May 9, 2024
State Housing Bills Are Dead; Time for Local Leaders to Step Up
While two statewide bills in Minnesota that would allow for missing middle housing everywhere and more dense housing in commercial zones have stalled, local officials remain acutely aware of housing affordability issues. Fortunately, they do not need to wait to take effective and immediate action. Many cities have traditionally been laser-focused on economic growth, while adding…
May 8, 2024
Beltway Liberals Are Playing Name Games to Expand the Welfare State
Higher prices aren’t the only kind of inflation coming out of Washington these days. Wildly inflated group names are on the rise, too — and they’re being used as a tool to expand government welfare benefits given even to able-bodied adults without dependents. That’s the term long used by the Department of Agriculture to describe those in their prime working years…
May 6, 2024
Generation Z Has Problems Compared to Past Generations, but Money Isn’t One
If you ask why these privileged college students are bringing their campuses to a halt over an issue that has almost nothing to do with their universities, the answer is likely to expand beyond Gaza into a story of a broader struggle and trauma this generation has endured. This contention, that Generation Z has grown up in a uniquely…
May 4, 2024
Make Parents Pay for Kids Who Miss School To Curb Chronic School Absenteeism
The COVID pandemic has ebbed, but one of its most damaging long-term effects has not. Chronic school absenteeism — collateral damage from students accustomed to staying home for alleged online learning — persists across the country. In New York City, a stunning four in 10 students — some 353,000 — were chronically absent, for the last full school year…
May 2, 2024
A New Lost Generation: Disengaged, Aimless, and Adrift
More than a quarter of America’s school-aged children were absent from school 10 percent or more of the time last year. There’s no shortage of explanations on offer for this surge in “chronic absenteeism,” mostly blaming the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath: lockdowns; lowered expectation; health and hardship; bullying and school safety issues. Remote learning…
May 2, 2024
Q&A: A Conservative Vision for Education
We just published a new book, Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College. As the title makes clear, we unabashedly make the case for a conservative approach to education. But we think it’s important to clarify the kind of “conservatism” we have in mind. We’re not talking about politics. We’re not politicos…
May 1, 2024
The closing of the American heart
In the late 1990s, I began my study of marriage and family as a graduate student at Princeton University “for the sake of the children.” Then, I was concerned that our nation’s retreat from this core institution since the 1960s was harming children. And at that point, the share of children residing with their married,…
April 30, 2024
I’m a Conservative But Defunding NPR Is a Mistake. What Should Happen Instead Might Be Surprising
The liberal political and cultural bias of National Public Radio has moved center-stage, thanks to the Free Press essay by Uri Berliner, the former NPR editor who resigned earlier this month. In his essay he correctly observed that NPR news both caters to and reflect “the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the US…
April 23, 2024
Awkward Truth: Subsidizing Women’s Work Drives Down Birthrates
Birthrates are low and falling in the United States, and commentators and policymakers are starting to realize this is a problem. It’s tempting to assume that this is about affordability: People aren’t getting married and having children because they can’t afford it! This is partly true, and so it’s partly true that we can drive up birthrates by giving money…
April 23, 2024
Neglected Representation in Foster Care
How do people working in the child-welfare system determine what is in a child’s best interests? Meeting the child in question might seem a good first step. A new report from the California legal advocacy group AdvoKids, however, found that the lawyers representing foster children in court often fail to perform this basic task. In…