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February 2025

The National Assessment of Educational Regress American children scored poorly, yet again, on the latest nationwide test; school choice is a way to right our sinking ship. By Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/05/the-national-assessment-of-educational-regress/

The headlines last week told the sad story. The New York Times’ title read, “American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows,” while The 74 proclaimed, The New NAEP Scores Are Alarming. Hope Is Not a Strategy for Fixing Them.” The Wall Street Journal announced, “American Kids Are Getting Even Worse at Reading, Test Scores Show.

The stories shared lowlights from the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test given periodically to the nation’s students. The results from the 2024 reading and math test, given to 4th and 8th graders, were announced last week and showed that 4th graders continued to lose ground, with reading scores slightly lower, on average, than in 2022 and much lower than in 2019.

In 2019, 35% of 4th graders scored at or above the test’s reading proficiency standard, but that figure dropped to 33% in 2022 and, further, to 31% in 2024. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40%. Some 33% of 8th graders scored below “basic” on the exam—a record low.

The news was especially bleak for our lowest-performing students, who are “reading at historically low levels,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. “We need to stay focused in order to right this ship.”

Worsening reading skills have wide-ranging consequences. Poor test scores have been linked to the economic success of both the nation and individuals. Students with limited reading skills are less likely to graduate from high school, and as adults, they are more likely to be incarcerated.

Mindy Sjoblom of On Your Mark Education, a group dedicated to using the science of reading to promote literacy, asserts, “When students are not reading on grade level by third grade, their life-long choices are severely limited. One long-term study found that students who fail to meet this bar are 4 times more likely to drop out of school. In fact, 88% of these dropouts were struggling readers in third grade.”

It is worth noting that we’ve seen the same pattern recently on other tests—TIMSS, PIAAC, i-Ready, MAP, and state assessment results—explains Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Hillary Clinton’s Hypersonic Hypocrisy: The Missile Tech Scandal She Hopes You Ignore By Charlton Allen

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/hillary_clinton_s_hypersonic_hypocrisy_the_missile_tech_scandal_she_hopes_you_ignore.html

The next time Hillary Clinton or her media allies wag a finger about “Russian interference,” remember this: Hillary Clinton’s State Department helped arm Russia with hypersonic missile technology.

Yes, the same Hillary Clinton who branded Tulsi Gabbard a “Russian asset”. The same Hillary Clinton who pushed the Trump-Russia collusion hoax for years. The same Hillary Clinton who expects America to believe that Moscow is an existential threat. Her tenure at the State Department actively facilitated, promoted, and encouraged the transfer of dual-use technology that helped build Russia’s next-generation hypersonic missile systems.

U.S. officials later sounded the alarm about Skolkovo’s military applications, but the damage was done by then. As Clinton’s State Department actively promoted the initiative, there was little visible scrutiny of how the technology could be weaponized—despite Skolkovo’s deep ties to Russian intelligence and defense interests. As U.S. concerns grew in subsequent years, Clinton and her allies never showed any sign of regret or reassessment—even as Clinton Foundation donors stood to benefit. You can’t make this up.

Selling Out National Security

By 2012, U.S. intelligence had reversed its view on the Skolkovo Project, a high-profile technology initiative to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in Russia. However, it was recognized—too late—that it had become a massive technology transfer operation benefiting Moscow’s military.

The U.S. Army warned that Skolkovo was being used to acquire highly sensitive information on space, satellite, nuclear, and missile technology, and in 2011, U.S. military intelligence assessed that Skolkovo had approved the development of a hypersonic cruise missile engine.

By 2014, the FBI was waving red flags, with the assistant special agent in charge of its Boston Field Office taking the extraordinary step of publicly warning that American technology had been sold to Skolkovo.

Cold Winters Mean Global Warming? In What World? By Brian C. Joondeph

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/02/cold_winters_mean_global_warming_in_what_world.html

Baby, It’s Cold Outside is a popular Christmas song from another era, long before the MeToo virus infected society. The virus turned harmless flirting into a crime against humanity, disqualifying perpetrators from employment, government service, or polite society.

Today, we sing, ma’am, sir, they, or ze, it’s cold outside.

How cold? “With an average temperature running 3.6 degrees below normal, this is currently the coldest January nationally (lower 48) since 1994”, says Kevin Williams, meteorologist and President of Weather-Track, Inc.

Another meteorologist, Joe Bastardi, agrees. “The nation for Jan is now the coldest max temps since 1988 at – 4.2.”

Logic suggests that cold winters, especially record-setting ones, mean that the planet may not be warming, as global warming alarmists insist.

In response, these Chicken Littles merely changed the name from “global warming” to “climate change” to mask the obvious contradiction of a warming planet causing colder winters.

This is similar to how illegal aliens became illegal migrants, then undocumented individuals, and finally just immigrants or visitors, making no distinction between law-abiding and border-crashing “visitors” to America.

USAID’s Long Track Record of Wasteful, Left-Wing Spending Made It an Obvious First Target for Musk : David Zimmerman

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usaids-long-track-record-of-wasteful-left-wing-spending-made-it-an-obvious-first-target-for-musk/

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has come under scrutiny after tech billionaire Elon Musk chose the agency as the first target in his campaign to reduce ballooning government costs and root out progressive ideology from within the executive branch.

Musk’s decision to first declare war on USAID in his role as head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency should come as no surprise, given the agency’s long history of wasteful, ideologically driven spending.

Established in 1961 under the Kennedy administration, USAID is meant to oversee humanitarian, development, and security programs, doing so in over 100 foreign countries. As originally conceived, the agency was meant to distribute aid in a way that advances U.S. interests, ideally without antagonizing the local population.

But, for decades now, the agency has apparently strayed from that mission.

In 1994, whistleblower Paul Neifert revealed that the agency was distributing U.S. aid based on race in violation of federal law.

How Tulsi Gabbard Won Over Skeptics with Help from Vance, Cotton, and a Lot of Phone Calls By Audrey Fahlberg

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/how-tulsi-gabbard-won-over-skeptics-with-help-from-vance-cotton-and-a-lot-of-phone-calls/

Ahead of her Thursday confirmation hearing, Tulsi Gabbard’s confirmation math didn’t quite add up as a crucial pair of on-the-fence Republican senators continued to telegraph their concerns about her unorthodox national security views and fitness for the role of director of National Intelligence through the press. Gabbard’s prospects improved on Monday when Susan Collins (R., Maine) came out in support of her nomination, leaving just one major roadblock to her ability to clear the Senate Intelligence panel’s closed-door vote Tuesday afternoon – swing vote Todd Young (R., Ind.).

Enter Vice President JD Vance. The former Ohio senator made a critical decision to spend his weekend in constructive conversations with Young, a former Marine Corps Intelligence officer who left Gabbard’s confirmation hearing feeling uneasy about her views on national security leaker Edward Snowden.

In Young’s telling, the vice president was instrumental in helping the Indiana senator get written assurances from Gabbard – a former Hawaii congresswoman and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate — about her views on national security matters and whistleblowers. “Frankly, he seemed to be effective on his end in getting from me the sort of concessions that were required to get to a yes,” added Young. “He delivered for me, and I’m grateful for that.”

John Tierney America’s Air-Traffic Control System: An International Disgrace After the Reagan Airport disaster, will we finally reform the FAA?

https://www.city-journal.org/article/reagan-national-airport-crash-faa-air-traffic-control

We still don’t know how many mistakes led to the collision of a helicopter with an American Airlines passenger jet making its descent at Reagan National Airport last week. But one thing has been clear for decades: America’s air-traffic control system, once the world’s most advanced, has become an international disgrace.

Long before the Obama and Biden administrations’ quest to diversify staff in control towers, the system was already one of the worst in the developed world. The recent rash of near-collisions is the result of chronic mismanagement that has left the system with too few controllers using absurdly antiquated technology.

The problems were obvious 20 years ago, when I visited control towers in both Canada and the United States. The Canadians sat in front of sleek computer screens that instantly handled tasks like transferring the oversight of a plane from one controller to another. The Americans were still using pieces of paper called flight strips. After a plane took off, the controller in charge of the local airspace had to carry that plane’s flight strip over to the desk of the controller overseeing the regional airspace. It felt like going back in time from a modern newsroom into a scene from The Front Page.

It was bad enough to see such outdated technology in 2005. But they’re still using those paper flight strips in American towers, and the Federal Aviation Administration’s modernization plans have been delayed so many times that the strips aren’t due to be phased out until 2032. The rest of the system is similarly archaic. The U.S. is way behind Europe in using satellites to guide and monitor planes, forcing pilots and controllers to rely on much less precise readings from radio beacons and ground-based radar.

Overseas controllers use high-resolution cameras and infrared sensors to monitor planes on runways, but many American controllers still have to look out the window—which is why a FedEx cargo plane almost landed on top of another plane two years ago in Austin, Texas. It was a foggy morning, and the controller couldn’t see that a Southwest airliner was on the same runway waiting to take off. At the last minute, the FedEx pilot aborted the landing, missing the other plane by less than 100 feet.

The Green Paradigm is Shifting Fast We no longer can afford our Disneyfied ideals about nature. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-green-paradigm-is-shifting-fast/

In just a few weeks, Donald Trump has started shifting a number of establishment paradigms, including the idealistic “rules-based” foreign policy, and the ghoulish transgender treatments and surgeries. However, the most dangerous for our economy and its future is the so-called “green energy” policies based on “climate change” ideology.

On November 5, voters sent the message that they’re sick of high gas prices, government diktats about what kind of cars they have to drive, billions in subsidies to “green renewable” energy industries, and EVs, and hectoring virtue-signaling from snooty elites about “settled science” and climate change “deniers.” The winds of change have set the “green” paradigm tottering.

What happened? Recently the Wall Street Journal’s Barton Swaim wrote,  “The possibility that an entire academic discipline, climate science, could have gone badly amiss by groupthink and self-flattery wasn’t thought possible. In many quarters this orthodoxy still reigns unquestioned.” But this statement begs the question that the more accurate name for “climate change,” ––Anthropogenic Catastrophic Global Warming (ACGW)–– reflects true science, which has “gone wildly amiss” because of “groupthink and “self-flattery” and other human frailties.

In fact, the real problem is the claim that, as the honest name above says, CO2 emissions from humans will eventually heat the atmosphere to the point that it becomes uninhabitable. But this is not a scientific fact established by the empirically based scientific method, but a dicey hypothesis. We simply do not have a thorough enough understanding of the complexity of global climate over time and space. For example, we don’t know precisely how water vapor in the atmosphere, the biggest greenhouse gas, interacts with CO2, or how it contributes to cyclic cooling and warming.

These gaps in our models and computer simulations have been exposed by many physicists, to whom we should listen rather than “climate scientists.” For example, MIT professor of atmospheric science Richard Lindzen, and Princeton emeritus professor of physics William Happer, wrote  in 2021, “We are both scientists who can attest that the research literature does not support the claim of a climate emergency. Nor will there be one. None of the lurid predictions — dangerously accelerating sea-level rise, increasingly extreme weather, more deadly forest fires, unprecedented warming, etc. — are any more accurate than the fire-and-brimstone sermons used to stoke fanaticism in medieval crusaders.”

Trump Says U.S. Will ‘Own’ Gaza By Robert Spencer And refuses to repeat failed policies.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/trump-says-u-s-will-own-gaza/

We are living at a truly momentous time in history. Donald Trump illustrated that yet again on Tuesday evening during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “You have to learn from history,” Trump declared and proceeded to upend the political order that has prevailed in the Middle East for decades. It is a multiply failed order and new approaches are very, very long overdue, but no one has dared to question it and suggest new solutions. Until now.

The most momentous announcement of this most momentous of press conferences was Trump’s declaration that Hamas would not be permitted to regain control of Gaza and that, in fact, the U.S. “will take over the Gaza Strip… we will own it.” He also reiterated his insistence that 1.7 million Palestinians would be relocated to Egypt and Jordan, explaining several times that this was necessary because the failed policies of the past should not and must not be applied yet again.

Hamas, Trump said, had ruled Gaza for years and offered no options for the Palestinian people beyond bloodshed and death. He sketched out a vision of a restored Gaza that would be an international area, populated not just by Palestinian Arabs but by people from all over the world who would be able to enjoy its renaissance as the “Riviera of the Middle East.”

When asked if this meant that he was rejecting the possibility of a “two-state solution,” Trump said that he wasn’t addressing that at all, but merely saying that the old policies of the past had failed and that new solutions needed to be tried. He and Netanyahu also both expressed confidence that Saudi Arabia would soon normalize relations with Israel, which would have a seismic effect upon the Muslim Middle East, as it has shown unremitting hostility to Israel ever since the founding of the modern Jewish state in 1948.

These Two Trump Executive Orders Get Little Love From Voters. Why?

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/05/hed/

Americans have been largely pleased with President Donald Trump’s deluge of executive orders. But not all of them. Public support is weak for his order to withdraw the U.S. from the World Health Organization and the Paris climate treaty. This is curious. One is clearly a political organization, the other a useless and wasteful effort. The failure by a significant swath of our countrymen to recognize this is worrisome.

This is actually the second time Trump pulled the U.S. from the WHO. The first departure was in 2020. It pleased us then that no longer would this country “take part in its kleptocratic incompetence and its cozying up to dictators and tyrants, including its biggest influencer, China.” The WHO’s reckoning, we said at the time, “is long overdue.” 

Of course Joe Biden put the country back under the WHO’s thumb on his first day in office in 2021, even though it was clear that leaving had hurt no none. Despite this, our I&I/TIPP poll found that only 38% of Americans agree, either strongly (22%) or somewhat (16%) with quitting the WHO.

Critics point out that at one time, when it followed its original mission, the WHO had value.

“Unfortunately, the WHO has expanded its mission over the years to areas that only tangentially relate to public health, such as issuing alcohol consumption and dietary guidelines,” says Cato Institute senior fellow Jeffrey A. Singer. “Such issues are more aptly defined as private health, i.e., matters that don’t cause harm to others.”