Social engineering at school
The experts are moving in on a longstanding childhood tradition: the best friend. From the New York Times: “increasingly, some educators and other professionals who work with children are asking a question that might surprise their parents: Should a child really have a best friend?” Why? For one thing, it sometimes makes the job of school principals more difficult. Great. Rearranging childhood for the convenience of […]
The Overton Window
The “Overton Window” has a lot of notice these days. John Miller provides some information about it here. I was privileged to have met Joe Overton on at least one occasion. The “Window” is a fine piece of analysis that would fit into any political science or sociology class dealing with changes in the public discourse concerning politics.
AGs lawsuit against ObamaCare
Last week, the Washington Policy Center held its eighth annual conference on health care. As part of the conference, Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna and KING-TV’s Allen Schauffler discussed the multi-state lawsuit challenging several provisions in the recent national health care reform legislation. You can view the discussion here, and it’s surprisingly interesting and informative. The entire video is about 45 minutes. The first 25 […]
Saving Cleveland
Can Cleveland be saved? Reason TV investigates. Cultural amenities are nice, but policy changes are even more necessary. As Joel Kotkin say, we think that cultural amenities drive prosperity, but it’s prosperity that drives amenities.
Geekiest Football Conference? Big 10/11
Much has been made of the fact that in its shopping trip to find new members, the Big 10/11 has been committed to taking in only members of the American Association of Universities (AAU). So just what is this association? It’s a club of leading universities that do some heavy lifting on the academic front. As the “about” page says, “The 61 AAU universities in […]
Where there’s a controversy, there’s a legislator
The sports world is abuzz this week with talk of changes in the big-time college conferences. Naturally, it’s driven by money. The Big 10 wants more eyeballs for its profitable cable network, and non-Texas universities in the Big 12 are unhappy with the distribution of money within the league. Rumor has it that Texas will go to the PAC 10. What happens then? For one […]
Time for differentiation in schooling
Instead of developing national, college-prep standards for high-school students, maybe we should be fostering some diversity in what students gets out of their time in school. The surprising advocate of this idea? Chester E. Finn Jr., whose Thomas B. Fordham Institute has been an advocate of strong academic standards. In this commentary, Finn worries that the Common Core movement might lead to more students dropping […]