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us department of education
'Betsy DeVos 2.0': Trump Picks WWE Billionaire Linda McMahon to Lead Education Department
"During his first term, Donald Trump appointed Betsy DeVos to undermine and ultimately privatize public schools through vouchers," said the president of the National Education Association. "Now, he and Linda McMahon are back at it."
Nov 20, 2024
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump announced late Tuesday that he intends to nominate Linda McMahon, the billionaire former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, to lead the Department of Education, a key agency that Republicans—including Trump and the authors of Project 2025—have said they want to abolish.
McMahon served as head of the Small Business Administration during Trump's first White House term and later chaired both America First Action—a pro-Trump super PAC—and the America First Policy Institute, a far-right think tank that has expressed support for cutting federal education funding and expanding school privatization.
Trump touted McMahon's work to expand school "choice"—a euphemism for taxpayer-funded private school vouchers—and said she would continue those efforts on a national scale as head of the Education Department.
"We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort," Trump said in a statement posted to his social media platform, Truth Social. (McMahon is listed as an independent director of Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs Truth Social.)
The National Education Association (NEA), a union that represents millions of teachers across the U.S., said in response to the president-elect's announcement that McMahon is "grossly unqualified" to lead the Education Department, noting that she has "lied about having a degree in education," presided over an organization "with a history of shady labor practices," and "pushed for an extreme agenda that would harm students, defund public schools, and privatize public schools through voucher schemes."
"During his first term, Donald Trump appointed Betsy DeVos to undermine and ultimately privatize public schools through vouchers," NEA president Becky Pringle said in a statement. "Now, he and Linda McMahon are back at it with their extreme Project 2025 proposal to eliminate the Department of Education, steal resources for our most vulnerable students, increase class sizes, cut job training programs, make higher education more expensive and out of reach for middle-class families, take away special education services for disabled students, and put student civil rights protections at risk."
"The Department of Education plays such a critical role in the success of each and every student in this country," Pringle continued. "The Senate must stand up for our students and reject Donald Trump's unqualified nominee, Linda McMahon. Our students and our nation deserve so much better than Betsy DeVos 2.0."
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, took a more diplomatic approach, saying in a statement that "we look forward to learning more about" McMahon and that, if she's confirmed, "we will reach out to her as we did with Betsy DeVos at the beginning of her tenure."
"While we expect that we will disagree with Linda McMahon on many issues, our devotion to kids requires us to work together on policies that can improve the lives of students, their families, their educators, and their communities," Weingarten added.
McMahon is one of several billionaires Trump has selected for major posts in his incoming administration, which is teeming with conflicts of interest. During Trump's first term, McMahon and her husband, Vince McMahon, made at least $100 million from dividends, investment interest, and stock and bond sales.
The Guardiannoted Tuesday that "in October, [Linda] McMahon was named in a new lawsuit involving WWE."
"The suit alleges that she and other leaders of the company allowed the sexual abuse of young boys at the hands of a ringside announcer, former WWE ring crew chief Melvin Phillips Jr," the newspaper reported. "The complaint specifically alleges that the McMahons knew about the abuse and failed to stop it."
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DOE Investigating Columbia University for Anti-Palestinian Harassment
"Students have the right to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, without fear of unequal treatment, racist attacks, or being denied access to an education by their university," one lawyer said.
May 02, 2024
Palestine Legal announced Thursday that the U.S. Department of Education has launched a federal investigation into "extreme anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic harassment" at Columbia University a week after the advocacy group filed a complaint on behalf of four students and a campus organization.
"While the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) looks into all complaints it receives, it only opens a formal investigation when it determines the facts warrant a deeper look," Palestine Legal pointed out on social media. "The complaint explains how Columbia has allowed and contributed to a pervasive anti-Palestinian environment on campus—including students receiving death threats, being harassed for wearing keffiyehs or hijab, doxxed, harassed by [administration], suspended, locked out of campus, and more."
"Instead of protecting Palestinian and associated students when their voices are most needed to oppose an ongoing genocide, Columbia has taken actions to reinforce this hostile climate in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964," added the group.
"The law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."
Palestine Legal senior staff attorney Radhika Sainath stressed that "the law is clear, if universities do not cease their racist crackdowns against Palestinians and their supporters—they will be at risk of losing federal funding."
"Students have the right to speak out against the genocide of Palestinians, without fear of unequal treatment, racist attacks, or being denied access to an education by their university," the lawyer added.
Since the filing, which highlighted that Columbia University President Minouche Shafik invited "the New York Police Department (NYPD) onto campus for the first time in decades to arrest over 100 students who had been peacefully protesting Israel's genocide of Palestinians," the Ivy League leader has called officers back to the school for more arrests.
On Tuesday night, the NYPD "violently arrested and brutalized dozens of student protestors, some with guns drawn, using sledgehammers, batons, and flash-bang explosives," noted Palestine Legal, which represents Maryam Alwan, Deen Haleem, Daria Mateescu, and Layla Saliba as well as Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
Columbia is one of many American campuses where administrators have called the police, who have behaved aggressively toward students and faculty nonviolently demonstrating to demand that their schools and the U.S. government stop supporting the Israeli assault of Gaza, which has killed at least 34,596 Palestinians in under seven months.
The Interceptrevealed last week that OCR opened an investigation into the University of Massachusetts Amherst after Palestine Legal filed a complaint "on behalf of 18 UMass students who have been the target of extreme anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab harassment and discrimination by fellow UMass students, including receiving racial slurs, death threats and in one instance, actually being assaulted."
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—who has supported peaceful student protests and whose daughter Isra Hirsi was suspended from Columbia's Barnard College for protesting last month—highlighted the reporting on social media and some of the verbal attacks that students have endured.
OCR has opened a probe into Emory University following a complaint filed by Palestine Legal and the Council on American Islamic Relations, Georgia (CAIR-GA), according toThe Guardian. The newspaper noted Thursday that complaints have also been filed about Rutgers University in New Jersey and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Emory spokesperson Laura Diamond said in a statement that the university "does not tolerate behavior or actions that threaten, harm or target individuals because of their identities or backgrounds."
CAIR-GA executive director Azka Mahmood said that she hopes the investigation into Emory helps "make sure that the systems put in place against bias are used for everyone across the board—so we can produce a comfortable, equitable place for Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab students in the future."
The probes and complaints are notably being conducted and reviewed by an administration that has condemned campus protests while arming Israeli forces engaged in what the International Court of Justice has called a plausibly genocidal campaign in Gaza.
After U.S. President Joe Biden delivered brief remarks on the demonstrations Thursday morning, Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney and national deputy director at CAIR, said his "claim that 'dissent must never lead to disorder' defies American history, from the Boston Tea Party to the tactics that civil rights activists, Vietnam War protesters, and anti-apartheid activists used to confront injustice."
"And if President Biden is truly concerned about the conflict on college campuses," Mitchell added, "he should specifically condemn law enforcement and pro-Israel mobs for attacking students, and stop enabling the genocide in Gaza that has triggered the protests."
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Dems Press Biden Admin to Expand Student Debt Relief Plan
"We are concerned that the latest draft of the rule would fall far short of providing the full scale of debt relief that low- and middle-income Americans urgently need."
Dec 11, 2023
Seven members of Congress on Monday sounded the alarm about the Biden administration's evolving student debt cancellation plan and called on U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to use his authority to provide broad relief.
After the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court in June struck down President Joe Biden's initial debt relief plan—designed to cancel up to $20,000 per federal borrower—the administration launched a negotiated rulemaking process to establish an alternative plan under the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965.
The committee responsible for crafting the rule "has met several times already, but its final round of talks began on Monday and will continue through Tuesday," reported USA Today. "Frustrations arose almost immediately. Committee members expressed disappointment in the department's latest forgiveness proposal, released last week, which many said doesn't go far enough in its current form to address the issues they've spent months debating."
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sens. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Frederica Wilson (D-Fla.) are also unsatisfied with the draft, as they made clear Monday in a letter to Cardona.
"This regulation has the potential to improve the financial security of tens of millions of hard-working Americans who are currently trapped by crushing student debt," the lawmakers noted. "However, we are concerned that the latest draft of the rule would fall far short of providing the full scale of debt relief that low- and middle-income Americans urgently need."
The letter explains that under the draft, only four groups would be eligible for relief: "(1) borrowers with outstanding federal student loan balances that exceed their original principal balance, due to interest; (2) borrowers with loans that have been in repayment for over 20 or 25 years; (3) borrowers who are eligible for forgiveness under an enumerated repayment plan or loan program but have not enrolled; and (4) certain borrowers who took on loans to attend programs that provide insufficient financial value, lost Title IV eligibility, or were found to have committed misconduct."
The U.S. Education Department (ED) "has also released an issue paper indicating the potential need for the rule to address a fifth category: 'those experiencing hardship that is not otherwise addressed by the existing student loan system,'" the letter notes.
The HEA empowers Cardona to "enforce, pay, compromise, waive, or release" federal student loans. The lawmakers pressured him "to leverage this authority to its fullest extent, maximizing relief for the greatest number of borrowers facing financial hardship," highlighting that 43.6 million borrowers "collectively owe an astronomical $1.65 trillion."
"As we lend our support to your diligent efforts to provide debt relief through regulatory procedures, we urge you to consider several recommendations to strengthen the department's debt relief rule," the lawmakers wrote, detailing six proposals:
- Eliminate all debt that exceeds the original principal balance of the loan;
- Provide full cancellation, not just a waiver of excess interest, for borrowers who have repaid enough to cover their original principal;
- Eliminate the sudden cliff that would give full relief to borrowers whose loans first entered repayment at least 20 or 25 years ago, and no relief to similarly situated borrowers;
- Extend relief to borrowers with financial hardship and create a catch-all category for unforeseen forms of hardship;
- Extend relief to borrowers who have been victims of student loan servicer misconduct or error; and
- Eliminate the need for borrowers to submit burdensome applications by basing eligibility for relief on information that ED already has or that it can acquire from other agencies.
"We are encouraged by the department's critical efforts to provide student debt relief through negotiated rulemaking. However, we believe more must be done to improve the draft regulatory text," the letter concludes. "The Biden administration should take every
opportunity to use the authority Congress has already given it to deliver on the promises made to student loan borrowers."
Acknowledging the letter on the Senate floor Monday, Schumer declared that "following the Supreme Court's cruel, abrupt blocking of student debt relief, too many borrowers—too many—remain saddled with massive—in many cases, unbearable—amounts of debt. We can and we must do more to help these borrowers."
After being paused throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and the legal battle over Biden's first debt relief proposal, student loan repayments resumed in October. Since the high court's ruling, federal borrowers across the country have pushed the president to continue pursuing sweeping debt cancellation.
"An Education Department spokesperson said the agency had received the letter, is reviewing it, and welcomes the input from lawmakers," according to Politico.
"The Biden-Harris administration is proud of our record of providing relief to borrowers as we work to fix the broken student loan system," the spokesperson said in a statement. "This rulemaking process is about standing up for borrowers who've been failed by the country's broken student loan system and creating new regulations that will reduce the burden of student debt in this country."
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