As you know the teachers unions and the education blob are ferociously fighting back against school choice. They say choice schools don’t improve education performance or test scores, they hurt public schools, and hurt minorities. (That last one is laughable since minority families are almost always first in line for vouchers or scholarships or ESAs.)
Anyway, we thought this would be a good time to set the record straight. We consulted with our friends at EducationChoice and they have summarized the results from scores of studies on the real-world impact of vouchers, charter schools, ESAs, and scholarship programs.
As you can see, with a few exceptions the results are either slightly or mostly positive. We were struck by the fact that six of the seven studies examining the impact of racial integration found that schools are LESS segregated by race with school choice. School choice also has well over 90% parental satisfaction. We’d say that parents are the best judges of whether their kids are better or worse off.
2) Sixty Years Later, Democrats Are Still Standing in the Schoolhouse Doors
In one of the most infamous moments in US history, Democratic Alabama Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse doors to block black kids from getting a good education. It was June 11, 1963.
On the 60th anniversary of that shameful moment, Democrat elected officials and the teachers' unions that have become one of their most powerful constituencies are going all-out to block school choice. They are once again standing in schoolhouse doors, this time to block lower-income families — many of whom are black and Hispanic — from having the ability to choose schools that work for them.
This is the civil rights fight of our time.
Here is one version of an ad we are running against the opponents of school choice:
Long-time readers of the HOTLINE know that we were the first vocal opponents of business shutdowns and school closures during COVID. We also presented the early evidence that those lockdown states — mostly the ones with Democrat governors — had lost the most jobs and suffered the most business bankruptcies. We also showed the mass migration of Americans who moved from lockdown states like California to open states like Florida and Utah.
Now the indispensable Wall Street Journal editorial page has updated the business relocation data based on the latest BLS data through the end of COVID. Notice that all the big winners were the red no-lockdown states and the big losers were the blue states that shut down their businesses. Migration of businesses out of the blue states doubled during the COVID years. And something tells us those firms and the jobs aren’t coming back.
4) Some Good News – First New Nuclear Power Plant in 40 Years Opens
If we really had to give up on fossil fuels — which thankfully we don’t — then the obvious energy solution would be nuclear power. A Gallup survey in April found that 55 percent of adults support the use of nuclear power. That’s up from last year.
So it’s very good news that the first new nuclear reactor built in the United States since hysteria over the Three Mile Island nuclear incident froze construction is coming online this month in Waynesboro, Georgia. Plant Vogtle Unit Three is a small modular construction reactor that is the first of several plants that the Tennessee Valley Authority plans to build. Other players planning new plants include Duke Energy, Dominion Energy, Rocky Mountain Power, and PacifiCor. Meanwhile, blue California is shutting down its nuclear plants.
Environmental groups still oppose nuclear power plants, dismissing them as “coal plants without coal.” But their solution is to spend hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on renewables that can barely provide baseload power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. The greens would embrace nuclear If they were even half as worried about greenhouse gas emissions as they claim to be.
We have to read the New York Times so that you don’t have to.
So we were thunderstruck (no pun intended) that the newspaper of record repeated the myth that climate change may be responsible for the fires – a myth we thoroughly refuted last week even as we predicted the lie would pick up steam in the coming days.
In their Q and A article explaining the forest fires, here is the Times grade school logic:
“What role has climate change played in the fires?”
“Climate research suggests that heat and drought associated with global warming are major reasons for the increase in bigger fires… Wildfire experts see the signs of climate change n the dryness, direct heat and the longer fire seasons.”
No word yet from the editors at the Gray Lady why 2022 was a record LOW level of Canadian forest fires.
