September 24, 2026

Photo credit: Paras Griffin / Contributor / Getty Images Entertainment via Getty Images

Earlier this week, New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones published an essay questioning her decision to send her daughter, Najya, to a high-poverty school in Brooklyn ten years ago. She thought that by doing so, she could help improve the school for the other children attending.

The decision worked to the detriment of her daughter. Najya’s work went uncorrected, her third-grade teacher often failed to show up, and she entered ninth grade not knowing fractions. Hannah-Jones blames the school’s failures on segregation, but bad pedagogy is the real culprit, Jennifer Weber argues.

“The failures that Hannah-Jones recorded demonstrate how schools trained teachers in ill-conceived but fashionable instructional methods—at the expense of proven approaches—while also incorporating equity policies that eroded standards and made no one truly responsible for student learning,” Weber writes. “Najya finally learned fractions when someone focused on her skills and how to improve them. Every child deserves that.”

Read more.

California runs the nation’s largest welfare system, spending more than $180 billion a year on public assistance for its lowest-income residents. But much of that cash, health care, and food is serving illegal immigrants—so much so that taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing them last year.

Christopher F. Rufo, Kenneth Schrupp, and Austen Hufford visited four public-services offices in Los Angeles and spoke with local officials, who were surprisingly open about the state’s shadow welfare system. They all confirmed that illegal immigrants can enroll in welfare programs or sign up on their children’s behalf.

“Federal law generally prohibits states from using federal dollars to serve illegal aliens,” Rufo, Schrupp, and Hufford write. “To dodge those restrictions, California created parallel state- and locally funded programs that allowed the state to extend benefits to illegal immigrants. Perhaps as a result, more than one in four California residents today is foreign-born.”

Read more about how the state gets away with it.

Manufacturing jobs have declined across America’s industrial heartland, but blue-collar work continues to thrive in different regions. Alaska, in particular, offers a good case study of what opportunity looks like for noncollege workers.

Jordan McGillis visited the state earlier this year. A carpenter he met on the North Slope told him that he made about $120,000 a year. Though manufacturing jobs make up less than 5 percent of employment in Alaska, more than 40 percent of noncollege men still earn at least $75,000. Median earned income for oil-and-gas drilling workers is $191,500, and mining operators earn $134,000.

“But Alaska’s remarkable wages do present a puzzle,” McGillis concedes. “The state has the nation’s highest median earned income for civilian, prime-age, noncollege men in blue-collar jobs, at more than $63,500. Yet only 36.6 percent of such Alaska men work in blue-collar occupations—below the national average.”

Read more about what McGillis describes as “the opportunities and the limitations emerging in this new landscape.”