More on Wisconsin School Choice Governance, freedom of speech, civil rights and freedom of religion

Phoebe Petrovic:

Wisconsin Watch reviewed public materials for about one-third of the state’s 373 voucher schools and found that four out of 10 had policies or statements that appeared to target LGBTQ+ students for disparate treatment. Some had explicitly discriminatory policies, such as expelling students for being gay or transgender. 

All 50 of the voucher schools with anti-LGBTQ+ stances identified by the news organization are Christian, with denominations including Lutherans and Catholics, among others. Almost every school cites religious principles as a basis for their positions.

Suzanne Eckes, an education law professor at University of Madison-Wisconsin, argued that language casting gay or transgender identities or behavior as sinful, even without policies codifying the perspective, “has a discriminatory intent behind it.”

She also pointed out how some policies, although not explicit, could result in LGBTQ+ students being treated inconsistently from others. For example, some schools specifically ban all sexual contact outside of a straight, cisgender marriage.

Green Bay Adventist Junior Academy, which has nearly 68% of students on vouchers, says that it “does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation (in admissions), but does discriminate on the basis of sexual misconduct,” which includes “homosexual conduct.” Reached by phone, a representative of the school said: “We have no comment.”

Werth, now approaching graduation from college, said his experience, although difficult, was not as hostile as the policies now in place at his alma mater and elsewhere.

It would be useful to compare $pending on traditional public schools and the voucher budget…

More:

Curious (false claims) reporting on legacy k-12 schools, charter/voucher models and special education via Wisconsin coalition for education freedom.

A “Wisconsin Watch” look at voucher schools; DPI heavy, no mention of $pending or achievement…

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Pay Teachers, Not Administrators

Frederick Hess:

Democrats need to placate a host of entrenched claimants. This means that they’re all for pumping money into schools, but they do so in ways that tend to further bloat bureaucracies, pad payrolls, and supersize benefits rather than increase paychecks, reward hard work, or honor excellence.

The public thinks teachers deserve a raise. Last year, 72 percent of respondents to the annual Education Next survey said that teacher salaries should be higher, and just 4 percent said they should be lower. (Among Republicans, the split was 56 percent to 7 percent.) Even when told how much teachers in their state earn (which is invariably more than expected), respondents broke 60 percent to 4 percent for higher pay.

The public has a point. The National Education Association reported this spring that, in 2021–22, the average teacher’s salary was $66,745. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics has it a bit higher, at $67,680 as of May 2021, but I’ll use the NEA figure here.) Sixty-six grand isn’t peanuts, but it is below the $70,000 median for college graduates in all fields. To attract and retain the kinds of educators we want, we should aim to pay teachers more than the typical college grad makes. Another recent survey asked teachers how much they think teachers should earn. The median response was $80,000.

As I note in The Great School Rethink, communities benefit when teachers are capable and professionally compensated. And, contrary to union talking points, there’s no evidence that cheapskate taxpayers are the problem when it comes to directing money at public education. Since the publication of A Nation at Risk, the landmark 1983 report of the U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education, per pupil spending, adjusted for inflation, has doubled. In 2019 (even before the massive infusion of federal pandemic aid), U.S. schools spent $16,774 per student.

But it can be unclear what taxpayers are getting for their money. Nationally, student achievement has been stagnant for a decade. Adding insult to injury, increases in school spending over time have done nothing to quiet concerns about teacher pay. Between 2012 and 2022, inflation-adjusted teacher pay fell by close to 4 percent even as real per pupil spending increased by 16 percent. In fact, falling pay and rising spending have been a pattern since the Clinton era. Why aren’t more dollars translating into more pay? Key culprits include the number of nonteaching staff, outsized benefits, and a truncated employee year.

The state capital of reading problems, Milwaukee Public Schools looks at how to turn things around

Alan Borsuk:

Year after year, MPS reading scores are abysmal, strong signs of the problems with educational success that lie ahead for many students. There are bright spots; some MPS schools consistently have better results.

But overall, in spring 2022 — the most recent results available — more than half (54.1%) of MPS third- through eighth-graders were rated “below basic” in reading on Wisconsin’s Forward tests, while 26.2% were at the basic level and 14.1% were rated proficient or advanced. Another 5.6% didn’t take the tests. Among Black students, 7% were advanced or proficient and 64.7% were below basic. In some schools, fewer than 2% of students were proficient and none were advanced.

It is fair and important to note that the overall success of students in private, parochial and charter schools generally wasn’t much different, although some schools stand out for above-average success year after year.

Specifically, in spring 2022 results for Milwaukee students using publicly funded vouchers to attend private schools, 41% were rated as below basic, 32% as basic, and 19% as proficient or advanced. The voucher percentages include ninth-, 10th- and 11th-grade students.

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Dane County Madison Public Health Mandates and the high school class of 2023

Scott Girard:

“I’d been looking forward to high school and it was so hyped up,” said West High School senior Alex Vakar. “It felt like this necessary period for growth because people always talk about them being the best days of their lives, and we missed out on half of that.”

Dances, sports, time with friends, theater performances — all of them were canceled or altered at some point over the past four years, and that’s just outside the classroom. The interruption to students’ learning was severe, and even while virtual learning was a positive for some, students noticed missing foundational pieces when they returned to in-person classes.

That environment faced a sudden change on the afternoon of March 13, 2020, as district officials announced an extended spring break, and later that afternoon Gov. Tony Evers closed schools statewide.

“Of course, we’re freshmen in high school, we’re like, ‘Let’s go! It’s an extra week!’” Mueller said. “Initially we were all just super excited for it because we didn’t know enough about it.”

No one knew how long it would last.

“When I heard that we were closing down and school was shutting down, I was in my geometry class and my teacher just said, ‘Hopefully I’ll see you next week,’” Vakar recalled.

Reality quickly set in, as the wait for a return kept being extended and the school district tried to formulate a plan to continue students’ learning. That spring, MMSD began virtual learning but switched to a “pass/no pass” grading system for high schoolers and froze grade point averages at their first semester level.

Vakar grew increasingly frustrated with MMSD as she saw peers in surrounding school districts return while Madison remained virtual. When Vakar returned in spring 2021 to a limited schedule at West, as the district phased in in-person instruction and a hybrid schedule, she noticed the differences from fall 2019: masking, one-way hallways and one class in which she “was completely alone with the teacher” while the rest of the class was on Zoom.

Dane County Madison Public Health Notes and links.

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Boston now spends more per student than any other large school district in the nation

James Vaznis:

Boston Public Schools spends more per student than any other large school district in the country, according to the latest figures from the US Census Bureau, a new distinction that reflects how BPS’s budget keeps growing even as student enrollment continues to decline.

The city’s highest-in-the-nation cost, of $31,397 per student during the 2020-21 school year, represented a nearly 13 percent increase from the previous year, or about $3,600 more per student, according to the census, which examined spending in the country’s 100 largest districts.

During that same period, BPS enrollment dropped by about 2,500 students, according to the state’s annual Oct. 1 head count.Yet for all the money BPS is spending, many education advocates, parents, and students are bewildered at how little the district generally has to show for it. State standardized test scores are low, huge gaps in achievement exist between students of different backgrounds, and the district had to aggressively fight off a state takeover last year.

Madison taxpayers spend about $26K per student, far more than most, though not as much as Boston.

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

The Empire of Racial Preferences Strikes Back

William McGurn:

Any day now, the Supreme Court will issue landmark rulings on the constitutionality and statutory compliance of using racial preferences in college admissions. And already the empire is fighting back.

No place is more in­sti­tu­tion­ally in­vested in us­ing race to de­ter­mine out­comes than our col­lege cam­puses. The bet­ting is that the high court will come down against what the chief jus­tice once called the “sor­did busi­ness” of “divvy­ing us up by race.” But the uni­ver­si­ties are even now plan­ning work-arounds that will al­low them to con­tinue to do what they’ve been do­ing—al­beit in a sneakier way.

The two cases in­volve a pri­vate school, Har­vard, and a pub­lic one, the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina. Stu­dents for Fair Ad­mis­sions sued both, claim­ing Har­vard dis­crim­i­nated against Asian-Amer­i­can ap­pli­cants and UNC dis­crim­i­nated against both Asians and whites. When the court took the case, Lau­rence Tribe told the Har­vard Crim­son that even if the uni­ver­sity lost, not much would change.

When I teach five-year-olds the subject they typically scream with excitement. Here’s how to stop maths-phobia setting in

Eugenia Cheng:

The basic problem, in my view, is that in our haste to convey content – fractions, percentages, algorithms – we don’t pay enough attention to feelings. Typical curriculums fail to imbue children with a love and appreciation of maths. This is not the teachers’ fault – the education system judges students on performance, not enjoyment. However, if we focus on content at the expense of feelings then that content is unlikely to stick. Worse, we end up producing maths-phobic or maths-sceptical people who then find it difficult to apply important logical and quantitative reasoning techniques in the real world. Just how dangerous this can be became clear during the pandemic. In the early days, people who did not understand exponentials thought that predictions of future widespread infection were just fearmongering. Later on, the fact that there were a large number of infections among vaccinated people was interpreted by some as a sign they weren’t working – rather than exactly what you would expect if the majority of the population had received their jabs.

As scientist in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago, I’ve been teaching art students at undergraduate level for eight years. Most of them were badly put off maths at school. I ask them what they found so disagreeable, and there are clear recurring themes: memorisation, especially of times tables, timed tests, right-and-wrong answers, and being made to feel stupid for making mistakes. Often they felt alienated because they had searching questions – such as why does -(-1)=1; do numbers exist; is maths real – but they were told these were silly or irrelevant, and they should get back to their repetitive, algorithmic homework assignments.

When five-year-olds first encounter maths, it’s as a creative, open-ended activity, involving play and exploration

I sometimes think that the current educational approach turns so many people off that it would be better not to teach maths at all, because at least then we’d be having no effect rather than a negative one. Prime minister Rishi Sunak has a point when he says we have an “anti-maths” culture, but he is wrong to think we can improve the situation by extending compulsory maths to 18. The last thing we need is more years of trauma-inducing maths lessons. Those who like it already carry on with it, so we’d just be forcing the disillusioned to continue studying something they don’t enjoy.

Even if the Supreme Court rules against using race in college admissions, some schools plan to ignore it.

William McGurn:

No place is more in­sti­tu­tion­ally in­vested in us­ing race to de­ter­mine out­comes than our col­lege cam­puses. The bet­ting is that the high court will come down against what the chief jus­tice once called the “sor­did busi­ness” of “divvy­ing us up by race.” But the uni­ver­si­ties are even now plan­ning work-arounds that will al­low them to con­tinue to do what they’ve been do­ing—al­beit in a sneakier way.

The two cases in­volve a pri­vate school, Har­vard, and a pub­lic one, the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina. Stu­dents for Fair Ad­mis­sions sued both, claim­ing Har­vard dis­crim­i­nated against Asian-Amer­i­can ap­pli­cants and UNC dis­crim­i­nated against both Asians and whites. When the court took the case, Lau­rence Tribe told the Har­vard Crim­son that even if the uni­ver­sity lost, not much would change.

“Uni­ver­si­ties as in­tel­li­gent as Har­vard will find ways of deal­ing with the de­ci­sion with­out rad­i­cally al­ter­ing their com­po­si­tion,” the Har­vard Law pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus told the Crim­son. “But they will have to be more sub­tle than they have been thus far.”

“Diversity and inclusion doesn’t belong in the maths curriculum”

John Armstrong:

In March, the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) – an independent body which oversees standards and quality in UK universities – released new guidance on curriculum design in mathematics. This guidance states:

‘Values of EDI [Equality Diversity and Inclusion] should permeate the curriculum and every aspect of the learning experience.’

At least on the face of it, this guidance seems odd. University lecturers are not teaching racist courses on calculus or sexist proofs of the prime number theorem. There is, therefore, no need for the QAA to tell them that they shouldn’t do this.

Can saying 2+2=4 be racist? Astonishingly, there is a hardcore of postmodernists who would say that it can. One such argument is: human knowledge can never be perfect; rational argument is only one way of knowing; rational argument was promoted in the enlightenment as a means of denigrating indigenous ways of knowing and oppressing colonised peoples; therefore saying that 2+2=4 smacks of white supremacy. This is a fringe view, but it is a real one. An historian speaking at the London Mathematical Society this week sincerely proposed that we should question the claim that 2+2=4, though she did not expand on her reasons.

Nevertheless, the majority of those calling for an EDI overhaul of mathematics are not seeking to change mathematics only the mindset of mathematics students. This though is in many ways even more alarming.

University lecturers are not teaching racist courses on calculus or sexist proofs of the prime number theorem

The True Story of UNC-Chapel Hill’s New School

Perrin Jones:

Last month, UNC-Chapel Hill faculty penned an open letter airing criticism of both the North Carolina General Assembly and the UNC Board of Trustees. Among their complaints was the allegation that the proposed new School of Civic Life and Leadership (SCiLL) is a “clear violation” of governance principles.

But the faculty don’t have the full story. More of the truth is finally coming out about the proposed school at UNC-Chapel Hill, my alma mater, where I am a member of the Board of Trustees.

The idea for the new school’s pro-democracy curriculum goes back years—and has involved faculty input from the beginning, contrary to the false narrative perpetuated by political partisans and other opponents of free and open learning and debate on campus.

The idea for the new school’s pro-democracy curriculum goes back years—and has involved faculty input from the beginning.

As confirmed publicly by Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Provost Christopher Clemens, the administration’s proposal for SCiLL grew out of Carolina’s Program for Public Discourse and its IDEAs in Action curriculum, which themselves arose from campus discussions dating back to 2017. Their aims were to promote open, civil debate on campus and to equip students for success in our diverse nation and world.

Campaigns Take Notice of Moms for Liberty

Eliza Collins:

Schools rely on only about 10% of federal funding, and funding decisions must first be approved by Congress, giving the executive branch less power than presidential candidates often campaign on, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

DeSantis has held listening sessions over pizza and barbeque with Moms for Liberty members in the general election battleground states of Michigan and Georgia. Earlier this year, he met with Moms for Liberty founders to discuss endorsements for school-board candidates and spoke at their summit last year. Trump’s team offered a chance for members of Iowa chapters to take a photo with him and reserved special seating for them at an event.

Scott’s team reached out to Wood and Dixon ahead of his campaign launch and asked them to bring friends, the two said. A Scott-aligned group donated to a fundraiser held by the Charleston chapter, and he frequently talks during appearances about education and his push to expand school choice.

Vivek Ramaswamy, founder of a biopharmaceutical company, has held town-hall gatherings with Moms for Liberty members in Iowa and South Carolina. Ramaswamy said he signed the group’s parent pledge, a promise to push the issue, “to provide empowerment to parents and to moms in particular across the country who are concerned about their kids’ education.”

A curious Bezos Washington Post take on homeschooling

Peter Jamison:

Across the country, interest in home schooling has never been greater. The Bealls could see the surge in Virginia, where nearly 57,000 children were being home-schooled in the fall of 2022 — a 28 percent jump from three years earlier. The rise of home education, initially unleashed by parents’ frustrations with pandemic-related campus closures and remote learning, has endured as one of the lasting social transformations wrought by covid-19.

But if the coronavirus was a catalyst for the explosion in home schooling, the stage was set through decades of painstaking work by true believers like those who had raised Aaron and Christina. Aided by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) — a Christian nonprofit that has been dubbed “the most influential homeschool organization in the world,” and is based less than five miles from the Bealls’ house in Northern Virginia — those activists had fought to establish the legality of home schooling in the 1980s and early 1990s, conquering the skepticism of public school administrators and state lawmakers across the country.

Through their influence, a practice with roots in the countercultural left took on a very different character. Among conservative Christians, home schooling became a tool for binding children to fundamentalist beliefs they felt were threatened by exposure to other points of view. Rightly educated, those children would grow into what HSLDA founder Michael Farris called a “Joshua Generation” that would seek the political power and cultural influence to reshape America according to biblical principles.

## I’ve known a number of people who chose home schooling. In many cases, academic rigor was a significant factor. Religion was for some as well.

Perhaps these links might offer a bit of background:

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Notes on Harvard’s Censorship Journal

Mike Benz:

SUMMARY

  • Harvard’s in-house censorship journal published an article declaring the field of “mis- and disinformation studies” to be “too big to fail” and “here to stay.”​
  • Citing government funding to academic departments who study how to optimize online censorship, the Harvard magazine embraced language from the 2008 financial crisis language reserved for major banks.
  • The Harvard authors openly acknowledged the troubling links between today’s censorship regime and civil liberties violations during 1950s Cold War propaganda efforts.

“The field of mis- and disinformation studies is here to stay.” So declares the opening line of a report titled “Mis- and disinformation studies are too big to fail: Six suggestions for the field’s future,” published last September by the Harvard Misinformation Review, housed within the Harvard Kennedy School of Public Policy and Government. 

“Disinformation studies” is academic speak for online censorship. As the Harvard report itself concedes, the field was born “after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump—arguably catalysts for the emergence of the field.” That is, per Harvard, the involvement of US academics in online censorship happened as a reactionary response to right-wing populist political success on both sides of the Atlantic. 

As a technical matter, “disinformation studies” is a merger of social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology) and computer sciences (AI, machine learning, network theory), each converging on a common target (law-abiding citizens) to censor on social media. University social science teams conduct a “network mapping” of so-called “misinformation communities” online for takedown, and their findings are converted into specific algorithm targets by the university computer science teams.

High school graduates choose jobs and turn away from college

Harriett Torry

More high-school grad­u­ates are be­ing di­verted from col­lege cam­puses by brighter prospects for blue-col­lar jobs in a his­tor­i­cally strong la­bor mar­ket for less-ed­u­cated work­ers.

The col­lege en­roll­ment rate for re­cent U.S. high-school grad­u­ates, ages 16 to 24, de­clined to 62% last year from 66.2% in 2019, just be­fore the pan­demic be­gan, ac­cord­ing to the lat­est La­bor De­part­ment data. The rate topped out at 70.1% in 2009.

Job growth at restau­rants, theme parks and other parts of the leisure and hos­pi­tal­ity sec­tor—which tend to em­ploy young peo­ple and typ­i­cally don’t re­quire a col­lege de­gree—has in­creased more than twice as fast as job gains over­all in the past year. There also re­mains a high num­ber of job open­ings in con­struc­tion, man­u­fac­tur­ing and ware­hous­ing, fields that of­ten re­quire ad­di­tional train­ing, but not col­lege de­grees.

Troy School Board eliminates middle school honors math classes despite parent outrage

Niraj Warikoo:

As the father of twin boys with differing academic abilities, Krit Patel, of Troy, said honors classes are helpful in improving the learning of all students.

“I love them equally,” Patel said of his twins in middle school. “They’re not academically on the same end of the spectrum. I have a son that’s a special needs student and I have a son that’s in the honors class. They are not equal. They should not be in the same class. … Not all kids learn at the same speed and have the same ability.”

So when the father of four children in Troy Public Schools heard the district had canceled its honors English program for ninth graders and was planning to end its honors-track math classes for some grades in middle school, he and others grew concerned. A petition asking the district to keep the current system garnered almost 2,900 signatures. And hundreds have jammed meetings in recent weeks voicing their opposition.

Shades of Madison’s failed English 10 expedition…

he last days of Grace King High School, a Jefferson Parish institution with famous alumni

NOLA:

Days after the final bell tolled, the yellow and green sign in front of Grace King High still bore a solemn message: “Last Day of School May 24.”

Inside the Metairie school, yearbooks, trophies and other memorabilia would be packed and taken to a warehouse for storage, until they are sold at auction. The halls were bare of the banners that once announced the home of the Fighting Irish, and the oil painting of the school’s namesake, a New Orleans writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, had been removed from its place in the library.

“You take it for granted while you’re there, and then you go around the world and you see fancy things and you realize you had it pretty good,” said Khan, valedictorian of the Class of 1994. 

The Kolleens

Last month, the Jefferson School Board approved a sweeping plan to close Grace King and five other schools, and relocate two others. Haynes Academy, a magnet school in Old Metairie, will shift into the Grace King building. Would-be Grace King students will be split between Bonnabel Magnet Academy High School in Kenner and Riverdale High in Old Jefferson.

“A Partner at a Big Firm … Received Memos with Fake Case Cites from … Two Different Associates”

Eugene Volokh:

A message I got from Prof. Dennis Crouch (Missouri), in response to my posting A Lawyer’s Filing “Is Replete with Citations to Non-Existent Cases”—Thanks, ChatGPT? to an academic discussion list. (The full text was, “I just talked to a partner at a big firm who has received memos with fake case cites from at least two different associates.”) Caveat emp…—well, caveat everyone.

Notes on taxpayer funded efforts to suppress academic religious freedom

Rob Jenkins:

Despite a couple of recent, high-profile legal victories for religious freedom, the Biden administration is not abandoning its attacks on faith-based organizations—including religious colleges and universities, as well as religious groups on public campuses. Quite the contrary. The administration, undeterred, continues its long-term strategy of whittling away at religious liberties rather than confronting them head-on.

Before we explore that strategy, let’s first take a moment to celebrate the wins. For those of us engaged in this battle, who often feel like we’re fighting a rearguard action against an overwhelming foe, it’s important to recognize that we are not, in fact, always losing. The courts, at least, appear to be on our side—for now.

Our most notable recent victory, perhaps, is the dismissal, in January, of a lawsuit against the Department of Education claiming religious exemptions to Title IX are “unconstitutional.” The suit, filed in Oregon by the Religious Exemption Accountability Project, on behalf of more than 40 plaintiffs, accused several Christian colleges of “discriminating” against “LGBTQ+” individuals.

One might think the Biden administration would give up trying to foist its agenda on religious organizations.

In her decision, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken upheld the exemption because, she said, it is “substantially related to the government’s objective of accommodating religious exercise.” She also rejected the plaintiff’s arguments that the policy runs afoul of the equal protection and establishment clauses in the U.S. Constitution.

Another case involved Brigham Young University, which was being investigated for Title IX violations after several “LGBTQ+” students there complained of discrimination. The DOE dropped its investigation last year, reaffirming BYU’s longstanding religious exemption from “various Title IX provisions to the extent that application of these provisions is not consistent with the religious tenets of the Church of Jesus Christ [of Latter-day Saints] ‘that pertain to sexual orientation and gender identity.’”

A firing at Bakersfield College shows that tenure is no match for leftist orthodoxy.

George Leef:

Every so often, one of our college leaders blurts out the truth about their feelings and beliefs. In their public pronouncements, they always try to appear reasonable, when they’re actually intolerant and belligerent.

That’s exactly what happened at Bakersfield College (BC) in California.

The story begins in 2021, when a group of faculty members at the school, disturbed at the inroads the DEI movement was making, formed the Renegade Institute for Liberty (RIL). Their purpose was “to promote diversity of thought and intellectual literacy through free and open discussion of American ideals including civil, economic, and religious freedom.” That amounted to waving a red flag in front of the DEI bull, since diversity zealots have no use for any of those concepts.

The conflict erupted last October at a meeting of the BC Equal Opportunity & Diversity Advisory Committee. History professor Matthew Garrett, who has tenure, voiced his opposition to a “racial-climate survey” on the grounds that it had been poorly done and was a weak justification for the creation of a new diversity task force that would undercut the authority of the existing committee.

Diversity zealots have no use for free and open discussion of American ideals.

An interesting detail is that members of RIL had succeeded in obtaining some of the seats on that committee by applying for them at midnight on the first day they came open. The DEI community at BC was furious, but the tactic was perfectly legitimate.

Professor Garrett had previously incurred the wrath of the BC administration. In 2019, he criticized it for improperly allocating funds, naming several of the individuals involved. BC hit back at him with an “investigation” and by alleging that he had engaged in “unprofessional conduct.” That led him to file a lawsuit over the school’s retaliation against him, which is currently pending in federal court.

Will Illinois Still ‘Invest in Kids’?

Wall Street Journal:

The program is popular with voters. In May 2021, an ARW Strategies poll showed 61% of Illinois voters approved the tax-credit program, including 67% of state Democrats. Seventy-one percent of black voters and 81% of Hispanics statewide approved of the plan.

The program’s popularity is one reason Gov. J.B. Pritzker has reversed his earlier opposition. He ran against it in 2018 but in 2022 indicated support on a Chicago Sun-Times candidate questionnaire. “With assurance from the advocates for Invest in Kids that they will support increased public school funding,” Mr. Pritzker wrote, “my budgets have ultimately included the relatively small Invest in Kids Scholarship Program.”

So why is the program in danger? The answer, as always, is pressure from the unions that dominate Illinois politics, including the Illinois Federation of Teachers, the Illinois Education Association and the Chicago Teachers Union.

Notes on IQ results

Human Varieties:

In our manuscript, titled “Reply to Warne,” we present average eduPGS and NIH Toolbox composite scores from the ABCD study, categorized by ethnic and religious groups. In our analyses, we used unweighted means instead of sample weighted scores, since we were only interested in the correlation between mean eduPGS and cognitive ability. However, we also computed weighted NIH Toolbox scores, which may be of interest to some readers.

These scores were computed using the surveypackage for R as recommended by Heeringa and Berglund (2020). These weighted scores, reported below, represent the “neuropsychological performance” scores, measured between 2016 and 2018, of representative samples of 10-year-old American children. The first three columns, after the group labels, display the sample size, means, and standard deviations, respectively. The fourth column presents the scores normalized with the non-Hispanic White mean set to 100.00 and standard deviations set to 15.00. To norm scores, we pooled the standard deviations across all groups (pooled SD= 16.39) and transformed the values using the pooled SD. On a reader request, I added average years of parental education, which I previously outputted, in the fifth column.

The ethnic groups are mutually exclusive, and the specific variables used to code them are provided in the supplementary materials of the manuscript. Classifications are based on the race/ethnicity of the child as reported by the responding parent in conjunction with the nationality and immigrant status of the parents; see the Parent Demographics Survey for specific variables and the second table for definitions. To be clear, some of the definitions do not perfectly overlap with ones commonly used in the social sciences. For example, the classification “USA Blacks” refers to children who were identified as being Black, not being White, not being Hispanic, but also not having an immigrant parent or grandparent. This was done because, when computing the scores, we were interested in mutually exclusive ethnocultural groups.

The Department of Education’s “Secret Shoppers”

Grace Hall:

Students around the country pay top dollar and take on mountains of debt to earn a degree. They hope doing so will pay dividends in the future. But some colleges and universities misrepresent themselves, or even outright lie. After all, what school doesn’t want to separate students from their money? Enter the U.S. Department of Education, which is attempting to crack down on these colleges with a tool straight out of the retail industry: secret shoppers.

Secret shoppers have been a means of evaluating customer service for decades. When businesses want to know if their employees are providing excellent goods and services in the manner employers wish, they can hire secret shoppers to experience what the average customer gets, then report back.

The current U.S. Department of Education announced in March that the enforcement division of the Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) will henceforth use this same tool to ensure that schools are not lying to students about key facts such as graduation rates, the transferability of credits, future earning potential, career services, and the cost of attendance.

The Biden administration is attempting to crack down on schools that lie to potential students.

The Education Department will not focus on for-profit schools alone; however, these schools are often criticized for doing exactly what the secret-shopper program is hoping to stop. The Biden administration is attempting to crack down on schools that lie to potential students, especially ones that take advantage of federal student aid programs.

Secret-shopper findings may be used as evidence to support investigations into schools suspected of fraud. The FSA is also focused on protecting military students. According to the Education Department, schools that are treating students fairly have nothing to fear, while schools that engage in misconduct and fraud should be nervous. As Kristen Donoghue, FSA’s chief enforcement officer, said, “Schools that engage in fraud … are on notice that we may be listening, and they should clean up accordingly.”

Notes on the tuition bubble

Zachary Marshall

Hereditary ailments are a useful comparison to understand the current problems with American higher education. Doctors can trace patients’ family medical histories to approximate higher risks for diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer’s. A patient’s genealogy impacts how that individual lives today. 

Similarly, the genealogy of the university, as a Western social institution, helps explain how colleges came to be disposed to structural ailments. 

From a genealogical perspective, the institutional liberal bias that Campus Reform covers is in large part due to higher education’s historically complex, often love-hate relationship with capitalism. Universities have come to love the free market when alumni donations, football franchises, and new flagship buildings suit them. But in many ways, they also refuse to operate as a business – even a non-profit one – and posture that responding to market forces is beneath them when either popular criticism or overspending hit.

The bottom line: American colleges and universities have a relationship of convenience to free market capitalism because they are genealogically pre-capitalist institutions. And that historical legacy accounts for how they indoctrinate students with leftist ideologies.

High school reschedules graduation ceremony due to only 5 seniors found eligible to graduate

Alex Fulton and Jordan Gartner

According to an audit from the district, 28 of 33 seniors at Marlin High School did not meet the graduation requirements due to their attendance or grades.

“We hold firm to our belief that every student in Marlin ISD can and will achieve their potential,” said Superintendent Darryl Henson. “Students will be held to the same high standard as any other student in Texas.”

Debates over deferments and debt relief raise similar questions about education and democracy.

Michael Toth:

The Supreme Court is considering the fate of President Biden’s student-loan cancellation plan. The economic significance of the case is obvious: If the court holds that it is lawful, it will transfer more than $400 billion from taxpayers to student borrowers. Even more significant is the foundational question at the heart of the debate: What privileges, if any, should higher education receive in a democratic society?

It’s a question that was once carefully considered by leading political and educational leaders, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower (who served as Columbia University’s president, 1948-53) and James Conant (Harvard’s president, 1933-53). The broader context of the mid-20th-century debate over educational privilege was student deferments from the military draft. It’s a useful analogy for today’s debate, and it illustrates how higher-education interests succeeded decades ago in creating a privileged place above the ordinary duties of American civic life.

The U.S. instituted the draft in 1940, more than a year before Congress declared war on Japan and Germany. FDR, who came out for the draft at the 1940 Democratic National Convention, championed universal military service by able-bodied males as an expression of national unity and democratic solidarity. On the day of the first draft lottery, Roosevelt read, with great fanfare, from letters written by Catholic, Jewish and Protestant leaders in support of conscription.

Let’s not write people off as “ai losers”

Sarah O’Connor:

But Swedish unions hope it will “make our members safer in the labour market and more resistant to destructive forces that are always at work in a small open economy,” says Fredrik Söderqvist, an economist for the LO — the Swedish trade union confederation. “This sort of highlights a basic tenet of the Swedish model — security in the labour market is supposed to bring security in the individual job — not the other way around.”

It’s time to stop saying AI will produce winners and losers, as if the whole thing is out of our hands. It creates opportunities and dangers. How they play out is up to us.

Arrested for handing out the Constitution

Rachel Culver:

Tizon, a student at the time of the incident, was arrested by the ASU Police Department on March 3, 2022.

In January of this year, Liberty Justice Center, which represents Tizon, appealed the conviction.

brief in his defense argued that the Arizona Forum Act defines all public areas of the ASU campus as public forums in which students are free to express their own message, even controversial ones.

Following his arrest, Tizon said through his attorneys: “Universities are supposed to be the epicenter of the marketplace of ideas.”

“ASU has let me down and every other student too by placing its bureaucracy ahead of our First Amendment rights.”

IRS investigated Matt Taibbi as he was revealing government censorship on Twitter

Karl Salzmann:

The IRS targeted journalist Matt Taibbi on two occasions while he was exposing information about censorship efforts by the government and Twitter.

The agency launched an investigation into Taibbi, a liberal journalist who has criticized left-wing censorship of conservative and moderate voices, on December 24, 2022, according to a Wednesday letterfrom House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio). On that same day, Taibbi was publishing some of the “Twitter Files,” internal Twitter emails that show the company coordinating with the government to censor so-called misinformation.

Just months later, on March 9, 2023, Taibbi was testifying in Congress when an IRS agent visited his home. The agency was performing “an extensive investigation” of Taibbi, looking into the journalist’s “voter registration records, whether he possessed a hunting or fishing license, whether he had a concealed weapons permit, and his telephone numbers,” Jordan’s letter revealed.

The investigation, which ostensibly concerned Taibbi’s 2018 tax filing, ultimately concluded that Taibbi “did not owe the IRS anything,” according to the letter. On the contrary, the IRS owed Taibbi “a substantial refund.”

Notes on University Governance

Molly Worthen:

Nery Rodriguez just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a major in economics, but one of the most significant courses she took there had nothing to do with marginal utility or game theory. When she registered last fall for the seminar known around campus as “the monk class,” she wasn’t sure what to expect.

“You give up technology and you can’t talk for a month,” Ms. Rodriguez told me. “That’s all I’d heard. I didn’t know why.” What she found was a course that challenges students to rethink the purpose of education, especially at a time when machine learning is getting way more press than the human kind.

On the first day of class — officially called Living Deliberately — Justin McDaniel, a professor of Southeast Asian and religious studies, reviewed the rules. Each week, students would read about a different monastic tradition and adopt some of its practices. Later in the semester, they would observe a one-month vow of silence (except for discussions during Living Deliberately) and fast from technology, handing over their phones to him.

Yes, he knew they had other classes, jobs and extracurriculars; they could make arrangements to do that work silently and without a computer. (Dr. McDaniel offers to talk to any instructors, employers or relatives who have concerns.)

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Fiat Currency edition

Alex Carp:

“Congress screwed up,” Beowulf wrote. By passing the law, it had given the president the authority to direct the secretary of the Treasury to mint a coin of any value — say, $1 trillion — and deposit it in the Federal Reserve, which would be legally obligated to accept it. Ultimately, the coin’s deposit would result in $1 trillion in government revenue or, with a coin of a different denomination, however much was needed to continue to pay its bills and avoid a default. “The catch is, it’s gotta be made of platinum,” Beowulf wrote. “Ditto the balls of any president who tried this.”

In the time since, the idea has gained an unexpected acceptance among policymakers and economists. In 2013, Representative Jerry Nadler said that the idea “sounds silly, but it’s absolutely legal.” Shortly after, Paul Krugman asked himself in the New York Times if the president should be willing to mint the coin to avoid default. His response? “Yes, absolutely.” Phillip Diehl, a former director of the Mint and Treasury chief of staff who co-wrote the 1997 law, allowed that a coin with a specific denomination of $1 trillion was “an unintended consequence” but maintained that the possibility was always conceivable. “In principle, there is nothing new,” he has said. “Any court challenge is likely to be quickly dismissed.” In 2020, Representative Rashida Tlaib sponsored a plan to mint two coins to fund pandemic aid, and this year both Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell have faced questions about using the coin to end the standoff. Each registered objections, but neither would rule it out.

As it turns out, Beowulf is not an economist or a professional policy wonk. He’s a Georgia lawyer named Carlos Mucha. “Criminal defense, shareholder disputes, a little of everything,” he told me recently. He’s a tinkerer — “Jack of all trades, master of none,” he says — and his frequent visits to the comments sections of a set of financial websites were a kind of hobby.

“What got me thinking about it was that I was reading that people were using their credit cards to buy tens of thousands of U.S. dollar coins from the Mint just to get the credit-card points,” he said. “At the time, the Mint had free shipping and handling, and since it’s from the government, the coins are tax free.” They would charge $10,000, get ten thousand one-dollar coins, and use the coins to pay off their card. This really happened — one such dollar coiner told The Wall Street Journal that he took 15,000 coins straight from the delivery truck to the trunk of his car, to more easily drive them to the bank. “You don’t have to do that too many times to get a free first-class ticket,” Mucha said.

Civics: IRS Whistleblower Defies the Biden Administration and the Media

Jonathan Turley:

Below is my column in the New York Post on the most recent whistleblower coming forward to publicly accuse the Biden Administration of “slow walking” the investigation of Hunter Biden. The source of the interference with the IRS investigation, according to Gary Shapley, was the Department of Justice. It is the latest chapter in the story of “The Incredibly Shrinking Merrick Garland.

Here is the column:

“I don’t want to do any of this.”

Those words from 14-year IRS veteran Gary Shapley may be the most important line in his CBS News interview this week.

After weeks of Democrats dismissing whistleblowers alleging the president’s administration interfered with investigations of Hunter Biden, Shapley had enough.

Putting his career and much of his life at risk, Shapley came forward to say he and others believe Hunter is being protected and identified the Justice Department as the source of the protection.

Shapley has every reason not to want to do any of this.

After all, as President Joe Biden stated last year, “No one f–ks with a Biden.”

For years, a Democrat-controlled Congress refused to investigate Biden family influence-peddling, and the press dismissed people raising Hunter’s laptop as spreading “Russian disinformation.”

The media have worked hard to minimize the blowback after acknowledging the laptop’s authenticity and the growing evidence of millions in influence-peddling.

Part of this effort at “scandal implosion” has been to dismiss any criminal charges as relatively minor tax violations unconnected to the president.

Indeed, when the president recently agreed to a rare sit-down interview, the White House chose MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle.

States should embed civic content into statewide reading assessments

Ross Wiener:

The recent dismal civics and history results from the Nation’s Report Card put American democracy at risk. Eighth-graders recorded their lowest scores ever in U.S. history and the first decline in civics scores. The decreases were most dramatic for lower-performing students. Just under half of eighth-graders report taking a class primarily focused on civics, and fewer than one-third have a teacher whose primary responsibility is teaching civics. School accountability policies that emphasize reading and math scores have led to less time spent on other essential subjects.

To counter this unproductive narrowing of the curriculum, states should embed civic content into statewide reading assessments. This simple change would incentivize more attention to civic learning while making reading tests more engaging, equitable and accurate.

Just 6 percent of American middle schoolers can read an excerpt from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and identify two ideas from the Constitution or Declaration of Independence that King might have been referring to. This is a symptom of the atrophy in the civic mission of schools that represents a grave danger to American democracy. Only 30 percent of millennials think a democratic government is essential, compared with 70 percent of Americans born before World War II. Most millennials say that if Russia invaded the United States, they would not fight to defend our country. These data are a wake-up call that the nation needs to recommit public schools to their foundational purpose: preparing young Americans for citizenship.

Taxpayer funded Open Records Resistance at the Madison School District

Scott Girard:

The complaint against Madison Metropolitan School District spokesperson Tim LeMonds that he fought to keep private alleges he bullied and harassed numerous employees under his management as well as members of the local media.

Filed in October 2022 by three employees, one of whom has since left the district, the complaint includes a timeline of examples of poor behavior beginning in March 2021 through early October 2022. It also includes experiences shared by former employees who are not officially part of the complaint.

The district released the complaint in response to an open records request on Friday. On Thursday, a Dane County Circuit Court judge ruled against LeMonds’ lawsuit seeking to stop that release based on concerns about the potential reputational damage it could cause. LeMonds began working in MMSD in 2019.

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Missing data on UW System $pending, enrollment and redistributed taxpayer funds

Wispolitics

The report also shows Wisconsin is the only state where education revenue for two-year colleges exceeds the amount for the state’s four-year institutions. In Wisconsin, revenue for two-year colleges is 6.4 percent higher.

State higher education, executive officers association

Since 2011, FTE enrollment has declined for 11 straight years to 10.31 million in 2022. Between 2015 and 2020, these declines were less than 1.0% annually. In 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a year-over-year decline of 3.2% in FTE enrollment, the largest decline since the start of the SHEF dataset in 1980. FTE enrollment continued to decline in 2022, marking the second largest drop in enrollment, with a decrease of 2.5%. As a result, public institutions enrolled 10,306,924 FTE students in 2022, down 11.6% from the peak in 2011, and only 0.4% above 2008 levels

Open Records and the taxpayer supported Madison School District

Scott Girard:

The Madison Metropolitan School District can release an employee complaint filed against its spokesperson as part of a response to an open records request, a Dane County judge ruled Thursday.

Circuit Court Judge Rhonda Lanford ruled against MMSD’s executive director for communications, Tim LeMonds, who filed a lawsuit against MMSD on March 24 asking the court to stop the release of a few documents that are responsive to an open records request.

“I do not think that the plaintiff, Mr. LeMonds, has come close to showing that the public interest of protecting his reputation outweighs the public’s right to know,” Lanford said. “Especially in a case involving the public schools and how not just investigations are conducted, but how well how they are conducted and the results of that.”

The public records request came from NBC15 reporter Elizabeth Wadas, who requested all emails from Dec. 19, 2021, through Dec. 19, 2022, that contained her name or references to an NBC15 reporter. The district released hundreds of pages of records related to the request, but per open records law notified LeMonds that the complaint would be part of the release and allowed him time to challenge that.

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Notes on legislation and k-12 reading

Christopher Peak:

For decades, schools all over the country taught reading based on a theory cognitive scientists had debunked by the 1990s. Despite research showing it made it harder for some kids to learn, the concept was widely accepted by most educators — until recent reporting by APM Reports.

Now, state legislators and other policymakers are trying to change reading instruction, requiring it to align with cognitive science research about how children learn to read. Several of them say they were motivated by APM’s Sold a Story podcast.  

Six states passed laws to change the way reading is taught since Sold a Story was released last fall. At least a dozen other states are considering similar efforts.  

The surge in activity is part of a wave of “science of reading” bills that more than half the states passed into law over the last decade — as parents, teachers, researchers and other advocates pushed legislators to make changes. But since Sold a Story, lawmakers are taking a closer look at what curriculum schools are buying and, in some states, attempting to outlaw specific teaching methods.  

Three states had already effectively banned cueing, the discredited practice covered in Sold a Story. The cueing theory holds that beginning readers don’t need to learn how to sound out written words because they can rely on other “cues” to figure them out, like the pictures on a page or the context of the sentence. This year another 10 states are seeking bans, three of which have already passed. 

The legislative efforts come at a time when fourth-grade reading scores in the United States have declined consistently since 2015, according to a nationwide achievement measurement conducted by the National Center for Educational Statistics.

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

K-12 Tax & spending climate – subsidies for the very wealthy

Curiously, our political class has exempt major baseball from antitrust laws

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Rising costs erode buying power of Social Security earnings by 36%, report says

Nora Colomer:

Inflation is moderating, but rising costs have eroded the buying power of Social Security earnings by 36%, according to a recent study by The Senior Citizens League (TSCL). 

Older Americans that retired before 2000 would have to earn an extra $516.7 more per month or $6,200 more this year than what they are currently getting to maintain the same level of buying power as in 2000, according to the study. 

The loss of buying power comes even as Social Security cost of living adjustments increased by 8.7%, which boosted the average monthly benefit by about $140. 

While slowing from a 40-year high hit last June, inflation remains well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target rate. April’s consumer price index (CPI), a measure of inflation, rose 4.9% year-over-year, a slowdown from the 5% increase in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The Strange Story of the Teens Behind the Mirai Botnet

Scott Shapiro:

First-year college students are understandably frustrated when they can’t get into popular upper-level electives. But they usually just gripe. Paras Jha was an exception. Enraged that upper-class students were given priority to enroll in a computer-science elective at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, Paras decided to crash the registration website so that no one could enroll.

On Wednesday night, 19 November 2014, at 10:00 p.m. EST—as the registration period for first-year students in spring courses had just opened—Paras launched his first distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. He had assembled an army of some 40,000 bots, primarily in Eastern Europe and China, and unleashed them on the Rutgers central authentication server. The botnet sent thousands of fraudulent requests to authenticate, overloading the server. Paras’s classmates could not get through to register.

The next semester Paras tried again. On 4 March 2015, he sent an email to the campus newspaper, The Daily Targum: “A while back you had an article that talked about the DDoS attacks on Rutgers. I’m the one who attacked the network.… I will be attacking the network once again at 8:15 pm EST.” Paras followed through on his threat, knocking the Rutgers network offline at precisely 8:15 p.m.

On 27 March, Paras unleashed another assault on Rutgers. This attack lasted four days and brought campus life to a standstill. Fifty thousand students, faculty, and staff had no computer access from campus.

The Politics of Academic Research

Matthew C. Ringgenberg, Chong Shu and Ingrid M. Werner

We develop a novel measure of political slant in research to examine whether political ideology influences the content and use of academic research. Our measure examines the frequency of citations from think tanks with different political ideologies and allows us to examine both the supply and demand for research. We find that research in Economics and Political Science displays a liberal slant, while Finance and Accounting research exhibits a conservative slant, and these differences cannot be accounted for by variations in research topics. We also find that the ideological slant of researchers is positively correlated with that of their Ph.D. institution and research conducted outside universities appears to cater more to the political party of the current President. Finally, political donations data confirms that the ideological slant we measure based on think tank citations aligns with the political values of researchers. Our findings have important implications for the structure of research funding.

The New Bar Exam Puts DEI Over Competence

Jay Mitchell:

The proposed exam will also eliminate family law and trusts and estates as tested subjects. Tens of millions of Americans live in rural areas and small towns, where legal needs typically revolve around family law (marriage, divorce, custody and adoption) and probate matters (estate administration, guardianships and conservatorships). In many rural areas, residents’ access to justice depends on the ability of only a handful of practicing attorneys. These residents need to know that new lawyers have the foundational knowledge to serve their needs or at least the threshold understanding necessary to refer them elsewhere. If these areas of legal practice are eliminated from the exam, it will be difficult to replenish the requisite knowledge in our lawyer ranks.

But perhaps the biggest concern is the NCBE’s use of the NextGen exam to advance its “diversity, fairness and inclusion” agenda. Two of the organization’s stated aims are to “work toward greater equity” by “eliminat[ing] any aspects of our exams that could contribute to performance disparities” and to “promote greater diversity and inclusion in the legal profession.” The NCBE reinforces this message by touting its “organization-wide efforts to ensure that diversity, fairness, and inclusion pervade its test products and services.”

What does all this mean—and how does it have any relation to the law? Based on the diversity workshop at the NCBE conference, it means putting considerable emphasis on examinees’ race, sex, gender identity, nationality and other identity-based characteristics. The idea seems to be that any differences in group outcomes must be eliminated—even if the only way to achieve this goal is to water down the test. On top of all that, an American Civil Liberties Union representative provided conference attendees with a lecture on criminal-justice reform in which he argued that states should minimize or overlook would-be lawyers’ convictions for various criminal offenses in deciding whether to admit them to the bar.

Notes on change and education outcomes

Troy Closson:

As New York embarks on an ambitious plan to overhaul how children in the nation’s largest school system are taught to read, schools leaders face a significant obstacle: educators’ skepticism.

Dozens of cities and states have sought to transform reading instruction in recent years, driven by decades of research known as the “science of reading.” But the success of their efforts has hinged in part on whether school leaders are willing to embrace a seismic shift in their philosophy about how children learn.

Already in New York City, the rollout has frustrated principals. The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, is forcing schools to abandon strategies he says are a top reason half of students in grades three to eight are not proficient in reading.

But principals will lose control over selecting reading programs at their schools, and their union has criticized the speed of change. And many educators still believe in “balanced literacy,” a popular approach that aims to foster a love of books through independent reading time but that experts and the chancellor say lacks enough focus on foundational skills.

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

“As artificial intelligence gets smarter, the premium on ingenuity will become greater”

Ben Cohen:

“The most interesting problems to do in the world are the ones where nobody has told you how to do them,” he told students. “And the problem I’ve been thinking about recently is how to help people flourish in a world with ChatGPT. Do you guys know what that is?”

Every hand in the auditorium shot up.

After his talk, I asked how his message to a room full of fifth-graders applies to someone in an office, and he replied faster than ChatGPT. “The future of jobs is figuring out how to find pain points,” he said. “And a pain point is a human pain.” Loh would tell anyone what he told the students and what he tells his own three children. It’s his theorem of success. “You need to be able to create value,” he said. “People who make value will always have opportunities.”

He is living proof. Born in California and raised in Wisconsin, the 40-year-old Loh was a child prodigy who attended the California Institute of Technology, where he met his wife on the first day of freshman orientation and got married on the day before graduation. After earning his graduate math degrees from Cambridge University and Princeton University, he joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon in 2010. He was named coach of the U.S. team in 2013. American teenagers hadn’t won the International Mathematical Olympiad in nearly two decades. They have since won four times.

He’s soon returning home and moving into dorms to start training for this summer’s world championship in Japan with his team of the nation’s top six high-school students. But first he’s barnstorming across the country on a tour so exhausting that I got tired just typing out his itinerary.

“This machine is the world’s most powerful tool at repeating things that have been done many times before,” he tells students. “But now I want to show you something it cannot do.”

Loh asked ChatGPT to find the largest fraction less than ½ with a numerator and denominator that are positive integers less than or equal to 10,000. It was a question that it almost certainly hadn’t seen before—and it flubbed the answer. (It’s 4,999/9,999.) This might sound familiar to anyone who has spent enough time with a chatbot that has a nasty habit of being confidently wrong: It made up a bunch of nonsense and apologized for its errors.

Censorship: No debate at high school debates….

James Fishback:

My four years on a high school debate team in Broward County, Florida, taught me to challenge ideas, question assumptions, and think outside the box. It also helped me overcome a terrible childhood stutter. And I wasn’t half-bad: I placed ninth my first time at the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) nationals, sixth at the Harvard national, and was runner-up at the Emory national.

After college, between 2017 and 2019, I coached a debate team at an underprivileged high school in Miami. There, I witnessed the pillars of high school debate start to crumble. Since then, the decline has continued, from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning to one that punishes students for what they say and how they say it.

First, some background. Imagine a high school sophomore on the debate team. She’s been given her topic about a month in advance, but she won’t know who her judge is until hours before her debate round. During that time squeeze—perhaps she’ll pace the halls as I did at the 2012 national tournament in Indianapolis—she’ll scroll on her phone to look up her judge’s name on Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA. That’s where judges post “paradigms,” which explain what they look for during a debate. If a judge prefers competitors not “spread”—speak a mile a minute—debaters will moderate their pace. If a judge emphasizes “impacts”—the reasons why an argument matters—debaters adjust accordingly. 

But let’s say when the high school sophomore clicks Tabroom she sees that her judge is Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whose paradigm reads, “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.”

More.

Faux white guilt has led to real black complicity in the deterioration of US race relations.

Jeff Goldstein:

Covington Catholic High School’s Nick Sandmann never tried to stare down a phony Native American activist. Smugly or otherwise. And we all should have known it.

Morgan Bettinger never threatened to run over BLM protesters, nor did she make any of the supposedly racist remarks Zyahna Bryant claimed she did. Bryant — a “social justice” activist and Marxian race hustler — can perhaps be trusted to review a new Applebee’s dessert pie, but on all other subjects, the wise move would be to adopt a skeptical pose when engaging with her, if not simply dismiss out of hand anything spilling from her mouth save maybe a tasty fruit filling. 

Michael Brown never said “hands up, don’t shoot!” Jacob Blake is not a hero or a civil rights icon — nor should be George Floyd or Trayvon Martin.

Christian Cooper did indeed threaten to take Amy Cooper’s dog. Justin Neely was a crazed homeless man and career criminal who absolutely threatened people on a subway train. Daniel Penny has never been a white supremacist.

Time and time again, the left creates its own mythology, then repeats it until the rest of us just kind of accept it as at least somewhat fairly described. And that’s a fatal mistake, both intellectually and practically.

Curious legacy media rhetoric on taxpayer supported tech school $pending increases

Alexander Shur:

Wisconsin technical colleges would receive an additional $9.4 million in state aid over the next two years under a GOP plan the Legislature’s budget committee approved Tuesday, lower than the nearly $66 million increase Democratic Gov. Tony Evers called for in his two-year spending proposal.

Democrats derided the Republicans’ plan, but GOP lawmakers said their proposal was more grounded in the state’s fiscal reality than Evers’ plan to give technical colleges their biggest-ever boost in state aid.

“That is incredibly disappointing,” Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, said about the Republicans’ proposal. “We’re talking about workforce today. It’s hard to imagine funding that we can provide that’s more directly related to our ability to train our workforce than to the technical college system.”

Third Grade Reading Retention Is Back. Should It Be?

Sarah Schwartz:

Research has borne out that it’s harder for students to succeed if they’re not proficient by 3rd grade. One landmark study found that students who couldn’t read on grade level by then were four times less likely to graduate high school on time than their peers who could.

But whether requiring struggling students to repeat that 3rd grade year will lead to better results is a different and more complicated question. Research findings on the policy are mixed, and have to be weighed against the negative social and emotional consequences of holding students back a grade. Many studies show only short-term academic gains, while others demonstrate greater likelihood of adverse outcomes like bullying.

The debate around these policies is heating up again now, as states wrestle with when to restart them after many were suspended during the early days of the pandemic. Alabama, for example, passed legislation that required 3rd grade retention in 2019, but decided to delay the enforcement of that policy until the 2023-24 school year.

K-12 tax & spending climate: Minnesota tax increases

Howard Root:

DFL Rep. Aisha Gomez claims she is just asking the higher income people “to contribute a little more to the public good.” As my total tax rate creeps toward 50%, I’d like to hear the number that will constitute “a little more” once Minnesota returns to a California-like deficit, even before paying reparations.

A few weeks ago, a resident of bucolic St. Anthony Park was shot dead outside his home at 7:30 a.m. on a Saturday. Car thefts are up 95% this year in Minneapolis, and carjackings, a crime seldom heard of before 2020, occur every week throughout the metro. At the recent Art-A-Whirl studio tour in northeast Minneapolis, a 70-year-old woman was sent to the hospital when she was randomly punched in the face as she crossed the street to go to a restaurant on a Friday evening.

Civics: Widespread FBI abuse of foreign spy law sets off “alarm bells,” tech group says

Ashley Belanger:

“The systemic misuse of this warrantless surveillance tool has made FISA 702 as toxic as COINTELPRO and the FBI abuses of the Hoover years,” Laperruque said, while his group’s press release noted that the court opinion “confirmed the worst fears of civil rights and civil liberties advocates.

“We now know that the FBI, which has already been under scrutiny for a litany of past compliance violations involving Section 702, engaged in improper searches for Americans’ communications targeted at political activities and actors,” the press release said.

These revelations came to light after a heavily redacted court opinion—decided in April 2022 by the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC, also known as FISA Court)—was newly unclassified last Friday. It detailed the “FBI’s pattern of conducting broad, suspicionless” queries and confirmed that Section 702 compliance issues have “continued to surface.”

Politics, taxpayer funded K-12 systems and Teacher Unions

Jack Elbaum:

There is a reason why you know who Randi Weingarten, the leader of the second-largest teachers union in the country, is. 

She’s the one who threatened to strike if schools did not close in 2020. She is the one who said that school closures were not that big of a deal because “kids are resilient.” She is the one who influencedthe CDC to change its COVID-19 guidelines using almost her exact language. She is the one who introduced a campaign to bring Ibram X. Kendi’s simplistic ideas on race into “every classroom.” In other words, you know who Randi Weingarten is because she is a left-wing culture warrior — and she is proud of it. 

But now, Weingarten wants you to believe that she is completely opposed to “culture wars,” particularly in education. On Sunday, Weingarten published a piece on the American Federation of Teachers website titled“Culture wars harm education.” 

The issue is not so much the basic statement, which seems to be self-evident. Of course, it is preferable for schools to be places of learning for the benefit of children instead of the centers of culture wars that win political points for adults. Rather, the issue is her premise that the culture war somehow just appeared in a vacuum. This assumption is reflected in her decision to focus the entire piece on Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) education policy. But to believe that the culture war over education only emerged because conservatives needed a new boogeyman would suggest a total lack of self-awareness on Weingarten’s part.

Commentary on Florida Teacher Union climate

Caleb Ecarma:

This two-pronged attack against educators and their union advocates, argues Pringle, the NEA president, is part of an overarching plot to make public schools more and more dysfunctional—therefore eroding community trust in them—before increasingly privatizing the system. “They’re systematically trying to pollute our schools and sow division within the labor movement and within communities,” she says. “This is just a part of their playbook.”

MIT students give longtime math professor a standing ovation after his last lecture

Eli Curwin:

After 63 years teaching and over 10 million views on his online lectures, MIT professor Gilbert Strang received a standing ovation from his students Monday once he completed his last linear algebra lecture.

The mathematics professor graduated from MIT in 1955 and has since published several books on linear algebra and differential equations. He was one of the first professors to publish his lectures on the institute’s online open learning library OpenCourseWare, or OCW, and continues to fall within the top 10 most viewed lecturers at MIT.

In a video posted by the creators of MIT:REGRESSIONS, a documentary recounting the history of the institute, Strang’s linear algebra class can be seen giving the longtime professor a round of applause.

The AI revolution already transforming education

Bryan Staton and Madhumita Murgia:

When Lauren started researching the British designer Yinka Ilori for a school project earlier this year, she was able to consult her new study pal: artificial intelligence. 

After an hour of scouring Google for information, the 16-year-old pupil asked an AI tool called ChatGPT, in which you input a question and get a generated answer, to write a paragraph about Ilori. It replied with fascinating details about the artist’s life that were new and — she later confirmed — factually correct. 

“Some of the things it brought up I hadn’t found anywhere online,” says Lauren, a pupil at Wimbledon High School, a private girl’s school in south London. “I was actually surprised about how it was able to give me information that wasn’t widely available, and a different perspective.”

“Some of the things it brought up I hadn’t found anywhere online,” says Lauren, a pupil at Wimbledon High School, a private girl’s school in south London. “I was actually surprised about how it was able to give me information that wasn’t widely available, and a different perspective.” Since ChatGPT — a powerful, freely available AI software capable of writing sophisticated responses to prompts — arrived on the scene last year, it has prompted intense speculation about the long-term repercussions on a host of industries and activities.

The New Bar Exam Puts DIE Over Competence

Jay Mitchell:

The bar exam is about to get a nationwide overhaul. The National Conference of Bar Examiners, or NCBE, which creates and administers the uniform bar exam, plans to roll out a revamped version of the bar exam, which it calls the “NextGen” exam, in 2026. After attending the NCBE’s annual meeting this month, I have serious concerns about how this test will affect law students, law schools and the legal profession.

Long term study of “reading recovery”; Madison was/is a long time user…

the report.

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Centralized empathy and the philanthropic calculation debate: “man plans, God laughs”

Robert Graboyes:

The greatest economics lesson of all may reside in the Yiddish expression, “Der mensch tracht, un Gott lacht” (“Man plans, and God laughs.”)That, writ small, is the message of Friedrich Hayek’s broadsides against central planning in The Fatal Conceit and “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The latter was one of the most influential economic essays of the 20th century, and in a gentler time, when philosophical adversaries actually listened to one another (some, at least), a significant number of socialists and would-be planners found the anti-socialist Hayek’s arguments persuasive (or at least informative). Hayek dedicated his The Road to Serfdom “to the socialists of all parties,” and he wrote that dedication with respect. Hayek, ever-generous of spirit, had no interest in “owning the libs.”

In recent years, the impulse to apply central planning techniques to charitable endeavors has taken form in the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. The movement has been defined by its own adherents as: 

“Effective altruism is a research field and practical community that aims to find the best ways to help others, and put them into practice.” 

Ostensibly, the idea is to think systematically about charity, to develop metrics concerning the relative effectiveness of different charitable outlets, and to use those metrics to apply cost-effectiveness analysis to help allocate resources across charitable institutions. Both the goal and the mathematical approach of EA appeal to me as an economist, but I’m always aware of economists’ chronic overconfidence in the ability of mathematical tools, created and operated by a clerisy of “experts,” to optimize over complex human behavior.

Notes on Milwaukee’s latest pension disaster

2002 Milwaukee pension scandal primer:

The pension scandal that broke in 2002 brought county government to its knees, forcing politicians from office and saddling taxpayers with massive unexpected costs that harmed parks, transit and social services.

Now, in a final chapter, a major civil lawsuit will put major players on the witness stand for the first time.

Here’s a roadmap for understanding the trial:

What’s at stake?

  • Money: Milwaukee County claims up to $900 million in higher costs linked to the 2000-’01 pension deal. A big win could alleviate some of the county’s stressed finances. The county claim comes as Mercer Inc., the county’s pension numbers cruncher, and its parent firm Marsh and McLennan Companies face another huge pension lawsuit by the state of Alaska. Also, Marsh and McLennan carry no insurance to cover employee errors – making a loss even more painful.
  • Careers: A win would help County Executive Scott Walker build political capital that could come in handy for his run for governor. A win would also help former County Executive F. Thomas Ament and some current and former county supervisors claim vindication, after years of public scorn over the pension scandal.
  • Closure: After six years of angst, political turmoil and public opprobrium over the county pension deal, the case could shed new light on the deal’s origins, who deserves blame and an ultimate accounting of its costs.

The stage: Federal Courthouse, 517 E. Wisconsin Ave.

The basics: Jury selection begins Monday, May 4. Testimony expected to last about four weeks. No photo, video or audio coverage is allowed under federal rules.

Back to top

Preliminary Injunction Against “Disparag[ing]” or “Frivolous” Claims About School Board or Employees …

Eugene Volokh:

From Livingston Parish School Bd. v. Kellett, decided Thursday by the Louisiana Court of Appeal (Judge Allison Penzato, joined by Judges Duke Welch & Walter Lanier):

[T]he School Board discovered that Ms. Kellett, the mother of a child attending Live Oak Elementary School, “repeatedly concealed” electronic devices in her child’s clothing or personal belongings in November 2019. Ms. Kellett purportedly used these devices to “intercept communications by and between faculty, students, and others in the school and/or classroom during school hours and while on school property.” One such device, an AngelSense, had GPS capability to track the child’s whereabouts and also allowed verbal communications between Ms. Kellett and her child. The School Board obtained a temporary restraining order (TRO) on January 27, 2020, then a preliminary injunction on April 8, 2020, prohibiting Ms. Kellett’s use of these devices on school property.

The School Board also accused Ms. Kellett of being critical of the School Board and publicly discussing “her child’s special needs” and individual education plan with the media. Ms. Kellett allegedly maintained a “live web blog and other ongoing social media posts” that involved discussion and disclosure of information related to the School Board, the special education program, and other identified individuals. According to the School Board, these posts have “caused concern for parents of other [Livingston Parish School System] students and have defamed and slandered the reputations of [the School Board] and Live Oak Elementary staff.” The January 27, 2020 TRO and April 8, 2020 preliminary injunction addressed this additional complaint by the School Board. Pertinently, the April 8, 2020 preliminary injunction enjoined, restrained, and prohibited Ms. Kellett from:

… d) … engaging in any form of written, verbal, or physical displays of hostility, anger, or disparagement, and/or from making threats of any physical assault, and/or any disorderly conduct that results in fear or disruption of activities through hostile and inappropriate behavior toward any LPSB [Livingston Parish School Board] member, administrator, faculty or staff at Live Oak Elementary School and/or on any LPSS [Livingston Parish School System] public school bus or other school property, and/or while participating in any educational or other school related business or function, including but in no way limited to any Individual Education Plan (IEP) or Individual Health Plan (IHP) meetings or evaluations required to facilitate the minor child’s special education and health care needs;

f) … making or publishing and/or from engaging in any activity to make, disseminate, publish or broadcast defamatory, slanderous, libelous, frivolous and/or fraudulent claims or statements concerning [the School Board], its faculty, staff and employees, as defined by R.S. 14:47-48, 13:3381(B), directly or by her enlisting the assistance of any other person(s) on her behalf ….

The School Board argues that false statements, like Ms. Kellett’s accusations against the School Board and its employees, which purportedly include allegations of criminal conduct, are not constitutionally protected free speech. Worse, it asserts, the words uttered by Ms. Kellett are defamatory per se. In Kennedy v. Sheriff of East Baton Rouge (La. 2006), the Louisiana Supreme Court recognized that words that expressly or implicitly accuse another of criminal conduct, or which by their very nature tend to injure one’s personal or professional reputation, without considering extrinsic facts or circumstances, are considered defamatory per se. “When a plaintiff proves publication of words that are defamatory per se, falsity and malice (or fault) are presumed, but may be rebutted by the defendant.” Thus, before liability can be imposed for the publication of words that are defamatory per se, the defendant must be given an opportunity to rebut the presumption.

Notes on book bans and the Bezos Washington Post

more:

My perspective is just as relevant and important as Ruth Marcus’s or Dahlia Lithwick’s, two former Politics and Prose speakers whose anti-Kavanaugh books were featured prominently in the store. Another speaker was Joan Biskupic, CNN Supreme Court reporter and the author of an anti-Kavanaugh book called Nine Black Robes.

My book is also one of the only honest retellings of Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle. Knowing that the Stasi media and the corrupt liberal politicians would lie about anything that came out of my mouth, I purposely controlled my own narrative. I wrote in detail about the criminality of those who tried to destroy Kavanaugh’s character — and mine.

It’s as good a case as any for a spot on a display row — especially at a liberal bookstore. Bookstores like P & P were once the fearless places where you were able to get edgy and bizarre books. When I was in college in D.C. in the 1980s, the big three cutting-edge books were Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.

Minnesota Drops Race Requirements Excluding Whites From Summer Program After Equal Protection Project Complaint

William Jacobson:

On Sunday night, May 21, 2023, I wrote about the Civil Rights Complaint filed by the Equal Protection Project of Legal Insurrection Foundation regarding a summer researh internship program at the University of Minnesota that excluded white students, Non-Whites Only U. Minnesota Summer Research Program Challenged By Equal Protection Project.

Notes on competent leadership

L. (Tex) Leugner

At the 2015 election enough Canadians voted to elect a man to the highest office in the land who had previously accomplished nothing more that inherit a name, thus confirming that Canada has a far more serious problem.

The danger to Canada is not only Justin Trudeau, but a citizenry capable of entrusting an incompetent man with the job of Prime Minister.

What is truly frightening is that it will be far easier to limit and undo the corrupt actions of Trudeau than to restore the necessary common sense and good judgment to an ignorant, unthinking electorate unwilling to research economic facts and elect such a jackass in the first place.

The problem therefore is much deeper and far more serious than just Mr. Trudeau, who is only a symptom of what ails this once great country. Blaming this unaccomplished, undistinguished hypocrite for the economic malaise he foisted on Alberta should not blind anyone to the stupidity of the majority of Canadian voters who elected this unpatriotic, treasonous, corrupt scoundrel in the first place.

Where Do Great Ideas Come From?

The Generalist:

The great business theorist Peter Drucker didn’t think all that much of ideas. “Ideas are cheap and abundant,” the management expert said, “What is of value is the effective placement of those ideas into situations that develop into action.” 

Drucker’s position is a common one. Across academia and industry, plenty of fine thinkers have made equivalent statements, arguing that real value resides in effective implementation, not ideation. The prolific executive brings most value to the world, this thesis goes, rather than the unproductive theorist. 

Though there’s wisdom in Drucker’s words, he is wrong in his assessment of ideas. Ideas are not cheap, not the valueless things the Austro-American characterizes them as. Certainly, ideas cannot impact society without “effective placement,” but there would be nothing to “place” without them. They are the seed of all progress, the beginning of every great invention. The fibers of our clothing, refrigeration of our food, design of our medicines, and architecture of our computer chips all began as ideas, or more accurately, a series of ideas stacked on top of each other, finely balanced. 

Nor are ideas abundant. Indeed, there is evidence they are growing rarer by the year. A Stanford University study titled “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” detailed how “research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.” For example, maintaining Moore’s Law – which predicts the doubling of transistors on a computer chip every two years – has required massive increases in research efforts. Compared to the 1970s, 18x more researchers are needed to continue its trajectory, with productivity slipping. The study documents similar slumps in other industries like agriculture and healthcare. 

The decrement of ideas makes their study all the more important. Rather than diminishing them, we should seek to understand better how, where, and by who they are created. What incentives encourage originality? Who should you hire to boost an organization’s innovation? And how do you harness the abilities of a collective?

Curious (false claims) reporting on legacy k-12 schools, charter/voucher models and special education

Wisconsin coalition for education freedom:

Wisconsin Watch has released its third article in a series attempting to discredit the great work choice programs do in Wisconsin. Their latest article misrepresents admission policies of choice schools while ignoring the fact that public schools often engage in admission practices that would be illegal for schools participating in the state’s choice programs.
Wisconsin Watch is again making false claims.

  • In their most recent article, Wisconsin Watch again misrepresents school choice admission practices and now adds a false narrative that schools “expel” students with disabilities at will. Their claims don’t match reality, nor is a single example provided.
  • Fact: Schools in Wisconsin’s choice programs may not discriminate against any eligible family based on a student’s disability.i
  • As with many individual public schools, individual private schools are not required to provide a full range of disability services. Parents who choose to enroll their student do so only after being fully informed of available services.
    Some Wisconsin public schools have admissions processes that would be illegal for private choice schools.
  • Public school districts often have specialty public schools, in addition to their residentially assigned schools. Public schools are permitted to create admission requirements for these schools.
  • Public schools having admission requirements is not a new phenomenon, with the practice being documented in Wisconsin for decades.ii (Link)
  • Today, specialty schools like those in Milwaukeeiii (Link) use a points system to admit students based on their report card scores, attendance, standardized test scores, and an essay. In Green Bay,iv (Link) students must complete a test for admission to a school for the gifted.
    1
  • Choice schools must admit students on a random basis if there is excess demand with few exceptions, primarily related to being in the same family as an existing student.v (Link)
    Public schools reject students in the public school full-time open enrollment program.

Phoebe Petrovic:

As an advocacy specialist at Disability Rights Wisconsin, Joanne Juhnke regularly finds herself on the phone with parents concerned about their children’s treatment at school.

Most complaints concern public schools, which enroll the majority of students. State funding for special education has shrunk, forcing districts to struggle to provide services, and disparate treatment of students with disabilities at public schools persists. But in public school, families have a state body to appeal to: the Department of Public Instruction.

DPI is far less helpful in disputes with private schools, which under state law can legally discriminate against students who need certain disability accommodations — or even kick them out. This applies even to private schools that receive taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers to educate students.

The calls Juhnke receives from voucher families often contain the same story. A family has enrolled a child with disabilities in a private school. Administrators have begun pressuring the student to leave or have kicked them out, something public schools cannot do. The parents are shocked. They’re sure the schools can’t do that.

Many times, Juhnke has to tell them: Yes, they can.

“You went into this school choice program thinking that you were the one, as the parents, who have the choice,” she said. “Really, on the other end, the school holds more choice cards than you do, and you’re coming out on the wrong side of that.”

I find the timing of Wisconsin Watch’s articles curious, amidst budget season. Ideally, the writer might dive deep and wide into the effectiveness of our well funded k-12 system. Reading would be a terrific place to start.

This Wisconsin Watch article was referenced in a recent St Marcus (Milwaukee) podcast. St Marcus operates an extraordinarily successful choice school on the City’s near north side. Read more, here.

Governor Evers’ most recent budget proposals have attempted to kill One City Schools’ charter authorization…

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Commentary on lockdowns and their implications

Related: “mandates” from unelected officials at taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health.

The Student-Loan Payment Pause Led Borrowers to Take on More Debt

Michael Dinerstein, Constantine Yannelis and Ching-Tse Chen:

We evaluate the effects of the 2020 student debt moratorium that paused payments for student loan borrowers. Using administrative credit panel data, we show that the payment pause led to a sharp drop in student loan payments and delinquencies for borrowers subject to the debt moratorium, as well as an increase in credit scores. We find a large stimulus effect, as borrowers substitute increased private debt for paused public debt. Comparing borrowers whose loans were frozen with borrowers whose loans were not frozen due to differences in whether the government owned the loans, we show that borrowers used the new liquidity to increase borrowing on credit cards, mortgages, and auto loans rather than avoid delinquencies. The effects are concentrated among borrowers without prior delinquencies, who saw no change in credit scores, and we see little effects following student loan forgiveness announcements. The results highlight an important complementarity between liquidity and credit, as liquidity increases the demand for credit even as the supply of credit is fixed.

Additional commentary.

Wisconsin has a higher percentage of prisoners incarcerated for crimes they committed as youth than any state except Louisiana

Alexander Shur:

One of them was a bipartisan measure, 2013 Assembly Bill 387, which proposed giving juvenile court jurisdiction over 17-year-olds alleged to have committed nonviolent offenses.

The bill received approval in a Senate and Assembly committee then stalled, never receiving a floor vote in either chamber.

As it stalled, Thompson, who was no longer in office, penned a Wisconsin State Journal op-ed urging its passage, saying the measure was “good policy, and makes sense for the future of Wisconsin.”

A similar proposal came back two years later as 2015 SB 280, a bipartisan measure that most Wisconsin lawmakers signed on to. But Republican interest in the measure dropped off after conservative radio host Mark Belling said the measure was soft on crime, calling the measure’s supporters “legislative sellouts.”

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Notes on z-library

Ernesto Van der sar

Library has become the go-to site for many readers in recent years by providing access to millions of books, without charging a penny.

The site’s continued ability to do so was put to the test late last year when U.S. law enforcement seized over 200 domain names connected to the site. Two alleged Z-Library operators were arrested as part of a criminal investigation. 

Despite being in the crosshairs of law enforcement, Z-Library has no intention of throwing in the towel. The site remained accessible through the dark web and later made a full comeback. When the U.S. authorities seized more domains earlier this month, it still didn’t budge.

UW-Madison Grad student and union efforts

David Blaska:

The UW-Madison branch of Workers Strike Back met here late last month and plastered the campus with their signage. Their pitch is a “demand” for a yearly salary of $50,000.

These are graduate degree students who help their professors grade papers, lead classes, and work at the lab. UW-Madison’s 5,400 graduate research and teaching assistants already make between $21,115 and $28,388 a year. That doesn’t count the $12,000 we pay toward their graduate school tuition, and $7,500 worth of health insurance. Plus a free bus pass, on-campus parking, access to the university health clinic, child care, no heavy lifting, yadda yadda. 

You wanna make a college degree even more unaffordable, go for it! The Werkes thinks graduate students should suffer for their art. A teaching assistantship is not a career, it’s a rung on a ladder!

Workers Strike Back is Kshama Sawant

Ms. Sawant announced that “Workers Strike Back will be launched in early March in cities around the country.” Sawant offers the usual grab bag of grievances: “Fight racism, sexism & all oppression! Quality affordable housing & free healthcare for all! No more sellouts! We need a new party.” Oh, and “Free abortions!”

A rapacious and parasitic capitalist class has amassed untold fortunes off the labor of billions of workers. But their system is in deep crisis, and it cannot sustain itself. Capitalism needs to be overthrown. We need a socialist world.— Kshama Sawant

Civics: Bezos Washington Post Correction

Marc Thiessen:

correction

An earlier version of this column incorrectly identified the Trump campaign as the target of an FBI FISA warrant application. The warrant application was for former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. It also implied that the FBI’s statements to special counsel John Durham regarding its doubts about case were made before the investigation started; they were made after it had begun. The earlier version also should have described the respondents to a question about the mainstream media from a New York Times-Siena College poll as “among those who say democracy is under threat.” This version has been updated.

The California Reparations Commission Fails State History

Will Swaim

California’s reparations commission has determined that slavery, as opposed to disastrous policies advanced by the political establishment for decades, is the real reason for present-day black poverty in the state. In just a few weeks, the legislature that created the task force will take up the commission’s proposal, which calls for payments to black residents of upwards of $1.2 million.

England and the Phonics Debate

Nick Gibb:

The modern debate about how to teach children to read was triggered in 1955 by the publication in America of Why Jonny Can’t Read. Rudolph Flesch’s book told the story of a 12-year-old who was failing at school because his reading was so poor.

Flesch attributed Jonny’s struggle to the fact he had been taught to read with a method known as “look and say”, in which children repeat common words until they recognise them on sight. “The teaching of reading never was a problem anywhere in the world,” Flesch wrote, “until the United States switched to the present method in 1925”.

Look and say replaced phonics — a system of teaching children the sounds of the alphabet and how to blend those sounds

A “Wisconsin Watch” look at Voucher schools; DPI heavy, no mention of $pending or achievement…

Phoebe Petrovic

As an advocacy specialist at Disability Rights Wisconsin, Joanne Juhnke regularly finds herself on the phone with parents concerned about their children’s treatment at school. 

Most complaints concern public schools, which enroll the majority of students. State funding for special education has shrunk, forcing districts to struggle to provide services, and disparate treatment of students with disabilities at public schools persists. But in public school, families have a state body to appeal to: the Department of Public Instruction.

DPI is far less helpful in disputes with private schools, which under state law can legally discriminate against students who need certain disability accommodations — or even kick them out. This applies even to private schools that receive taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers to educate students.

The calls Juhnke receives from voucher families often contain the same story. A family has enrolled a child with disabilities in a private school. Administrators have begun pressuring the student to leave or have kicked them out, something public schools cannot do. The parents are shocked. They’re sure the schools can’t do that. 

Many times, Juhnke has to tell them: Yes, they can. 

“You went into this school choice program thinking that you were the one, as the parents, who have the choice,” she said. “Really, on the other end, the school holds more choice cards than you do, and you’re coming out on the wrong side of that.”

Campus free speech censorship: Hunter College edition

Jonathan Turley

It is obvious that the display is not just triggering for Rodríguez’s students given the professor’s unhinged response. It is all part of an anti-free speech movement that seeks to treat speech as harmful. Once this foundation is laid, any speech can then be curtailed or denied for the protection of others.

This is unfortunately not surprising. Years ago, most of us would have been shocked as we were by the conduct of University of Missouri communications professor Melissa Click who directed a mob against a student journalistcovering a Black Lives Matter event. (Click was later hired by Gonzaga University). Since that time, we have seen a steady stream of professors joining students in shouting down, committing property damageparticipating in riotsverbally attacking students, or even taking violent action in protests. Others like Fresno State University Public Health Professor Dr. Gregory Thatcher recruited students to destroy pro-life messages. At University of California- Santa Barbara, professors actually rallied around a professor who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display.

As has been the case in many of these incidents, Rodríguez was supported by others at the college in violently opposing dissenting viewpoints. The group CUNY For Abortion Rights declared support for Rodríguez and said that she was “justified” in her actions. Her trashing of the display was presented after an effort to “constructive[] critique” the students’ exhibit. Furthermore, she is portrayed as acting only after she “correctly assessed the damage” the exhibit was doing to Hunter College’s “learning environment.”

“stop confusing performance with competence”

Glenn Zorpette:

Rapid and pivotal advances in technology have a way of unsettling people, because they can reverberate mercilessly, sometimes, through business, employment, and cultural spheres. And so it is with the current shock and awe over large language models, such as GPT-4 from OpenAI.

It’s a textbook example of the mixture of amazement and, especially, anxiety that often accompanies a tech triumph. And we’ve been here many times, says Rodney Brooks. Best known as a roboticsresearcher, academic, and entrepreneur, Brooks is also an authority on AI: he directed the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT until 2007, and held faculty positions at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford before that. Brooks, who is now working on his third robotics startup, Robust.AI, has written hundreds of articles and half a dozen books and was featured in the motion picture Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. He is a rare technical leader who has had a stellar career in business and in academia and has still found time to engage with the popular culture through books, popular articles, TED Talks, and other venues.

A foreign correspondent with ties to the Company [the CIA] stood a much better chance than his competitors of getting the good stories.”

Carl Bernstein:

Often the CIA’s relationship with a journalist might begin informally with a lunch, a drink, a casual exchange of information. An Agency official might then offer a favor—for example, a trip to a country difficult to reach; in return, he would seek nothing more than the opportunity to debrief the reporter afterward. A few more lunches, a few more favors, and only then might there be a mention of a formal arrangement — “That came later,” said a CIA official, “after you had the journalist on a string.”

Another official described a typical example of the way accredited journalists (either paid or unpaid by the CIA) might be used by the Agency: “In return for our giving them information, we’d ask them to do things that fit their roles as journalists but that they wouldn’t have thought of unless we put it in their minds. For instance, a reporter in Vienna would say to our man, ‘I met an interesting second secretary at the Czech Embassy.’ We’d say, ‘Can you get to know him? And after you get to know him, can you assess him? And then, can you put him in touch with us—would you mind us using your apartment?”‘

Formal recruitment of reporters was generally handled at high levels—after the journalist had undergone a thorough background check. The actual approach might even be made by a deputy director or division chief. On some occasions, no discussion would he entered into until the journalist had signed a pledge of secrecy.

“The secrecy agreement was the sort of ritual that got you into the tabernacle,” said a former assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence. “After that you had to play by the rules.” David Attlee Phillips, former Western Hemisphere chief of clandestine services and a former journalist himself, estimated in an interview that at least 200 journalists signed secrecy agreements or employment contracts with the Agency in the past twenty‑five years. Phillips, who owned a small English‑language newspaper in Santiago, Chile, when he was recruited by the CIA in 1950, described the approach: “Somebody from the Agency says, ‘I want you to help me. 1 know you are a true‑blue American, but I want you to sign a piece of paper before I tell you what it’s about.’ I didn’t hesitate to sign, and a lot of newsmen didn’t hesitate over the next twenty years.”

How home schooling can challenge our beliefs about education

Philip Ball:

This September my eldest daughter starts secondary school, a prospect that, like many parents, I regard with a mixture of excitement, pride and trepidation. But when she heads off, it will be a bigger change for my partner and I than for many others—because for the past two years we have been schooling her and her sister ourselves. When I tell people that we have been home-educating my children, a common response is: “I could never do that!” It’s pitched somewhere between an awestruck, “I could never imagine being able to do that!” and a horrified, “I would never do that!” Homeschooling is generally perceived to be both hard and risky. I won’t pretend it’s easy. My partner and I were constantly juggling schedules so that one of us was free, if not to be “teaching” then to be ferrying the children between activities. And practicalities aside, there’s a constant inner voice: “Do you really know what you’re doing?” (Answer: of course not.) But having had previous experience of several schools, both state and independent, I know that many of the worries about children’s education—Are the kids happy? Do they have friends? Are they keeping up?—are the same, whether they are taught at home or in a school. The difference is that we have more chance of doing something about it. Anxieties about children’s education and well-being have become pathological for many parents, and the school system is a big part of the cause. The fixation on choice and constant assessment has created a mad scramble to get to the top of the pile, without, to my mind, any overall improvement in education—possibly quite the reverse. Instead, the results are insecurity for parents and institutions alike—panic, constant tinkering with curricula and teaching methodologies, and an obsession with ranking and tests. These are not just interfering with education but subverting its purpose.

“Many British parents express surprise when they discover that they have a right to home-educate” 

Home education offers an alternative. But while freedom from the madness of SATs, fronted adverbials, catchment areas and league tables is tremendously relieving, we’re not really fleeing oppressive schools and “bad teachers” (trying to teach kids yourself only increases your respect for teachers). We just figured our children might be happier this way. As Fiona Nicholson, who runs the home-education website edyourself.org, says, one of the main benefits is “taking charge of your own life.” It is rewarding, exciting, scary and frustrating. It wouldn’t—probably couldn’t—work for everyone. And perhaps it’ll never work unless you accept that there are no perfect answers. In my experience the greatest satisfaction comes from having to decide for yourself (and of course for your child) what a “good education” really means, and to figure out how to get somewhere close to delivering it. That might sound hubristic. Isn’t this, after all, what teachers are trained to do? Sadly, many teachers will tell you that it is not. Their training in child development is minimal, and there is scant opportunity to put such insight as they develop into practice while maintaining order in class and marching through the national curriculum. If you think home education is grossly presumptuous about what goes on in schools, consider that many of the parents I know who home-educate are teachers. They do it precisely because they do know what goes on. The arguments for a role for homeschooling are not just about rights and responsibilities for giving children an education. They are about what education should be. While some teachers, educationalists and most education ministers believe they know the answer already, many employers, university lecturers and developmental psychologists are less convinced. The world that young people enter on leaving school is profoundly different from what it was several decades ago. Homeschooling offers one way to think differently about the requirements and objectives, and can catalyse an urgent and overdue debate. What is an education? It is a question I have been forced to confront and one that should be asked more widely.

Love It or Hate It, the Science of Reading Gains Traction in Schools

Andrew Bauld

In 2018, Anders Rasmussen arrived as principal of Wood Road Elementary School in Ballston Spa, NY, in his words, a “reading neophyte.” A former high school English teacher and assistant principal, Rasmussen came to the new job with a basic background in elementary reading curriculum and a readiness to learn what was working at his new school and what needed revamping.

What he heard from teachers was that there was a need to rethink the way reading was taught.

“What that started for me was a real effort to understand reading and how we teach it,” Rasmussen says.

Until then, the district had used an amalgamation of several different reading programs to provide a balanced literacy approach to reading instruction.

The concept of balanced literacy appeared in the 1990s, a curriculum meant to appease two camps in the long-feuding reading wars—those favoring explicit phonics instruction on one side; on the other, whole language advocates who believed simply exposing kids to a lot of books would get them to learn to read naturally.

Critics of balanced literacy say the approach, which emphasizes student choice, independent reading, and small group work along with some phonics, fails to incorporate the science of reading and the wealth of research that reading experts, especially cognitive scientists, have produced over the last few decades.

Rasmussen hadn’t been trained in any one program, so he immersed himself in everything recent studies said about how kids learn to read. He came away convinced there was a clear pathway to get students reading on grade level.

A letter on DIE culture

Flag officers 4 America:

 “Diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) divides rather than unites our military and society. DEI’s principles derive from critical race theory, which is rooted in cultural Marxism, where people are grouped into identity classes (typically by race), labeled as “oppressed” or “oppressors,” and pitted against each other.  

Join with the other flag officers fighting for America and sign this letter demanding Congress stop this practice infecting the U.S. military.

Civics: Legacy Media and access journalism

Commentary on “science and misinformation”

Fiona Fox:

And remember, misinformation is not confined to anti-vaxxers on social media. On Friday night, I was dealing with a BBC story suggesting the government had lifted a ban on animal testing of cosmetics. On Tuesday night, I was dealing with the breaking news of the first UK babies born with mitochondrial replacement therapy – headlines again called the technique ‘Three-Parent Babies’. For weeks now, the media have been carrying opinion piece after opinion piece from those who feel that AI is a dystopian nightmare that may destroy humanity, and all research should be paused. And last week, the science community had to balance their huge excitement about a second promising Alzheimer’s drug with a responsibility to not raise false hopes of patients. All of these stories are stoking public and media debate. All need scientific experts to ensure they are properly understood.

I’ll finish with the good news. We don’t have to first earn the public’s trust, or battle widespread public scepticism. Poll after poll show that scientists are right up at the top of the groups most trusted to tell the truth, with over 80% trust levels that are the envy of politicians and journalists alike.

So, we are in a good position – we don’t need to sit around working out who has a trusted voice. You are here in this room. You already have the trust. But that’s only the beginning. That trust has been hard won, and from a public who now expect nothing less than scientists being seen and heard in every media story that affects them, from nuclear power and gene-edited food, to vaccines and vaping. When campaigners are pulling them one way and politicians the other, it’s you that they look to for the unbiased truth – always speaking plainly and admitting uncertainties, never playing politics or ideologies, never ducking a question. If that hard-won public trust in science is to be maintained, scientists need to show at every opportunity that they deserve it.

Hong Kong student arrested over comments made on social media while in Japan

Karen Kaneko:

Amid growing fears of China’s crackdown on free speech, a Hong Kong student studying at a Japanese university was arrested upon returning home last month over comments made on social media during her time in Japan.

The student, who allegedly violated the Hong Kong national security law, is believed to be the first person apprehended under the law for actions committed in Japan, Jiji Press reported.

The student reportedly said on Facebook that “Hong Kong’s independence is the only way” two years ago when she was studying in Japan. The Hong Kong police arrested her when she went back to renew her identification document, alleging that she encouraged divisions in the country, according to the report.

According to Tomoko Ako, a professor of sociology at the University of Tokyo, the Hong Kong student — who is not a student at that university — is the girlfriend of one of her own students, and is currently at home on bail. According to Jiji, the Hong Kong student’s passport has been confiscated, preventing her from returning to Japan to continue her studies.

Civics: Musk, Soros and the End of the Media

Tom Luongo:

And that reason is simple. Musk’s real heresy wasn’t returning something closer to free speech to Twitter. It was proving that the company could operate on 20% of its old budget and one-quarter of its staff.

That 80% cost reduction didn’t just equate to stabilizing the company, it freed it from the tyranny of the advertiser.

Musk doesn’t need advertising on Twitter the way Twitter needed advertising before him. The company wasn’t being run as a profit center measured in dollars. 

Twitter was a loss leader for tyrants. The legacy media conglomerates are their policy makers and the ad executives their thought policemen.

Musk is now turning the entire cost structure of news media on its head. It was always going to happen, he just ripped the last band-aid off exposing the rot underneath.

The media companies and their advertising control model worked so well for so long because it costs billions to run a broadcast network. The on-air talent, the producers, the studio, cameras, travel, etc. are expensive folks. FOX’s makeup budget alone is more than my annual operating costs.

No wonder they just fired Laura Ingraham, too.

Have you seen the 25-54 demo ratings?

The media companies had to depend on the kindness of strangers to even stay in business.

Today most of the distribution has been decentralized, i.e. Twitter and personal ISP fees. Physical production tools are cheap. Bandwidth is cheaper. The overhead of running a small broadcast company with a private subscription model is a far lower percentage of top-line revenue than any big network.

Notes on Mississippi’s k-12 reading growth (while Wisconsin tolerated disastrous results)

Alex Tabarrok:

In 2002, Florida adopted a phonics based reading strategy due to Charlie Crist. Scores started to rise. Other southern states started to following suit, including Mississippi long deried as the worst in the nation.

APNews: Mississippi went from being ranked the second-worst state in 2013 for fourth-grade reading to 21st in 2022. Louisiana and Alabama, meanwhile, were among only three states to see modest gains in fourth-grade reading during the pandemic, which saw massive learning setbacks in most other states.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Today’s blacklisted American: 12-year-old sent home from school twice for understanding the 1st amendment better than his teachers

Robert Zimmerman:

….came to Nichols Middle School in Massachusetts on March 21, 2023 wearing a T-shirt with the words “There are only two genders” on the front, two teachers pulled him from class and told him he would have to remove the shirt or he couldn’t return to class. He refused, and so his father came to pick him up.

The teachers claimed he was causing a disruption, that some other unnamed students felt unsafe seeing the shirt. Liam however had experienced the exact opposite. Not only did he hear no complaints, he found many other students telling him they liked the shirt and wanted one for themselves.