February 27 is the anniversary of the fire that destroyed the Reichstag and gave Hitler a pretext to seize total power. How strong are America’s firebreaks?
Peter Schrag
Peter Schrag, a longtime education writer and editor, is the co-author of When Europe Was a Prison Camp: Father and Son Memoirs, 1940-41 (Indiana University Press, 2015) and author of Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future, and California: America’s High-Stakes Experiment. He is a former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee.
Posted inNotebook
Progressive California: The Long Road Back
The Golden State is the nation’s most liberal—but it has yet to untie its fiscal knots.
Posted inSpecial Report
Bush’s Education Fraud
Well before he became president, George W. Bush had made his education plan, the No Child Left Behind Act, the showcase of “compassionate conservatism” — meaning, in the conventional shorthand, a conservative route to liberal ends. Its objective was to force schools to close the huge racial achievement gaps in American education, to pay attention […]
Posted inFeatures
Books in Review
Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools By Jonathan Zimmerman, Harvard University Press, 307 pages, $29.95 It shouldn’t be surprising that the public schools have long been the biggest battleground in America’s culture wars: It’s in the schools, after all, where the rubber of our pluralism and deepest social disagreements hits the road of […]
Posted inFeatures
War on the SAT
Wherever he went in the past year, University of California President Richard Atkinson was handing out verbal analogies questions: DRAPERY is to FABRIC as (pick one) fireplace is to wood; curtain to stage; shutter to light; sieve to liquid; window to glass. The questions come from the SAT I exam that 1.3 million college applicantstake […]
Posted inFeatures
Ashcroft’s Hypocrisy
Three years ago, John Ashcroft–then a senator from Missouri, now the U.S. attorney general–opened a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on gun control by declaring that “a citizenry armed with both the right to possess firearms and to speak freely is less likely to fall victim to a tyrannical government than a citizenry that is disarmed […]
Posted inFeatures
The Electric Slide
Late this spring, while hardly anyone was paying attention, the epicenter of the California energy crisis moved east. For a year, the focus had been on the state’s misbegotten deregulation scheme and on Democratic Governor Gray Davis’s dithering response to the mess it created. But in the past couple of months, there’s been a seismic […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
The Populist Road to Hell: Term Limits in California
It sounded like a good idea, but if California is any indication, term limits are a recipe for political chaos and increased special interest influence.
Posted inFeatures
Feinstein’s Rule
Senator Dianne Feinstein has never been shy about grabbing hot-button law-and-order issues. So it was hardly surprising in the days after September 11 to see the California Democrat leading the charge for tougher visa restrictions and other controls on foreigners in the United States. As she pointed out, most of the plane hijackers who crashed […]
Posted inArticle
Globalization and Innocence
In the last few weeks we’ve heard endless reiterations of the phrase about the world never being the same again. And who can really deny it? Anyone looking at the scene where the World Trade Center used to be, or trying to imagine what madness would drive human beings to such acts, could hardly think […]