MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Houston’s comeback: Structure, direct instruction are paying off.

“Traditional education, discipline, and careful monitoring and data analysis” are improving student performance in Houston’s New Education System (NES) schools, writes Neetu Arnold of the Manhattan Institute in City Journal.

When Mike Miles was appointed superintendent in 2023, only one in five students could read or do math at grade level, she writes. More than 120 of the district’s 274 schools had D or F ratings. The state education agency took over the district, and put Miles in charge.

Houston schools have a long way to go, but reading and math scores are improving, especially for disadvantaged students, Arnold writes.

Under NES, the district’s worst-performing schools now use the highly effective and highly structured Direct Instruction (DI) method, Arnold writes. Teachers guide student learning instead of asking them to “construct” their own learning.

Who knew that methods proven to work, work?

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT LIKE THAT…:

“It goes beyond the government’s authority to not give me other people’s money to break anti-discrimination law” https://t.co/59DPAve7uW

— Inez Stepman ⚪️🔴⚪️ (@InezFeltscher) April 22, 2025

I’d ask if Harvard realizes how they sound but clearly they either don’t know or don’t care.

WHEN SAN FRANCISCO IS HOME TO YOUR CENTRISTS…: You’re Not Going to Believe What Group of Democrats Wants to Push the Party to the ‘Center.’

HMM: Somebody’s Lying About Chinese Exports. “Somebody, somewhere is lying about the strength of China’s economy and the health of their export sector. Remember, there were already plenty signs of a slowing economy in China before Trump took office. Is China Observer overselling economic difficulties in China? Probably some. Gloom and doom is their stock in trade. You never get any ‘Everything in China is honky dory!’ videos from them (with good reason). But I don’t think they’re making things up from whole cloth.”

It could also be that China is flooding overseas markets (the numbers back this up) like never before and they have a serious problem with excess capacity.

IT’S THE GOOD LIFE: Rev. ‘Rent-Free’ Warnock Living Large on Congregation’s Dime, Says Ethics Watchdog.

SMACKDOWN: EPA Administrator Confronts New York Times Reporter for Claiming He Had ‘No Evidence’ of Waste, Fraud, Abuse.

UMM…: California Mayor Suggests Giving Homeless Fentanyl to ‘Purge’ the Streets.

CHANGE (IT BACK): Education Department to Restart Debt Collection on Defaulted Student Loans.

The Education Department will resume collecting on defaulted student loans early next month, restarting a system that’s been on hold since spring 2020, the agency announced Monday.

Starting May 5, the department will withhold tax refunds or benefits such as Social Security from borrowers who are in default. Later this summer, the department will begin garnishing the wages of defaulted borrowers, a move consumer protection advocates have criticized as out of control.

About 38 percent of the nearly 43 million student loan borrowers are current on their payments, and a record number of borrowers are at risk of or in delinquency and default, the department said Monday. Borrowers default when they miss at least 270 days of payments.
…
“We think that the federal student loan portfolio is headed toward a fiscal cliff if we don’t start repayment and collections,” a senior department official said on a press call Monday. “American taxpayers can no longer serve as collateral for student loans.”

Thank you. I don’t remember cosigning for anybody’s student loans.

CORN, POPPED: CNN Just Pulled the Rug Out From Under CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.

YES, I VOTED FOR THIS: Trump reportedly drafted an executive order for ‘a disciplined reorganization’ of the State Department that would shut down embassies and cut climate change and refugee offices.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: I Love the Smell of a COVID Reckoning in the Morning. “Yes, I am furious at how We the People were treated by our own government. I hate that Fauci, now in his 80s, might die before slipping on his own orange jumpsuit, but Cuomo is a great place to start.”

ANTITRUST: Chrome on the chopping block as Google’s search antitrust trial moves forward.

With opening arguments beginning today, the US Justice Department will seek to convince the court that Google should be forced to divest Chrome, unbundle Android, and make other foundational changes. But Google will attempt to paint the government’s position as too extreme and rooted in past grievances. No matter what happens at this trial, Google hasn’t given up hope it can turn back time.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has a major advantage here: Google is guilty. It lost the liability phase of this trial resoundingly, with the court finding Google violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by “willfully acquiring and maintaining monopoly power.” As far as the court is concerned, Google has an illegal monopoly in search services and general search advertising. The purpose of this trial is to determine what to do about it, and the DOJ has some ideas.

This case, overseen by United States District Judge Amit Mehta, is taking place against a backdrop that is particularly unflattering for Google. It has been rocked by loss after loss in its antitrust cases, including the Epic-backed Google Play case, plus the search case that is at issue here. And just last week, a court ruled that Google abused its monopoly in advertising tech. The remedies in Google’s app store case are currently on hold pending appeal, but that problem is not going away. Meanwhile, Google is facing even more serious threats in the remedy phase of this trial.

The DOJ will come out guns blazing—it sees this as the most consequential antitrust case in the US since the Microsoft trial of the 1990s.

Exit quote: “Google says it will spend a lot of time arguing against the DOJ’s attempt to end search placement deals, and it will have some backup here in the form of representatives from Mozilla and Apple, both of which are paid billions of dollars per year to make Google their default search engine.”

I’m not convinced that last point doesn’t help the DOJ’s case more than Google’s.

ICYMI: George Mason PhD Student Asks ‘When Must We Kill’ Trump. Hilarity Ensues.

NATO NORTH: Sweden Has the Tanks. Finland Has the Troops. Welcome to the Pan-Nordic Army.

Any Nordic country would struggle to militarily square up to Russia on its own. But combined, the Nordics have an economy about the size of Mexico’s, and nearly the same size as Russia’s. Following Sweden and Finland’s accession to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, they have pooled some of their forces.

Sweden boasts an advanced defense industry that makes submarines, battle tanks and supersonic jet fighters. Norway possesses maritime surveillance and fighting capabilities in the Arctic. Finland has one of the largest standing armies and artillery forces per capita in Europe. And Denmark’s special forces have decades of experience deploying to some of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan and Iraq to fight American wars. (The fifth Nordic country, Iceland, has no standing army or defense industry).

“You have a regional grouping with the economic and resource potential to develop a fully integrated defense-industrial base like Germany has, but with a completely different kind of threat perception and political will,” said Eric Ciaramella, senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank and former senior U.S. intelligence analyst.

Well, good. Between the Nordics and the Poles, NATO’s front and northern flank are overperforming much-richer laggards in Britain, France, and Germany.

HEH: Betting on the Next Pope? You Might Have a Gambling Problem.

10-MILE THICK DIAMOND LAYERS ARE ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: NASA Discovers 10-Mile-Thick Diamond Layer Beneath Mercury’s Surface.

ALL IN THE FAMILY: Wife of former US Sen. Bob Menendez convicted in bribery scheme.

OOF: How Big Did ‘Snow White’ Really Bomb? THIS Big.

21ST CENTURY CAREER DECISIONS: Actors who sold AI avatars stuck in Black Mirror-esque dystopia. “For actors, selling their AI likeness seems quick and painless—and perhaps increasingly more lucrative. All they have to do is show up and make a bunch of different facial expressions in front of a green screen, then collect their checks. But Alyssa Malchiodi, a lawyer who has advocated on behalf of actors, told the AFP that ‘the clients I’ve worked with didn’t fully understand what they were agreeing to at the time,’ blindly signing contracts with ‘clauses considered abusive,’ even sometimes granting ‘worldwide, unlimited, irrevocable exploitation, with no right of withdrawal.'”

DOG BITES MAN: CCP-Tied Entity Bankrolled Anti-Trump Mayor.

DAVID MARCUS: These 3 are auditioning to be Democrats’ next George Floyd. “As we speak, the holy trinity of the supposedly oppressed that graces the altar of the progressive media ecosystem are alleged murderers Luigi Mangione and Karmelo Anthony as well as alleged MS-13 gang member and human trafficker in the country illegally, Kilmar Abrego Garcia.”

Look at who they venerate to understand where they want to take the country.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: George Mason PhD Student Asks ‘When Must We Kill’ Trump, Hilarity Ensues.

CALIFORNICATION: Colorado regulators raise emissions fees significantly, create new reporting requirements.

A Colorado regulatory panel agreed Friday to raise fees on industrial companies by as much as 67% and to implement a new system, beginning in 2027, under which those firms must report even small levels of emissions for 342 different toxic air contaminants.
…
However, groups such as the Colorado Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute Colorado and Colorado Utilities Coalition said they want the division to meet new performance standards focused on speeding permit review.

The average number of days between submission of permit applications and issuance of permits by CDPHE has risen by nearly 2-1/2 times, from 165 days in 2019 to 459 days in 2024, according to data that the state provided to the Joint Budget Committee. At the same time, addition and expansion of fees on the operations of emitters means Colorado businesses are paying $12,738 per ton of volatile organic compounds and nitrous oxides, said Christy Woodward, Colorado Chamber regulatory affairs advisor.

Kristen Derr, an environmental specialist for pipeline company Williams, said her company filed an application to upgrade a compressor station in 2022 — and waited 13 months for it to even get assigned to a permit reviewer before taking another 15 months to get approved. Julia Griffin, senior air permitting and compliance specialist with Kinder Morgan, described a permit application she filed to reduce fugitive emissions in March 2024 and noted that CDPHE has spent 308 hours on it and billed her $43,000 but hasn’t awarded a permit yet.

Message sent: Manufacturers not welcome here.

My libertarian friends keep telling me about Gov. Jared Polis’s light regulatory touch, but I keep reading stories like this one.

Previously: You traded the 1st and 2nd amendments for legal weed. Was it worth it?

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

This is what social contagion looks like.

When I was a kid, we had eating disorders, goths, Wiccans, and parents who forced kids to play a sport to vicariously fulfill some unmet dream of theirs.

Now, we have this: pic.twitter.com/lN2HpRnptb

— John LeFevre (@JohnLeFevre) April 20, 2025

THE NEW SPACE RACE: NRO reaches milestone with over 200 satellites deployed in two years.

The NROL-145 mission lifted off Sunday on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 8:29 a.m. Eastern. This marked SpaceX’s 10th launch of satellites for the NRO’s proliferated architecture, which includes Starshield imaging satellites built by SpaceX and Northrop Grumman.

A proliferated architecture refers to the strategy of using numerous smaller satellites rather than fewer large ones, creating networks that are more resilient against potential threats and capable of providing more comprehensive coverage.

Impressive — both the cadence and NRO having enough imagination to take advantage of it.