The headline comes from a famous quote of Margaret Thatcher before she became prime minister of Great Britain.

And so David Blaska writes in an air of feigned shock:

In “A better way to run schools,” David Leonhardt of the New York Times records that after Hurricane Katrina 12 years ago: 

New Orleans embarked on the most ambitious education overhaul in modern America. The state of Louisiana took over the system in 2005, abolished the old bureaucracy and closed nearly every school. Rather than running schools itself, the state became an overseer, hiring independent operators of public schools — that is, charter schools  —  and tracking their performance.

The charters here educate almost all public-school students, so they can’t cherry pick. And the students are overwhelmingly black and low-income … so gentrification isn’t a factor. Yet the academic progress has been remarkable.

Performance on every kind of standardized test has surged.  … Test-score gains are translating into real changes in students’ lives. High-school graduation, college attendance and college graduation have all risen.

Let’s be clear that charter schools are public schools and that voucher schools are not. But both offer parents a choice in schooling. Alternatives, competition in the market place. Not one size fits all.

In January, Israeli spies infiltrated a warehouse in Tehran and seized roughly 50,000 pages of documents and other records related to Iran’s nuclear program. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later cited the findings as a reason President Trump should abandon the 2015 nuclear deal, which he did days later.

“They make one thing clear: Despite Iranian insistence that its program was for peaceful purposes, the country had worked in the past to systematically assemble everything it needed to produce atomic weapons.” Read their report here.

The white lab coats here at the Policy Werkes (and Tanning Salon) did speed-read Dean Mosiman’s series of articles on Gun Violence (“Cycles of Trauma”) in the Wisconsin State Journal. Very well done: deeply sourced and well written. Your Squire has conversed with many of the peer support people working with the gang bangers profiled in the series. They cannot help but do good and deserve our support. Still, the Policy Werkes believes that the WI State Journal series missed the most promising strategy for young people at risk. Get to them while they are young. Middle school. By age 18, we fear, reform is more difficult.

Another takeaway from Mosiman’s series: Cops ain’t the problem. Are you getting this Dean Loumos? Social justice warriors?

Discipline, high expectations, breaking the self-imposed stereotype that to learn and obey is to act white. Quick, Democrats, shut down school choice! …

What’s this? Promoting socialism, sky-high taxes, and open borders is not going to help Democrat/Socialists trounce the GOP in November?! “The future belongs to us,” Bernie Sanders bellows to his audience. But not so fast, John Fund cautions in National Review.Overall, voters prefer capitalism, by 54% to 24%. 

What’s this? Socialist Venezuela is now considered a criminal organization, a “mafia state,” according to this expert in the New York Times. Would bombing help?