i am a senior fellow here at aei. our dream lecture series, the fourth installment, this series seeks to revitalize our nation's or institutions -- core institutions and values by inviting prominent writers and thinkers to address some significant all troll and social issues facing the united states. as we approach the 250th anniversary of america's founding, these are an opportunity to ask how healthy are our national institutions, our foundational suppose, and our citizens? what threats do they face in what form are they available? in a variety of featured speakers, the american dream lecturers continue the aei bradley series, which for decades enriched high-profile lecturers about state of american politics and culture. when you entered coming may have seen flyers listing the events we've held so far. i hope you took one to bring home. they make a perfect party gift. [laughter] they list some of the events we've had and some events to come. for some of you watching via livestream come on may 7, we are having ruth w

when i represent views they are mine, not aei's.ork in the education department, the domestic policy center. host: your funding? guest: independently funded, no government money. we have independent supporters from across the nation. host: you write that "having catalog how the nation's schools responded to the pandemic over the last four years i see two challenges. the first is learning loss which at its height in 2022 saw students more than half a year behind in math and one third of a year behind in reading. the second is less well known but arguably more important, absenteeism." you wrote a report, long covid of -- for public schools chronic absenteeism before and after the pandemic. guest: it is kids missing 1/10 of the school year. pre-pandemic it was a problem, it was not a new problem. it affected 15% k-12. it is not just high schoolers and neither is this truancy. this is the absolute number of absences that students have. the reason it is important is if you miss a lot of school it is not good for school -- it is not good

so i'm very honored to welcome to aei. i do want to make a couple observations in the beginning before we get started. so becoming president of aei made addressing the state of black america a priority for our institution. and i'm proud of the work we've done over the past few years. in 2022, we organized the old parkland conference, which brought together prominent intellectuals and public leaders to address the biggest challenges black americans. and last year, we created a new center on and social mobility, which is dedicated to developing solutions. expand access to opportunity for all americans. and for the 60th anniversary of the march on washington, we hosted a special forum here at aei honoring, dr. king's legacy. now we some distinguished guests here, but i want speak for a moment about to a scholars who are not guests here but are part of our community. and they. and let say about them that no scholars have more to improve our work on issues than ian rowe and howard husock ann's work on these issues is not just a

i'm a senior fellow here at aei and

so if you're there i'm here at aei. so the question i had was about the extent to which the declaration is meant for an versus internal audience and the role of relatively high levels of american literacy at the time. the role that would have played in the internal reception of the declaration. the question i take out or would you like to your expertise exceed exceeds mine. very much so. i would just i do think it i mean let's what facts be submitted a candid world to me the most the most salient point about the declaration as a whole in that regard is at least the incongruence, perhaps the rejection of paine's principle that one need not justify a change of government that was so important had that belief that they had to justify themselves to the whole world. but one can just also track what happened to the text. so it was immediately printed and sent to the army and read to the army. remember 1337 words you don't have to read. all you have to do is here it was read everywhere in massachusetts town government read it

moment towards the end of the event or move to q&a online questions can be sent to greg that for a at aei dot org on the spelling you'll have guess or it's greg dot for you are an ipr at ed at org or at the or the hashtag hashtag getting it right you can find the book at the teachers college press website if you enter the code api at checkout get 20% off and for those of you who are with us in person today after the we invite you to join us in the hallway for a drink and refreshments. we've got mike mcshane, national director of research at choice and my fellow author on the new. as i mentioned, we've got virginia secretary of education amy goodman and again, i'm rick best, director of education policy studies at aei. delighted to have you with us today. and i'm going to go take a seat. and amy, if you could get us started on the conversation. all right, thanks. we are now awesome. good afternoon, everyone. it is such delight and a pleasure and an honor to be and to be with all friends and to see so many friends in the audience here and hopefully online as well. i of all start by saying,

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cement which is the new liberalism kind of going with you think about it maybe 20 years ago, at the aei form about thehe new york times and they've just been complaining about the liberalism, and without i think that there's an interestingti comment about our situation and we are not taking by the newspaper the stands accused of being pro- liberal. were not talking by the newspaper that is not liberal or anti- liberal talking about you know the notion of guilt liberalism which is kind of a different and that will be what we kind of circled around his we discussed things. and med alluded to the sensational article, the james producer the economist and it is one of the most provocative eloquent things that i brought in a long time. whether you agree or disagree, you have to admire that you definitely reading the words somebody says perhaps less than what he really thinks. and that is always now the marble thing that makes us particularly special occasion for me, then the idea that will talk about with two colleagues who have a want to say in the same subject's also really gratifying so i'

i'm a senior fellow here at aei. and i have a feeling that many of you are already fans of. rob henderson and and i know the trajectory of his life. but if you going to go through the broad outlines and then he and my

tim is a senior fellow here at aei and a columnist at the washington examiner. his work is a lot of us know he focuses on family and on civil society, on religion, american politics. he's published widely beyond his columns, too, in the new york times, the wall street journal, the washington post, the atlantic and elsewhere. you see on tv a lot. tim's work is unique. he describes broad social trends by beginning from the experience of real people. he thinks from the bottom up, not from the top down. and for that reason, i think he has an understanding of how people thrive and how people fail. what holds together, what divides us. that is just deeply humane and sympathetic, even as it's always rooted in some moral fundamentals. his goal really is to prove your grandmother was right. if you want to be happy, you should get married. you have kids, you should go to church. you should show up for your neighbors. you should people well. but he also wants to explore what it is about modern life that makes it so hard. do what your grandmother told you to do and to see t

we hosted the project director for this here at aei when the report came out. it was saved -- it was so labor-intensive they didn't keep the project up but it's the kind of intensive investigation you've seen a lot more of as environmental studies has matured in the last 30 years. other people are starting to get into the game and i think maybe the turning point toward environmental optimism started with bjorn lor's book in 2000 . it was very controversial. you may remember that some danish scientific committee formerly charged lomborg with scientific dishonesty. i read the report and i couldn't find a single factual claim disputed, although there were many factual claims in the book you could dispute or hasty conclusions and so forth and they ended up retracting that finding but that shows you how politicized the matter still was . that was just the beginning. by 2005 we have jack hollander a meritus physicist from uc , berkeley who described to me that he got in the environment back in his days as a bobby kennedy liberal. this began to be a sign that environm

i'm a senior fellow here at aei. and i have a feeling that many of you are already fans of. rob henderson and and i know the trajectory of his life. but if you going to go through the broad outlines and then he and my colleague naomi schaefer riley who's a child welfare expert here aei will fill in fill in the wisdom of that outline, although wisdom that you extracted a very, very challenging upbringing. sohrab, his mother struggle with addiction and he was and she was deported back to south korea when he was three years old and he never saw her again. he spent the next four years in ten different foster homes in angeles. and at age seven, he was adopted and settled into a lower, lower class home in red bluff, california, which seems stable. and he had a for the first time but that stability was shattered two years later when those parents divorced and after that a series of poor performance in school a lot of vandalization with friends who were unfortunately often in the same position he was coming from unstable families, a lot of weed, a lot of fights, a lot of alcohol. bu

i'm a senior fellow here at aei. and i have a feeling that many of you are already fans of. rob henderson and and i know the trajectory of his life. but if you going to go through the broad outlines and then he and my colleague naomi schaefer riley who's a child welfare expert here aei will fill in fill in the wisdom of that outline, although wisdom that you extracted a very, very challenging upbringing. sohrab, his mother struggle with addiction and he was and she was deported back to south korea when he was three years old and he never saw her again. he spent the next four years in ten different foster homes in angeles. and at age seven, he was adopted and settled into a lower, lower class home in red bluff, california, which seems stable. and he had a for the first time but that stability was shattered two years later when those parents divorced and after that a series of poor performance in school a lot of vandalization with friends who were unfortunately often in the same position he was coming from unstable families, a lot of weed, a lot of fights, a lot of alcohol. bu

my next guest knows a thing or two, at out of six months aei fellow an author, you will love it.ily and family, how are culture made raising kids much harder than it needs to be. tim carney, welcome. >> thanks for having me. our government policies making parenting more challenging? >> the one thing we need is the ability to buy a house and are so many regulations that make it hard to build something start a home become family can enter into and now biden is talking subsidy that will drive up prices brother like all of the policies do and a lot of communities just don't build the playgrounds, sidewalks. when we were kids we would ride our bikes around town and now increasingly fair building not family friendly places for kids to buy can walk in the police are saying you shouldn't let your kids wonder the neighborhood anyway so on all these levels top to bottom, all of these obstacles. >> you also say when people focus on daycare, we need more daycare and you say you know what we need? one of moms would rather be home and rather than getting more daycare and make it affordable, ma

the senior fellow at aei who is part of the team which did the analysis, said the funding allocated tokraine has had a substantial impact on the u.s. defense industry. 117 production lines and 31 states are producing weapons which are sent to ukraine or refuelling the american supplies. >> it is highlighting the production. it is bringing back institutional knowledge about weapons manufacturing to the floor and pushing america and its defense sector to innovate and modernize old weapon systems and use things new ways. >> reporter: the new to facilits not only waiting for new funding, but so are small and mid sized companies. house speaker mike johnson is looking for a proposal to provide additional aid for ukraine and getting a support of house republicans. he is considering several options like making part of the aid alone or using russian assets seized to make that part of the aid package. members return to d.c. tonight and you can bet the funding is a top priority. frank. >> i expect it to be a priority, but there are political considerations in the issue. congress member marjorie t

steinglass, that partt didn't have aei mutual benefit. the purpose ofut that component uzto benefit the campaign. am i understanding you right? pecker, that is right. thepe focus how all this benefitted the trump campaign is important because the prosecution's central argument in this case,e the reason they were able to charge donald trump with a felony is because they say trump's hush money scheme was all about trying to cover up his criminal activity related to the 2016 election. prosecutors today reveal they are planning to rely on section 17, 152 of the new york criminal code,ew which prohibits any twor moreib persons from conspiring promote or prevent the election of any person to public office by unlawful means. and so it is important that trump'sor arrangement with the national enquirer and subsequent hush money payments wasn't just about helping trump, the man, it was about helping trump the candidate win the election. joining meel now duncan levine, and jeremy sohp lande, former assistant d.a. in the manhattan trial division. tha

robert li light hi iser was aei possibility.ng the core element of treasury secretary is dealing withlicy, sanctions on all kinds of enemies around the world. so you need somebody who is onos the same page with record to china and a i'm not sure that jamie dimon would be particularly --cu david: nolat as far as blackstone, though. >> you need somebody who is very similar in the thinking toward an aggressive approach th china as president trump is. david: they're giving me a wrap. you're going to the trump even this weekend, right in. >>>> yes.davi yes, i am. david:trum you think he'll mak> 32 million which is what he wants. let's hope so. we need a new. david: you were not always aal just trumpwa guy. >> i've always been prettyri positive on the president, particularly as relates to economic policies. now, with what's going on over the last several weeks, economically and culturally inle the country, we need a change. i feel very strongly about that. david:a we need a fix.d: w and that's going to take a lot of tooling by somebody who knows how to fix things, somebody who built a few b

. >> what is all the danger of aei that people are talking about here?he first most important things to understand ai is very different from traditional software. when we talk about software you might use at your computer. it is written with code you have programmers that write code instructions tell the computer what to do like texts can you read it and understand kind of what you are telling the computer to do. this is not how ai works. ai is more like organic. you have a huge piles of data on these massive super computers and you kind of grow a program on your data. and the way this program looks is kind of like a bunch of numbers and if these numbers don't make sense to us humans. kind of like looking in a petri dish. if you execute the numbers, if you run them on your computer they can do fantastical things. i'm sure many of us have tried chachatgpt. take this seriously make smarter and smarter systems do and more things to understand more and more complex task and perform those things, well, currently we just heard elon musk telling us that he thin

before joining aei, dr. summers was a philosophy professor at clark university. is best known for her defense, classical liberal feminism and critique of gender feminism. her books include freedom, feminism. its surprising history and why it matters today. one nation under therapy coauthored with sally satel who stole feminism and the war against boys which was named a new york times notable book of the year in 2001. and i will add that is an incredibly prescient, educational over 20 years later. last we henry olsen henry is a senior fellow at the ethics and public policy center, where he studies and provides commentary on american politics. mr. olson is an opinion columnist for. the washington post and his daily pieces focus on politics, foreign affairs and american conservative thought mr. olson's work has been featured in many probably prominent publications, including the new york times, the washington journal, the wall journal, national review, the guardian and the weekly standard and. he is the author of the working class ronald reagan and the return of blu

thank you to you and aei for having me. was worried how he was going to describe the bio with certain judgments, like when he didn't actually produce good analysis. i'm glad to have skipped past that. it's a great question and, i think, a great story about where the nation is. we are at a time where we are a maritime power and we know the challenge is china and what we are seeing is actual strategic choices. we are budgeteers and the standard thing that we do is we have these strategic words, but when we go and find the numbers, it's not supported. the easiest way you could always hoist someone is the service shares stayed the same. no war, cold war, why is there no change to that? what you are seeing is there is no change to that. they are trying to debate me into >> at the expense of the army. but that's not an important part of what it rings to the nation, that what we need more of our nuclear deterrent submarines, fast attack submarines, destroyers sailing in the red sea, a marine corps that can respond to a crisis like