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Florida is a high achiever in rankings of educational freedom -The high degree of transparency enables parents to hold schools accountable directly. Instead of trying to ensure quality through top-down regulations and red tape, Florida relies on bottom-up accountability, which is why it ranks second in the nation for regulatory freedom. Schools and teachers have a high degree of freedom to operate as they see fit, within the boundaries set by age-appropriateness and civil rights laws, and parents provide accountability through their freedom to choose the schools that work best for their kids. Florida lawmakers’ embrace of choice, transparency and regulatory freedom has produced one of the highest returns on investment in the nation, ranking seventh nationwide. While keeping spending within reason, Florida has steadily improved its performance on the National Assessment for Education Progress over the past two decades, rising to 17th nationwide in its combined fourth-grade and eighth-grade math and reading scores. Heritage Experts: Jonathan Butcher and Jason Bedrick

Biden’s Border Policies Are Taking Us Back To Pre-9/11 Homeland SecurityToday, we have an open border and few immigration controls. The Biden administration has directed ICE not to arrest, detain, prosecute or deport the majority of categories that make an alien removable. It effectively grants a provisional status of “asylum-seeker” to any immigrant claiming to live in fear in their native lands. It cuts corners in vetting applicants and adjudicating applications to grant more benefits more quickly. All of this encourages more illegal immigration and makes it easy for terrorists and other bad actors to enter our country. The Biden regime has returned us to a pre-9/11 posture. Clearly, it is up to Congress to take back control of our homeland security. This includes: defunding Biden’s open border policies, processes, and grants to NGOs; securing the border; stopping the fentanyl crisis; significantly increasing ICE resources for detentions and removals; requiring information-sharing among government agencies at all levels; defunding FBI and other agencies’ efforts against citizens who pose no threat and redirecting them toward real threats such as those posed by agents of Iran, ISIS, China, Russia, and North Korea. Heritage Expert: Lora Ries 

 

Queen Elizabeth II was one of the greatest leaders of the modern eraThe Queen will be revered as one of the greatest leaders of the modern era, and her life of selfless duty and service has left the world a better place. Her leadership over seven decades has also left the British Monarchy in great health, with public support for the Royal Family remaining robust and steadfast. Her son and successor, King Charles III, must now lead the British people. He should follow the example of his mother, whose heart was always filled with a spirit of hope and optimism, as well as faith in God and the greatness of the British nation. Heritage Expert: Nile Gardiner  

 

Biden’s Ever-Shifting Position on COVID-19 ‘Emergency,’ Exploited Purely for Political GainMaybe Biden really cares about the nation’s COVID-19 response. Maybe he’s really trying to balance restrictions against the need for family members to be together, students to be in school, and businesses to be open. If so, he seems to have much worse information than the rest of us. COVID-19 conditions have not changed as haphazardly as Biden’s policies have. If he’s operating in good faith, then he isn’t operating smartly. But maybe he isn’t operating in good faith. Maybe he’s just following the Democratic strategy of never letting a useful crisis go to waste. There is, after all, a curious overlap between his shifting position on COVID-19 and his political agenda at the time. In any case, what we can say for sure is that if you want to know whether there’s still a real COVID-19 emergency, the last person you should ask is Biden. Heritage Expert: GianCarlo Canaparo




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