A Public School Enrollment Crisis, and a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon

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From the New York Times, it's the headlines.

I'm Tracy Mumford.

Today's Tuesday, August 5th.

Here's what we're covering.

Public schools across the country are facing an enrollment crisis.

According to federal data, two-thirds of traditional public schools saw their number of students drop between 2019 and 2023.

The factors at play?

Beyond the pandemic, which caused mass disruption in attendance, U.S.

birth rates are in a historic slump to the point that the number of children in the country is starting to shrink.

At the same time, there's been a boom in private school vouchers and homeschooling, options the Trump administration wants to boost even more.

It's left public schools, which are often funded on a per-student basis, scrambling.

Some school districts, in order to boost enrollment and recruit back families who have fled to private schools, charter schools, are even hiring recruiters to go out and pitch parents on enrolling their kids in local public schools.

Dana Goldstein covers education for the Times.

She's been reporting from Florida, where despite being one of only a few states with a growing population of children, public schools are still facing significant declines.

I traveled across Orlando with a consulting firm that has been able to recruit hundreds or even thousands of students for over 100 school districts across the country.

This consulting firm goes to preschools, it goes to after-school programs, it goes to housing developments, and they look for anywhere they can find parents and try to give them a positive pitch about their local public schools.

In Orlando, the company will earn about $935 for every student that they successfully recruit back to the public school district.

Now, this is still worth it from the perspective of the school district to pay this fee to the consulting company because for every additional student that enrolls, they get per pupil dollars, thousands and thousands of them.

So they see it as a small price to pay to bring back what could be millions in revenues to their district.

Dana says, not everyone in public education is comfortable with the idea of schools getting into sales pitches and marketing.

But a lot of districts feel like they have to act now.

If they lose enough students for funding to noticeably shrink, enrichment programs get cut.

That can cause even more families to withdraw.

And so what begins as an enrollment dip can become a downward spiral.

President Trump's latest trade deadline has countries around the world racing once again to make a deal.

This Thursday, surcharges ranging from 15 to over 40% will kick in on countries that don't have an agreement in place.

That's left countries like Switzerland, for example, feeling the pressure.

It's facing 39% tariffs, which would be a significant hit to the Swiss economy.

So the country may need to follow a kind of playbook that other U.S.

trade partners have been using.

Give Trump an investment promise he can frame as a win in order to avoid the worst of the tariffs that he's threatened.

We're making a lot of deals.

We're making deals for trillions, trillions and trillions.

Nobody's ever seen anything quite like it.

We just made it.

As part of the trade negotiations, Trump says he's brought in more than $10 trillion in investment pledges from places like Japan, South Korea, and the European Union.

That's on top of tariff revenue.

This is making our country very rich and respected again.

Some trade experts say he's effectively turned the U.S.'s trade partners into trade hostages, shaking them down for cash.

But the experts note that those investments might not actually ever come through.

Many of the agreements that Trump has celebrated are vague or informal.

For example, the EU deal said that European companies have, quote, expressed interest in investing in the U.S., giving them a lot of wiggle room.

In President Trump's first term, during the trade war he kicked off back then with China, he also talked up a big investment promise.

At the time, China agreed to purchase billions of dollars of American farm products.

That commitment was never met.

Now, two other quick updates on the Trump administration.

Yesterday, the National Park Service announced that it will restore and reinstall the only Confederate statue in Washington, D.C.

The 11-foot-tall bronze monument to the pro-slavery Confederate general Albert Pike was torn down and set on fire during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.

The statue has been controversial for more than a century.

Some Civil War veterans from the Union Army had objected to its installation in the first place.

When it was torn down, Trump called the act a, quote, disgrace to our country.

And since coming back to office, he's led a sweeping effort to restore Confederate symbols across the U.S.,

including directing the military to restore the names of all Army bases that had been named for Confederate generals.

Also, the acting director of NASA is trying to fast-track efforts to put a nuclear reactor on the moon.

In a directive issued this past week, the director wrote that the project would be critical to, quote, support a future lunar economy and to strengthen our national security in space.

He also said the U.S.

needed to get ahead of similar efforts by China and Russia.

While many projects in space have relied in part on solar power, that would be trickier on the moon, which goes through two week-long cycles of complete darkness.

So the small reactor could help provide continuous electricity, though it's not clear yet what exactly it will be powering.

NASA says it's aiming to get the project launched in late 2029.

In New Jersey.

My office is excited to announce that we have reached a groundbreaking environmental settlement valued at over $2 billion with DuPont and a number of its corporate spin-offs.

The state's attorney general has announced a major settlement with three chemical giants over claims of pollution from so-called forever chemicals.

The value of this settlement makes it the largest environmental settlement by a single state ever.

Those substances, known as PFAS, are a class of almost 15,000 chemicals that are used in everything from non-stick cookware to cosmetics to firefighting foam.

After decades of use, they've now been found in half the country's tap water and have been linked to birth defects, increased risks of some cancers, and other health conditions.

Under the deal, the companies, which the Attorney General said had, quote, knowingly contaminated land and water in New Jersey, will have to fund the cleanup of four former industrial sites, and they'll have to set aside hundreds of millions of dollars for the work to continue, even if they go bankrupt.

The settlement is part of an aggressive push by many states to sue PFAS manufacturers.

And across the U.S., chemical companies have entered into separate multi-billion dollar agreements with public water utilities to try and clean up widespread contamination.

And finally, if you have ever enjoyed an ooey, gooey, cheesy bite of pizza that was so melty, the string of cheese just kind of stretched and stretched at some point until it snapped back into your face, James Laprino is the man to thank.

His company, Laprino Foods, produces 85% of the cheese for pizzas in the U.S.

He died this summer at 87.

Starting in the 1950s, he transformed his family's small Italian grocery store in Denver into a mozzarella empire.

He got into the business right when Pizza Hut and Little Caesars were opening their first stores.

The Pizza Hut Supreme, a special pizza with five counting five toppings.

To hit it big, the company basically reinvented the process of making mozzarella.

Normally, it takes 14 days to age.

They cut it down to four hours.

And they figured out how to freeze it successfully using a method that had been used to freeze peas.

That helped pave the way for frozen pizza, obviously a game changer.

Over his career, Laprino sold to all the big names, Domino's to Papa John's.

He reportedly had separate test ovens for each of the brands so that he could dial in the right custom mozzarella recipe for each one.

Laprino's cheese wizardry made him a billionaire.

Forbes dubbed him the quote, Willy Wonka of cheese.

Those are the headlines today on the daily.

How President Trump's decision to fire the official behind the jobs report is raising questions about whether government data can be trusted going forward.

That's up next if you're listening in our New York Times app or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Tracy Mumford.

We'll be back tomorrow.

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