November 19, 2021

AF Community

Reads of the Week: Ranked-Choice Voice, A New Approach to Immigration, and Administrative Bloat in Education

By: AF Editors

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!

Alaskans are right to worry about ranked-choice voting by Sarah Montalbano (Summer 2021) in the Washington Examiner

In January, the Alaska Supreme Court will hear its first appeal against Ballot Measure 2, which instituted ranked-choice voting in Alaska by a margin of half a percent . Trading “one person, one vote” for elections that foster confusion, lower voter turnout, and disenfranchise voters is a bad deal.

If the results of New York City’s first ranked-choice voting mayoral primary are any indication, ranked-choice voting is a disastrous voting method , and there’s no reason why it would be any different in Alaska. The court ought to strike it down before the 2022 elections…

A better plan than giving $450,000 to each separate immigrant by Josh T. Smith (Summer 2015) in The Hill

President Biden has spoken: The U.S. will not pay $450,000 to each of the family members who were separated at the border. Biden made the statement in an exchange with a reporter last Wednesday.

Biden’s dismissal leaves little room for doubt, “$450,000 per person? That’s not going to happen.” But it also doesn’t answer the more pressing question: What will the U.S. do instead?…

Are New Federal Funds Contributing to K-12 Administrative Bloat by Christian Barnard (Spring 2019) in RealClearEducation

The latest version of President Biden’s Build Back Better budget resolution excludes some of the priorities Democratic lawmakers backed in a previous $3.5 trillion budget plan, but it still contains some $400 billion in federal funding for universal pre-K and childcare. If passed, these federal dollars would be added to the $200 billion in stimulus funds that the federal government has already poured into public education during the pandemic.

Critics point out that such hefty spending packages are less likely to improve the education system than they are to bolster bureaucracy. The latest data seem to support that perception. School districts are using one-time stimulus funds to fund long-term commitments such as hiring new support staff and giving out permanent raises. This is why many education-reform advocates see administrative bloat as a key obstacle keeping much-needed dollars out of classrooms…