PRE-K STUDY by Penna Dexter

Following the Biden administration’s admission that its Build Back Better Plan is dead, there’s an effort to resurrect parts of this massive social spending bill. One goal is the White House’s proposal for a “transformational investment” – $200 billion – for free universal pre-K for 3 and 4-year-old children.

The plan is modeled on the Head Start program which was launched in 1965 to get kids from low-income families prepped for kindergarten. This push comes despite extensive research showing Head Start’s dismal results including one finding that elementary-school kids who didn’t participate were better prepared in math than those who started the program at age three.

Forget raising kindergarten performance. A long-term study on the state of Tennessee’s pre-K program found that children who attended it fared worse in sixth grade than children from similar backgrounds who didn’t participate.

The state’s program has existed since 2005 and meets 9 of 10 federal benchmarks.
Researchers at Vanderbilt University are following 2990 low-income children. The Wall Street Journal reports that: “The program was oversubscribed, so researchers followed applicants who ended up in the program versus those who were turned away.” So, all kids in the study had parents who were motivated to sign them up for pre-K.

Over time, students who had attended the pre-K program also exhibited more disciplinary infractions and attendance problems, and needed more special education services than those who did not attend.

The findings of this study are reported in the Journal of Developmental Psychology. Its authors say that the Tennessee program doesn’t have any “distinctive characteristics… that are a likely explanation for the disappointing findings.”

Perhaps most three and four-year-olds aren’t ready for “more rigid academic settings.” We really don’t have evidence to show that universal pre-K would be a worthwhile investment.

The Left continues to push government-funded preschools as a way to begin influencing kids early in life. We shouldn’t revive any pieces of the Build Back Better program, including this one.

KIDS WILL PAY by Penna Dexter

Panelists on the year-end edition of CBS’s “Face the Nation” were asked to identify what they think is the most under-reported story of the year. Correspondent Jan Crawford’s choice was “the crushing impact that our COVID policies have had on young kids and children.” These policies, she said, have been implemented despite the fact that children face “the least serious risk for serious illness.”

Jan Crawford is Chief Legal Correspondent for CBS News and the mother of 4. She said, “a healthy teenager has a one in a million chance of getting COVID, and dying from COVID.” And yet, she pointed out, “they have suffered and sacrificed the most.”

Parents across America are quite familiar with the policies Ms. Crawford listed that have harmed our kids: “school closures, lockdowns, cancellation of sports.”

Many of us didn’t know that “You couldn’t even go on a playground in the D.C. area without cops scurrying – getting – shooing the kids off.” That would have been quite the visual on the evening news.

With online learning a poor substitute for actual time in school, many of our students’ educations have been diminished. And children with behavioral, emotional and physical challenges have missed out on services they normally get through school.

Ms. Crawford said many COVID measures are having a “tremendous negative impact on our kids, and it’s been an afterthought. You know, it’s hurt their dreams, their future learning loss, risk of abuse, their mental health.” She referred to a statement by the U.S. Surgeon General declaring a mental health crisis among our kids with “suicide attempts among girls up 51%” last year and “black kids nearly twice as likely to die by suicide.”

She recommends “a more measured and reasonable approach for our children.” Otherwise, she warned, “they will be paying for our generation’s decisions, the rest of their lives.”

This critique of the national media by one of their own is refreshing.

WILL ROE GO? by Penna Dexter

After oral arguments in an abortion clinic’s challenge to Mississippi’s law banning most abortions before 15 weeks gestation, the question has become: Will Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey stay or go?

The Chief Justice hinted at the possibility of a narrower ruling. But attorneys for the abortion clinic and for the Biden administration argued for what National Review described as an “all-or-nothing outcome…giving the court no alternative path to uphold the Mississippi law without overturning Roe.”

Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life is optimistic. “I was gratified,” he said, “to hear the kinds of questions the six conservative justices were asking,”

If Mississippi’s law is upheld, the state’s laws on abortion will still be less restrictive than those of 39 of the 42 countries in Europe.

In oral arguments, neither the lawyers for the Jackson Clinic, nor the two pro-choice justices who spoke, seriously defended Roe as a correct reading of the Constitution. Justice Sotomayor argued that to protect a life is a religious view and to do so would create a political “stench.” Justice Breyer made an argument about “watershed precedents” that the court should be “more unwilling” to overrule.

But Justice Kavanaugh pointed to the many times the court has overruled precedent in cases that were wrongly decided. One of those cases was Brown v. Board of Education, which served to overrule the “separate but equal” principle set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Justice Roberts seemed to be looking for a middle ground. But the 1992 Casey decision presents a problem in that it declares that states cannot create an “undue burden” for accessing an abortion before a fetus is viable and no fetus is viable before 15 weeks gestation.

Once the decision is rendered – if, as hoped it overturns Roe and Casey – the states, the Constitutional laboratories of democracy, will decide their own laws regarding abortion. The people and their elected representatives will govern themselves on abortion policy.

ERIC CARLE by Penna Dexter

Of the books around my house meant for grandkids, Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar has been read the most. Often, several times at one sitting. The babies want to poke their little fingers through the nibble holes in the various foods the caterpillar eats. The older ones want to count the fruits, identify the days the caterpillar consumes them, and name the other treats he eats his way through.

Then, children and adults alike gasp at the “beautiful butterfly,” the book’s final illustration, which Washington Post writer, Emily Langer describes as “a panorama spread over two pages,” in which “light seems to shine through the creature’s wings as if through the stained glass windows of a European cathedral.”

Writer and illustrator, Eric Carle died six months ago. Ms. Langer, who wrote his obituary for the Post, describes “his hallmark collage illustrations, which he created by layering hand-painted tissue paper,” as part of his effort to show children “a world that was filled with beauty, despite the darkness he had intimately known.”

Mr. Carle was the son of German immigrants to the United States. The family returned to Stuttgart in Nazi Germany. He remembers hiding in a cellar during World War II as bombs fell. He told National Public Radio, “During the war, there were no colors…everything was gray and brown.” But an art teacher secretly introduced him to Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse and other modern painters disdained by the Nazis.

After a New York advertising career that began in 1952, Eric Carle, in 1967, illustrated Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” and found his calling. “The child inside me…”
he said, “…was beginning to become joyfully back to life.”

Mr. Carle wrote The Very Hungry Caterpillar in 1969. Ms. Langer’s piece points to the “caterpillar’s eating frenzy” as a reaction to wartime deprivation and suggests the story may be Christian allegory,” a “message of hope.”

It’s no wonder we’re still reading it.

PRIDE MONTH by Penna Dexter

June used to be Gay Pride Month. Now it’s LGBTQ Pride Month, or simply Pride Month. Really though, there’s no special month needed. The “T’ – the transgender push – is marketed to kids and young adults all year long.

However, every June we see an uptick, and this month is no exception as iconic corporations roll out special products to celebrate Pride Month.

There’s an LGBTQ Lego set. A tweet from the LEGO Group says the playsets were developed “to ensure our future builders are accepting of everyone!”

Disney is offering the Rainbow Disney Collection. One of the items is a stuffed Mickey Mouse wearing rainbow-colored shorts. The Daily Signal’s cultural commentator Nicole Russell says pushing gender and sex on kids is not only “inappropriate, but also “unrelated to – indeed antithetical to – the magic, wonder, and innocence of childhood the Disney brand purports to embody.”

Mars Wrigley has released limited-edition Skittles Pride Packs with all-gray candies and all-gray packaging that says, “Only one rainbow matters.” A share of the profit on each package goes to the LGBT advocacy group, GLAAD.

Because “boxes are for cereal, not for people,” Kellogg’s is also partnering with GLAAD to offer a “Together With Pride”-themed cereal.

I repeat, the kids who are the targets of these marketing campaigns are, for the most part, too young to care, or even be thinking about, sex or gender identity.

But there’s a different sort of marketing that targets older kids and teens online. Transgender u-tube personalities and celebrities are given prominence. Gender transition is touted as the answer to emotional struggles.

In an essay for The Claremont Institute, Mary Eberstadt describes how teens, especially girls, are drawn in through videos posted by “trans-tastemakers,” who document their gender transitions, and by the accolades that accrue to a teen who comes out online.

She says corrupt doctors, politicians, merchants and others who are stoking this “trans-kid craze” must answer for it. We must make them.

BARRETT AND SCALIA by Penna Dexter

President Trump promised to nominate Supreme Court justices with judicial philosophies like that of Justice Antonin Scalia. He has kept that promise, perhaps no more faithfully than in his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett.

After graduating first in her class from Notre Dame Law School, Judge Barrett held two clerkships the second of which was for Justice Scalia. She was greatly influenced by him.

And Justice Scalia would certainly be pleased by her nomination.

He wanted the Court to move away from its activist role, to interpret the law, not make it. He described his hopes for a shift in a 2012 book he wrote with Bryan Garner, READING LAW: The Interpretation of Legal Text:

“Our legal system” they wrote, “must regain a mooring it has lost: a generally agreed-on approach to the interpretation of legal texts…we must look for meaning in the governing text (the Constitution or a law passed by an elected legislature), ascribe to that text the meaning that it has borne from its inception, and reject judicial speculation…The descent into social rancor over judicial decisions is largely traceable to nontextual means of interpretation, which erode society’s confidence in a rule of law that evidently has no agreed-on meaning.”

Judge Barrett, like Justice Scalia, rejects the view that has often characterized the courts in recent decades that the Constutition is a living document that they can and should reinterpret in light of the times.

That view took prayer and Bible-reading out of schools. It brought us the Roe Vs. Wade decision on abortion. It has dismantled many of our freedoms and opened the definition of marriage to include same sex couples.

Only last year, in the Bostock decision, the Court included gender identity in the definition of sex for employment decisions.

Of Justice Scalia, Judge Barrett said, “his judicial philosophy is mine too.” When she
becomes Justice Barrett, we still won’t like every decision. But the shift will be a gamechanger.

Violent Muslims

Last Friday was the beginning of Ramadan, and I took the opportunity to explain why we sometimes see radical Muslim violence during this time. The examples I gave were from other countries, but there has been disturbing evidence that some radical Muslims in this country would also want to engage in terrorist acts.

Let’s begin with the obvious statement that the vast majority of Muslims in the US are peaceful and make great neighbors. But is there a potentially violent minority in this country that should concern us?

The Pew Research Center asked Muslims in this country under what circumstances “suicide bombings and other forms of violence against civilians is justified to defend Islam.” They found that 86 percent say that such behavior is “rarely or never” justified. What about the rest?

Seven percent of Muslims in America told Pew that violence against civilians is “sometimes” justified, and one percent even went so far as to say the violence is “often” justified. There are more than three million Muslims in the US. One percent equals 30,000 potentially violent Muslims.

That doesn’t mean that most of these Muslims would actually commit such an act. But it does highlight the fallacy of merely saying that most Muslims are peaceful.

It is also important to remember that this is how Muslims are self-identifying to the Pew researchers. That suggests to me that the percentages might be much higher since many Muslims might be reticent to admit their belief about violence to a stranger who calls them on the phone.

We should be grateful that a majority of Muslims in this country are not violent, but that should not blind us to the reality that thousands of Muslims believe that violence could be justified against their fellow Americans.

Vote by Mail?

The latest polls show that a majority of voters (58%) favor reforming our election laws so everyone in America can vote by mail. An additional percentage (9%) back a one-time exception this year because of the pandemic.

Having the entire nation vote by mail is not a good idea, but it will take some convincing arguments to sway the current push for nationwide voting by mail. In fact, there are already five states (Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, and Utah) that already conduct elections entirely by mail.

Why is voting by mail dangerous? First, the voter rolls are notoriously in bad shape. One study concluded that there are more voter registrations in 378 US counties than there are citizens of voting age in that county. Some voters have moved away. Others are registered more than once. Voters who have died are still on the rolls.

Mailing out ballots to the entire nation means that hundreds of thousands (or more) are arriving at homes for people who no longer live there or who are registered at more than one location. There is great potential for voter fraud.

Second, universal voting by mail raises significant security questions. These ballots are the only kind that are being marked without any supervision from election officials. People can engage in election fraud. Voters might even be intimidated into voting a certain way.

If someone is disabled or concerned about the virus, they can vote by absentee ballot in a majority of states. That has always been the case. Most all states allow early voting, which would allow citizens to vote when there isn’t a crowd at the polling place.

I think having the entire nation vote by mail is a bad idea. But I realize that it appears that most Americans want to move ahead with it anyway.

Hospital Bankruptcies?

Many hospitals in America seem headed for bankruptcy. How could this be, given the need for clinics and hospitals to fight the virus pandemic? The reason is simple. The CDC recommended that health-care providers postpone “elective” procedures in order to have the needed capacity to treat COVID-19 patients.

If you needed a knee replacement, you had to wait. Everything from hernia repairs to colonoscopies were delayed. Some doctors even paused chemotherapy for less aggressive cancers in order to avoid exposing their patients with suppressed immune systems to the virus.

There’s just one problem. Hospitals and doctors make most of their income from these elective procedures that the CDC recommended they postpone. The Wall Street Journal reports that hospitals and physicians are now hemorrhaging cash. That revenue stream has dried up for now.

In addition to the financial cost is the medical cost of suspending care. Preventive screenings (mammograms and colonoscopies) have been cancelled. Cancers that would have been found go undetected. Chronic conditions can get worse because regular check-ups have been postponed. We may be moving quickly toward telemedicine, but many important diagnoses must take place in person.

Over the next few weeks, we will be hearing about hospitals filing for bankruptcy and health-care workers being fired or furloughed. It may seem hard to believe that the doctors, nurses, and medical personnel that we depended on these many weeks will now lose their jobs because of the CDC recommendation.

We have been praising these health-care workers for their stamina and perseverance in the midst of this pandemic. Unfortunately, we may end up rewarding many of them with a pink slip.

Virus Reporting

If you have been concerned about how the media has been reporting the virus pandemic, you are certainly not alone. HBO host Bill Maher is not only upset with the way the establishment media is reporting, he has even warned those in the media that their current methods of reporting will help President Donald Trump be reelected.

He began by acknowledging that “we’re starting to see some hope in all this.” But he fears that this “non-stop doom and gloom gives Trump the chance to play the optimist.” Then he reminded them that “optimists tend to win American elections.” To drive home his point, he displayed a graphic of candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign poster that had the large word: HOPE.

He also gave them a little history lesson. President Franklin D. Roosevelt is famous for saying, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But he warned the media if they keep this up, Donald Trump will ride into a second term and “there will be no hope left for you to shame.”

He described the “daily drumbeat of depression and terror” as “panic porn.” He explained that “Everything looks scary if you magnify it one thousand times.” He also cited the major newspapers for describing the coronavirus as apocalyptic. His advice was to “calm down and treat us like adults.

He wasn’t finished. He also criticized his fellow liberals for making such a big deal out of calling it a Chinese virus. “Scientists,” he said, “who are generally pretty liberal have been naming diseases after places they came from for a very long time.”

This time, I think we can agree that Bill Maher is right. Sensationalistic reporting and politically correct demands for how to name the virus have not served the public well. The current virus reporting might even help President Trump win the 2020 election.