Iain Armitage portrayed young Sheldon Cooper for seven seasons, a role originally popularized by Jim Parsons on the sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007–19). The best part about writing an essay on the TV series Young Sheldon was that it…
Month: May 2024
School Vouchers, LGBTQ Rights, and Religious Liberty – by Michael J. Petrilli
At a House budget hearing two weeks ago, Representative Katherine Clark (D-MA) pushed Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to comment on a Christian school’s policy toward LGBT students and families. As described by the Boston Globe:
Clark waited patiently for her turn to question DeVos in the packed hearing room, and when the opportunity came, she asked about the private Lightho...
Are Private Schools Allowed to Discriminate? – by Education Next
With President Trump and Secretary DeVos advocating for a federal school voucher initiative, private school choice is having its moment in the spotlight. One question that has been raised by critics, including on Capitol Hill, is whether private schools would be required to follow civil rights laws if they became recipients of federal funds.
It is likely that Secretary DeVos wi...
My Uber Driver, the Book Banner
I was telling a reporter about book bans as I got into the Uber. “PEN America has reported exactly 3,362 book bans in public schools during the 2022–23 school year,” I said. “There were over a thousand in Florida alone.…
Building Better Citizens Begins in the Classroom
Every December, in a practice that dates back decades, the chief justice of the United States releases a year-end report on the federal judiciary. Despite the New Year’s Eve timing of these reports, they typically elicit less celebration than somnolence.…
The Education Exchange: Should Homeschooling Be Regulated?
Daniel Hamlin, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss efforts to regulate homeschooling rules in states, and the upcoming Emerging School Models: Maintaining the…
“Dear Future President of the United States”: Analyzing Youth Civic Writing Within the 2016 Letters to the Next President Project
American Educational Research Journal, Ahead of Print. This article investigates the civic writing practices of more than 11,000 students writing letters to the next president in the lead up to the 2016 U.S. election. We analyze how letter topics are…
Has President Trump Scared Away All the Foreign Students? – by Alex Usher
The United States has long been the world’s most popular destination for international students studying abroad. Yet in 2017–18, American universities sustained a 6.6 percent drop in new enrollments by foreign students, continuing a trend that began in 2015–16 and…
The Disinvestment Hypothesis: Don’t Blame State Budget Cuts for Rising Tuition at Public Universities – by Jason D. Delisle
There are many popular explanations for why college tuition tends to rise faster than inflation, and each of these motivate different policy proposals about whether, how, and whom to subsidize in our higher education system. In recent years, two explanations, the so-called “Bennett Hypothesis” and “state disinvestment” (state funding cuts for public universities), have receive...
Summer Learning Loss Sure Is Real – by Karl Alexander
In his summer 2019 essay “Is Summer Learning Loss Real?,” Paul von Hippel tells us that his belief in summer slide – the pattern that has low-income and disadvantaged minority youth losing ground academically to their more advantaged peers over…