Justin Katz
Robert Wiblin gets to the economics of student debt cancelation in a dead-on way with this comment: Cancelling student debt is good but we could do more. The government should also tax non-college grads in order to fund a $5,000 annual gift for all college grads as a way to show appreciation for how smart…
As a follow-up to Tolly Taylor’s sea-level scare addressed in this space yesterday, WPRI handed editorial control over Democrat Senator from Rhode Island Sheldon Whitehouse, whom the reporter permits to claim without context that Rhode Island will see nine to 12 feet of sea level rise by the end of this century. Seriously, don’t the…
Well, this is no surprise: “Remote learning poses a challenge for children’s behavioral health and functioning,” study co-author Emily Hanno told UPI in an email. “This aligns with what we know about how stress and disruption affect children’s behavior,” said Hanno, a post-doctoral researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass. Stress…
Judge Denise Casper of the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals made an important point while dismissing an appeal by Providence students seeking to assert a right to more-extensive civics education in public schools: Citing earlier cases, the First Circuit said no other court suggested teaching a specific subject was required by the constitution, save,…
Jill Colvin’s Associated Press “article” about the hiccup Republican Senator Ted Cruz from Texas had with the Republican base over a comment related to January 6 may be the single best example I’ve seen of the mainstream media’s new approach. It’s truly “the party line.” For decades, conservatives have been bashing establishment news organizations by…
I got myself in a little bit of trouble a few weeks back for expressing ideas like this, from Larry Alexander: In general, blacks as a group are doing better than ever before materially. And for those who are not doing well, the cause is not the effects of slavery or Jim Crow. Nor is…
Governor Dan McKee, along with the Rhode Island departments of health and education, implemented new guidelines for how schools handle COVID infections, yesterday. Employees and students who have been vaccinated and boosted (depending on age) do not have to quarantine, even if they had close contact with somebody who tested positive. Notably, the same applies…
Rhode Island’s Department of Health claims that almost everybody listed as hospitalized with COVID is in the hospital at least partly because of COVID, but I keep seeing stories like this: The majority of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in New Jersey were actually admitted for reasons other than COVID-19, officials said on Jan. 10. Of the…
With the head of one of Rhode Island’s teachers unions saying “the responsible decision” is to shut schools and force students back into distance learning, his reasons are worth a look: … the overwhelming number of cases, the inability to do meaningful contact tracing, the arctic temperatures we are expecting so windows cannot be opened,…
Have you ever seen a mainstream news report that treated scary environmental projections with even an iota of skepticism? Consider Tolly Taylor’s report for WPRI, which bears the headline, “Parts of Barrington will be underwater by 2035, sea-level data shows.” The first paragraph of the story gives the impression that the headline is a bit…