From:
david.j.worrell@gmail.com
Aug 10
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos formally moved to scrap a regulation that would
have forced for-profit colleges to prove that the students they enroll are able
to attain decent-paying jobs, the most drastic in a series of policy shifts that will free the
scandal-scarred, for-profit sector from safeguards put in effect during the Obama era.
***
Gail Collins comments on the development above:
DeVos, meanwhile, is worried about the government making “burdensome” demands on the for-profit schools. We will take a break for a minute to sigh.
DeVos loves for-profit education — you may remember she championed an overhaul of the Michigan school system, which replaced troubled public schools with truly terrible charter schools, most of them for-profit.
So she’s chipping away at anything the for-profits don’t like.
DeVos has stuffed her department with people from the for-profit education industry. The guy who’s supposed to be overseeing fraud investigations is a former dean of a for-profit named DeVry University, which paid $100 million to settle a lawsuit over
misleading marketing tactics.
***
Aug. 23
When Congress created its academic support fund three years ago, lawmakers had in mind a pot of money that would increase student access to art and music, mental health and technology programs at the nation’s most impoverished schools.
But back-to-back school shootings this year and inquiries from the state of Texas have prompted the education secretary, Betsy DeVos, to examine whether to
allow states to tap the school enrichment fund for another purpose: guns.
Such a move would reverse a longstanding position taken by the federal government that it should not pay to outfit schools with weaponry. It would also undermine efforts by Congress to restrict the use of federal funding on guns. As recently as March,
Congress passed a school safety bill that allocated $50 million a year to local
school districts, but expressly prohibited the use of the money for firearms.
But the Every Student Succeeds Act, signed into law in 2015, is silent on weapons purchases, and that omission would allow Ms. DeVos to use her discretion to approve or deny any state or district plans to use the enrichment
grants under the measure for
firearms and firearm training, unless Congress clarifies the law or bans such funding through legislative action.
***
It's sheer genius. Spend our education dollars on hokey for-profit
schools, and on arming teachers and administrators. It's idiotic.
But it's not all bad news today kids, due to how the courts keep
blocking terrible things Trump and Pruitt's EPA tried to do.
The article below is from another organization I support with
financial contributions, the NRDC.
Bucking Trump Agenda, Court Reinstates Clean Water Rule in 26 States
By Courtney Lindwall
August 21, 2018
http://tinyurl.com/y8bgkql5
Excerpts:
Victory! A federal judge in South Carolina recently reinstated water protections in 26 states, following a lawsuit filed by environmental groups against the Trump administration for illegally suspending the Clean Water Rule early this year. The law
clarifies which bodies of water are covered by the Clean Water Act’s pollution-control programs. Although implementation is still on hold in 24 states, the ruling is a decisive win for the environment—and for the millions
of Americans whose water
supplies are now better protected from pollution.
The water supply of one in three Americans is at stake.
The Clean Water Rule improves protections for numerous water bodies, including streams feeding the water supplies of about one-third of all Americans. These safeguards limit pollution like wastewater discharge from power plants, which contains toxic
metals such as mercury and arsenic. Though the Trump administration plans to repeal the Clean Water Rule outright (something that will spark yet another legal showdown), the suspension of the rule in the meantime threatened ecosystems and our drinking
water. The longer the Clean Water Rule was on hold, the longer Trump threatened
our communities’ health.
It’s not about “puddles.”
The Trump administration, alongside industry forces, has tried to misrepresent the Clean Water Rule as an attempt to regulate “nearly every puddle” and trample on property rights. This couldn’t be farther from the truth. The Clean Water Rule
explicitly excludes puddles, and what’s more, it protects only those waters with a “demonstrated and significant impact on the physical, chemical, and biological condition of downstream water bodies...
Environmentalists are on a roll!
Albeit partial, this win is the latest in a recent string of legal triumphs against the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks. In fact, this is the seventh victory over the course of just one week (but who’s counting?). To name a few,
workers at chemical plants had their rights to basic safety measures affirmed. The endangered vaquita porpoise won out against deadly gillnets. And opponents of the dirty Keystone XL pipeline are celebrating a court order demanding a more thorough
environmental review.
***
They keep trying to poison people, but the courts keep stopping them.
So far...
.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: www.darkrealms.ca (1:229/2)