Hey did you know that if you are a failure at third grade, the government just assumes that you’ll be a criminal forever? No? Well good, because that isn’t true anyhow. For many moons, Democratic candidates have repeated this old saw about states using third-grade reading scores as a predictor for how many prison beds they’ll need in 15 years. This sounds like exactly the sort of sad, spooky metric that governments would use to determine how doomed its citizens are, but apparently nobody actually uses it. MORE »