Posts tagged Department of Education
Faculty unions oppose 3-year degrees as Massachusetts, Virginia and Ohio push ahead
July 1, 2026 // A bachelor's degree in the U.S. typically requires about 120 credit hours — a number with surprisingly arbitrary roots. The standard traces back to the Carnegie Unit, created in 1906 by the Carnegie Foundation, which tied college funding and faculty pensions to a fixed measure of seat time rather than actual learning. Within a few years nearly every American college had adopted it, and the 120-credit, four-year degree became the default. That history matters because the four-year length was never sacred. In fact, the "original" liberal arts colleges, including Oxford and Cambridge, award most undergraduate degrees in three years. Much of Europe runs on a three-year bachelor's degrees. The American four-year model is a convention we selected 100 years ago, not a law of learning.
How Teachers’ Unions Became Political Big Spenders
May 18, 2026 // A new report out today accuses both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) of spending tens of millions of dollars on electing Democratic political candidates, and prioritizing politicking over the needs and interests of their union members. The report, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), Gevura Fund, and Rutgers University, among others, found that of the NEA’s $450 million annual disbursement budget from fiscal year 2025, less than $46 million, or 10 percent, was spent on activities directly representing the union’s constituents.
Potas: Trump cut federal employees — and the system didn’t break
April 14, 2026 // The federal workforce is smaller than at any point since the 1960s, the result of a deliberate effort by the Trump administration. Critics have asked how many employees the federal government can lose before it breaks. So far, the answer appears to be more than a 10% reduction. Most of the cuts were in white-collar roles: administrative, accounting and human resources.
America’s Largest Teachers’ Union Prizes Activism Over Education
April 2, 2026 // Members of America’s largest teachers’ union, the National Education Association (NEA), were back in training in February, this time for a confidential webinar entitled “Advocacy and Free Speech Rights for K-12 Educators.” The leaked slide deck, posted by the watchdog group Defending Education, reveals that the NEA is less focused on American students’ stagnant test scores than on training its members to become activists, while using misinterpretations of the First Amendment as a shield.
Opinion: Teachers Unions Get Desperate
February 17, 2026 // Antichoice plaintiffs “usually file lawsuits right before families sign up for the program just to be particularly cruel. They know they’ll lose nearly every case, but delaying or enjoining the programs in any way is the last-ditch effort to slow maximum uptake for families,” says Tommy Schultz, CEO of the American Federation for Children. Many suits are striking out. Idaho’s high court just ruled 5-0 in favor of the state choice program. Top courts in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and West Virginia have upheld choice programs. The U.S. Supreme Court has continued to issue beneficial rulings. Yet the legal threat is real, and unions, often accompanied by local school districts, continue to throw millions at litigation and disruption, forcing states to spend huge amounts to defend against them. Then the unions and the districts claim schools are underfunded.
Op-ed: Trump restores America’s control over Washington
February 12, 2026 // President Trump is all too familiar with this injustice. In his first term, senior bureaucrats repeatedly used their power to prevent his priorities from becoming policy. They slow-walked reforms at the Department of Education, refused to prosecute civil rights cases, and circumvented a federal hiring freeze—to name just a few examples. At the start of the second Trump administration, a poll found that 75 percent of federal managers who voted for Kamala Harris planned to disobey instructions they don’t like. But public servants are supposed to serve the public, even if they disagree with the party the public elected. In the private sector, workers could be fired for not doing their job. But until now, presidential administrations couldn’t hold senior bureaucrats accountable because federal rules made them effectively untouchable. While Democrats outnumber Republicans two to one at federal agencies, conservative career officials could also refuse to implement a liberal president’s agenda.
Education IT, tech employees lose union protections
February 4, 2026 // Legal challenges to the order are still playing out in court. The Trump administration maintains the president has the authority to end collective bargaining rights under the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which exempts national security roles from union protection.
Federal Workers Win Another Layoff Reprieve in DHS Funding Bill
February 4, 2026 // The extension is a temporary win for public-sector unions that have sought to permanently extend the moratorium after the Trump administration used a combination of resignation incentives and formal RIFs to cut the federal workforce by about 219,000 in 2025. The moratorium was initially negotiated by Kaine, and will last only until DHS funding runs out on Feb. 13.
Congress guarantees furloughed feds’ back pay despite continued White House maneuvering
February 3, 2026 // The Office of Personnel Management removed citations of the 2019 Federal Employee Fair Treatment Act from its shutdown guidance last month, as the Trump administration continues to insist that the law guaranteeing all federal employees back pay after a shutdown doesn’t.
Birch Run teachers union president decries state testing
January 25, 2026 // Test scores from M-STEP, Michigan’s assessment of public school students, paint an unfavorable picture of Urbanowski-Nowak’s district. More than two-thirds (68%) of third graders at Birch Run Area Schools were not proficient on the English Language Arts exam in 2024-25. Two-thirds (66%) of the district’s third-grade students were not proficient in math in 2024-25. Research by the group Tennesseans for Quality Early Education concludes that proficiency in reading and math by the end of third grade is one of the strongest predictors of future academic achievement and career success.