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The Florida Department of Education revealed that the Sarasota County School District falsified records and placed students on alternate assessment to avoid state testing or accountability in order to benefit financially. Investigators found that 27 of 66 sampled students’ files did not include sufficient documentation to demonstrate that they were placed correctly.

A 2019 report showed that $6.5 billion in foreign gifts to U.S. institutions were not reported. To hold colleges and universities accountable and ensure that their reporting is full, accurate, and transparent, the Department of Education enforces Section 117 of the Higher Education, which requires colleges to report all gifts and contracts involving foreign sources worth $250,000 or more.

Immediately after the President was elected, borrower advocates and lawmakers expressed concern about what would happen to the current regulations aimed at holding for-profit colleges accountable. On Tuesday, their concerns were validated. The Education Department announced that it would delay and renegotiate two of the previous administration’s signature regulations: the first aims to penalize programs whose graduates’ loan payments exceed a set percentage of their earnings, while the second simplifies the process for borrowers who say they have been defrauded by their colleges.

Universities in the United States should close down their Confucius Institutes – teaching and research centres funded directly by the Chinese government – says a report by the National Association of Scholars or NAS. The wide-ranging report includes additional insights on the institutes’ often-secretive operations gleaned from the contracts signed with a dozen US universities, obtained through freedom of information law requests. The report, Outsourced to China: Confucius Institutes and soft power in American higher education, says unless contracts between US universities and the Hanban can be renegotiated to include more transparency, financial and hiring autonomy for US host universities, academic freedom guarantees and other safeguards, the institutes should be shut down.

Last December, 1,055 high school communities around Mexico – comprising almost 1.3 million students – engaged in a transparency and accountability exercise. This involves each principal of public high schools completing three electronic forms covering more than 100 indicators. These range from income and expenditure, to enrolment and academic performance, to the condition of school equipment and infrastructure.