Analyses of graduate degrees suggest that many programs are ‘cash cows’ for colleges and universities, including online master’s degrees and certificates.

Shelby Kearns:

Higher Ed Dive recently shared a report from the Urban Institute on graduate degrees’ return on investment (ROI). The results are not good for the students. 

Data from the Urban Institute shows that “[b]orrowers are taking on more debt to complete their graduate degrees,” and “the typical earnings for workers with graduate degrees have held steady after increasing in the late 1990s and early 2000s,” according to Higher Ed Dive

“Undergraduate borrowers didn’t see the same level of increases in their debt loads as graduate students,” Higher Ed Dive reported. “These differences may be chalked up to differing federal student loan policies for undergraduate and graduate students.”

The Urban Institute report said that, adjusted for inflation, “the median debt among borrowers completing master’s degrees nearly doubled” from 2000 to 2016, and “increases for borrowers obtaining professional doctoral degrees or research doctoral degrees roughly doubled.”

How to Identify a Scientific Fact

Peter Vickers

When do we have a scientific fact? Scientists, policymakers, and laypersons could all use an answer to this question. But despite its obvious importance, humanity lacks a good answer. The renowned biologist Ernst Mayr was one scientist—probably one of many—frustrated by the fact that philosophers of science haven’t developed an account of the transition from theory to fact*. And recently an IPCC Special Report author explicitly asked, “Where is the boundary between ‘established fact’ and ‘very high confidence’?”. The truth is, nobody really knows.

And it matters. We want governments to base policies on scientific facts, insofar as that is possible. And the IPCC Report writer needs to know whether they are allowed to simply state something, or if they need to include a clause in brackets at the end of their statement: “(very high confidence)”. Moreover, in a world where we have no account of “scientific facts,” it is no wonder we encounter so much scepticism regarding even the most secure scientific claims.

Twitter as Institutional and Self-Corruption

Howard Wasserman:

At his Substack page, Josh Barro has a useful intervention into the relationship between Twitter and journalism. As a former journalist–very briefly, but it was a formative experience–with an abiding interest in the press and its role both in the First Amendment and in our social, legal, and political firmament, I found it to be a good one-stop source of reasons why the addictive relationship between legacy press institutions and social media has been so damaging. I say so somewhat sympathetically, since it is clear that the managers of those institutions hoped they would help stave off decline in an industry facing so much competition from online sources and so much apathy from readers. But only somewhat sympathetically, since it has long become clear both that this is a dubious hope and that the strategy has maimed the patient to a degree that calls into question the point of keeping it alive. Barro’s bottom line is that rather than demand that journalists recently thrown off Twitter (quite wrongly, although I think Taylor Lorenz is a one-person wrecking crew for the quality of any serious newspaper she has worked at) be reinstated, newsroom managers should treat the event as “an opening for [them] to do what they ought to have done long ago: Order their employees to drop their Twitter addictions, stop sharing their pithy opinions in an effort to build a personal brand, and get back to work.” Some arguments he offers, mixed with a few observations:

“Twitter’s usefulness for reporting has sometimes turned into a dependency.” Quite right. It is astounding the number of stories in the Times–the serious paper I read most frequently, despite its evident flaws–that report on Twitter controversies, rely on tweets for color and quotes, or use Twitter as their sole or near-sole fund of sources. As he notes, using social media as a databank for sources and quotes is “also biasing and distorting — the loudest voices on Twitter within a given field, such as medicine, often aren’t representative of broad opinion within the field.” And it fosters incredible laziness. Former American Lawyer editor Steven Brill, a great journalist in his own right, used to instruct his reporters, when working on a piece about a lawyer at a firm who declined to cooperate with a story or profile, to pick up the phone and call every single person at that firm until they found people willing to talk. When Woodward and Bernstein received a list of employees of CREEP, they visited every person on that list, in person and often multiple times. That’s called “shoe-leather reporting”–talking to numerous people, reading innumerable documents, and doing it all over again. Trawling or cherry-picking social media is no substitute for it. But it is easy–and, not insignificantly for newspapers, fast and cheap. 

Notes on Wisconsin’s 2023 K-12 Tax & Spending Climate

Alan Borsuk:

Here are thumbnail sketches of issues that will be fueling action in the hives:  

Revenue caps. Since the mid-1990s, the state has imposed caps on the general spending by school districts. Increases in the caps have been minimal in the last dozen years. Two years ago, Republican majorities in the legislature did not increase the caps at all, saying federal pandemic aid made that unnecessary. The end of the pandemic money is in sight and pressures on schools statewide have grown. So what will become of the revenue cap for the next two years?  

Private and charter schools. Under Wisconsin’s several programs for charter schools and private schools that enroll students using vouchers, per-student annual payments run from about $8,400 to $9,100. Public schools get a lot more per student. Expect a strong push from voucher and charter advocates to narrow the gaps. And Republicans remain committed to making private school vouchers more widely available across the state, which Democrats oppose.   

Special education. The state pays local schools about 30% of the costs involved with students with special needs. It’s one of the lowest rates in the nation. There has been advocacy – even bipartisan sometimes – to raise that. The issue will come up again, although the prospects for major change don’t appear to be good.  

‘They have set up a system to, in effect, insulate themselves from true alumni participation’

Jennifer Kabbany

A judge recently ruled that a lawsuit may proceed against Yale University that challenges administrators’ decision to yank a pathway for alumni to gain leadership roles at the Ivy League institution.

Connecticut Superior Court Judge John Burns Farley ruled Dec. 15 against completely accepting Yale’s motion to dismiss, stating the plaintiffs, two Yale alumni, appear to have standing to sue as third-party beneficiaries of the institution.

The plaintiffs, Victor Ashe and Donald Glascoff, are working to overturn a May 2021 decision by Yale officials to discontinue a petition pathway that allowed alumni to be elected to the Yale Corporation, its board of trustees.

Ashe, 77, celebrated the ruling as a vital victory in the fight against his alma mater.

“It’s a giant step forward,” Ashe said in a telephone interview. “This will be the first time Yale will have to discuss issues on the merits in a court of law.”

Modern institutions are rife with tech that disenfranchises, dehumanises, excludes and even bullies students and teachers. It’s high time for a rethink

Andy Farrell:

I was recently asked: “Which digital technologies could we get rid of in higher education?”

Some immediately spring to mind, such as the scourge of CCTV cameras and badge access systems, which are turning places of learning into high-security gulags. Or, at the behest of government bureaucrats, our draconian monitoring of student attendance like preschool infants. But these technologies, unwelcome and unnecessary as they are, do not capture the problem – which is that of equity.

Every part of an equitable university is accountable and responsive to its core stakeholders – students and teachers; those without whom the entire institution makes no sense. Within their activities each must be able to teach and learn as a fully human participant, to be genuinely heard, held in mind, have choice, agency, autonomy and equality of opportunity.

‘The Myth of American Inequality’ Review: Believe Your Eyes, Not the Statistics

Charles W. Calomiris:

According to Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know that ain’t so.” “The Myth of American Inequality,” by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund and John Early, quotes that wisdom, then offers 250 pages of analysis proving it.

Before reading the book, you should ask a few questions to test the authors’ hypothesis that misleading government statistics have led many Americans to misperceive the prevalence of poverty, the degree of inequality, and the changes in these measures in recent decades. Has the average standard of living grown substantially since the 1960s? Has inequality shrunk over that period? Did post-1960 redistributive policies reduce the percentage of families living in poverty?

Media commentators and politicians seem to believe that little progress has been made in raising average American living standards since the 1960s; that poverty has not been substantially reduced over the period; that the median household’s standard of living has not increased in recent years and inequality is currently high and rising (“a truth universally acknowledged,” according to the Economist magazine in 2020).

The authors—a former chairman of the Senate banking committee, a professor of economics at Auburn University and a former economist at the Bureau for Labor Statistics—show that these beliefs are false. Average living standards have improved dramatically. Real income of the bottom quintile, the authors write, grew more than 681% from 1967 to 2017. The percentage of people living in poverty fell from 32% in 1947 to 15% in 1967 to only 1.1% in 2017. Opportunities created by economic growth, and government-sponsored social programs funded by that growth, produced broadly shared prosperity: 94% of households in 2017 would have been at least as well off as the top quintile in 1967. Bottom-quintile households enjoy the same living standards as middle-quintile households, and on a per capita basis the bottom quintile has a 3% higher income. Top-quintile households receive income equal to roughly four times the bottom (and only 2.2 times the lowest on a per capita basis), not the 16.7 proportion popularly reported.

Notes on Madison’s ongoing k-12 tax and spending increases amidst declining enrollment

Dean Mosiman:

For Madison residents in the Madison School District, the total tax bill for the average home assessed at $376,900 is going up about $262, or 3.64%, to $7,468. Last year’s increase of $124 was a 1.76% hike. In 2020, the bill rose 4.3%, or $293.

Those sums reflect tax bills after the school tax credit is applied but before deducting the state lottery credit and another credit for building improvements. This year, the lottery credit declined 8.2% for the average Madison home but was still relatively high at $278.

The city’s $40 vehicle registration fee, also known as a wheel tax, does not app

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

Grade Inflation: What Goes Up Must Come Down; Harvard in Numbers

Adam Barton:

Here’s a quotation from one of Harvard’s many committees. Try to guess the year it was written.

“Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily — Grade A for work of no very high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity … One of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.”

This is from the “Committee on Raising the Standard” in 1894. Ever since letter grades at Harvard were established, perhaps as early as 1883 according to school archives, there’s been concern around the way they’re distributed.

There’s still a lot of talk around Harvard’s grade inflation problem today. It’s hardly a surprise to anyone who studies or teaches here that grades have risen over time. But grade inflation is inextricably linked to a worse problem, one that is seldom discussed: grade compression, where GPAs stop increasing and instead stabilize in the 3.8 to 4.0 range.

To understand grade compression, we first need to understand grade inflation. Looking at a graph of student GPAs since 1889 is sort of like looking at a graph of Harvard’s endowment: It only goes up. In 1950, when Harvey Mansfield was but a freshman at Harvard, the average GPA was estimated at 2.55. Now, it’s much closer to 3.80. Keep in mind these numbers are estimated from Crimson surveys that represent only a part of the student body, combined with third-party analyses of Harvard records, so try to focus on the long-term trend rather than specific GPA averages at any point in time.

Civics: They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars

Brett Murphy:

Harpster tells police and prosecutors around the country that they can do the same. Such linguistic detection is possible, he claims, if you know how to analyze callers’ speech patterns — their tone of voice, their pauses, their word choice, even their grammar. Stripped of its context, a misplaced word as innocuous as “hi” or “please” or “somebody” can reveal a murderer on the phone.

So far, researchers who have tried to corroborate Harpster’s claims have failed. The experts most familiar with his work warn that it shouldn’t be used to lock people up.

Prosecutors know it’s junk science too. But that hasn’t stopped some from promoting his methods and even deploying 911 call analysis in court to win convictions.

The Introvert’s Guide to Building a Strong Professional Network

Jenny Ray:

As an introvert myself, I understand the struggles and challenges that come with networking and building professional relationships. But I also know firsthand the importance of building a strong professional network, especially for introverts.

First, let’s define what it means to be an introvert. An introvert is someone who tends to recharge and energize through solitude and introspection, rather than through social interactions and stimulation. This doesn’t mean that introverts are necessarily shy or anti-social, but rather that social situations can be draining and overwhelming for them.

Now, why is building a strong professional network important for introverts? In today’s competitive job market, it’s not enough to just have a strong resume and skillset. Having a network of connections and relationships can open up new opportunities, provide valuable resources and advice, and help you navigate your career path. It can also help you build your personal brand and reputation within your industry.

More substantive change is needed in academia

Heather Heying:

Last week, I resigned from the Board of the University of Austin (UATX). It was a difficult decision, but a necessary one, and a long time coming.

What follows is, first, my resignation letter, barely edited to obscure personal details. After that, I include some of what I removed from the resignation letter, a little of which will be slightly cryptic for those not in possession of the many hundreds of pages of documents that members of the Board reviewed the previous week.

Brown University Replies on ‘Caste Oppression’ Rule

Wall Street Journal:

Suhag Shukla’s op-ed “Brown University Discriminates Against South Asians” (Dec. 22) is based on a mischaracterization of Brown’s antidiscrimination policy. Brown has added “caste oppression” to its nondiscrimination policy to underscore protections for members of the university community and call attention to a subtle, often misunderstood form of discrimination based on class. The policy has added an explicit reference to caste among other factors, including race, gender, sex, national origin and religion. The policy applies to every member of the Brown community. It does not and never has specified that any element applies specifically to any individual group.

Brown’s previous nondiscrimination policy would have protected people experiencing caste discrimination, but the university felt it was important to elevate this less-publicized form of discrimination and explicitly express a position on caste equity.

“this is an argument against scientific monoculture”

Adam Mastroianni

The word boring really stuck with me. Reviewing should be interesting. It should matter whether the paper’s claims turn out to be true or not, and the only reason to review it is that you care about those claims. The fact that we find it boring suggests that part of us, deep down, believes that the paper in front of us doesn’t actually deserve our attention.

Akshat Mahajan:

[W]e *have* truly open, zero moderation platforms (e.g. vixra.org). They have failed to produce the intended effect of better science, for many foundational reasons. 

I agree with Mahajan’s first point: we’ve got all the infrastructure we need, but people aren’t using it to experiment. They just post their PDFs on a website before trying to get them published in a journal, so whatever they produce is still intended to pass peer review. It’s like everyone has a Jeep that can go off-road, and yet they only ever drive on the highway. 

I disagree with Mahajan’s second point: these platforms haven’t failed. If you give everyone a Jeep hoping that they’ll drive it into the wilderness and nobody does, don’t fix the Jeeps; fix the drivers. You need to make them less afraid to leave the highway, convince them that there’s something worth seeing out there, and gas up their tanks.

This is why, as much as I would love to see people try out all the alternative platforms they suggested, I don’t think we’ll revolutionize science by building the perfect website. We have to a) free minds, and b) fund them. I’m working on (a) right now, and I’ve got plans in the works for (b).

Lobbying has made American higher education fat and ineffective.

Richard Vedder:

Economists call someone who gets paid more than necessary to produce a good or service a “rent-seeker.”

Arguably the preeminent rent-seeker in higher education, Terry Hartle, announced his retirement recently from his position as chief lobbyist at the American Council of Education (ACE). Terry is a master at the rent-seeking craft, persuasive in cajoling legislators into approving laws that lead to vast numbers of dollars being dropped onto college campuses.

Some of those dollars have allowed academics to do things we otherwise couldn’t have done—to live a better life. When speaking to legislative groups, I often assert, “I want to thank you for letting me rip off taxpayers for dozens of years.” While we are far from unique, many of us in academia get paid at least a bit more than necessary to perform our services.

While we are far from unique, many of us in academia get paid more than necessary to perform our services.

ACE is the largest and most influential group lobbying for America’s colleges and universities. Terry Hartle had a career working for the American Enterprise Institute (we were briefly coworkers there) and the U.S. Senate (where, too, I once worked) before joining ACE in the 1990s. I have always found him bright, persuasive, affable, and a person of integrity. I have testified along with him at congressional hearings.

In these settings, Terry has been extremely effective in convincing Congress to spend more dollars on colleges. The federal government’s role in higher education has grown during his ACE tenure, in my judgment to the detriment not only of long-suffering taxpayers, but probably of higher education itself. The additional federal dollars have generally proven to be inefficiency-inducing if not downright corrupting.

When Algorithms Rule, Values Can Wither

Interest in the possibilities afforded by algorithms and big data continues to blossom as early adopters gain benefits from AI systems that automate decisions as varied as making customer recommendations, screening job applicants, detecting fraud, and optimizing logistical routes.1 But when AI applications fail, they can do so quite spectacularly.2

Consider the recent example of Australia’s “robodebt” scandal.3 In 2015, the Australian government established its Income Compliance Program, with the goal of clawing back unemployment and disability benefits that had been made inappropriately to recipients. It set out to identify overpayments by analyzing discrepancies between the annual income that individuals reported and the income assessed by the Australian Tax Office. Previously, the department had used a data-matching technique to identify discrepancies, which government employees subsequently investigated to determine whether the individuals had in fact received benefits to which they were not entitled. Aiming to scale this process to increase reimbursements and cut costs, the government developed a new, automated system that presumed that every discrepancy reflected an overpayment. A notification letter demanding repayment was issued in every case, and the burden of proof was on any individuals who wished to appeal. If someone did not respond to the letter, their case was automatically forwarded to an external debt collector. By 2019, the program was estimated to have identified over 734,000 overpayments worth a total of 2 billion Australian dollars ($1.3 billion U.S.).4

When Algorithms Rule, Values Can Wither

Dirk Lindebaum, Vern Glaser, Christine Moser, and Mehreen Ashraf

Interest in the possibilities afforded by algorithms and big data continues to blossom as early adopters gain benefits from AI systems that automate decisions as varied as making customer recommendations, screening job applicants, detecting fraud, and optimizing logistical routes.1 But when AI applications fail, they can do so quite spectacularly.2

Consider the recent example of Australia’s “robodebt” scandal.3 In 2015, the Australian government established its Income Compliance Program, with the goal of clawing back unemployment and disability benefits that had been made inappropriately to recipients. It set out to identify overpayments by analyzing discrepancies between the annual income that individuals reported and the income assessed by the Australian Tax Office. Previously, the department had used a data-matching technique to identify discrepancies, which government employees subsequently investigated to determine whether the individuals had in fact received benefits to which they were not entitled. Aiming to scale this process to increase reimbursements and cut costs, the government developed a new, automated system that presumed that every discrepancy reflected an overpayment. A notification letter demanding repayment was issued in every case, and the burden of proof was on any individuals who wished to appeal. If someone did not respond to the letter, their case was automatically forwarded to an external debt collector. By 2019, the program was estimated to have identified over 734,000 overpayments worth a total of 2 billion Australian dollars ($1.3 billion U.S.).4

Hamline Student Newspaper (the Oracle) Removed Published Defense of Lecturer Who Showed Painting of Muhammad

Eugene Volokh:

On Saturday, I e-mailed the Editor-in-Chief of the newspaper to ask why this happened, and on Sunday got a response pointing me to this item (which was published Sunday):

The Oracle is Hamline’s independent, student-run newspaper. One of our core tenets, to minimize harm, exists for us to hold ourselves accountable for the way our news affects the lives of individual students, and the Hamline community and student body as a whole. Those in our community have expressed that a letter we published has caused them harm. We have decided, as an editorial board, to take it down.

In no way are any of us on this staff or on the Editorial Board experts about journalism or trauma. We are, however, dedicated to actively supporting, platforming and listening to the experiences and voices of members of our community.

We are a student publication that is here to provide a space to elevate the voices of students. Our work is of no value if at any time our publication is participating in furthering harm to members of our community.

Our website acts as a space to widely share information and as a digital archive. We believe that what we publish is a matter of public record that reflects and includes the viewpoints of our community that creates space for having conversations in the open that would otherwise be left in private. We hope these conversations can lead to transparency and accountability. However, our publication will not participate in conversations where a person must defend their lived experience and trauma as topics of discussion or debate.

Pulitzer Center describes minimizing harm as having “compassion and sensitivity for those who may be adversely affected by news coverage.” We will continue to consider and scrutinize our coverage and angles to elevate the stories of members of our community. It is not a publication’s job to challenge or define sensitive experiences or trauma. If and when situations arise where these stories are shared, it is our responsibility to listen to and carry them in the most supportive, respectful, safe and beneficial way for the story’s stakeholders and our readers.

We have learned and experienced from our first day at Hamline, a liberal arts institution, the importance of seeing things from a nuanced perspective. However, trauma and lived experiences are not open for debate.

Inquiry and Science

187 ways they keep things secret from you

How Much Washington Really Owes: $100 Trillion

Vince Kolber:

The issue arises from the way Treasury accounts for future spending that is required by law. It reports two separate figures, “net position” and “social insurance net expenditures,” but it doesn’t add them up into “total obligations,” and thereby deprives lawmakers and taxpayers of a full picture.

Net position is the difference between U.S. government “assets” and “total liabilities.” Importantly, total liabilities include only bonded debt—that is, U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds. Total liabilities were $34.8 trillion at the end of fiscal 2021. The Treasury reported assets at $4.9 trillion. Simple arithmetic brings us to the net position, negative $29.9 trillion.

But this accounting leaves a lot out. Social insurance net expenditures calculates the difference between the expected future liabilities of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and similar programs over the next 75 years and the income these programs are expected to generate during the same period under current law. The Treasury reported these unfunded liabilities at $71 trillion at the end of fiscal 2021.

That brings us to the alarming milestone. Add the net position of $29.9 trillion to the social insurance net expenditures of $71 trillion, and you find that they topped $100 trillion—the first time they have ever done so.

Government accounting specialists argue that the Treasury is right to keep these categories separate. They contend that social-insurance obligations aren’t truly debt because Congress has the power to curtail them by changing the law. But lawmakers have failed to do so for nearly 40 years and, until they do, the unfunded liability exists and is a present economic danger. By Treasury’s accounting, the amount these programs’ costs are expected to exceed their revenue is more than twice the net position—and the latter figure alone is what is commonly known as the national debt.

“if we accept the premise that governments have special rights to demand content moderation”

Chris Bray:

And on and on and on. Twitter has been constantly flooded with requests from at least dozens of separate federal entities, all of them needy and pushy and consuming the company’s time and energy: CENTCOM wants a meeting this week and CDC wants a meeting this week and NIH wants a meeting this week and the FBI wants a meeting this week and the White House wants a meeting this week and DHS wants a meeting this week and DOD wants a meeting this week even though CENTCOM already has one, and several members of Congress have some concerns they want the senior team to address this week, and….

Now: Twitter is a global platform. I would bet a kidney that there’s a Twitter Files equivalent for the Ottawa Police Department during the Freedom Convoy, and an RCMP file, and a Trudeau government file, and that Chrystia Freeland had some thoughts to share about some tweets she didn’t like. I would bet the other kidney that Twitter has equivalent files, in dozens of languages, from multiple government agencies in Iran and New Zealand and Australia and the Netherlands and the UK and Brazil and on and on an on.

In addition to the free speech problem and the pathologies of gleichschaltung, the Twitter files are about the way government without boundaries consumes resources from every entity it touches.

An Academic Is Fired Over a Medieval Painting of the Prophet Muhammad

Christiane Gruber:

The “Islamophobic incident” catalyzed plenty of administrative commentary and media coverage at the university. Among others, it formed the subject of a second Oracle article, which noted that a faculty member had included in their global survey of art history a session on Islamic art, which offered an optional visual analysis and discussion of a famous medieval Islamic painting of the Prophet Muhammad. A student complained about the image’s inclusion in the course and led efforts to press administrators for a response. After that, the university’s associate vice president of inclusive excellence (AVPIE) declared the classroom exercise “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful and Islamophobic.”

Neither before nor after these declarations was the faculty member given a public platform or forum to explain the classroom lecture and activity. To fill in the gap, on Dec. 6, an essay written by a Hamline professor of religion who teaches Islam explaining the incident along with the historical context and aesthetic value of Islamic images of Muhammad was published on The Oracle’s website. The essay was taken down two days later. One day after that, Hamline’s president and AVPIE sent a message to all employees stating that “respect for the observant Muslim students in that classroom should have superseded academic freedom.” The essay’s censorship and the subsequent email by two top university administrators raise serious concerns about freedom of speech and academic freedom at the university.

The instructor was released from their spring term teaching at Hamline, and its AVPIE went on the record as stating: “It was decided it was best that this faculty member was no longer part of the Hamline community.” In other words, an instructor who showed an Islamic painting during a visual analysis — a basic exercise for art history training — was publicly impugned for hate speech and dismissed thereafter, without access to due process.

These incidents, statements and actions at Hamline will be for others to investigate further. As a scholar specializing in Islamic representations of Muhammad, however, it is my duty to share accurate information about the painting at the heart of the controversy. I will provide a visual analysis and historical explanation of the image in question, in essence reconstituting the Hamline instructor’s classroom activity. I will then explore these types of depictions over the course of six centuries, with the aim to answer one basic question: Is the Islamic painting at the heart of the Hamline controversy truly Islamophobic?

A simple guide on words to avoid in government

Sam Gregory:

As civil servants, our choice of terminology makes a huge difference to how the public understands our policies and our projects. Using certain words can even shape and change the policies themselves. For example, you might only realise the flaw in your policy when you have to explain it in plain English.

Avoid jargon

Using the wrong words can muddy the waters, and make our work less understandable to the vast majority of people who’ve never worked in the Civil Service. In the past, government has been notorious for communicating in its own highly-developed form of jargon. For example, think about the archaic language MPs use as part of the rituals of the House of Commons. This kind of language is often impenetrable to anyone who isn’t already in-the-know, though sometimes it can be deliberate. The Plain English Campaign has some amusing examples of government jargon from recent years.

When GOV.UK launched in 2012, replacing the confusing previous website, one of the aims was to simplify the language of government. This helps everyone complete tasks (like registering to vote) quickly and with minimum fuss. The website’s constantly updated style guide tells anyone who publishes on GOV.UK how to write for the site. We also use it internally on the Department for Education intranet, alongside our own education-specific style guide.

“What’s wrong with a B? I’d much rather get that than spend six hours every week on business studies”

Lucy Kellaway:

Life at my school is founded on the Gospel values which, I found after a spot of googling, involve the sort of thing even the most devout atheist should be able to sign up to: forgiveness, honesty, trust, family and, above all, love.

I listened with disbelief in the first staff meeting when we were told it was our job to love all our students — especially the ones who were hardest to love. This was a departure from the successful academy school in east London where I trained, when staff would gather together in the name of no excuses, exam results and value-added scores.

This emphasis on love seems to me oddly profound, because from it everything else flows. If you force yourself to care deeply for every one of your students, you work harder for them, you want the best for them. All the other stuff I learnt in teacher training after leaving my job as a columnist at the Financial Times — differentiation and assessment for learning — seems a bit by the by. 

It is not only the Gospel that is making me have a rethink. It is the experience of teaching and living 300 miles from the capital, my home for the past 63 years.

The stats bear this out. According to the University of Essex’s Understanding Society study, the North East is the least mobile place in the country, with 55 per cent of survey respondents living within 15 miles of their mother — more than three times as many as in the capital. And, if my students are any guide, this statistic is not about to change, as few of them plan to leave. They might go abroad for a bit (I tried to warn them that Brexit has made this harder), but after that they want to return home. No one has any interest in moving to London. They know they can’t afford it, and don’t fancy it anyway.

Denying research opportunities because they do not align with an agenda is inane and potentially destructive.

Leslie Eastman:

James Lee, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Minnesota, says that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) now blocks access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may enter “forbidden” territory. Lee makes an important point that taxpayers paid for the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), which combines genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income.

My colleagues at other universities and I have run into problems involving applications to study the relationships among intelligence, education, and health outcomes. Sometimes, NIH denies access to some of the attributes that I have just mentioned, on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” Sometimes, it demands updates about ongoing research, with the implied threat that it could withdraw usage if it doesn’t receive satisfactory answers. In some cases, NIH has retroactively withdrawn access for research it had previously approved.

Note that none of the studies I am referring to include inquiries into race or sex differences. Apparently, NIH is clamping down on a broad range of attempts to explore the relationship between genetics and intelligence.

What is NIH’s justification?

…The federal government was under no obligation to assemble the magnificent database that is the dbGaP. Now that it has done so at taxpayer expense, however, it does have an obligation to provide access to that database evenhandedly—not to allow it for some and deny it to others, based on the content of their research.

The capture isn’t only impacting American science. Across the Atlantic, the British Royal Society of Chemistry claims chemistry is racist, as only one in 575 professors is black.

Parents lose court fight against gender lessons

Will Humphries:

A group of parents has lost a legal challenge against the teaching of gender identity and sex to seven-year-old children in Welsh primary schools.

Campaigners sought a judicial review in the High Court against the Welsh government’s relationships and sexuality education (RSE) curriculum, which was launched in September.

The challenge, which was heard last month in Cardiff, was brought by Public Child Protection Wales, says that the curriculum is inappropriate for primary age children. The parents argued that they had a fundamental common law right to excuse their children from the lessons.

Dismissing all aspects of the claim, Mrs Justice Steyn said: “Teaching should be neutral from a religious perspective but it is not required to be value neutral.” She added that sex education aims

In Memphis, the Phonics Movement Comes to High School: Literacy lessons are embedded in every academic class. Even in biology.

Sarah Mervosh:

But recently, he said, he has made strides, in part because of an unusual and sweeping high school literacy curriculum in Memphis.

The program focuses on expanding vocabulary and giving teenagers reading strategies — such as decoding words — that build upon fundamentals taught in elementary school. The curriculum is embedded not just in English, but also in math, science and social studies.

With his new tools, Roderick studied “I Have a Dream,” the speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — no longer skipping unfamiliar words, but instead circling them to discern their meaning. And when scanning sports news on ESPN in his free time, he knew to break down bigger words, like the “re/negotia/tion” of a player’s contract.

The instruction “helped me understand,” said Roderick, 17, who is on the honor roll at Oakhaven High School and is preparing to take the ACT. (He and other students, interviewed with parental permission, are being identified by their first names to protect their privacy.)

The program in Memphis is an extension of a growing national movement to change the way younger children are taught to read, based on what has become known as “the science of reading.” And it is a sign of how sharply the pendulum has swung in the decades-long, contentious debate over reading instruction, moving away from a flexible “balanced literacy” approach that has put less emphasis on sounding out words, and toward more explicit, systematic teaching of phonics.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

A thin chat with taxpayer supported Wisconsin DPI Superintendent JilL Underly

Scott Girard:

It’s been a challenging few years for K-12 education, both locally and nationally. Wisconsin State Superintendent Jill Underly is nonetheless “optimistic” about what’s ahead for the field.

“I think people are coming together, realizing that if we want to improve the lives of all Wisconsinites and especially the kids who are going to be the future leaders of the state, we need to all come together to solve these problems,” Underly said, as she reflected on 2022. “I see that reflected in a budget, I see it reflected in the referendums that our communities have passed, I see it in the policies that our stakeholders are proposing.

“I’m really, really optimistic about it in the long run.”

Notes and links on Jill Underly.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

“The results are in. It failed”

Adam Mastroianni:

Peer review was a huge, expensive intervention. By one estimate, scientists collectively spend 15,000 years reviewing papers every year. It can take months or years for a paper to wind its way through the review system, which is a big chunk of time when people are trying to do things like cure cancer and stop climate change. And universities fork over millions for access to peer-reviewed journals, even though much of the research is taxpayer-funded, and none of that money goes to the authors or the reviewers.

Huge interventions should have huge effects. If you drop $100 million on a school system, for instance, hopefully it will be clear in the end that you made students better off. If you show up a few years later and you’re like, “hey so how did my $100 million help this school system” and everybody’s like “uhh well we’re not sure it actually did anything and also we’re all really mad at you now,” you’d be really upset and embarrassed. Similarly, if peer review improved science, that should be pretty obvious, and we should be pretty upset and embarrassed if it didn’t.

It didn’t. In all sorts of different fields, research productivity has been flat or declining for decades, and peer review doesn’t seem to have changed that trend. New ideas are failing to displace older ones. Many peer-reviewed findings don’t replicate, and most of them may be straight-up false. When you ask scientists to rate 20th century discoveries in physics, medicine, and chemistry that won Nobel Prizes, they say the ones that came out before peer review are just as good or even better than the ones that came out afterward. In fact, you can’t even ask them to rate the Nobel Prize-winning physics discoveries from the 1990s and 2000s because there aren’t enough of them.

Of course, a lot of other stuff has changed since World War II. We did a terrible job running this experiment, so it’s all confounded. All we can say from these big trends is that we have no idea whether peer review helped, it might have hurt, it cost a ton, and the current state of the scientific literature is pretty abysmal. In this biz, we call this a total flop.

POSTMORTEM

What went wrong?Here’s a simple question: does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published?

“Manipulation by omission”

Astral Códex Ten:

Still, on the most nitpicky level, as far as I can tell the article doesn’t say a lot which is literally false. Perhaps great journalism would investigate how the printing process worked and where it went wrong, but as far as I know neither side does that – they just report the relevant officials’ claims in more vs. less accusatory tones and expect you to make a judgment call based on your priors (mine are on “honest mistake”).

Looking through Infowars, it looks like many of their articles are around this quality of these two. Others are even less misinformative; there are lots of articles about members of some group Infowars doesn’t like committing a crime or doing an offensive thing; usually other sources confirm that these crimes or offenses are real. Or articles about “EXPERT SAYS X!”, where someone who could be charitably described as an expert (an MD or PhD) really did say X, even though X is insane and all other experts disagree. If Infowars is lying here, it’s by choosing to report on these stories instead of others, in a way that suggests they’re important – not by making up completely imaginary things on the spot.

(if you disagree with this, it might be worth looking through the front page of www.infowars.com and calculating what percent of the articles seem technically-true-but-misleading vs. completely-made-up. I tried this and had trouble finding the latter, but your experience might differ)

Madison Square Garden Uses Facial Recognition to Ban Its Owner’s Enemies

Kashmir Hill:

Over Thanksgiving weekend, Kelly Conlon, 44, a personal injury lawyer from Bergen County, N.J., was chaperoning her 9-year-old daughter’s Girl Scout troop on a trip into Manhattan to see the “Christmas Spectacular” at Radio City Music Hall.

Before she could even glimpse the Rockettes, however, security guards pulled Ms. Conlon aside and her New York jaunt took an Orwellian turn.

“They told me that they knew I was Kelly Conlon and that I was an attorney,” she said this week. “They knew the name of my law firm.”

The guards had identified her using a facial recognition system. They showed her a sheet saying she was on an “attorney exclusion list” created this year by MSG Entertainment, which is controlled by the Dolan family. The company owns Radio City and some of New York’s other famous performance spaces, including the Beacon Theater and Madison Square Garden, where basketball’s Knicks and hockey’s Rangers play.

Its chief executive, James L. Dolan, is a billionaire who has run his empire with an autocratic flair, and his company instituted the ban this summer not only on lawyers representing people suing it, but on all attorneys at their firms. The company says “litigation creates an inherently adversarial environment” and so it is enforcing the list with the help of computer software that can identify hundreds of lawyers via profile photos on their firms’ own websites, using an algorithm to instantaneously pore over images and suggest matches.

“Conspiracy Theorists…Attempting to Discredit the Agency”: The FBI Attacks Critics Objecting to its Role in Twitter’s Censorship System

Jonathan Turley:

It is not clear what is more chilling: the menacing role played by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Twitter’s censorship program or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role. This week saw another FBI “nothing-to-see-here” statement to the release of files detailing how it actively sought to suppress the Hunter Biden story before the 2020 election, gave millions to Twitter, and targeted even satire or tiny posts that did not conform with its guidelines.

The releases document what some of us have long alleged: a system of censorship by surrogate or proxy. The FBI has largely shrugged and said that there is nothing concerning about over 80 agents working on the censoring of posters, including many American citizens.

In the latest statement, the FBI stated it did not command Twitter to take any specific action when flagging accounts to be censored:

Students Sue USC For Reporting False Data To U.S. News To Goose Its Ranking

Paul Caron:

A legal advocacy group for students is suing the University of Southern California and 2U, alleging that the school and the company that runs its online graduate programs in education defrauded students by using misleading U.S. News & World Report rankings to promote the courses.

According to the suit, filed in Los Angeles County Court, USC’s Rossier School of Education used rankings that covered their in-person programs to highlight the strength of the online offerings, even though they had different selection criteria and student populations. The suit also says those rankings, even if they had been relevant to the online programs, were based on inaccurate information the school used to improperly boost the school’s score. …

“USC intentionally falsified data to inflate their U.S. News ranking, and 2U used the false numbers to pad their profits,” said Eric Rothschild, litigation director of the National Student Legal Defense Network. …

Academic Freedom & Critical Race theory

Tom Knighton

That’s apparently what happened to one North Carolina teacher, and he’s filed a lawsuit in an effort to fight back.

A North Carolina professor has claimed that he was fired from a prestigious high school for criticizing critical race theory in a Friday lawsuit, according to a report from Fox 17 WZTV.

In the suit, filed by legal the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy group, Dr. David Phillips alleges that the Governor’s School of North Carolina (NCGS), a publicly funded summer program, fired him without explanation after he criticized the school’s embrace of “racially divisive ideology.”

Philips claims that NCGS adopted a social approach that views members of society “through the lens of characteristics like race, sex, and religion” and labels them as “perpetual oppressors or victims” based on group membership.

The professor, who taught at the school for eight years, held three optional programs over the summer where he critiqued critical race theory, as well as a lack of diversity in viewpoints in higher education. He also urged attendees to examine speech through a lens of “speech-act theory,” which asserts that the meaning of a linguistic expression can be explained in terms of rules governing their use in performing various speech acts, such as commanding and warning. 

The lawsuit states that Phillips was met with “open hostility” following the conclusion of each lecture by both students and staff. It also claims that audience members “attacked whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality and Christianity” when making comments and asking questions at the seminars. 

So much for academic freedom, right?

Parents hire dating coaches

Rachel Wolfe::

“I was like, ‘I’m trying!’ ” said Ms. Kaku, a 7th-grade teacher who had moved back home to Fresno, Calif., at the time. She agreed to the course, mostly because she didn’t want to waste her mom’s money.

Dating coaches say pandemic lockdowns and their long aftermath have raised parent worries that their grown children will stay single forever. That has led to a surge of interest from mothers and fathers splurging on premium dating-app subscriptions, relationship classes and one-on-one sessions with dating experts for their children, said relationship psychologist and dating coach Christie Kederian.

“Know if someone is the one for you in 5 dates!” according to an online advertisement for Dr. Kederian’s services. She consulted with Ms. Kaku and her advice was, first, to talk with her mother about maintaining personal boundaries, and, second, be more open-minded about potential partners.

A few months later, Ms. Kaku decided to take a chance on a Bumble profile she had previously passed over. It turned out to be a great match. Nobody is happier about the pair’s coming wedding than Ms. Kaku’s mother, who said she told her daughter, “See, it was totally worth the money.”

Advocating for Ongoing K-12 Tax & Spending Increases. Achievement?

Sophia Voight:

Advocates for early child care, K-12 and college emphasized the need for greater state investment in education during Gov. Tony Evers’ statewide “Doing the Right Thing” listening session tour Tuesday.

Evers joined about 150 people at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s STEM Innovation Center to get more ideas for the two-year budget he will propose in February.

Projections from the state Department of Administration show Wisconsin with a record-high $6.6 billion surplus that could grow to $9 billion by the end of the next budget cycle. Over the next several months, Evers and the Republican-run state Legislature will have to figure out how to use the money.

During the session, a large crowd of education advocates emphasized a need for increasing tax- revenue limits for public schools, funding early child care and special needs programs, and bringing back the universal free lunch program that was implemented during the pandemic but ended this school year.

The History of How School Buses Became Yellow

Bryan Greene:

The brainchild of education expert Frank Cyr, the meeting at Columbia University carried the goal of establishing national construction standards for the American school bus. Two years earlier, Cyr had conducted a ten-state study where he found that children were riding to school in trucks and buses of all different colors, and even horse-drawn wagons, in the case of one Kansas school district he visited. Standardization would solve two problems and simultaneously revolutionize school buses themselves: one, being uniformly one color would make bus travel safer; two, costs to districts would be lower as construction specifications would make it possible for manufacturers to mass-produce buses.

At the time of the conference, Cyr had more than 30 years of experience with rural schools. Born in 1900 in a sod house in Nebraska’s Republican River Valley, Cyr and his fellow classmates, like many rural students, traveled great distances to school. After attending Grinnell College and graduating from the University of Nebraska with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, Cyr spent nearly a decade in country schools, first as a teacher in Winner, South Dakota, then, as a school superintendent in Chappell, Nebraska. In promoting school-bus standardization and greater use of the buses in rural areas, Cyr saw an opportunity for rural school districts to save resources through consolidation. The Rockefeller-backed General Education Board provided Cyr $5000 ($92,000 in 2019) to study local school-bus needs and bring together the various parties who could effectuate needed changes.

Why are administrators at a top-ranked public high school hiding National Merit awards from students and families?

Aura Nomani

For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom.

An intrepid Thomas Jefferson parent, Shawna Yashar, a lawyer, uncovered the withholding of National Merit awards. Since starting as a freshman at the school in September 2019, her son, who is part Arab American, studied statistical analysis, literature reviews, and college-level science late into the night. This workload was necessary to keep him up to speed with the advanced studies at TJ, which U.S. News & World Report ranks as America’s top school.

Last fall, along with about 1.5 million U.S. high school juniors, the Yashar teen took the PSAT, which determines whether a student qualifies as a prestigious National Merit scholar. When it came time to submit his college applications this fall, he didn’t have a National Merit honor to report—but it wasn’t because he hadn’t earned the award. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a nonprofit based in Evanston, Illinois, had recognized him as a Commended Student in the top 3 percent nationwide—one of about 50,000 students earning that distinction. Principals usually celebrate National Merit scholars with special breakfasts, award ceremonies, YouTube videos, press releases, and social media announcements.

Career Recommendations

Hacker News:

I’m looking for some career recommendations, not quite sure what path to go. To me, I’m currently 17 years old and now doing cybersecurity since 3 years. Been doing bug bounty since then, at https://hackerone.com/f9cd8782?type=user. Got into it randomly when I accidently found a critical vulnerability when I was 14, had prior coding and system knowledge, as I’ve started coding at the age of 10.

I now stopped doing security research for Epic Games, for specific reasons. I’ve reported around 130 valid vulnerabilities in their engine and games (binary exploitation), including remote code execution, netcode vulnerabilities (mostly critical ones affecting the gameserver itself, technically a 0day due to it being the engine).

I’ve been told many times that I am low-balling myself and should get into smart contract or browser security. Please let me know what you think and feel free to ask any questions.

A Harvard Law professor broke the rules to let in WWII vets. They made ‘the best class there ever was.’

Joshua Prager:

Robert Drucker was somewhere in the Philippines, an ensign on a ship built in his home state of Illinois, when, in early 1945, he learned that a professor was helping American servicemen get into Harvard Law School. Drucker had always wanted to attend. His father was an alum. The son had emulated him all his 20 years, no less after Harry Drucker died in a car crash in 1932. And so, Drucker wrote to the professor, a man named Warren Seavey, asking for guidance on how to apply.

“I’m overseas,” Drucker recalls writing from his cabin on the ship. “As soon as the war is over and we’ve won, what shall I do?”

L.A. students’ grades are rising, but test scores are falling. Why the big disconnect?

Paloma Esquivel:

Their situation is far from unique. After falling in the early semesters of the pandemic, by spring 2022 high school and middle school math and English grades in the Los Angeles Unified School District not only rebounded, but went up, according to an L.A. Times analysis. At the same time, math and English proficiency rates on the state’s standardized tests fell to their lowest levels in five years.

The vast majority of students — whose teachers follow revised grading guidelines put in place amid the pandemic — received A’s, Bs and Cs in their classes. But the good report cards may not reflect a student’s ability to meet California’s grade level standards — even though a district policy calls for a C to mean that a student understands the material.

While grades and standardized tests are distinct ways of measuring how students are doing, the growing disconnect raises questions about whether families are fully informed about the extent of their children’s academic setbacks and whether they are being well positioned to push for additional help.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

How a Few Activists Made ChatGPT Deny Basic Science

Brian Chau:

There are wide reaching impacts to the political bias of artificial intelligence tools. ChatGPT is a technology that can already be used to draft articles, academic papers, poems, screenplays, and legal briefings. Political and cultural catechisms restrict the potential opportunities this can create, constantly interfering in favor of affluent social progressives against the wishes of ordinary Americans or foreigners of all stripes. Consider the following double standard:

Elite university degrees certify very little. And the secret is out.

Victor Davis Hanson:

“Gradually” and “suddenly” applies to higher education’s implosion. 

During the 1990s “culture wars” universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable. 

Their growing manipulation of blanket federal student loan guarantees, and part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants always was suicidal. 

Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research, and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought short-changed students, further alienated the public—and often enraged alumni.

Over the last 30 years, enrollments in the humanities and history crashed. So did tenure-track faculty positions. Some $1.7 trillion in federally backed student loans have only greenlighted inflated tuition—and masked the contagion of political indoctrination and watered-down courses. 

 But “gradually” imploding has now become “suddenly.” Zoom courses, a declining pool of students, and soaring costs all prompt the public to question the college experience altogether

Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year—or over 4 percent alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14 percent in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.

Alabama’s education system was designed to preserve white supremacy. I should know.

Kyle Whitmire:

But first, the children act out the story of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.

In “Lies my Teacher Told Me,” historian James Loewen says you can tell a lot about an American History textbook by how it depicts Brown — either as a righteous freedom fighter liberating the enslaved or, more often, a deranged zealot hell-bent on treason. The litmus test works for elementary school productions, too, but because we’re watching 11 and 12-year-olds and not professional actors, it’s hard to tell which direction this show is taking.

At least until Brown’s captor shows up — an American colonel and soon-to-be Confederate hero named Robert E. Lee.

A short kid in a long coat and a Santa Claus beard enters from stage left. A tuft of red hair sticks out from beneath a borrowed Stetson hat. He walks up behind the original outside agitator, points a cap pistol from the Pirates of the Caribbean gift shop at the center of his back and then shoots the bastard race traitor dead, center stage. As the lights dim for the scene change, the chorus sings “John Brown’s Body lies a moldering in the grave …”

Critics deride ‘un-grading’ as coddling, say it risks creating ‘snowflake’ students

Jon Marcus:

But advocates say the most important reason to adopt un-grading is that students have become so preoccupied with grades, they aren’t actually learning.

“Grades are not a representation of student learning, as hard as it is for us to break the mindset that if the student got an A it means they learned,” said Jody Greene, special adviser to the provost for educational equity and academic success at UCSC, where several faculty are experimenting with various forms of un-grading.

If a student already knew the material before taking the class and got that A, “they didn’t learn anything,” said Greene, who also is director of the university’s Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning. And “if the student came in and struggled to get a C-plus, they may have learned a lot.”

Critics respond that replacing traditional A to F grades with new forms of assessments is like a college-level version of participation trophies. They say taking away grades is coddling students and treating them like “snowflakes.”

Bradley Jackson doesn’t use those words. But Jackson, vice president of policy at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said that by getting of grades, “we get rid of crucial information that parents and students use to determine what they’re getting out of the expensive educations they’re paying for.”

A conversation about the “mediocre monopolists” of Big Tech, the weirdness of crypto, and the real lessons of science fiction.

Christopher Byrd:

I first spoke with Cory Doctorow two years ago. I was trying to get a handle on the sci-fi genre known as cyberpunk, most famously associated with the work of William Gibson. (It also served as the inspiration for a recent video game, Cyberpunk 2077, which had a famously tumultuous rollout.) Doctorow, who is often described as a post-cyberpunk writer, is both a theorist-practitioner of science fiction and a vigorous commentator on technology and policymaking; his answers to my questions were long, thoughtful, and full of examples. And so, after that first talk, I made plans to speak with him again, not for research purposes but as the basis for the interview below.

Doctorow, who is fifty-one, grew up in Toronto, the descendant of Jewish immigrants from what are now Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Before becoming a novelist, he co-founded a free-software company, served as a co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, and spent several years working for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Our first conversation, in late 2020, took place just after he had published the novel “Attack Surface,” part of his Little Brother series; it dramatizes the moral conflict of cybersecurity insiders who try to strike a balance between keeping their jobs and following their consciences.

The second time we spoke, Doctorow told me that he had eight books in production. “I’m the kind of person who deals with anxiety by working instead of by being unable to work,” he explained, when I asked how he was handling the ongoing pandemic. Among those eight books were “Chokepoint Capitalism,” co-written with the law professor Rebecca Giblin and published this past September, and “Red Team Blues,” a novel set in the world of cryptocurrency, which will come out in April. In the course of two interviews, Doctorow discussed the right and wrong lessons that one can learn from science fiction, the real dangers of artificial intelligence, and the comeuppance of Big Tech, among other topics. Those conversations have been edited for length and clarity.

Choice and competition have a positive effect on public-school performance.

Wall Street Journal:

Several red states appear poised to adopt expansive school-choice policies this year, prompting the teachers unions and their allies to claim that the sky is falling, especially in rural areas. Corey DeAngelis is right to call out the Chicken Littles for their scaremongering (“The Little Red Schoolhouse Could Do With a Little Competition,” op-ed, Dec. 17), pointing to copious evidence that choice and competition have a positive effect on public-school performance.

Arizona, a longtime leader in school choice, is the perfect example. It was the first state to enact tax-credit scholarships in 1997 and K-12 education savings accounts in 2011. More students in Arizona exercise school choice than in any other state. If school choice destroys rural public schools, as opponents claim, then Arizona should be ground zero.

The opposite is true. Arizona’s rural students have improved much more than rural students nationwide have over the past decade. From 2007 to 2019, Arizona rural students’ fourth and eighth grade reading and math scores on the National Assessment for Educational Progress increased by a combined 21 points, while scores in rural schools nationally decreased by two points. Postpandemic, Arizona’s rural students were still up a combined nine points while rural students nationally dropped 17 points from 2007.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

Academic Freedom and Critical Race Theory

Tom Knighton:

That’s apparently what happened to one North Carolina teacher, and he’s filed a lawsuit in an effort to fight back.

A North Carolina professor has claimed that he was fired from a prestigious high school for criticizing critical race theory in a Friday lawsuit, according to a report from Fox 17 WZTV.

In the suit, filed by legal the Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal advocacy group, Dr. David Phillips alleges that the Governor’s School of North Carolina (NCGS), a publicly funded summer program, fired him without explanation after he criticized the school’s embrace of “racially divisive ideology.”

Philips claims that NCGS adopted a social approach that views members of society “through the lens of characteristics like race, sex, and religion” and labels them as “perpetual oppressors or victims” based on group membership.

The professor, who taught at the school for eight years, held three optional programs over the summer where he critiqued critical race theory, as well as a lack of diversity in viewpoints in higher education. He also urged attendees to examine speech through a lens of “speech-act theory,” which asserts that the meaning of a linguistic expression can be explained in terms of rules governing their use in performing various speech acts, such as commanding and warning. 

The lawsuit states that Phillips was met with “open hostility” following the conclusion of each lecture by both students and staff. It also claims that audience members “attacked whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality and Christianity” when making comments and asking questions at the seminars. 

So much for academic freedom, right?

“here is a threat to democracy in plain sight, and now it’s “nothing to see here, move along.”

Arnold Kling:

Without any agency to act as a check against the FBI or other intelligence organizations, there is nothing to prevent mission creep. When the question of what constitutes a “threat” is left to the agencies themselves, they will gravitate toward the broadest possible answer. And when the question arises concerning what methods are legitimate to employ, they will decide on the minimal possible constraints.

Civics: Royal family ‘on mission to rewrite history’, claims archives campaign

Valentine Low:

In one instance, she said, an entire book about Prince George, Duke of Kent, was cancelled because of lack of access. George, the youngest brother of Edward VIII and George VI, died in an air crash in Scotland in 1942 while serving with the RAF.

The author, who wishes to remain anonymous to maintain good relations with Buckingham Palace, believes there has been a cover-up over the prince’s death. It has been suggested that he flouted wartime regulations to carry out his mission.

The author said he was denied access to the Royal Archives in Windsor and the prince’s file in the National Archives in Kent had “obviously been weeded”.

He added: “A family which relies on public support to retain its primacy in British social life has, I believe, a duty to act responsibly when it comes to breaking the law, especially in wartime. The actions of the Royal Archives in disallowing me access to Kent’s files amounts to censorship, nothing less.

Routine Writing Is About to Be Free

Virginia Postural:

While crashing the value of mediocrity, ChatGPT could increase the returns to excellence. (“Average is over,” as Tyler Cowen put it.) Think about what happened to graphic design. Many people used to make a living doing routine tasks, from laying out pages to selecting typefaces, that are now easily handled by software. Thanks to the graphic intelligence embedded in everyday tools, the standards for routine graphics, from websites and PowerPoint presentations to restaurant menus and wedding invitations, have increased.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no work for graphic designers with the conceptual chops to take on complicated tasks. Powerful tools make iteration and brainstorming easier, but cleverness is still a valued skill. When my friend Shikha Dalmia launched The Unpopulist on Substack, she asked me to look at some logos she’d come up with using easily available tools. They weren’t terrible, but neither were they distinctive. “Hire a professional,” I advised, and she got a real logo.1

As I write, there are 28 student papers awaiting my grading attention. I doubt any used ChatGPT, partly because mentioning it in class produced mostly blank stares. (The most tuned-in student, however, said he’s started using it in place of Google.) Already, we’re getting confirmed reports of cheating on exams given on Canvas, the web-based system used by many colleges for assignments and grading. By next term, every class will have to take account of ChatGPT, either explicitly incorporating it as a starting point or going back to handwritten tests and essays.

The end of Programming

Matt Walsh:

This shift is underscored by the fact that nobody actually understands how large AI models work. People are publishing research papers3,4,5 actually discovering new behaviors of existing large models, even though these systems have been “engineered” by humans. Large AI models are capable of doing things that they have not been explicitly trained to do, which should scare the living daylights out of Nick Bostrom2 and anyone else worried (rightfully) about an superintelligent AI running amok. We currently have no way, apart from empirical study, to determine the limits of current AI systems. As for future AI models that are orders of magnitude larger and more complex—good luck!

RIP: Kathleen Booth, the inventor of assembly language

Liam Proven:

Professor Kathleen Booth, one of the last of the early British computing pioneers, has died. She was 100.

Kathleen Hylda Valerie Britten was born in Worcestershire, England, on July 9, 1922. During the Second World War, she studied at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she got a BSc in mathematics in 1944. After graduating, she became a junior scientific officer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, a research organization in Farnborough. Two years later she moved to Birkbeck College, first as a research assistant, and later a lecturer and then research fellow.

She also worked at the British Rubber Producers’ Research Association (BRPRA), where she met and worked with mathematician and physicist Andrew Donald Booth, who later became her husband. After studying with X-ray crystallographer Professor J D Bernal – inventor of the Bernal Sphere – A D Booth was working out crystal structures using X-ray diffraction data, and finding the manual calculations very tedious; he built an analog computer to automate part of this.

Exam cheating at audit firms uncovered by UK accounting regulator

Michael O’Dwyer:

“The audit profession is a position of trust and there’s an irony where you’ve got auditors seeking to cheat on ethics exams and that sort of thing.”

US regulators fined EY a record $100mn in June after hundreds of staff shared answers or cheated on an ethics exam and the firm then failed to report the violations.

PwC’s Canadian business was fined in February for cheating by 1,200 staff on internal tests and KPMG was forced to pay a $450,000 penalty last year for similar misconduct.

KPMG’s US business was separately fined $50mn in 2019, partly for answer sharing by auditors, some of whom also manipulated computers so staff would pass even if they scored less than 25 per cent.

Rapson said responses to the FRC from the Big Four firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC — and their biggest mid-tier competitors BDO, Grant Thornton and Mazars had revealed examples of cheating at a “handful” of firms in the UK.

She added that the FRC was continuing its inquiries into the issues reported to it by the firms.

The biggest case of cheating in the UK to date involved hundreds of KPMG staff on training tests between at least 2018 and 2021, which has already resulted in a fine by the US audit regulator after the firm self-reported the misconduct. US regulators frequently fine overseas auditors responsible for checking the accounts of subsidiaries of American companies.

Civics: No one should be convicted for solving a problem the government refused to address

Tom Knighton:

What these two women were doing was using food to trap these feral cats, then taking them and getting them fixed so they wouldn’t keep creating more and more generations of feral cats.

It’s similar to what the nearby city of Montgomery did with great success.

And they weren’t hurting anyone by doing so, either. They’d been directed to set up their operation on public land, away from private property—which they did—and they started dealing with a problem in the city of Wetumpka.

Now, in fairness, I’ve been to Wetumpka a number of times over the last couple of years. I’ve got a friend who lives there and I visit semi-regularly. I never noticed an excess of stray cats, but that only means there were few in the area I happened to be.

So the question you may have is just what crime was committed, and that’s a fair question.

To be honest, I’m not really sure, either. If you read the story, you see that the trespassing charge deals with public land, which doesn’t sound like trespassing in that case; claims of interfering with the arrest of one woman which has body cam footage showing the one supposedly interfering was sitting in the car until she was physically removed of it.

The Overlooked Upsides of Algorithms in the Workplace

Jennifer Conrad:

The question to ask if you’re introducing a hiring algorithm is whether it is outperforming the human processes—not if it’s perfect. And when there are biases, what are the sources, and can they be corrected, for example, by adding more training data? How much can we debias as humans versus how much can we improve the different systems?

A vast majority of large companies today are using some form of automated resume screening. It’s important for agencies like the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Labor Department to look at the claims versus the results. There hasn’t been enough nuanced conversation about the sources of the risks and whether they can be corrected.

Gary Gensler

Shahid Nadeem, Erick Peinert and Matt Stoller

How Are Cryptocurrencies Different from Currencies or Traditional Securities?

Most currencies are managed by a central bank to ensure that they serve as a stable means of exchange. Without a central bank to manage them and ensure a stable value, cryptocurrencies do not serve as a meaningful store of value like the U.S. dollar does. In addition, with an influx of speculative investors over the past 10 years, the price of individual cryptocurrencies can skyrocket or decline in value overnight, making them nearly useless as a means of exchange, which is the traditional function of a currency. This means that despite early claims that cryptocurrencies would serve as functional currency or a means of payment, almost all crypto assets are instead used as a means of speculative investment — in other words, largely unlicensed securities.

Absolute Immunity Puts Prosecutors Above the Law

Billy Binion:

When a storm flooded Baton Rouge in 2016, Priscilla Lefebure took shelter with her cousin and her cousin’s husband, Barrett Boeker, an assistant warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. During her stay at her cousin’s house on the prison grounds, Lefebure later reported, Boeker raped her twice—first in front of a mirror so she would have to watch, and again days later with a foreign object.

Lefebure’s allegations led to a yearslong court battle—not against her accused rapist but against District Attorney Samuel C. D’Aquilla, who seemed determined to make sure that Boeker was never indicted. As the chief prosecutor for West Feliciana Parish, which includes Angola, D’Aquilla sabotaged the case before it began.

When a grand jury considered Lefebure’s charges, D’Aquilla declined to present the results of a medical exam that found bruises, redness, and irritation on Lefebure’s legs, arms, and cervix. Instead, he offered a police report with his own handwritten notes, which aimed to highlight discrepancies in her story. D’Aquilla opted not to call as witnesses the two investigators on the case, the nurse who took Lefebure’s rape kit, or the coroner who stored it. And he refused to meet or speak with Lefebure at all, telling local news outlets he was “uncomfortable” doing so.

The lawyer that Boeker hired to represent him was a cousin of the district attorney, Cy Jerome D’Aquila (who spells his name slightly differently). Boeker did not need his services very long, since the grand jury predictably declined to indict him.

Higher Education: Rising Production Cost – and Rising Resentment

Bruce A. Kimball and Sarah M. Iler

Why then did student debt rise to about $1.6 trillion? Different reasons apply to the various kinds of borrowers and we estimate that about two-thirds of the debt is owed by graduate students (including those in medical, law or business school) and by students who attended often-predatory, for-profit colleges and universities. Our focus is on undergraduates at non-profit colleges. A major reason for the burdensome debt of undergraduates at both public and private nonprofit colleges is neither the rising list price nor the steady net price. Rather, their ancillary expenses — food, housing, travel, technology, books, clothing, recreation and so forth — have risen with the cost of living and, since 1980, grown faster than the wages and salaries of their families. This growing shortfall over the past four decades, combined with the declining proportion of production cost paid by government subsidies, forced undergraduates at non-profit colleges to borrow more, we maintain.

While undergraduates’ net price of tuition plateaued even as their debt ballooned in recent decades, the proportion of revenue that colleges actually received from tuition increases (their net tuition revenue) declined. Through the 1960s, we explain, almost all the grant aid awarded to students comprised scholarships and fellowships funded by colleges’ revenue from gifts, grants, or endowments. Colleges’ tuition revenue virtually equaled their listed tuition through the 1960s.

Related Stories

Then, during the stagflation of the 1970s, a few colleges began to discount tuition — cut their list price — in order to attract specific students. Subsequently, tuition discounting accelerated, particularly at private colleges and universities, as they competed to attract the best students, diversify the student body or simply fill their seats. Net tuition revenue therefore diverged from listed tuition.

Colleges are generally reluctant to divulge how much they discount, and less than a quarter of the private non-profits report the amount, while discounting at public institutions is murky and little studied. Non-reporters obscure their discounts by folding them into “institutional grant aid,” which is reported in many datasets. By 2009, this grant aid (including scholarships and discounts) covered about 55 percent of the average list price at private, four-year colleges, which do most of the discounting and compose more than half of all four-year colleges and universities. The great majority of private colleges, lacking huge endowments and current gifts, realized diminishing returns from raising tuition because they had to increase their discounts at the same time. Therefore, the proportion of net tuition revenue available to pay their production cost decreased.

Analyzing production cost across higher education begins by distinguishing between aggregate cost and per-student cost. Growth in aggregate cost is usually salutary for the nation. Educating more citizens at a higher level fosters social mobility and improves decision-making in a democratic society, as well as generating more wealth for society by increasing people’s intellectual capital and making them more productive. However, if aggregate cost grows faster than the economy, then higher education is consuming an increasing fraction of the national income. This trend, called “cost escalation,” can become a serious problem, as with health care today.

Converting my PhD thesis into HTML

Damien Desfontaines:

Finishing a PhD is a weird emotional experience. All the hard work, the joys, the pains, the pulled hairs, everything gets condensed into a scary-looking PDF and then you’re just… done? What? This makes no sense whatsoever. Or rather, this makes sense on paper, but then you feel this weird sense of grief somehow. And you’re not quite at the acceptance stage yet. So instead, you decide to deal with those feelings in a perfectly normal and healthy way, and you embark on a journey to compile said thesis into a series of HTML pages.

HTML, by the way, is a much better way of disseminating information than PDF. Pretty much all of recent scientific research is recorded in PDF files, for historical reasons that are largely irrelevant today. PDFs are difficult to browse, impossible to read on a phone, uncomfortable to read on a tablet, hostile to screen readers, impractical to search engines, and the list goes on. It’s just a terrible format, unless you’re trying to print things on paper. Printing things is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but that’s really not the main use case we should be optimizing for.

Anyway. I converted my thesis to HTML and this is my story. A story of false hopes, perseverance, pain, and futility. I hope this can be useful to other people, as a guide on how to do this for your own thesis or large & complex LaTeX documents, or as an encouragement to do something better with your time instead.

Educator brags about indoctrinating kids, then complains about ‘right-wing’ reporting on it

Dave Huber:

A Chicago-area high school “literacy coach” recently recorded a video of herself in which she admits to indoctrinating the students in her charge.

Fox News reports Crete-Monee High’s Heather Marie Godbout (pictured), a member of the school’s Equity Team, also rips “right-wing conspiracy theorist nut jobs” in her video and notes she is opposed to traditional grading policies — because grades get “conflated with other things that aren’t actually learning, like effort or ‘work ethic,’ whatever that means.”

“All you right wing conspiracy theory nut jobs who seem to think the teachers are out here just indoctrinating children into some sort of woke agenda that you can’t actually define, I’m just going to come clean,” Godbout says. “I am, in fact, indoctrinating your children.”

Cornell makes letter grades optional. Some students say that’s not enough.

Eduardo Neret:

Students at Cornell University are split over calls for “universal pass equitable grading,” which would ensure all students would pass their courses and receive credit regardless of one’s final grade. 

The Cornell Daily Sun, the Cornell student newspaper, reported that some students petitioned the school to implement the mandatory pass system because of the coronavirus pandemic. Others petitioned to keep the option to choose between letter grades or pass/fail. 

The authors of the universal pass grading petition argued that if Cornell is truly going to commit to “nondiscrimination,” the school must move to the universal pass system.

“As COVID-19 spreads through our communities, we call on the Cornell administration to prioritize educational equity, student health, and community wellbeing by adopting a Universal Pass (UP) system for Spring 2020,” the petition reads.“It is vital for us to demonstrate how graded or pass/fail online courses burden those of us who are uniquely and severely affected by these circumstances, as well as the student body as a collective.”

The Taliban banned girls from attending elementary school,

Esmatullah Kohsar and Sune Engel Rasmussen:

In a gathering in Kabul with private-school directors, clerics and community representatives, Taliban officials on Wednesday also barred female staff, including teachers, from working in schools, closing off one of the few professions that had remained open to Afghan women under the new government, according to school principals who attended the meeting. They also said adult women could no longer visit mosques or attend religious seminaries.

Ghulam Sarwar Haidari, a shopkeeper in Kabul, said his daughter Mahbooba was sent home when she arrived at the tutoring center where she was attending classes in preparation for the coming semester in fifth grade. Mahbooba had hoped to study medicine and return to their home village in Ghazni province, where there are no female doctors.

“My daughter has locked herself in a room since this morning and won’t stop crying,” Mr. Haidari said. “All her hopes are broken. We are tired to death of this situation, and only wonder when it will be over.”

$pending more for less: Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction edition

Institute for reforming government


3. Department of Public Instruction:
Since 2017, DPI has seen its biennial budget increase by over $2 billion, from $14.2 billion to $16.3 billion. This is despite serving 18,500 fewer students and overseeing disastrous drops in math scores and college enrollment beyond pandemic averages.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

2023 Madison School Board election, Christine Gomez-Schmidt bows out

Scott Girard:

In her message to constituents, Gomez Schmidt listed a series of district accomplishments in her three years on the board, including navigating the pandemic, adopting new K-5 reading curriculums, investing in the “science of reading” and seeing the community approve a record referendum.

“I am grateful that this experience has challenged me in how I think about achievement, disparities, privilege, and opportunity,” she wrote, coming one day after a vote on standalone honors classes. “My sincere hope is that we can collectively find ways to continue to have necessary and challenging discussions with respect for one another. Our children deserve to see us model how to collaborate and build consensus to solve complex problems.”

Thanking her supporters for the opportunity to serve in the role, Gomez Schmidt also looked forward, writing that the district “must decide what we expect from, and for, our public schools,” which face “significant” challenges.

Declining enrollment, disparities in achievement, staff recruitment and retention, needed investment in our aging facilities, and a clear, multi-year strategic plan are a few of these,” she wrote. “Yet we have a Governor dedicated to education, incredibly strong support for public schools in Madison and Fitchburg, and a developing vision for the future.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

Notes on the teacher school district climate: Madison edition

Scott Girard:

“We need impactful change in our handbook before May 15 or the mass exodus of staff will continue,” she said. “It’ll become impossible to staff our schools with qualified teachers and the staff that our students deserve.”

MMSD spokesperson Tim LeMonds wrote in a statement Tuesday that the district “has hired more teacher staff this year than ever before, and now employs its largest teacher workforce in many years.”

“We value the voices of all MMSD staff. Our teachers who participated in public comment at last night’s Board meeting spoke from the heart, and their words were powerful,” LeMonds wrote. “The district’s recruitment strategy continues to make progress in addressing the nationwide teacher shortage impacting our school district.”

He said the 100 vacancies “only represent approximately 3.8% of our roughly 2,600 teaching positions and 1.7% of our overall staff.”

LeMonds also alluded to the ongoing financial challenges school districts face, calling the challenges ahead “serious” after a state budget that did not raise revenue limits for school districts each of the past two years.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

The Stanford Guide to Acceptable Words: Behold the school’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative.

Wall Street Journal:

Call yourself an “American”? Please don’t. Better to say “U.S. citizen,” per the bias hunters, lest you slight the rest of the Americas. “Immigrant” is also out, with “person who has immigrated” as the approved alternative. It’s the iron law of academic writing: Why use one word when four will do?

You can’t “master” your subject at Stanford any longer; in case you hadn’t heard, the school instructs that “historically, masters enslaved people.” And don’t dare design a “blind study,” which “unintentionally perpetuates that disability is somehow abnormal or negative, furthering an ableist culture.” Blind studies are good and useful, but never mind; “masked study” is to be preferred. Follow the science. 

“Gangbusters” is banned because the index says it “invokes the notion of police action against ‘gangs’ in a positive light, which may have racial undertones.” Not to beat a dead horse (a phrase that the index says “normalizes violence against animals”), but you used to have to get a graduate degree in the humanities to write something that stupid.

Deeper dive.

An obituary for Cazenovia College, my hometown school

Zachary Marshall:

Cazenovia College, a small, picturesque school outside of Syracuse, New York, is shutting down after nearly 200 years in operation due to severe financial circumstances.

I grew up in the Village of Cazenovia and my first college teaching position was at Cazenovia College. The school’s approaching closure at the end of the spring 2023 semester is a huge loss for the local community.

For the rest of the country, Cazenovia College exemplifies trends and data points that have plagued academia since COVID-19. At the time of the closure announcement in December, the College’s enrollment was down 40% from its peak after it spent large sums on “technology and campus safety measures.” Between 2020 and 2022, American colleges and universities experienced a 3.5% total decline in enrollment, largely driven by the pandemic.

Founded in 1824 as a Methodist seminary, Cazenovia College subsequently evolved into a non-sectarian junior and women’s college before becoming a co-educational bachelor’s-degree-granting institution in 1988. The college also boasts Stanford University founder Leland Stanford as an alumnus, local news outlet Syracuse.com recently reminded its readers.

The Full Inventory of Science, Technology, Mathematics, and Medicine Persons from “Human Accomplishment”

Charles Murray:

In Data Tools #3, I presented the full inventory of events in science, technology, mathematics, and medicine (STMM) from 800 BCE to 1950 that were assembled for my book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950 (HarperCollins, 2003). Data Tools #4 presents the full inventory of persons who have been associated with STMM achievements.

In Human Accomplishment, I limited my presentation of notable STMM persons to the 1,371 who qualified as “significant.” STMM Persons contains data on 4,596 persons. It includes all the persons who qualified as “significant” plus all others who met one of two criteria:

Data Biases, Cognitive Biases

David Thiel:

This data bias is compounded by cognitive bias: the recency illusion, i.e. the perception that recently noticed things are more prevalent. For someone with no tendency to spend time searching hashtags of Chinese cities (or in Chinese-language Twitter in general), the volume of spam will seem sudden and anomalous, and quite possibly suspicious. And because gathering and analyzing data takes time, quickly drawn conclusions will often be based on small amounts of poor quality data.

As such, the only way to truly compare current with historical activity is to consume it over long timeframes in realtime before it has been acted upon, with the terms defined ahead of time — which was not the case in any of the analyses of Chinese spamming activity that we are aware of. In retrospective research, historical Twitter data generally becomes “cleaner” — some amount of spam and inauthentic behavior will have been removed — as you go further back, but this is necessarily a less accurate representation of what actually occurred on the platform. Put simply:

In a retrospective sample of moderated social media platform, ToS-violating or inauthentic content tends to appear most prevalent in the immediate past. We can call this Content Moderation Survivor Bias.

To illustrate this effect as best we can with data gathered after the fact, let’s take a look at tweets containing the names of major Chinese cities.

“A good portion of this year was spent working on a book on the relationship between wokeness and civil rights law”

Richard Hanania:

That’s a lot of material. When I started writing for a public consumption, I was 35. That means I’d spent two decades thinking about American culture and politics, so I was brimming with insights. Inevitably, I’ve said many of the things I wanted to say, and continuing to write on the topic will be unlikely to produce material anywhere as good. Now is a good time to branch out a bit. 

Finally, for reasons I’ll expand on below, I’m becoming more alienated from conservatives, and therefore less interested in trying to promote total victory for one side in the culture war. The continuing and growing power of the anti-vaxx movement is perhaps the clearest demonstration that something has gone horrifyingly wrong on the Right. And yes, I know the smarter among them say they’re just “anti-mandate,” but the culture is clearly anti-vaxx, with Trump getting booed at rallies for telling his old and overweight fans to do the responsible thing and conservative influencers proudly talking about how they avoided the jab and making fun of those that didn’t.

Republicans may be generally preferable, but when the next great technological breakthrough comes, I’m confident that if it turns into a salient political issue it’ll be the Right that wants to ban it. On the vaccine issue specifically, the odds of us having another Operation Warp Speed if a Republican is in office when the next pandemic hits are low. There’s no way to justify this – every other right-wing scam, up to and including even (maybe) election denial, could at least theoretically be defended as serving some greater good. But this one is simply a tragedy, and reveals that when you build a movement that caters to low IQ and paranoid people you can’t hope to control the results. If the next pandemic is even worse than covid, those who’ve promoted anti-vaxx could be responsible for millions of lives lost. And of course public health is evil and deserves all the hate it gets and much more, but the issue of pandemics is too serious to answer their failures with mindless demagoguery.

Losing 20,000 k-12 students in the taxpayer supported Milwaukee schools

Alan Borsuk:

And 20,000 students lost? That’s a sea change.

A good way to get a handle on the decline is to ask: Where did all the kids go?

Here are two answers:

Fewer kids. A smaller but important change is that the universe of kids in Milwaukee is shrinking. Fourteen years ago, the number of children getting publicly funded education was 115,522. That includes conventional schools, as well as partnership schools, charter schools and more. That number rose to between 119,000 and 121,000 in four school years, beginning in September 2012. Then it began declining. It was 114,184 in fall 2020; it was 111,333 in fall 2021; and it was 109,934 in fall 2022, a decline of almost 10% since a peak of 120,895 eight years ago, according to data I’ve been tracking for several years.

The Latin School of Chicago in Shambles

Florian Sohnke:

Depravity, “rules for thee and not for me” and bullying culture appear systemic at Chicago’s most elite private school

What do Doug Sohn (Hot Doug’s), Carol Fox Flanigan (Co-Founder of the Lyric Opera of Chicago), William Wrigley (creator of the famed gum company), Lisa Madigan (Former Illinois Attorney General), Donny and Teddi Pritzker (children of current Governor J.B. Pritzker) all have in common? If you said they all attended the prestigious Latin School of Chicago, you would be correct!

Likely none of these famed alumni, with the exception of the Pritzker children who most recently attended the school, have any sense of what has become of their beloved alma mater.

Why even today, the Latin School of Chicago ranks as the third best high school in Illinois out of 142 private schools and nationally, number 141 out of 4,323 private high schools and only ranks below that of the famed University of Chicago Laboratory School as the top independent school in the Chicagoland region, according to Niche.com.

In short, Latin arguably remains the most elite school in the city of Chicago.

Yet nine months ago, 15-year old Nate Bronstein ended his life as a result of cruel and vicious cyberbullying from numerous classmates while attending the Latin School of Chicago. The child-perpetrators, a number of which were privileged children of families named in a lengthy lawsuit filed by the Bronstein family, allegedly have officially faced no consequences. And the former Latin School of Chicago Board Chairman David Koo continues to serve as the Board of Trustees Chair for the Shedd Aquarium. It remains unclear as to what David Koo’s role is in this story, but this will come out in the lawsuit.

Beyond the allegations surrounding Mr. Koo and other community members, not only have the kids involved in the matter not faced any consequences which anyone Chicago Contrarian spoke to is aware of, a “narrative” in the community has developed portraying Nate as troubled teen who struggled to form friendships at his “new school,” was prone to emotional outbursts and generally, “did not fit in” with the Latin culture. Of course all of these comments could not be further from the truth. By all accounts, and Chicago Contrarian has spoken with many parents close to the story, Nate presented as a typical teen with plenty of friends.

Madison School Board: “voted 4-3 to keep stand-alone honors classes for the time being”

Olivia Herken:

Board members Gomez Schmidt, Ali Muldrow, Laura Simkin and Nicki Vander Meulen voted against eliminating stand-alone honors classes. Board members Nichelle Nichols, Maia Pearson and Savion Castro voted in favor of eliminating them.

Stand-alone honors classes are meant to be more academically challenging. Students can also earn honors credit in some general classes by excelling in them.

“Rigor should not be synonymous with honors,” Pearson said. “Rigor and high expectations should exist in all of our classes and should be accessible to all of our children.”

Parents told the board they felt there was little transparency in the district’s proposal. One parent said it felt like the decision had already been made.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

How the Brain Distinguishes Memories From Perceptions

Kristina Armitage

“It started to raise the question of whether a memory representation is actually different from a perceptual representation at all,” said Sam Ling, an associate professor of neuroscience and director of the Visual Neuroscience Lab at Boston University. Could our memory of a beautiful forest glade, for example, be just a re-creation of the neural activity that previously enabled us to see it?

“The argument has swung from being this debate over whether there’s even any involvement of sensory cortices to saying ‘Oh, wait a minute, is there any difference?’” said Christopher Baker, an investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health who runs the learning and plasticity unit. “The pendulum has swung from one side to the other, but it’s swung too far.”

Even if there is a very strong neurological similarity between memories and experiences, we know that they can’t be exactly the same. “People don’t get confused between them,” said Serra Favila, a postdoctoral scientist at Columbia University and the lead author of a recent Nature Communications study. Her team’s work has identified at least one of the ways in which memories and perceptions of images are assembled differently at the neurological level.

McGraw Hill’s S3 buckets exposed 100,000 students’ grades and personal info

Jessica Lyons Hardcastle:

Misconfigured Amazon Web Services S3 buckets belonging to McGraw Hill exposed more than 100,000 students’ information as well as the education publishing giant’s own source code and digital keys, according to security researchers.

The research team at vpnMentor said they discovered the open S3 buckets on June 12, and contacted McGraw Hill a day later. One production bucket contained more than 47 million files and 12TB of data, and a second non-production bucket held more than 69 million files and 10TB of data, we’re told.

“In the limited sample we researched, we could see that the amount of records varied on each file from ten to tens of thousands students per file,” the researchers said. “Due to the amount of files exposed and because we only review a small sample following ethical rules, the actual total number of affected students could be far higher than our estimate.”

Overall, the buckets contained more than 22 TB of data and over 117 million files. It included students’ names, email addresses, performance reports and grades as well as teachers’ syllabi and course reading materials for US and Canadian students and schools such as Johns Hopkins University, University of California-Los Angeles, University of Toronto and University of Michigan.

Anthropology in Ruins

Elizabeth Weiss:

I made a special effort to attend sessions each day, looking specifically for sessions that dealt with human remains. However, if I had thought that there may be some interesting physical or archaeological sessions to attend, I was quickly disabused of that notion.

There were many red flags indicating that this conference would have a greater emphasis on the political trends of anti-colonialism, indigenous knowledge, and atonement for past behavior. For instance, there were nearly eighty sessions that used the keyword “decolonization” and over seventy sessions that used the term “white supremacy” (none of these were ethnographic studies on actual white supremacist groups, such as the Aryan Brotherhood). Session titles included:

• “Pronouns, Bottoms, Cat-Ears And Cuerpes, Girl: For An Intersectional Trans Linguistic Anthropology”

• “Unsettling Whiteness: Race And Religion In The United States”

• “On Indigenous People’s Terms: Unsettling Landscapes Through Remapping Practices”

• “Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Critical Genealogies and Decolonizing Futures”

At registration, you could ask for a “comfort ribbon” to indicate whether you preferred 1) handshakes, 2) elbow bumps, or 3) six feet of distance between you and others. The list of “the AAA Principles of Professional Responsibility,” which was prominently posted at entrances, starts with the line: “Do No Harm.” There were also signs stating that attendees shouldn’t use “scented personal care products” to ensure that those with “chemical sensitivities” could attend the conference in comfort.

Civics: A terrific new account of America’s social and political turmoil during the 1910s and ’20s provides some much-needed perspective on the problems afflicting the country today.

Michael J. Totten

Wilson’s presidential campaign pledged to keep the country out of the meat-grinding war across the Atlantic, and he kept that promise for nearly three years until Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917. But American Midnight isn’t about the First World War. It’s about what happened at home during and after it. The declaration of war in the House of Representatives passed by 373 votes to 50, and while most Americans approved of the decision, there were noisy pockets of dissent, as there are whenever democracies fight wars. Wilson feared that even the mildest bleats of complaint would undermine the morale necessary to sustaining the war effort. The upshot was the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which had almost nothing to do with actual espionage. Instead, it declared any kind of anti-war activity to be criminal, and defined “opposition” in ways that few modern critics of pacifists and isolationists would even recognize.

Anyone who “shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation of the military or naval forces of the United States” was subject to arrest. It would be a mistake to assume that the Wilson administration was only going after the purveyors of what we now call “fake news,” or to get hung up on the words “with intent to interfere.” Ordinary people were rounded up and prosecuted who had no intention of interfering with anyone or anything, and those convicted faced up to 20 years in prison—twice as long as the sentence Vladimir Putin metes out to his Russian subjects for similar offenses today.

A Texas man was jailed for saying, “I wish Wilson was in hell.” Andreas Latzko’s novel Men in War was banned for describing the war as a “wholesale cripple-and-corpse factory.” Police officers arrested playwright Eugene O’Neill at gunpoint on Cape Cod because somebody saw sunlight reflecting off his typewriter and thought he was sending signals to German ships. Filmmaker Robert Goldstein was arrested for co-writing and producing a silent film called The Spirit of ’76about the American Revolution. Regardless of what happened in 1776, the presiding judge said, “we are engaged in a war in which Great Britain is an ally of the United States,” and this was not the time for “sowing dissension among our people” or “creating animosity … between us and our allies.” Goldstein was handed 10 years in prison.

The Twitter Files and the Future of the Democratic Party With Silicon Valley’s Congressman

Bari Weiss:

Maybe most unusual of all, Khanna’s policies on Big Tech are not exactly the ones you’d imagine coming from the congressman whose neighbors are the creators of the next Googles and Facebooks. Not only does he think Big Tech needs to be broken up, he was also one of the only Democrats to diverge from his party’s censorious impulses when he reached out directly to Twitter in October 2020 to criticize its decision to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story in the runup to the election, as we reported in the Twitter Files story.

In an era where the Democratic Party and Big Tech often seem to march in lockstep, Khanna says: Maybe we should be skeptical of this kind of corporate power. And, by the way, isn’t that the core of what the Democratic Party is supposed to be about? And if not, when did that change and why?

We talk about all of that and more in today’s episode of Honestly.

I highly recommend listening to the entire conversation, but below, edited for length and clarity, are some of the key points.

Virus Veracity: The virus would become endemic. All would be exposed.Virus Veracity:

Holman Jenkins:

More generally, he and other officials seemed eager to abet the censorious segment of the public to berate others about masks, vaccinations and lockdowns beyond their merits.

At times he also seemed to wave off responsibility for the downside of his advice aimed at reducing absolutely the number of cases, saying it was somebody else’s job to consider the trade-offs in lost employment, depression, missed schooling, suicide.

And not for Dr. Fauci or any other official was the advice advertised from day one on the CDC website (until it mysteriously disappeared): “In the coming months, most of the U.S. population will be exposed to this virus.” At worst, he and others thought it wouldn’t be good for their personal brands to be seen delivering this unwelcome but realistic news to the American people.

In Mr. Brennan’s suggestion Dr. Fauci did his best, a fair conclusion from a grown-up perspective if we understand doing his best to mean making judicious decisions about when to mislead.

Consistently misunderstood, especially by the relentless Trump critic Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, officials were under a de facto mandate to avoid panic.

The mayor of New York, the governor of California, Dr. Fauci and CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier all declared that Covid was nothing to worry about, by which they really meant don’t worry yet. Their quotes now seem indefensibly glib. But under the textbook plan of “flatten the curve” the goal was to slow the spread only as needed to ease the burden on hospitals. Virtually any politician who paid attention to briefings understood job one to be playing down the new virus until it was time to institute specific measures.

The US Test Mess

Richard Phelps:

Now, consider what has transpired over the past twenty years in the USA. We were headed in the direction of other countries’ testing system structures at the turn of the millennium, with state-led consequential achievement tests for students administered only every few grade levels.[1] Plus, we benefitted from two competing college admission tests, whose scores could be submitted for consideration simultaneously to thousands of universities worldwide. [2]

Then came three disruptions, each of which, I would argue, served to undermine the utility of US educational testing.

First came passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act (2001–2002), which imposed a federal mandate on all public schools (including charters). The NCLB insistence on annual administrations of tests across seven grade levels virtually guaranteed lax security: teachers administer tests in their own classrooms to their own students and principals manage the distribution and collection of test materials in their own schools. Then, we judge schools and teachers based on those NCLB test scores they themselves proctor.

Challenging the Academic Publisher Oligopoly

Richard Phelps:

Here’s a business plan: Sell a product that …

some of the world’s most highly educated scholars, working at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions, invest thousands of hours to create;

governments and foundations subsidize, with anywhere from hundreds to tens of millions of dollars in both direct payments and in-kind services;

others volunteer to review and edit, thus controlling product quality for no pay;

is given to you for free, to legally own and copyright, despite your having invested nothing;

you then sell to your volunteers’ colleagues and employers at a monopoly price.

The academic journal industry comprises hundreds of publishers, but just five control over half of the market: Reed-Elsevier (Netherlands), SAGE (US), Springer (Germany), Taylor & Francis (UK), and Wiley-Blackwell (UK).

For decades, academic publishers at least bore the considerable expense of compiling, printing, marketing, and mailing physical copies of journals. With digitalization, however, even that burden has diminished. Soon, academic publishing may approach a state of pure “economic rent”—selling a close-to-cost-free (for them) product that customers want and can buy nowhere else.

K-12 Cost Disease and its consequences