Half a century has passed since I first fell through the looking glass into the peculiar world of federal education research and development. As an extremely junior domestic-policy aide in the Nixon White House, I helped Pat Moynihan, Jim Allen, George Shultz, and others craft what, in March 1970, became a presidential message to Congress proposing creation of a “National Institute of Education” (NIE). Two years later, it came into existence and it’s been reinvented and reconstructed twice since then—plus innumerable fine-tunings—into what is now the Education Department’s Institute for Education Sciences (IES). 

“Build new, don’t reform old,” says Jason Bedrick as he attempts to use my experience on the Maryland State Board of Education to prove that “the system is beyond reform,” and to imply that school choice is the only strategy worth pursuing. He’s maybe 30 percent correct, which isn’t a winning tally.

Here are some recent headlines: “Massive survey finds 1 in 3 college freshman struggle with mental health.” (Research published by the American Psychological Association) “The College Student Mental Health Crisis.” (Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors survey of counseling center directors).

Pressure has been building on colleges to stop chasing the same small subset of privileged, highly test-prepped applicants and start admitting needier kids. But suggests that the particular form this pressure has taken — including popular rankings based on Pell enrollment — has been at least partly backfiring.

It’s time to wage not just ideational but economic warfare against leftist academia. Three recent events add to growing evidence of the academic Left's malevolent nature. The least disturbing of the three stories is in itself tremendously troubling. The mega-distinguished Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield, who had been invited to give a commencement address at Concordia University in Canada, was then disinvited by its president because, reportedly, some alumni and faculty allege that Mansfield “traffics in damaging and discredited philosophies of gender and culture.”

Perhaps more than any world leader, the Japanese prime minister has sought to keep Donald Trump close, even though the results have been mixed.