PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY ELIZABETH BROCKWAY/THE DAILY BEAST

Congresswoman Frederica S. Wilson has been very busy this week, defending her own integrity under the full-frontal assault against her by the Trump administration. At least the liberal media must assume that she had no time to explain her focus on events in Niger -- because the story only emerged now on AM Joy with Joy Reid articulating Rep. Wilson's hunch about what happened in Niger.

In a nutshell, we knew that Rep. Wilson has a long history with U.S. Army Sgt. La David Johnson and his family, both as a school superintendent and family friend, and in her foundation 5000 Young Men of Excellence, which educated Sgt Johnson and mentored him for years.

Less well known is Rep. Wilson's involvement with the Chibok Girls, kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria. Her page doesn't mention the release of significant numbers of the girls -- which it should, frankly -- but it's estimated by the BBC that about 100 of the original Chibok Girls remain missing.

Rep. Wilson is demanding answers -- and praising Sen. John McCain, who is calling for a full inquiry. Wilson believes that it's no coincidence that there was an attack on these US servicemen in Niger, with Johnson being split off from the group and her own work on behalf of the Chibok Girls.

For the record, Niger and Nigeria are two different nations, separated by the Niger River. Still, in a world running rampant with conspiracy theories, Rep. Wilson's warrants serious consideration.

A quick Google search confirms that Boko Haram is definitely operating in Niger and has launched numerous deadly attacks against the local population.

The LA Times writes Sunday that the militant group responsible for the attack that took the lives of four Americans and five Nigerien troops is believed to be an offshoot of Al-Qaeda and not Boko Haram, previously associated with ISIS.

Boko Haram was taken over by the super deadly Al-Shabab in 2017, some say. However Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari this week expressed grave concern for ISIS and Boko Haram as a unit.

Whether or not Rep. Wilson's work on behalf of the Chibok girls and the assault in Niger are related is a big leap, as opposed to an understandable coincidence, given the growing and underestimated by the US violence in the region.

But what requires no clarification is the long and very close relationship between Rep. Wilson and the Johnson family. When I woke up Friday morning, I saw the term "digital lynching" in reference to Wilson. I frankly sighed a sad exhale at the moment, because lynching is not a word to throw around. At no time did I not side with Rep. Wilson in my mind, but the words "digital lynching" hit me as a dramatic escalation.

However, as I read the facts and saw Rep. Wilson's actual 2015 speech about the FBI office opening in Miami, I was filled with repulsion over the Trump administrations attempts to smear her. It's astonishing, frankly, and Trump should understand that his intense efforts to change the narrative around the deaths of all nine men in Niger, to an assault on Rep Wilson, who has her own history in the region in despicable. And it fuels her own conviction that there is a connection between the death of Sgt. Johnson and her own work on behalf of the Chibok girls.

Read more about the Trump administrations attacks on Rep. Wilson at The Daily Beast.

As Education Secretary Betsy DeVos seeks to expand school choice nationwide, including online, Pennsylvania serves as a case study in the shortcomings of the virtual charter school model. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

US education secretary Betsy DeVos is a big proponent of charter schools, so much so that she and her husband have put their money behind their values and beliefs. Over a decade ago, DeVos invested in junk-bond king Michael Milken-backed online charter-school operator K12, which targeted the growing homeschool market. But K12’s overly expansive business model made it both significantly less profitable and more prone to regulatory and operating deficiencies than smaller, less ideologically driven competitors, wrote The Atlantic prior to Besty Devos' senate confirmation. K12 still trades below its IPO price from 2007 and documents discovered by The Atlantic suggest that DeVos was a backer of Milken's parent company Knowledge Universe, now defunct.

It's not the case that no charter schools are successful. Over the same period, Bright Horizons emerged as a focused and successful leader in employer-sponsored early learning centers. Translated, Bright Horizons Family Solutions is also the largest provider of employer-sponsored childcare in America and Fortune's 2017 list of America's best companies puts Bright Horizons at #90.

Not so with K12 and the home school business in Pennsylvania, writes Politio in its Oct. 8, 2017 DeVos champions online charter schools, but the results are poor. The article focuses specifically on Pennsylvania and the 48 percent graduation rate in its virtual charters. Three states California, Michigan and Pennsylvania represent half of all charter schools in America. Michigan is another state with terrible charter schools results, and California is also struggling, based on an updated August 12, 2016 story the Mercury News reported California charter school scores dive.

“Here’s what I would say to Betsy DeVos — do those parents really understand what they’re sending their kids to?” said Mark DiRocco, executive director of the Pennsylvania Association of School Administrators in the Politico article.

Research by Bryan Mann, now an education professor at the University of Alabama and who studied virtual charters while at Penn State, establishes a strong connection between uneducated parents and their preferences for virtual-learning charter schools, writes Politico.

In America today, about six million good-paying, skills-rich jobs are unfilled. In an ideal world, uneducated parents would all follow the sacrifices made by many immigrants of working around the clock in order to send their kids to some of America's finest educational institutions.

It's a well-established fact that uneducated parents who want their kids educated online hold deeply conservative, religious-based views. Their do not want their kids to be contaminated by outside ideas -- more liberal ideas -- associated with higher learning. One asks if this is fair to children and a question of sacrosanct parental rights injuring the future of their own kids. Presumably, these are questions the Trump administration will never ask Betsy DeVos, given their commitment to this voter block of uneducated, evangelical white Americans.

Bottom line, there are many problems in America's education system -- problems that go far beyond America's teachers' unions. As Trump moves to end immigration in America, one expects our education scores to plummet even further.

PEW Research wrote in Feb. 2017: US students' academic achievement stlll lags that of their peers in many other countries. These new scores represent a major decline in the last five years. At one time, the US education was considered the best in the world. This PEW analysis shows just how far America has fallen, compared to other countries in the world. For example:

One of the biggest cross-national tests is the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which every three years measures reading ability, math and science literacy and other key skills among 15-year-olds in dozens of developed and developing countries. The most recent PISA results, from 2015, placed the U.S. an unimpressive 38thout of 71 countries in math and 24th in science. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which sponsors the PISA initiative, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science.

Michigan Gambled on Charler Schools. Its Children Lost. The New York Times