May 22, 2025

Now, on to the news…

Southern York County School District in Pennsylvania is making some encouraging policy changes. It recently axed culturally relevant and sustaining education (CR-SE) requirements in teacher training.

CR-SE was meant to assist teachers in serving students from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. But it was much more than that, Neetu Arnold observes. “The guidelines characterize students as either having power and privilege or as being marginalized and oppressed, based on their race or other identity groupings,” she writes.  

Read her analysis of how the school board pushed back, and what the change could mean for other districts in the state.  

To reduce government headcount, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) is using Reductions in Force (RIFs)—essentially mass layoffs that are carried out when agencies restructure.

While it’s certainly the OPM’s most useful tool to shrink the size of the workforce, it’s a problematic one, Connor O’Brien argues. Existing procedures limit agencies’ ability to determine who stays and who goes. Employees receive a score based on four factors—and the first is tenure. That means “the RIF process overwhelmingly prioritizes the most senior and longest-tenured employees over top performers,” O’Brien writes. Reforming the process would help the Trump administration develop the staff it needs to run a more effective government.

Read more about RIFs here.

Schools in New York City are facing a crisis. Enrollment continues to fall, absenteeism is high, and student achievement is at near record-lows. What’s going on?

Blame city hall, the city council, and the state legislature for more than a decade of poor decisions, write Ray Domanico and Danyela Souza Egorov. The good news: the city’s next mayor can turn it around. Whoever wins in November should see to it that “students engage with challenging material from the earliest grades,” they write. “Focusing on how students learn is important; what they learn matters just as much.”

Read their suggestions for the city’s next mayor here.

As artificial intelligence continues to advance, the electricity required to power it—and the cost to do so—will rapidly grow. The International Energy Agency estimates that half of U.S. electricity consumption growth by 2030 will come from AI demand alone.

This means that companies will inevitably face a cost and resource ceiling, John Garnett writes. But policymakers can enable more efficient technologies and cheaper electricity if they clear regulatory bottlenecks and let market incentives drive energy breakthroughs.

Read his take on the role the U.S. government can play to ensure that America remains the leader in the AI race.

Jordan McGillis joins Brian Anderson to discuss his story, "On the Twenty-First-Century Waterfront," and the tension between labor unions and technology at American ports. 

“The words ‘Harvard’ and ‘fraud’ have become inextricably linked.”

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Lex Orandi, commenting on the university’s ideological conformity

Photo credits: Maskot / Maskot via Getty Images