Most children in America have it pretty good in the summer: they get to swim in lakes, bike around aimlessly, run a lemonade stand, or play on their Nintendo DS.  While doing these activities, most are even more excited about what they don’t have to do: go to school.  The nine months on, three months off calendar is deeply ingrained in American culture, but much like the manual lawn mower or the GameBoy Color, it is a relic of an earlier, agrarian age in which children needed the summer months off to help on their family’s fields. Our population has…

The gender wage gap garners significant attention, both as an economic indicator of equality in the workplace and as a sparkplug for the gender equality movement more generally. Earlier this year, the White House Council on Women and Girls reported that women still make just 75 cents for every dollar a man earns. This statistic is calculated by comparing average earnings of full-time (at least 35 hours a week) year-round workers in the same occupation. As part of his senior thesis, “Incorporating household production into measurements of intertemporal elasticity of substitution of labor supply,” recent UW graduate Desmond Chan analyzes…

In a horrific car crash on June 25th, 2011, 27-year-old Jesse Herman hit and killed a 23-yearold female, injuring four others in the process. After the accident, he was found to have 0.27 percent blood alcohol content (BAC), over three times the legal limit. This was not his first offense; he had been convicted of drunken driving before, along with bail jumping and battery.

This brief story is one of many that advocacy groups and investigative journalists have used to call Wisconsin’s relatively lax policies on drunken driving into question. Wisconsin is one of the few states that will not…

In 2009, Benjamin Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth, was driving his children to school when he was forced to take account of a glaring inequality. His success in film had enabled him to provide world-class education for his children, yet he drove past public schools in deplorable condition on the way to his children’s elite private school. He knew that many of the students in the dilapidated buildings he passed would not graduate high school, and out of those that did, few would make it to college.

When Waiting for Superman—Guggenheim’s documentary on the languishing underbelly of America’s education…

The debate on school reform has raged back and forth for decades, with each new wave offering a different mantra for change. Some pushed choice, others the value of tests and various objective measures of performance, still others smaller classes, more rigorous teacher certification processes, and myriad other alterations. One assumption, though, has remained relatively constant: that private schools exert competitive pressure on public schools to improve teaching quality and student outcomes . This assumption seems reasonable, especially if families are given a choice of schools. A family with their child’s best interests at heart, so the thinking goes, will…

Sidney Crosby, captain of the Pittsburgh Penguins and considered one of the best centers in the National Hockey League, is no stranger to all-star treatment. When the Penguins officially opened the CONSOL Energy Center, the team’s $321 million dollar new complex, Crosby, along with Penguins owner Mario Lemieux, was the first person to skate on its virgin ice. Crosby is also handsomely compensated, earning roughly $9 million dollars a year. But his story is comparatively rare—Ryan Getzlaf, one of Crosby’s most talented contemporaries, makes $4 million dollars less playing the same position for the Anaheim Ducks. Median wages in the…