In most professions, the more education you receive the greater your expertise. The reverse appears true in the field of education, where additional years of schooling and advanced degrees increase the likelihood that you’ll become part of the problem rather than the solution — viewing every challenge through the distorted lens of bureaucracy, budgets, codewords and fads, hallmarks of education’s bloated and ineffectual establishment.
North Carolina is already the homeschooling capital of the United States. Now the attraction of this education option is soaring higher than ever — thanks not to the actions of its proponents but to the antics of its opponents.
Sure as autumn leaves turn color and fall is the inevitable political debate season now upon us. If you are old enough to remember the Kennedy-Nixon debates, you will recall the time when there was real substance to debates; they have evolved into made-for-television spectacles that are neither good television nor very informative.
Seventeenth-century poet and intellectual John Milton predicted, “When language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation.”
This election’s October surprise came in September, just as early voting began in the first few states. The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg not only upends the next six weeks before Election Day, but also could turn the 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day into a time of deep peril for the nation.
Editor’s Note: The following is Mary Ann Wolf’s “Final Word” from the Sept. 19 broadcast of Education Matters “STEM Engagement.”
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is committing $100 million of his considerable fortune to help Democrat Joe Biden win Florida, a key swing state that could determine the election. Pres. Donald Trump won Florida’s 29 electoral votes by a single percentage point in 2016, and polls show the state is once again on a razor’s edge.
According to the latest jobs report, North Carolina’s headline unemployment rate fell to 6.5% in August, down from 8.5% in July. Good news worth celebrating, right?
Last fall, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a member of the National Security Council staff, was a star witness against President Trump at House impeachment hearings. Since then, he has left public view, left the White House and left the Army. Now, with an election approaching, he is launching what appears to be a media campaign to take shots at the president.
The figure to keep in mind about this year’s race for the White House is that no president has won a second term in modern history when the unemployment rate was above 7.2%.
Editor’s note: Ruth Bader Ginburg died Friday after this column was distributed.
North Carolina is facing an education crisis. The dilemma is easily understood, but not so easy to resolve: How to educate students in a pandemic?
I have repeatedly criticized Roy Cooper’s troubling efforts to amass power in the governor’s office at the expense of other elected state leaders, local governments, and private citizens.
President Trump could perhaps be excused for getting North Carolina voting law wrong on Sept. 2 when he urged his supporters to vote by mail and then go to the polls and try to vote again to make sure their vote gets counted.
In an America bitterly divided over protests and politics, the least-familiar part of our Constitution’s First Amendment may be the most endangered: the right to peacefully protest.
If elected president, Joe Biden said more than a month ago he would rely on his attorney general to recommend any possible prosecution of President Donald Trump. We do not want to get ahead of ourselves here, but what happens to Trump if he loses the election is topmost in the minds of many voters, and it is not unreasonable to speculate what might happen.
North Carolina’s state government began its 2020-21 fiscal year with $1.5 billion in cash left over from last year plus another $1.8 billion in rainy-day funds and other earmarked reserves. Since then, the state has collected some $1.5 billion more in General Fund revenue than it has yet spent.
We don’t really know (and probably never will) whether President Donald Trump really called America’s World War One dead “losers” and “suckers,” as Jeffrey Goldberg claims in a September 3 piece in The Atlantic.
The Trump-Russia investigation effectively ended on July 24, 2019, the day special counsel Robert Mueller testified on Capitol Hill. Mueller’s halting presentation of his 400-plus-page report troubled both Republicans and Democrats. But of greater concern was this fact: After two years of investigating, with all the powers of law enforcement at his command, Mueller failed to establish that Russia and the Trump campaign conspired to fix the 2016 election. It was the central allegation the special counsel was hired to investigate, and he could not establish that it ever took place.
Without a doubt, all the reports are true. Without a doubt, President Trump called soldiers who volunteer for combat and get killed or captured “losers” and “suckers.”
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden didn’t mince words Monday when he angrily condemned President Trump as a “toxic presence” who has ignited violence during the 2020 presidential campaign.
Most North Carolina schoolchildren began this academic year trying to learn from home rather than at school. How’s it going so far?
In matters of race and other social phenomena, there is a tendency to believe that what is seen today has always been. For black people, the socioeconomic progress achieved during my lifetime, which started in 1936, exceeded anyone’s wildest dreams.
