I don’t get this. Why shouldn’t kids play in the backyard if they are lucky enough to have one?
A beautiful piece on why it’s important to read books we don’t understand.
How is it even possible to fit souch stupidity into such a short post?
Just as I started kind of liking Applebee’s, it decided to dial back the good changes.
Walmart came up with a very dumb idea.
Turns out that school vouchers are supported by the majority of African Americans.
Nothing else this time because the blogroll has been signally boring this week.
Clarissa's Blog 
“Turns out that school vouchers are supported by the majority of African Americans.”
https://tcf.org/content/commentary/school-vouchers-race-complicated/
“But Cato’s assertion that vouchers in particular are “extremely popular with African Americans” suffers from oversimplification for purposes of convenience.”
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“The 2015 PDK/Gallup poll that showed support for public school choice simultaneously challenges assertions of voucher popularity. Only 33 percent of African Americans, and 31 percent of respondents overall, favored “allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense.” These conflicting results indicate two things: 1) the evidence does not support the blanket statement that vouchers are “extremely popular with African Americans,” and 2) when respondents understand that vouchers divert public money to private schools, support for these proposals plummets. ”
Black families have traditionally supported school choice because, in an era of segregation, that seemed to be the only option for their kids to get access to education that was at par with average public schools.
Whereas, the primary motivation for white families was to escape those same public schools when they became desegregated.
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This is old news. The Democratic Party has always been in the pocket of the Teachers’ Union.
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Re the first link: what the what?! My kids are waay younger and are occasionally left by themselves in the backyard for some minutes (but within earshot – does that count as supervised?). By the time they get to the age of the kids in the article they will surely be playing outside by themselves for much longer stretches.
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Right? I’m not getting this at all. How will kids benefit from constant helicoptering at this age?
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It’s not really for the kids’ benefit. It’s because people are sue-happy and would rather invoke authorities than try to talk to their neighbors. An actual neighbor or someone who knows them would call their parents (because kids are taught not to answer the question “Where are your parents” from random strangers.) Don’t underestimate the apparent race of one of kids in the concerned citizen’s decision to call CPS: I’m not sure a random person would assume the two kids were siblings living at the same house. Or maybe the person was a neighbor that knew them and thought calling CPS was a great passive aggressive way to register disapproval of that family.
I once knew a man who called the cops when he saw a harmless old man walking very slowly and confusedly across the street from a CVS rather than go across and help him himself. The dude had a DUI, ranted incessantly about the cops, but felt less compunction about calling the cops than I did.
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People outsource community functions. Instead of helping out an elderly person or a mother with several kids, etc., they want authorities to come and make the disturbance go away. It’s a deeply consumerist position where other people are objects that tend to get in the way. It’s also deeply infantile. It’s very very sad.
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Gutting public education and diverting the funds to billionaire Walmart heirs is just not a very good idea, exhibit #64572.
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