Four members of the Whitnall School Board are being investigated for allegedly violating Wisconsin’s Open Meetings Law.
LuAnn Bird, a Hales Corner resident, filed the complaint last month with the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office.
The complaint alleges school board President Jason Craig, Vice President Cassie Rainer, Clerk Rachel Scherrer and Treasurer Karen Mikolainis conducted board business on the private Facebook group “Whitnall Watchdog” starting in April 2023.
The conservative sites allege that the group spent “only about $263,000 on its stated mission of electing candidates from Generation Z to office combined with donations to other Democrat Party committees and groups—and instead spent more than $1.4 million on disbursements to themselves for payroll and to political consulting firms and legal fees, in addition to travel and entertainment expenses like hotels, flights, and meals.”
However, it spent reportedly spent more than $1,314,000 on travel and related expenses while giving $80,000 to the Elias Law Group.
Previously, when allegations of self-dealing and accounting improprieties were raised with regard to Black Lives Matter, the group’s attorney, Elias, immediately stood out for many. Elias resigned from his “key role” with BLM as the scandal exploded.
Some teachers are leaning on software called Writable that uses ChatGPT to help grade papers but is “tokenized,” so essays do not include any personal information, and it’s not shared directly with the system.
Teachers upload essays to the platform, which was recently acquired by education company Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which then provides suggested feedback for students.
Other educators are using platforms such as Turnitin that boast plagiarism detection tools to help teachers identify when assignments are written by ChatGPT and other AI. But these types of detection tools are far from foolproof; OpenAI shut down its own AI-detection tool last year due to what the company called a “low rate of accuracy.”
Some schools are actively working on policies for both teachers and students. Alan Reid, a research associate in the Center for Research and Reform in Education (CRRE) at Johns Hopkins University, said he recently spent time working with K-12 educators who use GPT tools to create end-of-quarter personalized comments on report cards.
But like Layne, he acknowledged the technology’s ability to write insightful feedback remains “limited.”
For years, the Mastery Charter Network built its reputation as a college-for-all system of schools in Philadelphia and Camden.
Now, thanks to nearly $20 million from Bloomberg Philanthropies and a partnership with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Mastery is about to turn one of its schools, Mastery Hardy Williams High School in Southwest Philadelphia, into a workforce development hub. It’s part of a $250 million investment that Bloomberg is making to create 10 such high schools nationwide.
Beginning in 2025, Hardy Williams High students will be prepared for careers at CHOP — from patient-facing roles such as medical assistants to operations jobs such as information technology workers, and hospital administration positions — then walk right into full-time jobs in the hospital system as soon as they graduate.
Along the way, they’ll have access to hands-on CHOP resources and paid internships, and will have career supports once they graduate.
The partnership matches with the revised mission of Mastery, the Philadelphia-based network of 14,000 students in 24 schools.
“There are multiple entry points that students and families can choose on the pathway to a family-sustaining wage, a career,” said Saliyah Cruz, Mastery’s chief equity officer.
WTMJ:
@WTMJSteve was joined by @SenStroebel and @JacobJCurtis and they discussed the response.
Listen to the full Political Power Hour: wtmj.com/political-powe…
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More.
The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) released its latest report, Piercing the Fog: Shedding Light on School District Referenda in Wisconsin, which uncovers various transparency problems with Wisconsin’s referendum process that costs taxpayers millions of dollars every single year. The report also calls for significant reform to Wisconsin’s referendum process to give voters more complete information when deciding.
The Quotes: WILL Research Director, Will Flanders, stated, “Using referendums to fund school districts is not going away, but for voters to make smart decisions, they must be armed with all necessary information. Our report highlights the grave transparency concerns that exist in Wisconsin’s current process while outlining policy changes to ensure voters are fully informed. Ultimately, with the changes we proposed, referenda can be an important tool for direct democracy when used properly.”
Additional Background: More than 90 school districts around Wisconsin went to referendum in the 2024 spring elections, with 58.8% passing. The role of referenda in funding Wisconsin schools has been the subject of debate for many years. Some argue that referenda are necessary for school districts to keep their doors open, while others make the case that they are examples of wasteful spending that take advantage of voter sentiments in favor of funding education.
WILL’s report provides an overview of how referenda have been used historically around the state, and then highlights three ways that school districts around Wisconsin are “gaming the system.” We then make suggestions for what policy makers can do about it.
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More.
It’s almost as if Maddow doesn’t know that all these billions are owed to the U.S. Treasury & not to banks . . . as if she doesn’t know that Democrats cut the banks out during the Obama years in order to “protect borrowers.”
The First Amendment demands much more. If we are to have a free press, as guaranteed by the Constitution, then State Bar employees may not bully and intimidate reporters, as they have here.
Thus, long-term real interest rates might remain high persistently, partly because of perceptions of inflation risk, partly because of quantitative tightening and partly because the fiscal deficits of many countries are expected to remain large. All this threatens to create a vicious circle in which high perceptions of risk raise interest rates above likely growth rates, thereby making fiscal positions less sustainable and keeping risk premia high. Elevated fiscal debt also worsens the threat of a “bank-sovereign nexus”, in which weak banks cause concern about the ability of sovereigns to rescue them and vice versa.
Arguably, the situation of the US is the most significant of all. In The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2024 to 2034, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office notes that “debt held by the public rises each year in relation to the size of the economy, reaching 116 per cent of GDP in 2034 — an amount greater than at any point in the nation’s history. From 2024 to 2034, increases in mandatory spending and interest costs outpace declines in discretionary spending and growth in revenues and the economy, driving up debt. That trend persists, pushing federal debt to 172 per cent of GDP in 2054.”
Only a brave economist could insist that this can continue forever. At some point, surely, Stein’s law would bite: investor resistance to further rises in debt would jump and then monetisation, inflation, financial repression and a global monetary mess would ensue.
Here are three relevant facts for the US: first, by 2034, mandatory federal spending is forecast to reach 15.1 per cent of GDP against total federal revenue of a mere 17.9 per cent; second, federal revenue was just 73 per cent of outlays in 2023; and, third, the primary balance has been in consistent deficit since the early 2000s. All this shows how immensely difficult it will be to bring overall deficits under control.
Uri Berliner, a veteran at the public radio institution, says the network lost its way when it started telling listeners how to think.
An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don’t have an audience that reflects America.
That wouldn’t be a problem for an openly polemical news outlet serving a niche audience. But for NPR, which purports to consider all things, it’s devastating both for its journalism and its business model.
Like many unfortunate things, the rise of advocacy took off with Donald Trump. As in many newsrooms, his election in 2016 was greeted at NPR with a mixture of disbelief, anger, and despair. (Just to note, I eagerly voted against Trump twice but felt we were obliged to cover him fairly.) But what began as tough, straightforward coverage of a belligerent, truth-impaired president veered toward efforts to damage or topple Trump’s presidency.
Persistent rumors that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia over the election became the catnip that drove reporting. At NPR, we hitched our wagon to Trump’s most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff.
Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.
But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.
It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.
All Chicago Public Schools will get teacher positions based on a set formula that favors high-poverty schools and eliminates extra money historically given to magnet and selective enrollment programs and schools.
But CPS CEO Pedro Martinez emphasized that overall magnet and selective enrollment schools will not be hurt. “What we are seeing is that there is no disproportionate impact on any one set of schools,” he said.
Principals received their school budgets for next year on Monday. The school district has yet to release the school budgets to the press and, at this point, does not plan to until later in the process. This breaks from tradition.
These are the first school budgets under a new funding formula that shifts to focusing on the needs of schools, rather than enrollment.
Birth rates in the developed world are below replacement levels and global fertility is not far behind. Sub-replacement fertility leads to exponentially decreasing population. Our best models of economic growth suggest that a shrinking population causes economic growth and technological progress to stop and humanity to stagnate into extinction.
One theory of fertility decline says it’s all about opportunity costs, especially for women. Rising labor productivity and expanded career opportunities for potential parents make each hour of their time and each forgone career path much more valuable. Higher income potential also makes it cheaper for parents to gain utility by using financial resources to improve their children’s quality of life compared to investing time in having more kids. Simultaneously, economic growth raises the returns to these financial investments in quality (e.g education).
In addition to higher incomes, people today have more diverse and exciting options for leisure. DINKs can go to Trader Joes and workout classes on the weekend, play video games, watch Netflix, and go on international vacations.
Most bibliophiles would agree to this maxim: the older the book, the better. If so, a forthcoming lot at Christie’s offers the chance of a lifetime as the auctioneer is selling the oldest tome you are ever likely to see.
The oldest known book in private hands is one of two lots at the auction that can be said to be among the most important texts in the history of early Christianity.
Eugenio Donadoni, a senior specialist in books and manuscripts at Christie’s, said the texts were of “huge international significance”, adding: “They are really important touchstones in charting early Christianity.”
Jean Stockard, Timothy W. Wood, Cristy Coughlin, Caitlin Rasplica Khoury:
The importance of explicit and systematic instruction has become a central element of discussions of effective instruction (e.g., National Reading Panel, 2000). Direct Instruction (DI), developed by Siegfried Engelmann and his collaborators beginning in the 1960s, is often cited as an example. Over the past half century the corpus of DI curricular materials has grown as has the literature evaluating its effectiveness. This article presents a quantitative analysis of this effectiveness literature. Although the term direct instruction (lower case and sometimes referred to as “little di”) has been used to refer to a broad set of educational programs that incorporate elements of systematic or explicit instruction, our focus is only on Direct Instruction (capitalized) in the Engelmann–Becker tradition (Engelmann & Colvin, 2006).
For decades, nobody in Wisconsin’s Capitol dared to say it out loud: Wisconsin had an unsustainable number of institutions of higher learning.
The 2015-16 Blue Book, for example, listed 66 of them: 13 University of Wisconsin System four-year campuses, 13 two-year UW colleges, 16 technical colleges, 18 private colleges and universities, and six technical and professional institutions.
That total didn’t include three theological seminaries and two tribal colleges.
Nobody knows what the number will be in 2025, because one of the most important trends of the last few years is the downsizing of Wisconsin’s public and private universities and colleges.
Consider recent news stories:
The author’s efforts to place responsibility for Ohio’s reading struggles into my lap, however, are unwarranted. He writes, “A recent survey from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce found that two of the most popular curricula statewide are Fountas and Pinnell’s Classroom and Lucy Calkins’ Units of Study,” and he goes on to denigrate both.
The truth is, however, that the same survey showed that just 6% of Ohio’s schools identify Units of Study as their curriculum. Eight times that number of schools — 395 districts — cite Heggerty’s Phonemic Awareness Curriculum, six times that number, Fundations, and three times the number use the basal textbook “Reading Wonders.” How can a curriculum used by only 6% of Ohio’s schools be responsible for the state’s literacy woes?
My curriculum has been continually developed and refined for 40 years, informed by classroom-based research, by rich assessments of children and by scholarship, results that have been verified through a careful study by the American Institute of Research. The data overwhelmingly indicate that schools partnering with us demonstrate meaningful improvements in student performance and that improvements deepen over time.
And this is also true for Ohio schools that use Units of Study. Many that report using the curriculum far outperform the state average. In fact, if you average the results obtained by all 48 schools that reported using Units of Study, third-grade reading proficiency in those schools outperforms Ohio’s 2022-2023 state average by 7.44%.
Contrary to the author’s assertion, I have never bypassed phonics. It is ludicrous to suggest that I want children to open a book and guess wildly at the words. I’d be happy to walk anyone through the newest edition of Units of Study in K-2 Reading to show how it incorporates the instructional practices promoted by the science of reading. The same cannot be said of many of the curricula, per an in-depth analysis from University of Connecticut Professor Rachael Gabriel, on that state’s short list of approved curricula, which share much overlap with Ohio’s curricula list.
On Monday, April 8, hundreds of schools across North America, from Texas to Ontario, are closing in order to protect pupils from sustaining lifelong injuries—from the sun.
Just after 11 a.m. local time, a complete solar eclipse will begin over the Pacific coast of Mexico. Its “path of totality”—the areas where the sun will be entirely blotted out—will pass through 13 U.S. states, before ending off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. In these regions, schools face a dilemma: Is the eclipse a learning opportunity for kids—or a threat?
“The solar eclipse offers a rare educational occasion,” Natalie Jameson, an educator in Canada’s Prince Edward Island, admitted last month. “But prioritizing safety is crucial.”
And so, classes in her district will end two hours early to ensure “students will be home safely” before the start of the eclipse.
The decision, her department added, was made “out of an abundance of caution.”
^ Why are interest payments suddenly spiking? Because the bill for QE is coming due. Either die by high inflation or high rates. Or both.
Why is the country issuing debt at emergency levels, without acknowledging it’s an emergency? Because that’s the only thing that can keep this fake economy afloat through the 2024 election.
^ Why is China the world’s #1 trade partner on just about every physical good? Because the US only exports (a) printed money and (b) technology. Anyway, I could keep going, with literally dozens of graphs like this. But X only allows four per post.
3) On the topic of whether it’s a country with a “turbulent history of…violence”, the level of drug addiction, violent crime, homeless encampments, squatters, road blockages, and massive BLM/Hamas mobs swarming the streets has obviously spiked in recent years.
2020 didn’t represent a one-off, it’s a preview of what is to come, particularly in Blue America. Crime statistics are systematically faked — in San Francisco, you can actually see some dashboards where things like car ticketing have gone to zero — so we don’t have an accurate picture.
Until you see undeniable things like stores closing and people moving out of blue states. And then blue politicians yell at those companies, and try to stop them from moving out. This is systematic: blues always disable the warning lights that tell you we’re crashing into the ground, just like the mortgages labeled AAA in 2008, just as a mosquito anesthetizes you before drinking your blood, just as a snake evolves to employ camouflage before it strikes. Alongside lawfare, faking the stats is a core competency of both communist reds and woke blues.
From the Baltimore bridge collapse to chaos at Boeing, what look like discrete problems are in fact part of a wider dysfunction. The case in point here is Boeing, which was allowed to purchase the only other US domestic producer of commercial aircraft, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997. As United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby recently noted, innovation and quality have been on the decline ever since. Research and development budgets have gone down relative to Airbus, while share buybacks have gone up. Massive outsourcing resulted in highly complex and vulnerable supply chains. Workforce training languished, as labour was tallied as a cost not an asset.
Meanwhile, as Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan pointed out in a March speech warning against the dangers associated with promoting national champions, concentration and financialisation in the airline industry have not only led to safety issues — they have also cost US taxpayers a bundle, and created economic vulnerability rather than stability or security. One could say the same thing about America’s inability to build its own ships, or figure out how to work with allies to do so. Likewise the failure to understand all the domestic and foreign policy levers that must be pulled in order to accomplish the clean energy transition.
“The sickest thing of all, we had a key guy on the Trade Commission leave and go to the other side in the middle of negotiation. He knew the plans, the strategy, the details. As far as I’m concerned, that’s economic treason.”
A two-decade pursuit of vanity projects has left many local authorities in China in a deep morass of debt, with their status as “the largest local defaulters” not only having a knock-on effect on private businesses, but also adding to a grass-roots governance crisis, an academic has warned.
Feng Chuan, an associate professor at Wuhan University’s School of Political Science and Public Administration, called for greater efforts to rebuild social trust and business confidence after finding that officials, residents, local government financing vehicles (LGFVs), contractors and banks had been caught in the debt limbo.
“Credit overdraw systematically occurs … tearing apart the fundamental trust system that upholds social governance order,” he wrote in an article published last month on news portal NetEase.
When Birmingham-Southern College announced in March it was closing permanently on May 31, few supporters of the esteemed liberal arts college were surprised.
Alumni and ardent supporters of the private, Methodist-affiliated college watched a long, slow roller coaster ride that seemed to have more deep dives than upward climbs over 50 years.
“Birmingham-Southern was always a fragile institution since it lost the backing of the big industrial Stockham family,” said former New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines, a BSC graduate and author of the novel “Whiskey Man” and the Civil War history “Silent Cavalry.”
Birmingham-Southern College’s string of bad fortune dates to the 1970s and includes the murder of a student that prompted the building of a fence around campus, a national scandal after church arsons committed by three former students in 2006 that detoured fundraising efforts to rebuild burned churches, and extensive financial mismanagement that caused multi-million-dollar budget shortfalls and plunged the college deep in debt, draining its endowment.
It appears that confusion expressed by many of us is shared by Judge Reyes.
Judge Reyes noted the obvious: “There’s a person in jail right now because you all brought a criminal lawsuit against him because he did not appear for a House subpoena.” The DOJ demanded six months in prison. Navarro is now serving a four-month sentence.
What Lula and de Moraes are doing is an outrageous violation of Brazil’s constitution and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
At this moment, Brazil is not yet a dictatorship. It still has elections and the Brazilian people have other means at their disposal to confront authoritarianism.
But the Federal Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court are directly interfere in those elections through censorship.
Three days ago I published the Twitter Files for Brazil. They show that Moraes has violated the Brazilian Constitution. Moraes illegally demanded that Twitter reveal private information about Twitter users who used hashtags he considered inappropriate. He demanded access to Twitter’s internal data, violating the platform’s policy. He censored, on his own initiative and without any respect for due process, posts on Twitter by parliamentarians from the Brazilian Congress. And Moraes tried to turn Twitter’s content moderation policies into a weapon against supporters of then-president Jair Bolsonaro.
Sabine Hossenfelder today posted a new video on youtube which everyone in theoretical physics should watch and think seriously about. She tells honestly in detail the story of her career and experiences in academia, explaining very clearly exactly what the problems are with the conventional system for funding research and for training postdocs.
After a string of postdocs requiring moving and living far from her husband, she decided she needed to move back to Germany and applied for a grant to fund her research (I believe for this project). This is how she describes the situation:
At this point I’d figured out what you need to put into a grant proposal to get the money. And that’s what I did. I applied for grants on research projects because it was a way to make money, not because I thought it would leave an impact in the history of science. It’s not that was I did was somehow wrong. It was, and still is, totally state of the art. I did what I said I’d do in the proposal, I did the calculation, I wrote the paper, I wrote my reports, and the reports were approved. Normal academic procedure.
But I knew it was bullshit just as most of the work in that area is currently bullshit and just as most of academic research that your taxes pay for is almost certainly bullshit. The real problem I had, I think, is that I was bad at lying to myself. Of course, I’d try to tell myself and anyone who was willing to listen that at least unofficially on the side I would do the research that I thought was worth my time but that I couldn’t get money for because it was too far off the mainstream. But that research never got done because I had to do the other stuff that I actually got paid for.
In February, Hindenburg Research, the most famous short-selling fund in the world, put out a research report titled: Renovaro BioSciences: A Worthless AI Shell Game With A Murderous Magician Past
Renovaro, previously known as Enochian BioSciences, is a biotech firm focusing on cancer and infectious diseases, recently merged with AI company GEDi Cube, valuing Renovaro at approximately $567 million.
The most scandalous thing here is that the co-founder of this biotech firm hired a hitman:
CEO Mark Dybul, who has worked with Anthony Fauci and held significant positions in global health, joined the company in 2017. The company’s co-founder, Serhat Gumrukcu, was praised for his innovative work but was charged in 2022 for hiring a hitman in a scam-related murder.
But he also fabricated his academic history,
A week after the indictment, on June 1st, 2022, we released a report showing how “Doctor” Gumrukcu had faked his entire academic history, including forging his Russian medical degrees. In reality, Gumrukcu was a Turkish magician who had fled Turkish authorities after being charged over allegations that he faked being a doctor to steal money from a terminally ill cancer patient.
These fabricated credentials might be enough for an academic scandal in its own right, but that is not the focus of this scandal for our purposes.
I am including this story because a reader sent me a note saying:
So I will oblige and highlight the professor in question:
I have a few questions for Pres. Biden about his student loan forgiveness program… pic.twitter.com/PpwAQOZc90
— Eric Hovde (@EricHovde) April 7, 2024
The highest effective rates among metro areas with a population of at least 1 million in 2023 were in Chicago, IL (1.84 percent); Rochester, NY (1.77 percent); Hartford, CT (1.76 percent); Cleveland, OH(1.66 percent) and Columbus, OH (1.45 percent).
The lowest effective rates in 2023 were in Daphne-Fairhope, AL (0.27 percent); Salisbury, MD (0.30 percent); Honolulu, HI (0.31 percent); Knoxville, TN(0.32 percent) and Tuscaloosa, AL (0.32 percent).
Aside from Honolulu, the lowest rates among metro areas with a population of at least 1 million in 2023 were in Phoenix, AZ (0.38 percent); Nashville, TN (0.45 percent); Las Vegas, NV (0.48 percent) and Salt Lake City, UT (0.49 percent).
We needed to bypass obstacles like Congress, law-making, and budgets. Over the next few weeks, a three-step plan took shape.
Step one: My team found a couple sentences in the 20-year-old HEROES law, written to give military personnel a break on student loans when they were deployed post-9/11. Well, we took those phrases, pretended they applied to the pandemic (which was still, totally, completely raging), and said borrowers wouldn’t have to repay $500 billion in student loans. MAGA Republicans sued, the MAGA Supreme Court had to stop us, and the game was afoot.
Step two: Once we’d planted the idea that we could give out free money, we set out on two parallel paths. We started “forgiving” borrowers on a piecemeal basis. A few billion dollars here and there didn’t seem all that newsworthy compared to our HEROES ploy, but it let the president keep sending emails to borrowers telling them he was giving them free money. (That made the president very happy.) Meanwhile, we rewrote Income-Driven Repayment to quietly turn student lending into a vast new entitlement, one that would eventually let us give away trillions of dollars without worrying about Congress or budgets.
A few years ago, officials at Palo Alto Unified noticed that one district high school was giving out far fewer D’s and F’s than previously, instead giving students a “no mark,” which allowed additional time to complete assignments or take exams.
But teachers there weren’t giving all students that second chance for a better grade. They were disproportionately giving it to white and Asian American students. Black and brown students were still getting D’s and F’s.
“It was glaring,” said Superintendent Don Austin. “That really spoke to who was getting the opportunity for more time and second chances.”
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Based on data from the @AAMCtoday, the MCAT of the average black medical student (505.7/66th percentile) is one standard deviation below the average Asian (514.3/88th percentile) and white student (512.4/83rd percentile). Also, the GPA of the average black student (3.59) is below the average GPA of Asians (3.83) and whites (3.80) at an extremely statistically significant level.
Ranga Dias, the physicist at the centre of the room-temperature superconductivity scandal, committed data fabrication, falsification and plagiarism, according to a investigation commissioned by his university. Nature’s news team discovered the bombshell investigation report in court documents.
The 10-month investigation, which concluded on 8 February, was carried out by an independent group of scientists recruited by the University of Rochester in New York. They examined 16 allegations against Dias and concluded that it was more likely than not that in each case, the physicist had committed scientific misconduct. The university is now attempting to fire Dias, who is a tenure-track faculty member at Rochester, before his contract expires at the end of the 2024–25 academic year.
The investigation report (see Supplementary information) and numerous other documents came to light as the result of a lawsuit that Dias filed against the university in December last year. Dias submitted a grievance to Rochester over its decision to remove his students last August, but the university refused to hear the grievance on the grounds that it did “not relate to academic freedom”. The physicist’s lawsuit claims that this response was unreasonable. A university spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of ongoing litigation and personnel matters, but emphasized that Rochester is “vigorously defending its course of action”.
Are you hardcore enough to handle W.H. Auden’s reading list for 1941 University of Michigan undergrads?
Over 6,000 pages of material. One semester.
Including the complete texts of:
Once you get through those, you can enjoy the 8 books of recommended critical commentaries.
How many students today do you think could get through this?
BY MIKE NICHOLS & MARK LISHERON
The number of tenured faculty in the University of Wisconsin System has fallen roughly in line with the decrease in student enrollment since 2015 — the year a legislative decision to take tenure guarantees out of state statute unleashed a torrent of blowback from professors who called the move by Republican legislators “destructive” and “remarkably chilling” and like “a death in the family.”
A look back at what has happened to tenured faculty since then uncovered no deaths.
Or even much use of the replacement policy that was passed by the Board of Regents.
The numbers of tenured professors in the System decreased approximately 8% — from 4,561 to 4,209, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau — between the 2016-17 school year and 2021-22. Student enrollment was down 9% over the same time period.
Evidence in retrospect shows that the much-derided change in tenure protection — which took place in stages, first in the Legislature and then at the Board of Regents, in 2015 and 2016 — has had very little impact at all in the eight or nine years since then.
The changes were relatively simple.
Keirans used Woods’ identity “in every aspect of his life,” including obtaining employment, insurance and official documents, and even paying taxes under the name, according to a plea agreement signed by Keirans.
In 1990, Keirans obtained a fraudulent Colorado identification card with Woods’ name and birthday. He used the ID to get a job at a fast-food restaurant and to get a Colorado bank account. He bought a car for $600 in 1991, using Wood’s name, with two $300 checks that bounced.
He drove the stolen car to Idaho, where it broke down and he abandoned it. He withdrew all his money from the Colorado bank using an ATM in Idaho and left the state. An arrest warrant was issued for Woods in Colorado because of the stolen car, though documents don’t indicate whether Woods was arrested at that time.
It wasn’t the first time Keirans had stolen a car. When he was 16, he stole a car after running away from his adoptive parents’ home in San Francisco. He was arrested at the time in Oregon, under his own name, but never appeared in court, according to court documents.
Daniel has been a top 5 baby name twice since 2000. There are over 1.5 million Daniels in the United States (and almost 100,000 last-name Danielses). There are who knows how many Dans, Dannies, and Daniellas out there. “Daniel” is, by any way you slice it, a very modern name.
It may be the oldest attested name in common use.
When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures. – Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
A few years ago, a software engineer at Google named James Damore published an internal memo—in response to a mandatory diversity training program he attended—titled “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.
Damore, by all conceivable metrics the kind of competent, curious engineer that tech companies pay mountains of money to retain, made the unforgivable mistake of essentially asking: “Hey, what if Reality—and not targeted misogyny—accounts for the fact that more men than women work in tech? Also, why does it feel like I could get fired for asking this?”
He was, of course, fired less than three months later for “[advancing] incorrect assumptions about gender” and for raising a perspective that “is not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses, promotes, or encourages,” said Danielle Browne, Google’s VP of Diversity, Integrity, and Governance.
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The Vibe Shift I’m talking about is the speaking of previously unspeakable truths, the noticing of previously suppressed facts. I’m talking about the give you feel when the walls of Propaganda and Bureaucracy start to move as you push; the very visible dust kicked up in the air as Experts and Fact Checkers scramble to hold on to decaying institutions; the cautious but electric rush of energy when dictatorial edifices designed to stifle innovation, enterprise, and thought are exposed or toppled.
Fundamentally, the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.
When just papered over the festering rot of systems that are same structures, policies, culture, and in many cases people who brought us here. Why would one expect any difference in outcome?
We lied to each other. We lied to Congress. We lied to the world. From Arkansas to AUKUS, this moment will have impact.
Eventually the music will stop. We are now on the second generation of leaders who have been happy to ignore this systemic failure of performance as if it is a force of nature to endure, and not a creation of man that can be changed.
If you are waiting for the uniformed leadership to speak clearly on this, you simply have not been paying attention.
If you think the Executive Branch leadership will address this, you have not been awake the last 26-months.
The only solution to this wholesale institutional failure will be in Congress. It will need the will, power, and wisdom to do what Alexander did in Gordium, and be content to do it making no friends, and receiving no personal benefit or fame.
Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney:
A federal judge tore into the Justice Department on Friday for blowing off Hunter Biden-related subpoenas issued in the impeachment probe of his father, President Joe Biden, pointing out that a former aide to Donald Trump is sitting in prison for similar defiance of Congress.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee on the federal District Court in Washington, spent nearly an hour accusing Justice Department attorneys of rank hypocrisy for instructing two other lawyers in the DOJ Tax Division not to comply with the House subpoenas.
Northland College in Ashland declared a financial emergency on Thursday, buying another two weeks to raise enough funds and make changes to avoid closure.
On March 12, college leaders announced the campus needed to raise $12 million by April 3 to avoid closing its doors, saying it had insufficient resources to continue operations. Since then, the college has raised around $1.5 million from more than 900 donations.
The Northland Board of Trustees voted to declare financial exigency, which means the financial crisis requires immediate steps to resolve. Now, they plan to make a final decision in two weeks. Ted Bristol, the board’s chair, told WPR the decision came in response to the extraordinary effort of the community, faculty, staff and others.
“We really wanted to take another look at our options, and we were also, frankly, deeply reluctant to make a decision to close,” Bristol said. “During the past three weeks, we recognize this widespread commitment to help, and we decided that we really wanted to explore this further to see if there still might be a path forward.”
In truth, the crisis was a collision of multiple issues: racial tension, union power, the respectful treatment of queer and trans kids, and the place of religion in schools—not to mention the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic and what it has done to the fabric of civic life in the U.S. The public schools in Amherst were slow to return to pre-pandemic normalcy; they reopened for a mix of in-person and remote learning in April, 2021, only after they were forced to by the state of Massachusetts. “We had physicians, psychiatrists, social workers, and parents writing to us in despair about the impact that remote learning was having on the emotional and mental health of the children in our community,” Allison Bleyler McDonald, a former school-committee member, told me. Leaders of the Amherst teachers’ union “refused to even speak to us about the possibility of opening up schools and classrooms,” she said.
Talking to people in town, one gets the sense that the discord of that period has never fully gone away. “Things really ramped up with covid,” Ben Herrington, who is also a former member of the school committee, told me. “The language changed. People became comfortable with being blatantly hostile. We were no longer having normal conversations.” Several people told me about an incident from the fall of 2021, when the school committee approved a policy that would have allowed some unvaccinated staffers into school provided that they wore masks. In response, McDonald said, the union’s president at the time, Lamikco Magee, “accused us of wanting to inflict genocide on teachers.” (Magee denies invoking genocide.)
The ongoing fight in Amherst seems to press against every bruise that public schools have sustained in recent years, and the continued fallout—multiple investigations, resignations, a persistent leadership vacuum in the schools—doesn’t inspire confidence in our collective capacity to work through the inevitable frictions of a pluralistic society. Even in a liberal and largely affluent district, certain conflicts and tensions have come to feel irresolvable. As one person I spoke to in town told me, “The left is eating its own all over the country—it’s not just Amherst.”
All those things happened in 1894. If you think people hate “tech billionaires” now: they reallyhated railroad executives back then. The hatred exploded into riots when the strike happened. Railroad workers all over the country refused to allow any train with Pullman cars to run, and the railroads refused to break their contracts with Pullman and eliminate them. The rail barons also wanted to maintain ranks against the American Railway Union. Eugene Debs tried to escalate even further and call a general strike of all labor, everywhere. That didn’t happen.
The US Attorney General, Richard Olney, said the country was on “the ragged edge of anarchy.” Imagine if the Internet went down for weeks: that’s what railroads meant in late 19th Century America. The Pullman strike disrupted the entire country, but in the end it was defeated completely, and its leader, Eugene Debs, went to jail.
George Pullman refused to even meet with the union, let alone accede to their demand for arbitration, despite the appeals of the Mayor of Chicago and the Governor of Illinois. Somehow he got away with it and the strike failed. Nowadays, we have the National Labor Relations Board, political leaders routinely mediate disputes, and unions are a fact of life. Back then, there was none of that. Arguably, the failed Pullman strike was a leading cause of the labor reforms in the 1930’s, although Eugene Debs died too soon to see them.
Google has agreed to delete billions of records and submit to some restrictions on its power to track users, under the terms of a proposed legal settlement.
The deal aims to resolve a class action lawsuit brought in the US in 2020, which had accused the tech giant of invading people’s privacy by collecting user data even when they were browsing in “private mode”.
The suit had sought $5bn in damages.
Google is supporting the deal, though it disputes the claims.
It has already made changes in response to the lawsuit.
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Many taxpayer funded k-12 systems use Google services, including Madison
Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon says a lot of things. This time, it’s an important message about the battle against censorship.
Meanwhile, average hourly earnings in the US have increased 21% over the past 4 years (+4.9% per year). Why many Americans feel like they’re falling behind.
More.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr on the DNC Paying Homeless People to Protest Outside His Event
“I was very happy today to see the protesters outside. When our staff interviewed them they said, ‘Yeah, we were all paid to be here.’ And their posters were all written by the same guy…But I’m glad because I’m glad that the DNC and the White House are finally doing something to help poor people in this country.”
David Autor, Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew:
Rapid relative wage growth at the bottom of the distribution reduced the college wage premium and counteracted nearly 40% of the four-decade increase in aggregate 90-10 log wage inequality. Wage compression was accompanied by rapid nominal wage growth and rising job-to-job separations—especially among young non-college (high school or less) workers. Comparing across states, post-pandemic labor market tightness became strongly predictive of real wage growth among low-wage workers (wage-Phillips curve), and aggregate wage compression. Simultaneously, the wage-separation elasticity—a key measure of labor market competitionrose among young non-college workers, with wage gains concentrated among workers who changed employers. Seen through the lens of a canonical job ladder model, the pandemic increased the elasticity of labor supply to firms in the low-wage labor market, reducing employer market power and spurring rapid relative wage growth among young noncollege workers who disproportionately moved from lower-paying to higher-paying and potentially more-productive jobs.
This graph should be alarming to anyone who prioritizes the safety and security of The United States and its citizens.
Illegals from over 160 countries have crossed into the US to date.
How many are unaccounted for?
The Biden admin and Democrat open-border policies are facilitating the largest invasion in the country’s history.
More.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last month in the momentous case of Murthy v. Missouri. At issue is the constitutionality of what government authorities did to censor speech that departed from preferred narratives.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson posed a hypothetical to Louisiana Solicitor General J. Benjamin Aguiñaga: “Suppose someone started posting about a new teen challenge that involved teens jumping out of windows at increasing elevations. . . . Kids all over the country start doing this. There is an epidemic. Children are seriously injuring or even killing themselves in situations. Is it your view that government authorities could not declare those circumstances a public emergency and encourage social media platforms to take down the information that is instigating this problem?”
America needs more plumbers, and Gen Z is answering the call.
Long beset by a labor crunch, the skilled trades are newly appealing to the youngest cohort of American workers, many of whom are choosing to leave the college path. Rising pay and new technologies in fields from welding to machine tooling are giving trade professions a face-lift, helping them shed the image of being dirty, low-end work. Growing skepticism about the return on a college education, the cost of which has soared in recent decades, is adding to their shine.
Enrollment in vocational training programs is surging as overall enrollment in community colleges and four-year institutions has fallen. The number of students enrolled in vocational-focused community colleges rose 16% last year to its highest level since the National Student Clearinghouse began tracking such data in 2018. The ranks of students studying construction trades rose 23% during that time, while those in programs covering HVAC and vehicle maintenance and repair increased 7%.
“It’s a really smart route for kids who want to find something and aren’t gung ho on going to college,” says Tanner Burgess, 20, who graduated from a nine-month welding program last fall.
Imagine if American doctors told parents the following truths. The mental health benefits of puberty blockers are highly uncertain, according to multiple systematic reviews of the evidence, the bedrock of evidence-based medicine. The World Health Organization says the evidence is “limited and variable.” There is no research into long-term harms, but some evidence suggests decreased IQand brittle bones. Permanent sterility is guaranteed for minors who go through full hormonal “transition.” Sexual dysfunction appears to be extremely common as well. Over 93 percentof kids who take these drugs go on to cross-sex hormones, which lead to permanent physical changes including excruciating genital growth, vaginal atrophy and tearing and much higher risk for cancer and cardiovascular disease.
There is no credible evidence that puberty blockers function as suicide-prevention measures. Finland’s top gender clinician has called the suicide narrative “purposeful disinformation” and “dangerous.” For all these reasons, health authorities in a growing number of countries, including some of the most LGBT-friendly, are now prioritizing talk therapy.
I love the wayback internet archive machine! Check out what had been scrubbed off of the @FountasPinnell blog! I need to check the @rrcna_org too 😉
I am hoping you can set the stage. In general terms, what is happening at Boeing?
Insider: At its core, we have a marginalization of the people who build stuff, the people who really work on these planes.
In 2018, the first 737 MAX crash that happened, that was an engineering failure. We built a single-point failure in a system that should have no single-point failures. The second crash that followed—we cannot say this from a legal standpoint, with the FAA—looked like pilot error. But, in any case, a company cannot survive two crashes from a single aircraft type. Then-CEO Dennis Muilenburg defended the company in front of Congress, defended the engineering, defended the work—and that protected the workforce, but it also prodded the board and stoked public fear, which resulted in a sweeping set of changes that caused huge turnover in talent.
So, right now, we have an executive council running the company that is all outsiders. The current CEO is a General Electric guy, as is the CFO whom he brought in. And we have a completely new HR leader, with no background at Boeing. The head of our commercial-airplanes unit in Seattle, who was fired last week, was one of the last engineers in the executive council.
The headquarters in Arlington is empty. Nobody lives there. It is an empty executive suite. The CEO lives in New Hampshire. The CFO lives in Connecticut. The head of HR lives in Orlando. We just instituted a policy that everyone has to come into work five days a week—except the executive council, which can use the private jets to travel to meetings. And that is the story: it is a company that is under caretakers. It is not under owners. And it is not under people who love airplanes.
In this business, the workforce knows if you love the thing you are building or if it’s just another set of assets to you. At some point, you cannot recover with process what you have lost with love. And I think that is probably the most important story of all. There is no visible center of the company, and people are wondering what they are connected to.
…
DEI is the drop you put in the bucket, and the whole bucket changes. It is anti-excellence, because it is ill-defined, but it became part of the culture and was tied to compensation. Every HR email is: “Inclusion makes us better.” This kind of politicization of HR is a real problem in all companies.
If you look at the bumper stickers at the factories in Renton or Everett, it’s a lot of conservative people who like building things—and conservative people do not like politics at work.
The radicalization of HR doesn’t hurt tech businesses like it hurts manufacturing businesses. At Google, they’re making a large profit margin and pursuing very progressive hiring policies. Because they are paying 30 percent or 40 percent more than the competition in salary, they are able to get the top 5 percent of whatever racial group they want. They can afford, in a sense, to pay the “DEI tax” and still find top people.
Eva Edl, Eva Zastrow, James Zastrow, and Paul Place had charges brought against them for being part of a peaceful protest on March 5, 2021. They gathered on the second floor of an office building in the hallway outside the Carafem Health Center Clinic. The group prayed, sang hymns, and urged women showing up to the clinic to not get abortions.
It seems as though Edl, the Zastrows and Place violated the FACE Act (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances) of 1994. They face up to a year in prison and thousands of dollars of fines. Their sentencing is on July 30, 2024.
But in order for a Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) to stuff $50 million into the University of Alabama’s endowment fund (a university that hosts his Senate archive), we also get gems like these from Squad members:
Following last week’s 2 a.m. passage of the final six spending bills for this year, the Squad’s total ticked up from $218 million to $224.1 million—all borrowed against our enormous national debt. The two “minibus” packages this month alone contained 215 earmarks from these eight individuals.
Stephanie Stamm and Jesse Newman:
Prices for hundreds of grocery items have increased more than 50% since 2019 as food companies raised their prices. Executives have said that higher prices were needed to offset their own rising costs for ingredients, transportation and labor. Some U.S. lawmakers and the Biden administration have criticized food companies for using tactics such as shrinkflation, in which companies shrink their products—but not their prices.
Home of America’s most progressive policies, from criminal justice to vehicle emissions, California serves a unique role as a punchbag for right-wing politicians. Every few years it becomes fashionable to declare that it is a failed state, or that the California dream is turning into a nightmare. This rhetoric is often overblown: in terms of pure economic heft California remains the most powerful American state. But for all its continuing prowess in innovation (not least in artificial intelligence), California again appears to be entering one of its periodic rough patches.
The state faces three overlapping challenges: rising unemployment, growing fiscal strains and population outflows. All of these should abate over time, but for now they mark out California as a pocket of relative weakness in an otherwise robust American economy.
Banks: We have not taught the kids the basic fundamental structures of how to read.
David Banks is the chancellor of the New York City public schools.
Banks: We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation. And many of us follow the same prescript of balanced literacy. And…
Balanced literacy is the approach to teaching reading we focused on in Sold a Story.
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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Christopher Peak and Emily Haavik
Pressure is mounting on two universities to change the way they train on-the-job educators to teach reading.
The Ohio State University in Columbus and Lesley University near Boston both run prominent literacy training programs that include a theorycontradicted by decades of cognitive science research. Amid a $660 million effort to retrain teachers that’s underway in 36 states, other academic institutions are updating their professional development. Yet Ohio State and Lesley are resisting criticism and standing by their training.
For decades, their Literacy Collaborative programs deemphasized teaching beginning readers how to sound out words. These programs do cover some phonics, but they also teach that students can use context clues to decipher unfamiliar words. Studies have repeatedly shown that guessing words from context is inefficient, unreliable and counterproductive. Twelve states have effectively banned school districts from using that flawed approach.
The approach, sometimes called “cueing,” originated in the 1960s in the United States and New Zealand, and was popularized in American reading instruction by Gay Su Pinnell and Irene Fountas, professors at the two universities. Pinnell, who is now retired, founded OSU’s Literacy Collaborative, and Fountas founded and still directs Lesley’s Center for Reading Recovery & Literacy Collaborative.
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Jenny Warner shares:
As if they took a cue from @FountasPinnell, @OhioState won’t speak publicly, lucky for us @lesley_u took their cue from Calkins and shared their adoration for @rrcna_org and how they haven’t altered how they teach future teachers how to read, but rather how teach them to be “politically savvy.”
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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?
Milwaukee Teachers Union, via Debbie Kuether:
Fascinating maps of referendum results! Support for the referendum was moderately correlated with race (won in most majorty white wards) but even more strongly correlated with (not) having kids. In wards where 20% or less of residents have children, the referendum overwhelmingly passed with ~2/3 of the vote. Wards where more than 40% have kids? Lost by nearly 5 points.
In other words, the referendum was most popular in the parts of the city with the fewest children, and in the parts of the city with the most white, affluent residents.
I know most here are happy about the referendum-I myself voted “yes.” Regardless, these figures do say a lot – and if you’re not thinking long and hard about the implications and the work/listening we have to do going forward to best serve our Milwaukee community…l’d ask yourself why that is.
Referendum vote by the share of households wit lose size corresponds to the number of votes cast.
It’s official! Milwaukee Public Schools has become 1 of the highest-funded big districts in America!
This is a chance to make MPS as good as our kids deserve.
On balance, the MPS referendum won wards with few children and lost wards with lots of children. Yes, you read that right.
Sen. Larson leaves out a key out key point that makes his message misleading: school districts also get local funding. This takes the per pupil amount above the average voucher ($10,573) in every district. Below is the pupil spending in all districts. All are above voucher.
A relatively new report outlines how universities nationwide have signed over students’ private FERPA data to a third-party vendor that reviews their personal information to help study college students’ voting trends.
The nine-page report describes how a national voting study run out of Tufts’ Institute for Democracy in Higher Education gets university administrators from across the country to agree to release students’ Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA, enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, where its kept, to a voter data company.
“This is an extraordinary violation of student privacy and is not consistent with FERPA,” said Heather Honey, an investigator with Verity Vote, in a recent interview with The College Fix.
Verity Vote is an organization that works to ensure government transparency, including election integrity issues, she said, and published its findings on the student voting issue in July 2023.
At issue is Tufts’ institute’s National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, launched during the Obama administration in response to a “call to action,” the report states.
Last week, I did something unorthodox. I asked teachers to message me directly via X (formerly known as Twitter) to vent their frustrations. Within hours, I received almost 200 messages expressing not only frustration, but also hope, humor, fatalism, and quite a bit of hesitancy to converse with a complete stranger on the internet. Without a doubt, these messages represent a very thin slice of the teaching workforce, but a thin slice supplies at least a taste of the whole pie.
Responses ranged from expected complaints about low pay to idiosyncratic observations about processed school breakfasts. Teachers have a lot on their minds. That few mentioned politics surprised me. Considering I aimed my invitation to conservative teachers specifically, I expected laments over liberal dogma and progressive pieties to abound. And certainly, some teachers mentioned such things, but these were a minority.
Instead, one theme surfaced over and again, illustrated by these two examples:
After hours spent reading through these lamentations and conversing with some of the teachers who sent them, it seems there’s a deeper issue here than a mere lack of consequences. Students lack accountability of any kind. Teachers face an ever-mounting list of responsibilities and pressures, while students face ever fewer.
That Ehrlich made a bundle on wrong predictions isn’t such a big deal — we’ve had dozens of doomsaying futurists who’ve cashed in on fears that never materialized.
The problem is people listened to him.
Across the world, governments adopted population-trimming policies, from massively subsidized birth control to promoting two-worker households to China’s draconian “one child” policy, in which each couple was allowed only one child.
That has left China with crippling demographic problems just as it hopes to burst forth as a superpower on the global scene; it’s now trying to encourage people to have more babies, as its leadership realizes it’s hard to be a superpower when your military-age population is shrinking (and, as only children, too valued by their parents to safely be employed as cannon fodder), your elderly population is growing and your society is stagnating.
Debt is rising more quickly in the United States than most people would prefer. This is happening in part because the U.S. current account deficit and the country’s high level of income inequality distort the structure and amount of American savings.
Many Americans are worried about the seemingly inexorable rise in U.S. debt, whether government debt, household debt, or business debt. They are right to be concerned. Rapidly rising debt is a problem not just in the United States but in many other countries too, including China, parts of Europe, and most of the developing world. In today’s environment, it seems, reasonable levels of economic growth cannot be achieved unless boosted by even faster growth in debt.
With so much debt in the world, and with debt levels rising so quickly, people tend to think that economists have studied this issue deeply and fully understand it. But there continues to be a great deal of confusion about debt and about whether and why excessive debt levels can harm growth prospects. To try to address these issues, this blog post is divided into two parts. The first part discusses debt and some of the conditions under which it affects the prospects for economic growth.
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The article quotes Yellen as saying: “People like me grew up with the view: If people send you cheap goods, you should send a thank-you note. That’s what standard economics basically says,” she said. “I would never ever again say, ‘Send a thank-you note.’ ”
But what if I told you that the people in the political and media classes are the ones who are polarized—in fact, they are the onlyones who are so polarized?
This is obvious to most Americans, even—perhaps especially—to those who have neighbors or friends or colleagues who vote differently than they do. Regular Americans know we are more united than divided on the issues that are supposedly tearing us apart.
Democrats portray conservatives as characters out of The Handmaid’s Tale, and Republicans portray liberals as “baby killers.” Yet two-thirds of Americans agree that abortion should be rare and also legal.
Democrats like to tell us that Republicans are gung ho on school shootings, and Republicans are fond of saying Democrats want to steal our guns. Yet 61 percent of usbelieve that the Second Amendment should stand, but it’s too easy to get a gun.
Democrats tell us Republicans hate gays and Republicans tell us that Democrats want every child to be queer. Yet average Americans believe that sex is determined at birth and that trans people should be protected from discrimination, though when it comes to sports, trans people should compete on teams that match the sex they were born with. This is how six in ten of us feel.
The partisan claims of a polarized America ring especially false to working-class Americans. This is because—unlike the college-educated elites who run the country—they don’t identify with the full list of policy proposals produced by either party.
In a mandatory course on “structural racism” for first-year medical students at the University of California Los Angeles, a guest speaker who has praised Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel led students in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” and demanded that they bow down to “mama earth,” according to students in the class and audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Lisa “Tiny” Gray-Garcia, who has referred to the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks as “justice,” began the March 27 class by leading students in what she described as a “non-secular prayer” to “the ancestors,” instructing everyone to get on their knees and touch the floor—”mama earth,” as she described it—with their fists.
At least half of the assembled students complied, two students said. Gray-Garcia, a local activist who had been invited to speak about “Housing (In)Justice,” proceeded to thank native tribes for preserving “what the settlers call L.A.,” according to audio obtained by the Free Beacon, and to remind students of the city’s “herstory.”
The prayer also included a benediction for “black,” “brown,” and “houseless people” who die because of the “crapatalist lie” of “private property.”
“Mama earth,” Gray-Garcia told the kneeling students, “was never meant to be bought, sold, pimped, or played.”
So began a long and looney lecture that shocked some students at the elite medical school and has led to calls for an investigation. Wearing a keffiyeh that covered her entire face, Gray-Garcia, a self-described “poverty scholar,” led the class in chants of “Free, Free Palestine” as faculty and staff looked on in silence, according to people in the course and contemporaneous text messages reviewed by the Free Beacon.
As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.
More than one-quarter of Americans now identify as atheists, agnostics, or religiously “unaffiliated,” according to a new survey of 5,600 U.S. adults by the Public Religion Research Institute. This is the highest level of non-religiosity in the poll’s history. Two-thirds of nonbelievers were brought up in at least nominally religious households, like me. (I grew up in a Reform Jewish home that I would describe as haphazardly religious. In kindergarten, my parents encouraged my sister and me to enthusiastically celebrate Hanukkah—and, just as fervently, to believe in Santa Claus.) But more Americans today have “converted” out of religion than have converted to all forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam combined. No faith’s evangelism has been as successful in this century as religious skepticism.
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America’s national debt is skyrocketing to historic levels, as the partisan divide over how much voters care about the issue is greater than ever.
By the end of fiscal 2025, federal debt held by the public will add up to $29.7 trillion, the Congressional Budget Office reports, exceeding America’s gross domestic product.
National debt is a responsibility shared by both of the presidential candidates, yet it’s much more of a concern for Republicans than Democrats, at least according to one recent survey.
In the US, nonprofits’ assets have grown 16-fold since 1980. In 2020, nonprofits brought in $2.62 trillion in revenues, constituting more than five per cent of the US economy. Ironically, foundations that are funded with the great fortunes of Henry Ford, John D Rockefeller and John D MacArthur, all right-wing figures, have become some of the key financiers of ‘progressive’ causes.
Long before Gmail became smart enough to finish your sentences, Google’s now-ubiquitous email service was buttering up the public for a fate that defined the internet age: if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.
When Gmail was announced on April 1, 2004, its lofty promises and the timing of its release reportedly had people assuming it was a joke. It wasn’t the first web-based email provider — Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail had already been around for years — but Gmail was offering faster service, automatic conversation grouping for messages, integrated search functions and 1GB of storage, which was at the time a huge leap forward in personal cloud storage. Google in its press release boasted that a gigabyte was “more than 100 times” what its competitors offered. All of that, for free.
Except, as Gmail and countless tech companies in its wake have taught us, there’s no such thing as free. Using Gmail came with a tradeoff that’s now commonplace: You get access to its service, and in exchange, Google gets your data. Specifically, its software could scan the contents of account holders’ emails and use that information to serve them personalized ads on the site’s sidebar. For better or worse, it was a groundbreaking approach.
“Depending on your take, Gmail is either too good to be true, or it’s the height of corporate arrogance, especially coming from a company whose house motto is ‘Don’t Be Evil,’” tech journalist Paul Boutin wrote for Slate when Gmail launched. (Boutin, one of its early media testers, wrote favorably about Google’s email scanning but suggested the company implement a way for users to opt out lest they reject it entirely.)
Facebook gave Netflix all your private messages on Messenger in exchange for all your watch history,
Editor’s Note: This is an updated version of an article from Dec. 15, 2009, written shortly after Dr. Borlaug passed away. It features a new introduction and is written to honor the man who would have been 110 years old on March 25, 2024.
In the winters, I spend my time officiating high school wrestling. Last year, while going through my pre-meet duties, I noticed a wrestler with the last name Borlaug. I asked him if he knew who Norman Borlaug was and was delighted to learn that wrestler was his great-nephew.
Wrestling must be in the family blood, because Norman Borlaug was an accomplished high school and college wrestler who helped expand the popularity of sport at the high school level in Minnesota. (He also worked as a referee). He was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame.
The coach of Borlaug’s great nephew, a high school civics and history teacher, overheard our conversation and asked, “Who’s Norman Borlaug?”
That’s a typical response whenever I mention him. In fact, I didn’t learn of him until after completing my college degree. It’s a shame how few people know the name or the remarkable achievements of the man who took action to feed the world’s population at a time when much of the scientific establishment believed we were on the verge of an inevitable global famine.
In 2020 XKCD, a popular online comic strip, published a cartoon depicting a teetering arrangement of blocks with the label: “all modern digital infrastructure”. Perched precariously at the bottom, holding everything up, was a lone, slender brick: “A project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.” The illustration quickly became a cult classic among the technically minded, for it highlighted a harsh truth: the software at the heart of the internet is maintained not by giant corporations or sprawling bureaucracies but by a handful of earnest volunteers toiling in obscurity. A cyber-security scare in recent days shows how the result can be near-disaster.
On March 29th Andres Freund, an engineer at Microsoft, published a short detective story. In recent weeks he had noticed that ssh—a system to log on securely to another device over the internet—was running about 500 milliseconds more slowly than expected. Closer inspection revealed malicious code embedded deep inside xz Utils, a piece of software designed for compressing data used inside the Linux operating system, which runs on virtually all publicly accessible internet servers.
Nationally, average teacher pay has barely budged since 1990, despite states pumping more funding into public schools. Across the country, new education dollars have instead gone toward additional staff, rising healthcare costs and pension obligations.
Now, some lawmakers are championing new pay mandates to force the issue, amid elevated teacher-turnover rates and a decline in people training to become teachers.
In South Dakota earlier this month, Gov. Kristi Noem signed into law a minimum teacher salary of $45,000, which will rise with inflation.
“If you want to have quality teachers enter the workforce and stay in the workforce, you have to pay them,” state representative Tony Venhuizen said at the bill’s signing ceremony. “When the state puts money into the schools, we want to see that money get into the teachers’ pockets.”
Last year, Arkansas set starting teacher pay at $50,000, a five-figure increase in many districts. The legislation also guaranteed every teacher at least a $2,000 raise. In 2026, $50,000 and $60,000 minimums will go into effect in Tennessee and Maryland, respectively.
The response to Covid was the greatest mistake in the history of the public-health profession, but the officials responsible for it are determined to do even worse. With the support of the Biden administration, the World Health Organization (WHO) is seeking unprecedented powers to impose its policies on the United States and the rest of the world during the next pandemic.
It was bad enough that America and other countries voluntarily followed WHO bureaucrats’ disastrous pandemic advice instead of heeding the scientists who had presciently warned, long before 2020, that lockdowns, school closures, and mandates for masks and vaccines would be futile, destructive, and unethical. It was bad enough that U.S. officials and the corporate media parroted the WHO’s false claims and ludicrous praise of China’s response. But now the WHO wants new authority to make its bureaucrats’ whims mandatory—and to censor those who disagree with their version of “the science.”
The WHO hopes to begin this power grab in May at its annual assembly in Geneva, where members will vote on proposed changes in international health regulations and a new treaty governing pandemics. Pamela Hamamoto, the State Department official representing the U.S. in negotiations, has already declared that America is committed to signing a pandemic treaty that will “build a stronger global health architecture,” which is precisely what we don’t need.
AT&T* has determined that AT&T data-specific fields were contained in a data set released on the dark web approximately two weeks ago. While AT&T has made this determination, it is not yet known whether the data in those fields originated from AT&T or one of its vendors. With respect to the balance of the data set, which includes personal information such as social security numbers, the source of the data is still being assessed.
AT&T has launched a robust investigation supported by internal and external cybersecurity experts. Based on our preliminary analysis, the data set appears to be from 2019 or earlier, impacting approximately 7.6 million current AT&T account holders and approximately 65.4 million former account holders.
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More.
Mark Cuban and Christopher Rufo:
Cuban argues that corporations do not define “equity” as “equality of outcome,” but here are the official DEI materials from Raytheon and Disney, which explicitly reject “equality” in favor of “equity,” defined as “equality of outcome.”
Congress doled out $190 billion to states for K-12 education during the pandemic, $122 billion of which was part of Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP).
By the time ARP was passed schools had received $68 billion. Research indicates that this was more than enough to cover the costs of reopening.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether an extra $122 billion was needed, but have these dollars been put to good use?
Three years later, the answer seems like a clear “No”
1/5
The tragedy hardened Longo’s views on crime and abortion. “I could not vote for President Biden,” he said. Khanna sat quietly as Longo spoke. “One of the challenges we have as a country is we have a wrong stereotypical view of the Trump voter,” Khanna said to us after the conversation had moved on. “The Trump voter includes possibly the teacher you most respect.”
Longo spoke highly of Khanna, praising his slogan of “progressive capitalism” and his push to use technology to create economic opportunity. He even said he might be able to vote for Khanna one day. “A Trump-Khanna voter!” Khanna marveled.
Sidney K. Lee and Thomas J. Mete
Harvard spent $530,000 on lobbying the federal government in 2023, the lowest amount spent by the University in the past nine years.
While collective Ivy League federal lobbying expenditures surged by 12.4 percent last year, reaching an all time high during the Biden administration, Harvard’s own lobbying levels dipped from past years.
The University’s lobbying expenditures fell $40,000 from last year’s total to its lowest levels since the 2014 fiscal year. Harvard’s lobbying efforts peaked during the first three years of the Trump administration, when the University routinely spent roughly $600,000 annually on federal lobbying.
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KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year
On a posting for a position as an assistant professor in international and comparative education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, applicants are required to submit a CV, a cover letter, a research statement, three letters of reference, three or more writing samples, and a statement of teaching philosophy that includes a description of their “orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.”
At Harvard and elsewhere, hiring for academic jobs increasingly requires these so-called diversity statements, which Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning describes as being “about your commitment to furthering EDIB within the context of institutions of higher education.”
By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom.
A closer look at the Bok Center’s page on diversity statements illustrates how.
For the purpose of showcasing attentiveness to DEI, the Center suggests answering questions such as: “How does your research engage with and advance the well-being of socially marginalized communities?”; “Do you know how the following operate in the academy: implicit bias, different forms of privilege, (settler-)colonialism, systemic and interpersonal racism, homophobia, heteropatriarchy, and ableism?”; “How do you account for the power dynamics in the classroom, including your own positionality and authority?”; “How do you design course assessments with EDIB in mind?”; and “How have you engaged in or led EDIB campus initiatives or programming?”
Seen as the architect of the university’s ongoing response to protesters, Diermeier faces the brunt of criticism from the university’s various stakeholders. The ongoing fiasco puts the German-born academic in the driver’s seat of an actual reputational crisis, the specific niche Diermeier has spent decades studying as a business professor. He specifically addresses corporate responses to activist pressure and public relations scandals in academic articles and books, like 2011’s Reputation Rules: Strategies for Building your Company’s Most Valuable Asset.
More.
Rob:
It’s hard to overstate how important – and strategically brilliant – @jk_rowling’s power move was today, a first-move checkmate that effectively
neutered Scotland’s dangerous new #HateCrimeBill. By openly and unambiguously breaking this law – on a massive public platform – on its very first day, she has in effect nullified the law by forcing the authorities in Scotland into a corner where they only have two options, both of which will be this laws downfall. They can:
More people follow JK Rowling (14M) than the entire population of Scotland (5.5M). So she can summon her people online to push back on freedom-of-speech restrictions offline.
The Network is growing stronger than the State.
Packetized media is now the dominant media system. It has altered the way we think and is in the process of reorganizing society. Disruption and opportunity await.
The media we produce and consume is rapidly getting more granular and dynamic.
By packetizing our media, we are doing something similar to what the Internet does to data.
Packetized media has rapidly become the dominant form of media, although it’s important to note that dominance doesn’t mean replacement since the earlier forms of media don’t disappear; instead, as we’ve seen, these older types will be integrated into the new dominant form. Here’s how this shift happened.
A new paper published today in @EconJWatch finds these results can’t be replicated.
”Our inability to [replicate] their results suggests that … they should not be relied on to support the view that US publicly traded firms can expect to deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives.”
McKinsey’s bizarre regressions of executive diversity against firm-level financial performance are not only potentially reverse-causal, they don’t replicate in newer data.
JEFFREY J. MCHENRY, LEAETTA M. HOUGH, JODY L. TOQUAM, MARY ANN HANSON, STEVEN ASHWORTH
A predictor battery of cognitive ability, perceptual-psychomotor ability, temperament/personality, interest, and job outcome preference measures was administered to enlisted soldiers in nine Army jobs. These measures were summarized in terms of 24 composite scores. The relationships between the predictor composite scores and five components of job performance were analyzed. Scores from the cognitive and perceptual-psychomotor ability tests provided the best prediction of job-specific and general task proficiency, while the temperament/personality composites were the best predictors of giving extra effort, supporting peers, and exhibiting personal discipline. Composite scores derived from the interest inventory were correlated more highly with task proficiency than with demonstrating effort and peer support. In particular, vocational interests were among the best predictors of task proficiency in combat jobs. The results suggest that the Army can improve the prediction of job performance by adding non-cognitive predictors to its present battery of predictor tests.
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More.
A pair of local high school students are bringing their love of politics and competition to Forward Theater Company’s next production as they debate the Constitution live onstage.
Opening Thursday night at Overture Center, “What the Constitution Means to Me” follows character Heidi Schreck as she discusses women’s rights, immigration, domestic abuse and the history of the United States — all in the context of how they have been interpreted through the nation’s charter. Schreck is played by actor Colleen Madden.v
Two major Democratic clients of the daughter of the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money trial have raised at least $93 million in campaign donations — and used the case in their solicitation emails — raising renewed concerns that the jurist has a major conflict of interest.
Trump’s attorneys are considering filing another motion demanding Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan recuse himself from the trial set to begin April 15, sources said.
The judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, is president of Authentic Campaigns, a Chicago-based progressive political consulting firm whose top clients include Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who was the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial, and the Senate Majority PAC, a major party fundraiser.
A judge is supposed to avoid “even the appearance of impropriety” or else recuse. Instead of recusing himself, the Trump Trial Judge is simply censoring all journalism about the impropriety.
CNN & RFK, Jr.
CNN: “When people talk about the threat to democracy that Trump poses, do you really think that is equal to Biden?”
RFK JR: “Biden is much worse threat to democracy.. President Biden is the first president history that has used the federal agencies to censor political speech”
At noon, Rothman and Mnookin videoconferenced with Vos. The deal called for restructuring 43 DEI positions to focus on broader student success efforts. In exchange, lawmakers would approve the pay raises, fund the engineering building and reverse a $32 million budget cut.
“Frankly, I think it’s a reasonable compromise deal in both directions – though we are still not over the finish line and so til that happens … who knows?” Mnookin texted a friend around 1:30 p.m.
The Journal Sentinel and other media outlets reported on the proposed terms, which had yet to be officially announced. State Democratic lawmakers urged students to contact board members and declare DEI non-negotiable.
“I am concerned that others will frame this agreement, and we will not look good,” Diana Harvey, the UW-Madison vice chancellor for strategic communication, texted Mnookin around 4 p.m. “I hate the fact that we are surrendering the narrative on this.”
The chancellor’s inbox filled with opinions. One alumna said UW-Madison would survive without new buildings, but could not survive giving up its principles. The email’s subject line itself was a plea.
“Please don’t.”
Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) hold valuable information regarding biomedical entities such as genes, diseases, biological processes, and drugs. KGs have been successfully employed in challenging biomedical areas such as the identification of pathophysiology mechanisms or drug repurposing. The creation of high-quality KGs typically requires labor-intensive multi-database integration or substantial human expert curation, both of which take time and contribute to the workload of data processing and annotation. Therefore, the use of automatic systems for KG building and maintenance is a prerequisite for the wide uptake and utilization of KGs.
Unpicking what is going on is not simple. A good place to start is to note that young women are soaring ahead of their male peers academically. In the European Union fully 46% of them earn degrees, versus 35% of young men, a gap that has doubled since 2002. One consequence is that young women are more likely than men to spend their early adulthood in a cocoon of campus liberalism. Meanwhile, boys outnumber girls at the bottom end of the scholastic scale. Across rich countries, 28% of them fail to learn to read to a basic level. That is true of only 18% of girls.
Benjamin Eastman and Christina Wheatland
If the Electoral Count Act unambiguously did not allow for the vice president’s involvement, as some have contended, why did Congress quietly modify the law in an omnibus bill to clarify that the vice president’s role in the certification of elections was merely ministerial — a high-priced letter opener?
Finally, the legacy media would tar and feather Eastman before they admitted his claims of election illegality were, at the very least, credible and at most that the illegality and fraud were significant enough to steal the 2020 election. In fact, polls show that between one-third and two-thirds of right-leaning Americans believe the former and a growing number are inclined to think the latter.
Since Eastman’s appearance at the Ellipse, he has endured three years of malicious lawsuits, bar complaints, subpoenas, and testimony before the House January 6 committee.
These include criminal charges. Eastman — alongside President Trump and 17 other “co-conspirators” — was indicted with absurd and unprecedented racketeering charges in Georgia by a rogue district attorney, Fani Willis, who appears to have committed perjury while testifying under oath about the details of her affair with the prosecutor she hired for the RICO case.
Holy Week brought a new set of horrors. An action we foresaw based on the predictable conclusion of lawfare was taken Wednesday that shook two centuries of American jurisprudence to its core. After what one commentator has described as the longest (32 days of trial over 10 weeks), most expensive (more than half a million dollars) bar trial in this country’s history, a bar court judge who has continued to make donationsto Democrat politicians even after taking the bench has recommended the disbarment of Eastman.
The 2024 Abel Prize—the mathematics world’s Nobel Prize equivalent—has been awarded to Michel Talagrand for his advances in describing and predicting the universe’s randomness. Talagrand’s path into mathematics was marked with personal struggle and resilience, and his recognition came as a shock to him.
“There was a total blank in my mind for at least four seconds,” Talagrand tells Nature News’ Davide Castelvecchi, describing when he heard the news of his award. “If I had been told an alien ship had landed in front of the White House, I would not have been more surprised.”
These Birds Become Really Playful When They Hear This Sound
(Obviously this is a joke. We did once survey a 10-phd bbq party, and marriage was the most statistically significant positive correlator. But that’s a story for another time.)
Richard Hamming’s inspiring and influential talk You and Your Research is what convinced me to do a phd. I wanted to work on important problems and aspired to contribute to the advancement of human knowledge. Oh, to be a scientist! 3 years in I felt like there was no hope; I’ve toiled away all my time and the only way out is to quit.
So I sought advice from my parents. They asked me to think about the least accomplished PhD graduate I know – Can I do as much as they did? What would a minimum effort phd look like? I answered that would result in a pretty bad thesis. And they said, that’s fine, bad is ok, go do what you can. Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.
And here we are.
Be sure to watch all 15 parts of the Aisha Carr deposition. Very Different than her recent media appearances.
Are the liberal arts conservative?, asks Emma Green in a New Yorker story about the revival of “classical education.” A growing number of classical-ed charter and private schools are offering “a traditional liberal-arts education, often focusing on the Western canon and the study of citizenship.”
Unlike many traditional public schools, “classical schools prize memory work, asking students to internalize math formulas and recite poems,” she writes.
Reading lists aren’t trendy. “One New York City public-high-school reading list includes graphic novels, Michelle Obama’s memoir, and a coming-of-age book about identity featuring characters named Aristotle and Dante,” writes Green. “In classical schools, high-school students read Aristotle and Dante.”
At Brilla, a charter-school network in the South Bronx, the middle school is calm and phone free, she writes.
The FBI spends “every day, all day long” interrogating people over their Facebook posts. At least, that’s what agents told Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to ask her about her social media activity.
Three FBI agents came to Abdeljawad’s house and said that they had been given “screenshots” of her posts by Facebook. Her lawyer Hassan Shibly posted a video of the incident online on Wednesday.
Abdeljawad told agents that she didn’t want to talk and asked them to show their badges on camera, which the agents refused to do. She wrote on Facebook that she later confirmed with local police that the FBI agents really were FBI agents.
“Facebook gave us a couple of screenshots of your account,” one agent in a gray shirt said in the video.
“So we no longer live in a free country and we can’t say what we want?” replied Abdeljawad.