Adversity Ahead
What to know: Houston’s longstanding budget challenges are getting worse, not better. One recent estimate suggests that: “Houston is staring down a projected $381 million budget gap in fiscal year 2029, growing to $446 million in the following year.”
The TPPF take: Cut, cut, cut spending.
“The city of Houston’s loose fiscal habits have put it on a difficult path. The only real way to solve the city’s problems is to cut government spending in some big ways,” says TPPF’s James Quintero. “Houston does not have a revenue problem; it has an overspending problem.”
For more on local spending, click here.
A Distraction in Class
What to know: A mother in Wichita checked her seventh-grade son’s Google account and found that he had watched some 13,000 hours of YouTube videos in class. And they weren’t educational videos.
The TPPF take: Technology has become a significant challenge in schools, where smartphones become a distraction, not a learning tool.
“A 2020 study found that students who kept their cell phones during class and checked periodically performed worse on competency quizzes and tests than their peers who did not use their phones,” says TPPF’s David Dunmoyer. “Beyond academic performance, personal devices contribute to cyberbullying, social anxiety, sleep deprivation, and other harms.”
For more on tech in school, click here.
The Press
What to know: Writing in The Free Press, Liel Leibovitz recalls when the Pulitzer Prizes in journalism actually meant something.
The TPPF take: This year’s list of winners cannot be viewed as anything but hypocritical and partisan.
“No legacy media outlet won for reporting the cognitive decline of former President Joe Biden or the Medicaid and child nutrition program fraud in Minnesota,” says TPPF’s Sherry Sylvester. “No major outlet reported the millions that were being wasted on luxury hotels for illegal immigrants in New York, Chicago and other cities, and nobody won for reporting that the Nashville school shooter was a woman who insisted he was a man.”
For more on the Pulitzers, click here.