schoolinfosystem.org
Peter Gray: Many parents strive mightily to get their children into high achieving high schools. A high achieving school (or HAS) is defined as one where students score high on standardized tests and a high percentage go on to selective colleges. Such striving occurs through various means. Some move to a wealthy suburban community and pay a […]
The Disagreement Today’s disagreement is about the “math wars.”The “math wars” is a debate happening in K-12 education about the best way to teach math. Broadly speaking, there are two camps that have conflicting pedagogical approaches: Explicit instruction focuses on procedural fluency, guided practice, and repetition.Inquiry-based instruction focuses on conceptual understanding, open-ended problems, and productive […]
Jay Caspian Kang A new book by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, “What Are Children For?,” is an engaging, literary investigation into why so many highly educated, financially comfortable women in the United States are ambivalent about having children, and how we should actually think about that decision. (I recently interviewed the authors on a podcast […]
Patrick Brown: At times, it may feel like we’re living in P. D. James’s The Children of Men, but the Right Honorable Baroness might have gotten one thing wrong. Her story of a global epidemic of infertility finds the world caught in paroxysms of terrorism, xenophobia, and violent authoritarianism. But the soundtrack of a world without […]
Ira Wells: Over the past few years, the debate over how to manage cellphones in schools has offered a reprise of many of these arguments. Kids are going to use their devices anyway, so what’s the point of punishing them or tasking overworked teachers with policing usage? Do teachers have the right to confiscate students’ […]
Lawrence Person: Both Texas Scorecard and The Texan have done good work highlighting a disturbing reality: Numerous public school teachers of all grade levels have been arrested for sex offenses, many involving children. I’ve been running several of these in LinkSwarms, but Texas Scorecard has featured a number over the last week: “Former Texas Teacher Gets 30 […]
Douglas Carnine: To fill this void, our 84 volunteer experts are creating guidance for decisionmakers in the form of evidence-based resources. These are being vetted, curated and organized based on scientific research and on data from high-performing schools, districts and states that consistently produce strong results, especially for marginalized populations. These resources, focused on academic achievement and social-emotional […]
Ayaan Hirsi Ali When, on October 8, protests erupted across the Western world in support of Hamas—and not the democracy that had been overrun by terrorists—I saw the revolution. When I look at the recent spectacle at Columbia or Yale or UCLA or Harvard or Stanford—students tearing down American flags and raising Palestinian ones; or […]
Steve Karnowski Federal authorities in Minnesota have confiscated cellphones and taken all seven defendants into custody as investigators try to determine who attempted to bribe a juror with a bag of cash containing $120,000 to get her to acquit them on charges of stealing more than $40 million from a program meant to feed children […]
Quinton Klabon Nancy Carlsson-Paige, former Lesley University education professor/Matt Damon’s mom from that 1 Reason video: “I could barely stand [Sold A Story]…full of false information, misconceptions, and distortions of 3-cueing. She didn’t even understand it.” More from Dr. Tim Slekar: Mary Kate McCoy: We’re concerned about equity in education. You will never achieve equity […]
Joseph Cox: Google has accidentally collected childrens’ voice data, leaked the trips and home addresses of car pool users, and made YouTube recommendations based on users’ deleted watch history, among thousands of other employee-reported privacy incidents, according to a copy of an internal Google database which tracks six years worth of potential privacy and security […]
Greg Lukianoff and Andrea Lan In their 2015 article and 2018 book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg and Jonathan Haidt argue that cognitive distortions (practices like catastrophizing, black and white thinking, overgeneralizing, discounting positives, and emotional reasoning) and overprotecting children results in an external locus of control, helplessness and despair, and both the mental health crisis and the […]
Andrew Atterberry Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans have spent years aggressively turning the state into a haven for school choice. They have been wildly successful, with tens of thousands more children enrolling in private or charter schools or homeschooling. Now as those programs balloon, some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment […]
By Shannon Whitworth It’s been a rough cultural transition back to schools since the lockdowns, and we are starting to see the price that will be paid for keeping our kids out of the nation’s schools for as long as we did. We are fighting to reclaim our schools for the sake of the children […]
Sally Weale “This is mega!” said Daisy Greenwell from the Smartphone-Free Childhood campaign. “We are absolutely thrilled and we believe it’s going to have a domino effect.” She was reacting to news that St Albans in Hertfordshire is attempting to become the first UK city to go smartphone-free for all children under 14. Before St Albans, it was Greystones in […]
Michael S. Garet, Kerstin Carlson Le Floch, Daniel Hubbard, Joanne Carminucci and Barbara Goodson:
Glenn Reynolds: Over the past 50+ years, traditional ideas, like Butker’s, about marriage, child-rearing, and gender roles have been marginalized, in favor of those the put much less emphasis on, well, marriage, child-rearing, and traditional views about gender roles. And now we’re facing a global baby bust, or as some are calling it, a “demographic winter” due […]
Quinn Clark and Natalie Eilbert The details — an eighth-grade boy, his death, a pellet gun, a small tight-knit community — reveal a complex, tangled web that complicates any theory into why the tragic incident happened in the first place. The events have also left many with tricky questions over what exactly transpired, the boy’s […]
By Maria Godoy If you’re a parent struggling to get your kids’ off their devices and outdoors to play, here’s another reason to keep trying: Spending at least two hours outside each day is one of the most important things your kids can do to protect their eyesight. “We think that outdoor time is the […]
Corrinne Hess: Other findings include: Family Unity: Percentage of births to unmarried women, women currently married, and children with a single parent. Wisconsin ranks 16th. Family interaction: Percentage of children who are read to every day in the past week, children who watched four or more hours of television in the past week, and children […]
Maddie Hanna We have seen success in the classroom with what teachers are using,” Ashwina Mosakowski, the district’s director of elementary teaching, learning, and innovation, told the school board in January, explaining why the district continues to use Units of Study — a reading program that experts say is deeply flawed. ‘A disservice to all students’ […]
Jacki Lyden, Barry Wightman and John Norcross: Wisconsin Writers for Democratic Action (www) is keeping track of each book ban. We’re doing it because we know that these book banning efforts are about sowing distrust in the very idea of public education and all of our public institutions. These organized MAGA campaigns promote a white […]
Freddie Whittaker Pupil data is being used to check for benefit fraud and pursue parents under a secret deal between the education and work and pensions departments, Schools Week has learned. Leaders have warned the move may lead to parents “withdrawing their children from schools”, amid calls for transparency over the collection of children’s data. The national […]
Clare Ansberry: Three afternoons a week, he flexes his mom’s legs and arms to keep muscles from deteriorating and blood clots from forming. He does about 20 repetitions of each exercise. When her hands shake, he helps her eat and brushes her teeth. “It is my normal,” says Leo, a tall, lanky 15-year-old high-school freshman. […]
Park Macdougald Over the past several weeks, Americans have witnessed what has seemed like a mass outpouring of support for terror on elite college campuses. At Columbia, Yale, Princeton, NYU, UCLA, Northwestern, Texas, and elsewhere, masked mobs have occupied schools with tent encampments, established self-proclaimed “autonomous zones,” clashed with police, harassed and threatened visibly Jewish […]
Rory Linnane: Researchers have found a variety of reasons why students from lower-income families, and students of color, are more likely to need special education services. As a result of racist housing policies and governmental neglect, many children have been exposed to lead in their water or paint, live in food deserts and deal with other environmental stressors that affect […]
Timothy P. Carney But there are a hundred caveats to the notion that cash transfers drive up birthrates. Some subsidies encourage family formation and some encourage particularly unwed births. Some speed up births, but they don’t appear to increase the number of births. Others have no effect on birthrates. The simple lesson from all the […]
Sara Reardon: You might think you remember taking a trip to Disneyland when you were 18 months old, or that time you had chickenpox when you were 2—but you almost certainly don’t. However real they may seem, your earliest treasured memories were probably implanted by seeing photos or hearing your parents’ stories about waiting in […]
Matthew Yglesias: A few weeks ago, for example, I found myself in an argument with a think tanker about why school absenteeism exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic. My antagonist was saying that this was part of the downside of prolonged school closures. I argued that if you look at the numbers, absenteeism soared by almost as […]
Chris Rickert: Berg lives with his family on the Near West Side and sends his children to the Madison School District, which WILL sued in 2020 over its policy directing teachers to keep information about student gender-identity changes confidential — even from a student’s parents. In fact, Berg was the lead attorney on the case, […]
James Freeman: Few babies and sad, lonely adults may not seem like the ideal ingredients for a cultural revival. But some cheerful champions of marriage, family and faith are finding new cause for optimism. Their buoyancy comes from evidence that their ideas work and also a sense that cultural elites—having tried plenty of ideas that […]
Allysia Finley: How did our world, culture and politics become such a mess? A simple explanation can be found in the best-selling children’s picture-book series “If You Give . . .” by Laura Joffe Numeroff. In each story, indulging a creature’s unreasonable requests—be it for a cookie, muffin or pancake—stimulates an appetite for more. So […]
By Jay Caspian Kang: For the past five years or so, I’ve read books on my phone. The practice started innocently enough. I write book reviews from time to time, and so publishers sometimes send me upcoming titles that fall roughly within my interests. When a publisher provided a choice between a PDF of a book […]
By Kayla Huynh For decades, the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestras rehearsed in what Artistic Director Kyle Knox called “the bowels” of the UW-Madison humanities building. After the organization moved out four years ago, WYSO became scattered, with members practicing in schools, churches and even parking lots throughout Dane County. Now, for the first time in the nonprofit’s […]
Bruce Thompson: Beginning sometime after 2000, there was growing concern that many students had difficulty with reading. When comparing reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) among states, Massachusetts stood out. Suddenly, that state’s reading and math scores jumped. Massachusetts’ scores (shown in yellow in the graph below) started the late 1990s […]
Robin Hanson: The clearest proof of biologically maladaptive culture drift is fertility. Children per woman per lifetime has been declining worldwide for centuries, and is now below replacement levels almost everywhere. Earth passed peak births in 2016, and in a few decades, we’ll pass peak population. Absent huge AI advances, innovation rates will then fall even […]
Henry Oliver: The argument against smartphones and social media is familiar and repetitive: they steal our time, harvest our attention, farm our data. Tech companies are called attention merchants and algorithmic exploiters; we are all supposed to be hooked on dopamine which is immiserating us. And now the psychologist Jonathan Haidt is promoting the idea that […]
Patrick Mcilheran: “The longer schools were closed, the more students fell behind,” the Times’ authors wrote. Take, for instance, Madison, which reopened in-person learning in spring 2021, one of the two last districts in Wisconsin to do so, and nearby Verona, open from the start of the school year. From 2019 to 2022, researchers found, Madison kids lost more […]
Kristen Graham: For years, the Mastery Charter Network built its reputation as a college-for-all system of schools in Philadelphia and Camden. Now, thanks to nearly $20 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies and a partnership with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Mastery is about to turn one of its schools, Mastery Hardy Williams High School in Southwest Philadelphia, into […]
Maxwell Tabarrok: Birth rates in the developed world are below replacement levels and global fertility is not far behind. Sub-replacement fertility leads to exponentially decreasing population. Our best models of economic growth suggest that a shrinking population causes economic growth and technological progress to stop and humanity to stagnate into extinction. One theory of fertility decline says it’s all about […]
Milwaukee Teachers Union, via Debbie Kuether: Fascinating maps of referendum results! Support for the referendum was moderately correlated with race (won in most majorty white wards) but even more strongly correlated with (not) having kids. In wards where 20% or less of residents have children, the referendum overwhelmingly passed with ~2/3 of the vote. Wards […]
Glenn Reynolds: That Ehrlich made a bundle on wrong predictions isn’t such a big deal — we’ve had dozens of doomsaying futurists who’ve cashed in on fears that never materialized. The problem is people listened to him. Across the world, governments adopted population-trimming policies, from massively subsidized birth control to promoting two-worker households to China’s draconian […]
Candice Rodgers: Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who […]
Lucy Caulkins: Your Feb. 29 cover story, “When Kids Can’t Read,” references Springfield public schools and my curriculum, Units of Study. I applaud Springfield for attending to the individual differences among children as readers. It is fundamentally important to recognize that children are all different. Assessments from reading specialists and individualized support for those who need […]
Christopher Rufo: Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article titled “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.” Cross’s 2019 dissertation, […]
Martin Kulldorff: I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic. On March […]
Rory Linnane: At the same time, the biggest reason funding for MPS has dropped, the report says, is that MPS doesn’t have as many students as it used to. That’s partly because there are fewer children in the city, and partly because of the growth of non-MPS schools, like independent charter schools and private schools […]
Linda Carnine, Susie Andrist, and Jerry Silbert Project Follow Through was probably the largest study of educational interventions that was ever conducted, either in the United States or elsewhere. While it is now largely forgotten, at the time it embodied many of the hopes and ideals of those who wanted a more just and equitable […]
Alan Borsuk: The approach is best known for emphasizing phonics-based instruction, which teaches children the sounds of letters and how to put the sounds together into words. But when done right, it involves more than that — incorporating things such as developing vocabulary, comprehension skills and general knowledge. More:What is phonics? Here’s a guide to […]
Jean Mackenzie: Neither she, nor any of her friends, are planning on having children. They are part of a growing community of women choosing the child-free life. South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and it continues to plummet, beating its own staggeringly low record year after year. Figures released on Wednesday […]
Jill Barshay: Educators around the country have embraced the “science of reading” in their classrooms, but that doesn’t mean there’s a truce in the reading wars. In fact, controversies are emerging about an important but less understood aspect of learning to read: phonemic awareness. That’s the technical name for showing children how to break down […]
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Kate Archer Kent interviews Laura Adams: mp3 audio. Transcript. Literacy momentum stalls in Wisconsin (DPI): Why would Wisconsin’s state leaders promote the use of curriculum that meets “minimal level” criteria, instead of elevating the highest-quality: Karen Vaites: Last week, the nine-member ELCC submitted its recommendations: four curricula widely praised for their quality […]
Karen Vaites: All eyes have been on Wisconsin, where politics threaten to stall promising curriculum improvement efforts. The Badger State’s Act 20 literacy bill was one of the bright spots in a flourishing national legislative phase. The bill had a refreshing focus on all aspects of literacy, and recognized the importance of curriculum in fostering change. Act 20 called […]
Erin Geary: The letter of the day is B: Bureaucracy, benefits, and billions The school reading wars have raged since the 1800s and consists of two camps: Those who believe that children learn to read through phonics and those that believe that children read using a whole language approach. A third recent addition to the […]
Ryan Mcmaken: In recent months, stories from both the legacy media and the independent media have continued to pile up on how undocumented foreign nationals—also known as “migrants” and “illegal aliens”—are able to take advantage of a vast network of taxpayer funded benefits in daycare, medical care, housing, and more. For example, both the New York […]
Natalie Yahr cites a University of Wisconsin Survey of families with young children. Conducted by the UW Survey Center and analyzed by UW-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, the survey went to around 3,500 people across the state. Researchers compared the responses of participants who have children under age 6 with those who don’t. […]
Jessica Winter: When Tiffany Hammond was growing up in Texas, in the nineteen-nineties, other children teased her for how she spoke: she talked too softly, she talked in a monotone, she paused too long between words, she didn’t talk enough, she talked to herself. “Something’s wrong with her head,” kids would say. She was always […]
Liyan Qi: China’s baby bust is happening faster than many expected, raising fears of a demographic collapse. And coping with the fallout may now be complicated by miscalculations made more than 40 years ago. The rapid shift under way today wasn’t projected by the architects of China’s one-child policy—one of the biggest social experiments in […]
Denise-Marie Ordway About half of U.S. states offer private school choice programs, which help families pay for private school. It’s a highly politicized, complicated issue involving multiple types of tuition assistance, hundreds of thousands of children and billions of taxpayer dollars. It’s also an issue journalists need to examine closely. News coverage grounded in academic research is […]
by Carolyn Jones • CalMatters An Assembly bill introduced this week would require all California schools to teach students to read using the “science of reading,” a phonics-based approach that research shows is a more effective way to teach literacy. AB 2222, introduced by Assemblymember Blanca Rubio, a Democrat from West Covina, is backed by Marshall Tuck, who ran […]
Carl Trueman: The problems with the sexual revolution are embarrassingly obvious. A philosophy of sex that views it as recreational and focused on personal satisfaction tilts inevitably toward seeing the other person as an object to be used. That is why sexual liberation has not proved the gateway to a feminist utopia but has instead […]
Philip Greenspun: So the poor kids are now likely to have both intensified poverty and intensified ignorance as factors in shortening their lives (plus the Biden-era flood of migrants, who are correlated with unemployment and incarceration for the low-skilled native-born). The NYT journalists and editors don’t mention what happened in the one state where school closure […]
Pete: The problem of collapsing world-wide birth-rates is a complex topic but I will state my thesis baldly at the beginning: there is a large overlap between the things that underpin long-standing worldwide birth-rate declines and the things that underpin our prosperity. As the biologist John Aitken has put it:- ‘The fundamental cause of human fertility decline […]
Lauren Gilbert: In a discrete choice experiment in which bureaucrats in education were asked to make trade-offs between foundational literacy, completion of secondary school, and formation of dutiful citizens, respondents valued dutiful citizens 50% more than literate ones. For many policy makers, the goal is not the production of knowledge, but the fostering of nationalism. This may […]
Quinton Klabon: The coronavirus pandemic was a 2-year catastrophe for children. Students suffered through virtual schooling, quarantined teachers, and emotional misery. Academic results, the lowest this century, still have not recovered. After sending $860 million to help Wisconsin public schools manage through spring 2021, Congress sent a final $1.49 billion to get students back on track. The goal? Do […]
The Privacy Dad: This week saw a conclusion on the Danish Chromebook case. The result, long-awaited by father and privacy activist Jesper Graugaard, shows that the Danish Data Protection Authority has issued an injunction regarding the tracking of children’s personal data via Chromebook and Google platforms in schools. From 1 August 2024 onwards, Danish schools will no […]
The Economist: A year ago New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, proposed to adjust a state cap on charter schools, the publicly funded but privately run schools that have become a locus of innovation and controversy in American education. Ms Hochul’s plan was not ambitious, but it would have allowed dozens of new charter […]
Thomas Lin: Inside, the office is spare, pragmatic: just a computer, printer, chalkboard, papers and books, with few personal effects. The place where the magic happens seems not so much a physical location in space-time as a higher-dimensional world of abstractions in Viazovska’s mind. Across the small table in her office, the world’s preeminent sphere-packing […]
Nader Issa & Sarah Karp: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson says he supports ending the controversial Chicago Public Schools program that puts uniformed police officers in dozens of high schools. The mayor said in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ on Tuesday that he will give the Board of Education the green light to […]
Prepared by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity Staff “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born […]
Esther Dyson: People worried about AI taking their jobs are competing with a myth. Instead, people should train themselves to be better humans. We should automate routine tasks and use the money and time saved to allow humans to do more meaningful work, especially helping parents raise healthier, more engaged children. We should know enough […]
Wall Street Journal: On Thursday two Catholic schools in Chicago’s western suburbs announced they are shutting down. St. Frances of Rome School in Cicero and St. Odilo School in Berwyn said that the 164 Invest in Kids scholarship students between them represented more than half of the schools’ enrollment. Without them, the schools no longer […]
Sarah Karp: Blackburn and Presswood are two Black mothers in the middle of an intensifying debate about school choice, the system that allows Chicago parents to send their children to charters, magnets and selective enrollment schools, rather than be tethered to the school in their attendance boundary. The Chicago Board of Education wants to undo that system. […]
Here’s Paul Ehrlich in 1970 saying that the government needs to become increasingly tyrannical to stop child birth. Says the gov’t should use the FCC to force negative depictions of large families and eventually “throw you in jail if you have too many” children. pic.twitter.com/R7iOB2PBbO — Vince Coglianese (@VinceCoglianese) January 3, 2023
Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt: It is now widely accepted that an epidemic of mental illness began among American teens in the early 2010s. What caused it? Many commentators point to events in the USA around that time, such as a particularly horrific school shooting in 2012. But if the epidemic started in many nations at […]
The Economist: Fake birth certificates have long been a hot (if niche) commodity in China. In past decades couples would seek them out in order to get around the one-child policy. They could legally have two children if they were twins—or if their counterfeit papers stated as much. The one-child policy was loosened in 2016. […]
James Lister: The Madison School Board needs to take a hard look at the lessons of the last 10 years. The general functioning and the overall management of the school district have been poor and unprofessional. If you call the central offices, you seldom get ahold of a person or get a call back. Teachers […]
CJ Szafir: Despite having a new liberal majority, the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused this month to hear a challenge to the state’s school-choice programs. The lawsuit, supported by the Minocqua Brewing Co.’s progressive super PAC, would have deprived more than 60,000 students of funding. The episode carries a lesson for advocates of education freedom. Families […]
MB Matthews As we survey the American landscape, we cannot help but notice that just about everything has been corrupted by the left. The justice system has been corrupted by partisan politics to the point where Republicans and conservatives are persecuted and prosecuted at a level far higher than anyone else. We on the right can […]
Japan Times: The number of those that have reached Japan’s legal adult age fell by 60,000 from 2023 and accounted for 0.86% of Japan’s total population, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said Sunday. The year 2005, when the new adults were born, had seen the country’s total fertility rate — the average number […]
Josh Cowen: First, why are these new voucher schemes such bad public policy? To understand the answer, it’s important to know that the typical voucher-accepting school is a far cry from the kind of elite private academy you might find in a coastal city or wealthy suburban outpost. Instead, they’re usually sub-prime providers, akin to predatory […]
Wall Street Journal: What if you could create public schools that are racially and economically diverse with 90% of children reading at grade level? That’s the profile of a handful of selective-enrollment schools in Chicago that have been a success for many parents. Instead of replicating the model, the Chicago Public School system (CPS) wants […]
By Sue Loughlin Under a new law, HEA 1558, the state of Indiana is mandating instruction and curriculum that aligns with the science of reading; use of Reading Recovery must be phased out by fall of 2024. Science of reading is a methodology that uses direct, systematic use of five elements in literacy instruction: phonemic […]
Ross Pomeroy: The average number of children per family in the United States has fallen dramatically, from seven in 1800 to fewer than two in 2018. That’s good news for kids’ cognitive development, suggests a recently published study. Over the past few decades, scientific research has shown that children in larger families perform worse in school, score lower […]
Liz Essley Whyte: Jessica Harris’s 15-year-old daughter was walking to her school bus in London, Ky., last month when a classmate offered her a piece of red candy. The square-shaped sweet seemed harmless at the time to Harris’s daughter. But it turned out it contained a form of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the intoxicating ingredient in […]
Jason Riley: That advice, more popularly known as the “success sequence,” is often credited to research done by Brookings Institution scholars Isabel Sawhill and Ron Haskins, though others have made similar observations. In his recent book, “Agency,” Ian Rowe of the American Enterprise Institute writes that the message “has attracted many admirers because of the […]
James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley: The Jehovah’s Witnesses have long preached that going to college is a waste of time because the world as we know it is going to end soon. “No doubt, school counselors sincerely believe that it is in your best interests to pursue higher education,” advised the faith’s official publication […]
Christopher Brunet: Dr. Dybvig told Karlstack: ‘‘I realize I have been too pure. I assumed that a lot of people shared my dream (expressed for example by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) of ending oppression. However, the dream of most people (especially but not exclusively the oppressed) seems to be becoming the oppressor. This […]
By Amber M. Northern and Michael J. Petrilli We at Fordham view this as a healthy development, both because we believe in the fundamental right of parents to choose schools that work best for their children, and because of the large and ever-growing research literaturedemonstrating that competition improves achievement in traditional public schools. That “competitive effects” are largely positive should […]
Robin Hanson I’ve recently come to estimate that the world population and economy will suffer a several centuries fall, with innovation grinding to a halt, ended by the rise of Amish-like insular fertile subcultures, much like how Christians came to dominate the Roman Empire. And even though this hasn’t actually happened yet, my new estimate […]
Ryan Grim: What made the moment dramatically different, however, was that the Squad wasn’t isolated, but instead was part of a sizable group pushing back. Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota rose to slam the assault on Gaza, as did Reps. Andre Carson of Indiana, Chuy Garcia of Illinois, and Joaquin Castro of Texas. As chair […]
David Blaska: The teachers union laid down a gauntlet of demands — over two dozen! — before they would return, including (Surprise! Surprise!) that teachers union default: More Money, aka “hazard pay.” Socialist provocateur John Nichols had their back. When a former governor encouraged schools to reopen for in-class instruction, Comrade Nichols lit the match: “Scott Walker is exploiting the pandemic […]
The Economist: Two and a half millennia ago, Socrates complained that writing would harm students. With a way to store ideas permanently and externally, they would no longer need to memorise. It is tempting to dismiss him as an old man complaining about change. Socrates did not have a stack of peer-reviewed science to make […]
David Blaska: Who is behind the lawsuit seeking to bring down Wisconsin’s school choice program that helps 52,000 low-income, often minority students, escape failing public schools? Guy named Kirk Bangstad. Killing school choice is written into the Democrat(ic) party platform. Obeisance to the teachers union and the one-size-fits-all government school monopoly is central to Woke progressivism. […]
Mike Nichols: Half of Wisconsin’s 72 zip codes don’t have a single licensed dentist, according to the Wisconsin Primary Health Care Association; less than 40 percent of children covered by Medicaid received any dental care last year. Just this week, the Assembly Committee on Health, Aging and Long-term Care held a public hearing on a […]
Robert Pondiscio: Campus radicalism is easy to spot—and condemn. Attempts to justify the atrocities committed by Hamas, and in some cases to celebrate it, have caused crises at dozens of universities, prompting deep-pocketed donors to publicly withdraw philanthropic support and threaten not to hire graduates. Even some stalwart liberals have been shocked by the depth and virulence of campus anti-Semitism. […]
Jonathan Sumption: The Covid-19 inquiry’s terms of reference are as broad as could be, but it has only one useful purpose. Lockdowns and other aggressive government interventions were an unprecedented and untested experiment with the lives and wellbeing of each one of us. We need to know what they achieved, if anything. We need to […]
Wall Street Journal: Progressives tee up a case for the state Supreme Court’s new majority. This should be an easy case, but the new 4-3 progressive majority on the Court is cause for worry. If the lawsuit is successful, it could end school choice in Wisconsin without a possibility of appeal because the case is […]
Lauren Sloss: Anecdotally, at least, a desire for scheduling flexibility is taking root. Melissa Verboon started the Facebook group Travel With Kids in 2017 and writes a blog covering her family’s travel; she said that the group’s membership had grown since the pandemic, with more conversations centering on traveling during the school year. Ms. Verboon, who lives in Holiday, […]
Steve Sailer: As I’ve pointed out before, many veteran New York Times writers, such as Declan Walsh, the white guy who is the NYT’s chief Africa correspondent, often want to do a good old-fashioned job of informing readers about important facts. (Granted, the younger diversity hires mostly seem to want to talk about their hair.) But the marketing department […]