All posts by Jim Zellmer

Instead of cutting taxes this year the Milwaukee Board of School Directors voted to increase its Fund 80 levy by $77.7 million. 

Corrinne Hess:

Fund 80 is a special fund for non-classroom activities that serve the entire community including adult education, recreation and day care services. 

By increasing the fund, the district’s total tax levy is $320 million this year. 

MPS officials told the Policy Forum that over $40 million of the Fund 80 increase will be spent on a new recreation community center and aquatic facility at the former Browning School and Browning Playfield location that has been in the planning stages since 2018. 

The district had previously considered issuing debt for the project but now will pay cash to avoid interest costs. The remaining amount will be used to address a backlog of repair needs for other MPS-owned recreational facilities.

The $77.7 million could have been used to reduce taxes this year. 

——

Over the last few months, the central argument from MPS and referendum proponents has been that these resources will preserve the status quo for the next five years, and they have laid out no certain path toward improvement in educational outcomes. Preservation of the current state should be acceptable to no one. 

A scientist with West African heritage refuses to “check the box” on his NIH application.

Stev McGuire:

It means his team’s “application is more likely to lose on ‘diversity’ grounds,” but he thinks it’s “immoral and narcissistic to use race to gain an advantage over other applicants. All that should matter is the merit of my application.”

The NIH’s insistence on DEI criteria is “a double wrong. Not only is the system rigged based on nonscientific—and possibly illegal—criteria; it encourages me to join in the rigging.”

Kevin Jon Williams:

Do I deserve to jump the line? If I say yes, I may play a leading role in ending the scourge of atherosclerosis—also known as hardening of the arteries. If I play fair, I may lose the opportunity to save people around the world from heart attacks and strokes. I’m angry at the National Institutes of Health for putting me in this position. I’m even angrier it has done so in the name of racial equity. 

My quandary comes down to whether I should “check the box” on an upcoming NIH grant application attesting to my recent African heritage. Since at least 2015, the NIH has asserted its belief in the intrinsic superiority of racially diverse research teams, all but stating that such diversity influences funding decisions. My family’s origins qualify me under the federal definition of African-American. Yet I feel it’s immoral and narcissistic to use race to gain an advantage over other applicants. All that should matter is the merit of my application and the body of my work, which is generally accepted as foundational in atherosclerosis research.

Stanford Education School Professor and declining math rigor

Sanjana Friedman:

Jo Boaler, a Stanford professor of math education, is arguably the person most responsible for the new California Math Framework, a set of curriculum recommendations that advocate against teaching most middle-schoolers algebra in the name of equity.

Though she advocates for these changes in the public school system, she’s sent her own children to a $48,000-a-year private school that teaches its middle schoolers algebra, and charged an underfunded school district $5,000 an hour for her consulting services.

An anonymous 100-page complaint recently documented over 30 claims of alleged citation misrepresentation in her research — the very research that underpins the CMF.

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More.

You Count the Votes Over and Over Until They Add Up Right

By John Kass

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker—the perpetually frightened rich kid born on third base thinking he hit a triple—has a big fat political problem.

He’s hosting the Democratic National Convention, his big fat coming out party in Chicago, in August. His fantasy? Becoming president of the United States of America.

As he’s planning his party, America is starting to focus on the absolute political wasteland that Illinois has become. And if they but open their eyes they’ll see exactly how the Democrats treat the sanctity of the vote.

The leftists preen like perfumed apes dressed in velvet suits when speechifying about how much they revere the institutions of democracy. Democracy Dies in Darkness is the slogan of The Washington Post, the leftist paper that promoted the Russia Collusion Hoax designed to destabilize the Trump administration. But they received the highest prize of corporate media. They’re all about democracy and darkness.

But in Chicago, where the DNC is to be held, there is another way, the Chicago Way, the Johnny Rocco Way.

“Senior US journalist attacks leading scientists for ‘misleading’ him over Covid lab-leak theory”

Susie Cohen:

A former New York Times journalist has attacked a group of leading scientists for “clearly” misleading him over the Covid lab-leak theory in the early days of the pandemic.

Donald McNeil Jr said he became sceptical of the hypothesis the virus was engineered in a Wuhan lab after several top epidemiological virologists insisted it wasn’t possible.

Mr McNeil Jr said their efforts to throw him “off track” influenced the newspaper’s coverage of the theory and likely contributed to the topic being “dropped” for a year.

However, the experts initially thought the lab leak theory was plausible but didn’t want to disclose so for political reasons, according to a raft of messages between them accidentally released by a US congressional committee last year.

In his book The Wisdom of Plagues, which looks back at 25 years covering pandemics, Mr McNeil Jr said the scientists “clearly misled me early on” and he was a “victim of deception”.

He said he was “disappointed, both in them and in myself, that I was so easily taken in”.

“Don… pretty much nailed it,” Prof Andersen added. “Let’s not tell him.” They told him the rumours were “demonstrably false” and 10 days later published Proximal Origins.

Discussing his response to another email from Mr McNeil Jr nine days later, Prof Andersen told his colleagues he had used “humour to deflect the fact I’m dismissing him” and added a “very deliberate” smiley face.

More.

On Feb 6, 2020, NY Times reporter Don McNeil asked both Kristian Andersen & Richard Ebright about the possibility COVID-19 had a lab origin. In response, Andersen lied (see Slack chat) & Ebright told the truth (see below).

And.

Correct. Andersen and I received the same question on the same day from the same journalist. Andersen responded with pre-meditated disinformation. I responded with truthful, balanced, and detailed information.

Misinformation (Censorship) experts are perhaps not quite unbiased

Bjorn Lomborg:

“Experts leaned strongly toward the left of the political spectrum” Data from Harvard Misinformation Review, survey of 150 misinformation experts

Antonio Garcia Martinez:

It’s incredible there used to be this entire Misinformation Industrial Complex–experts, institutes, studies, corporate teams with censorship power–that operated like a powerful nomenklatura.

Marc Andreessen:

This is who determines what you can read and who you can talk to.

The best part is, if you’re a US taxpayer, you’re paying her salary.

Bill Ackman:

For example, the reporter’s description of a closed end fund is patently false and her description of my wife’s degree is also incorrect. So out of spite, the NY Times prefers to misinform its readers rather than admit it has made mistakes. To be clear, these are not disputes about opinions. These are disputes about basic facts

Mike Benz:

More than that, Kate Starbird was the formal head of CISA’s “misinformation / disinformation” advisory committee in 2021-2022 making formal censorship advisory proposals for DHS’s review

Influence and the 2024 Milwaukee K-12 Tax & $pending increase referendum

Rory Linnane:

When Milwaukee Public Schools turned to city voters for more funding in 2020, it was smooth sailing. The dynamics are different this year as the district asks voters for more funding April 2.

The 2020 referendum passed with 78% of the vote, providing the district with up to $87 million in annual funds as it committed to expand arts and music programs that were nearly extinct in many schools.

This time around, its case could be considered less exciting: it’s simply trying to maintain staff and avoid cuts as state education funding has fallen behind inflation.

Another challenge: The district is facing a deep-pocketed opponent.

The Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce has spent over $400,000 campaigning against the MPS referendum, finance reports filed this week show.

That’s more than the Vote Yes for MPS campaign, which is funded by the teachers union and other public schools supporters. That group has spent about $277,000 as of March 18. That’s less than the same campaign had spent at this time in 2020.

“excessive sentence findings”

Scrutinize:

Increased focus on state judiciaries has significant potential to improve the criminal legal system. Recognizing the need for evaluation metrics for judges, this report pioneers a data-driven, evidence-based approach to assessing the judiciary. We analyze written appellate decisions to quantify individual trial court judges’ decisions and impacts. This methodology transforms complex judicial texts into accessible data, creating metrics of judicial performance for use by policymakers and the public.

This report introduces ‘excessive sentence findings’ as a method to assess individual judges’ decisions and their impact. In New York, appellate courts review sentences for excessiveness and can reduce them in the “interest of justice,” a rare and clear signal—from highly-respected institutional actors—that a lower court judge made an exceptionally troubling choice. We identify lower court judges with sentences reduced by appellate courts for being excessive and calculate the total number of years reduced from those sentences.

Vast Archive of Rare Japanese Textbooks Now Online To Explore for Free

By Madeleine Muzdakis 

What did your school textbooks look like? Chances are they were old, ripped, and written in. Their computer-printed images were certainly not fine art, especially with other students’ layering doodles over the years. However, textbooks do not always have to be boring; they can be works of art. An online archive of historic Japanese textbooks from the 19th and 20th centuries—hosted by the National Institute for Educational Policy Research—exemplifies the textbook as an art form. Decorated in everything from hand painting and calligraphy to traditional block printing, the books are explorable in PDF format for free.

The collection includes artwork such as hanging drawings, elementary primers, and brushwork guides for calligraphy. These works span a broad period, from the 19th century till after World War II—a time of immense change for Japan. Some texts are many pages long, combining elegant writing with detailed illustrations. Horses dance across a page beneath simple characters; whereas in another book, plants found in the garden are illustrated. Others depict teachers and small pupils cross-legged in front of their lecturers. It’s fascinating even for those who cannot read Japanese.

Civics: The corporate media are all-in on government censorship

Michael Shellenberger:

The 60 Minutes segment was particularly shocking. Lesly Stahl never mentioned the mass censorship of accurate information about COVID’S origins, COVID vaccines, and lockdowns. She falsely suggested that shining a light on the censorship activists was tantamount to persecution. And she suggested that if the government didn’t do more to censor misinformation, Trump supporters would overthrow the government, which is a form of disinformation aimed at scaring people into giving up our first and most fundamental freedom.

There are many reasons why they are doing this….

I didn’t know that college would be a factory of unreason

Theo Baker

“We’ve had protests in the past,” Richard Saller, the university’s interim president, told me in November—about the environment, and apartheid, and Vietnam. But they didn’t pit “students against each other” the way that this conflict has.

I’ve spoken with Saller, a scholar of Roman history, a few times over the past six months in my capacity as a student journalist. We first met in September, a few weeks into his tenure. His predecessor, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, had resigned as president after my reporting for The Stanford Daily exposed misconduct in his academic research. (Tessier-Lavigne had failed to retract papers with faked data over the course of 20 years. In his resignation statement, he denied allegations of fraud and misconduct; a Stanford investigation determined that he had not personally manipulated data or ordered any manipulation but that he had repeatedly “failed to decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes” from his lab.)

In that first conversation, Saller told me that everyone was “eager to move on” from the Tessier-Lavigne scandal. He was cheerful and upbeat. He knew he wasn’t staying in the job long; he hadn’t even bothered to move into the recently vacated presidential manor. In any case, campus, at that time, was serene. Then, a week later, came October 7.

Civics: Non-Citizens Have Been Voting Since 2008

David Catron:

Why would a president running for reelection refuse to meet with the Speaker of the House to discuss a national crisis that most voters blame on the president himself? This would be regarded as bizarre behavior under any circumstances, but it’s particularly perverse considering that the crisis in question is illegal immigration — the signature issue of Biden’s probable challenger in November. Moreover, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average, 63 percent of the voters disapprove of the way he has handled immigration. Yet Biden refuses to discuss the problem. It’s almost as if he thinks it somehow works to his advantage.

Democrats may well have reached the conclusion that they can’t stay in power with legal votes by natural born or naturalized citizens.

What benefit would Biden gain by letting millions of illegal immigrants into the country? House speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) provided the answer during a recent appearance on Fox Business Network’s Mornings with Maria Bartiromo: “I genuinely believe that originally the idea was to bring people in, open the border, have the flow come in and turn them into voters, there’s no other reason that seems to make sense.” This has been dismissed as a conspiracy theory by the White House and its allies in the media. Yet Biden has often made public statements that suggest Johnson is right. In 2016, when he was Vice President, he put it thus:

The academic performance and mental wellbeing of world cup babies

Dirk Bethmann and Jae Il Cho

Highlights

The 2002 FIFA World Cup led to an unexpected and temporary increase in South Korea’s fertility rate.

We use the quasi-experimental nature of the event to examine Becker’s trade-off between quantity and quality of children.

Our results support the notion of adverse effects on child quality measured by academic performance or school test scores.

We uncover that the same students exhibit significantly higher degrees of mental wellbeing.

Data From 9,500 Districts Shows Another Boom Year for School Staffing Even as Fiscal Cliff Looms

Chad Aldeman:

An all-time high in 2022-23, with 173,000 students & 159,000 employees, including 15,000 more teachers. See latest numbers.

According to new data from the National Center on Education Statistics, public schools added 173,000 students and 159,000 employees in the 2022-23 school year, including 15,000 additional teachers. 

On a per-student basis, staffing levels hit an all-time high.  

These numbers are in full-time equivalents (FTEs), which are adjusted based on the number of hours worked by part-time staff. The FTE numbers are a better measure of total staff time available, but the raw headcount numbers come out faster, and those suggest schools may be in for another new high in 2023-24. 

The outlook beyond that looks murkier. As districts spend down the last of their federal ESSER dollars, they may have to lay off staff or close under-enrolled buildings. To identify which communities are most at risk, I worked with Eamonn Fitzmaurice, The 74’s art and technology director, to update our data on how student-to-teacher ratios are changing across the country. Click on the map below to see the results in your community. 

Civics: What is an “earmark”?

Sadie Frankel’s article might tell readers where the $ came from:

The money is part of the $1.2 trillion budget bill President Joe Biden signed into law early Saturday and will go toward the Chamber’s $15 million goal to renovate and expand its 15,000-square-foot facility at 5262 Verona Road in Fitchburg. The project is intended to increase the resources available and provide a space for entrepreneurs to develop their business ideas.

The grant was announced by U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison.

Kobeissi

$1.00 from 2020, right before $4 trillion in stimulus was handed out, is worth just $0.80 today.

That’s a 20% decrease in purchasing power in just 4 years.

We are paying for stimulus and its costing a lot more than 4$ trillion.

Inflation is the biggest involuntary tax of all time.

Earmark

Fiscal Indulgences. More.

US Debt Clock

Federal taxes and $pending

The federal government now spends twice what it takes in tax revenue. While debt service alone eats nearly 2/3 of individual income tax.

Federal government spending is inimical to economic growth. The government takes all of its resources (money) from the real economy. Government spending is paid for by taxes, borrowing, or printing money. One way or another, the people end up paying for it.

“In the hour-plus we spent talking in the ornate Speaker’s Lobby this week, the United States descended $350 million deeper into the red. The national debt is now at a record high of nearly $34.6 trillion. “

Thank you @Robert_Aderholt for listing some of the objectionable earmarks the Senate slipped into this giant omnibus. More.

A Conservative Thought Experiment on a Liberal College Campus

Rachel Slade:

Twitchy and youthful with a quick wit, Hersh is a 40-year-old Tufts graduate and political science professor renowned on campus for his tightly structured lecture classes, which draw impressive crowds. While co-teaching a seminar class with him a couple of years ago, I learned how he’d carved out a place for himself as a self-styled “right-leaning centrist” who is working to counteract what he sees as the overabundance of liberal thinking on campus.

Hersh is not quite a code-red alarmist, à la Bill Ackman—the Harvard-educated hedge-fund billionaire who told New York magazine that after his daughter came home from Harvard “an anti-capitalist…practically a Marxist,” he decided to wage war on higher ed, which he said had all but indoctrinated his daughter into a “cult.” Already vocal about his opposition to Harvard’s DEI initiatives, he became the poster boy of the conservative attack on higher ed when he spearheaded calls for a plagiarism investigation of the school’s then president, Claudine Gay, which resulted in her resignation in January.

Hersh hasn’t come to quite the same conclusion as Ackman, but he does know that there’s a paucity of conservative teaching on campus—liberal professors, after all, outnumber conservative professors 28 to 1 in New England, according to a 2016 study of data from the Higher Education Research Institute—and he believes it’s pedagogically important to offer diverse perspectives and voices. “Sometimes good ideas emerge from the right, and sometimes they emerge from the left,” Hersh tells me. “And you’ve got to burst the bubble that either democracy or the good life for American society is going to emerge exclusively from the left.”

Fourth Black Female Harvard Scholar Accused of Plagiarism Amid Assault on DEI Initiatives

Tilly R. Robinson and Neil H. Shah

Harvard Sociology assistant professor Christina J. Cross was accused of plagiarism in an anonymous complaint to Harvard’s Office of Research Integrity, conservative activist Christopher F. Rufo reported in the City Journal — the fourth Black woman at Harvard who studies race or social justice to be accused of plagiarism.

The allegations against Cross mark the fourth in a rapid series of anonymous plagiarism complaints of varying severity lodged against Black women at Harvard amid a growing right-wing attack against diversity, equity, and inclusion in higher education.

Cross follows former Harvard president Claudine GaySherri A. Charleston, Harvard’s Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer; and Shirley R. Greene, a Title IX coordinator at the Harvard Extension School, who have all faced plagiarism allegations since December.

Though the allegations against Cross are the weakest of the four, plagiarism expert Jonathan Bailey said, Rufo’s posts on X received more than a million views and were amplified by X owner Elon Musk.

Deportation delayed for German home-schooling family living in East Tennessee

Evan Mealins:

Immigration and Customs Enforcement granted the German home-schooling family in East Tennessee a one-year reprieve from deportation, according to an update from the Home School Legal Defense Association.

HSLDA applauded ICE’s decision to delay the deportation of the Romeike family, of Morristown, but said it will not be finalized until Oct. 11, the date they were told they must leave the country.

“This is excellent news! According to our friends on Capitol Hill, this outcome is the direct result of your calls, your petition signatures, and your outreach to Congress on this issue,” HSLDA Action Executive Director Joel Grewe wrote on Oct. 6. “Now the reality is that until this is signed on October 11, this is not guaranteed, but we do expect a positive outcome.”

U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-Tenn., who has introduced legislation to grant the Romeikes permanent residency, praised the decision on social media.

K-12 Tax & $pending climate: “The US faces a Liz Truss-style market shock if the government ignores the country’s ballooning federal debt”

Claire Jones:

Swagel, who served in the US Treasury under Republican president George W Bush, acknowledged that next year would be important “for fiscal policy in particular”, given debate over extending the tax cuts and Obama-era healthcare subsidies that are also due to expire.

The CBO projections issued this week showed debt-to-GDP levels surpassing their second world war high of 116 per cent in 2029 — a trajectory that Swagel described as “unprecedented”.

“The debt that was run up during World War Two, was largely paid back within the generation of the people who fought the war,” Swagel said.

“The fiscal burdens being generated today are not ones the current generation is going to bear the burden of.” The dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency would not always insulate the US from market pressures as debt interest payments increased, Swagel warned.

——

US Debt Clock.

Madison School Board Candidate Forum (both unopposed)

Simpson Street Free Press:

Local Journalists Interview School Board Candidates

Simpson Street Free Press hosts Q&A session for Madison school board candidates. Questions are posed by local education reporters. You can watch the video here:

Our panel of journalists — Abbey Machtig (Wisconsin State Journal), Kayla Huynh (Cap Times), Abigail Leavins (Isthmus), Sandy Flores Ruiz (Simpson Street Free Press), and Scott Girard (former Cap Times ed-beat reporter).

The candidates are Savion Castro (seat 2 incumbent, unopposed), and Maia Pearson (seat 1 incumbent, unopposed).

The moderators are Taylor Kilgore and Leila Fletcher from Simpson Street Free Press.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

K-12 Governance and Conflicts of interest

Gaius Mucius Scaevola

Superintendent Nyah Hamlett of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, not immune from controversy after allegedly plagiarizing her doctoral dissertation, has now opened herself up to charges of conflicts of interest after strong patterns in her hiring practices have been revealed.

This October the Superintendent approved the hiring of her husband, Breon Hamlett, to work at Carrboro High School as their head basketball coach. While not necessarily a coveted position within the district, the position does come with a taxpayer funded salary and raises the question of whether fair hiring practices were used.

Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School Board Policy 7100, section C, subsection 3, part C clearly outlines that “When making recommendations for the selection and assignment of personnel, the superintendent shall attempt to avoid situations in which one employee occupies a position in which he or she has influence over the employment status, including hiring, salary, and promotion, of another employee who is a member of the first employee’s immediate family.” The General Assembly of North Carolina also requires all employees of a school district’s administrative unit to undergo at least two hours of conflict of interest training a year. 

“Not communicating with media, low academic achievement scores at the St. Paul school district he recently led are worrisome”

Dave Cieslewicz:

The selection of Joe Gothard as Madison’s next public schools superintendent has met with widespread praise, including from me. But digging a little deeper into his record raises some concerns.

Let’s start with the good stuff. Gothard has led the St. Paul school district since 2017. That district is bigger and more diverse than ours and so he should be up to the task here. In fact, Gothard was named Minnesota Superintendent of the Year and then won National Superintendent of the Year just before he was selected for the Madison job in late February.

In addition, Gothard is well known in Madison and, apparently, well-respected by many. He grew up here, went to Madison public schools, got his education degrees from Edgewood College, started his teaching career with MMSD, and had administration experience in the Doyle Building. In fact, he was a runner-up for the top job when the board picked Jen Cheatham instead back in 2013.

Now for the concerns.

Let’s start with that Superintendent of the Year award. It’s given out by the School Superintendents Association. The criteria for selection include leadership, communication, professionalism and community involvement. Notice what’s missing? None of the criteria for that award have anything to do with the actual success of students. And, in fact, the criteria the Madison school board developed for selecting the new superintendent didn’t include that either.

That was lucky for Gothard because St. Paul students are not performing well. Numbers available as of August 2023 showed that only 26% of St. Paul third through eighth graders were proficient in math, only 34% in reading and only 24% in science. In addition, only 57% of St. Paul students were showing up in school at least 90% of the time, compared to almost 70% statewide in Minnesota. The St. Paul math scores are even worse than Madison’s, and those lag both the state and national averages.

“It’s just that people sometimes give privilege to some things and not others.”

Abbey Machtig:
Still, at least once major American leader of the balanced literacy movement, Lucy Calkins, has rolled out changes to her reading curriculum under pressure from the science of reading movement. And initial test scores from around the country show this science of reading model seems to be working. Mississippi was one of the first states to pass a law related to “evidence-based” reading instruction. More than 30 states, including Wisconsin, have followed suit, especially after 2019, when Mississippi became the only state in the nation to meaningfully improve its fourth-grade reading scores. —– The Madison School District adopted EL Education in 2022, one of the four curricula that ended up on the state’s final list, which the school district estimated at the time to cost about $3.5 million for materials, including shipping. The Oregon School District also has been using EL Education since the beginning of the school year. The McFarland School District started using a curriculum called Wonders last fall. McFarland schools said it meets the standards outlined in Wisconsin’s reading law even though it’s not one of the four approved by the state. The Waunakee School District has been using an early literacy curriculum called Meaning Making since fall 2022. This curriculum also does not appear on the state’s short list but still meets ACT 20’s requirements, according to Amy Johnson, the district’s director of elementary curriculum and instruction. Waunakee already is looking for a new elementary math curriculum. Johnson said the district will be focusing on that work, rather than pursuing another reading curriculum change.
Abbey Machtig interviewed Mariana Castro from the Multilingual Learning Resource Center for this article.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

Georgia’s School Choice Revival

Wall Street Journal:

Sixteen Georgia House Republicans dealt school choice a setback a year ago, voting against education savings accounts, or ESAs, for students in poorly performing districts. This month the ESAs came back to life, imperfectly, but at least it’s a start.

The Georgia House voted 91-82 last week to pass the scholarships, which are worth $6,500 each. They can be used toward private school tuition and other education expenses by students in the worst-performing 25% of Georgia public schools. Eight of last year’s Republican “nays” flipped their votes. The Senate, which passed the bill last year, voted for it again on Wednesday, and it heads to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk.

The success is thanks to Mr. Kemp getting over his seeming ambivalence from a year ago. He gave school choice top billing in his State of the State address, telling lawmakers the state had “run out of ‘next years.’” Last year his tepid public support came too late.

House Speaker Jon Burns also supported ESAs more forcefully, taking the unusual step of promoting the bill in committee last week. Lt. Gov. Burt Jones and Speaker pro tem Jan Jones kept up their commitment. House Republicans in rural areas were the main force joining Democrats against the bill last year, and seven still voted “no” last week.

In presentation to staff of brain-computer company, quadriplegic Arizona man details improvements after procedure

Alexa Corse:

Elon Musk announced in January that his Neuralink company had implanted its brain chip in a human for the first time.

Arbaugh said he was surprised how fast Neuralink moved, saying it took about five months from when he applied to when he got the surgery.

“Brain surgery was easy,” he quipped. “I was expecting a much longer recovery time, and they kicked me out of the hospital like a day later.”

Arbaugh also said he played a joke on his mom. When she walked in after the surgery, he pretended not to know her for a couple seconds. “She was not happy,” he said.

The presentation showed video clips of Arbaugh from the month after his surgery. One clip, for example, showed him and his dad playing “Mario Kart.”

A Neuralink employee said during the video that he had been spending long days at Arbaugh’s home working with him.

Moving a computer cursor isn’t a major technical leap for brain-computer interfaces. An older brain chip first implanted in a human in 2004 also helped a paralyzed person move a cursor with only their thoughts. But the older chip must be attached to a device on the outside of the brain to transmit data, requiring wires protruding through the skin. Neuralink’s device transmits data wirelessly.

Two Wisconsin teachers inducted into National Teachers Hall of Fame

Adrianne Davis:

The National Teachers Hall of Fame has named two Southeast Wisconsin teachers as inductees for its class of 2024.

English and language arts teacher Shelly Moore Krajacic of South Milwaukee High School and sixth grade history teacher Terry Kaldhusdal of Kettle Moraine Middle School were both honored Thursday with surprise celebrations from their students and the NTHF. Maddie Fennell, Acting Executive Director of NTHF, presented the awards to both teachers.

Krajacic and Kaldhusdal have been in the education field since the 1990s.

As of 2024 only one other Wisconsin teacher, Deborah Lynn Tackmann, has been given the prestigious honor.

Civics: The FDA Settled With Us Because They Knew They Were Going To Lose

Pierre Kory:

Obviously my readers know why “they” had to bury the evidence of efficacy of ivermectin at all costs: little ‘ole ivermectin threatened both the EUA for the vaccines and the global vaccine market (north of a $100 billion). It also threatened the markets for all the competing pricey, patented, pipeline pharmaceuticals like Remdesivir, Paxlovid, molnupiravir and the monoclonal antibodies (also massive global markets in the many billions). 

Pharma’s greatest weapon to attack ivermectin is the FDA. Pharma (and especially Pfizer) has near complete control of the FDA (and the CDC and the NIH). But the FDA couldn’t do it all by themselves so they called in the CDC to do some dirty work: 5 days after the FDA tweet the CDC sent out a warning advisory to all the state medical boards (which was then forwarded to every licensed physician in the country): 

Civics: Feds Ordered Google To Unmask Certain YouTube Users. Critics Say It’s ‘Terrifying.’

Thomas Brewster:

Federal investigators have ordered Google to provide information on all viewers of select YouTube videos, according to multiple search warrants obtained by Forbes. Privacy experts from multiple civil rights groups told Forbes they think the orders are unconstitutional because they threaten to turn innocent YouTube viewers into criminal suspects.

In a just-unsealed case from Kentucky reviewed by Forbes, undercover cops sought to identify the individual behind the online moniker “elonmuskwhm,” who they suspect of selling bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting.

In conversations with the user in early January, undercover agents sent links of YouTube tutorials for mapping via drones and augmented reality software, then asked Google for information on who had viewed the videos, which collectively have been watched over 30,000 times.

An introduction to Algorithmic Mathematical Art

Xah Lee

Here is an introduction and survey of Algorithmic Mathematical Art.

In the early 1990s, they were merely visualization aids in the study of mathematics. Gradually, the complexity and artistry of the images becomes an end itself.

Here, i examine the various methods of algorithmic mathematical art, and indicate the states of the art and possibilities. At the end, i give a definition of Algorithmic Mathematical Art.

Warrantless Surveillance on American Citizens

Harriett Hageman and Jim Jordan:

The Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government are conducting oversight of the federal government’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to surveil American citizens’ financial information. Based on recent reporting and other information obtained by the Committee and Select Subcommittee, we believe that the Department of the Treasury possesses information necessary for our oversight and we request your full cooperation.

In September 2023, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that it was using AI to “help IRS compliance teams better detect tax cheating, identify emerging compliance threats and improve case selection tools.”1 According to the announcement, “the IRS is deploying new resources towards cutting-edge technology to improve our visibility on where the wealthy shield their income and focus staff attention on the areas of greatest abuse,
” including “cutting-edge machine learning technology.”2 On February 28, 2024, the Treasury Department publicly be acknowledged that it has “implemented an enhanced process using AI to mitigate check fraud in near real-time by strengthening and expediting processes to recover potentially fraudulent payments from financial institutions” since late 2022. 3 As noted in a Treasury Department press release, “[t]he enhanced AI process and OPI’s [Office of Payment Integrity] strong partnership with federal law enforcement agencies have led to multiple active cases and arrests with law
enforcement” and the recovery of $375 million in Fiscal Year (FY) 2023 alone.4

—-

Commentary.

Political Power and the Chicago Teachers Union

The Economist:

As election-night parties go, the mood was bleak. On March 19th primary-election voters in Chicago were asked to vote on a ballot measure that would have raised the transfer tax on properties worth over $1m so as to generate money to pay for homelessness relief. The measure was backed by the city’s entire progressive establishment. Its opponents, mostly from the real-estate industry, did not even bother to organise a rival event. And yet by 9pm on election night, “No” was leading by around eight percentage points. “Let’s just pretend,” said Myron Byrd, from the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, an activist group, mournfully, before he belted out a song he had wanted to perform to celebrate victory. The party ended with chants of “we will not give up”, long after most attendees gave up and left.

The defeat of the “Bring Chicago Home” measure was crushing for Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, who had heavily promoted it. But it is perhaps an even bigger defeat for his former employer, the Chicago Teachers Union (ctu), which put $400,000 and the organising work of its 28,000 members into getting a Yes vote. In the past decade or so, the union has become one of the most powerful in the country by adopting a model of radical left-wing political organising. From 2022 to the end of last year it put $2.3m into Mr Johnson’s campaign fund. Its support helped elevate Mr Johnson, previously an unknown county commissioner, into office. This year it hopes to reap the spoils—the teachers’ contract is up for renewal. But is the union overreaching?

WEAC: $1.54M for four State Senators.

How science sleuths track down bad research

Nidhi Subarraman:

It was early January when the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute received a complaint about signs of image manipulation in dozens of papers by senior researchers. Days later, the organization said it was seeking to retract or correct several of the studies, sending shock waves through the scientific community.

Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School were sent a complaint the same month: A collection of nearly 30 papers co-authored by another professor appeared to contain copied or doctored images.

The complaints were from different critics, but they had something in common. Both scientists—molecular biologist Sholto David and image expert Elisabeth Bik—had used the same tool in their analyses: an image-scanning software called Imagetwin.

Behind the recent spotlight on suspect science lies software such as Imagetwin, from a company based in Vienna, and another called Proofig AI, made by a company in Israel. The software brands aid scientists in scouring hundreds of studies and are turbocharging the process of spotting deceptive images.

Stanford Math-Education Expert Has ‘Reckless Disregard for Accuracy,’ Complaint Alleges

Stephanie M. Lee

Jo Boaler, a Stanford University professor and one of the country’s most influential experts on math education, has misrepresented scholars’ findings in her work to the point of showing a “reckless disregard for accuracy,” according to an anonymous complaint reportedly filed with Stanford on Wednesday.

The 100-page document details 52 instances in which Boaler, a professor of math education at the university’s Graduate School of Education, allegedly misstated or misconstrued outside studies about learning, neuroscience, and math education in her own articles, lectures, and books. Several of its examples appeared in a draft of the California math framework, a guidance document Boaler co-authored about how math should be taught in K-12 schools.

A look at Large Language Models

Sherlock Xu:

Over the past year, the AI world has been abuzz with the rapid release of large language models (LLMs), each boasting advancements that push the boundaries of what’s possible with generative AI. The pace at which new models are emerging is breathtaking. Just last weekend, xAI released its Grok language model, a behemoth with 314 billion parameters, under the Apache 2.0 license.

These models, powered by an ever-increasing number of parameters and trained on colossal datasets, have improved our efficiency to generate text and write (as well as understand) complex code. However, the sheer number of options available can feel both exciting and daunting. Making informed decisions about which to use — considering output quality, speed, and cost — becomes a problem.

The answer lies not just in the specifications sheets or benchmark scores but in a holistic understanding of what each model brings to the table. In this blog post, we curate a select list of LLMs making waves over the past year. At the same time, we look to provide answers to some of the frequently asked questions.

Caulkins Commentary

Lucy Caulkins:

Your Feb. 29 cover story, “When Kids Can’t Read,” references Springfield public schools and my curriculum, Units of Study.

I applaud Springfield for attending to the individual differences among children as readers. It is fundamentally important to recognize that children are all different. Assessments from reading specialists and individualized support for those who need it are foundational parts of a successful education strategy. Some children will need help segmenting and blending sounds as they read, while others need more opportunities to read nonfiction texts and to develop world knowledge and vocabulary.

Springfield’s programs such as Real Men Read and Compass for Kids similarly show that the district is making sound, research-based decisions that will move readers forward. The Real Men Read program provides valuable mentorship, allowing children to grow up seeing themselves as readers and thinking, “Reading is something cool people do.” And Springfield’s decision to supplement classroom learning with after-school and summer programs to support readers is wise. Kids need time to practice reading. These efforts make a real difference. These programs matter.

——

Much more on Lucy Caulkins.

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

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

Complaint Alleges University of Wisconsin DEI Czar, Husband of Harvard’s DEI Chief, Has Decades-Long History of Research Misconduct

Aaron Sibarium:

The complaint, which was filed anonymously, implicates eight of Charleston’s publications, many of them coauthored, and accuses him of plagiarizing other scholars as well as duplicating his own work. It comes as the university is already investigating Charleston over a separate complaint filed in January, alleging that a 2014 study by him and his wife—Harvard University’s chief diversity officer, Sherri Ann Charleston—is a facsimile of a study he published in 2012.

“This is an extraordinary case of serial misrepresentation and deception,” said Peter Wood, the head of the National Association of Scholars and a former associate provost at Boston University. “The closest analogy would be someone who sells the same real estate to five different buyers, all of whom are unaware of the others.”

In January, Charleston won a lifetime achievement award for “excellence in higher education.” The university trumpeted the award in a press release, praising his “unwavering dedication to creating inclusive environments in academia” and noting his “wealth of academic accolades.”

Copy and Paste: Another Harvard racial-justice scholar is accused of plagiarism.

Christopher Rufo:

Harvard professor Christina Cross is a rising star in the field of critical race studies. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, secured the support of the National Science Foundation, and garnered attention from the New York Times, where she published an influential article titled “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home.”

Cross’s 2019 dissertation, “The Color, Class, and Context of Family Structure and Its Association with Children’s Educational Performance,” won a slate of awards, including the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award and the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, and helped catapult her onto the Harvard faculty.

According to a new complaint filed with Harvard’s office of research integrity, however, Cross’s work is compromised by multiple instances of plagiarism, including “verbatim plagiarism, mosaic plagiarism, uncited paraphrasing, and uncited quotations from other sources.”

I have obtained a copy of the complaint, which documents a pattern of misappropriation in Cross’s dissertation and one other academic paper. The complaint begins with a dozen allegations of plagiarism related to the dissertation that range in severity from small bits of “duplicative language,” which may not constitute an offense, to multiple passages heavily plagiarized from other sources without proper attribution. (Cross did not respond to a request for comment.)

Comparative advantage is very subtle, but incredibly powerful.

Noah Smith:

I hang out with a lot of people in the AI world, and if there’s one thing they’re certain of, it’s that the technology they’re making is going to put a lot of people out of a job. Maybe not all people — they argue back and forth about that — but certainly a lot of people. 

It’s understandable that they think this way; after all, this is pretty much how they go about inventing stuff. They think “OK, what sort of things would people pay to have done for them?”, and then they try to figure out how to get AI to do that. And since those tasks are almost always things that humans currently do, it means that AI engineers, founders, and VCs are pretty much always working on automating human labor. So it’s not too much of a stretch to think that if we keep doing that, over and over, eventually a lot of humans just won’t have anything to do. 

It’s also natural to think that this kind of activity would push down wages. Intuitively, if there’s a set of things that humans get paid to do, and some of those things keep getting automated away, human labor will get squeezed into a shrinking set of tasks. Basically, the idea is that it looks like this:

Doubts About Value Are Deterring College Enrollment

Jessica Blake:

Enrollment has been declining in higher education for more than a decade, and the most common explanations in recent years have been lingering effects of the pandemic and a looming demographic cliff expected to shrink the number of traditional-age college students. But new research suggests that public doubts about the value of a college degree are a key contributor.

The study—conducted by Edge Research, a marketing research firm, and HCM Strategists, a public policy and advocacy consulting firm with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—uses focus groups and parallel national surveys of current high school students and of adults who decided to leave college or who didn’t go at all to link the value proposition of a college degree and Americans’ behaviors after high school.

The Man-Made Miracle of SpaceX

Max Meyer:

So don’t let any sour punditry confuse you. What happened in Texas last week is a man-made miracle—emphasis on man-made, because it took the men and women of SpaceX 20 years to build a sustainable company that could pull off such a feat.

Oh, and billions of dollars of cash.

To build rockets, especially big rockets, you need money. Lots of it. NASA gets it from Congress—about $25 billion a year. SpaceX didn’t have money from Uncle Sam at the beginning. It had to raise money from private investors—about $10 billion since 2002.

In 2024, the company projects billions in profitsfrom two major revenue sources: launching rockets for commercial and government clients, and providing internet via Starlink satellites.

SpaceX has won an effective monopoly on space launches in the West by making them much cheaper and more reliable thanks to reusable rockets. The company launches the outright majority of worldwide material to orbit—that’s mostly commercial satellites and cargo for the International Space Station, though Elon Musk did once launch his personal Tesla Roadster sports car as well (it passed Mars in October 2020 and will swing past Earth in 2047). Outside of Russia and China, SpaceX accounted for over 99.9 percent of material sent to orbit at the end of 2023. The Falcon Heavy has achieved a cargo-cost-per-kilogram of just $1,500, about a quarter of the closest Chinese competitor. 

Notes on “ai” research

By Naomi Nix, Cat Zakrzewski and Gerrit De Vynck

University academics often have little choice but to work with industry researchers, with the company footing the bill for computing power and offering data. Nearly 40 percent of papers presented at leading AI conferences in 2020 had at least one tech employee author, according to the 2023 report.And industry grants often fund PhD students to perform research, said Mohamed Abdalla, a scientist at the Canadian-based Institute for Better Health at Trillium Health Partners, who has conducted research on the effect of industry on academics’ AI research.

My Clients, the Liars

Ymeskhout

All this puts some of my clients of the guilty persuasion in a bind. Sure, they don’t want me sitting on my ass doing nothing for their case, but they also can’t have me snooping around on my own too much. . . because who knows what I might find? So they take steps to surreptitiously install guardrails around my scrutiny, hoping I won’t notice.

You might wonder why any chicanery from my clients is warranted. After all, am I not professionally obligated to strictly maintain client confidentiality? It’s true, a client can show me where they buried their dozen murder victims and I wouldn’t be allowed to tell a soul, even if an innocent person is sitting in prison for their crimes. Part of my clients’ clammed-up demeanors rests on a deluded notion that I won’t fight as hard for their cases unless I am infatuated by their innocence. Perhaps they don’t realize that representing the guilty is the overwhelmingly banal reality of my job.[1] More importantly, it’s myopic to forget that judges, prosecutors, and jurors want to see proof, not just emphatic assurances on the matter. 

But clients still lie to me — exclusively to their own detriment

Voters reject Chicago tax & $pending increase

Dylan Sharkey:

Chicago voters were rejecting the referendum dubbed “Bring Chicago Home,” with 54% voting “no” to 46% “yes” with 98% of precincts reporting.

While 98% of precincts had reported, The Associated Press was estimating only 82% of the vote had been counted with another two weeks during which mail-in ballots could be received. Still, the Bring Chicago Home coalition was conceding the election.

The referendum would have given Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and the city council voter approval to raise the real estate transfer tax on properties worth more than $1 million. Johnson predicted it would give him $100 million a year in revenue.

What was the plan?

Chicago charges 0.75% on the sale of all property. The plan would have:

What The Milwaukee k-12 tax & $pending Referendum Could Cost You…

WILL:

Recently, Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) proposed a $252 million annual referendum that will raise taxes on those in the city in perpetuity. The question will be put to voters on the April 2 ballot. The district claims that, without the passage of the referendum, a 13% cut in schools and a 26% cut in central office administration will be required. Yet the district lacks a clear plan for how the increased spending will be put to work to improve student outcomes.

With nearly 70,000 students, MPS is by far the largest school district in the state. It is also a district where proficiency rates have been abysmal for decades. As such, this referendum request deserves a certain level of scrutiny. In this policy brief, WILL examines a number of different aspects of current spending in MPS to determine if this request for additional funding is truly warranted.

Police chief makes case to bring cops back to Madison high schools

Paul Fanlund:

When Shon Barnes became Madison police chief in 2021, the School Board had already removed police officers who had been stationed in each of the city’s four mainstream public high schools.

The year before, raucous protests against the school resource officers — SROs — had been visceral in the racial upheaval that followed the George Floyd murder at the hands of police in Minneapolis.

Opponents of using SROs argue that they are a key cog in the “school-to-prison pipeline,” particularly for students of color, but former Chief Noble Wray told me that officers who raised their hands for SRO assignments were those most committed to keeping young people out of the criminal justice system.

And Wray was not alone. Every Madison police official I ever talked with, including four police chiefs, have told me that only the best and brightest officers served as SROs, possessing the policing skills and emotional intelligence to make it work.

Fentanyl

DEA:

Drug Poisonings are a leading cause of death for Americans ages 18-45, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC estimates that over 110,000 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses in 2022, almost 70% of these deaths were caused by fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. 

Like most states across the country, the State of Washington has not been immune to the alarming increase in the availability of fentanyl and overdoses.  In Washington, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) records show that from 2019 to 2022 the amount of fentanyl seized by the DEA in Washington increased by 1670%.  In 2022, the DEA Seattle Field Division seized twice as much fentanyl in Washington as was seized in 2021.

Bar exam will no longer be required to become attorney in Washington State

Emma Epperly:

The bar exam will no longer be required to become a lawyer in Washington, the state Supreme Court ruled in a pair of orders Friday.

The court approved alternative ways to show competency and earn a law license after appointing a task force to examine the issue in 2020.

The Bar Licensure Task Force found that the traditional exam “disproportionally and unnecessarily blocks” marginalized groups from becoming practicing attorneys and is “at best minimally effective” for ensuring competency, according to a news release from the Washington Administrative Office of the Courts.

Washington is the second state to not require the bar exam, following Oregon, which implemented the change at the start of this year. Other states, including Minnesota, Nevada, South Dakota and Utah, are examining alternative pathways to licensure.

“These recommendations come from a diverse body of lawyers in private and public practice, academics, and researchers who contributed immense insight, counterpoints and research to get us where we are today,” Washington Supreme Court Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis, who chaired the task force, said in a statement. “With these alternative pathways, we recognize that there are multiple ways to ensure a competent, licensed body of new attorneys who are so desperately needed around the state.”

Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed

Keith Humphreys and Rob Bovett

America’s most radical experiment with drug decriminalization has ended, after more than three years of painful results. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek has pledged to sign legislation repealing the principal elements of the ballot initiative known as Measure 110: Possessing hard drugs is again a crime in Oregon, and courts will return to mandating treatment for offenders. Oregonians had supported Measure 110 with 59 percent of the vote in 2020, but three years later, polling showed that 64 percent wanted some or all of it repealed. Although the measure was touted by advocates as a racial-justice policy, support for its repeal was especially strong among African American and Hispanic Oregonians.

The key elements of Measure 110 were the removal of criminal penalties for possession of small amounts of drugs such as methamphetamine, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl, and a sharper focus, instead, on reducing the harm that drugs cause to their users. More than $260 million were allocated to services such as naloxone distribution, employment and housing services, and voluntary treatment. The original campaign for the measure was well funded by multiple backers, most prominently the Drug Policy Alliance, based in New York. Supporters hoped that ending penalties—and reducing the associated stigma of drug use—would bring a range of benefits. Once drugs were decriminalized and destigmatized, the thinking went, those who wanted to continue using would be more willing to access harm-reduction services that helped them use in safer ways. Meanwhile, the many people who wanted to quit using drugs but had been too ashamed or fearful to seek treatment would do so. Advocates foresaw a surge of help-seeking, a reduction in drug-overdose deaths, fewer racial disparities in the health and criminal-justice systems, lower rates of incarceration, and safer neighborhoods for all.

“The growing turmoil in the world of scholarly publishing has been weighing heavily on my mind for several years”

Donald Knuth (2003):

Editorial Board, Journal of Algorithms

Dear Board member,

Let me begin with some background information from my personal perspective. I “grew up” professionally with Academic Press journals: Part of my thesis was printed in Volume 2 of the Journal of Algebra

(1965); soon afterward I published an article about trees in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Volume 3. I was eventually destined to publish six more papers in the latter journal, and one each in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications, the Journal of Number Theory, and the Journal of Computer and System Sciences. Those papers were typeset so beautifully, I used Academic Press style as the model in my first demo of TEX to the American Math Society in 1978.

Therefore I was pleased when Herb Wilf approached me later that year with the idea to start a new Academic Press publication, to be called the Journal of Algorithms. On January 4, 1979, 1 replied to him that “Journal of Algorithms is a great title. Surely there must be a journal of that name someday.” We agreed that computer science had matured to the point where such a journal would be an ideal outlet for some of the explosive growth in high-quality algorithmic research.

Over the years the issues of this journal have accumulated to fill nearly five feet of shelf space in my office at home, and I couldn’t be more proud of the quality of many of the articles they contain. The experience of compiling and typesetting the index to Volumes 1-20 that appeared on pages 634 660 of the May 1996 issue gave me a special pleasure; and next year we shall reach Volume 50.

Academic Press built its reputation on producing high-quality scientific books and journals at reasonable prices. That is why Wilf and I were attracted to them initially, and why we continued to be satisfied as the years went by. Academic Press was acquired in 1989 by Harcourt Brace Javonovich, later to become known as Harcourt X for various other values of X, but at first their publishing team stayed fairly intact.

I became concerned about journal pricing in 1990, and I wrote a two-page letter asking them to do their best to minimize the effect on libraries; they promptly sent me a completely satisfactory reply, and indeed they kept price increases below the level of inflation during the next few years.

Civics: “lawful intercept engineer”

PC Mag:

“You will engage with other SpaceX engineers as well as our Legal and Market Access teams to understand the best solution for each country in our quest to connect the globe,” the job post notes. In addition, the same engineer will need to test the technology with “various law enforcement agencies around the world” while also “training the Network Operations Team in the day-to-day operations of these systems.”

Refuted papers continue to be cited more than their failed replications: Can a new search engine be built that will fix this problem?

Andrew:

Kind of, but not quite. A key difference is that in the courtroom there is some reasonable chance that the opposing lawyer or the judge will notice that the key case has been overruled, so that your argument that hinges on that case will fail. You have a clear incentive to not rely on overruled cases. In science, however, there’s no opposing lawyer and no judge: you can build an entire career on studies that fail to replicate, and no problem at all, as long as you don’t pull any reallyridiculousstunts.

94% of elevators on campus have expired permits

Andrew Zeng

According to Pane, the Blackwelder elevator’s permit was expired at the time. Though it has since been inspected, its permit expired once again on Aug. 12, 2023 — making it just one of the 260 elevators on campus, 94% of a total of 274, with expired permits, according to documents obtained by The Daily through a public records request. On average, each expired elevator is over 160 days overdue.

‘Very few have balls’ – Tina Brown- How American news lost its nerve

Max Tani:

There’s too much to read and watch, too many places to read and watch it. It’s enough to distract you from the biggest news in journalism right now: In 2024, it’s harder than ever to get a tough story out in the United States of America.

A landscape of gleefully revelatory magazine exposés, aggressive newspaper investigations, feral online confrontations, and painstaking television investigations has been eroded by a confluence of factors — from rising risks of litigation and costs of insurance, which strapped media companies can hardly afford, to social media, which has given public figures growing leverage over the journalists who now increasingly carry their water.

The result is a thousand stories you’ll never read, and a shrinking number of publications with the resources and guts to confront power.

One recent example illustrates the difficulty of getting even a modestly negative revelation about a popular public figure into print. Last year, freelance reporter John McDermott discovered that Jay Shetty, a massively popular lifestyle podcaster who recently interviewed President Joe Biden, had fudged biographical details about his life. But months after he began his reporting for Esquire, he wondered: Would any outlet publish it?

Esquire lost interest as the piece took on a critical tone. He then approached The Hollywood Reporter — as did Shetty’s publicists, who delivered a litany of complaints about the journalist, arguing that he had a conflict of interest. More than a year after its conception, McDermott’s story was eventually published by The Guardian, prompting British education officials to demand Shetty remove false references to them from his website.

“Very few owners have balls any more,” the former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown told Semafor, “a very sorry fact for journalism.”

There are at least five major factors putting journalists on their heels.

Libraries and ebooks

Susan Haigh:

Publishers, however, argue the arrangement is fair considering e-book licenses for libraries allow numerous patrons to “borrow” them and the per-reader cost is much less expensive than the per-reader rate. 

Librarians in several states have been pushing for legislation to rein in the costs and restrictions on electronic material, which has been growing in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic. Patrons are stuck on long waiting lists for audio and e-books, and digital offerings are limited. 

This year, lawmakers in states including Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, Hawaii and New Hampshire have proposed bills aimed at closing the affordability gap. A bill was introduced in Virginia but was tabled in February.

Notes on education commentary

Karen Vaites:

Recently, EdReports, the widely-used curriculum review site, has been under fire over inconsistencies in its reviews.

This has spawned a great deal of discussion – almost none of it defending EdReports. In particular, we have seen a dearth of EdReports defenders with regard to its reviews of basal programs and Bookworms. Educators aren’t chiming in to say, “Basal reading programs are actually high-quality.” In fact, the opposite.

Turns out even EdReports acknowledges the critiques. 

In a recent column, Eric Hirsch of EdReports announced plans to shift its review strategy, saying, “We’ll be evaluating how to make our reports more responsive to the rapidly evolving curriculum space and considering stakeholder feedback on topics including usability and volume of content.” Critiques about “volume of content” are at the heart of critiques of basal programs.

memo to its reviewers is more pointed: “We’re most vulnerable to criticism around our reviews of basals / big box programs. We need to be particularly intentional in this area.”

At this point, it’s a consensus position: EdReports got its reviews of basals wrong. 

Literacy experts think EdReports got Bookworms wrong, as well. And close watchers should note that Fishtank ELA earns a recommendation from the Knowledge Matters Campaign, but failed to earn all-green from EdReports. It’s hard to miss the daylight between experts and EdReports. 

“fill the gap of things the government couldn’t do” legally

Matt Taibbi:

Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and other Twitter Files reporters discovered the key elements of the Twitter Files reports, from the “industry calls” held between the FBI and Internet platforms like Twitter, to the role of Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, to the role of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center in sponsoring “anti-disinformation” work, in the first two weeks of research. Our central thesis about state-sponsored censorship was online months before we met Benz. By mid-December 2022, I knew we were looking at a sweeping federal content-control program, and repeated the idea many times. As I wrote on Christmas Eve, 2022:

The files show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government —from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA… The operation is far bigger than the reported 80 members of the Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF)… Twitter had so much contact with so many agencies that executives lost track.

Nonetheless, the gist of today’s Times piece is that Shellenberger and I got this thesis from Benz. They literally wrote it that way, that when I testified to Congress, I was presenting his thesis.

Related: David Rennie:

First time I’ve seen this: Chinese state TV pushing out an AI-generated animation showing workers across America striking and rioting as a result of income inequality and democratic crisis.

And. Plus.

Law Dork:

LAW DORK: The worse the government’s behavior was, the more likely it is that the platform is now liable.

ABDO: That’s right. It’s strange. The theory under Blum, basically, is the government has a gun to your head, and you’re doing the government’s bidding, and now potentially, you could be subject to damages liability for responding in the way that anyone would respond if you’re actually being coerced to that extent. But the other complication is that whatever remedy the plaintiff gets in that kind of the case might interfere with the First Amendment rights of the platforms and their users. You can imagine in the Murthy case, if the plaintiffs met the higher state action test, they might be entitled to an injunction directing, say Facebook or Twitter, to reinstate their accounts, or reinstate their posts, or even change their content moderation policies. And that has implications for the First Amendment.

NCLA:

This censorship regime has successfully suppressed perspectives contradicting government-approved views on hotly disputed topics such as whether natural immunity to Covid-19 exists, the safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccines, the virus’s origins, and mask mandate efficacy. The vast, coordinated silencing of First Amendment-protected speech has targeted influential, highly qualified voices including doctors and scientists like Drs. Bhattacharya, Kheriaty, and Kulldorff, as well as those like Ms. Hines who have tried to raise awareness of issues.

NCLA has emphasized throughout this case that the First Amendment’s text forbids “abridging” (diminishing) the freedom of speech, meaning the government’s scheme violates the Constitution even when it encourages social media platforms to suppress legal speech without coercing them. Though the Fifth Circuit’s injunction only forbids coercing or significantly encouraging the suppression of legal speech, the Supreme Court could and should expand it to bar the government from getting the social media platforms to abridge speech to any degree whatsoever.

“$pending to counter elitist perception”

Andrew Bahl:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to launch a statewide marketing campaign to change public attitudes that the school is too “elitist” and “leftist” in hopes for more state funding, documents show.

In documents seeking applications from private vendors to produce the initiative, UW-Madison said it wanted a campaign that would combat “misperceptions among state residents about the university and higher education in general.”

The chief goal, however, would be a favorable outcome next year, when the Legislature’s budget writers and Gov. Tony Evers will negotiate a new budget to cover Wisconsin’s state government until 2027.

“Primary mark of success will be a positive state budget for UW-Madison in the next budget biennium,” a university document answering questions about the project said.

The UW said it is looking to double its media spending as part of the campaign, with the total cost of producing and airing the ads expected to be around $1 million. UW-Madison spokesperson Kelly Tyrrell said the campaign will be privately funded.

“The practices outlined in the proposal are consistent with our peer institutions and are also consistent with marketing and outreach efforts UW-Madison has engaged in for many years,” Tyrrell said in an email.

“if certain conditions related to free inquiry, free expression and intellectual diversity are not met.”

David Gay:

This bill, initially brought forward by the Indiana Senate, impacts the status of tenure at public higher education institutions in the state of Indiana. The bill limits and restricts the ability of the public institutions to grant tenure and promotions “if certain conditions related to free inquiry, free expression and intellectual diversity are not met.”

Senate Bill 202 was authored by Indiana Senators Spencer Deery (R-District 23), Tyler Johnson (R-District 14) and Jeff Raatz (R-District 27). During the 2024 legislative session, the votes surrounding the bill mostly went along party lines

The bill also establishes a review of faculty tenure status every five years, making sure the faculty member abided by certain measures, including:

Civics: An executive from a company associated with Metric Media was hired to teach journalism, but the story doesn’t end there

Steven Monacelli:

The largest newspaper chain in the United States has an ongoing business relationship with a company linked to a sprawling network of over a thousand “pink slime” publications — sites that profess to be local but have no local staff and do not disclose funding they’ve received from political sources.

A Gannett spokesperson confirmed the company has a contract to produce “advertorial content” sourced from Advantage Informatics, a blandly named company founded by Brian Timpone, a conservative businessman and former TV reporter based out of Chicago. (Timpone’s name may be familiar to readers who remember the Journatic scandal of 2012, or to those who have followed the Tow Center for Digital Journalism’s extensive research on “pink slime” sites.)

The ongoing relationship between Gannett and the Metric Media network came to light due to a controversy over the hiring of an Advantage Informatics executive, Kyle Barnett, at Tennessee Tech University, a public research university that enrolls around 10,000 students a year. Barnett’s hiring at the university was first reported on December 14, 2023, by the progressive website Raw Story.

In a follow-up story, Raw Story published Barnett’s TN Tech application and offer letter, which it obtained via public records request. The documents show Barnett was offered the position of non-tenure-track journalism lecturer at a 9-month salary of $50,250.

——

Somewhat related: the funding of Wisconsin Watch.

Notes on Universal Basic Income

Karl Widerquist:

The modern definition of UBI stipulates the grant must be in cash, and because small-scale hunter-gatherer or agrarian communities do not have cash economies, they do not have UBIs. But these practices show how the values that motivate much of the modern UBI movement are not new to politics but have been recognized and practiced for a very long time.

Some writers trace the beginning of UBI history to ancient Athens, which used revenue from a city-owned mine to support a small cash income for Athenian citizens. This institution sounds like a UBI, except that the meaning of citizen was very different in ancient Athens. Citizens were a small, elite portion of the population. Noncitizens, such as slaves, women, and free noncitizen males, were the bulk of the population and virtually all of its labor force. A UBI for the elite is no UBI at all.

Proposals that begin to fit the modern definition of UBI begin in the 1790s with two writers, Thomas Paine and Thomas Spence. Paine’s famous pamphlet “Agrarian Justice” argued that because private ownership of the land had deprived people of the right to hunt, gather, fish, or farm on their own accord, they were owed compensation out of taxes on land rents. He suggested this compensation should be paid in the form of a large cash grant at maturity plus a regular cash pension at retirement age. That amounts to a stakeholder grant plus a citizens pension: nearly, but not quite, a UBI.

From a similar starting point, Spence carried the argument through to a full UBI, calling for higher taxes on land and a regular, unconditional cash income for everyone. If anyone can be said to be the “inventor” of UBI, it is Thomas Spence, but his proposal remained obscure, and the idea had to be reinvented many times before it became widely known.

On Homework

Alfie Kohn:

After spending all day in school, our children are forced to begin a second shift, with more academic assignments to be completed at home. This arrangement is rather odd when you stop to think about it, as is the fact that few of us ever do stop to think about it.

Instead of assuming that homework should be a given, or that it allegedly benefits children, I’ve spent the last few years reviewing the available researchand talking to parents, teachers and students. My findings can be summarized in seven words: Homework is all pain and no gain.

The pain is obvious to kids but isn’t always taken seriously by adults. Backpacks stuffed with assignments leave students exhausted, frustrated, less interested in intellectual pursuits and lacking time to do things they enjoy. “Most of what homework is doing,” says literacy expert Harvey Daniels, “is driving kids away from learning.”

We parents, meanwhile, turn into nags. After being away from our children all day, the first words out of our mouths, sadly, may be: “So, did you finish your homework?” One mother told me it permanently damaged her relationship with her son because it forced her to be an enforcer rather than a mom.

The surprising news, though, is that there are virtually no pros to balance the cons. Even if you regard grades or test scores as good measures of learning, which I do not, doing homework has no statistical relationship to achievement in elementary school. In high school, some studies do find a correlation between homework and test scores, but it’s usually fairly small. In any case, it’s far from clear that the former causes the latter. And if you’re wondering, not a single study has ever supported the folk wisdom that homework teaches good work habits or develops positive character traits such as self-discipline, responsibility or independence.

Washington State bill of rights for parents whose children attend public school

Wall Street Journal:

That’s good news for residents who have experienced the harmful side effects of progressive policies. In 2021 lawmakers restricted police officers’ ability to pursue suspects in vehicles on grounds that car theft is merely a property crime. Motor vehicle theft in the state increased 73% between 2019 and 2022, according to Washington state House Republicans.

The Washington state constitution forbids a graduated income tax, but last year Democrats in the Legislature approved a tax on capital-gains income, claiming it’s an excise tax. The state Supreme Court upheld the tax, 7-2, and this week’s initiative is an attempt to placate angry voters.

The initiatives are half of a slate of six that were initiated by citizens who gathered signatures and had the measures certified by the secretary of state in January. Under Washington state rules, when a voter initiative is approved by the Legislature, it is enacted without requiring approval from the Governor. The remaining three, including efforts to repeal the capital-gains tax and end cap-and-trade climate regulation, will go before voters in November.

Notes on school year length

Graham Drake:

As district administrators know, there’s no one way to map the school calendar. Depending on where you live, the start of the school year may be set to coincide with the dog days of summer or the onset of fall. Across the districts in NCTQ’s Teacher Contract Database (TCD), there are 39 days between when the earliest and latest school years begin. While the range of starting dates is interesting, what may be of more consequence, given the connection between learning time and outcomes, is that the length of the school year can vary by as many as 17 days for students, and there can be up to a 20-day difference in the number of teacher workdays (days on the job without students) throughout the year.

To further explore the makeup of academic years, this District Trendline looks at the 2023-2024 calendar for 146 of the largest school districts in the United States to provide a snapshot of what the school year looks like for both teachers and students.

The teacher school year

Before getting to the details, it’s important to define three categories of days for teachers:

“At the moment, the new organization has three main funders — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation and the Peter and Carmen Lucia Buck Foundation”

Greg Toppo:

This complete disconnect between research and policy has led us to a place where policymakers have been making guesses in the dark about how to fund our schools, and I frankly believe that’s one of the reasons why very few legislators actually understand their funding formula. There’s very little science behind it because we just haven’t provided that.

So who is your audience?

Grading and testing have gone astray, but eliminating student performance measures is the wrong prescription

Adam Tyner:

In the years since the Covid-19 outbreak, the grades and test scores that anchor our education system have been relentlessly disrupted. As the pandemic swept the globe, American schools canceled annual standardized testing, college admissions went “test-optional,” and students were offered “hold harmless” policies that prevented their grades from dropping, regardless of whether they completed assignments or even attended virtual classes. Most end-of-year testing returned to K–12 schools in 2021, but much of the “assessment holiday” has endured. Most colleges continue not to require SAT or ACT scores, states are eliminating high school graduation tests, and grading standards have slipped to their lowest levels onrecord. States and districts are fueling grade inflation through policies that, in the name of equity, prohibit penalties for late work, recalibrate grading scales in ways that make passing easier, require teachers to assign credit for assignments that aren’t turned in, and even eliminate grading penalties for cheating.

Into this accountability recession arrives a new book arguing that the idea of holding students accountable through measures such as grades and test scores is inherently misguided. Penned by Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt, two education-school-based researchers, Off the Mark is an ambitious volume combining history, policy analysis, and prescriptive recommendations. The authors evaluate the key “assessment technologies” of modern education systems—course grades and external tests—arguing that their presence undermines the aims of education. Although many of the book’s recommendations are sensible, its grandest claims are unsupported by research or contradicted by it.

Civics: “Given the increase in aggressive censorship, it seems unlikely these appointments were random.”

Name Redacted on X

The timing and staffing changes within tech giants like Google and Meta after the 2016 election raise important questions. It’s hard to believe it’s just a coincidence that several CIA officers were put in charge of content moderation departments in these companies. Given the increase in aggressive censorship, it seems unlikely these appointments were random.

The number of former Intelligence Community staff hired by Google and Meta since 2018 is significant. Before then, there were only a few, but now the numbers are much higher: CIA – 36, FBI – 68, NSA – 44, DHS/CISA – 68, State Department – 86, DOD – 121.

Take Aaron Berman, for example. After spending 18 years at the CIA, he joined Meta in 2019. He played a key role in setting up Meta’s “Misinformation Department” and now heads Misinformation and Elections Content Policy. We wrote about Berman and other significant hires made by Meta in our last article:

Cal State declining enrollment

Veronica Catlin:

According to the Education Data Initiative, college enrollment statistics indicate that more Americans are forgoing higher education; “some may be putting off college attendance to build savings.” 

From 2010 (enrollment peak) until 2023, enrollment has declined 9.8% nationwide, according to educationdata.org. The rate of enrollment among new high school graduates has also declined by 7.3% year over year.

Cal State declining enrollment

Veronica Catlin:

According to the Education Data Initiative, college enrollment statistics indicate that more Americans are forgoing higher education; “some may be putting off college attendance to build savings.” 

From 2010 (enrollment peak) until 2023, enrollment has declined 9.8% nationwide, according to educationdata.org. The rate of enrollment among new high school graduates has also declined by 7.3% year over year.

The threat to humans from animal viruses is small. The financial incentive to pretend otherwise is large.

Matt Ridley:

The World Health Assembly in May is poised to divert $10.5 billion of aid away from tackling diseases such as malaria and tuberculosis. Instead, that money will go toward combating the threat of viruses newly caught from wildlife. The assumption behind this initiative, endorsed by the Group of 20 summit in Bali in 2022, is that the threat of pandemics from spillovers of animal viruses is dramatically increasing.

That assumption is almost certainly false. A new report from the University of Leeds, prepared in part by former World Health Organization executives, finds that the claims made by the G-20 in support of this agenda either are unsupported by evidence, contradict their own cited sources, or fail to correct for improved detection of pathogens. Over the past decade the burden and risk of spillover has been relatively small and probably decreasing. The Leeds authors conclude: “The implication is that the largest investment in international public health in history is based on misinterpretations of key evidence as well as a failure to thoroughly analyze existing data.”

The Covid-19 pandemic, far from justifying the diversion of funds into tackling spillovers, may undermine this narrative. If Sars-CoV-2 entered the human species through a laboratory accident, as the WHO, parts of the U.S. intelligence community and many scientists agree is possible, then it wouldn’t count as a natural spillover. Worse, it would be more than a case of research gone wrong. It would be pandemic-prevention research gone wrong. The search for spillover risk may have caused a dangerous spillover.

Literacy Training of Kindergarten Children With Pencil, Keyboard or Tablet Stylus: The Influence of the Writing Tool on Reading and Writing Performance at the Letter and Word Level

Carmen Mayer 

During the last years, digital writing devices are increasingly replacing handwriting with pencil and paper. As reading and writing skills are central for education, it is important to know, which writing tool is optimal for initial literacy education. The present training study was therefore set up to test the influence of the writing tool on the acquisition of literacy skills at the letter and word level with various tests in a large sample of kindergarten children (n = 147). Using closely matched letter learning games, children were trained with 16 letters by handwriting with a pencil on a sheet of paper, by writing with a stylus on a tablet computer, or by typing letters using a virtual keyboard on a tablet across 7 weeks. Training using a stylus on a touchscreen is an interesting comparison condition for traditional handwriting, because the slippery surface of a touchscreen has lower friction than paper and thus increases difficulty of motor control. Before training, immediately after training and four to five weeks after training, we assessed reading and writing performance using standardized tests. We also assessed visuo-spatial skills before and after training, in order to test, whether the different training regimens affected cognitive domains other than written language. Children of the pencil group showed superior performance in letter recognition and improved visuo-spatial skills compared with keyboard training. The performance of the stylus group did not differ significantly neither from the keyboard nor from the pencil group. Keyboard training, however, resulted in superior performance in word writing and reading compared with handwriting training with a stylus on the tablet, but not compared with the pencil group. Our results suggest that handwriting with pencil fosters acquisition of letter knowledge and improves visuo-spatial skills compared with keyboarding. At least given the current technological state, writing with a stylus on a touchscreen seems to be the least favorable writing tool, possibly because of increased demands on motor control. Future training studies covering a more extended observation period over years are needed to allow conclusions about long-term effects of writing tools on literacy acquisition as well as on general cognitive development.

“Note that the statement on contribution to diversity will receive significant weight in the evaluation.”

John Sailer:

Thanks to a grant from the National Institutes of Health, Cornell University is able to support several professors in fields including genetics, computational biology and neurobiology. In its funding proposal, the university emphasizes a strange metric for evaluating hard scientists: Each applicant’s “statement on contribution to diversity” was to “receive significant weight in the evaluation.”

It might seem counterintuitive to prioritize “diversity statements” while hiring neurobiologists—but not at the NIH. The agency for several years has pushed this practice across the country through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program—First for short—which funds diversity-focused faculty hiring in the biomedical sciences.

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More.

Has the right’s vision of “education freedom” really triumphed? And at what cost to students?

Jennifer Berkshire:

We owe the concept of school vouchers to libertarian economist Milton Friedman. In a 1955 essay and manifesto, Friedman argued that it was time for the “denationalization” of schools. The government should get out of the business of running schools, he wrote, and instead give parents vouchers that they could use at the public or private school of their choosing. But Southern conservatives had already seized upon a similar idea as a way of resisting court-ordered integration. In the lead-up to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, voucher-like programs that paid for white students to attend private schools not subject to the same federal oversight as public schools exploded in popularity. As historian Steve Suitts has documented, by 1965, legislators across the South had passed as many as 450 laws and regulations aimed at blocking, discrediting, or evading school desegregation, many through school vouchers or tax credits. As for Friedman, he addressed the issue of segregation directly in a lengthy footnote to his essay, in which he stated his opposition to both “forced segregation” and “forced nonsegregation.” The solution, he argued, was a private system in which “exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools” could develop according to the preferences of parents.

The cause of school choice has long been a right-wing priority, attracting the support and the funds of a familiar cast of deep-pocketed conservatives—the Bradleys, the DeVoses, the Kochs. But the idea of giving money directly to families to pay for schooling also appealed to a surprisingly diverse political coalition. As Fitzgerald traces the history of school vouchers from the libertarian and far-right fringe to the mainstream, she brings to life a lesser-known cast of characters who rallied around versions of school choice. In Wisconsin, for instance, a Jesuit priest named Virgil Blum was urging the government to subsidize the cost of religious education. Blum was ahead of his time. His argument for religious school vouchers, based on the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom, was the same one the Supreme Court would embrace three decades later. But he died in 1990, just months before the Milwaukee voucher program was enacted, lamenting that his crusade for state-funded religious schools had gone nowhere.

Notes on Massachusetts’ K-12 Tax & $pending model

James Vaznis:

Nearly five years after Massachusetts lawmakers overhauled the state’s school funding formula, districts are struggling to balance their budgets for the upcoming school year, prompting many to consider cutting programs and staff or asking taxpayers to dig deeper.

The chief culprit, district leaders and advocates say, is the high rate of inflation that hit the US economy in recent years, much higher than the adjustments used in the new funding formula that was revamped to reflect modern-day costs.

The failure of the new formula to accurately capture inflation could be collectively costing districts hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, according to Colin Jones, deputy policy director at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, a nonpartisan research institute.

“The whole project is offensive and wrong-headed”

Dave Cieslewicz

The Madison Parks Commission has made a terrible mistake. They’ve allowed a mural to go up in an East Side park lionizing Tony Robinson. Nine years ago, only a couple blocks from that park, Robinson, who had a criminal record, was high on a mixture of hallucinogens and other drugs when he attacked a Madison police officer in a dark stairwell. He was responsible for his own ensuing death. 

“externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship”

Committee on the Judiciary

But NSF’s taxpayer funding for this potential automated censorship is only half of the story. The Committee and the Select Subcommittee have also obtained, via document requests and subpoenas, nonpublic emails and other documents that reveal a years-long, intentional effort by NSF to hide its role in funding these censorship and propaganda tools from media and political scrutiny. From legal scholars, such as Jonathan Turley, to conservative journalists, NSF tracked public criticisms of its work in funding these projects. NSF went so far as to develop a media strategy that considered blacklisting certain American media outlets because they were scrutinizing NSF’s funding of censorship and propaganda tools.

The First Amendment prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” 3 Thus, “any law or government policy that reduces that freedom on the [social media] platforms . . . violates the First Amendment.” 4 To inform potential legislation, the Committee and Select Subcommittee have been investigating the Executive Branch’s collusion with thirdparty intermediaries, including universities, non-profits, and businesses, to censor protected speech on social media. The Committee and Subcommittee have uncovered serious violations of the First Amendment throughout the Executive Branch, including:

The Biden White House directly coercing large social media companies, such as Facebook, to censor true information, memes, and satire, eventually leading Facebook to change its content moderation policies;

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Banning phones and the Internet for kids would mean that everything they get outside the family is from official authority figures, which would make everything worse. Seriously, check out today’s authority figures.

Notes on Math Curriculum

John Fensterwald:

An influential committee of the University of California Academic Senate weighed in again last month on the contentious issue of how much math high school students must take to qualify to attend a four-year California state university. 

It ruled that high school students taking an introductory data science course or Advanced Placement Statistics cannot substitute it for Algebra II for admission to the University of California and California State University, starting in the fall of 2025.

The Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, or BOARS, reaffirmed its position by accepting the recommendations of a workgroup of math and statistics professors who examined the issue. That workgroup determined that none of these courses labeled as data science “even come close” to qualifying as a more advanced algebra course. 

Notes on Teacher Turnover

Matt Burns:

“This is still a discouraging story,” said Katharine Strunk, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. ”I don’t think this level of consistent attrition is sustainable for the school system.”

National teacher exit data is released only sporadically, and many states don’t produce timely figures. But the Journal obtained information from 10 states, the most comprehensive recent compilation, that shows turnover typically followed a postpandemic pattern: a drop in the summer of 2020, followed by a spike in 2022.

In all 10 states, attrition fell last fall, as the current school year began. But in nine states, turnover still remained higher than in 2019, the last year before the pandemic.

Truth and Influence: 2024

Balaji:

8) Again, this isn’t small stuff. The level of insanity that society had gotten to was at the level of Orwell’s 2+2=5. People were denying that XX != XY. If they can lie about that, if they can convince themselves they are telling the truth even as they lie, they can lie about anything. And yes, many are still lying about it, but they have lost the high ground of Twitter. So they are losing ground.

10) The process is messy, too. Solzhenitsyn wrote about this. As breathing and consciousness return, as the nervous system of the body politic comes back online, as cells talk to each other freely again, it’s like a foot waking up after a long time asleep. It might stumble a bit, as it moves for the first time in a while.

11) And that’s why many of the new voices you hear are saying seemingly obvious things, like “wokeness is bad” or “XX != XY”. It takes a while for a decentralized system to synchronize, so people start with basic broadcast messages (again, of ideas that were unspeakable even a year ago).

New numbers show falling standards in American high schools

The Economist:

Low-achieving pupils may suffer the most

Springfield, Massachusetts, might seem an improbable setting for an education miracle. The city of 155,000 along the Connecticut river has a median household income half the state average; violent crime is common. Yet graduation rates at the city’s high schools are surging. Between 2007 and 2022 the share of pupils at the Springfield High School of Science and Technology who earned a diploma in four years jumped from 50% to 94%; at neighbouring Roger Putnam Vocational Technical Academy it nearly doubled to 96%.

Alas, such gains are not showing up in other academic indicators. At Springfield High scores on the SAT, a college-admissions test, have tumbled by 15% over the same period. Measures of English and maths proficiency are down, too. The pass rate on advanced-placement exams has fallen to just 12% compared with a national average of 60%.

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More.

“We have banded together to oppose the escalating panic around AI”

Brian Chau:

AFTF will work to inform the media, lawmakers, and other interested parties about the incredible benefits AI can bring to humanity. We will oppose stagnation and advocate for the benefits of technological progress in the political arena.

For decades, stagnation has been the root cause of our greatest national problems: the loss of the American dream for the normal person and the spiteful, zero-sum thinking which dominates politics.

The problem is, it’s more rewarding to be wrong

Frederick Hess:

The upshot is that, if you bet against the long-term success of any given school reform or educational innovation, you’ll generally be right at least 80% of the time. Hell, if you could bet on this stuff at Vegas sportsbooks, edu-skeptics would be laughing all the way to the bank.

So, for me, a crucial but oft-ignored question is this one: Given the track record, why is it so easy to find enthusiasts eager to leap aboard each new reform train?

Well, it turns out that there are a lot of rewards for jumping on board—even if the train is headed off the rails—and precious few rewards for refusing to do so. Embracing the promise of the new new thing means lining up shoulder-to-shoulder with enthusiastic funders, vendors, experts, and school and system leaders confident that this time we’re going to get it right.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Federal Reserve Policy Notes

Balaji:

One more Keynesian trick is to print the money, dilute down everyone in the economy, and then when those who were stolen from have to raise prices on each other…to then swoop in as the government on one side and attack the businesses for raising prices and shrinking portions.

In short, the Fed’s scam steals invisibly from everyone and turns society against each other. In the example below, Coke employees were diluted down just like you were. Both were made poorer by Powell. But you can only see the company’s actions and not the state’s inflation which led to those actions.

The New York Times is targeting Wordle clones with legal takedowns

Jess Weatherbed:

Hundreds of games inspired by Wordle, the popular web-based word puzzle, are at risk of being deleted due to copyright takedowns issued by The New York TimesAs reported by404 MediaThe New York Times — which purchased Wordle back in 2022 — has filed several DMCA notices over Wordle clones created by GitHub coders, citing its ownership over the Wordle name and copyrighted gameplay including 5×6 tile layout and gray, yellow, and green color scheme.

Two takedown requests were issued in January against unofficial Korean and Bosnian-languageversions of the game. Additional requests were filed this week against Wirdle — a variant created by dialect group I Hear Dee in 2022 to promote the Shaetlan language — and Reactle, an open-source Wordle clone built using React, TypeScript, and Tailwind. It was developed prior to the Times’ purchase of the game, according to its developer, Chase Wackerfuss.

The Reactle code has been copied around 1,900 times, according to GitHub, allowing developers to build upon it to create a wide variety of Wordle-inspired games that use different languages, themes, and visual styles, some of which 404 Media says are “substantially different” from Wordle. The DMCA notice against Reactle also targets all of these games forked from the original Reactle code on GitHub, alleging that spinoffs containing the Wordlename have been made in “bad faith” and that “gameplay is copied exactly” in the Reactlerepository. Numerous developers commenting on a Hacker News thread also claim to have been targeted with DMCA takedowns.

The NYPD Sent a Warrantless Subpoena for a Copwatcher’s Social Media Account, but Won’t Defend It in Court

Nick Pinto:

The NYPD sent a sweeping subpoena seeking information from the social media account of the president of a New York City police accountability organization in February, records reviewed by Hell Gate show, only to withdraw its subpoena when told they would need to justify the subpoena in court.

Michael Clancy, better known to friends on and off social media as Rabbi, received a notice last month from X, formerly known as Twitter, alerting him to the fact that the NYPD had sent X a subpoena requesting “all records consisting but not limited to all subscriber name(s), Email address(s), Phone number(s), account creation date, IP logs with timestamps (IP address of account logins and logouts), all logs of previous messages sent and received.” The subpoena also requested “all videos sent and received, including but not limited to meta-data. exit data about the messages and videos” for the account.

The notification included a copy of the subpoena, which warned X not to tell Clancy of its existence. “You are not to disclose or notify any customer or third party of the existence of this subpoena or that records were provided pursuant to this subpoena,” the document read.

But X, following its own corporate policy, told Clancy anyway, and suggested he might want to get some legal representation to fight the subpoena, recommending the American Civil Liberties Union. 

40 years of programming

Lars Wirzenius:

This essay discusses some of the things I’ve learned about how to successfully build software. These are things I’ve learned from my own experience; I’m not a researcher, and there are few references to sources, and this is largely not supported by evidence. I’m basing this essay on my own experience, and if you disagree, that’s fine.

My goal in this essay is to get the reader to think, to research, to learn, to ponder. My goal is not to tell the reader how to think, what to think, how things are, or to give the answer to every question about every aspect of the process of building software.

“by a “foreign adversary” by which the President and or Attorney General determines is a threat to the national security of the United States”

HR7521

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Just like the Restrict Act (Tammy Baldwin supported…):

The RESTRICT Act is not limited to just TikTok. It gives the government authority over all forms of communication domestic or abroad and grants powers to “enforce any mitigation measure to address any risk” to national security now and in any “potential future transaction”

——

Rather curious in light of

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The Dutch Law on Intelligence and Security Services defines a broad set of powers. It is also a somewhat odd law with a long 

Non profit fundraising and Portland school districts

Julia Silverman

In a Dec. 8, 2023 letter that The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained via a public records request, the seven superintendents wrote that they would no longer partner and share data with All Hands Raised.

“At this time, our seven K-12 districts collectively are in agreement that the work of All Hands Raised has pivoted away from its original purpose and is no longer in alignment with our districts’ needs or priorities,” they wrote.

The letter was signed by then-Portland Public Schools Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero, who left his post in February, as well as Multnomah Education Service District Superintendent Paul Coakley and the superintendents of the Gresham-Barlow, Centennial, Parkrose, David Douglas and Reynolds school districts, which collectively serve some of Oregon’s most diverse and highest need student populations.

Coakley, who has been at the helm of the Multnomah Education Service District since fall 2021 and made $228,941 in 2023, according to public records, is the first signature on the letter. Marifer Sager, Coakley’s communications director, refused multiple requests for an interview seeking more details, saying that his schedule was full and that he had no further context to offer beyond the letter. Superintendents from the Reynolds and Gresham-Barlow districts also declined interview requests.

Subsequently, an attorney representing the education service district sent a letter to The Oregonian/OregonLive complaining about the news organization’s attempts to interview Coakley and review relevant public records.

When it came to debating Covid lockdowns, Veritas wasn’t Harvard’s guiding principle.

Martin Kulldorff:

I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.

On March 10, 2020, before any government prompting, Harvard declared that it would “suspend in-person classes and shift to online learning.” Across the country, universities, schools, and state governments followed Harvard’s lead.

Yet it was clear, from early 2020, that the virus would eventually spread across the globe, and that it would be futile to try to suppress it with lockdowns. It was also clear that lockdowns would inflict enormous collateral damage, not only on education but also on public health, including treatment for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health. We will be dealing with the harm done for decades. Our children, the elderly, the middle class, the working class, and the poor around the world—all will suffer.

Schools closed in many other countries, too, but under heavy international criticism, Sweden kept its schools and daycares open for its 1.8 million children, ages one to 15. Why? While anyone can get infected, we have known since early 2020 that more than a thousandfold difference in Covid mortality risk holds between the young and the old. Children faced minuscule risk from Covid, and interrupting their education would disadvantage them for life, especially those whose families could not afford private schools, pod schools, or tutors, or to homeschool.