Evening Wrap

Most modern-day parents are familiar with school-ranking websites, where you enter your address and then proceed to obsess over the performance metrics for your child’s school. Those rankings are powerful (they’re why houses are astronomically expensive on one street but not the next), which is dumb, because they’re not actually the best measure of a school’s performance. Most of them rely heavily on standardized test scores, which can be a useful measuring tool — but usually not at the expense of considering every other aspect of your local public education system. 

A Norfolk Southern train skittered off the tracks Saturday in eastern Ohio, marking the rail line’s second major derailment in the state in just over a month. The train was not carrying hazardous materials and no one was injured, officials said. But the incident still renewed questions about rail safety that surfaced after a Feb. 3 derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that forced thousands of people to evacuate amid a massive chemical spill.

Let’s start with a rare display of political competence out of Arizona, where Attorney General Kris Mayes announced plans to revamp the state’s Election Integrity Unit, shifting its focus from trying to confirm (bogus) claims of election fraud to protecting voter rights and prosecuting threats against election officials. Among the first tasks for the now-appropriately named division: Investigating a slate of fake electors who attempted to give Arizona’s electoral votes to the guy who did not win them, the Arizona Mirror reported.

This isn’t entirely new — Republicans have been chipping away at public education since at least the 1990s — but it’s never been such a big focus. And if you knew nothing about American politics, that hyperfocus might seem logical. Because public education always needs more attention. Schools are underfunded, particularly in areas with high concentrations of Black and Latino students. Districts across the country are struggling to recruit and retain teachers, a long-time problem that’s been exacerbated by low pay, poor morale, increased pressure and health and safety concerns. The problems are persistent and complex — exactly the type of thing you’d want your elected representatives to prioritize.

Republican lawmakers have had a productive year so far, if you measure productivity in terms of pointless-but-prejudiced policy proposals. Nationwide, they’re up to 351 anti-LGBTQ+ bills — the most ever introduced in a single year, let alone two months. Most of them use similar language to suggest “solutions” for things that are not problems, like drag performances or transgender people using the bathroom. Together, the proposals constitute a massive expansion of government oversight into what are traditionally parental and family decisions, which is an … interesting platform for the self-proclaimed party of small government and parental rights. A contradictory set of priorities, you might say.

The most important of the important work took place last week at a legislative hearing in Arizona, where a QAnon loyalist gave a 40-minute presentation accusing dozens of elected officials of taking bribes from a Mexican drug cartel. Republican leaders denounced the allegations but shirked responsibility for allowing the testimony, which they claimed was not included in materials provided to lawmakers before the meeting, per the Arizona Mirror.

Let’s dive right in with a story about kratom, an energy-boosting herbal extract that would be legalized in Indiana under a bill approved last week by House lawmakers. The plant, native to southeast Asia, was legal in the Hoosier state until 2014, when lawmakers prohibited it in anticipation of a federal ban that never materialized, per the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

The system is a dysfunctional mess on a good day, and that’s before you factor in the various bureaucratic failings that further gum up the machine. (In other words, it is never really a good day.) Courts across the country are struggling to maintain staffing levels amid a nationwide shortage of state and local government employees. In some cases, those vacancies are limited to staff positions like court reporters and probation officers, which can usually be addressed by offering overtime pay and hiring bonuses. But the situation gets much dicier when the empty seat is on the bench itself.

I am often in the position lately of not knowing how to open the newsletter, even though I have a boatload of news to discuss. The stories are fresh, but I still feel like I’m repeating myself, because the topics stay the same — most days, we’re talking about abortion, or school vouchers, or attacks on LGBTQ+ rights. And some days, we’re talking about all three.

At a glance, the GOP’s education agenda can seem overly broad. (Among other things, lawmakers would like to: Ban books, limit lessons about things that happened and people that exist, meddle in athletics, give (some) parents more rights and siphon public funding away from public schools.) It’s a long list of policy goals that might seem divergent, but it’s not difficult to find the common thread among them. One way or another, it’s all about politics.

Unless you’re a foodie, most of the food news you’ve read in the past year has probably focused on grocery-store sticker shock. (Remember when we could all afford eggs?) There’s good reason for that — on average, grocery store prices increased by 11.8% from December 2021 to December 2022, and they’re expected to keep climbing — but it’s only half the story. The other half is hidden in kitchens across the country, where struggling families are about to lose the life raft that’s kept their heads above water since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With all of the drama over the fate of democracy and high profile battles in the Culture Wars, it’s easy to forget that the issue that hits closest to home for many, maybe most, people is how to access and pay for health care. And today, that’s what our newsrooms seem to be talking about most.