Our 12-year-old daughter, Josephine, found an interactive electoral map online, and on Election Night she was settled on the couch, snuggled in an old fleece blanket, watching TV with the map booted up in her lap. Earlier in the evening, we had dinner with friends, and she had been manic with excitement, running laps around the dining table with the […]
My Daughter Grew Up Believing She Could Do Anything Read More
Since 2001, about $15 billion has been spent by taxpayers and philanthropists trying to boost academic achievement in American public schools. These efforts have largely failed — especially in high school. For the average 17-year-old, reading and math scores have not budged since 1971. On standardized tests, white 17-year-olds still outscore black 17-year-olds by 20 points or more — a
Laurene Powell Jobs’s $100 Million Mission to Disrupt American High School Read More
Since December 14, 2012, Newtown, Connecticut, has had a prickly relationship with the press. So many camera trucks swamped the narrow, hilly roads in the hours after the mass shooting there — where 20 first-graders and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School were killed — that for weeks even longtime residents didn’t recognize their own neighborhoods. The media overstayed
The New Sandy Hook Elementary Is Meant to Be a Fresh Start, But It Still Evokes Tragedy Read More
The men are sweet when they talk to me, like boys eager to please the teacher. These are BMX riders — current and former, amateur and pro — mourning Dave Mirra, the Michael Jordan of their sport, who committed suicide in February. He sat in the cab of his truck near his home in Greenville, North Carolina, and shot himself
The Last Days of “Miracle Boy” Read More
Pope Francis has had some week. Aboard the papal plane en route to Rome on Thursday, in response to a reporter’s question about the use of contraception to prevent the conception of children afflicted with deformities possibly linked to the Zika virus, he said this: “Avoiding pregnancy is not an absolute evil.” What? What does that even mean? Certain
From Zika to Trump: The Savvy Politics of Pope Francis Read More
The state said a 19-year-old with an intellectual disability wasn’t equipped to look after her baby and whisked the newborn off to another family just after birth—a decision the mother was ready to fight. But how smart do you have to be to raise a child? The young woman labored in the back seat of her parents’ car
How Smart Do You Have to Be to Raise a Child Read More
Photo: Julie Blackmon The best government-pre-K classrooms don’t resemble remedial education designed to bring impoverished 3-year-olds up to speed; they look like the progressive places most rich Americans have been sending their kids to for generations. It’s easy to see why “universal pre-K” has become the calling card of so many Democratic politicians. Because, really, who can quibble? Universal pre-K,
Amid the hosannas and the traffic snarls that will accompany Pope Francis to America this week, amid all the gushing over the singular Argentine who has become, overnight, a moral voice for the entire world, a note of caution must be struck. There is one group that this pope — a protector of the poor and the outcast; a harsh
Pope Francis’s Revolution Has Left Out Women Read More
Amid the hosannas and the traffic snarls that will accompany Pope Francis to America this week, amid all the gushing over the singular Argentine who has become, overnight, a moral voice for the entire world, a note of caution must be struck. There is one group that this pope — a protector of the poor and the outcast; a harsh
Pope Francis’s Revolution Has Left Out Women Read More
From top: Morgan Geyser being questioned by detective Tom Casey, and Anissa Weier by detective Michelle Trussoni, in the Waukesha police station, May 31, 2014. If 12-year-olds Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser knew that the internet character they worshipped was a fantasy, why did they want to kill their friend for him? Video stills and Morgan’s drawings are part of
Slender Man is Watching Read More