Dallas News:

Rather, I want to focus the attention of readers on extremely important, disturbing data from recent years regarding student achievement in the Dallas ISD. Then, facing those facts, perhaps the community will be on firmer ground to improve and generate better student outcomes.

The nation’s best measure of student achievement is the National Assessment of Educational Progress. In the 2000s, urban districts began participating in NAEP through the Trial Urban District Assessment. Dallas ISD joined the program in 2011 and has seen its students measured every other year until 2019 at the fourth and eighth grade levels in math and reading.

Here’s the troubling news in Dallas: On both eighth grade math and reading, from 2011 through 2019, Black and Hispanic students showed a steady and substantial decline in achievement.

Fourth grade results, on the other hand, are more stagnant than down. In that regard, they resemble the results of other urban districts, such as Houston. So, while we would like more progress, especially given recent emphasis on early education, flatness has been characteristic generally across the land. Even so, however, some districts, such as Miami, have significantly outperformed the others. It can be done.

Yet, for several reasons, it is Dallas ISD’s eighth grade results that should draw our principal concern. First, they’re badly down.

In math, for example, Black students dropped steadily from 264 scale score points in 2011 to 252 in 2019. Hispanic students fell from 276 to 265 during the same period.

In reading, the drop for African American students was from 244 to 234, and for Hispanics, from 246 to 242.

During this period, all eighth grade students in DISD dropped from an average of 274 to 264 in math and from 248 to 242 in reading.

Tyler Cowen:

Of course this process has very little transparency and not much in the way of appeal, or even competition, or for that matter accountability to outside parties.  Might it also be a factor behind a lot of the academic conformism we witness?  You go through the early part of your career knowing that you are auditioning for a committee.  Can any voice wreck you?  Or is it majority rule?  You will never know!

Unlike a lot of the whiners, I am not saying this system is necessarily bad — I am genuinely unsure, in part because of the lack of transparency, not to mention that the relevant alternative is possibly something worse yet.  In any case, I find it striking how little discussion this method has received.  It allocates most of the best jobs in the economics profession, and it does not obviously satisfy many of the ideals that at least some of us pay lip service to.  John List, now tenured at the University of Chicago, received his initial Ph.D from University of Wyoming, not a top school, but that kind of climb up the academic ladder is extremely rare in economics.

Most lesser ranked schools, including GMU, do not rank their candidates collectively in the same manner.  There is no collective ranking, rather individual faculty, or perhaps small working groups, recommend their favored candidates.  In part they are competing against the other recommending faculty in their own department.  There is no “secret, collusive meeting,” and so you might think there is an incentive to over-recommend and to deplete the collective credibility of the department.  The market, however, understands that and takes it into account, and in that sense the credibility of the department “starts off depleted” to begin with.  The recommendations then have to be somewhat exaggerated simply to “break even” in the resulting signal-jamming equilibrium.

Lower-ranked schools don’t have the option of sending most of their Ph.D. students to Tier 1 research universities, so the notion of a uniform ranking probably doesn’t make sense there. And if you have only three graduating Ph.D. students in a year, and two of them are returning home to Asia, as is the case in many of the lower-ranked programs, does it really make sense to rank them? Furthermore, the lower-ranked schools may have a higher variance of faculty quality, which would render a consensus ranking of the graduates more difficult to achieve. In contrast, almost all of the faculty at Harvard have a pretty good sense of “what it takes” to succeed at MIT or Princeton as a junior faculty member.

Bret Devereaux:

While last week we noted how the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West did not destroy the Roman cultural sphere so much as accelerate its transformation (albeit into a collection of fragmented fusion cultures which were part ‘Roman’ mixed with other things), it did bring an end to the Roman state in the West (but not the East) and an end to Roman governance. But here too, we have to be careful in defining what that governance meant, because the Roman Empire of August, 378 AD was not the Roman Empire of August, 14 AD. This is a point that is going to come up again and again because how one views the decline of the fifth and sixth centuries depends in part on what the benchmark is: are we comparing it to the empire of Hadrian (r. 117-138) or the empire of Valentinian (r. 364-375)? Because most students are generally more familiar with the former (because it tends to be get focused on in teaching), there is a tendency to compare 476 directly with Rome under the Nervan-Antonines (96-192) without taking into account the events of the third and early fourth century.

Roman rule as effectively codified under the first emperor, Augustus (r. 31BC – 14AD) was relatively limited and indirect, not because the Romans believed in something called ‘limited government’ but because the aims of the Roman state were very limited (secure territory, collect taxes) and the administrative apparatus for doing those things was also very limited. The whole of the central Roman bureaucracy in the first century probably consisted of just a few hundred senatorial and equestrian officials (supported, of course, by the army and also several thousand enslaved workers employed either by the state directly or in the households of those officials) – this for an empire of around 50 million people. Instead, day to day affairs in the provinces – public works, the administration of justice, the regulation of local markets, etc. – were handled by local governments, typically centered in cities (we’ll come back to them in a moment). Where there were no cities, the Romans tended to make new ones for this purpose. Roman officials could then interact with the city elites (they preferred oligarchic city governments because they were easier to control) and so avoid having to interact directly with the populace in a more granular way unless there was a crisis.

By contrast, the Roman governance system that emerges during the reigns of Diocletian (r. 284-305) and Constantine (r. 306-337) was centralized and direct. The process of centralizing governance¹ had been going on for some time, really since the beginning of the empire, albeit slowly. The Constitutio Antoniniana (212), which extended Roman citizenship to all free persons in the empire, in turn had the effect of wiping out all of the local law codes and instead extending Roman law to cover everyone and so doubtless accelerated the process.

The Blogocarian:

Not long ago, Mary Beard graced us with a bit of honorable honesty in the Times Literary Supplement, in which she confessed to what is a bit of an open secret among most classicists. She can’t sight-read a complex Latin text all that well. Most classicists can’t. This admission — from someone like Beard — is good to have out there.

What irritates me is that —again like most classicists — she treats this as a self-evident fact to be just accepted rather than a problem to be dealt with, as if nobody could hope to actually read Cicero with ease. It always strikes me as bizarre and a bit embarrassing to see classicists insisting that it is impossible to acquire fluid or fluent command of Latin or Greek, that “we” can never do this. It’s not just that this assumption would be news to people like Galileo, Kepler or Descartes. It’s that people do actually acquire this kind of competence. Today. Anyone who pokes around at, say, the Conventiculum Bostoniense, will find proficient Latin-speakers as readily as Zeus finds incestuous booty-calls.

Take Msgr. Daniel Gallagher who worked for a decade at the Vatican Secretariat’s Latin Office. Here’s him delivering a lecture about the possibility of a manned mission to Mars in Latin. Here’s Jorge Tárrega teaching one of Horace’s most famous poems through the medium of Latin. Here’s Justin Slocum Bailey talking about Aulus Gellius in Latin. If you want something literary, here’s a lovely poem by Cäcilie Koch (AKA Caecilia) inspired by the discovery of the jaw-bone of a Neanderthal boy, and another poem by Alanus Divutius dedicated to the 9/11 victims. Here’s a Latin Wikipedia article about special relativity. Here’s a scene from Jurassic Park dubbed into Latin. Here’s the Quomodo Dicitur podcast in which three people (not always the same people) have unscripted conversations about various topics in Latin. I could keep spouting these links till either I or you, dear reader, die of boredom. There are plenty of people who read Latin as easily as any “modern” language that they have acquired as adults. There are entire internet forums written in it.

Black News:

Nationwide — More than just a tennis champion, Serena Williams has always been a champion for a cause. Through the Serena Williams Fund, new schools are being built in Jamaica and in various countries on the African continent.Williams, who has a total of 39 Grand Slam titles under her belt, recently built the Marsh Elementary School in Jamaica in conjunction with the nonprofit Helping Hands Jamaica. Schools on the African continent were also built in partnership with Build Africa.

Prior to that, Williams already established grade schools in other African countries including Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Kenya.

Allison Marsh:

Graeme Clark’s dogged pursuit of the technology enabled hundreds of thousands of people to hear

“A bit of bedlam.” That’s how the physician Graeme Clark described the scene at the Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, on the day before what would be the most important surgery of his career. 

Engineers and staff were running around with last-minute equipment tests. Meanwhile, Clark’s patient, Rod Saunders, was relaxed. Saunders had lost his hearing in a car accident two years earlier, and Clark planned to implant a prototype device to restore at least some of Saunders’s hearing. Perhaps Saunders’s sense of calm came from the belief that his life was about to be transformed; more likely, he was feeling the effects of the Valium he’d taken.

The following day, 1 August 1978, over the course of a 9-hour operation, Clark and surgeon Brian Pyman painstakingly inserted a multichannel cochlear implant behind Saunders’s left ear. They were able to attach electrodes to the cochlea—the spiral cavity within the inner ear that stimulates the auditory nerve—without much difficulty, moving slowly and taking steps to minimize the chance of infection. The surgery appeared to be successful, but as Clark recalled in a 2011 oral history with the Australian Academy of Science, he still slept fitfully that night, worried about his patient.

Cezary Podkul:

Consider some of the episodes last year in which large quantities of personal data were stolen: 300 million customer and device records for users of a service that’s supposed to shield internet traffic from prying eyes; a 17.6-million-row database from a second organization, containing profiles of people who participated in its market research surveys; 59 million email addresses and other personal data lifted from a third company. These sorts of numbers barely raise an eyebrow these days; none of the incidents generated major press coverage.

Cybertheft conjures images of high-tech missions, with sophisticated hackers penetrating multiple layers of security systems to steal corporate data. But these breaches were far from “Ocean’s Eleven”-style operations. They were the equivalent of grabbing jewels from the seat of an unlocked car parked in a high-crime neighborhood.