All posts tagged: School buses

Asylum Seekers Didn’t Create the ‘Migrant Crisis’

Asylum Seekers Didn’t Create the ‘Migrant Crisis’

When the mayor of New York, of all places, warned that a recent influx of asylum seekers would destroy his city, something didn’t add up. “I said it last year when we had 15,000, and I’m telling you now at 110,000. The city we knew, we’re about to lose,” Eric Adams urged in September. By the end of the year, more than 150,000 migrants had arrived. Still, the mayor’s apocalyptic prediction didn’t square with New York’s past experience. How could a city with more than 8 million residents, more than 3 million of whom are foreign-born, find itself overwhelmed by a much smaller number of newcomers? In another legendary haven for immigrants, similar dynamics were playing out. Chicago has more than 500,000 foreign-born residents, about 20 percent of its population, but it has been straining to handle the arrival of just 35,000 asylum seekers in the past year and a half. Some people have even ended up on the floors of police stations or in public parks. Mayor Brandon Johnson joined Adams and a handful …

Where Are All the Missing Students?

Where Are All the Missing Students?

In 2006, the School District of Philadelphia, in partnership with Microsoft, opened the School of the Future. The idea was simple enough: Establish a learning environment centered on technology—no textbooks, just laptops and Wi-Fi—that would provide students in relatively poor districts the same benefits that those in wealthier areas enjoyed. The district built a handsome, well-lit building and filled it with state-of-the-art trappings including electronic lockers and Italian-marble bathrooms. It was heralded as a path-defining achievement for public-private partnerships in education. Two years later, Michael Gottfried, now an economist at the University of Pennsylvania but then a graduate student there, was part of a team examining whether such a technological revolution actually made a difference in student achievement. But he soon realized that the technology was somewhat beside the point: “We were talking to a teacher [at the School of the Future] and she said, ‘Here’s the thing, we can talk all you want about smart boards and laptops per student and curriculum moving online, but I have a bigger problem: Half of my class …

The Agony of the School Car Line

The Agony of the School Car Line

For parents across America, the school car line is a daily punishment. The stern, annoyed command from some poor teacher or volunteer to “pull all the way forward, please!” The breakdown of the whole process when someone inevitably doesn’t. The long minutes spent idling, spewing exhaust. The cones, and walkie-talkies, and little signs hung from rearview mirrors that help deliver so many kids, individually, right to their school’s doorstep. Car lines are a classic tragedy-of-the-commons problem: Every parent acting in their perceived self-interest—Oh I’ll just drop him off again; it’ll only take a minute—makes us collectively worse off in the form of dirtier air, increased traffic, less human connection, and more frustration. This soul-sucking system is sadly the norm. But it doesn’t have to be this way. A few generations ago, in 1969, nearly one in two kids walked or biked to school. Now only about one in 10 kids gets to school those ways. And only about a third of children who live within just one mile of school walk or bike there. School …