On Chicago’s West Side, Frederick Douglass Academy High School sits in a building designed for about 1,000 students. According to a June 2025 ProPublica and Chalkbeat investigation, Douglass had 27 employees for 28 students. Douglass is the extreme case, but the gap between building space and students runs across Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the nation’s fourth-largest district. On Nov. 3,...
September 27, 2026
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New York’s Sports Betting Windfall: $5.1 Billion in Losses, and Who Paid Them
New York’s mobile sports betting tax is usually reported as a win for the state and its schools. Two numbers rarely appear alongside it: what bettors lost to produce that revenue, and whether schools actually receive more money because of it. The first can be calculated directly from the tax rate. For the widely cited $2.6 billion in tax revenue,...
Two Standards, One Border: The Vaccine Mandates That Stopped at the Rio Grande and at the Sanctuary State Line
For years, federal and state governments made jobs, military service, hospital work and school enrollment depend on vaccination. Those standards were never applied at the same strength to people entering between ports of entry, or to the jurisdictions that shelter them. Measles is now at a 35-year high, largely for reasons unrelated to the border. In the fall of 2021,...
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Chicago’s First Elected School Board Will Inherit Underused Buildings and a Budget It Can’t Yet Pay For
On Chicago’s West Side, Frederick Douglass Academy High School sits in a building designed for about 1,000 students. According to...
New York’s Sports Betting Windfall: $5.1 Billion in Losses, and Who Paid Them
New York’s mobile sports betting tax is usually reported as a win for the state and its schools. Two numbers...
Two Standards, One Border: The Vaccine Mandates That Stopped at the Rio Grande and at the Sanctuary State Line
For years, federal and state governments made jobs, military service, hospital work and school enrollment depend on vaccination. Those standards...
Rate Bets That Settle Like Futures and the Three Different Regulators Watching Them
Intro On Sept. 16, the Federal Open Market Committee raised its policy rate a quarter point. The decision, approved unanimously 12-0,...
The Navatek File: What’s Proven, What’s Alleged and What’s Unresolved in the Susan Collins Report
Intro A defense contractor’s former CEO is in federal prison for illegal campaign contributions to Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). A...
A Third of the U.S. Surrogacy Market Is Foreign. Almost Nothing Above It Is Federal.
The McKenna West case took four courts in three states to reach an unfinished answer, and every party in it...
Sued for Refusing an Abortion: The Surrogacy Clause Courts Won’t Enforce
A California couple is seeking at least $100,000 in damages from the woman who carried their son, on the theory...
The Good Climate Numbers of 2026, and the Coverage They Didn’t Get
Four major indicators moved in a favorable direction this year. Each arrived with a documented explanation from the agency that...