The State of Texas has just taken control of the Houston Independent School District. The justification is that the school district just isn’t very good at its job, educating students. What is interesting is the arguments being deployed against it, such as in a recent piece from Vice. On the one hand, we have the argument that this removes power over the school district from elected officials to those appointed by the State. We can’t say this worries us too much — it’s still the public schools being run by the political process, something that’s bound to happen when it’s tax…
Author: Tim Worstall
Forbes misrepresents IRS audit numbers in a way that supports Democrat recommendations for changes at the IRS. Well, people can make mistakes. But every error – or misrepresentation – has the effect of making Senator Elizabeth Warren and her colleagues’ complaints and ideas about the IRS look good. It would be remarkable if all mistakes worked that way, wouldn’t it? That James Bond idea of once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, and three times is enemy action comes into our thoughts. The background here is the bill to increase the IRS budget to hire more agents to do more…
Not everything in life works both ways, it’s possible to make the omelet from the eggs but not the eggs from the omelet. On the other hand, some things do work both ways, it is true that “Go woke, go broke” explains the world. But so to does “Go less woke, go less broke”. As the Oscars have just shown us. In recent years it has been obvious – because Hollywood has been forcing it down our throats – that the Oscars, as with the movies themselves, have been going more woke. This has also led to falling audiences for…
In a new piece, Esquire reports that opinion polls show many Americans are woke. Even, that Republicans might do better if they tried to make the lives of the people better. The point they miss is that definitions of what is “woke” differ. For example: “Republican presidential hopefuls are vowing to wage a war on ‘woke,’ but a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds a majority of Americans are inclined to see the word as a positive attribute, not a negative one. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed say the term means ‘to be informed, educated on, and aware of social injustices.‘”…
During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, media outlets were quick to silence stories that claimed the virus was anything other than naturally occurring. The New York Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli called anyone who so much as suggested other possibilities a racist. This is a twin tale of bad journalism and bad science. The appalling truth is that both science and journalism have been telling us untruths for political reasons. We’ve been fed what is politically convenient rather than the actual truth. Both of these are gross violations of what both science and journalism are supposed to be about – particularly…
Iowa is the recent success story of school choice. Accuracy in Media revealed in a hidden-camera investigation that school district administrators were bragging about skirting anti-CRT provisions. https://youtu.be/j6MnaZz97eU That created considerable political pressure in Iowa in favor of school choice, as legislating curriculum clearly did not work. That political pressure wasn’t enough in 2022, however. Plans to expand school choice had been several years in the making but actually getting them through the legislature proved difficult thanks to the usual objections from school districts, teachers’ unions, and politicians beholden to them. In 2023, in the Condition of the State address, Iowa Gov. Kim…
In March 2022, Accuracy in Media released an investigation into Idaho schools in the first of our videos that showed that Critical Race Theory bans do not deter teachers from teaching it. A lot has changed since then, and thanks in part to AIM’s investigation, some members of the Idaho House who opposed school choice lost their reelection bids. And what has happened shows exactly why this investigative work is so important. A school choice bill in Idaho has just been voted down by the State Senate. The bill failed the full Senate on a 12-23 vote. This was after the House had passed it…
School choice rests on the idea that we want education dollars to be spent educating children as is best for the child in the view of that child’s parents. We all pay our taxes into the school system but children do belong to parents and so that’s who should be deciding – parents. There are all too many within the school system itself who don’t grasp this. Such as this objection from Ohio: Benjamin Helton is a former public school teacher and is currently an assistant professor of music education at Case Western Reserve University. He teaches pre- and in-service music…
A new bill proposed in Florida dubbed the “Reverse Woke Act” is detailed in a Vice piece this week that fails to adhere to basic logic. Vice seems to think that it’s some gross attack on trans rights. At the same time, the outlet wants to tell us that it’s of no importance at all and is entirely trivial. Logic does rather insist that it’s one or the other, not both at the same time. That is our point here – we really should be holding the media to these standards of being able to do basic logic. The proposed…
A truly dangerous idea is being suggested in Washington, D.C.: that the federal government should be more involved in how much teachers are paid. The dangerous part of it isn’t how much – it’s that the money to pay the teachers should come from the federal government. As our investigations are showing (Texas, Ohio, Ohio again, Idaho and Tennessee) freeing the bureaucrats from direct and close control just means they waste the money. For they do waste our money – they use our tax dollars to do what we don’t want them to be doing. That’s why this idea is so dangerous: Sanders’s soon-to-be-introduced…