Tom Knighton:

Take admission standards at prestigious prep schools. One such school decided they needed more black students, so rather than look at how they could help more black students meet the existing standard, they opted to just lower it.

And one black parent is kind of pissed about it.

A parent spoke out against school district officials’ proposal to lower the admission standards of a selective public prep school in “order to increase diversity.”

A mom of two named Sylvia Nelson told a local news outlet she is “insulted” by Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS) plan to lower the admission standards of Walnut Hills High School, a prep school for grades 7-12.

“As an African American parent, I’m insulted because I don’t believe standards need to be lowered for African Americans to get into Walnut,” Nelson told local news outlet WKRC on Monday. “It was under the auspices of having more African Americans at Walnut Hills.” 

“competitiveness and “white supremacy”; Taxpayer supported Madison School District

This has always been my own take on the topic.

Look, if you have standards in place and African-American students aren’t qualifying, you have to look at why they’re not meeting the standards. You don’t lower it so they can get in.

First, it’s insulting, as Nelson said. The implication is that African Americans can’t meet that standard. How is that anything but an insult? Further, it’s racist as hell since you’re essentially saying that about an entire ethnicity.

“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 @CapTimes opinion editor confirmed to me that the editorial board didn’t bother to interview the city council candidates before endorsing.

As a reader, journalist, and financial supporter of the Cap Times, I’m extremely disappointed in this sloppy opinion journalism. pic.twitter.com/IZFtz9sARa

— Sam Hoisington (@SamHoisington) March 22, 2023

Some personal news! After I finish my master’s this upcoming May, I’ll be joining @CapTimes as a disinformation and tech reporter. So excited to be able to stick around in Madison and craft such an important beat.

— Erin McGroarty (she/her) (@elmcgroarty) March 22, 2023

Coinbase:

Today, we are disappointed to share that the SEC gave us a “Wells notice” regarding an unspecified portion of our listed digital assets, our staking service Coinbase Earn, Coinbase Prime, and Coinbase Wallet after a cursory investigation. A Wells notice is the way that SEC staff tells a company that they are recommending that the SEC take enforcement action for possible violations of securities laws. It is not a formal charge or lawsuit, but it can lead to one. Rest assured, Coinbase products and services continue to operate as usual – today’s news does not require any changes to our current products or services. 

Today’s Wells notice does not provide a lot of information for us to respond to. The SEC staff told us they have identified potential violations of securities law, but little more. We asked the SEC specifically to identify which assets on our platforms they believe may be securities, and they declined to do so. Today’s Wells notice also comes after Coinbase provided multiple proposals to the SEC about registration over the course of months, all of which the SEC ultimately refused to respond to. 

Although we don’t take this development lightly, we are very confident in the way we run our business – the same business we presented to the SEC in order for us to become a public company in 2021. We continue to think rulemaking and legislation are better tools for defining the law for our industry than enforcement actions. But if necessary, we welcome the opportunity for Coinbase and the broader crypto community to get clarity in court. Below we share more details on our attempts to engage with the SEC on registration paths, the current U.S. crypto regulatory confusion, and another reminder that Coinbase doesn’t list securities.

Key points from the memo:

-Steinbach on leave.
-No punishment for students—in part because administrators sent “conflicting signals about whether what was happening was acceptable.”
-Mandatory training not just on free speech, but “professional conduct.”🧵https://t.co/iUaom78bmy https://t.co/Qj2Q8cKGwm

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) March 22, 2023

The blackshirts at Stanford NLG must be disciplined. Listed below are the student leaders responsible for enabling fascism at Stanford:
Nathan Tauger
David Cremins
Lily Bou
Mohit Mookim
Marin Callaway
Oona Cahill
Bella Cooper
Esau Ruiz
Kiran Chawla
Jacob Maddox
Asher Morse
3/ pic.twitter.com/hK4WzixVyl

— Stanford College Republicans (@Stanford_GOP) March 15, 2023

Levin Mahnken:

Diana Smith stands at the head of a cluttered classroom at Washington Latin Public Charter School. The lights are dimmed, and projected on the wall behind is one of the most famous images in European art, Raphael’s The School of Athens, which acts as the anchor for today’s lesson in art, history and philosophy.

On a handheld whiteboard, Smith jots a word that perhaps one in 10,000 adults could define: “Aetiology,” the study of causes and origins. Not contenting herself with one stumper, she quickly adds more SAT material below it, this time written in Greek letters: “Logos.” Coaxing the kids to recite them with her, she wonders aloud what they could mean. 

If the prompt is a bit advanced for 10-year-olds, no one seems fazed. In fact, through the rest of the 80-minute period, Smith’s students gamely follow along as she traipses through more of the antiquarian lexicon, sometimes gesturing toward the image of an early modern masterpiece that decorated the walls of the Vatican for over 500 years. The tutorial, part of the school’s foundational coursework for young pupils, is a concentrated dose of a pedagogy that Smith has spent much of her career refining.

My 94-year-old grandmother has kept a list of every book she ever read since she was 14 years old. Amazing archive of one person’s mind over nearly a century pic.twitter.com/Cu9znTgkJO

— Ben Myers (@_BenMyers_) March 20, 2023

The Ivy Exile:

Whether wrecking American energy to wreak far worse environmental damage elsewhere, printing enough funny money to substantially devalue the dollar, insisting on demonstrably harmful Covid mandates, or ushering in millions and millions of unvetted migrants, it amounts to a sort of shock treatment to corral and humiliate an unruly electorate that has been found wanting.

Yet the crass opportunism only guarantees greater backlash and further delegitimizes the actual progressive project, or whatever’s left of it. Generations of hard work and good faith have been squandered in just a few short years, trading credibility and potential for spiteful self-indulgence.

Perhaps electoral apocalypse over several cycles might chasten the powers that be, but I doubt it. Beyond all the money and inertia, too much of the establishment truly believes enough coercion can make their fantasies come true, with all manner of carrots and sticks to force others into line.

Nonetheless, stubborn reality burbles on beneath even the best-funded manipulation. The Emerging Democratic Majority might’ve really materialized had Dem apparatchiks any discipline to appear to give the slightest shit about what most voters think. But with society supposedly determined by fungible narratives from up top, the peasantry’s ignorant superstitions are irrelevant.

Alex Tabarrok:

Here’s an interesting idea it wouldn’t have occured to me to ask. What is the length of time described in the average 250 words of narration and how has this changed over time? Most famously James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is a long novel about single day with many pages describing brief experiences in minute detail. In contrast, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men covers 2 billion years in fewer words than Joyce uses to cover a single day.

Using human readers grading 1000 passages, Underwood et al. (2018) finds that the average length of time described in a typical passage has declined substantially since the 1700s, from a day to about an hour so a decline by a factor of 24. Writers have become much more focused on describing individual experiences than events.

John Lee Shaw

In last week’s provincial elections in the Netherlands, an insurgent party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), took the largest vote share in all 12 Dutch provinces.

This is a remarkable win for the farmers’ party. The BBB (BoerBurgerBeweging) was only founded in 2019. It was born out of sympathy for the widespread Dutch farmers’ protests against the government, a populist movement which is still going strong today. The party is focussed on issues related to agriculture and the countryside. Among its proposals are a ministry for the countryside and allowing farmers to have more say in matters of agricultural policy. It also hopes to reduce the power of the European Union in the Netherlands, saying that while the Netherlands should remain a member state, the EU should aim to be merely a trading bloc, not a federal superstate (if only).

This unlikely victory means much more than just local seats. The provincial councils determine the makeup of the Dutch senate, its Eerste Kamer (first chamber). The Eerste Kamer functions much like Westminster’s House of Lords. It scrutinises the governing lower house (the Tweede Kamer) and has the power to reject proposed legislation.

In May, the new crop of provincial leaders will elect the Eerste Kamer, with the BBB projected to gain 17 seats, the largest of any party. This has the potential to massively shake up Dutch politics – particularly so given the scale of the losses endured last week by the current ruling coalition, comprised of prime minister Mark Rutte’s VVD party, the centrist D66 party, and the Christian-democratic CDA and ChristenUnie parties. After a weak performance in the provincial elections, the coalition parties are projected to end up with just 24 senate seats in May, down from their current total of 32.

Zach Winn:

Words have always played a central role in Barry Duncan’s life. He’s worked in bookstores for more than 40 years, reads often, and has tried his hand at writing novels, children’s books, song lyrics, and plays.

But it wasn’t until he stumbled onto the book “An Almanac of Words at Play” that Duncan realized words could go backwards. The discovery, which he made in the early 1980s, set him on a course he would follow for decades. For fun, and then out of habit, he began reversing words he saw in print, noticing words that took on new meaning when flipped, and writing sentences that could be read backward and forward — palindromes.

Today Duncan, who works as a staff member at the MIT Press Bookstore in Kendall Square, has developed a reputation as a professional palindromist. His creations have been featured in galleries, selected anthologies, and are the subject of an upcoming documentary. He’s written 800-word epics that don’t lose their meaning when flipped. He’s written reversible poems and tributes that were used as auction prizes. And he’s written countless palindromes to serve as gifts for birthdays, anniversaries, and other occasions.

Mostly, though, Duncan just writes palindromes for fun.

“I hope it gives people an idea of what can be accomplished in two directions,” he says. “Of course, I also hope that people will appreciate them. It’s always better if the person or organization for whom you’ve written a palindrome replies in a positive way. “

Kayla Jimenez

A House bill that may face a vote this week calls for public schools to give parents full access to all school curriculum, be transparent about school spending and provide information about violent activities at school.

Current language in the Republican proposal mimics some state-level parents’ rights laws already in effect or under consideration. 

A new Florida law, for instance, meant to protect parents’ rights, bans educators from teaching young students about sexual orientation or gender identity, and lawmakers are aiming to expand it this year. A proposal in North Carolina would allow parents to review course materials, withhold consent for participation in reproductive and safety education programs and be informed if their kids ask to go by a different name or use a different pronoun. A Texas proposal would require schools to tell parents about school choice options and give parents the option to decide if their child should repeat a grade or a course.

Jill Barshay:

Many major cities around the country, from New York and New Orleans to Denver and Los Angeles, have changed how children are assigned to public schools over the past 20 years and now allow families to send their children to a school outside of their neighborhood zone. Known as public school choice or open enrollment, this policy gives children in poor neighborhoods a chance at a better education. Many supporters hoped it could also be a way to desegregate schools even as residential neighborhoods remain racially divided.

However, a new study of public school choice in Charlotte, North Carolina, finds a deeply troubling consequence to this well-intended policy: increased crime. 

Three university economists studied the criminal justice records of 10,000 boys who were in fifth grade between 2005 and 2008. Thousands wanted to go to highly regarded middle schools, some of which were in nearby suburbs of the large Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district. Seats were allocated through a lottery.

Interview with Michel Martin:

Over the course of my career, one of the things that has really driven me crazy is the inability to describe something as racist when it obviously is, and using all of these euphemisms like “deeply conservative views” and things like that. I personally don’t understand why we have allowed that to go on for so long because that misidentifies what conservatism is. I don’t understand why “conservative” is code for “racist” anymore than I understand why “urban” is code for “Black.” Why can’t we just say what things are?

Just because I appreciate stating exactly what things are doesn’t mean I’m on some kind of warpath to label people. I don’t think labeling people as racist is any more productive than labeling somebody as an alcoholic. They’re not going to applaud you and say, “Thank you for telling me that.” But what you can do is accurately describe someone’s behavior.

Vladimir Putin says Russia supports the use of the Chinese yuan for conducting transactions between Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This stance aligns with the ongoing trend of de-dollarization and the shift towards a multi-polar global order.pic.twitter.com/lj89MhVkAa

— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 22, 2023

A dive into “reserve currencies”.

Gleech:

over time amateurs blow their lead by focusing less and relying on easier, more direct methods. They rely more on informal conversation as analysis method, they prefer personal connections over open competitions in choosing people, and they rely more on a perceived consensus among a smaller group of fellow enthusiasts. As a result, their contributions just don’t appeal as widely or as long.

Take Hanson himself: he has about 100 academic publications, two big books, and something like 3000 blog posts. Which will be his biggest contribution in the end?

Maybe tenured academics are the people best placed to do long content: lots of time, lots of connections, some pressure towards rigour and communicability. But you should be able to do it outside uni, if you’re wary.

Olivia Herken

A candidate for the Madison School Board on Tuesday said schools are the product of “white supremacy” and accused her opponent of favoring competition in the classroom — a characterization her opponent embraced.

“Our schools are products of white supremacy,” said Blair Mosner Feltham, an equitable multi-level system of supports site coordinator at Sun Prairie East High School and former Madison teacher.

“They reinforce white supremacy and if we want to talk about how we make sure all students are thriving in our schools, we need to fundamentally change both the structure of our schools and the purposes of them,” she said.

Badri Lankella, though, said “we need to have competitive students.”

“Yes, I am for competitive schools, because that’s where everything is moving towards,” he said.

Kennedy: “Do you know what a Brady motion is?”

Biden judicial nominee: “It’s not coming to mind… I believe that the Brady case involved something regarding the Second Amendment.”

(It requires prosecutors to disclose evidence to the defense)
pic.twitter.com/WOIuddxvw6

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) March 22, 2023

If a school system run entirely by Democrats, avowed Socialists, and “progressives” over many decades is indeed filled with “white supremacy,” who’s to blame? pic.twitter.com/iLbpC2Sl7W

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) March 22, 2023

The young woman is currently employed as — take this pill with a glass of water: an “equitable multi-level system of supports site coordinator” at Sun Prairie East high school. What, might you wonder, is that? (!!!) We looked it up and we’re still at a loss.

Ah, memories. Years ago (15?) I participated in a few school district strategy sessions. I sensed that the teachers in that forum were divided between: 1. Hold hands for 12 years and give the students a piece of paper, and 2. Learn, rigor and high expectations. My sense was that the former were winning the battle.

Commentary.

“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?

WRAL:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Tuesday for a deaf student who sued his public school system for providing an inadequate education. The case is significant for other disabled students who allege they were failed by school officials.

The case the justices ruled in involves Miguel Luna Perez, who attended public school in Sturgis, Michigan. Perez’s lawyers told the court that for 12 years the school system neglected the boy and lied to his parents about the progress he was making, permanently stunting his ability to communicate.

Dov Fischer:

First things first. When I was a little boy studying at yeshiva elementary school (Jewish parochial school), I had a first-grade English teacher who was first grade, Mrs. Sherman. Yes, Missus Sherman. She taught me two things I always have remembered. Having learned to speak English in Brooklyn, I did not initially know that “then” and “than” were two different words. The Yankees were better then the Mets, chocolate was better then vinella, becawss dat was da way we tawked then. Mrs. Sherman taught me “than.” It was a revelation and laid the foundation for my writing today at The American Spectator. The second thing she taught me was that you don’t say “me and Stuey”; you say “Stuey and I” whenever using the two nouns and that conjunction in the nominative case. And in the objective case, you say “Stuey and me.” But, with a poetic exception, you never say “Me and Stuey.”

Shift forward half a century, give or take. This week, our country saw something far more worrisome than the predictable collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. We saw the further degrading of our culture to the degree that so-called “law students” at a so-called premium university barked and yipped like dogs and disrupted a speech by an Article III judge, the Hon. Kyle Duncan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. He had been invited to address the conservative and libertarian Federalist Society of Stanford Law School, and the dogs who masquerade as “law students” at Stanford came to bark and growl and howl and bay and yelp and whimper. Caninites, if not Philistines.

I am a child of White Privilege. My grandparents had the privilege of fleeing pogroms in Russia and Galicia. My father had the privilege of working 10 hours daily, six days a week, with time off only for observing the Shabbat (Sabbath) according to its laws. I was very privileged. I was home every summer, never at sleep-away. I traveled by public transportation. But I had two parents at home, and they made me do my homework every night. Na-na-na-na-na.

I come from a different America. We may lose — even may already have lost — that America forever; I hope not. If we have — or if we do — who will stand for freedom and core decency if that America is gone while the likes of China, Russia, Iran, Arab Muslim sheikhdoms, North Korea, and other tyrannies proliferate? Will the planet take a detour back to the Middle Ages, albeit with social media and chatbots with which to draft our surrender, or to 1940s Germany and its occupied vassals? Who will stare down the axes of evil if America becomes a nation of feminized men and women who deny their gender that is dominated by whining victims demanding trigger warnings from Xi, Putin, and the ayatollahs?

Elizabeth Grace Matthew:

Former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s first book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, in which the Facebook COO offers predominantly female readers gutsy, directive advice about how to approach their careers, is about to reach its tenth birthday. Looking back over the last decade, it’s unclear whether it made a difference for women in America. 

Sandberg’s book, which grew out of her Ted talk entitled “Why We Have Too Few Women Leaders” and launched hundreds of women’s groups, is best understood as a forceful response to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s famous 2012 lament in The Atlantic that women in the twenty-first century still could not “have it all.” 

In her book, Sandberg accepts this fact and doubles down: Of course, no one can have it all; still, women should run fully half of the world’s businesses and men fully half of its homes, because a world in which more women lead is presumptively a better world for all women. 

Yet despite Lean In’s phenomenal popularity and some of its useful tips on matters like negotiating salaries, just eight percent of Fortune 500 companies today are female-led. We are not much closer to Sandberg’s visionthan we were a decade ago.

Tyna Eloundou, Sam Manning, Pamela Mishkin, Daniel Rock

We investigate the potential implications of Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) models and related technologies on the U.S. labor market. Using a new rubric, we assess occupations based on their correspondence with GPT capabilities, incorporating both human expertise and classifications from GPT-4. Our findings indicate that approximately 80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs, while around 19% of workers may see at least 50% of their tasks impacted. The influence spans all wage levels, with higher-income jobs potentially facing greater exposure. Notably, the impact is not limited to industries with higher recent productivity growth. We conclude that Generative Pre-trained Transformers exhibit characteristics of general-purpose technologies (GPTs), suggesting that as these models could have notable economic, social, and policy implications.

Kayla Huynh:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison will extend its Wisconsin Teacher Pledge for another two academic years in an aim to address teacher shortages across the state and nation. 

With a $5 million gift from bestselling author James Patterson and his wife Susan Patterson, a children’s book author and UW-Madison alum, the program will now go on through the 2027-28 academic year. Launched in 2020, the over $26 million initiative funded by donors was initially planned to last five years but was extended last March through the 2025-26 academic year. 

The program within the School of Education pays the equivalent of in-state tuition and fees, as well as testing and licensing costs, for all teacher education students who commit to working three or four years at Wisconsin schools.

NCLA:

In a thorough and well-reasoned decision, Judge Terry A. Doughty of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana has denied government defendants’ motion to dismiss in State of Missouri, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al. The New Civil Liberties Alliance, a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil rights group, represents renowned epidemiologists Drs. Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, as well as Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Ms. Jill Hines, in a lawsuit that has exposed an elaborate, multi-agency federal government censorship regime. Judge Doughty wrote, “The Court finds that the Complaint alleges significant encouragement and coercion that converts the otherwise private conduct of censorship on social media platforms into state action, and is unpersuaded by Defendants’ arguments to the contrary.”

Eugene Volokh:

William Brewer, Sarah Rogers & Noah Peters of Brewer Attorneys & Counselors and I filed a petition earlier this month asking the Supreme Court Second Circuit to review the Second Circuit decision in NRA v. Vullo; I think many of our readers will find it interesting (my apologies for the delay in passing it along).

I generally tend to agree with the NRA’s ideological views, to a considerable extent, but I would have been glad to be engaged to argue a similar case on behalf of groups I disagreed with as well; it’s a pretty important First Amendment question that can affect groups with all sorts of views. (Note that the ACLU filed an amicus brief on NRA’s side in the District Court.) Here’s our Introduction:

David Griffith:

Q: Do charter schools increase or decrease districts’ total revenues per pupil?
A: Charter schools may increase or decrease districts’ total revenues per student, depending on who authorizes them, how they impact the local housing market, and the policies that states and localities adopt.

Q: Do charter schools increase or decrease districts’ instructional spending?
A: Competition from charters may push districts to increase or decrease their instructional spending (though it has mostly positive effects on specific instructional inputs such as teacher salaries).

Q: Do charter schools make districts more or less efficient?
A: While few studies address the efficiency question directly, what we do know suggests that charters make affected school districts more efficient, at least in the long run.

The Bottom Line

In the long run, districts will adjust to charter-driven enrollment declines, just as they do when their enrollments fluctuate for other reasons, so the challenge for policymakers is managing any transition costs—that is, any temporary fiscal or operational challenges that districts face—in a way that is fair to students and taxpayers.

John Wilson:

The controversy began in 2015, when the department hired a professor and Coons felt the candidate did not meet the qualifications for a history of philosophy position. Coons was told that “the application alone leaves out critical information that is very important,” and he soon found out what was so important about this professor. In 2019, that professor helped the department receive a $1.6 million grant from the libertarian Charles Koch Foundation. Coons has expressed his view that the Koch money corrupted the hiring process in the department and continues to occasionally raise these concerns in emails to colleagues. Coons is not crazy to think that Koch money could corrupt academic values. There is overwhelming evidence of how the Koch Foundation at the time used its funding to influence academia, including (as one Institute for Humane Studies proposal to Koch put it) using “trusted faculty” who “acted as our agents.”

There is no doubt that Coons’ colleagues and the administration are annoyed at him and would prefer he shut up about the past disputes. Unfortunately for them, both academic freedom and the First Amendment do not allow their preferences to be imposed on Coons.

Coons is accused of three crimes: sending emails to faculty who didn’t want to receive them, insubordination for violating an order not to send emails, and violating a provision in the union contract urging faculty to show “respect” toward others.

Brendan Case and Ying Chen

When European travelers first encountered the Warlpiri of Australia’s Outback or the Kalapalo of the Amazon Basin in the 19th century, at least one institution would have been familiar amid the welter of cultural differences. As in the West, life among the Warlpiri and Kalapalo is profoundly shaped by marriage. In their own ways, the members of both of these societies strive to attract desirable spouses and then to raise children and forge a life together. As anthropologist Joseph Henrich observes, despite important variation in its form across cultures, “marriage represents the keystone institution for most (not all) societies, and may be the most primeval of human institutions.” 

Marriage might be nearly ubiquitous, but does it still matter today? As reliable contraception has lowered the stakes of sex, and women have achieved political and, in some cases, economic equality with men, perhaps marriage has now become merely optional, a capstone rather than a cornerstone of a successful life. Still, there are good reasons to doubt the benefits of a post-nuptial society, as comparisons of married people either with the never-married or the divorced have generally found that the former are healthier and happier than the latter, even today.

Tyler Cowen and Alexander T. Tabarrok

Abstract: GPTs, such as ChatGPT and Bing Chat, are capable of answering economics questions, solving specific economic models, creating exams, assisting with research, generating ideas, and enhancing writing, among other tasks. This paper highlights how these innovative tools differ from prior software and necessitate novel methods of interaction. By providing examples, tips, and guidance, we aim to optimize the use of GPTs and LLMs for learning and teaching economics effectively.

David Zweig:

While gain-of-function research—and its potential connection to the origin of SARS-CoV-2 and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)—continues togenerate headlines, and inquiries from Congress, one aspect of this evolving story over the past several years has remained constant: Anthony Fauci’s repeated evasions and outright denials about the U.S. government’s funding of this type of risky research, which can make viruses more deadly.

When questioned during a November 2021 Senate hearing about the National Institutes of Health funneling money to the WIV, and whether the lab there conducted GOF research of concern, Fauci issued a complex denial. Much of it rested on lawyerly semantics, where he admitted that “gain of function is a very nebulous term.” And in a hearing in May 2021, Fauci responded to similar questions narrowly, that “the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”

As I explained in my piece on gain-of-function research for The Free Press last week—according to numerous experts and an obvious reading of the grant applications for work conducted at the WIV—the NIH, indeed, did fund this type of research in Wuhan.

Scott Girard:

The candidates on hand will include the two running for Seat 6 — former school district educator Blair Feltham and former Madison City Council candidate Badri Lankella — as well as Seat 7 incumbent Nicki Vander Meulen, who is running unopposed. The current representative for Seat 6, Christina Gomez Schmidt, is not running for reelection.

The general election will take place on April 4.

The forum is free and will run 7-8 p.m. in the auditorium at East High, 2222 E. Washington Ave. We also plan to livestream the discussion on captimes.com.

“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?

www

 grades does the curriculum cover?

We provide a complete curriculum for kindergarten through twelfth grade.

Does the curriculum produce its own books or learning materials?

The curriculum is compiled from carefully selected external materials. This allows the student to benefit from the world’s best educational sources in each subject, and it creates space for the inclusion of great books on a wide variety of topics.

How does pricing work?

Our curriculum for kindergarten is completely free. For other grades, we offer a free seven-day trial to explore the curriculum. Thereafter the cost is $39 monthly for your whole family. You may pause or cancel your monthly subscription at any time.

Do I need to purchase books?

Other than the math and art curricula, you should be able to procure most of the core and optional books from your local library. You may wish to purchase your favorites keep in your home, but this is not required.

Quinton Klabon:

The coronavirus pandemic was a 2-year catastrophe for children. Students suffered through virtual schooling, quarantined teachers, and emotional misery. Academic results, the lowest this century, still have not recovered.

After sending $860 million to help Wisconsin public schools manage through spring 2021, Congress sent a final $1.49 billion to get students back on track.

The goal? Do whatever it takes to catch kids up by September 2024.

The problem? No one knows how schools have directed it or not directed it…until now.

“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?

Hannah Natanson

And Leah McCullough, 38, who has one child in the Mentor district and home-schools her other three, dates her distrust of public education to the era of Zoom school, when she said she saw lessons she deemed outlandish.

“I started noticing, they would break off into these meetings and it was, like, [a video of] dancing Muslims under a rainbow,” McCullough said. “And I’m like: ‘Oh what? What is this?’ And there was a lot of talking about color.”

(Asked about Popelas’s and McCullough’s stories, Mentor schools spokeswoman Kristen Estes said she could locate no evidence of either the assignment or the video.)

A few weeks after Concerned Taxpayers debuted, a coalition of about a dozen mothers and grandmothers began attending board meetings to speak after, and against, its members. At the start of this school year, Melanie Majikas, 51, founded Support Education to counter what she called the anger and misinformation emanating from Concerned Taxpayers. In weeks, nearly 300 parents joined up.

“I wanted to show the teachers that someone supported what they were doing,” said Lauren Marchaza, 40. “Particularly after my daughter’s kindergarten teacher went above and beyond during covid.”

Lynne Mazeika, 75, whose children and grandchildren graduated from the district and who has one grandchild still enrolled, said she “just couldn’t stand the negativity anymore.”

Great letter in @FT about moral panic around kids and smartphones and the lack of data to support it. One of the authors @OrbenAmy has been a constant voice of calm in a debate where too many – including it seems the FT – have succumbed to hysteria pic.twitter.com/NmfcQkKpL0

— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) March 20, 2023

Wall Street Journal:

Critical race theory is becoming institutionalized across American universities, and a major reason is the educational bureaucracy. Most universities now have offices for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, that exercise a broad writ on campus and act as speech police within the university.

That power was on ugly display last week at Stanford Law School, where a mob of law students shouted down Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan in a spectacle unfit for any institution of higher learning. (Judge Duncan relates his experience nearby.)

Heckling unpopular speakers is common on campus, but what makes this episode stand out is the role played by administrators. As the room grew unruly, Judge Duncan asked that a college official step in. The law school’s associate dean for DEI, Tirien Steinbach, took the podium. “Me and many people in this Administration do absolutely believe in free speech,” the dean said, but then went on to ask if “the juice is worth the squeeze”—that is, whether tolerating free speech is worth the pain it causes.

Rachel Cohen:

When President Joe Biden recently touted the hundreds of billions of dollars invested into American manufacturing in the last two years, he included a talking point that previous Democratic presidents might not have bragged about. New factories in Ohio, he said, could offer thousands of “jobs paying $130,000 a year, and many don’t require a college degree.” 

When Biden highlighted those non-college jobs at the State of the Union, it was just three weeks after Pennsylvania’s new Democratic governor Josh Shapiro eliminated the requirement of a four-year college degree for the bulk of jobs in Pennsylvania state’s government, two months after Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox did the same, and nearly one year after Maryland’s Republican governor Larry Hogan set off the trend. Since the president’s State of the Union, Alaska’s Republican governor Mike Dunleavy has also followed suit.

Maryland’s newly elected Democratic governor, Wes Moore, plans to continue opening up state jobs to non-college-educated workers, confirmed his spokesperson. 

For liberal politicians like Moore, Shapiro, and Biden, promoting policies to help the more than 70 million American workers who never graduated from college is rooted partly in politics, as Democrats have struggled recently to earn support from non-college-educated voters, especially men. After decades of prioritizing college attendance, the Democratic Party has been scrambling to figure out how to change the widespread perception that its leaders are out of touch with the struggles of average people.

Richard Sander:

With the Supreme Court poised to rule on affirmative-action in admissions, the time to spread the word is now.

Eighteen years ago, I published an article in the Stanford Law Review which documented for the first time the enormous breadth and scale of race-based admissions preferences in law schools [A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools, 57 Stan. L. Rev. 367 (2004)]. At most law schools, the undergraduate grades (UGPA) and median LSAT scores of enrolled Black students were two standard deviations below those of white students at the same school. Outside of a handful of “Historically Black” institutions (where racial preferences were minimal), Blacks in law school were not faring well. They were failing out of school at more than twice the white rate; half of those who did graduate had grades in the bottom 10th of their class; and Blacks were six times as likely as whites to take the bar exam multiple times but never pass. …

Robert Steinbuch (a colleague at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock) and I eventually secured the public release of data from 12 cohorts of law students at four law schools, covering about 6,500 students in all. And after a multi-year review process, the Journal of Legal Education—the official organ of the Association of American Law Schools—has now agreed to publish the first set of our results in its next issue.

Lili:

The other day, a new grad student asked me this question. It brought me back to my own first year.

When I entered grad school, I noticed that the older grad students just seemed… oddly bitter? The 6th years were living in a different world from us 1st years. Some of them would joke about it, some would deflect when asked, and some students we only heard about. I always wondered what made them so. Does their love for science slowly leave as they pass their time here? Will I become that way?? How do I avoid that?

Well, it has been 5.5 years since entered grad school, so I feel I can answer that now.

Scott Girard:

This month, the Madison School Board offered four opportunities for the community to share what’s going well — and what’s not — in the district.

Events at each of the four large high schools showed what is on the minds of parents, staff and students, including how concerns differ from building to building. After the third session, School Board President Ali Muldrow expressed emphatic appreciation for what they heard from the two dozen speakers that night.

“I have to say that tonight’s listening session allowed for me to really re-fall in love with the work we do as board members and with this community,” Muldrow said.

Below is a summary of each of the four listening sessions and the subjects they focused on. Each can be viewed online through the board’s YouTube channel.

“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?

Scott Girard

Wisconsin schools are increasingly turning to emergency licenses to get staff into classrooms with some using those licenses longer than may have been intended.

According to a new report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the state Department of Public Instruction issued 3,197 emergency licenses to teach in Wisconsin in the 2021-22 school year, up 184.2% from the 1,125 issued in the 2012-13 school year.

“When school districts in Wisconsin cannot find a teacher licensed by DPI to fill a certain position, they can hire an unlicensed individual who then applies for a license with certain conditions or stipulations,” the WPF report explains.

These types of licenses can be used by teachers, counselors, social workers, librarians and school administrators.

“Emergency licenses play an important role in staffing the state’s classrooms and may be used in a variety of scenarios, which are often short-term and sometimes urgent,” the report states.

In Preston yesterday, talking to 55 heads, one of them said,

‘But what about those of us who can’t be a dragon, who can’t be like you? What’s your advice for us?’

You can find allies and have a close team around you, but his point was a v good one.

I was stumped 1/4 THREAD👇🏼

— Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) March 18, 2023

Luis Serrano:

Word and sentence embeddings are the bread and butter of LLMs. They are the basic building block of most language models, since they translate human speak (words) into computer speak (numbers) in a way that captures many relations between words, semantics, and nuances of the language, into equations regarding the corresponding numbers.

Sentence embeddings can be extended to language embeddings, in which the numbers attached to each sentence are language-agnostic. These models are very useful for translation and for searching and understanding text in different languages.

Andrew Kerr:

Prominent tech companies, liberal news outlets, and a Democratic politician’s vineyards are among the thousands of businesses that breathed a sigh of relief on Sunday when the Biden administration moved to bail out Silicon Valley Bank.

Silicon Valley Bank maintained $209 billion in assets and $175.4 billion in total deposits, making it the 16th-largest bank in the country. It was the second-largest bank to fail in American history when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation took control of the institution on Friday.

President Joe Biden has insisted that the FDIC’s move was not a bailout, and claimed his administration is working to protect “American workers and small businesses.” But average Americans won’t benefit the most from the bailout. Ninety-three percent of the bank’s depositors kept more than $250,000 in the bank.

While the California bank was famous for its rolodex of tech clients, it happily accepted deposits from all manner of people, including some of the individuals and institutions involved in pushing the Biden administration’s bailout.

Here are just a few.

Gavin Newson

University of Iowa

Over the next few months, the Board of Regents will initiate a comprehensive study and review of all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs and efforts at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa.

I am appointing Regents Barker, Lindenmayer and Rouse to lead the study. This working group will report their findings and any recommendations back to the full Board.

As a result, I am directing Iowa’s three public universities to pause the implementation of any new DEI programs until the study is completed.

Sai Gaddam:

My wife and I run a micro-school in Mumbai, India. We recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. Our kids go there along with 15 others. As we like to joke, we are doing small-batch, locally sourced, artisanal education. I also run a tech startup where we are building a product in the learning space. Both of these were born as a result of the pandemic when schools shut down and we saw up close what happens in the name of education.

Wall Street Journal:

The Ghost of Social Security

It is very unlikely that Congress will fully sunset Social Security, which is a core issue for older Americans who have significant voting power. A policy to end Social Security would have far too much political pushback to be viable, as Rick Perry’s loss in the 2012 presidential primaries showed.

Rather, lawmakers will have to work incrementally. There are three potential routes Congress might take. The first would be to raise the age for full benefits. This would mirror the Social Security Reform Act of 1983, the U.K. Pensions Act of 1995 and the current proposal in the French Senate.

The second would be to encourage funding alternative retirement plans. An existing program ripe for expansion is the FICA Alternative Plan, which requires employees to set aside funds instead of contributing to Social Security. Social Security’s financial burden could be eased by providing an opt-in alternative retirement account that reduces Social Security eligibility but provides an avenue for tax-advantaged savings.

The third route would be to means-test Social Security based on wealth or lifetime income. This could be done by prohibiting Americans who reported more than $15 million of lifetime income from claiming Social Security. This may become popular with progressive groups but is likely to fail.

Brian Lopez

The move is in response to years of poor academic outcomes at a single campus in the district, Phillis Wheatley High School, and allegations of misconduct from school board members. TEA Commissioner Mike Morath said state law requires his agency to either close that campus or appoint a new board to oversee the district.

Texas passed a law in 2015 mandating a state takeover if a school district or one of its campuses receives failing grades from the TEA for five consecutive years. Phillis Wheatley reached that threshold in 2019.

Morath and the agency moved to force out the district’s school board that same year. The district pushed back and sued, but the Texas Supreme Court ruled in January that the agency could move forward with its plan to take over the district.

“Even with a delay of three full years caused by legal proceedings, systemic problems in Houston ISD continue to impact students most in need of our collective support,” Morath wrote in a letter to district leaders Wednesday.

Meanwhile:

“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?

Olivia Herken:

Memorial’s new music wing is among several projects made possible in November 2020, when voters in the Madison School District approved a $317 million capital referendum to build a new elementary school and fund significant high-school renovations.

Construction started around the district in 2022, and now all those plans are yielding real, tangible changes.

All four comprehensive high schools are undergoing renovations, including a new pool and gym at West, a new entrance at La Follette, and a cafeteria and music addition at East. A new elementary school is also being constructed on the South Side, and Capital High School is moving under one roof.

Most of the high schools started out this school year with some classrooms, bathrooms and offices already renovated. Now other, bigger projects are beginning to take shape.

Work at Capital High School is expected to wrap up this June. The district expects the new South Side elementary school, known for now as Rimrock Elementary, to be ready in August, just in time to welcome new students for the fall.

Work at the four main high schools won’t be completed until August 2024, but already there are plenty of changes.

“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?

Douglas Belkin:

Today, colleges and universities enroll about 15 million undergraduate students, while companies employ about 800,000 apprentices. In the past decade, college enrollment has declined by about 15%, while the number of apprentices has increased by more than 50%, according to federal data and Robert Lerman, a labor economist at the Urban Institute and co-founder of Apprenticeships for America.

Apprenticeship programs are increasing in both number and variety. About 40% are now outside of construction trades, where most have traditionally been, Dr. Lerman said. Programs are expanding into white-collar industries such as banking, cybersecurity and consulting at companies including McDonald’s Corp., Accenture PLC and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Willard Walker

Additionally four in five hospitals charge patients and insurers more than double their acquisition cost for medicine.

Wisconsinites feel this reality more than most. While health care costs are high generally, our state ranks among the five states with the highest hospital prices in the country.

Employers like myself, dedicated to providing affordable, quality health care coverage to our employees, rely on critical tools such as white-bagging to combat the hospitals’ monopolistic billing practices. We need Wisconsin lawmakers to remember the impact affordable health care has on our economic stability.

Joel Kotkin:

Beware of plutocrats bearing gifts. The annual clown show at Davos epitomises how today, the global elites have embraced an unholy trinity of ‘progressive’ doctrines: climate-change apocalypticism, a belief in systemic racism and racial ‘equity’, and radical gender ideology. The super-rich hope that by genuflecting to these causes, they can buy themselves political protection and fend off the activists lurking in the ranks of their own companies. Yet, in the long run, this could end up fuelling their demise.

The recent ‘Great Awokening’ of our elites reflects a long-standing shift among executives in terms of priorities and perspective. The capitalist class first arose out of the middle orders, and even from within the peasantry, as the industrial revolution, particularly in the Netherlands and Britain, challenged the autocracy of both the church and the monarchical state. These were often tough, ruthless entrepreneurs embodying values of hard work, thrift, family and faith. 

But with the managerial revolution of the 1950s, the nature of executive elites changed. As sociologist Daniel Bell first identified half a century ago, business leaders were no longer upstarts and thus the natural opponents of state power. Instead, they reflected a new type of individualism, unmoored from religion and family, a worldview which transformed the foundations of middle-class culture. The goal of this new executive class, as Bell saw it, was not so much building great companies, but gaining accolades from their peers, the press and the public – a trend also set out in Alvin Toffler’s 1980 book, The Third Wave.

Saul Costa:

They are constantly “hallucinating” alternative versions of reality, and then passing that on in a very convincing manner for the user to absorb. It is an unfortunate limitation, but one that can be mitigated through careful use of the AIs.

Using these AIs effectively in educational settings depends largely on the ability of the learner to know what statements to trust and which to validate. In my experience, all quantifiable data should be regarded as inaccurate by default. Names should be verified when they are a crucial part of the narrative being explored. Concepts are the most trustworthy because they stem directly from what the AIs do best: finding the connections between things.

As odd as it may sound, in the experience I am about to describe, the inaccurate details provided by ChatGPT do not matter. I intended to use the AI to learn how to approach answering my question by observing how it did, not to get concrete answers. I disregarded the bulk of the details because they are simply stand-ins that will be verified and updated later when I go to apply what I have learned.

Here is how it went.

Ilya Buynevich:

Walking near Temple University, I noticed a flyer advocating for “socialism in our lifetime.” The message from an outside group reads in full, “Socialist Revolution: Join the fight for socialism in our lifetime.” Having grown up in Soviet-era Ukraine and now a tenured professor at Temple, I feel strongly that most college-age Americans do not understand what they are saying when they advocate for socialism. 

Today, many American college students do not understand that they are advocating for a system that goes beyond what even the Soviets promoted. There is a real distinction that students do not appreciate between the romanticized idea of state socialism in Scandinavia and the reality of socialism – what I experienced as a student in the Soviet Union. 

Most student activists tout equity and many undergraduates champion socialism as a means to achieve equity – a process to engineer outcomes. Where I grew up, this would mean giving everyone the same grade, so it was never a factor in Soviet higher education. 

Soviet universities admitted roughly half of each cohort based on merit: grades in three placement exams. Yes, nepotism and bribes existed in the system, but applicants needed to be exceptionally smart to gain entrance in highly selective majors (international relations, law, or performing arts) at prestigious urban universities. The system prized engineered equality – nearly all were equally poor – but never used a concept of equity to fix results. 

My classmates and I were judged by our academic performances and faced high academic standards, especially during oral-style examinations (80-90% were in this format). I remain eternally thankful to my secondary school teachers and professors. They prepared us to succeed and graded us based on skill, and I was able to complete my education in the United States and earn a doctoral degree at Boston University.

Tom Knighton

A Vermont high school did the unthinkable. They forfeit a game.

Why? Because the other team had a trans player. 

There are all kinds of reasons why they might take this course of action in light of this fact, of course. After all, we’ve seen the damage a trans player can cause. Then there’s the fact that the school in question is a Christian school, which means there’s a potential religious angle here.Subscribe

It doesn’t matter, though, because now there’s a problem.

Melissa Korn:

The eight schools that make up the Ivy League engage in illegal price-fixing by not awarding athletic scholarships, alleges a lawsuit filed Tuesday by current and former Brown University basketball players.

While all Division I athletic programs award financial aid to selected athletes, Brown, Harvard, Yale and the other Ivies have for years agreed to provide only need-based financial aid to students, including athletes. According to the suit, the agreement violates federal antitrust law, and harms recruited athletes who otherwise could have gotten scholarships covering tuition and fees, or been eligible for reimbursement on thousands of dollars of other school-related expenses under National Collegiate Athletic Association regulations.

The suit names as defendants all eight Ivy League schools and the Ivy League Council of Presidents, which coordinates Ivy League athletics. It was filed in federal court in Connecticut, with a former men’s basketball player and current women’s basketball player at Brown as the named plaintiffs.

By LaTonya Goffney, Sonja Santelises and Iranetta Wright:

America is finally acknowledging a harsh truth: The way many schools teach children to read doesn’t work. Educators, and indeed families, are having a long overdue conversation about how one of the nation’s most widely used curricula, “Units of Study,” is deeply flawed — and where to go from here.

The problem became a mainstream topic of conversation after parents got a closer look at their children’s lessons over Zoom during the pandemic, and journalist Emily Hanford released a podcast exposing how schools and teachers were “Sold a Story.” 

As Hanford explained, “Units” was not crafted on the science of reading — or what research shows are the best ways to build literacy. Such research-based methods focus on developing content knowledge, an understanding of letter-sound and sound-spelling relationships, word recognition, and language comprehension and fluency. Multiple, rigorous studies over 40 years prove these are the most effective ways to teach reading.

Yet “Units” instead encourages children to “cue” their thinking by looking at pictures or other words on the page to figure out what they don’t know. This approach is wholly inadequate — it does not build knowledge and skills, is especially problematic for children with a limited vocabulary, and often amounts to little more than guessing. 

But the “Units” curriculum has been popular, championed by respected voices, and too few teachers know about or study the science of reading as part of their preparation programs and professional development. Many administrators have also assumed that instructional programs peddled to their districts have a solid research base and are supported by data.

“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?

University of Calgary:

Even though pediatric emergency department visits decreased greatly overall during the COVID-19 pandemic, a newly published study led out of the University of Calgary shows there was also a sharp increase in emergency department visits for attempted suicide and suicide ideation among children and adolescents in that same period of social isolation.

Dr. Sheri Madigan, a clinical psychologist in the Department of Psychology, is the lead author on the study, published today (March 9) in The Lancet Psychiatry, which provides a meta-analysis of 42 studies representing over 11 million pediatric emergency department visits across 18 countries, comparing the data on visits prior to the pandemic with those that took place during the pandemic, up to July 2021.

The numbers show that while there was a 32% reduction in pediatric emergency department visits for any health-related reasons during the pandemic, there was still a 22% increase in children and adolescents going to emergency departments for suicide attempts, and an 8% increase in visits for suicide ideation.

Issues and insights

Researchers found “a 22% increase in children and adolescents going to emergency departments for suicide attempts, and an 8% increase in visits for suicide ideation,” even though there was “a 32% reduction in pediatric emergency department visits for any health-related reasons during the pandemic.”

And which party was almost fully responsible for forcing the young into isolation? It was the Democrats in this country and their ideological kin in others, with the encouragement and approval of their media department, who placed the young under virtual house arrest and closed schools, houses of worship, playgrounds and other settings where social interaction takes place. No wonder so many lost hope.

It’s the same side of the political spectrum that has unconscionably stunted the speech, language, social and emotional development of small children through its obsession with mask mandates.

Not everyone agrees that this is the case. There is some debate among the experts. But common sense strongly suggests that forcing an entire population to appear less human – a masked population looks like a swarm of angry monsters – and interfering with basic verbal communication will have long-lasting negative consequences on society’s youngest and most vulnerable.

Stuart Kyle Duncan

Stanford Law School’s website touts its “collegial culture” in which “collaboration and the open exchange of ideas are essential to life and learning.” Then there’s the culture I experienced when I visited Stanford last week. I had been invited by the student chapter of the Federalist Society to discuss the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, on which I’ve served since 2018. I’ve spoken at law schools across the country, and I was glad to accept this invitation. One of my first clerks graduated from Stanford. I have friends on the faculty. I gave a talk there a few years ago and found it a warm and engaging place, but not this time.

When I arrived, the walls were festooned with posters denouncing me for crimes against women, gays, blacks and “trans people.” Plastered everywhere were photos of the students who had invited me and fliers declaring “You should be ASHAMED,” with the last word in large red capital letters and a horror-movie font. This didn’t seem “collegial.” Walking to the building where I would deliver my talk, I could hear loud chanting a good 50 yards away, reminiscent of a tent revival in its intensity. Some 100 students were massed outside the classroom as I entered, faces painted every color of the rainbow, waving signs and banners, jeering and stamping and howling. As I entered the classroom, one protester screamed: “We hope your daughters get raped!”

Commentary

MacIver:

Wisconsin has gotten mighty used to multi-billion budget surpluses over the past 12 years, something that was unimaginable before the passage of Act 10.

Rich Government Benefits Were Bankrupting Wisconsin 

Back in 2010, the state was facing an immediate $127 million budget shortfall and a $3.6 billion structural deficit going into the next budget cycle. Gov. Scott Walker correctly identified bloated public sector union contracts as the main culprit. Despite the left waging what we would today call a weeks-long “insurrection,” Walker and the Republican-led legislature passed a package of reforms that instantly turned around the state’s financial situation.

Bringing Government Benefits Closer In Line With The Taxpayers Who Finance Them 

Act 10 required government employees to pay 12.6% of their health insurance premiums (still less than half the usual contribution of private sector workers toward their health insurance) and half of the contributions made towards their own pensions. Previously, they paid nothing; state taxpayers picked up both the employer and employee match. For perspective, the average private sector worker pays 17% of their health insurance premiums for single coverage and 28% for family coverage, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Act 10 also limited what public-sector unions could negotiate for. These changes were meant to give state and local governments more flexibility to identify potential savings and keep their budgets balanced. It had an immediate impact.

Much more ion Act 10, here. Further background: the Milwaukee Pension Scandal

Washington Free Beacon:

Why members of the school’s Federalist Society chapter should help cover up the misconduct of their peers and the administrators who collaborated with them is a mystery to us. But such a cover-up is surely not in the best interests of the institution or the legal system it ostensibly serves.

McConnell told us he stands by his guidance about press engagement, but did not respond to questions about what sorts of consequences might be appropriate for the mob that shut down the event.

The school’s chapter of the National Lawyers Guild—the organizing force behind the Maoist horde of would-be lawyers—papered the hallways prior to Judge Duncan’s arrival with the names and photographs of the Federalist Society’s board members.

Yet when Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium quoted the group’s board members describing the protests as “Stanford Law School at its best,” and named those board members, we got a note from one of them, Lily Bou, demanding that we remove her name and those of her classmates. “You do not have our permission to reference or quote any portion of this email in a future piece.”

That’s not exactly how the First Amendment works.

We’ve gotten similar complaints about publishing images—pulled from social media—of Stanford Law School dean Jenny Martinez’s classroom, which protesters covered end to end in flyers after she issued an apology to Judge Duncan.

We received the following note from Mary Cate Hickman, who identified herself as a second-year law student and describes herself on LinkedIn as “passionate about social justice” and a graduate of the Sorbonne.

36.”OFTEN TRUE CONTENT” The Virality Project communications mirror those produced in the recent court case Louisiana vs Biden, which showed Facebook admitting to the WHO that it, too, was censoring true content. pic.twitter.com/2qqbWZROH7

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 17, 2023

Tyler Cowen:

With the introduction of GPT-4 and Claude, AI has taken another big step forward. GPT-4 is human-levelor better at many hard tasks, a huge improvement over GPT-3.5, which was released only a few months ago. Yet amid the debate over these advances, there has been very little discussion of one of the most profound effects of AI large language models: how they will reshape childhood.

In the future, every middle-class kid will grow up with a personalized AI assistant — so long as the parents are OK with that.

As for the children, most of them will be willing if not downright eager. When I was 4 years old, I had an imaginary friend who lived under the refrigerator, called (ironically) Bing Bing. I would talk to him and report his opinions to my parents and sister.

In the near future, such friends will be quite real, albeit automated, and they will talk back to our children as directly as we wish. Having an AI service for your child will be as normal as having a pet, except the AI service will never bite. It will be carried around in something like a tablet, though with a design that is oriented toward the AI.

Wall Street Journal:

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin won election in 2021 in no small part on education policy, including a promise to ban critical race theory in schools. His first executive order instructed the Superintendent of Public Instruction to review curricula and end the use of “inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory.”

The Black Lives Matter at School organization promotes an annual “week of action,” which took place Feb. 6-10 this year. The VEA encouraged its members to participate and offered an instruction manual “to be used as a resource guide for advancing racial justice in Virginia’s schools,” as Taisha Steele, director of the Human and Civil Rights division at the VEA, wrote in a memo with the materials.

By “advancing racial justice,” she means following the highly politicized agenda of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The materials show this isn’t an attempt to teach black history as part of American history, or to fill in the gaps in black history that no doubt have existed in instruction in the past.

Twitter identified “asking questions” as an attribute of a “misinformation spreader.” Our social media partner sought to censor such social deviants. #BestPractices https://t.co/aPIYzrd6Xc

— Department of Fear 🇺🇸 (@FearDept) March 17, 2023

35.A Cleveland Clinic study showed previous infection offered the “same immunity” as the vaccine, but VP said discovery was susbservient to narrative: “Whether or not… scientific consensus is changing, ‘natural immunity’ is a key narrative… among anti-vaccine activists.” pic.twitter.com/wmdiynJG4y

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 17, 2023

Here is the snippet: pic.twitter.com/85iBeXC0Wn

— Seidler (@SeidlerCorp) March 17, 2023

Don Surber:

Nice try, but Gannett eliminated no jobs. Its former readers did. While Benton blamed the company, he also had to admit that Sunday circulation fell 77% at Gannett’s 9 biggest newspapers between 2018 and 2022. Fewer readers, fewer reporters.

He pointed out the Lafayette Advertiser in Louisiana — his hometown paper — saw an 85% collapse in circulation over the past 7 years. 

2015: 26,885

2016: 23,773

2017: 20,177

2018: 14,670

2019: 10,389

2020: 8,592

2021: 6,528

2022: 3,996

The Internet won’t save the paper. Its online presence is pathetic — and it too dropped from 1,421 online subscribers in 2015 to just 468 online subscribers in 2022. 

Benton blamed Gannett.

Kayla Jimenez:

More than 60,000 bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria employees, campus security, teaching assistants and educators from the Los Angeles Unified School District say they’ll strike from March 21 to 23, a move likely to shut down hundreds of schools. 

The labor union representing the support staff announced the dates during a lively rally Wednesday afternoon at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles. 

Represented by labor union SEIU Local 99, about 30,000 school support staff are demanding LAUSD provide a 30% raise and $2 per hour equity wage increase. About 35,000 teachers represented by the United Teachers of Los Angeles plan to join them. The school district has offered, in part, more than a 15% raise, retention bonuses and to bring its minimum wage up to $20.

In a letter to families on Monday evening, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho told parents the district is trying to work with the union to come to an agreement before kids are severely impacted by the closures. And he and district negotiators are prepared to work around the clock to come to negotiations before the strike, he told news reporters on Wednesday morning.

Smart Asset:

Key Findings

$100K goes furthest in Memphis. The city may be known as the “Home of the Blues,” but Memphis’ low cost of living surely won’t make you sing them. A $100,000 salary is worth more here ($86,444) than in any other city in our study after subtracting taxes and adjusting for the cost of living.

Texas cities dominate the top 10. Thanks to no state income tax and the low cost of living, the Lone Star State looms large in our study. Seven out of the 10 cities in our top 10 are located in Texas. After deducting taxes and adjusting for the cost of living, a $100,000 salary on average is worth $77,885 across the 10 Texas cities that we analyzed in our study.

Oklahoma City has the lowest cost of living. A $100,000 goes a long way in the Sooner State’s largest city, considering that the cost of living is only 83.2% of the national average – the lowest out of all 76 cities in our study. A $100,000 salary is worth $84,498 in Oklahoma City after adjusting for the cost of living.

In New York City, $100K amounts to just $35,791 when you consider taxes and the cost of living. Taxes and cost of living take a big bite out of a $100,000 income in the Big Apple, which ranked last in our analysis. After adjusting for those factors, $100,000 is worth just $35,791.

Digital rights charter:

1. Everyone has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the digital realm.
2. Everyone has the right to own, and hold in their own direct and exclusive possession and control, digital objects, without unreasonable burdens. The government shall not have the right to store or access passwords or private keys without due process of law. All other legal or natural persons shall not have the right to store or access passwords or private keys without explicit permission.
3. Everyone has the right to be free to transact digital objects, without unreasonable burdens.
4. Everyone has the right to use decentralized applications, without unreasonable burdens.
5. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures of their digital objects and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. This right extends to digital objects and information a person provides to a third party, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The government may not search or seize such digital objects or information without complying with the requirements of the foregoing sentence.
6. Everyone has the right to participate in the creation and maintenance of digital public commons, such as open-source software and public blockchains and distributed ledgers. No one shall be held responsible for the actions of others in a digital public commons that is not under that person’s control.
7. Everyone has the right to privacy in their digital life. The right to privacy also includes the right of everyone to use encryption that is free from back doors or other intentional weaknesses or circumventions in the encryption that are accessible by the government or private companies or individuals. Interpretations of this right should be read broadly and to favor an individual’s right to privacy

Christopher Rufo

The process of shutting down the education department at University of Chicago was more orderly. The department’s pedigree was impressive: it was founded by reformer John Dewey and had been home to prominent scholars such as Bruno Bettelheim and William S. Gray, creator of the “Dick and Jane” reading series. But in the 1970s, the department turned away from educational practice and focused more on left-wing educational theory. Over time, the quality of academic work declined, and external funding began to dwindle. Finally, in 1996, after a formal review, the dean of the social science division, Richard Saller, recommended that the university close down the department, citing “uneven” research and “low expectations.” It was officially shuttered soon afterward.

These examples establish an important precedent: it is not a violation of “academic freedom” to close down ideologically captured or poor-performing academic departments; it is, to the contrary, part of the normal course of business. Legislators in states such as Florida and Texas, which will both be considering higher education reform this year, should propose the abolition of academic departments that have abandoned their missions in pursuit of shoddy scholarship and ideological activism.

It is time for the “victim’s revolution” to be met with a meaningful counter-revolution. Legislators have an opportunity to abolish academic programs, such as critical race theory, ethnic studies, queer theory, gender studies, and intersectionality, that do not contribute to the production of scholarly knowledge but serve as taxpayer-funded sinecures for activists who despise the values of the public whom they are supposed to serve.

Enough is enough. It is time for principled action, not fatalism and defeat. Conservatives have an opportunity to move beyond critique and enact meaningful reforms that will restore the pursuit of truth as the telos of America’s public universities.

Francie Diep:

As Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, was taking fresh aim at diversity initiatives in higher education, the state’s college presidents put out an unusual statement.

Some diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives “have come to mean and accomplish the very opposite and seek to push ideologies such as critical race theory and its related tenets,” said the statement, which was dated January 18 and stamped with the logos of the 28 state and community colleges that belong to the Florida College System. (These don’t include the four-year public universities, which are part of the separate State University System of Florida.)

“The average school board is spending between zero percent & 5 percent of its time each month actually focused on monitoring whether student outcomes are improving.”

⁦- @ajcrabill7⁩ discussing his new book “Great on Their Behalf.”

At #RHSU. https://t.co/VXEMJDwKBJ

— Frederick M. Hess (@rickhess99) March 16, 2023

Alexander Russo:

All three of these challenges include large investments of money, energetic state and local policy activity, and — most important — a large number of kids affected.

All three are happening now, in the present.

And yet, you’ll see relatively little about these core challenges and changes looking at the education pages of some of our biggest national news outlets.

Instead of covering core education issues, the Times and Post are focused on stories about culture wars and violence.

Intentionally or not, tabloid-style coverage has become a mainstay.

Collin Hinkley:

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.

Tom Knighton;

I’ve experienced education from a variety of angles. I went to both public and private schools. I’ve known people who went to parochial schools and talked with them about their experience and I’m now homeschooling my daughter.

So I’ve got some perspective on the idea of public education.

As I noted last week, I’m a proponent of school choice.

Yet let’s also be honest, the current paradigm in public education has a limited shelf life. 

Why? 

Because there are teachers like this:

Scott Girard:

The debate also featured discussions about how high-density developments affect Madison Metropolitan School District’s student population and whether it is time to bring police back into schools.

Reyes said there is concern among some residents that large housing developments taking place all over the city are pricing some families out of areas and diminishing school enrollments. She said that as mayor she wants the school district to be represented on Madison’s Plan Commission so that schools have a voice in development proposals.

Rhodes-Conway pointed out that there already is a slot reserved for the MMSD superintendent on the Plan Commission but that no one from that office has ever decided to serve in the position.

“We have asked repeatedly to have the school district appoint someone to the Plan Commission,” Rhodes-Conway said. “They have declined so far, which I think is really disappointing. In the meantime, we need to listen to what the district has told us, which is that we need more housing.”

Reyes, who was Madison School Board president during much of the pandemic, said she did not see collaboration between the school district and the mayor’s office during her tenure.

“This is the first time I’ve heard that there was a relationship between the school district and the mayor’s office,” Reyes said about Rhodes-Conway meeting with the superintendent. “During the pandemic we were on our own and did not have the support of the mayor.”

“It’s possible the superintendent didn’t keep my opponent informed of his calendar, but we met every week during the pandemic about how we could keep schools safe, keep kids fed and do virtual learning for kids who could not learn at home,” Rhodes-Conway replied.

On the topic of school safety, Rhodes-Conway pointed to the city’s Community Alternative Responsive Emerging Services, or CARES – a unit dedicated to deescalating tensions during a mental health crisis – as a program that could help school safety. CARES started in September 2021 during Rhodes-Conway’s first term as mayor.

Reyes said she believes it is time to consider whether to return school resource officers to school beats. Reyes, a former law enforcement officer, voted against removing police from schools prior to the pandemic during her tenure on the School Board, but then reversed course in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and voted to remove the resources officers from Madison schools.

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?

Adam Weinberg:

Free speech on college campus has emerged as a new front in the culture wars. But despite what you may have heard, most university students and faculty are supportive of free speech and the robust exchange of ideas on university campuses. According to recent research by the Knight Foundation, 84 percent of students view free speech rights as critical to our democracy.

Still, college campuses are increasingly challenging places to have challenging conversations. The same study found that the percentage of students who believe that free speech rights are secure has dropped from 59 percent to 47 percent since 2019—fully 12 points. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who felt their campus climate prevents students from expressing their opinions has increased, from 54 percent to 65 percent, since 2016.

Universities need to do more to protect free inquiry and expression, which will only flourish on campuses ​that ​​ ​are clear ​about ​their purpose, driven by cultures of curiosity and intellectual humility, hold the line when controversies arise, and focus on creating communities where everybody feels a sense of connection.

How do we do this kind of work? Universities can start by laying out clearly and loudly our purpose and articulating why free inquiry and expression of ideas are crucial to our work. This should be simple: Colleges and universities exist to produce knowledge and educate students. Neither of these is possible if faculty feel a need to censor themselves and students don’t have the opportunity to voice their views, hear the views of others and engage across intellectual differences.

Arvind Narayanan

I think a broader understanding of recommendation algorithms is sorely needed. Policymakers and legal scholars must understand these algorithms so that they can sharpen their thinking on platform governance; journalists must understand them so that they can explain them to readers and better hold platforms accountable; technologists must understand them so that the platforms of tomorrow may be better than the ones we have; researchers must understand them so that they can get at the intricate interplay between algorithms and human behavior. Content creators would also benefit from understanding them so that they can better navigate the new landscape of algorithmic distribution. More generally, anyone concerned about the impact of algorithmic platforms on themselves or on society may find this essay of interest.

I hope to show you that social media algorithms are simple to understand. In addition to the mathematical principles of information cascades (which are independent of any platform), it’s also straightforward to understand what recommendation algorithms are trained to do, and what inputs they use. Of course, companies’ lack of transparency about some of the details is a big problem, but that’s a separate issue from the details being hard to understand—they aren’t. In this regard, recommendation algorithms are like any other technology, say a car or a smartphone. Many details of those products are proprietary, but we can and do understand how cars and smartphones work. Once we understand the basics of recommendation algorithms, we can also gain clarity on which details matter for transparency.

In composing this essay, I’ve r

Henry Farrel:

However, as the book’s publication date suggests, this shift began to take hold years before the Great Awokening. And Binder and Wood provided persuasive evidence that the shift had far less to do with what was happening on college campuses than changes in the broader conservative movement. There was money – and lots of it – for organizations that were willing to take the culture war to America’s universities, creating an entire political economy.

The later consequences are described in The Channels of Student Activism, a more recent academic book, published by Binder and Jeff Kidder last year. While Binder and Kidder are sympathetic to Haidt’s broad program of reform, they push back with evidence against his causal argument. People like George Lukianoff and Haidt “point fingers at the supposed shortcomings of Generation Z,” blaming the purported psychological frailty of an entire generation. Binder and Kidder find that the evidence points towards organizations as the key factors of change. Students “are channeled not coddled,” provided with incentives, identities and even entire career paths by political organizations.

Binder and Kidder identify very different organizational political economies for conservative and liberal/left students. Right leaning students are “encouraged by organizations external to their schools to adopt a discourse hostile to the academic enterprise,” “targeting a liberal campus culture, which plays into a larger Republican game plan.”

As they describe it (on the basis of interviews with students and figures within the relevant organizations):

Gillian K. SteelFisher, Mary G. Findling, Hannah L. Caporello, Keri M. Lubell,

Public health agencies’ ability to protect health in the wake of COVID-19 largely depends on public trust. In February 2022 we conducted a first-of-its-kind nationally representative survey of 4,208 US adults to learn the public’s reported reasons for trust in federal, state, and local public health agencies. Among respondents who expressed a “great deal” of trust, that trust was not related primarily to agencies’ ability to control the spread of COVID-19 but, rather, to beliefs that those agencies made clear, science-based recommendations and provided protective resources. Scientific expertise was a more commonly reported reason for “a great deal” of trust at the federal level, whereas perceptions of hard work, compassionate policy, and direct services were emphasized more at the state and local levels. Although trust in public health agencies was not especially high, few respondents indicated that they had no trust. Lower trust was related primarily to respondents’ beliefs that health recommendations were politically influenced and inconsistent. The least trusting respondents also endorsed concerns about private-sector influence and excessive restrictions and had low trust in government overall. Our findings suggest the need to support a robust federal, state, and local public health communications infrastructure; ensure agencies’ authority to make science-based recommendations; and develop strategies for engaging different segments of the public.

FS blog

Writing is the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about. Importantly, writing is also the process by which you figure it out.

Writing about something teaches you about what you know, what you don’t know, and how to think. Writing about something is one of the best ways to learn about it. Writing is not just a vehicle to share ideas with others but also a way to understand them better yourself. 

Paul Graham put it this way: “A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”

There is another important element to writing that often gets overlooked. Writing requires the compression of an idea. When done poorly, compression removes insights. When done well, compression keeps the insights and removes the rest. Compression requires both thinking and understanding, which is one reason writing is so important.

Democracy next

France’s ongoing Citizens’ Assembly on end-of-life issues is proving that reading isn’t always the best way to soak up knowledge or solve problems. 

As an observer, I’ve watched as a graphic artists have come to play a critical role in the assembly, where 185 French citizen-members are sorting through complex questions relating palliative care, assisted suicide, euthanasia and related issues. 

When taking an important decision – absorbing unfamiliar information, questioning one’s conscience, prioritising options and finding consensus with others – illustrations are proving an excellent assist to the extensive reading materials. It turns out they help with thinking, talking and assembling a final report as well. Perhaps it should come as no surprise: the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual.

The role of the three artists who accompany each assembly session at first seemed mostly decorative, like the cartoonists who enliven conferences and speeches with real time caricatures of what’s going on.

Stuart Buck:

That said, there are some lingering issues with grant peer review that aren’t new at all. 

In 1975, the NIH launched a major “Grants Peer Review Study Team” that produced a number of reports and recommendations (much thanks to Bhaven Sampat at Columbia for sending me the documents in question!). 

A 1978 report from that team tried to address many of the comments raised by the scientific community about NIH’s grant peer review. Despite the passage of some 45 years, the issues might feel . . . very familiar:

First, some commenters felt that peer review was stacking the deck against outsiders:

Matt Taibbi:

Civil liberties have officially gone out of style, a phenomenon on full display at the Weaponization of Government Hearing at which I just testified. 

The circus-like scene featured a ranking member calling two journalists a “direct threat,” a Stanford-educated former prosecutor who confused accusation with proof, and a Texas congressman, Colin Allred, who proudly held up the results of an adjudicated criminal case to argue against due process in another arena. When I asked Allred’s permission to point out that he’d just demonstrated that a proper forum for dealing with campaign abuses already existed in the court system, he basically told me to shut up. 

“No,” he said, “you don’t get to ask questions here.”

I then had to keep my mouth shut as an elected official shifted to Dad mode to admonish me to “take off the tinfoil hat,” because “there’s not a “vast conspiracy,” by which he meant he apparently meant my last three months of research.

Matthew Yglesias

I keep trying to write an article about the strange death of the education reform movement and the extent to which many of the contemporary woke wars emerged from these once-intense, now-forgotten battlegrounds. Every time I sit down to write it, though, the column spirals out of control. But this is my newsletter and I can do what I want, so instead it’s going to be a series of posts that come out on no particular schedule. Some of them will probably be a little unsatisfying and anti-climactic, but I appreciate you all bearing with me on this journey because I think it’s important. 

What finally got me to actually start this series is the Chicago mayor’s race, where the incumbent Lori Lightfoot failed to make the runoff. 

To grossly oversimplify a situation that has lots of local nuance: with Lightfoot out, the final round will feature Paul Vallas, the candidate of the police union running on a law-and-order platform, against Brandon Johnson, the candidate carrying the progressive torch. This is Chicago of course, so all the main candidates, including Vallas, are left-of-center in a national political context, and the vanquished Lightfoot is genuinely very progressive. Johnson, though, is the preferred candidate of the Chicago Teachers Union.1

But I think what’s interesting about it from a national perspective is the extent to which Vallas’ profile is centered around the crime issue.

“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?

David Zweig:

This is a summary of one of the many complaints—some of which were bizarrely detailed like this—that were submitted to the Santa Clara County, California, complaint department, where citizens were encouraged to rat our their fellow county residents for violating health orders. I gained access to a government spreadsheet of some of the complaints [which I’ve included at the bottom of this post] while reviewing legal documents for my article about the lawsuit of Santa Clara vs Calvary Chapel for Covid violations. 

Reading the complaints gives a window into the psyche of our fellow Americans during the pandemic, and introduces serious questions about the healthy functioning of a society that encourages neighbors to snitch on neighbors for minor offenses.

In late November, a household was tattled on for regularly holding social gatherings, and doing so without people wearing face coverings or social distancing. At one of the gatherings kids from different families were running around together. To make matters worse, the complainant said that “contractors working at the premises do not wear face coverings” . . .and they were “chatting and laughing.”

The following day, a complaint came in about a neighbor who has a “swing band” that gets together every Saturday to practice. They don’t wear masks or distance, and they were “playing loud wind instruments.”

What’s so amusing, and perhaps unsettling about many of the complaints is their odd degree of specificity. A swing band? Really?

Ciprian Dorin Craciun

Imagine a parallel universe in which the society has developed so that, just like in our society, every time a person needs to interact with some business or governmental institution, one needs to present some form of document that, within a reasonable limit of certainty, attests that one is who one says to be. Also, to simplify the exercise, imagine that there is exactly one form of such identification document, the ID-card.

What happens if one doesn’t have such an ID-card? One basically doesn’t exist, or at least practically can’t get anything done. Lose it, and one needs to get another ID-card, which is identical to the previous one, obviously after jumping through some hoops in a sacred bureaucratic ritual. If one, for some reason, doesn’t manage to get an identical ID-card to the previous one, but instead gets even a slightly different one, for all practical purposes it’s just like one is now a completely different person that was born just yesterday. (Remember, this is a strange far away parallel universe.)

Joanne Jacobs:

An influx of unprepared students, admitted by a new lottery system, is destroying Philadelphia’s top-ranked school, charges a report by parents at Masterman, a middle and high school.

The selective school is being “systematically dismantled,” charges the Masterman Home and School Association. “The long history of rigor and enriched curriculum is fading. The identity of the school and its purpose and mission are in disarray, leaving a fractured community.”

The new admissions system gives preferences to students from previously underrepresented zip codes, writes Kristen A. Graham in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Students coming from Masterman’s very challenging middle school no longer are guaranteed admission to the high school.

Masterman lacks the staff and resources to support students entering at the “basic” and “below basic” level, the report states.

Edwin Rios:

Ongoing negotiations between teachers unions and school districts in recent years in Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere have increasingly centered around compelling districts to address housing affordability challenges their employees face beyond raising salaries and bolstering benefits.

In California, teachers on a weekly basis make nearly 18% less than comparable college graduates, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Gray says that disparity puts an “additional tax” on teachers of color who come into the profession saddled with more debt. She blames the lack of diversity among teachers on meager wages and benefits that are worsened by the housing affordability and childcare challenges.

John Sailer:

Ohio State University’s (OSU) College of Engineering heavily emphasizes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). For faculty, contributing to DEI is now simply a part of the job—in 2020, the college added questions about DEI to its annual reviews. That move is no surprise, as the college already asked for diversity statements from many of its prospective faculty, a practice which, of course, continues to this day. Applicants for a currently-open job in nuclear engineering, for example, must submit “a written statement that describes [their] commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

The OSU College of Engineering makes its approach to evaluating diversity statements abundantly clear, listing a rubric for assessing the statements on its website. The rubric illustrates, once again, the basic problem with diversity statements—namely, that they invite ideological screening.

We link the rubric below, but certain features are worth highlighting. Here are a few items that can earn a low score, according to the rubric:

Kimberly Wethal

“In Africa, for example, our people were using WhatsApp to study — that’s not the way to study, WhatsApp is a platform for communication,” Kabre said. “We can do better, and in fact, we can do even something much bigger that can really cover more areas, and also partner with institutions to have good content.”

For MATC, also known as Madison College, its partnership with Kabre fits neatly into one of its established initiatives. As part of its Africa Initiative, MATC sees the continent as an area of growth, both in terms of curriculum and international student enrollment. About 70% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population is under the age of 30, but there’s a skilled labor gap — less than 10% of traditionally college-age people there are enrolled in a post-secondary program and there are not enough universities to meet demand.

MATC signed partnerships with Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute of Business Studies and the University of Gambia last fall and is collaborating with UW-Madison to craft an African Studies certificate that could launch as early as this fall.

“The discussion we’ve had over the past few months (is) how can we assist those countries here in Africa to see some of the educational programs that we have?” MATC President Jack Daniels said. “It also fits within our mission of providing training, and we’ve done a great job here in the state of Wisconsin in terms of providing the types of skill-based training folks need for jobs.”

Daniela Jaime:

After several close calls and unconventional rounds, Madison’s top speller for two years running emerged as the winner of Saturday’s Badger State Spelling Bee.

The awards presentation at the All-City Spelling Bee on Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023.

The spelling bee at Madison Youth Arts Center went for four hours and more than 20 rounds before 12-year-old Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya, a student at Blessed Sacrament School, claimed the top spot after he spelled all 10 words correctly in a written test to determine the champion.

Runner-up Finn Siegl-Gesin, a seventh-grader at Platteville Middle School, spelled six of the words correctly.

Wijeyakulasuriya will be representing the Badger State at the National Spelling Bee near Washington, D.C., starting May 30.

Dean Mosiman:

Reyes, who said she’d seek five recommendations from Finance Department staff to address coming shortfalls, sees a different landscape. “I feel right now we are on the Titanic and we’re about to hit the iceberg,” she said. “We need a strong leader who’s going to be able to make some tough decisions.”

How’d we get here?

The candidates in the April 4 election disagree on why the city faces future budget deficits.

Reyes contends Rhodes-Conway has “mismanaged” city finances largely though the use of borrowing and one-time funds for operations. Asked for specifics, Reyes said the mayor is using federal funds to build the coming bus rapid transit (BRT) system but will not have the money to operate it.

“I think significantly what’s going to put us in this budget deficit is the bus rapid transit system,” she said.

Rhodes-Conway said Reyes doesn’t seem to have a grasp of how BRT and a coming Metro Transit redesign will work, contending that BRT — the backbone of the bus system — is replacing current service on main east-to-west and north-to-south routes and won’t add operating costs.

Madison taxpayers have long supported substantially higher per student spending than most K-12 school districts.

“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?

Rod Dreher:

It was a revolt of the elites, a pogrom against free speech and civil discourse carried out by some of the nation’s most privileged. It was a scene from Dostoevsky’s political novel Demons played out in one of America’s most exclusive training schools for its legal ruling class. And it is a stark warning about the potentially totalitarian future of the US.

You will have heard by now about the shocking incident last week at Stanford Law School, one of the country’s top three, in which Kyle Duncan, an appellate judge on the federal Fifth Circuit, was shouted down and verbally abused by woke students who did not want to let him give a talk to students of the Federalist Society, which had invited him. 

The law school’s diversity dean, Tirien Steinbach, turned up to read a long prepared statement in which she lectured the conservative judge for his wickedness, and for causing “pain” and “harm” to Stanford students through his jurisprudence and presence on campus. You can watch the entire debacle below — and you should, because you have to see it and hear it to grasp the grotesque and repulsive nature of what happened at one of America’s most elite law schools.

Eugene Volokh:

From today’s letter (posted by Ed Whelan [National Review Online]):

Dear Judge Duncan,

We write to apologize for the disruption of your recent speech at Stanford Law School. As has already been communicated to our community, what happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus.

We are very clear with our students that, given our commitment to free expression, if there are speakers they disagree with, they are welcome to exercise their right to protest but not to disrupt the proceedings. Our disruption policy states that students are not allowed to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a “public event” whether by heckling or other forms of interruption.

In addition, staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.

Sara Randazzo

Phil­adelphia schools Su­per­in­ten­dent Tony B. Watling­ton Sr. said he knows the process isn’t per­fect but calls the lot­tery an ap­pro­pri­ate step to­ward eq­ui­table ac­cess. The dis­trict is hir­ing out­side con­sul­tants and lis­ten­ing to com­mu­nity feed­back to see if the sys­tem needs to be ad­justed, he said.

“I want to ad­dress the is­sues in a way that we all get bet­ter,” Dr. Watling­ton said. “It doesn’t have to be an in­her­ent us-ver­sus-them sce­nario.”

Schools that set aca­d­e­mic qual­i­fi­ca­tions for en­roll­ment are rare in the na­tion’s pub­lic school sys­tems. Chester E. Finn Jr., a se­nior fel­low at the Thomas B. Ford­ham In­sti­tute, found 165 se­lec­tive-ad­mis­sions high schools na­tion­wide, many on the East Coast.

Yaron Steinbuch

The woke district’s letter didn’t cite Asian or white students as being qualified for the program.

“It has come to the attention of this Office that Cooper Middle School is engaging in conduct in contravention of the Virginia Human Rights Act … and the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution,” Johnson wrote.

“It appears that Cooper Middle School is soliciting and selecting applicants to the College Partnership Program based on race, color, and national origin,” she continued.

This excellent @jbenton piece on Gannett’s demise focuses mostly on local papers, but this stat also might make your jaw drop.

“In Q3 2018, USA Today reported total daily circulation of 2,632,392.

“In Q3 2022, that was down to 180,381.” https://t.co/UFFs6FoPkm

— Bill Grueskin (@BGrueskin) March 9, 2023

Glenn Reynolds:

Karol Markowicz and Bethany Mandel are the authors of a new book, Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.  Writers, thinkers, and mothers, the pair look at what’s being done to children today by schools, Hollywood, government, and the medical profession.  Because Helen is interested in this stuff too – she stole the review copy when it arrived and I had to work hard to get it back – she’s contributed some questions to this interview, too.

Make a Donation

Glenn:  You had rather a rough childhood both before and after immigrating. Can you tell us a little about it? Does that have something to do with your concern for how today’s kids are treated?

Karol: It’s funny because while it was rough, in so many ways, I always felt like being a child was an important time and that childhood was something the people around me were trying to protect for me. What I saw during the pandemic was a reverse of that. Children were put last, again and again, especially in New York City where we were living. I knew I could save my own kids but because I had grown up poor, in a bad neighborhood, I knew there were so many people who couldn’t just easily form a pod for their kid or get them a tutor or move to their beach house to have space and sanity. I couldn’t forget about those people and I could not forget about their children. 

Helen: I was stunned when I read about the hardships you dealt with as a child.  You had to endure a lot of childhood trauma with a sick mom and an absent Dad yet you proved yourself resilient. Why are so many young people unable to cope with life these days?

Bethany: My mother was a social worker and prided herself on raising me tough. There was no wallowing, there was only moving forward. I was praised for working hard and she deeply resented the participation trophies they handed out to us as kids. In the last chapter, I talked about the therapist that “tough loved” me into not just self-identifying as an orphan and a victim. Now, kids are praised for their victimhood status; they’re encouraged to marinate in the bad parts of life.