Weekly Writers Round-Up: Millennial Moms and School Choice, Trump’s Syria Withdrawal, and the DoD’s Failed Audit

Each week, we’ll be featuring the work of the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. For more information on how the program can help launch your career in writing, see here.

Fed-up Millennial Parents Should Turn to School Choice by Brad Polumbo (Summer 2018) in The Washington Examiner
People often say that millennials like to complain. But when it comes to education, our complaints actually have merit.

A new report from Echelon Insights found that many of those in my generation old enough to have kids are deeply dissatisfied with their children’s schooling. Less than half of millennial moms think students are getting a good education — and that figure drops even lower among Hispanic and low-income parents. Academic performance is one of millennial parents’ main concerns, but they also see the importance of taught job skills and school accountability. But young parents need to realize the solution to their complaints is the one they’ve been rejecting at the ballot box: school choice…

Donald Trump Is Ready to Shed the Syria Problem by Gil Barndollar (Summer 2018) in The National Interest
Speaking in Ohio in late March, President Donald Trump promised to pull U.S. troops out of Syria “very soon.” It took almost nine months but it appears he is belatedly fulfilling that pledge. Yesterday the president tweeted out that U.S. forces had defeated ISIS in Syria—“my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.” The roughly two thousand U.S. troops in Syria will be withdrawn over the next sixty to one hundred days. Reports claim that all State Department personnel will be out of the country within twenty-four hours. Following Vermont senator George Aiken’s famous advice to President Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam, it appears we will “declare victory and get out”…

Pentagon Must Put up or Shut up after Audit Failure by Fergus Hodgson (Fall 2018) in The Epoch Times
“Duty, honor, country” is the motto of the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York. Contrast that with the Pentagon’s response to its first attempted audit after almost three decades of requests: “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it,” said Patrick Shanahan, the current deputy secretary of defense who will assume the title of acting defense secretary starting Jan. 1…