“What the CTU Strike Teaches Us about the Fight for a Better World” was a featured theme of last month’s Midwest Marxist Conference, held at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. (Document link was available here, but apparently the Chicago Socialists site is down. As of this posting, the document can be accessed here.)...
Read More »

In 1958, Leonard E. Read wrote “I, Pencil”—a short, brilliant essay about how markets coordinate the countless steps that go into making an ordinary pencil. In addition to its insightful substance, the essay is also noteworthy for Read’s clever literary device: the story is told from the perspective of a pencil. The piece ran...
Read More »

The fight for civil liberties continues in San Antonio. The Northside Independent School District recently launched its controversial “Student Locator Project,” which requires students to carry ID badges equipped with radio frequency tracker chips. If they refuse, they could face fines, “involuntary transfers,” or suspensions. John Jay High School officials insisted the trackers were...
Read More »

When I arrived at the Johns Hopkins University to continue my graduate study in the fall of 1966, Jürg Niehans arrived there from Switzerland for an eleven-year stint as a professor in the Department of Political Economy. Because I had already completed a year of graduate work at the University of California, Santa Barbara,...
Read More »

Texas launched its controversial “Student Locator Project” last month. When fully implemented, it will reach more than 100 Texas schools districts and around 100,000 students. Two San Antonio schools are among the first to participate, John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School in the Northside Independent School District. Basically students returned to...
Read More »

Florida students in government-run schools are being challenged to improve their math and reading performance significantly over the next six years. But some students are being held to higher standards than others depending on their race. The State Board of Education recently voted that by 2018, 74 percent of black students, 81 percent of...
Read More »

A dozen ballot initiatives in nine states focused on K-12 education issues. Also making news was the surprise defeat of Indiana incumbent and reformer State Superintendent Tony Bennett by Glenda Ritz, a former teacher backed by the union. Charter schools won big in Georgia and Washington. Georgia voters passed an amendment allowing a statewide...
Read More »

Who’s the biggest spender? That seems to be the education policy debate in a nutshell this presidential election season—and it misses the point entirely. First, let’s put federal education spending into perspective. Funding for public schools comes from local, state, and federal taxes. Historically, the federal revenue share has stayed below 10 percent of...
Read More »

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....
Read More »

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...
Read More »