The Public Interest articles from June 2001

The Public Interest archives from June 2001

American diversity and the 2000 Census.
June 22, 2001... THE 2000 census, on which the Census Bureau started issuing reports in March and April of 2001, reflected, in its structure and its results, the two enduring themes of American racial and ethnic diversity, present since the origins of American...

The surprising consensus on school choice.
June 22, 2001... THERE has been a flurry of activity in school choice research in the last few years. As a result, where we used to have only theories and limited evidence we now have a relatively solid understanding of the likely effects of school choice. I...

Revamping special education.
June 22, 2001... PRIOR to the 1950s, the federal government was not routinely involved in the education of children with special needs. A few federal laws had been passed to provide direct educational benefits to persons with disabilities, mostly in the form of...

Learning from James Coleman.
June 22, 2001... WHEN James S. Coleman died in 1995, the headline in the New York Times obituary read "Work Helped to Foster Busing"--an interesting epitaph for someone whom many also considered to be one of the original neoconservatives. What Bayard Rustin...

The problem of reading in an age of mass democracy.
June 22, 2001... I AM not so audacious as to tell people like yourselves, who are directly engaged in the problems of schooling the young, how to proceed in specific and practical terms. I merely dare to suggest that I can tell you something about the...

The medicalization of unhappiness.
June 22, 2001... THE use of psychotropic medication in depressed patients has increased in the United States by more than 40 percent over the last decade, from 32 million office visits resulting in a drug prescription to over 45 million. This is in marked...

Who's a liberal?
June 22, 2001... IT is reported that after Thomas Babington Macaulay, the nineteenth-century British historian and statesman, delivered a typically emphatic speech in the House of Commons, one of his colleagues remarked to another, "By God, I wish I were as...

The princes pay tribute.
June 22, 2001... EDUCATING the Prince, [+] a new Festschrift in honor of Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., includes a list of his published work that attests to his prolific scholarship. But Mansfield has long had a reputation as an outstanding teacher as well....

Virtue and poverty.
June 22, 2001... UNTIL recently, for many intellectuals and policy experts, virtue was more than a suspect concept bound up with a bygone era and an outmoded woridview. Virtue, for them, signified a crude, blame-the-victim approach to reform, a code for the...

A successful civil war.
June 22, 2001... VISIT a large chain bookstore in almost any American city, and you will find half the shelves in the U.S. History section (sometimes more) groaning under the weight of books about the American Civil War--row upon row of volumes by Bruce Catton,...

CORRECTION.
June 22, 2001... In our last issue (Spring 2001), the publisher of The Burden of Bad Ideas by Heather Mac Donald should have been listed as Ivan R. Dee.