This is relatively huge: Jewish uber-philanthropist Edgar Bronfman — one of the main funders behind the Birthright Israel program, which sends young American Jews to Israel to develop their Zionist sympathies — has come out in the Huffington Post as a supporter of the Obama administration’s call for the Israeli government to freeze all settlement […]
Dana Goldstein
Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.
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SHOULD THE CDC RECOMMEND CIRCUMCISION?
The New York Times reports that the CDC is weighing recommending routine circumcision of baby boys, and even adult circumcision for populations at high-risk of contracting HIV. As I’ve written before, this would be a curious and rather hasty move. While it’s true that the World Health Organization recommends circumcision, the studies that showed the […]
Posted inEducation in America
THE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, BILL GATES, AND “INNOVATION.”
Maybe it’s his pro-basketball-playing past, but Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sure does like competition. Yesterday he appeared before a group of superintendents and edu-wonks — brought together by testing giant ACT — to herald the launch of “i3.” (Yes, it sounds like an Apple product.) Like Race to the Top, i3 is a competitive […]
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JOE KLEIN: GOP ENGAGED IN “DISINFORMATION JIHAD.”
Today’s must-read: A touching — but hard-hitting — column by Joe Klein on health care: In one of those awful collisions between public policy and real life, I was in the midst of an awkward conversation about end-of-life issues with my father when Sarah Palin raised the remarkable idea that the Obama Administration’s attempt to […]
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PUBLIC PLAN INVENTOR: GIVING UP IS “A TRULY UGLY IDEA.”
On Tuesday, Mark offered a history of how the public option became the dominant progressive priority for health reform. This morning, with the future of the public option at risk, its inventor — Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker — and its chief political defender, Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future — held […]
Posted inEducation in America
BILL GATES AND FEDERAL EDU POLICY.
I’ve written before about the outsize influence of Bill Gates on national education policy. That influence is growing. According to Education Week, as the Department of Education prepares to dole out $4.3 billion in federal grants as part of the Race To the Top program — an effort to foster education reform and innovation at […]
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BEYOND THE PUBLIC OPTION.
For the past two years, New York City has been running an experimental pilot program called OpportunityNYC, in which poor people — mostly black and Latina single moms and their kids — are paid for “good behaivor.” In the Prospect‘s current print issue, I report on how that program is faring. While the jury is […]
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THE PUBLIC OPTION FREAK OUT.
Ezra makes a good point: The administration’s recent ambiguity on the public option is not unusual; various members of the executive branch have been saying since April that the public option is not an absolutely essential part of reform. That said, as I wrote last week, Obama’s decision to give Max Baucus and his Gang […]
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IMMIGRATION AND HEALTH REFORM — STILL A PROBLEM.
In an interview with our dearly departed Ezra, White House health policy czar Nancy-Ann DeParle confirms what I’ve been reporting — that abortion is one of “six to 10” issues stalemating the Senate Finance Committee “Gang of Six.” (For more on the background of that debate, check out my fresh-off-the-presses feature report.) But DeParle also […]
