In the 2024–2025 school year, 60.2 percent of grades awarded at Harvard were A’s, according to the school’s Office of Undergraduate Education. For context, only a quarter of undergraduates received A’s two decades ago, reported The Harvard Crimson. 

Harvard students are undoubtedly bright, but should professors be giving them that many A’s? According to Harvard’s new grade inflation policy, no. On Wednesday, the school’s faculty voted 458–201 to put a 20 percent cap on A grades starting in the 2027–2028 school year, reports the Crimson. The plan, the outlet reports, would also allow for professors to give four additional A’s per course enrollment. 

A 2025 report attributed Harvard’s “out of whack” (as one faculty member described it) grading system to a few factors, including professors’ unwillingness to be perceived as “demanding” compared to other faculty and “increasingly litigious” students. 

The college also acknowledged that the pressure to inflate grades may come from the school itself, admitting that professors were increasingly expected to provide emotional support to students struggling with “difficult family situations,” “imposter syndrome,” and “stress.” As a result, “requirements were relaxed, and grades were raised, particularly in the year of remote instruction.” Many faculty members wanted to “reverse that shift,” but they reportedly feared whether the administration would “have their back.” Finally, the school shifted from assigning high-stakes exams to giving more, lower-stakes assignments, which many professors found difficult to assess in a “sufficiently differentiated way.”   

Harvard is not the only school struggling with grade inflation. In Yale’s recent report examining why Americans have lost trust in higher education, the school acknowledged that grade inflation was partially to blame. To “restore common grading norms,” the report recommended instituting “a 3.0 mean, or some other college-wide standard, so that letter grades can once again be used in a reliable and comparable way.” The report also recommended that Yale transcripts provide context for where students stand “relative to the rest of the class,” so students are not penalized for taking more demanding courses. Reason’s intern Ari Shtein, a current Yale student, has suggested this may be a more sensible, context-based approach to tackling grade inflation than instituting a grading cap.

Princeton recognized the grade inflation problem early, and in 2004, it adopted a grade cap policy. But it “abandoned the system a decade later after criticism that it disadvantaged students in competition for jobs and graduate school admission,” reported the Associated Press. Since then, the problem has resurfaced, with A-minuses, A’s, and A-pluses making up 66.7 percent of undergraduate grades in the 2024–2025 school year. 

Tackling grade inflation always seems to produce some controversy, understandably among students. When Harvard released its October report on grade inflation, several students told the Crimson the report “misrepresented their academic experience and would add pressure to an already demanding campus environment.”

In a statement released Wednesday, Harvard’s dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh said that grade inflation is a “complex and thorny issue.” Still, she encourages other institutions to confront similar issues with “the same level of rigor and courage.”

Harvard is taking a risk by curbing grade inflation, but it is one that others would need to adopt to restore meritocracy across the board. If other schools continue to dole out A’s like Oprah while others assess students more harshly, employers will continue to receive unclear and potentially misleading signals about students’ academic performance. And grades are not just for employers’ eyes; they are for the students to understand how well they have mastered a subject. If the purpose of a university is to pursue truth, students deserve honest feedback from their professors, even if that means receiving lower grades.

The post 60% of Harvard Grades Were A's in 2025. Now the School Is Fighting Grade Inflation. appeared first on Reason.com.

Farmer Alfalfa heads to town with an old truck full of corn. The truck is on the verge of collapse. But after selling his corn to Grocer Cat, Farmer Alfalfa uses the money to buy a new truck.

On another day, Alfalfa sells all kinds of produce and uses the money to make purchases from local merchants, including Stitches the tailor and Blacksmith Fox. Stitches, in turn, uses the money from Alfalfa to buy “an egg beater so that his family can make fudge,” while Fox buys more iron to use in his blacksmith business.

Welcome to the very busy—and pro-market—world of children’s book author and illustrator Richard Scarry. If you were a child in the latter half of the last century, there’s a good chance you read some of Scarry’s books. The man was prolific, completing more than 150 works from the 1950s to the 1980s (with many more Scarry books published after his death in 1994).

The Alfalfa stories come from Scarry’s What Do People Do All Day?, originally published in 1968. Set in Busytown, the book introduces readers to an array of professions—from carpenters and electricians to mail carriers, sailors, stay-at-home mothers, air traffic controllers, and many more.

Along the way, What Do People Do All Day? demystifies industrial processes that may be especially unfamiliar to young readers in the 21st century: how wheat growing in a field becomes the bread you can buy in a bakery, how cotton becomes clothing, how trees become paper, how coal becomes electricity. Some of the steps described by Scarry may now be a little outdated—but that means today’s readers get a history lesson too.

My sons, ages 2 and 4, are fascinated by chapters such as “The story of seeds and how they grow” and “Building a new road.” They are delighted by zany Busytown characters such as Gorilla Bananas (the friendly neighborhood fruit thief) and Lowly Worm (who pops up unexpectedly throughout the vignettes).

To me, the book’s most notable feature is its uncomplicated and nonchalant promotion of free market economics. Again and again in What Do People Do All Day?, Scarry illustrates how capitalism can benefit both buyer and seller. Busytown characters use their labor and skills to provide products and services their neighbors want and, in exchange, earn money that they use to fulfill their own families’ needs or invest in their own business activities.

What makes this especially great is that the book’s pro-market bent feels more incidental than ideological. This isn’t a book that hits readers over the head with a particular worldview. Rather, it implies a defense of free market capitalism just by describing the simple and symbiotic way that free markets work.

It may sound funny to say that realism lies at the heart of books full of anthropomorphic animals, several of whom drive pickle-shaped vehicles. But whimsy and realism go hand in hand in Busytown, in a way that just so happens to showcase some basic economic truths.

If they were ever known, Scarry’s personal political views seem to have been lost to history. But What Do People Do All Day? isn’t the only Scarry book that feels slyly oriented toward individualism.

In The Bunny Book, originally published in 1955, family members of a baby bunny take turns speculating about what the little boy will be when he grows up. “But the baby bunny did not want to be a doctor or a lifeguard or a farmer with a fine red tractor when he grew up,” it says. Instead, “the baby bunny will be a daddy rabbit” who plays games with his kids, reads them books, and tucks them into bed each night.

The Bunny Book—which was illustrated by Scarry and written by his wife, Patricia—never explicitly comments on this gender-role subversion. Unlike so many “message” books aimed at kids today, Scarry’s work lets readers make of the story what they will. It’s not even apparent if the Scarrys intended a message here at all, beyond the fact that this particular cute baby bunny boy’s ambition was to be a dad.

Over the years, Scarry got some flak for nonliberated portrayals of female characters in some of his early books. In later editions, he would add male characters in domestic roles, give the female animals more diverse jobs, and make other updates to keep up with changing mores. But the basic benefits of markets seem to have stood the test of time in Busytown.

The post The Happy Capitalism of Richard Scarry's Busytown appeared first on Reason.com.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! If you’re pregnant and about to give birth, maybe avoid hockey games—or else your child might be known for getting born during a 5–1 drubbing.

We’re coming to you a day early this week with reaction to President Donald Trump’s executive order that he thinks will fix college sports (it will not). We’ll start with that, move on to some sports TV news, and close with thoughts on the Masters ticket lottery. Giddy up.

But first, congratulations to Reason‘s own Phillip “The Ultimate Fris” Bader on winning our women’s bracket challenge, followed by Carl “Milwaukee’s Best” Peterson in second. Yours truly came in third—smart enough to pick UCLA to win, not chalky enough to beat Phillip and Carl.

Locker Room Links

• After bailing out the government authority that owns Progressive Field and Rocket Arena, Cleveland’s Democratic Mayor Justin Bibb is looking at raising fees on fans and businesses to fund stadium repairs.
• If you try to teach your underage child how to bet responsibly in New York State, you might get banned from concerts and casino restaurants.
• FanDuel Sports Network (formerly Bally Sports Network and Fox Sports Network) is coming to an end soon after the NBA and NHL seasons.
• “New Jersey cannot regulate Kalshi’s prediction market, US appeals court rules.”
• England’s Premier League is “voluntarily” (after a consultation with the government) banning gambling sponsors on jerseys starting next season. Now teams (usually smaller ones) are trying to find tens of millions of lost dollars.
• Augusta National Golf Club is famously extremely protective of its image—it has at least 67 registered or pending trademarks on various phrases and images.
• Volleyball on the rise: Two women’s volleyball matches are happening at Wrigley Field over Labor Day weekend.
• Elsewhere in Reason, our new cover story on presidential power: “Trump Realized He Can Just Do Things. Who Can Stop Him?“
• Go Blue.
  

  Michigan’s best players are a guy Mick Cronin buried, a guy who was a bust at North Carolina, a guy who came off the bench at Illinois and a guy who played at freaking UAB.

  Get outta here. https://t.co/cSUiYxV5un

  — Dan Wolken (@DanWolken) April 5, 2026

Can the President Regulate College Sports?

This certainly isn’t the first time Trump has tried to bring order to a chaotic situation and just ended up making it messier.

The president signed an executive order late on Friday attempting to overhaul how college sports function. The order says college athletes can only play five seasons, and they must happen during a five-year window (even though state judges are already saying otherwise). It also allows only one transfer (even though a 2024 antitrust legal settlement already said the NCAA can’t restrict transfers). Any schools that accept an athlete breaking these rules risk losing their federal funding. It also asks the attorney general (whoever that may be) to invalidate state laws that are in conflict with the order. The order takes effect on August 1.

Yet by the time you read this, the executive order may have already been challenged and stopped in federal courts.

You might think the president would be more focused on the big issues of the day, like inflation or the war he chose to start against Iran, but anyone who’s been a dedicated reader of this newsletter knows the president talks about fixing college sports almost every week.

Many people are frustrated with the constantly changing rules governing college sports, especially transfers and eligibility. A more proactive version of the NCAA may have taken the lead on these issues before the courts forced their hand. Instead, the NCAA has basically said there’s not much they can do, and asked Congress to figure out their mess. Now we have rules created by lawsuits that are ever changing and different by state.

These rules are, for good reason, not something the president can change with the swipe of a pen. But the Trump executive order has made the chaos even worse. Schools are stuck between a rock and a hard place: follow the president’s set of rules, or follow the rules that were set by various court decisions? They have to break someone’s rules, and that’s going to lead them straight back to court.

Apparently the real goal of Trump’s executive order is “to spur legislative action,” sources told The Athletic. But even rules passed by Congress are going to end up getting challenged on constitutional grounds. Attorneys’ billable hours remain undefeated.

The American college sports system is weird and unique. No other country spends as much time, energy, or money on collegiate sports. But Trump’s executive order is a great argument for getting federal government funding out of higher education altogether. “American universities spent $60 billion in federal money in 2023, more than 30 times what they spent in 1953, accounting for inflation,” according to calculations in The New York Times.

Schools wouldn’t have to worry about the president taking all that federal funding away over sports regulations if they didn’t take any federal funding.

Stopping Streaming in its Tracks

Did you know businesses don’t like competition, and often try to use the government to protect themselves? Fox Corp. and Sinclair Broadcasting certainly know it, since they’re trying to get the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to knock down league broadcasting deals with streamers.

“Fox Corp. and Sinclair Broadcasting last Friday submitted statements to the FCC that effectively characterized the streamers as a clear and present danger to the local TV business, with Fox labeling the digital interlopers as an ‘existential threat,'” Anthony Crupi writes for Sportico. Sinclair (which “operates or otherwise provides services to 185 TV stations,” as Crupi describes it) seems to feel entitled to the NFL. Their FCC letter said: “Sports programming is also critical to the financial model that supports local broadcast journalism. Without high-value live sports on broadcast television, local broadcast journalism will suffer.”

The context here is that CBS is renegotiating its deal with the NFL, and FOX is expected to be up next. The old-school broadcasters are worried the NFL might replace them if they get a better offer from a more cash-rich streamer like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or Apple TV. So now Fox and Sinclair are crying foul to the FCC, hoping for regulation or any kind of government pressure to stave off the streamers. The FCC’s recent request for comment on sports streaming was, as I wrote, “clearly a shot across the bow of sports leagues—a warning that the FCC may consider regulating games on streaming services in some way, or requiring leagues to broadcast every game on TV or the old-school regional sports networks.”

Threats to old business models are how a competitive economy should work. That’s what happens when businesses innovate and deliver new benefits for consumers. Fox and Sinclair aren’t entitled to NFL media rights any more than the Cowboys are entitled to a Super Bowl: You’ve got to be competitive and earn it. But instead of competing, Fox and Sinclair are hoping that whining to the FCC will get them some help. Since they’re both known for favorable coverage of Trump, they might just get it—and totally upend the landscape for streaming sports in the meantime.

The Masters Ticket Lottery Is Dumb

With apologies to soccer, golf is the real beautiful game—and this is the most beautiful week in golf, as the best golfers in the world head to Augusta, Georgia, for the Masters.

But unless you have some truly incredible luck or truly incredible wealth, you probably won’t be there in person. Augusta National distributes Masters tickets via lottery. If you win their lottery, you can get tickets for $140 each. Your odds of winning the Masters lottery in any given year are under 1 percent. If you don’t get through in the lottery, you better have $17,000 to spend on a premium hospitality ticket. Heading over to a ticket resale website is not a great option. As I wrote last year, “You can try to pay through the nose for a pass on the secondary market, but Augusta National has a strict ban on resale tickets and might not let you in—so you risk spending $2,500 on a resale ticket, plus hundreds more on flights and lodging, just to get turned away.”

Basically, as “Rick Golfs” points out below: “Now if you don’t win the lottery, you are screwed. Almost no chance of ever attending. Before you could at least bucket list it and do it once.”

What would you pay to attend the Masters?

The Masters has officially surpassed The Super Bowl and World Cup as the most expensive sports ticket.

$2,000 for practice round
$16,000 for Thursday
$8,000 for Sunday.

Why? The Masters has started cracking down on resellers, so… pic.twitter.com/GXMC2Z7Fcr

— Rick Golfs (@Top100Rick) April 5, 2026

Augusta National has every right to ban ticket resale, but their low prices are not ensuring the most dedicated people are getting in. Raising the price of a day pass, or just adding some extra steps to weed out more casual fans, would help. 

Replay of the Week

The fact that these all happened in a one-run game is mind-boggling. Although I wasn’t actually all that impressed by the first two, which were mostly just well-timed jumps—the last one shows absolutely no regard for his own body.

All THREE of Jo Adell's home run robberies from tonight …

Yes, you read that right ???? https://t.co/bc0Wb9i1Ii pic.twitter.com/axhyQFpLHD

— MLB (@MLB) April 5, 2026

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, the Houston Gamblers against the D.C. Defenders and the beer snake in the UFL.

The post Trump's College Sports Executive Order Adds Chaos to an Already Wild Legal War appeared first on Reason.com.

The Trump administration has decided that, for student loan programs at least, nursing programs are not “professional” degrees. While the decision simply means nursing students will be subject to a lower federal student loan borrowing cap, nursing organizations have reacted with horror, viewing it as an all-out assault on the nursing profession.

“At a time when healthcare in our country faces a historic nurse shortage and rising demands, limiting nurses’ access to funding for graduate education threatens the very foundation of patient care,” Jennifer Mensik Kennedy, president of the American Nurses Association, said in a statement last month. “We urge the Department of Education to recognize nursing as the essential profession it is and ensure access to loan programs that make advanced nursing education possible.”

However, the truth is much less outrageous. As part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Congress eliminated the Grad PLUS student loan program, which had previously allowed graduate students to borrow up to the cost of attending the program of their choice—in essence, allowing students to use the government as an endless funding supply. Over the nearly 20 years it was in place, the Grad PLUS program helped create a massive increase in graduate borrowing.

When Congress eliminated the Grad PLUS program, it replaced it with a new program that allows those in most graduate school programs to take out up to $100,000 in federal loans, with those in professional degree programs permitted to take on up to $200,000. Because the law was relatively vague about what constituted a professional degree for student loan purposes, a rulemaking committee settled on 11 programs, including medical, veterinary, dental, law, and clinical psychology degrees, for the higher loan cap.

“Classifying advanced nursing degrees as standard rather than professional is not a judgement on the profession’s inherent worth,” Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote last month. “There are many PhD programs, too, that are excluded from the professional loan limit—yet no one would argue that a professor with a PhD in economics is not a professional.” Cooper also pointed out that only advanced nursing degrees, like a Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP), could ever reasonably qualify as professional degrees under a sensible reading of the law. 

Excluding nursing degrees from a “professional” student loan designation isn’t a sign of the Trump administration’s war on nurses; it’s simply recognizing the fact that the vast majority of advanced nursing programs do not charge the exorbitant fees that are common in medical schools, law schools, and dentistry training programs. And, further, exclusion is probably a good thing for prospective nursing students, since the few schools that currently charge beyond the federal limit will be pushed to lower their prices.

Statements like Kennedy’s assume that graduate school tuition is essentially a fixed fact. Attempts to curb students’ ability to take on six-figure federal student loan debts are read as pushing poor students out of school, rather than pushing schools to lower their prices.

While derided as making graduate school less accessible, there’s already some early evidence that federal student loan caps are pushing schools to lower prices. In September, Santa Clara School of Law announced that it was effectively cutting tuition by $16,000, explicitly “to offset the impact of recent repeal of the Graduate Plus federal-loan program.” Caps on student borrowing mean that schools can no longer use the federal government as a bottomless piggy bank, with students suffering the consequences. 

The post The Trump Administration Says Nursing Isn't a Professional Degree. Here's Why That's a Good Thing. appeared first on Reason.com.

In England, the Hertfordshire Constabulary will pay Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine around $26,000 after wrongly arresting them for complaining about their daughter’s school in a private WhatsApp group. Six police officers arrested the couple at their home and detained them for 11 hours on suspicion of harassment and malicious communications. Their “offense” was questioning the school’s head teacher recruitment process. The school reported the parents to the police, claiming their messages upset staff. After a five-week investigation, police found insufficient evidence and took no further action.

The post Brickbat: Wrong Chat appeared first on Reason.com.

But Kennedy has a different concern. He recently told Fox & Friends that he’s worried the phones will case “neurological damage to kids” and “even cancer.”

The difference between Kennedy and me—well, there are many, but the key difference for our purposes today—is that I don’t mistake my suspicions about cellphones, socialization, and learning loss for demonstrated scientific facts.

Many other people have criticized Kennedy from a superficially similar angle: Like me, they think there are good reasons to keep cellphones out of classrooms, and like me, they don’t think Kennedy’s reasons are among them. But these critics argue that phones cause depression, anxiety, and other mental-health issues—and like Kennedy, they seem convinced that these concerns have been vigorously borne out by the scientific method.

Yet the claim that cellphones and social media cause mental health problems is also tenuous. RFK Jr. is wrong to be fearmongering about neurological damage and cancer. But it’s not much of an improvement to act as if Kennedy’s fearmongering is whacko while their fearmongering is just Science.

Evidence Could ‘Look Very Damning’ 

Kennedy told Fox that cellphones “produce electromagnetic radiation, which has been shown to do neurological damage to kids when it’s around them all day, and to cause cellular damage and even cancer.”

As is often the case with dicey information, Kennedy’s statements aren’t simply pulled from nowhere. Cellphones do emit radio frequency radiation. And while most research finds no association between cellphone usage and DNA damage or cancer, “there’s a lot of low-quality research in the literature that, if you wanted to collect all that and put it together, it would look very damning,” as Jerrold Bushberg, a radiation oncologist at the University of California, Davis, told NBC. “There are many activist groups out there that promote those studies and say that that’s the truth.”

The NBC piece goes on to point to a couple studies which could suggest a link between cellphones and cancer, but it also notes some reasons why these studies might not be reliable or might not apply to humans:

In a 2017 study, McCormick and his fellow researchers exposed rodents to radio frequency radiation and found a possible increased rate of certain tumors. However, findings in lab animals don’t necessarily apply to humans, given the many biological differences, and the studies contained limitations that prevented the researchers from drawing conclusions.

A decade earlier, a study looked at cellphone use among more than 5,000 people with brain tumors and found a possible increased risk of tumors in the 10% who used their phones the most. But the research relied on people’s memories about past phone use, which aren’t always reliable, so its results (like those of similar studies) are hard to interpret.

The National Cancer Institute, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency “have all said there’s not enough scientific evidence to associate cellphone use with cancer,” reports NBC. But it adds that “the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified radio frequency radiation as possibly carcinogenic, meaning it cannot rule out a causal link.”

“It is true that in 2011 the hyper-precautionary International Agency for Research on Cancer classified cellphones as a ‘possible carcinogen,'” noted Reason‘s Ron Bailey back in 2013:

But as a somewhat snarky response in the Journal of Carcinogenesis pointed out, the agency classifies coffee and pickles as possible carcinogens, too. Meanwhile, the National Cancer Institute flatly states that “to date there is no evidence from studies of cells, animals, or humans that radiofrequency energy can cause cancer.” A 2012 comprehensive review of studies in the journal Bioelectromagnetics found “no statistically significant increase in risk for adult brain or other head tumors from wireless phone use.”

(See also: “‘Anything Is a Possible Carcinogen’—More On Cell Phones.”)

And of course, if cellphones were causing things like brain tumors—one of the most frequent concerns about potential dangers—one would expect to see brain tumor rates rising dramatically. They are not.

The bottom line is that it may not be absolutely bonkers to posit a potential link between cellphones and certain physical health dangers. But Kennedy is overstating the evidence and ignoring evidence to the contrary.

And that’s just what those saying that cellphones cause teen mental-health problems are doing, too.

Screen Time ‘Proven’ Problematic?

In pushing back against Kennedy’s claims about cellphones and cancer, a lot of entities draw a contrast between his concerns and more respectable concerns about phones.

“Studies have found that excessive use of social media via smartphones can negatively impact teens’ mental health, elevating their risk of depression and anxiety,” NBC declares. “Scientists have also long understood that cellphone use in school can lead to poor academic performance, including lower grades.”

A community note under an X post sharing Kennedy’s statements says: “Despite widely circulated conspiracies and some tests on rats, there is no evidence in humans that cell phone radiation negatively impacts young people. Excessive screen time on the other hand have been proven to be problematic.”

Yes, there are a number of studies showing associations between cell phone usage and various psychological ailments or negative mental states. But these studies suffer both from methodological flaws and from people drawing flawed conclusions from them.

The biggest issue in all of this tends to be people assuming causation from correlation. Research will show a link between high social media use, phone use, or screen time more generally and some negative psychological attribute or maladaptive trait, and people—even some who pay lip service to the maxim that correlation is not causation—will be quick to cite this research as evidence that social media and cellphones are causing a mental-health epidemic.

Yet it’s possible—and plausible—that young people suffering from or predisposed to depression, anxiety, and other issues are more likely to retreat into TikTok videos, to compulsively check Instagram, to go down Reddit forum rabbit holes, and so on. That would make the screen time a symptom, not a cause.

After all, the majority of young people today have and use cellphones, but a much small percentage are prone to what can be termed problematic phone use. If cellphones were the craziness catalyst many claim they are, we should expect to see much higher numbers.

Of course, it’s possible that most young people can use cellphones and social media responsibly but for some subset of them, these things are very bad—perhaps even worse than whatever alternative escape mechanism these troubled teens might embrace in their absence. This, however, is not the claim people tend to make. And even if this is true, it does not follow that we should severely restrict phone or social media use for all young people simply because it may have negative effects on a small percentage of them.

Another issue is with the way these studies are conducted. Studies often ask young people to recall and rate their own social media and/or phone usage, which may not provide reliable answers. (NBC notes this flaw when describing the study showing an association between cellphones and cancer, but apparently it’s different somehow when kids are recalling how much time they spent on YouTube.)

The statistician Aaron Brown has laid out a lot more methodological flaws with various teen tech panic studies. Many of the papers Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, has cited in his arguments “contained coding errors, inappropriate statistics, and other issues,” Brown points out:

Most downloaded some data of little relevance—either cheap to generate, like surveying your sophomore psychology students, or data collected for a different purpose—and analyzed it with an off-the-shelf statistical approach.

Haidt cites 476 studies in his book that seem to represent an overwhelming case. But two-thirds of them were published before…the period that Haidt focuses on in the book. Only 22 of them have data on either heavy social media use or serious mental issues among adolescents, and none have data on both.

The bottom line: It’s not absolutely bonkers to posit a potential link between cellphones and certain mental-health dangers. But like Kennedy, proponents of restricting internet access and phones for young people tend to overstate the evidence on their side and ignore the evidence to against them.

A Case for Phones in Schools?

Kennedy and the phones-cause-depression crew and I may all agree that getting phones out of schools seems like a good idea.

But do you know who does not agree with us? A lot of parents. According to a survey conducted last year by the National Parents Union, most American parents want kids to have access to cellphones at schools. (Parents were also less down on phones than you might expect, with 46 percent saying phones had a “mostly” or “entirely” positive effect on their child’s life and 42 percent saying they had an equally positive and negative effect.)

I have also heard from teachers who agree that teaching would be easier if no one class carried a phone, but who also point out that a zero-tolerance phone policy means teachers have to spend a lot of time policing phone use, and that this could be an even bigger disruption to learning than the phones are.

Perhaps the phones-in-schools issue isn’t quite as simple or clear cut as it can seem at first.

But one thing seems abundantly clear: School cellphone policies should not be set by the federal government. They probably shouldn’t even be set by the state. These are matters best left to individual schools and school districts.

Local authorities are best equipped to know how big of a problem phones in school really are among their particular student bodies and how local parents and teachers feel about the issue. They’re the ones most likely to know whether restricting phones in their schools is feasible, and the best way to implement any anti-phone policies. (Do students leave their phones in a central place? Are they allowed to use them in the hallways between class, or not at all?) And they’re the ones who know what resources schools can devote to restricting phone use.

There is no universal effect of phones on young people’s psychological health or emotional well-being. We shouldn’t expect there to be a one-size-fits-all approach to phones in schools.

More Sex & Tech News

• Continuing the trend of “anything I don’t like is an antitrust violation,” the Federal Communications Commission is threatening to block telecom and media mergers for companies that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

• The European Union’s executive body won’t stop attacking American tech companies, notes Reason‘s Jack Nicastro.

Today’s Image

The post Everyone Is Wrong About RFK Jr. and Cellphones appeared first on Reason.com.

It’s important we get that fact cleared up first because both sky-is-falling sorts on the left and hail God-Emperor Trump types on the right have a vested interest in acting like an upcoming executive order—expected today—means curtains for the Department of Education.

What Trump’s executive order reportedly will do is tell Secretary of Education Linda McMahon to take “all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the States,” while ensuring “uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”

But ending the department and/or certain programs would take an act of Congress. And, as the Associated Press points out, Congress might not be so keen to go there:

The House considered an amendment to close the agency in 2023, but 60 Republicans joined Democrats in opposing it.

During Trump’s first term, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos sought to dramatically reduce the agency’s budget and asked Congress to bundle all K-12 funding into block grants that give states more flexibility in how they spend federal money. It was rejected, with pushback from some Republicans.

The Trump administration can make cuts, and has been—laying off about 1,300 staffers last week. So, significant reductions in Department of Education programs and/or bureaucracy are imminently possible. But that’s very different than abolishing the Education Department entirely.

But what if the Department of Education is abolished? What would that mean, in practical terms?

For K-12 students in U.S. public schools, it’s unclear how much difference it would make.

“Federal funding makes up a relatively small portion of public school budgets—roughly 14%,” according to the Associated Press. “The money often supports supplemental programs for vulnerable students, such as the McKinney-Vento program for homeless students or Title I for low-income schools.”

Some of these programs could be preserved even without a department of education. At McMahon’s confirmation hearing, she “said she would preserve core initiatives, including Title I money for low-income schools and Pell grants for low-income college students,” notes A.P.

Besides, the order itself is expected to mention “the effective and uninterrupted delivery” of an unspecified spate of “services, programs, and benefits.”

This should calm the nerves of some skeptics of federal education programs who still worry about drastic steps. But for those who truly want to get the federal government out of education decisions, it isn’t enough.

“It’s a good idea to cut the Department of Education,” but more importantly to “scrutinize federal funding of education at all levels, because we spent a lot of money on education before the [Department of Education] existed,” said Reason Editor at Large Nick Gillespie on this week’s The Reason Roundtable podcast.

Does Trump even want to get the federal government out of education? Even as he and other Republicans bash the department and sing the importance of leaving decisions up to state and local governments, Trump has been using the Education Department and threats to withhold federal funding to target college policies and programs with which the administration disagrees.

The Department of Education is investigating colleges over diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, pausing funding over a transgender woman competing on a women’s swim team, and financially punishing schools over pro-Palestinian protests.

This sort of thing isn’t unique to the Trump administration, of course. The specifics differ—for recent Democratic administrations, it was more about pushing more expansive notions of sex and gender, defining sexual misconduct in an expansive way, and using Title IX to push for campus administrators to adjudicate sexual assaults with little due process. But the through line is using the Department of Education to accomplish political or cultural goals not directly related to education at all.

Whatever you think about a particular administration’s goals, it surely isn’t ideal for presidential administrations to attempt to shape ideology on college campuses, or for the federal government to have this much power over campus affairs around the country.

The Department of Education is the “poster child” for having Washington issue “one size fits all diktats” for things that should be handled at a more local level, said Reason Editor at Large Matt Welch on The Reason Roundtable this week. Decentralizing education should be the goal, added Welch. But Trump “wants to influence behavior,” and this makes Welch skeptical that Trump will decentralize education in ways that diminish his ability to have this control.

It’s a step? To the extent that Trump’s order sparks a serious discussion about the federal government’s role in education, it could be a good thing.

Because the Department of Education has been around for several decades (it was created in 1979), many Americans assume it’s always been around or imagine that K-12 public schools couldn’t function without it these days, at least. But most of what the department does has nothing to do with running or funding these schools. And most of what it does in other realms—dreaming up new ways to enforce Title IX, imposing ideological agendas of whoever is in power, managing the federal student loan program that has contributed to skyrocketing tuition costs—we could do without.

Trump can’t kick transgender service members out of the military, a federal judge has ruled. The suit, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, concerns Trump’s January 27 executive order on “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.” The order declared—sans evidence—that transgender people “cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service” as their gender identity “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” Under its dictates, openly transgender individuals would be barred from military service.

“The President has the power—indeed the obligation—to ensure military readiness,” wrote Judge Ana C. Reyes in a March 18 opinion. “At times, however, leaders have used concern for military readiness to deny marginalized persons the privilege of serving.”

A group of transgender plaintiffs challenged the executive order and the Department of Defense order that resulted from it. Together, these plaintiffs “have provided over 130 years of military service” and “earned more than 80 commendations,” said Reyes, going on to note the lack of evidence, analysis, or data provided by the Trump administration to declare transgender people unfit to serve. Here’s the money paragraph from the decision:

Transgender persons have served openly since 2021, but Defendants have not analyzed their service. That is unfortunate. Plaintiffs’ service records alone are Exhibit A for the proposition that transgender persons can have the warrior ethos, physical and mental health, selflessness, honor, integrity, and discipline to ensure military excellence. Defendants agree. They agree that Plaintiffs are mentally and physically fit to serve, have “served honorably,” and “have satisfied the rigorous standards” demanded of them. Plaintiffs, they acknowledge, have “made America safer.” So why discharge them and other decorated soldiers? Crickets from Defendants on this key question.

The judge granted a preliminary injunction against the administration’s new policy regarding transgender people in the military.

Scenes from Ohio: An education bill is sparking protests in the state’s capital. Senate Bill 1, also known as the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, takes aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs at public institutions of higher education and “seeks to prevent faculty from striking and to simplify the process of firing poorly performing tenured professors,” WSYX reports. “While the bill proceeded through the House, a large group of protesters gathered outside the statehouse to denounce it.”

S.B. 1 would also make public colleges post course syllabuses and more information about each course instructor, “declare that it will not endorse or oppose, as an institution, any controversial belief or policy (with an exception for endorsing “the congress of the
United States when it establishes a state of armed hostility against a foreign power”), and “post prominently on its web site a complete list of all speaker fees, honoraria, and other emoluments in excess of five hundred dollars for events that are sponsored by the state institution.”

The bill has now passed the House and the Senate.

Quick Hits

• The Trump administration won’t provide a federal judge with details about flights carrying deported Venezuelan immigrants, saying that providing the information would infringe on executive authority.
• Israeli ground forces have seized part of the Gaza corridor, in what The New York Times is calling “the most significant ground operation since the collapse of the cease-fire with Hamas.” It follows “wide-scale Israeli aerial bombardment in Gaza that began early on Tuesday morning, ending the fragile truce between Israel and Hamas that had held since mid-January.”
• Why was a Brown University surgeon deported to Lebanon?
• A new bill in Arkansas provides more evidence that conservatives’ crusade against transgender people is going to wind up in more gender policing for everyone.
• Why are states suddenly exonerating long-dead “witches”?
• Is this…federal prosecutors admitting they were wrong about something?
• “The Social Security numbers and other private information of more than 200 former congressional staffers and others were made public Tuesday in the unredacted files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” The Washington Post has discovered.
• How Biden enabled Trump’s censorship.

The post Bad Education appeared first on Reason.com.

The school did this “all without telling January,” Trump reiterated, before touting his administration’s efforts to make public schools less friendly to “transgender ideology.”

Trump immediately pivoted to talking about how he would help pass a bill to criminalize “sex changes on children,” blurring the lines between mild actions like calling students by their preferred pronouns and major medical interventions of the sort that are exceedingly rare.

But that’s not the only way that Trump’s comments were misleading.

In Trump’s telling, the school was both pushing gender nonconformity on the Littlejohn’s child and doing so without the parents’ knowledge. But emails obtained by media outlets years ago suggest that not only did the parents know this was going on, it was they who first broached the subject with the school and suggested that staff follow their child’s lead on name and pronouns.

Emails Tell a Different Story

The reason that some outlets discovered this years ago is because last night’s Trump speech wasn’t the first time the Littlejohns have been used by politicians pushing an intolerant agenda. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis “repeatedly pointed to the [Littlejohn family] to explain the need for a controversial new law, dubbed by critics the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, that bans schools from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity,” CNN reported in April 2022.

“We had a mother from Leon County, [Florida,] and her daughter was going to school and some people in the school had decided that the daughter was really a boy and not a girl. So they changed the girl’s name to a boy’s name, had her dress like a boy and on doing all this stuff, without telling the mother or getting consent from the mother,” DeSantis reportedly said at a news conference back then, referring to the Littlejohns. “First of all, they shouldn’t be doing that at all. But to do these things behind the parents’ back and to say that the parents should be shut out. That is wrong.”

Like Trump’s story last night, DeSantis’ tale suggested that the school was for some reason grooming this child to be transgender and doing so without any conversations with the parents.

But emails obtained by the Tallahassee Democrat in response to a public records request, and later obtained by CNN, show that January Littlejohn wrote the school in 2020 to announce that her child wanted to use different pronouns and go by a gender-ambiguous nickname.

“This has been an incredibly difficult situation for our family and her father and I are trying to be as supportive as we can. She is currently identifying as non-binary,” January Littlejohn wrote to a teacher at her child’s school in August 2020, per CNN. “She would like to go by the new name [redacted] and prefers the pronouns they/them. We have not changed her name at home yet, but I told her if she wants to go by the name [redacted] with her teachers, I won’t stop her.”

The teacher asked if this information should be shared with other teachers. Littlejohn reportedly responded: “Whatever you think is best or [redacted] can handle it herself.”

In another email, Littlejohn told the teacher “I sincerely appreciate your support. I’m going to let her take the lead on this,” according to CNN.

These do not sound like the words of someone who was kept in the dark about her child’s social transitioning at school. Nor do these emails seem to suggest that the school was pushing unwanted “gender ideology” on the child.

The Littlejohns’ Lawsuit Dismissed

The emails that January Littlejohn exchanged with her child’s teacher do not tell the whole story, mind you.

The Littlejohn family would eventually sue the school board, superintendent, and assistant superintendent of Leon County Schools, the district in which their child was enrolled, and a counselor and assistant principal at Deerlake Middle School, where the child attended school. The Littlejohns objected to the school’s development of a Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Student Support Plan—indicating the child’s preferred name, pronouns, bathroom, and sleeping arrangements on school trips—and its decision not to immediately tell them about it when the child requested they not be told.

“Littlejohn claims that when she asked the school for more information, the school denied her access to meetings and information and tried to conceal information regarding her child,” according to CNN.

But whatever did or did not happen regarding this plan, the story still bears little resemblance to the one told by DeSantis, in which it was the school who “decided” the child was not a girl and “had her dress like a boy.” Or to the story told by Trump, in which the Littlejohn parents were “deceive[d]” by the school and totally ignorant of anything going on.

According to the school district, the child’s situation was “handled together in partnership with clear communication” with the Littlejohn parents. “The family clearly instructed the school staff via email to allow their child to ‘take the lead on this’ and to do ‘whatever you think is the best,'” Chris Petley, Leon County Schools communications coordinator, told CNN in 2022.

In December 2022, a federal judge dismissed the Littlejohns’ lawsuit.

“At its core, this is a case where Defendants allegedly (i) let [the child, going in the suit by A.G.] voluntarily chose a preferred name and pronouns that they knew [the Littlejohn parents] didn’t agree with, (ii) didn’t seek [the Littlejohn parents] input regarding A.G.’s name choice, pronoun choice, or other elements of A.G.’s Support Plan, (iii) didn’t notify [the Littlejohn parents] about the … Support Plan because they knew [the parents] would not agree with A.G.’s decision, and (iv) dragged their feet in disclosing the … Support Plan to the [parents],” wrote Mark Eaton Walker, chief judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida, in his decision. “This is not a case where Plaintiffs allege that their child was singled out by Deerlake staff and forced to adopt a support plan against their child’s will. Nor is this a case where Plaintiffs allege that Deerlake staff publicly accused Plaintiffs of abusing their child or tried to cause Plaintiffs to lose custody of their child. This is also not a case where Deerlake staff were forewarned that a child’s support plan was exacerbating the child’s mental health concerns, but they pursued it regardless of such warning, resulting in the child’s self-harm or suicide.”

Even “accepting all of [the Littlejohns’] allegations as true and construing them in a light most favorable to [them], Plaintiffs do not state a substantive due process claim,” Judge Walker concluded.

The Littlejohns have since appealed, and that case is pending.

Whose Parental Rights?

When and how schools should notify parents in situations like this is not always a clear-cut issue.

To me, it seems logical that schools would discuss things like preferred-pronoun changes and bathroom selection with the parents of younger students but stop automatically doing so with older students, such as those in high school and junior high. It also seems reasonable that exceptions might be made—in either direction—depending on particular circumstances.

The issue of field trip sleeping arrangements for older students gets a little trickier, and probably also lends itself to situational rather than one-size-fits-all decision making with regard to whether parents must be apprised.

Reasonable people might have different viewpoints here—but that’s not really what Republicans are arguing about.

The recent political focus on transgender and nonbinary students and their parents isn’t simply about field-trip sleeping arrangements, or giving parents a heads-up on bathroom choices. It isn’t merely about keeping parents informed or debating the finer points of notification policies.

Conservative officials, in the Trump administration and state governments, keep angling to forbid schools from accepting transgender and nonbinary students’ preferred identities—sometimes unless their parents give the school express permission, and sometimes not even then. They’ve been pushing to reject accommodations and acknowledgment for students who identify as nonbinary. Some states are passing laws to ban schools from letting students use bathrooms that don’t correspond to the sex they were born, even when their parents approve.

Republicans say this is about parental rights…but apparently that doesn’t include the rights of parents who support their children who identify as trans or nonbinary. It starts to seem a lot less about actually protecting parental choice and family privacy and more about imposing a specific “gender ideology” of their own on everyone.

More Sex & Tech News

• The Montana “abortion trafficking” bill that I covered in last week’s newsletter was rejected by both Democratic and Republican lawmakers on the state’s House Judiciary Committee. Eight Democratic and eight Republican committee members voted against the bill, with just four Republicans voting in favor.

• The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is dropping its lawsuit against peer-to-peer payment platform Zelle.

• Does Gen Z nostalgia for the late ’00s and early 2010s come down to the differences in how we used phones then?

• The U.K. Home Office ordered Apple to build a backdoor to its encrypted Advanced Data Protection cloud storage service. Apple responded by saying U.K. residents could no longer access that service. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard seems to side with Apple, telling members of Congress that requiring backdoor access “would be a clear and egregious violation of Americans’ privacy and civil liberties.”

• At least nine states are now considering legislation to force age-verification mandates on app stores.

• After a damning Department of Justice investigation into allegations against members of Massachusetts’ Worcester Police Department, WPD officers will only be allowed to conduct prostitution stings “without having a subject of an investigation enter a vehicle,” Massachusetts Live reports.

Today’s Image

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If your child has a school-issued device, there’s a good chance that school administrators are using it to spy on them. According to a new investigation from The New York Times, almost half of American schoolchildren are subject to surveillance on their school devices designed to track whether they’re at risk for self-harm or suicide.

Federal law requires schools to use content filters on the devices they give kids. However, many popular educational tech companies also offer AI-boosted tools that look at what students are typing and send school administrators alerts if a student displays warning signs of self-harm. 

Advocates of these programs say they can help schools identify and get help to struggling students. However, students, administrators, and parents at one Missouri school interviewed by Times reporter Ellen Barry said that false alarms were common. Students told Barry about being “flagged for text messages about hunting trips, historical research into the Ku Klux Klan and, in one case, the Oscar Wilde play ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.'” One administrator reported that he arrived at work one day to find 26 alerts stemming from students researching suicide for a class.

Sometimes these false alarms can have severe consequences. One 16-year-old girl and her family said they were woken up in the middle of the night by police officers after administrators were alerted by a poem the girl had written years before. The girl was no danger to herself but was shaken by the experience.

“There were people with guns coming to our house in the middle of the night,” the girl’s father told Barry. “It’s not like they sent a social worker.”

It’s easy to see how this technology can foster a better-safe-than-sorry mindset among administrators. “The girl’s mother said she told the school about the visit, and a guidance counselor explained that she felt she had no choice but to call police,” Barry writes. “If she had failed to act, and the girl had harmed herself, she could not have forgiven herself.”

Even if students and parents find the surveillance tech invasive, it’s easy to see how administrators fear being blamed if a student commits suicide after the surveillance tech is removed. “It is hard to switch it off,” even during summer break, Talmage Clubbs, the Missouri school district’s director of counseling services told Barry. “I mean, the consequences of switching it off is that somebody can die.” Clubbs further told Barry that sorting through and responding to the alerts occupied about a quarter of his work hours, and about a third of other counselors’ time.

While it’s understandable to want to do everything possible to prevent suicide and self-harm among high school students, there isn’t much evidence that spying on them through their laptops helps—or that it’s worth invading student privacy.

The post Does Spying on Laptops Really Prevent High School Suicides? appeared first on Reason.com.

Last year, student-led protests over the Israel-Hamas war broke out at dozens of college campuses. With the new school year well underway, student demonstrations have begun again in earnest.

While many students expressed their opposition to the war in Gaza through peaceful means, some protests devolved into property destruction, trespassing, and even violence on a handful of college campuses, including at some of America’s most elite universities. Many students erected large encampments claiming public space on campuses—a form of protest that colleges are generally free to limit under reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), attempts to deplatform speakers were surging by this April. Of the 67 attempts it had recorded from January to mid-April, 73 percent involved controversy surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So how did a year of raucous—and occasionally disruptive and destructive—protest affect student opinions on free speech?

In September, FIRE released its fourth annual College Free Speech Rankings. The survey, which polled almost 60,000 undergraduates from more than 250 colleges, asked students a wide range of questions about free speech and the campus climate affecting it. The survey—as in past years—also asked questions about whether they would find it acceptable for students to engage in various kinds of disruptive protests of a hypothetical controversial speaker on campus.

About 37 percent of respondents agreed it was “sometimes” or “always” acceptable for students to shout down a campus speaker; last year, only 31 percent said the same. In all, fewer than one in three students said that it would “never” be acceptable to shout down a speaker.

Less than half of all students said it was “never” acceptable to protest by blocking other students from attending a controversial speech—a decline from last year’s 55 percent. Nearly one in three said they would support violence to stop a campus speech in at least some circumstances. In 2023, only 27 percent of students said the same.

These results don’t necessarily show the percentage of students who would engage in these activities themselves—rather, they reveal the proportion of students who might condone actions from other students that restrict speech.

The rising support for disruptive and even violent tactics among college students is a disturbing shift. Increased protests over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict likely accelerated this trend, but the data show that students’ tolerance for censorship and obstruction has been growing for some time. This year, only 48 percent of students said it was never acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech. In 2022, upwards of 62 percent of students said as much.

While the latest Israel-Hamas war is drawing more attention to this trend, the seeds of the erosion of respect for open discourse were clearly planted before October 7, 2023.

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