EDUCATION Comments turned off

Neetu Arnold How Houston Is Holding Teachers Accountable The school district’s merit-pay program will attract top talent, benefiting students.

Posted By on May 3rd, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/houston-schools-merit-pay-teachers-salaries-students

In early April, the Houston Independent School District announced the details of its merit-pay system, which will launch during the 2026–2027 school year. Spearheaded by reform-minded superintendent Mike Miles, the new compensation scheme sets teachers’ salaries based on several performance-based criteria, including quality of instruction, student academic outcomes, professionalism, and school-wide achievement.

With this new program, Houston will become one of the few districts in the nation fully to tie teacher salaries to performance, rather than simply adding incentives or bonuses to a standard seniority-based pay structure. The plan will require significant administrative effort: the district will conduct up to 20 classroom evaluations per teacher, assess student progress on various exams—including the state’s annual standardized test—and rank teachers across six proficiency levels. Those with unsatisfactory scores may be fired

Initiatives like Houston’s almost always face pushback, particularly from teachers’ unions and some education advocates. While supporters argue that these plans reward effective instruction, critics contend that they impose arbitrary evaluation standards and encourage “teaching to the test.” Yet research shows that, when properly implemented, merit pay is supported by teachers, improves workforce quality, and ultimately benefits students.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Europe’s Illegal Land-Grab: Part II by Karys Rhea

Posted By on May 3rd, 2025

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/21491/europe-illegal-land-grab-part-ii

[T]he IDF tends to be… focused on immediate, critical threats from Lebanon, Syria, Gaza and Iran.

[Many in Israel] demand a zero-tolerance policy towards illegal construction, regardless of EU funding and lawsuits, and have called on the Israeli government to initiate a long-overdue diplomatic effort that will make it clear to the EU that it has established red lines that will be enforced.

It may even be that right-wingers such as [Finance Minister Bezalel] Smotrich and others have risen to power precisely because of growing Israeli frustration over fundamental threats such as this one having long gone ignored.

In 1967, Israel fought a monumental six-day war against neighboring Egypt, Syria and Jordan, who attacked the small country with the declared goal of wiping the Jewish state off the map. To the amazement of the international community, Israel unexpectedly emerged victorious, gaining control over multiple territories, including the West Bank. Historically known as “Judea and Samaria,” and before 1948 home to a thriving Jewish population, the West Bank was illegally occupied by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan without international recognition from 1948 to 1967. In that time, Jordan ethnically cleansed the Jewish residents and destroyed dozens of synagogues. It re-named the region the “West Bank,” meaning “west of the Jordan River,” to sever any Jewish connection to the land in an attempt to legitimize its occupation of territory that was never part of its internationally recognized borders.

When Israel wrested control of the West Bank from Jordan in 1967, it refrained from annexing the territory, immediately offering to exchange land for peace. This unprecedented overture was met with the resounding “Three No’s” at the infamous 1967 Arab League Summit in Khartoum: “No peace with Israel. No negotiation with Israel. No recognition of Israel.” Consequently, the West Bank came under Israeli military rule.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II Espionage and the importance of humanities scholars.by Danusha V. Goska

Posted By on May 3rd, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/book-and-dagger-how-scholars-and-librarians-became-the-unlikely-spies-of-world-war-ii/

Ecco, a subdivision of Harper Collins, released Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham on September 24, 2024. The book has 376 pages, inclusive of footnotes, endnotes, and an index. It is not illustrated. Graham received her PhD from Yale; she currently teaches English at Stony Brook.

The Washington Post raved about Book and Dagger. “Graham’s account is well-researched and scrupulously footnoted, but she also writes with a pulpy panache that turns the book into a well-paced thriller.” The Wall Street Journal praised “an almost breathless sense of wartime romance and drama. It makes for entertaining, atmospheric reading.” Publisher’s Weekly enjoyed “Graham’s exuberant prose … a colorful salute to some of WWII’s more bookish heroes.”

I liked this book, but did not love it. I would, though, recommend it to anyone intrigued by the title. More on my reaction to the book, below, after a somewhat choppy summary of a somewhat choppy book.

In the summer of 1941, President Roosevelt told his former Columbia classmate and World War I military hero William J. Donovan that “We have no intelligence service.” Other nations had established spy agencies with centuries of continuous experience. In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson had closed the Cable and Telegraph Section, a spy service created during World War I, declaring, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” In 1941, World War II loomed. America needed nationally coordinated intelligence gathering. Donovan left his law practice to become the first director of a new agency, the Office of Strategic Services or OSS. It would eventually become the CIA. A statue of Donovan stands in the lobby of the CIA headquarters building in Langley, Virginia.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard students are graduating ‘without finishing a book’ by David Millward

Posted By on May 3rd, 2025

https://www.yahoo.com/news/harvard-students-graduating-without-finishing-212516959.html

They may be the intellectual elite, but Harvard students could graduate without reading a work of fiction during their time at America’s oldest university.

Chastising her fellow 25,000 students at the college dating back to 1636, Claire Miller has claimed that the university should require them to at least pick up a book.

Writing in The Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper, Ms Miller has called for the university to make an English course compulsory for students, who pay more than $56,000 (£44,350) a year for their tuition.

Posing a question to her peers, she asked: “When was the last time you read a book cover to cover?

“For me, a prospective English concentrator, it was last week. But ask my peers in other concentrations and you’re more likely to get a shrug.

“Harvard students complain about readings constantly.

“They lament any assignments requiring they conquer more than 25 pages as tedious or overwhelming (if they aren’t passing the work off to ChatGPT). It’s far too rare that we’re assigned a full book to read and rarer still that we actually finish them.”

‘Blame rests with Harvard’

It was a withering condemnation of students at a university which in recent years has become better known for political activism than rigorous study.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Despite What You’ve Heard, Trump’s Budget Doesn’t ‘Slash’ Spending — It Barely Trims It

Posted By on May 3rd, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/03/despite-what-youve-heard-trumps-budget-doesnt-slash-sending-it-barely-trims-it/

President Donald Trump did something extremely rare in Washington on Friday. He offered a budget plan that proposes actual, honest-to-goodness cuts in spending next year. Which helps explain the hysterical reaction from the usual suspects.

Normally, White House budget proposals claim to be cutting spending when all they are doing is slowing the growth in spending. Or they promise spending cuts far down the road while boosting outlays in the short term.

But the budget outline Trump released Friday does none of that. In sticking with Trump’s “revolution of common sense,” when it says it cuts spending, it cuts spending – meaning spending less next year than this year.

Trump wants to reduce spending on domestic programs by $163 billion next year – which would be almost 23% less than the federal government will spend this year on things such as education, the environment, energy, transportation, foreign aid.

So, it’s not surprising to see headlines that scream that Trump’s is a “scorched earth” plan that “slashes spending,” makes “drastic cuts,” and – our favorite headline from the New York Times – proposes “Slashing Domestic Spending to the Lowest Level of the Modern Era.”

Right now, reporters are scouring the country for examples they can trot out – or invent – of how these spending cuts will harm children, gut scientific research and throw people on the streets.

But, while we commend Trump for proposing deep cuts this year – and for laying out in plain English what he wants to cut and why – let’s not get carried away. What he’s proposing is far from “drastic.”

If Trump got his way – which is doubtful considering how weak-kneed Republicans in Congress are when it comes to spending cuts – his plan would simply remove the massive increase in spending that happened during and after COVID.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Mining Our Own Business 

Posted By on May 3rd, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/05/02/mining-our-own-business/

Rare earth elements are crucial to our modern existence, as well as our advanced defense systems. China, America’s primary supplier of these metals, has restricted exports of rare earths into the U.S. in retaliation for the president’s tariffs on Chinese exports into the country. There’s no reason to panic, though. There’s a way to work around the problem, and it doesn’t require a minerals deal with Ukraine.

Rare earth elements are needed to make our cellphones, computer hard drives, flat-screen monitors and televisions, as well as life-saving medical equipment. They are in fact “indispensable metals in electronics manufacturing.” Without them, modern society simply cannot survive. Even renewable energy sources, so precious to green zealots, need rare earths.  

There are also “significant defense applications,” says the U.S. Geological Survey, including “electronic displays, guidance systems, lasers, and radar and sonar systems.”

Despite their importance to our economy and security, our “leaders” have put us in an awkward position. China provides the U.S. with 70% of the rare earth compounds we buy from abroad.

As their name implies, supplies are scarce. because they can’t be found “in high concentrations in the earth’s crust” and when they are discovered, the process to separate them from other resources is typically arduous. 

But the process is not beyond the U.S.

This country could have – and should have – been mining large volumes of its own rare earths. But environmental zealots have blocked mining efforts, including the planned Pebble Mine in Alaska, “home to at least 70 known occurrences of rare earth elements.” It was shut down in 2014 even before the partnership applied for federal approval. The Environmental Protection Agency “decided to kill this project before any science had been done,” Tom Collier, who was the project’s chief executive, told John Stossel. 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why India and Pakistan are on the brink of war The Kashmir terror attack has brought longstanding tensions to boiling point. Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Posted By on May 1st, 2025

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/05/01/why-india-and-pakistan-are-on-the-brink-of-war/

Not for the first time, nuclear-armed rivals Pakistan and India have exchanged fire in the disputed territory of Kashmir. The fighting follows last week’s jihadist attack, in which 26 non-Muslim tourists were killed at a popular beauty spot in Pahalgam, Kashmir. Responsibility for the attack has since been claimed by the Resistance Front, an affiliate of the Pakistan-based jihadist group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, which orchestrated the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 175 people.

Although Islamabad denies any involvement, India’s response shows it doesn’t believe the denials. New Delhi has closed the border to Pakistan, expelled diplomats and ordered almost all Pakistani citizens to leave India. In an unprecedented move, it has also suspended the 65-year-old Indus Waters Treaty, which guarantees water supply to Pakistan and provides 80 per cent of the water Pakistan uses for agriculture. According to reports, the Indian authorities have now arrested 1,500 people in Kashmir and destroyed homes linked to the alleged attackers.

In turn, Pakistan has responded by shutting down airspace and halting trade, all the while insisting that the Pahalgam attack was a ‘false-flag operation’, supposedly staged by India as a pretext for war. Ominously, it has described the decision to restrict water supplies as an ‘act of war’. Pakistan says it has ‘reinforced’ its military on the grounds that an attack by India is ‘imminent’.

While a tentative ceasefire has existed between India and Pakistan since 2021, there are well-founded fears that current tensions will escalate well beyond cross-border gunfire and into a full-blown war. This is far from unimaginable, as India and Pakistan have fought four wars against each other since partition in 1947. A deep religious antagonism – Pakistan is a hardline Islamic society and India increasingly Hindu nationalist – makes them perennially uneasy bedfellows, even without the added complications of disputed borders.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

James R. Copland, Charles Yockey EU Regulatory Overreach Threatens American Sovereignty Brussels’s sweeping new environmental and labor mandates are an extraterritorial power grab. Congress and the executive branch should push back.

Posted By on May 1st, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/eu-green-deal-parliament-environmental-labor-mandates

Most Americans pay little heed to the machinations of the European Parliament, the European Commission, or the various regulatory bodies of the European Union. They should. As part of its expansive EU Green Deal, Brussels bureaucrats have been working to put American companies that do business in Europe—or even those that merely do business with companies that do business in Europe—under the thumb of onerous environmental and human rights standards. This extraterritorial regulatory power grab would apply even when the European diktats directly conflict with American law.

The threat of overseas governments regulating American businesses is the “fifth horseman of the regulatory state,” to borrow a framing one of us (Copland) used in a 2018 City Journal article. In that article, subsequently expanded into a book, Copland described how regulation by administration, regulation by prosecution, regulation by litigation, and progressive anti-federalism combined to control huge swathes of economic activity largely untethered by national elections. To those four, we can now add: regulation from abroad.

This fifth horseman poses dangers similar to those of progressive anti-federalism. If we should worry about local officials in, say, New York City or San Mateo County, California affecting national policy, then we should be at least as concerned about far-reaching regulatory efforts from foreign governments that purport to transform American corporate governance.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

John D. Sailer Yale Professors Call Out University’s Bureaucracy A new open letter denounces administrative bloat and stresses the importance of focusing on the academic mission.

Posted By on May 1st, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/yale-professors-open-letter-faculty-hiring

Nearly 100 Yale professors have signed a letter calling for the university to “freeze new administrative hires” and conduct a “faculty-led audit” of its sprawling bureaucracy. The missive, sent to Yale’s president and provost last month, proposes an audit aimed at “cutting or restructuring administrative roles” and aligning the university’s “resources . . . with its core academic mission.”

While faculty have long complained about administrative growth and overreach, the Yale letter is a rare example of organized pushback. Its publication could inspire faculty at other schools to follow suit and potentially provide a roadmap for a tacit alliance between reform-minded liberal professors and the Trump administration.

Like other elite universities, Yale’s bureaucracy has grown much faster than its professoriate. The signatories note that “over the last two decades, faculty hiring has stagnated while administrative ranks have by some estimates more than doubled—outpacing peer institutions and leaving Yale with five times as many administrators as tenured faculty.”

This out-of-control growth, the professors argue, clashes with the university’s mission. They call for a “top-to-bottom audit of non-academic positions,” which “would not only generate immediate savings—potentially in the hundreds of millions—but would send a resounding message: Yale prioritizes intellectual vitality over bureaucratic inertia.”

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Dehumanization of the Jews Pro-Hamas activists like to claim the Palestinians are being “dehumanized.” Actually their foes are. by Robert Spencer

Posted By on May 1st, 2025

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/the-dehumanization-of-the-jews/

The “dehumanization” of the Palestinian Arabs is a common feature of their victimhood propaganda against Israel as their never-ending jihad to destroy the Jewish state continues.

In late March, the far-left “journalist” Chris Hedges interviewed the deceptive anti-Israel propagandist Muhammad el-Kurd in a video decrying “the dehumanization and infantilization of Palestinians by Western activists and media, and the psychological toll it has on its subjects.” That video appeared shortly after another piece of Palestinian victimhood propaganda showcased a “Palestinian-Canadian doctor, Tarek Loubani, spinning tall tales of alleged Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

In describing the supposed dehumanization of the Palestinians, Loubani said: “Ask yourself: what did you feel the last time you killed a mosquito? A mosquito that bites and takes your blood is literally taking a drop of your blood to feed its children. They cannot complete the reproductive process without a tiny bit of your blood. And yet you felt nothing. That’s kind of a small window into dehumanization.”

Back in the real world, however, the dehumanization was all going in the other direction. In fact, the dehumanization of the Jews is deeply embedded in Islamic religious texts. The Qur’an is well known for describing Allah transforming the disobedient Jews into apes and pigs (2:63-66; 5:59-60; 7:166). To this day, Hamas and other jihadis delight in calling their opponents “the sons of apes and pigs.”