In decrying disappointing U.S. reading performance, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos looked at what occurs within schools, citing ineffective teachers, antiquated approaches, bloated bureaucracies, overpaid administrators, bad policies and "Big Ed."

You might expect that I, as an immigrant and as an economist who favors the free movement of labor, would find the idea of open borders to be an obviously good policy. If you also learned that in 1977, the Immigration and Naturalization Service tried to deport me, you might think that I would also be emotionally, and not just intellectually, in favor of open borders. At times I have been.

How progressives mask their envy and lust for power.

The last week of October 2019 was an eventful one in the history of the Islamic State. On October 25, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, its leader and caliph, blew himself up during a U.S. special forces raid on his compound in Idlib Province, Syria. The next day, official spokesman Abu al-Hasan al-Muhajir, a potential successor to al-Baghdadi, was killed in a U.S. airstrike in nearby Aleppo Province. On October 31, the Islamic State confirmed the fatalities in an audio statement read by al-Muhajir’s replacement, Abu Hamza al-Qurashi, who went on to announce the appointment of a certain Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi as the new “commander of the believers and caliph of the Muslims.” The adjective Qurashi in their names denotes descent from the Prophet Muhammad’s tribe of Quraysh, one of the traditional qualifications of being caliph.