Allysia Finley:

You almost have to admire the chutzpah of the teachers unions. Even as they fight to keep poor minority kids trapped in failing public schools, they plead that racial preferences in college admissions are necessary to compensate for these students’ inferior K-12 education. High-achieving Asian-American and white students must be discriminated against to make up for the educational “privileges” that unions deny minorities.

That’s the argument advanced by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers in their friend-of-the-court briefs supporting Harvard and the University of North Carolina in cases the Supreme Court will hear on Monday concerning the legality of racial preferences. “Our schools, from K-12 to higher education, still struggle to provide equitable opportunities for students of color,” the NEA laments.

No argument there—but whose fault is that? Perhaps the gravest injustice of our time is the imprisonment of minority kids in substandard public schools. Students’ dismal scores on the Nation’s Report Card last week provided another reminder.

In Illinois 36% of white eighth-graders were rated proficient or better in math, which isn’t anything to brag about. But figures were only 14% for Hispanics and 8% for blacks. Similar or even wider gaps were found in other cities and states. In Los Angeles, 62% of whites scored proficient or higher in fourth-grade reading, compared with only 18% of blacks and 16% of Hispanics.

Unions blame these disparities on racism. “Racial minorities are disadvantaged in the United States—not only by the persistence of de facto segregation in schools—but by overt racial violence and coordinated efforts to stifle recognition of the nation’s shameful history of racial oppression,” says the NEA in its brief, citing state laws that limit the instruction of critical race theory and the “1619 Project.”

David:

That’s what Twitter is going through right now. Elon Musk is administering shock therapy to a company that’s had one of the most lethargic pace settings in the industry for years on end. To illustrate, we once had a designer at 37signals who had worked at Twitter previously. This person had spent over two years at Twitter and never shipping anything. It was mockups, meetings, and then eventual cancelations that propelled life in the product group at that time. Evidence of a company pace setting so depressingly low as to be scarcely believable.

Dean Mosiman:

“They broke the law. They refuse to admit it,” he said. “But breaking the law, violating the Department of Revenue requirements and violating the Constitution are serious offenses.”

City Assessor Michelle Drea defended the city’s practices.

“We respectfully disagree with this decision,” she said. “We believe it is a flawed decision based on a narrow set of skewed data which does not reflect a districtwide uniformity problem.”

The state’s uniformity clause requires that “all property within a class must be taxed on a basis of equality as far as practicable.”

Scott Girard:

The school’s new Sifting and Winnowing Club organized two sessions for their peers to attend in the auditorium Friday to get answers to questions on issues they care about.

Madison School Board member Nicki Vander Meulen and city of Madison District 5 Ald. Regina Vidaver spoke to the first group, while Emerge Wisconsin executive director Arvina Martin and state Rep. Shelia Stubbs, D-Madison, came for the latter event in the afternoon.

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?

They won a Pulitzer for covering up the genocide of four million Ukrainians.

They reported that Poland invaded Germany at the outset of WW2.

They helped Castro take power with fawning coverage.

And pushed Vietnam further into war with false coverage.https://t.co/4Cq2AzsHC9 https://t.co/VAeCawI1f3 pic.twitter.com/Y1j8jNzAuJ

— Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) November 4, 2022

John Hindraker:

Ilhan Omar exemplifies this more vicious type of hypocrisy. She hates law enforcement and campaigns to defund the police, but when it comes to her own safety? Men with guns. Alpha News reports:

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s campaign recently dropped tens of thousands of dollars on private security services following her calls to defund the police and support for a campaign to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department, federal filings show.

According to Federal Election Commission records, the campaign spent $27,081.14 on “security services” between July and September, the highest quarter to date.

Before the third quarter, her campaign paid roughly $83,000 to private security firms between May 2019 and July this year, according to a review of federal filings.

Florian Sohnke:

Yet nine months ago, 15-year old Nate Bronstein ended his life as a result of cruel and vicious cyberbullying from numerous classmates while attending the Latin School of Chicago. The child-perpetrators, a number of which were privileged children of families named in a lengthy lawsuit filed by the Bronstein family, allegedly have officially faced no consequences. And the former Latin School of Chicago Board Chairman David Koo continues to serve as the Board of Trustees Chair for the Shedd Aquarium. It remains unclear as to what David Koo’s role is in this story, but this will come out in the lawsuit.

Beyond the allegations surrounding Mr. Koo and other community members, not only have the kids involved in the matter not faced any consequences which anyone Chicago Contrarian spoke to is aware of, a “narrative” in the community has developed portraying Nate as troubled teen who struggled to form friendships at his “new school,” was prone to emotional outbursts and generally, “did not fit in” with the Latin culture. Of course all of these comments could not be further from the truth. By all accounts, and Chicago Contrarian has spoken with many parents close to the story, Nate presented as a typical teen with plenty of friends.

Nate, Contrarian is told, cracked a lot of jokes and loved to make his friends laugh. In fact, Nate loved sports and often talked about his future. Nate was empathetic, kind, some would say even a mensch (a person with integrity and honor). Nate played basketball at Oz Park and his friends at Francis Parker, his former school, were thrilled to hear that Nate would return to school for the second semester. Regrettably, Nate’s friends never got the chance to welcome him back.

Jason Leopold, Katrina Manson, and William Turton

An “experienced” analyst working at the National Security Agency developed a surveillance project about a decade ago that resulted in the unauthorized targeting and collection of private communications of people or organizations in the US, newly unearthed documents show.

An investigation into the matter, which hasn’t been previously reported, found that the analyst “acted with reckless disregard” and violated numerous rules and possibly the law, according to a 2016 report by the NSA’s Office of Inspector General. The agency released the report in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Students of all backgrounds are having academic success in Mississippi.

Our state is in the top of the nation in 4th grade reading gains for black students!

Thank you to our teachers, parents, and students for working so hard to get us here. pic.twitter.com/7Jw3wkj47H

— Governor Tate Reeves (@tatereeves) November 4, 2022

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?

.@FoxNews had more total & 25 to 54 year old viewers than @MSNBC, @CNN, @Newsmax & @NewsNation combined in the evening hours.

Americans turning to Fox News for fair and balanced election coverage. https://t.co/QDNi5AWmq8

— RoadMN 📈 (@RoadMN) November 4, 2022

Saralyn Cruickshank

“What were they thinking?”

It was the first thought to cross the mind of computational biologist Steven Salzberg after reading about a recent controversial Boston University study that combined strains of the virus that causes COVID-19, creating a form of omicron, the dominant SARS-CoV-2 variant currently circulating in the U.S., that is significantly more deadly among mouse test subjects.

The study, which caused waves in the media for its creation of a potential “superbug,” also renewed an ongoing debate among scientists about the value of gain-of-function research—studies that artificially enhance a microorganism’s genome to give it advantageous attributes, such as greater transmissibility or virulence. The study’s authors and Boston University argue that the study does not qualify as gain-of-function research, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health is conducting a review of the study documentation to determine if that is indeed the case.

An expert in genomics, Salzberg has studied the genomes of viruses including influenza and SARS-CoV-2, and has written about gain-of-function research in his regular Forbes column since 2014. He says it is clear that the BU study does qualify as gain-of-function research, and, as such, carries tremendous risks. The Hub reached out to Salzberg, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of biomedical engineering, computer science, and biostatistics, for his take on the issue and what should be done to curtail the creation of superbugs in the future.

You’ve spoken out against gain-of-function research for many years. What initially made you get involved?

Kate Rix:

To give others a better sense of how I approach this kind of reporting, here’s an example of a story I wrote recently about a district in Phoenix where they’ve found ways to bolster the numbers of Black teachers.

The story idea started as I was thinking about missed opportunities to highlight innovation last August, while reporting about a program in Oakland, California, that focuses on young Black boys and men.

One of the program’s pillars is that Black boys and young men need Black male role models as teachers, coaches, and mentors.

There’s a lot of research to back this up. Black kids who have a Black teacher by the third grade are more likely to go to college.

And yet, there aren’t a lot of places where Black and Latino kids are exposed to teachers who look like them.

If having teachers that look like them is so good for kids, who is doing a good job of hiring and retaining teachers of color? Where is progress being made to align teacher workforce ethnicity with student population ethnicity?

Isabel Dias:

One day leading up to winter break, administrators of the predominantly white New Trier Township High School in the wealthy northern Chicago suburbs announced that “Understanding Today’s Struggle for Racial Civil Rights” would be the theme for a school-wide topical event known as Seminar Day. One of its main goals was to help “students better understand how the struggle for racial civil rights stretches across our nation’s history.” Featuring National Book Award winners Colson Whitehead, author of the acclaimed The Underground Railroad, and Andrew Aydin, co-author of the March graphic novel trilogy about civil rights icon John Lewis, there also would be more than 100 elective workshops and group discussions, some led by students, on such topics as racial microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and implicit bias. A few months before the program, parents were encouraged to attend a session devoted to talking about identity and race.

The backlash was swift and intense. A group calling themselves Parents of New Trier started a Facebook page and a website to denounce what they considered to be the “biased, unbalanced, divisive, and costly” program. They urgedorganizers to add more conservatives—including former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, who once had compared the Black Lives Matter movement to the Ku Klux Klan—cancel the event, or make it an opt-in day for students. The group even published an annotated version of the speakers’ line-up highlighting such terms as “systemic racism,” “community resistance,” and “Latinos” and described them as “divisive, loaded, biased and in some cases bigoted” language. “If your children attend Seminar Day,” the website suggested, “you may want to encourage them to consider the workshops on comedy, poetry, gospel music, or the Civil War.”

Scott Girard:

A St. Louis-area native, van Buren spent five years teaching there and five more in New Mexico before she arrived in Madison and began working at La Follette. Her jobs have included a mix of teaching English, being a school librarian and now teaching a mix of design and technology classes.

At all of her stops, though, journalism was a key component.

“I don’t want to grade essays, I really just have always wanted to be a full time journalism teacher,” van Buren said, “but that’s not very common. They just don’t have schools where there’s enough classes to be full time journalism.

“So being a librarian and a journalism teacher, I absolutely loved.”

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?

Olivia Herken:

Former Sennett Middle School Principal Jeffrey Copeland has filed a grievance with the Madison School District seeking to overturn his dismissal, even as both sides still won’t say why he was let go. 

Copeland was placed on leave Sept. 13, and on Sept. 26, the school district announced that he was no longer an employee. His grievance was filed with the district on Oct. 12, said James Dickinson, one of Copeland’s attorneys.

“Basically, Dr. Copeland is hoping to get reinstated. He would like his job back,” Dickinson said. He said his legal team was working “closely” with the school district’s attorney.

It’s still unclear what led to Copeland’s dismissal, which came just a few days into the school year. This was to be his first year in the district.

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?

Molly Beck, Alison Dirr, Corrinne Hess and Daniel Bice;

A Milwaukee election official could face criminal charges accusing her of fraudulently requesting absentee ballots reserved for members of the military and sending them to a Republican lawmaker known for embracing unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Milwaukee Election Commission Deputy Director Kimberly Zapata, 45, of South Milwaukee was fired by Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson this week after Johnson discovered she had requested the ballots. Johnson said Zapata’s actions may have been to show voter fraud was possible.

“This has every appearance of being an egregious and blatant violation of trust,” Johnson said. “Election integrity is absolutely integral. It’s absolutely essential.”

Milwaukee County prosecutors are considering charging Zapata with malfeasance in office, a felony, and illegally requesting a ballot, a misdemeanor, a source told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

District Attorney John Chisholm said in a statement his office is reviewing the election fraud allegations and that prosecutors “expect charges to be filed in the coming days.”

Johnson held a news conference Thursday but left before reporters were finished asking questions about the matter.

Neal Morton:

The teachers share large groups of students — sometimes 100 or more — and rotate between group instruction, one-on-one interventions, small study groups or whatever the teachers as a team agree is a priority that day. What looks at times like chaos is in fact a carefully orchestrated plan: Each morning, the Westwood teams meet for two hours of the school day to hash out a personalized program for every student, dictating the lessons, skills and assignments the team will focus on that day.

By giving teachers more opportunity to collaborate and greater control over how and what they teach, Mesa’s administrators hoped to fill staffing gaps and boost teacher morale and retention. Initial research suggests the gamble could pay off. This year, the district expanded the concept to a third of its 82 schools. The team-teaching strategy is also drawing interest from school leaders across the U.S., who are eager for new approaches at a time when the effects of the pandemic have dampened teacher morale and worsened staff shortages.

“The pandemic taught us two things: One is people want flexibility, and the other is people don’t want to be isolated,” said Carole Basile, dean of ASU’s teachers college, who helped design the teaching model. 

ASU and surrounding school districts started investigating team teaching about six years ago. Enrollment at teacher preparation programs around the country was plummeting as more young people sought out careers that offered better pay, more flexibility and less stress. 

Team teaching, a concept first introduced in schools in the 1960s, appealed to ASU researchers because they felt it could help revitalize teachers. And it resonated with school district leaders, who’d come to believe the model of one teacher lecturing at the front of a classroom to many kids wasn’t working.

Issues and insights:

The problem is that dumping “old-style neutrality” hasn’t made news coverage more accurate, it’s just led the news media even further into the swamp of hysterical partisanship.

It’s left them prone to hoaxes and forced them to issue countless retractions and corrections. Any story that makes Republicans look bad gets paraded around before lifting a fact-checking finger — from Russia collusion to Jussie Smollet to the supposedly racist Catholic schoolboys. 

Immediately after the attack on Paul Pelosi, the press jumped to the conclusion that his attacker was some sort of MAGA nutjob. He’s hardly that. 

Just as bad, the non-neutral, truth-seeking press does its level best to keep the public in the dark about any scandals (Hunter Biden, anyone?) and crises that make Democrats look bad — a challenge that gets harder by the day.

Truth, it turns out, now matters far less to the “truth-seeking” press than ever.

Consider the recent string of events involving President Biden.

In the span of a few days, he called Kamala Harris a “great president,” got disoriented at an event on the White House lawn, claimed that his student loan giveaway was a law passed by Congress not his own executive order, misstated the name of Britain’s new prime minister, suffered another embarrassing teleprompter failure, appeared to nearly drift off into sleep during a TV interview, got confused about how to exit a stage he’d climbed up just moments before.

A neutral press would be demanding answers from the White House about Biden’s condition. They’d be talking to experts about the grave risks of having a president suffering from dementia in charge. They’d have their pollsters ask the public about its concerns with Biden’s mental health. (Something our Issues & Insights/TIPP has done).

Instead, reporters are feverishly sweeping Biden’s rapid deterioration under the rug. Indeed, if it weren’t for conservative news outlets, the public would have virtually no idea of how disturbing Biden’s decline has become.

They did the same thing with John Fetterman, the Democrat running for a senate seat in Pennsylvania. Reporters covering Fetterman haven’t been truth-seeking. They’ve been truth-denying about the debilitating effects of the stroke he suffered in May.

Robert Kuttner:

Kids have suffered during the coronavirus pandemic in ways whose long-term effects are only starting to become evident. And the reliance on screen time, whether for distance learning or for babysitting, has only worsened things.

I am no fan of standardized testing. But as a gross measure, tests can tell you how well children are learning. According to results of national exams released last week, between 2019 and 2022, students in fourth and eighth grade experienced unprecedented declines in math and reduced reading achievement.

Schools and teachers have been whipsawed between concerns for the health of students and teachers and the need to devise some reasonable form of pedagogy. Teachers also suffered. That’s why they are leaving the profession in droves.

A more subtle cost has been on the socialization of young children. Kids born just before the pandemic are now three and four years old, and starting to attend preschool. The results are not pretty.

Leslie Eastman:

The only remorse I can sense is the panic of the progressive activists as they see the scale of the retribution for the over two years of bureaucratic bullying and media misinformation that Americans have been treated to. Being sorry for receiving the just punishment to which you are due is NOT remorse.

Real remorse in this instance would be Big Pharma executives issuing heartfelt apologies for asserting the vaccine would stop infection. True regret would be the journalists and entertainers who mocked those who challenged their assertions (correctly), confessing how wrong they were in a sincere manner. Believable contrition would be bureaucrats from all aspects of government that pushed stringent pandemic policies jettisoning any of the current practices related to controlling people…including vaccine mandates.

Juliet Chung & Melissa Korn:

The median result for endowments and foundations in the fiscal year ended June 30 was a 7.8% loss, according to a preliminary estimate by Cambridge Associates—the worst showing since 2009. Some endowment chiefs and advisers said the returns likely would have been even worse if venture-capital and private-equity valuations fully reflected the deep declines in public markets, a potential overhang on future performance.

Surging venture-capital returns boosted large endowments’ returns the prior year, ushering in a raft of expanded financial-aid initiatives and other programs despite the fact that some of the gains were unrealized.

Endowments also help fund faculty salaries and capital projects. “If this continues for another year there will be impacts,” said Margaret Chen, global head of Cambridge’s endowments and foundations practice.

Still, she said endowments were cushioned from steeper losses by diversification in their portfolios, which beyond public and private equity and fixed income often include hedge funds, real estate, private credit and cash. A benchmark portfolio made up of 70% global stocks and 30% Bloomberg Aggregate bond index lost 13.8% for the period, according to Cambridge.

Seth Gershenson, Cassandra M. D. Hart, Joshua Hyman, Constance A. Lindsay and Nicholas W. Papageorge,

Leveraging the Tennessee STAR class size experiment, we show that Black students randomly assigned to at least one Black teacher in grades K–3 are 9 percentage points (13 percent) more likely to graduate from high school and 6 percentage points (19 percent) more likely to enroll in college compared to their Black schoolmates who are not. Black teachers have no significant long-run effects on White students. Postsecondary education results are driven by two-year colleges and  concentrated among disadvantaged males. North Carolina administrative data yield similar findings, and analyses of mechanisms suggest role model effects may be one potential channel.

Karin Fischer

Public confidence in higher education’s ability to lead America in a positive direction has sunk steeply in recent years, falling 14 percentage points just since 2020.

Two years ago, more than two-thirds of Americans said colleges were having a positive effect on the country, according to a survey conducted by New America. In the most recent version of the survey, released Tuesday, barely half agreed.

Matt Hornbach

As U.S. Public Debt continues to break records, should investors be concerned by the amount debt has risen? Or are there other, more influential factors at play?

Molly Beck:

“The proposal appears to be largely more of the same with some targeted funds at special education,” Bender said of Evers’ proposal. “After surprisingly vetoing bills on reading improvement last year, a bit unexpected that there are not more resources aimed at improving not only the low proficiency rates, but the nation’s worst racial gaps in the country.”

“It does appear that Evers keeps the automatic increase for private school choice and charter schools, but that does nothing to close the large gap between the sectors,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Michels did not answer questions from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about Michels’ plans for schools, including whether he would sign a budget that would raise revenue limits, or whether he would increase funding for school districts’ special education costs.

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?

Simon Grimm:

• German academia doesn’t have world-class universities and is self-avowedly egalitarian.
• Without a clear top university, many talented students instead enter highly competitive medical schools to prove their ability.
• But, as argued here, medical school is a bad default choice for these students if you care about accelerated scientific, material, and moral progress. This is for four reasons:
  1. Entering many different universities instead of one top college, talented students do not generate and thus do not profit from local agglomeration effects.
  2. Medical students aren’t allowed the intellectual flexibility to explore ideas and projects independently.
  3. Medical school takes six years, offering no intermediate degree. This locks in students’ choice of study, even if they change their minds.
  4. Lastly, practicing medicine offers small impact at the margin (i.e., talented medical students can’t add much to an already highly advanced medical system).
• Instead, talented individuals could study subjects and enter jobs that allow them to do much more good.

Sumit Agarwal, Andrea Presbitero, André F. Silva, and Carlo Wix:

We study credit card rewards as an ideal laboratory to quantify the cross-subsidy from naive to sophisticated consumers in retail financial markets. Using granular data on the near universe of credit card accounts in the United States, we find that sophisticated consumers profit from reward credit cards at the expense of naive consumers who lose money both in absolute terms and relative to classic cards. We estimate an aggregate annual cross-subsidy of $15.5 billion. Notably, our results are not driven by income—while sophisticated high-income consumers benefit the most, naive high-income consumers pay the most. Banks lure consumers into the use of reward cards by offering lower interest rates than on comparable classic cards and bank profits are highest for borrowers in the middle of the credit score distribution. We show that credit card rewards transfer wealth from less to more educated, from poorer to richer, from rural to urban, and from high to low minority areas, thereby widening existing spatial disparities.

Math Forum audio video.

Connected math

Singapore Math

Discovery math

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet,” the report from New Knowledge says. https://t.co/XTaIV71wdM pic.twitter.com/Urh0wyYuTC

— Cernovich (@Cernovich) November 2, 2022

Joanna Williams

Education has rarely been a major electoral issue in the US. Yet as we approach November’s Midterms, the state of the nation’s schools now follows closely behind the economy and crime among voters’ key concerns. And parents are worried about far more than falling academic standards. They are angry that teachers are using the classroom to promote their own narrow political views. 

Parents opposed to woke indoctrination in schools are organising. They may even prove to be a decisive force in the elections. Parents Unite, set up by New England mothers Ashley Jacobs and Jean Egan, is one of many groups to have emerged in the past couple of years. It brings together parents, teachers and academics concerned with what children are being taught in America’s independent schools. Having grown quickly, the group held its second annual conference in Boston last week, which I was invited to attend. What became clear from listening to the stories of parents was a growing sense of anger that children are being corralled into uncritically accepting highly contested and political ideas. This is an experience common to every type of school, public and independent alike, across the US.

Many of the parents I spoke to talked about lockdown and ‘Zoom school’ as having been pivotal in making them more aware of what their children were being taught. They say they witnessed lessons that push children to see America as a uniquely sinful country, forged solely out of racial discrimination. Parents say that this stepped up a notch in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in the summer of 2020, when suddenly a great deal of the school day was taken up by Black Lives Matter activism. A similar story emerges in relation to teaching about sex and gender. Parents are unhappy at the prospect of sending their daughter to school, only for her to return home questioning whether she might actually be a boy. In addition, there is concern that sex education introduces children to provocative and hyper-sexualised content at far too young an age.

Wall Street Journal:

Ms. Whitmer says children were out of classrooms only three months, but she may be suffering from her own math deficit. Many of the districts that stayed closed the longest, including Ann Arbor, Lansing, Kalamazoo and Detroit, have large minority populations. During the 2020-2021 school year, Ann Arbor offered in-person instruction a mere 11.4% of the time, according to data-analytics company Burbio, which tracked school shutdowns. Lansing was closed more than Ann Arbor, and in Kalamazoo students learned via Zoom all year.

A study by Michigan State University’s Education Policy Innovation Collaborative found that “students in districts that did not offer in-person instruction at any time during the 2020-21 school year were the least likely to achieve a typical year’s growth and the most likely to demonstrate no growth in either year, though performance gaps shrunk substantially once most districts returned to in-person learning in 2021-22. Improvements in growth outcomes between 2020-21 to 2021-22 were consistently larger for students who received in-person instruction in 2021-22.”

In 2022 only 32% of all Michigan fourth graders were proficient in math while 71% achieved only “basic.” The reading numbers were even worse, with 58% of fourth graders at or above basic and only 28% proficient. 

Many states closed schools out of caution at the beginning of the pandemic and test scores fell nationwide. But Michigan schools didn’t reopen for longer than many places, and Gov. Whitmer opposed a plan that would have made it a priority to open schools for K-5 students. According to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, by September 2020 only 460,000 public school students (about 35% of the total school population) had a chance to return to classroom learning full time while the rest were stuck with online or hybrid instruction.

Glenn Greenwald:

The rapid escalation of online censorship, and increasingly offline censorship, cannot be overstated. The silencing tactic that has most commonly provoked attention and debate is the banning of particular posts or individuals by specific social media platforms. But the censorship regime that has been developed, and which is now rapidly escalating, extends far beyond those relatively limited punishments.

The Consortium of State and Corporate Power 

There has been some reporting — by me and others — on the new and utterly fraudulent “disinformation” industry. This newly minted, self-proclaimed expertise, grounded in little more than crude political ideology, claims the right to officially decree what is “true” and “false” for purposes of, among other things, justifying state and corporate censorship of what its “experts” decree to be “disinformation.” The industry is funded by a consortium of a small handful of neoliberal billionaires (George Soros and Pierre Omidyar) along with U.S., British and EU intelligence agencies. These government-and-billionaire-funded “anti-disinformation” groups often masquerade under benign-sounding names: The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, Bellingcat, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. They are designed to cast the appearance of apolitical scholarship, but their only real purpose is to provide a justifying framework to stigmatize, repress and censor any thoughts, views and ideas that dissent from neoliberal establishment orthodoxy. It exists, in other words, to make censorship and other forms of repression appear scientific rather than ideological.

That these groups are funded by the West’s security state, Big Tech, and other assorted politically active billionaires is not speculation or some fevered conspiracy theory. For various legal reasons, they are required to disclose their funders, and these facts about who finances them are therefore based on their own public admissions. So often the financing is funneled through well-established front groups for CIA, the State Department and the U.S. National Security State, such as “National Endowment for Democracy.”

John Conlon:

Students appear to stereotype majors, greatly exaggerating the likelihood that they lead to their most distinctive jobs (e.g., counselor for psychology, journalist for journalism, teacher for education). A stylized model of major choice suggests that stereotyping boosts demand for “risky” majors: ones with rare stereotypical careers and low-paying alternative jobs…The same model predicts—and the survey data confirm—that students also overestimate rare non-stereotypical careers and careers that are concentrated within particular majors. The model also generates predictions regarding role model effects, with students exaggerating the frequency of career-major combinations held by people they are personally close to.

Benjamin Weingarten:

DOJ demanded every scintilla of associated evidence of wrongthink, from notes and research to communications with legislators and other interested parties.

Eagle Forum called on the court to quash the subpoena, arguing not only that complying with it would be excessively costly and complex and that its work was irrelevant to the case — it also threatened Americans’ most fundamental rights.

Eagle Forum’s volunteer general counsel, Margaret Clarke, said that in 45 years advocating for legislation, neither her organization nor its affiliates had ever been subpoenaed for their work. If enforced, she wrote in an affidavit, the subpoena “will have a chilling effect on historically protected Constitutional rights and legislative advocacy.”

The group’s executive director, Becky Gerritson, came to national fame for her impassioned 2013 testimony before Congress about the IRS’s targeting of the Wetumpka Tea Party she then led.

Now combating the apparent malice of another federal agency, she wrote in an affidavit that DOJ’s subpoena was “a form of government harassment and retaliation for simple communications with the public” and “elected officials to carry out our lawful purpose.”

Amid Eagle Forum’s objection to the subpoena and blowback from numerous supportive organizations via amicus briefs, the DOJ backed down. In early October, it told the court it had “narrowed” its mass of requests to one: medical studies or literature referenced in a single section of the law.

Michael Sender:

More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream, particularly on the left, is just beginning to realize that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.

But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn on the mainstream left, one must read between the lines of how their narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two years.

The narrative now goes something like this: Lockdowns never really happened, because governments never actually locked people in their homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if there were any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns; and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict; but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.

Wall Street Journal:

he Supreme Court Justices exhibited supreme patience Monday in hearing nearly four hours of argument in a pair of major cases involving race and college admissions. But the argument was worth the time, because it exposed some unhappy truths about those who believe in the necessity of discriminating by race.

This means revisiting Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), which said schools could use race as one factor in admissions in the name of achieving diversity. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor also famously wrote in Grutter that the use of race to achieve diversity probably wouldn’t be needed in 25 years.

That was 19 years ago, and on Monday several Justices pressed the question about when racial preferences would end. Seth Waxman, Harvard’s advocate, admitted that the school is trying hard to get to a race-neutral future but sees no end in sight for preferences.

Elizabeth Prelogar, the U.S. Solicitor General and an impressive advocate, said explicitly that “I just don’t think it’s tenable to read” Grutter to say the Court had suggested a timetable. She said using race the way the schools do could continue as long as their interest in diversity is “compelling.”

The clear implication is that the schools can discriminate by race for years to come. And anyone who knows anything about the men and women who run today’s universities, and how they believe racism is “systemic” in American life, knows that the schools will never stop using preferences.

David Langford, Superintendent, Ingenium Charter Schools:

In our January 2019 interview podcast, his 8th session with Tripp, Superintendent David Langford reflects on the state of education, the system, and how its set up, including various ways in how schools are working to move from “theory to practice” in their understanding and application of the Deming philosophy.

Highlights include:

The short term thinking which Dr. Deming warned us of, whether looking at profit or test scores

Longer term strategies are sacrificed for short term results

People get creative when driven to “show the numbers”

Alan Dershowitz:

Justice Samuel Alito stated last week that the leak of his draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization endangered the justices’ lives: “It gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us.” A man who was found heavily armed outside the home of Justice Brett Kavanaugh two weeks before the court decided Dobbs has been charged with attempted murder.

The leak constituted “a grave betrayal of trust,” Justice Alito added. So why hasn’t the perpetrator been identified and punished?

One reason is that Chief Justice John Roberts assigned the Supreme Court Marshal’s Office to conduct the investigation. The marshal’s office oversees the Supreme Court police, which provides security for the building and the justices. But it is totally unequipped to conduct an investigation of this magnitude. It has no authority to issue subpoenas or to immunize witnesses to testify. The tools at its disposal are limited to questioning possible witnesses and asking to review telephone and computer records. There is no guarantee that an intensive investigation would find the leaker or leakers, but it is nearly certain that they won’t be found without one. They have a strong incentive not to come forward: No one could trust a lawyer who engineered or collaborated in such a breach.

Why did the chief justice assign the marshal’s office to conduct this investigation? That raises another question: Is the court fully committed to uncovering the truth?

“Perhaps the gravest injustice of our time is the imprisonment of minority kids in substandard public schools… The real culprits are union collective-bargaining agreements and state laws that put teachers unions’ interests ahead of students’.”https://t.co/P2Qj2XTUA6

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) November 1, 2022

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?

Scott Girard:

The new budget totals $597.9 million in spending, up from the $515.7 million spent in 2021-22 and the $482.9 million the year prior. It’s also up from the June preliminary budget, which called for $561.3 million in spending.

The tax rate, however, is down to $9.97 per $100,000 of property value from the $11.40 rate in 2021-22 amid an increase in the tax base and a boost in state aid. That means a reduction of $62.16 on an “average home” in the district.

A significant piece of the spending increase from previous years comes from $42.9 million in federal COVID-19 relief funding plus additional one-time funding from the state and for specific initiatives like mental health.

“We made some really intelligent and thoughtful investments in our buildings, in the safety of our students and our staff using those one-time resources,” board president Ali Muldrow said. “However, in the long-term, I think we have a lot of work ahead of us in that one-time resources have really set us up to be incredibly agile in terms of our next budgets.”

A major initiative in the months since the June preliminary budget vote gave a $5 an hour raise to hundreds of hourly staff members in the district. Board members also expressed an interest in extending that raise to custodial staff, who have asked for such a move since it was given to other hourly staff, but they weren’t able to include it in this version of the budget given its complexity.

Taxpayers are spending $23,449 per student (25,497 enrolled via the DPI website).

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?

Olivia Herken:

“This is a very undesirable job. A lot of people try to make it seem like it’s not that difficult until you have to wrap a garbage bag around your hand and fish some kid’s defecation out of a toilet or out of a urinal,” he said.

He described other unpleasant tasks, like scraping tampons off bathroom ceilings, mopping up food after a rowdy lunch hour or unclogging a toilet after a student has shoved an entire roll of toilet paper down the drain.

“Our health is constantly at risk,” he said, adding that was especially true during the height of the pandemic. “You have no idea how afraid we all were.”

District spokesperson Tim LeMonds said that the support staff who received the $5 bump — educational assistants, school security assistants, clerical staff and food service workers — were the district’s lowest-paid groups.

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?

Docs show Facebook and Twitter closely collaborating w/ Dept of Homeland Security, FBI to police “disinfo.” Plans to expand censorship on topics like withdrawal from Afghanistan, origins of COVID, info that undermines trust in financial institutions. https://t.co/Zb3zmI1dQF

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) October 31, 2022

William Jacobson:

On Monday, October 31, 2022, the United States Supreme Court will hear oral argument in cases challenging racial preferences in university admissions at Harvard and UNC. Typically referred to as “Affirmative Action,” the universities argue that they must take race into account in making admissions decisions in order to achieve the racially “diverse” student body they say advances their educational missions.

The impact of giving racial preferences is stark, with students of Asian descent losing slots and having to jump hurdles relative to favored racial groups. From the challenger’s Petition asking the Court to take the Harvard case:

Kate Kaye:

“Dr. Schmidt has worked across many presidential administrations and with members of congress on both sides of the aisle – his work has and remains bipartisan and focused on supporting the country,” said Tara Rigler, a spokesperson for Schmidt’s new think tank, Special Competitive Studies Project. “He has been asked to serve on federal advisory boards to provide his advice on pressing technology issues before the country. In line with every other private citizen who has, and does serve on these federally appointed boards, he is an advisor, not a federal decision maker.”

The threats posed by an AI-dominant China — from AI-supercharged cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns to invasive surveillance tech deployed to monitor marginalized populations and development of fully autonomous weapons — should not be ignored. However, Schmidt’s proposed solution hinges on allocating massive government spending to unregulated AI, some of which could benefit companies he has connections to or directly invests in.

“Conflict of interest [concerns are] right at the center of this — not only with his venture investments,” said Merve Hickok, senior research director and chairwoman of the board for the Center for AI and Digital Policy, a nonprofit AI policy and human rights watchdog.

In response, Rigler said that Schmidt had “complied with all Federal ethics requirements during his service on the DIB and NSCAI.”

To assist in disseminating his ideas in Washington, Schmidt has cultivated a cadre of influential insiders. “When I hear people who know, like Eric, talking about the race with China on the technological side, we’d better get our act together,” former Secretary of State and frequent media commentator Condoleezza Rice said at a D.C. event held in September by SCSP.

Schmidt has spread his message for years among people with direct influence over national security policy and spending.

Ira Stoll:

The teachers unions are paying to mislead voters about a Massachusetts ballot question that would raise taxes to pay for education and transportation.

Two mailings received by a registered voter in the state make false claims about the initiative while disclosing in small print that they are paid for by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, American Federation of Teachers Solidarity Fund, and American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts. All five of the “top donors” listed on the mailings that include the factually inaccurate claims are teacher unions or related entities. When we last checked, the unions had put $15.8 million into the tax-increase campaign.

One mailing claims, “The Fair Share Amendment only taxes 4 cents on every dollar earned OVER $1 million a year. For the 1% who make that much money, the first million is free.” It’s not accurate that the first million is “free.” The first million dollars in income is already subject to state and federal taxes. Someone who earns $1 million in 2023 would be subject to 37 percent federal income tax on all income above $578,125 for a single filer, along with an additional 3.8 percent ObamaCare tax on investment income and a 5 percent state income tax. These million dollar earners, in other words, are already facing a marginal tax rate of more than 40 percent.

Helen Santoro

Both cases have been spearheaded by activist Edward Blum, who created Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), an organization that represents “more than 20,000 students, parents, and others who believe that racial classifications and preferences in college admissions are unfair”. As the plaintiff in both cases, SFFA argues that, by considering race in their admissions, Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill are discriminating against certain applicants, such as Asian American people. This, the group says, violates a clause in the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution prohibiting states from denying anyone equal protection of the law, as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Harvard and UNC-Chapel Hill, however, argue that affirmative action has helped them to even out the playing field for Black and Hispanic students who have not had the same educational opportunities as others because of systemic racism in the United States.

Joanne Jacobs:

In the 1970s, Ohio University employed two faculty members for every non-teaching/non-research staffer, Vedder writes. Today, administrators outnumber faculty — and inflation-adjusted tuition costs have more than tripled. “Students are paying to finance an army of apparatchiks who neither teach nor expand the frontiers of knowledge.”

He especially objects to “diversity, equity and inclusion” bureaucrats who “reduce freedom of campus expression that is the heart of the intellectually examined life.”

Research is a legitimate university function, but much of it is a pointless waste of resources, Vedder writes. Professors teach less to produce journal articles nobody will read. It would make more sense “to expect all faculty members to carry a full teaching load but to reduce it if outside parties want their research badly enough to buy their time.”

College sports is a money loser at most universities, writes Vedder. There’s no reason “ball-throwing, batting, and kicking contests” have to be affiliated w

Greg Piper:

Shortly before Musk took ownership Thursday night, Twitter slapped an “unsafe” warning on a JTN report about a former Democratic candidate’s sworn affidavit alleging years of illegal ballot harvesting in politically important central Florida, which prompted a state criminal probe.

The warning tells readers the “misleading” content “could lead to real-world harm.” It’s not inherently tied to the report’s web address, but only displays as an interstitial when shared by certain accounts, including those of JTN founder John Solomon and Upward News.

This happened. The Elections Commisariat of the State of California – and many other state government friends controlled by Democrats – *instructed Twitter* to ban @dc_draino

And it did.

Did you know this? pic.twitter.com/CWooKtVU3C

— Ron Coleman (@RonColeman) July 29, 2021

Steven Walters:

Public school funding in Wisconsin is at a political crossroads, with the two candidates for governor disagreeing over how state aid should be distributed in the future.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers wants $2 billion more spent on public schools, noting a projected $4.3 billion budget surplus by mid-2023.

His Republican challenger, Tim Michels, vows to “spend as much money as any governor” on K-12 schools, but would do that by removing all limits on the school choice program so that any parent could use a state-issued voucher to send their child to a private school.

In this important controversy, this statistic is important: State government will collect $20.8 billion in general-fund taxes — corporate and personal income taxes, sales taxes, cigarette, alcohol and utility taxes — this year. Of that, $6.6 billion — or almost one-third — will go for K-12 public schools.

Evers also directed $90 million in federal Covid relief to public schools, bringing total state aid for public schools to $6.7 billion this year, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. That’s an 11 percent increase over three years.

Four issues frame the controversy over state aid to K-12 schools: