Prioritizing Activism Over Education

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Last month, the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union in the U.S., hosted a training for educators. A leaked slide deck from the event is eye-opening.

Among the topics: tools for “educator-activists,” including tactics to protect left-leaning activism in classrooms; claims that the Trump administration’s Department of Education is “committed to violating civil rights”; and a partisan agenda that supports DEI, Black Lives Matter, and transgender ideology.

“A union representing millions of public school teachers might have paused to consider viewpoint diversity. Roughly 30 states are politically red; millions of parents voted for Trump in 2024,” Wai Wah Chin writes. “Yet the NEA offers no sensitivity training for members disparaging red state students or families rejecting its orthodoxy. Inclusivity, apparently, runs only one way.”

Read more here.

New York is considering 180 different AI-related bills—more than any other state. This extensive regulation will hurt technology companies’ ability to innovate.

“New York’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach to AI regulation will accelerate a continued business exodus. Consumers will suffer under the state’s micro-managerial, paperwork-first policies,” Logan Kolas and Adam Thierer write. “And, because many regulations will have negative spillovers, the damage will extend beyond New York.”

Read about the broader consequences.

Amid the pandemic and George Floyd protests in 2020, several Democratic-led cities and states implemented policies that tolerated public drug use and disorder. But as crime and overdoses skyrocketed, some Democratic officials pulled back, shifting toward more pragmatic approaches.

“The pragmatists are simply returning to common-sense principles that were widely accepted decades ago before they were driven from the public square,” Keith Humphreys writes. “Those principles are simple: public policy should consider the impact of drug use on others, not just users; harm reduction alone is an inadequate response to drugs as a policy and a service; the best goal for addicted people is not mere survival, but recovery . . . and some publicly provided housing should require abstinence from substance use.”

Read more about the cities that are turning things around.

At every moment in life, we face choices. Some are bigger than others, of course, but taken together, they determine who we are.

“Now suppose no standards existed for choosing,” Martin Gurri writes. “Every moment would be wide open: pick this or that—it doesn’t matter. How could I hope to become myself under such conditions? In that unbounded space, identity would splinter. Behavior would turn indecisive and erratic; I might take a year to choose a shirt.”

Read more of Gurri’s defense of standards of distinction and value.

“Funding research into areas that have a potential to contribute to fundamental governmental functions, like national security, is one thing.