School reform is dead. Long live school reform.

You might find it hard to believe, in 2022, that education reform used to be a bipartisan effort.
 
But it was . . . tenuously . . . as the left sought “equity” via reforming standards and metrics, and the right soft-pedaled virtue to push school choice against teachers’ unions.
 
Writing in National Affairs, Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Frederick M. Hess examine how that coalition came unglued . . . and what the future of school reform holds.
 
It’s truly a fascinating story.
 
Finn and Hess show how this bipartisan coalition arose in the 1980s . . . how it gave rise to No Child Left Behind . . . and why it may have been inevitable that it would dissolve in the noxious gas of CRT and antiracism.
 
What did this four-decade collaboration accomplish? Well . . . that’s a tough question.
 
But if you want to understand where education reform stands today—and what the future might hold— you need to read this article.

How and why journalism collapsed

Politics is downstream of culture, the old saying goes.
 
But maybe politics AND culture are downstream of revenue models.
 
So argues Andrey Mir in the latest issue of City Journal.
 
If you want to understand how journalism became “post-journalism” . . . how “just the facts” gave way to “controlling the narrative” . . . you need to look at how the business model changed.
 
Mir does just that. He examines how advertising incentivized impartial credibility—and what happened when Facebook and Google killed it dead.
 
We’re now living in the era of “the viral editor,” with publications relying on keeping subscribers engaged . . . and angry.
 
Follow the money. “If ad-driven media manufactured consent,” Mir writes, “reader-driven media manufacture anger.”
 
If Mir is right, polarization is here to stay. The business model depends on it.
 
How will you respond?

American Economic Forum: July 29-30, Washington, D.C.

ISI invites you to our 2022 American Economic Forum, to be held July 29-30 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., to hear leading conservative politicians, intellectuals, and thought leaders debate the best way for conservatives in 2022 to apply fundamental economic principles to our current crises.

For a limited time, students register for free. And if you’re under 30, weekend tickets are only $50.

You’ll hear panel discussions on a range of important topics, including: cronyism in the administrative state, China geonomics, big tech censorship, woke capital, middle-class prosperity, and more.

This is a conversation you don’t want to miss.
 

Lies and the lying journalists who write them

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