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Experience of irreproducibility as a risk factor for poor mental health in biomedical science doctoral students: A survey and interview-based study

Nasser Lubega, Abigail Anderson, Nicole C. Nelson:

High rates of irreproducibility and of poor mental health in graduate students have been reported in the biomedical sciences in the past ten years, but to date, little research has investigated whether these two trends interact. In this study, we ask whether the experience of failing to replicate an expected finding impacts graduate students’ mental health. Using an online survey paired with semi-structured qualitative interviews, we examined how often biomedical science doctoral students at a large American public university experienced events that could be interpreted as failures to replicate and how they responded to these experiences. We found that almost all participants had experience with irreproducibility: 84% had failed to replicate their own results, 70% had failed to replicate a colleague’s finding, and 58% had failed to replicate a result from the published literature. Participants reported feelings of self-doubt, frustration, and depression while experiencing irreproducibility, and in 24% of cases, these emotional responses were strong enough to interfere with participants’ eating, sleeping, or ability to work. A majority (82%) of participants initially believed that the anomalous results could be attributed to their own error. However, after further experimentation, most participants concluded that the original result was wrong (38%), that there was a key difference between the original experiment and their own (17%), or that there was a problem with the protocol (17%). These results suggest that biomedical science graduate students may be biased towards initially interpreting failures to replicate as indicative of a lack of skill, which may trigger or perpetuate feelings of anxiety, depression, or impostorism.

Japan’s declining births on track to fall below 700,000

Kenjiro Takahashi:

The number of births of Japanese children in the first half of 2024 has continued its alarming downward trend, with only 329,998 babies born between January and June.

If this pace continues, the country’s annual birth count will fall below 700,000 for the first time since 1947, when comparative statistics became available. 

On Nov. 5, the welfare ministry released preliminary population statistics, revealing a decrease of 22,242 births, a 6.3 percent drop, compared to the same period last year.

Choose life.

Notes on fall 2024 Tax & $pending Referendum Outcomes

Corrinne Hess

Voters in 137 school districts were asked to approve increased funding for schools. A preliminary analysis by the Wisconsin Policy Forum found 107 referendum questions passed, while 30 failed. 

Ari Brown, a researcher with the Policy Forum, said the outcome is better than expected, but shows that overtime school district have gotten better at choosing when to put referendums on the ballot and how to word the questions.

Notes and links on Madison’s 2024 referendums.

Administrative Reform: “ai” edition

Balaji:

Remember, federal agencies evolved over decades to obfuscate their internals to nosy humans. But they have no natural resistance to AI. Indeed, no agency can withstand this kind of AI interrogation.

So, this is how a small group of Elon-directed engineers can carve a path through DC, without the aid of a single corrupt bureaucrat or journalist. All they need is AI to ask the questions and X to distribute the answers.

It’s the Twitter Files, but for the entire federal government, and enabled by AI. And that’s how the digital network defangs the deep state.

Why Did Massachusetts Just Pull The Plug On 30 Years Of K–12 Success?

Frederick Hess:

Massachusetts residents voted Tuesday to scrap the requirement that high schoolers pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests in math, science, and English in order to receive a high school diploma. Instead, the new law will allow students to demonstrate proficiency in these core subjects by “complet[ing] coursework certified by the student’s district.” The measure passed58.9% to 41.1% after the Massachusetts Teachers Association spent $10 million to support the initiative, double the amount spent by its opponents.

In ditching the MCAS requirement, voters abandoned the cornerstone of the bipartisan 1993 Education Reform Act that fueled three decades of education gains in Massachusetts. Dating from 2001 through 2018 (the MCAS graduation requirement took effect in 2003), the share of students proficient in math grew by 33% and in English Language Arts by 40%. In 2005, Massachusetts became the first state to have its students lead the nation in all four major categories of the National Assessment of Educational Progress: fourth-grade reading and math as well as eighth-grade reading and math. The state has dominated the leaderboard ever since. In 2007 and 2011, international exams found that Massachusetts students were performing neck-and-neck with peers in high-performing nations like Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

Civics: Elections and the legacy media

Bill Ackman:

When the story of this election is written, I expect it will be as much about how half of America woke up to the reality that they have been manipulated by the media. This should lead to an abandonment by many of the MSM as their primary source of information. It will push more people to @X, to podcasts and other empirical sources, and it will lead to a more informed public.

Mark Cuban:

Congrats @realDonaldTrump. You won fair and square.

Congrats to @elonmusk as well.

Sophie:

the average offline person lives a life so full of bliss that most of us can’t even fathom

Dan Lurie:

Now we must show how the government can deliver:

  • Clean and safe streets for all.
  • Tackling our drug and behavioral health crisis.
  • Shaking up the corrupt and ineffective bureaucracy.
  • Building enough housing to turn around our affordability crisis.
  • Breathing life back into our downtown, and ensuring our small businesses are thriving.

Here’s the truth: Turning around this city is not going to happen overnight. No matter who wins this election, we have extremely difficult challenges ahead.

David French:

It’s all the big stuff — defeat in Afghanistan, a porous border, inflation, and (yes, this really matters) Biden’s refusal to acknowledge reality and step aside in time for Democrats to have a real primary.

Bari Weiss:

Winners: Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Josh Shapiro, X, prediction markets, Peanut (RIP).

Losers: Randi Weingarten, ayatollahs, cable news, pollsters, Obama.

Austin Rief:

So it turns out that gaslighting the US people about the health of the President, not running a primary, campaigning on fear of your opponent vs the strength of your policies, and failing to separate yourself from a very unpopular President didn’t work out.

And:

Joe Biden at the EV Summit where he didn’t invite Tesla and he told GM and Mary that they led the EV revolution

Commentary:

God works in mysterious ways.

Timur Kuran:

Among the evening’s most meaningful results: California’s Proposition 36, which raises punishments for theft and drug-related crimes, is passing overwhelmingly. Voters blue and red are fed up with woke approaches to law and order.

Tyler Cowen:

Clearly it has happened, and it has been accelerated and publicized by the Biden failings and the attempted Trump assassination.  But it was already underway.  If you need a single, unambiguous sign of it, I would cite MSNBC pulling off Morning Joe for a morning, for fear they would say something nasty about Trump.

Chicago:

Votes are still being counted in Chicago’s historic school board race, but it appears six Chicago Teachers Union candidates are poised to lose their races to pro-school choice/independent opponents.

David Bahnsen:

I believe the biggest message may be in two states that Harris actually won – New Jersey and Illinois. Harris only winning two deep blue states by 4 or 5 points that Biden won by 17 points is a screaming message about progressive culture war failures. From crime to police to migrants to school board issues, etc. – even blue states become pragmatic when progressive ideology runs amok. This is not a political failure, it is a cultural one. Critical theory and its insidious ideological cousins are failures – and politics follows culture.

Mark Halperin:

The Lincoln Project leaders will do even less soul searching than the newsroom denizens of the Washington Post and New York Times.

The stories of how Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, the pasts of Harris and Doug Emhoff, the coverup of Joe Biden’s loss of mental acuity, and how the attempts to keep Trump off the ballot, lawfare, and other anti-democratic efforts aimed at stopping Trump ironically backfired will only be told if the right people get the right book deals.

Eli Lake:

The reasons were clear if you were willing to tune out cable news.

For starters, their president, Joe Biden, had misinterpreted a narrow victory in 2020 as a mandate to make sweeping policy changes to everything from the border—some 10 million people crossed over illegally during Biden’s administration—to the national debt, which is more than $35 trillion. All the while, his Democratic Party advanced outlandish and radical social policies, such as support for biological men to compete in women’s sports, taxing unrealized capital gains, and colluding with social media companies to ban alleged health misinformation. He also insisted for most of his presidency that the very real inflation consumers experienced was fleeting and not serious. 

Glenn Greenwald:

Maybe the Democrats should try to a have a free and fair primary election to determine their next presidential nominee: one that extends beyond just Barack Obama Nancy Pelosi, Reid Hoffman and Alex Soros.

James Qually and Connor Sheets:

A tumultuous first term in office for Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón ended in a failed reelection bid, with challenger Nathan Hochman defeating him by a wide margin.

Gascón swept into office in 2020 on a promise of reform and restorative justice, but Hochman — a former federal prosecutor and defense attorney — has spent months painting the incumbent as responsible for increases in crime and homelessness around L.A. 

Kenneth Vogel:

Dem atty @MarcEElias’s firm convinced the @FEC to allow campaigns & super PACs to coordinate GOTV.

It was intended to help @ColinAllredTX benefit from a @GeorgeSoros-funded PAC.

It backfired.
Allred lost.
And @ElonMusk’s PAC seized on it to help Trump.

Mike Bloomberg:

Democrats, for their part, might ask themselves how exactly they lost to Trump, an ailing 78-year-old who much of the country despises. It probably wasn’t great to cover up President Joe Biden’s infirmities until they became undeniable on live TV. It wasn’t ideal that party elders replaced him with Harris, a nominee who had received no electoral votes and had failed decisively in a previous presidential run.

Civics & “Big Tech”

Barry Lynn:

This position as all-seeing middleman does indeed allow Google to collect vast tranches of information about you. The corporation can gather and store every word you say on or near your phone, and everything you do online—every time you break the speed limit, every massage parlor and weekend fling, even, with increasing accuracy, every cigarette, beer, and Twinkie you consume.

The existence of an all-seeing middleman is not, in and of itself, new. The postal system a century ago, AT&T fifty years ago, the internet itself twenty-five years ago—each of these old-school platforms also stood between us and the people with whom we wanted to speak and deal. And hence each of these platforms had access to enormous amounts of intimate information. But back then, the law required such entities to provide the same service on the same terms to everyone. Which meant they had few ways to profit from your private information, hence little interest in paying to collect and store it.

What makes Google and its peers unlike any corporation we’ve faced before is our failure to impose similar constraints on them. Unlike AT&T, we have failed at enforcing the laws that would prevent them from treating you differently from your neighbor.

A geometry masterpiece: Yale prof solves part of math’s ‘Rosetta Stone’

Jim Shelton:

Sam Raskin has wrapped his head around a math problem so complex it took five academic studies — and more than 900 pages — to solve.

The results are a sweeping, game-changing math proof that was decades in the making. Working with Dennis Gaitsgory of the Max Planck Institute and a team of seven other mathematicians, Raskin has solved a segment of the Langlands Conjectures, long considered a “Rosetta Stone” of mathematics.

The Langlands Conjectures, named after Canadian mathematician (and former Yale professor) Robert Langlands, suggested in the 1960s that deep, unproven connections exist between number theory, harmonic analysis, and geometry — three areas of math long considered distinctly separate. Proving these connections, mathematicians say, could suggest ways to translate certain areas of math that had seemed dissimilar.

Raskin, the James E. English Professor of Mathematics in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Gaitsgory led a team that solved the geometry portion of Langlands.

An experiment put remedial math students into ninth grade algebra and many succeeded

Jill Barshay:

In the fall of 2019, four high schools in a San Francisco Bay Area district shook up many of their ninth grade math classes. Students had traditionally been separated into more than five math courses by achievement level, from remedial to very advanced, and the district wanted to test what would happen if they combined their bottom three levels into one. Half of the students in those levels were randomly assigned to learn together, and half remained in their traditional tracks so that researchers could compare the difference. 

Students in the lowest level who were part of the experiment skipped remedial math and were able to learn algebra with the majority of ninth graders. The experiment also meant that average, grade-level students were learning alongside peers who lacked foundational math skills. 

It was risky. Students sometimes end up with lower math scores when they’re pushed to do work that is too advanced for them; that’s why California ended an eighth grade “algebra for all” initiative a decade ago. Grade-level students can also be harmed if teachers try to accommodate weaker students by making the material easier.

Civics: Targeted political “misinformation”

Collin Anderson:

Over the past three months, an avowed left-wing organization has spent more than $9 million on Facebook ads boosting Vice President Kamala Harris and attacking former president Donald Trump. The spots have reached scores of swing state voters using a Facebook feature that allows advertisers to submit their own data—for political groups, that is, data they’ve compiled on voters—to reach a precise audience.

The practice is considered standard operating procedure for campaigns and PACs. But the group behind the $9 million digital ad blitz is neither a campaign nor a PAC—at least not on paper. Instead, it’s Courier Newsroom, liberal operative Tara McGowan’s organization that pushes Democratic talking points under the guise of local “news” outlets.

Courier’s Facebook ad spending—and its targeting tactics—reflect the extent to which Democrats rely on McGowan’s media project to reach voters online.

More.

Netnews:

Steven Bellovin:

Netnews, sometimes called Usenet, was arguably the first social network. Quarterman describes it as “one of the oldest cooperative networks”. It had a profound influence on online socializing, including helping to give to the world the current slang meanings of words such as “spam” , “troll”, and “flame”. It was where many technologies we now take for granted were first announced, including Linux, the World Wide Web, and the graphical web browser. But its design was a function of both its design goals and the technological context of the time. I describe those and a variety of other early design decisions, those which were right, those which were wrong, and those which were inevitable.

Province tries to ease path to teaching

Maggie Macintosh

Among them, the province is no longer requiring teachers to specialize in an approved list of major or minor subject areas to get certified.

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?

These Researchers Critique Bad Science.

Nidhi Subbaraman:

A study trumpeting the value of applying rigorous standards to scientific research was retracted, in part because the authors didn’t follow their own advice.

In the sprawling project, scientists in four labs designed and tested experiments and then tried to replicate one another’s work. The intention, according to the study, was to test methods aimed at ensuring the integrity of published research. But the group neglected to fully document key aspects of the project ahead of running the experiments, one of the practices the study was looking to test, leading to the retraction.

The authors—who include two of the most prominent voices advocating for research reforms—dispute some of the criticisms and said any errors they made were inadvertent.

“It wasn’t because we were trying to fool someone, but it is because we were incompetent,” said Leif Nelson, one of the authors, a marketing professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nelson helps write the Data Colada blog, a website known for discussing research methods and debunking studies built on faulty or fraudulent data. Recently, the blog gained attention for its blistering critique of a star Harvard Business School professor’s work, alleging that her research contained falsified data.

Lack of Historical Literacy Has Disastrous Consequences

Will Fitzhugh:

There has recently emerged a refreshed concern over the fact that almost no American high school students read one complete history book while they are in school. This habit has been obscured by other concerns, over poor performances in math and basic reading, while Social Studies (including History) has faded from the views of EduPundits and school leaders of various kinds.

The near total absence of history books in the high schools has several unfortunate consequences. Students, even at some Ivy League colleges, have been found reluctant to attempt to read an assigned nonfiction book, because they have never read one before. In addition, the knowledge that could have been acquired from reading one or more history books in high school is not available to help students make connections with what they are hearing in lectures.

Some secondary students, not knowing any better, are reading history anyway. Since 1987, I have published 1,562 serious (average 9,000 words) history research papers by students from 47 states and 48 other countries in 142 issues of The Concord Review. As time has gone by, more and more of these papers are submitted as Independent Studies, suggesting that they are being done quite outside the expectations of their school Social Studies (or English) Departments.

One author, a Korean student at a highly selective private school in Massachusetts, wrote a 14,000-word paper (in his second language) on John Law, which we published. I had lunch with him when he went to Harvard and I asked why he had not offered the name of a teacher he had worked with. He said that no one at the school knew he was writing that paper. There was a Korean listserve, on which he had heard about the journal, and he decided to write the paper on his own. An autodidact. This sort of self-starting scholarship has characterized more and more of our authors as time has gone by.

Schools still do not assign history books or history term papers, but numbers of secondary students have discovered that if they spend a lot of time on them and do a lot of reading, there is a chance for their history essays to be published in a very well-established quarterly journal dedicated to the work of secondary students of history.

The journal only publishes 5-6% of the papers submitted, so that means that many students do not see their work in print. Nevertheless, what we hear, over and over, is that the effort to meet very high academic standards has enabled them to learn a good deal of history and greatly improved their nonfiction expository writing abilities. Even without getting published, they are proud of their effort and they feel they have gained a lot from the work.

Colleges seem to appreciate students doing serious work in history at the secondary level, and about 50% of our authors have gone to the Ivy League, Chicago, or Stanford. Others have gone to MIT, Wellesley, Amherst, Berkeley, Oxford, Caltech, Cambridge, and so on.

Colleges naturally look for students ready to do college work, and our authors, who have read extensively for their long serious history papers, have clearly gained and demonstrated that readiness.

In the wider world, as well, the ability to read nonfiction and write well are valued highly. Engineers and scientists, among others, also need to be able to read and write. The Pentagon recently complained about the problems they are having with maintenance crews who cannot read the manuals for the equipment they are assigned to take care of.

Fine literature is, of course, of fundamental value in a secondary education, but there is no excuse for allowing it to push aside any effort to have students read history books and work on history term papers.

Will Fitzhugh was born in Boston in 1936, and has a vague memory of Pearl Harbor. He has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard, and started The Concord Review in March 1987, while on a sabbatical from teaching history at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts. (tcr.org)

A University of Wisconsin student attends Kamala Harris and Donald Trump rallies

Apple Lamps:

Leaving both rallies, he found himself with a more nuanced understanding of American political dynamics. The passionate energy and openness he encountered, particularly at the Trump rally, left him questioning some of his preconceived ideas, providing him with a unique perspective on the motivations and unity that drive each side.

Video.

“Our ruling class is disgusting.”

I don’t know why Joe Biden did not use his presidency to bring us together by working to make the voting process as transparent and squeaky clean. He knew half (or at least a third) of the country had doubts. Why didn’t he work to dispel those doubts? Did he want all this discord? Was he hiding malfeasance? 

Just one of many opportunities squandered by Democrats, I’ll say. And by the way, we are down to the last few hours for making statements in the category I’ve been calling pre-postmortem.

An update on Wisconsin Literacy Teacher Retraining via 2023 Act 20

Quinton Klabon:

ACT 20 READING UPDATE
• 440 schools ignored DPI about reading retraining progress. Below describes those who responded.

• The large number may be due to teachers who previously completed a program or who chose a shorter retraining than LETRS. I welcome correction.

The October, 2024 Wisconsin DPI Report (PDF):

University of Wisconsin System Faculty or Academic Staff
2023 Wisconsin Act 20, section 27 (2) also requires professional development training for University of Wisconsin System faculty or academic staff member
who teach a course that includes curriculum in reading instruction designed for an individual who intends to apply for a license issued by the DPI to teach a grade from kindergarten to 3, to be a principal, or to be a reading specialist has received the professional. The training must be complete by July 1, 2025.

The University of Wisconsin System provided the following statement for this
report:

We are in process of complying with the requirements of Act 20 so the
Board of Regents can “ensure that, by July 1, 2025, any faculty or
academic staff member of the University of Wisconsin System who
teaches a course that includes curriculum in reading instruction
designed for an individual who intends to apply for a license issued by
the department of public instruction to teach a grade from kindergarten
to 3, to be a principal, or to be a reading specialist has received the
professional development training specified in par. (a) 1. and 2.”.

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?

“Alarmingly, 92% of parents believe their child is performing at grade level”

Debra Tisler:

yet only 31% of 8th graders in the U.S. are proficient in reading. This gap reveals how critical it is for parents to have a clear view of their child’s academic progress.

Under IDEA (34 CFR § 300.613), parents of children with disabilities have the right to promptly access educational records to make informed decisions about special education and placement. Similarly, FERPA grants all parents the right to inspect their child’s records within 45 days of a request.

Teens say: America, meh

Joanne Jacobs:

American teenagers no longer think the USA is the “best in the world,” writes Jean Twenge, a San Diego State psychology professor, in The Atlantic.

In the early 1980s, 67 percent of high school seniors agreed that “Despite its many faults, our system of doing things is still the best in the world,” Twenge writes. That fell to 27 percent by 2022.

“A first amendment montage”

Ann Althouse:


Civics & Free Speech: “The problem is America has the most useless aristocrats in history”

Illinois officials graduate record 88% of students despite tragic literacy, numeracy rates

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

It should be considered one of Illinois’ most egregious failures. School officials announced last week that in 2024 the state graduated high school students at a record 88 percent rate, even though the same data release showed that nearly 70% of graduating students can’t read or do math proficiently.

Take black students statewide. 81% of them graduated in 2024 though just 11% of those graduates were proficient in reading on the SAT as juniors the year before. Just 7% of the graduates were proficient in math. The student outcome data comes straight from the Illinois Report Card.

It’s not much better for Hispanics – an 85% graduation rate, with only 18% of them able to read and 14% able to do math proficiently on the SAT.

Overall, 88% of students statewide graduated despite SAT proficiency rates of just 32% and 27% in reading and math, respectively. State SAT results remained virtually unchanged between 2023 and 2024. 

What that disparity shows is just how willing the educational establishment is to cover up its failures.

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?

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: “Pritzker’s new budgets forecast $3 billion to $5 billion deficits”

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner:

On Tuesday’s Nov. 5 ballot there’s a nonbinding referendum that asks voters if they want the state to tax millionaires a 3% surcharge on the money they make over and above $1 million. In exchange for agreeing to target millionaires, Illinois voters can expect property tax relief, the referendum reads, though the referendum is noncommittal as to how much relief, if any, it would actually provide. The state says the 3% surcharge on millionaires will give the government about $4.5 billion in new revenues.

For the state to provide property tax relief, however, it would have to actually take some of those new tax revenues and commit them to property tax relief. And that’s where Illinoisans should be highly skeptical, we warned a week ago: “Given the upcoming budget deficits…there won’t be any money left over for tax relief.” 

Sure enough, it only took a few days for Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his budget office to announce that billion-dollar deficits are on their way.

Pritzker’s team on Friday released its five-year budget forecast and said it expects a whopping $3.2 billion deficit for next fiscal year (2025-2026), a $4.3 billion deficit for the following year, and $5 billion-plus deficits in each of the years 2028 through 2030.

More.

Curiously, Illinois Governor Pritzker has appeared and funded a number of Wisconsin political events and programs.

Law Student Faces Expulsion for ‘Aggressive Pointing’

Olivia Reingold:

When Houston Porter, a 28-year-old law student at Pace University, first walked into the college auditorium last month, he was surprised to see a packed house for the “Saving Women’s Sports” panel he was co-moderating. 

“Our events normally don’t get that kind of turnout,” says Porter, a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative group that sponsored the panel at Pace’s law school in White Plains, New York. “So it was exciting.”

But not long after, Porter’s world started “crumbling down”—with at least one professor shouting at panelists and another allegedly rushing the stage, followed by a Title IX investigation that accuses him of having “aggressively pointed” at a transgender student and misgendering her. Now Porter faces the possibility of suspension, expulsion, and even being barred from practicing law.

About two dozen students, plus two faculty members, attended the October 15 panel against Proposition 1, a New York ballot measurethat promises to codify gender identity and gender expression as protected classes in the state constitution. Porter said most attendees showed up wearing trans pride pins, but he didn’t think anything of it. In fact, he says, his LBGTQ peers were “the exact type of people” he hoped would join the discussion.

The Clash Between Academic Freedom and Antisemitism

George Leef:

Academics who cherish free speech have been pushed into a corner by the rapid rise of anti-Zionist and antisemitic rhetoric and action on our campuses. The concept of free speech covers speech we abhor and regard as not merely false but dangerous. As Justice Louis Brandeis said, the proper remedy for bad speech is more speech—to argue against that with which you disagree. That is a splendid concept, but what if that freedom of speech is abused by partisans who spread hatred and intimidate anyone who dares to respond to them?

University of Illinois professor Cary Nelson addresses that question in his book Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles. As Nelson begins, “Antisemitism is on the rise worldwide and academia plays an important role in rationalizing its character and application, indeed in applauding and promoting antisemitism’s culture and political strategies.” Nelson surveys the stunning resurgence of antisemitism (usually presented as the merely political “anti-Zionism,” though, he argues, the two are hardly distinguishable) at American colleges and universities and ponders the correct response to it. Can we protect academic freedom without letting loose the vicious hatreds that caused so much misery in the last century?

UNC’s Journalism School Can’t Serve Two Masters

Shannon Watkins:

The UNC-Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism and Media finds itself in a precarious position. It’s impossible to serve two masters, yet, in this calendar year alone, the school has attempted to satisfy the contradicting demands of two authoritative entities. The first is the programmatic accreditor for journalism schools, the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications (ACEJMC). The second is the University of North Carolina System, which creates and enforces policies for its member institutions, including UNC-Chapel Hill.

The history of Hussman’s trouble with these dual masters started with a planned ACEJMC site visit in October 2021. The visit came on the heels of the botched hiring of New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. ACEJMC found the school to be “out of compliance” with a Diversity and Inclusion accreditation standard. The site team noted a climate of low morale among faculty and staff, particularly in the aftermath of the Hannah-Jones upset. Many reported feeling “undervalued and not heard/understood.”

In this calendar year alone, Hussman has attempted to satisfy the contradicting demands of two authoritative entities.For the accreditor, the school’s overt efforts to bolster diversity and inclusion by embedding them in syllabi, activities, research, and strategic goals were not sufficient. Such efforts, according to students and faculty, were superficial and represented merely “going through the motions.”

Notes on “teaching creativity”

Carl Hendrick:

This paper asks a basic question: are some people simply born more creative, regardless of the subject or field and if so, what does this mean for education? this idea, known as the “domain-general hypothesis”, suggests that a person with a high level of general creativity could excel in any creative task they pursue.
The article questions whether we should be testing for this general creative ability, if we should teach it and whether “general creativity” is even a thing.

Civics: No ID, no democracy.

Balaji:

Because anyone or anything can vote, multiple times, without any verification. This is what’s called a Sybil attack in computer science.

Increasing the Supply of Very High-IQ Workers

Alex Tabarrok:

I have argued that there are on the order of just 164 thousand very high-IQ workers in the United States. How do we get more? Ian Calaway on the job market from Stanford has an interesting paper arguing that early math mentors can be a force multiplierfor students with superior math abilities. Calaway estimates that having a math mentor at a school, someone who runs a math club and organizes entry into top math competitions, increases the number of students earning PhDs and pursing careers as scientists and professors. Not every school has such a math mentor but Calaway estimates (after taking into account underlying abilities, he’s not naive) that over 27 years, math mentors identified 9,092 American Math Competitions students (the cream of the crop) but there were 11,168 missing students of very high ability.

These 11,168 additional students represent the missing exceptional math talents who would have participated in the AMC and been identified as exceptional if they had access to a mentor…these mentors would have increased the number of these students attending selective universities (3,017 students), majoring in STEM (3,465 students), earning PhDs (1,652 students), and pursuing careers as scientists and professors (1,850 students) during this twenty-seven year period.

“and that “executing to a Chinese standard is now going to be the most important priority”.

“Without additional referendum funding, the district would still add over 100 full-time equivalent staff” – enrollment has been declining….

Kayla Huynh:

“We are spending more revenue than we have to spend,” Superintendent Joe Gothard said. “We have a lot of work to do. Regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, we have to have some strategic direction moving forward.” 

“We need to be sustainable. There’s no doubt about this,” he added. “It’s frustrating to have two budgets and to have them dependent on a referendum and to have both of them still be a structural deficit.” 

The main difference between the two plans: The budget counting on referendum funding includes $7.1 million to pay for staff salary increases. District employees would receive a 2.06% base wage increase if the referendum passes Nov. 5. The increase would be on top of a separate 2.06% pay bump that staff received earlier this fall. 

Nicki Vander Meulen was the only board member to vote against the non-referendum budget. Vander Meulen said she could not support a budget without including full cost-of-living increases for staff.

The district would use $46.3 million in one-time funds to avoid reductions to staffing and other programs this year if the referendum fails, according to district finance administrator Bob Soldner. Cuts would be likely next school year, Soldner told the Cap Times in mid-October. 

Madison’s latest k-12 Superintendent:

Regardless of the results of the operations referendum, the school district expects to be in a structural deficit this year. Passage of the referendum would bring the district’s structural deficit of $46.3 million down to $22.9 million, though.

Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

Like, literally just stop. No government subsidies to companies. No government subsidies to NGO’s, nonprofits, foundations, activists. Let people spend or donate their own money their own way. ¡AFUERA!

Chasing away the tax base in Washington:

The politicians in Olympia who pushed the capital gains tax like to market it by saying “it only applies to the rich”, but they never honestly explain the huge economic tradeoffs that we will all suffer when we do damage to our economy.

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?

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: “We already pay more property taxes than any other county in the state”

David Blaska Summary:

For the fourth straight year I voted NO on the Dane County Budget. For 2025 the county budget:

Raises county property taxes by over $2.7 million. While this might not seem like a lot compared to a nearly billion-dollar total budget, it continues moving Dane County’s tax burden in the wrong direction. 

We already pay more property taxes than any other county in the state. [As of the Tax Foundation’s 2022 spreadsheet. Download at “Get the Data,” then sort.] We often hear from elected officials about the problem of rising home prices. If the county executive and County Board actually cared about housing affordability, they wouldn’t continue with these never-ending tax increases. I don’t know about you, but almost half of my mortgage payment goes toward property taxes. …

Is our quality of living any better than neighboring counties who pay thousands less than us?

Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

Instructor Value-Added in Higher Education

Merrill Warnick, Jacob Light and Anthony Yim:

Estimating post-secondary instructors’ value-added is challenging because college students select their courses and instructors. In the absence of sound measures of value-added, universities use subjective student evaluations to make personnel decisions. In this paper, we develop a method to estimate instructor value-added at any university.

The method groups together students who have previously taken similar courses and estimates value-added based on differences in outcomes for students in the same group and same course who have different instructors. Using a unique policy at a large public university in Indiana, we show that our non-experimental method controls for selection just as well as methods that exploit conditional random assignment of students to courses. We next show that our method reduces forecast bias in a wider variety of institutions using data from nearly all public universities in Texas. We find that individual instructors matter for students’ future grades and post-college earnings in many subjects and courses. On average, moving to a 1 standard deviation better instructor would increase a student’s next semester GPA by 0.13 points, and earnings six years after college entry by 17%. Strikingly, value-added is only weakly correlated with student evaluations. An instructor retention policy based on value-added would result in 2.7% higher earnings for students attending Texas universities.

The Kindergarten Intifada

Abigail Shrier:

In August, the second largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles—met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel. In front of a PowerPoint that read, “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired,” history teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating students.

But how to transport busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally, during the school day, without arousing suspicion? 

“A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”

Gochez was just getting warmed up. “It’s like tomorrow I go to church and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.”

Civics: civics: reflecting on the United States 

Murray:

Ron Paul’s farewell address to Congress in 2012 is one of the most insightful, accurate, predictive and honest speeches ever given by a United States politician at any level.

Nicole Shanahan:

It’s the people that Make America Great 🇺🇸 Unity 2024

Civics: Federalism and elections

Amber Jo Cooper:

He said these monitors will “ensure that there is no interference with the voting process.”

Our long term, disastrous literacy crisis & outcomes

Anjney Midha:

One the saddest realizations for me when we were scaling the @midjourney server at @discord in ‘22 was seeing millions of US gen z kids struggle to prompt

They literally don’t have the words. Broken english. Pidgin lingo. Translating thought to language is insanely hard for them

Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.

Madison taxpayers have 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?

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Falling property values and rising taxes in Chicago

JD Busch:

According to Chicago Contrarian, a property currently paying $25,000 in annual property tax (common for properties worth $750K-$1.25MM) will fork over an additional $4,685 annually based on the proposed 18.75% tax hike.

And while the real estate market hasn’t yet processed this latest curveball (it’ll take a few months for closed transactions to reveal the impact), October downtown condo transactions suggest the market is already in a steep nosedive. This move could only sharpen that trajectory.

The old trader’s adage “don’t try to catch a falling knife” seems to be the guiding principle for today’s Chicago buyers. Even though single-family homes in the under $2MM range are holding steady in many neighborhoods, due in part to limited supply and post-Covid building costs, condos in the Gold Coast, Streeterville, and Near North areas are proving that real estate doesn’t always go up, especially when property taxes are on a bender.

“I took a loss on my last investment, but I got out just in time before rising property taxes, which were already killing me,” a former Chicago real estate investor noted. He pointed us to recent closed deals that suggest the condo market was already in trouble, even before “Mayor Johnson’s new property price death sentence.”

Madison’s latest k-12 superintendent:

“It’s frustrating to have two budgets and to have them dependent on a referendum and to have both of them still be a structural deficit.” 

—- and —-

If the operations referendum fails, average Madison homeowners would see a nearly $280 decrease on their property tax bills.

Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.

Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.

Incumbrances [definition]

City of Madison (property, sales taxes & various fees): Assessor Short term rental regulations Ordinances Zoning Water Utility Streets (trash & recycling) Diggers hotline Wheel tax


Madison School District (property taxes & fees)

Madison College (property tax)

Dane County (property, sales taxes & fees) Parcels Register of Deeds Ordinances public health Dane county Madison


State of Wisconsin (income, sales taxes & fees) Statutes State Parcel Map Department of Natural Resources Department of Revenue Real Estate Transfer Tax


United States Government (income taxes & fees): Laws & Regulations debt clock

Sixth Circuit Will Rehear En Banc Case Involving High School’s Pronoun Policy

Eugene Volokh:

The order granting rehearing was just filed today, so the court will reconsider the case in the coming months. Here’s an excerpt from the now-vacated panel majority opinion (Judge Jane Stranch, joined by Judge Stephanie Davis), which deals with school policies that “prohibit students from repeatedly and intentionally using non-preferred pronouns to refer to their classmates”:

Tinker v. Des Moines Ind. Cmty. Sch. Dist.(1969) … does not require school authorities to wait for a disturbance before regulating speech, nor does it “require certainty that disruption will occur.” Even this limited preliminary injunction record contains evidence of the substantial disruption that repeated, intentional use of non-preferred pronouns to refer to transgender students can cause. The PDE parent-members themselves “understand[]” that use of non-preferred pronouns “will be considered ‘insulting,’ ‘humiliating,’ ‘dehumanizing,’ ‘derogatory,’ and ‘unwanted’ to those who want to go by different pronouns.”

PDE also attached to its preliminary injunction motion an article containing a therapist’s explanation that students who “have been misgendered all day” often become “traumatized,” “humiliated,” and “cry after school.” This evidence dovetails with a study, cited by the district court, collecting literature on the “measurable psychological and physiological harms” that can be caused by use of non-preferred pronouns. And it supports the conclusion that transgender students experience the use of non-preferred pronouns as dehumanizing and that, as a result, the repeated use of such pronouns can have severely negative effects on children and young adults….

Nepotism vs. intergenerational transmission of human capital in Academia (1088–1800)

David de la Croix & Marc Goni:

We have constructed a comprehensive database that traces the publications of father–son pairs in the premodern academic realm and examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence. We find that human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to children and that nepotism declined when the misallocation of talent across professions incurred greater social costs. Specifically, nepotism was less common in fields experiencing rapid changes in the knowledge frontier, such as the sciences and within Protestant institutions. Most notably, nepotism sharply declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, when departures from meritocracy arguably became both increasingly inefficient and socially intolerable.

More.

GPT-4o and Co. get it wrong more often than right, says OpenAI study

Matthias Bastian

OpenAI’s best model, o1-preview, achieved only a 42.7 percent success rate. GPT-4o followed with 38.2 percent correct answers, while the smaller GPT-4o-mini managed just 8.6 percent accuracy.

Anthropic’s Claude models performed even worse. Their top model, Claude-3.5-sonnet, got 28.9 percent right and 36.1 percent wrong. However, smaller Claude models more often declined to answer when uncertain – a desirable response that shows they recognize their knowledge limitations.

Wisconsin High School Teacher Messaging

Via Dan Lennington:

🤡Wisconsin high school preps teachers for election-day trauma.
Suggestions?
“take care of yourself and prepare to support students”
“staff circle to process your emotions”
“Affinity space for staff of color”
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, internal email…

Truth and the Bezos’ Washington Post

JD Vance:

I don’t care, frankly, whether the editorial page endorses Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. I care about whether the journalists are lying about Donald Trump or lying about Kamala Harris.

And frankly, they’re lying a lot in the negative direction about my running mate, and they’re lying a lot in the positive direction about Kamala Harris.

So what I would like to see from Jeff Bezos is a commitment to the Washington Post, not just being a Democrat Super PAC.

I don’t give a shit if he hires a few more conservative columnists. It doesn’t matter. What matters is do they hold their journalism to anything like a high standard?

Meanwhile: revising numbers…

And:

“They are now as mad as you will ever hear a stenographer on the record that white House officials tried to change the meaning of their transcripts.”

AP:

White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which President Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two U.S. government officials and an internal email obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.

Bill Ackman:

Civics: “What President?”

Ann Althouse:

Screen grab from NYT home page just now. It links here, where Michelle Cottle writes: “It is time for Democrats to stop putting a mic in front of President Biden unless absolutely necessary…. With just a few days left in this race, I’d like to request — ever so gently — that Biden keep those lips zipped on political matters. Things are crazy enough out here without his help.”

Either he’s President or he isn’t. He’s made a mess of everything and deprived us of a normal process of selecting a President. And the Democratic Party candidate for President is entirely implicated in the dangerous, outrageous situation, and you just want to shut him up for a few days?! No, the entire shit show is the responsibility of Democratic Party that is aggressively seeking power over his half-dead body. Why should we look away?

Meanwhile.

Civics: “ballot harvesting” in Milwaukee

Paul Bedard

The witness said in a statement that he saw somebody jam up to 500 ballots into an unguarded ballot box and then flee once he realized that he was being photographed.

In Wisconsin, the law requires that voters personally handle their ballots. It bans the collection, or harvesting, of ballots by others, CPAC said.

Civics: Colorado Voting Machine Passwords posted Online for months

Kyle Clark:

Griswold did not inform county election clerks that her office had posted voting machine passwords online for months and did not begin the process of changing the leaked passwords until after the security breach became public.

Civics: (non) open records

Senator Ron Johnson:

“You think there might be some incriminating information in this? Now, again, these are government documents. This is government federal federal records. This should be made available to congress. This should be mailed made available to the American public, but it is not.”

“So that’s the Fauci emails. My my letters on hot lots, I’ve written 4 of them starting in December of 2021. The first letter compared 25,000 lots of COVID vaccine to 22,000 lots of flu vaccine. 1 COVID lot had 5,297 adverse reactions associated with it. The worst flu lot had a 137.”

Civics: “An executive order prompted the agency to recast its mission”

Christopher Rufo:

As part of this initiative, the White House required each federal agency to submit detailed DEI progress reports regularly, appoint a chief diversity officer, and create “Agency Equity Teams,” whose leaders were tasked with “delivering equitable outcomes.” These requirements contributed to what the president called “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”

The gender component of this agenda spread to the State Department through the president’s “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World.” Published in February 2021, this memorandum directed State and other agencies to monitor closely and report on the “LGBTQI+” policies of our allies, to “broaden the number of countries willing to support and defend” the radical Left’s understanding of gender—for example, by funding pro-transgender “civil society advocates” in order to shift public opinion in those countries—and to tie in the principles of gender theory to America’s foreign-aid programs.

If necessary, the memo maintained, agencies should use “the full range of diplomatic and assistance tools” to ensure foreign governments’ compliance with this agenda, including “financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and other actions.”

Psychological Safety vs. High Standards

Sheril Mathews:

In this piece, I unpack the confusion surrounding psychological safety and why you need both psychological safety and high standards to achieve high performance.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Inflation

Jon Kamp, Joe Pinsker and Aaron Zitner:

The economy is humming. Inflation has cooled off. Americans are well-employed, getting raises and spending freely.

But—with an election in less than two weeks—people still haven’t gotten over how much higher prices are today than in 2020.

People find it unsettling that price tags don’t look like they did before inflation took off during the pandemic, surging to the highest level in four decades. Even though the growth in prices has eased significantly, prices themselves aren’t getting lower.

“It’s hard to adjust,” said Marilyn Huang, a 54-year-old engineer in Doylestown, Pa.

As with many Americans, Huang’s pay has increased since 2020, and she and her partner continue to spend on travel and even dine out more than in the past. But the higher prices are aggravating.

“You lived with these stable prices for all your life,” she said. “Mentally, it’s hard.”

The Kindergarten Intifada

Abigail Shrier:

In August, the second largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles—met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel. In front of a PowerPoint that read, “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired,” history teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating students.

But how to transport busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally, during the school day, without arousing suspicion? 

“A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”

Gochez was just getting warmed up. “It’s like tomorrow I go to church and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.”

University of Texas Robotics Program

Via Bill Gurley:

The University of Texas at Austin Texas Robotics Undergraduate Program is now open to high school students, allowing them to apply directly to the cohort-based Robotics Program through the Common App.

Learn more about the Texas Robotics Undergraduate Program.

First Game-Based Digital Therapeutic to Improve Attention Function in Children with ADHD

FDA.gov

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permitted marketing of the first game-based digital therapeutic device to improve attention function in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The prescription-only game-based device, called EndeavorRx, is indicated for pediatric patients ages 8 to12 years old with primarily inattentive or combined-type ADHD who have demonstrated an attention issue. EndeavorRx is indicated to improve attention function as measured by computer-based testing and is the first digital therapeutic intended to improve symptoms associated with ADHD, as well as the first game-based therapeutic granted marketing authorization by the FDA for any type of condition. The device is intended for use as part of a therapeutic program that may include clinician-directed therapy, medication, and/or educational programs, which further address symptoms of the disorder.

“The EndeavorRx device offers a non-drug option for improving symptoms associated with ADHD in children and is an important example of the growing field of digital therapy and digital therapeutics,” said Jeffrey Shuren, M.D., J.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “The FDA is committed to providing regulatory pathways that enable patients timely access to safe and effective innovative digital therapeutics.”

Massachusetts Is Making Its High School Diplomas Meaningless

Jessica Grose:

On Election Day, Massachusetts voters will have a chance to get rid of the state’s high school exit exam, which involves standards-based tests in math, sciences and English. The ballot measure is known as Question 2, and voting yes “would eliminate the requirement that students pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System in order to graduate high school but still require students to complete coursework that meets state standards.”

Massachusetts is one of fewer than 10 states that still have exit exam requirements. It is also consistently ranked among the best states for K-12 public education — as are some of the other states with exit exams, like New York and Virginia. The MCAS is not a killer exam. As my newsroom colleague Troy Closson pointed out, “More than 90 percent of sophomores pass the test” on their first try. Furthermore, “Failing students can retake the exams several times or lodge an appeal.”

A summary of the arguments for and against Question 2 from the nonpartisan Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University states that “96 percent manage to eventually pass or otherwise prove their competency via one of the state’s alternate paths.”

Notes on “ai” perceptions

More in common:

As a major technological development with wide reaching implications, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is poised to profoundly impact American psychology, society and politics. More in Common seeks to elevate Americans’ voices at this inflection point, particularly as private and public actors make decisions that shape AI’s potential to affect trust, social cohesion, and division.   

Key Takeaways

  • Americans view GenAI as a powerful force whose full consequences are yet to be seen. 
    • The most expressed emotion is “uncertain” (49%), followed by “interested” (36%) and “worried” (29%).  
    • Women, rural Americans, and those with a low sense of belonging are generally more skeptical and fearful about AI’s impact compared to men, urban residents, and those with a strong sense of community.  

“High achievers & Equity”

Brandon Wright:

America’s reckoning with racial injustice and the pursuit of equity have led some public school systems to reduce or terminate (or at least question) special programs for high achievers, such as “gifted” education, honors courses, and selective high schools. Historically, such programs have served disproportionately few Black, Hispanic, Native American, and low-income students. Their critics have used this fact to call for their overhaul or elimination—a position they often justify with claims that the programs don’t improve participants’ academic outcomes, especially those of marginalized students, and that more heterogeneous classrooms work just as well.

This policy brief considers four frequent arguments that opponents of advanced education programs use to advocate for their elimination.

Claim 1: Programs for advanced students don’t work, especially for marginalized students. False. Interventions including acceleration and readiness grouping benefit high-achieving students from all backgrounds and don’t harm their lower- and middle-achieving peers.

Claim 2: What’s commonly termed “differentiated instruction,” i.e., grouping all readiness levels into single classrooms, works just as well as advanced programs that group some of them separately.

False. No high-quality research shows that heterogeneous differentiation can work at scale for the full range of student readiness levels that are typically present in American classrooms. And several large-scale meta-analyses say it doesn’t work.

Claim 3: School systems under-identify marginalized students due to biased practices. Perhaps. We can’t deny that bias can take place, but the problem is deeper—and it is up to us to intervene early.

“We thought the union would focus on things that matter, like wages and benefits”

Michael Alcorn & Leslie Stratford:

Instead, union representatives negotiated over things like “pronoun pins,” which the company already provides. They demanded that Trader Joe’s cover abortion and “gender-affirming care.” The company’s response: The health plan already covers that. Either the union negotiators were embarrassingly uninformed, or they were playing a political game with workers as the pawns. Either way, our team deserved better.

We wrote up what we saw at the bargaining session and posted it in the break room. Within hours, the union asked the store captain to take it down. He refused. We then showed up to the next bargaining session in April 2023, only for our own union to deny us entry and ask security to escort us from the building. Why don’t the people who have a legal duty to represent our interests want us to see what they’re saying and doing?

Our frustration kept building, so last November, we told our fellow crew members that we were gathering signatures to hold a decertification election. We need the support of only 30% of the bargaining unit to force another election. We thought this would be tough, since many of our colleagues told us they were afraid of union reprisals and would sign only if we kept their names secret. Yet by July of this year, 46% of our co-workers had signed our petition. We felt we had a real shot, especially since a majority of the crew members who initially voted for unionization have since left. In July, we filed our petition with the National Labor Relations Board.

Two months later, our hopes were dashed. The NLRB’s regional director dismissed our petition on grounds that Trader Joe’s is under investigation for unfair labor practices at our store. The company is accused of everything from having an “overly broad” dress code to giving one of our co-workers a “negative appraisal.” The union has also claimed that managers in our store made “threats,” though in our experience they did nothing of the kind.

Student teacher compensation proposal

Abbey Machtig:

Student teachers could be paid $10,000 to help cover expenses and reduce debt while training in schools, according to a 2025-27 budget request from state Superintendent Jill Underly and the Department of Public Instruction.

Aspiring educators must complete some form of preparation program to become a licensed teacher in Wisconsin. Many college students spend a semester working in a cooperating school district to meet the requirement, while earning little to no pay.

There is no state program that pays student teachers, DPI spokesperson Chris Bucher said. Grant funding may be available through individual colleges or universities, such as the UW-Madison teacher pledge program.

Librarian brings medical history to life

David Wahlberg:

I like one from 1953 for a gel to treat asthma. The image, of a woman trying to catch her breath, is viscerally powerful. It’s more artistically compelling than a person sitting on a couch with an inhaler.

Another one, for Robitussin cough syrup, in 1972, is interesting because of the copy and what it says about the ethics of advertising. (The ad shows a TV weatherman giving a forecast.) It says, “the word gets around by professional recommendation, not television advertising – and we want to keep it that way … And we believe medicine should be recommended by a professional, not a weatherman.”

Wisconsin’s disastrous literacy programs: taxpayer funded litigation

Corinne Hess:

“The Governor and DPI will very likely show that the Governor validly partially vetoed Act 100 and that DPI is entitled to the $50 million in disputed literacy funding,” Kaul wrote to the Supreme Court. “Both issues are destined for this Court, and leaving them to the ordinary appellate process would significantly harm the Governor, DPI, school districts statewide, and the public.”

Meanwhile, State Superintendent Jill Underly announced Wednesday she’ll ask the Legislature for an additional $60 million to fund literacy improvements in the next biennial budget. 

“The early literacy priorities included in my budget proposal are needed to build on this year’s funding for Act 20 — which we still need,” Underly said. 

The money would, in part, increase the number of literacy coaches from the required 64 under Act 20 to 100. 

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.

Madison taxpayers have 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?

Civics: Trust, the political class and elections

Glenn Greenwald:

Why don’t people trust the voting process, one that takes days or weeks to fully count and that has things like this “unexpectedly” happening with Dominion machines 5 days before Election Day?

Democrats Used to Run on Education. What Happened?

Jonathan Chait:

It’s an unobtrusive line that stands out 30 years later. The reason: Better schools are no longer part of the basic litany of promises Democratic candidates make.

If you scroll over to Kamala Harris’s issues page, there’s plenty of programmatic detail, but look closely at the education section:

Vice President Harris will fight to ensure parents can afford high-quality child care and preschool for their children. She will strengthen public education and training as a pathway to the middle class. And she’ll continue working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt and fight to make higher education more affordable, so that college can be a ticket to the middle class. To date, Vice President Harris has helped deliver the largest investment in public education in American history, provide nearly $170 billion in student debt relief for almost five million borrowers, and deliver record investments in HBCUs, Tribal Colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and other minority-serving institutions. She helped more students afford college by increasing the maximum Pell Grant award by $900 — the largest increase in more than a decade — and invested in community colleges. She has implemented policies that have led to over one million registered apprentices being hired, and she will do even more to scale up programs that create good career pathways for non-college graduates.

Almost nothing here addresses K–12 education. There are details about kids younger than K–12 (expanding access to pre-K and child care) and students older than K–12 (college grants, apprenticeships, and career options for noncollege graduates). But other than a vague promise to “strengthen public education and training as a pathway to the middle class,” which could apply to postsecondary education as well as primary, there’s nothing here about schools.

Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.

Madison taxpayers have 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?

Renters and property taxes: “property taxes are by far the single largest expense of operating an apartment building”

AJ Manaseer:

What a great example showing who is actually responsible for rent increases in Chicago.

Tax burdens at a record high:

Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.

Madison taxpayers have 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?

Anthropic’s educational courses

Git:

Welcome to Anthropic’s educational courses. This repository currently contains five courses. We suggest completing the courses in the following order:

  1. Anthropic API fundamentals – teaches the essentials of working with the Claude SDK: getting an API key, working with model parameters, writing multimodal prompts, streaming responses, etc.
  2. Prompt engineering interactive tutorial – a comprehensive step-by-step guide to key prompting techniques. [AWS Workshop version]
  3. Real world prompting – learn how to incorporate prompting techniques into complex, real world prompts. [Google Vertex version]
  4. Prompt evaluations – learn how to write production prompt evaluations to measure the quality of your prompts.
  5. Tool use – teaches everything you need to know to implement tool use successfully in your workflows with Claude.

Please note that these courses often favor our lowest-cost model, Claude 3 Haiku, to keep API costs down for students following along with the materials. Feel free to use other Claude models if you prefer.

Civics: U.S. Rep. Steil: Urges immediate meeting of Wisconsin Elections Commission after release of draft guidance on non-domiciled ID

WisPolitics:

“Because both the “Limited Term” and “Non-Domiciled” identifications are issued pursuant to Chapter 343 of the Statutes, Wis. Stat. § 5.02(6m)(a)1. mandates that these identifications must be accepted as a proper form of voter identification. However, possessing a valid identification does not necessarily mean the holder of the identification is eligible to vote. 
 
“… if the potential voter presents a DMV identification marked “Limited Term” or “Non-Domiciled,” that indicates that the individual is most likely ineligible to vote because they are not a citizen and the election inspector should challenge that individual’s eligibility to vote, unless the person presents documentation demonstrating the person is now a citizen.” 

Read the full letter and draft memo here
 

Bill Maher Scorches The Teacher Unions

CTUP:

Comedian Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time,” is known to zing and call out both left and right on his late-night show. The self-described “common sense liberal” was in rare form last week when he attacked teacher unions for their role in destroying the quality of public education:

Standardized testing was dropped until schools saw how dumb that was. And yet, the head of the teachers union in Chicago still maintains that testing is “junk science rooted in white supremacy.”

And her union tweeted during COVID, when many Americans felt we could have gotten back to normal sooner, that “the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” No, it was rooted in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

The teaching of which is apparently job none in Chicago because only about one in four students in the city are proficient in either math or English, and absenteeism is off the charts. … Our schools need to do better. Our kids need to be in school, and when they’re there, they need to have the phones off and the brains on, learning the basic things we used to teach.

Misrepresenting History, Law, And The First AmendmentMisrepresenting History, Law, And The First Amendment

Mike Masnick:

People also seem to forget that recommendation algorithms aren’t just telling you what content they think you’ll want to see. They’re also helping to minimize the content you probably don’t want to see. Search engines choosing which links show up first are also choosing which links they won’t show you. My email is only readable because of the recommendation engines I run against it (more than just a spam filter, I also run algorithms that automatically put emails into different folders based on likely importance and priority).

Algorithms aren’t just a necessary part of making the internet usable today. They’re a key part of improving our experiences.

Yes, sometimes algorithms get things wrong. They could recommend something you don’t want. Or demote something you do. Or maybe they recommend some problematic information. But sometimes people get things wrong too. Part of internet literacy is recognizing that what an algorithm presents to you is just a suggestion and not wholly outsourcing your brain to the algorithm. If the problem is people outsourcing their brain to the algorithm, it won’t be solved by outlawing algorithms or adding liability to them.

It being just a suggestion or a recommendation is also important from a legal standpoint: because recommendation algorithms are simply opinions. They are opinions of what content that algorithm thinks is most relevant to you at the time based on what information it has at that time.

And opinions are protected free speech under the First Amendment.

The famous “Overton Window” is named after him

Jash Dholani:

You can’t expect politicians to not respond to public will. Even Napoleon said: “Public opinion is the thermometer a monarch should constantly consult.” But what you can do is persuade, nudge, seduce, and pull the public over to your side. This is why “Culture Wars” matter

Chinese Characters and the Problem of Literacy

Global China Pulse:

Chinese characters constitute one of the world’s oldest writing systems and these iconic symbols are so intertwined with Chinese history, philosophy, and the arts that they are virtually a semiotic representation of the culture itself. The staggering number of Chinese characters makes the system unique among the scripts of the world. The exact number of characters appearing in the historical record is debated, but is certainly in the tens of thousands. The latest version of the official Xinhua Dictionary contains more than 13,000 characters, but only 4,000–4,500 are necessary for full literacy. The process of mastering the system has thus been a daunting task for Chinese children throughout the centuries and up to the present. During the dynastic era, only the offspring of the wealthy elite had the time and wherewithal to spend their childhoods practising characters with a calligraphy brush, and therefore the literacy rate at the turn of the twentieth century was roughly 10–15 per cent—a number that was virtually unchanged when Mao Zedong took power in 1949 (Ross et al. 2006).

After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the May Fourth intellectuals under the new Republic of China turned their attention to language reform, with the focus on the problem of Chinese characters and literacy. After China’s century of foreign aggression and exploitation, the Chinese reformers recognised the need to cultivate an educated populace and the formidable task of memorising thousands of characters was seen as a stumbling block to that goal. Many prominent public intellectuals such as Lu Xun, Hu Shi, and, later, even Mao Zedong advocated eliminating the characters altogether, while transitioning to an alphabetic system (Moser 2016). The developed Western countries were in the middle of an information revolution and the Chinese intelligentsia was keenly aware that the myriad Chinese characters were ill-suited to the alphabet-based world of typewriters, telegrams, and teletype. For decades, Chinese linguists and inventors struggled mightily to develop phonetisation methods, character classification schemes, and character input systems to bring the ancient Chinese characters into the twentieth-century information environment (Tsu 2022).

Notes on Wisconsin’s latest early literacy legislation

Quinton Klabon:

ACT 20 READING UPDATE

  • debate about which skills are screened, whether students age out for screening lower-level skills, and whether a screener exists that screens all skills needed
  • DPI says DA chose aimswebPlus by price, Pearson’s evidence, and limitations of other vendors

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

K-12 Tax & $pending climate: Chicago Property Taxes up 155% in 10 years

AJ Manaseer:

People need to understand how incredible Johnson’s proposed property tax increase is (the one he promised multiple times wasn’t coming).

The current levy for Chicago is $1.73B.

The proposed increase is $457M, bringing the total up to $2.19B.

That is a 26% increase in your property taxes.

It gets worse:

In 2014 the levy was $859M. If Johnson’s increase goes through, that means Chicagoans’ property taxes have risen 155% in 10 years.

Madison School Board stays vague on how it would spend referendum dollars, but passes 2 budgets

Abbey Machtig:

“We are spending more revenue than we have to spend, therefore we are going to be spending one-time (reserve) funds …” Gothard said Monday. “We have a lot of work to do. Regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, we have to have some strategic direction.”

Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.

Madison taxpayers have 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?

Civics: “How do these foreign officials pay US politicians? By paying their families.”

Catherine Herridge:

IRS Whistleblowers Involved in Hunter Biden Tax Case Reveal IRS, DOJ, and FBI Knew Laptop “Was Real” Immediately; Claim Prosecutors Demanded They Not Ask Questions About Joe Biden Ahead of 2020 Election

“There were a lot of overt investigative steps that we were not allowed to take because we had an upcoming election.”

“The prosecutors…told us that they didn’t want to ask about ‘The Big Guy.’”

“We corroborated that ‘The Big Guy’ was Joe Biden. Yes.”

More.

Litigation over taxpayer funded race based education programs

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed its 12th lawsuit against the Biden-Harris Administration, this time targeting the U.S. Department of Education’s McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program. This $60 million program provides financial and educational opportunities to students nationwide who want to pursue graduate studies. But many college students are ineligible because of their race, including Asians, whites, Arabs, Jews, and some Latinos.  

WILL is representing Young Americans for Freedom Chapter at the University of North Dakota, the nationwide student organization Young America’s Foundation (YAF), and two students who are ineligible for the program solely due to their skin color.  

The Quotes: Scott Walker, President of Young America’s Foundation, stated, “Denying a student the chance to compete for a scholarship based on their skin color is not only discriminatory but also demeaning and unconstitutional. At YAF, we proudly defend our students’ right to be judged on their merit and abilities, not on race.” 

WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, stated, “WILL continues its march through Biden-Harris radical DEI programs. We have already heard that the Administration knows they can’t win in court and so one-by-one we will terminate these discriminatory, taxpayer-funded efforts.”