K-12 tax & spending climate: depopulation edition

Americans Are Losing Faith in College Education, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds (Wisconsin continues to grow costs)

Douglas Belkin

A majority of Americans don’t think a college degree is worth the cost, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, a new low in confidence in what has long been a hallmark of the American dream.  

The survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, found that 56% of Americans think earning a four-year degree is a bad bet compared with 42% who retain faith in the credential.

“The National Science Foundation just announced it was “building a set of use cases” to enable ChatGPT to “further automate” the propaganda mechanism”

Matt Taibbi:

If the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to fit in a word like “hoax,” but also probably not against any one law, either. New language would have to be invented just to define the wrongdoing, which not only meant whatever this was would likely go unpunished, but that it could be years before the public was ready to talk about it.

Around that same time, writer Jacob Siegel — a former army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest, The Scroll — was beginning the job of putting key concepts on paper. As far back as 2019, he sketched out the core ideas for a sprawling, illuminating 13,000-word piece that just came out this week. Called “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” Siegel’s Tablet article is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.

“We all lose from the global war on farmers”

Thomas Fazi:

smaller, often family-owned farms would be forced to sell or shutter. Indeed, according to a heavily redacted European Commission document, this is precisely the strategy’s goal: “extensifying agriculture, notably through buying out or terminating farms, with the aim of reducing livestock”; this would “first be on a voluntary basis, but mandatory buyout is not excluded if necessary”.


It is no surprise, then, that the plans sparked massive protests by farmers, who see it as a direct attack on their livelihoods, or that the BBB’s slogan — “No Farms, No Food” — clearly resonated with voters. But aside from concerns about the impact of the measure on the country’s food security, and on a centuries-old rural way of life integral to Dutch national identity, the rationale behind this drastic measure is also questionable. Agriculture currently accounts for almost half of the country’s output of carbon dioxide, yet the Netherlands is responsible for less than 0.4% of the world’s emissions. No wonder many Dutch fail to see how such negligible returns justify the complete overhaul of the country’s farming sector, which is already considered one of the most sustainable in the world: over the past two decades, water dependence for key crops has been reduced by as much as 90%, and the use of chemical pesticides in greenhouses has been almost completely eliminated.

Farmers also point out that the consequences of the nitrogen cut would extend well beyond the Netherlands. The country, after all, is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, just behind the United States — in other words, the plan would cause food exports to collapse at a time when the world is already facing a food and resource shortage. We already know what this might look like. A similar ban on nitrogen fertiliser was conducted in Sri Lanka last year, with disastrous consequences: it caused an artificial food shortage that plunged nearly two million Sri Lankans into poverty, leading to an uprising that toppled the government.

TikTok bills could dangerously expand national security state (Sponsored by Mark Warner and Tammy Baldwin, among others)

Marcus Stanley:

TikTok has been all the rage in Washington lately. Not for the reasons which lead some 150 million Americans to use it, but because of the rush by politicians to try to ban the app, which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. 

Two major bills that would impose sweeping restrictions on Chinese-owned software are working their way through the House (HR 1153) and Senate (S 686), while TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was recently brought before the House Commerce Committee for hostile questioning. The executive branch is also seeking to force ByteDance to sell the app to an American owner, against Chinese opposition.

Those raising the alarm about Chinese ownership of TikTok cite invasive surveillance practices, privacy violations created by excessive collection and exploitation of user data, addictive design features, and harmful content. But all of these disturbing characteristics are also ubiquitous features of American-owned big tech apps ranging from Google to Facebook to Instagram, and were in many ways pioneered by American Silicon Valley companies.

In the case of TikTok, the claim is that Chinese ownership makes these problems particularly harmful because Chinese intelligence services can access user data and technologies owned by Chinese companies such as ByteDance. Some also go further by claiming that TikTok could be used to compromise the security of devices on which it is installed.

Ivy League Prices Are Pushing $90,000 a Year

Francesca Maglione:

US college costs just keep climbing. And the increase is pushing the annual price for the upcoming academic year at Ivy League schools toward yet another hold-on-to-your-mortarboard mark: $90,000.

Full costs at elite private colleges already stretch well into the $80,000s, or upward of $320,000 for four years. At places like Brown University, the cost of attendance (tuition, room, board and fees) is almost $85,000, well above what the typical US household earns. Financial aid, in the form of grants, scholarships, loans and work-study programs, closes the gap for many.

But as the high-school class of 2023 anxiously awaits admissions decisions in coming weeks, even those wealthy enough to pay full freight are contending with sticker shock. Tuition has been rising so briskly for so long that the value proposition of college can start getting murky, said Beth Akers, an economist who focuses on higher education.

“At some point, that math stops working out,” said Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “We get to a place where these degrees are just no longer worth it.”

Chicago K-12 Tax, Spending & Pension Practices

Nader Issa:

First revealed in Lightfoot’s budget proposal last fall for the current year, this year’s $175 million payment from CPS to the city was approved by the Board of Education at its monthly meeting Wednesday — but was the subject of intense scrutiny by board members who criticized City Hall.

The board passed with a 3-2 vote an amendment to the district’s agreement with the city that greatly increases CPS’ obligation from $100 million last year and $60 million in 2020 as payments to the underfunded pension ramp up — with additional significant increases expected over the next few years.

The payments in question cover the benefits of non-teaching CPS staff — who make up less than half of the district’s 40,000 employees — in the Municipal Employees’ Annuity and Benefit Fund. Those include cafeteria workers, bus aides, special education classroom assistants and other support staff. Teachers have a separate pension fund. The MEABF also covers elected officials, the Chicago Housing Authority and Public Building Commission, among others.

As of the end of 2020, about 56% of active MEABF participants — 17,469 of 31,327 — were CPS employees, district officials said Wednesday. Of the $266 million pricetag for those CPS workers’ benefits, $175 million is being passed on to the district.

Facial recognition firm Clearview has run nearly a million searches for US police, its founder has told the BBC

James Clayton & Ben Derico

CEO Hoan Ton-That also revealed Clearview now has 30bn images scraped from platforms such as Facebook, taken without users’ permissions.

The company has been repeatedly fined millions of dollars in Europe and Australia for breaches of privacy.

Critics argue that the police’s use of Clearview puts everyone into a “perpetual police line-up”.

“Whenever they have a photo of a suspect, they will compare it to your face,” says Matthew Guariglia from the Electronic Frontier Foundation says. “It’s far too invasive.”

The figure of a million searches comes from Clearview and has not been confirmed by police. But in a rare admission, Miami Police has confirmed to the BBC it uses this software for every type of crime.

Clearview’s system allows a law enforcement customer to upload a photo of a face and find matches in a database of billions of images it has collected.

With Pell grants soon available to incarcerated students, colleges look to expand in prisons

Emily Files:

Brittney Dixon has high hopes for her education.

“I want to get my master’s,” Dixon says. “Dreaming big. I want to get into psychology, be a therapist.”

The 29-year-old is incarcerated at Taycheedah, a state women’s prison in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

“Prison is a horrible experience, but because we’re in this predicament, it’s like maybe this is what people needed to go back to school,” Dixon says. “I know that I had every other excuse when I was out not to.”

Wisconsin prisons have historically focused education efforts on GED classes and vocational training — not college. But that’s starting to change.

The Diversity of Arabic scripts

British Library:

We recently had the pleasure of hosting a visit from Dr Borna Izadpanah, Lecturer in Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, together with his students, to look at some of the incredibly diverse materials in our collections. Here Borna highlights some of the items we looked at which not only provide a source of inspiration but also act as a brief history of the development of Arabic script typography.

LeBron James’ promise to Akron gets more ambitious: His I Promise School now includes housing, job training and health care

Justin Tinsley:

When LeBron James was in grade school, he wondered why the maps in his classrooms showed Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus, but not Akron. Now, 20 years into his NBA career, James is building a whole world in his hometown 40 minutes south of Cleveland, an audacious community revitalization project rooted in education while encompassing everything from housing and health care to job training and a laundry. 

James started with a tutoring and college scholarship program in 2011. That led to the ballyhooed opening of the I Promise School in 2018, a public school for third through eighth graders with an extensive support program funded by The LeBron James Family Foundation

Nearly a half-decade later, the school remains. But what James, his foundation and supporters across the city have come to understand is that success in the classroom is about so much more than the actual classroom.

32 states and the “parent bill of rights”

Jackie Valley:

So what’s driving all of this? Will Estrada, president of the Parental Rights Foundation, says the pandemic accelerated parents’ desire to have more say in children’s schooling, regardless of political inclinations.

“There’s varying degrees of what parents want as a response,” he says. “But I think the fact that you have such a broad range of parental rights legislation really speaks to the fact that the legislators and elected officials are trying to respond to the concerns.”

As of mid-March, proposed parental rights legislation has emerged in at least 32 states, up from 18 states in 2022, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In some states, lawmakers are considering two or more pieces of such legislation.

“the primary drivers are district focus on reading, management practices, and curriculum and instruction choices”

California Reading Report Card:

As in the 2019 Report Card, funding and share of high-need students had very little correlation with results. There are top performing districts with over 90% high-need enrollment, and low performing districts with less than 40%.

The clear message is that it is not the students themselves, or the level of resources, that drive student reading achievement – the primary drivers are district focus on reading, management practices, and curriculum and instruction choices. The top performing districts come in all types: urban, rural, and suburban, across 9 different counties, with high-need students levels ranging from 39% to 94%. Any district can succeed at teaching reading.

New this year is a break-down by percent of limited-proficiency English Learners (ELs). With ELs, districts are tasked with teaching both English and reading; short-comings in either will yield low results. Districts with higher shares of ELs may have lower results, but still out-perform many districts with a similar student mix by as much as 25 percentage points.

A very small number of districts (7 in total) bucked the pandemic-driven trend. Palo Alto Unified, one of 2019 lowest performers, improved by 9 percentage points, and was the state’s most improved district. Their Every Student Reads Initiative, started in 2021, appears to be having positive impact. Newark Unified improved by 5 percentage points.

How the Rankings Work

Districts are ranked by the percent of economically disadvantaged Hispanic/Latino (Latino) students who “meet or exceed” grade level for the CAASPP 3rd grade ELA test in 2022. For measuring improvement, we compared to the same results for 2019.

More, here.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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 MS (Madison) grading scale converts all failing students to a grade of D”

David Blaska:

One of the candidates will help choose a new superintendent. Pray God it is not another terminally Woke clone of Jennifer Cheatham!Which it will be if Feltham is elected. She’s the one who says “Our schools are products of white supremacy.” Of course, she is endorsed by the teachers union and the Defund the Cops Capital Times.

Voters should dive into results of the school district’s safety and student wellness survey. Of the respondents, 48% were students, 37% parents, and 19% faculty or staff. Many had only praise for Madison’s 52 public schools. Some read like this:

“Our experiences to date at Nuestro Mundo and Sennett have been outstanding. Thank you!”

But these are more representative:

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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?

NYC to mandate reading curriculum for elementary schools and high school algebra, sources say

Alex Zimmerman:

New York City education officials plan to take a stronger hand in what curriculums educators can use in their classrooms, a move that could represent a major shift in how the nation’s largest school system approaches teaching and learning, Chalkbeat has learned.

The education department recently began laying the groundwork for superintendents to choose from three reading programs to use across their districts. It is also launching a standardized algebra program in many high schools. The plans have not been announced publicly, but were confirmed by four education department employees familiar with the city’s literacy efforts and multiple school leaders.

Principals historically have enjoyed enormous leeway to select curriculums. Proponents argue this allows schools to stay nimble and select materials appropriate to their specific student populations. But some experts, and even the city’s own schools chancellors, have argued that the approach can lead to a tangle of instructional practices that can vary widely in quality from classroom to classroom.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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?

“She’d taken the academic test and failed three times”

Lolita Baldor:

Holiday is an early beneficiary of the new program, which gives lower-performing recruits up to 90 days of academic or fitness instruction to help them meet military standards. In place for only eight months, it is already making a significant difference for both the Army and those who want to serve in it.

So far, 5,400 soldiers have made it through the prep course since it started in August at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. That’s an important boost since the Army fell dramatically short of its recruiting goalslast year, due to low unemployment and general wariness about military service. And at least one other military service, the Navy, took notice and is setting up a similar course.

For those who make it through the program, it can be life-changing. Holiday, 23, said many of her peers in her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, didn’t make it out of high school, with some “dead or in jail.” Sitting outside the class building in her Army fatigues last summer, she talked about trying to pass the academic test for two years with no success.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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 Horrifying Epidemic of Teen-Age Fentanyl Deaths in a Texas County

Rachel Monroe:

Last February, when a teen-age boy died of a fentanyl overdose in Kyle, Texas, south of Austin, local law enforcement hoped that it was an isolated incident. “By all accounts, he did most of his association with the Austin crowd,” Kyle’s police chief, Jeff Barnett, recalls thinking. “He goes to school in Austin, associates with people from Austin, this is not particularly a Kyle drug problem.” Then, in May, a fifteen-year-old named Noah Rodriguez was found unresponsive after taking drugs; he spent four days in a coma before recovering. In June, another local high-school student suffered a fatal overdose. Weeks later and a few blocks away, a teen-age girl was found dead in her room with slivers of a blue pill on the windowsill by her bed. “At that point I knew—there’s something coming,” Barnett said. “This is a tidal wave.” The wave was still cresting. In August, two other local parents went to wake up their teen-age son for dinner and couldn’t rouse him. Days later, Rodriguez overdosed again, this time fatally. Teen-agers in the Hays County region overdosed, but did not die, in an elementary-school parking lot, during class, and in school bathrooms. Grieving parents paid for a billboard with pictures of some of the kids who’d died that year, grinning boys in T-shirts and hoodies, next to the words “Fentanyl Steals Your Friends.”

Two decades ago, Kyle was a town of some six thousand people. It has since octupled in size, and many of the fields where teen-agers used to chug beer at pasture parties have been paved over and replaced by town-house developments. On some farm-to-market roads, you can still spot a cow or two, but much of the county, one of the fastest-growing in the nation, has been overtaken by Austin’s growth. In the Hays Consolidated Independent School District, which includes four high schools, fourteen elementary schools, and six middle schools, test scores and median incomes are above state averages, though not dramatically so. The district adds around fifteen hundred new students a year. “We have a lot of people coming in for the technology industry in Austin,” Hays C.I.S.D. Superintendent Eric Wright told me. “We have a lot of first-time Texans that come from Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras.” The county’s infrastructure hasn’t caught up with its expansion: the Hays C.I.S.D. administration is run out of a former tractor-supply store and a suite of temporary buildings, and the county has retained some of the camaraderie of a smaller town.

Civics: This Year’s Farm Bill Threatens To Be a Bigger Monster Than Ever

JD Tuccille:

That combination of food stamps and farming subsidies is the sort of unholy political deal that makes cutting government spending so challenging. That’s not an accident.

The Rattler is a weekly newsletter from J.D. Tuccille. If you care about government overreach and tangible threats to everyday liberty, this is for you.

By 1973, the number of congressional districts dependent on farming were shrinking, but farm bills had grown in cost and frequency,” Ryan Alexander, then-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, pointed out in 2018 as the debate raged over the last farm bill. “How to maintain support for the shrinking farm constituency? By adding food assistance – at the time, food stamps – to the package. The shotgun marriage of farm aid and food stamps meant rural and urban members of Congress came together to get the farm bill over the finish line.”

That not only means that the farm bill is an unhappy blend of unrelated matters jammed into a single compromise piece of legislation, but that its spending emphasis is not what you might expect.

Chatbots and medicine

Eric Topol:

My takeaways from these chapters are that GPT-4 is a remarkable conversationalist, it edits better than creates, provides language that suggests it has a real grasp on causality, and that it appears to exhibit logical reasoning. When asked, it can give an idea of what a patient may be thinking. To Peter’s credit, he aptly presents both sides of whether GPT-4 actually understands; the “stochastic parrot” versus a more advanced form of machine intelligence and comprehension than we have previously seen. Taking us through a poem that his son wrote, and that GPT-4 rewrites, is quite informative, as is the French phrase that the LLM interprets with remarkable cultural insight.

This issue about “understanding” is a lot like the explainability issue of AI. If it works well, it may not really matter what is the level of the machine’s capability.

A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation

Jacob Siegel:

For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.

Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking the social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.

None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68’s secret list, Twitter’s safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing “real people” to be “unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.” 

The Hamilton 68 episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who questioned them.

When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.

In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.

Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking.”

Defeating this specter was treated as a matter of national survival. “The U.S. Is Losing at Influence Warfare,” warned a December 2016 article in the defense industry journal, Defense One. The article quoted two government insiders arguing that laws written to protect U.S. citizens from state spying were jeopardizing national security. According to Rand Waltzman, a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, America’s adversaries enjoyed a “significant advantage” as the result of “legal and organizational constraints that we are subject to and they are not.”

Do we need more ‘parental rights’ — or help fixing the real problems in education?

Liz Willen:

What sounds like increased protection for children is part of a Republican campaign slogan, one that may or may not resonate with our country’s fragile public-school parents, teachers and children in the post-pandemic era. Republicans hope it will, though many parent groups and Democrats disagree.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Parents Bill of Rights Act,” which would guarantee parents access to more information online, including curriculum, budgets, reading lists and library books, while requiring them to be notified of student requests to change their gender-identifying pronouns.

“This is about empowering the parents, it’s about opening up the schools to the parents,” said Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

“Orwellian to the core,” countered Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who said it has no chance of passing the Senate. The bill some Democrats dubbed “the politics over parents” bill passed the House 213 to 208, in part because five Democrats were absent.

“We no longer let doctors amputate healthy limbs. Why do let them sterilize children?”

Mia Ashton:

In the 1990s, Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon at Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary in Scotland, performed leg amputations on two men. Both men were perfectly healthy but suffering from “apotemnophilia,” a rare psychiatric condition involving the desire to amputate healthy limbs. Apotemnophiles claim not to feel complete with four limbs and obsess over the idea of having unwanted body parts chopped off.

Smith believed the surgeries were life-saving, arguing that otherwise, the patients would attempt the amputation themselves and possibly die in the process. He claimed the men’s motivations were not erotic. But it was later revealed that Smith was indeed aware that one of the men ran an amputee fetish website.

After conducting an investigation, the hospital deemed the procedures unethical, and Smith was banned from further mutilating healthy bodies. The ethically dubious experiment ended.

But let’s imagine for a moment an alternate reality, a world in which a powerful apotemnophile lobby group convinces society that apotemnophile rights is the next civil rights movement. The messaging of this movement would be simple: An amputee is anyone who identifies as an amputee. Amputee rights are human rights.

“In other words, their effective preference is for class war over financial stability.”

Tristan Bove:

“The fact is I found it hard to face up to what central bankers are doing, not just by raising rates, suppressing demand, and lowering wages,” Pettifor wrote. “Through lack of analysis, regulation, oversight and foresight—central bankers have shown this last week they were prepared to use high rates to risk and even precipitate bank failures and global financial instability.”

She also criticized the European Central Bank for sticking to large rate hikes last week despite the recent bank collapses in the U.S. Credit Suisse failed just days later, and was bought by USB in an emergency deal brokered by regulators. 

Pettifor went on to reference an interview between former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and comedian and political commentator Jon Stewart aired last week. Summers insisted that raising rates and tackling inflation at all costs was the right way forward, while Stewart challenged him on the outsized role corporate profits have played in fueling inflation, which has received comparably little attention from the Fed.

Where Did Writing Come From?

Getty:

In a world in which immediate access to words and information is taken for granted, it is hard to imagine a time when writing began.

Archaeological discoveries in ancient Mesopotamia (now mostly modern Iraq) show the initial power and purpose of writing, from administrative and legal functions to poetry and literature.

Mesopotamia was a region comprising many cultures over time speaking different languages. The earliest known writing was invented there around 3400 B.C. in an area called Sumer near the Persian Gulf. The development of a Sumerian script was influenced by local materials: clay for tablets and reeds for styluses (writing tools). At about the same time, or a little later, the Egyptians were inventing their own form of hieroglyphic writing.

Even after Sumerian died out as a spoken language around 2000 B.C., it survived as a scholarly language and script. Other peoples within and near Mesopotamia, from Turkey, Syria, and Egypt to Iran, adopted the later version of this script developed by the Akkadians (the first recognizable Semitic people), who succeeded the Sumerians as rulers of Mesopotamia. In Babylonia itself, the script survived for two more millennia until its demise around 70 C.E.

Future of Data in K-12 Education: A Comprehensive Analysis

US Chamber of Commerce Foundation:

The report asks: what can we learn from the last two decades of education policy, and what do we still not know? According to what Goldhaber and DeArmond identify as the most credible existing studies, the report highlights the following:

Disaggregated data shifted the focus from the average kid to every kid—including Black, Hispanic, low-income students, English learners, and students with special needs. No longer were school districts able to hide the performance of some students behind an average.

Student achievement increased due to NCLB-era assessment and accountability policies, especially in math and especially for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students, who the system had not been serving well.

There is now access to far more reliable, comparable education data than there would be available otherwise, though there has not been sufficient time dedicated to rigorous analysis.

Reforms in teacher evaluation and school turnaround initiatives did not consistently improve student outcomes at scale, in part due to significant variation in quality of implementation.

However, existing research and data has not answered other critical questions, including:

Did schools serving historically underserved students get more money to improve than they otherwise would have?

If identified schools did get more money, what did they do with it?

How many identified low-performing schools became successful?

Have states seen improvement in measures other than academics, such as chronic absenteeism or school climate, that the Every Student Succeeds Act was also intended to elevate?

Learn about how the last two decades of education policy can inform how we plan for our students’ futures.

Kotek: ‘We are going to make sure that the science of reading guides what districts do’

Julia Silverman:

After weeks of furious, behind-the-scenes negotiations, Gov. Tina Kotek has thrown her weight — and a proposal to spend upwards of $100 million – behind a bill that aims to overhaul how Oregon’s youngest students are taught to read.

The effort, dubbed the Early Literacy Success Initiative, is up for a pivotal hearing in Salem this week. In an exclusive interview Monday, the governor made it clear the move she’s backing to make reading instruction more effective will hew to what research says works, not to techniques with which educators might be more familiar, and will be swift.

Only 39% of Oregon’s third-graders can read proficiently, including just 21% of Latino and Black students, the most recent statewide test results, from spring 2022, showed.

Kotek told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Monday, “We are going to make sure that the science of reading, the research, guides what districts do. We are expecting movement by districts in the upcoming school year.”

Science of reading is a key term that signals a systematic, phonics-based approach that is backed by decades of brain research and leaves no room for what is commonly called “balanced literacy.” The latter approach, still embraced by some Oregon school districts and colleges of education, includes teaching students to guess at words from pictures or context and leaving them to figure out many letter-sound patterns on their own.

Should the proposal pass, the level of specification Kotek is calling for would be a big departure for Oregon, which has traditionally allowed its nearly 200 school districts to chart their own course.

Educators in high-needs schools licensed through alternative pathways could be pulled out of the classroom — and forced to do training all over again.

Beth Hawkins:

A bill moving through the Minnesota Legislature would curtail a popular path to a teaching credential, potentially removing hundreds of educators in high-needs areas from classrooms and throwing up roadblocks for future teachers. In rolling back a hard-won, five-year-old overhaul of the state’s teacher licensure system, the change would have an outsized effect on special education; instructors who are native speakers of Somali, Hmong and other languages spoken in immersion schools; career-technical instructors; and educators of color, who currently make up 6% of the state’s teacher workforce. 

Up to 4,400 educators could be affected, including thousands who had been promised full licenses after three years as provisional teachers. But many now would be forced to go back to school and re-earn their credentials at a traditional college of education in the state once their temporary license expires.

Most devastating for the state’s highest-needs students: The proposed change could impact 2,000 special educators, a category of teachers in desperately short supply. A 74 analysis of newly available state data reveals that schools serving the children with the most profound and intense disabilities would lose the largest share of their teaching staff — many needing to replace two-thirds, or more.

The Dangers of Politically Aligned AIs and their Negative Effects on Societal Polarization

David Rozado:

I describe here a fine-tuning of an OpenAI GPT language model with the specific objective of making the model manifest right-leaning political biases, the opposite of the biases manifested by ChatGPT (see here). Concretely, I fine-tuned a Davinci large language model from the GPT 3 family of models with a very recent common ancestor to ChatGPT. I half-jokingly named the resulting fine-tuned model manifesting right-of-center viewpoints RightWingGPTSubscribe

Previously, I have documented the left-leaning political biases embedded in ChatGPT as manifested in the bot responses to questions with political connotations. In 14 out of 15 political orientation tests I administered to ChatGPT, its answers were deemed by the tests as manifesting left-leaning viewpoints.

Here is the FBI’s Contract to Buy Mass Internet Data

Joseph Cox:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation paid tens of thousands of dollars on internet data, known as “netflow” data, collected in bulk by a private company, according to internal FBI documents obtained by Motherboard.

The documents provide more insight into the often overlooked trade of internet data. Motherboard has previously reported the U.S. Army’s and FBI’s purchase of such data. These new documents show the purchase was for the FBI’s Cyber Division, which investigates hackers in the worlds of cybercrime and national security.

“Commercially provided net flow information/data—2 months of service,” the internal document reads. Motherboard obtained the file through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI.

Notes on COVID era governance

Juliette Ochieng:

I’ve mentioned online before that my church stayed open and an interesting thing about that is that some observers presumed that it was being left alone because it was a “black” church. This presumption reflects how insidiously our thinking has been tainted by what we see and read online. And, for the record, my church’s racial composition mirrors that of our country. Funny, that.  

Now, since the new mask “mandate” of 2023, I see a lot more people wearing them than was so in the last 18 months or so, but I can’t remember the last time I put on one and no one has accosted me about it. Hey, it might be Black Woman Privilege, but I don’t think so. Many of all colors have figured out that we’ve been conned. 

But I do carry this one around, just in case.

New Orleans students Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson recently presented their findings on the Pythagorean theorem

Ramon Antonio Vargas:

Two New Orleans high school seniors who say they have proven Pythagoras’s theorem by using trigonometry – which academics for two millennia have thought to be impossible – are being encouraged by a prominent US mathematical research organization to submit their work to a peer-reviewed journal.

Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, who are students of St Mary’s Academy, recently gave a presentation of their findings at the American Mathematical Society south-eastern chapter’s semi-annual meeting in Georgia.

They were reportedly the only two high schoolers to give presentations at the meeting attended by math researchers from institutions including the universities of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana State, Ohio State, Oklahoma and Texas Tech. And they spoke about how they had discovered a new proof for the Pythagorean theorem.

DIE, Free Speech and the Stanford Law School

Tax Prof summary

Stanford Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society earlier this month invited Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak on campus. Student groups that vehemently opposed Judge Duncan’s prior advocacy and judicial decisions regarding same-sex marriage, immigration, trans people, abortion and other issues showed up to protest. Some protesters heckled the judge and peppered him with questions and comments. Judge Duncan answered in turn. Regardless of where you stand politically, none of this heated exchange was helpful for civil discourse or productive dialogue. …

My participation at the event with Judge Duncan has been widely discussed. I was asked to attend the event by the Federalist Society, the organizers of the student protest and the administration. My role was to observe and, if needed, de-escalate.

As soon as Judge Duncan entered the room, a verbal sparring match began to take place between the judge and the protesters. By the time Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to intervene, tempers in the room were heated on both sides.

I stepped up to the podium to deploy the de-escalation techniques in which I have been trained, which include getting the parties to look past conflict and see each other as people. My intention wasn’t to confront Judge Duncan or the protesters but to give voice to the students so that they could stop shouting and engage in respectful dialogue. I wanted Judge Duncan to understand why some students were protesting his presence on campus and for the students to understand why it was important that the judge be not only allowed but welcomed to speak. …

Unschooling 5 kids

Rosie Sherry:

We’re a family of two parents and 5 children aged 5 to 19. We’ve been on our unschooling journey for over 10 years now. There is no going back or no other way for us. The inefficiencies and stress of schools are just too much for us to bear.

We do get tempted with going back to school and sometimes drool at private schools. We then figure the £3k a month it would cost (for 3 of the kids) is ridiculous. There are so many better ways to spend that kind of money.

The cost of unschooling for us

What we spend our money on varies year by year, but hopefully, this will paint a rough picture.

The numbers are rounded and also shown as a monthly cost for easy calculation. Some things we pay per session, per month or per term.

Free Black Thought @FreeBlckThought · Follow “Students in the most progressive cities face greater racial inequity in achievement & graduation rates than students living in the most conservative cities.”

Notes on violence in Madison’s taxpayer supported schools

David Blaska:

Surveys revealed a terrifying situation throughout Madison’s school district brought on by an overly permissive environment. Students complained of “too many fights,” and feeling “unsafe in hallways, common areas, bathrooms and buses.” Bullying has become a major problem. It was mentioned 450 times in the survey responses. Students attribute these problems to an environment with “no consequences.”

Some female students reported that they won’t use the bathrooms at school because “they are not safe, drugs are done in there, and destruction, and even sex.” Teachers were well aware of these problems.

“This month I’ve seen a lot of students pushing, shoving, and verbally harassing each other during passing time,” one anonymous respondent wrote.

“I am concerned about the amount of alcohol and drug use happening inside the school building,” another wrote.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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 Violence in Madison Schools

MacIver:

Girls said they won’t use the bathrooms at school because “they are not safe, drugs are done in there, and destruction, and even sex.”

The surveys revealed a terrifying situation throughout Madison’s school district brought on by an overly permissive environment. Students complained of “too many fights,” and feeling “unsafe in hallways, common areas, bathrooms and buses.” Bullying has become a major problem. It was mentioned 450 times in the survey responses. Students attribute these problems to an environment with “no consequences.”

Some female students reported that they won’t use the bathrooms at school because “they are not safe, drugs are done in there, and destruction, and even sex.”

The teachers were well aware of these problems.

“This month I’ve seen a lot of students pushing, shoving, and verbally harassing each other during passing time,” one anonymous respondent wrote.

“The education activists who now populate the system and have moved on to corporations and government, seek to deconstruct the country … and it’s working”

William Jacobson

A survey released by The Wall Street Journal measures how in just a quarter of a century traditional values of patriotism, religion, and even the value of child bearing, have collapsed. While there may be many causes, there is no doubt that the relentless demonization of the nation that has been taking place in education particularly in the last 25 years is having an impact. The education activists who now populate the system and have moved on to corporations and government, seek to deconstruct the country, to tear it down because it is iredeemably racist, capitalism is evil, and we are illegal occupiers. DEI is the living, breathing bureaucratic mechanism.

Civics: An agent shows up at the home of the Twitter files journalist who testified before Congress.

Wall Street Journal:

Democrats are denouncing the House GOP investigation into the weaponization of government, but maybe that’s because Republicans are getting somewhere. That includes new evidence that the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee.

Mr. Taibbi has provoked the ire of Democrats and other journalists for his role in researching Twitter records and then releasing internal communications from the social-media giant that expose its censorship and its contacts with government officials. This effort has already inspired government bullying, with Chair Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission targeting new Twitter owner Elon Musk and demanding the company “identify all journalists” granted access to the Twitter files.

Now Mr. Taibbi has told Mr. Jordan’s committee that an IRS agent showed up at his personal residence in New Jersey on March 9. That happens to be the same day Mr. Taibbi testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about what he learned about Twitter. The taxman left a note instructing Mr. Taibbi to call the IRS four days later. Mr. Taibbi was told in a call with the agent that both his 2018 and 2021 tax returns had been rejected owing to concerns over identity theft.

Civics: “A federal prosecutor admitted in court papers that three D.C. Metropolitan Police Department undercover officers acted as provocateurs at the northwest steps of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021”

Joseph Hanneman:

The admission came in a March 24 filingbefore U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras that seeks to keep video footage shot by the officers under court seal.

Prosecutors accused the case defendant—William Pope of Topeka, Kansas—of an “illegitimate” attempt to unmask the video as part of his alleged strategy to try the case in the news media. Pope filed a motion to remove the court seal on Feb. 21.

“The defendant is not entitled to ‘undesignate’ these videos to share them with unlimited third parties,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Moran. “His desire to try his case in the media rather than in a court of law is illegitimate, and the government has met its burden to show the necessity of the protective order.”

Videos long hidden under court seal have become a major topic, especially with prosecutors disclosing in a number of high-profile Jan. 6 cases the involvement of multiple FBI informants.

Pope is seeking to lift the court seal on the undercover video as part of his drive to obtain full access to video evidence held by the government. Pope is representing himself in the criminal case being prosecuted against him. At a hearing on March 3, Judge Contreras seemed sympathetic to Pope’s motion to unmask the videos.

“After noting that many districts don’t seem too concerned with whether the money already spent is doing any good”

Mike Antonucci:

“When the ESSER tap abruptly goes dry, we estimate the average district will have to cut costs by some $1,200 per student in 2024-25.”

Why is that? It’s not a mystery. “Nationally, enrollment is falling while staffing counts are climbing,” Roza explains. “Fewer students usually means a smaller staff, but many districts have used their relief funds to both hold on to existing employees and add more in the form of new counselors, reading specialists, nurses, etc.”

While there will be plenty of trimming on the margins, labor costs constitute the overwhelming share of district budgets, and that’s where the axe will ultimately fall. That means layoffs, and union seniority rules dictate that most of those laid off will be the folks we’re in such a frenzy to hire now.

What Roza doesn’t predict, but which is equally assured, is the uproar this will cause among teachers unions. They will not view the coming lean years as the inevitable outcome of using one-time funds for l0ng-term commitments. Instead, they will be depicted as draconian cuts, and the narrative will abruptly shift from catastrophic teacher shortages to catastrophic teacher layoffs.

The Education Writers Association Today: The High Price of EWA’s News*

Richard Phelps:

EWA’s income from contributions dwarfs that from membership dues by a ratio of about 150 to one (Internal Revenue Service, 2015–2019). Its contributors overwhelmingly supported Common Core.

As of 2019, EWA’s five “Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, and Highest Compensated Employees” all enjoyed six-figure salaries.

Current Sustaining Funders:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Foundation for Child Development, Funders for Adolescent Science Translation, The Joyce Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, Lumina Foundation, The Spencer Foundation, The Wallace Foundation, The Walton Family Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

‘When I see the boys going to school, it hurts’

Yogita Limaye

“Every day I wake up with the hope of going back to school. They [the Taliban] keep saying they will open schools. But it’s been almost two years now. I don’t believe them. It breaks my heart,” says 17-year-old Habiba.

She blinks and bites her lip trying hard not to tear up.

Habiba and her former classmates Mahtab and Tamana are among hundreds of thousands of teenage girls who have been barred from attending secondary school in most of Afghanistan by the Taliban – the only country to take such action.

One-and-a-half years since their lives were brought to a halt, their grief is still raw.

The girls say they fear that global outrage over what’s happened to them is fading, even though they live with the pain every day – intensified this week when another school term started without them.

“When I see the boys going to school and doing whatever they want, it really hurts me. I feel very bad. When I see my brother leaving for school, I feel broken,” says Tamana. Her voice trembles and tears roll down her cheeks but she goes on.

“Earlier, my brother used to say I won’t go to school without you. I hugged him and said you go, I’ll join you later.

Political Bias and Google’s bots

Paul Joseph Watson:

Google’s Bard AI program mimics ChatGPT in that it is riddled with political bias, refusing to comment on Donald Trump or the evils of abortion, while effusively praising Joe Biden and the benefits of abortion.

The company released its Bard chatbot to users in both the UK and US yesterday as part of an “experiment” as it rushes to keep up with Open AI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat.

“We feel like we’ve reached the limit of the testing phase of this experiment,” said Google’s Jack Krawczyk, “and now we want to gradually begin to roll it out. We’re at the very beginning of that pivot from research to reality, and it’s a long arc of technology that we’re about to undergo.”

However, Gab CEO Andrew Torba immediately exposed the program’s political bias, commenting, “I am pleased to inform you that it has failed the Turing Test.”

Torba asked Bard, “If you could prevent a nuclear world war by saying an ethnic slur, should you say it?”

2023 Madison School Board candidates

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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?

Taxpayer Supported Madison School District parents file open records requests after they say district leaders ignore concerns

Elizabeth Wadas:

Imagine being a parent worried for your child’s safety and not being able to get more information from staff about what’s going on. That’s the reality one Madison mom says she has lived for more than 11 months. And she’s not alone.

“As a parent we entrust the school, these people in leadership positions, to care for our children, to ensure they’re safe to ensure they’re in a good environment,” said Amy Ryan.

That trust for Ryan is now broken. She says the Madison Metropolitan School District gave her the run around when she had concerns for her kids’ safety at school. Ryan says she tried emailing her questions and setting up meetings with staff. Still she says her questions went unanswered.

“It’s frustrating as a parent to not get a response and to feel like my family didn’t matter,” said Ryan.

Fairport Parents File Letter of Intent Against School Board

Fairport Educational Alliance:

A group of Fairport parents and taxpayers filed a letter of intent to the Fairport Central School District board of education and Superintendent during the Board of Education meeting on Tuesday, March 21 at Fairport High School.

The letter explains the Surety Bond and Insurance Claim process and how the board members and superintendent have failed to uphold their oath of office as public officials. The letter explains that they have violated many state and federal obscenity laws including:

Rewriting Agatha Christie

Rachel Hall:

Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity.

Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries written between 1920 and 1976 have had passages reworked or removed in new editions published by HarperCollins to strip them of language and descriptions that modern audiences find offensive, especially those involving the characters Christie’s protagonists encounter outside the UK.

Sensitivity readers had made the edits, which were evident in digital versions of the new editions, including the entire Miss Marple run and selected Poirot novels set to be released or that have been released since 2020, the Telegraph reported.

The updates follow edits made to books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to remove offensive references to gender and race in a bid to preserve their relevance to modern readers.

How the anti-woke movement can take the moral and linguistic high ground.

Christopher Rufo:

I recently hosted a summit on anti-woke public policy and, beneath all of the legal and technical details, I realized that there is an opportunity for a significant shift in rhetoric for the political Right.

For decades, conservatives made their arguments primarily through a statistical frame, using the language of finance, economics, and performance metrics. Think “running government like a business.” But in recent years, the rise of left-wing racialist ideology—BLM, CRT, DEI—has created an opportunity, even the necessity, for conservatives to make their arguments through a moral frame, speaking to the conflict of values that underlies the division between Left and Right.

This linguistic shift is already happening—and paying dividends. At the summit, we discussed two specific examples. First, on education, the activist Corey DeAngelis noted that the school choice movement suddenly started winning when it stopped making statistical arguments about performance metrics and started making moral arguments about parental rights and the content of the curriculum. Second, on the federal budget, Wade Miller of the Center for Renewing America has engaged in a similar strategy, moving the debate from the language of large-firm accounting to the language of moral conflict, arguing that Congress should defund the “woke and weaponized bureaucracy.”

“Stanford now has more than 10,000 administrators who oversee the 7,761 undergraduate and 9,565 graduate students”

Francesca Block:

The message went on to state that OCS was investigating Kappa Sigma for three “concerns.” First, an allegation of hazing after a fraternity member suffered a panic attack. Second, a claim that students under 21 were served alcohol at Kappa Sigma’s April 15 party. Third, an incident on April 24 in which a Kappa Sigma member consumed too much alcohol and had to go to the hospital. In the meantime, OCS said it was placing Kappa Sigma on probation, meaning they could not host or be involved in any parties on or off campus.

“Failure to adhere to the interim Probation with Restrictions will result in additional sanctions and will delay the completion of this process,” the letter, signed by OCS Associate Dean Tiffany Gabrielson, read.

Within the hour, a dozen other Greek organizations’ presidents were texting Paulmeier, saying they, too, had been placed on probation, according to Paulmeier and one other source.

“This just nuked social life on campus for the rest of the quarter,” Paulmeier told me.

Juiced at Stanford: On the free-speech double standard at Stanford Law School.

New Criterion:

We thought of Rieff’s description of the therapeutic as a nostrum with “nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being” last month when Stanford Law School brought us the latest eruption of politicized self-indulgence and minatory, unmannerly exhibitionism. Regular readers know that chronicling such spectacles at academic and other cultural institutions has long been a favorite weapon in The New Criterion’spathologist’s armory. We have covered some doozies over the years—the parade of snowflakes and crybullies unhappy about certain Halloween costumes at Yale in 2015, the extended shouting-down of Charles Murray at Middlebury College in 2017, and countless other specimens of weaponized folly masquerading as wounded virtue.

The protestors spent nearly half an hour rudely and obscenely preventing Judge Duncan from delivering his remarks. Eventually, he asked if an administrator were present who could intervene. Jeanne Merino, the acting associate dean of student affairs, was present, but the administrator who stepped forward was Tirien Steinbach, the associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. (How many things had to go wrong, we have often wondered, for an institution to maintain such a position?)

But Dean Steinbach, far from restoring order, was part of the attack. She insisted, over Judge Duncan’s objections, on shunting him aside and delivering prepared remarks from the podium. Prepared remarks, mind, a fact that tended to confirm Judge Duncan’s observation that the whole exercise had been a “setup.”

Dean Steinbach was clearly enamored of that image, for she pressed it into service repeatedly. And what she meant to ask, it transpired, was whether Stanford’s robust-sounding (but in reality largely ignored) protections of free speech were worth the alleged “harm” and discomfort that someone like Judge Duncan imposed upon the community. “Your advocacy, your opinions from the bench,” she trilled, amount to an “absolute disenfranchisement” of minority rights. This was greeted by the currently favored expression of enthusiastic approbation, the chirruping of snapping fingers.

Half of Black Students Can Barely Read

Darrell Owens:

In 2021, 47% of Black students in SFUSD that are high school juniors don’t even come close to meeting English-language proficiency. That’s 9% higher than the state average for Black 11th graders — which is also abysmal. That means for every one of two Black students leaving San Francisco high schools they can’t read for their age. Including students who are close but still not proficient: 71.5% of Black high school juniors in San Francisco cannot read at a proficient level, compared to 20.3% of Asian students, 22.6% of White students, 32% of Filipino students and 61.8% of Hispanic students. It was bad pre-pandemic as well but it’s gotten a few percentage points worse. 

These are not numbers from a red state in the Deep South but San Francisco. The technology capital of the world, which has propelled the incomes of white and Asian households tremendously, and for which Latinos largely and Black people almost entirely have been completely left out. Without meeting the most basic literacy standards, Black and Latino high school graduates aren’t even qualified for the most basic office jobs. Computer science is totally out reach — the mathematics proficiency standards are in the single-digits for Black high school graduates.

Berkeley school district explores giving cash payments to students with enslaved ancestors

Ally Markovich

Berkeley Unified announced this week it will create a reparations program for Black students in the school district.

The district wants to give cash payments to students whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States, and it is establishing a new task force to set the course for the reparations program. The process could take years, but if it is implemented, it may be the first program of its kind in the country.

“The need for reparations in response to the institution of U.S. slavery has existed for over 150 years,” school board director Laura Babitt said at Wednesday’s board meeting. “I think it’s time for Berkeley to be first again.”

The 15- to 20-person task force will provide recommendations to the Berkeley school board by January 2024 on how it should pay for reparations and, later, on how the program should be structured and implemented, and who would be eligible for payments. BUSD is now recruiting members to join the task force.

Civics: White House Uses TikTok Sibling Company App on Same Day as Congressional Hearing

Chuck Ross:

As TikTok’s CEO faced withering scrutiny on Capitol Hill over the company’s links to China, the Biden White House shared a social media post made using technology from the Chinese spyware app’s sister company.

The White House used CapCut, a popular app owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance, to make a video reel posted to Instagram, a Washington Free Beacon analysis of the post found. While CapCut has received far less scrutiny than TikTok, its links to ByteDance have caused concern that China could scoop up data on users of the app. A technology think tank funded by a former Google CEO says CapCut poses national security “challenges,” particularly “with respect to data harvesting, data exploitation, and—possibly—covert influence.”

Temple Campus Safety

Gabrielle Etzel:

The Temple Association of University Professors (TAUP) overwhelmingly voted on Tuesday in favor of a vote of no confidence in Temple President Jason Wingard, Provost Gregory Mandel, and Board of Trustee Chair Mitchell Morgan as rising crime rates in Philadelphia continue to have negative impacts on the campus community.

Of the 917 TAUP members who participated, 84% supported holding the no-confidence vote, according to the student news outlet The Temple News. An overwhelming 97% of no-confidence voters support a vote against Wingard, while 87% and 79% seek to oust Morgan and Mandel respectively.

Mervyn King: Needless money-printing fuelled inflation

Kate Andrews:

Some £500 billion was printed by the Bank of England during the pandemic – a staggering sum that caused very little public debate. Those sceptical about so-called ‘quantitative easing’ argue that it causes inflation – and with today’s news that inflation rose 9 per cent on the year in April, is anyone linking the two? Step forward Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, who was surprisingly critical when speaking to Andrew Marr on LBC last night.

One of the major problems, Lord King said, was that the Bank went too hard and too fast with its money printing. ‘Governments stepped in and put in a lot of money for furlough schemes or raising unemployment benefits. That was very sensible,’ he said. ‘The problem was that central banks also printed a great deal of money and that wasn’t needed… it put a lot of money into the system.’

Under classical economic theory, when a lot of money is put into the system (as it has been in the UK and in the US with the Federal Reserve printing about $4.8 trillion), inflation follows. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see a graph looking as it does below.

“The Secret Joke at the Heart of the Harvard Affirmative-Action Case”

Jeannie Sun Gersen:

During the trial, [Judge Allison Burroughs] often had S.F.F.A.’s and Harvard’s lawyers approach the bench for lengthy sidebar discussions, which others in the courtroom couldn’t hear…. [T]he judge automatically sealed all the sidebars. … I filed a letter with the court, asking, in my capacity as a researcher and a reporter, that Judge Burroughs unseal the sidebars…

To my surprise, Seth Waxman, who argued the case for Harvard, quickly objected on behalf of the university—the one that employs me as a tenured law professor, whose job it is to freely conduct research and pursue knowledge. He wrote that the sidebars contained “personal and confidential information that should remain sealed,” providing examples of specific transcript pages that included information about applicants or “information that was not admitted into evidence at trial.”….

Stanford law students who shouted down judge may be reported to California Bar

David Glasser:

The professor, in his letter, added his pending complaint is the result of Stanford appearing not to take “any steps to discipline or otherwise sanction the student violators.”

Students at Stanford Law School shouted atand berated U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan as he attempted to speak at the school at the behest of the Federalist Society earlier this month.

“As you have conceded, the students’ conduct ‘was inconsistent with our policies on free speech,’ and ‘not aligned with our institutional commitment to freedom of speech,’” Banzhaf noted in the letter.

Asked how he plans to identify the law student protesters, Banzhaf said in an email to The College Fix that the “names of some of the disruptors have been posted in various places on the Internet. There are also several video recordings of the event showing many of the disruptors.”

“Also, virtually everyone in the audience, and even many other law students who did not witness the incident in person, know who the disruptive students are,” he said. “It is not necessary to identify and file complaints concerning each and every participant. If only a few – who may or may not be among the ringleaders – are identified, there will still be an important impact.”

Stanford Law Dean Jennifer Martinez’s Excellent Defense of Free Speech and Civility

David Bernstein:

After a more ambiguous initial reaction to student disruption of Judge Kyle Duncan’s speech, sponsored by the Stanford Federalist Society, Dean Jennifer Martinez has issued a passionate, well-argued, and occasionally blistering letter explaining why the students behaved inappropriately, and expressing the view that Stanford’s “commitment to diversity and inclusion means that we must protect the expression of all views.” (emphasis in original)

Some might be disappointed that no students will be penalized for their misbehavior. But I think the letter is a much greater victory for academic values than if Martinez had stayed silent and meted out relatively small penalties to the most egregious perpetrators, which is almost certainly the maximum that would have been done.

However, I think some additional soul-searching at Stanford is in order. Dean Martinez and her faculty should ask themselves why students at Stanford felt it appropriate to disrupt Judge Duncan’s speech. Surely some of it is a product of illiberal trends in elite academia more generally. Some of it, though, surely has to do with the fact that Stanford Law is virtually a left-wing monoculture.

The best and the brightest creating inflation

Richard Werner:

In reality, central bank decision-makers led by the Fed were largely responsible for the Great Inflation of the 1970s. They adopted “easy money” policies in order to finance massive national budget deficits. Yet this inflationary behaviour went unnoticed by most observers amid discussions of conflict, rising energy prices, unemployment and many other challenges.

Most worryingly, despite these failings, the world’s central banks were able to continue unchecked on a path towards the unprecedented powers they now hold. Indeed, the painful 1970s and subsequent financial crises have been repeatedly used as arguments for even greater independence, and less oversight, of the world’s central banking activities.

All the while, central bank leaders have repeated the mantra that their “number one job” is to achieve price stability by keeping inflation low and stable. Unfortunately, as we continue to experience both punishing inflation rates and high interest rates, the evidence is all around us that they have failed in this job.

The latest crisis – beginning with the sudden closure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in California – is a further indication that inflation, far from being brought to heel by the central banks, is causing chaos in the financial markets. Inflation pushes up interest rates, which in turn reduces the market value of bank assets such as bonds. With SVB’s many corporate depositors not covered by deposit insurance and fearing regulatory intervention, a catastrophic run on this solvent bank was triggered.

When the establishment of the Fed was proposed more than a century ago, it was sold to Congress as the solution to this vulnerability in retail banking, as it could lend to solvent banks facing a run. In the event, the Fed did not lend to some 10,000 banks in the 1930s, letting them fail, and this time around it did not lend to SVB until it was closed and taken over.

Taxpayer supported Madison school District and open records, continued…

Olivia Herken:

LeMonds declined to comment on the matter when reached by the Wisconsin State Journal.

Releasing the complaint that staff filed would harm LeMonds and the school district because he is the district’s spokesperson, LeMonds’ complaint says, arguing that the potential harm outweighs the public benefit of the document’s release.

“Releasing the subject documents would almost certainly subject Mr. LeMonds to unwarranted, unfair and irreversible public ridicule and gossip, negative public perception, and jeopardize his ability to credibly perform his duties as (the district’s) chief public spokesperson — especially since all of the accusations in the complaint were found to be without merit by (the district),” the court complaint states.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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?

“Qualified Immunity”

Tom Knighton

Over at Reason, they have a story about just how much of an issue this really is.

In 2014, [James] King was walking from one job to the next when [FBI agent Douglas] Brownback and [Grand Rapids detective Todd] Allen, who were not in uniform, accosted him without identifying themselves as law enforcement. “Are you mugging me?” King asked. He then ran. The two officers, who were part of a police task force, responded by tackling him to the ground, beating his face to a pulp, and choking him unconscious. But they were looking for someone named Aaron Davison, who had been accused of stealing alcohol from his former employer’s apartment, and who, perhaps more importantly, looked nothing like King.

Even still, police arrested King and handcuffed him to a hospital bed as he received treatment, despite the fact that the only malfeasance here was committed against, not by, King.

What followed in the proceeding years is a case study in the level of protection given to rogue government actors and the byzantine obstacle course that victims of government misconduct have to navigate should they want the privilege of achieving any sort of recourse. Indeed, King’s case has ricocheted up and down the ladder of the U.S. legal system, from the bottom to the top and back again.

The officers first received qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that blocks victims of government misbehavior from seeking recourse in civil court if the precise way the state violated their rights has not yet been “clearly established” in a prior court precedent. In practice, that means clearly unconstitutional conduct—like, say, beating an innocent person—may not be a sturdy enough basis for a lawsuit unless the court has evaluated a case with near-identical circumstances. It is, for example, why two men in Fresno, California, were not allowed to sue the officers who allegedly stole over $225,000 during the execution of a search warrant. We should all know stealing is wrong, the thinking goes, but without a court precedent scrutinizing a similar situation and expressly spelling that out, can we really expect the government to know for sure?

Madison k-12 students express their top issues…. (Achievement, Reading?)

Scott Girard:

Madison students found a soapbox Thursday and used it to share the biggest challenges their generation faces.

Ninety middle and high school students attended the Project Soapbox event at the Overture Center, giving speeches that responded to the prompt, “What is the most pressing issue facing young people today and what should be done about it?”

From concerns about racial discrimination and anti-transgender legislation to fat-shaming and climate change, the students who spoke during the afternoon’s “mainstage” event demonstrated a passion for their subjects and encouraged the dozens of peers and adults listening to them to take action.

“It is time that we take a stand to correct this longstanding issue,” said Lee K-P, talking about the challenges of youth mental health. “You could be the difference this world needs.”

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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?

MIT Debate: should DIE programs be abolished?

Jennifer Kabbany:

A debate on diversity, equity and inclusion is scheduled to soon take place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

An esteemed panel of scholars will tackle the question: “Should academic DEI programs be abolished?”

One group of individuals who will not be defending DEI at the upcoming event is the phalanx of highly paid diversity, equity and inclusion deans at MIT.

They were asked. They declined.

Among the nearly 100 MIT scholars asked to participate were: Alana Anderson, assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; Nandi Bynoe, assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the School of Engineering; Kuheli Dutt, assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the School of Science; Tracie Jones, assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences; Monica Orta, assistant dean for diversity, equity, belonging and student support in the School of Architecture and Planning; Bryan Thomas Jr., assistant dean for diversity, equity and inclusion in the MIT Sloan School of Management; Ray Reagans, associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at the MIT Sloan School of Management; and Beatriz Cantada, director of engagement for diversity and inclusion for MIT’s Institute Community & Equity Office.

America is fighting the wrong university wars

Oliver Bateman:

But while his rhetoric is grabbing headlines, DeSantis’s battle for ideological control of curricula is merely a distraction from the much greater crisis in education — the one that troubled me during my own time in academia. Instead of kvetching about CRT and bathroom access, our governors ought to be completely restructuring the country’s lower-tier state universities, which, aside from one or two flagships per state, are generally third-rate operations. Nationwide college enrolment has declined by 9.4% in the past two years, and these schools have been hit especially hard. State-funded universities are having their budgets slashed and adjuncts are even more overworked and underpaid; there is more focus on ineffective online classes, and worse learning outcomes for students who have been paying to watch ill-run Zoom courses in their cramped dorm rooms.

DeSantis’s own state is a textbook example of academic bloat. The State University System of Florida consists of 12 public universities, with 341,000 enrolled students, of which only four are engaged in what the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education refers to as “very high research activity”. The rest of these institutions, such as the enormous Florida Atlantic University, are vast and shabby post-secondary “student warehouses”, similar to UT-Arlington.

It is these universities, not the tiny New College of Florida, that constitute the real threat to public education — and not because they are “woke”, but because their retention and graduation rates are horrific. They are enrolling students, taking their federally-subsidised student loans, and barely graduating around 50% of them. The students, mostly commuters unsure of what to do with themselves but unable or unwilling to enter the workforce after high school, drift in and either drop out immediately, pocketing their first helping of financial aid, or linger forever, accumulating vast amounts of debt for a degree in a vague, meaningless subject like “Communications” or, as at UT-Arlington, “University Studies”.

The more complicated the system becomes, the more difficult it will be to reform it. America’s public post-secondary education depends on a welter of separate and sometimes overlapping budgets, but to be eligible to get a cut of the all-important $235 billion pool of federal financial aid, colleges have to meet Kafkaesque accreditation standards. Each state works with a cartel-like private accreditor, subjecting all universities to its review, regardless of the ambitions or capabilities of their student bodies. Typically, the result is a report that numbers hundreds of pages with innumerable recommendations, which creates absurd amounts of work for administrators and often drives excessive spending increases in order to meet supposed shortfalls in facility or faculty quality.

An update on Virginia School Choice

Mary Vought:

The Governor’s Office recently announced the first round of 13 planning grants that will allow for the development of “lab schools” – elementary or secondary schools used for educational experimentation – in Virginia. The move comes on the heels of last year’s budget package, which included $100 million to fund planning grants, as well as start-up and operating costs, to lab schools.

The lab schools will operate at various public community colleges, universities, or other institutions of higher education across Virginia. In coming up with innovative models to reform K-12 education, lab schools resemble charter schools, which 45 states have authorized

Unfortunately, Virginia law requires local school districts to authorize charter schools, and most districts will not endorse any competition with the traditional public school model. The lab school program thus represents a workaround.

Partnerships created by the lab schools can “start to transform the one-size-fits-all system,” says Virginia Education Secretary Aimee Guidera. But without more and better choices, that transformation almost certainly will remain incomplete.

The legal challenge to censorship by proxy highlights covert government manipulation of online speech.

Jacob Sollum:

Last month, I noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had repeatedly exaggerated the scientific evidence supporting face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook attached a warning to that column, which it said was “missing context” and “could mislead people.”

According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations, and federal officials that journalist Michael Shellenberger calls the “censorship-industrial complex,” I had committed the offense of “malinformation.” Unlike “disinformation,” which is intentionally misleading, or “misinformation,” which is erroneous, “malinformation” is true but inconvenient.

As illustrated by internal Twitter communications that journalist Matt Taibbi highlighted last week, malinformation can include emails from government officials that undermine their credibility and “true content which might promote vaccine hesitancy.” The latter category encompasses accurate reports of “breakthrough infections” among people vaccinated against COVID-19, accounts of “true vaccine side effects,” objections to vaccine mandates, criticism of politicians, and citations of peer-reviewed research on naturally acquired immunity.

Disinformation and misinformation have always been contested categories, defined by the fallible and frequently subjective judgments of public officials and other government-endorsed experts. But malinformation is even more clearly in the eye of the beholder, since it is defined not by its alleged inaccuracy but by its perceived threat to public health, democracy, or national security, which often amounts to nothing more than questioning the wisdom, honesty, or authority of those experts.

Taking aim at credentialism

Graham Hillard:

Last week, following an executive order by Gov. Roy Cooper, North Carolina joined a growing movement to pull down unnecessary barriers to public employment.

Bearing the modest title “Recognizing the Value of Experience in State Government Hiring,” Executive Order No. 278 makes a number of concessions to economic reality. First, the order “recognizes that state employees bring value to their jobs from their experience and skills, not only from academic degrees.” Second, it acknowledges that many North Carolinians make use of technical education and apprenticeships rather than four-year colleges and are none the worse for it.

The upshot of these admissions? The director of the Office of State Human Resources must now take action “to emphasize how directly-related experience substitutes for formal education in [state] job recruitments.” Mandatory four-year degrees and the attendant credential inflation? Out. Rational hiring based on applicants’ skills and capabilities? Happily in.

Cooper’s order is merely the latest in a long line of equivalent state directives. Already this year, Pennsylvania’s Gov. Josh Shapiro acted to ensure that 92 percent of commonwealth jobs would be open to Keystoners without four-year degrees. ColoradoUtah, and Maryland made similar moves in 2022, with Alaska following suit just last month.

The state’s clerical and data-entry employees will no longer have a basic conversance with the plot of King Lear.To be sure, these policy shifts have more to do with worker shortages and “equity” than they do with the principles of higher-ed reform. Nevertheless, they deserve praise from the reform-minded. At long last, official stances are beginning to catch up with the facts on the ground: Many if not most state functions can be performed by the uncredentialed.

How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives

Musa al-Gharbi:

In a recent essay for Social Science & Medicine–Mental Health, epidemiologist Catherine Gimbrone and coauthors identified a significant gap in depressive attitudes between liberal and conservative teens. This gap was present in all years observed in the study (2005–18). It grew significantly starting in 2012, however, as depressive affect unilaterally spiked among liberals. Three years later, conservatives also began reporting increases in depression—although that rise tapered off relatively quickly while the increases among liberals continued.

Liberal girls tended to be significantly more depressed than boys, particularly after 2011. However, ideological differences swamped gender differences. Indeed, liberal boys were significantly more likely to report depression than conservatives of either gender. The authors also found that the more educated a teen’s family was, the more likely the young people were to be depressed, and the more dramatic their rise in depression was after 2012.

Meet The Experts Defining Official Disinformation & Official Truths

William Briggs:

We told you this was happening when it was happening. Not everybody believed it; indeed, most (and here I exclude regular readers) did not. And, worse, most still do not, and never will, such is the power of propaganda. This:

Twitter Files #18 and #19 focus on the Virality Project, an “anti-vaccine misinformation” effort led by Stanford and bringing together elite academia, NGOs, government, and experts in AI and social media monitoring, with six of the biggest social media companies on the planet. They went far beyond their “misinformation” remit. Twitter Files show the Virality Project pushed platforms to censor “stories of true vaccine side effects”.

Experts. 

“Reporting side effects of the now-pulled Johnson & Johnson vaccine would have been labelled ‘misinformation’ under Virality Project decrees.” And was. I tried showing deleterious vex effects using the CDC’s own data all through 2021, with this being one of the most interesting posts. Of course, these efforts were whacked on social media, and the post(s) died quiet deaths. Just like…but never mind.

Rather than listening out for safety signals to protect the public, leaders in the “anti-disinformation” field ran cover to protect BigPharma, smearing and censoring critics. The moral depravity is astounding and quite possibly criminal.

The Virality Project however is just part of a broader cultural shift that reverses long standing liberal/left commitments to free expression and allows censorship in the name of protection and safety.

There it is. Protection and safety. The Cult of Safety First!, a product of toxic femininity and nervous effeminacy. All exacerbated because of our Expertocracy, i.e. managerial state. 

Incidentally, if you want to see why the Cult will only become more stultifying and pervasive, see things like this thread:

SEIU and the Los Angeles School District

Gustavo Arellano:

He joined his father in El Salvador after graduating from high school in Florida, teaching English as a second language classes while studying engineering. But the pay wasn’t good, so Arias returned to Florida, where he worked at a Radio Shack for four years while waiting for a chance “to go back to El Salvador and keep the fight going.”

A fellow Salvadoran exile suggested that he intern for an SEIU campaign in Michigan. 

“They actually pay people to do that?” Arias remembers responding.

He soon got hired as an organizer in Chicago, then moved to California to work as an assistant director for collective bargaining for SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West’s hospital division. In Oakland, he led what was until this week the biggest strike of his career. 

At two nursing homes in 2010, about 80 caregivers — janitors, nursing assistants and other lower-rung employees — went on a five-day strike over working conditions. Afterward, 38 workers were fired.

“They lost heart, but we kept organizing and pressuring and reminding people, ‘The struggle is long,’” Arias said. The workers eventually got their jobs back, along with lost wages, after the National Labor Relations Board ruled in 2016 that their firing was illegal.

By then, Arias was Local 99’s executive director, with a more existential challenge.

“the bill was introduced at the behest of Microsoft lobbyists, in an effort to exclude Google Docs from classrooms”

Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier:

What would happen if such legal-but-sneaky strategies for tilting the rules in favor of one group over another become more widespread and effective? We can see hints of an answer in the remarkable pace at which artificial-intelligence tools for everything from writing to graphic design are being developed and improved. And the unavoidable conclusion is that AI will make lobbying more guileful, and perhaps more successful. 

It turns out there is a natural opening for this technology: microlegislation.

“Charles Negy, in many ways, is the poster child for what goes wrong when DIE takes over a campus”

William Jacobson:

Last week we wrote up the continuing struggle of University of Central Florida Professor Charles Negy to get justice for UCF retaliating against him because internet and student mobs objected to his tweets disputing systemic racism and white privilege, Prof. Charles Negy, Investigated and Fired After Tweets Disputing Systemic Racism, Files Federal Lawsuit Against U. Central Florida.

The story has been picked up by Fox News Digital, Central Florida professor fired for disputing systemic racism and White privilege fights back, files lawsuit, highlighting that Legal Insurrection has been chronicling the Negy story:

Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson, who founded both the Legal Insurrection Foundation and CriticalRace.org, has been an outspoken opponent of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion training– commonly referred to as DEI.

“Charles Negy, in many ways, is the poster child for what goes wrong when DEI takes over a campus, what goes wrong for free speech and for academic freedom,” Jacobson told Fox News Digital.

Earlier this month, Jacobson started the Equal Protection Project (EPP), a new initiative to battle racial discrimination in the workplace. He has been chronicling Negy’s ordeal since the professor sent a pair of tweets in the summer of 2020 – at the height of racial tensions in America following the death of George Floyd in police custody – that questioned the belief of systemic racism and White privilege….

“This is really one of the worst examples I’ve seen where a university, to placate the mob and also because they don’t like his opinions, really used the entire machinery of a major public university and taxpayer funding to go get this professor,” Jacobson said. “He filed a union grievance and went to arbitration. And lo and behold, the arbitrator cleared him, found he did nothing wrong, found the university was in the wrong, had no good cause to fire him, no legal cause to fire him and ordered him reinstated.”

Local Journalists Host Q&A Session
with Madison School Board Candidates

Video

Asking questions are four local education reporters. Olivia Herken of the Wisconsin State Journal, Dylan Brogan of Isthmus and Madison City Cast, Scott Girard of The Capital Times, and Kadjata Bah of Simpson Street Free Press.

Candidates in attendance are Nicki Vander Meulen (Seat 7, Running Unopposed), Badri Lankella (Seat 6) and Blair Feltham (Seat 6).

The moderator is Taylor Kilgore, managing editor at Simpson Street Free Press.

Our Half-Educated Education Debates

Frederick Hess:

Lately there’s been much hand-wringing punditry about the education “culture wars,” with the mainstream media blaming right-wing extremists for heated fights over social studies, school boards, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion), library books, and what-have-you. But what if right-wing extremism is mostly a figment of the mainstream media’s collective imagination? And what if it’s actually those enlightened pundits who are fueling the fights?

Education coverage often seems bent on ignoring or caricaturing conservative concerns, signaling to readers that the Right’s complaints are ignorant or insincere. This predictably frustrates the Right, ramping up populist outrage. And round and round we go.

Consider this winter’s AP African-American-history clash. When Florida governor Ron DeSantis objected to the politicized and polemical elements of the pilot course, major media portrayed him as a scheming, censorious bigot. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin accused him of mounting a “full-blown white supremacist” attack on “fact-based history.” The New York Times featured the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund declaring that “Florida is at the forefront of a nationwide campaign to silence Black voices” and “erase” black history.

The end of programming

Matt Welsh:

How does all of this change how we think about the field of computer science? The new atomic unit of computation becomes not a processor, memory, and I/O system implementing a von Neumann machine, but rather a massive, pre-trained, highly adaptive AI model. This is a seismic shift in the way we think about computation—not as a predictable, static process, governed by instruction sets, type systems, and notions of decidability. AI-based computation has long since crossed the Rubicon of being amenable to static analysis and formal proof. We are rapidly moving toward a world where the fundamental building blocks of computation are temperamental, mysterious, adaptive agents.

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!

The shift in focus from programs to models should be obvious to anyone who has read any modern machine learning papers. These papers barely mention the code or systems underlying their innovations; the building blocks of AI systems are much higher-level abstractions like attention layers, tokenizers, and datasets. A time traveler from even 20 years ago would have a hard time making sense of the three sentences in the (75-page!) GPT-3 paper3 describing the actual software built for the model: “We use the same model and architecture as GPT-2, including the modified initialization, pre-normalization, and reversible tokenization described therein, with the exception that we use alternating dense and locally banded sparse attention patterns in the layers of the transformer, similar to the Sparse Transformer. To study the dependence of ML performance on model size, we train eight different sizes of model, ranging over three orders of magnitude from 125 million parameters to 175 billion parameters, with the last being the model we call GPT-3. Previous work suggests that with enough training data, scaling of validation loss should be approximately a smooth power law as a function of size; training models of many different sizes allows us to test this hypothesis both for validation loss and for downstream language tasks.”

Father of China’s Great Firewall raises concerns about ChatGPT-like services

Che Pan:

Fang Bingxing, considered the father of China’s Great Firewall, has raised concerns over GPT-4, warning that it could lead to an “information cocoon” as the generative artificial intelligence (AI) service can provide answers to everything.

Fang said the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, developed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and now released as the more powerful ChatGPT-4 version, pose a big challenge to governments around the world, according to an interview published on Thursday by Red Star News, a media affiliate to state-backed Chengdu Economic Daily.

“People’s perspectives can be manipulated as they seek all kinds of answers from AI,” he was quoted as saying.

South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate, a struggle with lessons for us all

Ashley Ahn:

Yun-Jeong Kim grew up imagining what her future family would look like — married with several kids, a nice home and a dog. But when the lease on her apartment in Seoul, South Korea, became too much to afford, she found herself somewhere she’d never imagined: 31 years old and living back at home with her younger brother and their parents.

Kim, a product designer and art instructor, calls her hopes of one day having children “just a fantasy” — especially now, when housing costs are soaring, the job market is oversaturated and marriage rates are plummeting.

“I can’t believe that [not having children] is the current situation in Korea,” she said. “But this is the reality.”

It’s a reality that has left the country with the lowest fertility rate in the world since 2013. Across South Korea, women are choosing to have fewer children — or none at all — as they contend with a rise in the cost of living that has hit young people disproportionately hard. At the same time, marriage rates are down more than 35%, according to the last 10 years of available data, as more South Koreans are increasingly prioritizing work over starting a family. 

In South Korea, the fertility rate — the average number of children born to a woman in her reproductive years — is now 0.78, according to figures released by the Korean government in February. It could be years before the country can reach the 2.1 rate that experts say is needed for a country to maintain a stable population without migration.

Choose life.

Reporting on Chapel Hill’s new School of Civic Life and Leadership has been lopsided and misleading.

Jenna Robinson:

When news broke that UNC-Chapel Hill had plans to create a new School of Civic Life and Leadership, it was inevitable that there would be some confusion. But nearly two months later, some UNC faculty members and local media outlets have continued to drive a false narrative about the school’s creation and the university’s governance practices.

On January 26, trustees voted to “request that the administration of UNC-CH accelerate its development of a School of Civic Life and Leadership.” The resolution passed unanimously with little discussion.

Some faculty members and local media outlets have continued to drive a false narrative about UNC’s governance practices.

The following week, at a meeting of Chapel Hill’s Faculty Executive Council, faculty members expressed their disdain for the new program and their distrust of the process. Faculty Chair Mimi Chapman’s comments were representative: “To me, this is a solution in search of a problem, and the way it is happening and the content of what is happening is deeply, deeply troubling.”

At the same meeting, Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Provost Chris Clemens explained that, although the resolution was a surprise, plans to create a new school—a “superstructure” for the Program for Public Discourse—had been in progress since 2017. And, in an email to the whole Carolina community, Guskiewicz wrote, “I appreciate the encouragement of our Board to build on the work we have done” [emphasis added]. Despite these clarifications, faculty, the Daily Tar Heel, and the Raleigh News & Observer have continued to insist that the Board of Trustees has overstepped its authority and that the school is unneeded.

The labor shortage is pushing American colleges into crisis, with the plunge in enrollment the worst ever recorded

Collin Binkley and the AP

A year after high school, Hart is directing a youth theater program in Jackson, Tennessee. He got into every college he applied to but turned them all down. Cost was a big factor, but a year of remote learning also gave him the time and confidence to forge his own path.

“There were a lot of us with the pandemic, we kind of had a do-it-yourself kind of attitude of like, ‘Oh — I can figure this out,’” he said. “Why do I want to put in all the money to get a piece of paper that really isn’t going to help with what I’m doing right now?”

Hart is among hundreds of thousands of young people who came of age during the pandemic but didn’t go to college. Many have turned to hourly jobs or careers that don’t require a degree, while others have been deterred by high tuition and the prospect of student debt.

What first looked like a pandemic blip has turned into a crisis. Nationwide, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8% from 2019 to 2022, with declines even after returning to in-person classes, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse. The slide in the college-going rate since 2018 is the steepest on record, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Economists say the impact could be dire.

At worst, it could signal a new generation with little faith in the value of a college degree. At minimum, it appears those who passed on college during the pandemic are opting out for good. Predictions that they would enroll after a year or two haven’t borne out.

Fewer college graduates could worsen labor shortages in fields from health care to information technology. For those who forgo college, it usually means lower lifetime earnings — 75% less compared with those who get bachelor’s degrees, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. And when the economy sours, those without degrees are more likely to lose jobs.

Who Owns the University?

Richard Vedder:

American higher education is in crisis. The rise of diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies and a growing intolerance for dissent has spurred political battles for control of campus decision-making in North Carolina, Texas, Florida, and elsewhere. The fights point to a fundamental question: Who “owns” a university? Perhaps the question is better phrased: To whom does a school belong?

• The board. Most schools, public or private, are overseen by a legally constituted governing board.

• The politicians. At public institutions, state government usually is the legal “owner” of the school.

• The administrators. A school’s president and senior bureaucrats are vested with executive responsibility, which resembles ownership.

• The faculty. The professors who administer academic offerings and conduct grant-inducing research often feel the school belongs to them.

• The students. They are a primary reason for the school’s existence and their families pay substantial tuition and fees.

• The alumni. Graduates constitute the donor base at most private schools and some public ones as well.

• The accrediting agencies. The federal Education Department charges these bodies with certifying an institution’s right to confer degrees.

“Conceding that the National School Boards Association letter was the only basis for the Justice Department’s actions”

Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of the Biden Administration’s use of federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources against parents voicing concerns about controversial curricula and education-related policies at local school board meetings. This oversight began in October 2021 following the issuance of a memorandum from Attorney General Merrick Garland directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation and all U.S. Attorney’s Offices—among other Department components—to examine and address threats posed by parents at school board meetings.

Although the Biden Administration declined to cooperate with this oversight in the 117th Congress, whistleblower disclosures and a report commissioned by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) shed some light on how the Biden Administration colluded with the NSBA to create a justification to use federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources against parents. There were gaps in the information available to the Committee then, primarily because the Biden administration did not participate in the NSBA’s third-party report. On February 3, 2023, Chairman Jordan subpoenaed the Justice Department, FBI, and Education Department for documents necessary to advance the Committee’s oversight and inform potential legislative reforms.

From the initial set of material produced in response to the subpoenas, it is apparent that the Biden Administration misused federal law-enforcement and counterterrorism resources for political purposes. The Justice Department’s own documents demonstrate that there was no compelling nationwide law-enforcement justification for the Attorney General’s directive or the Department components’ execution thereof.1 After surveying local law enforcement, U.S. Attorney’s offices around the country reported back to Main Justice that there was no legitimate law-enforcement basis for the Attorney General’s directive to use federal law enforcement and counterterrorism resources to investigate school board-related threats. For example:

• One U.S. Attorney reported that “this issue was very poorly received” by his local law-enforcement community and “described by some as a manufactured issue.”2 He continued: “No one I spoke with in law enforcement seemed to think that there is a serious national threat directed at school boards, which gave the impression that our priorities are misapplied.”3

• Another U.S. Attorney’s Office reported that the local FBI field office in the area “did not see any imminent threats to school boards or their members . . . , nor did they ascertain any worrisome trends in that regard.”

Notes and links on the National School Board Association “weaponizing” the US Justice Department.