Like “infatuated lovers, journalists make excuses” for President Biden’s “paucity of presidential pressers,” quips Daniel J. Flynn at The American Spectator — even when “as clearly shown by a photograph” the prez carries “with him a cheat sheet.” Indeed, the “it’s-evening-in-America video announcing Joe Biden’s run for reelection signals that Biden plans to appear before the people and the press primarily in ways scripted, artificial, and edited.” But “the bodily and mental burdens” of “advanced age require Biden to show his vigor by ditching the dishonest notecards and embracing unscripted events.” “Biden, who highlighted the age of his 63-year-old opponent to win his U.S. Senate race at 29 in 1972, now avoids the indelicate subject of serving as commander-in-chief beyond the average American life expectancy.”

“State education officials are poised to reset the way state assessments are scored” and “what it means to be ‘proficient,’ ” warns the Empire Center’s Emily D’Vertola. In the wake of pandemic-related learning loss, “many states have modernized their assessment frameworks to be more rigorous, accurate and transparent.” Not so in New York, which “spends more money to educate its students than any other nation in the world, while measures of student achievement continue to decline.” Constantly moving the goalposts makes it “difficult to meaningfully measure where kids stand academically” and creates “the impression that student achievement is improving, while kids may not actually be mastering skills.” Instead, the Regents are missing an opportunity “to develop the country’s most rigorous curriculum and performance standards.”

An executive order President Biden just signed made “major changes” to the way new regulations are adopted, and they prove to be one of his “more significant contributions to the growth of government,” contends Reason’s Eric Boehm. The order raises “the threshold for what counts as an ‘economically significant’ regulation from $100 million to $200 million,” and since “regulations deemed to have economically significant costs are subject to additional layers of scrutiny before being approved, this change” will make it easier for new regs to be approved. The order also creates “a new formula for calculating costs and benefits” — in an apparent “attempt to make climate regulations appear less costly.” It clearly exposes Team Biden’s eagerness “to impose costs today or in the near future for benefits that won’t materialize for years or decades.”

“Speaker Kevin McCarthy did more than pass a debt-ceiling bill this week,” cheers The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel. “He blew up President Biden’s entire operating assumption. Democrats aren’t the only game in town after all.” Biden “bet” the speaker wouldn’t be able to unite his members on spending cuts. “He lost that bet.” Biden can now “mulishly” keep refusing to negotiate, but the GOP bill is the only one that averts a default on obligations. Yet Biden will demand concessions. “Are Republicans wise enough to realize that . . . even a slimmed down package is a huge win?” If they strike a deal with Biden, they’ll “have reset the D.C. dynamic — making clear they are a force to be reckoned with.”

“Many parents feel the school system is broken” and “needs to be fixed,” note Connor Boyack & Corey DeAngelis at The Federalist. Are they right? US public schools were “reformed” by John Dewey and Horace Mann a century ago with the “fundamental intent” to “weaken a child’s family relationships and strengthen his or her relationship” to the state. That’s why even the “kind teachers at the nearby elementary school” are “pushing an agenda to fill children’s minds with information and ideas that are controversial or counterproductive to their healthy development” — the end result of Mann’s “quest to industrialize education” for “an economy that no longer exists.” The best option for many students “might be to place them in a different system altogether.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board