advocating for the preservation of this vital program,” said Wanda Minick, Florida Head Start Association’s executive director.View image in fullscreenFor You Thrive’s Stanton, it has been a surprise to realize how little many Americans understand the full impact and scope of the program. Head Start has served 39 million children and families since its inception in 1965, according to government statistics. At its most basic level, Head Start provides free childcare in a nation where households can pay more on average for childcare than on their housing. Access to childcare has a major economic impact on families and communities, since a US Chamber of Commerce study finds that states can lose up to $1bn a year when parents and guardians can’t find or afford childcare. That is not even counting the hundreds of thousands of Head Start employees, whose possible job losses would also have ripple effects on their households and communities.Head Start is actually multiple programs that do much more than education and childcare. Early Head Start is for infants to three-year-olds, and its staff work on parenting skills with families one-on-one. Children also receive medical care such as dental, vision and mental health screenings. Head Start serves kids from ages three to five, and there’s also a Migrant Head Start for children of agricultural workers.Building stronger familiesDoing away with Head Start would have immediate effects for affected families and their greater communities, but could also have long-term – even generational – consequences, said child and family policy expert Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It. He noted a 2022 study showing that the children of Head Start participants were more likely to graduate high school and enter college; less likely to be teen parents and enter the criminal justice system; and had higher self-esteem – all of which translated to a 6% to 11% increase in wages.In her book A Chance for Change: Head Start and Mississippi’s Black Freedom Struggle, Emory University historian Crystal R Sanders examined the impact Head Start had on economic opportunity in civil rights-era Mississippi. Through the Child Development Grant of Mississippi (CDGM), which ran from 1965-68, “federal money was going directly into the hands of working-class black people, something that had never happened in the state of Mississippi”, Sanders said.CDGM parents had the opportunity to work and go back to school. Many earned a GED or high-school equivalency, and some pursued college degrees, which resulted in better-paying jobs and even home ownership. “Head Start gave them a leg-up, too,” Sanders said. “That’s still true today.”For Lee Ann Vega, education manager at You Thrive, threats to Head Start are not just devastating – they’re personal. “It makes me sad for not only my families, but it makes me so sad for the children,” she said.Vega, 51, has Head Start to thank not only for a job but also for setting her on the right path in life. She and her brother were enrolled in Head Start after her mother abandoned the family due to substance abuse, and her father was working three jobs. The support she received inspires her passion for helping other children.“There’s so many days that I wake up and I thank God for allowing me to be a part of this process. Because Head Start works,” she said.Stanton of You Thrive said: “We are here to help the families achieve self-sufficiency.” To achieve this, staff work one-on-one with families to establish personalized goals. For some families, it means locating temporary or permanent housing. For some, it means entering higher education or learning new technical skills.View image in fullscreen“Some of them may not even know how to navigate on a laptop or computer,” Stanton said.Sometimes this leads to a job at Head Start itself, where former parents make up more than 20% of the program’s workforce. And while childcare as a whole pays low wages, Stanton noted that Head Start’s regulations, in a change made under the Biden administration, require that teachers earn as much as local public preschool or kindergarten teachers.“Head Start is an economic boon for communities, whether it’s the jobs it creates at those centers or the jobs that allow Head Start parents to work,” said Sanders, the Emory historian.The Trump administration budget proposal from April stated that eliminating Head Start aligned with its “goals of returning control of education to the states and increasing parental control”. That argument, Sanders said, “would suggest that they are actually not familiar with Head Start because Head Start prioritizes parental involvement”. Head Start standards require each agency to include parents on policy councils that decide or approve everything from enrollment and curriculum criteria to staffing.Tocra Waters is co-president of the policy council at Verner Early Learning Center in Asheville, North Carolina, where her three-year-old son Sincere has been enrolled in the county’s only Early Head Start program since the summer of 2023.The program provided crucial support at an unsettled time in her life. Waters and her two children had transitioned to a new home after spending time in a shelter, where Waters had gone after leaving an abusive partner. Sincere was “closed off” around people he didn’t know, she said.In home-based visits, Waters learned how to set boundaries and rules for Sincere, while he learned colors and improved his motor skills. Now in a classroom at Verner, Sincere has made friends and interacts more with others in all settings. “He’ll say, ‘Hi, morning, have a nice day,’ and it just melts my heart,” Waters, 32, said.Waters has seen her own confidence increase through her participation in the policy council. She values “that opportunity to be able to bring suggestions to the table … being an African American or a Black woman, in spaces, it seemed like we were not heard at times,” she said. She trusts Verner to care for her son and said its services “allowed me to be able to provide for my kids and still chase my dreams”.A future without funding?Verner, a non-profit center, received $3.2m, or 60% of its $5.3 operating budget this year from Head Start funding to support 139 children. Although the administration’s plans to eliminate Head Start funding gave CEO Marcia Whitney “heart palpitations”, she noted that “we as an organization would not cease to exist” if funding disappeared.However, they would start charging tuition for many of its programs, a move that would price out most of their Early Head Start families and force some to leave their jobs to stay at home with their children.The situation is far more critical for centers like those run by You Thrive Florida, where 98% of their funding comes from Head Start; the rest comes from the United Way and the state.While the Trump administration said eliminating Head Start would allow state and local governments to have control over education, Haspel said “states are absolutely not prepared to make that kind of shift”. He pointed out that states struggled to distribute pandemic stabilization grants to childcare programs because they lacked the staff and technological infrastructure to transfer funds as quickly and easily as the federal government.According to Minick, Florida would need to invest $688m to replace Head Start services. Florida already has its own version of Early Head Start, the School Readiness program. But it has stricter eligibility requirements; parents must work up to 20 hours a week and contribute co-pays. Minick estimates that those rules mean that only 13,000 of the more than 40,000 students in Head Start could now enroll (the state’s voluntary pre-kindergarten program currently has no waiting list). And Florida’s legislature is considering slashing its funding for state-run early learning programs by up to 8%.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenFor Sanders, the question is less whether the state governments can administer these programs but whether they are willing to do so, especially in states with a history of educational and racial segregation. “Historically, when we have left complete control of education to states, that has created inequality,” she said. When the CDGM received federal funding as one of the nation’s first Head Start programs, she noted, “the segregationist governor of Mississippi could not take away money from working-class Black people”.Even with an annual budget of $12bn, Head Start at best serves half of eligible children. “I don’t envision Americans truly saving any money by doing away with Head Start,” because it is so underfunded, Sanders said.Because the program has enjoyed bipartisan support since its inception, Haspel “would be somewhat surprised” if Congress agreed to the administration’s initial request to eliminate it completely. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the government on 28 April on behalf of a coalition of Head Start providers and parents, alleging that the executive branch does not have the power to impact Head Start’s funding without congressional approval.Stanton, for one, is hopeful. Longtime Head Start staff across the nation – people who have worked for the program for 30 or 40 years – told her that they have experienced tough moments like this before, though perhaps not of this magnitude.“I’m just a believer. I’m like, there’s too much good in this,” she said. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump to address graduating students at the University of Alabama

      by

      Donald Trump will travel to heavily Republican Alabama on Thursday to speak to graduating students at the University of Alabama, where he is expected to draw some protesters despite enjoying a deep well of support in the state.The US president’s evening remarks in Tuscaloosa will be his first address to graduates in his second term and will come as he has been celebrating the first 100 days of his administration.The White House did not offer any details about Trump’s planned message.Alabama, where Trump won a commanding 64% of the vote in 2024, is where he has staged a number of his trademark large rallies over the past decade. It also is where Trump showed early signs of strength in his first presidential campaign when he began filling stadiums for his rallies.While the White House has described Trump’s speech as a commencement address, it is actually a special event that was created before graduation ceremonies that begin Friday. Graduating students have the option of attending the event, but it is not required.Former Crimson Tide football coach Nick Saban is also speaking at the event.“As President Trump marks 100 days in office, there is no better place for him to celebrate all the winning than in Tuscaloosa, Alabama,” said the state’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey.Trump’s presence has drawn criticism from the Alabama NAACP and the University of Alabama College Democrats.College Democrats are countering with their own rally, calling it “Tide Against Trump” – a play on the university’s nickname. The event will feature onetime presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke of Texas and former US senator Doug Jones, the last Democrat to hold statewide office in Alabama.The NAACP said Trump’s policies are hurting universities and students, particularly students of color.“The decision for students of color, and really all students, should be to skip his speech and spend that time reflecting on how to make America a more inclusive nation,” said Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama NAACP.Trump’s visit to Alabama is his second trip this week. He held a rally in Michigan on Tuesday to mark 100 days in office.Outside of weekend trips for personal visits, Trump has not made many official trips since taking office on 20 January. He usually speaks to the public from the impromptu news conferences he holds in the Oval Office and at other events at the White House.After his stop in Alabama, Trump is scheduled to travel to Florida for a long weekend at his Mar-a-Lago resort.Next month, he is scheduled to give the commencement address at the US military academy in West Point, New York. More