June 30, 2023
House Republican Plan Penalizes Marriage
We just got more bad news about marriage. A record-high 25% of 40-year-olds in the United States were never married in 2021, according to sobering new statistics from the Pew Research Center. That statistic compares to just 6% of never-married 40-year-olds in 1980, underscoring marriage’s falling fortunes in recent decades. Digging further into the Pew data reveals that this retreat from…
June 30, 2023
The U.S. Could Learn a Lot from This School in the U.K.
Last month, I took advantage of a trip to the U.K. to spend a day observing at London’s legendary Michaela School, which serves about 800 students ages eleven to 18, a short distance from Wembley Stadium. Katharine Birbalsingh, who has gained fame in her country (some say infamy) as “Britain’s strictest headmistress,” invited me for an entire day…
June 30, 2023
It’s Time to End Legacy Admissions
The Supreme Court’s decision in the UNC and Harvard cases was received, as most news is these days, in two quite different ways on the two sides of our political aisle. But one theme seemed to resonate with both supporters and opponents of affirmative action: that in the spirit of ending unfair admissions practices, elite…
June 28, 2023
Yes, College Is Still a Good Investment
A four-year degree still pays dividends—but now’s a great time for young people to snap up some on-the-job experience, too. Another graduation season is in the books. Some students have finished high school and are thinking about their next steps while others have just finished college and are wondering if it was worth it. They…
June 27, 2023
House Republican Plan Penalizes Marriage
If there was something liberals used to hate most about welfare reform, it was policies that promoted more work and smaller welfare caseloads. For example, during debate about 1996 reforms, Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-IL) asked what would happen to families if they didn’t meet proposed work requirements: “Do we put them on trains and send them out West?” Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) said those reforms “can only encourage a…
June 26, 2023
Why There Are So Few Black Kids at Stuyvesant: Private Schools and Charter Schools Pull Top Students Out of the System
Once more there is hand-wringing as only a handful of Black students are in the 2023 entering Stuyvesant class; and very limited numbers at Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech: the three flagship New York City high schools. These numbers are virtually the same as the previous year. As usual, most liberals again demand that the…
June 24, 2023
City Can No Longer Afford Life-Long Subsidies for Lucky NYCHA Tenants
If the definition of insanity involves doing the same thing repeatedly and hoping for a different result, maybe the long-troubled New York City Housing Authority, the nation’s largest, isn’t entirely insane after all. Rather than pouring yet more money into repairs of the crumbling Fulton and Elliot-Chelsea Houses, among the nation’s oldest public-housing projects, NYCHA…
June 23, 2023
SNAP Can Improve Nutrition, Help Farmers, and Support the Environment
A headline in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year read, “America Is Binging on Snacks, and Food Companies Are Eating It Up.” The article explains how American diets that were already heavily reliant on snacks and packaged foods, have only gotten more so since the pandemic – to the tune of $181 billion in household snack purchases…
June 22, 2023
In An Age Of Low Social Trust, Stopping By Your Neighbor’s House Is Weird And Creepy
It was presaged during the pandemic: “Masks have also become so much more than mere barrier between germs and lungs,” the New York Times reported in April 2021. “They can keep that too-chatty neighbor at bay or help the introvert hide in plain sight.” Everyone had shouted at us in spring 2020 to stay at home. They told us that…
June 22, 2023
Thanks to the Baby Bust, America Is Getting Older
When I was born in 1978, the median American was 30 years old. These days, the median American is 38.9, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Thursday. That’s a rapid aging of the American population. Some portion of that increase is good news: Older people are living longer than they were 40 years ago. In 1980, the average American life expectancy at…