Charters held accountable, who’d work for Prez Trump II and other commentary

Education beat: Charters Held Accountable

The shutdown of Buffalo Collegiate, a charter school “that failed to meet student achievement standards,” is “a timely reminder of the high level of accountability New York demands from its charter schools,” cheers the Empire Center’s Emily D’Vertola. Indeed, “the success of New York’s charter-school system has come in part from closing low-performing schools and allowing new ones to open.” The closure puts the lie to claims from teachers unions and other opponents of charter schools “that they operate ‘without accountability.’ ” Fact is, “charter schools are being held to the sort of high standard to which all schools should be.”

From the right: Killing LA Schools

Classes are canceled at LA schools as teachers walk off the job in solidarity with “educational support workers such as bus drivers and teachers’ assistants” who are “unhappy with an offer of a mere 23% pay increase,” laments the Washington Examiner editorial board. “As they showed throughout the COVID pandemic by pressing school districts to stay closed, teachers unions have no solidarity with the children they are supposed to educate.” Parents have answered with their feet, as the LA district “has lost 11% of its student population since COVID began,” while Catholic school enrollment “is up 4.6%” and charter enrollment level “after increasing by 27% over the last decade.” Overall, “middle-class Californians are pulling their children out of public schools and moving to Florida, Utah, and Idaho,” since leaving is “better than living under captive state and local governments run by people who constantly demand more while doing less.”

Conservative: Who’d Work for Prez Trump II?

“Was Donald Trump ever really the president of the United States?” ponders National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty. To run the executive branch, “a new president basically has to hire 5,000 people in a period of a few months. This is doubly true for a Republican who has to deal with a civil service that more naturally inclines to the other side.” Yet “Trump could barely keep enough people on staff to have a functioning cabinet and White House. His orders and wishes — withdrawing from Syria, banning transgenderism in the military — were regularly reversed, ignored, or disobeyed.” Now his hiring pool’s smaller still, boosting “the chance of Trump’s second administration beginning the way his first one ended: with the president isolated in the White House, taking meetings with marginal figures who come bearing bad advice.”

Eye on energy: Joe’s EV Gift to China

Biden’s EPA has “proposed a change to the Renewable Fuel Standard” that will make fuel more expensive, notes Derrick Morgan at The Washington Times, by letting electric-vehicle makers collect off a program that supposedly promotes renewable fuels, mainly “biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel.” That’s though the electricity for EVs rarely comes from renewable sources. And “the ultimate beneficiary of the forced switch to EVs is going to be China, which dominates the EV supply chain.” The “United States has become a major exporter of liquid fuels,” but is “about to throw it all away and put all our transportation eggs in a basket made in China.”

Economy watch: Behind Biden’s Bank Bailout

“JPMorgan, Citibank and other giants provided $30 billion in deposits to shore up First Republic Bank,” but if the bank still were to fail, would the $250,000 limit on insured deposits apply to these “unsympathetic lenders?” asks The Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. “The politics would be harrowing.” In deciding to bail out Silicon Valley Bank’s uninsured depositors, President Biden “got a lot of help” from those “uninsured depositors, including tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who worked the phones and social media” and “skew heavily Democratic.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, “whose personal business and nonprofit ties with Silicon Valley Bank were extensive,” lobbied for the bailout. Others “might have made the same better-safe-than-sorry decision” as Biden, but most “wouldn’t have made the decisions two years earlier that helped create the problem” with policies that sent inflation and interest rates soaring.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board