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This week on “The Learning Curve,” Cara and Gerard are joined by Jim Blew, the assistant secretary for planning, evaluation, and policy development at the U.S. Department of Education. Assistant Secretary Blew shares lessons from leading and implementing K-12 public education reform efforts in often contentious policy environments, and the unique challenges of the current partisanship and gridlock in Washington, D.C. He describes Secretary DeVos’s courageous work on behalf of public and private school choice, as both a public official and private philanthropist, and why it caused such a stir from the national teachers’ unions and defenders of the status quo in Congress. The discussion concludes with a focus on the D.C. voucher program, the most successful federally-funded K-12 private school choice program ever established, its future prospects, and the outlook for private school choice programs across the country.
Stories of the Week: The New Hampshire state legislature will move forward on the first phase of a $46 million federal grant-funded initiative to double the number of charter schools, after Democratic lawmakers voted against the grant last year. Lily Eskelsen García rose from school cafeteria worker to president of the National Education Association – will President-elect Biden choose her as the next U.S. Secretary of Education?
President Trump and his appointed subordinates in the Department of Education have launched a real counteroffensive in the culture war. The president took the occasion of Constitution Day, which is also Citizenship Day, to announce a full offensive against the leftists’ lies, and identified Howard Zinn as a propagandist. Then the Department of Education took the president of Princeton at his word when he proclaimed in writing that this university, recipient of federal largesse in grants and scholarship guarantees, is shot through with systematic racism.
Betsy DeVos is once more in the sights of the House Democrats—and it’s going to get uglier with Democrats controlling the House. I’ve written about Secretary DeVos in the past, and because there is so much at stake with the state of education in the U.S., I’ve no doubt that the Democrats will do everything in their power to discredit her, remove her, and try to re-instate the biased and ineffective Obama administration and Leftist policies. This post will review some of the attacks on DeVos and the Department of Education, and why it is such a serious matter for this country, for education and for the rule of law.
You might want to sit down for this… Jerry Brown made a good decision. Actually, he made two.
It’s about time. Betsy DeVos, Secretary of the Department of Education, is pushing back on the shameful 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter that was sent to college campuses to intimidate them into misusing 
In advance of today’s confirmation hearings for Betsy DeVos, the nominee for Secretary of Education, defenders of the status quo have been spinning a narrative about her reform efforts in Detroit that runs contrary to all available evidence.
Over the summer, the New York Times published