President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive order to expand school choice across the country. While this policy could allow more students access to alternatives outside of public schooling, critics warn it might divert essential funding from public schools and exacerbate educational inequalities.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which provides a comprehensive measure of students’ academic achievement across the country, overall student achievement has not returned to pre-pandemic levels. The percentage of eighth-graders reading below NAEP Basic is the highest in the assessment’s history, and the percentage of fourth-graders scoring below NAEP Basic is the largest in 20 years.
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Recent audits revealed that private school parents, and now voucher recipients, have used the funds for a slew of, at best, questionable expenses, including kayak lessons, horseback riding lessons, home gyms, televisions, and more. Earlier audits conducted prior to the most recent expansion revealed similarly questionable uses.”
On New Year’s eve, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered his 2025 New Year address through China Media Group and the Internet. The following is the full text of the address:
What is the fundamental quality of the working class? What is its strongest moral weapon in the struggle? Solidarity and comradeship is the basis of communism. Unless this sense is strongly developed amongst working people, the building of a truly communist society is inconceivable. Politically conscious communists should therefore logically be encouraging the development of solidarity in every way and fighting against all that hinders its development – Prostitution destroys the equality, solidarity and comradeship of the two halves of the working class. A man who buys the favours of a woman does not see her as a comrade or as a person with equal rights. He sees the woman as dependent upon himself and as an unequal creature of a lower order who is of less worth to the workers’ state. The contempt he has for the prostitute, whose favours he has bought, affects his attitude to all women. The further development of prostitution, instead of allowing for the growth of comradely feeling and solidarity, strengthens the inequality of the relationships between the sexes.
Florida schools recently removed most information on sex in their sex education curriculum. My initial shock was over the removal of the teaching of sexual consent from the program. Apparently, it’s okay to rape Floridian children. Anyway, I shared the video and got a comment making fun of LGBTQ+, as teaching about that was removed as well. I forgot to bite my tongue and let loose in my response. I’ve posted it below. I’ve covered the stats before, so I’m not posting sources.
Did you know that more cis (straight) boys get gender-affirming surgery than those who identify as transgender? Breast reductions are considered gender-affirming. I remember going to school with a guy who had to wear a bra because his breasts were so big that they caused him problems in gym class. The other kids made fun of him for it. He was straight, or what is now termed cis. Besides, less than 3% of Americans identify as transgender and less than 7% identify as LGBTQ+. Right-wingers (and some so-called Communists/Left-wingers) blow the LGBTQ+ issue out of proportion. I identify as queer. I just don’t flaunt it, but I will stand up for my fellow LGBTQ+. Criticize the U.S. government for how it weaponizes LGBTQ+ rights, human rights, or women’s rights, as an excuse for overthrowing other governments, instead. Capitalism and American Imperialism are the real problems.
Political unrest continues to erupt in the nation of Georgia along Russia’s southern Caucasus border, led by openly anti-Russian protesters backed by US-European government money and support.
In the latest front in the culture war over school curricula, the House of Representatives is set to vote Friday on a bill that would give a congressional stamp of approval to the lesson plans of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a group closely linked to fervently hawkish corners of the foreign policy blob.
President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tapped Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive who ran the Small Business Administration for much of his first term, to lead the Education Department, an agency he has routinely singled out for elimination in his upcoming term.
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In part because of her recent policy role and her experience as the small business administrator, Ms. McMahon had been discussed as a possible pick to lead the Commerce Department until the role was officially offered to Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive and a chairman of the Trump transition team, earlier in the day.
Ms. McMahon will be in charge of overseeing what is widely expected to be a thorough and determined dismantling of the department’s core functions, as Mr. Trump and many of those in his orbit have questioned the agency’s purpose and disparaged its work as overregulating schools on political and ideological terms.
Other than a brief appointment in 2009 to the Connecticut State Board of Education, where she served for just over a year, Ms. McMahon has no experience in overseeing education policy. She would assume the role at a time when school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, many students are not making up ground lost during the pandemic in reading and math, and many colleges and universities are shrinking and closing amid a larger loss of faith in the value of higher education.
But the America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding “school choice” programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.
(Comrade Lenin is greeted by the delegates with stormy applause.) Comrades, in a certain sense this Congress of the women’s section of the workers’ army has a special significance, because one of the hardest things in every country has been to stir the women into action. There can be no socialist revolution unless very many working women take a big part in it.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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