Last week, mented on Grand Rapids Public Schools’ new attendance policy and Michigan’s tenure reform bill. To summarize, while applauding GR Public’s new policy as effectively incentivizing students to show up to class and take their studies more seriously, I was skeptical about MI’s new bill which ties teacher evaluations to student performance. In their article “Can Teacher Evaluation Improve Teaching” in the most recent issue of EducationNext, Eric S. Taylor and John H. Tyler share the results of their...

Samuel Gregg, Acton’s Director of Research, has an article in Crisis Magazine entitled ‘Irony of Ironies: Vatican II Triumphs Over Moribund Modernity‘. Challenging the incoherence of modern thought, Gregg remarks Another characteristic of late-modernity is the manner in which moral arguments are increasingly “settled” by appeals to opinion-polls, choice for its own sake, or that ultimate first-year undergraduate trump-card: “Well, I just feel that X is right.” For proof, just listen to most contemporary politicians discussing the ethical controversy of...

Call for Papers: “Our Entrepreneurial Future: East, West, North, and South” The Association of Private Enterprise Education Annual Conference, Maui, Hawaii, April 14 – 16, 2013. “Our Entrepreneurial Future: East, West, North, and South.” The Association of Private Enterprise Education (APEE) invites the submission of papers for its 38th International Conference in Maui, Hawaii, April 14-16, 2013. The Association posed of scholars from economics, philosophy, political science, and other disciplines, as well as policy analysts, business executives, and other educators....

Jonah Lehrer’s recent firing from the New Yorker prompted The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman to author a wrongheaded apologia for the disgraced scribe. Waxman notes that, ultimately, Lehrer engaged in unethical conduct, but places the onus of his misdeeds on those who purchased his shoddy work. The 31-year-old Lehrer, you see, manufactured quotes from whole cloth, freely lifted whole paragraphs from previous self-authored pieces and lied about both when confronted by reporters. Lehrer was fired and his promising career in journalism,...

If you want to work in international development, says Charles Kenny, go work for a big, bad pany: Kids today — they just want to save the world. But there is more than one way to make the planet a better place. Here’s another option: Get an MBA and go work for a big, bad pany. Consider this: Over the past decade, foreign direct investment in Africa topped foreign aid — and in 2011 alone, by $7 billion. And unlike...

The legal institutions of capitalism exist not to advance any particular purpose, says Robert T. Miller, but to facilitate the advancement by individuals of their various, often conflicting purposes: As this article in the Wall Street Journal explains, Missy Franklin, a seventeen year-old from Colorado who won the gold medal in the 100-meter backstroke last week, has steadfastly refused lucrative endorsement contracts. Why? Because she wants to preserve her amateur status so that she can petitively in college. In other...

PovertyCure, an educational initiative of the Acton Institute, has won a 2012 Templeton Freedom Award for its contributions to the understanding of freedom in the category of “Free Market Solutions to Poverty.” From the website: Acton Institute, United States The US based Acton Institute has won a 2012 Templeton Freedom Award for their PovertyCure educational initiative. PovertyCure advocates moral free enterprise as the key to authentic and permanent poverty elimination. PovertyCure has already had a tangible impact on the poverty...

In an interview in Our Sunday Visitor, an official with the Catholic Near East Welfare Association said refugees from Syria into Lebanon are increasing “tremendously” because of the military conflict. Issam Bishara, vice president of the Pontifical Mission and regional director for Lebanon and Syria, told OSV about the “perilous situation in Syria and how the local and global Catholic Church is responding.” OSV: What has life been like for local Christians in Syria? Bishara: Christians or non-Christians, they are...

People do not love markets,” says Pascal Boyer of the International Cognition & Culture Institute, “there is a lot of evidence for that.” Sadly, Boyer is right and I suspect he’s right about the cause too: People do not like markets because people seem not to understand much about market economics. We don’t fully understand this antipathy, Boyer notes, because there hasn’t been much research on folk-economics, a study of “what makes people’s economic modules tick.” But I think Boyer...

Acton Research Fellow and Director of Media Michael Matheson Miller will be featured on Christopher Brooks‘ “Christ and the City” radio program this evening at 5:00 p.m. EST. Brooks is the pastor of a Detroit church and his program, which airs from 4 – 6 p.m., addresses matters of faith from a variety of perspectives. Miller will be joining the program to discuss PovertyCure, an Acton educational initiative, and the PovertyCure team’s recent trip to Haiti. Follow this link to...