Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Here’s one fact Chicagoans should know as the Chicago Teachers Union demands billions more for its massive labor contract: only half of the $10 billion spent at CPS each year makes it to classrooms and instruction. The other $5 billion goes to fund a sprawling bureaucracy of near-empty to half-empty schools, an increasingly bloated administrative staff and ever more debt, driven largely by pensions. All to the union’s benefit.

The fact that just half of CPS’ spending goes to classrooms is based on an analysis by Wirepoints of the district’s 2025 interactive budget and the State Board of Education’s Illinois Report Card. A look at that budget shows that CPS plans to spend, all-in, nearly $9.9 billion in 2025. That includes operational, debt-service and capital spending.

Of that nearly $10 billion, only $5 billion will be spent on the city’s school network – about 51% of the total district spend. The other $5 billion? Pension contributions consume $1.2 billion, debt repayments eat up $800 million and capital spending uses $600 million. The remaining $2.1 billion goes to district administration and support services.

more.

Kaylah Huynh:

State Superintendent Jill Underly wants to put the responsibility of funding schools back on the state, she recently told the Cap Times in an interview.

Underly, who leads the state Department of Public Instruction, is proposing over $4 billion in spending toward schools for the 2025-2027 state budget.

The plans would reimburse 90% of schools’ special education costs, tie taxation limits to inflation, and prioritize spending on mental health, nutrition and teacher retention.

Underly also aims to limit school-related property tax hikes to an average of 1.5% over the next two years by increasing the amount of money school districts are allowed to spend per student. The higher limit would cost the state about $1.2 billion.

The proposal comes after over a quarter of public school districts asked voters in November referendums to raise property taxes to support schools. In Madison, voters approved a pair of school referendums totaling $607 million for operating costs and facilities improvements, the costliest ask among the 121 districts that went to referendum. 

*** No mention of the DPI’s ongoing rigor reduction efforts…. more.

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?

Ann Althouse Summary:

Try. I see your efforts. They’re so self-serving they underscore the essential problem: political favoritism

More:

“President Biden and President-elect Donald J. Trump now agree on one thing: The Biden Justice Department has been politicized.”

Thanks to the NYT for stating the obvious point obviously.

Oxford:

Following a public vote in which more than 37,000 people had their say, we’re pleased to announce that the Oxford Word of the Year for 2024 is ‘brain rot’.

Our language experts created a shortlist of six words to reflect the moods and conversations that have helped shape the past year. After two weeks of public voting and widespread conversation, our experts came together to consider the public’s input, voting results, and our language data, before declaring ‘brain rot’ as the definitive Word of the Year for 2024.

Wall Street Journal:

The FBI’s abuses under Mr. Comey were the worst since J. Edgar Hoover. As documented by the Justice Department inspector general and special counsel John Durham, officials lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get a warrant against Trump campaign official Carter Page. They also lied about the disinformation in the Steele dossier, which was financed by the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Mr. Patel worked for GOP Rep. Devin Nunes on the House Intelligence Committee at the time, and he helped uncover some of these abuses. He contributed to the Nunes Memo that the press criticized but turned out to be largely accurate. The deceit at the time was spread by Democrat Adam Schiff, now a California Senator. Messrs. Nunes and Patel were unfairly maligned.

It no doubt infuriates those who promoted the Russia collusion narrative to see Mr. Patel nominated to run the FBI, but abusing institutions for political purposes inevitably creates a demand for potential payback. The apologists for the Comey FBI and the Russia collusion narrative made a director Patel possible.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Jen Jones remembers the meeting well, down to which chair she sat in.

University of Wisconsin-Green Bay administrators huddled together in a meeting room about a decade ago, studying enrollment and financial reports. A new chancellor, Gary Miller, had just started and took a different tack from his predecessor.

“The demographic shift is coming,” Jones, a 25-year employee in the admissions office, recalled Miller saying at the meeting. “We’re going to have to change who we are. We’re going to have to think about how we do higher education differently.”

Noah Smith:

This, I believe, is the key to respecting and honoring Native Americans — not to focus on the tragedies of their past, but to give them the right to build a better future. Tribal lands should definitely have the autonomy to do whatever they want with their lands, including building housing or industry. In fact, we’re starting to see a pattern emerge where Native Americans embrace laissez-faire policies toward industry and manage to poach business from their over-regulated neighbors:

Tesla is ramping up efforts to open showrooms on tribal lands where it can sell directly to consumers, circumventing laws in states that bar vehicle manufacturers from also being retailers in favor of the dealership model…

Mohegan Sun, a casino and entertainment complex in Connecticut owned by the federally recognized Mohegan Tribe, announced this week that the California-based electric automaker will open a showroom with a sales and delivery center this fall on its sovereign property where the state’s law doesn’t apply…The news comes after another new Tesla showroom was announced in June, set to open in 2025 on lands of the Oneida Indian Nation in upstate New York.

This sort of thing could lead to a win-win for the U.S. and Native American tribes. American reindustrialization is being held back by a thicket of procedural requirements and local land-use regulations; if tribes were able to use their special legal status to circumvent those barriers, it could end up benefitting everyone.2 The tribes would get both jobs and the ability to tax local industry; America would get to execute an end run around the NIMBYs that are holding it back.

Graeme Hanna:

Research has suggested that diamond-based storage technology could preserve vast amounts of information for up to millions of years. 

The work carried out by a team at the University of Science and Technology of China achieved a new record for storage density in diamonds, at 1.85 terabytes per cubic centimeter.

As impressive as the storage capacity is, the researchers believe this can be eclipsed by the staying power. It has been claimed the diamond system can hold data for millions of years, due to the technique used to encode information within the atomic structure of the diamond.

As published in Nature Photonics, the scientific breakthrough extends beyond the significant density capacity with marked improvement in read times. The team indicated high-speed readout showed a fidelity of over 99%. 

John Ioannidis Lecture

Eugene Volokh:

The court rejects plaintiffs’ claims on various grounds, which it discusses in too much detail to render here. But here’s a good big-picture summary of a key part of the court’s concerns:

[B]eyond the particular, claim-specific failures outlined above, it must also be noted that significant First Amendment concerns underlie plaintiffs’ claims and requested relief. In effect, plaintiffs seek to litigate the propriety and legality of a potential curriculum with which they disagree. Their claims thus conflict with the First Amendment in several respects, and are largely barred on that basis as well.

First, plaintiffs’ claims directly implicate the First Amendment rights of the non-District defendants. Plaintiffs take issue with the non-District defendants’ forms of discussion, expression, and petitioning in relation to the challenged curriculum. Notwithstanding plaintiffs’ insistence and disclaimers that they challenge only publicly-funded government activities, plaintiffs seek to have this court impose restrictions on the non-District defendants’ protected speech. (See, e.g., id., Prayer for Relief at ¶ 6) (requesting an injunction “prohibiting all Defendants from using the elements of the LESMC at issue in this case … in any training sessions funded by public funds, or for which salary points are awarded by LAUSD”). In particular, plaintiffs seek to have the court suppress any speech by the non-District defendants in teacher-training sessions that might involve the use of “elements” of the challenged curriculum.

Anna Lulis:

“You can try to kill off everyone with Down syndrome by using abortion, but you won’t be any closer to a perfect society. You will just be closer to a cruel, heartless one.”

Charlotte Helene Fien pleads for the protection of unborn children with an extra chromosome at the UN.

Leila Fletcher and Sandy Flores Ruiz

We are concerned that Wisconsin’s Department of Public Instruction seems less than committed to the reforms outlined in Act 20. It’s been over a year since Gov. Tony Evers signed Act 20, dubbed “the reading bill.”

Act 20 looks to address our state’s dismal reading scores with science-based literacy instruction. Legal and bureaucratic snags have slowed progress. But despite delays, ACT 20 remains a ray of hope for this generation of kids.

According to some literacy experts and proponents of science of reading, Wisconsin DPI is choosing the wrong side of history. In her State of Education address at the Capitol, DPI superintendent Jill Underly steered clear of specifics about reading. She didn’t say supporting Act 20 and the science of reading was a priority.

DPI seems more focused on other things. Underly has faced heated criticism after announcing new labels for the proficiency categories used in statewide tests. DPI then lowered the cut scores associated with the new categories, effectively lowering academic standards.

In a recent story in The Capital Times, education reporter Kayla Huynh reports on DPI’s changes to the Wisconsin Forward Exam and how it’s scored. Some education advocates see lowered expectations for student achievement and unnecessary changes that make it difficult to measure student progress year over year.

——

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

——-

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?

Anna Stokke:

Letter in today’s Winnipeg Free Press from @umanitoba prof Darja Barr. “The MB govt’s decision to eliminate all subject-area requirements for pre-service teachers is a big miss — from misinterpreted research, to misrepresented contexts, misguided policy and a misled public.”

—-

A big math mistake

Re: Walking in the right direction on math (Think Tank, Nov. 25); Mathematics education of Manitoba teachers should be based on research (Think Tank, Nov.

13)

I am deeply troubled by the policy changes to teacher content requirements made recently, and what has been written about these changes in the press.

In recent opinion pieces, both Martha Koch and Thomas Falkenberg describe teacher candidates as being “forced” to take “university-level” math courses, and they claim research supports the elimination of teacher content requirements.

Not only do I take issue with making such sweeping generalizations and public policy changes from the research they cite but, more importantly, they present a misleading situation.

Since the six-credit-hour subject requirements were introduced, math departments across the province carefully developed math content courses specifically for K-8 teachers, which cover content such as triangle properties, areas and volumes, and other topics that relate directly to K-8 math classrooms. I have yet to see these courses mentioned in articles by my colleagues in education, though they are there to build exactly the type of

“mathematical knowledge for teaching” that their cited research strongly supports and have been taken successfully by hundreds of their students.

It is not unusual for math departments to develop and teach courses tailored for students for other faculties — we have specialized courses for engineering, business, arts, nursing, social work and education.

As to whether I am qualified to speak on this issue, I hold post-graduate degrees in mathematics and in education — including a PhD in math education – and received numerous teaching and outreach awards.

Thave taught math to thousands of students at University of Manitoba for almost 20 years. I have taught courses for both the mathematics department and the faculty of education. I work extensively with K-12 math teachers and I see firsthand on a daily basis in my classrooms the challenges we face in addressing a provincial math crisis.

Many students struggle with basic math, have negative attitudes about math or suffer from math anxiety. The most effective way to reduce math anxiety and foster positive attitudes about math — for both teachers and students

— is to increase teachers’ math knowledge for teaching, which is what our courses were designed to do.

The Manitoba government’s decision to eliminate all subject-area requirements for pre-service teachers is a big miss – from misinterpreted research, to misrepresented contexts, misguided policy and a misled public.

As someone who teaches hundreds of math students every year and as a mother to two small children about to enter our public school system, I believe it is a serious mistake and the consequences could be disastrous for Manitoba. I urge everyone to make their voices heard on this important and impactful issue.

Darja Barr

Winnipeg

By Thomas S. Benjamin, Jeffery A. Eitel, Jesse Elwell, Dmitry Evtyushkin, Abhrajit Ghosh, and Angelo Sapello

Side-channel attacks, such as Spectre, rely on properties of modern CPUs that permit discovery of microarchitectural state via timing of various operations. The Weird Machine concept is an increasingly popular model for characterization of execution that arises from side effects of conventional computing constructs. In this work, we introduce microarchitectural weird machines (µWM), code constructions that allow performing computation through the means of side effects and conflicts between microarchitectual entities such as branch predictors and caches. The results of such computations are observed as timing variations in the execution of instructions that interact with these side effects. We demonstrate how µWMs can be used as a powerful obfuscation engine where computation operates using events unobservable to conventional anti-obfuscation tools based on emulation, debugging, and static and dynamic analysis techniques. We present a practical example in which we use a µWM to obfuscate malware code such that its passive operation is invisible to an observer with full power to view the architectural state of the system until the code receives a trigger. When the trigger is received, the malware decrypts and executes its payload. To show the effectiveness of obfuscation, we demonstrate its use in the concealment and subsequent execution of a payload that creates a reverse shell. In the full version of this work, we also demonstrate a payload that exfiltrates a shadow password file. We then demonstrate the generality of μWMs by showing that they can be used to reliably perform non-trivial computation by implementing a SHA-1 hash function.

Marc Andreessen:

Forward this video to friends & family to understand just how evil the government has been
pic.twitter.com/XgRnikMK6J

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 29, 2024

More. and.

“Apple Lamps” timeline:

2011-2012:
The Obama administration targets the online poker industry, pressuring banks to cut off their services to poker companies.

2013:

• Operation Choke Point 1.0 begins. The Department of Justice (DOJ), in coordination with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), initiates a campaign to combat fraud by targeting banks that service “high-risk” industries, including payday lenders, firearms manufacturers, and adult entertainment businesses.
• The DOJ designates 30 specific merchant categories as “high-risk,” leading banks to preemptively cut ties with many companies and individuals within these sectors, even those operating legally.
• Michael Bresnick, executive director of Obama’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, emphasizes the strategy of targeting financial institutions and payment processors as “choke points” to combat fraud.

2014:

• Concerns grow about the chilling effect of Operation Choke Point on legal businesses, with banks facing increased scrutiny and pressure from regulators.
• The House Judiciary Committee launches an investigation into Operation Choke Point, highlighting the potential for abuse and the lack of transparency in the program.

Balaji:

Remember that Warren built an anti-crypto army. So of course she was willing to unbank companies! Her goal was to block you from escaping control. And she almost succeeded, if not for democracy.

Abbey Machtig:

After six decades of housing students and campers on overnight trips, the four cabins in the Madison school forest will be replaced next year.

Located about 20 miles south of Madison near Verona, the Madison School District owns more than 300 acres of land designated for use as a school forest — one of 255 registered school forests in Wisconsin. But after decades of use, the sleeping cabins within the forest are barely functional.

Scott:

The concept of ‘grit’ has been popularised by psychologist and author, Angela Duckworth. 

As part of her research, Duckworth conducted studies of high-achieving individuals in various fields ranging from business to education and the military. She was looking for common characteristics or personality traits that could be used as a predictor of success. 

After extensive research, she concluded that there is one characteristic that they almost all had in common and she has labelled that characteristic as GRIT.

Duckworth defines grit as ‘passion and perseverance for long-term goals’. 

It’s essentially the ability to stick at something for a long time, even when the going gets tough. 

Personally, I associate grit with resilience and it’s a trait that I deeply admire in other people. It’s something I try to display myself and a characteristic that I hope to cultivate in my children. 

I was therefore very interested to see if this was something that can be taught and if so, how.

Karin Klein:

Schools have generally been working hard to meet the special educational needs of an array of students — those with learning disabilities, those learning English, those with behavioral issues and those whose households struggle with poverty. But they have widely neglected one major group of students with special needs: the academically gifted.

Many school districts around the country have dropped programs for students who catch on quickly. The trend toward eliminating or scaling back such programs started about 15 years ago. But it picked up steam in 2021, when the Black Lives Matter movement made schools reckon with the discomfiting fact that they were far less likely to identify Black and Latino as gifted than they were white and Asian students.

Part of the problem was that the original purpose of gifted programs had been lost in parental competition for prestige and advantage. Unlike other special-education categories, the gifted label was coveted by parents. Classes and sometimes entire schools for gifted students often had richer curricula and more resources. They became classrooms for high achievers rather than for students properly defined as gifted.

University of Sheffield:

Machine Learning and by extension artificial intelligence has so many applications that this blog-post could be a dictionary, it can be used to help us solve abstract problems like helping healthcare providers to treat patients, to speech recognition (in fact, if you own an Alexa, Google Home, or even a normal smart-phone, you’ve probably experienced speech recognition in your day-to-day life!) 

The basis of all artificial intelligence and machine learning is treating things like probabilities. Understanding the basics of how to use probabilities can be incredibly useful when you’re doing more detailed machine learning and artificial intelligence later on in your course.

To get a refresher, I’d recommend looking at the university MASH (Mathematics and Statistics Help) refresher for Probability 1 and Probability 2

It may seem strange, but understanding things like probability of dice rolls, means you can understand things like object detection and deeper machine learning concepts! 

Andrew Kerr

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign directed nearly $600 million to just four media consulting firms with deep ties to the Democratic establishment, Federal Election Commission records show.

The latest available FEC data show the Harris campaign exceeded $880 million in total spending as of October 16, though that number is expected to balloon to $1.5 billion after the Harris campaign files its post-election FEC report on December 5. Seventy percent of the campaign’s known total spending flowed through four firms: Media Buying & Analytics, Gambit Strategies, Bully Pulpit Interactive, and Dupont Circle Strategies.

Together, these four Democratic firms were largely responsible for distributing Harris’s campaign messaging across the nation—an effort that ultimately saw Harris lose all seven swing states and the popular vote but directed huge sums of donor money the firms’ way.

The Economist:

What is fascinating is the philosophy behind the figures. Mr Milei is often wrongly lumped in with populist leaders such as Mr Trump, the hard right in France and Germany or Viktor Orban in Hungary. In fact he comes from a different tradition. A true believer in open markets and individual liberty, he has a quasi-religious zeal for economic freedom, a hatred of socialism and, as he told us in an interview this week, “infinite” contempt for the state. Instead of industrial policy and tariffs, he promotes trade with private firms that do not interfere in Argentina’s domestic affairs, including Chinese ones. He is a small-state Republican who admires Margaret Thatcher—a messianic example of an endangered species. His poll ratings are rising and, at this point in his term, he is more popular in Argentina than his recent predecessors were.

Make no mistake, the Milei experiment could still go badly wrong. Austerity has caused an increase in the poverty rate, which jumped to 53% in the first half of 2024 from 40% a year earlier. Mr Milei could struggle to govern if resistance builds and the Peronist opposition is better organised. Investor confidence will be tested if he finally removes capital controls and shifts an overvalued peso to a flexible exchange-rate regime: a currency slump could test nerves and push inflation back up. Mr Milei is an eccentric who could become distracted by culture wars over gender and climate change, and thus neglect his core mission of restoring Argentina’s economy to growth.

Arnold Kling:

Should we be in favor of government taking an active role in shaping higher education?  Scott Yenor writes,

states build universities to achieve certain goals—to gain informed citizens, cultivate an appreciation for the civilization, advance scientific progress. They have provided money and infrastructure to achieve these goals. States can and must demand that its goals be achieved. State legislatures and boards of trustees should eagerly seek to ensure that the public’s legitimate concern about the nature of education is vindicated.

Noah Gould writes,

When the funding source shifts to the state, educational institutions become oriented toward pleasing government officials. Professors who do not fit the narrow ideological band of those who are in power today become liabilities to politicians who are at the whims of the election cycle.

They are writing in the context of a debate over the role of government officials in general, and state legislators in particular, in addressing ideological bias in higher education.

It seems odd to claim that universities are the way they are because they are “pleasing government officials.” It seems to me that they are way too far to the left for that to be the case. 

I am fond of saying that government involvement in an industry typically consists of subsidizing demand and restricting supply. In the case of higher education, supply is restricted by requiring schools to be accredited, and then turning the accreditation process over to the incumbent institutions. Naturally, this leads to a strong barriers to entry.

To subsidize demand, the government provides all sorts of loans and grants to students and faculty. Higher education is one of the most powerful lobbies in the country. Because the public is lulled by the non-profit status of universities, there is no outcry over “Big Higher Ed” the way that there is about Big Pharma or Big Tech or Big Finance.

Universities claim to be essential to upward mobility. They have lobbied for “college for everyone” as a goal. I feel sorry for anyone who buys into this.

Allison Jones:

Ontario is staring down a teacher shortage as retirements and student enrolment are both on the rise, and the Ministry of Education expects the situation will start to get even worse in 2027.

The warning is contained in a series of briefing documents for the new minister of education, obtained by The Canadian Press through a freedom-of-information request.

Many school boards in Ontario and elsewhere are experiencing challenges recruiting and retaining enough qualified teachers, the document says, and in Ontario the issue is particularly felt in areas such as French and tech education.

Tomiwa Owolade

No one could put DH Lawrence in a box. He was born to a working-class mining family in Nottinghamshire but roamed the world, from Europe to North America, south Asia to Australia, with his aristocratic German wife. Over 20 years, he published 12 novels, multiple short stories and poems and an assortment of non-fiction texts, from travel books to literary criticism. He never suffered from writer’s block.

As Adrian Wooldridge puts it in his history of meritocracy, The Aristocracy of Talent, there was a time when “the Labour Party was the party of merit rather than levelling, and opportunity rather than equality”. The 20th century was a tribute to such a Labour Party: people from provincial backgrounds became acclaimed novelists, rock stars, broadcasters, even prime ministers.

But there is a tendency among some teachers and experts today towards another goal with education. That it should be relatable. This thinking regards the education system as exclusive, obsessed with subjects that children from disadvantaged backgrounds cannot relate to because they have never had experience of them.

Steve McGuire summary:

“If someone wanted to find a way to destroy American universities, they wouldn’t be able to find a better tool than D.E.I. An enormous bureaucracy that drains resources and drives up the already astronomical price of college while contributing next to nothing to the advancement of actually underprivileged students. It has a profoundly negative effect on campus life by turning it into victimhood Olympics. Through its influence on hiring it actively works to exclude people on both ideological and racial grounds, and it further tilts the already wildly imbalanced campus politics. Moreover, as this article demonstrates, by trying to infuse every aspect of teaching and research with DEl considerations it further erodes the distinction between activism and scholarship and remakes entire disciplines in its shape (and not for the better). Finally, by politicizing the university it undermines the already problematic standing of higher education among the American public. As I said, one of the most pernicious things ever to happen to American higher education.”

Ann Althouse:

That article asserts that “Elon Musk’s X is primarily a political project he is using to boost, or stifle, specific viewpoints and help his friends.” But The Onion’s desire to purchase the account that Infowars stuffed with speech over the years is all about stifling its specific viewpoint. The Onion has its own X account, but it wants the place that Infowars built up so it can stomp out that speech — rewrite it into a parody of itself. It could do that parody on a newly created account and thus give us more speech, more debate. 

So who’s more against freedom of speech here? It seems to me that X is protecting it.

—-

X’s Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts

Larry P. Arnn

The recent election is the product of a decades-long struggle in American politics that has intensified since 2016. The election produced a victory for the man who caused the intensification, Donald Trump. He caused it by convincing a people, jaded from broken promises, that he would “drain the swamp.” 

He also convinced the people who inhabit the swamp, and they have scorched the earth to stop him. He has been canceled, derided, slandered, libeled, investigated, searched, impeached, arrested, prosecuted, tried, convicted, shot, and yet…reelected!

Now the battle will begin anew. What will it be like? There are so many problems. The border. Crime. Inflation. Education. War. Ukraine. China. Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran. Debt stacked to the far reaches of a SpaceX mission. Which matters most?

Last February, I paid a visit to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. He might be, I told him, on the threshold of a historic opportunity. It may become possible to restore constitutional government in place of the administrative or bureaucratic state that has almost overtaken it. He replied that he prayed about that every day.

Frederick Hess:

It’s been a helluva fall. But it’s finally Thanksgiving, which means it’s time for some gratitude. Indeed, those in and around American education should be steeped in gratitude for the legacy that’s been gifted to us. Now, I know how old school that sounds—especially in an era when just a third of Gen-Z says the U.S. is a fair society and less than a third of high school seniors think their nation is the best country in the world. I mean, you needn’t look very hard to find curricular materials that depict Thanksgiving as yet one more instance of settler colonialism.

Old school or not, though, gratitude is foundational to healthy schools and civic institutions. Mike McShane and I discussed this at length earlier this year in our book, Getting Education Right. This seems like the perfect time to share a bit about our appreciation for the legacy we’ve all inherited. With your indulgence, I’m just going to go ahead and share an extended passage from the book. We wrote:

Corey DeAngelis:

“I don’t, I mean, my members don’t really care about whether they have a bureaucracy of the Department of Education or not. In fact, Al Shanker and the AFT in the 1970s were opposed to its creation!”

By Dr. Eric Ostermeier

The 119th Congress will have the most states represented by just one party on Capitol Hill since the 83rd Congress and largest number of all-GOP delegations since the 71st

Recent Smart Politics reports have highlighted electoral trends signaling the demise of competitive, battleground states, such as the 119th Congress setting a record low number of split U.S. Senate delegations and the Democratic and Republican parties currently owning record presidential winning streaks in 38 states.

Additionally, when the 119th Congress convenes in five-plus weeks, it will do so with 19 state delegations comprised only of U.S. Representatives and U.S. Senators from the same political party – the largest number of states since the 83rd Congress convened 72 years ago in 1953.

This marks an increase of three states with homogeneous representation since the 118th Congress – all in the Republican column.

Michael Scherer

“These operatives had the gall to say they were fighting to protect our democracy. In reality, they undermined it at every turn…”

“… with frivolous lawsuits, character assassination, and outright lies designed to prevent No Labels from exercising our constitutional right to get ballot access. If you are wondering why Americans are losing faith in our democracy and so many of our country’s self-anointed elites, this is Exhibit A.”

Now leaders of No Labels are fighting back in three federal courtrooms with a sprawling legal-discovery effort aimed at exposing the secret machinations they think led to their project’s demise. Leaders of the moderate Democratic group Third Way and of Investing in US, a political operation funded by LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, are fighting to limit the document production.

But documents already unsealed by the courts reveal remarkable details about private proposals for a wide range of hard-nosed tactics that would go beyond public efforts like ads, op-eds and meetings to discourage the No Labels campaign. The documents include emails exchanged between various Democratic strategists involved with efforts to oppose No Labels.

A separate “Direct Action Campaign” proposal, which was never fully adopted, called for the personal harassment of No Labels founder Nancy Jacobson and her husband, Mark Penn, a former adviser to Bill. and Hillary Clinton.

The proposal to “socially stigmatize” Jacobson and Penn, according to documents revealed in court, included plans to hire clowns “to hangout on their block” in the Georgetown area of D.C., post fliers in the neighborhood attacking the couple, send a “truck carrying musical performers” to wake them up at 6 a.m., and fly banner planes over Harvard University’s graduation attacking Penn, who does a poll for the university as chair of the Harris Poll and CEO of the marketing company Stagwell. Penn did not play a role in the No Labels. presidential bid, according to the group.

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more.

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Matt Taibbi:

“We can just rig our own poll to make it look as shit as possible…”

“Block signature-gathering…”

“Make [them] seem like they might be totally crazy/right-wing wackos to mid-low-info voters…”

“Hijacking their ballot line and pushing extremist candidates to muddy [their] brand…”

The above quotes are just a few excerpts from incredible documents made public after a long court fight. Details of a plan to “shun,” “stigmatize,” and “destroy” the third party No Labels suggest a Rosetta Stone of corruption, showing groups aligned with the Democratic Party using dirty tricks and elaborate fakery to attack anyone in their electoral path, all while presenting themselves as “pro-democracy” forces.

When filed a year ago on December 4, 2023, No Labels vs. No Labels seemed a picayune trademark dispute. It concerned No Labels, a political alternative founded in 2010 by longtime Democratic fundraiser Nancy Jacobson and backed by since-passed former Senator Joe Lieberman. Armed with $70 million and plans for “nationwide” ballot access, No Labels was whispered about early in the cycle as a potentially serious threat to the Democrats’ election chances, especially in a race with widespread diffidence regarding the two likely nominees, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal article about them from July 2023 was headlined, “A Mysteriously Financed Group That Could Upend a Biden-Trump Rematch.”

Openly talking about “deterring” other candidacies on principle, or stopping a third party from “successfully signature gathering” (as they did in a different memo), is striking given the Democrats’ stance on other voting access issues.

“Once we backed out, it’s like, all right, let’s go kill off Bobby Kennedy,” said No Labels chief strategist Ryan Clancy. “Some of these same people before were saying, let’s go kill off Dean Phillips.”

Irene Loewenson and Geoff Ziezulewicz:

Lt. Kennedy went on to command a patrol torpedo boat that a Japanese warship sheared in half during World War II, and he later received a Purple Heart and Navy and Marine Corps Medal.

In recent decades, the lies told to enlist haven’t approached those extremes.

Nonetheless, fudging medical histories has been a key step on many troops’ path from applicant to recruit, according to a group of active-duty military recruiters who spoke with Military Times for this story.

“What it takes to get in the Army is, quite frankly, a lot of fraud and perjury,” one recruiter said.

ACT

Based on 2005 ACT-tested high school graduates, it appears that only about half of our nation’s ACT-tested high school students are ready for college-level reading. What’s worse, more students are on track to being ready for college-level reading in eighth and tenth grade than are actually ready by the time they reach twelfth grade.

College readiness—the level of preparation students need in order to be ready to enroll and succeed without remediation in credit-bearing entrylevel coursework at a two- or four-year institution, trade school, or technical school—is currently inadequate and should be an expectation for all high school students.

It is also recognized today that the knowledge and skills needed for college are equivalent to those needed in the workplace (American Diploma Project, 2004; Barth, 2003). We and others have documented that improving college and workforce readiness is critical to developing a diverse and talented labor force that will help ensure our nation’s economic competitiveness in a growing global economy (Callan & Finney, 2003; Cohen, 2002; Somerville & Yi, 2002).

Todd Feathers:

Rather than failing to make school policies on AI clear, Levenson wrote, the Hingham High School A.P. English Language teacher gave a lesson on academic integrity and expectations for the use of AI during the first week of a class that the Harris’s son was enrolled in. She also sent students a document that instructed them not to use AI without permission or to copy and paste blocks of text into assignments.

While their request for a preliminary injunction was denied and Levenson doesn’t appear particularly convinced by their arguments, the Harris’s lawsuit against the Hingham school committee remains alive.

Corrine Hess:

The Madison running community is urging the University of Wisconsin-Madison to alter its plans for the new football practice facility on campus that includes a smaller indoor track than the one that stood for nearly 70 years. 

In August, UW-Madison demolished the aging Camp Randall Memorial Sports Center, commonly known as the “Shell,” to build a new indoor football field, strength and conditioning center and indoor track. 

The $285 million project is one of the largest in UW Athletics history. 

Joanne Jacobs’ summary:

They analyzed the 2012 PISA exam, which includes questions on how math is taught, as well as demographic information. That made it possible to control for socioeconomic status, family structure, use of the test language at home and immigrant status.

Comparing similar students, math instruction makes a meaningful difference in student learning, they conclude. Lower achievers were helped the most by teacher-directed instruction, but high achievers also did better.

Biggs provides details on what’s most and least effective on Substack.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Illinois’ educational establishment has been doing it for more than five decades. Year after year they’ve automatically advanced kids that can’t read or do math at grade level. They’ve graduated kids that are nowhere near proficiency levels on the SAT. And they always tell parents all is well. 

They just did it again this month when the State Board of Education and Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced the new state 2024 education results. This time to give the illusion of success, they conflated record graduation rates with improved elementary scores. Gov. Pritzker told parents: “This year’s report card shows we’ve reached the highest grad rate in 14 years at 87.7% AND the highest-ever proficiency rate in English Language Arts in grades 3-8.”

Tricky. When bragging about record graduation rates, it’s not elementary scores but rather high school SAT scores that matter. And those SAT scores are at or near all-time lows. Student reading proficiency statewide is down nearly 9 percentage points and math is down by over 10 points compared to 2017 when Illinois began using the SAT. 

Note that the scores on the SAT – a requirement for all juniors in Illinois – were trending down even before the pandemic began.

——

Taxpayer Funded Wisconsin DPI: “There is major score inflation”

Hope Kirwan:

“It’s so enrollment driven, which is a challenge in rural areas,” Heesch said. “You’re seeing declining enrollments, your revenues are either flat or decreasing based on those enrollments, while your expenditures, especially through an inflationary period, have increased dramatically.”

——

Patrick McIlheran:

The story hints at the real problem, which is the district’s falling enrollment. Per DPI figures, Mauston has about 11% fewer kids now than 20 years ago.

William Deresiewicz:

The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.

Some data points. A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked

more.

NCRI:

DEI programs purport to cultivate inclusive environments for people from diverse backgrounds and encourage greater empathy in interpersonal interactions. A key component of DEI offerings lies in diversity pedagogy: Lectures, trainings and educational resources ostensibly designed to educate participants about their prejudice and bias in order to eliminate discrimination 1 (Iyer, 2022). As institutions across corporate and educational sectors increasingly embed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) into their foundational strategies, it is crucial to evaluate the effectiveness of common aspects of this pedagogy.

A 2023 study by the Pew Research Center 2 found that 52% of American workers have DEI meetings or training events at work, and according to Iris Bohnet, a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, $8 billion is spent annually on such programs. 3 Despite widespread investment in and adoption of diversity pedagogy through lectures, educational resources, and training, assessments of efficacy have produced mixed results.

A meta-analysis by Paluck et al. (2021) found that too few studies in the field have investigated real-world impact on “light-touch” interventions or seminars and training programs. 4 Taken together, the limited evidence suggests that some DEI programs not only fail to achieve their goals but can actively undermine diversity efforts. Specifically, mandatory trainings that focus on particular target groups can foster discomfort and perceptions of unfairness 5 (Burnett and Aguinis, 2024). DEI initiatives seen as affirmative action rather than business strategy can provoke backlash, 6 increasing rather than reducing racial resentment 7 (Kidder et al., 2004; Legault et al. (2001). And diversity initiatives aimed at managing bias can fail, sometimes resulting in decreased representation and triggering negativity among employees 8 (Leslie, 2019; Kalev, Dobbin, & Kelly, 2006). In other words, some DEI programs appear to backfire.9

Lucas Vebber:

A @WILawLiberty study a few years ago found that WI has more regulations per capita than our neighbors. W/more than 161,000 restrictions, the WI admin code increases poverty, income inequality, leads to fewer business, costs jobs, and raises prices.

The unelected bureaucracy is crushing us, Wisconsin: we need to make Article IV of our state constitution great again!

Jill Barshay:

Like learning to read by third grade, taking eighth grade math is a pivotal moment in a child’s education. Students who pass Algebra 1 in eighth grade are more likely to sign up for more advanced math courses, and those who pass more advanced math courses are more likely to graduate from college and earn more money. “Algebra in eighth grade is a gateway to a lot of further opportunities,” said Dan Goldhaber, an economist who studies education at the American Institutes for Research, in a recent webinar.

Researchers are trying to understand why so few Black and Hispanic students and low-income students of all races are making it through this early gate. While 25 percent of white students passed algebra in eighth  grade in 2021, only 13 percent of Black students did, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education.

Andrew

In light of our recent discussion of the unwillingness of authors of published papers to acknowledge their mistakes, I thought I’d post the four correction notices that I’ve felt the need to issue.

From 1999, correcting a paper that appeared in 1993:

news.wisc.edu

Nearly half of UW–Madison’s $1.7 billion in total research expenditures comes from federal awards, from agencies such as NSF, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.

Chancellor Mnookin and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research have prioritized improvements to the university’s annual research expenditures.

“UW–Madison’s research success, as evidenced by the HERD Survey, includes collaborative efforts to connect faculty to more funding opportunities,” says Vice Chancellor for Research Dorota Brzezinska. “We are increasing campus engagement with our partners and fostering an entrepreneurial environment that supports our commitment to advancing scientific discovery and facilitates researchers moving their innovations from lab to marketplace. We are seeing increased support for research into Alzheimer’s, childhood asthma, combating the fentanyl crisis, and traumatic brain injuries. We are combining data-driven diagnostics and innovative technologies to develop highly targeted cancer treatments with investments in areas such as precision medicine.”

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner:

It’s the only reasonable conclusion. Illinois politicians who continue to oppose pension reform via a constitutional amendment should be booted from office. The latest state-by-state pension report from Fitch Ratings demonstrates why. 

At $172 billion,* Illinois has the nation’s biggest pension shortfall by far, the agency says. Fitch also calculates that Illinois’ pension debt as a share of its economy is the largest in the country. Either way, Illinois is the nation’s extreme outlier.

To get an idea of just how out of whack Illinois is, consider the pension shortfalls of its neighbors. Indiana’s is just $11 billion. Michigan’s, $8 billion. Wisconsin’s, $4 billion. Iowa’s, $2 billion.

Wall Street Journal:

The Biden Administration has effectively turned the Education Department into an arm of the teachers unions and cultural left. Ms. McMahon’s top priorities will be ending student loan write-offs, rolling back the department’s Title IX regulation, devolving school control to the states and promoting alternative education pathways.

Start with stanching red ink in the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program. The Biden team has unilaterally canceled more than $175 billion in debt, which doesn’t include the cost of its pandemic forbearance and SAVE plan. The latter eliminates payments for four million borrowers and reduces them for others by hundreds of dollars a month.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that about 25% of student debt disbursed over the next decade will be written off mainly because of the SAVE and Obama income-based repayment plans. While federal courts have put the SAVE plan on hold, the Biden team has suspended required payments for eight million borrowers already enrolled.

Scrapping the SAVE plan and requiring borrowers to resume making payments will no doubt provoke an outcry on the left. But the free lunch can’t continue forever, and it’s unfair to Americans who didn’t attend college or repaid their loans. More young Americans are deciding college isn’t worth it, and why should they have to subsidize degrees in community organizing?

Madeleine Rowley

“The amount of taxpayer money they are getting is obscene,” Charles Marino, former adviser to Janet Napolitano, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, said of the NGOs. “We’re going to find that the waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer money will rival what we saw with the Covid federal money.”

The Free Press examined three of the most prominent NGOs that have benefited: Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc. These organizations have seen their combined revenue grow from $597 million in 2019 to an astonishing $2 billion by 2022, the last year for which federal disclosure documents are available. And the CEOs of all three nonprofits reap more than $500,000 each in annual compensation, with one of them—the chief executive of Southwest Key—making more than $1 million.

Dataviz

Can we come up with 100 visualizations from one simple dataset?

As an information design agency working with data visualization every day, we challenged ourselves to accomplish this using insightful and visually appealing visualizations.

We wanted to show the diversity and complexity of data visualization and how we can tell different stories using limited visual properties and assets.

Chicago Tribune:

By any measure, Chicago Public Schools teachers are extraordinarily well paid given the norms of their profession.

The median salary for a CPS teacher is nearly $95,000. That’s 21% more than teachers make in Cook County’s suburbs, where median pay is $78,000. What’s more, CPS says it pays its teachers more than any other large school district in the nation, and that’s before whatever increases they get in union contract negotiations that are ongoing.

The Chicago Teachers Union continues to demand 9% annual raises, an outlandish ask, and is growing ever more shrill as CPS CEO Pedro Martinez and his administration try to hold the line on behalf of Chicago’s beleaguered taxpayers and in the face of heavy pressure from Mayor Brandon Johnson to give CTU everything it wants. The impasse is headed next month for a neutral fact-finder, who will hear both sides out and produce a report in January.

These are the first steps toward a potential teachers strike, which could occur as soon as February.

——-

John Arnold:

Chicago teachers get 78 days off and yet 41% are deemed chronically absent for missing 10+ days of work. With median pay of $95k (2nd highest in country), demands for 9% annual raises, and lousy outcomes, even the Chicago Tribune editorial board is fed up.

——-

Meanwhile, Milwaukee:

“Maybe it has to broken apart. Maybe we have to have somebody take it over. Maybe we have to do something dramatically different, because what they’re doing now certainly doesn’t seem to be working.” – Speaker Robin Vos on Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS)

Google sheet.

more.

Hannah Robbins

What appears to be evidence of some of the oldest alphabetic writing in human history is etched onto finger-length, clay cylinders excavated from a tomb in Syria by a team of Johns Hopkins University researchers.

The writing, which is dated to around 2400 BCE, precedes other known alphabetic scripts by roughly 500 years, upending what archaeologists know about where alphabets came from, how they are shared across societies, and what that could mean for early urban civilizations, according to the researchers.

“Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated,” said Glenn Schwartz, a professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University who discovered the clay cylinders. “And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now.”

Greg Ashman:

From October 20 to November 4, 2024, I ran a Google Forms survey about teacher training. I promoted this survey via my own social media accounts on Substack, X, Facebook and LinkedIn. The survey collected no names, email addresses, dates of birth or any other key identifying data. Instead, it asked participants about their experiences training. Overall, there were 1045 responses of which 378 were from those who stated they trained in Australia and 143 were from those who stated they trained in Australia from 2014 onwards. I wanted to see how the Australian experience compared with the experience worldwide on a number of issues. I was also interested to find out whether the situation had changed in recent years.

I anticipate this being the first of a few posts on the topic and I only intend to present initial highlights here. I probably have enough responses from England to analyse those separately. There are also some questions specific to primary education that I will not report on in this post.

This is not meant to be a piece of peer-reviewed research, just a survey of my various groups of followers and their networks. I have not tried to compute margins of error or any other such statistics because the data is probably not rigorous enough to justify such an analysis.

Learning styles

I asked respondents whether they recalled learning styles being discussed during the university component of their course. 69% of all those surveyed recalled learning styles being discussed and 72% of those who stated they were trained in Australia recalled learning styles being discussed. Of those who stated they were trained in Australia in the last ten years, 83%recalled learning styles being discussed.

Is this a concern or a good thing? Learning styles are a classic neuromyth. Although people will express a preference to learn via one particular mode or another, a review of the educational psychology literature does not support the idea of tailoring teaching to specific learning styles. So, it could be a good thing if all these teacher training courses were discussing learning styles as an example of a myth about teaching.

Stephen Council

In an bizarre twist, a Stanford University expert who studies misinformation appears to have created some of his own — while under oath.

Is this SF restaurant’s $180 11-course dining experience worth it?

On Nov. 1, Jeff Hancock, a well-known and oft-cited researcher who leads the Bay Area school’s Social Media Lab, filed an expert declaration in a Minnesota court case over the state’s new ban on political deepfakes. Republicans have sued to block the ban, arguing it’s an unconstitutional limit on free speech. Hancock defended the law in his declaration, explaining how artificial intelligence makes it easier to fabricate videos and discussed deepfakes’ psychological impacts. But he seems to have made an ironic mistake.

Hancock cited 15 references in his declaration, mostly research papers related to political deepfakes and their impacts. Two of the 15 sources do not appear to exist. The journals he cites are real, as are some of the two citations’ authors, but journal archivesshow no sign of either paper. The actual journal pages referenced by Hancock have different articles. SFGATE was unable to find the cited papers on Google Scholar, either. 

Sara Spafford Freeman:

Got a read out from Rep Long’s meeting w/MPS & NONE of this is going to happen. But the DFL is poised to abolish school choice, so they’ve officially lost the plot on public ed. We save this system by INVESTING in it, not by limiting families’ choices – is a hill I’ll die on.