Secretary of Education Linda McMahon released her budget proposal for next year, and it’s as bad as expected.
Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, reviewed the budget and concluded that it shows a reckless disregard for the neediest students and schools and outright hostility towards students who want to go to college.
We know that Trump “loves the uneducated.” Secretary McMahon wants more of them.
Burris sent out the following alert:
Linda McMahon, handpicked by Donald Trump to lead the U.S. Department of Education, has just released the most brutal, calculated, and destructive education budget in the Department’s history.
She proposes eliminating $8.5 billion in Congressionally funded programs—28 in total—abolishing 10 outright and shoving the other 18 into a $2 billion block grant. That’s $4.5 billion less than those 18 programs received last year.
And it gets worse: States are banned from using the block grant to support the following programs funded by Congress:
Aid for migrant children whose families move frequently for agricultural work
English Language Acquisition grants for emerging English learners
Community schools offering wraparound services
Grants to improve teacher effectiveness and leadership
Innovation and research for school improvement
Comprehensive Centers, including those serving students with disabilities
Technical assistance for desegregation
The Ready to Learn program for young children
These aren’t just budget cuts—they’re targeted strikes.
McMahon justifies cutting support for migrant children by falsely claiming the program “encourages ineligible non-citizens to access taxpayer dollars.” That is a lie. Most migrant farmworkers are U.S. citizens or have H-2A visas. They feed this nation with their backbreaking labor.
The attack continues for opportunity for higher education:
Pell Grants are slashed by $1,400 on average; the maximum grant drops from $7,395 to $5,710
Federal Work-Study loses $1 billion—an 80% cut
TRIO programs, which support college-readiness and support for low-income students, veterans, and students with disabilities, are eliminated
Campus child care programs for student-parents are defunded
In all, $1.67 billion in student college assistance is gone—wiped out on top of individual Pell grant cuts.
And yet, McMahon increased funding for the federal Charter Schools Program to half a billion dollars for a sector that saw an increase of only eleven schools last year. Meanwhile, her allies in Congress are pushing a $5 billion private school and homeschool voucher scheme through the so-called Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA).
And despite reducing Department staff by 50%, she only cuts the personnel budget by 10%.
This is not budgeting. It is a war on public education.
This is a blueprint for privatization, cruelty, and the systematic dismantling of opportunity for America’s children.
President Trump is very much still hung up on the star power that boosted former Vice President Kamala Harris’ ultimately unsuccessful campaign.
In a pair of posts shared to his Truth Social platform Sunday night and Monday morning, Trump criticized several celebrities who publicly endorsed Harris in her months-long bid. Among the stars fueling the former “Apprentice” host’s ire were Beyoncé, Bruce Springsteen, Oprah and Bono. In his caps-lock-laden tirades, Trump accused the Harris camp of illegally paying Springsteen, Beyoncé and other stars to appear at campaign events and throw their support behind the Biden-era VP.
“I am going to call for a major investigation into this matter,” Trump wrote on Sunday, before accusing Harris and her team of paying for endorsements “under the guise of paying for entertainment.”
The Boss did not back down on his fiery rhetoric against Trump on the second night of his “Land of Hopes and Dreams” tour in Manchester, England, on Saturday — a day after Trump lashed out against the legendary singer on Truth Social, calling him an “obnoxious jerk,” a “dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker,” and writing that he should “keep his mouth shut.”
Springsteen didn’t oblige. In a resolute three-minute speech from the Co-op Live venue, Springsteen thanked his cheering audience for indulging him in a speech about the state of America: “Things are happening right now that are altering the very nature of our country’s democracy, and they’re too important to ignore.”
He then repeated many of the lines that he used during his first Manchester show — the same words that upset Trump to begin with, including the administration defunding American universities, the rolling back of civil rights legislation and siding with dictators, “against those who are struggling for their freedoms…”
“In my home, they’re persecuting people for their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. That’s happening now,” Springsteen said. “In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. That’s happening now. In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.” In a steady voice, he listed the many concerns of those who oppose Trump, his enablers and his policies.
“They are removing residents off American streets without due process of law and deploying them to foreign detention centers as prisoners. That’s happening now. The majority of our elected representatives have utterly failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government,” Springsteen said as the crowd applauded and yelled its support. “They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.” He finished on a positive note.
“The America I’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real, and regardless of its many faults, it’s a great country with a great people, and we will survive this moment. Well, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, ‘In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.’ ”
Vice President Kamala Harris speaks from the South Lawn of the White House in Washington on Monday during an event with NCAA college athletes. This is her first public appearance since President Joe Biden endorsed her to be the next presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.
Credit: AP Photo / Susan Walsh
The likelihood that Vice President Kamala Harris will be the Democratic nominee for president is inviting scrutiny of her positions on every public policy issue, including education.
By her own accounting, those views have been profoundly shaped by her experiences as a beneficiary of public education, as a student at Thousand Oaks Elementary School in Berkeley and later at the Hastings College of Law (now called UC Law San Francisco).
Just three months ago, in remarks about college student debt in Philadelphia, she paid tribute to her late first grade teacher Frances Wilson, who also attended her graduation from law school. “I wouldn’t be here except for the strength of our teachers, and of course, the family in which I was raised,” she said.
The most memorable moment in Harris’ unsuccessful 2019 campaign for president was in the first candidates’ debate when she sharply criticized then-Vice President Joe Biden for opposing school busing programs in the 1970s and 1980s.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me,” Harris said in the debate.
She was referring to Berkeley’s voluntary busing program set up in 1968, the first such voluntary program in a sizable city. Biden was apparently able to put the exchange aside when he selected her to be his running mate several months later.
At age 12, her family moved to Montreal where she attended a public high school, and then went to Howard University, the Historically Black College and University in Washington D.C. for her undergraduate education.
It is impossible to anticipate what if any of the positions Harris took earlier in her career, or as a presidential candidate five years ago, will be revived should she win the Democratic nomination, or even become president.
But they certainly offer clues as to positions she might take in either role.
When she kicked off her campaign for president at a boisterous rally in downtown Oakland in January 2019, she made access to education a major issue. “I am running to declare education is a fundamental right, and we will guarantee that right with universal pre-K and debt-free college,” she said, referring to pre-kindergarten.
By saying education is a fundamental right, Harris addressed directly an issue that has been a major obstacle for advocates trying to create a more equitable education system.
While education is a core function of government — even “perhaps the most important function,” as Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling — it is not a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. That has meant relying much more on state constitutions.
During her term as vice-president, she has played a prominent role in promoting a range of President Biden’s education programs, from cutting child care costs to student loan relief.
Last year she flew to Florida especially to take on Gov. Ron DeSantis over his attacks on what he dismissed as “woke indoctrination” in schools. In particular, she was incensed by the state’s middle school standards that argued that enslaved people “developed skills that could, in some instances, be applied for their personal benefit.”
DeSantis challenged her to debate him on the issue — an offer she scathingly rejected. “There is no roundtable, lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact: There were no redeemable qualities to slavery,” she declared at a convention of Black missionary women in Orlando.
Earlier in her career, she was best known on the education front for her interest in combating school truancy — an interest that could be extremely relevant as schools in California and nationally grapple with a huge post-pandemic surge in chronic absenteeism.
Students are classified as chronically absent if they miss 10% or more of school days in the school year.
Nearly two decades ago, while district attorney in San Francisco, she launched a student attendance initiative focused on elementary school children. Each year, she sent letters to all parents advising them that truancy was against the law. Prosecutors from her office would meet with parents with chronically absent children. If they did not rectify the situation, they could be prosecuted in a special truancy court — and face a fine of up to $2,500 or a year in county jail.
By 2009, she said she had prosecuted about 20 parents. “Our groundbreaking strategy worked,” she wrote in an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, citing a 20% increase in attendance at the elementary level.
When she ran for California attorney general in 2010, she backed a bill that enacted a similar program into state law. The law also subjected parents to fines and imprisonment for up to a year, but only after they had been offered “support services” to address the pupil’s truancy.
As attorney-general, she used the clout of her office to go after for-profit colleges she accused of false and predatory advertising, and intentionally misrepresenting to students the benefits they could provide. She was able to get a $1 billion judgment against the California-based Corinthians Colleges Inc. which eventually declared bankruptcy. ““For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people – now they have to pay,” she said at the time.
During her presidential campaign five years ago, she made a major issue of what she labeled “the teacher pay crisis.” She said as president she would increase the average teacher’s salary by $13,500 — representing an average 23% increase in base pay. Almost certainly the most ambitious proposal of its kind made by any presidential candidate, the cost to the federal government would be enormous: $315 billion over 10 years.
To pay for it, she proposed increasing the estate tax on the top 1% of taxpayers and eliminating loopholes that “let the very wealthiest, with estates worth multiple millions or billions of dollars, avoid paying their fair share,” she wrote in The Washington Post.
Also on the campaign trail, she proposed a massive increase in funding to historically Black colleges and universities — one of which (Howard University in Washington, D.C.) she graduated from. In fact, she proposed investing $2 trillion in these colleges, especially to train Black teachers. She contended that if a child has had two Black teachers before the end of third grade, they’re one-third more likely to go to college.
Biden was able to push through a big increase in support for such institutions totaling $19 billion — far short of her goal of $2 trillion.
Many of her positions on education — including a push for universal pre-school, and making college debt-free — were aligned with those proposed by Biden, or ultimately implemented by him as president.
For that reason, there is likely to be continuity in her candidacy with much of the education agenda proposed by Biden.
But mainly as a result of lack of action in Congress and Republican-initiated lawsuits blocking his proposals, many of the administrations’s aspirations, like making community colleges free, doubling the size of Pell Grants, and student debt refiled, remain unfulfilled.
It will now be up to Harris — and the American voter — whether she will have the opportunity to advance that unfinished education agenda.
This story has been updated to include details about Harris’ education after her parents moved from Berkeley to Canada when she was 12.
Most of us have never met a transgender person. The first time I knowingly met a transgender person was 2016, in Los Angeles, where I met Caitlyn Jenner, once celebrated as the Olympic superstar Bruce Jenner. I attended a corporate luncheon, where she was the main draw for an audience of young people (of which I was not one).
Trump and his friends have made a major issue of demonizing trans men and women, although they are a tiny proportion of the population (1%?) and threaten no one. So far as I know, they are not murderers, rapists, or members of violent gangs. What they want is to live their lives in peace, without harassment.
My view, as I have often expressed in the comments section, is that it’s not up to me or you or Trump to tell them how to live. The decisions they make are not my business nor anyone else’s aside from their parents and medical professionals. In Caitlyn’s case, she decided to transition at the age of 65, a decade ago. She is a political anomaly, as she supported Trump in the 2024 election, despite the hysteria he promoted about trans people.
Here is a better representative of a trans woman: Hannah Szabó.
Hannah Szabó
A friend sent me a video of Hannah Szabó speaking at Central Synagogue in Manhattan on April 4. She is a senior at Yale. She is editor-in-chief of the Yale Historical Review and has a double major in Computing-&-Linguistics (B.S.) and Comparative Literature (B.A.).
Central Synagogue is a historic reform synagogue. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl is the first and probably the only Korean-American rabbi in the country. Both my sons celebrated their bar mitzvahs in this synagogue almost 50 years ago.
Most board members said Her, out of applicants from across the nation, was the best candidate to improve student outcomes.
The year-long selection process may have eroded community trust.
Fresno Unified, the state’s third-largest school district, named interim superintendent Misty Her to the permanent role Wednesday, ending more than a year-long, contentious process to select a leader for a school system that many say needs to improve student outcomes and rebuild trust in the community.
The board voted 6-1 in closed session to select Her, keeping her at the helm of the 70,000-student district with over 15,000 employees. Trustee Susan Wittrup who cast the sole “no” vote said Her does not have a “proven track record of action, urgency and accountability with accelerating academic achievement.”
Late last school year, the school board picked Her, who was then a deputy superintendent in the district, to lead the district on an interim basis while the search for the permanent position went on. The board will approve Her’s contract at the April 30 meeting.
“We are not waiting for change to happen,” Her said after her selection. “We are leading it, and I am proud to be the leader at the helm of this critical work.”
Despite a 1.52 percentage point improvement from the 2022-23 school year, 34.72% of students met or exceeded the state’s English standards in 2023-24.
For third grade – the school year hailed as being pivotal in determining reading proficiency and predicting future success – less than one in three students were on grade level in English standards, a GO Public Schools 2024 student outcome report showed. According to the report, the numbers are closer to one in five English learners, students with disabilities and Black students meeting standards. Specifically among the English standards, 30.7% of third graders were below the standard in reading and 43.3% were below the standard in writing, the report detailed.
In math, 25.14% of students met or exceeded standards, a 1.83 point increase from the previous school year.
“Nobody should be even remotely satisfied with where we are,” said board member Andy Levine. “Selecting Misty as our next superintendent is our best bet to seeing Fresno Unified significantly improve academic outcomes for all students in the years ahead…”
As interim superintendent, Her established two district-wide goals: improving student outcomes and achieving operational excellence, “recognizing that our district was not progressing because we lacked focus and clarity districtwide,” board president Valerie F. Davis said.
Increase the percentage of first graders proficient in literacy
Support elementary and middle school students with underachieving reading test scores to accelerate their reading skills and close achievement gaps
Raise the percentage of students graduating from high school who are considered college and career ready
Build and equip students with essential skills, such as communication, collaboration and critical thinking
Moving forward, the district will align its actions with those board-set goals, monitoring programs’ and initiatives’ “academic return on investment,” Her told EdSource during an interview in early April.
So far, Her’s own plans have included implementing, measuring the effectiveness and monitoring the progress of the district’s recently-launched Every Child Is a Reader literacy initiative to achieve first-grade reading proficiency for students, two years before third grade, when future success is predicted.
Also a part of her tenure, Fresno Unified gathered state, district, school and student data to identify and prioritize ways to enhance learning for each child while also focusing on historically underserved student groups, such as English learners and students with disabilities, who have significant achievement gaps compared to other groups.
This school year, educators have been able to adapt teaching and leadership strategies based on real-time data via a district dashboard, including data-informed and data-driven instruction.
Her’s entire 32-year career has been in Fresno Unified where she’s held many positions, including a bilingual instructional aide, teacher, school administrator, districtwide leader and deputy superintendent in 2021.
“I know this district because I am this district,” Her said. “My story, like so many of our students, began in hardship, but it is fueled by hope.”
Born in a prisoner-of-war camp in Laos, Her’s family escaped to a refugee camp in Thailand after the end of the Vietnam War before eventually coming to the United States and settling in Fresno when she was a young child. Both her parents worked as custodians cleaning Fresno Unified classrooms where she, as a student, later “learned to read, to dream and to lead.”
“As an immigrant who overcame language and cultural barriers,” according to the district, “Misty understands the challenges many of our students face and is committed to ensuring every student has the opportunity to succeed.”
Of the more than 92% of Fresno Unified students who are from ethnic minority groups, around 6,500 are Hmong. Behind Spanish, the Hmong language, which was only developed in written form less than 75 years ago, is at over 10%, the second most common home language of Fresno Unified’s English learners.
“My lived experience — the struggles, the barriers, the perseverance — are not liabilities,” Her said. “They are my greatest leadership strengths.”
Wednesday’s selection concludes a long process
While members of the Hmong community thanked the board for its “care” and “diligence” in the search process and commitment to diversity with Her’s hiring, some criticized the board for making closed-door decisions without community engagement.
The search process in its early months was engulfed in community angst about an alleged lack of transparency and accusations that the process had been tainted by politics, EdSource reported.
Respondents to a Fresno Teachers Association survey of teachers and school staff indicated that they’ve lost trust in the school board, “not because of the person you chose but because of the process that you led,” said Manuel Bonilla, president of the teachers union.
“This isn’t just about process; it’s about trust,” Bonilla said. “It’s about a pattern of closed-door decisions.”
In January 2024, then-superintendent Bob Nelson announced his resignation to start a tenure-track position at Fresno State after his last day on July 31.
On March 20, 2024, the board’s 4-3 decision to interview internal candidates before deciding how to proceed with the search process sparked community anger. Details of the closed session were leaked to the media, pushing the board to reverse course on April 3 and postpone already scheduled interviews.
In May 2024, to avoid rushing the search process, the board named Her to the interim role, to “maintain momentum.”
Qualities the community asked for
The district conducted 24 listening sessions.
Key themes deemed necessary for the district’s next leader included:
An educational background that includes experience as a teacher, an administrator and other roles
Experience and understanding of the district’s history, culture, complexities and diversity
Effective communication skills and the ability to collaborate and engage with people in the school community
A strategic vision supported by data-driven strategies
“Those are the qualities we found 100% in Misty Her,” board member Elizabeth Jonasson Rosas said.
Fresno Unified’s Misty Her and district leadersCredit: Fresno Unified / Flickr
Naming Her as interim superintendent wouldn’t restore community trust, Bonilla warned.
“You had the chance to build public trust through transparency and inclusion,” he said. “Instead, you allowed what many people thought was a secretive process.”
While the superintendent’s job description and criteria as well as other aspects of the search process were presented at public meetings where community members could comment, some people expected more participation in the search process, especially following last year’s alledged lack of transparency.
The teachers union, for example, requested a community forum for finalists, which didn’t occur. Candidate applications and interviews have remained confidential behind closed-door sessions.
In other places across the country, applications and interviews of those applying for a superintendency are open to the public because of state legislation.
According to the district, the board in its national search accepted applications from candidates from several states, in which Her’s “depth of experience, unparalleled skills and dedication to the students of Fresno Unified make her the ideal person to assume the top leadership role for Fresno Unified.”
“This next chapter is not about politics,” said board president Davis during a press conference announcing Her’s selection. “It’s about our 70,000 students and their families. It’s about building on the progress we have made while boldly charting a new path forward: one that demands excellence out of every student, every classroom, every teacher, every school, every neighborhood we serve.”
