Tag: Betsy DeVos

DeVos compares abortion rights debate to slavery

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos compared the abortion rights debate to the battle to eliminate slavery during remarks at a Colorado Christian University event in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday night, and her comments are drawing angry responses from Democrats.

DeVos, a Christian conservative, discussed the Trump administration’s record of opposition to abortion, and said she was reminded of President Abraham Lincoln. “He, too, contended with the ‘pro-choice’ arguments of his day,” she said, according to prepared remarks shared Thursday by the department with POLITICO. “They suggested that a state’s ‘choice’ to be slave or to be free had no moral question in it.”

She said Lincoln reminded “those pro-choicers” that a vast majority of Americans viewed slavery as a vast moral evil. “Lincoln was right about the slavery ‘choice’ then, and he would be right about the life ‘choice’ today,” she said. “Because as it’s been said: Freedom is not about doing what we want. Freedom is about having the right to do what we ought.” Continue reading.

Trump administration moves to protect prayer in public schools and federal funds for religious organizations

Washington Post logoThe administration announced it is proposing to ease restrictions on religious groups that provide social services.

The Trump administration is moving to strengthen protections for students who want to pray or worship in public schools and proposing changes that would make it easier for religious groups that provide social services to access federal funds, a development that comes as the president seeks to shore up support among evangelicals.

Nine federal agencies, including the Education Department, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Justice Department, are advancing rules that would reduce requirements for those religious organizations. The rules would lift an Obama-era executive order that compelled religious organizations to tell the people they serve that they can receive the same service from a secular provider.

In the Oval Office on Thursday, President Trump gathered with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, televangelist Paula White and students who said they had faced religious discrimination in public schools. Trump said his administration was engaged in a “cultural war” to defend school prayer from “the far left.” Continue reading.

House votes to overturn Trump rule that makes loan forgiveness harder; Senate fight looms

Washington Post logoThe House voted Thursday to overturn a Trump administration policy that  makes it more difficult for students who say they were defrauded by colleges to have their federal education loans canceled, setting the stage for a fight in the Senate.

The 231-50-180 vote fell largely along party lines, with six Republicans endorsing a resolution to scrap the administration’s overhaul of a 1995 law known as “borrower defense to repayment.” The law gives the Education Department authority to cancel the federal debt of students whose colleges misled them about graduation or job placement rates to get them to enroll.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos spent two years trying to delay  and then scuttle an Obama-era update of the law that lowered hurdles for students and shifted more of the cost of forgiveness onto schools. The Trump administration finalized its rewrite of the Obama rule in September, limiting the time borrowers have to apply for relief and requiring them to prove financial harm. The rule will take effect July 1. Continue reading.

Trump’s education secretary overrides department findings on defrauded student borrowers: report

AlterNet logoAlthough the Trump Administration has had a high turnover since 2017, one of the people who has remained is Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Trump’s education secretary, from 2017 to late 2019, has had more than her share of critics; some of them include college students, and a December 11 report by Cory Turner for NPR describes DeVos’ battle with recipients of student loans who say there were defrauded.

Turner reports, “These borrowers — more than 200,000 of them — say some for-profit colleges lied to them about their job prospects and the transferability of credits. They argue they were defrauded and that the Education Department should erase their federal student loan debt under a rule called ‘borrower defense.’”

DeVos, however, disagrees with the students, asserting that they did receive at least some value from their educations and that they deserve partial relief for their student loans but not total relief. And she is not swayed by some newly released memos from 2017 .

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‘Flat-out corruption’: DeVos accused of scheming to stop next president from canceling student loan debt

AlterNet logoBillionaire Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week proposed handing over the federal government’s $1.5 trillion student loan portfolio to a “stand-alone government corporation,” a move observers condemned as a corrupt ploy to strip the next president of the ability to cancel student loan debt.

“This very much appears to be a Betsy DeVos scheme to block the next president from unilaterally forgiving federal student debt, which she is well aware a president could do without Congress,” The Intercept‘s Ryan Grim wrote in a series of tweets late Wednesday. “The DeVos family is heavily invested in the student loan industry and this is just flat-out corruption.”

DeVos’ plan, first introduced on Tuesday, would spin off the Education Department’s Federal Student Aid office into a new and supposedly independent federal agency.

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Betsy DeVos poised to issue sweeping rules governing campus sexual assault

Washington Post logoStudents accused of sexual assault will win new rights under sweeping rules being finalized by the Trump administration, giving universities clear but controversial guidance on handling these emotionally charged conflicts.

The final regulation will maintain contentious elements of a version proposed a year ago, including a provision requiring universities to allow cross-examination of those alleging sexual harassment or assault, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the rules.

In publishing last year’s proposed regulation, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said the new rules would restore balance in a system that, in her view, had been skewed in favor of the accusers. She said her approach would provide clarity and fairness for victims and those accused of wrongdoing.

View the complete November 25 article by Laura Meckler on The Washington Post website here.

DeVos held in contempt for violating judge’s order on student loans

A federal judge on Thursday held Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court and imposed a $100,000 fine for violating an order to stop collecting on the student loans owed by students of a defunct for-profit college.

The exceedingly rare judicial rebuke of a Cabinet secretary came after the Trump administration was forced to admit to the court earlier this year that it erroneously collected on the loans of some 16,000 borrowers who attended Corinthian Colleges despite being ordered to stop doing so.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim wrote that “the evidence shows only minimal efforts to comply with the preliminary injunction” she issued in May 2018 ordering the Education Department to halt its collection of

View the complete October 24 article by Michael Stratford on the Politico website here.

Trump administration let nearly $11 million in student aid go to unaccredited for-profit colleges

Washington Post logoA trove of documents released Tuesday by the House Education and Labor Committee shows the Education Department provided $10.7 million in federal loans and grants to students at the Illinois Institute of Art and the Art Institute of Colorado even though officials knew the for-profit colleges were not accredited and ineligible to receive such aid.

The documents build on prior reports from the committee describing efforts by Education Department officials to shield Dream Center Education Holdings, owner of the Art Institutes and Argosy University, from the consequences of lying to students about the accreditation of its since-closed schools. Now it appears the Education Department tried to shield itself from an ill-fated decision to allow millions of dollars to flow to those schools.

Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott (D-Va.), chairman of the House Education Committee, is threatening to subpoena Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for more documents related to the department’s role in Dream Center’s actions. Scott says the agency has obstructed the committee’s investigation and refused to answer questions, as emails and letters paint a picture of a federal agency complicit in an effort to place profits before students.

View the complete October 22 article by Danielle Douglas-Gabriel on The Washington Post website here.

Federal Judge slams Betsy DeVos’ Education Deptartment for violating court order: ‘I’m not sending anyone to jail yet ⁠— but’

AlterNet logoA federal magistrate judge on Monday slammed Betsy DeVos‘ Department of Education for violating a federal court order after finding the federal agency is continuing to collect on the loan debt of former Corinthian Colleges students. The for-profit school went bankrupt and closed its doors in 2015.

“I’m not sending anyone to jail yet but it’s good to know I have that ability,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim told Education Dept. lawyers at a hearing in San Francisco, as Bloomberg News reports.

“I’m not sure if this is contempt or sanctions,” she added.

View the complete October 8 article by David Badash from the New Civil Rights Movement on the AlterNet website here.

DeVos Demands Universities Revise Mideast Curricula To Favor Christians, Jews

President Donald Trump, for all his isolationist tendencies, has repeatedly proclaimed himself to be a staunch and unwavering supporter of Israel. And Trump’s secretary of education Betsy DeVos, according to the New York Times, has been forcefully cracking down on what she views as a bias against Israel in higher education.

The Times’ Erica L. Green reported on Thursday that the Department of Education, under DeVos’ direction, has ordered two major universities — Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — to revise their Middle Eastern studies programs in a way that shows more “positive” images of Judaism and Christianity in the Middle East. The Department of Education is saying that the Middle Eastern studies programs at those universities didn’t meet the standards of a federal program that gives funding to international studies and foreign language programs.

Miriam Elman, who is an associate professor at Syracuse University and an opponent of anti-Israel boycotts, told the Times, “What they’re saying is, ‘If you want to be biased and show an unbalanced view of the Middle East, you can do that. But you’re not going to get federal and taxpayer money.’”

View the complete September 19 article by Alex Henderson from AlterNet on the National Memo website here.