The world is caught in a dangerous feedback loop—higher oil prices and climate disruptions lead to higher food prices, higher food prices lead to more instability, more instability leads to higher oil prices.
These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers—and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores).
The ultimate hope of liberal warfare is to fight as virtuously as possible, and with the minimum of risk.
What has become clear to me … is how important our Japanese friends and partners are to the 21st century Indiana experience.
If they expect to win back the House and the governor’s mansion, Democrats need to invest in an infrastructure that will begin to engage young Hoosiers.
Establishment Republicans are in danger of becoming as addicted to government aid as countless other individuals and interest groups.
My company is a member of our local chamber of commerce, and I’m about as pro-business as anyone can be. But that does not require me to be anti-union.
I’d never have been halfway around the world climbing all over nuclear research reactors if I hadn’t taken a few risks in Indiana.
We tend to think that elections in which one party or the other racks up an overwhelming majority should calm the body politic.
Unfortunately, journalists still sometimes fall into the trap of accepting what “everybody knows” without doing enough questioning.
The New Orleans school system, which endured almost total devastation due to Hurricane Katrina, may give us a model to follow. When given an opportunity for a fresh start, the city developed a combination of public and charter schools.
Why not take the tax money we would have spent sending children to a failing system and give their parents the opportunity to send them to the private school of their choice? After all, that’s what we do when it comes to higher ed.
The Indiana State Teachers Association opposes vouchers with every fiber of its being. So does the Democratic legislative caucus, supported by ISTA (and ISTA dues money).
It seems clear that local control of school calendar issues should be based on what is best for the students in local settings and not about the bottom dollar of profit.
It’s not when to start and when to end that matters, it’s the amount of time kids spend actually learning that will keep us competing in the global economy.
The shock of dark hair is gone, but Jerry Brown is still Jerry Brown. The prickliness, bluntness, questioning, calculating. That against-the-grain attitude; disdain for materialism, emptiness and politics as usual; that Jesuit-Buddhist outlook.
The ultimate goal is a sexual culture that makes it easier for young people to achieve romantic happiness—by encouraging them to wait a little longer, choose more carefully and judge their sex lives against a strong moral standard.
Both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs—the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class—have lagged behind.
Students can get their degrees without putting in more of an effort because in far too many instances the colleges and universities are not demanding more of them.
Of all the areas for potential cuts, higher education makes the most sense. Not only are there great opportunities for cuts, but our higher education institutions are well-prepared to handle them.
