When is a quota not a quota? That seems to be the burning question in the latest Supreme Court case on race-based college admissions. It’s also a problem of the Court’s own making. Twenty-two year old Abigail Fisher claims she was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin because she is white....
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Won’t Back Down, a film about the struggles of a single mom and a dedicated teacher to take over their failing Pittsburgh school using a parent trigger law, was released last month (see here and here for more)—on the same day the New York City teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, announced that...
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Only in the bizarro world of education politics would a teachers union strike that shut down schools for a week, affecting 350,000 students, be hailed as “great for students” and an exemplar of “union and management coming together to create great public schools, to make sure every single school is a school of choice.”...
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Wow, are people still talking about Big Bird? Romney said in the domestic policy debate last week that he would cut federal funding to PBS. Obama’s supporters responded with a flurry of media attention. Who knew this was such a third rail? Romney’s critics are right that ending PBS subsidies would not make a...
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Every day, New York city police commit 1,800 stop-and-frisk searches. Substantially less than one percent turn up guns—the supposed justification for the searches, and the carrying of which is protected by the Bill of Rights. In my piece for the Huffington Post, I noted the racial disparities and threats to civil liberties posed. New...
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The market economy is a remarkable institution: It reduces poverty, decreases discrimination, and provides opportunities for constructive social and economic advancement far more reliably than do government programs. And yet despite all the good that markets do, many people are dubious about the moral case for markets. As economist Dwight R. Lee writes in...
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The latest feminist volley, “Finding balance requires changing the lives of men,” from Professors Joan C. Williams and Anne-Marie Slaughter, calls to mind nothing so much as “Harrison Bergeron,” Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant short story projecting to its logical conclusion what the demand for strict equality would result in: everyone equally handicapped. Thus, as employers...
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Here I go, dating myself again. In the early 1960s, there was an absolutely horrible game show called “Queen for a Day,” in which each week several women would compete for who had the most pitiful life of hardships. At the end of each show, the audience would vote on who would be—literally, crowned—Queen...
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Everyone keeps harping on how the Israelis have licked their security problems through effective profiling of airline passengers, so the TSA decided it would give it a whirl—but it turns out TSA “Behavior Detection Officers” can’t do that well, either. Internal whistleblowers claim they’re engaging in racism, prompting “retraining,” according to this CNN report....
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A private foundation will begin managing the country’s largest Roman Catholic education system on September 1. The Archdiocese of Philadelphia will transfer management of 17 high schools and four special-education schools to the Faith in the Future Foundation. Declining enrollments, closings, and rising costs prompted the shift. “We’ve done a good job for years...
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