Trump turns White House into classroom as he moves to abolish America's 'no good' Education Department...

How the White House is handling Elon Musk and potential conflicts of interest...

Boeing Will Build US Air Force's Next-Gen Stealth Fighter Jet, Trump Announces...

Britain updates travel advice for U.S. amid Trump immigration crackdown...

Rapper Yella Beezy’s dark past as he cheated death and was sued with Chris Brown before ‘ordering Mo3’s brutal murder’...

Trump's big move in the war on education could strip students from schools

In 1972, 29-year-old journalist Geraldo Rivera filmed an expose revealing the atrocities inside Willowbrook School, a state-supported institution on Staten Island for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Children whose only crimes lay in looking and acting slightly different from their nondisabled peers were sentenced to life in a filthy, reeking room where they huddled naked on the floor in their own feces or rocked and howled in terror or sat slack-jawed and vacant-eyed day after day while a single staff member tried to attend to the basic needs of 50.

Contrast these images with a recent New York Times photo of Rachel Handlin, 30, resplendent in a black lace top and smiling beside the field camera she used to shoot photos for her solo exhibition “strangers are friends I haven’t met yet” at New York City’s White Columns Gallery. In May 2024, Handlin became the first person with Down syndrome to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree.

The exhibition depicts other people with her genetic condition who’ve graduated from two- and four-year colleges and universities around the world, including Spain’s Pablo Pineda, 51, who left his acting career to earn a B.A. in Educational Psychology and a teaching certificate; community college graduate Kayla McKeon, 38, who — in 2017— became the first Capitol