American Students are Stuck in Neutral

A Bad Bet: Why Sports-Gambling Tax Revenue Disappoints

By Charles Fain Lehman | Manhattan Institute | Photo: krisanapong detraphiphat/Moment via Getty Images

The rapid expansion of sports gambling following the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision striking down a federal ban has fueled growing public support for tighter regulation. Yet many lawmakers remain reluctant to act because sports betting is widely viewed as a valuable source of state revenue. In a new Manhattan Institute report, Charles Fain Lehman argues that this fiscal rationale has been greatly overstated.

While sports betting generates billions of dollars in wagers, it generates only about 0.2% of state tax revenue on average. Moreover, much of that revenue may simply be shifted from other sources, such as state lotteries, rather than representing new money for state budgets.

Meanwhile, a growing body of research links legalization to higher rates of bankruptcy, debt delinquency, problem gambling, child maltreatment, and crime. Lehman argues that even modest public costs associated with these harms can outweigh sports gambling’s limited fiscal benefits. Policymakers, he concludes, should prioritize public health and welfare over revenue when crafting gambling policy.

Teenage Literacy Is As Bad As It Was In The 1970s. What’s Going On?

By Jennifer Weber | Daily Wire | Photo by Lourdes Balduque/Getty Images

“For years, national averages hid a widening divide. The strongest students held their ground, while the weakest fell further behind. Among 13-year-olds, the gap between the highest and lowest quarter of students exceeds 50 points across both reading and math. That gap had been widening well before the pandemic. ...

“This began back in 2012, when the Obama administration began allowing states to opt out of No Child Left Behind. The law was unpopular and not perfect, but it forced schools to report results separately for poor, black, and Hispanic students. And it made schools face consequences — including replacing staff, removing the principal, or having the state take over the school — when any group fell behind. The waivers ultimately removed those consequences for 40 states, though the reporting remained. Congress then made the retreat from accountability permanent in 2015, with broad support from both parties.

“No national assessment can prove that No Child Left Behind caused the gains of the 2000s or that its rollback caused the declines that followed. But the timing is hard to ignore. The largest gains came when schools were required to report results for their poorest students and be held accountable for them. The decline set in after that requirement was lifted, and the students it was meant to protect are the ones still furthest from recovery.”

When Schools Try to Cover Up Their Failures

By Jason L. Riley | The Wall Street Journal | Photo by Klaus Vedfelt/DigitalVision via Getty Images

“If you stare really hard—and maybe squint—at last week’s federal report on long-term K-12 education trends in the U.S., there is some good news. Math and reading scores among 9-year-olds have improved a little since 2022, and most of the gains were driven by struggling students. It’s a signal that those in the youngest cohort of test takers are recovering from the disastrous pandemic school closures.

“The good news pretty much ends there. Among 13-year-olds in nearly every demographic group, test scores in math and reading were flat. And most youngsters continue to lack proficiency in both subjects. Standardized tests have no shortage of detractors, but these evaluations have become more important in an era of grade inflation and meaningless graduation rates. ...

“Job prospects and earnings for people who lack rudimentary language and math skills can be severely limited. There are exceptions, but in general people with higher levels of education have higher incomes and a lower risk of unemployment. We talk about the earnings gap between high-school graduates and college graduates, yet many of today’s high-school grads function at or below a middle-school level of education. Eliminating standardized tests wouldn’t change that reality, and it would help policymakers and the education establishment avoid accountability.”

MI has partnered with the Sun Valley Policy Forum’s Summer Institute, bringing some of your favorite City Journal contributors to Idaho’s iconic mountain town this summer: Heather Mac Donald, Reihan Salam, Ilya Shapiro, Shawn Regan, Jesse Arm, Judge Glock, Brandon Fuller, Mark Mills, and more. Friends of City Journal receive discounted registration. We hope to see you there.

Another Major Transgender Suicide Study Crumbles

By Leor Sapir | City Journal | Photo by Adam Gray/Getty Images

“In 2024, amid a wave of state legislation on transgender issues, the prestigious academic journal Nature Human Behavior (NHB) published a study titled ‘State-level anti-transgender laws increase past-year suicide attempts among transgender and non-binary young people in the USA.’ The study claimed to find that passage of state “anti-transgender laws increased incidents of past-year suicide attempts” by as much as 72 percent.

“Left-of-center media kicked into full gear, announcing that a study had found causal evidence that Republican-led laws are producing an epidemic of adolescent self-harm. ...

“Yet, in what has become routine in this research area, the NHB study’s findings and conclusions later crumbled under scientific reexamination. As a methodological criticism published (to its credit) in the NHB last month—over a year after the original study—shows, the observed elevation in suicide attempts came from a small sample (roughly 100 youth) in a single state (Idaho), at a time when that state’s ‘anti-transgender’ laws were not even in effect. ...

“As anyone who closely follows the subject knows, research in this field is contaminated by activist agendas and misconduct. The findings are fundamentally compromised, and the journals—even the most prestigious among them—often act as willing collaborators in the suppression of scientific debate. Though NHB deserves credit for allowing some debate, the 2024 study on suicide attempts shows, once again, that when it comes to transgender issues, activist researchers can exploit academic journals’ refusal to enforce even the most rudimentary scientific standards.”

Gifted and Talented Programs Need Competition, Not Abolition

By John Ketcham | City Journal | Photo by Kevin Sullivan/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images

“Do public school Gifted and Talented (G&T) programs improve outcomes, or unfairly favor affluent families? Last week, a viral New York article took up that question. Its author seemed to believe that G&T is mostly a way to entrench disadvantage.

“ That framing, though, misses the bigger picture. The shortcomings of G&T are not unique in public education. They reflect a system designed to serve teachers, organized labor, and education bureaucracies rather than students and families. ...

“G&T programs reassure status-conscious parents that their children are on a more promising path, one that appears to lead from accelerated classes to selective high schools and prestigious colleges. This distinctive track makes G&T a political pressure-release valve, easing calls on elected officials and their allies in organized labor for more fundamental change.

“G&T programs thus survive not because they consistently deliver a superior education but because they help a failing system retain the families most likely to flee or oppose it. Their high popularity among New York City families makes them especially valuable to the public school establishment, giving dissatisfied parents a reason to stay invested in the system rather than demand alternatives outside it. Better yet for the union, G&T creates demand for more teachers—and thus more members—while thinning general-education classes and easing those same teachers’ workloads.”

2026 Hayek Book Prize I An Evening with Sean McMeekin

By Manhattan Institute

In an interview moderated by Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Douglas Murray and introduced by City Journal Contributing Editor John Tierney, McMeekin discusses the history, principles, and failures of communism, exploring its rise, fall, and potential resurgence. Much of his discussion is rooted in modern day attempts to introduce socialism into the western world and what everyday Americans can do to prevent it.