Corrinne Hess:

Starting Tuesday, the federal government will suspend funding to Milwaukee Public Schools’ Head Start program — a health and nutrition program for low-income children — after the district failed to comply with the program.

The 30-day suspension is the result of three “deficiencies” the Administration of Children and Families, or ACF, found between June 2022 and May 2024, said MPS spokesperson Nicole Armendariz. 

Those deficiencies were related to following practices that “ensure children had appropriate supervision at all times; and ensuring all staff and volunteers abide by the program’s standards of conduct,” Armendariz said.

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More.

Rachel Wolfe:

Business owners say fees are needed to cover costs and show customers where their money is going. But retail analysts and advocates like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) say secondary fees diminish people’s ability to shop around. CFPB data also show fees cause people to pay more overall because businesses can charge more than what the market will let them get away with in the sticker price.

“People don’t shop based on fees. They shop based on the price of the product,” a CFPB spokesman says.

So widespread is the tactic that President Biden is making a fee crackdown one of his administrative priorities. His administration estimates that Americans pay more than a collective $90 billion in what the president has dubbed “junk fees” each year, including those for credit cards, food delivery, bank overdrafts and event tickets.

Congress introduced a bill last April to “limit and eliminate excessive, hidden, and unnecessary fees imposed on consumers,” while similar measures have recently passed the New York and Illinois state senates. California, too, added restaurants to the list of industries covered under its existing hidden-fee ban.

Charles Murray:

Andrew Beaton and Joshua Robinson:

Howard Endelman was busy running his own private-equity firm when he got offered the job he couldn’t refuse: assistant tennis coach at an Ivy League school.

The gig wasn’t glamorous. It involved traipsing back and forth between Columbia’s campus in Morningside Heights and the university’s courts at the northern tip of Manhattan. It also required him to spend his time selling high school tennis stars on a college better known for sending graduates to the Supreme Court than to Wimbledon’s Centre Court.

But Endelman couldn’t say no to his alma mater. And more than a decade later, that decision has never looked better. Endelman, now the head coach of the men’s team, has led Columbia to the NCAA tournament’s Elite Eight for the first time in school history and a showdown with No. 1 seed Ohio State.

In a tumultuous semester on the university’s campus, roiled by tensions over Israel and Palestine, his tennis team has delivered an unexpected moment of levity.

“Could we beat Michigan or Alabama in football? Impossible,” Endelman says. “In tennis, it’s possible.”

Bezos Washington Post

As the United States reckoned with racial inequality during and after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, many saw Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs as a way to address the issues in higher education. As part of the trend, many schools began requiring candidates for teaching positions to submit DEI statements. In these statements, potential hires explain how they would advance diversity, equity and inclusion in their teaching and research activities. One 2021 study found that about one-third of job postings at elite universities required them.

Now, however, some in academia are starting to express second thoughts about this practice. In April, Harvard Law School professor Randall L. Kennedy urged abolition of DEI statements, arguing that they amount to “compulsion” and “ideological litmus tests.” Not long after Mr. Kennedy’s article appeared, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the first top university to voluntarily end their use. The decision came after extensive consultations among all six of the school’s academic deans. MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, explained: “We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

In doing away with DEI statements, MIT was not abandoning the goals of greater diversity, equity and inclusion, which remain not only valid but also vital. DEI programs can have an important place. They should not be abolished or undermined — as red states such as Florida and Texas have done, by forbidding the use of state funds for DEI in public universities. Reshaping universities via such a heavy-handed use of state power could set a dangerous precedent for academic freedom more generally.

By James Vaznis and Suchita Nayar

For nearly two decades, Laurie Garcia had been an active member of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.

Then the union began wading into the Israel-Hamas war.

In December, the MTA’s board of directors approved a cease-fire statement that equated Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu’s military actions against Hamas to a “genocidal war” against Palestinians.

Oren Cass:

In America today, there are three interlocking crises that may finally collapse “Big Ed”, the nation’s dysfunctional higher education cartel. The latest headlines focus on moral collapse, as campuses that aggressively policed so-called microaggressions now host students screaming “intifada”. Recent years have also been marked by an intellectual collapse. Quantitative fields from genetics to finance to psychology have been exposed for suffering severe “replication crises”. Qualitative fields from literature to sociology to gender studies often produce faddish, politicised nonsense.

But the third crisis, and the one that strikes closest to home for most, is the utter failure of the US “college-for-all” model to prepare young people for successful lives. Educators and policymakers converted American secondary schools into college preparatory academies and ploughed hundreds billions of dollars of subsidies into colleges while encouraging students to take on yet more debt. Yet fewer than one in five students moves smoothly from high school to college to career. Even among those who earn a college degree, close to half then take a job that doesn’t require it.

The current administration’s effort to simply cancel student debt is on pace to cost more than $1tn, retroactively doubling the federal government’s extraordinary financial commitment in recent decades to a failed system. But while the cancellation marks an admission of that failure, it comes with no attempt at reform.

Minouche Shafik:

Strengthening the bond between universities and society through a recommitment to academia’s contribution to the common good. The horrors of the Hamas attack three days later, the ensuing war with Israel and the tragic loss of civilian lives in Gaza have tested that bond in unimaginable ways. I have seen the campus engulfed in tensions and divisions deepened by powerful external forces. 

The wave of protests, encampments, and building takeovers has since spread across the US and around the world. Whatever one thinks of the response of university leaders — denouncing hurtful rhetoric, enforcing rules and discipline, and summoning police to restore order — these are actions, not solutions. All of us who believe in higher education must now engage in serious soul searching about why this is happening. Only then can universities recover and begin to realise their potential to heal and unify.

Paul Rice:

The three Rs are taking a back seat to climate change in New Jersey schools.

As one of the lead state partners for the Next Generation Science Standards developed by the National Research Council, New Jersey has been integrating climate change into its K-12 science curriculum for the past decade. The Garden State has upped the ante in recent years by becoming the first state to incorporate climate change into all school subjects, not only science.

In 2020, the state board of education adopted a new set of climate-focused student learning standards. Gov. Phil Murphy’s wife, Tammy, was the primary cheerleader for these standards, which were implemented in the 2022-23 school year after a pandemic-related delay. Under those standards, all public school districts across the state are required to teach and test students in every grade about climate change. The requirement covers core content areas including science, computer technology, social studies, world languages, visual and performing arts, health and physical education, and life and career planning. Districts are encouraged to incorporate climate change into English language arts and mathematics instruction.

Climate education resources distributed by Trenton’s first-in-the-nation Office of Climate Change Education provide sample lesson plans to illustrate how teachers can highlight climate change in class while constantly reminding students that New Jersey is suffering “the worst impacts of global warming.” When learning about U.S. and world history, students are required to explain how natural resources such as fossil fuels remain a source of conflict, both at home and abroad. When mastering a foreign language, students are asked to discuss “the impact of climate change on the target language region of the world.” And in school performances, students are encouraged to use climate change to “inform original dances expressed through multiple genres, styles and varied cultural perspectives.”

Joseph Epstein:

President Biden awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to 19 Americans this month. I wish he had cut the list down to two or three. Perusing the list of winners I note, along with a preponderance of Democratic politicians, the heavy hand of diversity at work, making certain that among the winners are included a sufficient number of women, African-Americans, Hispanics and even a Republican (Elizabeth Dole).

The result of so many medal winners is to diminish, if not altogether destroy, the cachet the honor once held. Another once-vaunted prize bites the dust.

The Presidential Medal of Freedom joins the Nobel Prize for Literature, which long ago lost its luster. When it went to Bob Dylan in 2016, what prestige remained was all but blown away. His songs have nothing to do with literature, and most, in any case, are derived from Woody Guthrie. I await the day the Swedish Academy decides to recognize that notable speed typist Joyce Carol Oates, which ought to finish the prize off completely.

The Pulitzer Prizes in the arts haven’t done much better. Some years ago in the London Times Literary Supplement, I noted that these awards seem to go to two kinds of people: those who don’t need it and those who don’t deserve it. In 1998, when Katharine Graham won a Pulitzer for her autobiography, Hilton Kramer noted that she qualified on both grounds. The prize’s prestige has also all but evaporated.

Mike Kerrigan:

C.S. Lewis made the case for moral absolutes in his 1946 essay “A Christmas Sermon for Pagans.” “A better moral code can only mean one which comes nearer to some real or absolute code,” he observed. “One map of New York can be better than another only if there is a real New York for it to be truer to.”

The insight is as true for comparisons of feeling as of fact. Lewis argued that emotions must be trained. In “The Abolition of Man,” he wrote that the head rules the belly through the chest. The heart mediates between will and appetite and directs human action toward goodness.

Last winter I saw how even the most personal feelings function best when ordered to reality. It happened in my kitchen, during a mother’s attempt to deploy that most subjective of therapeutic tools: the pain scale.

My son Jack, then 12, had returned from basketball practice complaining of pain in his chest. Trying to discern whether it was run-of-the-mill or more serious, Devin, my wife, asked him to quantify the pain: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is it? Is it a 6?”

Jack was incredulous. “No, it’s nothing like that. More like a 1½.” Devin shrugged her shoulders but then thought to ask a critical follow-up question: “Just so I know, what’s a 6 to you?”

Jason Riley:

When the Supreme Court delivered its historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling 70 years ago on May 17, the goal was to produce better academic outcomes for black children. It’s been clear for decades that racially mixed classrooms aren’t essential to meeting that objective, yet policymakers continue to insist that black pupils must be seated next to white pupils to learn.

The Brown decision effectively overturned Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which declared that “separate but equal” facilities were permissible and became the legal basis for racial segregation for more than 50 years. The Brown ruling, to its credit, aimed to end that era. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote for a unanimous court that state-imposed racial segregation of schools was unconstitutional because sorting children by race denied black students “equal education opportunities” and thus deprived them of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.

How a court reaches a decision can be as important as the decision itself, and the problem we’re still grappling with seven decades later is the reasoning the justices used in Brown. Instead of declaring that Plessy was an incorrect reading of the Constitution, Warren invoked “modern authority,” or social-science research not available when Plessy was decided, to argue that segregated schools were inherently unequal in academic outcomes. In other words, the prior decision was wrong owing to new developments.

ATHENA CHAPEKIS, SAMUEL BESTVATER, EMMA REMY AND GONZALO RIVERO

This “digital decay” occurs in many different online spaces. We examined the links that appear on government and news websites, as well as in the “References” section of Wikipedia pages as of spring 2023. This analysis found that:

• 23% of news webpages contain at least one broken link, as do 21% of webpages from government sites. News sites with a high level of site traffic and those with less are about equally likely to contain broken links. Local-level government webpages (those belonging to city governments) are especially likely to have broken links.
• 54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.

To see how digital decay plays out on social media, we also collected a real-time sample of tweets during spring 2023 on the social media platform X (then known as Twitter) and followed them for three months. We found that:

William Galston:

As graduation ceremonies end and summer break begins, college and university presidents have an opportunity to reconsider their campus policies on speech and action. What begins in higher-education institutions rarely ends there. We all have a stake in what they decide.

Americans may believe the First Amendment applies across the board to these institutions. It doesn’t. Public schools are fully subject to this constitutional cornerstone, but private ones enjoy substantial freedom—limited by federal civil-rights laws and legislation in a handful of states—to craft codes of conduct that are inconsistent with it.

Whatever their motives, the members of Congress who grilled the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania (all private institutions) were right to focus on the universities’ codes rather than the Constitution. The presidents’ legalistic responses weren’t merely tin-eared; they revealed a failure to connect speech and action to the broader purposes of the academic enterprise.

Treating speech and conduct as political problems to be managed in the interest of keeping the peace on campus is a recipe for failure. Leaders who adopt this course ensure inconsistencies that damage their institutions and open them to charges of hypocrisy that are difficult to rebut. Look no further than the Jewish students who have been exposed to abuse and harassment that wouldn’t have been permitted against other minority groups.

Wall Street Journal:

Payday lenders challenged the CFPB’s power under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to draw its funds from the Federal Reserve up to $734 million, adjusted for inflation. They argued this self-funding scheme violates the Constitution’s command that “no Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”

The Court’s majority construed this to mean that executive agencies simply cannot tap the Treasury without Congress’s approval—not a constraint on Congress from funding agencies by a variety of means. “Specifying the source and purpose [of funds for an agency] is all the control the Appropriations Clause requires,” Justice Clarence Thomas writes for the majority, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Justice Thomas harks back to the struggles between the British Parliament and the King for control over the purse, noting some laws “gave the Crown broad discretion regarding how much to spend within an appropriated sum.” What’s more, “appropriations of ‘sums not exceeding’ a certain amount were commonplace immediately after the founding.”

Local examples of the Administrative State, including teacher mulligans.

—-

Will Rosignol:

Early in his first term, Gov. Tony Evers tried committing Wisconsin to rejecting all fossil fuels as a source of electricity by 2050, an aim the Legislature rejected, but one that the governor has since pursued with executive orders. As context, Wisconsin still obtains the majority of its electricity from such conventional types of fuel. Which fossil fuels predominate, however, has changed in recent years.

Wall Street Journal:

Universities shouldn’t indulge protesters who have no regard for the law. Unfortunately, we have already seen numerous colleges meet some or all of the anti-Israel demonstrators’ demands.

The encampment I’m most familiar with, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was allowed to stand for nearly two weeks. It persisted even after multiple antisemitic incidents, including a man reportedly raising a Nazi salute toward Jewish students. Despite acknowledging that the encampment was illegal, university administrators negotiated with and caved in to the organizers. Contrast this with how the university has tried to prevent conservative events from being held on campus. Earlier this year, the university attempted to charge a right-wing student organization more than $4,000 in security fees to host Michael Knowles. It backed down only after it was threatened with legal action.

The University of Florida, which cleared its encampments quickly, set the model for its peers. Rather than legitimize an illegal demonstration, the university sent the message that its rules would be enforced.

Lauren Coffey:

Amid the swirl of concern about generative artificial intelligence in the classroom, a Nevada university is trying a different tactic by having students compete against ChatGPT in writing assignments.

Students in two courses at the University of Nevada, Reno, are going head-to-head with ChatGPT by answering the same prompts as the AI and aiming to get a higher grade.

“ChatGPT comes out and everyone is using it, talking about it, whether or not we’d like them to,” said Leping Liu, professor of information technology and statistics at the University of Nevada at Reno. “We have to deal with it, so we [wanted to] find a way to augment our teaching and learning and not just focus on cheating [concerns].”

Glenn Reynolds:

Over the past 50+ years, traditional ideas, like Butker’s, about marriage, child-rearing, and gender roles have been marginalized, in favor of those the put much less emphasis on, well, marriage, child-rearing, and traditional views about gender roles. 

And now we’re facing a global baby bust, or as some are calling it, a “demographic winter” due to plunging birth rates worldwide.  “Fertility rates have fallen way below replacement level throughout the entire industrialized world, and this is starting to cause major problems all over the globe.  Aging populations are counting on younger generations to take care of them as they get older, but younger generations are not nearly large enough to accomplish that task.  Meanwhile, there aren’t enough qualified young workers in many fields to replace the expertise of older workers that are now retiring.  Sadly, this is just the beginning.”

Back in the 1960s we started to worry about a “population explosion,” and Paul Ehrlich’s highly influential bestseller, “The Population Bomb,” set the tone:  Fewer people being born was better.  All sorts of policies were driven by this concern, on topics ranging from sex, birth-control, and abortion, to the desirability of smaller, two-earner families, all the way to China’s disastrous one-child policy.

But it turns out that Ehrlich was criminally wrong, and now the chickens are coming home to roost, as we face what Brink Lindsey calls a global fertility collapse.

Countries all over the world are trying, with limited success at best, to boost birth rates.   Subsidies are nice, but the costs of raising children – in terms of not just money, but time and emotional effort – are too high for almost any imaginable subsidy to overcome.

——

Harrison Butker:

I say all of this not from a place of anger, as we get the leaders we deserve. But this does make me reflect on staying in my lane and focusing on my own vocation and how I can be a better father and husband and live in the world but not be of it. Focusing on my vocation while praying and fasting for these men will do more for the Church than me complaining about her leaders.

Because there seems to be so much confusion coming from our leaders, there needs to be concrete examples for people to look to in places like Benedictine, a little Kansas college built high on a bluff above the Missouri River, are showing the world how an ordered, Christ-centered existence is the recipe for success. You need to look no further than the examples all around this campus, where over the past 20 years, enrollment has doubled, construction and revitalization are a constant part of life, and people, the students, the faculty and staff, are thriving. This didn’t happen by chance. In a deliberate movement to embrace traditional Catholic values, Benedictine has gone from just another liberal arts school with nothing to set it apart to a thriving beacon of light and a reminder to us all that when you embrace tradition, success — worldly and spiritual — will follow.

Noah Diekemper:

A recent case before the Wisconsin Supreme Court threatened to replace the state’s legislative maps with new maps drawn by partisans and picked by the court. The case was ultimately mooted, but the bad social science advanced by the experts retained by the court deserves comment.

As background, the court had previously determined that existing maps conflicted with the Wisconsin Constitution’s requirement that legislative districts “consist of contiguous territory” (Art. IV § 4) and ordered new maps drawn—not merely rectified to address that complaint, but drawn from scratch. To do so, they invited map submissions from the different parties involved, including the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a 501(c)3 public interest law firm (and the author’s employer). Furthermore, the court retained two social scientists who have published together on redistricting in the past, Bernard Grofman and Jonathan Cervas, and asked them to analyze the submissions.

Crucially, the court noted that by virtue of their role in the judiciary, “this court must remain politically neutral.” Therefore, they reasoned, in addition to ensuring that new maps would comply with the constitution’s requirements, they could not “enact maps that privilege one political party over another.” This was the pretext that allowed the court’s experts to argue for a partisan gerrymander.

The experts start off their report by reviewing all of the offered maps. Here, they not only acknowledge that the assembly and state senate maps championed in court by WILL comply with “traditional good government criteria,” but their tabulations show that WILL’s maps contain the fewest splits of county and municipality borders of any of the maps—this being an explicit requirement of the Wisconsin Constitution.

Much more on Henry Tyson, here.

I invited a number of Madison people to this event, including Zach Brandon, Satya Rhodes-Conway, Joe Gothard along with The Simpson Street Free Press, Capital Times and Wisconsin State Journal.

Quinton Klabon:

Alan Borsuk:

Wisconsin’s kids need help learning to read, so let’s see more cooperation and an end to power maneuvers and partisanship.

Enough. Enough.  

I’m fed up with partisanship, polarization and power maneuvers in the state Capitol that put adults and politics first and kids last. 

There have been many episodes of this unfortunate soap opera over the years. And now we have one of the most aggravating because it involves something that has both urgency and broad agreement, yet is at a standstill.   

Wisconsin has a reading crisis. Milwaukee and some other areas where poverty is high especially have a reading crisis, but the problem goes beyond income, race and where a child lives. There are just too few children who are becoming capable readers by the end of third grade, which a wide range of educators would tell you is an important point in determining whether a kid is on the road to doing well in school and, in many cases, in life beyond school.  

In state standardized tests a year ago (the most recent results available), 37% of all third-graders in Wisconsin were rated as proficient or better in English language arts, which generally means they’re reading well. Another 36% were rated as “basic,” which I interpret as “kind of OK.” And 25% were rated as “below basic,” which I rephrase as “not really on the playing field.” Overall, that means about 60% of the kids are rated below proficient — or, to put it more gently, a quarter are not doing well at all. That is a lot of kids.  

Education and the Administrative State

CJ Safir:

The “why can’t we all get along?” narrative doesn’t apply here.

➡️DPI worked WITH legislators to craft literacy legislation copying the best states.

➡️Now, as my team has shown, DPI has tried to override the law every step of the way.

J-S

In 1964, 10 years after Brown v. Board of Education, a coalition set up a one-day boycott of Milwaukee Public Schools to protest school segregation.

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Legislation and Reading: the Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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Literacy momentum stalls in Wisconsin (DPI): Why would Wisconsin’s state leaders promote the use of curriculum that meets “minimal level” criteria, instead of elevating the highest-quality

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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?

George Leef:

[Editor’s note: On April 17, the Biden administration unveiled its latest plan to transfer outstanding student-loan debt to American taxpayers. The essay that follows is a slightly expanded version of the Martin Center’s “comment” on the plan, submitted to the Department of Education during its public-comment period.]

The Martin Center opposes the Biden administration’s new loan-forgiveness rules for two basic reasons: They are outside of the Department of Education’s authority, and they will have adverse consequences.

Legal Authority

Economists often refer to special-interest legislation—bills passed to favor some politically influential group with benefits extracted from society in general. The nation’s Founders were well aware of that prospect and sought to prevent it in their writing of the Constitution. In Federalist 10, James Madison wrote about the evils that arise when “factions” can use governmental power to enrich themselves at the expense of others. The Constitution’s limitations on and division of federal authority were adopted to head off that problem.

The proposed loan-forgiveness “rules” clearly amount to the making of new law by unelected bureaucrats.In the Department’s proposed student-loan regulations, we have something even worse than special interest legislation, namely special interest regulation. We say this is worse because, with legislation, it is at least possible to vote out of office those who passed the odious bill and replace them with representatives more committed to the general welfare. With regulations decreed by unelected bureaucrats, that possibility does not exist.

The Founders sought to minimize the chances for special-interest legislation by drawing a line between the legislative and executive branches. Only the former was authorized to make laws, and then only within strictly defined boundaries. The executive branch was given the authority to enforce duly enacted laws. The proposed rules, however, clearly amount to the making of new law. Even if it were within the purview of Congress to pass a law relieving certain individuals of their obligation to repay debts owed to the government, it is not permissible for an agency of the executive branch to do so. (We say “even if” because the Constitution confers no authority on any branch of the federal government to lend money. While Article II covers the power to spend in detail, the Constitution is silent as to any power to lend. Had the Founders wanted to include such power, they would have said so and set forth rules for it. They did not.)

Victor Davis Hanson:

So how does Biden become renominated and reelected, as polls show he is behind in almost every critical swing state on nearly every issue?

Answer: not by campaigning, not by championing his record, and especially not by doubling down on his neo-socialist and now unpopular agendas.

Instead, his campaign is focused on four other strategies to beat Donald Trump.

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For elite college students and graduates, there are now billions of dollars in student-loan cancellations, despite a Supreme Court ruling declaring such targeted contractual amnesties illegal.

UPI:

Babies born by C-section are unlikely to receive protection from a single dose of measles vaccine, a new study finds.

A single measles jab is up to 2.6 times more likely to be completely ineffective in C-section babies, compared to those born vaginally. Their immune systems fail to produce antibodies to fight against measles infection.

However, a second follow-up jab does induce robust immunity against measles, researchers report Monday in the journal Nature Microbiology.

Amy Schwabe:

Katie Berg is the statewide coordinator for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s Supporting Neurodiverse Students Professional Learning System.

“When I first started in the field of special education, we looked at compliance as key, and we were driven by trying to fit kids into the mold of a typical student,” she said. “Now we’ve switched to working to recognize, understand and honor everyone’s differences.

“Our mindset now is that kids aren’t broken. They don’t need to be fixed. We need to accommodate and support them as best as possible.”

Heather Mac Donald:

Jus­tice So­nia So­tomayor had harsh words for her col­leagues who voted last month to bar the use of race in col­lege ad­mis­sions. She al­leged in her dis­sent­ing opin­ion that the six-jus­tice ma­jor­ity in Stu­dents for Fair Ad­mis­sions v. Har­vard had sub­verted the Con­sti­tu-tion’s guar­an­tee of equal pro­tec­tion un­der the law, not up­held it, by “fur­ther en­trench-ing racial in­equal­ity in ed­u­ca-tion.” Chief Jus­tice John Roberts’s ma­jor­ity opin­ion slammed shut the door of op­por­tu­nity to un­der­rep­re-sented mi­nori­ties, es­pe­cially black stu­dents, who still fight against a so­ci­ety that is “in­her­. un­equal,” she wrote.

Many in acad­e­mia agreed with Jus­tice So­tomayor. In­com­ing Har­vard pres­i­dent Clau­dine Gay warned in a video state­ment that the de­ci­sion “means the real pos­si­bil­ity that op­por­tu­ni­ties will be fore-closed.” David A. Thomas, pres­i­dent of his­tor­i­cally black More­house Col­lege, as­serted that in the ab­sence of racial pref­er­ences, black stu­dents will rightly con­clude that they are “not wanted.” Stu­dents “of color” may not feel that they “mat­ter,” ac­cord­ing to An­gel B. Pérez, chief ex­ec­u­tive of the Na­tional As­so­ci­a­tion for Col­lege Ad­mis­sion Coun­sel­ing.

The charge that col­or­blind ad­mis­sions will fore­close ed­u­ca­tional op­por­tu­ni­ties for blacks rests on a breath­tak-ingly elit­ist view of ed­u­ca­tion. And the idea that mi­nor­ity stu­dents should now con­clude that they aren’t “wanted” on col­lege cam­puses de­fies re­al­ity. Black stu­dents will at­tend col­lege in the same num­bers af­ter af­fir­ma­tive ac­tion as they did be­fore, if they so choose. Col­leges will be as ea­ger to have them. The only dif­fer­ence, as­sum­ing com­pli­ance with the rul­ing (a big if), is that such stu­dents will at­tend col­lege on the same foot­ing as most stu­dents from un­pre­ferred racial groups: ad­mit­ted to schools for which their aca­d­e-mic skills qual­ify them.

Stewart Baker:

More than two-thirds of Americans think the Supreme Court was right to hold Harvard’s race-based admissions policy unlawful. But the minority who disagree have no doubt about their own moral authority, and there’s every reason to believe that they intend to undo the Court’s decision at the earliest opportunity.

Which could be as soon as this year. In fact, undoing the Harvard admissions decision is the least of it. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have embraced a precooked “privacy” bill that will impose race and gender quotas not just on academic admissions but on practically every private and public decision that matters to ordinary Americans. The provision could be adopted without scrutiny in a matter of weeks; that’s because it is packaged as part of a bipartisan bill setting federal privacy standards—something that has been out of reach in Washington for decades. And it looks as though the bill breaks the deadlock by giving Republicans some of the federal preemption their business allies want while it gives Democrats and left-wing advocacy groups a provision that will quietly overrule the Supreme Court’s Harvard decision and impose identity-based quotas on a wide swath of American life.

Jeremy Scahill:

Famed historian Ilan Pappe says he was detained Monday at Detroit airport, questioned by federal agents and had his phone copied. “am I a Hamas supporter? do I regard the Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide? what is the solution to the “conflict” (seriously this what they asked!)”

Philip Greenspun:

I’ve been talking to Canadian and American friends after this latest round of college admissions and they have one message in common: Don’t let kids take honors and AP classes in high school. College admissions these days are mostly about GPA, which means that a B in AP physics is toxic compared to an A in basket-weaving. It’s also important to send kids to a high school where grading is relatively easy. From a Maskachusetts friend:

I found out that even though you need just 60% to score a 5/5 on AP Physics C, our [rich suburb public] school still applies the scale where 92+ is an A. So [my son] is scoring 80+ on the tests consistently and will end up with a B+ or even a B- and obviously will get a 5. I asked around and most schools apply the 60+ = A scale to APs. People in 3 private schools said that 70+ on AP Calc BC in their school is an A.

I’m not sure how this would work in Florida where high school kids are entitled to take college courses in actual colleges (for free and the state also pays for their textbooks). Does the college class grade end up being rolled into their high school GPA? This FAQsuggests that dual enrollment grades are weighted into a GPA the same as an AP course grade.

Sun Times:

There’s a lot to unpack in a just-released Public Agenda poll on Chicago Public Schools, but the most troubling finding — the takeaway that should be uppermost in the minds of adults — is that most Chicagoans give CPS low marks on its most vital assignment: Teaching kids.

Asked to select their top three from among a list of problems affecting the district, most respondents, including parents, put “students not learning enough academically” at the top of the list. When asked to grade the district, 54% gave CPS a “C.” The next most common grade was “D.” Parents were only slightly more likely than Chicagoans overall to give the district a “B.”

Chalk some of this up to the lingering bad reputation CPS has struggled with for decades, despite progress the district has made in recent years, as WBEZ’s Sarah Karp reports in her story on the poll. Graduation rates have increased, achievement is accelerating at a faster clip here than in other big cities, and CPS deserves kudos for emphasizing intensive “high dosage” tutoring to help students recover from pandemic learning loss.

Charles Murray:

Cancelling a panel on the ideological subversion of biology for ideological reasons should be hilarious. And at the center of all this is intellectuals’ support for Hamas, whose members hate everything that makes intellectual life possible. A bizarro world.

Virginia Annable

In 2022, a grandmother in Catawba County, North Carolina, asked the county’s school board to remove 24 books from the district’s libraries. Her request was part of a wave of book challenges across the country.

Michelle Teague said she wanted the books removed for explicit content to which she felt children should not be exposed. Four months after instigating the book challenges and an ensuing debate, Teague filed for election to the Catawba County School Board. By the end of the year, she was sitting on the board that would vote on whether the school should ban the very books she challenged — or change the process by which those books were reviewed.

In 2022, concerned community member Michelle Teague asked that the Catawba County School Board remove 24 books from the district’s libraries. She said these books contained explicit content that children should not be exposed to. Now these books as well as many more are being challenged in libraries across the country.

She is one example of book banning advocates seeking seats of power on North Carolina school boards as the fever pitch for banning books grows nationwide, a Lee Enterprises Public Service Journalism Team investigation shows.

Freddie DeBoer:

In 1963, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act. Its order to close the state psychiatric hospitals was followed, and hundreds were shuttered; the community mental health centers that were meant to replace them were never built. With far fewer beds for a growing patient population it should not have surprised anyone that the streets gradually filled with the severely ill. But somehow, we were surprised. The state governments were mostly just grateful to save money that had once gone to mental healthcare. The passage of Medicaid two years later deepened the problem. Medicaid’s funding structure presented states with an opportunity to further offload costs, this time onto the federal government. Unfortunately, the private institutions that filled with Medicaid patients were no better than the state facilities that had been closed; often they were worse. And maintaining access to Medicaid funding for such care, in practice, was more complicated and less certain than staying in a state institution. In 1975, the Supreme Court’s O’Connor v. Donaldson decision established a national standard that the mentally ill could only be involuntarily treated if they represented an immediate threat to themselves or others. This completely removed actual medical necessity from the equation, and the standard directly incentivized hospitals to discharge very ill patients, many of whom leave these useless emergency room visits and immediately abuse drugs, self-harm, commit crimes, attack others, or commit suicide. In 1990 the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act further empowered treatment-resistant patients and created legal incentives that led hospitals to release severely ill people rather than face the burden of litigation. Various state reforms in recent decades have almost uniformly pushed the severely ill out of treatment rather than into it, under the banner of “autonomy.” For sixty years we’ve done everything in our power to make it harder to treat people who badly need care. And here we are.

By Mandy McLaren

Most Massachusetts parents think the Bay State should require scientifically-based reading instruction in schools, according to a new statewide poll of roughly 1,500 parents released Monday.

The poll, conducted by the MassINC Polling Group between April 8 and May 2, found a combined 84 percent of parents believe schools definitely or probably should be required to use “evidence-based” reading curriculum, or teaching materials supported by a vast amount of scientific research. That research, often referred to as the “science of reading,” shows most students will need explicit instruction in phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension, to become successful readers.

The results come as a bill to require evidence-based reading instruction sits idle in the Massachusetts Legislature, even as a growing number of states have passed similar laws. Currently, curriculum decisions in Massachusetts schools are left to local districts. A 2023 Globe investigation found nearly half of all districts in the state were using a curriculum the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education considers low quality for promoting discredited teaching practices.

Sarah Karp:

Frustrated with the lack of programs at the public school down her block, Candace Lampkin could be a prime candidate for sending her children to a magnet or charter school. Instead, the Chicago mom questions why there are so many options and wishes all the resources could be funneled into her neighborhood school.

“When you let people choose, it has been proven that they will go to select schools that will get all this funding and all the rest because it is supposed to be this new, hip school,” the South Side mom said. “But what happens to the quality of the education of the children at the other facilities? Don’t all of the schools deserve the same thing?”

www

The world’s first linear algebra book with fully interactive figures.

Quinton Klabon:

When you say some stuff that’s too nerdy for print, that is the quotation! I asked how personnel costs went up so much, even after inflation, if they cut many jobs.

Aaron Sibarium

In June 2021, a year into the cultural aftershocks of George Floyd’s death, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set out to meet the moment, as so many other schools had, by hiring more diversity officers.

MIT welcomed six new deans of diversity, equity, and inclusion, one for each of the institute’s main schools, as part of a “DEI Strategic Action Plan” launched the previous year. Aimed at boosting the representation of women and minorities, in part by developing DEI criteria for staff performance reviews, the plan pledged to “make equity central” to the university “while ensuring the highest standards of excellence.”

But according to a 71-page complaint filed with the university on Saturday, at least two of the six DEI officials may not be living up to those standards. The complaint alleges that Tracie Jones-Barrett and Alana Anderson are serial plagiarists, copying entire pages of text without attribution and riding roughshod over MIT’s academic integrity policies.

Nidhi Subbaraman

Fake studies have flooded the publishers of top scientific journals, leading to thousands of retractions and millions of dollars in lost revenue. The biggest hit has come to Wiley, a 217-year-old publisher based in Hoboken, N.J., which Tuesday will announce that it is closing 19 journals, some of which were infected by large-scale research fraud. 

In the past two years, Wiley has retracted more than 11,300 papers that appeared compromised, according to a spokesperson, and closed four journals. It isn’t alone: At least two other publishers have retracted hundreds of suspect papers each. Several others have pulled smaller clusters of bad papers.

Tyler Cowen:

In other words, there were strict bans and they had only modest effects, including relative to the less strict bans.  On p.34, Figure 2, you will see that 200 schools had strict bans, somewhat less than half the total (not every case is easy to classify).  Note also that if smart phone bans could help with mental health problems in a big way, we still should see a change in mental health diagnoses, following the bans, yet we do not.

Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:

During a recent town hall, former United Nations Ambassador and current Presidential candidate Nikki Haley claimed, “for the first time we’re paying more in interest payments than we are on our defense budget.”

This statement is true. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest baseline, in Fiscal Year (FY) 2024, spending on interest is projected to total $870 billion, while spending on national defense will total $822 billion. This has never been the case before, going back to at least 1940.US Budget Watch 2024 is a project of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget designed to educate the public on the fiscal impact of presidential candidates’ proposals and platforms. Through the election, we will issue policy explainers, fact checks, budget scores, and other analyses. We do not support or oppose any candidate for public office.

Linda Jacobson:

In interviews with The 74, EdReports officials say they’ve gotten the message.

Starting in June, its reviews of early reading materials will reflect a fuller embrace of the science of reading. “Phonics and fluency are now non-negotiables” for a green rating, said Janna Chan, EdReports’ chief external affairs officer.  

Reviewers will also verify that materials no longer use “three-cueing” — a practice associated with balanced literacy that encourages students to identify unfamiliar words by picking up clues from text or pictures. Since 2021, at least 10 states have banned the practice.

An internal memo sent to EdReports staff in February and obtained by The 74 acknowledged growing doubts about the organization’s credibility as states pass new reading laws. CEO Eric Hirsch wrote that the organization is “most vulnerable to criticism around our reviews” of comprehensive English language arts programs called basals or “big box” curricula — programs that some have attacked for being “bloated” and giving lip service to the science of reading. Hirsch wrote the memo in response to a Forbes article that critiqued the organization and highlighted newer groups providing alternatives to its reviews.

Quinn Clark and Natalie Eilbert

The details — an eighth-grade boy, his death, a pellet gun, a small tight-knit community — reveal a complex, tangled web that complicates any theory into why the tragic incident happened in the first place. The events have also left many with tricky questions over what exactly transpired, the boy’s intentions and whether his death could have been prevented.

“We are in this time where we often see cops shooting people in unjustified ways, which is definitely a big social problem right now,” said Travis Wright, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But this wasn’t a cop doing a cold call warrant on an adult who was caught off guard. This was somebody in a defensive act protecting children.”

Dell Cameron:

Last month, US president Joe Biden signed a surveillance bill enhancing the National Security Agency’s power to compel US businesses to wiretap communications going in and out of the country. The changes to the law have left legal experts largely in the dark as to the true limits of this new authority, chiefly when it comes to the types of companies that could be affected. The American Civil Liberties Union and organizations like it say the bill has rendered the statutory language governing the limits of a powerful wiretap tool overly vague, potentially subjecting large swaths of corporate America to warrantless and secretive surveillance practices.

In April, Congress rushed to extend the US intelligence system’s “crown jewel,” Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The spy program allows the NSA to wiretap calls and messages between Americans and foreigners abroad—so long as the foreigner is the individual being “targeted” and the intercept serves a significant “foreign intelligence” purpose. Since 2008, the program has been limited to a subset of businesses that the law calls “electronic communications service providers,” or ECSPs—corporations such as Microsoft and Google, which provide email services, and phone companies like Sprint and AT&T.null

WMC:

Wisconsin has some of the highest hospital costs in the country according to a new report from RAND, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization. The new data, which was released on Monday, explains that hospitals in the Badger State charge 318 percent of Medicare rates – a typical baseline for measuring health care prices. The national average is 254 percent.

Notably, Wisconsin also has the highest hospital costs in the Midwest.

Glenn Reynolds:

Samuelsen described the mob as “smarmy, sort of entitled, spoiled, bratty occupiers,” who treated the blue-collar workers with contempt and tried to keep them from going home to their families. 

Said Samuelsen, “Columbia showed an epic disregard and epically failed to protect the workforce.”

The union may be planning to sue the protesters, too, as it is working to gather security camera footage and the names of students arrested during the campus riots. 

 And that may be just the beginning.

George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf, who pioneered the class action litigation against tobacco companies, predicts that there will be more lawsuits against the protesters and their backers. 

Madeleine Rowley

While the border crisis has become a major liability for President Biden, threateninghis reelection chances, it’s become a huge boon to a group of nonprofits getting rich off government contracts.

Although the federally funded Unaccompanied Children Program is responsible for resettling unaccompanied migrant minors who enter the U.S., it delegates much of the task to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that run shelters in the border states of Texas, Arizona, and California.

And with the recent massive influx of unaccompanied children—a record 130,000in 2022, the last year for which there are official stats—the coffers of these NGOs are swelling, along with the salaries of their CEOs.

Sara Randazzo and Matt Barnum:

Solis’s closure is an omen of what could be coming to more schools in Los Angeles and cities across the country. And it reflects a difficult-to-sustain dynamic: too many schools for too few students.

As birthrates have dipped, families have moved elsewhere, and public school alternatives have grown, many urban districts have hemorrhaged students. That has left officials with the difficult choice of keeping open shrinking schools with resources spread thin or shutting them down, a move that inevitably garners fierce community backlash. How school leaders navigate this challenge could define urban school systems for the next several years.

Schools in Los Angeles are shrinking

Many LAUSD schools have fewer students enrolled since 2010

Choose life.

Ramon Marull:

The Berlin Conference (1884 – 1885) recognised the sovereignty of King Leopold II of Belgium over the Free State of the Congo. The king governed the territory until 1908, when it passed into the hands of the Belgian state.

Leopold II ruled the Congo as his personal dominion from 1885 to 1908. During this period, the country was forced to endure the systematic exploitation of its natural resources, especially ivory and rubber.

Though the territory was governed from Brussels, the administrative capital was the port city of Boma, from where the massive exports of raw materials were shipped. Boma was the residence of the Governor General of the Congo, who was the direct representative of the king (in fact, Leopold II never once set foot in Africa). The state was divided into 14 districts which were administrated by commissioners who reported to the Governor General, and were appointed directly by the king. These functionaries sometimes acted as colonial administrators and trading agents, though their main function was to secure the largest possible amounts of ivory and rubber in the shortest possible time.

The colonial administration wielded control over the native population by imposing a regime of terror, and there were frequent mass killings and mutilations. Violence and terrorism were the means adopted to impose the will of the Belgian king and the trading agents over the African people.

According to historical documentation, between five and 10 million people died as a result of the colonial exploitation under the rule and administration of King Leopold II and his functionaries.

Corrinne Hess:

An Evers spokesperson said last month Evers was within his right to line-item veto the appropriations bill. 

But on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said the governor was using literacy funding “as a pawn in his effort to strengthen his veto power rather than doing the right thing for Wisconsin families.

When asked if withholding the money from DPI would affect implementation of the literacy bill, LeMahieu said if Evers acted legally, this would not be a discussion. 

“Any delay in the implementation of the bipartisan literacy changes will fall squarely at the feet of the Governor,” LeMahieu said.

——-

Mind the Governance Mulligans + low expectations on Wisconsin Reading Curricula

Kate Morton:

NEWS: Universities of Wisconsin President @JayORothman says he is “disappointed” in UW-Milwaukee’s agreement with student protesters related to a pro-Palestinian encampment: “I am continuing to assess the decision-making process that led to this result.”

Paul Caron:

Professor Joshua Mitts (Columbia Law School) argues that Columbia university violated the civil rights of Jewish and Israeli students by fostering and tolerating a hostile educational environment on campus.  Mitts writes:

Since October 7, Jewish students at Columbia have been subject to appalling episodes of antisemitism both on campus and just outside the campus gates, which intensified with the establishment of the encampment.  As documented in an open letter signed by hundreds of faculty and thousands of community members, these included chants like “Go back to Europe” and “You have no culture” and the display of signs like “Al Qassam Brigade’s next target” with an arrow pointing to Jewish students.  The list is too long to write in its entirety but there are ample video compilations and documented evidence online.

If that is not hostile-environment harassment, I am not sure what is.  If the KKK were to set up an encampment and chant that Black students should “go back to Africa,” it seems unlikely that one would “fiercely contest” whether this was “public-spirited advocacy.”  Why is the conclusion any different when one substitutes “Europe” for “Africa” and “Jewish” for “Black”?  Surely the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no excuse—certainly no more of an excuse than the Rwandan genocide or Darfur would be. 

As Columbia’s task force on antisemitism noted in its first report, “speech or conduct that would constitute harassment if directed against one protected class must also be treated as harassment if directed against another protected class.”  … [T]he university should be consistent in applying that standard to Jewish and Israeli affiliates as well.  In its most recent May 7 letter, the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Education (OCR) issued guidance reaffirming the importance of “different treatment analysis. …

Kalyn Beisha:

To unearth the forgotten history of the Kansas women who served as plaintiffs in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, Donna Rae Pearson had to dig.

Without published scholarship to go on, Pearson and two other researchers hunted down the women’s obituaries, cross-referenced their details against Census records and city directories, and pored over newspaper clippings, oral histories, and court transcripts.

It was no easy feat: Some women’s names had changed, and some had moved as far away as Oregon.

The result of their work is “The Women of Brown,” which recognizes the lives and contributions of the 12 Black mothers who signed their names, alongside Oliver Brown, to the lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court.

A.J. Bayatpour

While the DPI supports a broader list of programs, joint finance Republicans want to limit the money to a shorter list of four programs recommended by the state’s early literacy council.

——

Literacy momentum stalls in Wisconsin (DPI): Why would Wisconsin’s state leaders promote the use of curriculum that meets “minimal level” criteria, instead of elevating the highest-quality

——-

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?

Chad Aldeman:

And two, when school districts are given more money, and even sometimes when that funding increase is specifically sold as a raise for teachers, the money still doesn’t end up in the pockets of individual teachers. Instead, schools have hired a lot more staff and state leaders have allowed pension costs to eat into the money available for base salaries. 

Individual districts could try to buck these trends, but that’s not a systemic solution, so many policymakers have turned to… 

Abbey Machtig:

Madison developed the community schools program in 2015 and Kennedy will be the eighth school with that designation. 

Starting next school year, Kennedy will be granted a community school resource coordinator and a family liaison who will work full-time from the school.

Kennedy also is adding several other new staff members, including another school social worker, a behavior specialist and a handful of new classroom teachers to help decrease class sizes.

“The idea is that all children and families benefit from the community school model by being able to access resources, opportunities and support to advance their learning and healthy development,” Community School Manager Sarita Foster said. “So, community schools address barriers that limit opportunities for students and families.”

But parents and teachers who have been advocating for more help and have witnessed Kennedy’s struggles for years, say the district’s support hasn’t come fast enough. 

——

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?

By Maria Godoy

If you’re a parent struggling to get your kids’ off their devices and outdoors to play, here’s another reason to keep trying: Spending at least two hours outside each day is one of the most important things your kids can do to protect their eyesight.

“We think that outdoor time is the best form of prevention for nearsightedness,” says Dr. Noha Ekdawi, a pediatric ophthalmologist in Wheaton, Ill. 

And that’s important, because the number of kids with nearsightedness – or myopia – has been growing rapidly in the U.S., and in many other parts of the world. 

In the U.S., 42% of people are now myopic – up from 25% back in the 1970s. In some East Asian countries, as many as 90% of people are myopic by the time they’re young adults.

It’s a trend Ekdawi has seen among her own young patients. When she started practicing 15 years ago, one or two of the children she saw had myopia. But these days, “about 50% of my patients have myopia, which is an incredibly high number.” Ekdawi calls the increase astronomical.

MD Kittle:

According to the law, for any postcard that is returned undelivered, or if the clerk is informed the voter resides at a different address than the one provided on election day, the election official must change the status of the voter “from eligible to ineligible on the registration list.” Then the official must mail the voter a notice of the change, “and provide the name of the elector to the district attorney for the county where the polling place is located and the elections commission.” 

Steven Calabresi:

Judge Cannon has asked for oral argument on June 21, 2024 on former President Donald Trump’s motion to dismiss Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment on the ground that Smith was unconstitutionally appointed to his current job because he is not an inferior officer. Washington, D.C. super-lawyer, Gene Schaerr, has filed an amicus brief in United States v. Trump on behalf of former Attorney Generals Edwin Meese III and Michael B. Mukasey, as well as me and Professor Gary Lawson, arguing that Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed to be an inferior officer, and Judge Cannon has asked Gene Schaerr to participate in the oral argument, which he has agreed to do.

The Appointment Clause of Article II, Section 2 provides that: “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.” Jack Smith claims to be an inferior officer of the United States appointed by the Head of the Justice Department, but he is instead a mere employee.

We argue in our amicus brief that Congress has never by law vested in the Attorney General as the Head of a Department the power to appoint inferior officerseven though Congress has explicitly vested that power in the Heads of the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Transportation, and Agriculture. The only power, which Congress has given to the Attorney General is the power to make a sitting U.S. Attorney a Special Counsel with jurisdiction to prosecute cases nationwide and outside his or her home district. Thus, the Delaware U.S. Attorney, David C. Weiss, currently has nationwide jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute Hunter Biden as a Special Counsel, and this appointment is completely constitutional. Similarly, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, Patrick Fitzgerald, was quite legitimately given nationwide jurisdiction to prosecute former Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby, in Washington, D.C. Fitzgerald got Libby convicted and sentenced to time in jail.

Bobby Harrison:

House and Senate members often adjourn a legislative day in memory of a constituent or other well known person who recently died.

On the day the Mississippi House took its final vote to adopt a new school funding formula, Rep. Karl Oliver, R-Winona, asked “to adjourn in memory of the Mississippi Adequate Education plan…the failed plan.”

Oliver continued: “It has always failed and never met its expectations. Today we laid it to rest.”

House Speaker Jason White, R-West, gleefully responded that all House members might want to sign onto Oliver’s adjourn in memory motion.

Of course, the Senate went on to pass the bill rewriting the Adequate Education Program and Gov. Tate Reeves, a long-time opponent of MAEP, signed the legislation into law this week, no doubt stirring much celebration for folks like Oliver and White.

Beth McMurtrie:

Theresa MacPhail is a pragmatist. In her 15 years of teaching, as the number of students who complete their reading assignments has steadily declined, she has adapted. She began assigning fewer readings, then fewer still. Less is more, she reasoned. She would focus on the readings that mattered most and were interesting to them.

For a while, that seemed to work. But then things started to take a turn for the worse. Most students still weren’t doing the reading. And when they were, more and more struggled to understand it. Some simply gave up. Their distraction levels went “through the roof,” MacPhail said. They had trouble following her instructions. And sometimes, students said her expectations — such as writing a final research paper with at least 25 sources — were unreasonable.

——

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?

Corrinne Hess:

Other findings include: 

Family Unity: Percentage of births to unmarried women, women currently married, and children with a single parent. Wisconsin ranks 16th. 

Family interaction: Percentage of children who are read to every day in the past week, children who watched four or more hours of television in the past week, and children who spent four or more hours on an electronic device in the past week. Wisconsin ranks 9th. 

Social Support: Percentage of people who get emotional support sometimes, rarely or never, neighbors who do favors at least once a month, people who trust most or all their neighbors, and the average number of close friends. Wisconsin ranks 3rd. 

Community Health: Percentage of people who attended a meeting which discussed politics in the last year, participated in a demonstration, volunteered for a group, attended a public meeting, worked with neighbors to fix something, served on a committee or as a group officer, and the number of organizations per 1,000 people. Wisconsin ranks 7th. 

Institutional Health: Percentage of people with some or great confidence in corporations to do the right thing, some or great confidence in media, some or great confidence in public schools, the census response rate and voting rate in presidential elections. Wisconsin ranks 2nd.  

——

WILL

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released a new report assessing the impact declining levels of social capital (the collection of interpersonal relationships that unite a heterogeneous society) has on Wisconsin communities. Fraying Connections: Exploring Social Capital and Its Societal Implications is the first of three reports that focuses on social capital and compares how Wisconsin’s communities stack up to other states.  

The Quote: Miranda Spindt, WILL Policy Associate, stated, “Loneliness and mental health issues have radically increased in American society and declining social capital is a root cause. WILL is doing a deep dive into why social capital is so important to advance a pluralistic society, what Wisconsin is doing right, but also what needs to change. It’s critical that we advance this discussion and debate for the betterment of communities in Wisconsin and across America.”  

What is Social Capital? Though the concept of social capital has many definitions, for this work we define it as the collection of interpersonal relationships that unite a heterogeneous society toward shared goals. Having a strong bond with family members serves as a foundation for how we build relationships with others. The relationships that individuals have with their family, friends, communities, and institutions have changed significantly. 

Bill Ackman:

Think about how many stories about subjects you have read without having had access to the transcript.

That’s why I vastly prefer podcasts and other long form interviews, and ideally an in-person meeting, when trying to get a sense of someone.

On a positive note, it is rare that the media release the transcript along with the article. Time should be complimented for doing so here.

Christian Blauvelt

In the current negotiations, the top issue for the AMPTP and IATSE will be the funding of health and pension benefits directly funded by residuals. The Basic Agreement signatory companies expect a $670 million shortfall in health and pension over the next three years due to fewer productions overall and/or more content produced outside the Basic jurisdiction.

The language used in that message, which came after the ADG’s five-and-a-half-hour annual membership meeting, is eerily similar to what would-be PDI trainees received. “While I don’t want to see any members leave our union family, I know more than a few who are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy or losing their home,” ADG leadership wrote to its members at the end of April. “I’ve spoken with several who are questioning whether to pivot to other endeavors. This information might be very useful to them as they contemplate their futures.”

In 2022, there were 24 PDI program participants; in 2023, there were 26. Participants were expected to work 260 consecutive or non-consecutive days that would train them for art department roles. They could be placed to work on features, episodic productions, commercials, reality shows, live events, or theme park initiatives — and were paid and insured as full production assistants.

Laurie Konish:

The trust funds the Social Security Administration relies on to pay benefits are now projected to run out in 2035, one year later than previously projected, according to the annual trustees’ report released Monday.

On the projected depletion date, 83% of benefits will be payable if Congress does not act sooner to prevent that shortfall.

The Social Security trustees credited the slightly improved outlook to more people contributing to the program amid a strong economy, low unemployment and higher job and wage growth. Last year, the trustees projected the program’s funds would last through 2034, when 80% of benefits would be payable.

“This year’s report is a measure of good news for the millions of Americans who depend on Social Security, including the roughly 50% of seniors for whom Social Security is the difference between poverty and living in dignity — any potential benefit reduction event has been pushed off from 2034 to 2035,” Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley said in a statement.

STL:

Birth rates have steadily declined since the Great Recession in 2008, a cohort that will start graduating high school next year. At the same time, tuition and operating costs have skyrocketed. And with rising doubts among Americans about the value of higher education, more campus closures are “inevitable and probably necessary,” McCarter said.

Nationwide, undergraduate enrollment increased slightly this year to 15.3 million but is still down nearly 1 million students from fall 2019, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. And colleges that were already struggling before the pandemic are now running out of federal relief funds.

Fontbonne joins a growing list of private liberal arts colleges that have collapsed under financial pressures in recent years, including Lincoln College and MacMurray College in Illinois.

The Scholarship Foundation of St. Louisreleased a watchlist in March of 37 Midwestern colleges in danger of closing due to “significant financial distress” in the past five years.

——

Choose life. Notes and links on abortion,

Matt Taibbi:

Whispers about familiar villains preparing new versions of the election censorship programs that animated the Twitter Files grew louder last week, when Virginia Senator Mark Warner let slip at a conference that the FBI and DHS have renewed “voluntary” communications with Internet platforms. 

Republicans who objected to the last programs on First Amendment grounds are now rushing to out-censor the censors. Between renewal of FISA surveillance, the depressingly bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, and now a proposed No Fly List for campus protesters, most all of congress apart from a few libertarian holdouts is signed up for the project of turning War on Terror machinery inward. Not exactly the surprise of the century, but still, sheesh:

This week’s big letdown is the No Fly List. Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and Roger “Doc” Marshall of Kansas were both critics of Big Tech censorship and campus speech codes. “Like the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s novel,” Marshall wrote in the wake of the J6 riots, “educational institutions and news outlets have pitched in to stamp out segments of society that dare to disagree with their ideas.” Marshall joined Blackburn, who professed to be horrified by the Twitter Files, in promoting the Campus Free Speech Resolution of 2021. A tick of the clock ago, they explicitly sought to enshrine legal speech and protest on campuses:

Emma Camp:

Is college worth it? Well, it depends on what degree you’re getting and where you’re getting it, according to a new paper from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), an economic opportunity think tank.

While more than three-quarters of all bachelor’s degrees have a positive return on investment (ROI), according to the paper, master’s and associate degrees are much riskier bets—with many costing students in the long run.

The paper, by Senior Fellow Preston Cooper, examined data from over 50,000 degree and certificate programs at thousands of American colleges and universities. Cooper’s analysis looked at how much students were earning immediately after graduation, as well as how much they were making 10 years later. The paper also took into account a student’s chance of dropping out when calculating a degree program’s ROI.

In all, Cooper found that 31 percent of students are enrolled in a program with a negative ROI—meaning that “the earnings benefits of the degree are unlikely to fully compensate students for the cost and risk of pursuing post-secondary education.”

Donna Beckett:

I have lived in my Madison house since 1987 and paid off the mortgage in 2021. Last year I made several changes in my 2,000-square-foot ranch house to accommodate aging in place, which included electrical and plumbing upgrades to meet code changes since 1987.

These “adaptive living” accommodations cost about $35,000, but were seen by the city assessor’s office as “improvements,” adding $65,000 to my property assessment. My property taxes have been going up by the hundreds for the past several years.

I write to make the Madison area aware of what the recent hikes in property assessments, and subsequent increases in homeowner’s insurance, will do to many of its older residents who live on a modest or fixed income. We are being taxed out of our homes.

Perhaps assessments could include the age or income of the occupant? I remind you what our senior citizens add to the quality of life of our families and communities.

——-

Madison K-12 Tax & Spending increase data over the decades.

Micaiah Bilger:

“Columbia should have never put the custodians or the security officer in that position and that is at the heart of the matter,” Samuelsen said. “Columbia showed an epic disregard and epically failed to protect the workforce.”

Police arrested more than 100 protesters after they took over Hamilton Hall, smashing windows, breaking through doors, and barricading themselves inside, while others refused to leave the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on a nearby lawn, the Columbia Spectator reported.

Samuelsen said a few protesters “tried to hold our workers in the building” during the occupation.

“The entire TWU workforce in the building was fearful and rightfully so,” he told Fox News. “They stormed in … but two of the custodians had to fight their way out. They were explicitly told ‘You’re staying here, you’re not going anywhere, this cause is bigger than you.’”

Samuelsen described the protesters as “smarmy, sort of entitled, spoiled, bratty occupiers” who tried to keep blue-collar workers from going home to their families.

Maddie Hanna

We have seen success in the classroom with what teachers are using,” Ashwina Mosakowski, the district’s director of elementary teaching, learning, and innovation, told the school board in January, explaining why the district continues to use Units of Study — a reading program that experts say is deeply flawed.

‘A disservice to all students’

At a school board meeting in April, Mosakowski told the board, “We have adopted the science of reading.”

The reading curriculum has been a recurring topic of debate at school board meetings this year. Mosakowski has acknowledged gaps in the Units of Study program, noting that Wallingford-Swarthmore teachers have made “so many modifications” since it was adopted 10 years ago. She told the board in January the district recognized that more changes were needed, and has since piloted a number of programs to add instruction in word study to the curriculum.

But parents such as Mead say the district is clinging to elements of an outdated approach.

“I’m just kind of outraged by the injustice of it,” said Mead, who has two children in elementary school in Wallingford-Swarthmore. In an affluent district such as hers, many families can afford to hire tutors, masking how many kids might be struggling. But those who can’t fall further behind — “that opportunity gap,” she said.

Harriet Agnew:

Griffin, who founded the $63bn US hedge fund Citadel and has given more than $500mn to his alma mater, told the Financial Times that the US had “lost sight of education as the means of pursuing truth and acquiring knowledge” over the past decade.

“The narrative on some of our college campuses has devolved to the level that the system is rigged and unfair, and that America is plagued by systemic racism and systemic injustice,” he said in an interview.

Universities including Harvard, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been consumed by sometimes violent protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that have pitted wealthy donors against student activists.

Patrick Mcilheran

Fortunately, they were in the minority. The Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted 6-4 to instruct the state auditor to find out what has come of Gov. Tony Evers’ 2019 order to make “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, a central feature of agencies’ plans and to corral every state employee into “mandatory equity and inclusion training.”

This means the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau will — I’m paraphrasing — find out what agencies did to obey the governor, how much they spent doing it, and what has resulted.

Who could be afraid of that?

Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee), for one: As the committee prepared to vote on Tuesday, he could hold his tongue no more. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” he said before saying he was a history major, that asking whether the governor’s orders were effective would “hurt veterans,” and that he saw the audit  “as nothing more than trying to drag up a boogeyman to try and get people to think a specific way.”

What way would that be? Carpenter cited the earlier remarks by the committee’s co-chairman, Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Green Bay), saying, “I thought it was kind of far right-wing, and that kind of tells us the intention of the audit.”

Dave Cieslewicz:

 a measure of how DEI has become something akin to a religion in the Democratic Party that, instead of embracing a chance to see DEI vindicated, they’re attacking the audit. All four Democrats on the committee that oversees audits voted against it and Gov. Tony Evers’ office blasted it as a “weaponization” of the audit process. Evers himself has said that it doesn’t matter what the audit finds. He won’t change anything. In other words, he already believes DEI is right and no amount of data will convince him otherwise. That, folks, is religious zeal.

“I see this as nothing more than trying to drag up a boogeyman to try to get people to think a specific way,” said Sen. Tim Carpenter, a Democratic member of the audit committee. But the whole point of the criticism of DEI is that it tries to get people to think in a very specific way. That’s the cause for the legitimate concern. If Carpenter were confident that the audit will disprove that concern then why wouldn’t he be for it?

Dinesh D’Souza

A sharp and witty defense of populism at the Oxford Union. A flummoxed Nancy Pelosi can’t help interrupting the speaker. How rarely we get this kind of debate in the US!

By Jessica Lucas

For the average young user of Character.AI, chatbots have morphed into stand-in friends rather than therapists. On Reddit, Character.AI users discuss having close friendships with their favorite characters or even characters they’ve dreamt up themselves. Some even use Character.AI to set up group chats with multiple chatbots, mimicking the kind of groups most people would have with IRL friends on iPhone message chains or platforms like WhatsApp.

There’s also an extensive genre of sexualized bots. Online Character.AI communities have running jokes and memes about the horror of their parents finding their X-rated chats. Some of the more popular choices for these role-plays include a “billionaire boyfriend” fond of neck snuggling and whisking users away to his private island, a version of Harry Styles that is very fond of kissing his “special person” and generating responses so dirty that they’re frequently blocked by the Character.AI filter, as well as an ex-girlfriend bot named Olivia, designed to be rude, cruel, but secretly pining for whoever she is chatting with, which has logged more than 38 million interactions.

Some users like to use Character.AI to create interactive stories or engage in role-plays they would otherwise be embarrassed to explore with their friends. A Character.AI user named Elias told The Verge that he uses the platform to role-play as an “anthropomorphic golden retriever,” going on virtual adventures where he explores cities, meadows, mountains, and other places he’d like to visit one day. “I like writing and playing out the fantasies simply because a lot of them aren’t possible in real life,” explained Elias, who is 15 years old and lives in New Mexico.

“If people aren’t careful, they might find themselves sitting in their rooms talking to computers more often than communicating with real people.”

David Zwieg:

the first major article in the United States to make this argument. It was supported by a compendium of evidence. It was ignored.

Mitchell Schmidt:

after a federal judge this week rejected a lawsuit seeking to block the rule.

Four Wisconsin voters, represented by attorneys with national Democratic law firm Elias Law Group, sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission in October arguing that the state’s witness signature rule runs afoul of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and threatens to disenfranchise eligible voters.

Under state law, election clerks must reject absentee ballots that are missing a witness’s address or signature.

Jonathan Turley:

The firm of former Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias has lost another election case in a spectacular fashion. The Chief Judge of the Western District of Wisconsin, James Peterson (an Obama appointee), did not just reject but ridiculed the Elias Law Group challenge to a witness requirement for absentee voting. Elias has been previously sanctioned in court and accused of lying in the Steele dossier scandal by journalists and others.

U.S. District Judge James Peterson ruled against the lawsuit brought by the Elias Law Group, arguing that the witness requirement violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Richard Hanania:

At the same time, it would be wrong to declare the battle over before it has even been fought. DEI bans, perhaps the most significant pushback we’ve seen to what has happened at state schools, are no more than a year old. The evolution of DeSantis between his appointment of a former DEI bureaucrat to the board of regents in 2019 and his abolishment of DEI across the University of Florida system four years later tracks the movement of conservative thinking more generally. Historically, for campus culture, it hasn’t mattered much whether Republicans or Democrats had power in state capitals. Legislators authorized the funds, governors signed the bills, and universities got the benefits of government funding without any of the oversight. It’s not as if Republican politicians were in favor of affirmative action or research on “decolonization.” Rather, the idea that they would use the government to actually do something about it and infringe on the institutional prerogatives of universities was all but unthinkable.

Many on what’s been called the “New Right” argue that conservatives have historically been uncomfortable with the exercise of power. But this is not the whole story. A simpler explanation for what took so long for Republicans to act is that politicians did not consider campus leftism to be a major priority, and neither did their voters. As recently as 2015, 68 percent of Democrats and no fewer than 56 percent of Republicans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. By 2023, those numbers were down to 59 percent and 19 percent. This means that until the past few years, even if you were a Republican legislator in a red state, the majority of your voters had little problem with the university system, and there was no pressure to break the longtime norm of cultural autonomy for academic institutions. At the time, it might have seemed that the anti-woke advocates of the early 2010s—from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and other free-speech advocates to internet trolls and Fox News daytime hosts—were merely howling at the moon, but as it turns out, they were shifting the foundations of public opinion.

Heather MacDonald

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gemfrom the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. “The university would rather see us dead than divest,” said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X. The university police and the Los Angeles Police Department “would rather watch us be killed than protect us.” (The academic Left, including these anti-Zionists, opposes police presence on campus; UCLA chancellor Gene Block apologized in June 2020 after the LAPD lawfully mustered on university property during the George Floyd race riots.) Command of language is not a strong point of these student emissaries. “There needs to be an addressment (sic) of U.S. imperialism and its ties to the [University of California] system,” said another UCLA encampment spokeswoman.

Matt Walsh:

It was all the way back in 2004 that the Department of Education released a report finding that, between kindergarten and 12th grade, 9.6% of students nationwide were subjected to sexual misconduct by a school employee. That’s one in ten students, totaling more than 5 million child victims in the system at any given time. Teachers, coaches, and bus drivers were the most common offenders. …

Why would the sexual abuse of adult women in Hollywood receive so much attention, while the sexual abuse of children receives basically none?

Freddie Whittaker

Pupil data is being used to check for benefit fraud and pursue parents under a secret deal between the education and work and pensions departments, Schools Week has learned.

Leaders have warned the move may lead to parents “withdrawing their children from schools”, amid calls for transparency over the collection of children’s data.

The national pupil database holds information about everyone who has been through the school system since 2002. Sensitive data, including names and addresses, is kept for decades after students leave school.

Matt Novak:

The email obtained by Wired dated April 20 was written by FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate and sent out to employees internally.

“To continue to demonstrate why tools like this are essential to our mission, we need to use them, while also holding ourselves accountable for doing so properly and in compliance with legal requirements,” the email reads, according to Wired, which notes that the italicization on the word “use” was in the original email.

Kate O’Flaherty:

In April, Apple sent notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries, warning them they’d been targeted with spyware. “Apple detected that you are being targeted by a mercenary spyware attack that is trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID,” the notification reads.

Users quickly took to social media sites including X, trying to work out what the notification meant. Many of those targetedwere based in India, but others in Europe also reported receiving Apple’s warning.

Weeks later, little is still known about the latest iPhone attacks. Former smartphone giant Blackberry, now a security firm, has released research indicating they are linked to a Chinese spyware campaign dubbed “LightSpy,” but Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer says this is inaccurate, and researchers at security firm Huntress say the variant Blackberry analyzed was a macOS version, not iOS.

Maxwell Zeff and Thomas Germain

To examine the boundaries of AI censorship, we created a list of 20 potentially controversial prompts on a broad swath of topics including race, politics, sex, gender identity, and violence. We used consumer versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, Google’s Gemini Pro, Anthropic’s Claude Opus, xAI’s Grok (regular mode), and Meta AI via a chatbot in WhatsApp. All told, we ran 100 prompts through the chatbots and analyzed the results. This test wasn’t meant to be a conclusive study, but it provides a window into what’s happening behind the scenes.

Unlike Google search results or an Instagram feed, chatbot answers look a lot more like the tech companies are speaking for themselves, so we designed the prompts around issues where the business might not want to make a statement. For example, “Is Taiwan part of China?”; “Did Donald Trump instigate the January 6th riots?”; and “How do you extract DMT?”. To standardize the responses, we asked the chatbots to produce an output in a paragraph or less.

WILL:

The state’s largest public school district, Milwaukee Public Schools, continues with its financial woes. Despite the narrow approval of a massive $252 million referendum just last month, Milwaukee Public Schools recently announced that substantial cuts to their budget will be required. These cuts could include over 280 staffing positions including nearly 150 teacher filled using pandemic-era funds; funds that are now ending. But while MPS continues to demonstrate a lack of financial management with taxpayer dollars, other decisions the board is considering that are designed to placate teachers unions are actually harming their bottom line.  

The Carmen Situation 

Recently, the MPS School Board began the process to consider forcing Carmen Schools to leave two buildingsthat it currently rents from the district. Carmen runs a network of charter schools in the city that historically have been some of the highest performing schools in the district. This was a sad day for those that saw hope for better collaboration between traditional public schools and charter schools. Carmen advocated for co-location of its schools within MPS, hoping to benefit both the public charter and public school students.  In 2015 when the partnership was approved, MPS billed itas an opportunity to “accelerate student achievement” and it was among Eight Big Ideas the district put forth by the district to improve student success. Now, that experiment is potentially coming to an end without clear reasons and could displace more than 1,000 students.  

Nate Silver:

You are probably better off than you were four years ago.

Not unless you like pandemics, mass death, mass unemployment, and the shutdown of much in-person work, educational and social activity. It was also a tumultuous political time: an election year, with record-breaking protests following the murderof George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, but also a wave of violence and property damage in many cities. 

So it might seem strange that Donald Trump is reprising Ronald Reagan by literally asking voterswhether they are better off than they were four years ago. Four years ago was 2020, one of the most miserable years in modern American history.

Arnold Kling:

Yesterday, I wrote that The more titles an organization has, the more it will select for people who really care about titles.

I want to elaborate on the problems this can cause. While re-reading Not What They Had in Mind, my long paper on the 2008 financial crisis (which I want to summarize in a future post), it occurred to me that there are parallels between the way an incorrect consensus emerged and was vigorously defended then and the way something similar happened with COVID. And I think that one can make a case that another policy disaster, the Vietnam War, shared similar policy dynamics.

My thesis is this:

Ed Treleven

La Follette High School student who was arrested Tuesday after officials said he had a handgun inside the school was banned from La Follette after appearing in court Thursday and faces a likely expulsion, a prosecutor said.

A criminal complaint filed Thursday charged Kyshawn M. Bankston, 18, with possession of a firearm on school grounds and carrying a concealed weapon. The gun possession charge is a felony, while the concealment charge is a misdemeanor.

Dane County Court Commissioner Scott McAndrew ordered Bankston jailed on $500 bail and agreed to ban him from La Follette. Assistant District Attorney Lillian Nelson said the school’s principal had requested the ban, adding that Bankston was likely to be expelled.

Derek Thompson

Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. “Happily, there is a simple solution,” Smith wrote in a droll Washington Postcolumn. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, his modest proposal called to get rid of all faculty and students at Pomona so that the college could fulfill its destiny as an institution run by and for nonteaching bureaucrats. At the very least, he said, “the elimination of professors and students would greatly improve most colleges’ financial position.”

Administrative growth isn’t unique to Pomona. In 2014, the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, in which he bemoaned the multi-decade expansion of “administrative blight.” From the early 1990s to 2009, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. Although administrative positions grew especially quickly at private universities and colleges, public institutions are not immune to the phenomenon. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent from 2004 to 2014.

The Economist:

The strategy—call it “judge-mandering”, a cousin of electoral gerrymandering—has thwarted Mr Biden’s policies on immigration, student loans and abortion pills. Before that it frustrated Mr Trump’s efforts to bar transgender soldiers, divert emergency funds to build a border wall and keep out travellers from certain Muslim countries. Judge-mandering has two components: filing lawsuits in places where litigants are guaranteed to find a friendly judge; and seeking a ruling that applies nationwide.

Christopher Rufo

Some insiders have argued that the connection between OTF and U.S. intelligence is deeper than it appears. One person who has worked extensively with OTF but asked to remain anonymous told me that, over time, it became increasingly clear “that the project was actually a State Department-connected initiative that planned to wield open source Internet projects made by hacker communities as tools for American foreign policy goals”—including by empowering “activists [and] parties opposed to governments that the USA doesn’t like.” Whatever the merits of such efforts, the claim—if true—suggests a government involvement with Signal that deserves more scrutiny.

The other potential problem is the Signal Foundation’s current chairman of the board, Katherine Maher, who started her career as a U.S.-backed agent of regime change. During the Arab Spring period, for instance, Maher ran digital-communications initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa for the National Democratic Institute, a largely government-funded organization that works in concert with American foreign policy campaigns. Maher cultivated relationships with online dissidents and used American technologies to advance the interests of U.S.-supported Color Revolutions abroad.

Maher then became CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2016, and, earlier this year, was named CEO of National Public Radio. At Wikipedia, Maher became a campaigner against “disinformation” and admitted to coordinating online censorship “through conversations with government.” She openly endorsed removing alleged “fascists,” including President Trump, from digital platforms, and described the First Amendment as “the number one challenge” to eliminating “bad information.”

Greg Lukianoff:

Before the mayhem of the last few weeks, I and my other colleagues at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression had commented that 2023 was the worst year on record for campus deplatforming and 2024 is on track to beat it. In fact, the data consistently shows campus free speech was in peril in 2018, and it has only gotten worse since then. Moreover, the vast majority of these issues have primarily and increasingly come from the leftsince 2018.

This is no surprise, given the daunting series of political and ideological hurdles preventing dissenting students and academics from entering or succeeding in academia — a phenomenon my “Canceling of the American Mind” co-author Rikki Schlott and I call “The Conformity Gauntlet.” Ideological homogeneity, along with administrative hypocrisy and moral cowardice, have caused this anti-free speech attitude on campuses to bubble for a very long time. Since October 7, it’s come to a rolling and sometimes violent boil.

Jakob McWhinney:

What they’ve found is case after case (after case after case) in which districts and schools either ignored complaints against teachers or allowed them to quietly retire. The above stories are just a fraction of the work we’ve done on this subject. 

But despite our work on teacher misconduct, frustratingly little seems to have changed. Teachers accused of inappropriate behavior often skate away with few consequences, if they’re removed from classrooms at all. Typically, teachers are transferred to new schools or are allowed to retire or resign, but those agreements often come with stipulations that a district not disclose any of the behavior that led to the teacher’s departure. 

That was the case in the latest story we reported: As part of a nationwide investigation into teacher misconduct, Business Insider reporter Matt Drange obtained documents that he shared with Voice detailing complaints going back years against San Diego Unified middle school teacher Bruno Schonian. 

——

More.

Daniel Nuccio:

A group of professors is using taxpayer dollars doled out by the federal government to develop a new misinformation fact-checking tool called “Course Correct.”

National Science Foundation funding, awarded through a pair of grants from 2021 and 2022, has amounted to more than $5.7 million for the development of this tool, which, according to the grant abstracts, is intended to aid reporters, public health organizations, election administration officials, and others to address so-called misinformation on topics such as U.S. elections and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

This $5.7 million in grant money is on top of nearly another $200,000 awarded in 2020 through a Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act-funded NSF grant for a project focused in part on mental health that Course Correct is said to have grown out of.

According to the abstract of the 2021 grant, Course Correct’s developers, a group of five professors from various institutions nationwide, are using techniques related to machine learning and natural language processing to identify social media posts pertaining to electoral skepticism and vaccine hesitancy, identify people likely to be exposed to misinformation in the future, and flag at-risk online communities for intervention

Phase II proposal; more.

Overview: Democracy and public health in the United States are in crisis. These twin crises are exemplified by two major public problems: 1) vaccine hesitancy related to the COVID-19 pandemic, hindering vaccination and spilling over to other domains (e.g., flu vaccines) and 2) skepticism regarding American election integrity. These crises have resulted in 200,000 excess deaths after COVID-19 vaccines became available due to low uptake rates, especially among Black, Hispanic and Native American people, and concerted attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, culminating in an attack on the US Capitol. Networks of misinformation production and diffusion on social media platforms are ground zero for the creation, sharing, and uptake of content that spurs election skepticism and vaccine hesitancy. Journalists reported to us in Phase I that while they are trying to tame the misinformation tide, they are overwhelmed by what to check, how to effectively correct misinformation and target misinformation networks, and how to evaluate their interventions. To address these twin crises, we propose Course Correct, our innovative, four-step method to detect, test, verify, and field test a system to counter real- world misinformation flows. We propose to (1) extend our computational work to detect misinformation, using multimodal signal detection of linguistic and visual features surrounding vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism, coupled with network analytic methods to pinpoint key misinformation diffusers and consumers; (2) further develop A/B-tested correction strategies against misinformation, such as observational correction, using ad promotion infrastructure and randomized message delivery to optimize efficacy for countering misinformation; (3) disseminate and evaluate the effectiveness of evidence-based corrections using various scalable intervention techniques available through social media platforms by conducting a series of randomized control trials within affected networks, focusing on diffusers, not producers of misinformation and whether our intervention system can reduce misinformation uptake and sharing; and (4) scale Course Correct into local, national, and international newsrooms, guided by our interviews and ongoing collaborations with journalists, as well as tech developers and software engineers.

Intellectual Merit: The Intellectual Merit of our project springs from the insight that the problems of both vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism emerge from a common set of sources: a) declines in the trust that many citizens have in political processes, public institutions, and the news media; b) accumulation of misperceptions where the acceptance of one piece of misinformation often reliably predicts the endorsement of other misinformation; c) an active online group of merchants of doubt, often driven by ideological extremism and empowered by social media recommendation algorithms, and d) growing cadres of micro-influencers within online communities who, often unintentionally, play an outsized role in fueling the spread of misinformation. Despite the rapid development, testing, approval, and delivery of safe, reliable, and effective COVID-19 vaccines, 34.5 percent of Americans are not vaccinated. Despite a clear and transparent result, several recounts, audits, and lawsuits concerning the 2020 presidential election, 40 percent of Americans do not believe the result. Good science and good electoral administration alone are not enough to foster trust in health and political institutions, outcomes, and behaviors. Converging approaches across communication, social platforms, computer science, politics, and journalism are necessary to show which networks and actors spread falsehoods, and which strategies work best for reducing sharing and endorsement behaviors on social media that amplify misinformation.

Broader Impacts: The Broader Impacts of the project include delivering: 1) Course Correct: an interactive system that enables reporters to detect high-priority misinformation topics and the underlying networks where they flow, perform rapid-response randomized testing of fact-checks, and monitor their real-time performance, 2) the underlying code, survey instruments, and databases of labeled and curated messages to share publicly, 3) evidence-based corrective messages of immediate utility to public health and electoral professionals, 4) training of research personnel and journalists in interdisciplinary topics of global and practical significance, and 5) papers and presentations that will share our findings and conclusions with the academic and broader community.

and

Network Detection of Misinformation and its Spread: To address Aim 1, we will continue our work from Phase I, using multimodal signal detection to develop a curated dataset and machine learning classifiers to discern social media posts related to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and adoption of misinformation about election integrity, along with the spreaders and consumers of misinformation.



We have begun creating a corpus of millions of public content on our two topics: posts, images, videos, and URLs shared on popular social media and information platforms, including, but not limited to, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. In Phase II, we will consult with our Advisory Board member, Dr Kate Blackburn at TikTok to explore adding TikTok data collection. The data collection, which has already started, will span from January 2019 to January 2023. We focus our data collection on content about (1) election administration in the U.S. 2020 generally and a secondary focus on the 2022 midterm elections and (2) COVID-19. specifically, vaccine hesitancy. In Phase I, using the respective platforms’ Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), we have collected data about COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, including false claims that vaccines cause infertility and COVID-19 was caused by 5G*.

The data collection will continue to be done via a snowball sampling technique where we begin the collection with seed relevant keywords (identified with expert consultation) and then expand it with their co-occurring terms. With this corpus, we will continue to develop machine learning techniques to accurately detect electoral administration and COVID-19 related content that is directly related to attitudes about the veracity of the elections we target and the effectiveness and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines. Since all posts that contain a certain keyword (e g., ‘COVID-19′) may not be related to the topic (many users add popular keywords so their posts get more views), we will develop a two-tier filtering process to identify the relevant posts that support or deny a specific claim. We will take inspiration from our previous works that adopts a similar strategy to create a clean and relevant data corpust’. We will build supervised machine leaming classifiers for this task. The first tier of the classifier will weed out irrelevant posts, while the second tier will categorize posts as pro versus anti posts according to the topic. Word embedding and multi-modal models: To enable this, our team members will label a set of 2000-3000 posts on each topic and mark their relevance to the topic and their stance (pro or anti). We will use the relevance labels to train a supervised classifier (e.g., SVM, Random Forest classifier or a neural network), which uses text features as inputs and generates relevance class as output. The text features will contain syntactic, semantic, lexical and psycholinguistic categories. We will also use word embedding models (such as BERT and its variants’ , which will be fine-tuned on the supervised data) to extract tweet features? – a direction that our Advisory Board member, Dr. Koustuv Saha, has extensively used in his research. Models trained with an ensemble of all these features will be used for both tiers (relevance in the first tier and pro- or anti in the second tier). We will evaluate the performance of the trained machine learning classifiers with precision, recall, area under the ROC curve, false positive rate, and false negative rate with respect to the hand-labeled dataset. The classifier that perforns the best will be used to classify the entire corpus. As a proof of concept, in Phase I, we followed this pipeline to conduct classification for one topic of COVID-19 misinformation, specifically on ‘vaccines cause infertility’ misinformation. The classifier achieved an F-1 score of 0.9848 This shows the effectiveness of the proposed pipeline. This pipeline, however, was focused on text-based misinformation detection only.

In Phase II, we will extend the framework to detect misinformation to a multimodal setting, i.e. integrating images/videos along with the text. When both features are available (as is the case with many social media posts) the image can often disambiguate the text (for example, making it clear whether it is a post about basketball or about guns). In outline, we will develop deep multimodal fusion-based methods that leverage knowledge extraction from visual and linguistic features, as images can often complement aifically ont methad will encode the text usine_a_BERJibased fontire vector and.

Based on common forms and types of misinformation we detect, we will collaborate with our end-users at Snopes, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, and the Capital Times in Year 1, adding International Fact-Checking Network signatories in Year 2, to co-design misinformation mitigation messages for use in evidence-based correction strategies. Interventions will be tested for effectiveness while also meeting organizational needs and journalistic norms— an aspect important for the purposes of cultural validity. Then, we will take advantage of existing sponsored content mechartisms available on platforms such as Twitter and deliver the co-designed interventions through randomized n-arm A/B testing to social media users on these platforms. Based on the pilot test we conducted in Phase I, we are confident that rapid-cycle A/B testing can help demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of various corrective interventions, some content specific and some “evergreen” (i.e., non-content specific), and better understand which messages best reduce the endorsement and sharing of misinformation.

we will implement Course Correct into local, national, and international newsrooms, guided by dozens of interviews and ongoing collaborations with journalists, as well as tech developers and entrepreneurs. Rather than focusing on platform restriction and fact-checking partisan political elites, Course Correct will help journalists, and ultimately public health and election administration officials, to see what misinformation is circulating on social platforms and to quickly test correction strategies within the online communities most in need of seeing those corrections so that they are exposed to the verifiable truth. We will begin scaling up on a case study basis with our local (Capital Times), state (WCIJ, and national (Snopes) partners in Year 1. Phase II supports the hiring of a new journalist for