Melana Zyla Vickers is a policy analyst and commentator who wrote for The Weekly Standard on a range of topics including foreign affairs, education policy, and gender issues such as Title IX and the growing gender gap in higher education. She contributed articles spanning from 2001 to 2017, covering subjects from U.S.-France relations during the Iraq era to boys' struggles in the education system. She has been affiliated with various policy organizations and think tanks focused on defense and education issues.
[img caption="Saddam with Chirac (far right) in France in 1975" float="right" width="318" height="210" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]1057[/img] AS FRANCE'S political leaders feign high-mindedness in their opposition to waging war in Iraq, could it be that a little-publicized threat of…
It's been a bad autumn for public school leaders in the state of Washington, a battleground in the nation's reemergent math wars. First, a whopping 52 percent of seventh graders and 41 percent of fourth graders failed the statewide math test. That dismal news further energized a new parents' group…
Here's a thought that's unlikely to occur to twelfth--grade girls as their college acceptances begin to trickle in: After they get to campus in the fall, one in four of them will be mathematically unable to find a male peer to go out with.
Gulag
NEW DELHI While President Bush was meeting with Indian prime minister A.B. Vajpayee at the United Nations recently, back in New Delhi a Sikh pilot of Soviet-made fighter aircraft, sporting a turban, beard, and substantial handlebar mustache, was regaling American cocktail party guests with an…
NO SOONER had a meeting of Food and Drug Administration advisers broken up in suburban Maryland on Thursday than the food-safety alarm bells began ringing on the subject of mercury in fish: "Pregnant Women Should Avoid Tuna," warned an Associated Press story on Friday. "FDA advisers urge pregnant…
THE WEATHER may be perfect for a round of golf or a nice long-distance run, but don't tell that to college athletes. In the last two months, no fewer than 14 college sports teams have given up the ghost, sacrificed in large part to campus bureaucrats' struggle to satisfy the federal requirement…
EVERY DAY AT LUNCH HOUR last year, Karen Gayhart busied herself piling up the green, plastic pill trays at the health clinic of Great Neck Middle School in Virginia Beach, Va. Scooping out little, round Ritalin or Adderall pills one at a time, she and other clinic workers quickly emptied four of…
Building Capitalism The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc by Anders Aslund Cambridge Univ. Press, 550 pp., $27 TWO YEARS AGO in an interview, I asked Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chairman of Yukos Oil and one of Russia's leading oligarchs, whether it was possible to have risen to his financial…
Of all the dinner-party questions that arose among the small band of conservative journalists from Europe and America who lived in Asia during the 1990s boom years, the one probed with greatest curiosity was whether Asians would need democratic reform to make their capitalism successful. We hoped…