opportunity

“Human advancement is not a mere question of almsgiving, but rather of sympathy and cooperation among classes who would scorn charity,” writes W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk.

It is strange, isn’t it, that a state that may be indirectly responsible for touching off the de-licensing revolution among the states still hasn’t joined that revolution? But that’s where…

America has always been a country on the move. Across the ocean, across the continent, and, for decades after the frontier officially closed, Americans have moved away from (and often…

Sometimes we know the answer but dislike its implications so much we try to avoid it to find the easier way around it — and usually fail. Such as the…

The Supreme Court decision in North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners v. Federal Trade Commission in 2015 shattered states’ presumption that occupational licensing boards are automatically immune from federal…

In The Right to Earn a Living Act: A Well-Considered Answer to Licensing, I examined the first two statement of findings behind the Right to Earn a Living Act. It…

A new report from the National Employment Law Project looks at how state occupational licensing laws make it difficult for people with arrest and conviction records to find work in…

The Institute for Justice has released the second edition of its landmark “License to Work” (LTW) study. This report was authored by Dick M. Carpenter II, Lisa Knepper, Kyle Sweetland,…

This fifth annual report on schools from the North Carolina Education Alliance shows that many school districts in the state made progress in 2001-02. It also shows that many of the failing school systems from 2000-01 were still performing in the failing range again last year. Official results of statewide testing are reported annually in the Department of Public Instruction’s ABCs of Public Education. End-of-grade tests for elementary students and end-of-course tests for high school students are the only exams administered statewide each year. As such, information about public schools is focused on the results of these exams. Grading Our Schools offers a different lens for studying test results and other performance data. As an additional information tool, we hope it will allow parents and taxpayers to better evaluate student performance in North Carolina’s public schools.