Fred Bauer

Conservative approaches to education reform may in the next few years encounter a fateful fork in the road. One long tradition of conservative educational theory has stressed the value of vouchers as a way of decentralizing education and providing state subsidies directly to parents (rather than routed through local school...

Mickey Kaus, spurred on by other media speculation, wonders whether Mitt Romney will pivot on immigration now that the primary race seems to be drawing to a close.  Kaus fears/anticipates that Romney will switch from his pro-enforcement position to some kind of support for mass legalization for undocumented...

Here's a riddle that many Americans are familiar with: how are a house mortgage, credit card debt, and a car loan different from student loans?  For the latter, the federal government has gone the extra mile to protect lenders by making them non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.  This means that student loans,...

Last week, the Louisiana House passed HB974, which would reform teacher tenure in that state, with a bipartisan majority.  This measure radically weakens teacher tenure: in order to receive tenure, a teacher must be rated "highly effective" for five out of six years.  If this teacher...

During the week of Feb. 24, the New York City Education Department released data estimating the performance (based on a value-added testing evaluation metric) of over 12,000 teachers in the city's public schools.  The individual data sets were requested by journalists, and these requests were at first resisted by...

In 2010, John F. Cogan, R. Glenn Hubbard, and Daniel P. Kessler published in Forum for Health Economics & Policy a report ("The Effect of Massachusetts' Health Reform on Employer-Sponsored Insurance Premiums") on the effects of Governor Mitt Romney's 2006 health-care reform in Massachusetts.  Using data for average health-insurance premiums...

As Mitt Romney struggles in the polls against his Republican rivals (particularly Rick Santorum) for the GOP nomination, it may be time for him to focus more on industrial policy.  Romney has obviously done a lot of thinking on manufacturing policy, so he perhaps should put that thinking to use. ...

The recently released Congressional Budget Office report on the budget for the next ten years has what might at first seem like good news for the US fiscal order.  It estimates that, by 2015, the national deficit would fall to under 2% of the GDP, often hovering around 1%...

Mitt Romney has promised to make a forceful argument against Newt Gingrich in order to rehabilitate his campaign, which has recently hit a South Carolina-sized pothole.  Here are some thoughts on what Romney could do to revive his campaign.

Perhaps the most crucial thing that Romney can do is to...

There is no doubt that Gingrich's win in South Carolina is a significant victory for him.  The anti-Romney forces pulled out all the stops in the Palmetto State, and, if they couldn't stop the Mitt Train here, they wouldn't be able to stop it anywhere.  Nor should it be forgotten...

A persistent -- and, I think, powerful -- theme in conservatism is the emphasis upon limits and doubt about the wisdom of centralized actors.  One of the strongest pragmatic defenses of the free market is that centralized authority is not efficient enough and wise enough to direct the economic energies...

In the lead-up to the New Hampshire primary, here are a few key things to look for:

Romney's margin of victory: It's widely assumed that Romney is going to win New Hampshire tonight.  If Romney had come in a distant third in Iowa, he would probably need a New...