Education in America

With President Bush’s encouragement, Congress passed a provision in last week’s budget for a $14 million voucher program in Washington, D.C. — the first such federally financed program in the country. While the president and Congress may think that jumping on the voucher bandwagon is the best way to improve our nation’s schools, little indicates […]

An undersecretary in the Department of Defense, Dov Zakheim, stood at the podium in the Pentagon’s briefing room Friday and made a case for next year’s big increase in the defense budget. Zakheim has thick glasses and a big mustache, and he bears a striking resemblance to Groucho Marx. Only instead of a cigar, Zakheim […]

New York City’s Harvey Milk School — believed to be the country’s first public high school for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered students — will open today in an expanded incarnation after years as a small, two-classroom program. Whatever its educational merits, the school is the latest example of a dangerous and constitutionally troublesome trend: […]

The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers by Katherine Greider, Public Affairs, 189 pages, $14.00 A couple of months ago, I was invited to give a presentation for the psychiatry department at another medical school. The topic was medical ethics, and I was planning to talk especially about the growing influence […]

George W. Bush is becoming ever more the schoolyard bully. Now that he’s cut education spending for college students, he’s ready to take on the younger kids with a new bill to gut Head Start. During the course of its 38 years, the Head Start program has prepared 20 million children of low-income families for […]

High school seniors across America are getting their diplomas. But it looks like many of them won’t be able to afford college. Eighty percent of young Americans who go to college attend a state-supported institution. For the children of working families that can’t afford sky-high private tuitions, state universities and colleges are the ladders to […]

Last week, in this space, I wrote a column bemoaning the Democrats’ all-too-characteristic circular firing squad, and pronouncing the winner of the South Carolina Democratic primary debate George W. Bush. Since then, things have only gotten worse. Think of the nine-person Democratic field as several sub-fields. One sub-rivalry is the two New Englanders, former Vermont […]

It is easy to forget that after the Education Amendments of 1972 became law, it was initially unclear whether Title IX of those amendments — which prohibited gender discrimination in any education program receiving federal funds — would even apply to college sports. Prior to the bill’s passage, most of the congressional debate focused on […]

If the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program scares you, you’re not alone. Of course, even if it doesn’t scare you, and the Pentagon has its way, you still won’t be alone. That’s kind of the point. The problem is, if you’re worried enough to try to find out more about this mass monitoring system, you […]

When U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii) passed away on Sept. 28 , she left an empty seat in the House of Representatives — and a far-reaching legacy for both Hawaii and the country. On Nov. 30, in what will be the final House race of this calendar year, Hawaii’s voters will go to the polls […]