Commentary Culture Investigations

Iran, Israel and the United States are now engaged in war, with the fallout spreading across the region.Strikes have been reported in at least 18 provinces of Iran.

High-definition satellite imagery shows the massive destruction caused by the bombing of the compound of Iran’s supreme leader in the heart of Tehran.US President Donald Trump declared Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed in the assault by Israel and the United States.

As a single mother of two, Leanne Farrugia was proud to secure a stable job as a junior prison guard at Metropolitan Remand & Reception Centre at Silverwater, in Sydney’s west, in 2018.That sense of security was shattered one night in May 2022. She was at home sick when her supervisor, then-senior correctional officer Scott Hawken, arrived at her house and drugged her.

BPMB’s 2019 Rejection of a Shareholder Restructuring Offer as Evidence of Targeted Destruction

New satellite imagery shows strikes hit at least seven buildings around an Iranian school where the country’s government said more than 150 mostly young girls were killed last Saturday.Funerals have been held for some of the people, including children, killed when the Shajereh Tayyebeh school was hit in the coastal city of Minab, according to state media.

Investigating the return of the Islamic State terrorist groupThe Bondi Beach terrorist attack signalled the resurgence of the Islamic State terrorist group in Australia.

WASHNGTON, DC; March 5, 2026 – The Fund for Investigative Journalism today announced that eight accomplished journalists have been awarded Alicia Patterson Fellowships to conduct public-service reporting this year. The annual fellowships foster independent, in-depth reporting on topics of public interest. The fellowships were established in 1965 in memory of Alicia Patterson, the founding editor […]
The post Eight Journalists Receive Alicia Patterson Fellowships for In-Depth Reporting in 2026 appeared first on The Fund for Investigative Journalism.

Joel Kotkin & Wendell Cox, RCI This is the second of a two-part series on the global housing crisis. Read the first installment here. The affordable housing crisis in America and many other…

In a recent piece for the City Journal, Carolyn Gorman made a strong case against a bill adding $243.6 million to the Department of Education’s Safe Schools and Citizenship Education coffers when “safety” has been redefined to mean using K-12 schools as mental-health clinics. Calling the track record of similar measures poor would be a compliment: universal mental-health screening driving overdiagnosis by producing up to 90 percent false positives. In one case she cites, a California math teacher turned a number-line lesson into a unit on food deserts, complete with video of a single mother struggling to feed her children. When the students cried and promised to become activists, that was counted as “radical healing,” an example of trauma-informed pedagogy in action.
But parents and lawmakers should not think that killing this spending bill will do much to slow down the juggernaut of couches and treatment plans aimed straight at our kids.
What Gorman doesn’t explore is that even if this bill is killed, that won’t reverse or even slow down the therapization of education. It’s simply declining to pour gasoline on a tire fire.
Directives to bring more therapy-like teaching methods into the educational environment are already deeply embedded, not just in teacher training, but increasingly in licensure requirements. This is supported and fueled by numerous NGOs’ policy development efforts, leadership training, and institutional “best practices.”
Teacher Training
Trauma-informed pedagogy is sweeping through education schools and other university programs. Touted as an empathetic teaching approach that accounts for the widespread impact of trauma and its effects on cognitive function, this instructional framework aims to foster safety and resilience.
But like the term “safety,” universal “trauma-informed” teaching is a bait and switch. The phrase sounds like awareness, that a teacher should know trauma exists and respond appropriately when issues arise. The reality is an omnipresent pedagogical orientation in which every student interaction is filtered through a trauma frame, and discipline is replaced with empathy and inquiry.
One predictable consequence: some students will quickly realize that acting out is an effective strategy to do what they want without facing consequences, rewarding those children who least need such accommodations. At the same time, less audacious students are harmed through infantilization, missing out on painful relational challenges that teach them that suffering is survivable.
Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that “trauma-informed” school models reorient classroom discipline:
[I]nstead of asking “What’s wrong with this student?” educators are urged to ask “What happened to them?” The result is a quasi-therapeutic posture that treats misbehavior as a distress signal, calling for empathy and support rather than consequences. In many districts, this principle now shapes everything from daily interactions to discipline codes.
Trauma-informed teaching isn’t just optional continuing professional development for teachers. It is being built into the system that produces teachers: state licensure requirements, university preparation programs, and ongoing professional development mandates. Once embedded across these layers, the orientation persists regardless of what any single appropriations bill does.
According to Child Trends, a research organization focused on children, youth, and families, in 2019, 35 states had policies to favor or demand professional development in trauma-informed practices for school resource officers, with additional policies supporting mental health. While this study didn’t directly address teacher standards, it is an indicator of how broadly the framework had spread by then.
That was nearly a decade ago. Today, a quick search turns up resources and information on trauma-informed pedagogy at the University of Denver, the University of Oregon, Barnard College, the University of Michigan, the College of DuPage, and the American Library Association, and that is just the first page of search engine results.
The Tennessee Department of Education’s information on trauma-informed schools includes resources on becoming a trauma-informed teacher, conflict resolution guidance documentation, and even a Trauma-Informed Discipline Guide for Educators. This guide directs teachers to respond to student cursing with, “It sounds like you’re really upset. Let’s take a break and check back in,” and to greet a student returning after leaving class without permission with, “Glad you’re back. Want to talk about what you needed?”
The National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) reports that more states are adopting trauma-informed teacher training. Among the examples it highlights:
Trauma-informed training is often embedded in classroom management coursework, as in Washington, Oklahoma, and Utah. In Virginia, teacher candidates must receive training on how trauma affects students and how to identify it.
The Iowa state board requires districts to provide annual training on identifying adverse childhood experiences and “strategies to mitigate toxic stress.” Similarly, West Virginia requires trauma training every two years.
As recently as 2022, NASBE sponsored a webinar to discuss policy and programming, intended to provide teachers the skills to perform trauma-informed instruction under the auspices of building trauma-informed school systems.
The NASBE structure deserves inspection beyond the report and webinar themselves. NASBE is a private 501(c)(3) membership-based trade association whose members are state regulators, specifically, the state boards of education that set policy in each state.
This makes for a relational loop where state regulators belong to a private association that develops policy positions, which they then return to their states to adopt as regulation. In this way, new pedagogies move from private organization to state policy without any legislative voting to even slow it down.
The policy adopted via this pathway is not neutral guidance. NASBE describes itself as “the only organization dedicated solely to helping state boards advance equity and excellence in public education.” Its strategic plan commits to maintaining “a diverse staff in terms of age, race, gender, background, and experience” and “Model equity values by supporting diverse staff to secure thought leadership opportunities.” The equity commitments are made explicit in the strategic plan, but won’t show up in any state legislative record.
There are countless other similar organizations, many of them 501(c)(3) non-profits either populated by government regulators or courting them with things like Social Emotional Learning (SEL), trauma training, or other resources that suit their agendas.
Some of the more prominent organizations blending education and mental health include:

CASEL — The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning is the center for SEL, which has partnered with states to add SEL into standards and curriculum
The National Council for Mental Wellbeing is a mental health membership organization that champions policy and social change. It offers training and gives opinion on Capitol Hill.
The National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN) is funded by the Center for Mental Health Services (CMHS), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). It promotes trauma-informed care.
The Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development is a major proponent of SEL.
The Wallace Foundation is a major private funder of SEL.

Gorman is quite right: the federal government shouldn’t allocate funds specifically tied to new measures that would bring more therapy-adjacent interventions into schools. But parents and lawmakers should not think that killing this spending bill will do much to slow down the juggernaut of couches and treatment plans aimed straight at our kids during the middle of their math lessons.
READ MORE: 
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American Education Is in Almost Irredeemable Decline
Suzannah Alexander is the External Affairs Coordinator for the National Association of Scholars. She came to this work after blowing the whistle on ideological indoctrination in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Master’s program at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

In 1790, the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island wrote to President George Washington with words that carried the weight of centuries of persecution: “Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of citizens, we now behold a government which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Washington’s letter to the Hebrew Congregation is one of the most remarkable documents in American history, not for its eloquence alone, but for what it rejected. The new republic, Washington insisted, would not merely tolerate its religious minorities. It would guarantee their rights. Every American, he promised, “shall sit in safety under his own Vine and Figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Americans possess an inalienable right to live out their faith that no city zoning code can extinguish.
Two hundred and thirty-six years later, the town of University Heights, Ohio, failed to live up to that promise for one of its Jewish residents. Daniel Grand is an Orthodox Jew. His faith requires him to pray three times a day, preferably with a minyan, a quorum of at least 10 men. On the Sabbath and High Holidays, when driving is forbidden, that means gathering on foot within walking distance of home. In January 2021, Grand sent an email to about a dozen neighbors, inviting them to pray together at his house. One neighbor informed the mayor.
The next day the city’s law director sent Grand a cease-and-desist order. The letter warned Grand that if he held his planned prayer meeting at his home, his residence would be transformed into “place of religious assembly,” prohibited by the town’s zoning laws. If he wanted to pray with friends, he would need to apply for a special-use permit.
What followed was a systematic campaign of civic harassment. When Grand applied for the permit, the hearing was converted to a “quasi-judicial” format that locked the record and prevented him from submitting supporting evidence. Neighbors sent letters of protest, including one that read, “I do not want our neighborhood labeled as Jewish.” When Grand withdrew his application, the mayor doubled down, publicly declaring that the cease-and-desist remained in full force and urging neighbors to report any signs of religious gathering at Grand’s home to city authorities. Police began conducting drive-bys, and the city withheld Grand’s certificate of occupancy and tax abatements, costing him thousands of dollars. Sanitation workers stopped collecting his trash.
Grand sued, but the federal district court dismissed the case on procedural grounds as he hadn’t completed the permit process, they said, so his claims weren’t “ripe” for review. The Sixth Circuit affirmed, and in February 2026, Grand petitioned the Supreme Court. Last week, the Court agreed to hear his case. The legal question before the Court is a technical one about First Amendment application. But the deeper question Grand v. City of University Heights raises is one Washington already answered in 1790.
Before the American founding, the English tradition offered religious minorities what legal historians call “mere toleration,” a grudging minimum, not a right. England’s Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670 criminalized religious gatherings of five or more people outside the household, but tolerated quiet private worship at home. The logic was Blackstonian. The state would condescend to indulge private acts of conscience in one’s own dwelling so long as it posed no public inconvenience. But the state would suppress any public gathering of religious minorities for worship.
When George Mason drafted the religious liberty clause of the Virginia Bill of Rights, he used the word “toleration.” James Madison objected. Toleration, Madison argued, implies an act of legislative grace; permission bestowed by those in power and revocable at will. He substituted “the free exercise” of religion instead. That substitution was the American founding’s decisive break from the English past. As Tench Coxe put it in 1794, “mere toleration is a doctrine exploded by our general constitution.”
University Heights, on the other hand, sought to provide Grand with less religious liberty than the pre-constitutional English model the founders believed was totally inadequate for a free nation. Permitting private gatherings only at the city’s discretion and setting neighbors to spy on his home, University Heights sought to force Grand’s religious exercise out of his home and into a public place. In some ways, that is less than mere toleration, and it was directed at the very community Washington had promised would live without fear.
The Supreme Court should make clear that the First Amendment means what it meant in 1791: that Americans possess an inalienable right to live out their faith that no city zoning code can extinguish. Home worship, Bible study, prayer groups, and Sabbath minyan, should not require a permit. Daniel Grand asked for nothing more than what George Washington and the First Amendment promise. The Supreme Court should make good on that promise.
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Is the Supreme Court the Final Word on the Constitution?
Marc Wheat is General Counsel for Advancing American Freedom. Mitchell Bahnsen is an Intern for Advancing American Freedom.