Anna-Lena Schubert, Christoph Löffler, Clara Wiebel, Florian Kaulhausen and Tanja Gabriele Baudson

Highlights
We evaluated a three-minute speeded reasoning test as a screening of general cognitive abilities.

The test showed an excellent reliability.

Test performance was substantially related (r = 0.57) to general cognitive abilities.

The association of test performance and g was explained by working memory capacity.

The paper- and computer-based versions demonstrated scalar measurement invariance.

Jon Keegan:

Using a panel of 709 volunteers who shared archives of their Facebook data, Consumer Reports found that a total of 186,892 companies sent data about them to the social network. On average, each participant in the study had their data sent to Facebook by 2,230 companies. That number varied significantly, with some panelists’ data listing over 7,000 companies providing their data.

Liam Beran:

By searching student names or entering a search query related to graduate program applications in search engines, users could access, view and download hundreds of letters of recommendation for applicants to UW-Madison graduate programs. 

Though the issue appears fixed on Google as of Thursday evening, searching the same queries in search engine DuckDuckGo shows personal email addresses and other sensitive information about students.

Clicking on the page links to recommendation letters now shows UW-Madison’s online recommendation application is “down for a critical patch.”

It’s unclear how long the security flaw has been in place and the extent of letters affected. Searches conducted by The Daily Cardinal indicate there were accessible letters for applicants across nearly all UW-Madison graduate programs.

Ariell Rose Bertrand, Melissa Arnold Lyon, Rebecca Jacobsen

Narrative storytelling surrounds us. Narratives are especially salient in politics, as policy problems do not simply exist, but are actively created through the stories policy actors tell. Scholars introduced the narrative policy framework (NPF) to create a generalized framework for studying how policy actors use storytelling strategically to influence policy. We use the NPF to examine the recent rise of critical race theory (CRT) in policy debates. We demonstrate that increasing exposure to the ban-CRT narrative plots led to greater support for a ban on CRT, particularly for White and Republican individuals. Finally, we introduce and test the concept of narrative spillover, which provides a new way of thinking about how micro, meso, and macro policy narratives interact to influence-related political beliefs and macrolevel beliefs about institutions and culture.

Cynical Publius

1. A paper copy of an English language dictionary printed before 1980.
2. A paper copy of a high school-level US history textbook, printed before 1980.
3. Paper copies of “1984,” “Animal Farm” and “Fahrenheit 451.”

One of the key features of so-called “progressivism” is the constant erasure and redefinition of objective truth. The Internet has made that so much easier, as change can happen without record or notice. If one relies only upon the Internet, one will believe the word “woman” is defined as “someone who feels like a woman” and one will be unable to find record of continuous Democrat systemic racism throughout all of US history.

Rosemary Meszaros and Katherine Pennavaria

One question that routinely comes up in genealogy research: why is the family’s surname different from its (presumed) original form? Most people have heard one explanation: those names were “changed at Ellis Island,” altered either maliciously or ignorantly by port officials when the immigrant passed through. The charge against immigration officials, however, is provably false: no names were written down at Ellis Island, and thus no names were changed there. The names of arriving passengers were already written down on manifests required by the federal government, lists which crossed the ocean with the passengers. Records kept by the government demonstrate conclusively that immigrants left Ellis Island with the same surnames they had arrived with. The idea that names were changed at the point of entry is a myth, an urban legend promoted by a popular film. Changes were made later, by the immigrants themselves, usually during the naturalization process.

Harvey Mansfield:

Claudine Gay herself best stated the issue of her brief presidency of Harvard. When her appointment was announced, she declared that “the idea of the Ivory Tower, that is the past, not the future, of academia.” We must be a “part” of society, not outside it. What is the difference she invokes?

The Ivory Tower is often used to dismiss academia, and the metaphor is rarely examined for its virtue. Ivory is a natural substance that is rare, precious and pure. It’s also fragile: An ivory tower probably wouldn’t stand without a mix of steel and concrete. It signifies a university that is indeed in society but towers above it because it seeks to find truth out of what society takes for granted. A university doesn’t possess truth as much as it honors it. Society’s interest above all is justice—the Declaration of Independence states “self-evident” truths that serve justice—and society surely wants its justice to be true, but it doesn’t honor truth as Harvard does by having “Veritas”as its motto.

Honoring anything implies inequality and isn’t very democratic. Honor can best be understood as doing good in a way that is against your interest. Honoring truth as a professor isn’t lucrative, though our prosperous society keeps academics out of penury. Nor is questioning popular belief the avenue to popularity. But living a life of honoring truth offers a peculiar satisfaction that does you no worldly good. You realize that you could have sought money or acclaim but doing so would have a cost that can be appreciated only from the Ivory Tower. Still, thanks to good-hearted Americans, you won’t have to suffer the fate of Socrates. They will honor you as a professor even though they wouldn’t vote for you as dogcatcher.

Wall Street Journal:

The University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine requires that first year students take a class called “Structural Racism and Health Equity” as part of the standard curriculum. In one exercise for the course, students divide by racial group and retreat to different areas to discuss antiracist prompts.

This is known as racial caucusing, a teaching device that UCLA describes as an “anti-racist pedagogical tool” to “provide a reflective space for us to explore how our positionality—particularly our racial identities as perceived within clinical spaces—influence our interaction with patients, colleagues and other staff.”

It’s also illegal. According to Do No Harm, a group that describes its mission as “eliminating racial discrimination in healthcare,” the practice violates the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a letter to the San Francisco Office for Civil Rights, Do No Harm wrote this week that the school’s racial caucusing groups “illegally segregate and separate its first year medical students based on their race, color and/or national origin” in violation of Title VI.

Medical students in the class are asked to choose which of three racial categories they will identify with. They can select among “white student caucus group,” “Non-Black People of Color (NBPOC) student caucus group” or “Black student caucus group.”

David Brooks:

The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”

This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.

Commentary.

Abbey Machtig:

The pandemic significantly affected the projects.

Not only did it exacerbate inflation and supply chain delays, but it also altered the scope of work by bringing new needs to attention — such as improving HVAC systems and ventilation and getting rid of environmental hazards such as asbestos in the old school buildings.

These expenses meant the district had to scrounge up $28 million beyond the $317 million voters authorized in the 2020 referendum, bringing total spending to $345 million.

High inflation accounted for $11 million of that, additional electrical and mechanical work accounted for $9 million, and environmental work accounted for another $8 million, according to school board materials.

Some of those extra dollars came from the district’s general education fund and from money the district saved from staff vacancies and reduced energy usage in buildings during the pandemic. Fundraising gave the district extra money to work with as well.

——

Madison school district spending over the decades, now at least $25k/student.

——

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“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?

Lauren Coffey

Arizona State University is slated to become the first higher education institution to partner with the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, which will give ASU students and faculty access to its most advanced iteration of ChatGPT. 

OpenAI announced the partnership Thursday. The deal, for an undisclosed sum, aims to bolster research and coursework at ASU through the use of ChatGPT Enterprise, which focuses on larger entities instead of individual use.

“ASU recognizes that augmented and artificial intelligence systems are here to stay, and we are optimistic about their ability to become incredible tools that help students to learn, learn more quickly and understand subjects more thoroughly,” ASU president Michael Crow said in a statement. “Our collaboration with OpenAI reflects our philosophy and our commitment to participating directly [in] the responsible evolution of AI learning technologies.”

Carole K. Hooven

I teach in and co-direct the undergraduate program in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.

During the promotion of my recent book on testosterone and sex differences, I appeared on “Fox and Friends,” a Fox News program, and explained that sex is binary and biological. In response, the director of my department’s Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging task force (a graduate student) accused me on Twitter of transphobia and harming undergraduates, and I responded.

The tweets went viral, receiving international news coverage. The public attack by the task force director runs contrary to Harvard’s stated academic freedom principles, yet no disciplinary action was taken, nor did any university administrators publicly support my right to express my views in an environment free of harassment. Unfortunately, what happened to me is not unusual, and an increasing number of scholars face restrictions imposed by formal sanctions or the creation of hostile work environments. In this article, I describe what happened to me, discuss why clear talk about the science of sex and gender is increasingly met with hostility on college campuses, why administrators are largely failing in their responsibilities to protect scholars and their rights to express their views, and what we can do to remedy the situation.

Jens Ludwig, Sendhil Mullainathan

While hypothesis testing is a highly formalized activity, hypothesis generation remains largely informal.

We propose a systematic procedure to generate novel hypotheses about human behavior, which uses the capacity of machine learning algorithms to notice patterns people might not. We illustrate the procedure with a concrete application: judge decisions about who to jail. We begin with a striking fact: The defendant’s face alone matters greatly for the judge’s jailing decision. In fact, an algorithm given only the pixels in the defendant’s mug shot accounts for up to half of the predictable variation. We develop a procedure that allows human subjects to interact with this black-box algorithm to produce hypotheses about what in the face influences judge decisions. The procedure generates hypotheses that are both interpretable and novel: They are not explained by demographics (e.g. race) or existing psychology research; nor are they already known (even if tacitly) to people or even experts. Though these results are specific, our procedure is general. It provides a way to produce novel, interpretable hypotheses from any high-dimensional dataset (e.g. cell phones, satellites, online behavior, news headlines, corporate filings, and high-frequency time series). A central tenet of our paper is that hypothesis generation is in and of itself a valuable activity, and hope this encourages future work in this largely “prescientific” stage of science.

Douglas Detterman:

Education has not changed from the beginning of recorded history. The problem is that focus has been on schools and teachers and not students. Here is a simple thought experiment with two conditions: 1) 50 teachers are assigned by their teaching quality to randomly composed classes of 20 students, 2) 50 classes of 20 each are composed by selecting the most able students to fill each class in order and teachers are assigned randomly to classes. In condition 1, teaching ability of each teacher and in condition 2, mean ability level of students in each class is correlated with average gain over the course of instruction. Educational gain will be best predicted by student abilities (up to r = 0.95) and much less by teachers’ skill (up to r = 0.32). I argue that seemingly immutable education will not change until we fully understand students and particularly human intelligence. Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains. This evidence is reviewed.

Sarah Karp:

Blackburn and Presswood are two Black mothers in the middle of an intensifying debate about school choice, the system that allows Chicago parents to send their children to charters, magnets and selective enrollment schools, rather than be tethered to the school in their attendance boundary.

The Chicago Board of Education wants to undo that system. Leaders said it is built on a foundation of structural racism and makes inequality worse. But changing a system that some parents see as creating the only viable options for their children will be difficult and complicated. This is especially true in the Black community. CPS data shows that a third of Black students go to charter, selective enrollment or magnet schools — more than any other racial or ethnic group in the district.

Middle-class and upper-middle-class Black families in most urban cities, including Chicago, live in low-income neighborhoods far more often than white and Asian families of the same economic status, according to a Stanford study. School choice has provided a way for these Black families to escape the neighborhood schools that have historically suffered from disinvestment.

Some city leaders and school board members, including Mayor Brandon Johnson, know this conundrum well. They are among the many that trek across the city to take their children to either selective enrollment or magnet schools.

The stories of Blackburn and Presswood illuminate this complicated issue. It is not only about how money is allocated, they say, but also about how parents and students are treated and feel about their schools.

Tyler Cowen:

Two kinds of AI-driven education are likely to take off, and they will have very different effects. Both approaches have real promise, but neither will make everyone happy.

The first category will resemble learning platforms such as Khan Academy, Duolingo, GPT-4, and many other services. Over time, these sources will become more multimedia, quicker in response, deeper in their answers, and better at in creating quizzes, exercises and other feedback. For those with a highly individualized learning style — preferring videos to text, say, or wanting lessons slower or faster — the AIs will oblige. The price will be relatively low; Khan Academy currently is free and GPT-4 costs $20 a month, and those markets will become more competitive.

For those who want it, they will be able to access a kind of universal tutor as envisioned by Neal Stephenson in his novel The Diamond Age. But how many people will really want to go this route? My guess is that it will be a clear minority of the population, well below 50%, whether at younger or older age groups…

Chatbots will probably make education more fun, but for most people there is a limit to just how fun instruction can be.

Derron Wallace:

In this talk, Derron Wallace will explore the structural, cultural and historical factors that shape the educational experiences of Black youth in London and New York City. Based on his new ethnography, The Culture Trap, Wallace argues that the overemphasis on culture as the secret to Black (and racially minoritized) students’ success or failure in schools is not only tricky; it is a trap.

Jim Jordan

We now know the federal government flagged terms like “MAGA” and “TRUMP,” to financial institutions if Americans completed transactions using those terms.

What was also flagged? If you bought a religious text, like a BIBLE, or shopped at Bass Pro Shop.

WILL:

In preparation for the session, law students are asked to study a description of “racist” behaviors, including the false claim that non-discrimination is “racist” and a collection of other assertions about “whites” and “people of color” that actually are racist. It would be one thing if the law school proposed an academic debate about such matters. But no one believes for one moment that’s what this session is about. This “DEI training” is a form of indoctrination and demeans law students based on their race. WILL strongly condemns this meeting’s proposed subject matter and demands that any racially discriminatory instruction be removed. By pushing racist ideology on law students, the University is defying federal law, creating a racially hostile environment, and harming individual student dignity. 

The Quotes: Rick Esenberg, WILL President and General Counsel, stated, “The student body is being subject to nonsense that ignores the rule of law and true equality in favor of a racialized way of seeing the world. The United State Supreme Court has stated clearly that justice is colorblind and race-based discrimination is against our human dignity. It is distressing to see our state’s only public law school requiring students to be ‘trained’ in a set of concepts which shreds the rejection of racial discrimination that so many fought so hard to make the law of the land. We are asking the University of Wisconsin-Madison to take a serious look at the materials they just distributed to the student body and decide if this is accomplishing its core goals and mission. To us, the answer is obvious.”    

Skylar Croy, WILL Associate Counsel, and a former UW Law Student, stated, “There was nothing like this at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when I received my law degree from them in 2019. To see this happen to a university I love is so disappointing and for the sake of true education, we hope they reconsider discussing this subject matter during this mandatory meeting.”   

A UW law school student who wanted to remain anonymous stated, “Programs like these make me feel as if I cannot speak openly in my classes, nor with my peers. I do not feel that this culture promotes intellectual diversity, but rather a singular way of thinking. I should not feel ashamed that I do not choose my friends by the color of their skin. I should not feel ashamed that I believe in diversity in thought, rather than diversity in appearance. It is disheartening that this institution does not agree.”

Timur Kuran:

The leadership of U of Wisconsin Law School is delusional. And in treating white students as categorially racist, it’s violating the Civil Rights Act. Wisconsin’s taxpayers should not be funding such divisive, tribal, and prejudiced educational practices.

John McArthur:

Using a sample of 59 children aged 10 to 12, a team led by Dr Karen Froud asked its subjects to read original texts in both formats while wearing hair nets filled with electrodes that permitted the researchers to analyze variations in the children’s brain responses. Performed in a laboratory at Teachers College with strict controls, the study used an entirely new method of word association in which the children “performed single-word semantic judgment tasks” after reading the passages.

Vital to the usefulness of the study was the age of the participants – a three-year period that is “critical in reading development” – since fourth grade is when a crucial shift occurs from what another researcher describes as “learning to read” to “reading to learn”.

Froud and her team are cautious in their conclusions and reluctant to make hard recommendations for classroom protocol and curriculum. Nevertheless, the researchers state: “We do think that these study outcomes warrant adding our voices … in suggesting that we should not yet throw away printed books, since we were able to observe in our participant sample an advantage for depth of processing when reading from print.”

NCTQ:

State education leaders across the country are rightly prioritizing efforts to improve elementary student reading outcomes. However, too often these initiatives do not focus enough on the key component to strong implementation and long-term sustainability: effective teachers. Only when state leaders implement a literacy strategy that prioritizes teacher effectiveness will states achieve a teacher workforce that can strengthen student literacy year after year. This report outlines five policy actions states can take to ensure a well-prepared teacher workforce that can implement and sustain the science of reading in classrooms across the country.

The Challenge
There are 1.3 million children who enter fourth grade each year unable to read at a basic level—that’s nearly 40% of all fourth graders across the country.1 These students may not be able to identify details from a text, sequence events from a story, and—in some cases—may not be able to read the words themselves.2 The rate of students who cannot read at a basic level by fourth grade climbs even higher for students of color, those with learning differences, and those who grow up in low-income households, perpetuating disparate life outcomes.3

——

Wisconsin Recommendations:

Recommendations for Wisconsin

Teacher prep standards:

• Create specific, detailed standards for teacher preparation programs for the five components of reading aligned with the science of reading, including what they should not teach.
• Revise teacher prep reading standards to include the knowledge and skills teachers need to support struggling students, including students with dyslexia, in learning how to read.
• Revise teacher prep reading standards to include the knowledge and skills teachers need to support English Learners in learning how to read.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

JUST OUT: New "Chart of the Century" with data through December 2023. Increases in College Tuition and Fees continue to far outpace increases in Average Wages and the Overall CPI. If College Tuition had increased at the rate of the Overall CPI since 2000, it would be 28% LESS… pic.twitter.com/kWlo1nP7I6

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) January 18, 2024

Best way to listen to the Milei speech in English, rendered using HeyGen, in his own voice. pic.twitter.com/eYsSPLeukc

— David Sacks (@DavidSacks) January 18, 2024

Tom Stafford

A mind-boggling achievement in a classic video game reveals wider lessons about the extreme limits of human performance, says cognitive scientist Tom Stafford.

For decades, it was a feat that was considered impossible.

In the dying days of 2023, US teenager Willis Gibson – online handle “Blue Scuti” – “beat” the Nintendo Entertainment System version of the video game Tetris, which was first released in 1989.
The original Tetris designers thought it couldn’t be done – the game is designed to play endlessly. The pieces fall faster and faster until a player is overwhelmed. To beat the game, a player has to achieve scores so high that the game’s memory banks overload and it crashes. Victory is achieved because the computer simply cannot continue.

Jake Seliger:

If a person doesn’t know fundamentals of a given field, and particularly if a larger group doesn’t, teach those fundamentals.[2] I’ve taught commas and semicolons to students almost every semester I’ve taught in college, and it’s neither time consuming nor hard. A lot of the students appreciate it and say no one has ever stopped to do so. 

Usually I ask, when the first or second draft of their paper is due for peer editing, that students write down four major comma rules and a sample sentence showcasing each. I’m looking for something like: connecting two independent clauses (aka complete sentences) with a coordinating conjunction (like “and” or “or”), offsetting a dependent word, clause, or phase (“When John picked up the knife, …”), as a parenthetical (sometimes called “appositives” for reasons not obvious to me but probably having something to do with Latin), and lists. Students often know about lists (“John went to the store and bought mango, avocado, and shrimp”), but the other three elude them.

Eugene Volokh

It was ultimately determined that neither Ms. Young nor her residence had any connection to the target of the search warrant. The incident, which was captured on video by the officers’ body-worn cameras (“BWC”), led to a Civilian Office of Police Accountability (“COPA”) investigation and a lawsuit between Ms. Young and the City of Chicago.

In January 2022, Defendant Newsweek Digital, LLC published an article regarding the search and the resulting settlement that Ms. Young received from the City. In the article, Newsweek cited COPA’s recommendation that Wolinski be suspended for a year with the possibility of “separation from the department.” The article also purported to describe the BWC footage of the incident, stating:

Body camera footage from that night shows police breaking down Young’s door while she was in the middle of undressing. She is seen handcuffed naked for about 17 minutes and is heard repeatedly telling officers they were at the wrong address.

John Sailer

Elsewhere, university trustees and regents have played a pivotal role in reform efforts. Four years ago, UNC–Chapel Hill was fully committed to the DEI agenda. The UNC School of Medicine even created and adopted a “Task Force to Integrate Social Justice into the Curriculum.” Its recommendations included requiring that the faculty agree that “specific organs and cells do not belong to specific genders.” 

But by early 2023, the UNC Board of Governors banned compelled speech across the entire state’s university system, effectively ending the use of DEI statements in faculty hiring.

In some cases, the simple act of exposure has created serious change. In early 2023, I acquired documents through a public records request showing how Texas Tech’s biology department relied on the DEI statements of their candidates as a major criterion for hiring. I wrote the story for The Wall Street Journal, showing, for example, that one candidate was penalized for not properly explaining the difference between equality and equity. The response was instantaneous.

Texas Tech announced that it was jettisoning diversity statements in hiring. A day later, Governor Greg Abbott released a memo declaring the practice unlawful. Soon, other university systems in Texas followed suit and publicly scrapped the use of diversity statements.

These statements have also been banned throughout the University of Missouri system. And now Arizona, Wisconsin, Florida, and Georgia have seen the practice banned either by law or by university trustees and regents.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Enter a city, county, state, or agency in the U.S., or leave blank to search the whole country:

Oren Cass:

But few prominent institutions or analysts have explored what Americans actually believe and why. Or perhaps they prefer not to have the answer. Survey data published this week by American Compass helps to fill that gap. It depicts a public that has made nuanced and reasonable judgments that simply conflict with the preferences of their leaders. 

The survey, conducted in partnership with YouGov, asked 1,000 American adults whether “you, personally,” had “benefited” or “suffered” from America’s embrace of globalisation and China. Overall, 41 per cent reported benefiting while 28 per cent reported suffering. The share benefiting was higher across classes and regions. Yet as the frame of reference expanded, the sentiment turned more negative. The margin in favour of “benefited” was only +7 per cent when the question was about “your family and friends”, fell to zero for “the community where you live”, and reached -13 per cent for “the nation as a whole”. Rather than nursing resentment, Americans appear simultaneously to appreciate the personal benefits of globalisation while worrying about its broader effects. 

Likewise, actual attitudes bear little resemblance to Americans’ hypothesised xenophobia. While half of respondents were asked about the effects of “America’s embrace of globalisation”, the other half saw a question about “America’s embrace of China”. Rather than cause people’s blood to boil, mention of America’s main geopolitical adversary triggered a more positive response. Across classes, Americans were more likely to see the embrace of China than the embrace of globalisation as benefiting them personally. What two groups reacted far more negatively to mention of China? Those in the upper class or living in coastal cities.

John Arnold:

Two Harvard Crimson articles, one from 2006 and the other from 2023, describing the legendary Math 55 class showcase how much college has changed in less than a generation.

’06: “This is probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country,” reads a page on the Mathematics Department Web site.
’23: “Our slogan is, if you’re reasonably good at math, you love it, and you have lots of time to devote to it, then Math 55 is completely fine for you.” — article published by the math dept titled, “Demystifying Math 55.”

’06: Regardless of the course’s name brand value, Math 55 students face a single fact: It’s hard. Really hard.
’23: Zoe Shleifer ’26, another current Math 55 student, also doesn’t get the hype. “It’s fun,” she says. “It’s just like any other class. You know, we go to lecture, and then we leave lecture, and then we do the problem set.”

Greg Toppo:

Parents are more concerned than ever about their kids’ social media habits, worried about everything from oversharing and cyberbullying to anxiety, depression, sleep and study time. 

Recent surveys of young people show that parents’ concerns may be justified: More than half of U.S. teens spend at least four hours a day on these apps. Girls, who are particularly vulnerable, spend an average of nearly an hour more on them per day than boys. Many parents are searching for support. 

Perhaps more than anyone, Carla Engelbrecht and Devorah Heitner are qualified to offer it. They’ve spent years puzzling over how families can help understand media from the inside out, and how schools both help and hurt kids’ ability to cope.

Engelbrecht is a longtime children’s media developer. A veteran of Sesame Workshop and PBS Kids Interactive, she spent seven years at Netflix, most recently as its director of product innovation. Engelbrecht was one of the minds behind the network’s Black Mirror “Bandersnatch” episode in 2018, which allowed viewers to choose among five possible endings.

Lindsay Ellis

Jenna Starr stuck a blue Post-it Note to her monitor a few months after getting her M.B.A. from Yale University last May. “Get yourself the job,” it read.

It wasn’t until last week—when she received a long-awaited offer—that she could finally take it down.

New Discourses

Did you know the focus in education is about to change again? It is. While we’ve rightly been focused on fighting CRT, Queer Theory, SEL, DEI, and all manner of issues in the schools to protect our kids, a big shift has been being prepared and is likely to be about to launch. Schools in the coming year or two are very likely to lurch into direct instruction into activism to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations Agenda 2030. The documentation from entities like the WEF and UNESCO already makes this clear, but in this episode of the New Discourses Podcast, host James Lindsay goes through a document from the NEA Foundation, the charitable arm of the largest national teachers union, to show that they not only have these plans but have adopted well-developed curriculum guides to start distributing to teachers and school administrators, right down to detailed lessons on topics like hunger and starvation in kindergarten. These plans will, of course, be UN and World Economic Forum compliant, as they tell us themselves. Join James in this episode to get a preview of the next big fight in education.

Matthew Yglesias:

The American K-12 school system is expansive, with millions of students attending thousands of schools. And one of the great frustrations of education policy research is that while many interventions appear to be highly effective at small scale, they almost all flop when implemented at the scale that would actually move the needle for the country as a whole. The very existence of this scaling problem suggests that one promising avenue for change is to look at things we are already doing that don’t seem to work, because we could simply stop doing those things.

Suppose America hired only right-handed teachers, but then it turned out that lefties teach just as well. 

Repealing the ban on left-handed teachers would be a large-scale intervention that works. Not an intervention that revolutionizes education, but one that makes it a bit easier for principals around the country to fill vacancies without compromising on quality. 

Of course, in reality, the United States doesn’t do anything as blatantly stupid as banning left-handed people from teaching in public schools. But emergency measures adopted in many states to recruit additional teachers during the pandemic provide further evidence for something many analysts have long believed: Many of the current teacher training and licensing requirements have no real benefits, and getting rid of a lot of them would save time and money for various stakeholders andexpand the potential supply of teachers, without reducing quality. That doesn’t on its own make schools better, but it does make it easier to do basically anything else, including raising teacher quality, cutting class size, or reallocating money to other priorities like climate control, air quality, and school meals.

Dan Williams:

Summary

To address objections that modern worries about misinformation are a moral panic, researchers have broadened their focus to include true but misleading content. However, there can’t be a science of misleading content. It is too amorphous, too widespread, and judgements of misleadingness are too subjective.

The emergence of misinformation studies

According to a popular narrative, democratic societies are plagued by misinformation, which is driving the public to accept falsehoods about election fraud, conspiracies, climate change, vaccines, and more. Given the dangers associated with such falsehoods, misinformation threatens democracy, social harmony, the environment, and public health. As Joe Biden declared recently, it is literally “killing people.”

This narrative first gained popularity in 2016 after Brexit and the election of Donald Trump, and it gave birth to the field of modern misinformation studies, which researches the nature and causes of misinformation and designs interventions to limit its harms.

The field has been extremely influential, both scientifically and politically. It attracts big grants. It has fuelled a steady stream of publications in elite scientific journals. And its researchers are consulted by governments, international organisations, and corporations (Google, Meta, etc.) in their efforts to combat misinformation.

Liyan Qi:

The number of newborns has gone into free fall over the past several years. Official figures released Wednesday showed that China had fewer than half the number of births in 2023 than the country did in 2016, after China abolished the one-child policy. The latest number points to a fertility rate—the number of children a woman has over her lifetime—that is close to 1.0, a level considered by demographers as “ultralow.”

The worsening demographic gloom has taken on increasing urgency for Beijing. The country hit a historic turning point in 2022, marking the first year the population shrank since the starvation years in the early 1960s.

Over the past year, China’s population dropped by 2.08 million, more than twice the drop in 2022. China ended 2023 with 1.410 billion people, the National Bureau of Statistics said Wednesday, down from 1.412 billion in 2022.

Economic headwinds didn’t help the situation. Another possible factor was China’s sudden abandonment of Covid-19 restrictions at the end of 2022, which might have led to a sharp rise in deaths early last year.

The statistics bureau, which doesn’t break out deaths by month, said the number of deaths increased to 11.10 million in 2023 from 10.41 million in 2022.

Juliet Chung and Berber Jin:

There was some internal discussion at the endowment about whether the university could lose its spot in future venture funds. Several people familiar with Harvard’s tour said it wasn’t driven by worries about Harvard losing allocations but by a desire to partner with its managers and answer questions about what was happening at the university.

Harvard executives in meetings last week said that the endowment wasn’t political and didn’t play a role in choosing Harvard’s president, said people familiar with the matter.

Executives also addressed frustration among some managers that Gay’s initial statement responding to the Hamas attacks had been too weak. That statement didn’t explicitly condemn Hamas or distance Harvard from a statement by student groups laying blame for Hamas’s violence on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians over decades. A follow-up statement condemned “the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas” and said student groups don’t speak for Harvard. Finnegan said that Gay had sought input from the deans of Harvard’s various schools and that the process had weakened the statement, signed by Gay and the school’s leadership.

Javier Milei:

“I’m here to tell you that the western world is in danger and it is endangered because those who are supposed to have to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inextricably leads to socialism and thereby to poverty.”

Hunter Biden’s laptop is not only real; it’s also a manifestation of the largest government censorship enterprise in United States history.

We’re headed to the United States Supreme Court to halt that censorship operation. https://t.co/sNcoT0mgVx

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) January 17, 2024

Related: “We will let you know if there is any news made in that speech, if there is anything noteworthy, something substantive and important.”

Mandy McLaren:

Students with the common disability can learn to read with the right instruction, but many Massachusetts schools don’t, or won’t, provide it

Chris Arnade:

The Thursday before Christmas, I woke up in downtown Sofia, leisurely drank a coffee, and jumped on a metro that took me directly to the airport. In less than an hour, I was at the gate for my flight to New York’s JFK. My plan was to get the last bus upstate that evening, so I could be in my own bed a little after midnight. But it would only work if the flight landed on time — and if passport control took under an hour and a half.

The first happened, but the second didn’t even come close. To describe Terminal One that Thursday night as a shitshow is unfair to shitshows, which are at least darkly entertaining. This was bureaucratic hell: lines of exhausted travellers snaking out into dreary linoleum hallways festooned with disconcertingly cheery posters welcoming us to NYC. It took close to an hour to even reach the main hall, and then we endured another hour of slow shuffling up to the 10 or so border security agents.

Benjamin Yount:

“Simply put, Wisconsin’s teacher pipeline is leaking everywhere. Too few people want to become teachers. Too few varieties of people want to become teachers. Too few people who enter a teaching degree program end up becoming teachers. Too many teachers who do make it quit right away,” IRG’s Quinton Klabon said. “The result is obviously bad for schools. Rural and urban districts leave jobs unfilled. Suburban districts have five candidates per job instead of 20. And when you don’t have a lot to pick from, that lowers the quality of teaching that your child is getting. In fact, 13% of teachers are in their first or second years in Wisconsin, when all research shows teachers are still figuring it out. A real factor in Wisconsin’s low test scores may be that 1 in 10 kids has a rookie teacher.”

IRG is pushing for legislation that would allow teacher apprenticeships. Currently, 28 other states allow for apprenticeships.

IRG’s plan would give new or want-to-be teachers two years learning how to teach their subject and manage a classroom, then two years of student teaching under a master teacher.

“Student teaching is like the mini-version of apprenticeships. A senior gets 1 semester of practice in a real school under the mentorship of a senior teacher … except instead of getting paid, they pay thousands in tuition to do it. Apprenticeships could help get college students paid for around 2 years of student teaching while receiving the benefits of Wisconsin’s incredibly strong apprentice program. Our major employers have helped us make electricians and nurses the best they can be, and they can help do the same for educators,” Klabon added.

Zachary Bleemer

I study the efficacy of test-based meritocracy in college admissions by evaluating the impact of a grade-based “top percent” policy implemented by the University of California. Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) provided large admission advantages to the top four percent of 20012011 graduates from each California high school. Estimates from a regression discontinuity design show that ELC led over 10 percent of barely-eligible applicants from low-opportunity high schools to enroll at selective UC campuses instead of less selective public colleges and universities. Half of those participants came from lower-income families, and their average SAT scores were at the 14 th percentile of their UC peers. Despite this mismatch, ELC participants overperformed in their college grades, and more-selective enrollment led participants to graduate earlier and earn higher late-20s wages by over $1,000 per percentage point change in their enrollment institution’s graduation rate. These returns appear to exceed the average return to university selectivity among higher-testing students in this setting, implying that university admission policies targeting low-testing students can promote economic mobility without efficiency losses.

Leigh Thomas:

French President Emmanuel Macron promised on Tuesday to overhaul parental leave so it pays better after France saw the lowest number of births since World War Two last year, in a blow to its traditionally strong demographic profile.

France registered 678,000 births last year, representing a decrease of 7% from 2022 and down 20% since peaking in 2020, INSEE said in its annual census report.

The country has for decades been an outlier compared to other European countries, avoiding a collapse in birth rates as seen in Germany, Italy and Spain.

Rick Hess:

That said, even as real teacher pay fell from 2012 to 2022, real per-pupil spending increasedby 16 percent. And that’s not just a matter of COVID spending: In 2019, even before all the federal pandemic aid, U.S. schools were spending $16,743 per student (in 2021 dollars). New York City spent $38,000 per student last year, or more than $850,000 per class of 23 students. You don’t have to be especially good at math to imagine that we can raise pay within existing budgets.

So, for me, the question isn’t “Why won’t taxpayers pony up more dollars?” It’s “Why aren’t more dollars translating to more pay?” I’ve got thoughts on this. But, first, I’m curious to hear your take on this count.

Lawrence Andrea:

A high-powered Democratic law firm is asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to reconsider the state’s congressional map ahead of the 2024 election, arguing a redistricting decision last month calls into question the battleground state’s current district lines.

Elias Law Group, chaired by Marc Elias, who has led previous voting access lawsuits in Wisconsin and across the country, filed the motion to revisit Wisconsin’s congressional district lines on Tuesday. The group aims to have a new map in place for the 2024 election, though those plans likely face a tight deadline with under 11 months to go before the November election.

——-

North Carolina lawfare.

More.

Eugene Volokh:

I actually follow Justice Holmes in recognizing the potential benefits of speech restrictions. Among other things, while it’s hard to estimate the likely consequences of any particular statement going forward, looking backward we can see that virtually every ideological crime (whether committed by a solo offender, a group, or a government) stemmed in part from some sort of political or religious speech. If only we could prevent that, without causing all sorts of other problems ….

My view, though, is that on balance attempts to restrict the expression of bad views generally do more harm than good; and the quote in the title expresses well one of the many forms of such harm. (The earliest use of the quote I found is from 2018, by Robert Graboyes, though I noticed it because of this more recent post of his.)

Maggie Kelly:

Vanderbilt University employs more than one full-time administrator for every two students, a College Fix analysis found.

During the 2021-22 academic year, the most recent for which data are available, the private Nashville university employed 3,516 full-time administrators and support staff, according to information the school filed with the federal Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

Administrators and support staff include management, student and academic affairs divisions, IT, public relations, administrative support, maintenance, legal, and other non-academic departments.

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective wellbeing, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging − one with higher subjective well-being for men.

JEL Classification:

Join us TONIGHT: The UW NOW Livestream will feature CROWE co-director Ananth Seshadri, and Eric Wilcots, dean of the UW–Madison College of Letters & Science, discussing data on the value of a college degree. Watch beginning at 7 pm tonight, January 16: https://t.co/BlBxY3zQtm

— CROWE (@CROWE_UW) January 16, 2024

Julie Wernau:

Braxton is among thousands of teenagers and young adults who have developed delusions and paranoia after using cannabis. Legalization efforts have made cannabis more readily available in much of the country. More frequent use of marijuana that is many times as potent as strains common three decades ago is leading to more psychotic episodes, according to doctors and recent research. 

“This isn’t the cannabis of 20, 30 years ago,” said Dr. Deepali Gershan, an addiction psychiatrist at Compass Health Center in Northbrook, Ill. Up to 20% of her caseload is patients for whom she suspects cannabis use triggered a psychotic episode.

Rates of diagnoses for cannabis-induced disorders were more than 50% higher at the end of November than in 2019, healthcare-analytics company Truveta said this week. The trend is contributing to the broader burden of caring for people who developed mental health and addiction problems during the pandemic.

Julie Wernau:

Braxton is among thousands of teenagers and young adults who have developed delusions and paranoia after using cannabis. Legalization efforts have made cannabis more readily available in much of the country. More frequent use of marijuana that is many times as potent as strains common three decades ago is leading to more psychotic episodes, according to doctors and recent research. 

“This isn’t the cannabis of 20, 30 years ago,” said Dr. Deepali Gershan, an addiction psychiatrist at Compass Health Center in Northbrook, Ill. Up to 20% of her caseload is patients for whom she suspects cannabis use triggered a psychotic episode.

Rates of diagnoses for cannabis-induced disorders were more than 50% higher at the end of November than in 2019, healthcare-analytics company Truveta said this week. The trend is contributing to the broader burden of caring for people who developed mental health and addiction problems during the pandemic.

James McElvenny:

Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages, we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seemingly compels us to talk in a certain way and to see things from a particular perspective. But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?

In the modern academic context, such questions are usually treated under the rubrics of ‘linguistic relativity’ or the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. Contemporary research is focused on pinning down these questions, on trying to formulate them in rigorous terms that can be tested empirically. But current notions concerning connections between language, mind and worldview have a long history, spanning several intellectual epochs, each with their own preoccupations. Running through this history is a recurring scepticism surrounding linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down, but by a deep-seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativistic doctrines.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Alex Mancilla graduated last month from Marquette University, an electrical engineering degree in hand and a job lined up at GE HealthCare.

Behind the educational milestone is the story of a young south side Milwaukee man whose parents immigrated from Mexico and were unable to help him financially. College wasn’t even on Mancilla’s radar until his seventh-grade English teacher pulled him out of class and asked about his plans.

“Was college the dream?” Mancilla asked “I don’t think so. The teachers that we had in elementary school had good intentions but college wasn’t something talked about. They would tell us to go to college but didn’t say how. There was no robust path to get there.”

Paving a path for Mancilla, 22, and hundreds of others was All-In Milwaukee, a nonprofit supporting diverse, low-income Milwaukee students through college and into their careers. Corporate and individual donors cover their college costs, so most graduate without any debt. Equally important is the advising support students receive throughout their time on campus.

Azeem Ghorayshi:

Marcia Herman-Giddens first realized something was changing in young girls in the late 1980s, while she was serving as the director for the child abuse team at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. During evaluations of girls who had been abused, Dr. Herman-Giddens noticed that many of them had started developing breasts at ages as young as 6 or 7.

“That did not seem right,” said Dr. Herman-Giddens, who is now an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health. She wondered whether girls with early breast development were more likely to be sexually abused, but she could not find any data keeping track of puberty onset in girls in the United States. So she decided to collect it herself.

A decade later, she published a study of more than 17,000 girlswho underwent physical examinations at pediatricians’ offices across the country. The numbers revealed that, on average, girls in the mid-1990s had started to develop breasts — typically the first sign of puberty — around age 10, more than a year earlier than previously recorded. The decline was even more striking in Black girls, who had begun developing breasts, on average, at age 9.

The medical community was shocked by the findings, and many were doubtful about a dramatic new trend spotted by an unknown physician assistant, Dr. Herman-Giddens recalled. “They were blindsided,” she said.

Ilya Somin:

Today is Martin Luther King Day. One of King’s most important legacies was his advocacy of civil disobedience as a strategy for resisting injustice. In 2022, I wrote a Martin Luther King Day post addressing some common misperceptions about King’s views on this topic. I built, in part, on a piece on King by Georgetown Prof. Jason Brennan, author of an important book on the morality of resistance to government power.

Contrary to popular perception, King did not categorically oppose all violent resistance to injustice. His views also don’t imply that practitioners of civil disobedience have a categorical obligation to accept punishment. In the case of the US civil rights movement, he advocated both nonviolence and acceptance of punishment for primarily tactical reasons. But the reasons for doing so don’t always hold true in other cases. On the other hand, King did strongly oppose rioting, on both moral and pragmatic grounds. And his reasoning does imply a strong presumption against violence, even if not a categorical bar.

A few excerpts from the 2022 post:

Roger Clegg:

Very well: We want not DEI but MNO — that is, Merit, Nondiscrimination, and Openness.

It seems obvious that our institutions should strive for merit rather than a predetermined demographic mix of any sort (the Left’s definition of “diversity”). And it can be added that, if you don’t think that the current standards result in the best-qualified individuals being selected, then by all means improve them. So if it really doesn’t make sense to require a college diploma for this job, or if the legacy preference at that school is a bad idea, or if physical fitness can be better measured this way rather than that way, fine. Let’s have an honest discussion.

Danielle DuClos

Green Bay School District senior leaders have created a “dynamic of distrust and antagonism” leaving employees “frustrated,” according to an internal report on district administration.

The report details a district whose senior administration undermines its employees, whose members are tethered to their desks and have turf wars among colleagues. 

The 34-page report, obtained by the Press-Gazette through an open records request, comes on the heels of 275 employee resignations since August 2022. These resignations include teachers, principals and district administrators. 

Burns/Van Fleet, the educational consulting firm hired by the district, conducted 60 interviews with district employees throughout June and July. The firm uncovered a “a lack of genuine engagement” on the ground in schools, saying that the greatest need lies with the habits of senior administrators themselves.

Superintendent Claude Tiller, who is in his first year leading the district, said in a written statement about the report that the district has its challenges and opportunities for improvement.

Ben & Marc

Welcome to “The Ben & Marc Show”, featuring a16z co-founders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen.  In this latest episode, Marc and Ben tackle the university system – a hot topic that’s been dominating the news over the past few months.

As Marc states at the top of the episode, universities matter tremendously to our world, but they’re currently in a state of crisis. In this one-on-one conversation, Ben and Marc take a “structural” look at higher education, delving deep into the twelve functions of the modern university. They also unpack the numerous challenges that universities face today – the student debt and the replication crisis, among them.

Camus:

Professor Angus Dalgleish, physician, oncologist, pathologist, medical researcher: I fear for the university system, I fear for the education system, I fear for the research system. It really has entered the new dark age. And part of this course is this so-called wokeism, is the political correctness.Political correctness is anti-scientific, ’cause it’s already decided what you can say and what you can’t say and how you should observe the scenario and how you should react to it…

Sean O’Driscoll

An internal report found that a third-placed job applicant, who was Black, was given a tenure-track assistant professor job last April, above white and Asian candidates who were ranked higher in the selection process.

Other violations included excluding white staff from meetings with job candidates, deleting a passage from a hiring report to hide discrimination, and discussing ways to “think our way around” a Supreme Court ruling that barred affirmative action in colleges.

A UW spokeswoman told Newsweek on Thursday that the case was exposed when “the dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, responding to an internal whistleblower, requested an internal review of this process by what was then called UCIRO (University Complaints, Investigation and Resolution Office) and is now the Civil Rights Investigation Office.”

The psychology faculty has been barred from hiring tenured staff for two years as a result.

Lance Morrow:

The novelist Henry James said that Ralph Waldo Emerson—who was once the country’s beloved essayist-laureate, author of the iconic American effusion called “Self-Reliance” and the semiofficial philosopher of entrepreneurial individualism—suffered from a fatal flaw. Emerson’s disabling defect, James thought, was innocence: He had no “sense of the dark, the foul, the base.” The novelist said of the essayist: “A ripe unconsciousness of evil is . . . one of the most beautiful signs by which we know him.”

James and Emerson were giants of American literature long ago, but they belonged to different generations. Emerson (1803-82) wrote his important essays (those sun-shot prose miracles of the country’s morning energy) in the years before the Civil War, before that catastrophic crack in American history. James (1843-1916) composed his elaborately shadowed novels well after Appomattox. It was the Civil War that introduced the naive country to its fallen self. The conflict ushered in, among other things, Reconstruction and Jim Crow, the Gilded Age and the robber barons, mass immigration from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe. James and Emerson came of age in two different Americas. No wonder, then, that they had different ideas about the country’s capacity for good or evil.

Emerson graduated with Harvard’s class of 1821. James studied at the law school 40 years later, during the Civil War. I mention them because those sons of Harvard framed the issue that haunts the great university now. The controversy that divides Harvard in the 21st century is rooted in the question of American theodicy: How can the country’s evils be reconciled with its core Emersonian ideal of excellence, individualism, freedom of thought and speech, and other foundational notions that—not always honored but always implicitly there—are essential to the country’s future?

Jeremy Clarkson

That’s great of course. Except, if you think for a moment, it’s not great at all because how in the name of all that’s holy can a supermarket sell you 415g of food for so little? You’ve got all the tomatoes needed to make the sauce, and the herb extracts and the salt and the cornflour and the vinegar. And then you need the tin and the labelling. And all of the trucks needed to get the ingredients to the Heinz factory in Wigan, and the distribution centres, and the profit that the retailers are going to need. So how much of the £1.40 do you suppose is left over to pay the farmer who grew the 465 beans that you find in each tin?

Yes, you’re absolutely right. It’s bugger all. And it’s not just beans either. McDonald’s has got staff bills and heating and lighting and a logistical empire bigger than the US navy’s. So how much of the £4 they charge for a Big Mac goes to the farmers who grew the cows and the potatoes and the flour and the tomatoes and whatever it is they put in that delicious sauce? 

Answer? Not much. Which is why, historically, governments in the civilised world have given farmers subsidies and cut-price fuel and so on. It was compensation for the fact that people simply would not pay what it had cost to grow the food.

Paul Bedard:

More than three quarters of African American births are to unmarried women, nearly double the illegitimacy rate of all other births, according to new federal data.

The National Center for Health Statistics said that in 2015, 77.3 percent of non-immigrant black births were illegitimate. The national non-immigrant average is 42 percent, and it was 30 percent for whites.

The new numbers were in a Center for Immigration Studies analysis on the births to immigrants. That total is 32.7 percent, but to Hispanic immigrants it is 48.9 percent, according to Steven Camarota, the director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies.

Conor Friedersdorf

Before immigrating to America from Russia as a young academic, Alexander Barvinok lived under a repressive regime that he experienced as “systemic absurdity.” He is now a tenured mathematics professor at the University of Michigan. Earlier this year, he resigned his three-decade membership in the American Mathematical Society in a letter citing the group’s failure to oppose the growing number of job openings for mathematics faculty that require applicants to draft and submit a statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. He regards these statements as a gravely concerning trend for his discipline, and he wanted to register some sort of protest against them.

Painful experiences long ago convinced Barvinok that requirements to affirm any ideal are corrosive in academia.

“I grew up in the Soviet Union, where people had to affirm their fealty to ideals, and the leaders embodying those ideals, on a daily basis,” he told me. “As years went by, I observed the remarkable ease with which passionate communists turned first into passionate pro-Western liberals and then into passionate nationalists. This lived experience and also common sense convince me that only true conformists excel in this game. Do we really want our math departments to be populated by conformists?”

Nick Minock:

7News was the first to report how Loudoun County Superintendent Aaron Spence brought his public relations person, Natalie Allen, with him from Virginia Beach City Public Schools, created a new position for her at LCPS and gave her a taxpayer-funded salary of $251,000 — which is more money than LCPS pays their top attorney, chief of schools, and Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning.

7News emailed LCPS and asked, “How does the superintendent justify giving [Natalie] Allen a salary of more than a quarter of $1 million plus benefits and moving costs?”

“This level of compensation is in line with other chief officers,” LCPS replied in part.

So 7News submitted public records requests to learn what nearby school systems pay their top PR people.

David Randall:

The statement also specifies that “Historians hold this view not because they believe that all interpretations are equally valid, or that nothing can ever be known about the past, or that facts do not matter. Quite the contrary. History would be pointless if such claims were true.”

An old debate is where to place history in the divide between subjective and objective truth.But these are stipulations distinctly in a minor key.

At the core, this issue reopens the old debate about where to place history in the divides between subjective and objective truth (historical truth derives from the interpreter or historical truth derives from the facts themselves) and between absolute and relative truth (historical truth is transhistorical or historical truth is historically situated). Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (1988) provided a classic articulation of how this debate played out among American historians. In their mutual polemics, the absolutist/objectivist is arrogant and rigid, while the subjectivist/relativist can just say any old thing, usually ideological nonsense, as the requirement to aspire to the truth has been removed.

What Novick’s account couldn’t include is how the professional standards of the AHA themselves have been deformed since he wrote. The year before Novick published That Noble Dream, the AHA issued its first Standards of Professional Conduct (this version, as revised through 1999). These initial standards left open the nature of history by including both options: “Scholarship, the uncovering and exchange of new information and the shaping of interpretations, is basic to the activities of the historical profession.” Although these first standards prescribed “an awareness of one’s own bias,” they also strongly emphasized the objective importance of sources: “Because historians must have access to sources—archival and other—to produce reliable history, they have a professional obligation to preserve sources.” The standards gave measured additional support to history as interpretation but under the rubric of intellectual diversity: “When applied with integrity, the political, social, and religious beliefs of historians may inform their historical practice.”

Sara Randazzo:

The effort has been slow to gain traction partly because the loudest opposition comes from teachers themselves. Some Texas teachers complain that the extra pay is doled out unfairly and pits colleagues against one another, even as recipients report life-changing raises that have paid off debts and funded long-awaited vacations.

“This merit-based pay breeds hostility, it breeds competition,” said fourth-grade teacher Stephanie Stoebe.

The reaction in Texas shows why attempts to pay U.S. teachers based on performance have often fizzled, even amid widespread calls to make teacher pay more competitive. Teachers make $67,000 on average nationwide, with average starting salaries of $43,000. The majority are paid based on seniority, with stipends for postgraduate degrees and extra duties, a system preferred by teachers unions.

John Mauldin:

We face this not just because of government policy choices but the political process itself. It is a function of the two-party system. Our system has lost the ability to act decisively against big problems we all see coming. We are a nation of deer in the headlights.

But our system won’t stay paralyzed forever. At some point, we’ll see action because the crisis will have become impossible to ignore. Then we’ll respond. It will be a furious, poorly planned response with massive side effects that could have been avoided unless some of us begin thinking about possible solutions in advance.

Melodramatic? Hyperbole? Let’s rewind the clock to 2008 when then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson literally got on his knees to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, begging her to authorize the bailout for the banks. The system was getting ready to collapse. The plan was poorly thought out, but that is my point. No one really “war-gamed” the possible solutions and choices in advance. Rather, with leaders on both sides of the aisle staring into the abyss and realizing there was no bottom, they made the best choices they could in a very short time.

Now we have an approaching debt crisis we can actually think about in advance. I believe—and hope it’s not just my naive optimism—we will have some time to consider solutions. And as I have been saying for years, nobody will be happy. We have gone way past the time for relatively easy fixes. Having cut taxes and increased spending, we are running almost $2 trillion deficits annually.

Eugene Volokh

From today’s decision by Judge Jodi Dishman (W.D. Okla.) in Bridge v. Oklahoma State Dep’t of Ed.:

“Physical differences between men and women … are enduring” and the “‘two sexes are not fungible….'” United States v. Virginia(1996). In fact, “sex, like race and national origin, is an immutable characteristic ….” Frontiero v. Richardson (1973) (plurality opinion). With these principles in mind, the Court tackles a question that has not yet been addressed by the Supreme Court of the United States or the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit: whether separating the use of male and female restrooms and changing areas in public schools based on a student’s biological sex violates the Equal Protection Clause … or Title IX ….

{In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, the Supreme Court held that an employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender unconstitutionally discriminates against that person because of sex under Title VII. However, the Supreme Court also made clear that its opinion did “not purport to address bathrooms, locker rooms, or anything else of the kind.”}

The court upheld Oklahoma’s S.B. 615, which provides:

By Naomi Martin

A 17-year old Boston Public Schools student who asked to be identified by her initial, T., looked at her phone at home. When she moved to Boston six years ago, she could not speak English or read in Cape Verdean Creole. She read at around a prekindergarten level last year

Josh Barro

Over the past few years, conservatives have rapidly lost trust in higher education. From 2015 to 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 points, from 56 to 19 percent. As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have engaged in political attacks on the sector, most recently in the fact-finding and pressure campaign that caused Claudine Gay to resign as president of Harvard.

This decline is something close to common knowledge. Less discussed is the fact that public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across all ideological groups since 2015. Though Republicans’ confidence cratered the most, Gallup found that it fell by 16 points among independents (from 48 to 32 percent) and nine points among Democrats (from 68 to 59 percent, not far from where Republicans were nine years ago).

Ben Yount:

MPS just got an $87 million tax hike in 2020. Gov. Evers also gave them a 400-year school funding boost. But apparently they need a quarter-billion more.

Andrew Friedman:

Imagine a university just like Stanford. This university boasts a prestigious faculty, which includes 10 Nobel Laureates, and has held an average rank of 2.7 over the past 9 years in the U.S. News College Rankings. Its alumni include four of nine seats on the Supreme Court. And, this university is making big investments in new buildings, like a 94,000 square foot space for biological sciences. The school does not mandate a Eurocentric curriculum and even asks students to fulfill a gender studies requirement. Of course, this description is not a fiction; it is one of Stanford in 1994.

The campus experience of yesteryear sounds identical to the experience today, with two key differences — tuition and the number of non-teaching employees. The total cost of 1994 attendance (tuition + room & board + mandatory fees) in 2017 dollars was $42,231. Today, tuition is $22,000 higher. Would students rather spend four years at 2018 Stanford, or four years at 1994 Stanford and receive $92,000 in cash? Here is the total cost of attendance and the number of non-teaching employees over the past three decades:

Timothy William Waters:

The line gets a laugh, but students know I’m serious because I say it in a speech about difference, discourse and the reason they are in that classroom. Which isn’t to commit genocide—or to stop it. They aren’t there to do anything besides learn: what the law is and isn’t, how to prosecute or defend war criminals, what works and doesn’t. What they do with that knowledge is up to them. Some defend corporations. Others liberate oppressed communities by any means necessary. Some become military judge advocates, while others oppose America’s wars. On Israel and Gaza—you can imagine.

If a student tried to commit genocide in my class, I’d call the police. I’d do the same if he urged his classmates to kill Jews, Palestinians, Ukrainians or Russians, because inciting people to commit genocide is also a crime. If that is what “advocating genocide” means, then yes, genocide isn’t allowed in my classroom.

But arguing that genocide shouldn’t be a crime is allowed. You want to say that acts widely considered genocide can be legally justified? Say more. That killing Armenians in 1915, Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s, Ukrainians or Israelis or Palestinians in 2023 isn’t genocide? Discuss. I’ve argued similar positions myself, and my university neither would nor should punish me for it.

Steve McGuire:

In a series of emails, Harvard Professor Jennifer Hochschild has apologized to Harvard Extension School students and staff:

Here’s Paul Ehrlich in 1970 saying that the government needs to become increasingly tyrannical to stop child birth.

Says the gov’t should use the FCC to force negative depictions of large families and eventually “throw you in jail if you have too many” children. pic.twitter.com/R7iOB2PBbO

— Vince Coglianese (@VinceCoglianese) January 3, 2023

IMPORTANT ACT 20 LITERACY UPDATE

TODAY, council MAY soft-approve first batch of reading curriculum. (DPI and legislature must agree.)

District/charter/voucher that pick them get partially reimbursed. If not, they pay for new Themselves.

NOT recorded, so follow this thread!

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) January 12, 2024

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

—-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“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?

Frederick Hess:

That’s a problem in a field that (unlike, say, math or poetry) is explicitly charged with being useful to practitioners and policymakers. That gap isn’t new (see Arthur Bestor’s Educational Wastelands from 1953 for a sense of how far back this goes), but I fear it’s been getting worse. I say this as someone who’s had a front-row seat, teaching at a half-dozen universities, publishing When Research Matters, compiling the Edu-Scholar rankings for more than a decade, convening AEI’s K-12 Working Group for nearly two decades, and toiling at the intersection of research and policy since the lastcentury.

When I talk to K–12 officials, the top-of-mind issue may be the looming expiration of federal pandemic aid. Yet, questions about where those funds have gone, whether they’ve made a difference, and how to handle the requisite cuts just aren’t a focus for more than two or three of the 200 Edu-Scholars. While there are lots of education economists and finance specialists, they gravitate to analyses that feature causal claims, racial disparities, and for which timeliness isn’t a concern. This work yields some interesting results but ones which tend to be more useful for New York Times think pieces than real-world decisionmaking.

To learn more about the methodology used by Rick Hess and his panel of 40 education scholars, visit. To see how the scholars ranked overall, visit.

Katherine Wu:

Some 24 years ago, Diana Bianchi peered into a microscope at a piece of human thyroid and saw something that instantly gave her goosebumps. The sample had come from a woman who was chromosomally XX. But through the lens, Bianchi saw the unmistakable glimmer of Y chromosomes—dozens and dozens of them. “Clearly,” Bianchi told me, “part of her thyroid was entirely male.”

The reason, Bianchi suspected, was pregnancy. Years ago, the patient had carried a male embryo, whose cells had at some point wandered out of the womb. They’d ended up in his mother’s thyroid—and, almost certainly, a bunch of other organs too—and taken on the identities and functions of the female cells that surrounded them so they could work in synchrony. Bianchi, now the director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was astonished: “Her thyroid had been entirely remodeled by her son’s cells,” she said.

Zach Rausch and Jon Haidt:

It is now widely accepted that an epidemic of mental illness began among American teens in the early 2010s. What caused it? Many commentators point to events in the USA around that time, such as a particularly horrific school shooting in 2012. But if the epidemic started in many nations at the same time, then such country-specific theories would not work. We’d need to find a global event or trend, and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis doesn’t match the timing at all, as Jean Twenge and I have shown.

In our 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and I presented evidence that the same trends were happening in Canada and the United Kingdom—not just the rise in depression and anxiety, but also the overprotection of children, the rise of “safetyism,” and the shouting down of speakers on university campuses when students deemed the speaker to be “harmful.” It seemed that all the Anglo nations were setting up their children for failure in the same ways at the same time.

Karen Rivedal:

Driven by the goal of improving the country’s ability to solve complex problems, a partnership led by UW–Madison’s Wei LAB will help engineering societies apply a newly released international standard on diversity and inclusion. It aims to foster STEM disciplinary excellence by supporting fuller engagement of women and minoritized people in the STEM workforce and academic settings. 

Project leaders say science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professional societies are uniquely positioned to advance national-level diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reform for underrepresented groups. Engineering societies were selected from among the STEM disciplines for the project because engineers are seen as especially attuned to standards. 

Project leaders believe positive, evidence-based culture change that succeeds in attracting and retaining more members of underrepresented groups is needed in STEM because evidence shows that well-trained and diverse work teams made up of fully engaged individuals are most effective at solving complicated problems, developing innovative products, and maintaining resilience in crises. But too many work teams in STEM-related business and academia still fail to match this profile.

Mary Beard:

Have you ever thought the Classics are just ancient history − nothing to do with our world today? Well, think again!

Celebrity guests join Prof Mary Beard and her friends from Cambridge University to explore modern day classroom themes with a classical spin.

Douglas Belkin:

Yet even before those accusations emerged—and before Gay attracted sharp criticism for her testimony at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses—Gay was at the center of a raging debate on the Harvard campus over a much bigger question: what a university should be.

Gay ascended to the presidency just days after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action last summer, a ruling that unleashed a roiling debate across the country about the very issues she pursued most stridently. As dean of faculty, Gay had played the role of change agent and pushed progressive ideals, including more racial diversity among faculty and academic disciplines.

The emphasis won fans but also brought detractors, as the school sometimes sanctioned scholars and disinvited speakers with conservative viewpoints, and fell to the bottom of an influential ranking of colleges for free speech.

Under Gay’s leadership, said Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist in Harvard’s department of astronomy, the mandate of the administrative state of the university continued to expand and shift from serving faculty to monitoring them.

“The message was, don’t deviate from what they find to be appropriate,” Loeb said. “It became more of a police organization.”

Gay’s supporters said she guided efforts to expand student access and opportunity. When she was selected as president, Penny Pritzker, the senior fellow of Harvard’s board, said Gay had already strengthened “Harvard as a fount of ideas and a force for good in the world.”

Naomi Martin and Mandy McLaren

At school, she panics if she has to read aloud. She’s a conscientious student and keeps her grades up, but it isn’t easy; at times she has such trouble synthesizing the novels she reads in English class, she Googles plot summaries to remind herself of what happened. Even in math, word problems are thickets.

Madison von Mering, a driven 16-year-old who loves field hockey and sailing, is not a strong reader. As a young child, she was never correctly taught how to sound out unfamiliar words.

More.

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“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?

Dan Williams:

Consider some general facts about misinformationon a narrow definition:

First, it is relatively rare. Extensive empirical research shows that the average person consumes very little of it, especially when contrasted with information from mainstream sources (e.g., the BBC, CNN, the NYT, etc.). In fact, typical estimates are likely to greatly exaggerate the amount of clear-cut misinformation because they measure it at the source level. That is, they classify 100% of the content from low-quality websites and outlets as misinformation. However, even extremely unreliable outlets generally refrain from publishing demonstrable falsehoods.

Second, engagement with misinformation is heavily concentrated in certain groups. Most people share and consume very little, but a relatively small minority of very active social media users engage with quite a lot. Call this the “misinformation minority.”

Third, the misinformation minority is not a cross-section of the population. They are people with very specific traits, such as strong conspiratorial worldviews, high partisan animosity (i.e., they actively hate political and cultural enemies), anti-establishment attitudes, and—most importantly—institutional distrust. The causes of this distrust are complex, but exposure to narrow misinformation seems to play a minor role. People seek out narrow misinformation because they distrust institutions (science, public health, mainstream media, etc.), not vice versa.

Eighth grade graduation exam from 1912 pic.twitter.com/9C9EwYVtrc

— Jeremy Wayne Tate (@JeremyTate41) February 25, 2023

Mauricio Karchmer

For most academics, getting a job at MIT is a dream. Until October 7, it was for me. But in December, I resigned from my post because I could no longer deal with the pervasive antisemitism on MIT’s campus. 

How I got there is a story that is unique to me, but it’s also a story about what’s happening across American academia today. 

I was born in Mexico to a Jewish family. I immigrated to the States in the 1980s to obtain a master’s at Harvard, and then moved to Israel for my PhD in computer science from Hebrew University. In 1989, I started working as an assistant professor at MIT, and after a career in the financial industry, I returned in 2019 as a lecturer. 

As a computer scientist, I normally don’t have time for politics. But when Hamas invaded Israel on Saturday, October 7, brutally murdering 1,200 Israelis, I emailed the head of my department and urged her to issue a statement of support for Israelis and Jews. I assumed the reason was obvious. The university had sent statements before on various issues—such as a message condemning the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and another standing in solidarity with the Asian community amid a wave of hate crimes in 2021.

Roxandra Teslo:

The above quote from Der Steppenwolf is a good encapsulation of the difficulty faced by The Intellectual, or shall we say, in more modern terms, The Weird Nerd. The Weird Nerd is distinguished by its unyielding devotion to Truth, often placing it above social graces or conventional norms. That’s one of the reasons the nerd is “drowning”, as Hesse put it. This species, while occasionally difficult to interact with, plays a crucial role in society, acting as an innovator and “village truth-teller”. In the last decades, The Weird Nerd has found a sanctuary within the confines of academia, a natural habitat where its traits are not only tolerated but often nurtured. In this symbiotic relationship, the wider world benefits from the intellectual pursuits and discoveries of the Weird Nerd, without the need to engage directly with its often annoying demeanour. It’s a situation that seems to maintain a harmonious balance: the Weird Nerd is protected from “drowning”, while society at large reaps the rewards of its unique contributions without having to deal directly with it.

Allysia Finely:

The Harvard Crimson published an op-ed on Dec. 31, written by an anonymous undergraduate, titled “I Vote on Plagiarism Cases at Harvard College. Gay’s Getting Off Easy.” Two days later, Claudine Gay resigned as president. Could it have been the catalyst?

“When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year,” wrote the student who sits on Harvard’s honor council, which adjudicates peer academic-integrity violations. “When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation ‘unanimously stand in support of’ her,” as the body declared in a Dec. 12 statement.

By shrugging at Ms. Gay’s plagiarism, the Harvard Corp. showed that its commitment to academic integrity was as phony as its other ideals.

Wall Street Journal:

Claudine Gay’s resignation Tuesday from the presidency of Harvard is a measure of accountability amid scandals on campus antisemitism and plagiarism. Her leadership had clearly become a drain on the school’s reputation. The question is whether the Harvard Corporation that chose her and presided over this debacle will rebalance by installing an educator who isn’t afraid to challenge the school’s dominant and censorious progressive factions.

In the months since Hamas brutally murdered Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, the atmosphere on Harvard’s campus has been hostile to Jewish students. During one rally, the Crimson newspaper reported, a student “led the crowd in a chant of ‘Long live Palestine; long live the intifada; intifada, intifada; globalize the intifada.” Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi of Harvard Chabad said Dec. 13 that a menorah couldn’t be left outside on campus overnight, “because there’s fear that it’ll be vandalized.” Sen. Dan Sullivan described on these pages the intimidating scene inside the school’s Widener Library.

That was only days after Ms. Gay’s disastrous testimony to the House, which also prompted the University of Pennsylvania’s president to quit. Asked about chants to “globalize the intifada,” Ms. Gay said such calls were “hateful,” “abhorrent,” and “at odds with the values of Harvard,” but she would not say that they violated the code of conduct.

Anyone care to explain how the DNC bullying New Hampshire to repudiate its own 104-year-old Presidential Primary as "meaningless" — and threatening candidates "not to participate" — is consistent with the Democrats' 2024 campaign pledge to preserve our cherished democracy pic.twitter.com/5xal84I5H9

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 10, 2024

This is crazy. https://t.co/It8LmSYCbU

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) January 10, 2024

Commentary.

Video

Audio and transcript as well.

Notes and links on Mark Seidenberg.

Callie W. Little, Ashley E. Edwards, Monique Harris, Dana Santangelo, and Nicole Patton Terry

Phonological awareness is a necessary component of effective early reading instruction.1 Student’s phonological awareness skills are related to their ability to read words. Students who have strong phonological awareness skills tend to be good readers. The Heggerty Phonemic Awareness Curriculum is an instructional program that is
designed to target this skill.2 However, at the time of this study, there was limited evidence about the program’s effectiveness in improving reading achievement. Some, but not all elementary schools in our partner school district were using the program during the 2021-2022 school year. These conditions allowed us to examine reading
achievement for students in schools using the program. Using data on students and schools, we examined reading achievement for Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd graders in schools using Heggerty (8 schools) compared to matching schools using their typical reading instruction program (7 schools).

Commentary.

Jonathan Butcher:

Community colleges are supposed to offer a range of academic opportunities for high-school students, high-school graduates, adults seeking job skills, and more. Most still do: Community colleges (also called junior colleges) allow students who struggled in high school or who cannot afford to attend a four-year institution to continue their education and enhance their career prospects.

Woke radicals, however, are also propagating the same racially focused, ideologically driven DEI offices and training on community-college campuses that have distracted four-year institutions from educating students. While these schools should be focused on improving their academic offerings and completion rates, radical racial and “gender” activists have captured whole departments and administrative offices at community colleges across the country.

Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), I found that 81 percent of the largest community colleges in medium or large cities or suburban areas have DEI staff or list at least one DEI program on the college’s website. My report identified degree-granting public or private community colleges that enroll at least 1,000 students, a dataset that contains 328 schools, approximately 22 percent of all community colleges in the United States.

and:

The proposal released Friday requires hiring decisions across all state governmental entities to be based on “merit, fairness and equality,” a conservative rejoinder to DEI with its own acronym (MFE), bill authors Rep. Dave Murphy, R-Greenville, and Sen. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, told legislators in a memo seeking support for the measure.

The Economist:

Fake birth certificates have long been a hot (if niche) commodity in China. In past decades couples would seek them out in order to get around the one-child policy. They could legally have two children if they were twins—or if their counterfeit papers stated as much. The one-child policy was loosened in 2016. But fake birth certificates remain in demand. Several hospitals are suspected of selling them. Some believe human-traffickers are the buyers. But investigators are eyeing another group: people who have babies via surrogates.

Surrogacy falls into a legal grey area in China. The state often says that the practice is banned; but there is no law against being a surrogate or hiring one. Yet doctors and hospitals that facilitate it are punished. Selling eggs, sperm or embryos are also crimes. And surrogacy contracts are not recognised by the state. That is where the bogus documents come in. A birth certificate is needed to obtain such things as health insurance, social security and household registration (see Chaguan). The fake ones allow non-biological children to officially be part of their new families.

Hadley Freeman:

The saga of Claudine Gay — the outgoing president of Harvard, who lasted a record-breakingly brief six months — has become a news story hall of mirrors, in which everyone sees in it exactly what they want. According to the BBC, “Dr Gay — who is black — represents much of what [the right-wing] loathes about modern American higher education”. Others blame the influence of Harvard donors, who over the past month became increasingly critical of her. The Rev Al Sharpton insisted that Gay’s resignation “is an attack on every black woman in this country who has put a crack in the glass ceiling”.

RUXANDRA TESLO

So how did I shed my Inceldom? It’s tempting to weave a story of a sudden epiphany sparked by reading Mokyr’s writings, but that wouldn’t be truthful. The reality is less dramatic: I can’t pinpoint an exact moment when the change occurred. It was a slow transformation, influenced primarily by two factors. The first was the Marginal Revolution blog. Witnessing someone as knowledgeable and insightful as Tyler Cowen champion alternative views of our current situation gave me the confidence to trust my instincts, even when it seemed I stood alone. That alone is a testament to the power of ideas. The second one has been starting to Tweet. Tweeting is like a mating song sent into the void, in the hopes of attracting like-minded people. And attract like-minded people my tweeting did. There’s too many of them to exhaustively name, but relevantly to the topic of this piece,

The Works in Progress Newsletterteam really helped me consolidate my current views.

This excerpt from When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories, edited by Bernestine Singley, appeared in 2002 as part of Harvard Magazine’s coverage of recent books by Harvard affiliates. The excerpt concerns author Noel Ignatiev’s role in launching a journal “to chronicle and analyze the making, remaking, and unmaking of whiteness.”

“THE GOOD NEWS is that there are now a host of writers and a growing number of courses and workshops designed to enlighten white people as to the real benefits and the great cost of their property in whiteness,” writes former Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell in his epilogue to When Race Becomes Real: Black and White Writers Confront Their Personal Histories,edited by Bernestine Singley, LL.M. ’76 (Lawrence Hill Books, $26.95). Many of those engaged in this Herculean task are white, Bell notes, among them Noel Ignatiev, Ed.M. ’85, Ph.D. ’94, C.A.S. ’95, author of How the Irish Became White and a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, who writes:

IN THE INTERESTS of survival, Afro-Americans have always studied whiteness. There is a long tradition among them that the white race is a peculiar sort of social formation, one that depends on its members’ willingness to conform to the institutions and behavior patterns that reproduce it. By the early 1900s…it was becoming commonplace in the academy to speak of race, along with class and gender, as a social construct….