Notes on growing legacy media censorship
Does The Atlantic seriously think political lies are a brand new development? It’s depressing to see the top of journalism denouncing the First Amendment.
Does The Atlantic seriously think political lies are a brand new development? It’s depressing to see the top of journalism denouncing the First Amendment.
In this first episode of a two-part series, math professor Anna Stokke sits down with Dr. Brian Poncy, a school psychology professor at Oklahoma State University, who specializes in math interventions. His extensive research on basic fact fluency led to the development of a free math program called M.I.N.D, aimed at improving numeracy and computational skills.
In the episode, Brian stresses that we have a basic fact crisis where many students struggle with basic fact fluency, affecting their overall math proficiency. They discuss his research and effective strategies for teaching basic facts and computational skills.
The story begins in 2021, when the Biden administration signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) into law, allocating $3.8 billion in federal funds to Colorado. The City of Denver, which had declareditself a “welcoming city” to migrants, drew on this reservoir of money to launch its Emergency Migrant Response resettlement program, with the goal of housing and providing services to a massive flow of migrants.
Denver, in turn, signed multimillion-dollar contracts with two local NGOs, ViVe Wellness and Papagayo, to provide housing and services to more than 8,000 predominantly Venezuelan migrants. These NGOs are run, respectively, by Yoli Casas and Marielena Suarez, who, according to professional biographies, do not appear to have previous experience in large-scale migrant resettlement.
Nevertheless, the city flooded them with cash. According to public records, between 2023 and 2024, ViVe Wellness and Papagayo received $4.8 million and $774,000, respectively; much of this funding came from the Migrant Support Grant, which was funded by ARPA. Then, in 2024, ViVe secured an extra $10.4 million across three contracts, while Papagayo received $2.9 million from a single contract to serve migrants; two of those five contracts were awarded to implement the Denver Asylum Seekers Program, which promised six months of rental assistance to nearly 1,000 migrants.
It’s unconscionable that 300k migrant children who were trafficked across the border are now unaccounted-for.
Last month, the UBL announced that it will deselect an extensive collection of foreign dissertations. We are happy to report now that The Internet Archive will be taking over this collection.
The dissertations were originally part of an exchange programme between (mostly European) universities until the year 2004 but were never catalogued on arrival. As Leiden University Libraries has limited space for growth in its stacks, it decided to deselect these dissertations, so that 3.2 km could be freed up for new acquisitions. The universities where these dissertations originally were defended informed UBL that they still have the dissertations and were not interested in receiving back the Leiden copy. The Internet Archive will now take over this collection from the UBL, and will take care of its future preservation and access. The UBL is pleased that The Internet Archive is able to give this collection of foreign dissertations a second life.
I don’t think that’s consistent with the First Amendment, even if limited to knowingly false statements of fact. The Supreme Court has held that “prosecutions for libel on government have [no] place in the American system of jurisprudence,” regardless of whether the government thinks it can show that the statements are knowingly false: Even outright lies that damage the government’s reputation are thus constitutionally protected. Likewise, the 3-Justice dissent in U.S. v. Alvarez concluded that,
Parker Baxter Michael J. Petrilli Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. David Griffith:
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Parker Baxter, Director of the Center for Education Policy Analysis at the University of Colorado, joins Mike and David to discuss his new report on the impact of Denver’s education reforms. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber shares a RAND survey on teachers’ experiences with school violence and lockdown drills.
In retribution for speaking publicly, MTI says, Terrell and Torres both submitted workplace bullying and discrimination paperwork with the Madison School District against all but one current MTI member who spoke at the board meeting.
The employment relations complaint alleges that Terrell filed this paperwork “to influence the outcome” of the investigation into her behavior. The same staff who spoke out have now been subject to “prosecutorial interrogations” by the district staff, according to the MTI complaint.
District employees can be disciplined or fired if found to be in violation of the workplace bullying or discrimination policies. As a result, the employment relations complaint also names the Madison School District.
Terrell and Torres denied the allegations in their responses to the complaint, but confirmed they did submit bullying and discrimination complaints with the school district.
Governor Glenn Youngkin, after being notified this afternoon that the Biden-Harris Department of Justice was filing a lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Virginia, released the following statement:
“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote. Virginians – and Americans – will see this for exactly what it is: a desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy. With the support of our Attorney General, we will defend these commonsense steps, that we are legally required to take, with every resource available to us. Virginia’s election will be secure and fair, and I will not stand idly by as this politically motivated action tries to interfere in our elections, period.”
In 2006, then Democrat Gov. Tim Kaine signed into law a common sense bill requiring Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls. It was the law then and it REMAINS the law now.
And the racial achievement gap in Madison was far worse than the rest of the state. Statewide the gaps were 43% for English and 50% for math. About 60% of white students were proficient in English compared to 17% of Black students. About 64% of white students were proficient or better in math while only 14% of Black students achieved that level.
But in Madison the gaps were 60% for English and 62% for math because the achievement levels were higher for white students than the state average and lower for Black students. About 74% of white students in MMSD were proficient in English compared to only 14% of Black students. Nearly 72% of white MMSD students scored proficient or better in math while only 10% of Black students were proficient.
And this despite the fact that for over a decade MMSD has been obsessed with the racial achievement gap. And now the district wants Madison taxpayers to pour in another $607 million in two referendums on the November ballot. They want to exceed state taxing limits by that much while they promise no changes in performance.
School board member Ali Muldrow spoke for the board when she claimed that the reason for Black underachievement was the district’s suspension policy. It’s true that far more Black students get suspended than white students, But Muldrow’s been on the board for six years and her views are echoed by the other board members. If she doesn’t like the suspension policy why didn’t she change it?
No bruto. Hay que ahorrar y ahorrar toda la plata que se pueda en el Estado para que algún día se puedan eliminar (cheque y retenciones, etc.) impuestos y bajar otros (Ganancias, IVA, etc.) para que la gente deje de ser un esclavo impositivo. Mas libertad, no más gasto público.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
If left as is, the rule sets the stage for the federal government to create a national database filled with the private data of Americans, enabling our government to restrict the movement of citizens, regulate and monitor everyday purchases, and even set about implementing a social credit system not unlike the system imposed in Communist China – a system capable of evaluating how their citizens live their lives, judging the degree to which they accept subjugation, and then granting or withholding rights or privileges based solely on their loyalty to the regime.
In essence, the rule regulates the federal government’s collection, retention, and use of American citizens’ personally identifiable information from the date of their first interaction forward.
For background, in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the 9/11 Commission, formed by Congress, examined the attacks and our failure to prevent them. In July 2004, the Commission delivered its report, concluding, in part, that automated information systems used by federal agencies to collect, analyze, and disseminate information in real-time were “woefully inadequate” to address ongoing threats and that the federal government “should set standards for the issuance of birth certificates and sources of identification, such as drivers licenses.”
Wisconsin’s 2024 test scores, out tomorrow, are inflated, biased, and unreliable.
How they got that way is the subject of “Testing Our Patience: How Wisconsin Lowered Standards, Widened the Achievement Gap, and Busted Its State Exams,” the latest Institute for Reforming Government Center for Investigative Oversight (IRG CIO) report. The report and supporting materials are located at reforminggovernment.org/test-score-changes.
What Happened: Public records obtained by IRG CIO reveal DPI management knew its inflation of Wisconsin’s proficiency rates would come at a cost: wider achievement gaps for Black, special needs, and impoverished students, a bias toward schools serving high-income students, and a future where 93% of districts score 4 or 5 stars on state report cards.
Records also revealed that State Superintendent Underly criticized “nonsense going on with literacy” in June 2023, a week after critical Act 20 reading reforms were introduced.
Much more, here.
As a math teacher in the early 2000s, Adrian Mims saw few Black and Hispanic students succeeding in Brooklin (MA) High School’s honors and advanced math courses. Disadvantaged students lacked foundational skills, study habits and confidence, writes Javeria Salman for the Hechinger Report.
Mims founded summer classes to prep students for eighth-grade algebra, honors geometry and eventually AP Calculus. His Calculus Project now works with roughly 1,000 students from 14 Boston-area districts, offering summer and after-school classes. Most come from Black, Hispanic and/or low-income families.
A lot of California policymakers journeyed to Finland to see what was in their special sauce when they scored well on PISA a few years ago. Mississippi’s growth has been more durable. We have a lot to learn if we bring an open mind.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
There are currently results from two studies, one from the University of Wisconsin (UW) and another from the National Institute on Aging (NIA). The evidence from these studies seemed to be in disagreement when their respective initial publications came out, and overall, the results do not convincingly support survival benefits from caloric restriction. A summary of both results was provided in a 2017 publication that did provide evidence supporting lower age-related morbidity rates for calorically restricted (CR) monkeys:
More.
Rather curiously, Bud Light takes on plagiarism in a recent short.
And.
Two years into the Generative AI revolution, research is progressing the field from “thinking fast”—rapid-fire pre-trained responses—to “thinking slow”— reasoning at inference time. This evolution is unlocking a new cohort of agentic applications.
On the second anniversary of our essay “Generative AI: A Creative New World,” the AI ecosystem looks very different, and we have some predictions for what’s on the horizon.
The foundation layer of the Generative AI market is stabilizing in an equilibrium with a key set of scaled players and alliances, including Microsoft/OpenAI, AWS/Anthropic, Meta and Google/DeepMind. Only scaled players with economic engines and access to vast sums of capital remain in play. While the fight is far from over (and keeps escalating in a game-theoretic fashion), the market structure itself is solidifying, and it’s clear that we will have increasingly cheap and plentiful next-token predictions.
With birthrates plummeting, more and more societies are heading into an era of pervasive and indefinite depopulation, one that will eventually encompass the whole planet. What lies ahead is a world made up of shrinking and aging societies. Net mortality—when a society experiences more deaths than births—will likewise become the new norm. Driven by an unrelenting collapse in fertility, family structures and living arrangements heretofore imagined only in science fiction novels will become commonplace, unremarkable features of everyday life.
Human beings have no collective memory of depopulation. Overall global numbers last declined about 700 years ago, in the wake of the bubonic plague that tore through much of Eurasia. In the following seven centuries, the world’s population surged almost 20-fold. And just over the past century, the human population has quadrupled.
Choose life.
Charter schools are public schools, free and open to all. Like traditional public schools, charter schools are prohibited from charging tuition, must not discriminate in admissions or be religious in their operation or affiliation, and are overseen by a public entity.
Much has transpired since the first charter school law was approved in 1991 by the state of Minnesota. Today, 46 charter laws have created about 8,000 schools and campuses. Cumulatively, they enroll 3.7 million students (around 7.5% of all public school students), according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ (NAPCS) Data Dashboard. NAPCS also reports that charter schools employ around 251,000 teachers. Around six out of 10 (58.1%) schools are in urban areas, with the others in suburbs (24.9%), rural areas (11.4%), or smaller towns (5.6%).
While there are many nuances, the primary difference between public charter schools and traditional district schools is their governance model. In addition to oversight from a charter school authorizer accredited by state statute, public charter schools are governed by their own nonprofit boards. Board members are normally selected for their strong community connections and their commitment to advancing the particular mission of their school or network of schools.
This could be the worst violation of journalistic ethics ever during a presidential election. @60Minutes literally manipulated @KamalaHarris answer (after the public blowback of her answer from the preview release of the excerpt) by cutting, culling, and pasting her words.
Something’s broken. One year anniversary since the Safe-T Act started and defendants released after their arrest have missed 67,416 court dates. This includes defendants charged with violent felonies in a justice system that is clearly not protecting victims of crime.
From yesterday’s decision in Moms for Liberty-Brevard County v. Brevard Public Schools, written by Judge Britt Grant and joined by Judge Barbara Lagoa:
For many parents, school board meetings are the front lines of the most meaningful part of local government—the education of their children. And sometimes speaking at these meetings is the primary way parents interact with their local leaders or communicate with other community members. No one could reasonably argue that this right is unlimited, but neither is the government’s authority to restrict it.
The most satisfied — 70 percent — have a child in a parochial or other religious school, and non-religious private schools and homeschools are close behind at 65 percent. About half of those with kids in public magnets, charters, online schools and microschools are satisfied.
Support for school choice — especially parent-controlled Education Savings Accounts — is high, reports Colyn Ritter, citing EdChoice’s Schooling in America Survey. “About two-thirds of Americans support school vouchers, charter schools, and tax-credit scholarships. Support for ESAs is much higher at 76 percent.” Parents with school-age children are even more enthusiastic.
Support for school choice could help Donald Trump carry the swing states, predicts Corey DeAngelis, a choice advocate, in the New York Post.
Time is a central feature of human experience. But what actually is it? In traditional scientific accounts it’s often represented as some kind of coordinate much like space (though a coordinate that for some reason is always systematically increasing for us). But while this may be a useful mathematical description, it’s not telling us anything about what time in a sense “intrinsically is”.
We get closer as soon as we start thinking in computational terms. Because then it’s natural for us to think of successive states of the world as being computed one from the last by the progressive application of some computational rule. And this suggests that we can identify the progress of time with the “progressive doing of computation by the universe”.
But does this just mean that we are replacing a “time coordinate” with a “computational step count”? No. Because of the phenomenon of computational irreducibility. With the traditional mathematical idea of a time coordinate one typically imagines that this coordinate can be “set to any value”, and that then one can immediately calculate the state of the system at that time. But computational irreducibility implies that it’s not that easy. Because it says that there’s often essentially no better way to find what a system will do than by explicitly tracing through each step in its evolution.
No. This is incorrect.
The Legislature specified certain amounts for certain things. Governor Evers’ partial veto put the money in 1 pot. Whatever.
But DPI then wanted to spend it on wrong stuff, which will waste tens of millions of dollars with no effect.
A deeper dive into taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI’s ongoing rigor reduction campaign
Do No Harm has released its database of hospitals performing sex changes on children. There were 198 sex-change patients in Wisconsin between 2019-2023 who were minors. Here is the top list from Wisconsin:
“The Race & Culture unit… determined that while Dokoupil’s questions & intentions were acceptable, his tone was not… The Standards & Practices division… determined that Dokoupil had not followed the preproduction process where questions are run through Race & Culture.”
The Woke Mind Virus in the New York Times & Washington Post pic.twitter.com/ssYhpWB7Qq
— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) October 10, 2024
Isral DeBruin:This week, Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) unveiled yet another change to how “proficiency” is measured on the state’s Forward exams. This change, not the first in recent years, makes it difficult to tell whether school districts are doing good work and hold them accountable: long-term trend lines can’t be constructed when the targets keep changing.
Worse, these specific changes seem designed to goose performance numbers—not because of sudden, dramatic improvement all across the state, but just by classifying things differently. DPI discarded the old categories of “Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced” and are now using “Developing, Approaching , Meeting, Advanced.” Apart from being less obvious to the user what these terms mean, introducing new terms gives them the excuse to redefine the boundaries for what falls into which category.
The results are shameless. For each school district, we tally what percent of students are “Proficient,” i.e. were graded in either the “Meeting” or the “Advanced” bucket for this year, and compared those percentages to the same statistic (the percentage of students districtwide graded in either “Proficient” or “Advanced”) from last year.
Districts on average boosted their Math proficiency statistic by 14.0 percentage points. The average district’s Math proficiency moved from 44% to 57%, with the crucial result that a majority are now proficient rather than failing proficiency. Meanwhile, the English Language Arts (ELA) proficiency numbers moved by almost as much, 13.2 points on average. Once again, the average district saw this proficiency rate cross the majority threshold, from 42% to 54%.
This really crystalizes the impact of WI’s new, lower standards: Someone could graduate high school “meeting” the new standards but not actually be ready for college.
And they wouldn’t know until it was too late to do anything about it.Gaming the System: Wisconsin’s Forward Exam Scores Now Useless.
“These (Wisconsin DPI) revisions are a way to make post-pandemic school performance look better just by lowering standards, without improving student outcomes”
More.
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Lots of people are saying this is frivolous because firefighters should have to pass some test, but let’s go ahead and look at some test questions so you can see why this test is just way too hard.
This first one’s a doozy:
What’s mind-boggling is that students DON’T EVEN TRY. At this, I also don’t care– I don’t get paid that great– but it still saddens me. Students used to be determined and the standard of learning used to be much higher. I’m sorry if you were punished for keeping your standards high. None of this is fair and the students are suffering tremendously for it.
And
HS teacher chiming it. It’s trickle up for us as well. If I were to impose any actual rigor or memorization requirements I would be out of a job due to the massive failure rate I would have.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The first step in fixing our public schools… is getting rid of the administrative class.
“so the point is it was an existence proof, that there’s this entire universe of alternative cost structures that is out there”
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Today, Wisconsin’s DPI released the 2023-24 Forward Exam scores for schools across Wisconsin. In the past, WILL has referred to these scores–and the report card built from them–as creating a “Lake Wobegone” effect where everyone is above average. But the changes made to the report card this year make the previous version of report cards seem like the pinnacle of accountability. In this blog post, we will compare the new report card to the old and highlight how DPI’s unilateral power to make changes to the state’s school accountability system must be checked.
What has Changed?
We wrote about some of this in a previously when the changes DPI was planning first became public. In a closed-door meeting that required the signing of a non-disclosure agreement to get into, DPI altered both the labels for categories of Forward Exam achievement and the cut points for those categories. The new labels are perhaps meant to be less “triggering” for kids, but they are also far less informative for parents. “Below Basic” is now “Developing.” “Basic” is now “Approaching.” “Proficient” is now “Meeting.” And “Advanced,” mercifully, will remain the same. But far more insidious than changing the names of the categories were changes to what “proficiency” itself means. DPI took it upon itself to alter proficiency standards that have been in place in Wisconsin since 2012. The new bar was expected to be lower, and that clearly has proven to be the case based on results released today.
“These (Wisconsin DPI) revisions are a way to make post-pandemic school performance look better just by lowering standards, without improving student outcomes”
More.
Pop culture, viral dances, and comedy are big on TikTok. News and politics? Not so much.
A new report from the Pew Research Center finds that Americans on TikTok follow very few politicians, journalists, or traditional media outlets. In fact, the typical U.S. adult on TikTok follows zero accounts in those categories.
For the new analysis published Tuesday, the Pew Research Center used human coding and machine classification to look at a nationally representative group of 664 U.S. adults who use TikTok and the 227,946 unique accounts they follow. (Pew researchers have shared details on how they use OpenAI’s GPT model to tackle “rote” research tasks before.) Journalists, traditional media outlets, and politicians each accounted for less than half of 1% of the followed accounts.
It should come as no surprise that educators tend to be more liberal than the general public. But it is less well-known just how liberal they are, how much professors differ from K-12 teachers, and how much the ideological inclinations of educators vary across states.
In this analysis, we examine 437,783 campaign contributions made by K-12 teachers and university professors during the 2022 election cycle to gain a better understanding of the political orientation of the people who teach our children. The results show that university professors lean much more to the left than do K-12 teachers, and this monolithic support for Democratic political candidates among professors hardly varies with the partisan composition of the state in which they are located. While decidedly liberal, K-12 teachers are less so than professors, and the extent of their leftward tilt tends to vary with the partisan make-up of each state.
The dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, Jerlando Jackson, plagiarized extensively over the course of his career, according to a complaint filed with the university on Thursday, lifting text without attribution and raising questions about his fitness to lead one of the top teacher training programs in the country.
The complaint includes nearly 40 examples of plagiarism that span nine of Jackson’s papers, including his Ph.D. thesis, and range from single sentences to full pages. It adds to the allegations of research misconduct already facing the embattled dean, who was a coauthor on several papers implicated in complaints against diversity officials earlier this year, including Harvard University’s chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston.
“Jackson has failed all ordinary standards of academic honesty,” said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former provost at Boston University, where he helped lead plagiarism investigations of faculty and alumni. “As long as he remains as a dean, the university has no legitimate basis to hold students and faculty to basic standards of intellectual integrity.”
Recent research suggests that the number of students seeking help with academics is growing, and that over the last couple of decades, more families have been turning to tutoring for that help. Private tutoring for K–12 students has seen explosive growth both nationally and around the globe. Between 1997 and 2022, the number of in-person, private tutoring centers across the United States more than tripled, concentrated mostly in high-income areas like Brentwood. Many students are also logging onto laptops to get personalized digital tutoring, with companies like WyzAnt and Outschool reporting they’ve enrolled millions of students for millions of hours in private, video-based learning sessions that students access conveniently from home. Market reports estimate the digital tutoring market was worth $7.7 billion globally in 2022, with projections of a compound annual growth rate of nearly 15 percent from 2023 to 2030.
Increasingly, public schools are also offering tutoringto help students catch up on learning they might have lost during the rocky years of school closures and mass quarantines. This tutoring, often embedded into the school day, is mostly provided by nonprofit companies and paid for with Covid relief funds.
While some of tutoring’s rise can be explained by the pandemic and associated learning loss, experts say families are increasingly willing to go outside of school to add academic time to students’ days—and pay a hefty price for it—for a variety of reasons. These include the ease of education technology, declining trust in schools and instructional quality, and shifting attitudes around personalization—the “For You”-ification of our modern digital lives that’s bringing big changes to how families view education.
Douglas MacMillan, David Ovalle and Aaron Schaffer
Hundreds of Americans have been arrested after being connected to a crime by facial recognition software, a Washington Post investigation has found, but many never know it because police seldom disclose their use of the controversial technology.
Police departments in 15 states provided The Post with rarely seen records documenting their use of facial recognition in more than 1,000 criminal investigations over the past four years. According to the arrest reports in those cases and interviews with people who were arrested, authorities routinely failed to inform defendants about their use of the software — denying them the opportunity to contest the results of an emerging technology that is prone to error, especially when identifying people of color.
An unsettling stylized fact is that decorated early childhood education programs improve cognitive skills in the short-term, but lose their efficacy after a few years. We implement a field experiment with two stages of randomization to explore the underpinnings of the fade-out effect. We first randomly assign preschool access to children, and then partner with the local school district to randomly assign the same children to classmates throughout elementary school. We find that the fade-out effect is critically-linked to the share of classroom peers assigned to preschool access—with enough treated peers the classic fade-out effect is muted. Our results highlight a paradoxical insight: while the fade-out effect has been viewed as a devastating critique of early childhood programs, our results highlight that fade-out is a key rationale for providing early education to all children. This is because human capital accumulation is inherently a social activity, leading early education programs to deliver their largest benefits at scale when everyone receives such programs.
Teens between the ages of 13 and 17 are being tracked across the internet using identifiers known as Advertising IDs. When children turn 13, they age out of the data protections provided by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Then, they become targets for data collection from data brokers that collect their information from social media apps, shopping history, location tracking services, and more. Data brokers then process and sell the data. Deleting Advertising IDs off your teen’s devices can increase their privacy and stop advertisers collecting their data.
What is an Advertising ID?
Advertising identifiers – Android’s Advertising ID (AAID) and Identifier for Advertising (IDFA) on iOS – enable third-party advertising by providing device and activity tracking information to advertisers. The advertising ID is a string of letters and numbers that uniquely identifies your phone, tablet, or other smart device.
Sixty years ago this month, the Free Speech Movement was born at the University of California, Berkeley. How is that working out?
In mid-September 1964, Berkeley’s dean of students banned tables and political activity along the Bancroft strip, a 26-foot stretch of university-owned sidewalk near Telegraph Avenue down from Sproul Plaza. I walked around the area last week and found, almost paradoxically, a capitalist BMO Bank, a Marxist-glorifying César Chávez Student Center and a techno-optimist Open Computing Facility.
Berkeley’s 1964 students protested the table ban. On Sept. 30, five students were cited. More than 400 insisted that they were also responsible and should all be cited too. They then staged their first sit-in inside Sproul Hall, Berkeley’s administration building. The next day, tables were set up outside Sproul Hall. The police were called and arrested Jack Weinberg. Some 200 students surrounded the police car. Speeches began as thousands assembled. Mario Savio emerged as a Free Speech Movement leader.
With the cop car still surrounded by late afternoon on Oct. 2, 500 police officers were on hand at the university. A six-point agreement was reached with the university president, and the protests ended. As is typical of universities, committees were formed. A six-week ban on tables was instituted and Mario Savio and others were suspended. But by mid-November, the tables were back, and 3,000 students marched around campus.
Justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court said Wednesday that Gov. Tony Evers’ creative use of his expansive veto power in an attempt to lock in a school funding increase for 400 years appeared to be “extreme” and “crazy” but questioned whether and how it should be reined in.
“It does feel like the sky is the limit, the stratosphere is the limit,” Justice Jill Karofsky said during oral arguments, referring to the governor’s veto powers. “Perhaps today we are at the fork in the road … I think we’re trying to think should we, today in 2024, start to look at this differently.”
The case, supported by the Republican-controlled Legislature, is the latest flashpoint in a decades-long fight over just how broad Wisconsin’s governor’s partial veto powersshould be. The issue has crossed party lines, with Republicans and Democrats pushing for more limitations on the governor’s veto over the years.
Judge Conti wrote:
“In elementary school, it is constitutionally impermissible for a school to provide teachers with the unbridled discretion to determine to teach about a noncurricular topic—transgender identity—and not to provide notice and opt out rights based on parents’ moral and religious beliefs about transgender instruction, while providing notice and opt out rights for other sensitive secular and religious topics.”
Judge Conti found that the school had violated:
- The parents’ 14th Amendment parental rights & familial privacy rights;
- The parents’ 14th Amendment Equal Protection rights;
- The parents’ 14th Amendment Due Process rights; and
- The parents’ 1st Amendment free exercise rights.
Massachusetts voters loathe the obsessive focus on standardized testing in our schools – and that is a bitter pill for our policy elites to swallow. Fear mongering from media & edreform inc over this ballot ? appears to have been utterly ineffective
Meanwhile, reducing rigor continues at the taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI.
Four members of the Chicago Teachers Union have filed a lawsuit against the CTU, demanding that the union produce an audit after failing to do so for four years.
Under CTU’s Constitution and Bylaws, Article VI, Section 1(d), the union is required to “furnish an audited report of the Union which shall be printed in the Union’s publication.”
The Council for German Orthography (RdR) caused a stir amongst grammar perfectionists on Monday when it announced that as of 2025, an apostrophe used to indicate possession will be considered correct.
Since 2004, the RdR has been considered the leading source on Standard High German spelling and grammar, and is relied on for school textbooks in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
In English, possession of an object is almost always implied by use of an apostrophe, as in: Henry’s Bar, Bloomingdale’s department store.
More.
Nicholas Garton and Danielle DuClos
If the referendum next month passes, one proposal estimates a homeowner with a property value of $457,000 would pay about $3,330 in taxes to the city — a $313 increase from the current year.
If the referendum fails, the other budget proposal estimates the same homeowner would pay around $3,100 — still an $83 increase. Although the city’s overall tax rate would decline, a nearly 8% increase in average home values could lead to higher payments for homeowners.
Without funding from the referendum, Rhodes-Conway also proposes the city add an “infrastructure special charge” of $76 per year to a typical single-family home. The fee would generate about $10 million annually citywide which, paired with cuts and dipping into budget reserves, would help fill the city’s financial deficit next year.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
Sarah Krouse, Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha and Robert McMillan:
A cyberattack tied to the Chinese government penetrated the networks of a swath of U.S. broadband providers, potentially accessing information from systems the federal government uses for court-authorized network wiretapping requests.
For months or longer, the hackers might have held access to network infrastructure used to cooperate with lawful U.S. requests for communications data, according to people familiar with the matter, which amounts to a major national security risk. The attackers also had access to other tranches of more generic internet traffic, they said.
As the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges explained, on why he preferred this language more than any other: ‘English is both a Germanic and a Latin language. Those two registers — for any idea you take, you have two words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example if I say “regal” that is not exactly the same thing as saying “kingly.” Or if I say “fraternal” that is not the same as saying “brotherly.” Or “dark” and “obscure.” Those words are different. It would make all the difference—speaking for example—the Holy Spirit, it would make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or I wrote the Holy Ghost, since “ghost” is a fine, dark Saxon word, but “spirit” is a light Latin word.’
He was correct, and without this French and Latin influence our language would be far poorer. For that we should be thankful, grateful and appreciative.
Fisher Derderian writes about how this has happened with the National Endowment of the Arts, which is giving out out $12M to NGOs that show their commitment to “equity.”
The Quotes: WILL Associate Counsel, Skylar Croy, stated, “All law students deserve an equal shot to compete for prestigious post-law school employment. No one should assess them based on the color of their skin—especially not the ABA and especially not judges. Instead, they should be considered based on their individual talents and knowledge of the law. We will continue to challenge race-based programs to reach WILL’s goal of complete race neutrality.”
Additional Background: Most judges hire a recent graduate as a “law clerk.” These jobs are often considered a golden ticket to a successful legal career. For example, six of nine current U.S. Supreme Court justices once clerked for the Court.
Christopher F. Rufo, Christina Buttons:
The best way to understand the migrant crisis is to follow the flow of people, money, and power—in other words, to trace the supply chain of human migration. In Charleroi, we have mapped the web of institutions that have facilitated the flow of migrants from Port-au-Prince. Some of these institutions are public and, as such, must make their records available; others, to avoid scrutiny, keep a low profile.
The initial, and most powerful, institution is the federal government. Over the past four years, Customs and Border Patrol has reported hundreds of thousands of encounters with Haitian nationals. In addition, the White House has admitted more than 210,000 Haitians through its controversial Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV), which it paused in early August and has since relaunched. The program is presented as a “lawful pathway,” but critics, such as vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, have called it an “abuse of asylum laws” and warned of its destabilizing effects on communities across the country.
The next link in the web is the network of publicly funded NGOs that provide migrants with resources to assist in travel, housing, income, and work. These groups are called “national resettlement agencies,” and serve as the key middleman in the flow of migration. The scale of this effort is astounding. These agencies are affiliated with more than 340 local offices nationwide and have received some $5.5 billion in new awards since 2021. And, because they are technically non-governmental institutions, they are not required to disclose detailed information about their operations.
Zachary R Mider and Nic Querolo:
At 1 p.m. on certain Saturday afternoons, hundreds of foreign-born professionals from all over the US converge on a small city in central Pennsylvania. They assemble in a high-rise office building, where they sit through four hours of college classes. Then they return to the airport and head home.
What’s drawing these students to Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is not the prospect of landing a good job. A majority already have one. Nor is it the prestige of a Harrisburg degree. If they’re lucky, they won’t ever graduate.
Susan B. Porter, Timothy N. Odegard, Emily A. Farris & Eric L. Oslund:
The importance of having a highly qualified teacher in every classroom is an educational necessity. Determining which teacher characteristics define teacher quality and measuring their impact on student outcomes has offered mixed results. This study explored the effect of teachers’ knowledge of language and literacy on their students’ reading outcomes in foundational skills and reading comprehension. Data from 9,640 students and 512 classroom teachers in 112 schools were analyzed using multi-level mixed effects modeling to account for the nested data. After controlling for student and teacher-level variables, results showed that teachers’ knowledge of language and literacy reliably predicted students’ spring foundational skills scores, but not reading comprehension scores. These findings support the idea that more knowledgeable teachers generate students with more favorable reading outcomes. Implications are discussed in addition to directions for future research.
As part of her answer, Pellebon said that “‘affordable housing’ is not affordable.” The audience of around 40 people erupted into applause.
The reaction at the Sept. 19 forum reflects just how expensive and inaccessible housing has become in Dane County, Wisconsin’s second-largest county. The county’s severe housing shortage has forced action from a state flagship university looking to house its ever-growing student population and challenged local employers hoping to grow their ranks. Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway in 2023 called a lack of housing the “defining problem of our region right now.”
According to Dane County’s 2024-28 housing roadmap, one in four Dane County households are cost-burdened, meaning they spend more than 30% of their gross income to pay for housing. Renters are affected too: In 2022, Dane County’s median monthly rent, $1,258, was $266 dollars above the statewide average, according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The Unified School District of De Pere is under investigation by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction after board member Melissa Niffenegger accused the district’s reading curriculum and its director of curriculum and instruction, Kathy Van Pay, of violating Wisconsin law.
“That is retaliation. You are retaliating against the board for disagreeing with you,” board member Brandy Tollefson said.
According to a report Van Pay read Monday night, Niffenegger, who was elected to the board in April 2023, insisted the district was using three-cueing, a curriculum model that violates Act 20, the state’s new literacy law that requires young elementary students to get “science-based” reading curriculum with a focus on phonics.
Three-cueing is teaching strategy that uses context, structure and letters to identify words.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
It is galling to hear a politician justify deliberately making test scores incomparable to previous years as a way to reduce “confusion.”
More:
Questions we will asking: Why changes were made? Why move to lower standards ? (Even @GovEvers disagrees with this) Why make it impossible to track data from previous years? And just what about act 20 does the superintendent find to be nonsense?
We @CityForwardCol have been clear: DPI’s changes are bad for students & families. This is just one reason why
But the results of last year’s Forward Exam can’t be compared to previous years after the state lowered the score students must achieve to be considered proficient or advanced, and they highlight yawning racial achievement gaps.
According to the data, which is from testing done last spring, about 51% students statewide who took the Forward Exam either met or exceeded grade-level expectations in English/language arts. In math, about 53.2% of students met that standard.
Using the old standards, in 2022-23, about 39% of students performed at proficient or advanced levels on the Forward Exam in English/language arts. Forty-one percent of students scored at those same levels on the Forward math test. But the changes to portions of the Forward Exam make it hard to compare the new results and scores from previous years to track student achievement trends over time.
Parents, do not be deceived by the DPI’s manipulation of achievement levels. This only hurts our struggling students further. And for heavens sake, follow @GhaleonQ for clear answers on what’s really happening in our schools!
Last year less than 40 percent of students were considered ‘proficient‘
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The canary in the coal mine has already died when a city’s schools are in decay. So we must double down on school choice, aided by vouchers that allow the state’s school district contribution to follow the student to the school of his/her family’s choice.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Perhaps most egregious are the changes in districts where everyone knows that schools are failing kids. Milwaukee’s proficiency still looks low at 23.4% in ELA. But now they can tout that it’s gone up 8% in one year.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Pritzker should revive School Finance Authority to take financial control of schools, approve contracts, audit programs, provide direction. Pursue a Consent Decree to remove obstacles to improving schools & provide poor parents with school choice. Here are the reasons. READ MORE.
•CPS spends $30K per student and has increased spending by 46% since 2019 despite a 9% drop in enrollment, yet only 1 in 3 read at grade level and 1 in 6 in math.
•There is now ONE full time employee for every 7.6 students in the school district as CPS has added over 9,500 full time budget positions and almost 7,800 actually filled positions since 2018.
•Half of the districts full time employees (over 22,000) are not teachers and there are over 7,500 district employees not even assigned to schools.
The raises require the school district to dip into its day-to-day operating budget, even though Solder warned the board “we do not have clearly sufficient ongoing revenues” to pay for the recurring expense.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
This year’s two Nobel Laureates in Physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning. John Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.
More.
Our latest Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) results show that the university has done significant work on “disinformation” for the State Department. But of what sort? Back in January, Gabe Kaminsky of The Washington Examinerreported that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) had given three direct awards to ASU. But the redacted documentsuncovered by Kaminsky don’t explain the purpose of the awards.
Last month, the House Committee on Small Business released a report that details the lengths to which the GEC has gone to evade congressional oversight. The committee sent the GEC a subpoena in June, only to be told that it would take the State Department another twenty-one months to produce the requested documents.
What might be underneath those redactions? According to the committee:The Global Engagement Center (GEC), an interagency body housed within the U.S. Department of State (State), circumvented its strict international mandate by funding, developing, then promoting tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.
This report shares new analyses on the impact of EBF on K-12 education resource equity and remaining gaps between current funding levels and full, adequate funding. The data are striking and underscore the need for the state to honor the commitment it made in the EBF legislation to invest at least $350 million in our schools through the new formula each year. This investment is critical to support long-term school improvement and close longstanding funding disparities.
Question: How does it feel to be an AI influencer?
Answer. I hate that description. I’ve been on social media for a long time, and I’m a compulsive sharer. But I don’t take money from any of these AI companies or do sponsorship deals. I talk to them because it’s interesting. I’m a tenured professor, I can say whatever I want. It’s strange to see companies trying to manipulate me by showing me their stuff, but I don’t have the infrastructure of an influencer. I worry that that influencer title smears everything together. There’s a difference between public intellectuals, researchers, and critics. It would be better if we had more classes of thinking.
Q. You recommend spending three sleepless nights to master AI.
Chicago’s pensions remain in bad shape and are getting worse. For perspective, three of the city’s plans have only enough money to pay out less than four years of benefits. And the latest official reports from the city’s pension plans and those of its sister agencies show a total pension debt of $52 billion, up from $42 billion just five years ago. The city’s shortfall exceeds the pension debt of 46 of the nation’s 50 states and imposes the worst costs per capita of any major American city, by leagues.
The Pension working group’s recommendations can go only in two directions. The group can either get serious about tackling the pension problem, or it can choose to continue the decades of public policy malpractice that got Chicago into this mess. We hope those involved will heed some sage advice — from right here in Chicagoland — and choose the former.
So long as you can articulate your notion, AI can make a decent stab at producing an artefact to represent your creativity. It’ll make music to your command. Write words. Produce an image. Whatever you’re trying to conceive and give birth to, AI disintermediates the historic imperative of “crafting”. It takes your ideas and makes them evident. Others can see what you intend. People can relate to what you wish to convey.
With literacy rates declining in public schools across the nation, the last thing we need is for families to read fewer books to their children—yet Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes is pushing parents to do just that. With the help of a new lawsuit, parents are fighting back.
For years, Arizona families have bought books and other school supplies through the state’s Empowerment Scholarship Account. But when former special-education teacher Velia Aguirre and home-school mother Rosemary McAtee tried to use ESA funds to buy books for their kids this summer—including “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See,” “Little People Who Became Great” and “Where the Red Fern Grows”—they ran into trouble. A July decree from Ms. Mayes prohibited such purchases unless the families could cite a pre-established curriculum requiring these books.
These and other purchases—such as math workbooks, copies of the periodic table, geography puzzles, pencils and other school supplies—had been permitted in the ESA handbook approved by the State Board of Education. All fall under the new regulatory umbrella. This overreach by the state restricts parents’ ability to provide basic learning materials for their kids.
Wright’s campaign said he has received the recommendation of the Wisconsin Education Association Council Political Action Committee.
Wright is the first announced challenger to incumbent Jill Underly, who took office in 2021.
WEAC PAC asked for input on Wright for state superintendent, and liberal judge Susan Crawford for Supreme Court. The PAC did not ask for feedback about supporting Underly
Underly is wrapping-up her first term as state superintendent. She announced her re-election bid last month.
But she has proven unpopular during her first four years in office.
Republican lawmakers have criticized Underly for focusing too much on LGBTQ issues, and not focusing enough on reading and math.
Two principals have been removed from their positions at Southside Elementary School, according to an email sent Monday to families by Madison schools Superintendent Joe Gothard.
In the email obtained by the Cap Times, Gothard says Principal Candace Terrell and Assistant Principal Annabel Torres are not serving at the school “until further notice.”
The Madison Metropolitan School District launched an investigation into the two administrators in May after 24 current and former staff members lodged a 39-page complaint the previous month. As first reported by the Cap Times, staff said Terrell and Torres had for years created an untenable working and learning environment at the school.
Students who misbehave were taken out of class, isolated from their peers and given no instruction — in some cases for weeks at a time — a dozen current and former staff members told the Cap Times in May. The staff said they’ve faced disciplinary consequences for speaking out, causing many to have nightmares, seek therapy or quit altogether.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Can we get back to a place where Coates is free to write people are free to challenge, and life just goes on? A DEI strategist b/c someone asked hard questions?
& problem, of course, is that if CBS News does this, how is average non-profit exec expected to have a backbone?
State test scores, out tomorrow, are inflated, biased, and unreliable. DPI knew achievement gaps for Black, low-income, and special-needs students would grow.
Superintendent Underly criticized “nonsense going on with literacy” while Act 20 negotiations occurred.
So, why lower them? Because they were killing the vibes.
Superintendent Underly wanted them changed in JANUARY 2023. She thinks the national college-ready standards set by Governor Evers make them look bad.
That is all bad enough, but pressing buttons without knowing why is even worse.
Superintendent Underly asked what Proficient and Advanced meant, choked on change data, and argued @NAEP_NCES @GovBoard @EdNCES ARE ILLEGITIMATE, though (awesome) DPI staff are on their task force.
Well, when critical Act 20 reforms came out, the Superintendent wrote, “And with all this other nonsense going on with literacy I want to make sure we’re not throwing more fuel onto this fire.” NONSENSE?!
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
In 2020-21, as many schools across America were shuttered because of COVID-19, parents were sitting at home working virtually, alongside their children learning virtually, and they began to realize that classroom education was no longer focused on math, science, history, English, and other subjects that would prepare young
students for success. Now, children were being taught that America was systemically racist, that they were either the oppressors or the oppressed, and that it was their responsibility to call out micro-aggressions and systemic racism and to look down on the now-hateful idea of legal equality for all. They were being taught that racism permeates every aspect of society and that no matter your biological sex, you can be a boy, girl, both, or neither. And they were told that any dissent from this orthodoxy would be met with discipline and social ostracization.Fearing for their children and aware of the limited time that young students have to learn critical skills in the public school system, parents spontaneously mobilized to protect the integrity of taxpayer-funded public education. They utilized every legal tool at their disposal, from lawsuits and efforts to recall elected officials to simply voicing their opposition to school board members who often seemed committed to ignoring their constituents, to prevent public education from becoming woke indoctrination.
While this movement grew across America, it reached its peak in Virginia, where school systems had not only embraced these divisive concepts but began the process of forcing students as young as five years old to share bathrooms and locker rooms
with members of the opposite sex. Teachers who protested were suspended, and parents who spoke out were mocked, vilified, arrested, and verbally attacked by the very elected officials who represented them.
Month 1: Last September, I was deep into my math undergrad. It was pretty dry. I was looking for some fun non-math side project. I flirted with French, Russian, archery, parkour, and Japanese. But those didn’t ignite my passion. I happened to watch a snippet of the anime Demon Slayer in an obscure Chinese fan dub. Ironically, this caught my attention. I also had lots of Chinese friends, so why not learn a little Mandarin? Oh my, I had no idea how obsessed I’d end up with this “little” side project.
Berkeley had a breakneck-speed Mandarin beginner class. I loved it. Within a week, we learned pinyin. We learned the tones. We learned to read. We learned to write. Then started talking immediately, every single day. Talking in horribly horribly broken Chinese, but nevertheless having conversations. I learned the very most important survival vocabulary, like: I am Isaak and Yes, I live in America and Sorry, no, I’m not a basketball player for the Golden State Warriors.
Here you can find a list of charts categorised by their data visualization functions or by what you want a chart to communicate to an audience. While the allocation of each chart into specific functions isn’t a perfect system, it still works as a useful guide for selecting chart based on your analysis or communication needs.
Any illusion that Mayor Brandon Johnson has a steady hand on the wheel in the Windy City was put to rest on Friday when all seven members of the Chicago Board of Education resigned amid a pressure campaign from City Hall. That’s a no-confidence vote, Chicago style.
Chicago is in the middle of negotiating what is likely to be a costly new contract with the Chicago Teachers Union, Mayor Johnson’s largest campaign contributor. Since the Chicago school district can’t afford the hefty raises and benefits CTU is demanding, the mayor has suggested that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) take out a $300 million short-term, high-interest loan to cover the shortfall.
More.
Robert McMillan & Jenny Strasburg:
Kurtaj was arrested a third time and charged with hacking, fraud and blackmail. Authorities said that while at the Travelodge, he broke into Uber and taunted the company by posting a link to a photo of an erect penis on the company’s internal Slack messaging system, then stole software and videos from Rockstar Games. Stolen clips had popped up in a “Grand Theft Auto” discussion forum from a user named teapotuberhacker and stirred a frenzy.
As officers collected evidence, the teen stood by, emotionless, police say. During his stay, he was polite and shy, said Susanne Langford, the hotel manager. “He was very quiet, didn’t interact with people much,” she said. Langford, who has a son with autism, said she recognized traits of it in Kurtaj.
Police knocked on his mother’s door to tell her that they’d just arrested her son again. For years, according to court records, she had struggled to keep her son on a path that provided schooling and other support. He had limited social skills and trouble developing relationships, records say—and ultimately looked for approval in the booming world of cybercrime.
YouTube just removed my entire channel, claiming I violated their “Hate Speech” policy. 8 years of tireless work, and 63,000 subscribers gone. I know it doesn’t come as a surprise given YouTube’s recent crackdown, but I’m still devastated.
My last video with @s_m_marandi hit 100,000 views in 12 hours (a new record for my channel). Joining the special club with @MarkSleboda1, @Glenn_Diesen, @DD_Geopolitics and others, who have challenged the U.S. narrative on Ukraine, and been deleted by YouTube.
I attempted to appeal, and it was denied within minutes.
Why American politics in the 21st century is marred by incivility and mistrust is the subject of more books and essays than any normal person would wish to read. The premise underlying most of them is that it’s a left-right problem: The right hates the left and the left hates the right, only the reasons for the hatred vary according to the author.
But what if it isn’t a left-right problem at all? What if the acrimony and loathing that animate our politics have more to do with class than ideology, more to do with educational status than any set of views on culture and policy?
The assumption that the nastiness of our politics is chiefly a matter of warring ideologies wouldn’t explain, for one thing, the mindless rage currently evident on elite campuses. These are places dominated by a confederation of left-progressive worldviews, yet the acrimony issuing from them is ferocious: occupations of quads and academic buildings, chanting mobs in the grip of antisemitic lunacy, assaults on Jewish students, flag-burning exhibitionism, dizzying varieties of “intersectional” preoccupations glomming onto the cause of anti-Zionism, and on and on.
The bulk of Bloomberg’s millions have gone to a remote college-counseling program. Bloomberg Philanthropies, the ex-New York City mayor’s charitable arm, also invested in the American Talent Initiative, a group of college presidents that aimed to attract 50,000 more lower-income students to schools with high graduation rates.
Bloomberg Philanthropies now says the college counseling has had “minimal” impact, according to a presentation shared with The Wall Street Journal. And the American Talent Initiative has shelved its big goal after falling off track.
“We think we have moved the needle. We have not solved the problem,” said Howard Wolfson, who leads Bloomberg Philanthropies’ education work.
Behind the spending is Michael Bloomberg’s belief—a belief shared by other large donors and nonprofits—that the path to economic mobility runs through America’s leading colleges.
One reason these programs haven’t found strong success is that scalable, lower-cost strategies—such as distributing packets about colleges or encouraging students to work with counselors online—struggled to get through to students. Several studies have found that more-intensive, in-person college counseling programs tend to be more effective.
According to the owner of this site, 2024 will be America’s “last election” if Trump doesn’t win.
According to the major media and the party in power, this will be the last election if Trump is elected.
But the nationwide search for a new leader that ended with Gothard’s hiring wasn’t an inexpensive endeavor: The district spent more than $100,000 on contracts with consulting groups, catering, hotels and travel during the search, according to records provided to the Wisconsin State Journal via an open records request.
This is on top of Gothard’s starting salary of $299,000 a year, which puts him well ahead of the district leaders that came before him. Interim Superintendent Lisa Kvistad received $271,900 for her one-year contract with the district. Carlton Jenkins, who spent three years as superintendent before exiting in June 2023, received an annual salary of $272,000, according to his contract.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The Wisconsin Newspaper Association Foundation is accepting submissions for the fourth annual editorial and cartoon contest as part of the Wisconsin Civics Games.
The contest is open to all Wisconsin high school and middle school students and aims to promote civics education and generate an interest in public service.
For the writing contest, high school students will be asked to write a column about the First Amendment in 500 words or less. Middle school students will be asked to write a letter to the editor on the same topic in 200 words or less.
For the cartoon contest, students can submit one editorial cartoon, also around the theme of the First Amendment.
Why it matters: The intrusion could give Chinese intelligence access to court-authorized wiretap requests and vast amounts of internet traffic, undermining U.S. law enforcement and intelligence operations.
Key points:
- The attack targeted major U.S. broadband providers, including AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies (Source: WSJ)
- Hackers may have had access for months to systems used for lawful wiretapping requests
- The breach is considered “historically significant and worrisome” by U.S. officials
LifeWise Academy relies upon a 1952 U.S. Supreme Court ruling (Zorach v. Clauson) that allows students optional, off-campus released time for religious instruction, or RTRI. The Ohio-based nonprofit Bible education program has made the Buckeye State a hub for RTRI, and will reach over 600 school districts in 30 states this school year.
“People who believe in separation of church and state should love LifeWise and should love release time because it’s a beautiful manifestation of it,” LifeWise CEO Joel Penton said in an interview, underscoring that students in LifeWise are transported off-campus (often to churches or community centers), the program is independently funded, kids don’t miss core classes (LifeWise is held during specials like art, music, recess, or lunch), and there’s no state compulsion to attend.
Stephen J. Choi and Mitu Gulati:
Donald J. Trump’s presidency broke the mold in many ways, including how to think about judicial appointments. Unlike other recent presidents, Trump was open about how “his” judges could be depended on to rule in particular ways on key issues important to voters he was courting (e.g., on issues such as guns, religion, and abortion). Other factors such as age and personal loyalty to Trump seemed important criteria. With selection criteria such as these, one might expect that Trump would select from a smaller pool of candidates than other presidents. Given the smaller pool and deviation from traditional norms of picking “good” judges, we were curious about how the Trump judges performed on a basic set of measures of judging. One prediction is that Trumpian constraints on judicial selection produced a different set of judges. Specifically, one that would underperform compared to sets of judges appointed by other presidents. Using data on active federal appeals court judges from January 1, 2020 to June 30, 2023, we examine data on judges across three different measures: opinion production, influence (measured by citations), and independence or what we refer to as “maverick” behavior. Contrary to the prediction of underperformance, Trump judges outperform other judges, with the very top rankings of judges predominantly filled by Trump judges.
More.
Venice.ai:
Unrestricted AI image generators are platforms that allow users to generate images from text prompts without added content restrictions beyond what exists inherently within an AI model.
In contrast, many mainstream AI platforms place added restrictions on what types of content you can create. Because of this, an unrestricted AI image generator provides a broader range of possibilities compared to other AI platforms.
What is Venice.ai?
Venice.ai is an example of an unrestricted AI image generator. Venice doesn’t impose additional content restrictions beyond those already inherent within the open-source models that the platform uses. These unrestricted models make Venice.ai suitable for artists, designers, and content creators who require more flexibility and creativity in their work.
The future of the University of Wisconsin-Madison is a subject of debate within the 2024 Legislative Council Study Committee on the future of the Universities of Wisconsin System.
The topic was brought up in the council’s meeting on Aug. 29 by Vice President for Administration at University of Wisconsin System James Langdon. Langdon distributed a written proposal to the other committee members, according to the meeting minutes.
Part of Langdon’s proposal focused on establishing UW-Madison as a separate state agency named the “University of Wisconsin” and providing UW with limited bonding authority, according to the meeting minutes.
In last month’s meeting Wisconsin Policy Forum President Jason Steingave a presentation regarding higher education governance. UW-Madison, out of its peer universities, is the only one that both reports to a larger governing board with statutory authority and is part of a comprehensive statewide system, according to the 62-page document.
Jamil Scott, Elizabeth Lane and Jessica Schoenherr:
Groups seeking to advance rights have often appealed to the Supreme Court. But the justices are hesitant to engage with such cases, especially when it means siding with a traditionally-unpopular group. Attorneys consequently look to make these cases more appealing. One way of doing this is identifying counter-stereotypical litigants, or litigants whose identities do not align with the expected beneficiaries of a decision. Counter-stereotypical litigants should change the conversation about who benefits from
a rights-affirming decision and increase support for the Court making that decision. Using survey experiments, we find that counter-stereotypical litigants can make a difference, but not universally. Our results show that Black male litigants increase support for overturning affirmative action while Asian American men decrease it. We also find that White female litigants draw broad support for upholding gun rights. These results suggest that attorneys must carefully consider identity politics when seeking to increase decision support.
I noticed these signs placed on the Wisconsin State Capitol grounds Saturday, 28 September 2024 and wondered who was behind their printing and placement (along with whether such partisan activity can be placed on taxpayer funded facilities)?One week later, two employees of the Foundation for Madison Public Schools (8 total employees according to them) staffed a table on the Capitol Square during the Saturday farmer’s market. The FMPS’s 2022 IRS form 990 (more from Propublica “tax exempt since 2002” EIN: 39-2043104) lists total assets or fund balances of $14,316,174 (up from 12,953,618 in 2021); revenues of $1,716,885 and expenses of 2,075,053 (loss of 358,168 vs a gain of 2,290,985 in 2021). Section IX lists expense details (including bad debts).
The Foundation for Madison Public Schools is apparently advocating for a large fall 2024 tax and spending increase referendum:
More:
“On four previous operating referendums, Madison voters opted to raise their school property taxes in perpetuity, so those tax increases never expire”.
“The irresponsibility of this (Madison School Board) is just hard to get your head around”.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
Moderna has been rebuked by regulators after offering children cash to test the Covid vaccine…
Elias Ilin and Alvaro Sanchez:
The structure of the United States social safety net features phaseouts of public assistance as household income increases, which can function as an effective marginal tax on wage gains, commonly referred to as a “benefits cliff.” These so-called benefits cliffs create a disincentive for low-income workers, especially those with children, to accept higher-paying jobs or promotions. This paper describes how benefits cliffs can affect the financial resources of a single adult, one child family living in the District of Columbia (DC) and introduces the DC Career Mobility Action Plan (Career MAP) pilot program, which serves as a benefits cliff mitigation strategy
for participants.
After recommendations from a working group on Registered Student Organization code of conduct, the University of Wisconsin-Madison required student organizations to have an advisor listed and outlined consequences for organizations who do not participate
The University of Wisconsin-Madison updated the Registered Student Organization (RSO) code of conduct in August to require RSOs have an advisor and mandate RSOs participate in disciplinary investigations.
“RSO advising can be provided by a volunteer advisor chosen by or matched with the student organization; an assigned advisor provided by the departmental sponsor; or CfLI advising services,” an email sent to RSO contacts in early August said.
The new policy — that went into effect Aug. 30 — outlines consequences for organizations that disaffiliate from the university during conduct investigations and disciplinary action for any RSO that knowingly collaborates, cosponsors or in any way participates in any event with an RSO that has disaffiliated from the university during the conduct process.
To me, one of the greatest historical puzzles is why the Cold War was even a contest. Consider it a mirror image of the Needham Question: Joseph Needham famously wondered why it was that, despite having a vastly larger population and GDP, Imperial China nevertheless lost out scientifically to the West. (I examined this question at some length in this review.) Well, with the Soviets it all went in the opposite direction: they had a smaller population, a worse starting industrial base, a lower GDP, and a vastly less efficient economic system. How, then, did they maintain military and technological parity1 with the United States for so long?
The puzzle was partly solved for me, but partly deepened, when those of us who grew up in the ‘90s and ‘00s encountered the vast wave of former Soviet émigrés that washed up in the United States after the fall of communism. Anybody who played competitive chess back then, or who participated in math competitions, knows what I’m talking about: the sinking feeling you got upon seeing that your opponent had a Russian name. These days, the same scenes are dominated by Chinese and Indian kids. But China and India have large populations — the Russians were punching way about their weight, demographically speaking. Today, those same Russians are all over Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Ivy League math departments, still overrepresented in technical fields. What explains it? Are Russians just naturally better at math and physics?
The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed an Amicus Brief in the Wisconsin Supreme Court in a case against the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA). WILL urges that because the WIAA has monopolized high school sports and has binding power over the public, including nearly 90,000 student athletes, their parents, and public school officials, it should be considered a state actor and bound by the state and federal constitutions.
The Quotes: WILL Associate Counsel, Skylar Croy, stated, “We cannot allow the WIAA to wield government power without the same limits imposed on the government itself. If the WIAA is going to control all high school athletics, it must follow our constitutions for the sake of our student athletes’ rights.”
Additional Background: With the help of the state, the WIAA became the unifying institution that governs the athletic programming of every public high school in Wisconsin. Thus, any athlete, coach, or family who wants to be involved in high school athletics must comply with the rules implemented by the WIAA. This use of delegated state power over our public schools should lead the WIAA to be considered a state actor and be bound to our state and federal constitutions.
The entire Chicago Board of Education is resigning, a stunning development after months of acrimony that clears the way for Mayor Brandon Johnson to appoint a new board that will follow his orders — fire schools CEO Pedro Martinez, make a contract deal with the Chicago Teachers Union and take a loan to cover a city pension payment and the teachers’ contract this year.
Johnson confirmed Friday in an exclusive interview that the expected resignations of all seven board members will come later this month. This was followed by a joint statement from the School Board and the mayor. WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times first reported the possibility of resignations on Monday.
The motives behind the mass resignations appear to be complicated. The board has seemed to back Martinez in clashes with Johnson at times but has also had its own concerns with Martinez’s performance, WBEZ and the Sun-Times previously reported.
But over three decades, the number of district buildings decreased by only 3.9 percent, despite a 29.1 percent drop over that period in MPS’ full-time enrollment, the policy forum found.
“The overall trend suggests that the current number of publicly supported school buildings in the city may not be sustainable over the next decade, even taking into account the latest MPS referendum,” an August 2024 Policy Forum report states.
More.
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Student Voice survey participants indicated a variety of reasons why they didn’t want to use AI tools. Some were disdainful of the technology as a whole, and others indicated it wasn’t appropriate to use in higher education.
When asked their top three concerns about using generative AI in their education, Chegg’s survey found students were worried about cheating (52 percent), receiving incorrect or inaccurate information (50 percent), and data privacy (39 percent).
“Whether you’re very leery of this for a variety of reasons—whether they be ethical, environmental, social, economic—or enthusiastic, I think we have to occupy the space for a while and recognize it’s going to be odd and complicated,” says Chuck Lewis, writing director at Beloit College in Wisconsin.
In a recently published study in Science Direct, University of California, Irvine, researchers surveyed 1,001 students to understand their usage and concerns around using ChatGPT. Among students who held concerns, the top themes were around ethics, quality, careers, accessibility and privacy or surveillance.
Some survey respondents indicated they were concerned about unintentional plagiarism or use of ChatGPT compromising their work, which could lead to consequences from their institution.
These days, there’s a formula for articles pushing the unproven claims of harm from social media. Start with examples of kids harming themselves, insist (without evidence) that but for social media it wouldn’t have happened. Throw some shade at Section 230 (while misrepresenting it). Toss out some policy suggestions without grappling with what those policy suggestions would actually mean in practice, and never once deal with the actual underlying issues regarding mental health.
It’s become so easy. And so wrong. But it fits the narrative.
I enjoy Andrew Solomon’s writing and especially found his book, Far From the Tree, an exceptional read. So, when I saw that he had written a big story for the New Yorker on social media and teens, I had hoped that it would approach the subject in a manner that laid out the actual nuances, trade-offs, and challenges, rather than falling for the easy moral panic tropes.
Unfortunately, it fails woefully in that endeavor, and in the process gets a bunch of basic facts wrong. For all of the New Yorker’s reputation for its great fact-checking efforts, in the few stories where I’ve been close enough to know what’s going on, the fact-checking has been… terrible.
A study published this week in a prestigious journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, makes a claim that’s almost unheard of on the pages of leading medical journals: systemic racism and implicit bias are not the self-evident explanations for a pervasive racial disparity. To be precise: black newborns aren’t dying at higher rates when they’re treated by white doctors.
The study, conducted by a Harvard economist and a Manhattan Institute researcher, purports to debunk a widely circulated 2020 study, also published in PNAS, which concluded that black newborns attended by a white physician suffer a “mortality penalty” and are twice as likely to die. That study garnered incriminating headlines in USA Today, CNN, Science News, NPR, and The Washington Post. It was also so influential that it was cited by Supreme Court Justice Brown Jackson in the high court’s 2023 affirmative action case, in which the American Medical Association and 44 other parties declared in their amicus brief: “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician is tantamount to a miracle drug.”
How could two teams of researchers look at the same data — 1.8 million childbirths in Florida between 1992 and 2015 — and reach diametrically opposite conclusions?
This time around, the researchers added one key variable that the 2020 researchers had overlooked — low birth weights — and the whole thing collapsed. The research design contained a fatal flaw, overlooking the fact that severely underweight babies, who have very high mortality rates to start with, tend to be treated by white doctors. Physicians who handle the most serious medical cases tend to see higher death rates.
Northwestern Law Review published a special issue featuring only black women. But, according to material unearthed in a new lawsuit, the issue was rife with plagiarism.