Tag: American

  • The Great American University Shakedown

    The Great American University Shakedown

    With each new resolution agreement, it becomes clearer that the Trump administration intends to base the government’s relationship with higher education on extortion. In its recently cut deal, Northwestern University will pay the Treasury $75 million in exchange for about $800 million in congressionally approved research funding it had already secured. NU now joins Columbia on the list of institutions that have paid fees to the federal government—Columbia’s deal included a $200 million payment to the Treasury over three years.

    In the grand scheme of things, $75 million is chump change for Northwestern. It’s a fraction of the research funding that was at risk and barely makes a dent in the institution’s $14.3 billion endowment. It’s less than two months’ worth of the up to $40 million the institution said it was paying every month to supplement lost research funding. The payment was, according to interim president Henry Bienen, “the best and most certain method to restore our federal funding, both now and in the future.”

    Part of that is likely true. Litigation would have taken years and cost many more millions. But nothing in the agreement precludes the government from leveraging federal research funding to extract certain political wins from the university again. The government didn’t even need evidence Northwestern violated any federal laws to revoke its federal funding. Officials offered no conclusions from the three investigations into antisemitism on campus the Departments of Education, Justice and Health and Human Services launched. With the punitive withholding of federal funds, the institution is being punished before it’s proven guilty. As Andrew Gillen, a scholar at the Cato Institute put it, “Much like the Queen in Alice in Wonderland who said, ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’”

    Before this administration, rarely did OCR investigations require institutions to pay money to the government. The resolutions focused mainly on training and improving processes at the university in question. By contrast, the agreements the Trump administration has reached with elite, research-focused universities harm the institution as well as the country. Northwestern, Columbia, Brown and others might have their funding back, but they’re now weighed down by even greater compliance burdens.

    Northwestern has to report admissions data on every student who applies, is admitted and enrolls; socialize international students on the norms of campus life; and make sure nobody is wearing a face mask to conceal their identity. After cutting more than 400 jobs in July, Northwestern now has fewer people around campus to take over additional reporting duty. This is how the administration wants our leading research institutions to spend their time. And while U.S. institutions process paperwork and fight to have funding restored, China sprints ahead in artificial intelligence, robotics and innovation.

    Precedent for paying fines in government settlements exists for other sectors, but those partly fund solutions to problems. Purdue Pharma, for example, paid local and state governments to fund opioid treatment, prevention and recovery services. In its multibillion-dollar settlement with the U.S. government over cheating on emissions tests, Volkswagen paid billions of dollars to fund clean energy initiatives and electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Even Columbia in its settlement agreed to pay an additional $21 million to compensate employees who may have experienced antisemitism on campus after Oct. 7, 2023. Northwestern’s millions simply disappear into Treasury’s coffers and do nothing to combat antisemitism in higher ed.

    NU won’t be the last institution the government attempts to force into a settlement. This summer it demanded UCLA, a public institution, pay $1.2 billion as part of a settlement to unfreeze millions in research funds. Harvard’s heated legal battle for its funding rages on, and research funds remain frozen for Duke and Princeton.

    These resolutions are a strong indicator of how the administration wants its relationship with research institutions to be—politically self-serving, one-sided and fear-based. Institutions could choose to fight, but mounting expensive legal battles without millions of research dollars isn’t really a choice at all. The agreements might be an offer universities can’t refuse.

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  • Higher Education Inquirer : American Christmas 2025

    Higher Education Inquirer : American Christmas 2025

    Mass surveillance is no longer a marginal concern in American life. It is the silent architecture of a society managed from above and distrusted from below. The cameras aimed at students, workers, and the precarious class reflect a deeper spiritual, political, and moral crisis among the elites who designed the systems now monitoring the rest of us.

    Universities, corporations, city governments, and federal agencies increasingly rely on surveillance tools to manage populations whose economic security has been gutted by the same leaders who now demand behavioral compliance. Cameras proliferate, keystrokes are tracked, movement is logged, and predictive algorithms follow people across campuses, workplaces, and public spaces. Yet those responsible for creating the conditions that justify surveillance—politicians, corporate boards, university trustees, executive donors, and policy consultants—operate in near total opacity. Their meetings take place behind closed doors, their decisions shielded from public scrutiny, their influence networks essentially invisible.

    This is not a coincidence. It is the logical extension of a neoliberal elite culture that elevates market logic above moral obligation. As the Higher Education Inquirer documented in “How Educated Neoliberals Built the Homelessness Crisis,” the architects of modern austerity—professionalized, credentialed, and trained in elite universities—constructed social systems that demand accountability from the poor while providing impunity for the powerful. Their policy models treat human beings as units to be managed, scored, nudged, and surveilled. Surveillance fits seamlessly into this worldview. It is the managerial substitute for solidarity.

    The moral void of this elite class is perhaps most visible in the realm of healthcare. The Affordable Care Act, whatever its limitations, represented a modest attempt to affirm that healthcare is a public good and that access should not depend entirely on wealth. But the undermining of Obamacare under Donald Trump laid bare how deeply the nation’s policy culture had descended into nihilism. Trump’s efforts to gut the ACA were not about ideology or fiscal prudence; they were an expression of power for its own sake. Funding for enrollment outreach was slashed. Navigator programs were dismantled. Work requirements for Medicaid were encouraged, despite overwhelming evidence that they punished the sick and disabled. The administration promoted junk insurance plans that offered no real protection, while lawsuits were advanced to overturn the ACA entirely, even if doing so meant millions would lose coverage.

    This assault revealed the moral collapse of a political and economic elite that had grown comfortable with cruelty. It was cruelty performed as policy, sanctioned by corporate donors, embraced by right-wing media, and tolerated by the broader professional class that rarely speaks out unless its own interests are threatened. Even many of the centrist neoliberal policymakers who originally shaped the ACA’s cost-sharing structure responded with timidity, reluctant to confront the underlying truth: that the American healthcare system had become an arena where profit mattered more than survival, and where surveillance of the poor replaced accountability for the rich.

    As traditional moral frameworks lose their authority—whether organized religion, civic duty, or shared ethical narratives—many Americans have drifted into agnosticism or atheism not enriched by humanist values, but hollowed out by a sense of futility. Without a shared moral anchor, people retreat into private meaning or abandon meaning altogether. In this void, conspiracy theories flourish. People know they are lied to. They sense power operating behind closed doors. They see elite institutions fail repeatedly without consequence. When institutions offer no transparency, alternatives emerge in the shadows.

    The elite response is predictable: condemn conspiracies, scold the public for irrationality, invoke the language of “misinformation.” But this reaction deepens the divide. The same elites who created opaque systems—financial, academic, political, and technological—now fault ordinary people for trying to make sense of the opacity. In a society where truth is managed, measured, branded, and optimized, conspiracy becomes a form of folk epistemology. It is not always correct, but it is often understandable.

    Mass surveillance is therefore not the root of the crisis but its mirror. It reflects a ruling class that no longer commands moral authority and a public that no longer trusts the institutions governing it. It reflects a society that treats the vulnerable as suspects and the powerful as untouchable. It reflects a political order in which the dismantling of healthcare protections is permissible while the monitoring of poor people’s bodies, behaviors, and spending is normalized.

    If the United States is to escape this downward spiral, the cameras must eventually be turned upward. Transparency must apply not only to individuals but to corporations, boards, agencies, foundations, and the political donors who shape public life. Higher education must cease functioning as a credentialing arm of elite impunity and reclaim its role as a defender of democratic inquiry and human dignity. Public institutions must anchor themselves in ethical commitments that do not depend on religious dogma but arise from the basic principle that every human being deserves respect, security, and care.

    Until that reconstruction begins, the nation will remain trapped. The elites will continue to rule through metrics and surveillance rather than legitimacy. The public will continue to oscillate between nihilism and suspicion. And the moral void at the center of American life will continue to widen, one camera at a time.

    Sources

    Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

    David Lyon, Surveillance Studies

    Higher Education Inquirer, How Educated Neoliberals Built the Homelessness Crisis

    Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos

    Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites

    Sarah Brayne, Predict and Surveil

    Elisabeth Rosenthal, An American Sickness

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  • Want to Protect American Children? End the Shutdown – The 74

    Want to Protect American Children? End the Shutdown – The 74


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    Politicians love to say, “We must protect our children. They are our future.” But looking at what’s happening in Congress right now, children are not being protected. Families are not being prioritized. Instead, lawmakers are locked in a standoff, waiting to see who blinks first as they fight over who gets the last word and how big of a tax break they can give the wealthiest Americans.

    Meanwhile, families — especially families of color and low-income families — are left to hold their breath and wonder what this shutdown means for them. As members of Congress keep making their rounds on television, babies still need formula, toddlers still need health screenings, children still need breakfast and lunch at school and in their child care programs, and parents still need child care so they can work. Amid extreme stress, families are left, wondering how they will be able to take care of their children.

    The demands of children and their families do not stop just because Congress is at a standstill. 

    According to Kids’ Share 2024, an annual report published by the Urban Institute about federal expenditures, children received only about 9% of all federal spending in 2023, while about 43% of federal spending went toward health and retirement benefits for adults 18 years and older. That’s a very small percentage for a nation in which politicians on both sides of the aisle have expressed interest in increased government investment in children. These numbers contradict the narrative that claims children matter because they are our future.

    That 9% starts to feel even smaller during a government shutdown. Some programs, like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, are mandatory, meaning they don’t require annual congressional approval. But others, including a number of crucial children’s programs, such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), are funded through the annual appropriations process, which Congress must approve. This means when lawmakers can’t agree on a budget, these critical programs are left in limbo.

    The fallout on the horizon from this needless dysfunction is becoming clearer.

    In September, the National WIC Association reminded the public that WIC only had enough funds to temporarily remain open during a government shutdown. Now, according to Reuters, at least two dozen state websites warn there could be an unprecedented benefit gap for more than 41 million people in America who get aid from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the nearly 7 million people who rely on WIC. 

    Georgia Machell, president and chief executive officer of the National WIC Association, delivered this sobering news last week.

    “Without additional support, State WIC Agencies face another looming crisis,” she said. “Several are set to run out of funds to pay for WIC benefits on November 1 and may need to start making contingency plans.”

    Many families in historically marginalized communities, who already face greater barriers to health care, housing and early education, will feel this impact even more sharply. For example, we know that tens of thousands of young children and families rely on vital support received through Head Start, a service that promotes early learning and development, health and well-being. The shutdown is already in its fourth week, and, according to a statement issued on Oct. 16 from the National Head Start Association, if the government shutdown doesn’t end by Nov. 1, more than 65,000 children and families will be at risk of losing critical services. 

    A missed doctor’s appointment, a delay in SNAP benefits or a gap in child care isn’t just inconvenient. It can destabilize a family and hinder a child’s development, especially in the classroom.

    A research brief published by The Food Research & Action Center highlighted the links between hunger and learning, stating that “behavioral, emotional, mental health, and academic problems are more prevalent among children and adolescents struggling with hunger” and that young people experiencing hunger have lower math scores and poorer grades. The shutdown will have real and lasting consequences on the learning, development and well-being of America’s children because these programs are being impacted.

    It’s frustrating to watch lawmakers stand at podiums and declare how much they care about children while their actions — or inaction — puts children at risk. 

    Words don’t put food on the table. Words don’t pay rent. But actions do. 

    And right now, the actions coming out of Congress are sending an unfortunate message to families: protecting children is not the priority.

    If children truly are our future, then they cannot be treated as bargaining chips. Children deserve more than 9% of America’s federal spending budget. We need federal budgets that reflect children’s needs and protection for essential services. Critical programs that protect child health and well-being should never be disrupted by a government shutdown.

    Finally, Americans deserve government accountability. Policymakers should be held responsible for their words and actions, especially when they fail to deliver on the promises they make about protecting children.

    Children cannot wait. They are growing, learning and developing right now. The choices we make as a country today will shape their tomorrow.


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  • Campus Censorship Puts American Soft Power at Risk

    Campus Censorship Puts American Soft Power at Risk

    International students see American life portrayed in movies and on TikTok; U.S. universities have built global brands, helped along by Hollywood and merchandising. When it comes time to apply, international students can readily imagine a U.S. college experience, starting with seeing themselves in a crimson sweatshirt studying on a grassy quad flanked by ivy-covered buildings.

    And as the U.S.’s hold on cutting-edge science and innovation slips away to China, and other destinations with more welcoming visa policies offer lower-cost degrees and jobs, soft power might be the only edge American universities have left.

    The desire is about more than bricks and mortarboards. Students from other countries have long sought out American values of academic freedom and open discourse. They are excited by ideas and experiences that are as emblematic of the American way of life as tailgating on game day: criticizing the government, discussing LGBTQ+ rights or learning about the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, the Armenian genocide in Turkey or the comfort women victimized by the Imperial Japanese Army.

    But in 2025, those freedoms are at risk of becoming strictly theoretical. Anti-DEI laws in Utah led to Weber State University asking researchers to remove the words “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” from their slides before presenting at a—wait for it—conference on navigating the complexities of censorship. Conference organizers canceled the event after other presenters pulled out in protest.

    University leaders in Texas and Florida are refusing to put in writing policies that prohibit faculty from talking about transgender identity or diversity, equity and inclusion in classrooms, sowing fear and confusion across their campuses. A secret recording of a Texas A&M professor talking about gender in her class led to a successful campaign by a state representative to get her fired and forced a former four-star general to resign as university president.

    This weekend, students at Towson University moved their No Kings rally off campus after school officials told them their speakers’ names would be run through a federal government database. They changed locations out of fear the speakers would be targeted by the Trump administration.

    Meanwhile, dozens of faculty are still out of jobs after being fired for posting comments online about the murder of Charlie Kirk. Repressing free speech on social media is also what the Chinese government does to political dissenters.

    It’s true that colleges are exercising American values by following laws passed by democratically elected legislators. And presidents say they will follow the rule of law without compromising their missions, but overcompliance with vague legislation and policies is incompatible with this aim.

    International students who care about more than a name brand may find the erosion of the country’s global reputation as a democratic stronghold a reason to look elsewhere. That means billions of dollars are also at stake if international students no longer trust in America’s values and choose to stay away. Modeling from NAFSA: Association of International Educators projected a 30 to 40 percent drop in international students this fall that would result in $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer jobs across the country. Records from August suggest a similar outlook: 19 percent fewer students arrived in the U.S. compared to August 2024.

    International students bring more than just valuable tuition dollars to American campuses. They contribute global perspectives to their less traveled American peers and build relationships that could turn into partnerships when they go home and become entrepreneurs or political leaders.

    Higher ed can track the number of international student visas issued, students who enroll and the economic contributions of these students, but they can’t quantify what it means when a student in Shanghai stops imagining America as a place where all ideas can be expressed and explored. It’s taken decades for this country to build power based on free expression and open discourse, but by the time the loss of students starts to register in economic data and visa applications, the decline may be too late to reverse.

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  • Foreign Academics Won’t Give Up on the American Dream

    Foreign Academics Won’t Give Up on the American Dream

    Donald Trump’s defunding of scientific research and proposed new charges on migrant labor will not be enough to deter international academics from heading to America, given the country’s unparalleled willingness to reward academic talent, Radenka Maric has argued.

    Since February 2022, Maric has served as president of the University of Connecticut, a six-campus public research university with a $3.6 billion annual operating budget.

    The Bosnian-born engineer is arguably one of the world’s most well-traveled university leaders, having worked in seven countries in a 30-year career, including Japan (where she earned her Ph.D. at Kyoto University and worked at Toyota’s material science research division), Canada (where she led the Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation at the National Research Council Canada), and Italy (where she was a visiting professor at Polytechnic University of Milan on a Fulbright scholarship).

    Having joined Connecticut as a professor of sustainable energy in 2010, Maric was appointed vice president for research in 2017 and took the top job five years later—an achievement she believes would not have been possible in any other country.

    “As someone born in Bosnia without a U.S. college degree, I would never have been made a university president in Japan, Italy or even Canada,” argued Maric, who studied at Belgrade University in Serbia, where she later worked as a junior scientist.

    “I don’t have that traditional academic pedigree required by some countries. I didn’t study at Harvard—I have a ‘Japanese Harvard’ Ph.D., but who really cares about my Japanese degree—nor have I been a provost or dean at a big U.S. university,” she continued.

    “But American universities don’t care if you studied in Italy or Serbia—they are only focused on excellence in science and innovation, which means ‘what is your h-index?,’ ‘where have you published?’ and ‘how many people have you brought with you on your journey?’” Maric said.

    Despite uncertainty over federal science funding—with several national agencies facing cuts of about 50 percent to their budgets next year—the academic meritocracy promised by U.S. universities will continue to appeal to international researchers, Maric believes.

    “That is what is powerful about American academia. As long as the American dream is there—that people like me can make it on their own merits—then America will be a magnet for talent. Crises will come and go,” she said.

    The current uncertainty over funding has undoubtedly caused problems, Maric explained, while there are growing concerns over plans to charge a $100,000 fee for H-1B skilled worker visas, up from $7,000—a move that would make it much more difficult for U.S. universities to employ foreign Ph.D. students or postdocs.

    On the likely damage of Trump’s recent higher education policies, Maric said, “It depends how long this lasts, but America has a great capacity to resituate itself very quickly. If you compare how the U.S. pivoted after the 2008 financial crisis, it came back much quicker than any other nation.”

    Despite her evident enthusiasm for her adopted homeland, Maric said she was also inspired by her time in Japan. “This was the 1990s and I was the only woman doing a Ph.D. at Kyoto’s engineering school. I stayed for 12 years there, so it wasn’t just the language that I learned but the culture. There is an immense amount of care in how everything is done, so I applied this to my career by thinking, ‘how can I improve my skills?’ or ‘how can my research get better?’

    “When I was in Japan, it was constantly stressed that there was no great science if it didn’t lead to great technology. And there is no great technology without a product, and there is no product without a market,” Maric explained of her approach to applied science—she worked in the field of battery technology for Toyota and later Panasonic before leaving to join a start-up in Atlanta.

    “The most important thing about Japan is kata—a way of doing things in a particular way. There is a natural tendency to do things in a certain way and there is a desire to protect their culture, so eventually I knew I had to leave,” reflected Maric on her leap from Toyota to the U.S. start-up world.

    Recruited to lead a battery fuel research group in Vancouver, Maric eventually headed to Connecticut—a state with long-established defense and manufacturing industries, in which the university now plays a crucial research role.

    “Since 2010 the state has been recruiting faculty in renewable and environmental sustainability, including CO2 capture, so I’ve been part of this, but the history of manufacturing goes back to the mid-19th century when bicycle companies had their first factories in Connecticut,” Maric said.

    Her university’s willingness to recruit someone with an eclectic CV—including stints in corporate R&D, academia and start-ups covering three continents—then promote them to the top job is a good example of why American academia will continue to thrive, despite the current challenges, Maric said.

    “I am not a traditional person, but I was always a hard worker who sought to improve myself and bring people along with me whenever I could. Not many foreigners—whatever their expertise or experience—will become university presidents, but it is possible in America,” she said.

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  • Mindfulness is Gaining Traction in American Schools, But It Isn’t Clear What Students Are Learning – The 74

    Mindfulness is Gaining Traction in American Schools, But It Isn’t Clear What Students Are Learning – The 74

    In the past 20 years in the U.S., mindfulness transitioned from being a new-age curiosity to becoming a more mainstream part of American culture, as people learned more about how mindfulness can reduce their stress and improve their well-being.

    Researchers estimate that over 1 million children in the U.S. have been exposed to mindfulness in their schools, mostly at the elementary level, often taught by classroom teachers or school counselors.

    I have been researching mindfulness in K-12 American schools for 15 years. I have investigated the impact of mindfulness on students, explored the experiences of teachers who teach mindfulness in K-12 schools, and examined the challenges and benefits of implementing mindfulness in these settings.

    I have noticed that mindfulness programs vary in what particular mindfulness skills are taught and what lesson objectives are. This makes it difficult to compare across studies and draw conclusions about how mindfulness helps students in schools.

    What is mindfulness?

    Different definitions of mindfulness exist.

    Some people might think mindfulness means simply practicing breathing, for example.

    A common definition from Jon Kabat-Zinn, a mindfulness expert who helped popularize mindfulness in Western countries, says mindfulness is about “paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, nonjudgmentally, in the present moment.”

    Essentially, mindfulness is a way of being. It is a person’s approach to each moment and their orientation to both inner and outer experience, the pleasant and the unpleasant. Fundamental to mindfulness is how a person chooses to direct their attention.

    In practice, mindfulness can involve different practices, including guided meditations, mindful movement and breathing. Mindfulness programs can also help people develop a variety of skills, including openness to experiences and more focused attention.

    Practicing mindfulness at schools

    A few years ago, I decided to investigate school mindfulness programs themselves and consider what it means for children to learn mindfulness at schools. What do the programs actually teach?

    I believe that understanding this information can help educators, parents and policymakers make more informed decisions about whether mindfulness belongs in their schools.

    In 2023, my colleagues and I conducted a deep dive into 12 readily available mindfulness curricula for K-12 students to investigate what the programs contained. Across programs, we found no consistency of content, teaching practices or time commitment.

    For example, some mindfulness programs in K-12 schools incorporate a lot of movement, with some specifically teaching yoga poses. Others emphasize interpersonal skills such as practicing acts of kindness, while others focus mostly on self-oriented skills such as focused attention, which may occur by focusing on one’s breath.

    We also found that some programs have students do a lot of mindfulness practices, such as mindful movement or mindful listening, while others teach about mindfulness, such as learning how the brain functions.

    Finally, the number of lessons in a curriculum ranged from five to 44, meaning some programs occurred over just a few weeks and some required an entire school year.

    Despite indications that mindfulness has some positive impacts for school-age children, the evidence is also not consistent, as shown by other research.

    One of the largest recent studies of mindfulness in schools found in 2022 no change in students who received mindfulness instruction.

    Some experts believe, though, that the lack of results in this 2022 study on mindfulness was partially due to a curriculum that might have been too advanced for middle school-age children.

    The connection between mindfulness and education

    Since attention is critical for students’ success in school, it is not surprising that mindfulness appeals to many educators.

    Research on student engagement and executive functioning supports the claim that any student’s ability to filter out distractions and prioritize the objects of their thoughts improves their academic success.

    Mindfulness programs have been shown to improve students’ mental health and decrease students’ and teachers’ stress levels.

    Mindfulness has also been shown to help children emotionally regulate.

    Even before social media, teachers perennially struggled to get students to pay attention. Reviews of multiple studies have shown some positive effects of mindfulness on outcomes, including improvements in academic achievement and school adjustment.

    A 2023 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites mindfulness as one of six evidence-based strategies K-12 schools should use to promote students’ mental health and well-being.

    A relatively new trend

    Knowing what is in the mindfulness curriculum, how it is taught and how long the student spends on mindfulness matters. Students may be learning very different skills with significantly different amounts of time to reinforce those skills.

    Researchers suggest, for example, that mindfulness programs most likely to improve academic or mental health outcomes of children offer activities geared toward their developmental level, such as shorter mindfulness practices and more repetition.

    In other words, mindfulness programs for children cannot just be watered down versions of adult programs.

    Mindfulness research in school settings is still relatively new, though there is encouraging data that mindfulness can sharpen skills necessary for students’ academic success and promote their mental health.

    In addition to the need for more research on the outcomes of mindfulness, it is important for educators, parents, policymakers and researchers to look closely at the curriculum to understand what the students are actually doing.

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Trump Hijacks American Science and Scholarship (opinion)

    Trump Hijacks American Science and Scholarship (opinion)

    In a nearly daily barrage, President Trump and his MAGA forces heave fireballs at science and higher education. In the last weeks alone, the administration has been busy hurling a demand for a billion dollars from the University of California, Los Angeles; axing proven mRNA vaccine research; and demanding colleges submit expanded sex and race data from student applications, among other startling detonations. Amid the onslaught of these unsettling developments, it would be easy to miss the decisive change in conventional scientific and scholarly practice, one so vast that it threatens to overturn our revered American research achievements.

    On Aug. 7, Trump issued an executive order that uproots more than a half century of peer review, the standard practice for funding federal scientific grants. Taking approval out of the hands of experts, the new rule makes grant approval contingent upon the assent of political puppets who will approve only those awards the president finds acceptable.

    When I first came upon the order, I was immediately struck by how closely it resembles the unquestioned authority granted to senior political appointees in Soviet Russia and Communist China. As if dictated by commissars, the new rule requires officials to fund only those proposals that advance presidential priorities. Cast aside, peer review is now merely advisory.

    It took my breath away, suddenly realizing how completely threatening the new order is to the very foundations of the democratic practice of research and scholarship. As Victor Ambros, Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of microRNA, aptly put it, the order constitutes a “a shameless, full-bore Soviet-style politicization of American science that will smother what until now has been the world’s pre-eminent scientific enterprise.”

    Decades ago, long before I entered higher ed, I worked at a small publishing company in New York that translated Russian scientific and technical books and journals into English. As head of translations, I’d travel once or twice a year over many years to Moscow and Leningrad (now, once again, St. Petersburg) to negotiate with Soviet publishers to obtain rights to our English translations.

    One evening in the late ’60s, I invited a distinguished physicist to join me for dinner at a Ukrainian restaurant not far from my hotel in Moscow. We talked for some time openly over a bottle of vodka about new trends in physics, among other themes. As dinner drew to a close, he let his guard down and whispered a confidence. Mournfully, he told me he’d just received an invitation to deliver the keynote address at a scientific conference in England, but the Party official at his institution wouldn’t permit him to travel. I still remember the sense of being privy to a deep and troubling secret, reflected in the silence that followed and the palpable unease at the table. Shame enveloped him.

    Over a couple of dozen years of frequent trips to the Soviet Union and Communist China, I never met a single Party official. My day-to-day interactions were with administrators, editors, researchers and faculty who managed scientific publishing or were involved in teaching, research or other routine matters. The Party secretary remained hidden behind a curtain of power as in The Wizard of Oz.

    On one rare occasion in the 2010s, at a graduation ceremony at a local technical university in Beijing where I ran a couple of online master’s degrees in partnership with Stevens Institute of Technology, a student seated next to me in the audience drew near and identified a well-dressed official several rows ahead of us up front. “The Party secretary,” he revealed in hushed tones. I saw the officer later at the reception, standing by himself with a dour expression, as faculty, students and family members bustled about at a distance.

    One afternoon at that university in Beijing, I came upon a huddle of faculty in a corner office. As they chatted quietly among themselves in Mandarin, I took a seat at the far end of the room to give them privacy. But I could make out that a man in the group was disturbed, his face flushed and his eyes close to tears. Later, I approached one of the faculty members in the group with whom I’d grown close and asked what had troubled his colleague.

    “Oh,” he replied. “He often gets upset when the Party secretary objects to something we’re doing. He worries that our joint program is in jeopardy.”

    These personal reflections, based on my limited encounters with scientists and faculty, do not reveal the full extent of the control over scientific research exerted by Party functionaries. But if you compare the president’s new order with that of the Party’s authority in Soviet Russia and Communist China, you’ll find they’re all out of the same playbook.

    The order’s demand for political appointee approval takes decisions out of the hands of apolitical, merit-based peer-review panels. In the Soviet Union and China, adherence to the Party line and loyalty to the regime was (or is) paramount, with grant funds being used to advance ideological or state power. Similarly, the president’s order establishes a party line, stating that federal money cannot be used to support racial preferences, “denial … of the sex binary in humans,” illegal immigration or initiatives deemed “anti-American.”

    Relegating peer review is no small matter. It is at the center of modern science, distributing responsibility for evaluating scholarly work among experts, rather than holding this responsibility in the fist of authority. Even though peer review is under criticism today for its anonymity and potential biases, among other perplexing features, when researchers referee proposals, they nevertheless participate in a stirring example of collaborative democracy, maintaining the quality and integrity of scholarship—characteristics anathema to far-right ideologues.

    Of all the blasts shattering American science and higher education since the president assumed office in January, this executive order may be the most devastating. It is not one of Trump’s random shots at research and scholarship, but an assault on democracy itself.

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  • Tutoring was supposed to save American kids after the pandemic. The results? ‘Sobering’

    Tutoring was supposed to save American kids after the pandemic. The results? ‘Sobering’

    Rigorous research rarely shows that any teaching approach produces large and consistent benefits for students. But tutoring seemed to be a rare exception. Before the pandemic, almost 100 studies pointed to impressive math or reading gains for students who were paired with a tutor at least three times a week and used a proven curriculum or set of lesson plans. 

    Some students gained an extra year’s worth of learning — far greater than the benefit of smaller classes, summer school or a fantastic teacher. These were rigorous randomized controlled trials, akin to the way that drugs or vaccines are tested, comparing test scores of tutored students against those who weren’t. The expense, sometimes surpassing $4,000 a year per student, seemed worth it for what researchers called high-dosage tutoring.

    On the strength of that evidence, the Biden administration urged schools to invest their pandemic recovery funds in intensive tutoring to help students catch up academically. Forty-six percent of public schools heeded that call, according to a 2024 federal survey, though it’s unclear exactly how much of the $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds have been spent on high-dosage tutoring and how many students received it. 

    Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

    Even with ample money, schools immediately reported problems in ramping up high-quality tutoring for so many students. In 2024, researchers documented either tiny or no academic benefits from large-scale tutoring efforts in Nashville, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C.

    New evidence from the 2023-24 school year reinforces those results. Researchers are rigorously studying large-scale tutoring efforts around the nation and testing whether effective tutoring can be done more cheaply. A dozen researchers studied more than 20,000 students in Miami; Chicago; Atlanta; Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; schools throughout New Mexico, and a California charter school network. This was also a randomized controlled study in which 9,000 students were randomly assigned to get tutoring and compared with 11,000 students who didn’t get that extra help.

    Their preliminary results were “sobering,” according to a June report by the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC, a research organization.

    The researchers found that tutoring during the 2023-24 school year produced only one or two months’ worth of extra learning in reading or math — a tiny fraction of what the pre-pandemic research had produced. Each minute of tutoring that students received appeared to be as effective as in the pre-pandemic research, but students weren’t getting enough minutes of tutoring altogether. “Overall we still see that the dosage students are getting falls far short of what would be needed to fully realize the promise of high-dosage tutoring,” the report said.

    Monica Bhatt, a researcher at the University of Chicago Education Lab and one of the report’s authors, said schools struggled to set up large tutoring programs. “The problem is the logistics of getting it delivered,” said Bhatt. Effective high-dosage tutoring involves big changes to bell schedules and classroom space, along with the challenge of hiring and training tutors. Educators need to make it a priority for it to happen, Bhatt said.

    Related: Students aren’t benefiting much from tutoring, one new study shows

    Some of the earlier, pre-pandemic tutoring studies involved large numbers of students, too, but those tutoring programs were carefully designed and implemented, often with researchers involved. In most cases, they were ideal setups. There was much greater variability in the quality of post-pandemic programs.

    “For those of us that run experiments, one of the deep sources of frustration is that what you end up with is not what you tested and wanted to see,” said Philip Oreopoulos, an economist at the University of Toronto, whose 2020 review of tutoring evidence influenced policymakers. Oreopoulos was also an author of the June report.

    “After you spend lots of people’s money and lots of time and effort, things don’t always go the way you hope. There’s a lot of fires to put out at the beginning or throughout because teachers or tutors aren’t doing what you want, or the hiring isn’t going well,” Oreopoulos said.

    Another reason for the lackluster results could be that schools offered a lot of extra help to everyone after the pandemic, even to students who didn’t receive tutoring. In the pre-pandemic research, students in the “business as usual” control group often received no extra help at all, making the difference between tutoring and no tutoring far more stark. After the pandemic, students — tutored and non-tutored alike — had extra math and reading periods, sometimes called “labs” for review and practice work. More than three-quarters of the 20,000 students in this June analysis had access to computer-assisted instruction in math or reading, possibly muting the effects of tutoring.

    Related: Tutoring may not significantly improve attendance

    The report did find that cheaper tutoring programs appeared to be just as effective (or ineffective) as the more expensive ones, an indication that the cheaper models are worth further testing. The cheaper models averaged $1,200 per student and had tutors working with eight students at a time, similar to small group instruction, often combining online practice work with human attention. The more expensive models averaged $2,000 per student and had tutors working with three to four students at once. By contrast, many of the pre-pandemic tutoring programs involved smaller 1-to-1 or 2-to-1 student-to-tutor ratios.

    Despite the disappointing results, researchers said that educators shouldn’t give up. “High-dosage tutoring is still a district or state’s best bet to improve student learning, given that the learning impact per minute of tutoring is largely robust,” the report concludes. The task now is to figure out how to improve implementation and increase the hours that students are receiving. “Our recommendation for the field is to focus on increasing dosage — and, thereby learning gains,” Bhatt said.

    That doesn’t mean that schools need to invest more in tutoring and saturate schools with effective tutors. That’s not realistic with the end of federal pandemic recovery funds.  

    Instead of tutoring for the masses, Bhatt said researchers are turning their attention to targeting a limited amount of tutoring to the right students. “We are focused on understanding which tutoring models work for which kinds of students.” 

    Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

    This story about tutoring effectiveness was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

    The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

    Join us today.

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  • American Lung Association urges school radon testing

    American Lung Association urges school radon testing

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    The American Lung Association is urging K-12 schools to prioritize indoor air quality and to test for radon, the second-leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S.

    The naturally occurring, odorless, tasteless and colorless radioactive gas can accumulate indoors, entering through cracks in floors, walls and foundations. The only way to determine if a facility has elevated radon levels is through testing, according to the organization. “There is no known safe level of radon exposure,” it says. 

    “Radon … can accumulate inside schools without anyone knowing,” Harold Wimmer, president and CEO of the American Lung Association, said in a statement. “The good news is that testing for radon is simple and affordable — and schools can take action to fix the problem if levels are high.” 

    Young children are especially vulnerable to indoor air pollutants like radon because they spend more time indoors and breathe more air relative to their body size than adults, according to a working paper by the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. 

    ALA recommends short-term, charcoal-based radon test kits. In its announcement, it shares two national standards facility managers can follow: 

    • The Radon Mitigation Standards for Schools and Large Buildings (RMS-LB 2018), released jointly by the American National Standards Institute and the American Association of Radon Scientists and Technologists. The standards address specialized techniques and quality assurance processes to mitigate radon in buildings with complicated designs and specialized airflow, which is typical of schools. 
    • The Radon in Schools standards, developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, recommend that building operators take action if radon levels are at 4.0 picocuries per liter or higher and consider taking action if levels are as low as 2.0 pCi/L. 

    ALA also recommends a school radon testing guide the Minnesota Department of Health developed. 

    HVAC status

    To assess radon levels during normal conditions, testing must take place while the building’s HVAC system is running, the ALA says in a fact sheet. For the most accurate test results, HVAC maintenance and filter changes must be current, it says. 

    If testing finds radon levels under 4.0 pCi/L, schools don’t need to test again for five years, according to the ALA fact sheet. But changes that affect the school HVAC system or changes to the building foundation or the surrounding soil could warrant sooner testing because those events can affect radon levels, the organization says.  

    Many states offer training for school facility managers on how to conduct radon testing, or schools can hire licensed professionals to conduct the tests, according to National Radon Proficiency Program information. 

    The EPA requires states that are receiving indoor radon grants to maintain and provide the public with a list of radon testing service providers credentialed through their own state programs or through two national radon proficiency programs.

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  • The American Historical Association Comes Close, but Misses

    The American Historical Association Comes Close, but Misses

    I believe it to be very important for disciplinary bodies to issue statements/guidance on the use of generative AI when it comes to the production of scholarship and the work of teaching and learning.

    For that reason, I was glad to see the American Historical Association issue its Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in Education. One of the chief recommendations in the concluding chapters of More Than Words: How to Think About Education in the Age of AI is that we need many more community-based conversations about the intersection of our labor and this technology, and a great way to have a conversation is to release documents like this one.

    So, let’s talk.

    First, we should acknowledge the limits of these kinds of documents, something the AHA committee that prepared the principles acknowledges up front at the closing of the preamble:

    Given the speed at which technologies are changing, and the many local considerations to be taken into account, the AHA will not attempt to provide comprehensive or concrete directives for all instances of AI use in the classroom. Instead, we offer a set of guiding principles that have emerged from ongoing conversations within the committee, and input from AHA members via a survey and conference sessions.”

    —AHA Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in Education

    I think this is obviously correct because teaching and learning are inherently, inevitably context-dependent, sometimes down to the smallest variables. I’ve used this example many times, but as someone who frequently taught the same course three or even four times a day, I could detect variances based on what seems like the smallest differences, including the time of day a particular section met. There is a weird (but also wonderful) human chemistry at play when we treat learning as a communal act—as I believe we should—but this means it is incredibly difficult to systematize teaching, as we have seen from generations of failed attempts to do so.

    Caution over offering prescriptions is more than warranted. As someone who now spends a lot of time trying to help others think through the challenges in their particular teaching contexts, I’m up front about the fact that I have very few if any universal answers and instead offer some ways of thinking about and breaking down a problem that may pave the road to progress.

    I cringe at some folks who seem to be positioning themselves as AI gurus, eager to tell us the future and, in so doing, know what we should be doing in the present. This is going to be a problem that must be continually worked.

    The AHA principles start with a declaration that seeks to unify the group around a shared principle, declaring, “Historical thinking matters.”

    My field is writing and English, not history, but here I think this is a misstep, one that I think is common and one that must be addressed if we’re going to have the most productive conversations possible about where generative AI has a place (or not) in our disciplines.

    What is meant by “historical thinking”? From what I can tell, the document makes no specific claims as to what this entails, though it has many implied activities that presumably are component parts of historical thinking: research, analysis, synthesis, etc. …

    To my mind, what is missing is the underlying values that historical thinking is meant to embody. Perhaps these are agreed upon and go without saying, but my experience in the field of writing suggests that this is unlikely. What one values about historical thinking and, perhaps most importantly, the evidence they privilege in detecting and measuring historical thinking is likely complicated and contested.

    This is definitely true when it comes to writing.

    One of my core beliefs about how we’ve been teaching writing is that the artifacts we ask students to produce and the way we assess them often actually prevents students from engaging in the kinds of experiences that help them learn to write.

    Because of this, I put more stock in evidence of a developing writing practice than I do in judging the written artifact at the end of a writing experience. Even my use of the word “experience” signals what I think is most valuable when it comes to writing: the process over the product.

    Others who put more stock in the artifacts themselves see great potential for LLM use to help students produce “better” versions of those artifacts by offering assistance in various parts of the process. This is an obviously reasonable point of view. If we have a world that judges students on outputs and these tools help them produce better outputs (and more quickly), why would we wall them off from these tools?

    In contrast, I say that there is something essentially human—as I argue at book length in More Than Words—about reading and writing, so I am much more cautious about embracing this technology. I’m concerned that we may lose experiences that are actually essential not for getting through school, but for getting through life.

    But this is a debate! And the answers to what the “right” approach is depend on those root values.

    The AHA principles are all fair enough and generally agreeable, arguing for AI literacy, policy transparency and a valuing of historical expertise over LLM outputs. But without unpacking what we mean by “historical thinking,” and how we determine when this thinking is present, we’re stuck in cul-de-sac of uncertainty.

    This is apparent in an appendix that attempts to show what an AI policy might look like, listing a task, whether AI use could be acceptable and then the conditions of acceptance. But again, the devil is in the details.

    For example, “Ask generative AI to identify or summarize key points in an article before you read it” is potentially acceptable, without explicit citation.

    But when? Why? What if the most important thing about a reading, as an aspect of developing their historical thinking practice, is for students to experience the disorientation of tackling a difficult text, and we desire maximum friction in the process?

    Context is everything, and we can’t talk context if we don’t know what we truly value, not just at the level of a discipline, or even a course, but at the level of the experience itself. For every course-related activities, we have to ask:

    What do we want students to know?

    and

    What do we want students to be able to do?

    My answers to these questions, particularly as they pertain to writing courses, involve very little large language model use until a solid foundation in a writing practice is established. Essentially, we want students to be able to use these tools in the way we likely perceive our own abilities to use them productively without compromising our values or the quality of our work.

    I’m guessing most faculty reading this trust themselves to make these judgments about when use is acceptable and under what conditions. That’s the big-picture target. What do we need to know and what do we need to be able to do to arrive at that state?

    Without getting at the deepest values, we don’t really even know where to aim.

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