When a Utah teachers’ union stared down parents who simply wanted to know what their kids were being taught, it was a state lawmaker who blinked. Recently, Utah Rep. Jordan Teuscher introduced a house bill to require curriculum transparency in public schools. The Utah Education Association responded with an online petition, and even the ACLU...
Late last month, Axios ran a piece titled: “Teacher crisis grips Austin schools.” As the article’s title would suggest, the Virginia-based media outlet keyed in on a perceived teacher shortage in Austin ISD (while never once mentioning the huge student enrollment decline in process, with the district shrinking from 83,270 students in 2016-17 to 75,075...
Last week, Texans braced themselves for another bitter cold snap almost exactly a year after the catastrophic blackouts of February 2021. The media and leftist political organizations were giddy about the possibility of more blackouts as an opportunity to create controversy and galvanize Democrats heading into the primary election, hoping to pin blame on Gov....
The latest inflation report from the U.S. Department of Labor showed an acceleration in price increases, with the consumer-price index (CPI) rising 0.6% from December 2021 to January 2022. The annual increase, measured without seasonal adjustments, was 7.5% — a four-decade high. As troubling as these numbers are, the truly scary figure is hiding behind them. A recent change...
There’s new evidence government-imposed shutdowns prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic have done more harm than good. Instead, a better choice is keeping the economy open so people stay connected to work and targeting resources to vulnerable populations. A new meta-analysis from Johns Hopkins University underscores this finding, revealing that lockdowns in America and Europe during...
Even though Sen. Joe Manchin says the Build Back Better Act is “dead,” we all know that spending plans in the D.C. swamp have a disturbing tendency to rise from the grave. There’s already speculation (on CNN and elsewhere) about what a new big-government spending bill will contain. But with the national debt recently surpassing...
Is a pay-to-play scheme underway in Harris County? A shocking new Houston Chronicle investigation makes it appear so. According to the paper’s latest exposé, Harris County commissioners are raking in campaign cash from “executives at companies awarded no-bid contracts by those commissioners.” The article even puts forward some eye-opening data to support its proposition. “From...
State politicians are finally stepping up to exercise appropriate oversight of K-12 education under unrelenting pressure from parents who have learned what Texas and many other states have allowed to replace education in our public schools. Unfortunately, there remains extreme hesitancy to tackle the upstream problem of the co-opting of higher education toward mindless activism...
Last week, the Texas Public Policy Foundation published a new report looking at property taxes in Texas’ major urban centers. In the report, the authors, Anthony Jones and James Quintero, compare property tax levy growth vs. population and inflation increases over five years in select communities. The facts and figures are aimed at helping taxpayers...
I’ll admit it: I used to subscribe to modern culture’s distorted prejudice against homeschooling. I used to believe that homeschooling was a relic of the past, merely for socially awkward children whose families had an elitist grudge against the state. Now that my prejudices have been replaced with the dangerous combination of facts and real-life...
Nearly two years of upheaval and uncertainty in America’s schools during the COVID pandemic has led many parents to feel powerless, and they’re not taking it anymore. At the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s annual Policy Orientation on January 19, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott received a roaring applause when he said “parents are losing a voice...
Government spending is at the heart of sound public policy. But out-of-control spending for decades has created substantial economic destruction and ongoing threats that must be remedied before things get worse. Fortunately, we have examples of how fiscal rules can solve this problem. We must put these rules into place before our economy gets any...