Christina L. Brown, Supreet Kaur, Geeta Kingdon & Heather Schofield

Schooling may build human capital not only by teaching academic skills, but by expanding the capacity for cognition itself. We focus specifically on cognitive endurance: the ability to sustain effortful mental activity over a continuous stretch of time. As motivation, we document that globally and in the US, the poor exhibit cognitive fatigue more quickly than the rich across field settings; they also attend schools that offer fewer opportunities to practice thinking for continuous stretches. Using a field experiment with 1,600 Indian primary school students, we randomly increase the amount of time students spend in sustained cognitive activity during the school day—using either math problems (mimicking good schooling) or non-academic games (providing a pure test of our mechanism). Each approach markedly improves cognitive endurance: students show 22% less decline in performance over time when engaged in intellectual activities—listening comprehension, academic problems, or IQ tests. They also exhibit increased attentiveness in the classroom and score higher on psychological measures of sustained attention. Moreover, each treatment improves students’ school performance by 0.09 standard deviations. This indicates that the experience of effortful thinking itself—even when devoid of any subject content—increases the ability to accumulate traditional human capital. Finally, we complement these results with quasi-experimental variation indicating that an additional year of schooling improves cognitive endurance, but only in higher-quality schools. Our findings suggest that schooling disparities may further disadvantage poor children by hampering the development of a core mental capacity.

Michael Shellenberger:

“The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation.”

After an Axios reporter asked, “Isn’t misinformation and disinfo around climate a threat to public health itself?” McCarthy responded, “Oh, absolutely… We are talking, really, about risks that no longer need to be tolerated to our communities.” 

McCarthy pointed specifically to those who criticized the failure of weather-dependent renewables during the blackouts in Texas in February 2021. But many of those criticisms were factual. Over the last decade in Texas, investors sunkover $53 billion on weather-dependent energy sources, mostly wind turbines, which alongside frozen fossil fuel plants were largely unavailable during the cold snap in February. That was only partly because of the cold and mostly because of low wind speeds.

Eric Gilliam:

Since the last article on WW2-era German science was so well-received, I’ve decided to keep the theme of great pieces of scholarship about scientific history going. This week’s post is largely drawn from the essays of Gerard Holton. Holton’s work is, similar to the scholarship covered in the previous post, criminally under-talked about in the progress studies community. The Holton essays I talk about in this post, largely written between the early 1950s and 1970s, have lasting relevance today.1

Holton would have been best described as a scientific historian; however, as you’ll see in the modeling section of this post, his contributions go beyond that of an ordinary historian. The application of his physicist’s mind and toolkit to the problem of scientific innovation was incredible. Nowadays, we might consider him a social scientist who studied science itself, an early progress studies scholar. And a great one.

In this post I’ll go over:

Colleen Hroncich:

Some of the innovative education models that are exploding recognize this fact. Forest schools, hybrid schools, unschooling, and microschools typically offer children flexible ways to learn that can help keep them more engaged than they would be in a conventional classroom.

Another option for students who are looking for a more hands‐​on approach to education is vocational‐​technical school, also known as career and technical education or CTE. This can be particularly important in states like Massachusetts that have no private school choice programs, such as tax credit scholarships or education savings accounts.

Fortunately for students in the Bay State, most of Massachusetts’s voc‐tech schools are producing impressive results. According to Jamie Gass, Director of the Center for School Reform at Pioneer Institute, a 1993 education reform law had a huge impact on voc‐tech schools. “At that time, voc‐tech schools were some of the lowest performing schools,” he says. “Because of their focus on occupational education, they were highly resistant to standards and tests. Eventually they embraced it, though, and they’ve seen the biggest gains of pre‐existing schools.”

Lisa Chu & Christine Pitts:

Despite national attention on bolstering summer school options for students who lost learning time during the pandemic, most large districts have not expanded or improved their 2022 summer programming, according to a review by the Center on Reinventing Public Education. 

Even after an additional year to plan and more federal recovery dollars available, districts’ 2022 summer programs are mostly the same as last year, or have decreased in type and scope, based on our review of summer learning plans for 100 of the nation’s large and urban districts.

Among the 50 districts that publicly post budget documents detailing their American Rescue Plan spending, just 28 are directing federal relief money toward summer school this year, as of our review May 10.

Joel Kotkin:

America is suffering from a worker shortage, but a more persistent and perhaps even urgent problem is the profound lack of skills among younger Americans. American elite universities may still be still regarded as the world’s best, but for most young people, the educational system—from grade school to graduate school—is something of a failure, a critical engine of persistent inequality and diminished competition on the international stage.

This crisis in competence predates the pandemic. So does the very related labor shortage. The percentage of firms reporting shortages of labor more than doubled between 2015 and 2020, to 70 percent. Low birthrates among millennials has created what the forecasting firm EMSI describes as a “demographic drought,” as U.S. population growth between 16 and 64 has dropped from 20 percent in the eighties to less than 5 percent last decade. By 2028, Korn Ferry projects there will be a deficit of at least six million workers.

But the bigger problem is not just numbers; consider that our competitors, notably China, face even more challenging demographics. The big issue is the lack of skills throughout the workforce. From grade to graduate schools, our education is deteriorating.

Engen Tham:

A protest planned by hundreds of bank depositors in central China seeking access to their frozen funds has been thwarted because the authorities have turned their health code apps red, several depositors told Reuters.

The depositors were planning to travel to the central province of Henan this week from across China to protest against an almost two-month block on accessing at least $178 million of deposits, which has left companies unable to pay workers and individuals unable to access savings. read more

Molly Ashford:

The board of directors for the Nebraska Association of School Boards voted Saturday to formally cut ties with a national organization that spurred controversy last year by calling for federal investigation into threats made against school board members.

This decision comes less than a month after the Nebraska association’s executive committee voted to recommend canceling its membership in the National School Boards Association, a federation of state associations that advocates and lobbies on public education issues.

Saturday’s decision adds Nebraska to a growing list of state school board associations that have distanced themselves or completely cut ties with the NSBA. In a text message, Nebraska association President Brad Wilkins confirmed that they will not pay dues to the NSBA this year. The money would have been due by June 30.

Chip Gibbons:

The Espionage Act was passed today in 1917. It helped destroy the Socialist Party of America and quashes free speech to this day.

Last week, a little over an hour after the Interceptnonepublished a story about a classified National Security Agency report concerning Russian election interference, Reality Winner, the alleged leaker, was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act.

In recent years, the Espionage Act has been used as a statutory sword against whistleblowers. Donald Trump allegedly told former FBI director James Comey he wanted to prosecute journalists under the statute.

But historically, the Espionage Act is perhaps most significant not for its role in persecuting whistleblowers, but for crushing dissent during World War I.

Nowhere was this crackdown felt more acutely than within the Socialist Party (SP). While never on par with some of its international counterparts, the SP was a genuine mass party that elected countless local officials, sent two members to Congress on its own ballot line, and fostered a vibrant socialist press that reached millions. Its longtime standard-bearer, Eugene Debs, was a nationally known figure.

William Jacobson:

As of this writing the court’s electronic docket does not reflect any amicus briefs filed in support of the Gibsons. Oberlin College will have a chance to respond as to the cross-appeal request for jurisdiction.

You may be wondering about the status of the Gibsons’ attempt to collect on the surety bond posted by the college to prevent execution (i.e., collection efforts) on the judgment, which we detailed in Oops – Gibson’s Bakery Seeks To Execute On $36 Million Appeal Bond Since Oberlin College Failed To Obtain Stay Of Appeals Court Mandate. As of this writing, the only filings I see in the trial court docket are an entry of appearance for the surety company and a motion for additional time to respond.

We will, of course, continue to follow the appeal and the surety bond collection effort.

Ingrid Lunden:

Education took some significant twists and turns when the COVID-19 pandemic descended on the world. We saw a surge of new users, and new tools, around online learning; but we also saw a number of people and organizations more basically start to rethink how to get the best out of learning environments overall. (In fact, education went through many of the same changes as many enterprise verticals facing digital transformation around newly distributed teams, in that regard.)

Today, a startup called Prenda, which has built a platform to enable one permutation of delivering education — by way of tuition-free microschools of 10 students or fewer — is announcing $20 million in funding to expand its business and its vision.

Alexa Schwerha:

Carnegie Mellon University will issue a one-time payment to select employees meant to alleviate the impact of inflation at the same time it is increasing undergraduate tuition by 4% to $59,864.

A singular $1,500 payment will be delivered by the end of the month to select employees to provide relief for the increased cost of food, gas, energy, and transportation.

“The goal is to assist employees in addressing the impacts of inflation that have been so prevalent over the past several months,” University President Farnam Jahanian stated in a staff-wide message on Tuesday.

Simultaneously, the university estimates that first-year students will have to pay $76,660 for the 2022-2023 academic year. That number includes rates for a “standard double room” and a “traditional first-year meal plan.”

Faculty and staff hired prior to July 1, including temporary staff, will be eligible to receive the payment. However, the website lists a slew of staffers who are ineligible to receive relief: union members, interns, and part-time adjuncts.

Ira Still:

How much has Rochester been “overspending?” The website Seethroughny.com, a project of the Empire Center for Public Policy, lists 717 Rochester City School District Employees who earned more than $100,000 in 2019. The district has about 25,000 K-12 public school students, according to the state of New York. Spending runs about $20,000, a little below the statewide average. Whether that amounts to “overspending” probably depends on one’s view of how much the children are learning, and also one’s view of whether the students could learn more, and how much more, if more money were spent.

The teachers may point out that they earn less the SEC staff, who average more than $200,000 a year, according to the FederalPay.org, which tracks government pay. Though the SEC may counter that its lawyers can earn much more at corporate law firms, a consideration that may be less applicable to Rochester teachers.

In practice, the legal aspects of the case will probably turn more on considerations about disclosure to potential bond buyers than about the details of the spending on teacher salaries.

Even so, the mere mention of securities law and bondholders as potential tools to curb school district “overspending” is intriguing, especially when the action comes under a president who campaigned promising to increase school spending so as to pay teachers “competitive salaries.” For years, reformers have complained that teachers unions capture school boards and run school systems for the benefit of adults rather than children. Now a different set of influential adults—bondholders—is, in a way, asserting, via the SEC, its own claim that could be a countervailing force.

SEC Press Release.

Edward Luce:

In contrast, voters think they know what the party believes about illegal immigration, defunding the police, transgender participation in girls sports and Zoom-biased teachers’ unions. Most do not like these stances. This applies as much to non-white as to white voters.

As Ruy Teixeira, a veteran political scientist, says: the Democratic brand is “somewhere between uncompelling and toxic to wide swaths of American voters, who might potentially be their allies”. The fact that Teixeira is saying this ought to make Democrats take notice. He was co-author of the seminal book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, which argued that racial trends would make Democratic rule inevitable. This remains an article of faith among election consultants. Yet Texieira has changed his mind.

Alison Collins, the head of San Francisco’s education board who was ejected earlier this year, said that “‘merit’ is an inherently racist construct designed and centred on white supremacist framing”. Such thinking drove Collins to switch San Francisco’s biggest selective school from merit-based application to a lottery system. Liberals nationwide are pushing to end standardised tests altogether. Yet most voters, including African Americans, reject this as the soft bigotry of low expectations.

But its upper echelons are dominated by a white college-educated activist class that is used to talking with itself.

Andrea Stoppa:

In particular, Musk asked for clarification about whether Twitter engages in “shadow bans” to limit the visibility of some users and their content. In 2018, Twitter stated that it does not use the technique and that any apparent “bans” were the result of technical problems.

But a year later, Twitter updated its terms of service to say that it may obscure the content of some users at its discretion. And in a paper published last year, three European researchers analyzed more than 2.5 million Twitter accounts, looking for cases where the visibility of a user’s posts appeared to have been reduced. They said they found “a good indicator of the presence of groups of shadow-banned users on the service.”

Twitter leadership is aware of such problems, but instead of confronting them, it has vilified Musk. That’s a mistake. Twitter’s long-term survival depends not just on its finances, but on the level of trust it inspires users and advertisers. If the platform is infested with bots, spam and fake accounts, the user experience deteriorates. If users have doubts about how the algorithm suggests topics or if some users believe Twitter silences them because of their ideas, Twitter cannot ignore the call for transparency and accountability.

June 20, noon CT

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued the fourth edition of the Apples to Apples report, a definitive and objective analysis of Wisconsin school performance across sectors. This year’s report, the first in three years due to pandemic disruption of the Forward Exam, finds that Milwaukee’s choice and charter schools continue to perform better, on average, than traditional public schools in Milwaukee. But the pandemic has taken a toll as proficiency rates across all schools, statewide, has dropped below 40% for the first time.

Join WILL Director of Education Policy & Legal Counsel Libby Sobic and Research Director Will Flanders for a noon webinar as we dive deeper into our findings and how Wisconsin school choice options continue to provide a performance advantage when demographics of a school are accounted for.Time

Jun 20, 2022 12:00 PM in Central Time (US and Canada)

WILL:

The Milwaukee Public School Board voted to amend a union leave policy, subject of a lawsuit from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), to make clear that employees may only use such time for activities that are politically and ideologically “view-point neutral.” WILL sued the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) in July, on behalf of a Milwaukee taxpayer, alleging the previous wording of the policy amounted to a violation of the First Amendment’s ban on compelled speech. As a result of this amendment, WILL recently stipulated to a dismissal of the case.

The Quotes: WILL Deputy Counsel, Lucas Vebber, said, “We are pleased that the MPS Board took efforts to clarify this policy. Taxpayers now have a better understanding of how these public resources are being used and what oversight is in place.”

WILL client, Dan Sebring, said, “I am pleased that this policy has been clarified. When I left public office and people asked me why, I told them that I’ve found that I can be more effective as an activist than a public official – and this is case in point!”

Frances Fukuyama:

The social contract establishing the state is an agreement on the part of citizens to give up their natural freedom to deprive others of their lives, in return for protection of their own rights. The horizon of politics was thereby lowered: instead of seeking the good life, as determined by religious doctrine, the modern state would seek merely to preserve life itself and relegate disputes over the good life to private life. Though Hobbes and Locke represented different sides in an enduring controversy between English liberals and conservatives, the conceptual distance separating them was not great. John Locke accepted Hobbes’ natural right framework, and argued that governments could also violate those rights, leading to a right on the part of citizens to resist governments that did not receive popular consent. Political legitimacy in liberal societies would henceforth be based on “consent of the governed.” Locke directly influenced Thomas Jefferson and the American Founding Fathers, who declared their independence from Britain on the basis of the protection of their rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Liberalism originated in a pragmatic compromise between religious factions that understood that they would be better off settling for religious tolerance than seeking their maximal goals of a religiously grounded polity. But the stability of this system depended also on the emergence of ideas that legitimated a regime preserving individual rights. Individualism was deeply ingrained in English culture from well before the Reformation, but the Reformation’s emphasis on inner faith cemented the view that all human beings were autonomous agents who were subject to God’s grace as individuals. In later years the religious component underlying notions of agency would erode, but the individualism would remain as a foundational principle of modern Western civilization.

Bill Lueders

The issue has come up in a different form before. In 2011 La Follette, at the direction of a Dane County judge, refused to publish the passed version of Act 10, the state law kneecapping public employee unions. The state Supreme Court, then as now dominated by conservatives, ruled that the judge had exceeded her jurisdiction in putting a hold on the law, meaning there was nothing to preclude La Follette from publishing the bill. Two years later, the Legislature passed a bill that stripped the secretary of state of the power to delay publication of new laws.

Loudenbeck’s campaign did not respond to an inquiry for this article asking whether she believes the statute cited by Schroeder gives the secretary of state legal authority to deny an election result by refusing to sign and whether she would have sought to use this authority to block the 2020 election result.

The third GOP contender for secretary of state on the Aug. 9 ballot, Daniel Schmidtka, also did not respond to the same query. He declares on his website that the “mission” of his campaign is “abolishing the Wisconsin Election Commission and returning oversight and certification of elections to the Secretary of State.”

Much more on Act 10, here.

Brooke Steinberg

Alaska, Arizona, Missouri, North Dakota and Wyoming parents are able to get their kids outside for an average of six hours a week.

Reasons parents encourage their children to play outside included getting fresh air (51 percent), taking a break from screen time (47 percent) and exercise (42 percent).

Of the parents surveyed, 75 percent said creating memories of playing outdoors with their children is a top priority. More than three-quarters agreed that most of their time growing up was spent playing outside, while just under three-quarters feel that kids in this generation don’t appreciate the outdoors as much as their generation.

Rachel K. Jones, Jesse Philbin, Marielle Kirstein, Elizabeth Nash, Kimberley Lufkin:

According to new findings from Guttmacher’s latest Abortion Provider Census—the most comprehensive data collection effort on abortion provision in the United States—there were 8% more abortions in 2020 than in 2017.

Pam Belluck:

The uptick began in 2017, and as of 2020, one in five pregnancies, or 20.6 percent, ended in abortion, according to the report by the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. In 2017, 18.4 percent of pregnancies ended in abortion.

The institute, which collects data by contacting every known abortion provider in the country, reported that the number of abortions increased to 930,160 in 2020, from 862,320 in 2017. The number increased in every region of the country: by 12 percent in the West, by 10 percent in the Midwest, by 8 percent in the South and by 2 percent in the Northeast.

Overall, the abortion rate rose in 2020 to 14.4 per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 from 13.5 abortions per 1,000 women in 2017, a 7 percent increase, the report said

Linda Villarosa:

As young girls, the Relf sisters were sterilized without consent. What does the government owe them — and the thousands of other living victims?

Margaret Sanger & Eugenics.

Yikes. Projections vs. actual births in the US pic.twitter.com/3zvXH6XOe0

— Bruce Mehlman (@bpmehlman) June 16, 2022

Kelly Field:

Even before the pandemic forced tens of thousands of Americans to quit college, Oscar Joya struggled to stay in school.

In 2018, when he was a sophomore, he’d dropped out of the University of Washington to earn tuition money and focus on his mental health. One quarter off stretched into two, until Paul Metellus, the student-success coordinator in the college’s Brotherhood Initiative for men of color, helped Joya stitch together the resources he needed to re-enroll.

“He was always on my case, in the most positive way,” recalled Joya, who is the youngest of four children of Mexican immigrants, and the first to attend college.

Chris:

I am jealous of this scoop because it would have made a great Karlstack original investigation. Go read it. Check out how perfect the smoking gun paragraphs are…. they are copy-pasted directly from old dissertations:

US DOJ:

According to court documents, Pena allegedly unlawfully used a law enforcement service operated by Securus Technologies Inc. (Securus) for personal reasons, including to obtain cell phone location information relating to multiple individuals with whom the defendant had personal relationships and their spouses. Pena obtained this information by uploading false and fraudulent documents to the Securus system and by certifying that those documents were official documents giving permission to obtain the relevant individuals’ cell phone location information. After this activity became known to law enforcement, Pena lied to law enforcement officials about his use of the Securus service for personal reasons, including to locate individuals with whom he was or had been in a personal relationship. Pena also drafted an affidavit in the name of one of these individuals and persuaded that individual to sign the affidavit, which falsely stated that the individual had given Pena unlimited access to all of that individual’s personal cell phone information at all times.

Sydney Steidl

Alabama policymakers, in a state traditionally known for poor education outcomes, are actively working to increase literacy skills—especially in early education.

With Alabama typically falling behind other states in literacy, the pandemic only made matters worse. Research shows students at all grade levels lost ground. For example, in 2021 only about 18% of kindergartners had reached the physical, social-emotional, and literacy standards for their grade, and only two out of every three were assessed as prepared to begin schooling.

The state is currently focused on implementing the Alabama Literacy Act, which was passed in 2019. The goal is to bolster literacy and basic reading skills. The law requires school districts to provide programs and other strategies to raise struggling students to higher levels of literacy. 

One key element in the Literacy Act requires school districts to deliver a major boost for students during the summer. The requirement means Alabama school districts will provide summer literacy programs for students who need it. 

Alabama now offers summer camps focused on literacy. These camps offer students who are falling behind about 70 hours of extra instruction time, preparing them for the following school year and beyond through improving their foundational literacy skills.

Antonia Cundy:

In the fertile plains of the Bekaa valley, in eastern Lebanon, seven hectares of wheat stand tall under the sunshine. In one field, sprays of black florets cast a striking shadow over the golden ears; in another, the grains are long and thin, humped and yellow like an old camel’s tooth.

Unlike on many farms, where homogenous crops form a uniform mass, these wheat fields are diverse and visually distinctive because they have been grown at Buzuruna Juzuruna – a seed producer and sustainable farming school that cultivates heirloom seeds.

Buzuruna Juzuruna’s aim is to preserve and promote the use of ancient grains from the Shaam — the historic region along the Eastern Mediterranean coast . It has operated out of the small town of Saadnayel, in the Beqaa, since 2017.

And, as Lebanon has faced compounding crises — including a wheat shortage caused by the war in Ukraine, which supplies 80 per cent of the country’s imports of the grain— there has been a surge in demand for Buzuruna Juzuruna’s homegrown seeds and ecological methods.

Scott Girard:

Board president Ali Muldrow, who has a conflict of interest in discussing teacher salaries as her husband is a teacher, commented only on the hourly workers’ pay rate Monday, but indicated she strongly supports an increase.

“I’m really deeply vested in our ability to substantially shift how we’re compensating hourly wage workers,” Muldrow said. “I’d really like to see our board get behind as great of an increase as possible so that folks are making a living wage when they are SEAs, when they are security assistants, when they are secretaries.”

“We have the largest single, one-time source of funding coming into the district that we’re being asked to spend in a very short timeframe,” MacPherson said. “You get the money once and once you spend it, it’s gone.”

That makes counting on it for operational funds that will repeat year after year — like a salary increase — dangerous, he and others said.

“Figuring out how to balance the desire and the need to support staff with being fiscally responsible for the budget years that are coming down the road is a really difficult balance,” board member Christina Gomez Schmidt said. “We really don’t know what increase (in the next state budget) we’re going to get.”

Madison plans to create 55 new support staff positions for schools…

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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]

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Joel Kotkin:

Overall, these cities tend to have some of the worst inequality of any location, an urban model very different to the Jane Jacobs conception of a city that does not “lure the middle class” but creates one. Indeed, as the transactional city reached its apogee, the opportunity horizon for working- and middle-class families dimmed. In 1970, half of the city of Chicago was middle income; today, according to a 2019 University of Illinoisstudy, that number is down to 16 percent. Meanwhile, the percentage of poor people has risen from 42 to 62 percent.

San Francisco, the urban center that gained most from the technological revolution, epitomizes the final stages of the transactional city. It is now the country’s costliest city and anchors a region with the smallest middle class among the 52 Metropolitan Statistical Areas with over a million people. Inequality grew most rapidly there over the last decade, reports the Brookings Institution, as techies moved into tough urban areas like the Tenderloin. A city of enormous wealth has become bifurcated, plagued by mass homelessness and petty crime, while the middle-class family heads toward extinction. San Francisco has lost 31,000 home-owning families in the last decade, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic.

The current crop of urban leaders has only made things worse. In recent years, some city officials seem to have become tolerant of—and even willing to embrace—disorder. At the height of the 2020 urban riots, even the planning community favored “defunding” the police. Efforts to reduce policing have, unsurprisingly, been accompanied by rising crime in places like Chicago, Washington, DC, Minneapolis, New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Perhaps most remarkable has been the deterioration of tech-rich San Francisco, where tolerance of deviant behavior has helped to create a city with more drug addicts than high school students, and so much feces on the street that one website has created a “poop map.” Homeless encampments can also be found throughout Los Angeles, with a particular concentration along the beach, in inner city parks, and most famously in the downtown “skid row” area, the conditions of which a UN official last year compared to those of Syrian refugee camps.

Demographer Wendell Cox estimates that the percentage of households with children between the ages of five and 17 was nearly three times higher in suburbs or exurbs than in or near the urban core. Urban school districts are imploding as the number of young people growing up in core cities has declined.San Francisco, for example, is home to more dogs than children under 19, while Seattle boasts more households with cats than two-legged offspring.

Ally Markovich

With statewide vaccine mandates no longer in sight, Berkeley Unified will likely walk back its own vaccine policies, postponing a vaccine mandate for district employees and rescinding a vaccine-or-test rule for students.

The two policy changes are expected to be approved at Wednesday’s school board meeting. The board reviewed the policies at a June 1 meeting and they have been added to the consent calendar, which means the board will most likely approve them without a vote. 

This fall, Gov. Gavin Newsom said California students would soon have to be vaccinated against COVID-19 to attend school. Many districts, including BUSD, designed policies in step with California’s. Now that talk of a vaccine mandate has stalled, BUSD joins several districts, including Oakland Unified, in walking back their policies.

BUSD’s vaccine-or-test policy took effect in January, requiring students to get vaccinated or tested weekly for the coronavirus. The policy was designed as an “on-ramp” for the California student vaccine mandate, which was scheduled to take effect in January or July, pending full vaccine approval by the FDA.

In April, the California Department of Public Health announced that a vaccine mandate would take effect “no sooner” than July 1, 2023. On the same day, a state senator dropped a bill requiring students to be vaccinated and eliminating a personal belief exemption in the process.

Derek Thompson:

It was as if Silicon Valley had made a secret pact to subsidize the lifestyles of urban Millennials. As I pointed out three years ago, if you woke up on a Casper mattress, worked out with a Peloton, Ubered to a WeWork, ordered on DoorDash for lunch, took a Lyft home, and ordered dinner through Postmates only to realize your partner had already started on a Blue Apron meal, your household had, in one day, interacted with eight unprofitable companies that collectively lost about $15 billion in one year.

Josh Christenson:

A Virginia judge has kicked a George Soros-funded prosecutor off a case involving potentially a dozen burglaries in multiple counties, saying the prosecutor’s office had concealed criminal records to “sell” a plea bargain.

Loudoun County circuit court judge James Plowman said the office of Commonwealth’s Attorney Buta Biberaj (D.) was “deliberately misleading the Court and the public” about “a possible 12 burglary crime spree spanning 4 counties over 10 days.” In a plea agreement, Biberaj’s office failed to note the offender had recently pleaded guilty to felonies and had pending charges and prior convictions as a minor, according to Plowman. Fox 5 on Saturday first reported on the judge’s order to remove Biberaj from the case.

“The Commonwealth is deliberately misleading the Court, and the public, in an effort to ‘sell’ the plea agreement for some reason that has yet to be explained,” Plowman wrote in his order.

Alex Gutentag:

The collapse of educational pathways and structures has had a particularly brutal effect on the poorest students, who can least afford to have their schooling disrupted. High-poverty schools had the lowest levels of in-person instruction, causing low-income students to fall even further behind their more affluent peers. The entirely foreseeable ways in which bad COVID-19 policy choices exacerbated inequality perversely led many public school systems to try to hide their mistakes by dismantling programs for gifted and talented students along with entrance tests and other standardized testing regimens—piling on more bad policy choices that deprive economically disadvantaged students of opportunity.

The available numbers tell a worrying story of educational slippage that is likely to keep large numbers of kids from acquiring the basic skills, both intellectual and social, that they will need to hold decent jobs. Recent test scores have dramatically declined, with one report finding that in districts offering distance learning, the decline in passing rates for math was 10.1 percentage points greater than in districts that offered in-person instruction. In Maryland, 85% of students now are not proficient in math, and in Baltimore the figure is 93%. Michigan, Washington, and other states have found dramatic declines in their test scores. In Los Angeles, the decline has been worse for younger students, with 60% of third and fourth graders not meeting English standards compared to 40% of 11th graders. Overall, the youngest children were most profoundly impacted by lockdowns and school disruptions, and some of them now lack basic life skills.

Raina Weinstein:

Increasingly, first-generation immigrants, many with limited educational backgrounds and English language skills, are opting to homeschool their children.

Ginevra Davis:

It is hard to imagine someone at Stanford building an island anymore. In fact, it is hard to imagine them building anything. The campus culture has changed.

Today, most of the organizations JP remembers from Stanford are gone. The Kappa Alpha boys have been kicked out of their old house. Lake Lagunita was closed to student activities in 2001, ostensibly to protect an endangered salamander that had taken up residence in the artificial waters. Eventually, Stanford let the lake go dry. JP claims you can still see his island though, now a patch of elevated ground in a dry, dusty basin.

Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.

Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student social life. Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.

What happened at Stanford is a cultural revolution on the scale of a two-mile college campus. In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated a hundred years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all, Stanford erected a homogenous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.

Liz Szabo:

Many schools in California and nationwide were in dire need of upgrades — burdened by leaking pipes, mold, and antiquated heating systems — long before the pandemic drew attention to the importance of indoor ventilation in reducing the spread of infectious disease.

The average U.S. school building is 50 years old, and many schools date back more than a century.

So, one might assume school districts across the nation would welcome the opportunity created by billions of dollars in federal COVID-relief money available to upgrade heating and air-conditioning systems and improve air quality and filtration in K-12 schools.

But a report released this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found most U.S. public schools have made no major investments in improving indoor ventilation and filtration since the start of the pandemic. Instead, the most frequently reported strategies to improve airflow and reduce COVID risk were notably low-budget, such as relocating classroom activities outdoors and opening windows and doors, if considered safe.

The CDC report, based on a representative sample of the nation’s public schools, found that fewer than 40% had replaced or upgraded their HVAC systems since the start of the pandemic. Even fewer were using high-efficiency particulate air, or HEPA, filters in classrooms (28%), or fans to increase the effectiveness of having windows open (37%).

Mary Kay Linge and Jon Levine:

New York is showering taxpayer funds on a group that sends drag queens into city schools — often without parental knowledge or consent — even as parents in other states protest increasingly aggressive efforts to expose kids to gender-bending performers.

Last month alone, Drag Story Hour NYC — a nonprofit whose outrageously cross-dressed performers interact with kids as young as 3 — earned $46,000 from city contracts for appearances at public schools, street festivals, and libraries, city records show.

Since January, the group has organized 49 drag programs in 34 public elementary, middle, and high schools, it boasted on its website, with appearances in all five boroughs.

“I can’t believe this. I am shocked,” said public school mom and state Assembly candidate Helen Qiu, whose 11-year-old son attends a Manhattan middle school. “I would be furious if he was exposed without my consent. This is not part of the curriculum.”

Scott Girard:

One of the biggest things was how we co-created our equity vision. That was a huge piece of it, having our families, our students and our staff really lean in, look at our data, both numerical (and) looking at our interviews with our families, especially families who have not been included in school decisions before, students who have not been. Then we created our equity vision, which is, “In order to grow academically and professionally, community members will create a just and antiracist school where we all feel safe, seen, heard and connected.” It wasn’t something that we just set aside, but we really dove in. The first thing everybody wanted to do was define what antiracism meant to us.

The other piece was understanding what antiracist practice includes is really having high expectations for all kids, and then giving kids what they need. We really started leaning into a schoolwide reading culture and a data culture. We had all this data, and we hadn’t really dug into it in the past to see why we are here for certain demographic groups and what we need to do differently as teachers and as principals. Our kids, they come with gifts, but what do we need to do differently? So we really changed our approaches in the classroom and created lessons that are more culturally responsive, but also giving kids small group instruction, which wasn’t really happening here before.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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]

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Joseph Henrich

No, it was a religious mutation in the Sixteenth Century. After bubbling up periodically in prior centuries, the belief that every person should read and interpret the Bible for themselves began to rapidly diffuse across Europe with the eruption of the Protestant Reformation, marked in 1517 by Martin Luther’s delivery of his famous ninety-five theses. Protestants came to believe that both boys and girls had to study the Bible for themselves to better know their God. In the wake of the spread of Protestantism, the literacy rates in the newly reforming populations in Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands surged past more cosmopolitan places like Italy and France. Motivated by eternal salvation, parents and leaders made sure the children learned to read.

The sharpest test of this idea comes from work in economics, led by Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann. The historical record, including Luther’s own descriptions, suggest that within the German context, Protestantism diffused out from Luther’s base in Wittenberg (Saxony). Using data on literacy and schooling rates in nineteenth-century Prussia, Becker and Woessmann first show that counties with more Protestants (relative to Catholics) had higher rates of both literacy and schooling. So, there’s a correlation. Then, taking advantage of the historical diffusion from Wittenberg, they show that for every 100-km traveled from Wittenberg, the percentage of Protestants in a county dropped by 10%. Then, with a little statistical razzle-dazzle, this patterning allows them to extract the slice of the variation in Protestantism that was, in a sense, caused by the Reformation’s ripples as they spread outward from the epicenter in Wittenberg. Finally, they show that having more Protestants does indeed cause higher rates of literacy and schooling. All-Protestant counties had literacy rates nearly 20 percentage points higher than all-Catholic counties. Subsequent work focusing on the Swiss Reformation, where the epicenters were Zurich and Geneva, reveals strikingly similar patterns.

The Protestant impact on literacy and education can still be observed today in the differential impact of Protestant vs. Catholic missions in Africa and India. In Africa, regions with early Protestant missions at the beginning of the Twentieth Century (now long gone) are associated with literacy rates that are about 16 percentage points higher, on average, than those associated with Catholic missions. In some analyses, Catholics have no impact on literacy at all unless they faced direct competition for souls from Protestant missions. These impacts can also be found in early twentieth-century China.

The notion of universal, state-funded schooling has its roots in religious ideals. As early as 1524, Martin Luther not only emphasized the need for parents to ensure their children’s literacy but also placed the responsibility for creating schools on secular governments. This religiously inspired drive for public schools helped make Prussia a model for public education, which was later copied by countries like Britain and the U.S.

When the Reformation reached Scotland in 1560, John Knox and his fellow reformers called for free public education for the poor and justified this with the need for everyone to acquire the skills to better know God. Having placed the burden for delivering schooling on the government, the world’s first local school tax was established in 1633 CE and strengthened in 1646 CE. This early experiment in universal education may have mid-wifed the Scottish Enlightenment, which produced intellectual luminaries ranging from David Hume to Adam Smith. A century later, the early intellectual dominance of this tiny region inspired France’s Voltaire to write, “we look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilization.” Voltaire, who grew up in a region controlled by Huguenots (French Calvinists), was educated in Jesuit schools, along with other Enlightenment luminaries like Diderot and Condorcet. Rousseau, for his part, likely learned to read from his Calvinist father in the Protestant city-state of Geneva.

Susie Nielson

The overall number of San Franciscans under 18 actually grew by about 5,700 people since the last census count in 2010. But the adult population grew faster — hence the decrease in the proportion of kids. Whereas the city’s adult population grew by 9%, the number of youths grew by just 5.3%. Overall, the city’s population grew by about 8.5% from 2010 to 2020.

San Francisco’s drop in percentage youth population was actually less extreme than the rest of the Bay Area. All nine counties in the region saw a drop in youths as a share of population, and many counties saw these drops after decades of stability or growth.

Napa County saw the biggest decrease since 2010, from just over 23% to 20%. Contra Costa, which has the greatest share of youths of any Bay Area county as of 2020, dropped over two percentage points from nearly 25% to under 23%.

Gavin Rice:

It shouldn’t be controversial to suggest that all of us have differing aptitudes, abilities and preferences, and that all should have the chance to play to their strengths. Yet Katharine Birbalsingh, the inspiring headteacher of Michaela, has come under extraordinary and deeply unfair criticism for suggesting just that. …

Yair Goldberg, Micha Mandel, Yinon M. Bar-On, Omri Bodenheimer:

Among persons who had been previously infected with SARS-CoV-2 (regardless of whether they had received any dose of vaccine or whether they had received one dose before or after infection), protection against reinfection decreased as the time increased since the last immunity-conferring event; however, this protection was higher than that conferred after the same time had elapsed since receipt of a second dose of vaccine among previously uninfected persons. A single dose of vaccine after infection reinforced protection against reinfection.

Ryan TracyFollow and Andrew Ackerman:

Mr. Chopra showed his extraordinary reach last fall in the days after he ended his FTC stint, when the FTC’s Ms. Khan announced a new policy designed to deter legally questionable corporate mergers.

The twist: He cast the deciding vote even though he had left the commission. He had read an obscure provision of FTC bylaws that he said allowed his vote to stay valid for weeks after leaving. Republicans decried the use of a “zombie” vote, but the policy stood.

Around that time, Jelena McWilliams, the FDIC’s then-chairwoman, invited Mr. Chopra to that agency’s dining room for a welcome lunch. Appointed by President Donald Trump, she had about two years left on her term. Mr. Chopra brought a bottle of bourbon as a gift, said people familiar with the meeting—and news Ms. McWilliams didn’t expect.

Robert Pondiscio:

Calkins’s work mostly disregards this fundamental insight, focusing students’ attention in the mirror instead of out the window. For low-income kids who are less likely to grow up in language-rich homes and don’t have the same opportunities for enrichment as affluent kids, the opportunity costs of Calkins’s “philosophy” are incalculable. Endless hours of class time that could be building knowledge and vocabulary are squandered.

I witnessed this daily in my South Bronx elementary school, where fewer than 20 percent of students passed state reading tests. I never had a single student unable to read words printed on a page. When they were reading and writing about topics they knew—the Calkins method—students did well. But when asked to read about unfamiliar topics on state tests, they often struggled. They read it, but they didn’t get. One principal I worked under attributed our low scores to “test anxiety,” but that wasn’t the problem. Their education was all mirrors and no windows.

It is well that Calkins has finally seen the light on phonics, however begrudgingly. But her approach commits even greater sins, particularly against low-income children, that phonics alone can’t fix.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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]

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Chris Griswold:

That young children were working under dangerous conditions in a cotton mill was not unusual. In 1870, there were about 765,000 American workers between the ages of 10 and 15. Some ardent reformers objected, but the mainstream view held that child labor was inevitable, economically and socially valuable, and none of the government’s business to regulate.

The subject matter of child-welfare debates changes over time as technological progress presents new challenges, but the contours remain eerily fixed. On one side stands the well-being of children; on the other, a range of economic interests and ideological commitments that insist on deference. Child labor’s prevalence in the 19th century was a consequence of that era’s industrial revolution, which obviated traditional agriculture’s demand for size and muscle. Much smaller bodies could operate industrial machines — an innovation that afforded a new opportunity for converting childhood into economic surplus.

Michael Itzkowitz:

We are in dire need of a completely different approach to assessing institutions of higher education. Instead of prioritizing reputation and selectivity, we propose a new rating system known as the Economic Mobility Index (EMI) that attempts to answer the question: “If the primary purpose of postsecondary education is supposed to be to catalyze an increase in economic mobility, which schools are succeeding in that goal?” The following analysis is designed to give policymakers, researchers, and consumers a better way to assess which colleges are delivering on that promise for low- and moderate-income students—and which ones are falling woefully short.

Creating an Economic Mobility Index

To assess the degree of economic mobility that institutions of higher education provide, we examined which schools enroll the highest proportion of students from low- and moderate-backgrounds AND provide them with a strong return on their educational investment. This index builds upon previous rounds of research focused on generational mobility, most notably Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s inter-generational mobility studies comparing students’ post-enrollment incomes to those of their parents.⁴

Our first step in creating the EMI was to determine the return on investment that the average low-income student obtains from attending a particular institution of higher education. To do this, we use our Price-to-Earnings Premium (PEP) metric that looks at the time it takes students to recoup their educational costs based off the earnings boost they obtain by attending an institution. In particular, we looked at the PEP for low-income students, defined as those whose families make $30,000 or less upon their enrollment in college. The data show that many institutions provide low-income students enough of an earnings premium that allows them to pay down their higher education costs within five years or less. However, others show these students unable to pay down their costs even fifty years later—or worse—provide no return on their educational investment whatsoever.

US Department of Education Press Release

Across the Department, staff are already using sophisticated data analyses and experimentation to inform policy and improve operations. As Chief Economist, Jordan will work with experts in the Office of the Chief Data Officer, the Institute for Education Sciences, Budget Service, and Federal Student Aid to:

1. Provide the best-possible analysis and advice to guide real-time policymaking;
2. Conduct rigorous research to further key elements of the Department’s learning agenda;
3. Build a culture of experimentation, including partnerships with leading social science researchers to pilot-test new ways to serve students and borrowers; and
4. Serve as a liaison to the research community so that leading researchers’ insights and evidence inform our agenda and we can work together to build the evidence and research base on how best to strengthen education.

Jordan is the perfect person to define and carry out the role of Chief Economist. An economist from Teachers College at Columbia University, his research has focused on the nexus between education and the labor market and how government policy can promote socioeconomic mobility. He has worked with higher education systems and state governments to develop data infrastructure and research partnerships to support data-driven decision making—a focus of this Administration. And he’s experienced in bringing rigorous data analysis and evidence to crafting policy at the highest levels of government. As Chief Economist of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, he contributed to the development of policies to promote higher education access and accountability, and led the interagency team developing data for Department’s College Scorecard initiative.

Why does the Education Department need an Economist?

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The case prompted UWM to make many changes, including increased communication to its roughly 4,400 graduate students and additional training to help employees recognize and flag potential fraud. It also underscored the financial vulnerability of graduate students enrolled at UWM, where only about 22% receive assistantships that cover the cost of their tuition. For comparison, at UW-Madison, 71% of doctoral students and 27% of master’s students hold assistantships that qualify them for tuition remission.

UWM’s 2021 investigation into Yu, released to the Journal Sentinel under the state’s public records law, offers new insight on the case. The university was alerted to potential problems when employees noticed “suspicious activity” related to one of Liu’s research grants. Yu was a co-leader of her husband’s project.

From at least 2014 through 2018, UWM records indicate, Liu sent letters to several students who had applied for admission to the civil and environmental engineering program. He used UWM letterhead and the fictitious name “Ian Wyatt” in the letters, which promised prospective students that tuition would be covered and paid work with him provided if they sent payments of more than $31,000 per year to the “Wisconsin International Education Foundation.”

The foundation’s office address matched the couple’s home address in Mequon, the report said.

Liu and Yu, who also worked in the civil and environmental engineering department, then set up fake gifts and grants as a mechanism to pay the students’ tuition and their work stipends, according to the report. Investigators linked Liu to the fictitious entities because his UWM email address was listed as the recovery email address for a limited liability company funding one of the fake gifts.

:

Perhaps the biggest impact from the Boudin recall — both politically and practically — is the loss of the most popular scapegoat for frustrations over crime in San Francisco. Removing an easy target of blame could lead to more scrutiny of the San Francisco Police Department, which “solves fewer crimes despite larger staffing per city resident and costs per area patrolled” compared with other California jurisdictions, according to a March report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Boudin repeatedly argued during the campaign that district attorneys can only bring charges when police make arrests. The San Francisco Police Department’s arrest rates have been decreasing for years.

Kaya Yurieff:

Sixth graders at Polly Ryon Middle School in Richmond, Tex., clamored to get into a certain math class at the beginning of the last school year. That’s not because they’d heard rumors that the class was easy or that they’d get to watch a lot of movies between lessons. The reason: The class was taught by Deidre Kelly, a teacher with 1.5 million TikTok followers.

“Usually the kids before they even come to this school know who I am. They’re excited to see me,” Kelly, 34, said. “They’ll say they’re starstruck. I’m like, ‘I am just a teacher. I am so normal.’”

Kelly’s TikTok account is full of math-focused videos with tips and tricks for adding fractions, subtracting integers and multiplying by 8. She often stands in front of her classroom’s whiteboard, usually with a trending (but appropriate) TikTok song playing in the background. Sprinkled between educational videos are sponsored clips that Kelly films for advertisers such as Mastercard’s Girls4Tech STEM education program and fast-food chain Sonic’s donation campaign for local school projects.

Sam Adler- Bell:

Explaining precisely why left activists have adopted these self-destructive habits is beyond the remit of this short column. But the two main culprits are the obvious ones. The first is social media, where it is infinitely easier — more satisfying and algorithmically rewarding — to imaginatively signal affiliation with those who already share your values than try to convince anyone who doesn’t.

The second is the university. Conservatives resent elite universities for churning out well-credentialed radicals. And they do, to an extent. Elite college graduates with left-wing values go on to run liberal nonprofits, staff Democratic campaigns, work in media, and become middle managers in the corporate world. Right-wingers envy this privilege, imagining that an indoctrinated managerial elite has taken control of the country’s commanding heights. But they overstate the case. The class interests of the Ivy-educated tend to reassert themselves when they accumulate power. And when college-educated radicals speak for the left, they tend to speak in the language of “wokeness” — precisely as I have defined it — with distorting and destructive effects.

This is due, in part, to the peculiar history of 20th-century campus radicalism. The victories of student activists in the 1970s onward — in creating departments and new curricula through which radical thought could be studied and taught — were pyrrhic. Conceived as beachheads in a broader war against capitalist society, radical departments became sepulchers for radical thought: places where wild ideas could be quarantined from the challenge of convincing anyone outside to believe them.

Ryan Finley:

A perfect example would be the equality versus equity comparison. Every junior and senior is well acquainted with this cartoon graphic; the school makes sure of it in Seminar on Identity. For those who are not familiar with it, spectators of different heights watch a baseball game from behind a fence. On one side, labeled “Equality,” each spectator stands on a box of similar size. As a result, only the tallest can see the game. On the other side, labeled “Equity,” the shorter spectators are supplied with appropriately sized boxes so that everyone can watch the game from an equal vantage point. As the tallest spectator can see over the fence without a box, they receive none. Everyone is exposed to the graphic at some point during their HM education and told to recognize the inherent superiority of the equity model. In other words, equity is taught as a moral imperative.

The gravity of the graphic’s message is easy to miss. When it’s displayed to students, the struggle between the two choices is made cartoonishly simple, literally. The choice of equity seems so plainly obvious that if you argue for equality, it appears as if you are an elitist who doesn’t want people without certain resources to enjoy their lives. There is never any dynamic discussion on the real effects of either choice. Equality and equity are philosophies on access, but the real pros and cons of choosing one over the other, details which are decidedly complex and unable to be reduced to childish cartoons, are practically ignored. When the principle of the sports game is applied to the real world, it proposes either a rejection of meritocracy, or a denial that it exists in the first place. This approach gets students bogged down in a false impression of simplicity, leading to such conclusions on meritocracy that frequently include: the system is broken, unable to be reformed, rotten to the core, and deserving of demolition.

Matt Taibbi:

.

Which brings us to Matt Walsh’s new movie, What is a Woman?, simultaneously the most talked-about and most ignored documentary in the world. The movie, which tries and fails to get trans activists, academics, and medical professionals to offer a definition of womanhood, is both trending and more or less totally un-reviewed. The most prominent outlets who’ve admitted to watching it have names like the Christian Post and Spectator Australia, despite a 96% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The film is narrated by Walsh and distributed by Ben Shapiro’s conservative Daily Wire, which is crucial to understanding why it will be a success even if — especially if — no mainstream reviewers touch it.

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch:

The only thing lacking is intellectual diversity, as leftism has become the agreed creed, not the Hebrew Bible that’s etched into the original college seal.

Many readers will recall when billionaire-philanthropist Lee Bass in 1990 gave his alma mater $20 million to establish a program studying Western civilization. The problem? Bass wanted the program to portray the West in a postive light. Yale couldn’t abide such a condition and returned the money in 1995, claiming the center wouldn’t be academic enough for the school’s notably leftist faculty. 

My story is equally wicked.

I left the board at Yale in 2002, just before a dean was charged with embezzling funds from their accounts to pay for such things as his daughter’s education—at Harvard, of all places—and padding his own pocketbook. The story broke in the New York Times, and all hell broke loose. This deed occurred at Berkeley Divinity School—a school that no longer believed in an omnipotent God who created heaven and earth.

When I received a large multimillion-dollar grant followed by two smaller ones, I urgently needed to find a university at which to place the funds and conduct the research. At our house, Yale was number one—Lux et Veritas. My son, a world-renowned, all-Ivy rower, was a Yalie and into the secret society lore as well as the prestige of wearing the big Y on the blue shirt. He had so many victories in rowing we used the multiple t-shirts from his opponents to wash and dry our cars.

Imagine that! Exiled to the Persian Gulf because you are a conservative at Yale. That’s how the system works nowadays.

There is no intellectual diversity. It is leftism or else. When Yale got $4 billion to open a non-degree granting campus in Singapore, the faculty voted 99 percent to turn the money down because the Asian economic powerhouse had an “authoritarian regime.” But Yale’s then-president, Rick Levin, took the money anyway.

My research at Yale was on (good) virtuous companies. The idea that companies might be “good” upset a lot of people who believed especially all big businesses were basically evil. I only taught two courses at the graduate level with the management crowd and Ph.D. students on “Virtue and Business.” One student who took the classes actually asked, in all seriousness, “what is virtue?” He had never before encountered the term.

Only behind closed doors and certainly not in the classroom could we openly discuss ideas—which used to be the very basis of any university. Today the basis of that purported education is simply and blatantly: indoctrination. Debunk everything, deconstruct reality, make everything about race, rid the students of the diseases of religion and class and, for God’s sake (Oh, there is no God, I forgot), by all means, redistribute the wealth (which, of course, was ill-gotten).

One does not impose personal autonomy, which is the secret of America’s real and lasting power.

What distinguished the United States from England were three crucial things: the lack of a feudal class structure that dominated Great Britain down into the 20th century; an extensive virgin territory for applying it (the Louisiana Purchase); and, most especially, the opportunity for a multitude of dissenting Protestant sects, Catholics, and Jews to engage the new world with a religious fervor largely absent from the feudalistic state churches of Europe. It is important to remember how many of the original settlers were from dissenting protestant sects such as the Puritans, Methodists, Baptists, and Quakers.

Robert Lewis & Joe Hong:

A CalMatters investigation found that schools had wildly different approaches to stimulus spending — from laptops to shade structures to an ice cream truck. No centralized database exists to show the public exactly where the money went. 

When the pandemic closed schools in March 2020 – abruptly ending classes and stranding children and working parents – leaders in Washington and Sacramento scrambled to provide relief.

The result was a series of stimulus measures that allocated $33.5 billion in state and federal funds to California’s K-12 schools to address the devastation of the pandemic. It was a staggering amount of one-time funding for the state’s cash-strapped schools, equal to a third of all the money they got the year before the pandemic. 

Imagine your boss giving you a check equal to four months of your salary and telling you to spend it quickly or risk giving it back. For schools, this was money for things like laptops, air filters and mental health counselors – money to help kids.

But much of the funding has come with limited oversight and little transparency, according to a CalMatters investigation. No centralized state or federal database exists to show how schools have spent this money. And data from the districts’ quarterly spending reportsprovided to the state are so broad as to be virtually useless in tracking this COVID relief money.

Robert Lewis & Joe Hong:

A CalMatters investigation found that schools had wildly different approaches to stimulus spending — from laptops to shade structures to an ice cream truck. No centralized database exists to show the public exactly where the money went. 

When the pandemic closed schools in March 2020 – abruptly ending classes and stranding children and working parents – leaders in Washington and Sacramento scrambled to provide relief.

The result was a series of stimulus measures that allocated $33.5 billion in state and federal funds to California’s K-12 schools to address the devastation of the pandemic. It was a staggering amount of one-time funding for the state’s cash-strapped schools, equal to a third of all the money they got the year before the pandemic. 

Imagine your boss giving you a check equal to four months of your salary and telling you to spend it quickly or risk giving it back. For schools, this was money for things like laptops, air filters and mental health counselors – money to help kids.

But much of the funding has come with limited oversight and little transparency, according to a CalMatters investigation. No centralized state or federal database exists to show how schools have spent this money. And data from the districts’ quarterly spending reportsprovided to the state are so broad as to be virtually useless in tracking this COVID relief money.

Robert Lewis & Joe Hong:

A CalMatters investigation found that schools had wildly different approaches to stimulus spending — from laptops to shade structures to an ice cream truck. No centralized database exists to show the public exactly where the money went. 

When the pandemic closed schools in March 2020 – abruptly ending classes and stranding children and working parents – leaders in Washington and Sacramento scrambled to provide relief.

The result was a series of stimulus measures that allocated $33.5 billion in state and federal funds to California’s K-12 schools to address the devastation of the pandemic. It was a staggering amount of one-time funding for the state’s cash-strapped schools, equal to a third of all the money they got the year before the pandemic. 

Imagine your boss giving you a check equal to four months of your salary and telling you to spend it quickly or risk giving it back. For schools, this was money for things like laptops, air filters and mental health counselors – money to help kids.

But much of the funding has come with limited oversight and little transparency, according to a CalMatters investigation. No centralized state or federal database exists to show how schools have spent this money. And data from the districts’ quarterly spending reportsprovided to the state are so broad as to be virtually useless in tracking this COVID relief money.

Andrew Sullivan:

Elite imposition of the new social justice religion — indoctrinating children in the precepts and premises of critical race and gender theory — has also met ferocious backlash as parents began to absorb what their kids were being taught: that America is a uniquely evil country based forever on white supremacy; that your race is the most important thing about you; that biological sex must be replaced by socially constructed genders of near-infinite number; and that all this needs to be taught in kindergarten. Yes, some of this was politically exploited or hyped by the right. But if you think there is no there there in this concern about schooling, you’re dreaming.

Across the country, school boards are thereby in turmoil, with those supporting less ideological education on the march. On the question of trans rights, there is broad support for inclusion — but most Americans are understandably uncomfortable with pre-pubescent kids having irreversible sex changes, and with trans women competing with women in sports. For which those normies are called “hateful.”

And many people have now experienced firsthand what happens to a workplace when crusades for “social justice” trump every other value. The Washington Post this week was convulsed by public infighting — initiated by a reporter, Felicia Sonmez, whose crusade to dismantle the “oppressive systems” she endures at the WaPo went on for a week of public name-calling, vitriol, and victim-mongering. As a professed victim of sexism, Sonmez felt fully justified in destroying any shred of civility or decorum — because she assumed she couldn’t be punished. The same applies to the unethical journalism of Taylor Lorenz, another social justice warrior at the WaPo.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

There can be little doubt that the history profession is experiencing a turn to the pre- sent. The post-2016 “crisis of democracy” has only dramatized it. Long-standing anx- ieties over presentism have crumbled under the weight of recent events.1 They have proven little match for Brexit, Trump, the rise of strongmen in the world writ large, racial injustice, and the pandemic. The turn to the present, however, is at times marked by undeniable provincialism—one that consistently offers a narrow perspec- tive for understanding new and emerging global realities. Some historians, for instance, have taken on the role of liberal watchmen ready to strike the tocsin against suspected fascism, but they regularly do so by focusing on Europe’s fascist past of the 1930s to explain the contemporary order.2 Or consider the economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. In the search for solutions, scholars proved quick to make historical comparisons to the great war economies of World Wars I and II, but appeared little bothered by the possibility that taking inspiration from Europe’s age of extremes might “lead us to look for enemies and scapegoats.”3

David Kane:

Kane’s Free High School Data Science Bootcamp will run from Tuesday, June 1st through Thursday, June 24th. The expected workload is 13 hours per week: 2.5 hours in class with Harvard Preceptor David Kane, lecturing live at around 8:00 PM EDT and 10.5 hours of work completed by students on their own. By the end of this bootcamp, students will be able to do basic data science! The course covers the first three weeks or so in Kane’s introductory data science class, Gov 1005: Data.

There are no prerequisites. The programming language we will be using is R. You must have a computer with R, RStudio and Git installed.

Sign up for our e-mail list to receive updates as we move forward.

Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Anthony Keats, Michael Kremer, Isaac Mbiti, Owen Ozier

We examine the impact of enrolling in schools that employ a highly-standardized approach to education, using random variation from a large nationwide scholarship program. Bridge International Academies not only delivers highly detailed lesson guides to teachers using tablet computers, it also standardizes systems for daily teacher monitoring and feedback, school construction, and financial management. At the time of the study, Bridge operated over 400 private schools serving more than 100,000 pupils. It hired teachers with less formal education and experience than public school teachers, paid them less, and had more working hours per week. Enrolling at Bridge for two years increased test scores by 0.89 additional equivalent years of schooling (EYS) for primary school pupils and by 1.48 EYS for pre-primary pupils. These effects are in the 99th percentile of effects found for at-scale programs studied in a recent survey. Enrolling at Bridge reduced both dispersion in test scores and grade repetition. Test score results do not seem to be driven by rote memorization or by income effects of the scholarship.

Nomenklatura was series of posts/institutions filled by Communist party. Who you knew was important. In US now, someone goes from fed bureaucracy, to industry dependent on govt (Boeing), lobbying firms, media. Who you know. And so FBI monitoring school boards isn’t surprising.

— FischerKing (@FischerKing64) June 11, 2022

Chris Rickert:

The free charter school is required to meet minimum instructional hour requirements contained in state law, which Davis said the school exceeds because its school day runs from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and its year from Sept. 1 to July 31, longer than most traditional public schools. The school will continue to exceed those minimums under the new schedule, he said.

It’s not clear what other traditional public, public charter or private schools in the state’s voucher program might have similar alternative staff schedules or are planning for them.

Nearby Oconomowoc High School changed their teaching and compensation model nearly 10 years ago.

Robert Lewis and Joe Hong:

When the pandemic closed schools in March 2020 – abruptly ending classes and stranding children and working parents – leaders in Washington and Sacramento scrambled to provide relief.

The result was a series of stimulus measures that allocated $33.5 billion in state and federal funds to California’s K-12 schools to address the devastation of the pandemic. It was a staggering amount of one-time funding for the state’s cash-strapped schools, equal to a third of all the money they got the year before the pandemic. 

Imagine your boss giving you a check equal to four months of your salary and telling you to spend it quickly or risk giving it back. For schools, this was money for things like laptops, air filters and mental health counselors – money to help kids.

BLS.Gov:

The all items index increased 8.6 percent for the 12 months ending May, the largest 12-month
increase since the period ending December 1981. The all items less food and energy index rose
6.0 percent over the last 12 months. The energy index rose 34.6 percent over the last year, the
largest 12-month increase since the period ending September 2005. The food index increased 10.1
percent for the 12-months ending May, the first increase of 10 percent or more since the period
ending March 1981.

Tommy Benghazi

OPT is a 12-month, temporary employment programthat foreign college students can participate in either pre- or post-graduation. There is a 24-month extension for foreign students who completed a Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics (STEM) degree that brings the visa duration to 3 years. Additionally, if an OPT participant is waiting on a decision to be made on an H-1B visa, they can stay for another 6 months. This brings the total OPT work period to a maximum of 42 months before the new Biden rule is implemented. When that comes into effect, the maximum extension will be 54 months.

The top companies who hire OPT students are tech and consulting companies. However, these jobs are not measly internships. Most are highly sought after jobs that Americans want. How many foreign STEM graduates do you think take jobs that American college graduates won’t do? The answer is zero, and if you think that the vast majority of these workers will leave the country after their OPT has expired, you are mistaken. Biden’s rule gives them another year, and many will just overstay their visas anyways. In fact, there are nearly as many visa overstays in the US as there are illegal border crossings.

Biden’s new Ministry of Truth would assure you that OPT is a compassionate way to attract the best and the brightest students from foreign countries as a temporary way of culturally enriching our workforce and investing sorely needed human capital into our STEM jobs. This narrative is the dismissive equivalent of the old, “they are taking jobs that no Americans will do! Shut up and like it!” The reality is that companies employ OPT workers over similarly qualified American workers because they are subsidized to do so by our government and no labor standards exist for OPT.

Paul Thacker:

This of course, is laughable. We have plenty of evidence that medical boards are incapable of regulating physician behavior simply by looking at the history of drug scandals in America, none of which could have occurred without the complicity of corrupt doctors—few if any of whom were later sanctioned by their own profession.

Anyone notice a medical board going after Duke University’s Dr. Ralph Snyderman for aiding the Sacklers’ opioid scheme and helping spread disinformation that these highly addictive drugs are NOT…highly addictive?

Of course not. Snyderman built up Duke University into the 3rd most prestigious medical school in the States. Despite spreading disinformation about opioids that killed tens of thousands of Americans, he’s obviously a great doctor.

The NEJM’s essay writers were most exercised about physicians spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. Not because they have any special insight about COVID-19, vaccines, or misinformation, but because everyone in medicine today knows that the most important thing to get exercised about is COVID-19 vaccine misinformation:

On July 29, 2021, the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), the umbrella organization of state and territorial licensing boards, issued a policy statement that “Physicians who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.”

Alan M. Dershowitz:

The Supreme Court, in its next term, will render a decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, which will determine the legality of Harvard’s race-based affirmative-action program. The plaintiffs claim that, by creating a floor for certain racial and ethnic groups in its admissions, Harvard created a ceiling for Asian-Americans. The result is that Asian-Americans who are academically qualified become victims of discrimination.

If the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, as many experts believe it will, Harvard and many universities around the country will have to continue their quests for increased racial diversity without violating the specific terms of the decision.

The time has come, however, for universities to abandon their efforts to achieve superficial, artificial diversity based on race. The coming decision would provide American schools with an opportunity to develop admission criteria based on academic achievement and potential—while abolishing such non-merit-based criteria as legacy status, athletics, geography and other nonacademic preferences. There would be resistance to getting rid of these advantages, but it could be done.

I believe the result of a merit-based policy would be more meaningful diversity. The result of such a policy would likely give way to more political, ideological, geographic, religious and other types of diversity that are at least as relevant to the educational mission of the university as race and ethnicity. I certainly am not asking for a return to “the good old days” of WASP dominance—those days were anything but good—but I am asking for an approach rarely attempted by American universities: pure meritocracy.

Marty Makary:

People don’t trust the CDC. Here’s one example illustrating why. Two weeks ago, with no outcomes data on COVID-19 booster shots for 5-to-11-year-olds, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) vigorously recommended the booster for all 24 million American children in that age group. The CDC cited a small Pfizer study of 140 children that showed boosters elevated their antibody levels—an outcome known to be transitory.

When that study concluded, a Pfizer spokesperson said it did not determine the efficacy of the booster in the 5-to-11-year-olds. But that didn’t matter to the CDC. Seemingly hoping for a different answer, the agency put the matter before its own kangaroo court of curated experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

I listened to the meeting, and couldn’t believe what I heard. At times, the committee members sounded like a group of marketing executives. Dr. Beth Bell of the University of Washington said “what we really need to do is to be as consistent and clear and simple as possible,” pointing out that the committee needed “a consistent recommendation which is simple.”

Other committee members similarly emphasized the importance of a universal booster message that applies to all age groups. Dr. David Kimberlin, editor of the American Academy of Pediatrics Red Book, speaking on his own behalf, said “Americans are yearning for, are crying out for a simpler way for looking at this pandemic.” He suggested that not recommending boosters for young children would create confusion that “could also bleed over to 12-to-17-year-olds, and even the adult population.”

gov.uk

What actually is going on?

Despite the popular narrative, it’s not true that social mobility is getting worse on all counts. In reality the picture is complex. On some measures it is doing better than others, and on some – such as occupational mobility – it has been fairly stable for decades

There have been big changes in the economy, as the service industry has grown. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the occupational structure shifted considerably – creating more white-collar than blue-collar jobs. So more people were able to move “up” the occupational hierarchy compared to their parents.

But more recently, while we are still generating professional and managerial jobs, the rate has slowed. There are fewer people born into families who have routine and manual occupations, and more born into families with professional and managerial jobs. There is competition from those wishing to “move up” at the same time as more people being “at risk” of moving down. This is often referred to as the problem of “less room at the top”, which makes it look like social mobility is worsening when it might not be.

Of course, occupational mobility is only one aspect. There is less consensus about mobility in income and in other things like housing or wealth.

Given this evidence, we need to stop presenting social mobility in this way. For some people it feeds the view that the country is less open to talent than it has been in the past. There are clearly areas where we need to improve, but there are also areas where we are doing relatively well. As usual, the truth is more complex.

Those born nearer to the top have advantages over those born nearer to the bottom. But we need to be careful about moving from this general observation to the conclusion that nobody has agency, or that the gaps and disparities between the “disadvantaged” and everyone else are set in stone.

We need a more analytical approach if we want to understand what is going on.

Exactly.

Because they just make stuff up. https://t.co/dJ4uYnqmRr

— Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) June 10, 2022

Ruy Teixeira:

Finally, there is perhaps the key issue for many Asian voters: education. It is difficult to overestimate how important education is to Asian voters, who see it as the key tool for upward mobility—a tool that even the poorest Asian parents can take advantage of. But Democrats have become increasingly associated with an approach to schooling that seems anti-meritocratic, oriented away from standardized tests, gifted and talented programs and test-in elite schools—all areas where Asian children have excelled.

This of course was a huge issue in San Francisco, where the School Board pushed this approach up to and including replacing the rigorous entrance test for the famed Lowell School with a lottery. That move, combined with the School Board’s bizarre obsession with an “anti-racist” school renaming project even as schools remained closed and students suffered, angered Asian parents and others so much that they took the lead in successfully recalling three of the ringleaders of this approach, a clear precursor to the current recall.

So Democrats are hemorrhaging support among Asian voters, alienating other nonwhite voters with their lax approach to public safety and losing many formerly loyal white liberals and moderates who are “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”. What to do?

The answer seems clear to me. It’s time for Democrats to adopt former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s felicitous slogan: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Conservative outlets like Fox News may exaggerate but voters really do want law and order—done fairly and humanely, but law and order just the same. Democrats still seem reluctant to highlight their commitment to cracking down on crime and criminals because that is something that, well, Fox News would say.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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]

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Josef Aschbacher:

It is the one that if we don’t get widespread buy-in and risk-tolerance fast, then the other priorities become quite irrelevant. This of course applies to projects or programmes that one may consider in the NewSpace domain. Having said that, there will always be domains where the commercial sector has no interest to invest and where projects will follow the more traditional space project development scheme. I would put high precision, cutting edge, long-term missions with fundamental technology development needs into this category, like BepiColombo, Aeolus, or Mars Sample Return.

But in many other domains, where technology is more mature and markets ready to pay for services or information, industry has completely changed its approach and has become very pro-active in co-developing and/or co-funding space projects. I have seen many incredibly encouraging examples where this is happening right now. 

When I look at the European space sector, I see a huge talent base, with many engineers and scientists having incredibly innovative ideas which they want to bring to fruition. I would claim that Europe’s human resource excellence is unique world-wide with some of the brightest talents among them. Where Europe is weak though is easy access to funding and speed in implementing projects. Lower readiness to take risk is often linked to these deficits. 

The overall European space economy could be at risk if Europe doesn’t respond to this evolution. Let’s take for instance the case of European-bred start-up Spire, founded by three Europeans educated in Europe. Spire was created 8 years ago, ultimately choosing Silicon Valley over Europe due to lack of substantial financial funding opportunities here but has in the meantime expanded very impressively and was listed at the NYSE just last month. According to market expectations the company may be valued at up to 1.6B US$, with more than 200M US$ of new cash to invest. As much as I am happy about this success for Spire and for space in general, I regret that the financial backing has been made primarily by Silicon Valley investors (I said primarily – not totally).

Max Larkin:

With takeover threats in the air, state officials have made clear that they expect brisk and broad improvement in the Boston Public Schools in problem areas identified in a recent report, including fuller inclusion of students with disabilities, more punctual school buses and safer, cleaner school buildings.

But in the two competing draft plans for achieving reforms, the state itself is cast in very different roles. Commissioner Jeff Riley’s initial May 20 draft imagines his agency — the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education — primarily as overseer and enforcer, while Boston Mayor Michelle Wu asks for DESE’s “partnership” and “support” in her counter-proposal from May 25.

Alex Usher:

Okay, now down to three books that really made me think. The first was Reforms, Organizational Change and Performance in Higher Education: A Comparative Account from the Nordic Countries (Pinheiro et al, eds), which I mentioned here. It provides top-notch mixed-methods comparative research into how educational institutions are actually managed, a field which in North America often relies too much on discussion about “neoliberalism.” Elizabeth Buckner’s Degrees of Dignity: Arab Higher Education in the Global Era was also excellent. I didn’t agree with everything in there, but it contains some excellent insights and I think Dr. Buckner found an appealing way to write about “regional” higher education and hope her style gets copied far and wide. Finally, there is Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (Stevens, Miller-Idriss and Shami). This intriguing book is ostensibly about area studies and how geographically-based knowledge gets systematically devalued in big traditional disciplines like Political Science and Economics in favour of universal “placeless” knowledge. That in itself is interesting, but perhaps more intriguing is the way they document how this fight plays out bureaucratically inside universities, when well-funded and secure disciplinary “departments” can behave imperiously towards more precarious cross-disciplinary “centres”. Clocking in at around 140 pages, this one is well worth the time of anyone seeking to better understand the politics of knowledge inside social science and humanities disciplines.

Scott Girard:

That model would be similar to the foundation’s Teacher Support Network fund, which helps provide school supplies for staff to help them avoid spending their own money on needs. Stensland said the Play Every Day initiative grew out of the work on the support network, as they heard from staff about the “other needs” at schools, including physical education equipment.

Giving each school its own budget to spend helps avoid the foundation needing to identify what needs are there.

“I’m not going to come in and decide every school must need 500 basketballs,” she said. “We could do that, we could source things and deliver them but maybe they don’t need that, maybe they need something else. We want to give every school that agency, that decision making power to use the funds that their school community needs the most.”

Matthews, once again pointing to his soccer experience while in school, said that he has developed friendships while in the NBA with stars like Luka Dončić and Giannis Antetokounmpo through a mutual interest in the game.

Betsy Morris:

Dr. Sinclair has been criticized by other scientists for hyping the results of some of his findings, like the antiaging effects found in the compound resveratrol, claims he rebuts. He says that he doesn’t overstate his research findings and that the resveratrol research was published in leading scientific journals. He has co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies and is invested in most of them, including some that are developing therapeutics that target the biology of aging.

Segterra Inc.’s InsideTracker, a personalized-nutrition company founded by scientists from Harvard, Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calculates biological age by having users take blood tests and analyzing the samples for markers of conditions like inflammation, heart health and liver or kidney disorder. Those who test as older than their years get recommendations to adjust diet, exercise and supplements.

Many other health startups are offering testing that purports to calculate biological age, sometimes with little scientific backing, and designing supplements aimed at boosting youthfulness.

Stephen Roberts, a winery owner in France, tested himself earlier this year with an at-home blood test by U.K.-based biotech company GlycanAge Ltd. The test was part of an effort by Mr. Roberts to improve his health at age 51.

“I drink. I sometimes smoke and party and eat what I want,” he says, so he expected his biological age to be a lot older than his calendar age.

Benjamin Yount:

“As proficiency has plummeted under his tenure, Governor Evers is forced to point to outdated data to back up his claims that he has been an effective leader on education,” Will Flanders with the Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty told The Center Square.

Flanders added that Gov. Evers’ approach to public schools has had a darker impact than the report suggests.

“The sectors that actually are doing better – choice and charter – have been the subject of repeated attempts by the governor to bring them to an end,” Flanders added. “School shutdowns during COVID, which the governor did nothing to stop, have exacerbated already huge achievement gaps among minority and low income students. None of this is reflected fully in the data for this ranking.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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]

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

US Department of Homeland Security (PDF):

The spread of disinformation’ presents serious homeland security risks:

Conspiracy theories about the validity and security of elections may undermine trust in core democratic institutions, amplify threats against election personnel, and jeopardize the voting rights of vulnerable communities.

Disinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks undercuts public health efforts to combat the pandemic.

Foreign terrorists, nation-states, and domestic violent extremist (DVE) groups leverage disinformation narratives to amplify calls to violence, including racially or ethnically motivated and anti-government/anti-authority violence. These actors often amplify and exploit narratives that already exist in public discourse, such as disinformation surrounding the validity of the 2020 election underpinning calls to violence on January 6, 2021.

Disinformation can complicate the performance of core DHS missions. Falsehoods surrounding U.S. Government immigration policy drive vulnerable populations to pay smugglers to bring them on the dangerous journey to our southern border. Disinformation can hamper emergency
responders in the aftermath of natural disasters or other incident responses. DHS efforts to combat disinformation must account for the sensitivities inherent to this mission:

DHS efforts to combat disinfonnation must account for the sensitivities inherent to this mission:

The Department must ensure its counter-disinformation efforts do not have the effect of chilling or suppressing free speech and free association or of infringing on individuals’ privacy or other First Amendment protected activity.

The protection of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties must be incorporated into every step of this work and any overarching framework guiding its execution.

New whistleblower documents describe the scope of the planned operations of the Biden Admin's Ministry of Truth.

1) The Ministry would regulate “[d]isinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks."

[1/3]https://t.co/aadxSL8VjG

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) June 9, 2022

Tim Hayward:

What does propaganda have to do with academic research and teaching? Citizens can reasonably expect the academic community to generate scholarly understanding and public awareness of what propaganda is and how propaganda operates. Academics should certainly aim to ensure their own research and teaching are not influenced by it. But how well does the academic community actually deal with propaganda? Addressing this question means considering both how propaganda should be dealt with and how academics actually deal with it.

Given the distinctive social role of academics, there are five general responsibilities that it is reasonable to expect them to fulfil in relation to propaganda. The most basic is to engage in research and teaching with methods of developing and communicating knowledge quite different from those that constitute propaganda. Whereas propaganda involves strategically communicating information selected on the basis of a prior agenda, the methods of science and scholarship involve collaborative deliberation and openness to new discoveries. A second general responsibility directly follows: academics should endeavour not to succumb to the influence of propaganda in their teaching and research. While seemingly a negligible risk in some fields of inquiry, something to be alert to regarding topics of public controversy is how an academic may, unaware, have passively absorbed assumptions and framings of propagandistic genesis. A third responsibility is to avoid reproducing propaganda, even inadvertently, in teaching and written works. A fourth, more imperative still, is the responsibility not to engage in the active (re)production of propaganda.

The four responsibilities just referred to do come with certain caveats: not all forms of propaganda are necessarily pernicious; perhaps not all instances of it will ever be fully identified; and academics are not necessarily less vulnerable to being deceived by propaganda than are their fellow citizens. But while there is scope for discussion of caveats, the important point is to be clear about the responsibilities themselves. While recognizing a place for reasoned critiques of particular studies of propaganda, in fact, we need also to be aware of one further general responsibility, namely, to ensure that the critical study of propaganda is not actively obstructed or attacked. This distinct fifth responsibility unfortunately needs mentioning because, as we will see, the active discouragement of critical study of certain cases of propaganda comes not only from representatives of vested interests outside academia but even sometimes from people who hold positions within.

US DoJ:

Myers acknowledged in court that on almost every Election Day, Myers transported Beren to the polling station to open the polls. During the drive to the polling station, Myers would advise Beren which candidates he was supporting so that Beren knew which candidates should be receiving fraudulent votes. Inside the polling place and while the polls were open, Beren would advise actual in-person voters to support Myers’ candidates and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls.

During Election Day itself, Myers conferred with Beren via cell phone while she was at the polling station about the number of votes cast for his preferred candidates. Beren would report to Myers how many “legit votes,” meaning actual voters, had appeared at the polls and cast ballots. If actual voter turnout was high, Beren would add fewer fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates. From time to time, Myers would instruct Beren to shift her efforts from one of his preferred candidates to another. Specifically, Myers would instruct Beren “to throw support” behind another candidate during Election Day if he concluded that his first choice was comfortably ahead.

Bari Weiss:

Amazingly, this story competed with another Post drama from the weekend: The paper issued three corrections to a story by the technology columnist Taylor Lorenz, which still contains at least one obvious falsehood. The paper claims that Lorenz reached out to a source for comment, which the source says she didn’t do, and Lorenz later admitted she didn’t do (but the story still contains the lie). Even a CNN media reporter said it was “weird WaPo can’t get this basic detail straight.” Lorenz freaked out about CNN noting the correction debacle and said that doing so was “irresponsible & dangerous.” Yes: Dangerous! 

So let’s get this straight: at the paper that cracked wide open the biggest presidential scandal in history, the paper that has long defined great political reporting, the paper of Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee and David Broder, journalists lie and publicly attack their colleagues and remain comfortably in their positions. And a reporter is suspended without pay for a retweet.

ChinaTalk:

Lesser known are cases involve an increasingly common scheme of private sector-driven urbanization in China. In this case, private sector actors take charge of the coordination and development process of urbanization.

Companies such as China Fortune Land Development (CFLD) are developing industrial towns as private-public partnerships (PPP) with local governments. CFLD has developed around 100 industrial towns mostly in China with a few in South East Asia. 

CFLD recently came into the public spotlight due to its critical financial situation which mirrors one of many of the large conventional real estate developments in China. CFLD and its PPP model have also become the object of academic research (see e.g., ‘Towards Urban economic vibrancy – patterns and practices in Asia’s new cities’ by Siqi Zheng and Zhengzhen Tan and ‘Rising private city operators in contemporary China: A study of the CFLD model’ by Yongli Jiao and Yang Yu). 

Besides the PPP model, there is also a fully privatized model in which the local government signs a concession agreement with a private firm responsible for developing and operating the city including the provision of public services and receipt of taxes. 

This fully privatized model is still little studied and known outside of China, but the Journal for Special Jurisdictions is about to publish a special volume on the topic of these Chinese private cities later this year. 

One of the main success cases of this model is Jiaolong.

The absolute state of American education today. pic.twitter.com/uWIRehSHk6

— Asabiyyah Promoter (@asabiyyahfan) June 7, 2022

Michael T. Nietzel:

The decline in college enrollment is worsening. According to a just released report by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC), total postsecondary enrollment, including both undergraduate and graduate students, decreased by 4.1% – equal to about 685,000 students – in spring 2022 compared to spring 2021. Overall postsecondary enrollment now stands at about 16.2 million students.

Added to the 3.5% drop that was seen in spring 2021, the overall two-year decline in college enrollment has reached 7.4%, or nearly 1.3 million students since spring 2020. The deepening slide dashed hopes that the worst of the pandemic-era erosion of enrollment was over and, instead, raised concerns that other factors – such as growing skepticism over the value of college – may be keeping students away.

Joe Schoffstall:

Walensky’s calendar shows that she also had contact with unions beyond the NEA before the guideline’s release, further illustrating the administration’s coziness with unions during its COVID-19 pandemic guidance process. 

“At every turn, the CDC has told the American people that they have followed the science, but with every record we receive, we see further proof that the CDC keeps turning to teachers unions for guidance instead,” said Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, who provided Walensky’s calendar to Fox News Digital.

NY Daily News:

A New York nonprofit, Upsolve, started out helping automate the bankruptcy process for low-income Americans. Then it stumbled into a related problem: Many of the families it served were on the receiving end of a barrage of intimidating letters, calls and lawsuits from debt collectors insisting they owed boatloads. Knowing that many of these mistake-riddled cases would have been easy to dismiss if only their clients had been able to afford lawyers, Upsolve sought to offer a helping hand, in the form of free legal advice.

That’s when they ran head-first into state statutes that make it a felony, punishable by up to four years in prison, to engage in the unauthorized practice of law.

Now, with the help of fully credentialed attorneys, they are challenging that law in Manhattan federal court. Tuesday, they scored an early victory, as Judge Paul Crotty granted Upsolve’s motion for a preliminary injunction, ruling on First Amendment grounds that the state cannot enforce its prohibition against the free advice program.

Victor Davis Hanson:

One day historians will look back at the period beginning with the COVID lockdowns of spring 2020 through the midterm elections of 2022 to understand how America for over two years lost its collective mind and turned into something unrecognizable and antithetical to its founding principles.

“Sovietization” is perhaps the best diagnosis of the pathology. It refers to the subordination of policy, expression, popular culture, and even thought to ideological mandates. Ultimately such regimentation destroys a state since dogma wars with and defeats meritocracy, creativity, and freedom. 

The American Commissariat

Experts become sycophantic. They mortgage their experience and talent to ideology—to the point where society itself regresses. 

The law is no longer blind and disinterested, but adjudicates indictment, prosecution, verdict, and punishment on the ideology of the accused. Eric Holder is held in contempt of Congress and smiles; Peter Navarro is held in contempt of Congress and is hauled off in cuffs and leg-irons. James Clapper and John Brennan lied under oath to Congress—and were rewarded with television contracts; Roger Stone did the same and a SWAT team showed up at his home. Andrew McCabe made false statements to federal investigators and was exempt. A set-up George Papadopoulos went to prison for a similar charge. So goes the new American commissariat.

Examine California and ask a series of simple questions.

Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 2369 pages of records from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealing over two dozen cases where research involving recombinant or synthetic nucleic acid (r/sNA) molecules was conducted in America without proper approval and in violation of NIH guidelines.

Recombinant or synthetic nucleic acid (r/sNA) molecules are constructed outside of living cells. The molecules are made by joining DNA or RNA segments (natural or synthetic) to DNA or RNA molecules that can replicate within a living cell. They may also result from replication of previously constructed recombinant molecules.

NIH guidelines detail safety practices and containment procedures for basic and clinical research involving recombinant or synthetic nucleic acid molecules – including the creation and use of organisms and viruses containing recombinant or synthetic nucleic acid molecules. These guidelines require that any significant problems, violations, or any significant research-related accidents and illnesses be reported to NIH within 30 days.

The documents further showed that the research, which occurred at Biosafety Level 1/2/3 laboratories, led to dozens of dangerous mishaps, accidents, and spills.

Wall Street Journal:

Pennsylvania law says voters must “fill out, date and sign” the ballot declaration. The state judiciary has held that dating is mandatory. But last month in a dispute over a 2021 judicial election, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that undated ballots are valid if they arrived on time. The court cited the Civil Rights Act, which says officials may not “deny the right of any individual to vote” based on a paperwork error that “is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law.”

This is a good opportunity for the Supreme Court to make clear that judges shouldn’t rush into ballot-counting rooms without a compelling reason. The Third Circuit hadn’t even written a publishable opinion when it issued a judgment in that 2021 case. The timing, three days after Pennsylvania’s primary, suggests intent to upend the way that ballots were being tallied.

Sgt Mom

The post at Legal Insurrection (link) says in part, that the goal is to “…to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.”
So basically, this is an administrative rubber-stamping a passing grade on the report cards of black students who can’t be arsed to attend class, behave properly as students when they do, or turn in required assignments. Frankly, one wonders why such students even bother with school anyway, if they are so vehemently disinclined towards the life intellectual, but truant law and free daycare for such parental units as they have probably account for it, as well as money for butts in seats on the part of the school itself. At this rate of scholastic malpractice, urban schools might just as well hand out high school graduation certificates as if they were Pokemon cards, one to a customer and save themselves time and effort in the classroom. Any serious education of pupils appears as merely a happy afterthought to a means of employing large numbers of administrators, assistant principals and teachers whose union membership is vastly more important to the powers that be than imparting knowledge to that handful of rare-as-hen’s-teeth pupils who seriously want to learn.

This particularly unfortunate notion to enforce the mystical quality of “equity” on students of color will backfire of course. Future employers, associates, neighbors and professional will regard those students of color who hold such useless bits of paper as worthless, illiterate, and dumber than dirt, which will no doubt make those public-school products feel even more disrespected, resentful, and inclined to casual criminality and general uselessness as citizens than they already are. Just call me Cassandra, if you please.

Honestly, home school looks better and better all the time, as many otherwise well-intentioned, well-paid and ambitious-for-the-children parents discovered during sessions of remote learning and home lockdown, exactly and to their vast disgust what kind of sex-ed and racial-theory lunacies were romping untrammeled through the classrooms.

Josh Verges:

An architect and planning manager promoted to director in 2014, Parent has overseen a sudden increase in spending on St. Paul’s school buildings — from $30 million a year in 2016 to around $112 million each year since.

Starting in 2014, facilities staff met with schools and sketched out plans to improve the look and function of every building in the district. The resulting Facilities Master Plan was approved by the school board in 2016 and laid out $484 million in school renovations, expansions and maintenance projects to tackle over the next five years.

Besides modern heating and plumbing systems, schools are getting secure and welcoming entrances, more natural light, gender-neutral restrooms and more functional learning space.

The district is borrowing to pay for the increased spending by issuing long-term bonds. The average homeowner was told to expect a series of $30 property-tax increases each year.

But the initial five-year plan quickly went off track as costs soared and numerous future projects were postponed.

Shannon Whitworth

Recently, in my high school Business Communication class, I had one of the most disheartening conversations I’ve ever had with my students. It was regarding the effects of the pandemic lockdowns. Policymakers and leaders need to listen to these experiences, get students back on track and develop new strategies if we ever have a challenge similar to the COVID-19 pandemic in the future.

It was apparent during this conversation that many children under 18 cannot do school by computer.  My students admitted that they regularly checked in with their teachers and then either turned off their camera or checked out after attendance. Many students said the isolation shortened their attention spans and made it difficult to stay on task. This is reflected in recent research as well. The Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard released a study in May based on two years’ worth of data, from 2019 through 2021. Over that timeframe students who attended school in-person for the 2020-21 school year—and were only remote for the spring of 2020—lost about 20% of their learning in math, while students who were remote for the majority of that time lost close to 50% of their learning. That is a disaster.

Two students shared about taking the ACT exam and how they just wanted to give up in the middle of the test because in the last year they “hadn’t learned anything.” By far, this was the saddest statement shared within the discussion. When I revealed to them that schools in their surrounding suburbs were allowed to go back to in-person instruction much sooner than Milwaukee Lutheran, I saw anger in their eyes. They feel the policymakers and community leaders bailed on them, and they won’t forget it.

I’ve been getting a lot of notes and inquiries so I’ll tell you what I know about the end of APM Reports. 1/5 pic.twitter.com/GMQTxMJjYc

— Emily Hanford (@ehanford) May 29, 2022

Emily Hanford links.

Scott Girard:

Simkin suggested one example is in the student use of cell phones in classrooms, something teachers have expressed concerns about this school year. The BEP already prohibits the use of unauthorized, non-educationally required devices that disrupt learning, but Simkin said that teachers “don’t have what they need to implement this and it’s greatly impacting the learning of students.”

“This is something huge that needs to be addressed this summer,” she said. “I don’t think this is something that waits until we work on implementation over the course of next year. We need to talk about the disruption of these devices.”

Much of the other criticism from board members Monday was grounded in a lack of data. Board member Christina Gomez Schmidt said she wanted to see how the moratorium on suspensions at elementary schools this school year affected schools before voting to put it in the plan.

“I was expecting when this came back to us that we would definitely have data about how that has been working this year,” she said. “We don’t have anything that you have given us to show us what these changes in policy have done in practice in the schools.”

Elizabeth Beyer:

But board member Nicki Vander Meulen pushed back against the proposed changes, saying the district hadn’t sought board input until the policy was finalized.

“The Behavior Education Plan needs to be formed with the board who runs the policy, not the administration. It has to be done with us, together,” Vander Meulen said. “(The BEP) doesn’t work, and our students who are most vulnerable are the ones who are getting bullied, the ones who aren’t feeling safe at school, are the ones who are paying the price.”

Board member Nichelle Nichols expressed concern about the lack of data presented along with the policy revisions and asked for a contingency plan if the district isn’t adequately staffed to make the BEP effective in the coming school year.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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]

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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Laura Camera:

“While nearly all educators act with extraordinary care and professionalism, many state-level policies and practices can and must be strengthened to ensure greater protections for our young people,” Deputy Assistant Secretary Ruth Ryder said in a statement. “Gaps in many of these policies and variability in policies between states remain significant challenges.”

The Education Department has been under increasing pressure to release the report, which was started during the Trump administration, by congressional lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who see this as a growing problem.

There is no national database for this type of incident. According to estimates by some advocacy groups, 95% of educator sexual misconduct cases are handled internally and not reported to law enforcement or reported by the media. A recent analysis of all local new stories by Fox News found that at least 135 teachers and teachers’ aides have been arrested on child sex-related crimes in 41 states between Jan. 1 and May 13.

Josh Gerstein

An advocacy group that has spent more than two decades fighting for free expression on college campuses is broadening its efforts to fight so-called cancel culture and other perceived threats to free speech across American society.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is renaming itself the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and keeping the “FIRE” acronym as it launches a drive to promote greater acceptance of a diversity of views in the workplace, pop culture and elsewhere. Part of the push may challenge the American Civil Liberties Union’s primacy as a defender of free speech.

Atif Ansar & Bent Flyvbjerg:

How should government and business solve big problems? In bold leaps or in many smaller moves? We show that bespoke, one-off projects are prone to poorer outcomes than projects built on a repeatable platform. Repeatable projects are cheaper, faster, and scale at lower risk of failure. We compare evidence from 203 space missions at NASA and SpaceX, on cost, speed-to-market, schedule, and scalability. We find that SpaceX’s platform strategy was 10X cheaper and 2X faster than NASA’s bespoke strategy. Moreover, SpaceX’s platform strategy was financially less risky, virtually eliminating cost overruns. Finally, we show that achieving platform repeatability is a strategically diligent process involving experimental learning sequences. Sectors of the economy where governments find it difficult to control spending or timeframes or to realize planned benefits – e.g., health, education, climate, defence – are ripe for a platform rethink.

Wall Street Journal:

Now the Florida Department of Health Office of Inspector General has exonerated Mr. DeSantis. The IG interviewed more than a dozen people who worked with state Covid data, including Ms. Jones’s supervisors. None corroborated her claims.

Some said she had told them she was pressured to alter Covid case and death counts, but her allegations didn’t make sense to them, not least because she didn’t have access to the raw data to do so. Ms. Jones, a geographer by training who previously worked on hurricane tracking systems, merely assisted with the Covid data’s online dashboard.

“If the complainant or other DOH staff were to have falsified COVID-19 data on the dashboard, the dashboard would then not have matched the data in the corresponding final daily report,” the IG explained, adding that “such a discrepancy” would surely have been detected by Bureau of Epidemiology staff, researchers or the media. The IG found no truth to any of Ms. Jones’s accusations.

One reason so many Americans don’t trust the media is because they have figured out that partisan narratives drive too much reporting. We wish they were wrong.

Wall Street Journal:

All of this has been another failure of progressive economics. By focusing solely on macroeconomic demand, while ignoring supply-side and regulatory bottlenecks, their policies fueled the inflation we have today. They also ignored the role of excess money, forgetting economist Milton Friedman’s famous lesson. As President Biden declared in an April 2020 interview, “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” That is one campaign promise he has kept.

Progressives pushed the same agenda for months even as evidence of inflation became too obvious to ignore. Inflation was supposedly “transitory.” The White House kept pressing its Build Back Better (BBB) plan for nearly $5 trillion in new spending—and even claimed it would be a cure for inflation.

No fewer than 17 Nobel prize winners in economics endorsed all this in a remarkable “open letter” last September. The White House broadcast the letter far and wide, and Mr. Biden referred to it often as an appeal to authority. “Because this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressures,” said the letter.

We list the names of the letter’s signers nearby. They are all notable economists, and some have written for these pages. Since BBB didn’t pass, they can say the predictions in their letter were never tested. But their inability to see in September that inflation was already rising fast makes their claims almost worse as a failure of expertise. Annual inflation hit 6.2% in October last year and is now above 8%.

Josh Christensen:

The top 40 percent of wage earners hold the majority of student debt. Of student-debt holders between the ages of 25 and 40, the top 40 percent bears half of the total debt, meaning the richest young adults carry the most.

The liberal push for student debt cancellation comes as the United States faces 40-year high inflation and record-breaking gas prices, which have doubled since Biden took office in January 2021.

Alliance Defending Freedom:

Description:  The Harrisonburg City Public School Board in Virginia is usurping parents’ right to direct the upbringing of their children and forcing school staff to violate their religious beliefs by affirming the board’s view on gender identity. Upon a child’s request, school district policy requires staff to immediately begin using opposite-sex pronouns and forbids staff from sharing information with parents about their child’s request, instead instructing staff to mislead and deceive parents.