In the Alabama State House, the familiar refrain surrounding public education is that the legislature has failed to ever “fully fund” it. The implication, of course, is that we cannot and should not expect positive outcomes from our public schools. This philosophy has been refuted by an enormous body of academic research and, last week, […]

Had the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the poorly-named Affordable Care Act in King v. Burwell, almost 500,000 Alabamians could have been spared the cost of the program’s individual mandate. Premiums for a healthy 21-year-old would have dropped by almost seven hundred dollars a year, and by more than two thousand dollars annually for a […]

Since 1992, public charter schools have offered families in other states a choice when it comes to which public school their children can attend. Charter schools are public schools that are publicly funded, tuition-free, and must enroll any student who wishes to attend as long as there is capacity for them. They are authorized through […]

With spiraling mandatory spending and reduced tax revenues threatening to send one or both of the state’s budgets into proration, the options of raising additional income by establishing a compact with the Poarch Creek Indians or legalizing a state-sponsored lottery are on the minds of Alabama’s legislators. Using the refrain of “let the people decide”–the […]

Half of the pregnancies among American women are unintended, and about four in 10 of these are terminated by abortion. From 1973 to 2011, nearly 53 million legal abortions were performed in America. Forty-five percent of all abortions since 1973 have been for women who were not married at the time of the procedure. According […]