Civics: Federalism and elections
He said these monitors will “ensure that there is no interference with the voting process.”
He said these monitors will “ensure that there is no interference with the voting process.”
One the saddest realizations for me when we were scaling the @midjourney server at @discord in ‘22 was seeing millions of US gen z kids struggle to prompt
They literally don’t have the words. Broken english. Pidgin lingo. Translating thought to language is insanely hard for them
Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
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?
According to Chicago Contrarian, a property currently paying $25,000 in annual property tax (common for properties worth $750K-$1.25MM) will fork over an additional $4,685 annually based on the proposed 18.75% tax hike.
And while the real estate market hasn’t yet processed this latest curveball (it’ll take a few months for closed transactions to reveal the impact), October downtown condo transactions suggest the market is already in a steep nosedive. This move could only sharpen that trajectory.
The old trader’s adage “don’t try to catch a falling knife” seems to be the guiding principle for today’s Chicago buyers. Even though single-family homes in the under $2MM range are holding steady in many neighborhoods, due in part to limited supply and post-Covid building costs, condos in the Gold Coast, Streeterville, and Near North areas are proving that real estate doesn’t always go up, especially when property taxes are on a bender.
“I took a loss on my last investment, but I got out just in time before rising property taxes, which were already killing me,” a former Chicago real estate investor noted. He pointed us to recent closed deals that suggest the condo market was already in trouble, even before “Mayor Johnson’s new property price death sentence.”
Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
Incumbrances [definition]
City of Madison (property, sales taxes & various fees): Assessor Short term rental regulations Ordinances Zoning Water Utility Streets (trash & recycling) Diggers hotline Wheel tax
Madison School District (property taxes & fees)
Madison College (property tax)
Dane County (property, sales taxes & fees) Parcels Register of Deeds Ordinances public health Dane county Madison
State of Wisconsin (income, sales taxes & fees) Statutes State Parcel Map Department of Natural Resources Department of Revenue Real Estate Transfer Tax
United States Government (income taxes & fees): Laws & Regulations debt clock
The order granting rehearing was just filed today, so the court will reconsider the case in the coming months. Here’s an excerpt from the now-vacated panel majority opinion (Judge Jane Stranch, joined by Judge Stephanie Davis), which deals with school policies that “prohibit students from repeatedly and intentionally using non-preferred pronouns to refer to their classmates”:
Tinker v. Des Moines Ind. Cmty. Sch. Dist.(1969) … does not require school authorities to wait for a disturbance before regulating speech, nor does it “require certainty that disruption will occur.” Even this limited preliminary injunction record contains evidence of the substantial disruption that repeated, intentional use of non-preferred pronouns to refer to transgender students can cause. The PDE parent-members themselves “understand[]” that use of non-preferred pronouns “will be considered ‘insulting,’ ‘humiliating,’ ‘dehumanizing,’ ‘derogatory,’ and ‘unwanted’ to those who want to go by different pronouns.”
PDE also attached to its preliminary injunction motion an article containing a therapist’s explanation that students who “have been misgendered all day” often become “traumatized,” “humiliated,” and “cry after school.” This evidence dovetails with a study, cited by the district court, collecting literature on the “measurable psychological and physiological harms” that can be caused by use of non-preferred pronouns. And it supports the conclusion that transgender students experience the use of non-preferred pronouns as dehumanizing and that, as a result, the repeated use of such pronouns can have severely negative effects on children and young adults….
David de la Croix & Marc Goni:
We have constructed a comprehensive database that traces the publications of father–son pairs in the premodern academic realm and examined the contribution of inherited human capital versus nepotism to occupational persistence. We find that human capital was strongly transmitted from parents to children and that nepotism declined when the misallocation of talent across professions incurred greater social costs. Specifically, nepotism was less common in fields experiencing rapid changes in the knowledge frontier, such as the sciences and within Protestant institutions. Most notably, nepotism sharply declined during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, when departures from meritocracy arguably became both increasingly inefficient and socially intolerable.
More.
OpenAI’s best model, o1-preview, achieved only a 42.7 percent success rate. GPT-4o followed with 38.2 percent correct answers, while the smaller GPT-4o-mini managed just 8.6 percent accuracy.
Anthropic’s Claude models performed even worse. Their top model, Claude-3.5-sonnet, got 28.9 percent right and 36.1 percent wrong. However, smaller Claude models more often declined to answer when uncertain – a desirable response that shows they recognize their knowledge limitations.
🤡Wisconsin high school preps teachers for election-day trauma.
Suggestions?
“take care of yourself and prepare to support students”
“staff circle to process your emotions”
“Affinity space for staff of color”
Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, internal email…
I don’t care, frankly, whether the editorial page endorses Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. I care about whether the journalists are lying about Donald Trump or lying about Kamala Harris.
And frankly, they’re lying a lot in the negative direction about my running mate, and they’re lying a lot in the positive direction about Kamala Harris.
So what I would like to see from Jeff Bezos is a commitment to the Washington Post, not just being a Democrat Super PAC.
I don’t give a shit if he hires a few more conservative columnists. It doesn’t matter. What matters is do they hold their journalism to anything like a high standard?
Meanwhile: revising numbers…
And:
“They are now as mad as you will ever hear a stenographer on the record that white House officials tried to change the meaning of their transcripts.”
AP:
White House press officials altered the official transcript of a call in which President Joe Biden appeared to take a swipe at supporters of Donald Trump, drawing objections from the federal workers who document such remarks for posterity, according to two U.S. government officials and an internal email obtained Thursday by The Associated Press.
Bill Ackman:
Screen grab from NYT home page just now. It links here, where Michelle Cottle writes: “It is time for Democrats to stop putting a mic in front of President Biden unless absolutely necessary…. With just a few days left in this race, I’d like to request — ever so gently — that Biden keep those lips zipped on political matters. Things are crazy enough out here without his help.”
Either he’s President or he isn’t. He’s made a mess of everything and deprived us of a normal process of selecting a President. And the Democratic Party candidate for President is entirely implicated in the dangerous, outrageous situation, and you just want to shut him up for a few days?! No, the entire shit show is the responsibility of Democratic Party that is aggressively seeking power over his half-dead body. Why should we look away?
The witness said in a statement that he saw somebody jam up to 500 ballots into an unguarded ballot box and then flee once he realized that he was being photographed.
In Wisconsin, the law requires that voters personally handle their ballots. It bans the collection, or harvesting, of ballots by others, CPAC said.
Griswold did not inform county election clerks that her office had posted voting machine passwords online for months and did not begin the process of changing the leaked passwords until after the security breach became public.
“You think there might be some incriminating information in this? Now, again, these are government documents. This is government federal federal records. This should be made available to congress. This should be mailed made available to the American public, but it is not.”
“So that’s the Fauci emails. My my letters on hot lots, I’ve written 4 of them starting in December of 2021. The first letter compared 25,000 lots of COVID vaccine to 22,000 lots of flu vaccine. 1 COVID lot had 5,297 adverse reactions associated with it. The worst flu lot had a 137.”
As part of this initiative, the White House required each federal agency to submit detailed DEI progress reports regularly, appoint a chief diversity officer, and create “Agency Equity Teams,” whose leaders were tasked with “delivering equitable outcomes.” These requirements contributed to what the president called “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”
The gender component of this agenda spread to the State Department through the president’s “Memorandum on Advancing the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons Around the World.” Published in February 2021, this memorandum directed State and other agencies to monitor closely and report on the “LGBTQI+” policies of our allies, to “broaden the number of countries willing to support and defend” the radical Left’s understanding of gender—for example, by funding pro-transgender “civil society advocates” in order to shift public opinion in those countries—and to tie in the principles of gender theory to America’s foreign-aid programs.
If necessary, the memo maintained, agencies should use “the full range of diplomatic and assistance tools” to ensure foreign governments’ compliance with this agenda, including “financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and other actions.”
In this piece, I unpack the confusion surrounding psychological safety and why you need both psychological safety and high standards to achieve high performance.
Jon Kamp, Joe Pinsker and Aaron Zitner:
The economy is humming. Inflation has cooled off. Americans are well-employed, getting raises and spending freely.
But—with an election in less than two weeks—people still haven’t gotten over how much higher prices are today than in 2020.
People find it unsettling that price tags don’t look like they did before inflation took off during the pandemic, surging to the highest level in four decades. Even though the growth in prices has eased significantly, prices themselves aren’t getting lower.
“It’s hard to adjust,” said Marilyn Huang, a 54-year-old engineer in Doylestown, Pa.
As with many Americans, Huang’s pay has increased since 2020, and she and her partner continue to spend on travel and even dine out more than in the past. But the higher prices are aggravating.
“You lived with these stable prices for all your life,” she said. “Mentally, it’s hard.”
In August, the second largest teachers union chapter in the country—there are more than 35,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles—met at the Bonaventure Hotel in L.A. to discuss, among other things, how to turn their K-12 students against Israel. In front of a PowerPoint that read, “How to be a teacher & an organizer. . . and NOT get fired,” history teacher Ron Gochez elaborated on stealth methods for indoctrinating students.
But how to transport busloads of kids to an anti-Israel rally, during the school day, without arousing suspicion?
“A lot of us that have been to those [protest] actions have brought our students. Now I don’t take the students in my personal car,” Gochez told the crowd. Then, referring to the Los Angeles Unified School District, he explained: “I have members of our organization who are not LAUSD employees. They take those students and I just happen to be at the same place and the same time with them.”
Gochez was just getting warmed up. “It’s like tomorrow I go to church and some of my students are at the church. ‘Oh, wow! Hey, how you doing?’ We just happen to be at the same place at the same time, and look! We just happen to be at a pro-Palestine action, same place, same time.”
The University of Texas at Austin Texas Robotics Undergraduate Program is now open to high school students, allowing them to apply directly to the cohort-based Robotics Program through the Common App.
Learn more about the Texas Robotics Undergraduate Program.
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) permitted marketing of the first game-based digital therapeutic device to improve attention function in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The prescription-only game-based device, called EndeavorRx, is indicated for pediatric patients ages 8 to12 years old with primarily inattentive or combined-type ADHD who have demonstrated an attention issue. EndeavorRx is indicated to improve attention function as measured by computer-based testing and is the first digital therapeutic intended to improve symptoms associated with ADHD, as well as the first game-based therapeutic granted marketing authorization by the FDA for any type of condition. The device is intended for use as part of a therapeutic program that may include clinician-directed therapy, medication, and/or educational programs, which further address symptoms of the disorder.
“The EndeavorRx device offers a non-drug option for improving symptoms associated with ADHD in children and is an important example of the growing field of digital therapy and digital therapeutics,” said Jeffrey Shuren, M.D., J.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health. “The FDA is committed to providing regulatory pathways that enable patients timely access to safe and effective innovative digital therapeutics.”
On Election Day, Massachusetts voters will have a chance to get rid of the state’s high school exit exam, which involves standards-based tests in math, sciences and English. The ballot measure is known as Question 2, and voting yes “would eliminate the requirement that students pass the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System in order to graduate high school but still require students to complete coursework that meets state standards.”
Massachusetts is one of fewer than 10 states that still have exit exam requirements. It is also consistently ranked among the best states for K-12 public education — as are some of the other states with exit exams, like New York and Virginia. The MCAS is not a killer exam. As my newsroom colleague Troy Closson pointed out, “More than 90 percent of sophomores pass the test” on their first try. Furthermore, “Failing students can retake the exams several times or lodge an appeal.”
A summary of the arguments for and against Question 2 from the nonpartisan Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University states that “96 percent manage to eventually pass or otherwise prove their competency via one of the state’s alternate paths.”
As a major technological development with wide reaching implications, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is poised to profoundly impact American psychology, society and politics. More in Common seeks to elevate Americans’ voices at this inflection point, particularly as private and public actors make decisions that shape AI’s potential to affect trust, social cohesion, and division.
Key Takeaways
- Americans view GenAI as a powerful force whose full consequences are yet to be seen.
- The most expressed emotion is “uncertain” (49%), followed by “interested” (36%) and “worried” (29%).
- Women, rural Americans, and those with a low sense of belonging are generally more skeptical and fearful about AI’s impact compared to men, urban residents, and those with a strong sense of community.
America’s reckoning with racial injustice and the pursuit of equity have led some public school systems to reduce or terminate (or at least question) special programs for high achievers, such as “gifted” education, honors courses, and selective high schools. Historically, such programs have served disproportionately few Black, Hispanic, Native American, and low-income students. Their critics have used this fact to call for their overhaul or elimination—a position they often justify with claims that the programs don’t improve participants’ academic outcomes, especially those of marginalized students, and that more heterogeneous classrooms work just as well.
This policy brief considers four frequent arguments that opponents of advanced education programs use to advocate for their elimination.
Claim 1: Programs for advanced students don’t work, especially for marginalized students. False. Interventions including acceleration and readiness grouping benefit high-achieving students from all backgrounds and don’t harm their lower- and middle-achieving peers.
Claim 2: What’s commonly termed “differentiated instruction,” i.e., grouping all readiness levels into single classrooms, works just as well as advanced programs that group some of them separately.
False. No high-quality research shows that heterogeneous differentiation can work at scale for the full range of student readiness levels that are typically present in American classrooms. And several large-scale meta-analyses say it doesn’t work.
Claim 3: School systems under-identify marginalized students due to biased practices. Perhaps. We can’t deny that bias can take place, but the problem is deeper—and it is up to us to intervene early.
Michael Alcorn & Leslie Stratford:
Instead, union representatives negotiated over things like “pronoun pins,” which the company already provides. They demanded that Trader Joe’s cover abortion and “gender-affirming care.” The company’s response: The health plan already covers that. Either the union negotiators were embarrassingly uninformed, or they were playing a political game with workers as the pawns. Either way, our team deserved better.
We wrote up what we saw at the bargaining session and posted it in the break room. Within hours, the union asked the store captain to take it down. He refused. We then showed up to the next bargaining session in April 2023, only for our own union to deny us entry and ask security to escort us from the building. Why don’t the people who have a legal duty to represent our interests want us to see what they’re saying and doing?
Our frustration kept building, so last November, we told our fellow crew members that we were gathering signatures to hold a decertification election. We need the support of only 30% of the bargaining unit to force another election. We thought this would be tough, since many of our colleagues told us they were afraid of union reprisals and would sign only if we kept their names secret. Yet by July of this year, 46% of our co-workers had signed our petition. We felt we had a real shot, especially since a majority of the crew members who initially voted for unionization have since left. In July, we filed our petition with the National Labor Relations Board.
Two months later, our hopes were dashed. The NLRB’s regional director dismissed our petition on grounds that Trader Joe’s is under investigation for unfair labor practices at our store. The company is accused of everything from having an “overly broad” dress code to giving one of our co-workers a “negative appraisal.” The union has also claimed that managers in our store made “threats,” though in our experience they did nothing of the kind.
Student teachers could be paid $10,000 to help cover expenses and reduce debt while training in schools, according to a 2025-27 budget request from state Superintendent Jill Underly and the Department of Public Instruction.
Aspiring educators must complete some form of preparation program to become a licensed teacher in Wisconsin. Many college students spend a semester working in a cooperating school district to meet the requirement, while earning little to no pay.
There is no state program that pays student teachers, DPI spokesperson Chris Bucher said. Grant funding may be available through individual colleges or universities, such as the UW-Madison teacher pledge program.
I like one from 1953 for a gel to treat asthma. The image, of a woman trying to catch her breath, is viscerally powerful. It’s more artistically compelling than a person sitting on a couch with an inhaler.
Another one, for Robitussin cough syrup, in 1972, is interesting because of the copy and what it says about the ethics of advertising. (The ad shows a TV weatherman giving a forecast.) It says, “the word gets around by professional recommendation, not television advertising – and we want to keep it that way … And we believe medicine should be recommended by a professional, not a weatherman.”
“The Governor and DPI will very likely show that the Governor validly partially vetoed Act 100 and that DPI is entitled to the $50 million in disputed literacy funding,” Kaul wrote to the Supreme Court. “Both issues are destined for this Court, and leaving them to the ordinary appellate process would significantly harm the Governor, DPI, school districts statewide, and the public.”
Meanwhile, State Superintendent Jill Underly announced Wednesday she’ll ask the Legislature for an additional $60 million to fund literacy improvements in the next biennial budget.
“The early literacy priorities included in my budget proposal are needed to build on this year’s funding for Act 20 — which we still need,” Underly said.
The money would, in part, increase the number of literacy coaches from the required 64 under Act 20 to 100.
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
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?
Why don’t people trust the voting process, one that takes days or weeks to fully count and that has things like this “unexpectedly” happening with Dominion machines 5 days before Election Day?
It’s an unobtrusive line that stands out 30 years later. The reason: Better schools are no longer part of the basic litany of promises Democratic candidates make.
If you scroll over to Kamala Harris’s issues page, there’s plenty of programmatic detail, but look closely at the education section:
Vice President Harris will fight to ensure parents can afford high-quality child care and preschool for their children. She will strengthen public education and training as a pathway to the middle class. And she’ll continue working to end the unreasonable burden of student loan debt and fight to make higher education more affordable, so that college can be a ticket to the middle class. To date, Vice President Harris has helped deliver the largest investment in public education in American history, provide nearly $170 billion in student debt relief for almost five million borrowers, and deliver record investments in HBCUs, Tribal Colleges, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, and other minority-serving institutions. She helped more students afford college by increasing the maximum Pell Grant award by $900 — the largest increase in more than a decade — and invested in community colleges. She has implemented policies that have led to over one million registered apprentices being hired, and she will do even more to scale up programs that create good career pathways for non-college graduates.
Almost nothing here addresses K–12 education. There are details about kids younger than K–12 (expanding access to pre-K and child care) and students older than K–12 (college grants, apprenticeships, and career options for noncollege graduates). But other than a vague promise to “strengthen public education and training as a pathway to the middle class,” which could apply to postsecondary education as well as primary, there’s nothing here about schools.
Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
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?
What a great example showing who is actually responsible for rent increases in Chicago.
Tax burdens at a record high:
Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
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?
Git:
Welcome to Anthropic’s educational courses. This repository currently contains five courses. We suggest completing the courses in the following order:
- Anthropic API fundamentals – teaches the essentials of working with the Claude SDK: getting an API key, working with model parameters, writing multimodal prompts, streaming responses, etc.
- Prompt engineering interactive tutorial – a comprehensive step-by-step guide to key prompting techniques. [AWS Workshop version]
- Real world prompting – learn how to incorporate prompting techniques into complex, real world prompts. [Google Vertex version]
- Prompt evaluations – learn how to write production prompt evaluations to measure the quality of your prompts.
- Tool use – teaches everything you need to know to implement tool use successfully in your workflows with Claude.
Please note that these courses often favor our lowest-cost model, Claude 3 Haiku, to keep API costs down for students following along with the materials. Feel free to use other Claude models if you prefer.
“Because both the “Limited Term” and “Non-Domiciled” identifications are issued pursuant to Chapter 343 of the Statutes, Wis. Stat. § 5.02(6m)(a)1. mandates that these identifications must be accepted as a proper form of voter identification. However, possessing a valid identification does not necessarily mean the holder of the identification is eligible to vote.
“… if the potential voter presents a DMV identification marked “Limited Term” or “Non-Domiciled,” that indicates that the individual is most likely ineligible to vote because they are not a citizen and the election inspector should challenge that individual’s eligibility to vote, unless the person presents documentation demonstrating the person is now a citizen.”Read the full letter and draft memo here.
CTUP:
Comedian Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time,” is known to zing and call out both left and right on his late-night show. The self-described “common sense liberal” was in rare form last week when he attacked teacher unions for their role in destroying the quality of public education:
Standardized testing was dropped until schools saw how dumb that was. And yet, the head of the teachers union in Chicago still maintains that testing is “junk science rooted in white supremacy.”
And her union tweeted during COVID, when many Americans felt we could have gotten back to normal sooner, that “the push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” No, it was rooted in reading, writing, and arithmetic.
The teaching of which is apparently job none in Chicago because only about one in four students in the city are proficient in either math or English, and absenteeism is off the charts. … Our schools need to do better. Our kids need to be in school, and when they’re there, they need to have the phones off and the brains on, learning the basic things we used to teach.
People also seem to forget that recommendation algorithms aren’t just telling you what content they think you’ll want to see. They’re also helping to minimize the content you probably don’t want to see. Search engines choosing which links show up first are also choosing which links they won’t show you. My email is only readable because of the recommendation engines I run against it (more than just a spam filter, I also run algorithms that automatically put emails into different folders based on likely importance and priority).
Algorithms aren’t just a necessary part of making the internet usable today. They’re a key part of improving our experiences.
Yes, sometimes algorithms get things wrong. They could recommend something you don’t want. Or demote something you do. Or maybe they recommend some problematic information. But sometimes people get things wrong too. Part of internet literacy is recognizing that what an algorithm presents to you is just a suggestion and not wholly outsourcing your brain to the algorithm. If the problem is people outsourcing their brain to the algorithm, it won’t be solved by outlawing algorithms or adding liability to them.
It being just a suggestion or a recommendation is also important from a legal standpoint: because recommendation algorithms are simply opinions. They are opinions of what content that algorithm thinks is most relevant to you at the time based on what information it has at that time.
And opinions are protected free speech under the First Amendment.
You can’t expect politicians to not respond to public will. Even Napoleon said: “Public opinion is the thermometer a monarch should constantly consult.” But what you can do is persuade, nudge, seduce, and pull the public over to your side. This is why “Culture Wars” matter
Chinese characters constitute one of the world’s oldest writing systems and these iconic symbols are so intertwined with Chinese history, philosophy, and the arts that they are virtually a semiotic representation of the culture itself. The staggering number of Chinese characters makes the system unique among the scripts of the world. The exact number of characters appearing in the historical record is debated, but is certainly in the tens of thousands. The latest version of the official Xinhua Dictionary contains more than 13,000 characters, but only 4,000–4,500 are necessary for full literacy. The process of mastering the system has thus been a daunting task for Chinese children throughout the centuries and up to the present. During the dynastic era, only the offspring of the wealthy elite had the time and wherewithal to spend their childhoods practising characters with a calligraphy brush, and therefore the literacy rate at the turn of the twentieth century was roughly 10–15 per cent—a number that was virtually unchanged when Mao Zedong took power in 1949 (Ross et al. 2006).
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the May Fourth intellectuals under the new Republic of China turned their attention to language reform, with the focus on the problem of Chinese characters and literacy. After China’s century of foreign aggression and exploitation, the Chinese reformers recognised the need to cultivate an educated populace and the formidable task of memorising thousands of characters was seen as a stumbling block to that goal. Many prominent public intellectuals such as Lu Xun, Hu Shi, and, later, even Mao Zedong advocated eliminating the characters altogether, while transitioning to an alphabetic system (Moser 2016). The developed Western countries were in the middle of an information revolution and the Chinese intelligentsia was keenly aware that the myriad Chinese characters were ill-suited to the alphabet-based world of typewriters, telegrams, and teletype. For decades, Chinese linguists and inventors struggled mightily to develop phonetisation methods, character classification schemes, and character input systems to bring the ancient Chinese characters into the twentieth-century information environment (Tsu 2022).
ACT 20 READING UPDATE
- debate about which skills are screened, whether students age out for screening lower-level skills, and whether a screener exists that screens all skills needed
- DPI says DA chose aimswebPlus by price, Pearson’s evidence, and limitations of other vendors
Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-
People need to understand how incredible Johnson’s proposed property tax increase is (the one he promised multiple times wasn’t coming).
The current levy for Chicago is $1.73B.
The proposed increase is $457M, bringing the total up to $2.19B.
That is a 26% increase in your property taxes.
It gets worse:
In 2014 the levy was $859M. If Johnson’s increase goes through, that means Chicagoans’ property taxes have risen 155% in 10 years.
“We are spending more revenue than we have to spend, therefore we are going to be spending one-time (reserve) funds …” Gothard said Monday. “We have a lot of work to do. Regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, we have to have some strategic direction.”
Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
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?
IRS Whistleblowers Involved in Hunter Biden Tax Case Reveal IRS, DOJ, and FBI Knew Laptop “Was Real” Immediately; Claim Prosecutors Demanded They Not Ask Questions About Joe Biden Ahead of 2020 Election
“There were a lot of overt investigative steps that we were not allowed to take because we had an upcoming election.”
“The prosecutors…told us that they didn’t want to ask about ‘The Big Guy.’”
“We corroborated that ‘The Big Guy’ was Joe Biden. Yes.”
More.
The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed its 12th lawsuit against the Biden-Harris Administration, this time targeting the U.S. Department of Education’s McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program. This $60 million program provides financial and educational opportunities to students nationwide who want to pursue graduate studies. But many college students are ineligible because of their race, including Asians, whites, Arabs, Jews, and some Latinos.
WILL is representing Young Americans for Freedom Chapter at the University of North Dakota, the nationwide student organization Young America’s Foundation (YAF), and two students who are ineligible for the program solely due to their skin color.
The Quotes: Scott Walker, President of Young America’s Foundation, stated, “Denying a student the chance to compete for a scholarship based on their skin color is not only discriminatory but also demeaning and unconstitutional. At YAF, we proudly defend our students’ right to be judged on their merit and abilities, not on race.”
WILL Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, stated, “WILL continues its march through Biden-Harris radical DEI programs. We have already heard that the Administration knows they can’t win in court and so one-by-one we will terminate these discriminatory, taxpayer-funded efforts.”
A new analysis released in October 2024 by the Community College Research Center (CCRC), at Teachers College, Columbia University, and the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center tracked what happened to every high school student who started taking dual enrollment classes in 2015. Of these 400,000 high schoolers, more than 80 percent enrolled in college straight after high school. That compares favorably with the general population, of whom only 70 percent of high school graduates went straight to college. Almost 30 percent of the 400,000 dual enrollees, roughly 117,000 students, earned a bachelor’s degree in four years. But a majority (58 percent) had not earned any college degree, either a four-year bachelor’s or a two-year associate, or any post-secondary credential, such as a short-term certificate, within this four-year period. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)
This is the most detailed and extensive analysis of dual enrollment that I’ve seen, covering all students in the nation, and tracking them for years after high school. But the analysis does not answer the fundamental question of whether dual enrollment is a worthwhile public policy.
It’s not clear that an early taste of higher education encourages more students to go to college who wouldn’t have otherwise. And it’s hard to tell from this report if the credits are helping students get through college any faster.
Meanwhile, the taxpayer funded Madison k-12 system has resisted such student opportunities.
More.
And, more.
The United States should be far ahead of the rest of the world in a technology that saves lives, promotes our economy, and has great strategic value. But we are not.
As you will see, this unfortunate situation results from ineffective government bureaucracy, isolation of government weather prediction from the creative energy of the university community, and too much money leading to multiple duplicative efforts, among other reasons.
Reason Number One: U.S. numerical weather prediction is spread over too many agencies
In most nations, numerical weather prediction is the responsibility of one group. In the U.S., governmental global weather prediction is spread over FIVE efforts:
- NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (the leading U.S. effort)
- The US Navy
- The US Air Force
- NASA
- U.S. Department of Energy
Subdividing your topic
Use a LLM like chatgpt to subdivide your topic, this helps making what you need to learn more clearer and concrete.
Some prompts:
- “Tell me the main topics of X”.
- “Subdivide X into as many topics as possible”.
- “For everything i say here, make me a list of topics i have to learn with [ ] on each one, be as specific as possible”(my particular one, but you can test each and see what’s best).
Then you use the output as a checklist.
The school day was not yet 30 minutes old, but on the first floor of the district’s central office, in the small, overstuffed cubicle of social worker Jackie Willemain, the problems were already piling up.
A first-grader from Haiti hadn’t shown up at school, again. Memorial, one of the elementaries, needed supplies — wipes, underwear, pants — for students who were homeless. Abigaille, a 13-year-old from Haiti, was suffering headaches from squinting to see the board, but was afraid to tell her mom because she feared glasses would be too expensive.
Willemain’s eyes flashed frustration; of course, the child was eligible for free glasses. She turned to the young man standing by her desk, Morad Majjad, the district’s multilingual family liaison. “The case worker should have taken care of this,” she said, as much to him as to the universe.
Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.
The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.
Do children today have useful childhoods?
~ ~ ~
An individual’s life can continue with an inertia that will lead them on to the next year or decade. Most young people today know approximately what they are going to be doing for the first twenty-or-more years of their life: school. Post-schooling, the inertia continues. Many a modern story opens with a worker—an office worker usually—who is so inert that he scarcely notices the passage of time until he becomes blindsided by a sudden yank of reality that forces him out of this inertia. Since we do not live in stories, we have to ask: How can we make that pull ourselves?
Agency is the capacity to act. Gaining agency is gaining the capacity to do something different from the rigid path of events that simply happen to you. Remarkable people typically go off-script early, usually in more than one way. Carnegie becoming a telegraph message boy is one opportunity; asking how to operate the telegraph is another. He was handed the first one, but he had to ask for the second. Da Vinci had plenty of small-time commissions, but he quit them all in favor of offering his services to the Duke of Milan.
“If teachers know only 60 per cent of the correct responses, then they can only teach with 60 per cent accuracy to their students at best. So, it clearly does have impacts,” he said.
“It also tells us, across the faculties, that whatever we’re doing, we’re not quite doing enough,” he added. “We need to do more here to make sure that our teachers are well prepared for the schools.”
The challenge, he said, is trying to cover the teaching of foundational word-reading skills within the existing language arts curriculum in teacher-education programs. He said that his university is looking at developing an elective class on reading methods in the absence of a mandated course from the province’s teacher accreditation body.
When asked why reading instruction courses were not made mandatory, the Ontario College of Teachers, which regulates and licenses teachers, responded by saying that teacher education programs should enable educators to teach the Ontario curriculum, including math, reading and literacy.
In the meantime, some school districts are taking steps to change teaching practices in reading.
More.
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.
Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
“The Washington Post never spoke to PG Shokin even though Shokin volunteered to talk. The WP never checked the details of what actually happened with the case in Ukraine. They used a one sentence quote given by someone who was fired by Shokin on suspicion of working with the Biden family in Ukraine, to form this story…”
Maze:
The Washington Post committed massive election interference on behalf of Joe Biden to help him win in 2020. WP produced a fake story through its “fact checking” department that became nationally accepted and served as the basis for exonerating Biden of corruption in Ukraine. From CNN to Senate Democrats, everybody repeated verbatim the WP story in defense of Joe Biden.
This was just as big, if not bigger interference than the media outlets claiming Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation.
Riva:
People are way too forgiving. The Washington Post spent years contributing to narratives that have destroyed this country, and Bezos’ ex-wife is spending her billions on progressive programs. Oh he wrote an op-ed after it all? Strong and brave
But in the same way that a reporter can publicly disclose an anonymous source who burns them with bad information, Tapper and CNN are causing serious harm to the country with their revisionist history of their own key role in the Russia collusion hoax. It’s become a matter of conscience that I stop hiding what I witnessed at CNN.
In his debate Sunday with J.D. Vance, an extremely emotional and petulant Tapperasked no policy questions, choosing instead to talk almost exclusively about the mean things that neoconservatives such as Gen. John Kelly and former Rep. Liz Cheney have to say about Trump. In an amazing coincidence, this is also a major closing argument of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign. Vance highlighted the unimportant nature of Tapper’s questions, noted that the claims were credibly disputed, and kept trying to turn the conversation to important policy distinctions between the two campaigns.
Vance also noted Tapper’s problems with “integrity,” highlighting his media outlet’s leading role in driving the hysteria surrounding the dangerous Russia collusion conspiracy.
A majority of people across 27 developed countries now believe:
Governments are untrustworthy, unethical, and incompetent.
Corporations are trustworthy, ethical, and competent.
Corporations should take the lead in delivering prosperity and social progress.
Glenn Greenwald:
Hilarious: the NYT identifies “a stream of conspiracy theories” on Truth Social:
- The US has a Deep State: a permanent secret DC power faction.
- Kamala and the media hid Biden’s failing health.
- The US blew up Nord Stream 2.
- The Soros’ use their wealth to control Dems.
What is Florida doing right? After the 2000 recount made the state a punchline, it successfully reformed its elections. Anyone can cast a mail ballot, no excuse required, but the system is set up to ensure speedy results. The deadline to request a blank ballot via the mail is 12 days before the election. Completed ballots must be received by 7 p.m., local time, on Election Day. In the meantime, clerks are permitted to pre-process mail votes that come in early.
California’s rules are intentionally lenient. Every registered voter is sent a mail ballot, and as long as the return envelope has a postmark saying it was sent back by Election Day, it’s still valid if it arrives at the clerk’s office a week later. This is “a little slower,” one proponent in the state Assembly recently said. “But in a society that wants immediate gratification, I think our democracy is worth taking a little time to get it right and to create a system where everyone can participate.”
American elections are hardly rushed affairs. They last for months, and mail ballots are sent out to voters with weeks to spare. It isn’t too much of a burden to ask that they be returned by Election Day, and this interminable counting of tardy mail ballots is corrosive to public confidence. Late counting opens the door for partisans to raise doubts about races that flip outcomes after Election Day.
What’s in? The sugar-frosted stuff: teacher pay, forgiving loans, reducing the cost of college, CTE, and money for early childhood are pretty much all upsides for elected officials (except when bills eventually come due).
Now, there are two big items on the GOP “in” list where things get more complicated. One is the “science of reading.” Fueled both by practical frustrations and conservative antipathy to “whole language” progressivism, this may be the closest thing you’ll find in 2024 to Bush-Obama wonkery—even if it’s been partly fueled by culture-clash ire. (The politics of reading are fascinating, so let’s set this aside for another time.)
Then there’s school choice. Politically, the great thing about school choice is that it gives families the freedom to decide what kind of education is best for their children. This has immediate, visible benefits for families. But the political challenge is that any adverse consequences are immediate, too, allowing critics to point to lost enrollment and budgetary impacts. Moreover, some worry that choice will upend familiar, comfortable arrangements, especially in suburban and rural communities. These complicating factors are why the appeal of choice tends to vary with state context, program design, and sales pitch.
Some years ago—I think it was 2008, and was certainly no earlier—I found myself in the audience for panel discussion with graphic novelists. Somehow the rest of the audience was composed of people who had never read a graphic novel. They seemed confused by the idea. A panelist mentioned that there were graphic novel adaptations of Shakespeare plays, and several audience members seemed to latch onto that fact. They asked, somewhat timidly, if it might be possible to create a graphic novel that was an adaptation of…someone else’s plays? The panel had to assure them that not all graphic novels were adaptations!
This seems an absurd story for NYC in 2008, but I was there. It’s a true story. Surely it couldn’t happen today!
Graphic novel is a terrible term. It is never used with any kind of precision. The three graphic novels most non-nerds are likely to have encountered are Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home, none of which are novels (being memoirs). Somehow Harvey Pekar’s Our Cancer Year and Joe Sacco’s Palestine and John Lewis’s March and Derf’s Kent State are all graphic novels despite their non-fiction credentials. Adrian Tomine’s 32 Stories and Gilbert Hernandez’s Fear of Comics are graphic novels despite being quite explicitly collections of short stories.
At Apple, we believe privacy is a fundamental human right. Our work to protect user privacy is informed by a set of privacy principles, and one of those principles is to prioritize using on-device processing. By performing computations locally on a user’s device, we help minimize the amount of data that is shared with Apple or other entities. Of course, a user may request on-device experiences powered by machine learning (ML) that can be enriched by looking up global knowledge hosted on servers. To uphold our commitment to privacy while delivering these experiences, we have implemented a combination of technologies to help ensure these server lookups are private, efficient, and scalable.
One of the key technologies we use to do this is homomorphic encryption (HE), a form of cryptography that enables computation on encrypted data (see Figure 1). HE is designed so that a client device encrypts a query before sending it to a server, and the server operates on the encrypted query and generates an encrypted response, which the client then decrypts. The server does not decrypt the original request or even have access to the decryption key, so HE is designed to keep the client query private throughout the process.
For most of the 20th century, IQ scores steadily climbed, a phenomenon so consistent it was named the “Flynn effect” after the psychologist James Flynn, who first documented it. Generations across the globe were getting smarter, or at least, their scores on intelligence tests were improving. Explanations ranged from better nutrition and healthcare to more complex societies that required sharper minds. But now, as we move further into the 21st century, the Flynn effect seems to be crumbling. In some countries, the rise has plateaued; in others, it has reversed. What is going on? Are we getting dumber, or is something else at play?
A timely study by Sandra Oberleiter and her colleagues has provided an answer that is both unsettling and enlightening. Published in Intelligence, their research suggests that the Flynn effect is faltering because the nature of intelligence itself is shifting. The problem isn’t that we’re getting dumber. It’s that we’re getting more specialized, and that, in turn, is weakening the ties that bind our cognitive abilities together. In short, modern life is forcing us to become experts at the expense of being generalists.
Lincoln STEM Elementary School in Watertown will be honored with an Excellence in STEM Award, commonly known as a Stemmy, Oct. 30 at the 21st annual sySTEMnow Conference in Milwaukee.
Lincoln STEM is being recognized in the Partnership category by STEM Forward, the host organization for the Stemmy awards.
“Lincoln Elementary School re-established itself as a STEM elementary school within the Watertown Unified School District (WUSD) in 2016,” says a release from STEM Forward. “They couldn’t provide STEM opportunities within their school budget without the organization, planning, and support of parents, staff, and educators through the Lincoln STEM PTO. The Lincoln STEM PTO is a 501(c)(3) organization established to help bring school families and staff closer to aid in enriching their student’s education. Together, they have created more engaging STEM experiences to start the love of hands-on, problem-solving learning early in their 4K-5th grade levels.
Despite a $2.3 billion increase in public school funding, Minnetonka Public Schools faces a $6 million budget deficit due to limitations in the funding increase. The biggest cost, teacher and staff salaries, was not fully covered by the increase, which did not keep up with inflation.
Nearly 95,000 people in Dane County received Social Security payments in 2022. In January this year, the estimated average monthly Social Security check was about $1,900.
The annual property tax bill on the average Madison home costs over $7,000 for city- and school-related taxes, according to city and school district estimates. In a few years, depending on the Nov. 5 election results, those costs could grow by over 20% for many residents.
The Madison Metropolitan School District is asking voters for $507 million to fund facilities construction costs. Approval of the referendum would increase property taxes by about $300 annually for the average homeowner over 23 years.
The district’s separate $100 million referendumwould fund day-to-day operating costs, such as salaries and programs. Approving this referendum alone would hike property taxes on the average home by over $40 in the first year, according to the district.
Notes and links on the Fall $600,000,000+ 2024 referendum, here.
Madison taxpayers have long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
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?
Howard is disappointed the athletics department is spending millions of dollars to build a brand new facility that she said would be inadequate for some of the university’s athletes.
“I think they need to be held accountable for that,” she said.
PEN America today sharply criticized some Republican members of Congress for their recent actions scrutinizing academic decision-making at the Naval Academy, including insinuating that an invitation to scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat to deliver a lecture could violate federal law, which led to the event’s cancellation.
A leading expert on authoritarianism and history professor at New York University, Ben-Ghiat is the author of numerous books on Italian fascism, including most recently Strongman: Mussolini to the Present — which compares Donald Trump to Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet, among other dictators. She is a regular commentator on MSNBC, and has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump, regularly connecting his temperament and viewpoints to some of the dictators she studies. Ben-Ghiat had been invited by the Naval Academy’s history department to deliver the Bancroft Memorial Lecture on October 10, which she said would focus on “what happens to militaries under authoritarian rule.”
In the days before the scheduled lecture, however, the Naval Academy canceled the lecture claiming it wanted to avoid even appearing to violate federal law. This came after the urging of Congressman Keith Self (R-TX), who wrote to the Academy’s superintendent, Admiral Yvette M. Davids, saying the invitation was “a serious lapse in judgment” and that allowing her to speak, especially within weeks of the presidential election, would violate a Department of Defense directive that prohibits the military from engaging in partisan political activity. A group of sixteen Republican members subsequently wrote to Superintendent Davids, similarly labeling Ben-Ghiat a “partisan historian” and lauding the event’s cancellation. They also posed a series of questions to Academy leadership about internal academic processes, including how Ben-Ghiat came to be selected for the lecture, and how the institution defines “academic freedom.”
Literacy is a key social determinant of health that affects the daily socioemotional lives of children and their economic prospects later in life. Being able to read, write, and understand written text is essential to participating in society, achieving goals, developing knowledge, and fulfilling potential. Yet a significant proportion of adults in Canada do not have the literacy skills they need to meet and manage increasingly complex workforce demands. Paediatric care providers play a pivotal role in identifying children and families at risk for low literacy. This statement offers approaches for assessing children and counselling families to improve reading skills, while advocating for their right to access evidence-based reading instruction.
With the help of Open the Books, a nonprofit research organization, we have obtained documents detailing the NIH’s descent into left-wing racialism. The agency, which is supposed to prioritize hard science, has made DEI a top priority, shelling out millions on “diversity” initiatives that do nothing to advance medical research.
At the beginning of his term, President Biden signed an executive order implementing DEI throughout the federal bureaucracy and Congress directed the NIH to develop “a strategic plan with long-term and short-term goals to address the racial, ethnic, and gender disparities at NIH.” In short: less focus on curing cancer, and more attention to making sure no one cures cancer without acknowledging his “responsibility to correct systemic racism and inequities.”
The NIH immediately got to work implementing the executive order across the mammoth agency. The plan, which applied to fiscal years 2023 through 2027, required“the participation of all 27 Institutes and Centers (ICs); Offices within the Office of the Director (OD); and working groups, staff committees, advisory groups, and employee groups across NIH.” Altogether, the agency reported, it had “identified a community of almost 100 offices, committees, and groups working within the NIH-wide DEIA ecosystem.”
2023 research highlights a dramatic increase in fraudulent scientific artiles traced back to paper mills. In just five years, the numbers of retractions soared jumped from 10 in 2019 to 2,099 in 2023.
Paper mills have also extremely overwhelmed major scientific journal publishers. Hindawi and Wiley, publishers of open access journals in the UK, for example, retracted around 1,200 paper mill articles in 2023. SAGE, a global publisher of books, journals and academic library resources and Elsevier, a scholarly publisher in the Netherlands also retracted hundreds of paper mill articles in 2022.
Paper mills are found operating in countries whose research policies incentivise researchers to produce as many scientific articles as possible, such as China, Russia, India and Iran.
In this brief video, Dr. Cheryl Twyman, Director of Partnerships, and Dr. Penny Rossetto, Senior Coach and School Designer, both with EL Education, speak about their organization and its partnership with One City Schools. They also share their assessment of the progress being made at One City’s elementary and middle schools.
About EL Education
EL Education, formerly known as Expeditionary Learning, is a non-profit organization that partners with K-12 schools to help students learn through active learning, teamwork, and character development:
EL Education’s approach to education is based on the following principles:
The top U.S. consumer finance watchdog warned businesses about potential legal problems they could face from using new technology such as artificial intelligence or algorithmic scores to snoop on and evaluate their employees.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Thursday said “invasive” new tools to monitor workers are governed by a law designed to ensure fairness in credit reporting, giving employees specific rights.
Employees have the right to consent to the collection of personal information, to receive detailed information and to dispute inaccurate information, the CFPB said in the newly released guidance.
“Workers shouldn’t be subject to unchecked surveillance or have their careers determined by opaque third-party reports without basic protections,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said.
More companies are leaning on AI and other powerful tools throughout the employment process, using software that can, for example, interview candidatesand surveillance tools that can look for unsafe behavior. Americans have expressed concerns about Big Brother-style surveillance while they are on the job.
A small but growing number of American schools are reducing or delaying access to advanced courses. Most often, these changes have been enacted in the name of reducing achievement gaps between demographic groups. However, rather than helping marginalized students, these policies deny educational opportunities for gifted students of all backgrounds.
“Detracking” is an increasingly popular proposal among educators that attempts to reduce the degree to which students are separated by academic ability. It typically takes the form of removing advanced course offerings or delaying the introduction of these offerings. Supporters claim that marginalized students are often wrongly placed—or place themselves—in less advanced courses and that these students often stay on a less advanced curricular path.
Think Dave Petraeus. The idea of the “warrior scholar” is nice in the abstract, but in reality what we did was infect our senior leaders with the woke mind virus.
Sofoklis Goulas, Foreword by: Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. and Michael J. Petrilli:
In Chicago, where 35 percent of seats are now unfilled, nearly three in five school buildings are underutilized.[3]
In Milwaukee, at least forty schools are “significantly underenrolled” (though that hasn’t stopped the district from requesting a 30 percent increase in property taxes).[4]
In Broward, sixty-seven schools are now operating at less than 70 percent capacity.[5]
The same can be said for forty-eight schools in Fort Worth.[6]
“Let’s be clear about what just happened: only eleven days before a Presidential election, a federal judge ordered Virginia to reinstate over 1,500 individuals–who self-identified themselves as noncitizens–back onto the voter rolls. Almost all these individuals had previously presented immigration documents confirming their noncitizen status, a fact recently verified by federal authorities.
“This is a Virginia law passed in 2006, signed by then-Governor Tim Kaine, that mandates certain procedures to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls, with safeguards in place to affirm citizenship before removal–and the ultimate failsafe of same-day registration for U.S. citizens to cast a provisional ballot. This law has been applied in every Presidential election by Republicans and Democrats since enacted 18 years ago.
“Virginia will immediately petition the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and, if necessary, the U.S. Supreme Court, for an emergency stay of the injunction.”
More.
15,000 of those ballots were sent to people who have expressed they have no intent to return back to the United States. And also, 15,000 of those people have not ever registered before.
Sun Prairie School District has a whopping 42% of all employees assigned as “administrative.” In their defense, they told parents basically, “we’re not as bad as other Dane County schools.” Ugh. Learn how bloated your district is at will-law.org/school-scoreca… @WILawLiberty
Madison’s well funded k-12 system and city government are seeking substantial 607M+ tax and spending increases via referendum this fall.
Madison taxpayers of long supported far above average K – 12 spending.
The House report on HHS covid propaganda is devastating. The Biden admin spent almost a billion dollars to push falsehoods about covid vaccines, boosters, and masks on the American people. If a pharma company had run the campaign, it would have been fined out of existence.
More: taxpayer funded Dane County Madison Public Health Mandate lockdowns.
In 1953, the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin published one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated essays, titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” He was riffing on the Greek poet Archilochus, who wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In this essay, Sir Isaiah divided people—well, writers and thinkers, those sorts of people—into two categories. As summarized in Wikipedia, they are:
…hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Blaise Pascal, Marcel Proust, and Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Aristotle, Desiderius Erasmus, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe).
Reflecting on my own engagement with education over the past sixty years, beginning just a dozen years after Berlin wrote, I find that I started as a hedgehog but have turned into a fox. My hedgehog self, I should add, was young, optimistic, probably naïve. Becoming a fox has meant growing skeptical, wary, perhaps jaded, though still determined.
Once upon a time—college senior time, LBJ time—I pretty much agreed with President Johnson that the way to end poverty in America while achieving other worthy ends was to beef up the education system, particularly the parts that served poor kids, and that the way to do that was to ramp up its funding, such as via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the War on Poverty, both of which he pushed through Congress.
When he signed ESEA in the one-room schoolhouse of his childhood in Johnson City, Texas, the president declared that:
Dealing with an increasing number of marginal students in an equity-charged environment is one factor that has favored grade inflation. But there is a contributing factor that is built into the American system and has taken some years to reach fruition. When I first came to this country from Britain, I was surprised to find that students were graded by the individual who taught them. This obviously introduces a conflict of interest, especially for teachers of elective courses. Harsh grades mean a drop in enrollment. A drop in enrollment means a loss of salary for the tenured, or of a job for adjunct faculty. Given the incentives, I am surprised that grade inflation has taken so long to become a problem.
The U.S. system allows for spontaneity but also for corruption; how might it be fixed?The contrast with British practice was stark. At that time (the 1960s), pupils’ futures were decided by two sets of high-stakes exams: Ordinary Level, taken at 16, and Advanced Level, at 18 or so. After O-level, a good pass meant you could go on to A-level two years later and then, possibly, to college (maybe five percent or so of each cohort made it to college in those days, so the process was very selective).
These vital examinations took place in a separate location, “examination halls” (mine was in South Kensington in central London). Students, identified not by name but by a number, from schools all over the city, sat at widely separated tables patrolled by a gowned “invigilator.” The whole thing was completely anonymous; the student didn’t even know who was grading his exam, which was done by a system-wide committee that might include his teacher but most likely did not.
This system is totally fair, but it’s also rather rigid, because all must teach from the same syllabus. Teachers have little room for spontaneity.
On October 4, Emma, who asked not to be named, got a letter from the Scottish government. Addressed “Dear Resident,” its purpose was to alert her that her home, due to its proximity to the hospital, is now in an abortion censorship zone.
This is due to the UK’s brand-new “Safe Access” law, which came into effect September 24 and made it a criminal offense to do anything within 200 metersof an abortion facility that could “influence” someone’s decision to access, provide, or facilitate an abortion. In the Scottish government’s letter, Emma read that even “activities in a private place (such as a house) within the area could be an offence if they can be seen or heard within the Zone and are done intentionally or recklessly.”
“You can report a group or an individual that you think is breaking the law,” the letter added, before providing instructions on how to do so.
More.
The ball began rolling on a steady chain of glaring constitutional violations, contends IJ attorney Kirby West: “The government cannot go wherever and whenever it wants—that’s the very reason for the Fourth Amendment in the first place. We see a lot of cases where government goes overboard, but this statute is the plainest example I’ve seen that contradicts the Fourth Amendment on its face.”
NEW: Azeen Ghorayshi reports in the @nytimes that prominent gender clinician Johanna Olson-Kennedy of @ChildrensLA has refused to publish data from a study on puberty blockers, fearing that the unimpressive results will be “weaponized” by critics of “gender-affirming care.”
‘We must not publish a study that says we’re harming children because people who say we’re harming children will use the study as evidence that we’re harming children, which might make it difficult for us to continue harming children.’
The top readers’-pick comments on the @NYTimes article on the researcher shielding her null findings from her puberty blocker study for political reasons:
The judge ruled in favor because she said the district attorney’s office failed to timely provide the requested documents. According to Krause, the law firm is owed those documents and will be awarded attorneys’ fees.
It stemmed from a lawsuit in which Ashleigh Merchant accused the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office of violating the state’s Open Records Act.
The lawsuit accused Willis of “hiding documents” related to a media monitoring company, alleging the district attorney had used taxpayer dollars to pay for it. It also accused the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office of not wholly fulfilling open records related to employees’ nondisclosure agreements.
“She is the elected DA. It’s her office. I think that every government agency has a duty to respond to open records requests. I think when you have an elected official, they are the ones who are held accountable by the public. They are the ones who set the policy,” Merchant, who is Trump co-defendant Michael Roman’s lawyer in the election interference case, said on Monday while testifying on the stand in the case.
An example of the problem with DPI changing standards from Reddit. This poster earnestly believes proficiency is up 12% this year. The average person doesn’t have time to delve into the nuance of state tests. DPI is willfully pulling the wool over our eyes to hide their failings.
Curiously, after reducing rigor statewide, Wisconsin DPI Superintendent Underly chimes in.
The taxpayer funded Wisconsin DPI recently reduced rigor….
FIRE:
POLL: Americans rank free speech second only to inflation on their list of 2024 concerns, according to a new poll by FIRE. That’s higher than other hot-button issues like crime, immigration, and health care.
Trump has to meet a very high bar to rule as our most authoritarian President ever. If he sends an ethnic minority to internment camps, tries to pack the Court, and stays in office for four terms, he’ll still only be tied.