“Department of Education” on The Daily Caller

It’s a congressional hearing that’s notable for what it’s not addressing. (more)

Top GOP oversight official Rep. Darrell Issa of California is quietly planning a hearing on a scandal-ridden new regulation just finalized by the Education Department, according to a June 13 letter he sent to New York Democrat Rep. Edolphus Towns. (more)

Is investment giant Morgan Stanley trying to hide just how cozy its analysts were with top Education Department officials over strict new rules concerning for-profit colleges?  (more)

Department of Education Sec. Arne Duncan is finalizing a controversial new regulation on for-profit, or “career,” colleges, issuing final rules Wednesday that condition federal aid to students of the schools to numeric thresholds on how much debt they incur or how quickly they repay the loans after attending. (more)

A conservative non-profit is raising privacy concerns over a Department of Education (DoED) rule change that will allow for “personally identifiable information” about students to be shared with other government departments. Personally identifiable information that could potentially be shared includes hair color, blood type, family health history and students’ grades and other academic records. (more)

Last week colleges were abuzz with news that Yale University had decided to kick the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity off campus for sexist hazing antics which occurred in October of 2010. The decision has its supporters and its critics, yet both sides speculate that political pressure from the federal government led the Ivy to give DKE the boot. (more)

Top government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed its third consecutive lawsuit to compel the release of documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Wednesday, and officials at the group are asking why it’s been so difficult to pry the documents loose. (more)

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is going to bat against the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) over what they see as infringements on college students’ due process and free speech rights. (more)

The Department of Education (DoED) is poised to issue its “gainful employment” (GE) regulation that relies upon a non-transparent “black box” test to determine whether the large proportion of minority and lower-income students enrolled in career college programs will be eligible for Title IV student loans. Strong rumors contend that Secretary Duncan will approve using (private) actual income data collected by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Social Security Administration (SSA) rather than public/transparent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to calculate “debt-to-income” ratios. According to the GE rule, the ratio will determine which students are eligible to receive financial aid to obtain their higher education degree and which will be denied. (more)

The Education Department’s inspector general is investigating Wall Street short sellers’ role in strict new regulations of the for-profit college sector, sources confirm to The Daily Caller. (more)

Federal regulators are unelected officials given the power to make law in the form of regulations. But that power is not unlimited. It is checked by a statute called the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), enacted in 1946. The APA requires fairness, open-mindedness, transparency, and a level playing field by unelected regulators before their proposed “rules” can become law. (more)

Last February, 58 Democrats in the House of Representatives — including major members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the then-speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, the current chair of the Democratic National Committee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and such leading progressive members as Reps. Carolyn McCarthy, Rob Andrews and Elliot Engel, and many others — voted to block funding of the implementation of the Department of Education’s (DOE) “gainful employment” (GE) regulation. The GE regulation makes programs ineligible for federal financial aid (grants and loans) if they fail to meet certain debt-service-to-income thresholds or a repayment rate and disproportionately impact minority and lower-income students who predominantly attend for-profit, career colleges, to which the proposed GE regulation virtually exclusively applies. (more)

Did a top official from the Department of Education receive a ‘golden parachute’ upon his leaving the administration for a consulting gig? (more)

President Obama has committed the United States to having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 — up from its current ninth-place ranking. This noble goal has been his primary justification for increasing Pell Grant spending. But how effective have Pell Grants been in reaching this ambitious goal? And if they have not helped, then why increase funding? (more)

While the Department of Education continues its crackdown on mean-spirited taunting on Facebook, some members of Congress are joining the fight in Washington’s War on Bullying with a new bill aimed directly at kids who target students with disabilities. (more)

I’m a big fan of giving the benefit of the doubt to issues I don’t agree with. My thinking is always that if there’s a ban, a loophole or a hurdle, it was placed there not to piss anybody off, but because of some honest, albeit sometimes wrong-headed, motivation to do the right thing. When I discover, however, that the driving force is malevolent, illegal, or just plain immoral, all bets are off. (more)

Roughly 150 various advocates — lobbyists for gays and lesbians, legislators, White House officials, at least one cabinet secretary and the first lady — gathered around President’s Obama’s bully pulpit in the White House Thursday to cheer for increased government monitoring and intervention in Facebook conversations, in playgrounds and in schoolrooms around the country. (more)

Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn blasted the Education Department Wednesday for what he called “very significant inappropriate behavior in tipping hedge funds on short selling private education” and called on a key Senate panel to investigate the matter. (more)

A new Congress is in town, the result of widespread opposition to the Obama Democrats’ aggressive expansion of federal power and their concomitant orgy of pork-barrel spending and job-killing regulatory measures. Recently, our president penned an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal asserting that, all along, he’s really been for eliminating regulations that hamper business. Now, he tells us, his administration will attack unnecessary regulation so that the private sector can create jobs and rejuvenate the economy.  (more)

Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, called for cuts to the Department of Defense budget and entitlement reform in his Thursday afternoon speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). (more)