Private Schools, Reform, and the Holistic Admissions Process — In a recent guest essay for the New York Times, Sophie Callcott, a graduate of a Bay Area private high school, claims that schools like hers are pernicious because of the significantly better education they provide to those able to afford them. This idea — that private schools are much…

Register to vote in California here. See also: Axios endorsement round up. I trust the SF Chronicle, SPUR, SF Bicycle Coalition, and SF YIMBY. Feel free to dispute anything I’ve written or ask questions at reschwartz@wesleyan.edu. State Ballot Measures As usual, the default for any proposition should be No; referendums hamstring the legislature…

San Francisco has too many elections — here’s how I’m voting in our third this year. Also worth consulting: SF YIMBY, SF Chronicle, SPUR. Federal Elections United States Representative, District 13 Primary Shahid Buttar is running again, for some reason, but the race won’t be competitive this year either. Vote for Nancy Pelosi for District 13 Representative. United States Senate, Partial Term, and United States Senate, Full Term Primary

Imagine an apartment building, ablaze, with a family of six trapped inside. One unit over, there is also a painting worth $20,000 belonging to an art museum. There is only enough time to save one — which would you choose? This thought experiment was proposed in a Stanford Social Innovation…

In a 60 Minutes interview a few days after his upset victory, President-elect Donald Trump threw out a haphazard endorsement of congressional term limits, a policy he failed to pursue during his first term (Stahl). Republicans had pushed for term limits in their “Contract with America” in the 1994 midterms…

As I predicted in last semester’s issue, in September, Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA) easily defeated California’s second gubernatorial recall. To an outsider, the recall might seem like a triumph of democracy: voters were given the option to judge whether the governor, who had failed to deliver on many of his…

“There is a front door which means you get in on your own. The back door is through institutional advancement… And I’ve created this side door in.” — Rick Singer, architect of the 2019 college admissions bribery scandal In 2019, more than 50 adults were charged with felony conspiracy to…

What can the Gavinator learn from the Governator? As of March 26, 2021, the effort to recall Governor Gavin Newsom appears to have made it onto the ballot. The Republican-funded effort has submitted 2,117,730 signatures to the California Secretary of State, well over the 1.5 million signature threshold, and if…

Democrats’ Favorite Tax Cut for the Rich — This article ran in the Spring 2021 issue of the Arcadia Political Review, available here. In a 2017 reconciliation bill, Congress imposed a strongly progressive tax increase on the wealthiest Americans, which was unanimously opposed by the minority opposition. In a bygone era of income-polarized politics, one might have expected…