Weekly Writers Round-Up: Charter Schools, Endless Wars, and Outdated Alert Systems
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. For more information on how the program can help launch your career in writing, see here.
Bernie’s Blunder: Profit Isn’t the Problem in K-12 Education by Christian Barnard (Spring 2019) in The Washington Examiner
A few days ago, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., announced a far-reaching plan to reform K-12 education, and he’s coming for charter schools. Sanders wants to halt federal funding for new charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, and ban for-profit charter schools outright. For many education activists, this change is more than welcome. As education consultant Andrew Rotherham put it in a column for U.S. News & World Report, “For-profit charters are barely more popular than cancer among the education crowd.”
But all of these folks seem to have the wrong idea because profit isn’t a bad thing…
Honor Veterans by Considering Alternatives to the Foreign Policy Status Quo by Jerrod Laber (Fall 2017) in The Hill
Washington has a bias for war. Since 2001, the United States has occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, and is currently conducting anti-ISIS and anti-Iranian operations in Syria as part of their ongoing civil war. Seven countries are experiencing American-led bombing campaigns, and U.S. forces are involved in some form of combat in 14 different counties. If you include training exercises and the presence of U.S. bases as part of the war on terror, 40 percent of the entire world bears the imprint of the U.S. military.
On Memorial Day, we honor those who have died as a result of these efforts, as well as those in previous conflicts. This particular Memorial Day, after 18 years of continuous war, lawmakers and citizens alike should reflect not just on who died, and where and how, but also on the question of why…
An Amber Alert Was Botched Because Detectives Struggled to Work a Fax Machine. Wait, What? by Billy Binion (Spring 2018) in Reason
Police detectives located an 8-year-old kidnapping victim from Fort Worth, Texas, early on Sunday morning—in spite of a botched Amber Alert, a message meant to sound the alarm when a child has been abducted by a stranger and faces risk of serious injury or death.
A slew of bureaucratic roadblocks prevented the alert from effectively disseminating news about the status of Salem Sabatka, whose mother reported her abduction to law enforcement on Saturday at 6:37 p.m.
One of the hurdles was particularly bizarre. The Amber Alert system still requires that radio stations receive the information via fax, but detectives struggled with the fax machine, so it never went through…