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March 3 to March 9, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, Vince Bielski reports on a major flashpoint in the post-pandemic disruption of traditional public education: opposition to so-called "classical education" charter schools -- i.e., education that focuses on liberal arts and the Western canon. -
Classical charters are only a small niche within the broader charter sector, but local school officials, unions and progressive advocates see them as a Trojan Horse, sneaking quasi-Christian right-wing dogma into public education under the cover of liberal arts. -
Classical charters deny that: “The opposition paints us as if we're trying to do political things with children, which we are not,” says the head of the K-12 program at Hillsdale College, a Christian school at the center of the wrangling. -
But critics knock Hillsdale for its Republican ties, notably the school’s President, Larry Arnn. Sources in the movement say high-profile advocates like Arnn are a problem as they try to appeal beyond conservatives to urban school districts. -
The debate is hardly black vs. white: The classical movement has elevated Dominican-born Roosevelt Montás of Columbia University, who is well to the left of many in the cause. Cornel West, the black progressive presidential aspirant, gives talks about the liberating power of classical education for all students. -
But the movement’s accommodating gestures to the left stir criticism from within. One dissenter says it was bad enough that charters removed Christian moorings from education. Now they are succumbing to intense pressures for diversity. -
With a sidebar about the movement’s own book wars.
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Denver Cuts to Give Migrants Housing, RCI
NIH Cash for Transgender Voice Training, RCI
Pentagon's Unintelligent $1.8B AI Budget, RCI
The IRS's Postal Boastfulness, RCI
Grant Spent to Figure Out Grant Spending RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway One of the mysteries surrounding Hunter Biden’s lucrative foreign business deals is what exactly did he do to earn those alleged tens of millions of dollars? One Chinese client, which paid Hunter $1 million to act as attorney for its employees, is now answering: not much. So says Dr. Patrick Ho, who worked with the Chinese Energy firm CEFC before his corruption conviction. Miranda Devine of the New York Post reports that Ho “sent a legal letter to Hunter last week requesting that their attorney-client agreement be terminated immediately and threatening legal action unless he receives a detailed list of services provided by Hunter and reimbursement for the unused funds, as laid out in the 2017 contract.” Ho's chief claims seems to be that Hunter left him the lurch after he was busted: Ho was arrested in New York on November 18, 2017, as he got off a plane from Hong Kong. The former Hong Kong home affairs secretary was convicted in 2019 for paying bribes to the presidents of Chad and Uganda. He was sentenced to three years in jail before being deported to Hong Kong. According to Ho, Hunter, 54, pocketed the $1 million but did no legal work for him, other than call another attorney, Edward Kim, and turn up half an hour late for a meeting with Ho and Kim at the Manhattan Correctional Center the morning after Ho’s arrest. Hunter didn’t visit Ho, 74, even once in jail, Ho has told friends bitterly. A separate article in Just the News suggests what Hunter was really selling. Echoing earlier testimony from Devon Archer, another of Hunter’s former business partners, Jason Galanis, has told the House committee looking into impeachment that their deals often hinged on showing they had access to Joe Biden. Here’s how Galanis described what he called the “Biden lift”: I would say his role … was the person who closed the deal, Hunter and Jim would initiate the deal. They would make their pitch, their business model was to be able to what I call influence peddle, but what they were doing is selling access to Joe Biden. And then Joe Biden would get on the phone or have lunch with them or do something and make it known in a plausible deniability kind of way that, that he was involved, Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Joe the Closer: Witness on Dad's Role in Hunter's Deals, Just/News
Lawsuits Right and Left Shaping 2024 Election, Just the News
How One Biden Agency Is Railroading Voter Turnout Left, Daily Signal
Pa.: Gov. Shapiro Embraces Censorship Before '24 Vote, Federalist
Biden Admin Asks Sanctuary Cities to Cooperate With ICE, Daily Caller
Biden's Climate Blowout Tightens China's Grip on Critical Minerals, Daily Signal Other Noteworthy Articles and Series While Texas Governor Greg Abbott was being criticized by Democrats for sending tens of thousands of migrants to blue cities on buses, this article reports, the Biden administration secretly flew 320,000 migrants from foreign airports into some 43 American last year, all pre-approved on a cell phone app called CPB One. Although the Center for Immigration Studies forced U.S. Customs and Border Protection to release this information through an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, CBP is still refusing to identify those 43 airports because, it says, that might harm the public. [CPB says] the public can’t know the receiving airports because those hundreds of thousands of CBP-authorized arrivals have created such “operational vulnerabilities” at airports that “bad actors” could undermine law enforcement efforts to “secure the United States border” if they knew the volume of CBP One traffic processed at each port of entry. In short, the Biden administration’s legally dubious program to fly inadmissible aliens over the border and directly to U.S. airports has allegedly created law enforcement vulnerabilities too grave to release publicly, lest “bad actors” take advantage of them to inflict harm on public safety. The article reports that the program at the center of the FOIA litigation is perhaps the most enigmatic and least-known of the Biden administration’s uses of the CBP One, the cell phone scheduling app used for “almost invisibly importing by air 320,000 aliens with no legal right to enter the United States since it got underway in late 2022.” It remains part of the administration’s “lawful pathways” strategy, with its stated purpose being to reduce the number of illegal border entries between ports of entry. The countries whose citizens are eligible are Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, and Ecuador. Vladimir Putin is not just killing Ukrainians; he has also not let up on snuffing out Russians who have soured on his war and his rule. The death of Alexei Navalny in a gulag earlier this year has drawn wide attention, but that's hardly the whole story. This article reports that since the Ukraine invasion, many other prominent Russians have died in unusual circumstances on three continents: Businessmen have been found hanged in London and drowned in Puerto Rico. A ruling-party boss fell from the roof of an Indian hotel and a 46-year-old deputy science minister died of an unexplained illness on a return flight from Cuba. Spanish police are still investigating the 2022 deaths of Sergey Protosenya, the former deputy chairman at gas producer Novatek JSC, and his wife and daughter in their home near Barcelona. … There are enough deaths that Wikipedia publishes a running list, at 51 names, entitled “Suspicious deaths of Russian business people (2022–2024).” The article also reports that since Putin’s invasion, Ukraine and its Western allies have ratcheted up attempts to hollow out the Russian state and military by attracting a stream of defectors they hope could become a torrent. The Kremlin, in turn, has tried to hunt down its turncoats, one after the next, to deter more losses through the morbid power of example. The Palestinian Authority – which the Biden administration wants to replace Hamas as the governing body in Gaza – has committed tens of millions of dollars for terrorists who were killed or captured while carrying out Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack on Israel and the resulting war, this article reports: Since Oct. 7, the PA has doubled down on its longstanding "pay for slay" policy, which gives salaries and benefits to Palestinians imprisoned for involvement in violence against Israel and to the families of those killed in "the revolution" against the Jewish state. The policy does not distinguish between terrorists and civilians. But based on Israel Defense Forces estimates of enemy casualties and prisoners, the PA has put itself on the hook for more than $97 million in such payments for more than 13,000 Hamas terrorists in the year following Oct. 7. According to Palestinian law and decree, this article reports, the families of "all those martyred and wounded as a result of being participants or bystanders in the revolution" are entitled to an immediate onetime grant of about $1,700 followed by a lifetime annual salary of at least $4,700, similar to the average income in the West Bank, which the PA currently runs. Those imprisoned for crimes connected to “the occupation” receive a monthly salary of at least $420 that increases with the length of incarceration. For example, Abdullah Barghouti, 52, a Hamas commander and mass murderer who has served 21 years of 67 life sentences in Israeli prison, gets a monthly PA salary of more than $2,200. Released prisoners are also guaranteed salaries, benefits, or jobs. A California activist group is using taxpayer money to reward teens with $14,000 apiece for learning how to fight for "racial justice," Francesca Block reports on the Substack site The Free Press: Contracts between Long Beach Unified School District and Californians for Justice from 2019 to 2023, exclusively obtained by The Free Press, show the school district used taxpayer funds to pay the group nearly $2 million to facilitate equity and leadership development training for students and teachers. In addition to the student stipends, the contracts also allocated a total of $20,200 to 13 parents for participating in the group’s programs. ... CFJ boasts on its site to have “trained hundreds of youth of color in Long Beach to be community leaders and organizers.” In Long Beach, the group successfully advocated for implementing “restorative justice practices” across the district’s 84 schools, according to its site. Longtime readers of RealClearInvestigations will recall Paul Sperry's report back in 2018 that "restorative justice" was the Obama administration-pioneered policy of leniency to end the "school to prison" pipeline for minorities -- the approach that kept Nikolas Cruz enrolled until he committed the Parkland high school massacre in Broward County, Florida. In another political instance of compensating students with taxpayer funds, Just the News reports that the Biden administration plans to pay college students to register voters and participate in get-out-the-vote activities shortly after canceling student loan debt. As so many institutions fray around us, the iron laws of economics are standing firm – for good and ill. This article reports the wholly predictable news that independent, often family-owned restaurants are on financial life support, squeezed between escalating payroll costs and diners’ dwindling tolerance for ever-higher checks: Wages for waitstaff, table bussers and line cooks will grow more expensive for many eateries this year, with 22 states in January raising the minimum wage for hourly workers. In January, 59% of small-business owners reported higher labor costs were their biggest source of inflation, according to a survey of more than 425 entrepreneurs conducted for The Wall Street Journal by Vistage Worldwide, a business-coaching and peer-advisory firm. … In January, prices for food eaten away from home were up 30% compared with the same month in 2019, Labor Department data showed. Like so many government regulations allegedly aimed at helping the little guy, the mandated pay bumps for workers are hurting small businesses the most. The article reports that “by some measures, U.S. restaurants are booming. The National Restaurant Association, an industry trade group, forecasts U.S. food-service sales will hit a record $1.1 trillion this year, up 5% from 2023 levels. … McDonald’s, Chipotle and other takeaway-oriented chains have emerged as the long-term winners while many sit-down establishments struggle." |
