Choice Needs a Voice

“Charter school saved my life.”

This isn’t just an anecdote from a concerned constituent that I have heard in passing. These are the words this very morning of my wife, an incredibly bright, but also quite introverted woman who moved from rural Nevada to Southern California in middle school, and felt lost – struggling to thrive in enormous classes that teachers had challenges managing. Then she was given the opportunity to attend high school at a charter school in Apple Valley, CA and blossomed. She graduated at the top of her class, while taking not only college-level courses in high school, but classes at local area colleges as well.

She credits this to the idea that all students are not alike and shouldn’t be educated as such. While charter schools like hers recognize and foster individual differences in learning, public schools regress to a mean established by whatever standard du jour is imposed upon them by the federal government. These methods may or may not make for good test scores, but even former New York state Teacher of the Year John Gatto doesn’t believe they lead to a well-educated mind that is capable of critical thinking.

A Beloved Franchise Goes Rogue

Twelve months ago, I entered a movie theater with anxious, but cautious, anticipation for the first installment in a new era of Star Wars films. JJ Abrams rewarded this anticipation with an exceptional piece of entertainment that also just so happens to be an excellent Star Wars flick.

Fast forward to this week, when I sat down for the first foray into a new realm of Star Wars entertainment, one the diverges from the episodic format of all the prior films, though still telling a story familiar to anyone who knows the universe even remotely. Reports of reshoots heightened the similarly cautious optimism that I felt and made me worry this may not live up to the example set the year before.

Was I wrong to worry?

A Forum on Cognitive Dissonance

As a libertarian, I have a responsibility to court both sides of the political spectrum to look for allies and help people see a different perspective, while also broadening and better informing my own. A while back, I attended a local Republican committee meeting on the Common Core with that in mind, and last night I attended a forum hosted by The Center for Western Priorities on public lands management. While the topics were markedly different, the sentiment was mostly the same at both: the other side is wrong - dead wrong - and we must not allow them any medium for their message.

Situational Leadership and our Presidential Candidates

After the horrific events in Orlando over the weekend, there was the usual rush to judgment as to the causes of such a heinous crime, well before any kind of thorough investigation had been conducted. And while we expect such things from the media, what we found this time was that the two major party presidential candidates were all too happy to join the bandwagon. Their chosen narratives were well suited to the early details that trickled out, and with great pomp and conviction, they told America just what was wrong and how they would fix it.

The trouble is, both of them are now proving to be quite wrong.

The Sanders Revolution Fails Itself

Bernie Sanders’s ride has come to its end. Finally. Or has it?

When Senator Sanders launched his nascent bid for the presidency last year, my initial thoughts were not complimentary. Here was a perennial outsider and nonconformist (qualities I actually could respect), who had charmed my home state of Vermont into thinking he could accomplish something in the Senate, casting aside any notions of political independence in signing on to the Democratic party machine. Why? “It is the only way to get elected,” he claimed at the time. If that were true, then Jill Stein and Gov. Gary Johnson would have to be at the party doorstep, would they not? The truth is, that was never the reason.