Female ambition is fine, but men also need to be men.

Erica Komisar:

As American wives increasingly outearn their husbands, many couples experience what relationship coach Suzanne Venker calls “role-reversal stress.” This stress can be deleterious for their emotional and sexual lives, three studies published in the American Sociological Review suggest:

• Harvard sociologist Alexandra Killewald found that if a husband is employed full-time, the couple has a 2.5% chance of splitting up in the next year; if he isn’t, the likelihood of divorce rises to 3.3%.

• Christin Munsch of the University of Connecticut found that husbands who are economically dependent on their wives have a greater propensity to be unfaithful.

• Three sociologists from the Juan March Institute and the University of Washington found that the frequency of marital sex is lower for couples in which the husband often does traditionally feminine chores such as cooking, cleaning and taking care of kids, and higher if he does masculine ones like yard work, paying bills and car maintenance. Julie Brines told reporters that she and her co-authors were surprised at “how robust the connection was between a traditional division of housework and sexual frequency.”

It seems younger generations are taking note. A University of Texas survey in 2014 found that younger millennial men, then 18 to 25, were likelier to agree with the statement “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family” than Generation X men or older millennials had been at the same age.

These evolving attitudes may reflect differences in the households in which these young people grew up. In 1987 wives outearned men in less than 25% of households. By 2015 that share was 38%.

Leadership Lessons in My 1950s Boarding School

Fay Vincent:

When I was 17, the head of my school told me I ought to see myself as a leader. I’m reminded of that as I read about a growing trend in academia to adopt programs like Yale Law School’s new Joseph C. Tsai Leadership Program. I don’t know if leaders are born or trained, but I see value in this kind of leadership development. Budding leaders need mentors who encourage strong character.

I had one. As a junior at Hotchkiss School in 1955, I followed my headmaster down the main corridor. He showed me a plaque honoring the winners of the alumnus-of-the-year award and asked if I knew how many had been “scholarship boys.” He listed those who had come from families of limited means like mine.

Among them: John Hersey, author of the celebrated 1946 book “Hiroshima,” and Henry Luce, founder of Time magazine. He said my peers were waiting for me to lead. “You should speak up when you have something to contribute,” he said. “Mr. Vincent, I believe that someday your name will be listed here with the others. You ought to see yourself as a leader.”

He repeated that in a letter to my parents, which I found in the school files. I was dubious. I was a solid but unremarkable adolescent. My headmaster was revered by his students, so I took his counsel seriously. I gradually adopted the behaviors he suggested. At Williams College, I intentionally sought leadership positions.

I continued to accept opportunities to lead in my professional life. At 40 I was unexpectedly offered the position of CEO of Columbia Pictures, which was in a legal and business crisis. The leadership position was significant, but as a Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer I had no business experience. Some friends advised me to be cautious and remain a lawyer. Many believed I wasn’t the Hollywood type. I decided I had faith in my capacity to lead in difficult circumstances.

Yes, Critical Race Theory Is Being Taught in Schools
A new survey of young Americans vindicates the fears of CRT’s critics.

Zach Goldberg Eric Kaufmann

We began by asking our 18- to 20-year-old respondents (82.4 percent of whom reported attending public schools) whether they had ever been taught in class or heard about from an adult at school each of six concepts—four of which are central to critical race theory. The chart below, which displays the distribution of responses for each concept, shows that “been taught” is the modal response for all but one of the six concepts. For the CRT-related concepts, 62 percent reported either being taught in class or hearing from an adult in school that “America is a systemically racist country,” 69 percent reported being taught or hearing that “white people have white privilege,” 57 percent reported being taught or hearing that “white people have unconscious biases that negatively affect non-white people,” and 67 percent reported being taught or hearing that “America is built on stolen land.” The shares giving either response with respect to gender-related concepts are slightly lower, but still a majority. Fifty-three percent report they were either taught in class or heard from an adult at school that “America is a patriarchal society,” and 51 percent report being taught or hearing that “gender is an identity choice” regardless of biological sex.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Parent poll political results

Karl Salzman:

An enormous majority of Americans with children disapprove of Joe Biden’s job as president, according to a Monmouth University poll released Thursday.

Sixty-nine percent of Americans with kids in the house disapprove of Biden’s job performance, the poll found. Only 24 percent approve of his performance, by contrast, making a whopping 45-point gap.

The poll found that 53 percent of all American disapprove of Biden, the same figure as his FiveThirtyEight polling average. But it is one of the first since the 2020 election to look into what parents think of the president. In 2020, Biden won among parents of school-age children, 52 percent to 46 percent, according to the New York Times.

Former education journalist: How I missed the phonics story

Maureen Downey:

Patti Ghezzi covered education for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1996 until 2006. In a guest column today, Ghezzi writes about the big story she says she missed while covering Georgia schools — the phonics story.

It wasn’t until years after she left the beat that Ghezzi said she realized widespread problems with how children were being taught to read here and across the country.

Her essay is part of a series of reflections by current and former education journalists curated by The Grade, an independent project to improve schools coverage. Ghezzi is a writer and nonprofit communication professional in Atlanta and also helps high school students write their college admissions essays.

Those interested in more on teaching reading should check out a new podcast, “Sold a Story,” starting today from American Public Media.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

The National Institutes of Health now blocks access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may enter “forbidden” territory.

James Lee

A policy of deliberate ignorance has corrupted top scientific institutions in the West. It’s been an open secret for years that prestigious journals will often reject submissions that offend prevailing political orthodoxies—especially if they involve controversial aspects of human biology and behavior—no matter how scientifically sound the work might be. The leading journal Nature Human Behaviourrecently made this practice official in an editorial effectively announcing that it will not publish studies that show the wrong kind of differences between human groups.

American geneticists now face an even more drastic form of censorship: exclusion from access to the data necessary to conduct analyses, let alone publish results. Case in point: the National Institutes of Health now withholds access to an important database if it thinks a scientist’s research may wander into forbidden territory. The source at issue, the Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP), is an exceptional tool, combining genome scans of several million individuals with extensive data about health, education, occupation, and income. It is indispensable for research on how genes and environments combine to affect human traits. No other widely accessible American database comes close in terms of scientific utility.

Legacy Jeff Bezos owned media K-12 climate commentary

At 34%, Americans’ trust in the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” is essentially unchanged from last year

Megan Brenan:

Americans’ confidence in the media has been anemic for nearly two decades, and Gallup’s latest findings further document that distrust. The current level of public trust in the media’s full, fair and accurate reporting of the news is the second lowest on record. This new confidence reading follows Gallup’s historically low confidence in both TV news and newspapers in June and a new low in December’s annual rating of the honesty and ethics of television reporters. Newspaper reporters received similarly low ratings in the same poll.

Girls as . . . Not Necessarily Woke

Bruce Gilley:

I am blessed to be the father of a beautiful young woman who just began university after graduating from St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic school in Portland, Ore. I’ve always been surrounded by strong and faithful women—my mother, my two elder sisters, my many nieces, and of course my wife. In addition to rearing children, they have followed many vocations, some as doctors, engineers, attorneys, investors and the like. But reflecting on the state of my daughter’s high school, I’m concerned that girls today are being offered radically limited ideas of how to live meaningful lives.

Like all Catholic schools, St. Mary’s was pressured during the past decade to get woke with equity teams, affinity groups, Black Lives Matter movements, Native American land acknowledgments, transgender affirmations, climate-change hysteria and all the rest. I found myself counting the days until my daughter was out.

Like all prudent parents, I kept my peace for the most part. But after my daughter graduated, I had an opportunity to reflect on the school’s direction when I received the first alumni donor appeal. The school president defined St. Mary’s mission as preparing girls “to bridge equity gaps, explore careers in STEM, and advocate for change in every element in society.”

Every element in society? This appeal for girls to become mindless agitators without any contemplation of the need, direction and consequences of change should scare the living daylights out of any parent. Yes, your daughter can grow up to be Jane Fonda.

As a handy reference, the fundraising letter included a header with suggested future roles for your daughter. “Girls as . . .” was the repeated phrase followed by a series of suggestions: global citizen, social activist, environmental champion, political leader, scientist, entrepreneur.

How to Get Your Public-Speaking Mojo Back

Rachel Feintzeig:

Palms sweaty, heart racing, face flushed. You’re in front of a crowd at work again, and it’s terrifying.

Public speaking is our most common fear, according to psychology researchers, and things have only gotten weirder after years spent in the protective cocoon of Zoom. Facing just our monitors, and maybe an audience count ticking up in the corner, we read from our notes and became reliant on elaborate setups and crutches (filters, Post-its peeking over the screen).

Even those who’ve managed to avoid it for months—keeping meetings virtual, heading out of town this summer—are on the hook now. Many recently scored promotions, and are now returning to oratory responsibilities they didn’t have before. Fall conferences are back on, as are blowout weddings where the happy couple would like you to give a toast. And that crowd, man. They’re tough.

Civics and COVID origin documents: “Anthony, in this case, appears to be an NSC employee and an expert in biodefense and China”

Adam Andrzejewski

Flashing back to December 2019, when patients in Wuhan were showing up at hospitals with unidentified pneumonia cases, Fauci attended the National Institutes of Health — Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dinner and workshops on December 19 and 20th – the sixth annual event for NIH staff and Gates Foundation executives.

On the morning of the 19th, billionaire Bill Gates tweeted out his own hopes for the coming year and his now prescient prediction: “one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.”

Today, we only know about these meetings, because our organization at OpenTheBooks.com, in partnership with the public-interest law firm Judicial Watch, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in federal court. NIH had refused to even acknowledge our Freedom of Information Act request.

So, for the first time, here is our exclusive release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s official calendar:

How One School Is Beating the Odds in Math, the Pandemic’s Hardest-Hit Subject:
Benjamin Franklin Elementary in Connecticut overhauled the way it taught — and the way it ran the classroom. Every minute counted

Sarah Mervosh:

It’s just after lunchtime, and Dori Montano’s fifth-grade math class is running on a firm schedule.

In one corner of the classroom, Ms. Montano huddles with a small group of students, working through a lesson about place value: Is 23.4 or 2.34 the bigger number? Nearby, other students collaborate to solve a “math mystery.” All the while, Ms. Montano watches the time.

At 1:32 p.m., she presses a buzzer, sending students shuffling: “Ladies and gentleman, switch please!”

This is what pandemic recovery looks like at Benjamin Franklin Elementary in Meriden, Conn., where students are showing promising progress in math, a subject that was hit hard during the shift to remote learning, even more so than reading.

The school’s math progress may not look like much: a small improvement amounting to a single decimal point increase from spring 2019 to the spring of this year, according to state test results.

But by pandemic standards, it was something of a minor miracle, holding steady when test scores nationally have fallen, particularly among low-income, Black and Hispanic students, the children that Franklin serves. About three in four students at the school qualify for free or reduced lunch, and a majority are Hispanic, Black or multiracial.

The groundwork was laid before the pandemic, when Franklin overhauled how math was taught.

It added as much as 30 minutes of math instruction a day. Students in second grade and above now have more than an hour, and fourth and fifth graders have a full 90 minutes, longer than is typical for many schools. Students no longer have lessons dominated by a teacher writing problems on a white board in front of the class. Instead, they spend more time wrestling with problems in small groups. And, for the first time, children who are behind receive math tutoring during the school day.

Related: math forum audio and video

Discovery math

Connected math

Singapore math

University-issued “diversity statements” are either too banal to justify or unconscionable attacks on free speech.

Tim shampling

Moreover, how could the ballooning administrative apparatus at universities that exists largely to oversee DEI statements be justified if they amount to nothing more than uncontentious sappiness? Indeed, if higher ed really is facing an adverse economic climate—with austerity looming even in its core pedagogical and research functions—then it is irresponsible to devote so many university resources to such a pointless enterprise.

Apologists for this burgeoning practice have been pushed toward emphasizing a level of generality and lack of clear content in DEI statements, even at the cost of making them seem pointless and wasteful. The reason is clear: as Brian Soucek, a defender of diversity statements, acknowledges,less “specific” (in other words, more substance-free) statements are less susceptible to the challenge that they constitute “thinly veiled ideological litmus tests.” The more obvious interpretation is that DEI statements have been adopted across academia with such passion and pervasiveness not because they are empty vessels, but because they do express a particular value system and political outlook. DEI statements demonstrate, and align universities with, a way of looking at the world fashionable among faculty and (especially) administrators.

School Choice politics: Illinois Edition

Corey DeAngelis:

Mr. Pritzker at­tended Mil­ton Acad­emy, a pri­vate board­ing school, and he sent both of his chil­dren to pri­vate schools in Chicago. By sup­port­ing school choice for low-in­come stu­dents, Mr. Pritzker in­su­lates him­self against ac­cu­sa­tions of hypocrisy.

Mr. Pritzker isn’t the first De­mo­c­rat to make this switch. Last month, Penn­syl­va­nia gu­ber­na­to­r­ial nom­i­nee Josh Shapiro changed his ed­u­ca­tion plan to in­clude pri­vate school choice. But Mr. Pritzk­er’s flip is even more no­table than Mr. Shapiro’s. Illi­nois is more heav­ily De­mo­c­ra­tic than Penn­syl­va­nia and is dom­i­nated by some of the most pow­er­ful—and no­to­ri­ously ruth­less—teach­ers unions in Amer­ica.

Civics: Emmy-winning producer James Gordon Meek had his home raided by the FBI. His colleagues say they haven’t seen him since.

Tatiana Siegel:

Meek has been charged with no crime. But independent observers believe the raid is among the first — and quite possibly, the first — to be carried out on a journalist by the Biden administration. A federal magistrate judge in the Virginia Eastern District Court signed off on the search warrant the day before the raid. If the raid was for Meek’s records, U.S. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco would have had to give her blessing; a new policy enacted last year prohibits federal prosecutors from seizing journalists’ documents. Any exception requires the deputy AG’s approval. (Gabe Rottman at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press says, “To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a case [since January 2021].)

In the raid’s aftermath, Meek, who frequently collaborated with ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir, has made himself scarce. None of his Siena Park neighbors with whom Rolling Stone spoke have seen him since, with his apartment appearing to be vacant. Siena Park management declined to confirm that their longtime tenant was gone, citing “privacy policies.” Similarly, several ABC News colleagues — who are accustomed to unraveling mysteries and cracking investigative stories — tell Rolling Stone that they have no idea what happened to Meek.

“He fell off the face of the Earth,” says one. “And people asked, but no one knew the answer.”

Mandate for Madison: K-12 reform +

Badger Institute:

What will it take to make Wisconsin among the best places in America to live, work and do business? The Badger Institute has pulled together some of the best minds in the state and the country to offer answers. What follows is a book full of ideas and solutionsabout public policy centered on how to improve Wisconsin, offering research and recommendations from a remarkable set of scholars who bring extraordinary insight into Wisconsin’s situation. To make systemic change to problems holding back our state from greater prosperity, these options offer a fast start.

Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong

APM Reports:

There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.

Why do teachers give girls higher marks than boys? Italian researchers have the answer

Taylor & Francis:

Girls are routinely being given more generous grades than boys with the same academic competences, a new study of tens of thousands of pupils and their teachers concludes.

This bias against boys could mean the difference between a pass and a fail in subjects such as maths. It could also have wider consequences in areas such as college admission, job choice and earnings, warn the Italian researchers.
Their study, published in British Journal of Sociology of Education, is the first to demonstrate that the problem is systemic—it is present across a variety of educational environments and irrespective of teachers’ characteristics.
Gender-related gaps in educational achievement are common worldwide. However, the nature of the gap differs with different ways of measuring achievement.

When the results of standardised tests, which have a standard scoring system, are used, girls typically outperform boys in humanities, languages and reading skills, while boys do better in maths. 

In contrast, when grades are awarded by teachers, females do better than males in all subjects.

To find out how teachers’ evaluations tend to favour females, the University of Trento researchers began by comparing the scores almost 40,000 students received in standardised tests of language and maths with the grades they achieved in their classroom exams.

Notes on Teacher Licensing

Talia Richman & Trisha Powell Crain:

For Dallas schools, “it’s about the passion, not about the paper,” said Robert Abel, the district’s human capital management chief. 

Dallas’ uncertified hires — who must have a college degree — participate in training on classroom management and effective teaching practices. Abel said the district is getting positive reports on the new teachers. 

Some teacher groups worry about inconsistent expectations for teacher candidates. 

A great teacher needs sensitivity and empathy to understand how a child is motivated and what could interfere with learning, said Lee Vartanian, a dean at Athens State University. A certification helps set professional standards to ensure teachers have content expertise as well as the ability to engage students, said Vartanian, who oversees the Alabama university’s College of Education.

Uncertified teachers may have some of that knowledge, he said, but not the full range. 

“They’re just less prepared systematically,” he said, “and so chances are they’re not going to have the background and understanding where kids are developmentally and emotionally.”

___

Elections and Parental Rights: Virginia Edition

Nick Minock:

There may be no debate before the Nov. 8 election between Democrat Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger and her Republican opponent Yesli Vega.

Virginia’s 7th congressional district is expected to be one of the closest U.S. House races in the United States.

7News requested an interview with Rep. Spanberger to learn why she pulled out of the only scheduled debate with her Republican opponent. Spanberger refused to do an interview.

Instead, a Spanberger spokesperson sent 7News a statement.

“Due to the Vega campaign’s pressure to corrupt the Prince William Committee of 100’s efforts and stall the debate into nonexistence, with just five days to go before the scheduled debate, it became increasingly clear a debate was never going to become a reality,” a Spanberger spokesperson said Monday via email. “Ever since the Republican nominee was declared, Rep. Spanberger has been crystal clear in her efforts to join a debate with her opponent to discuss the issues that matter most to Virginians. The same cannot be said for her opponent, Yesli Vega, who declined a traditional debate in Fredericksburg with a nonpartisan moderator. Additionally, Vega has pulled out of multiple nonpartisan forums, including with local chapters of the NAACP and other local committees.”

Vega said Spanberger backed out of the debate because of comments made by Democratic lawmaker Elizabeth Guzman last Thursday.

Parents and taxpayer supported School Board Governance

Tyler O’Neil:

Feller insisted that the school district’s legal department—rather than the board president—schedules the hearing of grievances and that she has “no input” on such decisions.

However, another board member, Danielle Weston, countered Feller’s claim, insisting that the board president has authority over its meetings. 

Police arrested Story on Sept. 17, 2021, on a misdemeanor charge of hindering proceedings by disorderly conduct. The charge dates to the previous Aug. 16, when Story raised concerns about Schools Superintendent Hafedh Azaiez, who at the time faced allegations of family violence in an application for a protective order (redacted version available here). 

According to publicly available footage of the meeting, Amy Weir, then president of the Round Rock Independent School District Board of Trustees, warned Story not to speak about “something other than D1 or D2” on the meeting’s agenda. 

Story responded: “I will show you how what I’m about to comment on is related to that.”

Congress outlawed racial preferences. It doesn’t matter if they’re constitutional.

John O. McGinnis:

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear two cases on Oct. 31 about whether universities have illegally discriminated against Asian-Americans. In both cases, Students for Fair Admission asks the court to overturn Grutter v. Bollinger, the 2003 case that held the pursuit of diversity satisfies the strict scrutiny required to overcome the constitutional presumption against discrimination under the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

But the justices can put a stop to racial preferences without reaching the constitutional question. Universities are required to abide by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is unambiguous about preferential admission on the basis of race. The provision reads simply: “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

There is no indication in its text that Title VI incorporates the Equal Protection Clause. It could have been written to track the Constitution’s language, but it wasn’t. As Justice John Paul Stevens noted in his partial dissent from University of California v. Bakke (1978), the legislative history also indicates a clear intent to prohibit all discrimination on the basis of race.

Nonetheless, the majority in Grutter read the statute as if it applied the Equal Protection Clause. Traditionally, courts read statutes to avoid hard constitutional questions if possible. Grutter did the opposite; it entangled Title VI unnecessarily with the Constitution. Courts also generally interpret clear statutory language to mean what it says. Grutter did the opposite here as well, replacing clear and precise language with vague and ambiguous language not in the statute.

A More Diverse America Turns Against Racial Preferences

John Ellis:

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments about the use of racial preferences in college admissions. On this score, a curious divergence in opinion has arisen in recent years. While the public has moved sharply in one direction, academia has raced in the exact opposite.

Take California. In 1996 Californians voted by a 9-point margin to approve Proposition 209, a constitutional amendment to ban the use of racial preferences in public employment and college admissions. As the state’s electorate moved to the left in the subsequent years, it was widely assumed that support for the ban had evaporated. The University of California evidently felt bound by the letter but not the spirit of the law, as the system reduced its reliance on objective test scores so that it could use “holistic” judgments, effectively making it easier to hide its use of racial preferences.

Yet in 2020 the assumption was tested. When Proposition 16 was put on the ballot—a provision to repeal the state’s prohibition of racial preferences—Californians voted it down by a 14-point margin. Even a state that voted nearly 2 to 1 for Joe Biden affirmed its opposition to racial preferences. What explained the split?

What nobody realized was that the entire country had become increasingly hostile to the use of race in such decisions. A 2022 Pew Research Center poll found that 74% of Americans oppose the use of race in college admissions. Even more surprising, 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asians and 59% of blacks also opposed it. The same applied to both political parties, with 87% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats objecting.

Civics: “greater Idaho”

Greateridaho.org:

Idaho doesn’t have a homelessness problem; Oregon’s keeps growing. Idaho doesn’t restrict the building of new homes.

We’d save money being a part of Idaho.

Combining all taxes together, the average Idahoan paid $1722 less in taxes in 2019 than the average Oregonian. That’s averaging together every adult or child.

Northwestern Oregon has 79% of Oregon’s voters. Oregon’s governor and legislature don’t need any votes from eastern Oregon to rule Oregon. This has led to a ruling party that ignores eastern Oregon because none of our legislators are in the ruling party. That’s why Oregon passes laws that kill eastern Oregon industries and values.

Lawsuit to stop the taxpayer funded student loan forgiveness scheme

PDF link:

Under our Constitution, the people’s elected representatives in Congress make public policy, not the President or other members of the executive branch on their own. President Biden’s unilateral decision to cancel one-half-trillion dollars’ worth of student-loan debt without congressional authorization usurps a power the Constitution vests solely in Congress. This debt- cancellation plan violates the Constitution’s Appropriations and Vesting Clauses, misconstrues and exceeds any statutory authority granted in the HEROES Act, and violates the Administrative Procedure Act. The Court must stop this plan before it dupes debtors and causes further harm.

Civics: Foreign Government influence

Against Algebra: Students need more exposure to the way everyday things work and are made.

Temple Grandin

One of the most useless questions you can ask a kid is, What do you want to be when you grow up? The more useful question is: What are you good at? But schools aren’t giving kids enough of a chance to find out.

As a professor of animal science, I have ample opportunity to observe how young people emerge from our education system into further study and the work world. As a visual thinker who has autism, I often think about how education fails to meet the needs of our very diverse minds. We are shunting students into a one-size-fits-all curriculum instead of nurturing the budding builders, engineers, and inventors that our country needs.

Back when I went to school in the 1960s, shop class was the highlight of my day. I can vividly recall the wooden workbenches and the coping saws, hammers, pliers, screwdrivers, and eggbeater drills hung from a pegboard in a neat row. I also loved home economics. Although I was a tomboy, I enjoyed working with my hands in all kinds of ways. The skills I learned by embroidering, sewing, and measuring ingredients, I still use today.

If you went to public school in the ’90s or after, you may not remember such programs, which began to be scrubbed out around that time. In 2001, Congress passed the education-reform bill known as No Child Left Behind. Intended to raise national academic standards through comprehensive testing, it decimated classes that didn’t lend themselves to standardized testing. “Beginning in third grade, the amount of instructional time in the arts, music, science, and history was reduced, because basically what was tested got taught, and these subjects were not equally tested,” writes Nikhil Goyal in his book Schools on Trial. A new philosophy had supplanted hands-on learning: teach to the test, otherwise known as “drill, kill, bubble fill.”

Most Americans Oppose Laws That Curtail Professors’ Classroom Speech

Carolyn Kuimelis

Most Americans oppose laws that regulate how professors are allowed to speak about certain topics in college classrooms. Still, nearly one-third of people — across the political spectrum — believe that professors have too much freedom to speak their minds in the classroom.

The results come from a new YouGov poll, which found that only 19 percent of U.S. adults support these laws. That number is higher among Republicans; 30 percent say the government should be able to regulate professors’ classroom speech. And 50 percent of Republicans say professors have too much freedom to express themselves in class. Older and more educated Americans are the most likely to oppose these laws, which is true among both Democrats and Republicans.

Federal Officials Trade Stock in Companies Their Agencies Oversee

Rebecca Ballhaus, Brody Mullins, Chad Day, John West, Joe Palazzolo and James V. Grimaldi:

More than 2,600 officials at agencies from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, disclosed stock investments in companies while those same companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies. That amounts to more than one in five senior federal employees across 50 federal agencies reviewed by the Journal.

A top official at the Environmental Protection Agency reported purchases of oil and gas stocks. The Food and Drug Administration improperly let an official own dozens of food and drug stocks on its no-buy list. A Defense Department official bought stock in a defense company five times before it won new business from the Pentagon.

The Journal obtained and analyzed more than 31,000 financial-disclosure forms for about 12,000 senior career employees, political staff and presidential appointees. The review spans 2016 through 2021 and includes data on about 850,000 financial assets and more than 315,000 trades reported in stocks, bonds and funds by the officials, their spouses or dependent children.

Federal officials who filed public financial disclosures, 2016-21

The future of farming: how global crises are reshaping agriculture

Emiko Terazono in London, Benjamin Parkin in New Delhi and Nic Fildes in Sydney:

From little wild orchids to the sound of warblers, nothing much gets past Jake Fiennes as he surveys a strip of wild flowers that borders a field of spring barley on the 25,000-acre Holkham estate in the east of England, where he is conservation manager.

Creating such buffer zones, known as “hay meadows”, around a field reduces its acreage, but boosts its biodiversity and improves the quality of the underlying soil. A smaller field might mean less crop, but with fewer input costs and a small uptick in yields, it also means more profits, he says.

The system of land management practised by Fiennes, and a number of like-minded farmers, is about “bringing farming and nature closer” he says. His methods fall under the wider umbrella of the regenerative agriculture movement, which aims to restore natural ecosystems that have been depleted by traditional farming methods — and, ultimately, to produce food in a more sustainable way. “Food that’s produced working with nature rather than working against it,” as Fiennes puts it.

A look at News interaction among 18 to 24 year olds

I spoke recently with a political money person who mentioned that 70% of state and federal office campaign $ are spent on television!!

Family Dinners Are Key to Children’s Health. So Why Don’t We Eat Together More?

Julie Jargon and Andrea Petersen:

For busy families, gathering together for dinner can feel like an impossibility. Children could use it now more than ever.

Robin Black-Burns’s teenage daughter has after-school activities that fall over dinnertime, making evening meals at home a thing of the past. The SUV has become their de facto dinner table.

Ms. Black-Burns’s daughter, 14-year-old Athena Burns, has dinner in the car four nights a week, eating during the hourlong drive home from robotics-club meetings. Ms. Black-Burns usually arrives at her daughter’s school 15 minutes early to eat her own dinner in the front seat while waiting for Athena.

Athena, a freshman at a private high school in Virginia, had a similarly demanding evening schedule in middle school. The mother and daughter have been eating on the go for years. Their dining table was so underused that two years ago Ms. Black-Burns donated it, converting the family dining room into a lounge.

“We wonder why so many kids have anxiety,” Ms. Black-Burns says. “Well, gee, they have a rigorous academic schedule and after-school activities and they’re eating in the car.”

Matrix multiplication – where two grids of numbers are multiplied together – forms the basis of many computing tasks, and an improved technique discovered by an artificial intelligence could boost computation speeds by up to 20 per cent

Matthew Sparks:

An artificial intelligence created by the firm DeepMind has discovered a new way to multiply numbers, the first such advance in over 50 years. The find could boost some computation speeds by up to 20 per cent, as a range of software relies on carrying out the task at great scale.

Matrix multiplication – where two grids of numbers are multiplied together – is a fundamental computing task used in virtually all software to some extent, but particularly so in graphics, AI and scientific simulations. Even a small improvement in the efficiency of these algorithms could bring large performance gains, or significant energy savings.

More On The Free Speech Scandal At UC-Berkeley Law School

Taxprof:

Following up on last week’s post, UC-Berkeley Law Faculty Statement In Support Of Jewish Students:  Chronicle of Higher Education Op-Ed:  A Free-Speech Scandal at Berkeley Law, by Steven Lubet (Northwestern):

The University of California’s Berkeley campus has been a hotbed of leftist politics since at least the early 1960s, so it is unsurprising that students at its prestigious law school have long embraced the cause of Palestinian rights. It was shocking, however, when the latest expression of anti-Israel sentiment veered into territory so extreme that even the law school’s progressive dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, observed that it could be seen as antisemitic. Although the students had not in any sense established “Jewish-free zones,” as some overheated commentaries called them, what they did was bad enough. Nine law-school affinity organizations, nominally representing a majority of the student body, adopted a bylaw providing that they will not “lend platforms to speakers” who “have professed or continue to hold” Zionist views.

Yes, you read that correctly. The bylaw does not simply prohibit pro-Israel presentations at the organizations’ events. It bans speakers on any topic who happen to support the existence of Israel — a category that encompasses more than 80 percent of the world’s Jews, and includes many Berkeley Law students and faculty. As Chemerinsky remarked in an email to students, “Indeed, taken literally, this would mean that I could not be invited to speak because I support the existence of Israel, though I condemn many of its policies.” For the same reason, I would also be unable to speak to the student groups about my research on 19th-century abolitionist lawyers, notwithstanding my decades of support for the anti-occupation movement within Israel. …

Digital Preservation Framework for Risk Assessment and Preservation Planning

National Archives

NARA developed its Digital Preservation Framework to document and share recommended preservation actions based on its electronic record holdings and current capabilities. It is a comprehensive resource that includes:

  • A Matrix for file format risk analysis and prioritization for action;
  • Preservation Plans for 16 categories of electronic records (or “record types”), such as email, still images, and software, which identify “Significant Properties,” the properties that should, if possible, be retained in any format migration; and
  • Preservation Action Plans for over 650 file formats, including proposed preservation actions and tools.

NARA won the 2020 National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Award for Digital Preservation in the Organization category, citing the team and the international impact of the Digital Preservation Framework.

“there are no exemplar populations in which the obesity epidemic has been reversed by public health measures.”

A chemical hunger:

The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.

Mystery 1: The Obesity Epidemic 

The first mystery is the obesity epidemic itself. It’s hard for a modern person to appreciate just how thin we all were for most of human history. A century ago, the average man in the US weighed around 155 lbs. Today, he weighs about 195 lbs. About 1% of the population was obese back then. Now it’s about 36%.

Back in the 1890s, the federal government had a board of surgeons examine several thousand Union Army veterans who fought in the Civil War. This was several decades after the end of the war, so by this point the veterans were all in their 40’s or older. This gives us a snapshot of what middle-aged white men looked like in the 1890s. When we look at their data, we find that they had an average BMI of about 23 (overweight is a BMI of 25 and obese is a BMI of 30 or more). Only about 3% of them were obese. In comparison, middle-aged white men in the year 2000 had an average BMI of around 28. About 24% were obese in early middle age, increasing to 41% by the time the men were in their 60s.

Essays written by AI language tools like OpenAI’s Playground are often hard to tell apart from text written by humans.

Claire Woodcock:

While Laffin acknowledges that a reevaluation of effective education is necessary, he says this can happen when looking at the types of prompts educators assign students, noting a difference between the regurgitation of facts and information discovery. However, he worries that products like OpenAI’s text generator will make essay writing a moot point.“We lose the journey of learning,” said Laffin. “We might know more things but we never learned how we got there. We’ve said forever that the process is the best part and we know that. The satisfaction is the best part. That might be the thing that’s nixed from all of this. And I don’t know the kind of person that creates more than anything. Beyond academics, I don’t know what a person is like if they’ve never had to struggle through learning. I don’t know the behavioral implications of that.” Meanwhile, innovate_rye eagerly awaits GPT-4, which is anticipated to be trained on 100 trillion machine learning parameters and may go beyond mere textual outputs. In other words, they aren’t planning to stop using AI to write essays anytime soon. “I still do my homework on things I need to learn to pass, I just use AI to handle the things I don’t want to do or find meaningless,” innovate_rye added. “If AI is able to do my homework right now, what will the future look like? These questions excite me.” 

Commentary.

Civics: Governance, lives and elections

Jonathan Weisman

In early 2019, as the Defense Department’s bureaucracy seemed to be slow-walking then-President Donald Trump’s order to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria, Joe Kent, a CIA paramilitary officer, called his wife, Shannon, a Navy cryptologic technician who was still in Syria working against the Islamic State group.

“‘Make sure you’re not the last person to die in a war that everyone’s already forgotten about,’” Kent said he told his wife. “And that’s exactly what happened,” he added bitterly.

The suicide bombing that killed Kent and three other service members days later set off a chain of events — including a somber encounter with Trump — that has propelled Kent from a storied combat career to single parenthood, from comparing notes with other anti-war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to making increasingly loud pronouncements that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are political prisoners.

In five weeks, Kent, 42, a candidate for a House seat in Washington state that was long represented by a soft-spoken moderate Republican, may well be elected to Congress. And he is far from alone.

A new breed of veterans, many with remarkable biographies and undeniable stories of heroism, are running for the House on the far right of the Republican Party, challenging old assumptions that adding veterans to Congress — men and women who fought for the country and defended the Constitution — would foster bipartisanship and cooperation. At the same time, they are embracing anti-interventionist military and foreign policies that, since the end of World War II, have been associated more with the Democratic left than the mainline GOP.

NYU professor fired for tough teaching says standards and grades have both dropped

Nathan Biller:

A professor fired by New York University after students said his class was too difficult told The College Fix that students are not trying as hard, even as exams have become easier than before.

More than 80 students from Maitland Jones, Jr.’s 350-student chemistry course signed a petition claiming “that the high-stakes course — notorious for ending many a dream of medical school — was too hard, blaming Jones for their poor test scores,” according to The New York Times, which did not link to the petition.

The Fix asked Jones (pictured) in an email interview whether the number of failing grades in recent years has been unusually high. He responded on October 10 that grades have tanked even as he had made the exams easier to pass.

“If you include withdrawals with the few F’s I give in the course, yes,” Jones told The College Fix.

Though “the exams have become easier (the top of the class now routinely gets 100 on the exams),” he wrote, “the grades have plummeted.”

“Class attendance (about 33% mid year) and office hours attendance (3-10 and only the top students) has also crashed,” Jones wrote. “Is there a connection? You tell me!”

Civics: But instead, we have one that almost invariably, and perhaps suicidally, adopts progressive positions.

Joel Kotkin:

Yet the tech elite today, as well as their Wall Street allies, no longer resemble the entrepreneurs of the past. The masters of our increasingly “woke” corporate elites are, for the most part, now second-generation bureaucrats presiding over the wealthiest, most pervasive monopolies on the plant. Controlling 90 percent of a market like search (Google), operating system software (Microsoft), dominating the cloud and on-line retail (Amazon) or 90 percent of phones (Google and Apple) does not turn executives into-risk takers but acquirers. Three tech firms now account as well for two-thirds of all on-line advertising revenues, which now represent the vast majority of all ad sales. Once paragons of entrepreneurial vigor, these firms, as Mike Lind has noted, have morphed into exemplars of “tollbooth capitalism,” which receive revenues on transactions that far exceed anything they lose in failed ventures and acquisitions.

Finance, the other pillar, has also become markedly more concentrated, with the number of banks down a full third since 2000 in the U.S. while Europe experienced a slower, but similar consolidation. The five largest banks control more than 45 percent of all assets in the U.S., up from under 30 percent twenty years ago. The five largest investment banks control roughly one third of investment funds: the top 10 control an absolute majority.

This growing concentration fosters a greater acceptance and even eagerness for state regulation. In the earlier open, entrepreneurial period, tech and even finance executives tended to a variety of views, with most leaning towards libertarianism. Historically, Silicon Valley elected middle-of-the-road Republicans—liberal on defense and culture but fiscally conservative—like Pete McCloskey, Ed Zschau, and Tom Campbell. Democrats certainly were present and competitive, but those too tended towards the center.

Subtractive Scholarship

Richard Phelps:

With each public remark a scholar may add to society’s collective working memory or subtract from it. Their addition is the new research they present in a journal article or conference presentation. The subtraction, when it occurs, is typically found in the scholar’s portrayal of previous research on the topic.

Editors typically grant scholars, and especially celebrity scholars, quite a bit of latitude in how they reference the universe of other relevant research. The single new study presented in a manuscript sent to a scholarly journal for review may be rigorously critiqued even while the literature review presented at the beginning is not reviewed at all. This dynamic allows scholars to write pretty much anything they please about the universe of research—declaring themselves to be the first in the world to study the topic (and, thus, to be the world’s foremost expert), ignoring or demeaning the work of professional rivals, or referencing only the work of friends, who may return the favor in their own writings.

Preposterous, you say?

Indeed, the practice of “dismissive reviews” pervades contemporary scholarship. Look for yourself. Access a standard internet search engine, such as Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, and enter phrases such as: “there is no research,” “this is the first study,” “little research exists,” “there are few studies,” “paucity of research,” and the like.

Here are some search engine counts I got on Google (September 12, 2022) for certain phrases:

Columbia vs the little guy

Glenn Reynolds

It was an important, if not especially proud, moment for Columbia — but it was surely a bigger moment in the lives of those West Harlem business owners, as their property gets taken away to promote the “vision” of what is, in fact, a multibillion-dollar corporation servicing the daughters and sons of the wealthy, the powerful and the connected.

Traditionally, the “public-domain” power was used to acquire property needed for things like roads and bridges. It’s still often defended in those terms, but the “public use” required for such takings has now been interpreted by courts to include pretty much anything the government wants to do with the property — including handing it over to someone else who just happens to be wealthier or better-connected than the original property holder. 

In this case, the government lacks even the weak excuse that the change will boost tax revenues, since — as Megan McArdle of The Atlantic Monthly pointed out — the property is being transferred from taxpaying businesses to a largely non-taxpaying enterprise. 

Part of the American Dream was the expectation that if you started a business, you might go broke but you didn’t have to worry about the government seizing your business on behalf of those with more political juice. That sort of thing was for Third World countries, corrupt kleptocracies where connections mattered more than capability. 

Not anymore. In fact, some of those formerly corrupt Third World countries have started providing stronger protection for private property, as they’ve realized that the more power you give to politicians and their cronies, the less incentive people have to try to succeed through hard work. What’s the point, if you’re at the mercy of the cronies?

We, on the other hand, seem to be moving backward. 

The fact is the powerful and connected — the Bloombergs, the Bollingers, et al — don’t really need strong legal protections. Nobody’s going to take their property anyway. (When’s the last time you heard of a rich guy’s home being condemned?) For those with juice, things seldom get as far as the courts. 

The courts are supposed to be there to protect the rest: The people without the connections, the ones who depend on the rule of law to keep the predators away. 

That protection has never been perfect, of course, but in the area of eminent domain it’s become a sick joke. The message sent is that your property belongs to you — until somebody with more clout wants it for something else, be it a “vision,” or a moneymaking scheme.

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

Q&A: UW-Madison’s Monica Kim reflects on winning MacArthur Fellowship

Kayla Huynh:

Kim’s research particularly dives into U.S. involvement in the Korean military conflict during the Cold War. Her unique approach examines the experiences of ordinary people caught in the machinery of war, rather than narratives of government and military leaders.

She details those accounts in her award-winning book, “The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold Story.” The book focuses on Japanese American soldiers whom the U.S. drafted into the conflict. Many of them served as interrogators during the Korean War after being held in U.S. internment camps just five years prior. 

Before working at UW-Madison, Kim taught at New York University. She also completed her undergraduate studies at Yale University and received her doctorate from the University of Michigan. Her next book, tentatively titled, “The World that Hunger Made,” explores how states, organizations and political economies have attempted to regulate hunger rather than solve it.

The states where teachers still hit students — and more reader questions!

Andrew Van Dam:

You might want to look at corporal punishment of children in schools.

— Lucien Lombardo, New York

As a means of controlling classrooms or improving academic performance, corporal punishment has an uninspiring track record. Last year, a review of 69 studiespublished in the medical journal the Lancet found “physical punishment is ineffective in achieving parents’ goal of improving child behaviour and instead appears to have the opposite effect of increasing unwanted behaviours.”

The good news is that, in most of the country, fewer than 0.01 percent of public school students were paddled, slapped or otherwise physically punished in the 2017-2018 school year, the most recent for which we have data from the U.S. Education Department.

The bad news is that 10 states, mostly in the South, don’t seem to have gotten the memo.

Those 10 states accounted for a full 99 percent of incidents of corporal punishment reported to the Education Department. About 75 percent happened in just four Southern states: Mississippi, Texas, Alabama and Arkansas.

Mississippi is the nation’s corporal-punishment capital, and it’s not particularly close. About 4.2 percent of students there were physically punished, more than double the rate in Arkansas, which ranked second at 1.8 percent. That adds up to more than 20,000 Mississippi students being paddled in the 2017-2018 school year — nearly a third of all American public-school students who were physically punished that year.

In the 10 paddling states, Native American and Black boys are punished at the highest rates (more than double the average), while White boys and boys with disabilities also face relatively high rates of corporal punishment. Girls are physically punished at much lower rates, with Native Americans, Blacks and girls with disabilities bearing the brunt of such punishment in those states.

Statement of Commissioner Gail Heriot in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report: Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connection to School to Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

“Weber Shandwick Provides PR for Moderna and Pfizer, While Staffing the CDC’s Vaccine Office”

Paul Thacker:

A potential $50 million contract allows PR firm to be “embedded at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta as part of the Division of Viral Diseases team.”

I’m still not certain what happened to Americans, who seem to have tossed aside all caution and critical thinking when it comes to medical interventions that get labeled “vaccines.” I can only remark that, to myself and many living in Europe, it comes across as rather disturbing at times—almost cultish.

If interested in further reading about the major conflicts of interest and lack of transparency surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines, I won a British Journalism Award for a series of investigations published by The BMJ:

Oxford’s John Bell is certainly an interesting figure, as he has his fingers in so many pies. Yet Oxford and the British government continue to hide his financial interests and corporate ties. Bell is also a board member of Hakluyt, a British spy firm, with a long shady past. As I wrote a couple weeks back, the Brunswick Group PR firm provides public relations for both Hakluty and British Petroleum (BP), the fossil fuel company which employed Hakluty in the early 2000s to spy on Greenpeace activists.

ACT test scores fall to lowest levels since 1991

Erin Doherty:

The average ACT test score for students in the class of 2022 dropped to its lowest level in more than three decades, according to data out Wednesday.

Why it matters: The decline in scores is the latest indicator of the pandemic’s detrimental effects on the nation’s students — and underscores the extent to which graduating high school students are ill-prepared for college.

  • “The magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming, as we see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting the college-readiness benchmark in any of the subjects we measure,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a statement

Driving the news: The national average composite score for graduating seniors in 2022 was 19.8 out of 36, the lowest average score since 1991 and down from 20.3 for graduating seniors in 2021.

“If people aren’t safe here, they’re not going to live here. I’ve had multiple colleagues mugged at gunpoint”

Joaquin Nunez:

I’ve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, that’s a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from,” Griffin told the Wall Street Journal.

In relation to his remarks, it is necessary to point out that, under the leadership of Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D-IL), Chicago recorded 797 homicides in 2021, the highest of any U.S. city.

Civics: “This is the politicisation of credit”

Mark Dittli:

When I see that we are headed into a significant growth slowdown, even a recession, and bank credit is still growing. The classic definition of a banker used to be that he lends you an umbrella but would take it away at the first sight of rain. Not this time. Banks keep lending, they even reduce their provisions for bad debt. The CFO of Commerzbank was asked about this fact in July, and she said that the government would not allow large debtors to fail. That, to me, was a transformational statement. If you are a banker who believes in private sector credit risk, you stop lending when the economy is headed into a recession. But if you are a banker who believes in government guarantees, you keep lending. This is happening today. Banks keep lending, and nominal GDP will keep growing. That’s why, in nominal terms, we won’t see an economic contraction.

Arthur Burns, who was the Fed chairman during the Seventies, explained in a speech in 1979 why he lost control of inflation. There was an elected government, he said, elected to fight a war in Vietnam, elected to reduce inequality through Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs. Burns said it wasn’t his job to stop the war or the Great Society programs. These were political choices.

You get stagflation after years of badly misallocated capital, which tends to happen when the government interferes for too long in the allocation of capital. When the UK government did this in the 1950s and 60s, they allocated a lot of capital into coal mining, automobile production and the Concorde. It turned out that the UK didn’t have a future in any of those industries, so it was wasted and we ended up with high unemployment.

Board member Savion Castro said, “I think we’re going to have to look at another referendum in the coming year or two, given our fiscal situation.” (Taxpayer supported political activity)

Commentary

Attack on ‘critical race theory’ ignores bullying of Black student – Wisconsin Watch

Mario Koran:

But documented racism provided the kindling for Kiel’s political eruption. That story started in 2020 when Amy Wempner discovered racist Snapchat messages sent about her son Armond — one of five Black students at Kiel High School.

The family’s push for the school district to respond illustrates how a Republican strategy to mischaracterize discussions of race as political indoctrination can prevent schools from protecting students of color.

After the school district brought on a consulting firm to conduct training about racism and harassment, Kiel parents accused the firm of advancing critical race theory. That movement flipped the school board and prompted Armond to transfer to another school district.

In a federal lawsuit filed in October, the family accused the Kiel school district of violating Armond’s civil rights by failing to appropriately address racial hostility.

Notes on Wisconsin Watch $ and influence.

“The Madison school district’s 2022-23 budget has increased from the preliminary $561 million budget adopted in June”

Olivia Herken:

We have extended ourselves beyond a balanced budget with this calculated use of fund balance to make this historical investment in our hourly staff,” board member Christina Gomez Schmidt said, “which we have heard is very important.

“I do want to recognize that our obligation in the next year’s planning and budget is to make the structural changes that we indicated would be needed to balance this investment and not create a structural deficit for future budgets,” she said. Some of those proposed structural changes include repurposing or eliminating 100 positions in the district.

“I know this discussion tonight is about the 2022-23 budget, but beyond this year I’m concerned about future budgets and the future of funding for public education in Wisconsin,” she said.

Board member Savion Castro said, “I think we’re going to have to look at another referendum in the coming year or two, given our fiscal situation.” (Taxpayer supported political activity)

Madison taxpayers have long spent more than most k-12 school districts, now more than $22,000 per student.

Scott Girard: It continued the ongoing drop since the onset of the pandemic, which has seen the district go from 26,977 students in fall 2019 to 25,244 in this year’s “third Friday count,” which is completed on the third Friday each September. This year’s drop, however, was smaller than the past two years, which saw drops of 1,032 and 470 students.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Adults Today Care Too Much What Young People Think

Rob Henderson:

Until the early 1960s, young people acted older than their actual age. Now, older adults pretend to be younger than their actual age, which is perhaps one of the reasons why boomers are so easy to mock. In a recent article, Abigail Shrier quoted a physician and psychologist who had told her that “Fifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys.”

An article in the Wall Street Journal reports:

Aging baby boomers are … struggling with a bunch of issues … One of the most vexing issues they face is deciding what they want to be called by their grandchildren, lest it make them sound—and feel—old … Ms. Wilkofsky has decided to be called Glamma, as in glamorous grandmother, a name suggested by one of her girlfriends. Her husband, Steven, a 58-year-old doctor, said he didn’t want a typical grandfatherly name, either, because “I still feel like I am 25.” So he chose to go by “Papa Doc.”

And this is from an article on the same topic from the New York Times:

However mightily my peers may pine for grandchildren and adore them when they arrive, some don’t want to acknowledge being old enough to be dubbed Grandpop or Granny. Such names conjure up gray hair and orthopedic shoes, along with a status our society may honor in the abstract but few boomers actually welcome.

A few months after the student eruptions at Yale in 2015, I met with a professor for coffee.

Madison Schools’ 2022 Political activity

David Blaska:

Why in hell (our favorite rhetorical flourish) is the Madison public school district promoting a Get Out the Vote rally? For a partisan election! No school board candidate, no school referendum is on the ballot. But Tony Evers and Mandela Barnes are!

Why is the rally, scheduled for Monday 10-24-22 at the State Capitol, called “Unity in the Community”? What unity? An election — any election — is up or down, yes or no. Somebody wins, the other guy loses — the antithesis of unity. Unity? That’s Kim Jong Un language. The kumbaya word is invoked to hide the partisan nature of this exercise. Unavoidably, the Madison Metropolitan School District gives away its game:

Andrew Gumbel:

Thiel’s spending has been dwarfed this year by at least three other mega-donors – Soros ($128m to the Democrats), shipping products tycoon Richard Uihlein ($53m to Republicans) and hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin ($50m to Republicans). And Thiel has some way to go to match the consistent giving, cycle after cycle, of the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late Las Vegas casino magnate.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

How ‘woke’ policies turned Downtown San Francisco into an urban drug-den

Leighton Woodhouse:

Earlier this month, old-fashioned Xeroxed copies of a newspaper article appeared across the Mid-Market neighborhood in Downtown San Francisco. The article, from the San Francisco Chronicle, featured the headline:“S.F. D.A. Brooke Jenkins says she’ll consider murder charges for fentanyl dealers.” The article was taped to walls on neighborhood corners regularly frequented by drug dealers. At least one of those Xerox copies had the headline translated into Spanish — all the better for the dealers in question, most of whom are Honduran nationals, to get the message.

The photocopies were distributed by Matt Dorsey, Supervisor for the district that includes the Mid-Market area, which is adjacent to the Tenderloin (in San Francisco, which is both a county and a city, Supervisors are the equivalent of City Council members in other cities). Dorsey’s office had organized a neighborhood clean-up and the Supervisor had handed the article for volunteers to promote. Dorsey is himself a recovering addict and prior to becoming Supervisor, he was the Communications Director for the San Francisco Police Department. Ridding the neighborhood of drug dealers is his number one priority — a goal he shares with new District Attorney Jenkins.

Civics: “Just the opposite occurred. The migration was primarily to the relatively capitalist countries such as the US, despite our lack of welfare programs”

Scott Sumner:

[As an analogy, it’s awkward for intellectuals on the center left to watch large numbers of working class Americans moving each year from blue states to places like Texas and Florida.  Indeed, this fact explains their sudden interest in zoning reform, which is (ironically) a longstanding cause for libertarians like me.]

That’s not to say that the US might not have been better off with more welfare spending in the 19th century, just that it’s not an obvious example of the failure of  extreme libertarianism. Indeed, I’d go even further.  At the (cross sectional) level, I don’t believe world history offers any obvious examples of the failure of libertarian ideology.  Not one.  If I am wrong, which country is the failed libertarian model?

On the other hand, from a time series perspective there are some seemingly obvious examples of libertarian excess, including the Great Depression of the 1930s and the more recent Great Recession that followed the 2008 banking crisis.  While those events certainly look like failures of libertarian ideology, on closer inspection they are both examples of the failure of government monetary policy.  Nonetheless, here I believe DeLong is partly correct, as while I see these events as representing government policy failure, I accept DeLong’s view that they largely reflect government policy failures caused by ideas popular among many libertarians, such as opposition to stimulus when NGDP has fallen.  So I certainly don’t wish to suggest that our hands are clean.  Libertarians are like anyone else; they often hold incorrect and even morally objectionable views.  

[BTW, throughout the book DeLong sprinkles in a few embarrassing quotes from libertarians like George Stigler and Friedrich Hayek.  In contrast, one finds almost no examples of embarrassing quotes from intellectuals on the center-left, even though if you go back in history you can find plenty of such examples on issues ranging from race to gay rights.  Whole books have been written documenting the left’s embarrassing excuse making regarding communist regimes.]

DeLong views Herbert Hoover as an example of how laissez-faire ideology can lead to disaster. The truth is more complicated. At the time, Hoover was regarded as being much more interventionist than Coolidge. DeLong correctly lists some of Hoover’s mistakes, but only those that would be viewed as mistakes by a center-left economist. Thus Hoover favored high tariffs and opposed devaluing the dollar. But DeLong doesn’t discuss the many (ineffective) actions that Hoover took to ameliorate the Depression. Nor does he discuss Hoover’s decision to dramatically raise income taxes on the rich (from 25% to 63%), or his success in jawboning corporations to avoid the sort of deep nominal wage cuts that allowed for a fast recovery from the 1921 deflation. That’s not laissez-faire. I’m not one of those libertarians that believe these policy errors caused the Great Depression—tight money was the main problem—but these mistakes made it somewhat worse. (As did FDR’s NIRA wage shock.) I suspect that most center-left economists support higher taxes on the rich and oppose nominal wage cuts in a depression, so perhaps this explains DeLong’s oversight.

But given what we know now, the cause of the Great Depression was clearly government failure.

In 1987, the NIH found a paper contained fake data. It was just retracted

Retraction Watch:

Ronald Reagan was president and James Wyngaarden was director of the National Institutes of Health when a division of the agency found 10 papers describing trials of psychiatric drugs it had funded had fake data or other serious issues. 

Thirty-five years later, one of those articles has finally been retracted. 

A 1987 report by the National Institute of Mental Health found that Stephen Breuning, then an assistant professor of child psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, had made up results in 10 papers purportedly describing research funded by two grants the institute had funded.

Tired tropes about scarcity and backwardness obscure stories about diversity and innovation.

Nick Fouriezos:

Close your eyes and imagine a rural person. What do you see?

Now hold on to that image … we’ll get back to it.

Growing up, I traded urban and rural values each Wednesday and every other weekend while being shuttled between one parent who lived in the Atlanta suburbs and the other in the rolling foothills of Appalachia.

Even with that partial education in rural life, I find myself constantly contending with my blind spots, which I’ve become even more acutely aware of since last October, when I joined Open Campus and became the nation’s only national reporter dedicated to rural higher education.

Take a recent piece I wrote co-published with Open Campus and The Washington Post about rural broadband, headlined Despite pandemic promises, many rural students still lack fast internet.

K-12 Tax & spending climate: US Homes Face Longest Streak of Energy Bill Increases in Decades

Naureen S. Malik

Gas bills in September were about 33% higher than a year earlier to chalk up an 18th consecutive double-digit percentage gain, according to Labor Department data. That’s the longest streak in more than three decades, when a 58-month run of such gains ended in September 1983. Electric bills, which rose 15.5% last month, are on a seven-month streak of double-digit gains, the longest run in 16 years.

US heating bills are poised to be even costlier, given signs of soaring oil and natural gas prices and cooling temperatures ahead of winter along with disruptions exacerbated by a European energy crisis and Russia’s war in the Ukraine. Natural gas is the key fuel for many US power plants and homes that rely on oil for heat — such as in the Northeast — may be hit even harder by rising costs.

Most Read from Bloomberg Businessw

Commentary on legacy media and political bias

Dan O’Donnell:

Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson went to a debate Thursday night and a Mandela Barnes rally broke out.  The crowd for Today’s TMJ 4’s farce wildly applauded Barnes, repeatedly booed and heckled Johnson, and whipped itself into such a partisan frenzy that it accidentally gave away the media bias game by loudly cheering at some of the questions that moderator Shannon Sims was asking Johnson.

“Audience, please,” moderator Charles Benson chided, perhaps recognizing how obvious it looked that both Sims and the crowd were doing their best to make Barnes look as good as possible (admittedly not an easy task).

As fair-minded and professional as Benson was, though, he was an overmatched ringmaster for this circus.  And ironically, it seemed to throw Barnes off his game, as the constant applause that interrupted his answers caused him to fumble many of his best lines.

This serves as an apt metaphor for Barnes’ campaign: Both the media and his fellow Democrats so protected him during the primary that once he faced actual questions about his record during the general election, he found himself unable to come up with satisfactory answers.

Notes on Taxpayer Supported K-12 Wisconsin and Madison Enrollment Declines

Rory Linnane:

The picture isn’t complete, as the count excludes homeschooling and students who pay tuition in private schools. And the numbers released by the Department of Public Instruction on Friday are unaudited. 

According to the preliminary numbers, the decline for public school districts is less dramatic than earlier years of the pandemic but continues a downward trend that creates more budget holes for public schools.

Scott Girard

Wisconsin public school districts saw a drop of 25,742 students from fall 2019 to fall 2020 amid the onset of the pandemic. The situation slightly stabilized the following year, when the decrease was 3,866, similar to the 3,788 student decrease from fall 2018 to fall 2019.

This year, though, there are 6,889 fewer public school students than last fall.

Enrollment in the four private school parental choice programs, meanwhile, increased 6.7% from last fall to 52,189 students this year.

The state uses enrollment to help determine a school district’s revenue cap, which limits the amount of revenue it can take in through a combination of state aid and local property taxes.

In its June preliminary budget, MMSD officials had projected an enrollment of 25,238 students.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Numbers and Influence: book edition

Melanie Walsh:

While McEnaney and Todd call our attention to the manipulative maneuvers behind Spotify’s algorithms, Jordan Pruett explores the artifices behind the New York Times’ famous bestseller list (an investigation that pairs well with the NYT bestseller data that he curated and published in the Post45 Data Collective). Pruett lays bare how the seemingly authoritative list has long been shaped by distinct historical circumstances and editorial choices.

The last three essays all tackle important issues of cultural representation by turning to numbers. Howard Rambsy and Kenton Rambsy examine how, and how often, the New York Times discusses Black writers. They offer quantitative proof of the frequently leveled critique that elite white publishing outlets often cover only one Black writer at a time, and they show that this is especially true with writers like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead.

Nora Shaalan explores the fiction section of the New Yorker, especially the view of the world imagined by its short stories over the past 70 years. Despite pretensions toward cosmopolitanism, the magazine, Shaalan reports, largely publishes short stories that are provincial, both domestically and globally.

Civics: New IRS Complaint Alleges “Zuck Bucks” Groups’ Illegal Partisanship in 2020 Election

Hayden Ludwig

newly filed complaint with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) alleges that three tax-exempt organizations—the Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), and National Vote at Home Institute—unlawfully intervened in the 2020 election in order to aid Democrats.

Under IRS rules, 501(c)(3) nonprofits that engage in partisan election intervention are subject to loss of their tax exemption.

A second IRS complaint alleges that billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, made unlawful personal income tax deductions on the roughly $400 million they gifted to CTCL and CEIR in 2020—funds which were routed through the left-leaning intermediary Silicon Valley Community Foundation—since those organizations were engaged in illegal campaign activities.

What are the best general math workbooks?

Via Hacker News:

I am currently studying at a non-english university in a technical specialty involving math (Calculus and Linear Algebra, to be exact). Right now the workload is 3-4 hours of classes a week, which is painfully low. And after a second year, apparently even less time will be spent on it. My English is good enough to consume math content, so that’s not an issue. As well as explanations: I have already found and used resources (both in English and my mother tongue) to self-study fast enough to submit my homework.

What actually is an issue are workbooks (or exercise books, whatever you call it). All the workbooks by which we study vary in quality and there are library shortages. The authors are almost always dropping easy exercises right after the start of the paragraph in favor of much more complex ones.

Since I can buy books on Amazon or acquire PDFs using other methods I am asking for your advice on picking general math workbooks that fall under all of the following criteria:

How has the pandemic affected students with disabilities? An update on the evidence: Fall 2022

CPRE:

This report is the second installment of an updated set of papers that assess the best available evidence on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected America’s students.

The Center on Reinventing Public Education has compiled hundreds of studies and convened multiple panels of education experts to interpret the data. Three initial reports released in 2021 assessed what we knew to date about the pandemic’s effects on students’ academic progress, its effects on their mental health and social-emotional well-being, and its impact on students with disabilities.

WILL Appeals to the Seventh Circuit on Biden Student Loan Debt Forgiveness Lawsuit

Will-Law:

The News: On behalf of the Brown County Taxpayers Association (BCTA), the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed an emergency injunction with the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, arguing that the President cannot spend trillions of taxpayer dollars without authorization from Congress. 

WILL Quote: WILL President and General Counsel, Rick Esenberg, said, “The decision ultimately rests upon higher courts. WILL anticipated this outcome, and is well prepared to advance the rule of law to the Court of Appeals—even to the U.S. Supreme Court, if need be. The President must be held accountable for his overreach of power.”

Background: WILL filed a federal lawsuitagainst the Biden Administration last week in support of BCTA, challenging the new federal student debt forgiveness program. The “One-Time Student Loan Debt Relief Plan,” announced by President Biden in August of 2022, promises to cancel debts owed to the U.S. Treasury by tens of millions of borrowers, all without authorization of such a program by Congress or federal law. The U.S. Department of Education is expected to begin automatically canceling debts in the coming days, potentially costing U.S. taxpayers more than $1 trillion.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister Keeps Covid Records Secret

Ray Carter:

In July 2020, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister unveiled a school COVID plan so restrictive it would have mandated closure of all schools across an 1,834-square-mile county when as few as four active COVID cases were identified.

The State Board of Education declined Hofmeister’s request to implement that plan as a mandate, but thanks to state health records Oklahomans can still know what would have happened if her plan had been adopted as a mandate and maintained. State data shows that schools in every county in Oklahoma would have been mandated or pressured to cease in-person instruction for more than half of the 76-week period from Sept. 24, 2020, to March 1, 2022.

What Oklahomans do not know is how Hofmeister’s plan was developed and why she chose such low thresholds to impose school closures that are now linked with severe learning loss.

For nearly a year, Hofmeister’s office has not responded to an open-records request for her email communications regarding COVID. Hofmeister’s refusal to provide transparency contrasts with the actions of at least one other statewide officeholder who publicly released thousands of emails and hours of recordings related to state-government COVID response.

Instead, Hofmeister’s inaction mirrors the approach taken by former officeholders criticized by a state open-records organization.

One national expert on government transparency said delayed responses to open-records requests are often a red flag.

“People in government, when they don’t want to talk about what they’ve been doing, generally speaking there is a reason why they don’t want to talk with you about it,” said Mark Tapscott, an award-winning journalist who was admitted to the National Freedom of Information Act Hall of Fame in 2006 and continues to cover Congress for The Epoch Times. “And it’s probably not something they want to see published in the media. That’s a good rule of thumb.”

Professors, Judges Speak Out Against Boycott Of Yale Grads For Judicial Clerkships over free speech

Taxprof

Denying jobs to students who don’t boycott Yale is an obvious case of excess, a moral failure anyone should recognize, especially a federal judge. It punishes innocent students for making reasonable choices about where to get an education. They no more deserve punishment than Judge Ho’s clerks deserve to be denied future jobs for working in his chambers, where cancel culture seems to be embraced. Perhaps Judge Ho does not mean to punish the students, but — at best — his actions treat students as casualties of a boycott targeting Yale, as if the students were products we should refuse to buy, like grapes during the Delano strike.

We should reserve boycotts, shaming, and shunning for intolerable behavior. Judge Ho points us in the opposite direction, into a world where we punish everyone whose views offend us, including those who will not join our boycotts. Strategies like these are the cause of our cancel culture problems, not the solution.

The Death of Intellectual Curiosity

Sven Schneiders:

The following critique of the education system goes beyond merely pointing out that these institutions mostly do not deliver on their main promise of teaching valuable skills. I argue that these institutions also destroy the desire to learn. This destruction is, as we will see, a real catastrophe.

Professors Only TalkMany people have heard of the “concept” of lifelong learning mostly from professors who are themselves not lifelong learners but think that it is a great idea. People who keep on learning throughout their lives do not talk in boring presentations about it, because for them it is not an abstract concept that has to be integrated into everyone’s life. They know that lifelong learning is not something that academics can persuade people to do, rather it is a natural consequence of intellectual curiosity. This is a key observation and changes the goal from “making people lifelong learners” to “making people intellectually curious.” Academics—not realizing this distinction—have been trying to persuade people into becoming lifelong learners by highlighting the importance of it; they should instead foster the natural curiosity and critical thinking of their students. This critical thinking would ironically relieve many of the same professors of their jobs—mostly those in the social “science” category.So how do we make people intellectual curious? We do not need to, they already are. More accurately, they used to be. You see this curiosity is in children. They are learning machines asking questions all day, trying to figure out everything. Now a curious person might wonder: Why are there not many more intellectually curious adults? And that is exactly the right question. We will see later how schools and universities destroy this quality in most people. But first, we turn towards the discussion of learning and mental models.

The Enduring Relevance of Classical Education

David Withun:

In an 1891 essay penned as a student at Harvard, future civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois asked a provocative question: “Does education pay?” 

Anticipating the rivalry with Booker T. Washington that would define much of his early career, Du Bois writes true education is more than just practical job training. Genuine education, Du Bois argues, aims at the higher ends of human life, the “Truth, Beauty, and Virtue” of the tradition that includes Aristotle, Socrates, Michelangelo, Goethe, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Christ—a few of the denizens of the realm that Du Bois calls “the kingdom of culture.” One enters this kingdom through an education grounded in the liberal arts—the great works of literature, history, philosophy, and science that have explored the nature and meaning of human life.

Today, a liberal arts education continues to have both detractors and defenders. One hotspot for the conflict between the two is the increasing national interest in returning to classical education. 

While this movement has been on the rise in charter schools, homeschooling, and private schools for several decades, it has grown even more prevalent during the last few years as the recent pandemic drew attention to the problems in America’s public schools. Just as in the days of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, much of the conflict over classical education is focused on questions of access, particularly for people of color and children from underserved communities.

K12 Tax & Spending Climate: Global Wealth to Shrink by More Than 2% This Year, Allianz Says

Carolynn Look

Global household wealth is on track for its first significant contraction since the great financial crisis of 2008, according to a report by Allianz.

After three years of record gains in the value of household financial assets, 2022 is likely to result in a nominal drop of more than 2%, researchers said in a global wealth report published Wednesday. They called this year a “turning point” for global wealth, amid scant signs that a meaningful reversal will follow.

Law schools are part of the problem—but they can (and should) be part of the solution.

Aliza Shatzman:

Law schools report employment data each year to the American Bar Association (ABA) as a condition of their accreditation, as well as to the National Association for Law Placement (NALP). Troublingly, law schools are not required to collect and report any data about the outcomes of many of their graduates prestigious first jobs as judicial law clerks. After law schools receive reports from law clerk alumni about their negative clerkship experiences, institutions are not required to report this data anywhere.

Institutional structures within the legal community discourage law schools from collecting and reporting data about negative clerkship experiences for several reasons. First, no law school wants to appear to publicly antagonize judges, because law schools are incentivized to maintain positive relationships with the judiciary. Second, some law schools would like to remain ignorant of the scope of the problem. Finally, many law schools intend to continue funneling students into clerkships with notoriously misbehaving judges because the clerkships are so prestigious: collecting and reporting data on judicial misconduct could undermine these efforts.

Seven times ‘disinformation’ turned out to be just the opposite

Aaron Kliegman:

At the heart of the second trial to come out of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion probe is a story of disinformation.

Marc Elias, general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, testified both during a House Intelligence Committee investigation in 2017 and recently during Durham’s ongoing probe that he was the one who hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump.

Fusion GPS went on to commission former MI6 agent Christopher Steele to create the infamous “Steele dossier,” which purported to show collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin. It contained several salacious and since-debunked claims about Trump and his alleged ties to Russia.

The federal government infamously used the now-discredited dossier to obtain a warrant to surveil former Trump 2016 campaign aide Carter Page. The Justice Department later admitted the warrant application was full of misinformation and the surveillance warrant should’ve never been approved.

The primary source of the Steele dossier was Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst who’s now on trial as part of Durham’s investigation for allegedly lying to the FBI about his own sources for the information that he provided to Steele.

Which Party Will Voters Trust on Education?

Nat Malkus

American attitudes on education-related issues are undergoing historic changes leading up to this year’s midterm elections. Typically a tertiary issue for voters, education ranked sixth in a recent Pew Research Center poll on issues voters find “very important.” A recent Harris Poll found education to be the fourth-most important issue for parents — behind perennial heavyweights such as the economy, taxation, and health care. At the same time, over 80% of parents said that education had become more important to them than in the past, and just as many said they would vote outside their own party for candidates whose education stances matched their own.

Voters’ attention to education issues may be uncommonly high, but an even more momentous shift is suggested by the fact that the political party Americans trust most on education is now a toss-up. Over the past three decades, Hart Research has conducted two dozen polls and found that Americans favored Democrats over Republicans on education issues by a minimum of six points; on average, the Democratic advantage was just under 14 points. But in March 2022, when Rasmussen asked 1,000 likely voters, “[w]hich party do you trust more to deal with education issues, Democrats or Republicans?” 43% reported that they trusted Republicans, compared to just 36% who favored Democrats.

Other polls confirm this finding: A June 2022 poll by Democrats for Education Reform found that 47% of voters in battleground districts trusted Republicans on education while 44% trusted Democrats. Another poll of voters in battleground states by the American Federation of Teachers revealed that 39% of voters trusted Republicans on the issue, giving them a one-point lead over Democrats. It seems that just as education’s salience with voters is rising, Democrats’ advantage is dissolving.

Civics: The future belongs to manufacturers, energy suppliers and farmers.

Joel Kotkin:

Yet the material economy has been hugely constrained in recent years – and deliberately so. This has become all too apparent since the war in Ukraine. Back in the pandemic era, thanks to the recurring lockdowns, the biggest winners were the tech giants and their supporters in Wall Street. Now Silicon Valley, suffering from the worst IPO market in 20 years, resembles something akin to a psychiatric ward, while Goldman Sachs is contemplating mass layoffs. Today, many green-energy projects and ESG funds (that is, funds rated as environmentally sustainable) are languishing, despite benefitting from massive government subsidies and relentless public-relations campaigns in recent years. Meanwhile, oil companies, once demonised by climate-obsessed politicians and activists, are now enjoying bumper profits, as are some commodity firms.

The conflict between the material economy and the economy based in ephemera – such as the creative industries, tech and financial services – is likely to define the coming political conflicts both within countries and between them. The laptop elites, led by Silicon Valley, the City of London and Wall Street, generally favour constraining producers of fuel, food and manufactured goods. In contrast, the masses, who produce and transport those goods, are now starting to realise that they still have the power to demand better futures for themselves and their families. Like railway workers, they can threaten to shut things down and win much higher pay.

Aristotle’s lost treatise on laughter is a serious business. Could laughter lead to the downfall of society?

Alexander Lee:

As definitions go, this is pretty thin. Although Aristotle makes it clear that laughter is a form of disdain, distinct from mockery, he does not explain what sorts of errors and disgrace make a person ridiculous, what sort of pleasure laughter confers, whether any other dramatic devices are needed to elicit a chuckle, or if any other types of laughter are possible. He probably intended to answer these in another part of his treatise. At various points, he promises that there is more to come; some later authorities (Diogenes Laertius, Boethius, etc.) indicate that, in its original form, the Poetics contained at least two books. But at some point in late antiquity the second was lost. 

For more than 1,000 years scarcely a trace of the lost treatise remained in the Latin West, beyond a handful of second-hand remarks. In 1839, however, a manuscript was found in the Bibliothèque nationale de France which looked like a summary of the missing text. Since then, this has been used as the basis for a possible reconstruction. But the manuscript is so garbled that some scholars doubt its authenticity and feel that Aristotle’s full philosophy of laughter may be gone forever

Public Good Through Charter Schools?

Philip Hackney:

Instead of the community controlling major educational decisions, charter management organizations control those decisions. Still, allowing parents to seek the form of education they deem right for their children may increase voice in part. Additionally, valid democratic authorities across the country have chosen to provide some education through charter vehicles. Given the strong interest in keeping tax policy in harmony with democratically chosen policies, most ideal in this conflict would be to maintain tax-exemption. However, to be charitable, a charter school and its management organization ought to be democratically operated in some broad sense. The Article thus suggests some ways to increase the democratic accountability of charters.

Teaching Hope Instead of Critical Race Theory in Social Studies

WILL:

The News: Academic theories underlie the important classes that our children learn in every day at school. But these theories are more than an academic exercise – they shape the lens that students view the world. This is especially true in social studies.

WILL is proud to partner with Scott Niederjohn and Mark Schug, professors who have spent their careers crafting social studies curriculum and training teachers, to provide a roadmap for educators and parents looking to understand how academic theories impact student learning of social studies.

The Quotes: WILL Director of Education Policy­­, Libby Sobic, said, “We encourage Wisconsin school districts to use this report as a guide. Students deserve the right resources and skills to analyze social studies-based subjects, for their personal growth and individual liberties.”

Providence (RI) Schools Bow To Radical Mob, Remove Whistleblower Ramona Bessinger From Teaching Position

William Jacobson:

The Ramona Bessinger story is beginning to remind me of the Gibson’s Bakery story.

A massive bullying educational institution capitulating to and becoming part of a student and administrative mob trying to destroy a career over claimed (but not real) racial sleights, resulting in a defamation lawsuit. Then it was Oberlin College, now it’s the Providence School District. Then it was David and “Grandpa” Gibson, now it’s Ramona Bessinger.

The Gibson’s Bakery case ended up with an unapologetic institution owing tens of millions of dollars and capturing the ire of the nation. There was no adult in the room at Oberlin College when it came to Gibson’s Bakery. There doesn’t appear to be an adult in the room at the Providence Schools when it comes to Ramona Bessinger. Providence Schools appear to be acting stupidly.

We covered the Gibson’s Bakery case since the inception of the student protests, through the legal wrangling, through the verdicts, appeals, and finally payments. It took almost six years in total. My gut tells me it’s deja vu all over again, but we’re in the early innings.

We have covered Bessinger’s story from inception. In July 2021, then a middle school teacher, Bessinger blew the whistle at Legal Insurrection on a new radicalized and racialized curriculum that was creating racial tension in school, including turning students and staff against her because she is white:

Yale Law School Dean’s “Message to Our Alumni on Free Speech”

Eugene Volokh:

Just released today:

Dear members of our alumni community:

Yale Law School is dedicated to building a vibrant intellectual environment where ideas flourish. To foster free speech and engagement, we emphasize the core values of professionalism, integrity, and respect. These foundational values guide everything we do.

Over the last six months, we have taken a number of concrete steps to reaffirm our enduring commitment to the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. These actions are well known to our faculty, students, and staff, but I want to share some of them with you as well.

  • Last March, the Law School made unequivocally clear that attempts to disrupt events on campus are unacceptable and violate the norms of the School, the profession, and our community.
  • The faculty revised our disciplinary code and adopted a policy prohibiting surreptitious recordings that mirrors policies that the University of Chicago and other peer institutions have put in place to encourage the free expression of ideas.
  • We developed an online resource outlining our free speech policies and redesigned Orientation to center around discussions of free expression and the importance of respectful engagement. Virtually every member of the faculty spoke to their students about these values on the first day of class.
  • We replaced our digital listserv with what alumni fondly remember as “the Wall” to encourage students to take time to reflect and resolve their differences face-to-face.

Civics: At the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Journal found that ‘more than 200 senior officials… or nearly one in three, reported that they or their family members held investments in companies that were lobbying the agency.’

Brad Polumbo:

Some Americans still believe the federal government is working in the public’s best interest. If anything can disabuse these naive holdouts of this notion, it will be the bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation that just dropped—revealing runaway corruption among the federal bureaucracy.

The Journal reviewed more than 31,000 financial disclosure forms and analyzed more than 850,000 financial assets and 315,000 trades to shed light on any conflicts of interest among more than 12,000 senior career bureaucrats and political appointees.  Its investigation found that “thousands of officials across the U.S. government’s executive branch disclosed owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies made.”

“Across 50 federal agencies ranging from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, more than 2,600 officials reported stock investments in companies while those companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies, during both Republican and Democratic administrations,” the Journal reports. “When the financial holdings caused a conflict, the agencies sometimes simply waived the rules.”

The federal employees weren’t even subtle about it. Per the Journal, “More than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.”

That’s sus.

Notes on academic rigor

Wall Street Journal

There seems to be a grow­ing di­vide among stu­dents in how they view their ed­u­ca­tion. Many are happy to take the eas­i­est road, with lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion of how that may later af­fect them. The case of Mait­land Jones, the New York Uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor who was fired af­ter a stu­dent pe­ti­tion al­leged his or­ganic-chem­istry course was too hard, is a great loss for the uni­ver­sity—and all of acad­e­mia, since he is the man who wrote the stan­dard text­book on or­ganic chem­istry. Mr. Jones tried to keep stu­dents en­gaged, spend­ing $5,000 to record lec­tures and re­duc­ing the num­ber of ex­ams. What kind of prece­dent does this set? Will other pro­fes­sors pre-emp­tively ca­pit­u­late to stu­dents who are try­ing to take the easy way out?

American Universities Continue to Falter in World Rankings, China Rising

Douglas Belkin and Sha Hua

The U.S.’s pre-eminence among the world’s top research universities continues to diminish, according to a new global ranking, while Chinese universities are on the rise, producing a greater quantity and higher quality of research than ever before.

This year’s World University Rankings, released Tuesday by Times Higher Education, a British publication that tracks education, also named University of Oxford in England the world’s leading research university for the seventh straight year.

New research evidence is at odds with views of many dyslexia advocates and state policies

Jill Barshay:

In 2019, a grassroots campaign led by parents succeeded in passing a wave of dyslexia legislation. At least seven states, from Arkansas to Wisconsin, now require teachers to be trained in the Orton-Gillingham teaching approach and use it to help students with dyslexia read and write better. Many more states mandated hallmarks of the Orton-Gillingham method, specifically calling for “multisensory” instruction.  In New York, where I live, the city spends upwards of $300 million a year in taxpayer funds on private school tuition for children with disabilities. Much of it goes to pay for private schools that specialize in Orton-Gillinghaminstruction and similar approaches, which families insist are necessary to teach their children with dyslexia to read.

But two recent academic papers, synthesizing dozens of reading studies, are raising questions about the effectiveness of these expensive education policies. A review of 24 studies on the Orton-Gillingham method, published in the July 2021 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Exceptional Children, found no statistically significant benefit for children with dyslexia. Instead, suggesting a way forward, a review of 53 reading studies, led by University of Virginia researcher Colby Hall and published online September 2022 in Reading Research Quarterly, found that much cheaper reading interventions for children with a variety of reading difficulties were also quite effective for children with dyslexia.

There’s no litmus test for dyslexia and education experts say the diagnosis covers a range of reading problems. Orton-Gillingham is one of the oldest approaches to help struggling readers, dating back to the 1930s, and it explicitly teaches letters and sounds, and breaks words down into letter patterns. It also emphasizes multisensory instruction. For example, students might learn the letter “p” by seeing it, saying its name, and sounding it out while tracing it in shaving cream.

The Remediless Reading Right

Shana Hurley:

Lawmakers nationwide are trying to improve reading by embracing a scientific consensus regarding literacy acquisition and enacting robust regulatory regimes touching every part of the learning process. For most actors, “Right to Read” laws establish clear accountability rules and noncompliance remedies. However, students who are not provided with statutory reading entitlements have inconsistent or nonexistent remedies against their schools. As a result, states do not hold accountable educators using debunked instructional methods and schools failing to provide necessary interventions. And courts abstain from enforcing their entitlements based on anachronistic research and policy. This Note introduces the new literacy science and laws, arguing descriptively that Right to Read regimes are enforceable under an implied right of action or a statutory negligence claim. Nevertheless, it recommends that lawmakers enact a public enforcement scheme that would better serve the students most in need of support.

The report, which builds on a 2019 Wisconsin Policy Forum report on the same subject, comes less than a month before a gubernatorial election that is likely to have a significant impact on the future of school funding.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

Commentary and advocacy on Wisconsin K-12 Redistributed taxpayer funds

Scott Girard:

In the Madison Metropolitan School District, the formula meant $2,068 per student of unfunded special education costs in the 2019-20 school year, according to a district-by-district map that accompanies the report. MMSD spent $80.7 million on special education in the 2019-20 school year and received $19 million in state reimbursement, plus $6.1 million in federal special education funding, leaving $55.5 million total in unfunded special education costs.

The cost can be even higher for some rural school districts like the 737-student Lakeland Union High School District on the state’s northern border, which had $3,268 per pupil in unfunded special education costs in 2019-20.

“If you increase the state’s spending on special education through the reimbursements to school districts, it helps every child in every school district in the state,” University of Wisconsin-Madison law and education professor Julie Underwood said.

The report, which builds on a 2019 Wisconsin Policy Forum report on the same subject, comes less than a month before a gubernatorial election that is likely to have a significant impact on the future of school funding.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

Civics: A brief note about disagreement in the blacklist age

Matt Taibbi:

After publishing “On John Lennon’s Birthday, a Few Words About War” last night, old friend and former Moscow Times editor Matt Bivens* and I discovered we’d written on the same topic. You can find Matt’s excellent essay here. He notes a big thing I missed. A series of ominous statements was buried in Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s recent joint press conference with Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, trumpeting the “tremendous opportunity” the Nord Stream blasts afforded to remove “the dependence on Russian energy.” A few public figures questioned those comments, but Blinken said something else that was worse. The relevant passage:

I also made clear that when Russia made this move, the United States and our allies and partners would impose swift and severe costs on individuals and entities – inside and outside of Russia – that provide political or economic support to illegal attempts to change the status of Ukrainian territory…

We will hold to account any individual, entity, or country that provides political or economic support for President Putin’s illegal attempts to change the status of Ukrainian territory.  In support of this commitment, the Departments of the Treasury and Commerce are releasing new guidance on heightened sanctions and export control risks for entities and individuals inside and outside of Russia that support in any way the Kremlin’s sham referenda, purported annexation, and occupation of parts of Ukraine.

There’s no way to know what a State Department official might believe meets the definitions of “political support,” support “in any way,” the “Kremlin’s sham referenda,” or any of a half-dozen phrases in that passage. This is why the negative precedent of government watch lists after the PATRIOT Act was important. By making lists, officials can seriously impacting your life without notice or right of appeal. Even if courts later strike down the activity, it may take nearly 20 years to get there, and that’s assuming a) the state discloses enough to make a court challenge possible and b) they abide by any judicial rulings.

Why urban charters outperform traditional public schools

Michael J. Petrilli David Griffith:

High-quality studies continue to find that urban charter schools boost achievement by more than their traditional-public-school counterparts—an advantage that has only grown larger as the charter sector has expanded and matured. For example, a 2015 analysis of charter performance in forty-one urban locations, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), estimated that students who attended charter schools in these cities gained an average of twenty-eight days of learning in English language arts (ELA) and forty days of learning in math per year. Students who enrolled in urban charters for at least four years gained a total of seventy-two days of learning in ELA and 108 days—over half a year’s worth of learning—in math. Moreover, the gains were even larger for Black and Latino students, and the performance of the charter sector improved dramatically over the course of the study period (i.e., between the 2008–09 and 2011–12 school years).

Understandably, some were skeptical of these results. Yet evaluations of matching approaches such as CREDO’s suggest that its estimates closely resemblethose generated by a random lottery, meaning they aren’t the product of “selection bias” or unobserved differences between students in charter and traditional public schools. Nor, according to multiple studies, is there much evidence that charter schools cream the best students. (Indeed, some research suggests that charters enroll unusually low-performing students.)

Emerging research also suggests that the gains associated with charter school attendance go far beyond test scores. For example, recent studies have also found a positive relationship between enrollment in urban charter schools and long-term, real-world outcomes, including college enrollment, teenage pregnancy, incarceration, and voting.

How to Protect Yourself If Your School Uses Surveillance Tech

Pia Ceres:

There are more eyes on students today than just a teacher’s watchful gaze. Thousands of school districts use monitoring software that can track students’ online searches, scan their emails, and in some cases, send alerts of perceived threats to law enforcement. A recent investigation by The Dallas Morning News revealed that colleges have been using an AI social-media-monitoring tool to surveil student protesters.

While technology companies claim to be able to prevent violence, there’s little proof that surveillance can actually protect students. Meanwhile, monitoring software has been used to eveal students’ sexuality without their consent. Low-income, Black, and Hispanic students are also disproportionately exposed to surveillance and discipline.

If your school (or your child’s school) uses monitoring software, there are a couple of steps you can take to protect your privacy—and start a conversation with your school.

Ask Your School These Questions

It’s important first to understand why your school is using monitoring software in the first place. In the US, schools are required by the Children’s Internet Protection Act to have some kind of web filtering in place to prevent students from accessing obscene or harmful material online. Schools are not required to implement sophisticated technologies that can scan the content of students’ emails and send alerts to police.

The inclusion of women in higher education is a great achievement for Western liberal societies. How is this changing academic culture?

Cory Clark and Bo Winegard:

Women are now supported and encouraged to pursue their intellectual interests, and it is clear that when they do, they excel. These societies now benefit from the many contributions of women in the sciences and humanities. And indeed, many have argued that the inclusion of women in formerly male-dominated fields has broadened the scope of inquiry and shed light on once-mysterious or hitherto neglected phenomena. 

So, how are these changes impacting academic culture—its priorities, policies, and norms—and shaping the direction of higher education and science? It is increasingly evident that men and women view the purpose of higher education and science differently, and that many emerging trends in academia can be attributed, at least in part, to the feminization of academic priorities.

School vs Wikipedia

Dave Gauer:

Wikipedia may have its internal problems. Maybe it’s too easy to make edits. Maybe it’s too hard to make edits. Maybe they don’t use all of the donation money the way you might want them to. Maybe all of that’s true. Cool, let’s fix that. Keep pressure on Wikipedia. Money can do nasty things to organizations. Don’t let them get all weird like Mozilla where I don’t even know if I support them anymore (though I’m a staunch Firefox supporter and MDN supporter).

But if you ask me to pick the most valuable thing on the Web, my answer for many years has been, without a moment’s hestitation, Wikipedia.

As far as I’m aware, it’s the greatest trove of human knowledge ever assembled outside of the great libraries of the world, and it’s accessible to anyone, anywhere, any time. No advertising. No agenda (or damn near no agenda, I mean, come on – show me a more neutral source for this information).

“Mississippi’s rise from having some of the nation’s lowest-performing reading scores to its most improved — required nearly a decade of new laws, strategic planning and fresh thinking”

David Kaufman:

Indeed, 32 percent of Mississippi students hit literacy targets in 2019, up from 27 percent in 2017 and just 17 percent in 1998, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Despite the successes so far, Ms. Wright — who retired from education this year — believes there are plenty of challenges left to be tackled “to make things better for the children of Mississippi.”

“Each year we tweak our methods, but the goals always remain the same,” said Ms. Wright, who feels that the state’s math programs are particularly ripe for an overhaul.

Here are some of the actions that helped pull Mississippi up the reading ranks.

Leading Through Laws

The most crucial element of Mississippi’s testing turnaround was the establishment of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013, which required third-grade students to demonstrate basic reading proficiency levels to progress onto fourth grade.

Championed by the Republican State Senator Gray Tollison and signed into law by former Republican Gov. Phil Bryant, the act not only set clear standards and expectations (“a critical model of accountability,” Ms. Wright said), it also set off a range of policies and legislation — such as provisions for new charter schools — to support students, districts and, most critically, teachers in achieving its aims.

Among the most notable was the Early Learning Collaborative Act, which funds specialized collaborative pre-K programs. Rachel Canter, executive director of Mississippi First, said it encourages partnerships between school districts and Head Start, along with private schools or child care, which could then trigger state funding to run pre-K programs for 4-year-olds.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

Madison LaFollette Homecoming dance ends early due to fight and “popping” noise

Olivia Herken:

A fight between students and a loud popping noise that alarmed the crowd caused the La Follette High School homecoming dance to end early Saturday night, according to Principal Mat Thompson.

At about 8:45 p.m. a physical altercation broke out between two students, according to a letter that Thompson sent to families late Saturday night.

While staff worked to deescalate the situation, a loud noise was heard nearby, causing an “immediate rush of students exiting the gym, resulting in a momentary chaotic atmosphere.”

Madison Police were called and found there was no evidence of a weapon being present. Because of the nature of the noise, some students believed a weapon was involved, but Thompson said it’s believed the noise was likely caused by a balloon being popped.

There was a large police presence at the school during the incident, and the dance was ended early. The school is working with the two students involved in the fight to determine consequences.

Phonics and reading outcomes

Bella DiMarco:

The student in Cassie Gilboy’s first-grade class stumbled over the word ‘pig.’ Instead of looking at a picture for clues, she tapped out the sound of each letter with her fingers to break the word apart—/p/ /i/ /g/. She then exclaimed “pig” with a big smile.

This fall, the students at Broad Rock Elementary School in Richmond are learning to read using their fingers to break down words sound by sound and mirrors to watch how their mouths move when they say specific letters.

The central Virginia school district is placing a big bet on an evidence-based approach to teaching children to read, one that many districts and states are embracing this fall. The approach, known as the “science of reading,” relies on helping students decode the words on the page by understanding the sounds that letters make.