Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

September 3, 2026

Free Buses, Dark Screens

On the Thursday before Labor Day, the principals of New York City’s public schools opened a memo from the Education Department. The free T-Mobile internet service built into 350,000 student Chromebooks would end that Sunday, August 31. Classes begin September 10. Four days of warning, ten days of scramble, and then the school year opens on machines that still power up, still glow, and can no longer reach anything. The laptop survives. The world inside it has been repossessed. During the pandemic the city handed out some 725,000 devices and never tracked how many still function; the Chromebook program was the sequel, the do-over, the one arriving with a plan attached. The plan lasted a year.

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May 13, 2014October 13, 2023

The Most Intelligent Alternative: In Defense of the Public Good

[Publisher’s Note: Boles Blogs author Howard Stein died on October 14, 2012 at 90 years of age. In an ongoing effort to preserve his legacy and memory, David Boles is sharing articles and preserving other works from his private Prairie Voice archive. The following article was likely written by Dr. Stein in the early 1980’s — and his point still rings true, and still bites us with a bitter hardness of the flat truth — three decades later.]

Public education in the minds of the parents, schoolboards, teachers, and local politicians seems to have as its purpose either the preparing of the young for higher education (preferably private education), or the preparing of the young for a variety of jobs and trades.