Reads of the Week: Education Spending, Modernizing Regulations, and the Importance of Cultural Symbols
Each week, we’ll be featuring opinion pieces from the alumni and current participants of AF’s Writing Fellows Program. A few highlights from the past week are below. Do you dream of having bylines like these? Learn more about how the Writing Fellows Program can help boost your writing career!
Biden Wants to Fix Education Funding by Throwing More Dollars in a Broken System by Christian Barnard (Spring 2019) in National Review
If progressives get their way, the nearly $200 billion in COVID-19-relief funding that has been distributed by the federal government to K–12 school districts over the past year will merely be the down payment for a more expansive federal role in public education.
The Biden administration’s budget proposal, released last month, would more than double federal Title I spending for K–12 education, using $20 billion in new “equity grants” to incentivize states to change the way they allocate their own education dollars to “help address long-standing funding disparities between under-resourced school districts and their wealthier counterparts…”
Cutting-edge products, services need cutting-edge regulations by James Czerniawski (Summer 2020) in Business North Carolina
Companion bills that passed the North Carolina General Assembly with little opposition would create a “regulatory sandbox.” It’s a novel administrative approach to regulating newly emerging products and services — in this case, financial and insurance technology.
The idea respects that technological change moves faster than regulations can adjust, so trying to apply old regulations to cutting-edge products could quash innovation, leaving consumers, innovators, and the economy worse off. Sandboxes waive certain regulatory obstacles on a trial period for fast-emerging products and services while keeping consumer protections in place…
Dear Conservatives: Cultural Symbols Like Juneteenth Really Do Matter by Sarah Weaver (Summer 2020) in Townhall
Juneteenth, a holiday that commemorates the day the last slaves in the U.S. were formally freed hardly seems like it should be controversial.
But when a bill to make Juneteenth a federal holiday passed the House of Representatives last week, progressives were quick to enlist the holiday to support their contention that celebrating America is celebrating racism, since blacks have not historically been given the same rights as whites in this country. But conservatives, just as quickly, let them adopt the holiday…
