July 16, 2023
When Office Perks Become Perils
If you want to understand the downside of seeing your work as a “calling,” just look at zookeepers. In his book, The Good Enough Job, Simone Stolzoff writes: “It’s a job where the money is short and the hours are long. The majority of zookeepers have college degrees but the annual salary is less than $40,000…
July 15, 2023
Yonkers’ Only Charter School Illustrates Just How Broken the System Is
To what lengths will teachers’ unions and their allies go to destroy charter schools? Eduardo LaGuerre and Sobeida Cruz are in the process of finding out. The couple raised their three children in Yonkers. It wasn’t the best public school district, but they hired tutors to fill in the gaps. Two decades ago — when…
July 13, 2023
The Test Isn’t the Problem
Now that the Supreme Court has disallowed overtly race-conscious university admissions policies, we can expect colleges to try to find other ways to pursue their version of diversity. In New York, we’ve already seen one likely workaround: the lingering idea of ditching entrance-exam requirements for admission to the city’s elite public schools. Thanks to a…
July 12, 2023
New York Rent Control: Could the End be Near?
Those who care about housing policy and the future of New York City will be paying close attention this fall to see if the Supreme Court decides to take up a serious challenge by apartment owners to the Big Apple’s big blunder: rent regulation. At stake is a law which regulates rent prices and tenant rights for…
July 10, 2023
Reforming the EITC to Reduce Single Parenthood and Ease Work-Family Balance
Sixty years ago, in 1963, 94% of American children were born to married mothers. Today, the figure is only 60 percent. This decline signals a fundamental disruption in the long-standing stability of the traditional family, the foremost institution shaping each generation of children. Using the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, I find that in 2021, 40% of…
July 8, 2023
Why the End of Affirmative Action Is Good for Black Science Students
“Corporate diversity in the crosshairs.” That was a typical headline after last week’s Supreme Court decision declaring the use of racial preferences in college admissions unconstitutional. Panic has set in among the chattering classes about what will happen to “workplace diversity” as a result of the ruling. Not only do observers fear that the court — whose majority…
July 7, 2023
With Affirmative Action Gone, We Should Focus Admissions Policies on Poverty
If history is any guide, Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard won’t mark the end of the struggle over the constitutionality of race-conscious policies. It won’t even mark the beginning of the end. Most likely, it will just be another in a long series of inflection points. To borrow from one of the…
July 3, 2023
Child Welfare’s Ideological Enforcer
University of Houston professor Alan Dettlaff is the founder of upEND, a movement dedicated to abolishing child protective services and foster care because of their alleged systemic racism. Dettlaff is active on social media, where he spends his time attacking rigorous academic research, encouraging social media mobs to insult others in the field, and even demanding…
July 2, 2023
New York’s Quality of Life Budget: Focus on Improving Conditions for Everyday People First
With no little fanfare, the City Council passed legislation requiring New Yorkers to separate their food waste for composting. Unmentioned amidst the claims for environmental progress was the fact that, even in a less aggressive plan included in Mayor Adams’ budget, the city would have to add 158 collection trucks to its sanitation fleet, at a…
June 30, 2023
Democrats Call Biden’s Economy “Savage” in Attempt to Revive Child Tax Credit
With unemployment near record lows and President Joe Biden running for reelection, some Democrats recently offered an unexpected take on the U.S. economy: It stinks, especially for low-income families. During a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) thundered that parents are currently “scraping by … in this savage economy,” burdened with “some of the lowest…