Civics: “The most startling aspect, to me, about the modern institutional media is its hyperconformity”

Niccolo Soldo:

This hyperconformity seems to have developed in two phases: Phase One was a collapse of previously distinct media types (network TV, cable TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, et al) into just “web sites” and now “mobile apps”. This was not their fault. Phase Two was the virtually universal industry-wide adoption of a strident ideological monoculture. This is their fault. I’m a First Amendment absolutist, so I don’t begrudge anyone the freedom to say and write what they think, but we are told that we live in a marketplace of ideas. But if you mainly consume the standard media product, what you are experiencing is closer to a marketplace of idea.

This monoculture challenges two of my most fundamental beliefs. First, in business — and these are businesses — you seek to differentiate, to offer a unique product that your customers can’t get anywhere else. In economic terms, differentiation is the key to pricing power, which is the key to profits, which is the key to staying in business. This is precisely what the existing media industry is not doing; the product is now virtually indistinguishable by publisher, and most media companies are suffering financially in exactly the way you’d expect. Second, civilizational progress happens not by top down unanimity and ideological instruction, but by debate and dispute. That this should happen, but is not happening, in the institutional media today is obvious.

And so I think it’s obvious that the incumbents are handing us, by their own considered and determinedly executed choices, a sparkling opportunity to both build better businesses and an actual marketplace of ideas. I’m intensely proud of both Substack and Clubhouse and have very high hopes that they can deliver.

Locally, the traditional media has largely supported K-12 status quo governance, to the long term detriment of our students and community vigor.

‘Race,’ ‘Diversity,’ and the University

Maximilian C. Forte:

If this was a good time for Canadian academia, you would not be able to tell from the blanket of almost absolute silence that has been pulled over universities. There is no euphoria, no celebratory mood, no applause for the changes that are happening. There is, however, a degree of infighting, mutual suspicion, recrimination, and a palpable tension that divides faculty and also pits them against students and administrations. Against a backdrop of publicized cases of ostracism, real worry exists that expressing a perspective that has not been authorized could lead to termination or at least media-driven defamation. University administrations are all-too-quick to proclaim that what Professor X said or wrote, “does not represent the values of this institution”. Why would it? Why should it? These are not private religious colleges; Canada’s universities are public and secular. When applicants go through the hiring process, are they ever once presented with a list of the university’s “values”—a manifesto—and are they then told that if they do not agree with the document they can apply elsewhere, or else sign at the bottom line? No, that never happens (to my knowledge), and yet we work under the dictates of a party line—a decidedly partisan thrust that is distinctly and clearly a carbon-copy of the ideology of the ruling Liberal Party. This is far from the only instance where copy-and-paste has displaced academic reasoning, questioning, and debating.

Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think

Brian Gallagher and Kevin Berger:

I can’t see them. Therefore they’re not real.” From which century was this quote drawn? Not a medieval one. The utterance emerged in February 2019 from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth, who was referring to … germs. The former Princeton University undergraduate and Afghanistan counterinsurgency instructor said, to the mirth of his co-hosts, that he hadn’t washed his hands in a decade. Naturally this germ of misinformation went viral on social media.

The next day, as serendipity would have it, the authors of The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread—philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall—sat down with Nautilus. In their book, O’Connor and Weatherall, both professors at the University of California, Irvine, illustrate mathematical models of how information spreads—and how consensus on truth or falsity manages or fails to take hold—in society, but particularly in social networks of scientists. The coathors argue “we cannot understand changes in our political situation by focusing only on individuals. We also need to understand how our networks of social interaction have changed, and why those changes have affected our ability, as a group, to form reliable beliefs.”

O’Connor and Weatherall, who are married, are deft communicators of complex ideas. Our conversation ranged from the tobacco industry’s wiles to social media’s complicity in bad data. We discussed how science is subtly manipulated and how the public should make sense of contradictory studies. The science philosophers also had a sharp tip or two for science journalists.

Her High School Said She Ranked Third in Her Class. So She Went to Court.

New York Times:

Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computer’s camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa.

Ms. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with.

“This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the G.P.A. contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the G.P.A.,” Ms. Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District “was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it.”

School officials said she ranked third in her class. Ms. Sullivan disagreed.

Getting Schooled: The Role of Universities in Attracting Immigrant Entrepreneurs

Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul A. Gompers, George Hu & Kaushik Vasudevan

Immigrant founders of venture capital-backed companies have been critical to the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We document the channels through which immigrant founders find their way to the United States and how those channels have changed over time. Immigrants have been an important source of founders for venture capital-backed startups accounting for roughly 20% of all founders over the past 30 years. Immigrants coming to the United States for their education have been the primary source of founders with those coming after being educated abroad and then arriving for work decreasing in importance over time. The importance of undergraduate education as a channel for immigrant founders has increased over time. Immigrant founders coming for education are likely to start their companies in the state in which they were educated, especially states where they received their graduate education, leading to potentially large local economic benefits. The results of this paper have important policy implications for the supply of entrepreneurial talent and efforts to promote entrepreneurial ecosystems.

High school valedictorians put a year like no other in perspective

Joe Heim:

The word valedictorian comes from the Latin vale dicere or “to say farewell.” So it is a goodbye speech, but also a “Look at what we’ve done” speech. And what seniors have done this year has never been done before. From start to finish, this school year has been under a cloud. At some schools, the doors never opened and learning took place not in thousands of classrooms but in millions of bedrooms and kitchens, on back porches and in parking lots or wherever the WiFi signal was strongest.

Will ending tests really end racism in college admissions?

Jonathan Turley:

Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.” Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.” In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.

That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted. So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions. The system will go from two years of “optional” testing to a “test-blind” system until or unless it develops its own test.

Ending standardized testing will have a notable impact on legal challenges to the use of race in college admissions. Last November, Californians rejected a resolution to restore affirmative action in college admissions.

The Supreme Court has issued a series of 5-4 decisions that have ruled both for and against such race criteria admissions — but even justices supporting such systems have expressed reservations. The author of the 2003 majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, said she expected “that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” That 25 years is about up.

Why Do Scientists Lie?

Liam Kofi Bright:

It’s natural to think of scientists as truth seekers, people driven by an intense curiosity to understand the natural world. Yet this picture of scientists and scientific inquiry sits uncomfortably with the reality and prevalence of scientific fraud. If one wants to get at the truth about nature, why lie? Won’t that just set inquiry back, as people pursue false leads? To understand why this occurs – and what can be done about it – we need to understand the social structures scientists work within, and how some of the institutions which enable science to be such a successful endeavour all things considered, also abet and encourage fraud.

The Woke-Industrial Complex

Christopher Rufo:

Last year, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent white male executives to a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their “white male culture” and encouraging them to atone for their “white male privilege,” according to documents I have obtained.

The program, hosted on Zoom for a cohort of 13 Lockheed employees, was led by the diversity-consulting firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners, which specializes in helpingwhite males “awaken together.” The Lockheed employees, all senior leaders in the company, included Aaron Huckaby, director of global supply chain operations; retired Air Force lieutenant colonel David Starr, director of the Hercules C-130 military transport program; retired Air Force lieutenant general Bruce Litchfield, vice president of sustainment operations; and Glenn Woods, vice president of production for the Air Force’s $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program. (Lockheed Martin did not return request for comment.)

At the beginning of the program, the diversity trainers led a “free association” exercise, asking the Lockheed employees to list connotations for the term “white men.” The trainers wrote down “old,” “racist,” “privileged,” “anti-women,” “angry,” “Aryan Nation,” “KKK,” “Founding fathers,” “guns,” “guilty,” and “can’t jump.” According to the participants, these perceptions have led to “assumptions about white men and diversity,” with many employees believing that white men “don’t care about diversity,” “have a classical perspective on history and colonialism,” and “don’t want to give away our power.”

The White Men As Full Diversity Partners team—Jim Morris, Mark Havens, and Michael Welp—framed the purpose of the training session as providing a benefit for white men who embrace the diversity and inclusion philosophy. In response to a prompt about “what’s in it for white men,” the participants listed benefits such as: “I won’t get replaced by someone who is a better full diversity partner,” “[I will] improve the brand, image, reputation of white men,” and “I [will] have less nagging sense of guilt that I am the problem.”

Activists Mobilize to Fight Censorship and Save Open Science

Rory Mir:

Major publishers want to censor research-sharing resource Sci-Hub from the internet, but archivists are quickly responding to make that impossible. 

More than half of academic publishing is controlled by only five publishers. This position is built on the premise that users should pay for access to scientific research, to compensate publishers for their investment in editing, curating, and publishing it. In reality, research is typically submitted and evaluated by scholars without compensation from the publisher. What this model is actually doing is profiting off of a restriction on article access using burdensome paywalls. One project in particular, Sci-Hub, has threatened to break down this barrier by sharing articles without restriction. As a result, publishers are going to every corner of the map to destroy the project and wipe it from the internet. Continuing the long tradition of internet hacktivism, however, redditors are mobilizing to create an uncensorable back-up of Sci-Hub.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Federal Reserve Policies

David Haggith:

e Fed is financing the government at this level to save the nation from the economic devastation caused by the government-mandated COVID closures of 2020, but it is doing it at the cost of crushing monetary policy. No one in the main financial or political media is calling the Fed out on this outright debt financing, and no one is likely to care because everyone quietly realizes the entire economy and all markets would crumple into the dust if the Fed stopped doing what it is doing.

What they don’t allow themselves to realize is that this situation predictably developed because the Fed has been creating total economic dependence on itself for the last decade. We are now witnessing the terminus of years of bad Fed policy that piled up as the Fed tried to centrally control the US economy under its own superior intelligence as to what is best for markets. (At a level that has made Chinese central planning look like the “B” team.)

Most financial writers and political writers wore blinders to block out that reality throughout the long period over which the Fed tried to create a recovery from the Great Recession. I have always argued they were creating a permanently Fed-dependent recovery that could never withstand the Fed’s withdrawal of stimulus money and never withstand the next major financial crisis.

‘A conspiracy of silence’: Tulsa Race Massacre was absent from schools for generations

Nuria Martinez-Keel:

That was the first time Matthews learned of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Thirty-five blocks of Black-owned businesses and homes in the affluent Greenwood District were reduced to ash in the two-day rampage. Estimates place the death toll between 100 and 300.

One of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history took place in his hometown, and Matthews, who now leads the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, never heard a word of it in school.

“That’s a very common experience of a lot of Oklahomans,” said Joy Hofmeister, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public schools.

Many, like Matthews and Hofmeister, were well into adulthood when they discovered a wealthy African American district — nicknamed Black Wall Street — existed in Tulsa and that it had been razed in a spree of white violence.

Civics: From Big Tech to Big Brother

Daniel Oliver:

All the News That’s Fit to Click

Above all, though, we have to factor in the enormous social cost of leaving our entire public discourse in the hands of a censorious few. There may be tremendous social advantages provided by, e.g., Amazon: with the click of a button, a shopper can satisfy almost any want. But is this social wealth enough to offset every other drawback? Who says? If what you want is a conservative book, a click on Amazon may not bring satisfaction. In February, Ryan T. Anderson’s empathetic and well-researched book on transgenderism, When Harry Became Sally (2018), was stripped from the online shelves. And last October, Amazon Prime rejected Shelby Steele’s documentary on race relations in America, What Killed Michael Brown? (2020). Anderson is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution; neither is a bigot. You can look them both up on Google—before Google stuffs them, too, down the memory hole.

The same discriminatory behavior, mutatis mutandis, exists at Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Last June, under massive pressure from both advertisers and employees, Facebook majority stockholder Mark Zuckerberg formed a committee to decide what is acceptable for publication. According to the New York Post, there may be at least half a dozen Chinese nationals at Facebook working in this “Hate-Speech Engineering” group. You can’t make this stuff up—unless you’re George Orwell. So Facebook users will read only the truth…as Facebook understands it. Or perhaps, as they want you to understand it. But truth, most notably scientific truth, has proved elusive recently. At first, the World Health Organization said the Chinese flu could not be transmitted from person to person. At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised against wearing face masks—until they were for it. Now there is, again, serious doubt about the efficacy of masks. Throughout, Facebook has decided which studies are licit and which must be suppressed. How does the public benefit from such diktats?

Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts use Google and Facebook / Instagram services, including Madison.

Spending less for more: Florida

Ron Matus:

Today its grad rate is 90% and its public schools rank No. 3 in K-12 achievement, according to Education Week. Since 2009, it’s finished in or near that Top 10 every year.

This, with some of the lowest education spending in America.

Florida spent $9,374 per pupil, according to the most recent federal stats, putting it No. 43 among states.

New York, the No. 1 spending state, spends nearly two and a half times more per student than Florida, with not as much to show for it. (More on that in a sec).

Madison spends about 2X Florida per student, yet we have long tolerated 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.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

How a Software Error Made Spain’s Child COVID-19 Mortality Rate Skyrocket

Elena Debre:

Government reliance on the manual entrance of COVID-19 data into basic software has caused data errors and civilian confusion across the globe. The U.K. used a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to track COVID cases—until the high caseload became too large for the software to handle. The maxed-out file stopped loading cases into the government’s system and left more than 15,000 cases behind in the national count. As a result, exposed people were not contact-traced and quarantined, causing an additional 125,000 infections and an estimated 1,500 deaths. One employee’s misstep in Ohioprevented 4,000 COVID deaths from being reported in the state’s system. The newest entry to the COVID count glitch list comes from Spain.

On March 10, a respected peer-reviewed medical journal, the Lancet, published Spain’s child COVID mortality rate as around two to four times that of the U.S., U.K., Italy, Germany, France, and South Korea. The paper said that 54 children (defined as below 19) had died of COVID in the small country, making Spain’s reported death rates a staggering 4.9 percent for kids aged 10-19—which is at least 2.92 percentage points higher than other country in the report.

Colorado Becomes 1st State To Ban Legacy College Admissions

Elissa Nadworny:

During the pandemic, many colleges backed off on using SAT and ACT scores in admissions. Research has shown — and lawsuits have argued — that the tests, long used to measure aptitude for college, are far more connected to family income and don’t provide meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed in college. Wealthier families are also more likely to pay for test prep courses, or attend schools with curricula that focus on the exams. 

As pandemic restrictions loosen up, and in-person testing resumes, some universities have begun to reincorporate the SAT and ACT into their admissions. But others have made the temporary changes permanent. That includes Washington state’s public universities, which announced earlier this month that its schools will no longer require test scores for admission. 

This spring, the University of California system agreed to continue a test-free admissions policy through 2025. California sends the largest number of high school students to U.S. colleges, and if the UC system no longer uses the tests, it’s unclear whether those students will be interested in applying to other schools that do require them.

When Scientific Orthodoxy Resembles Religious Dogma

Avi Loeb:

When my Harvard colleague Stephen Greenblatt saw my book Extraterrestrial featured on the coverof the Orthodox Jewish magazine Ami, he commented “It is interesting that the Orthodox evidently do not consider their faith threatened by the possibility of other inhabited worlds.” To which I replied: “They appear to be less orthodox than my colleagues in the scientific community.” This was in reference to the pushback that my book received regarding the possibility that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua might have been manufactured by another civilization.

Innovation blossoms in a culture willing to acquire new knowledge rather than being trapped in its past belief system. A mainstream astronomer who worked on rocks in the solar system for decades commented grudgingly: “‘Oumuamua is so strange…. I wish it never existed.” Such a sentiment is not the trademark of an intellectual culture that fosters discovery. In the weeks following the publication of my book I received numerous e-mails from astronomers, some tenured, who confessed that they agree with me but are afraid to speak out because of the potential repercussions to their careers.

Resistance to innovation is not a new phenomenon. When the astronomer Otto Struve suggested in a 1952 paper to search for hot Jupiters—massive, gaseous planets like our own Jupiter orbiting very close to their stars—his proposal was ignored until Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor found 51 Pegasi b. Prior to this discovery, astronomers argued that telescope time should not be “wasted” on this search because a Jupiter-like planet is unlikely to form so close to a sunlike star. Many even doubted whether exoplanets are common in the first place. The fact that this predictive “baby” was born four decades after it was conceived implies that there must be more “babies” that have never born because their existence is still in doubt. Placing blinders on our telescopes keeps us in our comfort zone at the expense of prolonging our ignorance. But reality does not abide by our prejudice; the existence of exoplanets or neighboring civilizations does not depend on whether we search for them.

Does correcting online falsehoods make matters worse?

Peter Dizikes:

So, you thought the problem of false information on social media could not be any worse? Allow us to respectfully offer evidence to the contrary.

Not only is misinformation increasing online, but attempting to correct it politely on Twitter can have negative consequences, leading to even less-accurate tweets and more toxicity from the people being corrected, according to a new study co-authored by a group of MIT scholars.

The study was centered around a Twitter field experiment in which a research team offered polite corrections, complete with links to solid evidence, in replies to flagrantly false tweets about politics.

“What we found was not encouraging,” says Mohsen Mosleh, a research affiliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, lecturer at University of Exeter Business School, and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “After a user was corrected … they retweeted news that was significantly lower in quality and higher in partisan slant, and their retweets contained more toxic language.”

“Facebook, don’t even try to censor fake news…. I absolutely do not trust Facebook to decide what’s fake and what’s not fake…”

Ann Althouse:

That headline has been changed to “Facebook no longer treating ‘man-made’ Covid as a crackpot idea/Facebook’s policy tweak arrives as support surges in Washington for a fuller investigation into the origins of Covid-19.” The new headline minimizes the problem with Facebook, which was censorship. That’s more than just treating something like a crackpot idea. One way to treat a crackpot idea is to call it a crackpot idea — that’s the “more speech” remedy that should be our first idea for dealing with bad speech. In this case, more speech would have given us a better chance to approach the truth. By going to censorship, Facebook gummed up the speech process for a year.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Facebook / Instagram services, including Madison.

You can’t help the disadvantaged by refusing to engage in critical thinking

Freddie deBoer:

I received a lot of support for my recent post on the folly of the University of California’s decision to drop the SAT, as well as a lot of pushback. I’ve done several podcasts in the past week on this question and will share them in this week’s Saturday evening roundup post. I recommend this resource for an exhaustive exploration of the SES-SAT question specifically. I want to take a little time and go through a few dynamics of this conversation that I think are important. I will say that I find this a particularly frustrating debate in large measure because many liberals loudly and confidently repeat “facts” that are in reality empirically indefensible half-truths or out-and-out errors and will not relent when this is brought to their attention. That’s no way to arrive at more equitable and fair college admissions.

Research has found again and again that considering GPA+SAT results in the most accurate predictions of college success.

This paper aggregates three of the most commonly-cited studies performed to answer the question of how best to quantitatively predict college performance. Again and again, we have found that SAT scores explain variance in college GPA and graduation rates not explained by GPA. In other words, they provide useful predictive information that can be utilized to reduce the number of students who are accepted into college who then fail out, a major negative event in a young person’s life due to opportunity cost and taking on student loan debt. The predictive effectiveness of the SAT is inconvenient for liberals who hate the test, but it is about as empirically well-justified as a claim about education can be, so they try to dissemble their way around it. The simple fact of the matter is that, for making the determinations that college admissions departments are meant to make, the SAT is a useful tool. Getting rid of it just makes us dumber.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: population changes

David Keltz:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 2010 and 2019, California, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois lost a combined four million residents. Meanwhile, the top five states that saw the greatest influx of new residents were the Republican-led states of Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, and Arizona. It does not hurt that Florida, Texas, and Tennessee also have no income tax.

But the pandemic, in conjunction with disastrous Democrat policies, has only accelerated the blue-state exodus. It turns out that draconian lockdowns in the form of school, restaurant, and business closures; massive spikes in violent crime; few entertainment options; higher taxes; and scarce job opportunities do not make for a desirable living environment or a suitable place to raise a family.

Shocking, I know.

Look at California, a state that, with its sprawling beaches and sunny weather, has long been a desirable place to live. But not anymore, thanks to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s totalitarian leadership and unscientific mismanagement of his state’s pandemic response. He faces a likely recall election, but many people are simply voting with their feet.

In 2020, 135,600 more people left the state of California than moved there, the third-largest population loss ever recorded in the Golden State and only the 12th time since 1900 that California has had a net migration loss. From July 1, 2019, to July 1, 2020, California added just 21,200 people, increasing the state’s population by 0.05 percent. Over the past year, Newsom has done all he can to make living in California essentially a prison sentence.

Are Schools About Education Or Activism?

Tom Knighton:

I’m not a huge fan of public schools. Part of that is because public schools in my neck of the woods are almost universally bad. The best school in the area is still not all that great compared to the rest of the state, much less the rest of the nation.

Yet the purpose of school is to educate, even if it doesn’t do the job as well as we might like.

Here in the Deep South, there are reasons our schools are crap. That’s a whole post unto itself, though, so I won’t delve into why, but the point is that they still educate.

At least, in theory.

However, it seems that’s not the case in New York City public schools where teachers are being urged not just to be teachers, but also activists. Not just that, but to focus that activism along a particular ideological line.

A New York City principal sent an email to her staff this past week urging them to “take action” in support of Palestinians during the current crisis in Israel and Gaza.

According to the New York Postthe email from Middle School 136’s Amanda Bueno reads “You can take action today by protesting, attending a vigil, making a public commitment to Palestinian Liberation, signing a petition, or calling your government officials to place sanctions on Isreal [sic].”

The message also says people “need not prove [Palestinians’] humanity and right to exist […] Empathy is a bare minimum.” It includes various hashtags such as #GazaUnderAttack and #SaveSheikhJarrah.

“Additional resource” links at the end of the email feature the Teach Palestine website, the main page of which states “We know you share our outrage at attacks by the Israeli military and settlers against the people of Palestine.”

Teach Palestine also has a “Stolen Land” section which compares the plight of Palestinians to illegal immigrants in the U.S.

One problem: A teacher who works for Bueno is Jewish.

How Inevitable Is the Concept of Numbers?

Stephen Wolfram:

Everyone Has to Have Numbers… Don’t They?

The aliens arrive in a starship. Surely, one might think, to have all that technology they must have the idea of numbers. Or maybe one finds an uncontacted tribe deep in the jungle. Surely they too must have the idea of numbers. To us numbers seem so natural—and “obvious”—that it’s hard to imagine everyone wouldn’t have them. But if one digs a little deeper, it’s not so clear.

It’s said that there are human languages that have words for “one”, “a pair” and “many”, but no words for specific larger numbers. In our modern technological world that seems unthinkable. But imagine you’re out in the jungle, with your dogs. Each dog has particular characteristics, and most likely a particular name. Why should you ever think about them collectively, as all “just dogs”, amenable to being counted?

Imagine you have some sophisticated AI. Maybe it’s part of the starship. And in it this computationis going on:

Liberals used to care about the rights of the accused. Now, they care more about identity politics.

Dave Cieslewicz

There isn’t much of anything that I agreed with the Trump Administration about, but I think they got at least one thing right. His Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, rolled back Obama era “guidance” (read: “mandate”) to strip those accused of sexual assault or harassment on college campuses of their fundamental rights.

The Obama rules, provided in a “Dear Colleague” letter, but short of actual legislation or formal rules, suggested that any school that received Federal money (basically, all of them) had to tip the scales in favor of the accuser. The standard of proof was reduced to “a preponderance of the evidence,” the accused could not question the accuser, and one person could function as both investigator and judge.

And it expanded the definition of sexual harassment to a ridiculous extent. As staff writer Emily Yoffe wrote in The Atlantic, “It resulted in a radical inflation of the definition of sexual misconduct on campus to potentially include virtually any sexual encounter—from behavior that could meet the criminal definition of rape, to jokes and unwanted flirtation. And schools, desperate to avoid displeasing federal Department of Education investigators, established Title IX procedures that flouted the rights of the accused.”

The Revolution Comes to Juilliard

Heather Mac Donald:

Turn on CNN or open the New York Times, and you may encounter someone explaining how exhausting it is to be a black person. The idea that systemic racism is leaving blacks scarred and spent has been embraced across mainstream America, articulated by corporate CEOs and university presidents. The latest performative assertion of black oppression is playing out at the Juilliard School in New York City. The controversy has significance beyond the school.

In September 2020, the Juilliard School’s Drama Division announced a series of “community meetings” to address “Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (EDIB) issues.” The school’s growing cadre of diversity bureaucrats would discuss Juilliard’s’ “anti-racism work.” The head of the Center for Racial Healing would give a presentation. Workshops would address such topics as “race in rehearsal” and “voice and speech and race.” NYU theater professor Michael McElroy, one of the school’s two external diversity consultants, would offer a three-day seminar in black musical culture.

Ongoing K-12 tax and spending growth: Wisconsin edition

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.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Civics: Facebook no longer treating ‘man-made’ Covid as a crackpot idea

Christiano Lima:

Shifting definitions on social media: Facebook announced in February it had expanded the list of misleading health claims that it would remove from its platforms to include those asserting that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured.” The tech giant has updated its policies against false and misleading coronavirus information, including its running list of debunked claims, over the course of the pandemic in consultation with global health officials.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Facebook and Instagram services, including Madison.

COVID-19 Mitigation Practices and COVID-19 Rates in Schools: Report on Data from Florida, New York and Massachusetts

Emily Oster, Rebecca Jack, Clare Halloran, John Schoof, Diana McLeod

This paper reports on the correlation of mitigation practices with staff and student COVID-19 case rates in Florida, New York, and Massachusetts during the 2020-2021 school year. We analyze data collected by the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard and focus on student density, ventilation upgrades, and masking. We find higher student COVID-19 rates in schools and districts with lower in-person density but no correlations in staff rates. Ventilation upgrades are correlated with lower rates in Florida but not in New York. We do not find any correlations with mask mandates. All rates are lower in the spring, after teacher vaccination is underway.

Advocating curriculum transparency legislation

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

The News: A new report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is urging the adoption of curriculum transparency legislation to arm parents and taxpayers with the ability to access and review controversial curriculum material in public schools. WILL recently issued identical open records requests to nine large Wisconsin school districts and experienced, first-hand, the cost, time, and difficulty of accessing curriculum material.

The Quotes: WILL Policy Associate, Jessica Holmberg, said, “America’s culture wars are finding their way into public school classrooms. With curriculum transparency legislation, we can arm parents and taxpayers with access to curriculum material to ensure that local school districts are held accountable.”

Scarlett Johnson, a Hispanic American parent in the Mequon-Thiensville School District, said, “Parents like myself are at a disadvantage when school districts are not forthright about philosophies like Critical Race Theory being taught in the classroom. More transparency is vital for parents to ensure that our students are not being taught propaganda that denies the fundamentals of the U.S. Constitution or losing precious learning time in critical topics like math, science, and reading.”

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: The ten highest lifetime tax states

Brad Polumbo:

In the mood for a depressing statistic? A new report from the financial services firm Self concludes that the average American will pay an astounding $525,037 in taxes over their lifetime—roughly 34 percent of their lifetime earnings. 

But the numbers aren’t uniform across the country; they vary wildly from state to state. Based on taxes on earnings, spending, property, and cars, here are the 10 states where residents pay the highest taxes over a lifetime.

Trends in Mothers’ Parenting Time by Education and Work From 2003 to 2017

Kate Prickett & Jennifer March Augustine:

Scholars have been increasingly concerned about the rise in “intensive mothering” and its implications for the well-being of children and women and for inequality more broadly. These concerns, however, reflect a key assumption: that socioeconomic disparities in mothers’ parenting time observed in earlier eras have continued to grow. Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from 2003–2005 and 2015–2017 (n = 13,755), we test this assumption by examining whether maternal education gaps in active time spent with children have persisted across the 2000s. We pay particular attention to the continued socioeconomic bifurcation in women’s access to full-time stable work, assessing whether changes in the education-related time gap are due to changes in who works and how much. We find that the gap in active childcare time between mothers with a college degree and those without has closed dramatically. Although some of this narrowing was driven by declines in time among college-educated mothers, most was driven by increases among mothers with less education. These trends, however, are observed only among mothers who were not employed full-time. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analyses further reveal that although most of the increase in active care time among nonworking mothers with less education was attributable to behavioral change, 58% of the decline among nonworking, college-educated mothers was a result of sociodemographic compositional changes. These findings illuminate population-level trends in mothers’ active parenting time, provide insights into the driving factors, and help update theories, qualitative findings, and policy considerations related to mothers’ and children’s well-being.

It’s Not About ‘Politics’—The Brouhaha over Nikole Hannah-Jones

Jenna Robinson:

Last week, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees came under fire for “viewpoint discrimination” over its decision not to offer tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, who will join UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism in July. An anonymous source reported that the decision was “a very political thing.”

But politics needn’t have come into it at all. For one thing, the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees has a long history of granting tenure to left-leaning faculty members—if the political make-up of the school is anything to go by. But more important is Hannah-Jones’ own record. Her history of shoddy journalism, unprofessional conduct, and lack of scholarship is more than enough to disqualify her from tenure at any university.

These shortcomings have been well-documented.

In December of 2019, five historians, led by Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz, wrote an open letter expressing their “strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project.” The signatories were a politically diverse group: Victoria Bynum at Texas State University, James M. McPherson at Princeton, James Oakes at City University of New York, and Gordon S. Wood at Brown University. They called attention to serious factual errors in the project, including its central thesis that the American Revolution was fought to protect the institution of slavery:

These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or “framing.” They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds—that they are the objections of only “white historians”—has affirmed that displacement.

Then in March 2020, a fact-checker who had been employed by The New York Times to vet the project came forward to say that Hannah-Jones and the Times knew about these errors before they went to print. Leslie M. Harris, a professor of history at Northwestern University, is no conservative ideologue. Her criticism of Hannah-Jones essay is based on fact. “Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay,” she wrote in Politico.

The Myth of Manifest Destiny

Livia Gershon:

In high school history class, you might have learned that US leaders and citizens in the nineteenth century believed in “Manifest Destiny,” the inevitable extension of national power across the continent. From that perspective it might look like the destruction of Native nations, the establishment of the western states, and the creation of the US as we know it was almost inevitable. But, as Andrew C. Isenberg and Thomas Richards Jr. write, that’s not really how it looked to a lot of people at the time.

The first known use of the phrase appeared in 1845, as part of a pitch for the annexation of Texas. Newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan wrote of the “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

But, Isenberg and Richards write, this was not conventional wisdom at the time. Just ten years earlier, former President John Quincy Adams had warned that any conflict with Mexico would be chancy, particularly given the likelihood that Native American nations and enslaved people would ally with the other side. Many US leaders also opposed President Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy, not for humanitarian reasons but because, as a writer for the Arkansas Gazette put it in 1839, “the policy of concentrating on our borders large bodies of armed and hostile Indians, smarting under a sense of recent injury, was generally supposed to be rather dangerous to the quiet of the frontier.”

“Our children are experiencing unprecedented levels of pediatric mental health issues,”

Carina Julig:

He teared up while discussing a conversation he had with the father of a high school boy who had attempted suicide.

“Our kids have run out of resilience,” he said. “Their tank is empty.”

Chief nursing officer Pat Givens said that the hospital system does not have enough capacity for the number of children in crisis.

“We can’t build enough beds to keep pace with the demand,” she said.

Children with behavioral health needs are now being placed in medical or surgical beds because of the shortage while they wait for a bed in a behavioral unit, she said. Children as young as eight years old have come to the hospital after suicide attempts.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

If Apple is the only organisation capable of defending our privacy, it really is time to worry. A giant private company is doing the work governments should be doing on regulation of user data. That’s not a good thing

John Naughton

Why not? The answer is that the EU delegates regulatory power to the relevant institutions – in this case data protection authorities – of its member states. And these local outfits are overwhelmed by the scale of the task and are lamentably under-resourced for it. Half of Europe’s DPAs have only five technical experts or fewer. And the Irish data protection authority, on whose patch most of the tech giants have their European HQs, has the heaviest enforcement workload in Europe and is clearly swamped.

So here’s where we are: an online system has been running wild for years, generating billions in profits for its participants. We have evidence of its illegitimacy and a powerful law on the statute book that in principle could bring it under control, but which we appear unable to enforce. And the only body that has, to date, been able to exert real control over the aforementioned racket is… a giant private company that itself is subject to serious concerns about its monopolistic behaviour. And the question for today: where is democracy in all this? You only have to ask to know the answer.

What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks

John Bowers, Clare Stanton, and Jonathan Zittrain:

We found that of the 553,693 articles within the purview of our study––meaning they included URLs on nytimes.com––there were a total of 2,283,445 hyperlinks pointing to content outside of nytimes.com. Seventy-two percent of those were “deep links” with a path to a specific page, such as example.com/article, which is where we focused our analysis (as opposed to simply example.com, which composed the rest of the data set).

Of these deep links, 25 percent of all links were completely inaccessible. Linkrot became more common over time: 6 percent of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43 percent of links from 2008 and 72 percent of links from 1998. Fifty-three percent of all articles that contained deep links had at least one rotted link.

“inequality between ethnic groups is strongly driven by politics, where powerful groups and elites channel the state’s resources toward their constituencies.”

Nils-Christian Bormann, Yannick I. Pengl, Lars-Erik Cederman and Nils B. Weidmann:

Recent research has shown that inequality between ethnic groups is strongly driven by politics, where powerful groups and elites channel the state’s resources toward their constituencies. Most of the existing literature assumes that these politically induced inequalities are static and rarely change over time. We challenge this claim and argue that economic globalization and domestic institutions interact in shaping inequality between groups. In weakly institutionalized states, gains from trade primarily accrue to political insiders and their co-ethnics. By contrast, politically excluded groups gain ground where a capable and meritocratic state apparatus governs trade liberalization. Using nighttime luminosity data from 1992 to 2012 and a global sample of ethnic groups, we show that the gap between politically marginalized groups and their included counterparts has narrowed over time while economic globalization progressed at a steady pace. Our quantitative analysis and four qualitative case narratives show, however, that increasing trade openness is associated with economic gains accruing to excluded groups in only institutionally strong states, as predicted by our theoretical argument. In contrast, the economic gap between ethnopolitical insiders and outsiders remains constant or even widens in weakly institutionalized countries.

Madison recently expanded our least diverse schools, despite nearby space.

Google and Facebook now have moderators to keep internal online debates from getting out of hand

The Economist:

But lately the pendulum has started to swing back. One reason is that more than in other sectors, discussions in tech firms mostly take place over Slack and other corporate communication services—not ideal forums in which to advance nuanced arguments. This has been a problem in large tech firms particularly, which is why Google and Facebook now have moderators to keep internal online debates from getting out of hand.

Many Taxpayer a Supported K – 12 school districts use Google and Facebook / Instagram services, including Madison.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Five rural counties in liberal Oregon vote in favor of leaving state for more conservative Idaho

Derek Hawkins

“Given the number of entities whose approval would be required, I just don’t think it will happen,” Norman Williams, a constitutional law professor at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., said in an email.

Even if there was support among Democrats, Williams said, “no legislature or governor wants to be one (I think) who goes down in history as having given away half of the state’s territory to Idaho.”

His proposal for Idaho to swallow parts of Oregon’s south and east shares DNA with a long-standing push to create a “State of Jefferson,” including Northern California and southwestern Oregon. But asking to join an existing state is a slightly less difficult task than forming an entirely new one. McCarter points to a 1961 land transfer between Minnesota and North Dakota as evidence that it can be done.

McCarter has called the effort “a peaceful revolution” and a way “to gain political refuge from blue states” in interviews with the Oregonian. He claims that relocating the border could bring tax benefits to both states and ease some political gridlock in Oregon.

A signature-gathering campaign by McCarter’s organization paid off last year when Jefferson County in the central part of the state and Union County in the northeast voted to study the proposal. Other counties added referendums on the move to their ballots.

School Funding and the Pandemic: How Much Money Is Enough?

Libby Sobic and Will Flanders:

Without fail, each state budget cycle always results in cries from the public school establishment that “we need more money in public schools!” Governor Evers continues this status quo assertion with his 2021-23 budget proposal for massive increases in spending for K12 education (about $1.7 billion). These declarations are often made without regard to the research showing that more money does not improve student proficiency.  But as taxpayers in a state with low reading proficiency statewide, the largest racial achievement gap for minority students nationwide and immense learning disruption after the pandemic, Wisconsinites must expect local school districts to be smart about their investment of taxpayer dollars.

As the Joint Finance Committee debates Wisconsin’s education budget this week, the following will provide clarity around the state and local funds and federal stimulus funds flooding into the state.

K-12 Funding Pre-Pandemic 

Wisconsin invests in our K-12 schools by creating options for families. On average, Wisconsin school districts average revenue (of local, state and federal funding) per student was $14,737 in 2019-2020.

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.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Legislators urge state to deny S.F. school district’s bid for $12 million in reopening funds

Dustin Gardner:

State legislators have accused San Francisco’s school district of trying to exploit a legal loophole to receive $12 million in state funding to reopen schools for in-person learning, arguing the district did not bring back enough students to qualify for the money.

California set aside $2 billion earlier this spring to help school districts reopen during the coronavirus pandemic. To qualify for the money, districts needed to reopen for all elementary grades and at least one grade in middle or high school by May 15.

The San Francisco Unified School District chose to bring back high school seniors but instead of offering in-person instruction to the entire grade, only some seniors were invited to return before the deadline. District officials have said they launched a “hybrid schedule” for seniors by the deadline, which might not qualify under the law.

Teacher Union Interests and Pennsylvania Pension Fund Governance

Mike Antonucci:

AFT Pennsylvania called for the resignationsof most of the board of the state school employees pension system amid allegations of dubious investments, lack of transparency and funny math.

A federal grand jury is investigating the Pennsylvania School Employees Retirement System (PSERS) “looking for evidence of kickbacks or bribery” and “potential concealment of material information,” according to reports.

“Through alleged errors and omissions, and under a shroud of secrecy, this PSERS Board appears to have jeopardized the present and future financial security of our Commonwealth’s most dedicated public servants,” wrote Arthur Steinberg, president of AFT Pennsylvania, in a letter to PSERS board members.

Civics: “vaccinated individuals will be required to show their vaccine cards”

Jamie Goldberg:

Oregon will allow people to go maskless outside but will require them to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 — and be able to prove it — to forgo masks in most public indoor settings.

That’s according to new guidance released by the Oregon Health Authority on Tuesday.

Oregonians will no longer be required to wear masks in public outdoor areas, regardless of their vaccination status, under the new guidance. However, the state is still recommending that people wear masks in crowds and large gatherings, especially if they are unvaccinated or at high risk for COVID-19.

The state will also allow fully vaccinated people to forgo masks in most indoor spaces if their inoculation status can be verified, putting the onus on businesses, employers and faith institutions to check vaccination records.

The new guidance comes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week that fully vaccinated people generally do not need to wear masks or maintain physical distance in most public settings. Masks had been required in most circumstances across all of Oregon since July 1.

The sad legacy of American Indian boarding schools in Minnesota and the U.S.

Dr. Denise K. Lajimodiere:

American Indian boarding schools, which operated in Minnesota and across the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century, represent a dark chapter in U.S. history. Also called industrial schools, these institutions prepared boys for manual labor and farming and girls for domestic work. The boarding school, whether on or off a reservation, carried out the government’s mission to restructure Indians’ minds and personalities by severing children’s physical, cultural, and spiritual connections to their tribes.

On March 3, 1891, Congress authorized the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to create legal rules that required Indian children to attend boarding schools. It also authorized the Indian Office to withhold rations, clothing, and other annuities from Indian parents or guardians who would not send and keep their children in school. Indian Agents forcibly abducted children as young as four from their homes and enrolled them in Christian- and government-run boarding schools beginning in the mid-1800s and continuing into the 1970s.

Captain Richard H. Pratt’s boarding school experiment began in the late nineteenth century. A staunch nineteenth-century assimilationist, Pratt advocated a position that diverged slightly from the white majority’s. Convinced of the U.S. government’s duty to “Americanize” Indians, he offered a variation of the slogan—popular in the American West— that stated the only good Indian was a dead one. The proper goal, Pratt claimed, was to “kill the Indian…and save the man.”

Status Trumps Arguments

Robin Hanson:

Are elites nicer than other people? No, but they are better at being nice contingently, in the right situations where niceness is rewarded. And also with being mean contingently, in the situations where that is rewarded. Other people aren’t as good on average with correlating their niceness with rewards for niceness. A similar pattern applies to elites and arguments.

In a world with many strong prediction markets, social consensus would be set by the people willing and able to trade in those markets. Which could be most anyone. And those traders would in general be responsive to good arguments, as they are on the hook to win or lose a lot of money if they fail to listen to good arguments. So then arguments would be a powerful force for producing better beliefs.

But in our world, the perceived social consensus is mostly set by elites. That is, by whatever seems to be elites’ shared opinion. And so the power of arguments depends on elites being willing and able to listen to them. Do they?

Many elites are selected for their ability to generate and evaluate good arguments. So many are quite able to listen. But as with being nice, elites are especially good at a contingent strategy: they listen to and generate good arguments when they are rewarded for that, but not otherwise.

Her ‘1619 Project’ Is a Political Lightning Rod. It May Have Cost Her Tenure.

Jack Stripling and Andy Thomason:

Kreiss said he anticipated that, given the national controversy around “The 1619 Project,” there would be some political pushback about hiring Hannah-Jones. At the same time, he said, the Chapel Hill professors would not have brought someone on board who did not embrace the university’s fundamental commitment to intellectual rigor and evidence-based argument.

“If we saw Nikole Hannah-Jones as being an ideologue, who was coming here to push a political point of view, I don’t think the faculty would have so overwhelmingly endorsed her,” Kreiss said. “That’s not the way we teach. It’s not part of our values here.”

Social promotion

I was the fastest girl in Connecticut. But transgender athletes made it an unfair fight.

Chelsea Mitchell:

It’s February 2020. I’m crouched at the starting line of the high school girls’ 55-meter indoor race. This should be one of the best days of my life. I’m running in the state championship, and I’m ranked the fastest high school female in the 55-meter dash in the state. I should be feeling confident. I should know that I have a strong shot at winning.

Instead, all I can think about is how all my training, everything I’ve done to maximize my performance, might not be enough, simply because there’s a runner on the line with an enormous physical advantage: a male body.

I won that race, and I’m grateful. But time after time, I have lost. I’ve lost four women’s state championship titles, two all-New England awards, and numerous other spots on the podium to male runners. I was bumped to third place in the 55-meter dash in 2019, behind two male runners. With every loss, it gets harder and harder to try again.

Pennsylvania voters impose new limits on governor’s powers

Associated Press:

“Last night, Pennsylvanians voted to reject Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf’s overreach of executive powers after his failed COVID response – a clear sign of accountability coming in 2022,” Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel tweeted Wednesday morning.

The state’s Republican Party chairman, Lawrence Tabas, said in a statement that Pennsylvanians voted to “put a stop to Gov. Tom Wolf’s dictatorship.”

Wolf has largely lifted his orders to stem the spread of the coronavirus, with the remaining limitations on crowd capacity lifting May 31 and a mask-wearing mandate for the unvaccinated that tracks federal guidance, until the state reaches a 70% vaccination rate.

Wolf’s office maintained that the disaster declaration does not affect orders designed to prevent COVID-19 from spreading.

Rather, it relaxes regulations for medical professionals, gives the state access to federal emergency aid and streamlines National Guard deployments, among other things, his office said.

Commentary on a new generation of tiger parents

Leo Lewis:

When I speak to her a decade later, Chua — a US-born law professor at Yale — is even more circumspect. And, in a parallel moment of self-awareness, China itself may be reaching a similar conclusion on the wisdom of allowing educational arms races to get out of control.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported Chinese government discussions on curtailing the country’s $120bn private tutoring industry, partly to ease pressure on children, but also to help revive slackening birth rates by reducing the financial burden of after-school classes. Analysts rushed to play down the risks of forced weekend closures and fee-caps, though shares in listed tutoring companies like New Oriental and TAL tumbled. The initiative sounds sensible, but can anyone, even the Communist party, resist the massed instincts of Tiger parents?

“A classic Research Cartel”

Judith Curry:

What is concerning about this episode is not so much that a consensus has been overturned, but that a fake consensus was so easily enforced for year. This occurred during a key period when understanding the origins of the virus had implications for how it could best be fought. Scientists who understood that there was a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the origins of the virus did not speak up. Probity came from knowledgeable individuals that were outside of the field of virology.

Matthew Crawford states, ” Regardless of how the question of the virus’s origins is ultimately decided, we need to understand how the political drama surrounding the science played out if we are to learn anything from this pandemic and reduce the likelihood of future ones.”

Tower Of Babble: Nonnative Speakers Navigate The World Of ‘Good’ And ‘Bad’ English

CAROLYN MCCUSKER and RHAINA COHEN:

Decades of research show that when a native English speaker enters a conversation among nonnative speakers, understanding goes down. Global communication specialist Heather Hansentells us that’s because the native speaker doesn’t know how to do what nonnative speakers do naturally: speak in ways that are accessible to everyone, using simple words and phrases.

And yet, as Hansen points out, this more accessible way of speaking is often called “bad English.” There are whole industries devoted to “correcting” English that doesn’t sound like it came from a native British or American speaker. Try Googling “how to get rid of my accent,” and see how many ads pop up.

Software Carpentry

Website:

Since 1998, Software Carpentry has been teaching researchers the computing skills they need to get more done in less time and with less pain. Our volunteer instructors have run hundreds of events for more than 34,000 researchers since 2012. All of our lesson materials are freely reusable under the Creative Commons – Attribution license.

The Software Carpentry Foundation and its sibling lesson project, Data Carpentry, have merged to become The Carpentries, a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives, a 501(c)3 non-profit incorporated in the United States. See the staff page for The Carpentries.

A New Replication Crisis: Research that is Less Likely to be True is Cited More

UCSD:

Papers in leading psychology, economic and science journals that fail to replicate and therefore are less likely to be true are often the most cited papers in academic research, according to a new study by the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management. 

Published in Science Advances, the paper explores the ongoing “replication crisis” in which researchers have discovered that many findings in the fields of social sciences and medicine don’t hold up when other researchers try to repeat the experiments. 

The paper reveals that findings from studies that cannot be verified when the experiments are repeated have a bigger influence over time. The unreliable research tends to be cited as if the results were true long after the publication failed to replicate.  

“We also know that experts can predict well which papers will be replicated,” write the authors Marta Serra-Garcia, assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School and Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioral economics also at the Rady School. “Given this prediction, we ask ‘why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?’”

Media Criticism & Civics

Glenn Greenwald:

One of the Intercept stories to which I (and many others) objected involved a fund-raising email sent by The Intercept to the public on May 4, in which they proudly boasted that they had obtained the full archive of private data on all users of the social media platform Gab. The Intercept vowed that they would use the data archive to target ordinary citizens, including QAnon conspiracy theorists and those who believe that the election was defrauded. Based on that promise, the email solicited donations from the public (why an outlet lavishly funded by the world’s 73rd richest billionaire and which provides their largely unread writers and editors enormous, above-market salaries has to beg for donations from the public in the middle of a pandemic and joblessness crisis is, as I understand it, the subject of an imminent investigative exposé on their finances). Because I am not on their email list, I became aware of that Gab email only when a former senior Intercept editor forwarded it to me, furious that The Intercept was now doing the work of the NSA and FBI by infringing privacy rights rather than protecting them: a core mission of the organization’s founding.

Commentary on critical race theory

Wisconsin Institute for law and liberty:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) submitted public comment to the United States Department of Education against the adoption of a proposed grant program to prioritize Critical Race Theory in federally funded American History and Civics Education. WILL’s public comment emphasizes our concern that the Biden Administration is attempting to push Critical Race Theory – including the New York Times’ “1619 Project” and the “anti-racism” ideology of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi – into public school curriculum.

The Quote: WILL President and General Counsel, Rick Esenberg, said, “The federal Department of Education’s stated priority to emphasize ‘equity’ and ‘anti-racism’ represents a troubling divergence from American values and principles. Advancing and promoting Critical Race Theory in public schools is not only morally wrong but may leave public schools vulnerable to liability and litigation.”

What is Critical Race Theory? Critical Race Theory is an academic discipline, based in Marxism, that teaches racism pervades every corner of American society, and therefore, that American institutions must be torn down and remade so that all of society’s benefits can be equitably redistributed.

Background: In April 2021, the U.S. Department of Education issued a call for public comment on “proposed priorities” for competitive grants in American History and Civics Education. Specifically, the Department wants to prioritize grant proposals that “support the development of culturally responsive teaching and learning and the promotion of information literacy skills in grants under these programs.”

Supporting background information for the grant priority state:

UC-Berkeley’s ‘Equity and Inclusion’ budget is $25 MILLION

Ashley Carnahan:

According to Storbeck Search—a firm hired by UC-Berkeley—the university allocates a budget portfolio of $25 million per year for the Division of Equity and Inclusion. 58% of the budget comes from campus and state funds, 31% from federal and state public service grants, and 11% from philanthropy and public grants. 

“As Berkeley strives towards the ideals of an inclusive, uplifting, anti-racist, and justice-centered campus during this unprecedented time in higher education and in the world, the University seeks a collaborative, solutions-oriented leader and accomplished visionary to serve as the next Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion,” read the program layout.

The university announced on Feb. 18 that Storbeck Search would be assisting with the search for a new Vice Chancellor, Equity & Inclusion.

K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: “There is [going to be] a time in which people wake up and say ‘the emperor has no clothes.”

Brad Polumbo:

“When the [Federal Reserve] says this [inflation] is transitory, I think that’s an excuse for government spending and borrowing,” the senator said. “It’s sort of from the same kind of lexicon of ‘deficits don’t matter.’”

But our spending levels aren’t sustainable. “We added four or five trillion dollars’ worth of debt last year,” Paul added. “We’re probably going to do the same again this year.”

It’s more than just bad budgeting, the senator warned. “What you’ve caused is a massive misallocation of resources, a massive infusion of cash into the stock market.”

“There is [going to be] a time in which people wake up and say ‘the emperor has no clothes,’” Paul said. “And at that moment in time, you will discover that there’s a lot of capital that’s gone in the wrong direction, that demand is exceeding supply… because we’ve disrupted the normal marketplace.”

Texas Becomes Third State To Pass Free-Range Kids Law

Lenore Skenazy:

Hats off to Texas: Over the weekend, it became the third U.S. state, after Utah and Oklahoma, to make reasonable childhood independence the law of the land. Now parents who live there cannot be investigated for neglect simply for giving their kids some old-fashioned freedom.

Amazingly, the bill became law on the 11th anniversary of “Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day,” a holiday created by Free-Range Kids and once considered so wacky—so dangerous—that it was splashed across the pages of The New York Daily News. The paper quoted the mother of an eight-year-old, saying: “Never in a million years would I do something that stupid. When the kid turns 18—fine. Until then you watch them.” And it spoke to an “expert”—the chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn—who said that “a seven-year-old shouldn’t be left alone in a backyard, much less a park.”

Too bad for that shrink. When the Texas law goes into effect in September, more than one tenth of all Americans will live under laws passed with the help of Let Grow, the nonprofit that grew out of Free-Range Kids, that insists our kids are smarter and safer than our cowering culture gives them credit for.

HB 567 enjoyed bipartisan support, sailing through the Texas Senate unopposed, and winning the House with a vote of 143 to 5.

Science has become a cartel

Matthew Crawford:

The idea that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a laboratory, and then escaped accidentally, always had a certain plausibility. The virus first appeared in Wuhan, China, where there is a laboratory that conducts research on bat coronaviruses — one of only a handful in the world to do so. Yet this possibility was dismissed quite forcefully and from the beginning of the outbreak by prominent virologists.

Now that same lab-leak hypothesis appears to be on the verge of acceptance as the most likely. Such reversals happen; it is the nature of science. In an emergency, it is understandable that a research community might commit to one theory over another, even if prematurely, in order to focus its intellectual energies and resources. Surely that’s what happened here.

But there may be more to the story. On 2 May, the veteran science reporter Nicolas Wade published a long, detailed account of the career of the lab-leak hypothesis. His reporting appears to have triggered a cascade of defections, not simply from a consensus that no longer holds, but from a fake consensus that is no longer enforceable.

Now 18 scientists have signed a letter in the journal Science with the title “Investigate the origins of COVID-19”. The New York Times notes that “Many of the signers have not spoken out before.” “Speaking out” is an odd locution to use in a scientific context; one expects to find it in a story about a whistle blower. If, during the Covid fiasco, scientists have not felt free to speak their minds, then we have a serious problem that goes beyond the immediate emergency of the pandemic. Regardless of how the question of the virus’s origins is ultimately decided, we need to understand how the political drama surrounding the science played out if we are to learn anything from this pandemic and reduce the likelihood of future ones.

Commentary on Rocketship Charter Schools in Milwaukee

Libby Sobic:

Rocketship Public Schools in Milwaukee is a network of two campuses around the City of Milwaukee that are serving more than 700 K4-5th grade students. Rocketship embraces their students and families to ensure that they are supported in and beyond the classroom. For Ms. Oliver and her daughter, a six-year-old with special needs, Rocketship has been a source of support, not only for her daughter’s academic needs, but ensuring that her daughter’s social needs are met.

Parent trap: why the cult of the perfect mother has to end

Eliane Glaser:

It’s the middle of a dark, November night, and I’m about to have my first baby. But instead of the joyful experience I’d hoped for, I am being rushed into the operating theatre to have an emergency caesarean under general anaesthetic. I have a dangerous complication and my son’s life is at risk. Four hours earlier, I’d been sent home by a midwife who told me I couldn’t stay in hospital and have an epidural because labour wasn’t properly “established”.

It’s a week later and I’m back home with my son who, thankfully, made it. But I’m struggling. If someone asks me how I am, in a kindly voice, my voice cracks. I’m spending a lot of time sitting on the bed in a milk-stained dressing gown. In a few days, my partner will go back to work.

It’s five years later. I’m tired and hungry and alone with the children, who are bickering in the bath. It has been a long evening of trying to keep my temper. My son whacks his little sister. I shout so loud my throat hurts, pull him out of the bath, and shut him in his room. I’d slipped him a towel, but I’m still overcome with remorse. After they go to bed, I sink wretchedly into parenting websites, searching for reassurance. But all I find is cheery, zero-tolerance tips on positive reinforcement and leading by example.

Private College Tuition Discounting Continued Upward Trend During COVID-19 Pandemic – 53.9 percent average

NACUBO:

Private colleges and universities significantly discounted listed tuition and fee prices for most students in 2020-21—continuing a long upward march in discount rates that only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the 2020 NACUBO Tuition Discounting Study, 361 private, nonprofit colleges and universities reported an estimated 53.9 percent average institutional tuition discount rate for first-time, full-time, first-year students in 2020-21 and 48.1 percent for all undergraduates—both record highs. By providing grants, fellowships, and scholarships, these institutions forgo about half the revenue they otherwise would collect if they charged all students the tuition and fee sticker price.

COmmentary On Madison’s ongoing “one Size Fits All” Curricular Experiments

Elizabeth Beyer:

With earned honors, all students are enrolled in classes with the same level of rigor and have the option to earn an honors credit using predetermined criteria at the end of each semester, based on their demonstration of knowledge and skills in the course. Students won’t have to decide in advance whether they think they’re able to achieve honors designation, and teachers won’t determine whether a student meets criteria to obtain honors status, something the district hopes will eliminate barriers to advanced course credits.

Earned honors started in the district’s Pathways program a few years ago and showed an increase in the number of students of color accessing honors designation: 54% as opposed to 41% in traditional honors courses during the 2018-19 school year. The new earned honors option has expanded throughout the district as a means of testing its efficacy before district-wide implementation.

The administration hopes to take earned honors district-wide for students entering into ninth grade by the 2022-23 school year and plans to provide staff with professional development to prepare them to teach earned honors courses before then. By the 2023-24 school year, the district plans for all 10th grade honors options to be earned, as well.

Related: English 10.

Civics: Report: USPS ‘Internet Covert Operations Program’ Is ‘Much Broader in Scope Than Previously Known’

The program’s existence came out after the news outlet obtained a copy of a March USPS bulletin that was “distributed through the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers.” It warned of the possibility of violence at upcoming protests though they acknowledged they had no reliable intelligence to suggest any alleged threats were legitimate:

“Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021,” says the March 16 government bulletin, marked as “law enforcement sensitive” and distributed through the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers. “Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts.”

[…]

“No intelligence is available to suggest the legitimacy of these threats,” it adds.

The bulletin includes screenshots of posts about the protests from Facebook, Parler, Telegram and other social media sites. Individuals mentioned by name include one alleged Proud Boy and several others whose identifying details were included but whose posts did not appear to contain anything threatening.

“iCOP analysts are currently monitoring these social media channels for any potential threats stemming from the scheduled protests and will disseminate intelligence updates as needed,” the bulletin says.

The report about the previously unknown iCOP sparked an outcry among Congressional Republicans. A House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing was held a week later where a USPS official confirmed its existence without going into a lot of detail:

The Defeat of Proposition 16 in California and Mr. Dooley: Should the Supreme Court Take Note of “Th’ Iliction Returns” the Next Time It Addresses Race-Preferential Admissions Policies?

Gail L. Heriot and Alexander M. Heideman:

This article makes the following points:

I. Some commentators have argued that in deciding Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the Supreme Court (and Justice O’Connor in particular) was influenced by the “broad societal consensus” in favor of race-preferential admissions policies, there was no such consensus in 2003. Indeed, the consensus of opinion went—and remains—in the opposite direction. Thus, if Justice O’Connor was so influenced, she was mistaken.  

II. Even if there had been such a “broad societal consensus,” it should not have excused the Court from its obligation to strictly scrutinize the University of Michigan’s racially discriminatory admissions policy. Unfortunately, by purporting to “defer” to the university’s judgment on whether the need for racial diversity in education is “compelling,” Justice O’Connor essentially admitted that the Court was not scrutinizing the policy with the level of care that had become customary in racial discrimination cases up to that point. 

III. With the overwhelming rejection of California’s Proposition 16 in the November 2020 elections, it has become all the more clear that a societal consensus really does exist on race-preferential admissions policies, but it’s a broad agreement against such policies, not a broad agreement in favor. Certainly, therefore, if Justice O’Connor based her opinion in part on the belief that Americans were somehow favorably disposed toward race-preferential admissions (at least for the short term), that reasoning can be safely dismissed now. With Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University likely to come before the Court in the near future, the lesson of Proposition 16’s defeat should be (and likely will be) drawn to the Court’s attention.

Prepone That! Your Accent Is Funny! Readers Share Their ESL Stories

Carolyn McCusker:

Last month, we published a story in collaboration with the NPR podcast Rough Translation about nonnative speakers navigating the world of “good” and “bad” English. Dozens of readers wrote in with their own stories about how challenging — and frustrating and rewarding — it can be to learn and teach English. 

We’re featuring three responses that we found especially insightful: an English professor from India shares an English word she’s used for years — not found anywhere in the dictionary; an author points out the politics behind terms like “native language” and “mother tongue”; and an engineering professor discusses why stereotypes about “accented English” are totally hypocritical.

Rhode Island lawmakers introduce legislation fighting back against CRT

Alex Mungia:

According to Morgan, critical race theory does just the opposite, she continued, causing Americans no longer to see each other as individuals but groups divided by the color of their skin. She can think of “nothing more destructive to the cohesiveness of American culture than imposing [this] new type of racism.”

Morgan was shocked by how widespread is CRT in the American education system and told Campus Reform “I knew indoctrination was occurring at Brown University, RISD and URI, but from the response I have received to my bills in the past few days, I find that the left has surreptitiously infiltrated all our colleges and universities and K-12 schools.”

“We would never accept race shaming if directed towards black school children,” Morgan said, “And we should not accept it when directed at white school children. Or for that matter against anyone based on the color of their skin.“

Catherine Lhamon, Obama’s Title IX Enforcer, Just Got Her Old Job Back

Robby Soave:

From 2013 to 2017, the task of enforcing Title IX—the federal statute that prohibits sex and gender-based discrimination in public education—fell to Catherine Lhamon, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights within President Barack Obama’s Education Department.

Continuing the work of her predecessors, Lhamon’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) compelled colleges and universities to adopt sexual misconduct procedures that violated the due process and free speech rights of accused students and professors. Under her authority, the federal government pressured schools to adopt the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, discourage attorneys from becoming involved, and move toward an adjudication model that relied upon the testimony of a single campus bureaucrat vested with investigative powers. When Betsy DeVos became secretary of education under President Donald Trump, she swiftly moved to reverse the agency’s Title IX guidance and restore basic fairness to these proceedings.

But now that Joe Biden is in the White House, he’s giving Lhamon her old job back: Last week, the president appointed her to be assistant secretary for civil rights once again.

“Lhamon’s nomination is the latest example of the White House steering civil rights policy back toward the Obama administration’s approach and is likely to please advocacy groups for victims of sexual assault and civil rights organizations,” noted NBC News.

Assuming the Senate confirms her, Lhamon will be well-positioned to erode DeVos’ reforms. As such, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has called on the Senate to vote her down.

In first speech since leaving office, Barr decries ‘militantly secularist government-run schools’

John Solomon:

“While an astonishing number of public schools fail to produce students proficient in basic reading and math, they spare no effort or expense in their drive to instill a radical secular belief system that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago,” he added.

He cited the example of an Iowa public school district’s transgenderism study that declared that “everyone gets to choose if they are a girl, or a boy, or both, or neither, or someone else, and no one else gets to choose for them.”

“One thing we know this is not established science,” he argued. “It is a moral, psychological and metaphysical dogma of the new progressive orthodoxy.”

Event: COVID-19: Education Divide

Asia Society – Southern California:

Of all the industries impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education has experienced one of the most foundational disruptions to its traditional model, displacing in-person classes and a vibrant campus life for virtual coursework done at home. This challenge of translating the college experience to an online format has only been compounded by pre-existing social issues exacerbated by the pandemic. Facing financial hardship, many students, especially within communities of color, have deferred enrollment or been unable to utilize the tools that make at-home classes possible, like designated study spaces or adequate technology. These inequities that low-income students and students of color have encountered during the pandemic threaten to have long-term impacts on their education for years to come.

“We do not find any correlations with mask mandates”

Emily Oster, Rebecca Jack, Clare Halloran, John Schoof, Diana McLeod:

This paper reports on the correlation of mitigation practices with staff and student COVID-19 case rates in Florida, New York, and Massachusetts during the 2020-2021 school year. We analyze data collected by the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard and focus on student density, ventilation upgrades, and masking. We find higher student COVID-19 rates in schools and districts with lower in-person density but no correlations in staff rates. Ventilation upgrades are correlated with lower rates in Florida but not in New York. We do not find any correlations with mask mandates. All rates are lower in the spring, after teacher vaccination is underway

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Clinical Trial

Retrospective study; not a clinical trial.

Funding Statement

Funding provided by : Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Arnold Foundation, Templeton Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Brown University Role on the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard: Providing funding for the dashboard, including funding for the engineering support at Qualtrics to host the overall and district-specific dashboards, and funding for staff to clean and review data from districts and states. None of the funding partners have had any influence on which data are displayed in the dashboard or how the data are presented.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Commentary on Tenure and the 1619 Project

Joe Killian and Kyle Ingram:

Journalism school will instead offer Nikole Hannah-Jones a fixed five-year contract

In her career in journalism, Nikole Hannah-Jones has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant.” But despite support from the UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor and faculty, she won’t be getting a tenured teaching position at her alma mater. At least not yet.

As Policy Watch reported last week, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media pursued Hannah-Jones for its Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured professorship. But following political pressure from conservatives who object to her work on “The 1619 Project” for The New York Times Magazine, the school changed its plan to offer her tenure — which amounts to a career-long appointment. Instead, she will start July 1 for a fixed five-year term as Professor of the Practice, with the option of being reviewed for tenure at the end of that time period.

K-12 Spending Splurge: Another $5.7 billion for Wisconsin governments is insane

Mike Konecny:

Wisconsin’s share, $5.7 billion — $3.2 billion for our state government and another $2.5 billion to more than 2,000 county and local governments — is not needed. And its allocation was almost entirely arbitrary, much of it a matter of simple division rather than targeted need.

The numbers alone are staggering: $405,720,000 for the City of Milwaukee, $183,420,000 for Milwaukee County; $49,190,000 for Madison, $106,030,000 for Dane County; and $25,230,000 for Green Bay, $51,310,000 for Brown County.

Counties will get more than $1.1 billion, but from the most populated to the least populated county, from the wealthiest to the poorest, the shares will be equal, at a rate of about $194 per resident.

Waukesha County was allocated $78,390,000, but through some quirk in the formula, the City of Waukesha is getting “only” $7,150,000. “We’re talking to our legislators about it,” Waukesha City Administrator Kevin Lahner tells me. “We should have been in the (Community Development Block Grant) entitlement category.”

The problem, and this is a big one, is that the federal government is borrowing the money to give to governments that are, for the most part, better off than they were before the pandemic because of the CARES Act in March 2020.

UW-Madison Lincoln Statue Climate

Christian Schneider:

Between June and November, Blank’s office received 192 emails, 80 percent of which supported keeping the UW’s landmark Lincoln statue on Bascom Hill, according to a review of the emails obtained by The College Fix through a public records act request.

Blank has consistently said, despite Lincoln’s “complex” legacy, which “contains actions which, 150 years later, appear flawed,” she opposes removing the statue.

“Chancellor Blank considers a wide range of factors when considering an issue like this, including input from current students, faculty, staff, alumni and others,” university spokeswoman Meredith McGlone told The College Fix in an email.

Of the emailers supporting Lincoln, two dozen specifically threatened to withhold donations or other sorts of funds from the university if it were to give in to demands of activist students who called for the Lincoln statue to be removed.

“I will cease immediately all donations to the university and its student organizations” if the statue were to be removed, wrote one alumnus, adding, “I will also cancel my season tickets to the UW football and men’s basketball teams. And finally, I will engage in a very public and messy campaign to encourage my fellow alumni to do the same.”

A Collegiate GED: The Time Is Now

Richard Vedder:

There are three relatively novel ideas to increase efficiency and reduce costs in college that I have promoted, largely to no avail, in recent years. First, I have called for colleges to have “skin in the game,” that is have to share the losses to taxpayers from defaulted student loans. That would incentivize colleges to be careful in matching student desires with capabilities and reality. Second, I have called for Income Share Agreements, a new way to finance college attendance reducing financial risks to students, one that has gained some limited acceptance and may yet be important in the future.

But I have been all but completely ignored in my call for a “National College Equivalence Test (NCET), where students performing well on a broad based fairly rigorous test could be granted a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. (See this space for July 2, 2018). A student from my early teaching days, Clarence Page (pictured above), a distinguished Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, citing me, recently spoke favorably of a college GED, a way students with brains and ambition but limited formal education and resources could demonstrate that “I have the same capabilities of a typical college graduate and passed the NCET with a score of X.”

Following up on Clarence’s Tribune column, Steve Bertrand of Chicago radio station WGN interviewed me about the Collegiate GED. One listener then wrote me, “ I have no college education and am frustrated at 58 because I’m intimidated by the idea of walking into a university with all the scientific work I have done.” I would speculate the listener had gained a good deal of skill in the sciences from either the work he had performed and/or knowledge he gained through reading and other non-school ways of learning. If the body of knowledge accumulated equaled that of typical college degree holders, why shouldn’t he be eligible for a bachelor’s degree?

Change is boosting diversity at Boston’s exam schools, but some feel angry about not getting in

In West Roxbury, a powerhouse in the exam-school admission race, the overall number of seventh-grade applicants receiving admission offers dramatically declined from 133 last year to 69 this year under a temporary policy that capped admission by ZIP code. The tougher competition meant students needed an A minus to get in.By contrast in Mattapan, a neighborhood where families typically have less means to hire admission consultants, the total number of seventh-grade applicants getting in more than doubled to 51 this year, with some candidates who had a B-minus average securing a coveted acceptance letter from one of the exam schools.

Commentary on Education Dept. Proposal To Inject 1619 Project and Kendiism Into Schools

William Jacobson:

We have covered the ahistorical 1619 Project and the neo-racist “antiracism” of Ibram X. Kendi many times. There is a growing grassroots and state legislative movement to keep these Critical Race Theory variants out of education.

One of the high priorities of the Biden administration, however, is to force those teachings into public elementary and secondary schools through the federal Department of Education via a Rule Proposal, Proposed Priorities: American History and Civics Education.

Education Week described the heart of the Rule Proposal:

The Biden administration wants a grant program for history and civics education to prioritize instruction that accounts for bias, discriminatory policies in America, and the value of diverse student perspectives.

In describing the basis for the new grant priority for American History and Civics Education programs, the administration cites the scholar and anti-racism activist Ibram X. Kendi, as well as the 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine project that highlights slavery and its legacy as a central element in America’s story.

“It is critical that the teaching of American history and civics creates learning experiences that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, histories, contributions, and experiences of all students,” the April 19 notice in the Federal Register states.

Purdue University President Mitch Daniels warned that the pandemic snuffed out the American eagerness to take risks and move ahead boldly.

Graduation Speech:

This year, when I say I am happy to be here, I’m not just making small talk. If you’re like me, you’re happy to be anywhere after the year we’ve all been through. I wish we were over in Elliott Hall, celebrating your achievements individually as only Purdue does among schools our size. But this beats the virtual version we were forced to in 2020 and marks a long step back on the path to fully normal life.

As we’ve never done an outdoor commencement before, we may have gotten a few things wrong. For one thing, way out here on the 50-yard line, it feels like we’ve carried that social distance thing a little far. However well it goes, like everything about your senior year, it will be one for the history books. For all the trouble and downsides, there can be some real value in living through a time like that.

For decades to come, scholars and ordinary citizens alike will look back on your senior year, trying to identify its consequences, and imagine what lives so disrupted were like. As they do so, they will know more than we can now about the results of the choices today’s leaders made. They will reach judgments, with the benefit of hindsight, about the wisdom and maturity with which our nation handled the challenge of this particular pandemic.

Odds are, not all those judgments will be favorable. Time will tell.

An ability to comprehend and work with complex facts and data has always been part of a Purdue education. At least since the Industrial Age, that’s been an essential tool for a useful life of the kind at which Boilermakers excel.

Civics / K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: More Oregon counties vote to move into Idaho, part of rural effort to ‘gain political refuge from blue states’

Douglas Perry:

Five eastern Oregon counties voted Tuesday in favor of considering becoming part of Idaho. Baker, Grant, Lake, Malheur and Sherman counties join Union and Jefferson, which voted last year to require county officials to study or promote joining Idaho.

Grant voted 1,471 to 895 for county officials “to meet and discuss relocating Idaho border.”

Lake voted 1,341 to 463 for the “relocation of Idaho border” to be taken up in “county board of commissioners meetings.”

Malheur voted 3,050 to 2,572 for “county court meetings regarding relocation of Oregon-Idaho border.”

Sherman voted 429 to 260 in favor of “promoting moving Oregon-Idaho border.”

Baker voted 3,064 to 2,307 for county commissioners “to meet three times per year to discuss a proposal to include 18 counties, including Baker, as part of Idaho,” the Baker City Herald reported. Baker County results are not yet available from the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office.

The grassroots group Move Oregon’s Border for a Greater Idaho wants to flip Oregon’s mostly rural eastern and southern counties — plus a few northern counties in California — into Idaho, believing they’d be better off in Idaho’s more conservative political environment. It’s hoping that political pressure from county initiative votes will lead to negotiations between Oregon and Idaho to move the border between the two states, putting up to 22 of Oregon’s 36 counties in Idaho.

The Mental Benefits of Being Terrible at Something

Brad Stulberg:

You’ve probably heard of the 80/20 rule before: once you’ve learned or figured out the first 80 percent of something, the effort it will take to learn the last 20 percent might not be worth it—because the last 20 percent is almost always the hardest. The 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto principle, applies to both physical and cognitive pursuits. For example, it’s usually easier to go from running nine-minute miles to six-minute miles than it is to go from running six-minute miles to five-minute miles; it’s easier to get proficient at chess than to become an international grand master.

The 80/20 rule is interesting to consider, but it can also be misleading. That’s because both the early and the late stages of skill acquisition feature unique benefits despite their varied difficulties.

Beginner’s Luck

When author and Outside contributing editor Tom Vanderbilt had his daughter, he, like so many other new parents, spent endless hours in awe of her capacity to learn new things and the joy those processes brought her. This got Vanderbilt thinking: When was the last time I learned anything new? So began his journey to learn five new skills—chess, singing, surfing, drawing, and juggling—which he details in his latest book, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. Vanderbilt makes a compelling case that learning something new has myriad advantages, including promoting the brain’s ability to rewire itself, connecting you to new people and new communities, and reengaging our innate curiosity and open-mindedness. While all of these offer tremendous benefits, that last one may be the most important.

Will your gifted child take calculus? Maybe not under California’s reimagined math plan

Howard Blume:

A plan to reimagine math instruction for 6 million California students has become ensnared in equity and fairness issues — with critics saying proposed guidelines will hold back gifted students and supporters saying it will, over time, give all kindergartners through 12th-graders a better chance to excel.

The proposed new guidelines aim to accelerate achievement while making mathematical understanding more accessible and valuable to as many students as possible, including those shut out from high-level math in the past because they had been “tracked” in lower level classes. The guidelines call on educators generally to keep all students in the same courses until their junior year in high school, when they can choose advanced subjects, including calculus, statistics and other forms of data science.

Although still a draft, the Mathematics Framework achieved a milestone Wednesday, earning approval from the state’s Instructional Quality Commission. The members of that body moved the framework along, approving numerous recommendations that a writing team is expected to incorporate. 

The commission told writers to remove a document that had become a point of contention for critics. It described its goals as calling out systemic racism in mathematics, while helping educators create more inclusive, successful classrooms. Critics said it needlessly injected race into the study of math.

The state Board of Education is scheduled to have the final say in November.

An early look at the 2022 budgets of Wisconsin’s two largest school districts; +$70M for Madison!….

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Since 2013, the Wisconsin Policy Forum has produced an annual report on the superintendent’s proposed Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) budget that analyzes and describes the key elements and provides an independent assessment for school board members as they deliberate its contents. Last year, for the first time, we produced a similar budget brief for the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD).

This year, because of several unique circumstances, we alter our approach to consider the budgets of Wisconsin’s two largest school districts in a single report. One reason is the vast uncertainty that surrounds both proposed budgets. MPS and MMSD each will receive huge new infusions of federal dollars from recently adopted pandemic relief packages, but there is still some murkiness surrounding allowable uses of those dollars and they have not yet been plugged into the superintendents’ proposals.

Moreover, state lawmakers have not yet determined whether or how the infusion of federal aid will impact their decision-making on state K-12 aids and revenue limits in the next state budget, thus also casting a cloud of uncertainty over the districts’ state and local revenue picture for next year. Similarly, questions surrounding future district enrollment levels and whether they will rebound in the fall will impact future revenue limits and state aid allocations and provide additional ambiguity for both districts.

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.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Politics vs Students in Racine

Libby Sobic:

Wisconsin parents have spent the last year scrambling to help cover learning loss created by the pandemic. For students living in Racine, any learning loss is particularly harmful considering the district was a low-performing school district prior to the pandemic. Despite this unfortunate reality, local leaders in Racine continue to purposefully confuse parents and make it as difficult as possible for families to access the educational options available to their students.

The first thing the district did was update their website to refer to its own public-school options as the “School Choice” program. Of course, the phrasing of this option is misleading for parents when the state has long referred to the Racine, Wisconsin and Milwaukee Parental Choice Programs as the “choice programs.” In fact, the Department of Public Instruction’s (DPI) website for parents to complete applications is called the “private school choice programs.” The district is actually referring to the public school options available to its students within the district that are not assigned to students based on their address.

Racine has a good reason to highlight options for its families. Racine Unified was rated as “meets few expectations” by the state for the 2018-2019 school year. According to DPI, nearly 50% of the district’s students were not proficient in English Language Arts or math on the state’s test for 2018-2019. Without a doubt, students are in a crisis in Racine and deserve access to as many high-quality educational options as possible.

But while imitation is the best form of flattery, in this case, Racine Unified is purposefully misleading parents and confusing the options available to them. In a time when students are struggling academically and families are trying to determine the best options for their kids, Racine’s actions make it needlessly harder.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Advice for Young Scientists—and Curious People in General

The best way to learn what we need to know is by getting started, then picking up new knowledge as it proves itself necessary. When there’s an urgent need, we learn faster and avoid unnecessary learning. The same can be true for too much reading:

“Too much book learning may crab and confine the imagination, and endless poring over the research of others is sometimes psychologically a research substitute, much as reading romantic fiction may be a substitute for real-life romance….The beginner must read, but intently and choosily and not too much.”

We don’t talk about this much at Farnam Street, but it is entirely possible to read too much. Reading becomes counterproductive when it serves as a substitute for doing the real thing, if that’s what someone is reading for. Medawar explains that it is “psychologically most important to get results, even if they are not original.” It’s important to build confidence by doing something concrete and seeing a visible manifestation of our labors. For Medawar, the best scientists begin with the understanding that they can never know anything and, besides, learning needs to be a lifelong process.

WILL, ADF Warn Kettle Moraine School District Gender Identity Policy Violates Parental Rights

The Wisconsin Institute of law and liberty:

Background: A fundamental and long-recognized “inherent right” protected by the Wisconsin (and United States) Constitution is the right of parents to “direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” This means parents are the primary decision-makers with respect to their minor children—not their school, or even the children themselves.


But the Kettle Moraine School District has adopted a policy that disregards parents’ decision about how their children will be addressed at school. This policy violates parents’ constitutional rights.
This past school year, a couple’s daughter began to experience gender dysphoria and considered adopting a male identity. The family immediately sought professional and medical support for their daughter, but based on extensive research they also knew that immediately transitioning would not be in her best interest. The parents communicated their desire for the school and staff to refer to their daughter using her legal name and associated pronouns, yet the Kettle Moraine School District refused to honor their request, forcing them to withdraw their daughter from school.


After withdrawing her from school and following through on counseling, their daughter realized her parents were right and has re-embraced her birth name and her nature as a girl. She is now enrolled in a different school district.

Why kids hate school?

Supermemo:

Children do not like school and they know exactly why. Adults find it hard to empathize and insist that “school is good”therefore “school needs to be endured”. In their difference of opinion, children are right, and adults are wrong. School is not good (I explain that in Problem of schooling). This text is intended for parents to outline the reasons for which kids cannot possibly like school.

A Synopsis of Elementary Results in Pure Mathematics

G. S. Carr, M.A. (“The Textbook that Unleashed Ramanujan’s Genius”)

THE work, of which the part now issued is a first instalment, has been compiled from notes made at various periods of the last fourteen years, and chiefly during the engagements of teaching. Many of the abbroviated methods and mnemonic rules are in the form in which I originally wrote them for my pupils.

The general object of the compilation is, as the title indicates, to present within a moderate compass the fundamental theorems, formulae, and processes in the chief branches of pure and applied mathematics.

The work is intended, in the first place, to follow and supplement the rise of the ordinary text-books, and it is arranged with the view of assisting the student in the task of revision of book-work. To this end I have, in many cases, merely indicated the salient points of a demonstration, or merely referred to the theorems by which the proposition is proved. I am convinced that it is more beneficial to the student to recall demonstrations with Bach aids, than to read and re-read them. Let them be read once, but recalled often. The difference in the effect upon the mind between reading a mathematical demoustration, and originating one wholly or partly, is very great. It may be compared to the difference between the pleasure experienced, and interest aroused, when in the one case a traveller is passively conducted through the roads of a novel and uncxplored country, and in the other case he discovers the roads for himself with the assistance of a map.

In the second place, I venture to hope that the work, when completed, may prove useful to advanced students as an aide-meirwire and book of reference. The boundary of mathematical science forms, year by year, an ever widening circle, and the advantage of having at hand some condensed Btatement of results becomes more and more evident.

To the original investigator occupied with abstruse researches in some one of the many branches of mathematics, a work which gathers together synopticaUy the leading propoBitions in aU, may not therefore prove unacceptable. ALler hands than inine undoubtedly, might have undertaken the task of making such a digest ; but abler hands might also, perhaps, be more usefully employed,—and vith this reflection I have the less hesitation in commenciiig the work myself. The design which I have indicated is eomevhat comprehensive, and in relation to it the present essay may be regarded as tentative. The degree of success which it may meet witli, and the suggestions or criticisms which it may call forth, will doubtI”; i have theu- effect on the subsequent portions of the work. With respect to tlie abridgment of the demonstrations, I may remark, that while some diffuseness of explanation is not only allowable but very desirable in an initiatory treatise, concisencss is one of the chief requirements in a work intended for the purposes of revision and reference only. In order, however, not to sacrifice clearness to conciseness, mucli more labour has been expended upon this part of the subject-matter of the book than wiU at first sight be at all evident. The only palpable result being a compression of the text, the resiilt is so far a negative one. The amount of compression attamed is illustrated in the last section of the present part, in which more than the number of propositions usually given in treatises on Geometrical Conics are contained, together with the figures and demonstrations, m the space of twenty-four pages.

The foregoing remarks have a general application to the work as a whole. With the view, however, of makmg the earlier sections more acceptable to beginners, it •wiU be found that, in those sections, important principles have sometimes been more fully elucidated and more illustrated by examples, than the plan of the work would admit of in subsequent divisions.

A feature to which attention may be directed is the uniform system of reference adopted throughout aU the sections. With the object of facilitating such reference, the articles have been numbered progressively from the commencement in large Clarendon figures; the breaks which will occasionally be found in these numbers having been purposely made,in order to leave room for the insertion of additional matter, if it should be required in a future edition, -without disturbing the original numbers and references. With the same object, demonstrations and examples have been made subordinate to enimciations and formulse, the former beiug printed in small, the latter in bold type. By tlieso aids, tlic interdcpendt’nco of propositions is more readily sliown, and it Lccomes ca8y to trace the connuxion between thcorcms in different branches of mutliomatics, witliout the loss of time which would be incurred in turning to separate treatises on the subjects. The advantage thus gained will, however, become more apparent as the work proceeds. The Algebra section was priuted some years ago, and does not quite correspond with the succeeding ones in some of the particulars named above. Under the pressure of other occupations, this section moreover wag not properly revised before going to press. On that account the table of errata will be found to apply almost exclusively to errors in tliat section; but I trust that the list is exhiuistivo. Great pains have been taken to secure the acciiracy of the rest of tlie volume. Any intimation of errors w-111 bo gladly received.

I have now to ackiiowledgc some of the sources from which the present part has been compiled. In the Algebra, Theory of Equations, and Trigonomctry scctioiis, I am liirgely indebted to Todhuntcr’s well-known treatises, tlie accuracy aiiil completeness of wliich it would be suporfluous iu mo to dwull upon.

In the section entitled Elementary Geometry, I liave added to simpler propositioiis a selection of tlicorcms from Town. seiid’s ifodrru Geometry and Saliuon’s Conic Sections.

In Geometrical Couics, the liue of domonstration followrd ngrecs, in the main, with that adopted iu Drew’s treatise on tlio subject. I am inclined to think tliafc the method of tliat author cannot bo much improved. It is true thiiA soine iinportant properties of the ellipse, which arr arrived at…..

This, along with many other math posts is done in memory of Richard Askey.

Report: State-level test scores improve the more school choice options are given

Bethany Blankley:

As school choice bills continue to make their way through state legislatures, a report on student achievement published by the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform argues that the more educational options are afforded parents, the better statewide test results are.

“We find that higher levels of school choice are significantly associated with higher National Assessment of Education Outcomes (NAEP) achievement levels and higher NAEP achievement gains in all our statistical models,” the report states.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 50 school choice bills have been introduced in 30 states so far, designed to create or expand vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, among other measures.

“This is a banner year for the educational choice movement. Hundreds of thousands of children nationwide will now have greater access to educational opportunities,” Jason Bedrick, director of policy at Ed Choice, a national nonprofit organization that promotes state-based educational choice programs, told The Center Square.

Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled

Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.   

While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state. 

Channel3000:

The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.

The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.

“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”

Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.

All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.

Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Assembly against private school forced closure.

Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.

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.

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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

Commentary in Wisconsin K-12 Governance and School choice

James Wigderson:

The governor’s proposed state budget included an assault on school choice, three assaults actually, as Will Flanders of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) pointed out. The budget included an enrollment cap on all private school voucher programs, eliminating the charter school authorizer Office of Educational Opportunity, and a requirement that all teachers in the school choice program be licensed by the state (even as the state faces a teachers shortage).

We know from prior research that school choice helps close the racial achievement gap. We also know that Wisconsin has the worst racial achievement gap in the country.

“The persistent achievement gap is particularly problematic because this represents the situation prior to the coronavirus pandemic,” Flanders wrote last October in an op-ed. “Differences in access to supplementary materials, tutoring, and even basic internet access tend to fall along racial and economic lines. At a time when most education is being conducted at home, some research has suggested that the pandemic will serve to further exacerbate these gaps.”

The largest school districts in the state, serving the largest numbers of minority students, refused to be open to in-person instruction during the pandemic despite research showing that transmission of Covid-19 from students was minimal. Meanwhile, many suburban and rural school districts, along with school choice and charter schools, remained open to in-person instruction and demonstrated that it could be done safely. While the teachers unions kept the schools closed that served the state’s minority populations, Evers remained silent.

America Is Flunking Math
We need to get racial politics out of the equation before it’s too late.

Among all human endeavors, mathematics stands alone in terms of its beauty, universality, and innumerable applications. Though its role is often obscured by esoteric language, mathematics is behind almost all of humanity’s major advances in science and engineering.

Bridges stand, planes fly, rockets carry us into space, and MRIs can see into our brains thanks to precise mathematical calculations performed by powerful computers, invented by mathematicians such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann. Behind tasks performed by computers—predicting the weather, performing complex financial transactions, or encrypting billions of messages each day—lie sophisticated mathematical algorithms. Artificial intelligence, for example, is but a happy marriage between powerful computers and abstract mathematical models that sort and analyze massive amounts of data.

Before our discipline became the universal global enterprise it is today, great mathematical discoveries passed from ancient civilizations to medieval ones and then to modern ones. One can argue that the preeminence of each civilization was, in part, due to their sophisticated understanding and use of mathematics. This is particularly clear in the case of the West, which forged ahead in the 17th century with the discovery of calculus, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.

“Canceling” Math Class in California

Williamson Evers:

The frame­work rec­om­mends eight times that teach­ers use a trou­bling doc­u­ment, “A Path­way to Eq­ui­table Math In­struc­tion: Dis­man­tling Racism in Math­e­mat­ics In­struc­tion.” This man­ual claims that teach­ers ad­dress­ing stu­dents’ mis­takes forth­rightly is a form of white su­premacy. It sets forth in­di­ca­tors of “white su­premacy cul­ture in the math­e­mat­ics class­room,” in­clud­ing a fo­cus on “get­ting the right an­swer,” teach­ing math in a “lin­ear fash­ion,” re­quir­ing stu­dents to “show their work” and grad­ing them on demon­strated knowl­edge of the sub­ject mat­ter. “The con­cept of math­e­mat­ics be­ing purely ob­jec­tive is un­equiv­o­cally false,” the man­ual ex­plains. “Up­hold­ing the idea that there are al­ways right and wrong an­swers per­pet­u­ates ‘ob­jec­tiv­ity.’ ” Ap­par­ently, that’s also racist.

Survey results of US civic knowledge

Rasmussen Reports:

A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 50% of Likely U.S. Voters who say MSNBC or CNN is their favorite cable news outlet believe more than 100 unarmed African Americans were fatally shot by police in 2020. By contrast, only 22% of Fox News viewers believe police shot more than 100 unarmed black people last year. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Nearly a quarter of CNN viewers (24%) and almost one-in-five MSNBC viewers (19%) think cops fatally shot more than 500 unarmed black suspects last year, but only nine percent (9%) of Fox News viewers think so. Fox News viewers (60%) were about three times more likely than viewers of MSNBC (19%) or CNN (23%) to correctly estimate the number of unarmed black people shot and killed by police in 2020 as less than 50. Sixty percent (60%) of talk radio listeners also estimated the number correctly.

Commentary on the SAT

There’s a lot to say. First, we must distinguish between two types of tests, or really two types of testing. When people say “standardized tests,” they think of the SAT, but they also think of state-mandated exams (usually bought, at great taxpayer expense, from Pearson and other for-profit companies) that are designed to serve as assessments of public K-12 schools, of aggregates and averages of students. The SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT, and similar tests are oriented towards individual ability or aptitude; they exist to show prerequisite skills to admissions officers. (And, in one of the most essential purposes of college admissions, to employers, who are restricted in the types of testing they can perform thanks to Griggs v Duke Power Co.) Sure, sometimes researchers will use SAT data to reflect on, for example, the fact that there’s no underlying educational justification for higher graduation rates1, but SATs are really about the individual. State K-12 testing is about cities and districts, and exists to provide (typically dubious) justification for changes to education policy2. SATs and similar help admissions officers sort students for spots in undergraduate and graduate programs. This post is about those predictive entrance tests like the SAT.

Liberals repeat several types of myths about the SAT/ACT with such utter confidence and repetition that they’ve become a kind of holy writ. But myths they are. 

  1. SATs/ACTs don’t predict college success. They do, indeed. This one is clung to so desperately by liberals that you’d think there was some sort of compelling empirical basis to believe this. There isn’t. There never has been. They’re making it up. They want it to be true, and so they believe it to be true.

    The predictive validity of the SAT is typically understated because the comparison we’re making has an inherent range restriction problem. If you ask “how well do the SATs predict college performance?,” you are necessarily restricting your independent variable to those who took the SAT and then went to college. But many take the SAT and do not go to college. By leaving out their data, you’re cropping the potential strength of correlation and underselling the predictive power of the SAT. When we correct statistically for this range restriction, which is not difficult, the predictive validity of the SAT and similar tests becomes remarkably strong. Range restriction is a known issue, it’s not remotely hard to understand, and your average New York Times digital subscription holder has every ability to learn about it and use that knowledge to adjust their understanding of the tests. The fact that they don’t points to the reality that liberals long ago decided that any information that does not confirm their priors can be safely discarded.

How the media covered Common Core

Kappanonline:

Common Core began with great promise: broad popular support, the endorsement of policy elites from both parties, boatloads of cash from governmental and philanthropic sources, and adoption by 45 states within a few months of the standards’ June 2010 release.

And yet, more than a decade later, the best-designed study of Common Core’s impact on student achievement found only small, negative effects. No study has documented positive gains that rise to the level of either statistical or practical real world significance.

My recent book, Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core, attempts to describe what happened to that bold initiative.

Media coverage of Common Core followed an arc that mirrored the policy’s fate: perhaps too optimistic at the beginning, but after a few years of documenting the standards’ choppy implementation, a more realistic view of the reform emerged.

I’m no education journalist, but there are some valuable lessons here for the next time a major policy proposal is being presented and adopted: maintain a healthy skepticism, suspend judgment until evidence of outcomes appears, and do not let the assumptions of major policies go unchallenged.

Civics: Pentagon Surveilling Americans Without a Warrant, Senator Reveals

Joseph Cox:

The Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by Motherboard.

Senator Wyden’s office asked the Department of Defense (DoD), which includes various military and intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for detailed information about its data purchasing practices after Motherboard revealed special forces were buying location data. The responses also touched on military or intelligence use of internet browsing and other types of data, and prompted Wyden to demand more answers specifically about warrantless spying on American citizens.