252 results
Associated Press: A lab experiment aimed at fixing defective DNA in human embryos shows what can go wrong with this type of gene editing and why leading scientists say it’s too unsafe to try. In more than half of the cases, the editing caused unintended changes, such as loss of an entire chromosome or big chunks […]
Sui-Lee Wee and Steven Lee Myers: The number of babies born in China last year fell to a nearly six-decade low, exacerbating a looming demographic crisis that is set to reshape the world’s most populous nation and threaten its economic vitality. About 14.6 million babies were born in China in 2019, according to the National […]
Chris Baynes: An investigation into suspected sex-selective abortions has been launched by magistrates in a district of northern India after government data showed none of the 216 children born across 132 villages over three months were girls. Authorities in Uttarkashi, Uttarakhand state, said the official birth rate was “alarming” and pointed towards widespread female foeticide, […]
Rob Stein: A scientist in New York is conducting experiments designed to modify DNA in human embryos as a step toward someday preventing inherited diseases, NPR has learned. For now, the work is confined to a laboratory. But the research, if successful, would mark another step toward turning CRISPR, a powerful form of gene editing, […]
What’s on Weibo: A recent article, in which two Chinese academics propose the implementation of some sort of ‘tax’ for people under 40 who have no second child, has sparked outrage on social media. “The same woman who had to undergo a forced abortion before, is now pressured to get pregnant,” some say. A controversial […]
Carter & Mark: In life, you can choose to be G(rouchy) or you can choose to be J(olly). It’s way too easy to be G. To complain. To wake up in a bad mood. To find little flaws in everything you see in the world, and focus on those. You can spend hours fighting with […]
Rich Cohen: In the summer before my freshman year of college in 1986, I waited for the letter that would bring news of my roommate, anxious to learn who fate had chosen to be possibly my new best friend, or my new worst enemy. But that’s not what my son Nate did. Last spring, as […]
Peachy Keenan: What if the best way to change her mind was not by focusing on votes, elections, candidates, the legality of a 6- or 8-week ban, or technicalities like viability? What if instead of “abortions are bad,” the argument was: “Babies are awesome!” Imagine connecting the clinical concept of “embryo” and “fetus” to “a little […]
Harm Venhuizen “I continue to believe that having ‘we the people’ decide the profound moral issue of abortion is the only way to find a reasonable consensus that most people will accept,” Johnson said in a statement Wednesday. “One of the benefits of a one-time, single-issue referendum would be the education and discussion that would […]
Yi-Fu Tuan: What is it then that I do? My answer is human geography; more precisely, a sub-field within human geography that might be called (albeit inelegantly) systematic humanistic geography. And what is that? I will try to provide an answer, drawing on my own experience and work. A good way to start is to […]
Zeina Amhaz: In the US, one in eight couples, or 6.7 million peoplestruggle to conceive. A quick Twitter search of “IVF” will return scores of women sharing heartbreaking stories of failed IVF rounds and crushing miscarriages, like Breanna. Each year, the use of assisted reproductive technology (ART) increases 5-10%. Considering that our only real job, biologically, is […]
Kara Zupkus: An English professor at Iowa State University has threatened to dismiss students who voice opposition to abortion or the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization from her upcoming class this fall. She falsely claims students who resist leftist orthodoxy hold a viewpoint “that takes at its base that one side doesn’t deserve the same […]
Ronald Bailey: The U.S. total fertility rate has dropped to below 1.73 births per woman, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. This record low edges out the previous U.S. fertility nadir of 1.74 births per woman back in 1976. U.S. rates appear to be following the downward trend seen […]
Hacker News: I’m at the end of my MSc. studies in CS. At the moment, I can choose to graduate in a month or two, or stay-on for another 9 months doing research in interactive theorem proving that will potentially lead to a PhD opportunity. I’m doing my MSc in a foreign country and I’m […]
Ross Douthat: The analyst is a historian named Ben Schmidt, who just five years ago wrote an essay arguing that the decline of the humanities was overstated, that enrollment in humanistic majors had declined in the 1970s, mostly as women’s employment opportunities began switching to more pre-professional tracks, but that since then there has been […]
Eric Fish: When 22-year-old Langou Lian looks back at her decision to study in the United States, one influence sticks out: Disney Channel movie High School Musical. “I hated Chinese education,” Lian says, the high-pressure, test-centred schooling in her native Sichuan province. High School Musical presented an alternative: a carefree atmosphere where even adolescent students […]
ABC: Carolina Williams of Brentwood, Tennessee received a letter from the prestigious school’s admission committee in March announcing the good news. More surprisingly, the letter highlighted one of the ten essays she had written for the application as a stand out. “It really tickled me that they specifically commented on that one because there were […]
As a young faculty member at Harvard, I got asked such questions a lot. Why did you choose this career? How do you do it? And I can’t blame them for asking, because I am scared by those myths too. I have chosen very deliberately to do specific things to preserve my happiness, lots of small practical things that I discovered by trial and error.
So when asked by graduate students and other junior faculty, I happily told them the things that worked for me, mostly in one-on-one meetings over coffee, and a few times publicly on panels. Of course, I said all these things without any proof that they lead to success, but with every proof that they led me to enjoy the life I was living.
Most people I talked to seemed surprised. Several of my close friends challenged me to write this down, saying that that I owed it to them. They told me that such things were not done and were not standard. That may be true. But what is definitely true, is that we rarely talk about what we actually do behind the scenes to cope with life. Revealing that is the scariest thing of all.
I’ve enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty tremendously, quietly playing the game the only way I knew how to. But recently I’ve seen several of my very talented friends become miserable in this job, and many more talented friends opt out. I feel that one of the culprits is our reluctance to openly acknowledge how we find balance. Or openly confront how we create a system that admires and rewards extreme imbalance. I’ve decided that I do not want to participate in encouraging such a world. In fact, I have to openly oppose it.
In his revealing book “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” Charles Murray spends hundreds of pages using statistics to illustrate the rising inequality that is increasingly putting the white working class on the path toward generational poverty.
Murray concludes by suggesting that the “new upper class” — which increasingly is cloistered in pockets of rich, highly educated super-neighborhoods — move into the communities of “regular” people.
“Age-old human wisdom has understood that a life well lived requires engagement with those around us,” writes Murray, who himself lives in what he describes as an increasingly troubled “blue-collar and agricultural region of Maryland.”
He closes: “A civic Great Awakening among the new upper class can arise in part from the renewed understanding that it can be pleasant to lead a glossy life, but it is ultimately more rewarding — and more fun — to lead a textured life, and be in the midst of others who are leading textured lives.”
Murray’s invocation sprung to mind a few weeks ago as I was reading stay-at-home dad Andy Hinds’ “Why I Want to Choose the ‘Disadvantaged’ Local School (and Why I Might Not)” on The New York Times’ “Motherlode” blog.
Hinds describes the gut-wrenching choice he has to make about whether to put his “mixed-race, socioeconomically advantaged, English-proficient twin girls” into the good school where his neighbors’ kids go or into the troubled school only a five-minute walk from his home. His idealism makes him wonder if he and a group of caring, motivated parents could change a school with 100% poverty and a predominantly Hispanic student body. Ultimately, such participation could make a difference for the whole community.
Free through 3.31.2012 in epub, pdf and mobi format:
This is a book of passion, media literacy and social justice. Grounded in real-life examples, it points the way for all of us by raising important questions of how we can live on this planet as one human family.
The most important decision you will make about your children’s education is picking their school, right? That’s the conventional wisdom, but it’s actually wrong — or at best it’s only half-correct. Teacher effectiveness varies a lot within schools, even within good schools, which means that just choosing the right school for your kid is not a proxy for choosing great teachers. So while “school choice” is hotly debated (next week is National School Choice Week, complete with Bill Cosby’s blessing and events galore,) there are few rallies being held for giving parents the right to choose a particular teacher. That’s because the whole system is stacked against empowering families in this way. In fact, because of how seniority rules generally work, it’s a lot more common for teachers to choose their students than for students to choose their teachers.
Just how much individual teachers matter is the big implication of an analysis of 2.5 million students and their instructors that was released in December and highlighted recently in the New York Times. The long-term, large-scale study by economists at Columbia and Harvard used two decades of data to examine differences in student outcomes (including such categories as teen pregnancy and college enrollment) and link those differences with how effective their teachers were at improving student scores on achievement tests. The headline-grabbing finding was that replacing an ineffective teacher with one of average quality would boost a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by a quarter-million dollars. And that’s just from one year of assigning that group of kids to an average teacher instead of a lousy one. A second study, released January 12 by the Education Trust-West, an education advocacy group in California, examined three years of data on teachers from the Los Angeles public school system and noted that low-income and minority students are twice as likely to have teachers in the bottom 25% of effectiveness. The Ed Trust study did not get as much attention as the one by the Ivy League economists, but it reached the same obvious conclusion: more effective teachers boost learning for students
As the school year speeds by, rising seniors at Fairfax High are already meeting with their teachers and guidance counselors to decide which classes they should take next year. Up until this point, the math sequence is spelled out — Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II. After this point, there are plenty of options.
Here are the math classes students in a non-honors Algebra II class can choose from:
Trigonometry (Semester Course)
Probability and Statistics (Semester Course)
Discrete Math (Semester Course)
Pre Calculus with Trigonometry
AP Statistics
AP Computer Science
If they are not pursuing an advanced diploma, they can also choose to take no math class their senior year. That’s an option a few students I talked to this week planned to take. Others were aiming for pre-calculus, which will put them on track to take Calculus in college. Others were talking about a combination of the semester-long courses.
CNN:
Recently, at 48 years of age, I was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. For most of my life, I knew that I was “other,” not quite like everyone else. I searched for years for answers and found none, until an assignment at work required me to research autism. During that research, I found in the lives of other people with Asperger’s threads of similarity that led to the diagnosis. Although having the diagnosis has been cathartic, it does not change the “otherness.” It only confirms it.
When I talk to people about this aspect of myself, they always want to know what it means to be an “Aspie,” as opposed to a “Neurotypical” (NT). Oh, dear, where to start . …
The one thing people seem to know about Asperger’s, if they know anything at all, is the geek factor. Bill Gates is rumored to be an Aspie. We tend to have specialized interests, and we will talk about them, ad infinitum, whether you are interested or not. Recognizing my tendency to soliloquize, I often choose silence, although perhaps not often enough. Due to our extensive vocabularies and uninflected manner of speaking, we are called “little professors,” or arrogant.
Harris Interactive: The 2006 survey looks at the expectations of teachers upon entering the profession, factors that drive career satisfaction, and the perspectives of principals and education leaders on successful teacher preparation and long-term support. In addition, it examines data collected from past MetLife American Teacher surveys to understand the challenges teachers face and their […]
Espen Andersen, Associate Professor, Norwegian School of Management and Associate Editor, Ubiquity: [The following article was written for Aftenposten, a large Norwegian newspaper. The article encourages students to choose math as a major subject in high school – not just in preparation for higher education but because having math up to maximum high school level […]
Karen Matthews: In a mirror-lined dance studio, teenagers sashay through a number from the musical “Hairspray.” Next door in the weight room, teacher Shawn Scattergood demonstrates proper form on the leg press. At Northport High School on Long Island, physical education also includes yoga, step aerobics and fitness walking, as well as team sports like […]
Dan Lennington Wisconsin Supreme Court strikes down 1849 abortion ban. Honoring campaign promises, 4-3 liberal majority proclaims the law was “impliedly repealed.” Decision leaves in place major restrictions. 🧵 1/ More. Choose life.
STL: Birth rates have steadily declined since the Great Recession in 2008, a cohort that will start graduating high school next year. At the same time, tuition and operating costs have skyrocketed. And with rising doubts among Americans about the value of higher education, more campus closures are “inevitable and probably necessary,” McCarter said. Nationwide, […]
Japan Times: The number of those that have reached Japan’s legal adult age fell by 60,000 from 2023 and accounted for 0.86% of Japan’s total population, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications said Sunday. The year 2005, when the new adults were born, had seen the country’s total fertility rate — the average number […]
Ashley Ahn: Yun-Jeong Kim grew up imagining what her future family would look like — married with several kids, a nice home and a dog. But when the lease on her apartment in Seoul, South Korea, became too much to afford, she found herself somewhere she’d never imagined: 31 years old and living back at […]
Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox: We are entering an unanticipated reality—an era of slow population growth and, increasingly, demographic decline that will shape our future in profound and unpredictable ways. Globally, last year’s total population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see population declines while the world’s […]
Olivia McCormack Ryan Bomberger comes from a family of 15. He was adopted out of the foster-care system — along with 9 of his 12 siblings. Bomberger is staunchly antiabortion, in part because of the circumstances around his own conception, he said. “I am 100 percent antiabortion, 100 percent pro-life,” said Bomberger, a 51-year-old living […]
Tanya Lewis: Arnstein Aassve, a professor of social and political sciences at Bocconi University in Italy, and his colleagues looked at birth rates in 22 high-income countries, including the U.S., from 2016 through the beginning of 2021. They found that seven of these countries had statistically significant declines in birth rates in the final months […]
Joel Kotkin: Families, and the lack of them, are emerging as one of the great political dividing lines in America, and much of the high-income world. The familial ideal was once embraced by all political factions, except on the extremes, but that is no longer the case. This is among the biggest lessons from the […]
Janet Adamy and Anthony DeBarros: Some demographers cite an outside chance the population could shrink for the first time on record. Population growth is an important influence on the size of the labor market and a country’s fiscal and economic strength. Yet after births peaked in 2007, they never rebounded from the nearly two-year recession […]
Sabrina Tavernise: How the declining birthrate could profoundly shape the nation’s future. michael barbaroFrom The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. [music]A few days ago, the U.S. government revealed that the country’s population is growing at the slowest rate in nearly a century. Today, Astead Herndon spoke with our colleague Sabrina […]
Ann Althouse: There was some concern expressed yesterday over the “remarkable slackening” in population growth seen in the 2020 census. What will it do to the economy going forward if Americans don’t maintain the long human tradition of robust reproduction? I was inclined to say, don’t worry about it, less population growth is good for […]
Axios: As the U.S. fertility rate falls to a 35-year-low, new technologies promise to radically change how we have babies. Why it matters: The demand for assisted reproductive technology like IVF is likely to grow as people delay the decision to have children. But newer advances in gene editing and diagnostic testing could open the […]
Izabella Kaminska: When you’re on a plane, do you think about its aerodynamics? When you look at a mountain, do you think about how precisely it was formed? Do you always notice how the music you are listening to is structured? If the answer to all these is yes, you could be what Simon Baron-Cohen […]
Associated Press: China is eliminating a trio of agencies responsible for enforcing family planning policies in a further sign the government may be planning to scrap long-standing limits on the number of children its citizens can have. The move was part of a reorganization of the National Health Commission announced Monday that creates a new […]
Austin Bay: It’s highly probable China will face the same “geriatric” economic conditions that already threaten Japan and several Western European countries: too few workers paying the pensions of retirees as well as shouldering their medical costs. By 2030, the median age in China will rise to 43. In 1980, the median was 23. In […]
Mandy Zuo: A proposal to tax all working adults aged under 40 – with the money going to a “reproduction fund” to reward families who have more than one child – has caused uproar in China. The idea was the most controversial among a series of measures floated by two academics from prestigious Nanjing University […]
Bloomberg: China’s parliament struck “family planning” policies from the latest draft of a sweeping civil code slated for adoption in 2020, the clearest signal yet that the leadership is moving to end limits on the number of children families can have. A new draft of the Civil Code submitted Monday to the Standing Committee of […]
Tyler Cowen: Each individual will be seen as something special by the other humans. Public spaces will be emptier, so anyone out in public will attract more notice. If you are waiting in line at the movie theater, you will be more likely to start talking to the person next to you. After all, you […]
Mike Solana khanna’s ‘billionaire wealth tax,’ which is not a tax but an asset seizure in which he tallies everything you own, then demands a percentage on top of what you’re taxed — every single year — is already targeting anyone worth $50 million or more. this ends with your 401k. ——— Blue States’ Wealth Tax […]
Tyler Cowen: Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler’s own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, […]
Cremieux How many of the people who would’ve been in your generational cohort aren’t here because they were aborted? Between the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationdecision in 2022, women had access to abortion because of the Supreme Court’s decision to establish a woman’s constitutional right to it based on […]
The Economist: You are having too many babies. For decades that crude message was drilled into the minds of Indians by their rulers, abetted by inept foreign donors. In the 1960s slogans on school buildings chided parents, telling them: “Two or three children, enough”. By the 1970s officials had taken a crueller turn, overseeing the […]
Elizabeth Hernandez: Between 2007 and 2025, births in the U.S. declined by 16%. In Colorado, they decreased about 8% during the same timeframe, according to Neal Marquez, projections demographer at the Colorado State Demography Office. The Boulder-based Western Interstate Commission predicts a 12% decline in Colorado’s high school graduates between 2023 and 2041. A total […]
Steven Pinker: The innumeracy of narrative journalism: Long NYT essay on the fertility decline blames it on uncertainty due to rises in mortality, inequality, unemployment, work vulnerability, poverty, etc., without citing a single datum on how any of these have changed over time, nor even the simplest correlations with fertility. | Why So Few Babies? […]
Sarah Mervosh, Francesca Paris and Claire Cain Miller With fewer students, many public school districts are confronting unfilled classrooms, and hard choices about school closures. As American women have fewer babies each year, the number of young children in the United States is dwindling. The trend is now catching up to the nation’s public school districts. There […]
Ness Sandoval: If you follow the national headlines, you will see a familiar story: the United States is experiencing historic declines in births. That is true. But when you move from the national narrative to the regional data, a sharper reality comes into focus. The 2025 population estimates suggest that the 15 county St. Louis […]
Steven Ertelt: The dismissal fulfills the terms of a January 2025 settlement in which California dropped all chargesagainst Daleiden and undercover reporter Sandra Merritt. The agreement required no jail time, no fines, no admission of wrongdoing and no probation. In exchange, the pair entered a “no contest” plea to a single misdemeanor video-recording charge, which […]
Alec Johnson Declining enrollment is a big reason behind school closures Shaw said that while the Policy Forum has not specifically studied school closures, it has closely tracked student enrollment, which has a direct effect on funding. Enrollment has declined at public school districts every year for more than a decade. That decline has affected […]
The Standard 英文虎報: China’s population fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2025 as the birthrate plunged to a record low, official data showed on Monday, with experts warning of further decline. Li The country’s population dropped by 3.39 million to 1.405 billion, a faster decline than 2024, while the total number of births dropped […]
By Elizabeth Rembert, Amanda Albright and Marie Patino The Big TakeTrinity Christian College, Siena Heights University and Sterling College couldn’t pull through. In 2025, they succumbed to a fundamental problem killing colleges across the US: not enough students. The schools will award their final degrees this spring, stranding students not yet ready to graduate and […]
FutureDad: ‘Everything is incentives, the rest is commentary.’ – Stephen Landsburg The world’s fertility rate has crashed in the last few decades. Some selected examples from 1950 to 2021 are1: – South Korea’s dropped from 5.72 to 0.82. Italy’s dropped from 2.45 to 1.21. Morocco’s dropped from 7.18 to 2.26. Canada’s dropped from 3.31 to 1.46. […]
Leif Le Mahieu Unborn babies continue to be aborted at a higher rate across the United States despite the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the implementation of stronger pro-life laws, according to new data. Data released in December by the pro-abortion Society of Family Planning revealed that the number of monthly abortions continued to […]
James Hankins: Two weeks ago I gave my last lecture at Harvard, where I have been a history professor for forty years. My four decades of experience at one of the world’s leading universities have given me a unique vantage point to trace the replacement of Western history by global history. This change is part […]
Phoebe Arslanagic-Little This disaster has sources that will sound eerily familiar to Western readers, including harsh tradeoffs between careers and motherhood, an arms race of intensive parenting, a breakdown in the relations between men and women, and falling marriage rates. In all these cases, what distinguishes South Korea is that these factors occur in a […]
Bryan Caplan: Only a small minority of pregnancies have horrible physical consequences, and people who are contemplating an abortion rarely claim otherwise. But when contemplating an abortion, many if not most prospective parents predict horrible mental consequences for themselves. In the vernacular: “A baby would ruin my life.” If my argument so far is correct, the correct reaction to […]
Sichuan Mala: My husband and I have recently been considering starting a family together (i.e., having children). Naturally, wanting to give my children the best chance at a healthy, successful life, I spent some time over the past several weeks personally surveying the landscape of embryo selection companies. These companies essentially facilitate in vitro fertilization by using polygenic […]
Alexandra Topping: Almost three in 10 conceptions ended in legal abortions in the two nations in 2022, up from about two in 10 a decade earlier, according to new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). The percentage of conceptions leading to legal abortion – which has been increasing for all age groups since […]
Census.gov As recently as 2020, there were just three states where older adults outnumbered children: Maine, Vermont, and Florida. By 2024, this number had increased to 11, with Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia joining their ranks. Choose life.
Maarten Boudry For the past few years, I have been the holder of a Chair at Ghent University dedicated in honour of Etienne Vermeersch, a Belgian philosopher renowned for many things but perhaps most notably for his early warnings about overpopulation and his advocacy for birth control. A few years before his untimely death in 2019, […]
Scholars: Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. From across the fearful twentieth century, here are twenty lessons about what it takes to oppose tyranny, adapted to the circumstances of […]
Ashanty Rosario: AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them—I generally choose not to—but they are inescapable. During a lesson on […]
Cremieux: How many of the people who would’ve been in your generational cohort aren’t here because they were aborted? Between the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 and the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organizationdecision in 2022, women had access to abortion because of the Supreme Court’s decision to establish a woman’s constitutional right to it based on […]
US District Court alt link ORDER For the reasons stated in the memorandum opinion issued today, it is this 7th day of August, 2025, hereby ORDERED: 1. 2. 3. The plaintiffs’ motion for class certification, ECF 97, is GRANTED. A class is CERTIFIED under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(2) consisting of: Any child who […]
Louise Perry: “I do not think this is a coincidence. About 30 years ago, P.D. James’s prescient novel ‘The Children of Men’ imagined that a birthrate crisis would induce governments to facilitate the suicides of the elderly in a ritual known as ‘the Quietus.’… The population pyramid is increasingly inverted…. This poses an existential threat […]
Benjamin Rothove: The 247,703 recorded abortions in 2022 is a 13.1 percent increase from the 218,923 abortions recorded in 2021. The numbers represent a nearly 50 percent jump in abortions since 2012, when 20.84 percent of conceptions ended in termination. Most conceptions – 61.7 percent – occurred outside of marriage or civil partnerships. Within marriage […]
Stephanie Hegarty: Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.But it always comes back to one question: ‘Can we afford it?’ She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one […]
The Economist Without fanfare, something remarkable has happened. The noxious practice of aborting girls simply for being girls has become dramatically less common. It first became widespread in the late 1980s, as cheap ultrasound machines made it easy to determine the sex of a fetus. Parents who were desperate for a boy but did not […]
Rachel Cohen: The average age of a new mom is now 27.5, up from age 21 in 1970. I had no interest in having kids in my early twenties, but there are certainly reasons others might want that: Fertility decreases with age, and some find it easier to keep up with young children when they […]
Quinton Klabon: I again emphasize that the falling birth rate is bad. The Demographic Future of Humanity: Facts and Consequences Credentialism and family formation. ——- Choose Life
Marc Porter Magee: As is often the case, this debate hinges on definitions. So Harvard’s pushback seems to boil down to: “We are not teaching a remedial math class, we are simply remediating math in a class.” Is that a distinction without a difference? In the end, as I said to Randazzo, “You don’t get […]
John Carter: This explains two related phenomena, both much deplored by feminists, who are in the business of ignoring human instinct. The first is male flight: the tendency of male involvement in a given profession, occupation, institution, or industry to drop precipitously once a certain threshold of female involvement is surpassed. The second is the […]
Ann E. Marimow The lawsuit over story time and books with titles such as “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding” and “Love, Violet” touches on the type of diversity and inclusion efforts the Trump administration has targeted on college campuses, and in government and private businesses. It is one of three major religious-rights cases on the Supreme Court’s […]
Kali Fontinella If you want a textbook example of teachers union corruption, look no further than the gold standard for scandal and failure: the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). The year 2023 was a banner year of debacles for what was the largest local union in the American Federation of Teachers until the 1960s. Similar to what the modern U.S. […]
Quinton Klabon Wisconsin predicts -69,053 fewer grade-school-age children (5 to 14) from 2020 to 2030, -9.4%. They predict -106,513 fewer from 2020 to 2050, -14.5%. The first 2 images are population loss by count. The second 2 are population loss by percentage. —— more. Madison’s 2024 tax & $pending increase referendum choose life
Sian Leah Bellock: A president’s embrace of neutrality—or restraint, as we call it at Dartmouth—is a good thing. When presidents make statements about something unrelated to the academic mission of the university, they advance politics, not education. Not only do such statements have a chilling effect on discourse and intensify polarization on campus; they jeopardize […]
Michael J. Petrilli and Devon Nir States across the country have enacted new private-school choice programs in recent years, inevitably raising questions about accountability for participating institutions. Though it is true—as our friends in the school choice movement argue—that choice itself is a form of accountability because of the agency it provides to parents and […]
Kenjiro Takahashi: The number of births of Japanese children in the first half of 2024 has continued its alarming downward trend, with only 329,998 babies born between January and June. If this pace continues, the country’s annual birth count will fall below 700,000 for the first time since 1947, when comparative statistics became available. On […]
Nicholas Eberstadt: With birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation, one that will eventually encompass the whole planet. What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies. Net mortality—when a society experiences more deaths than births—will likewise become the new norm. Driven […]
Bezos Washington Post To have children or not to have them? That is the question more and more Americans are asking themselves. Only 26 percent say having children is extremely or very important for a fulfilling life, according to a Pew Research Center survey, whereas 71 percent say the same about “having a job or career they […]
Frank Newport and Joy Wilke: The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the U.S. general fertility rate reached an all-time low in 2011, at 63.2 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. The fertility rate has dropped 11% from 1990, when there were 70.9 births per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. The […]
Emma Jacobs: —— Choose life!
Zvi: As a bonus, here are two sections that would have been in my next childhood roundup: Ban Phones in Schools England to give the power to ban mobile phone use on primary and secondary school grounds, students will have to switch them off or risk confiscation. Reactions like this always confuse me: However, teachers’ […]
Glenn Reynolds Last week the Democrats showed us the past and the future of population policy. Even as they cheered news that a Planned Parenthood mobile van would park right outside their national convention to choke off pregnancies with free abortions and vasectomies, nominee Kamala Harris announced a half-baked proposal to encourage childbearing via tax credits for new parents. The […]
Leo Lewis in Tokyo and Wang Xueqiao and Thomas Hale in Shanghai In the US, which is by far the world’s largest pet market, there are more pets than children of any age. The American Veterinary Medical Association estimates there were 84mn-89mn dogs and 60mn-62mn cats in 2020. Government data shows there were 73mn children […]
Sara Randazzo and Matt Barnum: Solis’s closure is an omen of what could be coming to more schools in Los Angeles and cities across the country. And it reflects a difficult-to-sustain dynamic: too many schools for too few students. As birthrates have dipped, families have moved elsewhere, and public school alternatives have grown, many urban […]
WILL The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a response to a case brought by Planned Parenthood seeking an original action ruling from the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (SCoW) that would create a constitutional right to an abortion in Wisconsin. WILL believes ruling in favor of Planned Parenthood would embroil SCoW in the same mess of policy questions that Roe […]
Natalie Stechyson It’s something her own children won’t experience. Lancastle’s older brother and sister don’t have children and her husband is an only child. So Nicholas, 9, and Charlie, 7, don’t have any cousins at all — a growing trend as the decreasing fertility rate causes extended families to narrow over time, sociologists and demographers say. Worldwide, families […]
James Pethokoukis But there’s another kind of Peak Human, a moment whose occurrence and timing are far more foreseeable. If you’re a Millennial or a younger Gen Xer, you’ll probably see the start of a long-term decline in human population due to the global collapse in fertility. That’s something that’s never happened before with Homo […]
Evan Osnos: Even as the ruling class has become a preoccupation of the right, it remains a concern on the left. Senator Bernie Sanders had such an abundant audience for his latest book, “It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism,” that his royalties nearly matched his salary for representing Vermont. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who entered Congress […]
Michael Walsh: Social Security’s problems aren’t just its unrealistic economics, which posited starting from a hole and an ever-increasing work force paying taxes in order to support the generation ahead of it; the “trust fund” was always a polite fiction, which as you see is now being stealthily abandoned. But keeping Social Security solvent isn’t […]
Robin Hanson: Re fertility decline, yes, as the main change in the last half century is the number of women who become moms, not the number of kids per mom, all we need is a larger fraction of women having kids. Yes, as that used to happen, it must still be feasible. Yes, a big […]
Wall Street Journal: Happy to report: North Carolina on Friday became the tenth state to approve universal school choice. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper says he won’t veto the bill passed by the Legislature, no doubt because Republicans have enough votes to override. The choice provisions are in the state’s much-delayed budget, which includes Medicaid expansion […]
Diana Fleischman, Ives Parr, Jonathan Anomaly, and Laurent Tellier: This is where a new technology comes in: preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) or polygenic screening, which may inform which embryo parents choose and who is born. Because embryo choice is so consequential, polygenic screening—like other, new reproductive technologies before it—attracts more than its […]
Jessica Grose: The number of school-age children in America is declining. At least one reason is the fallingbirthrate after the Great Recession. And declining university enrollment based on a lower school-age population — which has been described as a “demographic cliff” — is something that some colleges are already grappling with. K-12 public school systems […]