FACT SHEET: President Biden Announces Actions to Promote Educational Opportunity and Diversity in Colleges and Universities

It's a really good thing that President Biden didn't hesitate to chide the Supreme Court for their recent, anti-affirmative action decision. Here is a related piece titled, "Biden says Supreme Court ruling should not deter colleges from efforts to diversify their campuses" where he states the following:

"While colleges can no longer explicitly consider a student’s race as part of a holistic admissions review, the court’s opinion does allow colleges to look at how race affected a student’s life, so long as it’s tied to a unique skill or character they’d bring to the school. Discussions like that typically come up in an applicant’s personal essay."

In other words, a student can bring this up in their personal essay or statement of purpose so as to inform the admissions evaluator of their race and how it connects to a personal strength, skill or attribute they'll bring to the university if admitted. While this is a good thing, much more must be done. Do read through President Biden's fact sheet below as it outlines an array of responses by his administration that should prove helpful. It's curious that there's no mention of percent plans like we have in Texas.

-Angela Valenzuela

FACT SHEET: President Biden Announces Actions to Promote Educational Opportunity and Diversity in Colleges and Universities

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Today, the Supreme Court upended decades of precedent that enabled America’s colleges and universities to build vibrant diverse environments where students are prepared to lead and learn from one another. Although the Court’s decision threatens to move the country backwards, the Biden-Harris Administration will fight to preserve the hard-earned progress we have made to advance racial equity and civil rights and expand educational opportunity for all Americans.

As our nation’s colleges and universities consider their admissions processes in the wake of the Court’s decision, President Biden is calling on them to seize the opportunity to expand access to educational opportunity for all. Our nation is stronger when our colleges and universities reflect the vast and rich diversity of our people. But while talent, creativity, and hard work are everywhere across this country, equal opportunity is not.

Specifically, the President is calling on colleges and universities, when selecting among qualified applicants, to give serious consideration to the adversities students have overcome, including:the financial means of a student or their family; where a student grew up and went to high school; and personal experiences of hardship or discrimination, including racial discrimination, that a student may have faced.

In doing so, colleges and universities can fully value aspiring students who demonstrate resilience and determination in the face of deep challenges.

The Biden-Harris Administration is taking swift action to support our Nation’s colleges and universities so they can continue building pathways to upward mobility and success for all students to thrive in the American workforce and our Nation’s military. Specifically, the Biden-Harris Administration is:Providing colleges and universities with clarity on what admissions practices and additional programs to support students remain lawful. The Department of Education and Department of Justice will provide resources to colleges and universities addressing lawful admissions practices within the next 45 days, as colleges prepare for the next application cycle. The Department of Education will also provide assistance to colleges and universities in administering programs to support students from underserved communities.

Convening a National Summit on Educational Opportunity. The Department of Education will host a national summit on equal opportunity in postsecondary education next month with advocates, student leaders, college and university administrators, researchers, and state, local, territorial and Tribal leaders to share lessons learned and innovative strategies, and develop additional resources for colleges and students to expand access to educational opportunity.

Releasing a report on strategies for increasing diversity and educational opportunity, including meaningful consideration of adversity. Following the Summit, the Department of Education will produce a report by this September, elevating promising admissions practices to build inclusive, diverse student bodies, including by using measures of adversity. The report will address topics including the impact of current admissions practices that may negatively affect the admissions chances of students from underserved communities; strategies to integrate measures of adversity in admissions; outreach and recruitment programs to create diverse applicant pools; strategies for retention and degree completion; and financial and other support programs to make college attainable.

Increasing transparency in college admissions and enrollment practices. The Administration is committed to providing transparent data with respect to admissions and enrollment. The Department of Education’s National Center for Educational Statistics will consider ways to collect and publish more information related to college application and enrollment trends. This includes ways that information might be validly disaggregated by race and ethnicity, first-generation status, legacy status, and other measures. Information in these areas could help higher education leaders, academics and the general public address potential barriers to college recruitment, admissions, and enrollment.

Supporting states in analyzing data to increase access to educational opportunity for underserved communities. The Department of Education will assist states, territories and Tribal nations in marshaling their data to improve college recruitment, admissions, and financial aid practices and devise strategies for increasing access to educational opportunity, such as partnerships to appropriately share and use education data, and direct admissions programs that proactively admit students based on factors such as academic performance and students’ geographic location – without requiring them to apply or pay an application fee.

This work builds upon the Biden-Harris Administration’s historic efforts to ensure all students have the opportunity to access higher education by:Securing a historic increase in the Pell Grants: The President championed the largest increase to Pell Grants in the last decade – a combined increase of $900 to the maximum award over the past two years to benefit low – and middle-income students.

Prioritizing college completion: The Biden-Harris Administration has championed efforts to improve postsecondary outcomes, particularly for students who face the greatest barriers to accessing and completing college. In response to the President’s budget, Congress established a new Postsecondary Student Success Grant program to provide direct support to institutions to engage in evidence-based activities that support college re-enrollment, retention, and completion among individuals who are close to graduation.

Supporting America’s Minority-Serving Institutions: President Biden has secured historic investments in institutions that enroll and graduate disproportionate shares of low-income students and students of color, including tens of billions of dollars in funding for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Tribal Colleges and Universities, Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions and Minority Serving Institutions, including Hispanic Serving Institutions through the Department of Education.

Fixing the broken student loan system: The Biden-Harris Administration has taken action to make the student loan system more manageable for current and future borrowers and reduce the burden of student debt, including by:Cutting monthly payments in half for undergraduate loans. The Department of Education is proposing an income-driven repayment plan that protects more low-income borrowers from making any payments and caps monthly payments for undergraduate loans at 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income – half of the rate that borrowers must pay now under existing plans. The average annual student loan payment will be lowered by more than $1,000 for both current and future student borrowers who owe payments.

Fixing the broken Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program by ensuring that borrowers who have worked at a qualifying nonprofit organization, in the military, or in federal, state, territorial, Tribal, or local government, receive appropriate credit towards loan forgiveness. These regulatory changes build on temporary changes the Department of Education made to PSLF, under which roughly 616,000 public servants received more than $42 billion in loan forgiveness.

Ensuring targeted student loan forgiveness programs work. Including its reforms to PSLF, the Department of Education has approved a total of more than $66 billion in relief to over 2.2 million student loan borrowers, including many who were defrauded by their college, enrolled in a college that abruptly closed, or are permanently disabled and unable to work.

Super helpful information here on loan forgiveness, a plan, that despite some Republicans' efforts, will go forward. Applying should take no more than a half hour. It takes 4-6 weeks to process. This is such great timely opportunity for folks buried in student debts, especially considering the difficult economy we're experiencing.

-Angela Valenzuela

Everything to know to apply for student loan forgiveness

The application process is now open. Some Republican-led states have filed lawsuits to try to stop the cancellation, but the Biden administration says they’re confident the challenges won’t succeed.

President Joe Biden speaks about the student debt relief portal beta test in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex in Washington, Monday, Oct. 17, 2022. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)(Susan Walsh / ASSOCIATED PRESS)

By The Associated Press

3:09 PM on Oct 19, 2022 — Updated at 3:47 PM on Oct 19, 2022

NEW YORK (AP) — President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. announced in August, will cancel up to $20,000 in debt per borrower. The application process is now open, and the administration says the forms should take five minutes to complete.

Borrowers who apply before mid-November should see forgiveness before Jan. 1, when payments on loans are scheduled to restart after a pause during the pandemic. Some Republican-led states have filed lawsuits to try to stop the cancellation, but the Biden administration says they’re confident the challenges won’t succeed.

Here’s how to apply, and everything else you need to know:

Who qualifies for student loan forgiveness?

You qualify to have up to $10,000 forgiven if your loan is held by the Department of Education and you make less than $125,000 individually or $250,000 for a family. If you received Pell grants, which are reserved for undergraduates with the most significant financial need, you can have up to $20,000 forgiven. If you are a current borrower and a dependent student, you will be eligible for relief based on your parents’ income, rather than your own.

One major lingering question is what will happen to students with commercially held FFEL loans who didn’t refinance before Sept. 29. At the moment those loans are not eligible (even though they were initially going to be eligible). The administration has said it’s looking for “additional legally-available options to provide relief” to those borrowers, but nothing has been announced yet.

How do I apply for loan forgiveness?

Go to studentaid.gov and in the section on student loan debt relief, click “Apply Now.”

Be ready to type in some basic personal information. The form asks for: name, Social Security Number, date of birth, phone number and email address. It does not require documentation about your income or your student loans.

Next, review the eligibility rules and confirm that you’re a match. For most people, that means attesting that they make less than $125,000 a year or that their household makes less than $250,000 a year. If you meet the eligibility rules, click the box confirming that everything you provided is true.

Click “Submit.”

How long will it take to receive forgiveness?

After the form is submitted, the Biden administration says it should take four to six weeks to process. The Education Department will use its existing records to make sure your loans are eligible and to look for applicants who might exceed the income limits. Some will be asked to provide additional documentation to prove their incomes. The Education Department estimates that the verification application will take about half an hour, including time to review and upload tax documents.

Most borrowers who apply before mid-November should expect to get their debt canceled before Jan. 1, when payments on federal student loans are scheduled to restart after a pause during the pandemic.

Will student loan forgiveness definitely happen?

Things could get more complicated, depending on the outcomes of several legal challenges. The Biden administration faces a growing number of lawsuits attempting to block the program, including one filed by six Republican-led states.

A federal judge in St. Louis is currently weighing the states’ request for an injunction to halt the plan. Biden on Monday said he’s confident that the suit will not upend the plan. “Our legal judgment is that it won’t,” he said, “but they’re trying to stop it.”

A group of Wisconsin taxpayers asked the Supreme Court Wednesday to block the program from taking effect, Bloomberg Law reported.

The emergency filing from the Brown County Taxpayers Association seeks to keep the plan on hold while the group’s legal challenge goes forward. Bloomberg News reported the Supreme Court has ruled in the past people generally don’t have the right to take the federal government to court over how tax dollars are spent.

Has the student loan payment freeze been extended?

The payment freeze has been extended one last time, until Dec. 31. The freeze started in 2020 as a way to help people struggling financially during the COVID-19 pandemic and it’s been extended several times since. It was set to expire Aug. 31.

Interest rates will remain at 0% until repayments start. Under an earlier extension announced in April, people who were behind on payments before the pandemic automatically will be put in good standing.

Does graduate student debt qualify?

Yes, federal student loans taken out to cover graduate degrees qualify for forgiveness.

What if my student loan balance includes a lot of interest?

The interest itself is considered part of the balance for purposes of this program. Forgiveness will remove $10,000 from the total balance you owe.

Will I have to pay taxes on the amount I’m forgiven?

At least a few states have said they plan to tax the forgiveness, including Indiana and Mississippi, and it’s unclear whether some others will change their tax rules to exclude forgiven student debt. Previously, Congress eliminated taxes on loan forgiveness through 2025.

Do parent plus loans qualify?

Parent Plus loans are included in the forgiveness plan, subject to the same $250,000 income cap for families that applies to the rest of cancellation.

Parent Plus loans differ from other federal education loans in that they can go towards covering expenses other than tuition, such as books, and room and board for college students. As of March 2022, parents of 3.6 million students owe more than $107 billion in Parent Plus loans, according to the Department of Education. That represents about 6% of the total amount of federal student debt held by Americans.

If a parent received a Parent Plus loan on behalf of a student and the same student received a direct loan, both would receive relief, as the cancellation is on a per-borrower, not a per-student basis. That means that each person who has Education Department-held federal student loans and meets the income requirements qualifies for cancellation.

What’s a Pell grant and how do I know if I have one?

Roughly 27 million borrowers who qualified for Pell grants will be eligible to receive up to $20,000 in forgiveness under the Biden plan.

Pell grants are special government scholarships for lower-income Americans, who currently can receive up to $6,895 annually for roughly six years.

Nearly every Pell Grant recipient came from a family that made less than $60,000 a year, according to the Department of Education, which said Pell grant recipients typically experience more challenges repaying their debt than other borrowers.

Pell grants themselves don’t generally have to be paid back, but recipients typically take out additional student loans.

“This additional relief for Pell borrowers is also an important piece of racial equity in cancellation,” said Kat Welbeck, Civil Rights Counsel for the Student Borrower Protection Center. “Because student debt exacerbates existing inequities, the racial wealth gap means that students of color, especially those that are Black and Latino, are more likely to come from low-wealth households, have student debt, and borrow in higher quantities.”

To find out if you have a Pell grant, check any emails you’ve received that describe your FAFSA award.

How many people will this help?

About 43 million Americans have federal student debt, with an average balance of $37,667, according to federal data. A third of those owe less than $10,000. Half owe less than $20,000. The total amount of federal student debt is more than $1.6 trillion.

What if I’ve already paid off my student loans — will I see relief?

If you’ve voluntarily made payments since March 2020, when payments were paused, you can request a refund for those payments, according to the Federal Office of Student Aid. Contact your loan servicer to request a refund.

What repayment plan is the Department of Education proposing?

The Department of Education has proposed a repayment plan that would cap monthly payments at no more than 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income, down from 10% now. Borrowers will need to apply for the repayment plan if it’s approved, which could take a year or more.

For example, under the proposal, a single borrower making $38,000 a year would pay $31 a month, according a government press release.

The amount considered non-discretionary income will also be increased, through the department has not said how much.

Discretionary income usually refers to what you have left after covering necessities like food and rent, but for student loan repayment purposes it’s calculated using a formula that takes into account the difference between a borrower’s annual income and the federal poverty line, along with family size and geographic location.

“What’s tough about income-driven repayment is that it does not take into account your other liabilities, such as your rent payment,” said Kristen Ahlenius, a financial counselor at Your Money Line, which provides financial literacy training. “If someone’s living paycheck to paycheck and their rent is taking up half of their paycheck and then their car payment takes the other, they have to choose. Unfortunately, income-driven repayment doesn’t take that into consideration, but it is an option.”

Student Debt Relief offers a calculator to help determine your discretionary income.

What if I can’t afford to pay even with loan forgiveness?

Once payments resume, borrowers who can’t pay risk delinquency and eventually default. That can hurt your credit rating and mean you’re not eligible for additional aid.

If you’re struggling to pay, check if you qualify for an income-driven repayment plan. You can find out more here.

The Biden plan also includes a proposal that would allow people with undergraduate loans to cap repayment at 5% of their monthly income. Proposals like this one can take a year or more to be implemented, and it’s not clear what the fine print will be.

If you have worked for a government agency or a non-profit organization, you could also be eligible for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which you can read more about here.

The Dallas Morning News contributed to this report.

By CORA LEWIS and ADRIANA MORGA Associated Press. Collin Binkley contributed to this report from Washington.

Important read. This piece makes the case that we really shouldn't bother with high-stakes testing. As per this recent statement by National LULAC, a civil rights organization to which I proudly belong, we are asking for a moratorium on high-stakes testing. This agenda is otherwise very much integral to the Billionaire's neoliberal game as stated herein: 

"It is the same non-educators influencing the debate today: the John Podesta, Bruce Reed, and Ian Rosenblum types who convert billionaire wishes into public policy. But those affected see it differently."

Indeed, those closest to the children like the teachers, parents, an increasing number of administrators, and most of all, the children themselves, find this testing system to be incredibly harmful, and thusly, highly unethical and objectionable.

-Angela Valenzuela 

Biden Is Reigniting the Movement to Oppose Standardized Testing

Teachers always knew the tests lacked validity, and now some progressive Democrats in Congress are joining their opposition.

by Jake Jacobs

March 22, 2021

December 14, 2019, with the Democratic primaries still up in the air, then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden made headlines promising educators he would end standardized testing. 

Today the controversy is compounded by the COVID-19 crisis, with more than a third of U.S. students still learning remotely.

Biden admitted to thousands of teachers tuning in that teaching to a standardized test “makes no sense.” In a seven-minute soliloquy against the practice, he argued that teachers should determine school curriculum, as they know best how to instill confidence in their students. 

But just a month after his Inauguration, amid a deadly pandemic, the Biden Administration announced that testing will continue.

Immediately after Biden’s statement, students, parents, and educators launched petitions and renewed mass opt-out campaigns. American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten called it “dumb,”  a “frustrating turn” for Biden, who had credited his wife Dr. Jill Biden—a community college professor and longtime educator—and his deceased wife Neilia, also a teacher, for convincing him of the harms of standardized testing. 

Nevertheless, in early March 2021, hope was renewed as a letter urging Biden’s Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to waive the tests was co-signed by Senators Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, and Representatives Tom Suozzi (New York), Mark Takano (California), and Ilhan Omar (Minnesota). The letter was authored by Representative Jamaal Bowman (New York), who is also the newly elected vice chair of the House Education and Labor Committee. 

Dr. Bowman, a former middle school principal in the Bronx, is a longtime leader in the opt-out movement who sees standardized testing as a pillar of systemic racism. The twenty-year educator campaigned promising to fight “invalid” federal testing long before anyone had heard of COVID-19, and is today leading his colleagues in Congress to urge Biden to listen to educators.

To understand the importance of this moment, a little historical background is in order. 

In 2002, when the newly-passed federal No Child Left Behind Act mandated standardized tests in math and English in all public schools, it prompted two decades of unabated contention and resistance. From the harm to students, to the waste and fraud in test administration, to the long-term data showing no return on investment, compelling international consensus has emerged against standardization in education. 

Today the controversy is compounded by the COVID-19 crisis, with more than a third of U.S. students still learning remotely, and many in social and emotional crisis, prompting many prominent former proponents of standardized testing to change positions. 

Not only have achievement gaps persisted or widened throughout the standardized testing experiment, so-called “help” has never come, year after year. In fact, the original No Child Left Behind Act meted out escalating punishments, defunding and closing low-scoring schools, or placing them on closure lists to the delight of charter school developers and investors.

Furthermore, people will be shocked to understand how test scores are computed. 

The tests are built largely on multiple choice, which for most students means a long series of guesses. All students begin with a twenty-five percent chance of picking a correct answer, whether they understand the question or not. Then, students who can eliminate another answer have a fifty-fifty chance for credit with a lucky guess. 

And year after year, the majority of test-takers fail. In fact, more than seventy percent of students in New York failed in the first year of the hastily implemented Common Core iteration of the tests. So what did the state do? 

Well, officials simply changed the “cut scores”—the actual passing/failing threshold between a “2” and “3” quietly, for certain grades, after tests were already taken—adjusting “raw scores” in order to give the Education Department a better press release. In other years, they simply removed questions or entire passages. How is this scientific?

Created by corporations like Pearson, Questar, or American Institutes for Research (AIR), the tests and the scoring are built upon incomprehensible formulas, broad presumptions, and subjective, developmentally inappropriate benchmarks which prominent statistical organizations repeatedly urged should not be used in high-stakes decisions.

In 2018, the third-to-eighth grade benchmarks for math scores were so out-of-whack with high school benchmarks that three times the number of students labeled “not proficient” in eighth grade did just fine in high school standardized tests the following year. 

It gets worse. Scores for English-learners or students with disabilities were further manipulated, but how is anyone’s guess—practically no one outside of the testing companies has ever seen the hidden proprietary formulas or verified their validity.

In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s 2015 Education Transformation Act required scoring formulas to be made “transparent and available” to all teachers prior to the start of the school year, meaning that concealing the “weights and scorings” actually violates the law. A federal court in Houston ruled similarly in May 2017 that hidden formulas were unverifiable and therefore violated teachers due process rights. In New Mexico, a court injunction made hidden formulas a popular topic in the winning 2018 gubernatorial campaign of Democrat Michelle Lujan Grisham.

Cuomo, now embroiled in his own harassment and data-fudging scandals, has a dark history of weaponizing flawed tests against teachers.

Cuomo, now embroiled in his own harassment and data-fudging scandals, has a dark history of weaponizing flawed tests against teachers whom he once characterized somewhat ironically as sex offenders. “I want to evaluate teachers, and I want to be able to get bad teachers out of the classroom,” he declared in 2014, falsely claiming “there are teachers that have been found guilty of sexually abusing students who we can’t get out of the classroom.”

In 2015, I reported on how little was known, even by New York lawmakers, about test-based teacher evaluations. Assuming math and English teachers were assigned scores from their subjects, how was everyone else—i.e., the majority of teachers—rated? The short answer is that math and English scores are assigned no matter what they teach. Teachers in New York City could pick their preferred subject, and even pick the class, or grade, or a schoolwide average. 

What about the rest of the state? Most school districts negotiated a “group measure” to be assigned for every teacher, regardless of the subject being taught, with the score coming from a single “reliable” test like a biology exam. That’s convenient, but—like the rest of the testing regime—it’s entirely arbitrary. 

Not to be outdone, New York City’s union is now negotiating the use of a single “citywide” score that averages every student together to arrive at a single score to be shared by every teacher. A masterwork of compliance theater, but again, it’s arbitrary. 

New York state parents have boycotted testing from the very beginning in 2001. By 2014, 20 percent of the state was opting out, and in the two counties of Long Island, well over 50 percent refused. But, not told of their right to opt-out, almost all students in New York City were tested. 

Originally, students could be held back if they failed the tests, but even after this was rescinded, administrators often did not share this little fact with students, providing a little extra fear-based “motivation.”

NYSAPE, an anti-testing group which circulates parent opt-out letters each year, found many schools deceptively offering prohibited rewards and punishments to boost participation. Around the state, families were fed all kinds of untrue stories, coerced, lied to, or presented with fake hurdles like the need to come in-person to speak to the principal when only a letter was actually necessary. 

During Donald Trump’s presidency, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos penalized schools with high opt-outs rates, and for certain metrics, counted students who had opted-out as if they failed the test. 

So the claim that standardized tests “help” simply rings hollow today. 

As Obama did before him between 2009-2016, Biden has said there will be no federal consequences for opt-outs. But because of the incredibly high potential for opt-outs this year, it begs the question, why bother testing? 

As Denisha Jones, professor of education at Sarah Lawrence College posits, canceling tests for two years in a row could be the death knell for the federal mandate, as inertia has been a major factor keeping them around. Considering how unpopular the tests have been, particularly during the 2020 presidential primary, you may wonder who is still pushing them. 

Hiding behind the fig leaf of “civil rights” organizations, it inevitably traces back to the same white billionaires, spending millions to commodify education, conduct mass experiments, and kneecap teacher unions. In this revealing 2012 video, the highest ranking politicos in the game convened at a Thomas B. Fordham Institute-hosted soiree for wealthy donors, laying bare a bipartisan plot to blanket the country with campaign cash and astroturf in pursuit of standardized tests, teacher evaluations, and Common Core, grooming a new breed of teachers to overcome resistance to corporate privatization. 

It is the same non-educators influencing the debate today: the John Podesta, Bruce Reed, and Ian Rosenblum types who convert billionaire wishes into public policy. But those affected see it differently. 

Teachers, myself included, see the harm up close, the labeling, the wasted time, the junk science, the disillusionment, and the tears, vomit, and peed pants. Teachers foresee yet another chaotic testing season, but this time it’s Joe Biden in the White House, seemingly deferring to the world’s richest social engineers. 

And because testing “makes no sense,” we can only hope sanity may yet prevail.