The Greatest Crime In Education – The Joe Cunningham Show

The Joe Cunningham Show airs 3-4 p.m. every weekday on NewsTalk 96.5 KPEL. The daily show notes offer you a look into the topics of the day and the links to the top stories and Joe's own writings on the state of politics in Louisiana and around the country. Follow Joe on Twitter at @JoePCunningham and Like the Joe Cunningham Show on Facebook. You can also subscribe to the Joe Cunningham Show podcast on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or Amazon.

The Weather Is The News

Locally, we do have a lot of weather conditions to look out for. Continued heavy rains have encouraged Lafayette Consolidated Government to set up sandbag locations.

Luckily, it is just rain and not severe tropical weather. The National Hurricane Center is looking at three areas of tropical disturbance, but there isn't any indication that they will become serious threats to Louisiana (or any other part of the country) anytime soon.

The rain we have right now, though, is capable of causing localized flooding and traffic issues. Stay safe out there.

The Greatest Crime In Education

Mary Katherine Ham has a stellar, if not horrifying, review of the book The Stolen Year by NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz. The book, according to Ham, acknowledges that COVID policies' effect on education was underreported by a mass media complex that was far too scared of the pandemic, despite the fact that it was "all easy to predict."

These stories of American families juggling loss of routine, child care, therapy services, and more are the most worthwhile part of this book. Their stories were always important and, as Kamenetz belatedly notes, predictable. Jonah in San Francisco, diagnosed with autism, became violent after hours of school screen time while the city closed the skate park he frequented; Alexis in Hawaii, a nonverbal child who regressed into diapers when deprived of in-person services; Khamla, who was removed from his family's home over allegations of abuse and neglect. All predictable.

"It seemed like depraved indifference to children's welfare," Kamenetz writes in 2022. It did.

COVID policies in the American education system, pushed across the country by teachers unions reacting entirely to fear and in no way to data, is the greatest crime in education history. We still don't know the total effect these policies had on students, but we do not that this was one of the final straws to break the public education camel's back. Education is now one of the surprise motivating issues of the 2022 midterm.

Joe Biden Is Going To Cancel Student Loan Debt

Up to $10,000 of it, according to CNN. But, of course, that isn't enough. $10,000 of canceled student loan debt is actually structural racism.

A while back, it came out that it was folks like Stacey Abrams who were pushing the White House to do this, though they really didn't want to. The polling numbers at the White House must be awful now if they are pushing it.

It's a big problem, because it's only going to help rich white kids at the expense of middle class Americans.

Such a policy would, perhaps counterintuitively, give the biggest benefits to those with high incomes. That’s partly because lower-income people are less likely to have gone to college. Additionally, many borrowers with the largest loan balances attended graduate and professional programs (medical, business and law school) that lead to higher earnings.

A recent study from economists Sylvain Catherine and Constantine Yannelis found that student-loan forgiveness of up to $50,000 for every borrower would work out to an average of $700 for people in the bottom income decile and nearly $5,000 for those in the top decile.

Headlines Of The Day

• Yelp Will Start Flagging Crisis Pregnancy Centers to Steer People Toward Abortion Clinics (RedState)
• Global Economies Flash Warning of Sharp Slowdown (Wall Street Journal)
• Josh Guillory Under Fire For Possible Ethics Breach In New Report (KPEL)
• Quiet quitting is the latest workplace trend, but it doesn't mean what you think (CNN Business)
• Famed hacker blows whistle on Twitter, claims app is risk to national security (NY Post)

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