Dan Klein:

That is from The Constitution of Liberty, specifically, the epilogue. Now it’s proven that Hayek was right and the others wrong.

There is a lot of talk about how ‘big data’ is going to make miracles and answer big questions. When a lot of interpretation and judgment is involved in utilizing the data, the touting of ‘big data’ is hooey.

When interpretation and judgment are simple and straightforward, however, big data are powerful. The Google Ngram Viewer is simply counting and percentages. There is no statistical manipulation on my part. Because we can speak so plainly of the data, we say “the data speak for themselves.” Here again is the slide from above:

Jack Cashill:

The one obvious clue that President Joe Biden did notattend an Ivy League University is this: When busted for plagiarism, Biden suffered real-world consequences. In a 1987 Democratic primary debate, while very much a viable candidate, Biden famously lifted a passage from a speech by Neil Kinnock, the former leader of Britain’s Labour Party, and tried to pass it off as his own.

The Michael Dukakis campaign caught the theft, and the media, still in their journalism phase, went digging for more purloined pearls of Biden wisdom. They were not hard to find. Under pressure, Biden had to confess that he had plagiarized a paper while in law school — the Syracuse University Law School, that is — and he was out of the presidential race even before the corn stalks withered in Iowa.

As Biden learned the hard way, a Syracuse University affiliation offers no immunity to the plagiarism bug. Harvard’s does. Yale’s does. And Princeton’s will likely do the same. But even the Ivy schools require the individual to boost his/her/their natural Ivy immunity with renewable doses of progressive toxins.

No Ivy Leaguer has done more to earn his immunity than “History’s Attack Dog,” Princeton University professor Kevin Kruse. In addition to his more prosaic tasks at Princeton, Kruse has assumed the responsibility of patrolling the daily news. “Online,” observes Emma Pettit in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “the historian specializes in serialized posts, called threads, that lend historical context to breaking news or skewer a version of history spouted by right-wing agitators.” It is the skewering that has netted Kruse his 502,000 followers on Twitter.

In May 2017, Kruse took particular pleasure in slicing and dicing former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke. Clarke set himself up for the kill by announcing his likely appointment as assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under President Donald Trump. As a conservative and an African American, he made a tempting target for leftists eager to show Blacks the consequences of thinking for themselves.

Andrew Kaczynski of CNN’s KFile took the first stab at Clarke’s reputation, accusing him of having “plagiarized portions of his master’s thesis on homeland security.” This was a low blow. A police officer by profession, Clarke never pretended to be a scholar. In fact, he didn’t graduate from college until he was 43 and only then through a continuing education program. The mistakes he made on the thesis were amateurish, the sort one routinely sees on papers at this level. Still, compared to Dr. Jill Biden’s botch of a doctoral dissertation, Clarke’s thesis was downright Aristotelian.

Compelled to review the two cases, then-Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan and then-Harvard President Larry Summers dithered for months before finally declaring the offenses of their legal luminaries “inadvertent.” At this level, “inadvertent” was no worthier an excuse for Tribe and Ogletree than it had been for Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Nonetheless, it provided cover enough to allow the media to look the other way. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: ‘Roots,’ ‘Dreams,’ and the Unequal Punishment of Fraud)

Additional notes.

Related: Ivy League Summary: Tax Break Subsidies And Government Payments: “Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.”

Scott Girard:

Derrick Holt, teaching Digital Music Media & Production at the Cherokee Middle School site this summer, wants his students to understand they don’t have to wait to work on their artistry.

“The basic thing is I hope they figure out whether or not they like this stuff,” Holt said. “You don’t have to decide you want to be a rapper or a producer, just have your hands on some professional equipment that’s used in studios and (realize), ‘Oh, this is fun,’ or ‘I’m actually good.’”

Colin Carroll:

That is exactly right. And you can see that more clearly when Rufo’s correct quote is put into full context. “To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust. I think that the public schools have done a remarkable job at doing just that, specifically, the public school teachers unions. They shut down the schools for more than a year.” 

And if you look at the polling, confidence in public schools has been decreasing for decades, long before Rufo became an activist. According to Gallup, in 1973, 61% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats had confidence in public schools. By 2000, those numbers had fallen to 33% of Republicans and 43% of Democrats. 

The COVID lockdowns, in particular, have done even more damage to trust in public schools, at least among Republicans. In 2019, just 28% of Republicans had confidence in public schools. Today, that number has fallen to 14%. Meanwhile, Democrats’ confidence in public schools has risen through COVID from 30% in 2019 to 43% today. 

Separately, Pew has found that the vast majority of people, 62%, believe that the government gave “too little priority” to “meeting the educational needs of K-12 students.”

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?

Whatever one thinks of the legal rationale on which Dobbs was based, the entire point, and result, was the Supreme Court effectively stripped itself of jurisdiction over abortion, shifting it to the states.

This letter is bizarre. This is what conservatives long demanded: https://t.co/1KCl6MFCVU

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 15, 2022

Jonathan Allen:

“But then you want to turn to areas that are more important” such as funding and fundamental instruction.

That explains the two-step thrust-and-parry messaging American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten will outline Thursday morning during her union’s convention in Boston.

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?

Inavate

The published paper, entitled ‘Quantifying the Effects of Working in VR for One Week’ found “concerning levels
of simulator sickness, below average usability ratings and two participants dropped out on the first day using VR, due to migraine, nausea and anxiety.”

The study found that, as expected, VR results in significantly worse ratings across most measures. Each test subject scored their VR working experience versus working in a physical environment, many felt their task load had increased, on average by 35%. Frustration was by 42%, the ‘negative affect’ was up 11%, and anxiety rose by 19%. Mental wellbeing decreased by 20%., eye strain rose 48%, and VR ranked 36% lower on usability. Participants self-rated workflow went down by 14% and their perceived productivity dropped by 16%.

“Nevertheless, there is some indication that participants gradually overcame negative first impressions and initial discomfort. Overall, this study helps lay the groundwork for subsequent research, by clearly highlighting current shortcomings and
identifying opportunities for improving the experience of working in VR.”

Dylan Pahman and Alexander William Salter:

It would be one thing if inflation were unforeseeable, but it isn’t. The Federal Reserve flooded the market with money for years and supported the market for government debt. Politicians ran record deficits as the Fed happily purchased bonds. The result was an unprecedented money-supply increase, to almost $22 trillion today from about $15.5 trillion in March 2020—far outpacing the market’s need for liquidity. Policy makers kept the money flowing despite clear warning signs. The Russian invasion of Ukraine contributed to inflation, but not nearly as much as America’s own fiscal and monetary profligacy.

Even if policy makers had the best of intentions, the exigencies of the moment don’t justify yoking the underprivileged to the burden of fading purchasing power. The engineers of today’s inflation violated the biblical commandment to maintain a stable currency. Those in authority are supposed to protect “the least of these” from exploitation. Instead, they made the economically insecure even more vulnerable.

Will Flanders:

In the latest example of doubling down on bad policies, the Biden administration is currently seeking to restore Obama-era federal guidance that had severe consequences for student safety. According to recent reports, the policies under consideration would investigate schools based on their rates of discipline of students with disabilities and those from racial minority backgrounds. In the past, these investigations have led to the threats of federal lawsuits against school districts, and mandated a focus on reducing the rates of suspension for disabled and minority students.  

All of these policies are based on the woke narrative surrounding “disparate impacts.” Under this theory, even a policy that, on its face, is entirely race-neutral, is adjudged to be racist if it affects individuals from different races or backgrounds at different rates. This narrative has come to the forefront not only in education, but also in policing with countless headlinesnoting that minorities are arrested and incarcerated at higher rates for a wide variety of crimes.  

What is not allowed to be discussed is whether this is a result of true racism, or of differences in behavior that are correlated along race lines. Even though it is politically incorrect, most of the evidence points to the latter. The reality is that on objective measures where there is little or no possibility of racial bias, racial disparities still exist in the rates of anti-social behavior. 

For instance, research has found that African Americans are far more likely than their white peers to report having been in a fight at school, and more likely to face mandatory discipline where there is little room for discretion on the part of teachers and principals. There are many explanations for why this could be the case. The most likely is differences in poverty among white and minority students, which correlates very well with student discipline disparities. Indeed, extensive researchhas found that poverty rates are predictive of misbehavior regardless of student race. But whatever the reason, ignoring misbehavior is likely to lead to greater harm to the students it is designed to protect.

Stanley Kurtz:

The first problem with PolitiFact’s argument is that it misstates the meaning of the relevant language of the bill. That language doesn’t “prevent” the education secretary from imposing curricula; rather, it merely states that the bill shall not be interpreted to authorize such action (a much weaker proviso). Although it’s an issue for another day, plenty of folks argue that education secretaries have been disregarding similarly weak constraints for decades.

But even if PolitiFact had correctly described the bill, the argument would be a non sequitur. DeSantis never claimed that Biden’s education secretary would formally “impose” curricula on the states. On the contrary, DeSantis said that CSDA would allow Biden to “buy off” states with grant money “if” they teach CRT.

Rich Cohen:

From ages 6 to 12, I spent eight weeks every summer at Menominee, an all-boys camp in Eagle River, Wis. I was taught archery at Menominee, how to shoot a rifle, roll a kayak, cross the lake on a single water ski, bus a table, operate a Lazy-susan, tell a ghost story, make a bed with hospital corners and mark a trail, but those are not the only things I learned. In the manner of a public school or army base, what I learned was usually not what was being taught. I learned how to form an alliance, survive a bully, win a fight against a stronger person, spark a softball rally, sneak off the grounds and into Eagle River taverns without leaving a trace, gamble, chew tobacco, throw a knife, dismember a daddy long legs, barter and bluff.

Those who spent summers there come from towns across the country and world, but we all grew up at Menominee. We loved it, and that’s why we cried at the banquet held the last night of every summer, tears streaming as we sang, “Fill a stein, sing a song, to the camp I love.” It’s why we did not merely try to defeat but to demolish the kids from our archrival, Kawaga, at the midseason Olympiad. Mike Dunleavy Jr., who went on to play basketball at Duke, had been a Menominee standout in those games. When a “kid from Menominee” introduced himself to Dunleavy on the floor amid the celebration that followed Duke’s 2000 NCAA championship, Dunleavy, turning serious, asked, “Did we beat Kawaga?”

Scott Girard:

Planning the trips is plenty of work, but in picking locations, Anderson acknowledged a bit of selfishness, as she’s “just going through my bucket list right now.”

She learned in her time working for an airline how to find “really cheap ways to experience really amazing things.”

The group works with EF Education First, which organizes educational trips around the world. That takes some of the planning and stress off Anderson. She first saw how well this collaboration could work when 34 people traveled to 10 cities across Europe for 15 days for $5,000 in 2018.

“It was amazing,” she said. “I could absolutely not do this without a tour.”

The organization came in handy this year with COVID, as the “COVID care promise” covered hotels, meals and changes to their trip home. Knorr also said the benefits of a local tour guide made it so that someone with Anderson’s travel experience was a bonus rather than a requirement, allowing the trip to continue for those who weren’t sick or required to quarantine.

Marty Makary:

At the NIH, doctors and scientists complain to us about low morale and lower staffing: The NIH’s Vaccine Research Center has had many of its senior scientists leave over the last year, including the director, deputy director and chief medical officer. “They have no leadership right now. Suddenly there’s an enormous number of jobs opening up at the highest level positions,” one NIH scientist told us. (The people who spoke to us would only agree to be quoted anonymously, citing fear of professional repercussions.) 

The CDC has experienced a similar exodus. “There’s been a large amount of turnover. Morale is low,” one high level official at the CDC told us. “Things have become so political, so what are we there for?” Another CDC scientist told us: “I used to be proud to tell people I work at the CDC. Now I’m embarrassed.”

Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science.  

The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions. That such decisions are being driven by what’s politically palatable to people in Washington or to the Biden administration. And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health.

Nowhere has this problem been clearer—or the stakes higher—than on official public health policy regarding children and Covid. 

First, they demanded that young children be masked in schools. On this score, the agencies were wrong. Compelling studies later found schools that masked children had no different rates of transmission. And for social and linguistic development, children need to see the faces of others. 

Next came school closures. The agencies were wrong—and catastrophically so. Poor and minority children suffered learning loss with an 11-point drop in math scores alone and a 20% drop in math pass rates. There are dozens of statistics of this kind.

Ben Cohen:

‘I used to get paid money,’ says Buchholz High School math coach Will Frazer, a former Wall Street bond trader. ‘Now we get trophies

Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus. As soon as the system was in place, the team started winning and never stopped.

It turned out there was value in putting a bunch of smart kids in the same room: They feel empowered to make each other smarter.

Many of the gifted kids in his program have parents who work at the nearby University of Florida and push to get on Mr. Frazer’s radar. Others he finds on his own. He tracks down test scores of students in his district, follows the data and recruits high achievers. Some who were discovered by his spreadsheets have since graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with math degrees and landed on Wall Street themselves.

The mathletes who try out for the team and make the cut are combined into one class section and fly through competitive algebra, geometry and calculus during the school day. Mr. Frazer essentially bends the rules to move faster through harder material and pack more than two years of math into one school year. “I cover everything the state wants me to cover,” he said. “But there is no restriction on covering extra material.”

Joanne Jacobs:

Kelly Smith opened a seven-student pod in his Arizona home in 2018, writes Eden. “By partnering with an online charter school,” Smith’s Prenda created tuition-free microschools that combine to “self-paced Chromebook lessons and group problem-based learning.” It became a big hit during the pandemic.

However, many parents want “less time on laptops, more time with pen and paper, a knowledge-rich curriculum, and a focus on reading great books,” writes Eden.

One of the most predictive political metrics in the US is how much formal education one is plagued with.

In the new NYT/Harris poll showing Biden with 33% approval (😬), only 20% of those with no HS approve of Biden, compared to 55% of those with graduate degrees: the Dem base. pic.twitter.com/9I2z1lbRHa

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 11, 2022

College of St. Joseph:

The College of St. Joseph the Worker forms students into effective and committed members of their communities by teaching them the Catholic intellectual tradition while training them in skilled and dignified labor. We teach our students to think, but also to pray, to love, and to build.

Lola Fadulu:

Mayor Eric Adams announced Thursday the details of a plan to turn around a literacy crisis in New York City and, in particular, to serve thousands of children in public schools who may have dyslexia, an issue deeply personal to the mayor, who has said his own undiagnosed dyslexia hurt his academic career.

School officials plan to screen nearly all students for dyslexia, while 80 elementary schools and 80 middle schools will receive additional support for addressing the needs of children with dyslexia. The city will also open two new dyslexia programs — one at P.S. 125 Ralph Bunche in Harlem and the other at P.S. 161 Juan Ponce de Leon in the South Bronx — with a goal of opening similar programs in each borough by 2023.

Officials also plan to train all teachers, and will create a new dyslexia task force. School leaders are requiring school principals to pivot to a phonics-based literacy curriculum, which literacy experts say is the most effective way to teach reading to most children.

“Dyslexia holds back too many of our children in school but most importantly in life,” Mr. Adams said during a press briefing Thursday morning, adding that it “haunts you forever until you can get the proper treatment that you deserve.”

New York is facing a literacy crisis: Fewer than half of all third to eighth graders and just 36 percent of Black and Latino students were proficient on the state reading exams administered in 2019, the most recent year for which there is data. Research suggests that the coronavirus pandemic has only worsened those outcomes.

Stephen Moore and Jon Decker:

Based on our survey of the top 68 officials in the Biden administration, starting with the president himself, and including cabinet members, regulatory officials, and White House advisers, this study finds:

62% of Biden appointees who deal with economic policy, regulation, commerce, energy and finance have virtually no business experience.

Only one in eight has extensive business experience.

Average business experience of Biden appointees is only 2.4 years.

Median years of business experience is zero.

The vast majority of the Biden economic/commerce team members are professional politicians, lawyers, community organizers, lobbyists, or government employees.

We also compared the Biden administration’s business experience to President Trump’s cabinet officials during his last year in office. We found that the average Trump cabinet member had 13 years of business experience, and the median years of experience was 8. A breakdown of this analysis is available on our website.

Becky Dernbach:

I’ve been reporting on Hassan’s journey since she became the first Somali American to win the Minnesota Teacher of the Year award, in 2020. Over that time, I visited her classroom, spoke with her students, and talked to school parents and fellow teachers. All of them praised Hassan’s teaching methods, her uncanny ability to connect with children, and the representation she brought to their schools. In the classroom, at award ceremonies, and even at a school board protest, I’ve observed how much Hassan means to her students—and how much they mean to her.

“We’ve got children all across Minnesota that believe that they can do anything because of your example, and for that I am incredibly grateful,” Gov. Tim Walz told Hassan in a speech at the following year’s Minnesota Teacher of the Year ceremony.

But more recently, the joy Hassan had once found in the classroom was fading, she told me. She dreaded going to work. She felt like she was becoming less of herself.

Quanta:

In 1994, a mathematician figured out how make a quantum computer do something that no ordinary classical computer could. The work revealed that, in principle, a machine based on the rules of quantum mechanics could efficiently break a large number into its prime factors — a task so difficult for a classical computer that it forms the basis for much of today’s internet security.

A surge of optimism followed. Perhaps, researchers thought, we’ll be able to invent quantum algorithms that can solve a huge range of different problems.

But progress stalled. “It’s been a bit of a bummer trajectory,” said Ryan O’Donnellof Carnegie Mellon University. “People were like, ‘This is amazing, I’m sure we’re going to get all sorts of other amazing algorithms.’ Nope.” Scientists discovered dramatic speedups only for a single, narrow class of problems from within a standard set called NP, meaning they had efficiently verifiable solutions — such as factoring.

John Schuppe:

In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, 2020. Three adults and two children died in the fire.

That search of Google’s records helped point investigators to the teen and two friends, who were eventually charged in the deadly fire, according to police records. All were juveniles at the time of their arrests. Two of them, including the 17-year-old, are being tried as adults; they both pleaded not guilty. The defendant in juvenile court has not yet entered a plea.

The 17-year-old’s lawyers say the search, and all evidence that came from it, should be thrown out because it amounted to a blind expedition through billions of Google users’ queries based on a hunch that the killer typed the address into a search bar. That, the lawyers argued, violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches.

“People have a privacy interest in their internet search history, which is really an archive of your personal expression,” said Michael Price, who is lead litigator of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ Fourth Amendment Center and one of the 17-year-old’s attorneys. “Search engines like Google are a gateway to a vast trove of information online and the way most people find what they’re looking for. Every one of those queries reveals something deeply private about a person, things they might not share with friends, family or clergy.”

Neeraj Sood, Shannon Heick, Josh Stevenson, Tracy Høeg;

There is still considerable debate about whether mask mandates in the K-12 schools limit transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in children attending school. Randomized data about the effectiveness of mask mandates in children is still entirely lacking. Our study took advantage of a unique natural experiment of two adjacent K-12 school districts in Fargo, North Dakota, one which had a mask mandate and one which did not in the fall of the 2021-2022 academic year. In the winter, both districts adopted a masks-optional policy allowing for a partial crossover study design. We observed no significant difference between student case rates while the districts had differing masking policies (IRR 0.99; 95% CI: 0.92 to 1.07) nor while they had the same mask policies (IRR 1.04; 95% CI: 0.92 to 1.16). The IRRs across the two periods were also not significantly different (p = 0.40). Our findings contribute to a growing body of literature which suggests school-based mask mandates have limited to no impact on the case rates of COVID-19 among K-12 students.

Allysia Finley:

There are many lessons to be gleaned from the U.S. pandemic response. House Democrats don’t care to study them.

The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis last month issued a deeply partisan report demonizing doctors who purportedly espoused “a dangerous and discredited herd immunity via mass infection strategy.” The report took aim at the Trump administration’s embrace of the October 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, in which epidemiologists Martin Kulldorff (Harvard), Sunetra Gupta (Oxford) and Jay Bhattacharya (Stanford) advocated protecting the elderly and vulnerable while allowing schools and businesses to reopen. This wasn’t a strategy to infect masses of people on purpose. The goal was to minimize deaths and social and economic harm until the country reached herd immunity through infection or vaccination.

The Great Barrington strategy of “focused protection” helped minimize the pandemic’s collateral damage until vaccines became available. The Biden administration then undertook a strategy of herd immunity via vaccination. But when this strategy failed, it doubled down with vaccine mandates.

One of the most predictive political metrics in the US is how much formal education one is plagued with.

In the new NYT/Harris poll showing Biden with 33% approval (😬), only 20% of those with no HS approve of Biden, compared to 55% of those with graduate degrees: the Dem base. pic.twitter.com/9I2z1lbRHa

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 11, 2022

Sofia Garcia:

The paper outlines a statistical model meant to “explain how a difference in variability could naturally evolve between two sexes of the same species,” a direct reference to the GMVH. The paper relied on strict biological assumptions, such as the idea that genes encoding for variability would be expressed in only in one of the two sexes, that one sex would be more selective than the other, and that the same allele could result both in unusually high and unusually low expressions of a trait. Former Harvard President Larry Summers used the GVMH in a 2005 speech to justify the lack of women in tenured positions in science and engineering.

Both the paper itself and its two retractions have garnered a great deal of media interest since early September 2018. Accomplished mathematicians and computational biologistshave commented on both the paper itself and how it relates to online academic publishing. Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker have made public comments in support of the paper, with Pinker framing the controversy as an example of academic suppression.

The paper was first accepted for publication in TheMathematical Intelligencer’s Viewpoint column, a section discussing any topic of mathematical interest from readers of the journal.

Peter Biello:

Researchers at MIT and Georgia Tech have developed a tool that redraws school attendance boundaries to both reduce racial segregation and travel times.

Researchers surveyed parents’ preferences on class size and school travel time. Overall, when looking at elementary school districts across the country, researchers found they could achieve a 12% decrease in segregation by moving one in five students to a new school and also reduce overall travel time. 

Nabeel Gillani led the project at MIT. He said results vary by district. 

“Certainly there’s the technology piece here, but we know fundamentally this is not a technology problem: It’s a social problem, i’s a political problem,” he said. “So we wanted to see if we could use technology now in ways to get more people involved, get more voices involved in the mix, and share more of what they think of these boundaries.”

Gillani says researchers chose to focus on elementary schools because the benefits of integration can start earlier.

“The way early learning experiences shape children and the impact those have later in life … was definitely a consideration,” he said.

Rafael Medoff:

In a successful lawsuit, it was proven that the Internal Revenue Service under Barack Obama discriminated against Z-Street, a Zionist organization that disagreed with the President’s views regarding Israel. For the American Jewish community, it’s a reminder of a disturbing episode that took place during the Holocaust era.

The Jewish target of U.S. government wrath in the 1940s was the Bergson Group, a political action committee led by Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), a Zionist emissary from Palestine. The group used newspaper advertisements, rallies, and lobbying to press the Roosevelt administration to rescue Jews from the Nazis.

To put it mildly, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was unhappy about those protests. One senior White House aide reported that FDR was “much displeased” when the Bergson Group brought 400 rabbis to Washington to plead for rescue. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt told Bergson himself that the President was “very upset” about one of the group’s newspaper ads, which FDR felt was “hitting below the belt” because it accused him of turning a blind eye to the Nazi massacres.

The State Department, too, was annoyed by Bergson’s campaign for rescue. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long privately complained that the group’s newspaper ads “made it very difficult for the Department.” Long’s deputy, Robert Alexander, absurdly claimed that the slogan used in one Bergson ad, “Action–Not Pity,” had actually been invented by the Nazis as part of a conspiracy to embarrass the Allies.

Beginning in 1942, the Roosevelt administration sent the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service after Bergson. They were looking for evidence of criminal activity, but their motivation was political. An internal FBI memo I obtained under the Freedom of Information Act bluntly explained why U.S. government action against Bergson: “This man has been in the hair of [Secretary of State] Cordell Hull.”

Daniel Wu:

Flower had the opportunity to experience China more closely than most. He studied Chinese philosophy and history at the University of Virginia and moved to the southwestern province of Sichuan to conduct a three-year study in 1991. In 2003, he gave up a tenured position at the University of North Carolina to teach Chinese history at the D.C. private school Sidwell Friends, where he and his wife Pam Leonard developed a China fieldwork program that brought high school students to study in rural China.

In 2012, Flower and Leonard moved their program to Yunnan, a province on the southwestern reaches of the Chinese countryside bordering Myanmar. There, on a trip to a remote village named Cizhong on the edge of the province in 2015, Flower found Zhang and the house he’d eventually bring to the United States.

The idea that started as a joke over tea seemed feasible — Zhang, who was being relocated by the local government, was happy to sell his house to save it from demolition — and the educational opportunities were too exciting to pass up.

“It would be a text,” Flower said. “Like bringing an incredibly interesting book.”

The journey back to the United States was long and painstaking. Flower and a team of craftsmen returned to Cizhong in 2017 to document the house’s design and carefully pry its beams and floorboards apart. It took months to truck the pieces across China to the eastern port of Tianjin and then ship them to Baltimore. Flower did it at his own expense.

While blacklisting the maker of Pegasus, the US Govt of course acquired its incomparably invasive software: can extract all contents of phones without your clicking on a link, turning your phone into a tracking/recording device. CIA has it. FBI debated using it *domestically*. pic.twitter.com/fspKZFhKdB

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 11, 2022

Ted Nordhaus and Saloni Shah:

Faced with a deepening economic and humanitarian crisis, Sri Lanka called off an ill-conceived national experiment in organic agriculture this winter. Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa promised in his 2019 election campaign to transition the country’s farmers to organic agriculture over a period of 10 years. Last April, Rajapaksa’s government made good on that promise, imposing a nationwide ban on the importation and use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides and ordering the country’s 2 million farmers to go organic.

The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.

By November 2021, with tea production falling, the government partially lifted its fertilizer ban on key export crops, including tea, rubber, and coconut. Faced with angry protests, soaring inflation, and the collapse of Sri Lanka’s currency, the government finally suspended the policy for several key crops—including tea, rubber, and coconut—last month, although it continues for some others. The government is also offering $200 million to farmers as direct compensation and an additional $149 million in price subsidies to rice farmers who incurred losses. That hardly made up for the damage and suffering the ban produced. Farmers have widely criticized the payments for being massively insufficient and excluding many farmers, most notably tea producers, who offer one of the main sources of employment in rural Sri Lanka. The drop in tea production alone is estimated to result in economic losses of $425 million.

Human costs have been even greater. Prior to the pandemic’s outbreak, the country had proudly achieved upper-middle-income status. Today, half a million people have sunk back into poverty. Soaring inflationand a rapidly depreciating currency have forced Sri Lankans to cut down on food and fuel purchases as prices surge. The country’s economists have called on the government to default on its debt repayments to buy essential supplies for its people.

Michael Shellenberger:

Organic farm advocates said they wanted what’s best for the 22 million people of the island nation off the coast of India. What went wrong?

NPR this morning: "this is a victory for democracy in Sri Lanka" https://t.co/wqhVck7iaP

— John Robb (@johnrobb) July 13, 2022

Governor Doug Ducey:

“In Arizona, we fund students, not systems, because we know one size does not fit all students,” said House Majority Leader Ben Toma. “It was my privilege to sponsor the most expansive school choice law in the nation, opening Empowerment Scholarship Account eligibility to all school-age children without restriction. I appreciate Governor Ducey for his strong support to help Arizona become the first state with a truly universal ESA program, delivering educational freedom to more than 1.1 million students.”

.@AlexBerenson reports, “Twitter has acknowledged that my tweets should have not led to my suspension at that time.” https://t.co/R61V4sxRO1 Since Twitter has relented, it would be great for @AlexBerenson to write a roundup of the exact tweets which Twitter now admits were fine. pic.twitter.com/iilPD4TmEO

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) July 9, 2022

BREAKING: Parents in Tennessee have filed a lawsuit against Williamson County Schools, alleging that the district’s curriculum teaches children they are “inherently racist and oppressive” based on their skin color and violates the state’s anti-critical race theory law. pic.twitter.com/J2d3ZVeZhp

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) July 11, 2022

Andrew Van Dam:

With Leah Boustan, now of Princeton University, Abramitzky is helping to change the way we look at American immigrants during a 14-year effort to follow Americans across generations by linking together their records in one of humanity’s greatest data troves: old decennial census files.

Seventy-two years after each census, the government releases every sheet of data collected by enumerators in a single, magnificent data dump. But for decades, that was more or less the end of it. Piles of magnificent data dumps sat slowly decaying in government warehouses and data centers.

It took pioneering researchers such as Northwestern University’s Joseph Ferrie years of tedious searching to link even a couple thousand people across multiple censuses in the 678 million records now available.

Within a few years of that phone call, the high data priesthood at IPUMS at the University of Minnesota would make much of that historical census data freely available to scholars online. Today, hundreds of millions of records at IPUMS can be credited to genealogy sources such as Ancestry — a for-profit Utah organization that was purchased in 2020 for $4.7 billion by private-equity behemoth Blackstone — and FamilySearch, a nonprofit subsidiary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that relies heavily on volunteer efforts to decipher old records.

Ancestry alone has more than 30 billion records in its database, including contributions from its almost 3.8 million subscribers. Using the genealogy data, the economists could soon follow generations of immigrants from the Ellis Island era as they assimilated (or didn’t) and prospered (or didn’t).

“Our work would not be possible if not for the volunteers that digitized this data,” Abramitzky said.

Casey Schwartz:

More specifically, according to data provided to The Times by Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefits manager, prescriptions across three categories of mental health medications — depression, anxiety and A.D.H.D. — have all risen since the pandemic began. But they have done so unevenly, telling a different story for each age group and each class of medication.

Antidepressants continue to be the most commonly prescribed of these medications in the United States, and their use has become only more widespread since the pandemic began, with an 8.7 percent rate of increase from 2019 to 2021, compared with 7.9 percent from 2017 to 2019, according to Express Scripts.

IQVIA, a global health technology and clinical research firm, found that in 2021, a total of 337,054,544 prescriptions were written for antidepressants in the United States through the course of the year, representing a steady annual increase since 2017, when that number had been 313,665,918.

But for some age groups, that change has been more pronounced. Since 2017, there has been a 41 percent increase in antidepressant use for the teenagers included in the Express Scripts data (which consists of roughly 19 million people.) For this same 13- to 19-year-old bracket, in the first two years of the pandemic, there was a 17.3 percent change in anxiety medications. It had been a 9.3 percent rate of change between 2017 and 2019.

One 13-year-old rising eighth grader in Colorado currently takes the antidepressant Paxil and the stimulant Adderall. (She also takes melatonin, a nonprescription supplement, to help her sleep.)

CDC link.

Alex McKenna:

After a trip to the Delaware Supreme Court, the University of Delaware has until July 22 to prove that its vast collection of then-U.S. Senator Joe Biden’s papers are immune from a Freedom of Information Act request made by Judicial Watch and the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Delaware Superior Court Judge Mary Johnston ordered the university to submit evidence that archives Biden gave the school in 2012 are not subject to a public records request and consequently public access.

The order came after the Delaware Supreme Court overturned a previous Superior Court decision that held that the papers were not subject to FOIA and therefore not open to public access.

In a recent email to The College Fix, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said there is “significant public interest in the materials.”

“In my experience, politicians hide documents because they have something to hide,” he said.

Amy Cutler:

In response, Kaitlin Harrier, the Senior Education Policy Advisor to the Governor, wrote:

“Signing this bill into law furthers Governor Ducey’s pro-education policies by giving schools the flexibility to establish their own locally designed school leadership preparation programs and will allow those without a bachelor’s degree to start training to become a teacher while also completing their degree. This flexibility will help strengthen the teacher talent pipeline, provide the opportunity for more Arizonans to become teachers, and allow for locally driven solutions.”

Garcia said this changes the credentialing requirements for public schools. In addition, it brings it in line with charter schools. There is a website you can go to check if your child’s teacher is certified by the state. You can find more information at OACIS – Arizona Department of Education (azed.gov).

Inflation-adjusted current education spending per student in Iowa:

1970: $5,881
1980: $7,886
1990: $9,228
2000: $10,764
2010: $12,777
2019: $13,410

128% real increase since 1970.https://t.co/KQGL9ClNL6

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) July 10, 2022

Angela Yang:

Internships are often a springboard to full-time jobs, yet high living costs have some students questioning whether they can afford to take summer roles in certain locations.

Many companies are paying interns in order to compete for talent and ensure opportunities don’t go solely to those who can afford to work for little or no compensation. Yet some students and employers say stipends and wages don’t go as far as they did a year ago, and soaring rents from New York to Seattle also have changed students’ calculations as to where they’re able to take internships.

Debbie Girma, a rising third-year law student at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, has worked as a legal intern and political canvasser in recent years. Ms. Girma, who ultimately wants to do nonprofit or civil rights work on the East Coast, is interning this summer at a private law firm in Dallas, because it pays more than the $12 an hour many public-defender summer roles offer. Plus, the cost of living in Texas is relatively low.

Drewry:

Drewry’s composite World Container Index decreased marginally by 0.2% to $7,050.94 per 40ft container this week.

Note the price mismatch from <-> to China.

Alex Tabarrok:

A very nice paper in Management Science by Kini, Shen, Shenoy and Subramanian finds that labor unions reduce product quality. Two strengths of the paper. First, the authors have relatively objective measures of product quality from thousands of product recalls mandated by the FDA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration covering many different industries. Second the authors use 3 different methods. First, they find that unionized firms are more likely to have recalls than non-unionized firms (a simple difference in means subject to many potential cofounds but I still like to see the raw data), second they find that in a panel model with industry and year fixed effects and other controls that firms which are more unionized have a greater frequency of product recalls. Finally they find that firms where the union just barely won the vote are more likely to have subsequent product recalls than firms for which the union just barely lost the vote–a regression discontinuity study.

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?

Scott Girard:

Despite enrollment dropping over the past five years districtwide, especially during the pandemic, the full-time equivalent (or FTE) staff positions dedicated to those areas have not dropped at the same rate.

In student services, for example, the 2017-18 school year featured 105.78 students per staff member in positions including psychologist, social worker, nurse and behavior education assistant. Last year, that was down to 98.1.

Similarly, the special education student-to-staff ratio dropped from 46.33 to 35.53.

Yet the ratios reflected here are determined by the district’s annual budget. Given the staff shortages plaguing education and MMSD in recent years, especially following the onset of the pandemic, the number of students per staffer is likely higher.

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?

Ann Althouse:

But what’s really bothering Strauss isn’t the outrage of insulting education departments. It’s Hillsdale’s participation in charter schools around the country. There’s the “Hillsdale K-12 curriculum that is centered on Western civilization and designed to help ‘students acquire a mature love for America.'”

Valerie Strauss:

At the reception last week, held at a Cool Springs conference center in Tennessee, Arnn made comments while addressing an audience from a lectern and while sitting on the stage next to Lee on a stage. Here’s a sample:

• “Ed departments in colleges. If you work in a college you know, unless you work in the ed department. Ours [Hillsdale’s] is different. They are the dumbest part of every college. [Audience laughs.] You can think about why for a minute. If you study physics, there is a subject. … How does the physical world work? That’s hard to figure out. Politics is actually the study of justice. … Literature. They don’t do it much anymore, but you can read the greatest books, the most beautiful books ever written. Education is the study of how to teach. Is that a separate art? I don’t think so.”
• “If you read a book called ‘Abolition of Man’ by C.S. Lewis, you will see how education destroys generations of people. It’s devastating. It’s like a plague. … The teachers are trained in the dumbest part of the dumbest colleges in the country. And they are taught that they are going to do something to those kids. … My wife is English, and she is a gardener, big-time. And she doesn’t talk about what she is going to do to these plants. She talks about what they need. Because if you give them what they need, they will grow.”
• “The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement. … They’re messing with people’s children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.”
• “Here’s a key thing we are going to try to do. We’re going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it.”

Educators and other Tennesseans said they were angry at Arnn for making the comments and at Lee for failing to defend his state’s teachers and teacher preparation programs. Claude Pressnell Jr., president of Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, tweeted: “This is incredibly disturbing. Dr. Larry Arnn’s demeaning portrayal of Tennessee’s Ed prep programs and professors is uninformed and offensive. I’m disappointed that @GovBillLee is not on record with Dr. Arnn defending the integrity of Tennessee’s education programs.”

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?

Sunlight Policy New Jersey:

After three years of no information on New Jersey’s most powerful special interest, the IRS finally released the NJEA’s 2019 990, which revealed the multi-million-dollar going-away present for Richardson. As executive director from 2013 to 2019, Richardson was paid a total of $5.8 million, or $968,000 a year. By comparison, the average New Jersey teacher made $76,000 in 2019.

But Richardson was not alone. The NJEA’s top ten leadership was paid a record $7.7 million in 2019, with six of the top ten getting record compensation and six becoming New Jersey one-percenters.

ALL OF THIS WAS PAID FOR BY TEACHERS’ HIGHEST-IN-THE-NATION DUES.

If teachers knew their hard-earned salaries were making their leadership multi-millionaires, they would be outraged. If New Jersey citizens knew their hard-earned tax dollars were making taxpayer-funded multi-millionaires, they would be outraged.

Dan Barry:

But they were also chastened. They hadn’t attended the town meeting. They hadn’t fulfilled their democratic obligation. They hadn’t kept informed about the Free State movement. To some observers, they had gotten what they deserved.

“I was practically kicking myself in the ass for not being there,” Mr. Spiker said. “I guess I assumed our town would take care of it.”

The moment revealed a democracy mired in indifference. Turnout at town meetings has been low for years. The town’s websites are barely rudimentary, with school board minutes posted online sporadically. The select board’s minutes are found at the town hall — open three afternoons a week — or the general store, beside chocolate bars being sold to benefit the local humane society.

From this muddle of anger, confusion and regret, though, a movement was born. It came to be known as We Stand Up for Croydon Students.

Evaluating the utility and effectiveness of ongoing k-12 tax and spending practices is rare….

Calling the proposed budget a “ransom,” he moved to cut it by more than half — to $800,000. He argued that taxes for education had climbed while student achievement had not, and that based in part on the much lower tuition for some local private schools, about $10,000 for each of the town’s 80 or so students was sufficient — though well short of, say, the nearly $18,000 that public schools in nearby Newport charged for pupils from Croydon.

Ann Althouse:

There are lots of comments at that link. The one with the most up-votes is: “The things that are going on are barely distinguishable from grooming.”
The part about prostitution as a “rewarding job” was about a post at a website, Bish, “an online guide to sex and relationships for children aged over 14,” written by Justin Hancock, who “teaches sex education in schools and provides teacher training on sex education.”

MYKEL J. KOCHENDERFER, TIM A. WHEELER, AND KYLE H. WRAY:

This book provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty. We cover a wide variety of topics related to decision making, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them.

Andrew Van Damm:

In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts.

This partly reflects population trends: Over that same period, the share of parents with graduate degrees and college-age children rose 10 percentage points, to 14 percent, our analysis of Census Bureau data shows. But compared with the typical American, a typical new economist is about five times more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree.

The new analysis comes from Anna Stansbury of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Michigan graduate student Robert Schultz, who got their hands on detailed data on U.S. PhD recipients going back more than 50 years. The data includes extensive information about almost half a million recipients in the 2010-to-2018 period alone.

1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Sara Fischer:

Americans’ confidence in newspapers and television news has plummeted to an all-time low, according to the latest annual Gallup survey of trust in U.S. institutions.

Why it matters: The erosion of trust in media is one of the most significant signs of deepening polarization in America. 

• Political party affiliation has become the primary driver of opinions about the media’s trustworthiness, as Gallup has noted.
• A 2021 poll from Pew Research Center found that Republicans are far less likely to trust media sources that are considered “mainstream.”

Tunku Varadarajan:

If you’re looking for proof that teachers unions don’t care about the interests of schoolchildren, you can find it in the impoverished Bronx neighborhood of Soundview. A school building on Beach Avenue has been shuttered for almost a decade, and the United Federation of Teachers is suing to keep it closed.

On Aug. 22, a new charter high school, Vertex Academies, will begin classes here. In the local school district, only 7% of students who enter ninth grade are ready for college four years later. For black students, the figure is 4%. The new school promises to deliver “a high-quality education to 150 minority students from low-income backgrounds” in its first year, says founding principal Joyanet Mangual.

Vertex will use the premises of the defunct Blessed Sacrament School, where Sonia Sotomayor was valedictorian in 1968. When the school shut down in 2013, the justice declared herself “heartbroken.” Her mother had scrimped and saved to send her there: “She watched what happened to my cousins in public school, and worried if we went there, we might not get out,” Justice Sotomayor told the New York Times.

Kyle Stokes:

In 2007, leaders of LAUSD and the district’s teachers union agreed to create the first of what they called “pilot schools.” Pilot schools would be semi-autonomous campuses that would have greater freedom over their own budgets and academic programs.

At the time, UCLA had already been working with the union, district and local advocacy organizations to explore launching a community school of its own. In the nascent pilot program — and on the soon-to-be-rebuilt site of the former Ambassador Hotel in Koreatown — the school’s planners saw an opening.

Karen Hunter Quartz, the UCLA Center for Community Schooling director, led the team that submitted the first proposal for what became its Koreatown school in 2007. That proposal was inspired by trips to visit small schools on the East Coast.

“The concept was really, ‘How can we design schools differently to promote these small, nurturing communities?’” said Hunter Quartz. “So based on that experience and the pilot school experience and the building of new buildings in L.A., this was a great opportunity to create that here.”

In 2009, UCLA Community School opened its doors along with five other pilot schools on the RFK Community Schools campus on Wilshire Boulevard.

From its inception, Hunter Quartz envisioned a school that embodied many of the core tenets of the community schools movement — including the elements now known as the “four pillars” of community schooling.

Today, schools that want a share of California’s multi-billion dollar community school grant program will also have to agree to embrace a number of reforms, including these four pillars.

Ian Miller:

But a new study out provides some important new evidence with regards to the efficacy of mask mandates.

The Study Design

The study authors included several credentialed experts like Tracy Høeg and USC’s Neeraj Sood, along with one extremely qualified data analyst, Josh Stevenson. 

You may know Josh from his fantastic work on Twitter as well as Substack, and this study could very well be his most important contribution yet.

Their detailed examination of North Dakota has created more advanced academic level research similar to the data comparisons that myself and many others have shared.

The introduction explains the methodology and goals:

Keeping schools and preschools open when other countries closed them was an extremely difficult decision. In March 2020 the criticism against me was harsh for not closing down schools and preschools, but I was – and still am – convinced that it was the right decision. https://t.co/AzM5RHu5gY

— Anna Ekström (@Anna_Ekstrom) July 9, 2022

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?

Amanda Ripley

And that gets to the heart of the problem here: If so many of us feel poisoned by our products, might there be something wrong with them?

Last month, new data from the Reuters Institute showed that the United States has one of the highest news-avoidance rates in the world. About 4 out of 10 Americans sometimes or often avoid contact with the news — a higher rate than at least 30 other countries. And consistently, across all countries, women are significantly more likely to avoid news than men. It wasn’t just me and my hypocrite journalist friends after all.

Why are people avoiding the news? It’s repetitive and dispiriting, often of dubious credibility, and it leaves people feeling powerless, according to the survey. The evidence supports their decision to pull back. It turns out that the more news we consume about mass-casualty events, such as shootings, the more we suffer. The more political news we ingest, the more mistakes we make about who we are. If the goal of journalism is to inform people, where is the evidence it is working?

George Will

These kids today “are fluent in the thin-gruel cant (diversity, inclusion, equity, anti-racism, antipatriarchy, antiheteronormativity, etc.) of ostensibly political but actually just emotionally satisfying performative demands.”

In a flattened world drained of greatness, today’s steep decline of humanities majors among undergraduates is a lagging indicator of lack of interest in humanity’s lessons learned on the path to the present. Given this nation’s unhappy present, it is remarkable to remember that the arrival of screen-soaked lives was cheerily announced as the next stage of the “information age.” LOL.

Jeffrey Flier:

In principle, leadership roles in academic institutions perfectly position incumbents to be public intellectuals, robustly engaging with educational, scientific and political issues of the day from their distinguished perches atop the academic pyramid. Unfortunately, anyone holding this view would be severely mistaken.

Academic leaders, such as university presidents and deans, can issue anodyne pronouncements on various matters as long as these safely align with the views prevailing in their communities. Most do so with regularity, occasionally edging a wee bit from the centre lane. But when academic leaders engage in intellectual discourse by expressing views that diverge from prevailing opinion, the ensuing reactions – even when expressed only by a vocal minority – can easily disrupt their ability to fulfil their primary duties. Such disruption, if severe enough, can even end their leadership tenure. Just ask former Harvard president Larry Summers, the reaction to whose provocative speech on potential explanations for the dearth of women at the highest levels of mathematics and engineering led to his having to step down.

Two major factors account for this state of affairs. The first is in the realm of the practical. Leadership jobs are complex and demanding, requiring full-time effort to manage the areas for which the leader is ultimately accountable. These include choosing among competing academic goals, addressing faculty, answering student and alumni concerns, managing facilities and budgets, devising and refining numerous policies, and, of course, leading fundraising efforts. At best, offering public opinions is seen as a frill – surely not essential but perhaps nice to do if time permits.

James Somers:

For instance I never learned that a man named Oswald Avery, in the 1940s, puzzled over two cultures of Streptococcus bacteria. One had a rough texture when grown in a dish; the other was smooth, and glistened. Avery noticed that when he mixed the smooth strain with the rough strain, every generation after was smooth, too. Heredity in a dish. What made it work? This was one of the most exciting mysteries of the time—in fact of all time.

Most experts thought that protein was somehow responsible, that traits were encoded soupily, via differing concentrations of chemicals. Avery suspected a role for nucleic acid. So, he did an experiment, one we could have replicated on our benches in school. Using just a centrifuge, water, detergent, and acid, he purified nucleic acid from his smooth strep culture. Precipitated with alcohol, it became fibrous. He added a tiny bit of it to the rough culture, and lo, that culture became smooth in the following generations. This fibrous stuff, then, was “the transforming principle”—the long-sought agent of heredity. Avery’s experiment set off a frenzy of work that, a decade later, ended in the discovery of the double helix.

In his “Mathematician’s Lament,” Paul Lockhart describes how school cheapens mathematics by robbing us of the questions. We’re not just asked, hey, how much of the triangle takes up the box?

Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes, and he lagged the state’s GOP Congressmen by 63,547. Split tickets by Republicans more than explain why Mr. Trump fell short. Drop boxes were an unlawful delivery method, but if real Wisconsinites put real ballots into them, as instructed by local officials, that isn’t “fraud.” Judges are unlikely to throw out legitimate votes after the fact.

That’s actually what happened in Wisconsin. Mr. Trump didn’t raise hell about the state’s voting procedures until after he lost. Then he asked courts to invalidate 28.4% of the votes in Milwaukee County, on the basis of challenged practices that took place statewide. That case failed. The drop box lawsuit decided Friday was filed in 2021 by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. If Mr. Trump was so opposed to drop boxes, why didn’t he bring a claim earlier in 2020, when the WEC memos were issued?

Former Attorney General Bill Barr told a podcast recentlythat Mr. Trump was duly warned to get solid lawyers working to defend business-as-usual voting processes. 

“One of his aides went in and said, look, you need to set up a fund of $20-30 million in escrow, because lawyers don’t trust you to pay their bills, and you need to get a top-flight firm in here,” Mr. Barr said. “He ignored that advice. He did not have a legal team prepared to go and fight around the country. So a lot of these, bending of the playing field, were his own fault.”

Ann Althouse notes:

As the podcast goes on, Kramer uses the term “popular constitutionalism,” which has to do with judging “by what resonates with us, what makes sense, what kind of society do we want to have” and “not just blindly following popular desires.” What does that mean? What’s the difference between “popular desires” and what “resonates… makes sense… [and] we want to have”? I suspect the answer is elitism. Look at Kramer’s stress on “leadership”:

It involves leadership. If you read Madison’s original stuff, he had an important role for leadership. But it wasn’t leadershiptells the subjects what to do and what they should believe. It’s that we engage in an ongoing active conversation where the role of leadership is to lead towards some sort of better vision. You offer that vision, and you try and persuade, and if you do, the country follows you…. So that’s what political leaders are supposed to do…. The ability of leadership to exercise leadershipis really impaired. The media system has been fragmented. Deference to leadership is down…

And then it’s back to vision: 

So it’s a little hard to see how it emerges, but the idea is that you get competing political visions of what the country should be that are themselves coherent and normatively attractive that are presented and people vote. I mean, Ronald Reagan did that, right. It’s not that we haven’t had visions. He had a vision, and he sold it…. 

But the liberals don’t have a vision. They need a leader with a vision to animate them, but “we’re kind of between, betwixt and between uniting visions.”

and:

That’s 75,000 to 180,000 per year. Rosenberg doesn’t seem to notice that to emphasize the number of new babies is to say, implicitly, that during the reign of Roe, that’s the number, per year, that were quietly and invisibly kept from our presence.

More: Andrew Yang on abortion.

Amanda Fortini:

“Professors taught what they wished, and students graduated when (or if) they wanted — only about 55 of the 1,200 or so students who attended Black Mountain in its 24-year existence attained a formal degree — as long as they passed two sets of exams, one roughly at the halfway point and the other before the end of their tenure, whenever they decided that was. The hierarchy, too, was minimal, with students and most faculty living in the same building and taking their meals together. There were none of the ‘usual distinctions… between curricular and extracurricular activities, between work done in a classroom and work done outside it.’ Students often performed chores as part of the ‘work program’; afternoons were left free for activities outdoors, which might have included chopping wood, clearing pasture and planting, tending or harvesting crops…. By all accounts, the manual labor was not only fun but gave students a meaningful sense of contributing to the day-to-day maintenance of the college. It was also a great leveler. ‘You might be John Cage or Merce Cunningham… But you’re still going to have a job to do on campus.’

Allison Prang:

Ms. Viazovska took home the Fields Medal for her work on the sphere-packing problem in eight and 24 dimensions, the university said. The problem—how densely one can pack a space with identical spheres—used to only be solved for three dimensions or less, it said.

“In doing so, she resolved a question that had stumped mathematicians for more than four centuries: how to pack spheres—such as oranges stacked in a pyramid—as close together as possible,” EPFL said. The university added that Ms. Viazovska’s proof, which drew on other areas of math, was considered by experts to be “particularly elegant and original.”

ICYMI: Top Voter Issues vs Top Media Issues

Our most recent from last week – no changes since then.

What a disconnect. pic.twitter.com/qhpwGwU3Uk

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) July 9, 2022

“Places with low-performing schools kept them shut for longer than others in their regions. Closures were often long in places where teachers’ unions were especially powerful, such as Mexico and parts of the US.” https://t.co/krCiBZd82p

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) July 9, 2022

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?

Eugene Volokh:

Yesterday, a grand jury returned an indictment in federal court in Brooklyn charging five defendants with various crimes pertaining to a transnational repression scheme orchestrated on behalf of the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)….

Three of the defendants—Fan “Frank” Liu, Matthew Ziburis, and Qiang “Jason” Sun—allegedly perpetrated in the transnational repression scheme to target U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the PRC government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC. Among other items, the defendants plotted to destroy the artwork of a PRC national residing in Los Angeles, California that was critical of the PRC government, and planted surveillance equipment in the artist’s workplace and car to spy on him from the PRC. Liu and Ziburis were arrested pursuant to a criminal complaint in March 2022, while Sun remains at large.

There are two new defendants charged in the scheme, Craig Miller and Derrick Taylor. Miller is a 15-year employee of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), currently assigned as a Deportation Officer to DHS’s Enforcement and Removal Operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Taylor is a retired DHS law enforcement agent who presently works as a private investigator in Irvine, California. The charges against Miller and Taylor pertain to their alleged obstruction of justice, including by destroying evidence, after they were approached by agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and asked about their procurement and dissemination of sensitive and confidential information from a restricted federal law enforcement database regarding U.S.-based dissidents from the PRC. This information was used by Liu and Sun in the transnational repression scheme. Both Miller and Taylor were arrested pursuant to a criminal complaint in June 2022….

Jordan Uhl:

I’m one of the 43.4 million Americans who owe more than a collective $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. Feels great. The average federal balance is $37,014 per borrower, with the total (including private loans) balance a few thousand more.

According to the College Board’s 2021 Trends In College Pricing Report, the average annual tuition and fees at public, 4-year colleges have risen from $4,160 to $10,740—a 158% increase, since the early 1990s. At private institutions there has been a 96.6% increase during that same period, with tuition and fees increasing from $19,360 to $38,070.

Vincent Manancourt

Jack Murphy* was suspicious. His ex-girlfriend, Eve Doherty, seemed to know a lot about who he was calling. 

His suspicions were merited. Doherty had been using her job in the Irish police force to access his phone records, an investigation by the local judiciary revealed. Doherty was disciplined and transferred in 2011.

Three years later, in 2014, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) ruled that the Irish law that forced telcos and internet service providers to hang on to traffic and location data was contrary to EU law, and so was the EU directive it was based on. The data retention regime allowed government agencies to access citizens’ data in ways that violated their privacy — like what Doherty was doing when she accessed those phone records of her ex-boyfriend.

And yet, the risk of similar cases — of police officers overstepping their powers to access phone records — still lingers today.

The landmark 2014 ruling was followed by a bevy of subsequent judgments from the EU’s highest court that reinforced its message to stop blanket data retention. But it didn’t stop Ireland from keeping its mass surveillance of phone and internet data, including who you call and where you are, largely intact.

“In Ireland, we’ve been in a period of lawlessness, at least since 2001,” said TJ McIntyre, chair of Digital Rights Ireland, the non-profit organization whose legal complaint brought down the EU Data Retention Directive in the landmark 2014 case.

Callum Borchers:

Don’t even get them started on time-off requests, an especially contentious subject in sunny weather. They say colleagues’ family vacations routinely get approved before their own romantic getaways or solo excursions because managers (who often have kids, too) prioritize time with children.

One thing many parents and non-parents can agree on: The always-on culture of work—made worse by the pandemic—is largely to blame for fueling resentment.

Scott Girard:

More than one-third of the Madison Metropolitan School District buildings will have a different principal in the 2022-23 school year than the person in that role last fall.

Among the 19 of 50 principals who left the school they were at last fall are six who left their building mid-year, while the rest finished the school year but left this summer. At least two of them retired, six will be principals at a different MMSD school, five will be principals at schools outside of Madison, one has taken a central office position in a nearby district and one left for a role with the state.

The Cap Times could not determine what the next step is for four of the people who left the principal roles they were in to begin last school year. They did not respond to messages on social media and a search of LinkedIn profiles and news reports did not indicate their new role.

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?

The Economist

Then the pandemic struck and hundreds of millions of pupils were locked out of school. At first, when it was not yet known whether children were vulnerable to covid-19 or were likely to spread the virus to older people, school closures were a prudent precaution. But in many places they continued long after it became clear that the risks of reopening classrooms were relatively small. During the first two years of the pandemic more than 80% of schooldays in Latin America and South Asia were disrupted by closures of some sort. Even today schools in some countries, such as the Philippines, remain shut to most pupils, leaving their minds to atrophy.

Globally, the harm that school closures have done to children has vastly outweighed any benefits they may have had for public health. The World Bank says the share of ten-year-olds in middle- and low-income countries who cannot read and understand a simple story has risen from 57% in 2019 to roughly 70%. If they lack such elementary skills, they will struggle to earn a good living. The bank estimates that $21trn will be wiped off their lifetime earnings—equivalent to about 20% of the world’s annual gdp today.

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?

Mitchell Schmidt:

Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, described the court’s ruling as “a body blow to the state’s traditions of open government.”

“It undermines the provision in the open records law that allows litigants to recover actual costs and attorney’s fees in cases in which access to records is wrongfully denied,” Lueders said in a statement. “The court’s conservative majority has created new opportunities for authorities to deprive the public of access to public information.”

Both Kamenick and Lueders called on state lawmakers to pass legislation clarifying state records laws in light of Wednesday’s ruling.

Jordana Cepelewicz:

Huh, 39, has now been awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, for his ability to wander through mathematical landscapes and find just the right objects — objects that he then uses to get the seemingly disparate fields of geometry and combinatorics to talk to each other in new and exciting ways. Starting in graduate school, he has solved several major problems in combinatorics, forging a circuitous route by way of other branches of math to get to the heart of each proof. Every time, finding that path is akin to a “little miracle,” Huh said.

One might say the same of his path into mathematics itself: that it was characterized by much wandering and a series of small miracles. When he was younger, Huh had no desire to be a mathematician. He was indifferent to the subject, and he dropped out of high school to become a poet. It would take a chance encounter during his university years — and many moments of feeling lost — for him to find that mathematics held what he’d been looking for all along.

That poetic detour has since proved crucial to his mathematical breakthroughs. His artistry, according to his colleagues, is evident in the way he uncovers those just-right objects at the center of his work, and in the way he seeks a deeper significance in everything he does. “Mathematicians are a lot like artists in that really we’re looking for beauty,” said Federico Ardila-Mantilla, a mathematician at San Francisco State University and one of Huh’s collaborators. “But I think in his case, it’s really pronounced. And I just really like his taste. He makes beautiful things.”

“When I found out that he came to mathematics after poetry, I’m like, OK, this makes sense to me,” Ardila added.

Josh Mitchell:

The states that gained the most mi­grants levied an av­er­age max­i­mum in­come-tax rate of 3.8% on in­di­vid­u­als. Four—Flor­ida, Texas, Ten­nessee and Nevada—charged no in­come tax at all. The 10 states that lost the most res­i­dents to moves have an av­er­age tax rate of 8.0%.

Mike Antonucci:

I provided in-person gavel-to-gavel coverage of every National Education Association Representative Assembly from 1998 — the year of the failed merger attempt with AFT — through 2016. NEA denied me a press credential thereafter due to my partnership with The 74, which they said “does not meet journalistic standards as a credible news outlet.”

In truth, it was a bit of a relief. The convention was tedious and became more and more stage-managed as the years went on. It was also an expensive trip and a week of little rest and bad food.

Looks like I’m not the only who has lost interest in the NEA Representative Assembly. Delegate attendance over the years:
1998 – 9,715
2002 – 8,519
2012 – 7,403
2017 – 6,880
2022 – 5,071 (3,858 in person)

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) July 3, 2022

Thanks to Terry Stoops of the John Locke Foundation and his sources, we now have a complete list of the new business items NEA delegates are debating this week. For this first time, the union has seen fit to hide this information behind a firewall, making it available only to the delegates themselves.

You can take a look at Terry’s Twitter threadto see the items he highlighted, but I’ll point to these few for now:

NBI 15 – The latest in a long history of creating enemies lists (this one from 1998):

“NEA shall compile research to create fact sheets about the largest 25 organizations that are actively working to diminish a students’ right to honesty in education, freedom of sexual and gender identify, and teacher autonomy.”

NBI 31 – The return of merger!

“I move that the NEA create a committee and a plan to work with AFT to strongly consider a national merger of the two education unions.”

NBI 37 – Another in long history of fringe NBIs that never pass from activists in the Oakland Education Association:

“The NEA will work with state affiliates to support a national policy of mandatory masking and COVID vaccines in schools, as well as high-quality virtual education for immuno-compromised students and all families who want it by publicizing successful virtual education programs in public schools throughout the nation in existing media outlets.”

NBI 44 – Offers sample contract language to institute bereavement leave for “pregnancy loss and failed fertility treatments.” Doesn’t open can of worms by including bereavement leave for abortions.

NBI 63 – More sample contract language, this time suggesting “mother” be replaced with “birthing parent” and “father” with “non-birthing parent.” The NBI’s sponsors will need bereavement leave when this gets voted down.

NBI 77 – Wrote about this when the California Teachers Association sent it to committee. Now it’s aiming for nationwide application:

Twitter bans @TerryStoops for 12 hours for posting “other people’s private information,” by which they mean new business items from the NEA Representative Assembly. Hey @Twitter, come get me, too. pic.twitter.com/XhFLG959xo

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) July 6, 2022

By a vote of 3,103-1,084, NEA delegates committed the union to “publicly stand in defense of abortion and reproductive rights and encourage members to participate in… rallies and demonstrations, lobbying and political campaigns, educational events, and other actions…”

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) July 6, 2022

Summary:

The purpose of the four-day assembly is to elect officers, approve the union’s budget and set national policy for the coming school year. In practice, however, the agenda is largely decided by the union’s executive officers, staff and 172-member board of directors. The election results are usually a foregone conclusion, and the budget is always approved with no alterations.

Where the delegates get their say is in the introduction, debate and votes on “new business items.” These are actions that are “specific in nature and terminal in application, shall concern issues beyond one affiliate and shall not call for NEA to do work that is already in progress.” It takes just 50 delegate signatures on a petition to get an item to the floor for debate and vote.

The focus of these items runs the gamut, from battling institutional racism to supporting a national opt out/test refusal movement to calling for Arne Duncan to resign as President Barack Obama’s secretary of education. Many have no relation to education or labor at all.

Though approval of new business items is the expressed will of the delegates, execution of the actions demanded usually falls very short of impactful. The 2021 assembly debated 66 items. Of these, 11 were ruled out of order or withdrawn. Ten were voted down. A full 22 were referred to an NEA standing committee without a recommendation. That left only 23 that were approved. Of those, nine called on NEA to use its print and social media outlets to publicize something.

Lisa Bannon and Rebecca Smith:

American universities are searching for ways to generate more revenue. As a result, hundreds of schools—including Vanderbilt University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—are teaming up with for-profit companies such as 2U to provide online programs.

As part of the arrangement, one that is reshaping higher education, universities sometimes hand over to companies a great deal of control of student recruitment and instructional design, especially for nondegree programs. For their work, the companies receive hefty shares of tuition dollars.

Much of this isn’t clear to prospective and current students. Universities often cooperate with companies in ways that can blur the lines for students between schools and recruiters.

2U, based in Lanham, Md., has emerged as a leader in the booming field, employing aggressive recruiting practices and in some cases playing down its role, according to interviews with current and former 2U employees and students.

Christopher “Chip” Paucek, 2U’s chief executive and a co-founder, said the company is providing valuable services to universities that many can’t do themselves. “For the last 14 years, 2U has worked to expand access to high-quality online education for learners around the world, enabling hundreds of thousands of students to transform their lives,” Mr. Paucek said in a written statement.

Christina Denkinger wanted something new after 14 years as an elementary-school teacher in Portland, Ore. After shopping around for a course in data analytics last fall, she requested information through a University of Oregon website portal for an online training program, called a boot camp, offered by the university’s continuing-education division.

Eileen is a DHS reporter for NYT who authored the puff piece on Nina Jankowicz — this is her sharing the link. Question for you Eileen: you assert Nina was targeted by false info, but never mention a single falsehood (& there are many!) that she had a history of promoting — why? https://t.co/mCs4cJZ9fq

— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) July 6, 2022

Kat Rosenfeld:

Gullaba’s agent knew he had something special, and he was excited for a big submission push. But on the eve of sending the manuscript out to publishers, the agent suggested Gullaba update his bio to emphasize his racial identity. Publishers, he reasoned, would be excited to support a young black writer fresh on the literary scene.

There was a problem: Gullaba is Filipino.

“We had never met in person,” he tells me, laughing. “I guess you can’t really judge who’s black or not based on a name like Alberto, and Gullaba is just ethnically ambiguous enough that it could be from Africa? I don’t know.”

What was clear, immediately, was that something had changed. The agent wasn’t excited anymore. Actually, he seemed downright nervous, and he started asking for significant changes to the manuscript.

“The guy’s frightened,” Gullaba says. “God bless him, that’s the reality of that world.”

At first, Gullaba was asked to add an Asian character—east Asian, specifically, perhaps a Pacific Islander. Then it was suggested that Titus’ wingman, the biggest secondary character, should also be assigned an Asian identity. And there was one more bizarre twist: Another agency employee, who we’ll call Sally, was brought in at the eleventh hour to read the book and provide additional feedback.

Brianna Hatch:

Two California universities announced Thursday they are leaving the Pac-12 athletic conference to join the Big Ten. The move is poised to send shockwaves through higher education — with revenue gains, athletes’ well-being, and the organization of college athletics as a whole at stake.

The University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California will become the 15th and 16th members of the Big Ten, effective 2024, the conference announced Thursday. The move comes less than a year after the Universities of Oklahoma and Texas at Austin announced

WILL:

The ongoing discussions about public school education continues to be divisive and difficult. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) provides these model school board policies as an addition and alternative to the limited options that school boards have access to. WILL offers these model policies with goals of increasing parents’ rights and involvement, creating transparency, optimizing student academic achievement and improving school governance.

Gallup:

Gallup summarizes Americans’ overall confidence in institutions by taking an average of the ratings of the 14 institutions it measures consistently each year — all but small business and large technology companies. This year’s 27% average of U.S. adults expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in those 14 institutions is three points below the prior low from 2014.

Kay Hymowitz

I am overstating, but not by much. A significant number of American students are reading fluently and with understanding and are well on their way to becoming literate adults. But they are a minority. As of 2019, according to the National Association of Education Progress (NAEP), sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, 35 percent of fourth-graders were reading at or above proficiency levels; that means, to spell it out, that a strong majority—65 percent, to be exact—were less than proficient. In fact, 34 percent were reading, if you can call it that, below a basic level, barely able to decipher material suitable for kids their age. Eighth-graders don’t do much better. Only 34 percent of them are proficient; 27 percent were below-basic readers. Worse, those eighth-grade numbers represent a decline from 2017 for 31 states.

As is always the case in our crazy-quilt, multiracial, multicultural country, the picture varies, depending on which kids you’re looking at. If you categorize by states, the lowest scores can be found in Alabama and New Mexico, with just 21 percent of eighth-graders reading proficiently. The best thing to say about these results is that they make the highest-scoring state—Massachusetts, with 47 percent of students proficient—look like a success story rather than the mediocrity it is.

The findings that should really push antiracist educators to rethink their pedagogical assumptions are those for the nation’s black schoolchildren. Nationwide, 52 percent of black children read below basic in fourth grade. (Hispanics, at 45 percent, and Native Americans, at 50 percent, do almost as badly, but I’ll concentrate here on black students, since antiracism clearly centers on the plight of African-Americans.) The numbers in the nation’s majority-black cities are so low that they flirt with zero. In Baltimore, where 80 percent of the student body is black, 61 percent of these students are below basic; only 9 percent of fourth-graders and 10 percent of eighth-graders are reading proficiently. (The few white fourth-graders attending Charm City’s public schools score 36 points higher than their black classmates.) Detroit, the American city with the highest percentage of black residents, has the nation’s lowest fourth-grade reading scores; only 5 percent of Detroit fourth-graders scored at or above proficient. (Cleveland’s schools, also majority black, are only a few points ahead.)

In April 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of former students suing Detroit schools for not providing an adequate education. The suit cited poor facilities and inadequate textbooks, but below-basic literacy skills were the primary academic complaint. One of the plaintiffs was a former Detroit public school student who went on to community college and ended up on academic probation, in need of a reading tutor. His story is typical enough as to be barely worth mentioning—except for the fact that he graduated at the top of his public high school class. And as if this isn’t bad enough, the numbers appear likely to get worse, with the impact of Covid-19 disruptions.

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?

HUGE NEWS: A judge ruled this morning that @LASchools’ student Covid vaccine mandate was illegal, blocking LAUSD from sending kids to independent study for not getting the Covid vaccine. pic.twitter.com/E3mhaKIGhd

— Reopen California Schools (@ReopenCASchools) July 5, 2022

Here is a compilation of zoomed 4k drone footage of the EF3 tornado in Andover KS earlier this spring with quick analyses of some of the complex vortex dynamics observed. Helical sub-vortices, a descending vortex breakdown bubble, and a low pressure reservoir just above ground pic.twitter.com/uYdpc6NMLB

— Reed Timmer (@ReedTimmerAccu) June 29, 2022

David Bell:

Last week, the Lancet published a modeling studyby Oliver Watson and others from Imperial College London, funded by, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This predictive model from Imperial College suggests that COVID-19 vaccination introduced at the end of 2020 saved 14.4 to 19.8 million lives in the subsequent 12 months. A summary is provided here. The Imperial College modeling team previously massively overstated anticipated COVID-19 deaths in 2020. 

Models should pass basic credibility criteria to be published, based on plausibility. Alternatively, a lack of coherence with real-world data or known biology should be stated. For reasons upon which one can only speculate, the Lancet again seems not to have actually assessed the credibility of the paper prior to publication. This matters, as others who lack an apparent basic understanding of scientific process, such as The Economist and various commentators on social media, then disseminate the model’s predictions as fact. 

People can die when public health is twisted in this way.

Vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 commenced in late 2020, and significant vaccination rates were not achieved in most populations until at least a few months into 2021. In a respiratory virus outbreak the most vulnerable, most likely to die, are likely to be overrepresented in mortality in year one. However, this first year did not produce anything like the mortality claimed to have been ‘saved’ by the vaccines in 2021. Lockdowns and other nonpharmaceutical interventions don’t account for this.

Michael Walsh:

Before 1776 what eventually became the U.S.A. was a collection of British colonies; in 1619, when black Africans aboard a Portuguese slave ship, taken as bounty by English privateers (aka “pirates”), came ashore in the New World, they did so near Hampton in the British colony of Virginia. At that point, there was nothing “American” about it, other than its location. (The Portuguese, by the way, were among history’s worst black-African slavers, directing the  bulk of the transatlantic slave trade to their colony, Brazil. Yet somehow slavery is “America’s original sin.”)

Instead, slavery was a cause for which hundreds of thousands of Americans died. On these first few days in July 1863, in the midst of the Civil War that may have started as a rebellion but turned into a war to free the slaves, Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and George Meade electrified the nation with the news of their twin victories at Vicksburg, the last of the southern citadels on the Mississippi River, and at Gettysburg, a small town in southern Pennsylvania where Robert E. Lee’s defective generalship finally caught up to his inflated reputation, and killed the Confederacy’s hopes at point-blank range during Pickett’s Charge. It was a blunder that made Grant’s worst military decision, Cold Harbor, look almost sensible.

This is the same Grant who called the “cause” of the Confederacy “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” In a forgotten bit of history, the capture of Vicksburg also vindicated General Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan,” which advocated choking the South to death by blockading its ports and seizing its principal waterways. Which is exactly what Grant—who served under “Old Fuss and Feathers” in the Mexican War—did.

Michael O’Dwyer:

“It’s difficult to stop title inflation as [it is] quite a powerful recruitment tool and cheaper than paying properly,” said one salaried partner whose job title has been upgraded at EY.

Musa al-Gharbi

Indeed, Thomas’ embrace of the Republican Party is consonant with a deep mistrust of white liberals, the institutions they control and the policies they try to advance in the name of “social justice.” 

This mistrust was widely shared among Black activists of his generation — and is in keeping with Thomas’ Supreme Court decisions, including overturning Roe. If anything, the racialized attacks many liberals directed at Thomas in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling confirm the pessimistic view of race relations that prevailed among many of the Black thinkers who shaped Thomas’ worldview and is exhibited by Thomas himself. 

For instance, Thomas was deeply inspired by Malcolm X. He had a poster of Malcolm X that hung in his dorm room. He memorized many of his speeches by heart, and he continues to evoke him frequently to this day.

It was Malcolm X, of course, who famously declaredthat, “In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negros (i.e. the race problem, the integration and civil rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power.”

Jacob Howland:

Last week, while we were teaching in the forbiddencourses program of UATX (commonly referred to as the University of Austin), the economist Deirdre McCloskey told me a story. The year was 1969, and an official from Princeton had come to the Institute for Advanced Study to discuss the university’s decision to establish an African-American Studies program. Students in Cornell’s Afro-American Society had recently engineered an armed takeover of Willard Strait Hall. Met with skepticism about the proposal, the exasperated official finally blurted out, “But the black students have the guns!” To which economist Alexander Gerschenkron replied, “When I hear the word ‘guns,’ I reach for my culture.”

On hot-button political issues, Americans today have itchy trigger fingers. Chalk it up to poor education. Academia, which is upstream of culture and politics alike, has become a den of ideological uniformity and score-settling snitching that promotes the forceful (and sometimes violent) suppression of speech. But while most colleges and universities are effectively teaching students to reach for their guns, some teach them to reach for their culture. That means cultivating the citizenly virtues of interpretive charity, intellectual humility, and open-mindedness without which politics in the proper sense—the collective determination of matters of common concern through public debate—becomes impossible.

UATX’s forbidden courses program, which brought together undergraduates from leading colleges and universities, lived up to its name. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s course analyzed “key foundations of critical thinking, argumentation, reasoned debate, and freedom of expression, as these pertain to some of the most controversial issues of our day.” Students studied logical argumentation and read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in preparation for exploring theses like “Islam is a religion of peace” and “transgender women are women” from opposing perspectives. Kathleen Stock’s course on varieties of feminism examined “what kind of metaphysical and political subject is being implicitly conjured in the background under the heading ‘woman,’ and whether it is a coherent one.” Writer Thomas Chatterton Williams introduced his class to the “pain, rage, and hope of America’s most loyal critics,” including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. McCloskey’s course asked whether capitalism has been a tragedy or a triumph. Historian Niall Ferguson led an examination of free and unfree societies in the twentieth century.

Francis Menton:

Of the three decisions discussed, the one likely to have the most far-reaching impact is West Virginia. During his first days and weeks in office, President Biden issued one Executive Order after another instructing every part of the bureaucracy to figure out any way it could to implement the “climate” agenda. Statutory authorization? Who needs that? Now, not only is EPA’s most expansive regulatory initiative getting shut down, but multiple other agencies have comparable gambits likely to fail in the courts. Most famously, the SEC is now out with 100 pages or so of new proposed regulations, mandating corporate disclosures of “emissions”; and the Federal Reserve supposedly is adopting saving the climate as a third of its missions (the other two being price stability and full employment). More such dubious initiatives are under way in agencies from the Department of Energy to the Department of the Interior.

A major transformation of the economy requires specific legislation duly enacted by Congress. Who could have though of such a crazy idea?

Thankful to see another year .It’s always an honor to share the same birthday with the country I love . Happy 4th of July everyone . Please enjoy the day and most importantly, be safe ! Thank you to our brave men & women who have served & currently are serving for your service! pic.twitter.com/Mh5XSlxGZs

— Rodney Smith Jr (@iamrodneysmith) July 4, 2022

Eugene Volokh:

So the rule seems clear: Content-neutral bans on residential picketing are constitutionally permissible. And that would apply whether the residence is that of an abortion provider or that of a Justice who ruled that the Constitution doesn’t secure abortion rights. Perhaps Justices Brennan and Marshall (and possibly Stevens, though his position in Frisby was more complex) were right to reject this, and to conclude that people should be free to picket outside the homes of everyone (again, abortion providers or others). But the current rule upholding residential picketing bans has been useful to abortion providers as well as others.

UPDATE: For more on whether the bans being discussed in this situation are indeed content-neutral and therefore valid, see this post as to Maryland and this post as to Virginia. (Summary: Maryland law very likely invalid, Virginia law likely invalid, Montgomery County ordinance likely valid.)

Scott Girard:

While lesson planning late on a Sunday night last year, East High School social studies teacher Anisa Yudawanti texted a friend, teacher Amy Wilson, with a “wild idea.”

Months later, Yudawanti’s freshmen students and Wilson’s second- and third-graders at John Muir Elementary School held copies of the books they co-created, “What Does it Mean to Tell the Truth?”

“I was asking students for a very different kind of demonstration of learning, a very different kind of assignment that was very closely tied to their personal dreams, their ideas,” Yudawanti said. “A lot of them were not used to that and I think that was a really exciting thing to do.”

William J. Bennett:

All Americans should be concerned about any indoctrination of children. But content addressing America’s difficult history of race relations, including today’s challenges, isn’t necessarily evidence of that. Achievements in the realm of civil rights have happened through an imperfect process spanning more than two centuries. The struggles of Americans like King and Frederick Douglass are lessons in striving toward the “more perfect union” of the Founders’ imagination. And they are worth teaching.

The American public-school system must teach both the galling and glorious aspects of U.S. history. As Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has said, “We can teach all of our history, the good, the bad, and Virginia’s children will be better for it.” While it isn’t always a comfortable process, teaching children America’s complete history in an age-appropriate way, with parental awareness, is necessary for their own sake and for our country’s.

Doing so will help take politics out of education. It will prepare kids for the real world, where preventing hurt feelings doesn’t take precedence over facing uncomfortable facts. And it will instill in our children the ability to entertain ideas they may disagree with—an essential condition for a functioning democracy.

American exceptionalism is real, but fragile. Teaching the full story of American history will encourage the next generations of Americans in their own progress toward a more perfect union. America is still, as Lincoln said, “the last best hope of Earth.” If we tell the full story of the American past, it will help write a bright story of the American future.

A world of languages – and how many speak them [source, read more: https://t.co/goSX1GKWQ4] pic.twitter.com/G5xaUeyuDt

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 3, 2022

Steven Nelson:

TV correspondents, famed veteran reporters and leaders of the White House Correspondents’ Association rallied behind the call to end year-old restrictions on venues such as the East Room that in past administrations were “open press.”

Biden aides have refused to tell the Correspondents’ Association the selection criteria for presidential events and individual reporters have received an array of conflicting explanations, resulting in a widespread belief that the practice is meant to shape the variety of questions presented to the president.

“The current method of allowing a limited number of reporters into these events is not only restrictive and antithetical to the concept of a free press, but it has been done without any transparent process into how reporters are selected to cover these events,” the letter says.

Natasha Piñon:

The world’s most famous typing teacher was born in a garage in Sherman Oaks, Calif., more than three decades ago. 

Her creators named her Mavis Beacon and she would go on to teach a generation to type with her trademark tranquility while coaching millions of students through the basics of QWERTY. 

In the many years since, she’s come to represent excellence in typing, used as a shorthand for speed everywhere from the Tonight Show to The Office. As Jim once complimented Pam, arguably one of the most famous characters ever to hold down a typing-centric job: “Mavis Beacon doesn’t even type 90!”

The twist? She wasn’t real.

Pamela Paul:

But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.

As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”

Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women’s rights, omits the word “women” from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used “birthing people” in lieu of “women.” The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women’s rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.”

It left out those threatened most of all: women. Talk about a bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

David Larson:

These allegations were submitted to the board by Jacquelyn Lopez of the Elias Law Group on behalf of the N.C. Democratic Party’s deputy get-out-the-vote director, Michael Abucewicz. The accusations — which include that the Green Party misrepresented itself to get some to sign and that they turned in fraudulent sheets of signatures — can be read here. 

But Matthew Hoh, the Green Party’s U.S. Senate candidate — who will now be unable to get on the ballot with Republican Ted Budd, Democrat Cheri Beasley, and Libertarian Shannon Bray — said the national Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Elias Law Group, and the N.C. Democratic Party were less concerned with exposing fraud than keeping Hoh off the ballot to protect Beasley’s vote share. And they used dishonest tactics to get the job done, Hoh said.

Kaleem Caire:

I have grave concern for our children in Dane County and Wisconsin.

We face no greater long-term crisis in America than the widespread underperformance, diminishing motivation and poor preparation of children and young people in our nation’s K-12 schools, and the rapidly declining number of educators available to teach our children.

Student performance in Dane County is troubling. In spring 2021, near the conclusion of our first full pandemic-impacted school year, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s website shows that the percentage of proficient readers in grades three, four and five of public elementary schools across Dane County’s 16 school districts was only:

7% of Black students (5% in Madison alone).
13% of Latino students (7% in Madison).
37% of Asian students (25% in Madison).
42% of white students (41% in Madison).
26% of multiracial students (16% in Madison)

This means they tested at or above grade level on the English language arts section of the state’s Forward exam, administered annually to children in Wisconsin in grades three through eight and 10. The remaining students tested below grade level.

The results were very similar statewide in grades three through eight, across all 423 public school districts and 32 independent public charter schools in Wisconsin.

If the percentages above aren’t shocking enough, consider this: When you look at the educational performance of Black students in Dane County by the conclusion of third grade — when reading shifts from learning how to read to reading to learn — just 10% move on every year to fourth grade as proficient readers. Among the remaining 90%, 30% have a partial understanding of reading and language arts while the remaining 60% struggle to read well at all.

We are talking thousands of children attending public schools in Dane County and our state who are way behind academically. Every demographic is affected by this. The matter has only been made much worse by the pandemic, and by the lack of enough educators to effectively address the problem. The situation is worsening by the day and year. It is not getting any better.

All in favor of teaching civics in Wisconsin high schools, say aye — ‘Aye!’

The future of our community hangs in the balance. The massive numbers of job openings across our region and this country are not because people don’t want to work. We haven’t prepared our young people well enough for the jobs that are available, and we have not helped enough of them develop the skills to create a job for themselves.

We cannot build a future and solve the growing numbers of geopolitical, environmental, housing, food insecurity and public health crises with thousands of children who cannot effectively read a restaurant menu, or who attend schools that aren’t preparing them to solve these problems.

We must do better, and I welcome that conversation.

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?

TikTok:

3. Do any ByteDance employees have a role in shaping TikTok’s algorithm?

Subjectto the controls described in our response to question 1, ByteDance engineers around the world may assist in developing those algorithms, however our solution with Oracle will ensure that training of the TikTok algorithm only occurs in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and will also ensure appropriate third-party security vetting and validation ofthe algorithm. For more information about how TikTok’s algorithm recommends content, please see our Newsroom post: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/how-tiktok recommends videos-for-you.

4. Do any Douyin employees have any access to American user data or a role in shaping TikTok’s algorithm?

ByteDance developed the algorithms for both Douyin and TikTok , and therefore some of the same underlying basic technology building blocks are utilized by both products , but TikTok’s business logic , algorithm , integration , and deployment of systems is specific to the TikTok application and separate from Douyin .

By Susan Svrluga and Lori Rozsa:

In June, DeSantis lauded work experience over “a magic piece of paper which likely would have cost too much anyway” when he signed a law allowing state agencies to substitute work experience, including military experience, for college degrees in hiring.

“Give me somebody that served eight years in the Navy or the Marine Corps. That education is going to be much more beneficial and pertinent than someone that went $100,000 in debt to get a degree in zombie studies,” DeSantis said.

He has also pledged to keep tuition at public colleges and universities low, and this week, he changed rules for the state’s Bright Future scholarships to allow work experience by high school students to count toward required community service.

Still, his proposals to rein in the independence of those schools have alarmed some academics in Florida and beyond. In other parts of the country, some legislators and governors are pushing for more autonomy over hiring and firing state employees. Tenure is coming under increasing criticism. And a number of states have passed bills to prevent colleges from teaching “divisive concepts.”

Last month, the accrediting agency announced that it would take no further action after a committee visited the University of Florida toevaluate whether the school was in compliance with standards requiring integrity and academic freedom and reviewed new procedures. School officials said in a statement that the outcome “affirms the university’s commitment to the academic freedom of its faculty members and the First Amendment’s guarantees of the right of free speech.”

It remains to be seen whether other jurisdictions follow Florida’s example on accreditation, Kelchen said. But he noted DeSantis’s significant national clout and said scrutiny of higher education sends a clear “message to the political base during an election year that ‘we care about your priorities.’ ”