New data from Texas shows that regardless of economic status or race, enormous numbers of students who learned virtually for the majority of the past school year experienced a dramatic learning loss. This learning loss was most pronounced for Black and Hispanic students. This outcome is tragic given that schools that reopened for in-person instruction […]
What cut-throat free market?
The free market is often characterized by some as a Darwinian or Hunger Games-style survival of the fittest competition. But that’s seldom true. Take the Wall Street Journal headline this week: Sanofi to Help Make Moderna Covid-19 Vaccine for U.S. As the story explains, Sanofi has signed up to make as many as 200 million […]
The Private Sector’s COVID-Era Triumph
<This op-ed first appeared in National Review on January 11, 2021> While government struggled mightily to steer us through the coronavirus pandemic, the free market got to work. Popular culture most often portrays businessmen and the corporations they head as greedy and ruthless. A lightly regulated free market and the profit motive, we’re told, inevitably leads […]
Pandemic learning gaps make clear the need for public school reform
(This op-ed first appeared in the Washington Examiner on October 30, 2020.) Approaching two months of in-person learning this school year, the Catholic Diocese of Dallas reported to parents that no cases of COVID-19 classroom transmission had occurred at its 36 schools. Only 19 have had any lab-confirmed cases among students or employees, all of […]
Don’t let COVID-19 dominate your life
President Trump’s tweets are far too often boneheaded, unhelpful and immediately forgettable. However, what he wrote following his discharge from Walter Reed was notable: It may have been better to have also said, “Take COVID-19 seriously”, but “Don’t let it dominate your life” is the same sort of argument many others, myself included, have been […]