For many low-income, disadvantaged students, the distance between high school and university can seem insurmountable, in part because they’re often stuck in failing public schools. Now a new “early college” model can help them bridge the gap. 400 early college high schools across the country offer college-level courses taught by professors, increasing their chances of […]

Dozens of cities and towns in New York are near financial collapse. Now the state Comptroller is implementing an “early intervention mechanism” to help them stave off bankruptcy and reassure investors that it’s still safe to lend to New York municipalities.As in newly bankrupt Stockton, the chief problem is skyrocketing pension costs. The Comptroller’s office found that […]

China can’t be too pleased with North Korea right now. Because of the Norks, the US military is heavily deployed across the Asia-Pacific, protecting American territory and allies against a North Korean attack but also effectively encircling China. B-2 stealth bombers, radar-evading F-22s, aircraft carriers, and various anti-missile and high altitude defense systems have all […]

Making patients more aware of health care prices won’t stop medical spending from bankrupting the US. In the wake of Steven Brill’s now-famous piece on hospital price-gouging, people on all sides are coming to agree that increasing health care price transparency is an important policy goal. But Dr. Peter Ubel argues in The Atlantic that it won’t fix our cost problem: Consider […]

If anyone needed further evidence of Iran’s contempt for the negotiations over its nuclear program, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was happy to provide it yesterday. Speaking on the occasion of National Nuclear Technology Day (a holiday he created several years ago), Ahmadinejad declared that Iran was already a nuclear power and suggested that the world would […]

The classical German sociologist Max Weber (who has been an icon in my professional ideology) distinguished various types of authority in his theory of politics. The modern world, he proposed, is dominated by what he called “legal-rational authority”. Its typical institutional expression is bureaucracy. Those who exercise power must be able to justify why their […]

California legislators want to make it easier to fire bad teachers—and the bill even has the support of the California Teachers Association. The LA Times editorial board has the details: Under the existing system, when teachers fight an attempt to fire them, the matter goes to a review panel made up of an administrative law […]

Indonesia has the world’s largest Muslim majority, but the country is also home to black magic and a community of people willing to pay warlocks and witches gobs of money to hex their enemies. Somehow, this belief in the occult is seen as compatible with Islam, but a new proposal seeks to outlaw the practice. […]

Over the past few months, California has come under fire for its use of capital appreciation bonds to fund school repairs and expansions. These exotic bonds allowed pols to pour money into schools without raising taxes. The catch was that when bills come due decades later, taxpayers will be on the hook for as much as […]

Dai Xu, a colonel in the People’s Liberation Army, made a preposterous claim on Weibo yesterday: The national leadership should not pay too much attention to it [bird flu]. Or else, it’ll be like in 2003 with SARS! At that time, America was fighting in Iraq and feared that China would take advantage of the opportunity […]