What They're Saying
June 13th, 2007

The Daily Newscheers the performance of city students on the state math standardized math test. And the paper applauds the educations policies of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein too: “Ending social promotion, winning teachers contract reforms that boosted instructional time and sending a clear message that schools must be held accountable for student performance have all contributed to improved learning.”

Also in the News, Maura Moynihan, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s daughter, urges the city and state to go ahead with the plans for a new and better Penn Station, named for her late father. A project once intended primarily to remove New Yorkers from the squalor and inefficiency of Penn Station now has added importance, she writes. Global warming gives a new urgency to public transportation projects, Moynihan says, adding, “Our future survival rests upon our collective will power to get things done with speed and vision.”

In the Sun, Sigrid Fry-Revere criticize a plan in Albany to require health professionals to routinely test most, and perhaps all, patients for the virus that causes AIDS. Fry-Revere argues this idea is driven not so much by medical concerns as by new federal regulations that give states money based partly on the numbers of their residents who test positive for HIV. “It’s bad enough for a state government to decide that it wants to protect people from themselves by making medical choices for them,” Fry-Revere, a bio-ethicist at the libertarian Cato Institute writes. “But it’s worse when that supposedly well-intentioned paternalism is really a ploy to dip into federal coffers.”