Penelope Green:
In 2008, she graduated from the College of San Mateo, a two-year community college in Silicon Valley, along with her younger brother, Stoyan. With scholarships from the San Mateo Rotary Club, among other awards, they were both accepted at Berkeley, where Boryana earned a degree in economics. She worked as an account manager at Brocade, a software company, before joining Tesla in 2011.
When society wants to encourage something, the government serving it subsidizes that activity. Conversely, when it wishes to discourage an activity, often it taxes it. Thus we have high taxes on cigarettes and alcoholic beverages to help curb lung cancer and alcoholism. And we give subsidies to universities because we think doing so will help produce a better society —higher incomes, more enlightened leaders, greater opportunities for individuals to advance themselves financially and maybe even spiritually, etc. Universities allegedly reek with positive spillover effects.
But then there is Yale University. We give it all sorts of subsidies despite the fact that it is one of the greatest private concentrations of wealth on the planet, with at least $2.5 million dollars of endowment for every student attending providing about $100,000 income annually or roughly $300 daily per student (whether school is in session or not) in investment income to educate each of the 12,000 students enrolled. Donations to the school are tax deductible. The school’s earnings (including capital gains) from the over $30 billion endowment are not taxable as they are for private individuals. To be sure, the U.S. recently imposed an endowment tax on ultra-rich schools like Yale, but still the tax benefits of its university status far exceed the costs.
What sort of oversight is there of this highly favored institution? How transparent is its decision making process? Recent articles by two fine graduates of the Yale Law School (typically rated as the nation’s finest), Lanny Davis (Wall Street Journal) and Glenn Reynolds (New York Post) suggest the governance of Yale probably more closely resembles that of, say, Belarus, than it does of a typical U.S. governmental body or publicly traded U.S. corporation. The Board of Trustees of Yale is elected theoretically at least in part by university alumni, but in reality the only candidates considered for election are selected by the board itself, and candidates are not allowed to campaign or provide alumni with detailed information about their lives or their positions of interest to the Yale community.
Until recently, it was possible for alumni to petition to be on the ballot, and occasionally there would be contested elections, but Yale’s anti-democratic aristocrats have put a stop to that, changing the rules to allow voting only for the two Board-approved candidates who are forbidden to really campaign. And this is at a university that openly allows public inspection of its Board minutes only after 50 years. And one that still has “secret societies” like Skull and Bones for the most elite amongst the elite kids populating the place.
WILL:
The News: The Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously declared that an order from the City of Racine’s public health officer closing all schools, public and private, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, is invalid and lacked proper legal authority. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed an original action to the Wisconsin Supreme Court on November 19, on behalf of a group of parents, schools, and membership associations. The Court granted WILL’s original action and issued a temporary injunction blocking the City of Racine’s school closure order before it could go into effect on November 27.
Quote: WILL President and General Counsel, Rick Esenberg, said, “The Court determined, once again, that a local public health officer violated the law when it ordered all schools in her jurisdiction closed. This marks another important case reminding public officials that emergencies do not override the rule of law.”
Background: The City of Racine Public Health Department issued an order on November 12, closing all school buildings in the City of Racine, private and public, from November 27 to January 15, as a means of addressing COVID-19. When Racine issued this order, WILL had already filed an original action to the Wisconsin Supreme Court challenging Dane County’s school closure order and obtained an order enjoining it.
WILL filed an original action to the Wisconsin Supreme Court on November 19, on behalf of a group of parents, schools, and membership associations and similarly earned a temporary injunction blocking Racine’s school order while the Court decided the challenge to Dane County.
Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled
Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).
which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.
While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state.
The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.
The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.
“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”
Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.
All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.
Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Assembly against private school forced closure.
Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.
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.
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
[edit: existing polygenic screening companies might not read enough genes to do this. Although it would be easy to offer a more complete service that reads most genes, banning the more complete version might be one way regulators could prevent this otherwise hard-to-prevent thing.]
What about IQ? There are definitely scientists who have figured out how to do polygenic analyses to predict a modest amount of variation in IQ, though I don’t know if their algorithms are public, and they’re certainly not convenient for amateurs to use. If you had them, would they work? Gwern has done some calculations and finds that with ten embryos (a near-best-case scenario of what you’re likely to get from egg extraction) and modern (as of 2016) polygenic scoring technology, you could get on average +3 IQ points by implanting the smartest. If polygenic scoring technology reached the limits of its potential (might happen within a decade or two) you could get +9 IQ points. Embryos from the same parents only vary a certain amount in IQ, and about half of IQ variation is non-genetic, so you can’t work miracles with this (if you want to know how to work miracles, read the rest of Gwern’s article).
The police are attempting to use YouTube’s stringent copyright system to keep people from posting recordings of encounters with law enforcement.
In a video posted Thursday by the Anti Police-Terror Project (APTP), a community organization dedicated to defunding the Oakland Police Department, Alameda County Sheriff’s deputy David Shelby pulled out his phone and began playing Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” during an encounter. He openly admitted, “it can’t be posted to YouTube.”
“Are we having a dance party right now?” APTP’s policy director James Burch asked in the video, which is posted on YouTube.
“Are you playing pop music to drown out the conversation?” the person recording asked. You can record all you want, I just know it can’t be posted to YouTube.
Vivian Wang and Alexandra Stevenson:
The Hong Kong government has issued hundreds of pages of new curriculum guidelines designed to instill “affection for the Chinese people.” Geography classes must affirm China’s control over disputed areas of the South China Sea. Students as young as 6 will learn the offenses under the security law.
Lo Kit Ling, who teaches a high school civics course, is now careful to say only positive things about China in class. While she had always tried to offer multiple perspectives on any topic, she said, she worries that a critical view could be quoted out of context by a student or parent.
A display at the Hong Kong Museum of History on Hong Kong’s handover from Britain to China in 1997.
Ms. Lo’s subject is especially fraught; the city’s leaders have accused it of poisoning Hong Kong’s youth. The course had encouraged students to analyze China critically, teaching the country’s economic successes alongside topics such as the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Officials have ordered the subject replaced with a truncated version that emphasizes the positive.
“It’s not teaching,” Ms. Lo said. “It’s just like a kind of brainwashing.” She will teach an elective on hospitality studies instead.
“Eve. Eve, the golden girl. The cover girl. The girl next door, the girl on the moon. Time has been good to Eve. Life goes where she goes. She’s been profiled, covered, revealed, reported, what she eats and what she wears and whom she knows and where she was and when and where she’s going. Eve. You all know all about Eve.”
— Addison DeWitt, All About Eve (1950)
Over the seven months that I’ve been writing at Original Jurisdiction, I have covered some of the most prominent figures in the legal profession, including leading judges, law firm partners, in-house lawyers, and law professors. Who has been the best for ratings?1
According to the list of my most popular posts, none other than Amy Chua. She’s the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School (YLS), although she’s most famous not as a legal academic but as the author of a controversial, bestselling parenting memoir, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. She also happens to be the wife of another longtime YLS faculty member, Jed Rubenfeld (and some refer to them collectively as “Chubenfeld”).
Over the past few weeks, articles about Chua have appeared in multiple major news outlets. Right now, it seems that every journalist in the country is chasing Amy.
Why is this 58-year-old law professor back in the headlines, more than a decade after the viral Wall Street Journal op-ed that propelled Tiger Mother onto the bestseller list? To catch up, check out my earlier story on Chua, or read this CliffsNotes version:
Nicole Solas is the South Kingstown, Rhode Island, mother of a child entering kindergarten in the fall who has been targeted by the School District, School Committee, and Rhode Island School Superintendents Association, after she filed a large number of public records requests regarding Critical Race and Gender teaching in the elementary school.
Solas first told her story in an op-ed at Legal Insurrection, and her story went national with multiple media appearances, including on Fox and Friends, and Tucker Carlson. Here are our posts about her story:
My 2009 copy of Why Don’t Students Like School by Dan Willingham is among the most dog-eared and annotated books I own. Along with E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit (2006) and Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion (2010), I’m hard-pressed to think of another book in the last twenty years that had a greater impact on my teaching, thinking, or writing about education. I’m clearly not alone: Dan’s book has been translated into thirteen languages.
A second-edition has just been published. There’s plenty of new and refreshed material, but the strength of the book—its proof point, actually—is how much has not changed from its first printing. Willingham set out to put between two covers a set of enduring principles from cognitive science (“People are naturally curious, but they are not naturally good thinkers”; “factual knowledge precedes skill”; “proficiency requires practice,” et al.) that can reliably inform and shape classroom practice—a rich vein of ore that Willingham began to mine in his “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” columns for The American Educator starting nearly twenty years ago. His many admirers will appreciate the opportunity to refresh their familiarity with the book. But the primary beneficiaries may be younger teachers who might be encountering it for the first time.
I recently talked to Dan about his masterful and accessible book, its origin and impact, the importance of explaining the findings of cognitive science to teachers, and the decision to bring out a second edition. Here’s our conversation, edited for concision:
Agency is the capacity to act. More subtly: An individual’s life can continue, with a certain inertia, that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most people today more-or-less know what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life—being in some kind of school (the “doing” is almost more “being told what to do”). Beyond that age there is of course the proverbial worker, in modern stories usually an office worker, who is often so inert that he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality (that forces him out of his inertia, and in doing so the story begins).
Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something differently from, or in addition to, the events that simply happen to you. Most famous people go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a message boy is one opportunity, asking how to operate the telegraph is another. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan. And of course no one has to write a book, or start a company. But imagine instead if Carnegie or Da Vinci were compelled to stay in school for ten more years instead. What would have happened?
Through the floor-to-ceiling windows in Nebraska athletic director Bill Moos’s office in Memorial Stadium, you can hear heavy machinery ripping up a sidewalk to make room for a new $155 million indoor training facility. But that’s not the biggest change to campus Moos will oversee this year.
The university is angling hard to be at the front of the pack in persuading recruits it can help them take advantage of a new era of compensation for college athletes that is dawning.
Nebraska will be among the first states to permit college athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness. The state’s law does not take effect until July 1, 2023, but allows universities to give their athletes the right to monetize their names before then, at the school’s discretion.
Moos is using his discretion to start immediately. Laws in at least six states will take effect on July 1 that allow athletes to make money from their name, image and likeness, beginning a new era of compensation for college athletes.
The movement for academic equity — that is, for equal outcomes — is splitting the Democratic coalition, warns David Frum in The Atlantic.
Eighty-three percent of Americans support testing for entry into honors programs, he writes, citing a PDK poll. Yet, “blue-state educational authorities have turned hostile to academic testing in almost all of its forms.”
Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The internet—how we both communicate with one another and together preserve the intellectual products of human civilization—fits Clarke’s observation well. In Steve Jobs’s words, “it just works,” as readily as clicking, tapping, or speaking. And every bit as much aligned with the vicissitudes of magic, when the internet doesn’t work, the reasons are typically so arcane that explanations for it are about as useful as trying to pick apart a failed spell.
Underpinning our vast and simple-seeming digital networks are technologies that, if they hadn’t already been invented, probably wouldn’t unfold the same way again. They are artifacts of a very particular circumstance, and it’s unlikely that in an alternate timeline they would have been designed the same way.
The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or expect to make money from their invention.
The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network the way that, for example, FedEx metabolized a capital outlay of tens of millions of dollars to deploy liveried planes, trucks, people, and drop-off boxes, creating a single point-to-point delivery system. Instead, they settled on the equivalent of rules for how to bolt existing networks together.
Federal law enforcement agencies secretly seek the data of Microsoft customers thousands of times a year, according to congressional testimony Wednesday by a senior executive at the technology company.
Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.
“Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.
The relationship between law enforcement and Big Tech has attracted fresh scrutiny in recent weeks with the revelation that Trump-era Justice Department prosecutors obtained as part of leak investigations phone records belonging not only to journalists but also to members of Congress and their staffers. Microsoft, for instance, was among the companies that turned over records under a court order, and because of a gag order, had to then wait more than two years before disclosing it.
The estimable National Student Clearinghouse recently released data on spring 2021 enrollments. The press accounts stressed continuing decline; total numbers were down 3.5% from spring 2020 to spring 2021. By exploring the NSC website in greater detail, I learned that since spring 2011, total enrollment has fallen over 14 percent. In 2011, there were about 63 college students for every 1,000 American population; now there are less than 51, a decline of nearly 20 percent. As colleges shrink in immediate importance in people’s lives, support for colleges wanes.
Yet the aggregate numbers disguise a striking additional trend: the decline in male enrollment is dramatically greater than that for women. In the 2020-21 year, for example, the number of women enrolled declined by nearly 203,000, but the male decline was nearly double that, over 400,000. In the 2011-21 decade, spring enrollment for men fell strikingly more than 18%, nearly double the female decline.
If recent trends continue, we will soon reach a milestone: there will be more than three female students for every two male ones. Girl students may find it hard to get dates with guys!! Ironically, the reverse was the case a half century earlier; almost 60% of students in the 1969-70 school year were male. At that time, the burning issue was: should elite Ivy League schools admit female students! They did, and the number of all-male schools is approaching zero.
A handful of teams from the Seattle area and another from southeastern Washington state made a strong showing in the finals this month of the American Rocketry Challenge, the world’s largest student rocket contest.
Competition concluded on June 20 and a virtual awards ceremony was held on Monday. The Argonauts, a team from WISE Camps in Bellevue, Wash., finished eighth among the 100 best teams in the country. Five other Seattle-area teams also placed in the finals:
Several online media outlets in Hong Kong took down opinion articles and videos from their websites or said they would move out of the city after one more columnist of the Apple Daily was arrested at the airport on Sunday.
Stand News, a pro-democracy news outlet, said in a statement that it had temporarily removed commentaries written by its bloggers and readers from May this year and before until it had decided whether it was appropriate to publish them again.
It said it had decided to stop accepting monthly sponsorship from readers and to shelve older commentaries. It added that it had enough money to run for another nine to 12 months and maintain its current editorial guidelines.
The news outlet said six of its directors, including barrister Margaret Ng, singer Denise Ho and columnist Joseph Lian, have accepted recommendations to resign. Two founding directors, Tony Tsoi and chief editor Chung Pui-kuen, will stay on,
The Supreme Court extended its protection of student speech to social media on Wednesday, by an 8-1 ruling that a Pennsylvania school district overstepped its authority by punishing a high-school cheerleader who used a vulgar word on Snapchat when she didn’t make the varsity cheerleading team.
The court said there are some occasions when schools can reach beyond campus to regulate student speech, mentioning bullying and cheating as subject to discipline whether they occur in the classroom or in cyberspace.
But the court has long held that even on campus, students retain First Amendment rights to speak on controversial matters so long as they don’t cause a substantial disruption. Beyond school grounds, administrators’ power to punish students diminishes further still, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote for the court.
In this instance, “the school’s interest in teaching good manners is not sufficient, in this case, to overcome [the student’s] interest in free expression,” Justice Breyer wrote, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.