Interesting article from Vox.com, a pro-Democrat online publication about how Betsy DeVos (Donald Trump's Secretary of Education) is erasing President Obama's education legacy. (Link at the bottom of this article)
They list a variety of things the Trump Administration is doing to undo policies adopted during the Obama era. Their perspective is that these things are all negative. Permit me to offer a contrary point of view. Let's go point by point:
The Obama Administration issued a rule saying Title IX, a law passed decades ago, protects transgender kids. The article starts with a horror story about how a transgender child was treated and then laments that the Trump Administration is rolling back the Obama rule. Then we have a quote from a Transgender advocate saying the message of the Trump Administration is that discrimination against trans people is okay.
But wait, the article points out that the Obama rule had previously been halted by a Federal court, who agreed with the 11 States who filed the lawsuit, saying the rule was "unlawful." So in point of fact, the Obama rule is providing protection for no one right now. Meanwhile the story points out that transgender kids can, if they feel discriminated against, bring action in Federal Court and get relief.
So what exactly did the Trump Administration take away from Transgender children? Perhaps what they took away was false hope. Maybe the real message should be that the Obama Administration was wrong to a) adopt an unlawful rule and b) mislead people into thinking their remedy is from the Washington bureaucracy, which is slow to do anything if it ever does, rather than pursuing action in Court where they can get a more timely result that addresses their own particular situation.
Why false hope? Well the next story in the article is about the Dept. of Education's Office of Civil Rights closing out cases at a fast pace, and not doing it in a way where the claims are investigated properly. The theme is how terrible it is to do this to an area whose mission is to "make sure harassment doesn't interfere with a student's right to learn."
Except the article points out there is a massive backlog of cases and"students sometimes wait years to get their cases investigated." And that was under the Obama Administration. If the Obama Administration didn't fund that unit properly how is it better to leave students with the false impression that they are better off filing a complaint with the Department of Education than in pursuing their own individual action in the courts?
The next heresy cited is the proposed reduction in funding of professional development for teachers. Now it sounds like a good idea for teachers to get advanced degrees and more training. Except that even Arne Duncan, President Obama's Secretary of Education questioned whether there is sufficient data to provide this program is benefiting teachers. Why is it not appropriate for the Trump Administration to pull funding from a multi-billion dollar program that has not proven it's worth after years of billions of dollars of expenditures?
We go from "untrained teachers" to malnourished kids as the next crime of the Trump Administration as is relaxes school lunch nutrition standards. Now if you ask whether schools provide healthy food for kids? Absolutely. But the next question has to be do bureaucrats in Washington know better what works for kids than people who live and work with those kids every day? Absolutely not.
My father-in-law worked for a number of years in a school and often complained about the amount of food thrown away because kids did not like the mandatory healthy food options forced on the schools by the Obama Administration. His anecdotal evidence is confirmed by the article pointing out that the LA School District reported that it threw away $18 million worth of food per year.
The Obama rule is typical top-down rule making from bureaucrats in DC who think they know what's right for everyone everywhere and even the Obama Administration realized it wasn't working because they started granting waivers to create the illusion that all the problems were being fixed.
We move from schools to colleges. The Obama Administration adopted a rule saying on the one hand that for profit colleges and vocational schools that could not meet Federal benchmarks would be cut off from the Student loan programs but on the other hand the Obama Administration said it would be years before they told the schools how to meet the benchmarks. Gee that sounds fair.... not.
For those who obtained loans to attend for profit institutions, the Obama Administration relaxed rules on Students not having to repay the loans. This caused serious financial issues for some institutions.
Its truly remarkable - the Obama Administration felt that for profit institutions were ripping off students. Rather than investigate and prove that what they believed was true and prosecute, the Obama Administration just decided what they believed to be true and acted in a manner that removed all due process rights of the institutions to demonstrate that the charges against them were untrue.
Speaking of stripping due process rights, the final point in the article attacks the Trump Administration for rolling back what I feel was probably one of the more heinous actions of the Obama Administration. Under President Obama, the Department of Education basically told universities to adopt a lower standard of evidence and adopt other procedural changes when investigating and deciding sexual assault cases or face losing all federal funding.
But the Obama Administration's action was so deplorable even a group of Harvard Law Professors felt compelled to write an open letter criticizing their policies. One of the professors said the Obama Administration rules created an environment where "schools felt in order to keep their federal funding, they had to change their policies to ones stacked against anybody accused."
Is sexual assault a deplorable act that deserves harsh penalties? Yes. No question. But the way to combat those crimes is not to adopt rules stripping American citizens of their Constitutional rights and criticism of the Trump Administration for restoring to people their right to a fair hearing is worthy of praise not criticism.
Read the article for yourself. As I said, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The actions the author condemns are generally actions that I would praise as undoing unlawful rules and defunding wasteful programs.
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