Commentary: Diversity Is a False Religion to Destroy America

A group of college students stuying

This week, the National Association of Scholars (“NAS”) and the Heritage Foundation are sponsoring a panel discussion on diversity ideology in higher education. A number of reports have recently been published on the topic, with most documenting monies spent by state universities on “diversity, equity and inclusion” (“DEI“). The Maryland affiliate of the National Association of Scholars released the most recent such report this summer, but the Virginia affiliate issued one last year, while Idaho, North Carolina, Maine, and Tennessee produced similar documents before that.

The Maryland report reminds state officials that “diversity” is usually a cover for race-based practices that are now likely illegal under the 2023 United States Supreme Court case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (or “SFFA”). That opinion found that racial preferences in university admissions were a violation of federal civil rights laws and also the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. SFFA means that any race-based practice in college is presumptively unlawful. As the Court said, “Eliminating discrimination means eliminating all of it … distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their nature odious.”

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Case Could Make Unenforceable a Law That Prohibits Schools From Disclosing Gender Transitions to Parents

Aurora Regino in front of Chino Unified School District building (composite image)

A California mom’s lawsuit against the school district that helped her daughter identify as a boy without her knowledge could block the enforcement of a new California law that mandates schools hide students’ so-called gender identities from parents.

The Center for American Liberty first filed a lawsuit against Chico Unified School District in January 2023 on behalf of Aurora Regino, whose 11-year-old daughter “socially transitioned” at school and started identifying as male. The district has what the lawsuit calls a “Parental Secrecy Policy,” requiring Chico schools to socially transition students upon their request, regardless of parental support and without consent.

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College Students Lack ‘Rudimentary’ Knowledge of History, Civics: Survey

College students lack a “rudimentary grasp” of American history and government, as displayed in a civic literacy assessment recently conducted by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

The 35-question survey, “Losing America’s Memory 2.0,” asked more than 3,000 students from all 50 states questions about history and government, including Senate term lengths and a quote from the Gettysburg Address, according to ACTA. The survey was conducted in June by College Pulse.

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Commentary: Cell-Phone Free Classrooms Will Unleash Student Success

Students on Cell Phones

Amid the many battles over how to improve American schools, it’s often forgotten that what’s taught in the classroom is but one component of ensuring that students receive a high-quality education; it’s also important to remove barriers to children’s learning.

And the idea to remove one major impediment – cell phones in K-12 schools – has gained significant traction over the past year, most recently in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

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Commentary: Tim Walz’s Radical Education Record

Tim Walz

The National Educators Association, the largest teachers union in America, is “fired up” for Kamala Harris’s VP nominee, Tim Walz. “Gov. Walz is known as the ‘Education Governor,’” wrote NEA President Becky Pringle, “because he has been an unwavering champion for public school students and educators, and an ally for working families and unions. As a high school teacher and NEA member, Walz is committed to uplifting our public schools.”

The NEA’s endorsement should be worrisome for Americans who are actually concerned about the state of education in this country: for years, the NEA has put radical politics above children.

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Most Law School Students Say Social Justice More Important Than Winning in Court: Poll

About two out of every three law school students believe social justice is more important than obtaining a winning result for a client, according to the results of a recent survey of current law school students conducted by the Buckley Institute.

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New President of American Association of University Professors Says J.D. Vance is ‘Fascist’

Todd Wolfson

The new president of the American Association of University Professors recently referred to Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance as a “fascist.”

In an August 8 statement, Todd Wolfson, a Rutgers University anthropologist whose research “is a mixture of traditional and cyber-based ethnography,” took issue with Vance’s claim that universities are the “Enemy” and are “dedicated to ‘deceit and lies, not to the truth.’”

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Commentary: Chronic Absenteeism Is a Problem, but Most Proposed Solutions Miss the Point

Classroom

Two weeks ago, three unlikely bedfellows joined forces to announce their intention to cut K-12 chronic absenteeism in half by 2029.

The right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Education Trust, and the nonprofit organization Attendance Works revealed their plan in Washington, DC. The coalition hopes to combat chronic absenteeism, defined as students missing 10 percent or more of school days in a given academic year, by implementing a variety of initiatives, including home visits and similar interventions. Chronic absenteeism rates more than doubled during and after the Covid response. The goal is to reduce these rates to pre-pandemic levels, or around 13 percent.

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Male Students Do Better on ACT, Get Less Financial Aid

Male College Student

The gender gap in higher education is growing – and it may be due to how universities admit students and help them pay for school.

Men earn 42 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 38 percent of master’s, and 44 percent of doctorates, according to the American Institute for Boys and Men.

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Christian and Conservative Professors Divided over Louisiana’s New Ten Commandments Law

Jeff Landry

Political science professors at conservative and Christian colleges are split over the constitutionality of a new Louisiana law that requires all public schools to display the Ten Commandments in every classroom.

The law already faces a legal challenge from several families as well as left-leaning and atheist activist groups while Christian and conservative Louisiana lawmakers applaud the law.

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‘Beholden to Teachers Unions’: NEA and AFT Donated over $135K to Walz, Who Backs Their Far-Left Agenda

Tim Walz

Teachers unions are among the largest donors to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Democrats’ vice presidential candidate, giving over $135,000 to his campaigns for governor and, before that, Congress.

Walz, who once taught high school social studies, sides with teachers unions instead of everyday Minnesotans, some parents say.

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Commentary: Social-Emotional Learning Is Hurting Students

Sad Student

Social-emotional learning (SEL) has been in vogue in education circles for decades. Following its precepts, teachers, counselors, and administrators encourage students to look inward and focus on their feelings. The result?

A generation of young people who can’t stop thinking about their emotions, leaving them incredibly fragile. But that’s not what many of the experts will tell you.

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Commentary: DEI Litmus Tests Must End

Ideological litmus tests have no place in higher education. They weaponize loyalty and contradict the university’s purpose of fostering academic inquiry and informed debates. Scholars cannot pursue truth or progress if they are denied academic jobs based on their devotion to a specific political ideology or philosophy. 

I applaud states like Florida, Alabama, Wyoming, Tennessee, and Texas that have banned varied Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) requirements that mandate loyalty to its agenda. But we need to go further. Congress can deny federal funding to universities that impose DEI on faculty, administrators, and staff. Conservative lawmakers are already trying to “dismantle” DEI in the federal government and others are currently weighing defunding universities over Title VI violations. They should extend defunding to universities that require DEI. 

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Commentary: The Reckoning Has Come for K-12 Sex Abuse, and You the Taxpayer Are on the Hook

High School students in the classroom

The teenage female athletes at California’s Pomona High School said they felt special when a handful of coaches there took them under their wing, spending more time with them than others, providing extra encouragement, sharing personal stories and, sometimes, seemingly harmless flirtatious talk.

One track team member was amazed at a Nevada meet when she saw the coaches drinking, smoking marijuana, and sharing the party scene with teammates. But that attention turned to tragedy at a subsequent meet in Las Vegas when a coach brought the 16-year-old to his hotel room, plied her with alcohol, and, she says, raped her.

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Acquitted Former Student Sues Fifteen Groups for Defamation After They Called Him a Rapist

Saifullah Khan

A former Yale University student who defeated claims of rape is continuing his legal battle to seek justice.

Saifullah Khan is suing fifteen organizations including the National Women’s Law Center, the Fierberg National Law Group, and the National Crime Victim Law Institute, along with attorney Jennifer Becker, for “defamation, false light, negligent infliction of emotional distress, and abuse of process action.”

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University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Suspends Groups After Saying Israel Supporters ‘Not Welcome’ and to ‘Stay Tuned’

Pro-Palestinian protesters at UWM

Five pro-Palestinian groups at the University of Milwaukee are currently suspended and under investigation following an Instagram story.

The chancellor’s office wrote it was “alerted to an Instagram story on the uwm4palicoalition account that included intimidating language aimed at Jewish community members and organizations on campus that support Israel.”

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Commentary: Bias Lurks in Study Linking Bronchitis in Children with Poor Air Quality

People wearing masks

A new study by a team of University of Southern California researchers claims that children exposed to poor air quality are at greater risk of (self-reported) bronchitis symptoms than are adults. But this health claim is tenuous.

Published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, the study uses data sets from a 30-year-old Southern California Children’s Health Study cohort—with a long length of time between exposure and presumed response of self-reported bronchitis.

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Parents Petition Denver Schools to Stop ‘Seal of Diversity’ Program

Denver East High School

A Denver high school allows students to take classes such as Queer Literature and Gender Studies to earn a “Seal of Diversity” award.

Students can submit a short, five-minute application to be part of the program, then take “diversity, equity, and inclusion”-related classes and engage with a DEI-related club or organization on campus to receive the award, according to documents obtained by The Daily Signal through a Colorado Open Records Act request.

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Parents Outraged School District Forces Children to Room with Trans Students on Overnight Trips

Students in a Southern California school district could be forced to choose between rooming with a transgender-identifying student or missing out on an overnight school field trip.

If parents complain about their child rooming with a transgender-identifying student of the opposite biological sex, staff in the Newport-Mesa Unified School District listen to the parents’ concerns, then say that the child’s rooming assignment isn’t the parents’ choice, according to emails from 2021 and 2022 obtained by the Center for American Liberty and shared with The Daily Signal.

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20 Universities Still Require Students Get COVID Vaccine

Man getting bandaid on vaccination shot

Twenty United States colleges continue to require their students to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, according to the watchdog organization No College Mandates.

These mandates face increasingly heavy criticism from medical doctors and scholars who point to concerns regarding the vaccine’s safety, efficacy, and necessity.

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Aspiring ‘Teachers of Color’ Program Gets $1.1 Million in Taxpayer Funds at Minnesota’s University of St. Thomas

Teacher with classroom of students

The University of St. Thomas will “increase the number of science, technology, engineering and mathematics…teachers, particularly teachers of color, who work in the community,” with the aid of $1.1 million in taxpayer dollars.

The Catholic university in St. Paul received the federal grant with the assistance of Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith and Congresswoman Betty McCollum, according to a news release.

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Commentary: The Beginning of the Revolution Our Kids Need

A revolution is underway. Parents, physicians, and principals have seen the devastation inflicted on an entire generation of children raised on screens, and they are taking bold steps to end “phone-based childhood.” Politicians are joining the cause, too, with Congress on the brink of passing bi-partisan legislation to protect kids online – the first significant law of its kind in nearly 30 years. The catalyst for this revolution is Jonathan Haidt’s new bestselling book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.

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Historian Turned Lawyer Finds Second Career Suing ‘Ridiculous, Clearly Out of Control Universities’

Michael Thad Allen

“These universities are so arrogant and so disrespectful of their taxpayers’ wishes and, quite frankly, their money, that it’s infuriating.”

So says Michael Thad Allen, once a tenured history professor who found a second career as a lawyer defending college students and faculty against “hallucinatory” accusations from what he calls “Campus Cloudcuckooland.”

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Poll: Voters, Parents Opposed to AI in Schools over Cheating Concerns

Person on Computer

The majority of likely voters say artificial intelligence shouldn’t be in schools because it makes it too easy to cheat, new poll results show.

The Center Square Voter’s Voice Poll conducted by Noble Predictive Insights found that over two-thirds of likely voters say they think AI should stay out of schools.

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Report: Eighth-Grade Students Need Whole School Year to Reach Pre-Pandemic Performance

Teacher and Students

An education organization that administers a nationwide assessment has found that students are still not performing as well as they were immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic and that students’ achievement gap worsened in the 2023-24 school year as compared to before COVID.

NWEA, which issues the Measures of Academic Progress, said in a report this week that some middle school students are still an entire school year behind where they were before the pandemic in almost every grade as schools are slated to run out of federal relief this fall.

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College Board is Making It Easier for High School Students to Pass Prestigious Exams: Report

The College Board recently made changes to the Advanced Placement (AP) tests that have resulted in more student test-takers receiving higher scores, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The AP tests’ scoring changes involve replacing a panel of experts with a large-scale data analysis to determine skills students learned throughout the courses, the WSJ reported. Educators and test-prep companies are skeptical of the changes, alleging it is another form of grade inflation and a way to increase College Board’s business.

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Use of Cell Phones and Headphones Restricted in Florida County Schools

Cell Phones in Class

The Broward County School Board on Tuesday unanimously voted to restrict students’ use of cellphones in an effort to keep them focused and off social media during school hours.

Although the school district said restrictions on cell phone use were already part of the Student Code of Conduct, there will now be some changes that will go into effect when classes start on August 12.

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California School District Partners with LGBTQ Center That Recommends Transgender Surgeries for Minors

Child at doctor's visit

A California high school refers students to an LGBTQ+ nonprofit that helps minors get transgender surgery referrals, documents obtained by The Daily Signal reveal.

The high school in the Newport Mesa Unified School District in Southern California has scannable QR codes in its hallways that take students to a number of “LGBTQ+ Resources,” including the LGBTQ Center of Orange County’s website, according to photos shared with The Daily Signal.

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Student Test Scores Continue to Plummet Despite Hundreds of Billions in Pandemic Aid for Education

Student taking class online

Student test scores are continuing to fall four years after schools moved online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a study released Tuesday by testing company Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA).

The paper found gaps in academic performance between today’s students and their pre-pandemic counterparts are widening, despite the record $190 billion in federal aid distributed to schools since the pandemic began. The findings — which were divulged from an analysis of test results from the 2023-24 school year for approximately 7.7 million students between the third and eighth grades — also come two years after experts had claimed a recovery in education was underway.

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DEI, Critical Race Theory Pervades Military Trainings: Report

Military DEI

Diversity, equity and inclusion and critical race theory topics now pervade U.S. Armed Forces educational trainings and programs, according to newly published research.

The recent report out of Arizona State University’s Center for American Institutions detailed the extensiveness of DEI training throughout the branches of the military and military academies, as well as highlighted an increasing budget for DEI training.

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Commentary: Harvard May Never Have to Face Accountability for Claudine Gay’s Actions

Claudine Gay

In an ideal world, wrongdoers face swift and exact justice for their misdeeds. In reality, the legal system is costly. Justice comes at a steep price, one that I, and others whose works were allegedly plagiarized by Harvard’s Claudine Gay and others cannot afford.

After months of turmoil and legal back and forth, it is with a heavy heart that I announce that my intended copyright infringement case against former Harvard President Claudine Gay and the Harvard Corporation — a legal complaint that would have requested a jury trial — cannot be filed as planned in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee. The inability to raise sufficient funds for a trial (a steep minimum of $100,000 to $250,000) and the knowledge that the losing party could be ordered to cover the legal expenses of the victors, to which no limits exist under federal copyright law, gave me pause.

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Commentary: Cancel Culture Backfires on its Leftist Makers After Trump Assassination Attempt Remarks

Donald Trump

by David Huber   In a perfect world, people like Alison Scott, a teacher in the Oklahoma-based Ardmore City Schools district would have the self-control not to post stupid stuff on social media after a U.S. presidential candidate is almost assassinated. The high school music teacher responded to a Facebook user’s…

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Federal Court Halts Student Loan Payment Program in Another Blow to Biden Admin

College Students

A federal appeals court issued a temporary halt on Thursday on President Joe Biden’s income-driven repayment program for student loans due to challenges to its legality.

The Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) plan, which was introduced in 2023, seeks to provide new repayment methods for student loan borrowers, including lowering monthly payments based on income and minimizing interest payments. The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals halted the plan in its entirety in order to give the court time to issue a final ruling after also issuing a partial injunction in June.

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Medical Internship Program Under Fire for Rejecting Anyone Who Doesn’t ‘Identify’ as Black

Medical Students

A medical internship program is under fire for allegedly racially discriminating against otherwise qualified applicants, requiring that applicants must “identify” as black or African American.

Do No Harm filed a complaint on behalf of a member on Thursday requesting the federal government investigate an internship offered by the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine (ARM). The anonymous member was qualified academically and met all other requirements but was rejected because of his race.

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Commentary: The Four-Day School Weeks Are a Trend Across America Despite Questionable Results

School with students learning

Next month, the Huntsville School District in Arkansas will join the wave of public schools switching to a four-day week. 

The shorter school week, which first emerged in a few rural areas decades ago, is now expanding into suburbs and smaller cities. At least 2,100 schools in half the states have embraced the three-day weekend mostly as an incentive to hire and keep teachers, prompting cheers of support from instructors, unions, and many families.  

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California Passes Law to Keep Students’ Gender Transitions Secret from Parents

Gavin Newsom visiting a public school

On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) signed a controversial bill into law that would forbid schools from notifying parents if their children have decided to “transition” their gender.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, polling has suggested that the law is widely unpopular with voters nationwide as well as within California. A poll from Rasmussen in June of 2023 shows that over 60 percent of likely voters in California support schools informing the parents about a child’s desire to “transition.” A national poll by the Center Square in November saw two-thirds of respondents say that schools should let parents know.

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University in Kentucky Suspends Instructor After ‘Offensive’ Trump Shooting Post

John James

A college in Louisville has placed an instructor on unpaid leave after posting on social media he wished the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump succeeded.

“If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss,” John James wrote in all caps on a post discovered Sunday by Libsoftiktok. The statement was made above a screenshot of a news story on the Saturday shooting during a campaign rally in Pennsylvania that left the former president and current Republican nominee injured after a bullet grazed his ear.

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Audits Find Financial Issues with Some Florida Charter Schools

Classroom

The Florida Auditor General’s office has released two reports that detail significant issues and financial trends in the Sunshine State’s charter schools, charter technical career centers and district school boards.

There are 720 charter schools and charter technical career centers operating in Florida, with the majority in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. State law requires these schools to be annually audited by an independent certified public accountant.

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Defense Department Hid DEI Relaunch in K-12 Schools, Emotionally Manipulates Students: Watchdog

Military school

As the Democrat-controlled Senate prepares to debate and consider amendments to the fiscal 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, which already passed the GOP-led House with several amendments supported by Anti-Woke Caucus members, a transparency group is shining a light on the curriculum and vendors in the Pentagon’s 70,000-student school system.

The K-12 Department of Defense Education Activity, probed in a January hearing on “progressive ideologies in the U.S. military,” simply reshuffled its “radical” diversity, equity and inclusion programs and staff after reassigning DEI chief Kelisa Wing and deleting its DEI Division page, according to a report by OpenTheBooks.com published Thursday.

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Commentary: The Huge American Sex-Abuse Scandal That Educators Scandalously Suppress

Every day millions of parents put their children under the care of public school teachers, administrators, and support staff. Their trust, however, is frequently broken by predators in authority in what appears to be the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history.

Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America.

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University ‘Decolonizes’ Art Collection Due to ‘Problematic’ Paintings and Sculptures

What does an institution of higher learning do when it has a “problematic” collection of paintings and sculptures?

Answer: It “decolonizes” them. In other words, it replaces “white settler” works with those by Indigenous/Native/First Americans.

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MIT Grew Staff Size by 1,200 While Enrollment Barely Budged

MIT Campus

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology added more than 1,200 new administrative/support staff positions in less than a decade – including six “diversity, equity, and inclusion” assistant deans in one year, a College Fix analysis found.

Meanwhile, between 2013 and 2022, undergraduate student enrollment remained basically flat.

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Duke University Dumped Doc Who Exposed Lack of Evidence for ‘Racism’ as a Public Health Crisis

Dr. Kendall Conger, Duke University

Two years ago this month, the University of Pennsylvania law school stopped accusing a tenured professor of making up statistics about black student performance, which she called defamatory, after ignoring requests for the supposedly correct statistics going back four years.

Dean Ted Ruger still sought “major sanctions” against Amy Wax for “intentional and incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements,” and disgraced ex-President Liz Magill approved a hearing board’s recommended one-year suspension, slashed pay and mandatory scarlet letter in her public appearances.

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California Joins 26 States in Requiring Students Take Personal Finance Class

Students in Class

Over half of U.S. states now require high school students to receive a financial literacy course before they graduate after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill passed by the California Legislature.

With the passage of California’s law requiring schools to offer a course in personal finance by the 2027-28 school year and requiring the class of 2031 to receive at least one class, a total of 26 states now require students to take a course on how to manage money, according to a nonprofit spearheading efforts to pass such laws.

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Federal Court Halts Biden’s Title IX Regulations in Four New States

Federal Judge John Brooms

Federal judge John Broomes ruled on the side of attorneys general in Kansas, Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming, claiming that Title IX was meant to protect biological women from discrimination in education.

A federal court in Kansas on Tuesday blocked the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations from taking effect in four states, becoming the latest court to stop the new controversial rules from taking effect in August.

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Commentary: Don’t Let the Department of Education Silence Our Kids

Moms for America

The Founding Fathers recognized that an educated citizenry was vital to the survival of our republic. Thomas Jefferson, for example, saw education as essential to giving every citizen the opportunity to participate meaningfully in a free society.

Writing in 1818, our third president described public education as “the means to give every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business … to express and preserve his own ideas … to improve his morals and faculties … to understand his duties, and to exercise his rights.”

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Commentary: Four Education Trends to Watch This 4th of July

As we celebrate our independence on the Fourth of July, Americans would do well to reflect upon what’s necessary for a nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, to long endure.

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One of Oldest Women’s Studies Departments in U.S. on Chopping Block, Citing ‘Low Student Interest’

Wichita State University

Wichita State University is closing its women’s studies department, one of the oldest in the country, due to continuously low student interest.

The Department of Women, Ethnicity, and Intersectional Studies will be dissolved and its degree program will be merged with the English Department, according to an action plan approved earlier this month by the Kansas Board of Regents.

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Mean Speech Not Protected at Public Universities, Appeals Courts Rule

Stephen Porter

Faculty at public universities in nine states may have fewer speech protections than they assume following federal appeals court rulings against professors on the political right and left who were punished for perceived lack of collegiality – strong words short of harassment.

But a private university has egg on its face after taking seven months to allegedly clear a professor of wrongdoing for telling anti-Israel campus protesters they are “ignorant” and “Hamas are murderers,” despite having immediate access to both viral video and its own surveillance.

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