I recently looked at major index funds and state treasuries that have been backing away from investing based on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) policies.
Over on the other side of the Atlantic, however, European bureaucrats have been far warmer to implementing ESG, which drives companies away from fossil fuels whether or not such a move is practical for their operations.
Europe may now also be cooling toward ESG, in the light of energy realities that cannot be ignored.
At a recent mathematics education conference in Nashville, Tennessee, scholars pushed a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion agenda. Campus Reform obtained exclusive audio and images from the meeting.
The conference was the 44th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, held from Nov. 17 – Nov. 20.
An entire section of the academic gathering was dedicated to “Equity and Justice” in mathematics education.
Papers presented under this heading included “Leveraging Equity and Civic Empathy through Community-Based Mathematical Modeling,” “Discourses of Justice,” “Equitable Teaching Practices: Developing Emergent Bilinguals’ Positive Mathematical Identities,” and “Whiteness in Fearmongering Towards Mathematics Education Reform.”
In one image, a presentation slide can be seen with the term “Equipartitioning,” giving an example of a practice problem involving equitably distributing sandwiches brought on a field trip.
You have many choices in Chicago for your daughter.
I asked Open AI to help me with answers to your question and also to generate related images (note: these are Open AI’s responses verbatim to the questions asked, except the italics):
Why should I send my child, who uses the pronouns ze/zir/zirself and robs people on the red line train, to the Latin School of Chicago?
You should send your child to the Latin School of Chicago because it offers a supportive, inclusive environment for all students, regardless of their identity. The school’s commitment to diversity and inclusion is evident in its mission statement (not to mention its commitment to anti-bullying and a spoils system for certain administrators), which states that it seeks to cultivate an open and welcoming community for students from a variety of backgrounds and experiences.
Furthermore, the school has a strong community of faculty and students who are dedicated to being an inclusive, safe, and supportive environment for all students. It is possible that the school could provide your child with the additional guidance and support they may need in order to address any issues that may be contributing to their behavior on the Red Line train.
When Parker Noland launched his trash-hauling business at age 20 in the summer of 2021, he was excited about the opportunities that lay before him. After taking out a loan from a local bank, the Montana native bought a truck and some dumpsters and got to work promoting his services. The business plan was simple: he would deliver dumpsters to construction sites looking to get rid of debris and then transport the dumpsters to the county dump once they were full.
Things quickly got complicated for Noland, however. Though he had registered his business, gotten the proper insurance, and complied with all public health and safety standards, he was still missing one thing, a Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity. As a result, right when he was about to get his business off the ground he was given a cease and desist order by the Montana Public Service Commission, the agency responsible for administering the Certificate law.
Noland applied for the Certificate shortly thereafter on September 8, 2021, but his troubles were just getting started. Two national garbage companies—his would-be competitors—protested his application, which they are allowed to do under the law. The companies issued various demands, such as data requests, and Noland’s legal expenses to fight the protests were soon thousands of dollars and counting.
Karlstack:
Over next 6 months I published 11 more articles about Harvard’s blatant corruption:
This claim is neither new nor persuasive. Democrat Joy Hofmeister called school choice a “rural school killer” in her unsuccessful bid for Oklahoma governor this November. Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke likewise failed in his attempt to campaign against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s support for school choice. This week Iowa Senate Minority Leader Zach Wahls resorted to the same tactic, calling school choice “an existential threat” to rural public schools.
These same politicians also claim that rural constituents wouldn’t benefit from school choice because the local public school is their only option. These arguments can’t both be true. If rural families didn’t have any other options, public schools wouldn’t suffer. And if rural public schools are as great as the teachers unions say they are, they would have no need to worry about a little competition.
Representing the state as Miss Wisconsin, Stanke, of Wausau, wowed the judges in Connecticut with her classical violin performance and advocacy for clean energy.
Beating out 50 other candidates, Stanke is only the third Miss Wisconsin to win Miss America in the contest’s 101-year history. Terry Meeuwsen, of De Pere, became the first Miss Wisconsin to win Miss America 50 years ago. Laura Kaeppeler, from Kenosha, was the last Miss America to represent Wisconsin in 2012.
Designed as a how-to guide for progressive urban parents to more effectively coddle and mold progressive young minds, The Official Parker Handbook is already receiving rave acclaim and early praise from Party members who have read the book prior to publication.
Dr. Anthony Fauci: “There is a misplaced perception about people’s individual right to make a decision that supersedes societal safety, except at Francis Parker School. 💉”
Mayor Lori Lightfoot: “Diversity and inclusion is imperative … This is exactly why I’m being intentional about prioritizing requests from people of color and the #buttplugdean. 🌈”
Ibrahim Kendi: “The life of racism cannot be separated from the life of capitalism … In order to truly be anti-racist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist. I endorse The Official Parker Handbook for prioritizing dildonomics in their curriculum. 🇨🇳”
Yoel Roth: “Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility, or worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr – including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults participating in extra curricular activities inside Francis Parker. 🍆”
In a prestigious medical journal, doctors from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children have laid out policies and procedures for administering medically assisted death to children, including scenarios where the parents would not be informed until after the child dies.
The article appears just three months before the Canadian Council of Academies is due to report to Parliament on the medical consensus about extending voluntary euthanasia in circumstances currently forbidden by law. The Canadian Council of Academies is specifically looking at extending so-called assisted dying to patients under 18, psychiatric patients and patients who have expressed a preference for euthanasia before they were rendered incapable by Alzheimer’s or some other disease.
The Sept. 21 paper written by Sick Kids doctors, administrators and ethicists was published in the British Medical Journal’s J Med Ethics and backed by the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics.
In a flowchart that outlines how a medically induced death would occur at Sick Kids, authors Carey DeMichelis, Randi Zlotnik Shaul and Adam Rapoport do not mention conversation with family or parents about how the child dies until after the death occurs in the “reflection period.”
Patient confidentiality governs the decision about whether or not to include parents in a decision about an assisted death, the authors said. If capable minors under the age of 18 stipulate they don’t want their parents involved, doctors and nurses must respect the patients’ wishes.
With education options galore for parents and students, each choice by a family makes a statement. It doesn’t take too many choices — a few students gained, a few students lost — to affect which schools are thriving and which are not, how deep a school’s staff is and whether some classes and extracurriculars are offered.
And 20,000 students lost? That’s a sea change.
A good way to get a handle on the decline is to ask: Where did all the kids go?
Here are two answers:
Fewer kids. A smaller but important change is that the universe of kids in Milwaukee is shrinking. Fourteen years ago, the number of children getting publicly funded education was 115,522. That includes conventional schools, as well as partnership schools, charter schools and more. That number rose to between 119,000 and 121,000 in four school years, beginning in September 2012. Then it began declining. It was 114,184 in fall 2020; it was 111,333 in fall 2021; and it was 109,934 in fall 2022, a decline of almost 10% since a peak of 120,895 eight years ago, according to data I’ve been tracking for several years.
BBC:
A Sanskrit grammatical problem which has perplexed scholars since the 5th Century BC has been solved by a University of Cambridge PhD student.
Rishi Rajpopat, 27, decoded a rule taught by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around 2,500 years ago.
Sanskrit is only spoken in India by an estimated 25,000 people out of a population of more than one billion, the university said.
Mr Rajpopat said he had “a eureka moment in Cambridge” after spending nine months “getting nowhere”.
“I closed the books for a month and just enjoyed the summer – swimming, cycling, cooking, praying and meditating,” he said.
For several years, Neustar knowingly sold sensitive internet metadata which it presumably obtained from unwitting consumers. Some ofthese consumers may have been promised that their data would not be sold to third parties. Neustar did not take sufficient steps to warn consumers
that it no longer intended to honor these promises, and as such, appears to have engaged in business practices substantially similar to those that the FTC has previously argued violated the FTC Act.
The most terrifying podcast I listened to so far this year was not about the death of American democracy or even Jordan Peele’s new horror offering (though more of that at a later date). Rather, it was a podcast about reading.
Sold a Story, Emily Hanford’s new six-parter highlighting how American kids have been learning – or more accurately, not learning – to read for decades, is an investigation into why teachers, parents, and governments came to believe in a methodology that she says caused harm to a generation of children.
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?
When India was at war with Pakistan in 1965, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri asked Indians to miss a meal on Mondays. The next year, a minister dug up his five-acre backyard in the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi to sow wheat – the same spot where Home Minister Amit Shah now lives. And America, busy with the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement, was plotting a giant Revolution in India.
As Indians chanted “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan”, scientists from the Pusa Institute anxiously waited at Mumbai’s docks for a consignment of magic seeds that would end hunger.
Such was its power that by 1968, the US-aided Green Revolution had transformed India from a ship-to-mouth shortage economy to a country that shut down schools and cinema theatres to store surplus food.
Half a century later, India attempted another farm revolution in 2020. But this time, the farmers themselves took to the streets in protest and won.
India won its war against hunger with its combined arsenal of science, diplomacy, and political courage.
The man who deployed these weapons was C. Subramaniam. Selected especially to be the Union Minister of Food and Agriculture in 1964 during a food crisis, Subramaniam faced an uphill battle. Time was running out for India — in a 1961 report, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization predicted that India’s population would outstrip its food production in five years.
A survey that will help guide safety and student wellness work in the Madison Metropolitan School District is open for staff, parents and students until 11:59 p.m. Monday.
The Madison School Board’s Safety and Student Wellness Ad Hoc Committee met Thursday for the 16th time to discuss progress on the subject. The group was formed in the spring in response to a series of safety concerns last school year.
So far, the three-question survey has received about 6,500 responses, committee co-chair and Memorial High School senior Lavenia Vulpal said. District spokesperson Tim LeMonds called it a “very, very good response” level.
“Please encourage people you know to get online and fill it out,” Vulpal told committee members. “We are still looking for ways to reach students, staff and parents.”
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?
Among the vanished stories: Spencer’s painstaking reconstruction of a 1959 plane crash that haunted central Virginia; a prizewinning investigation of the conflicts of interest driving up costs for the region’s water management program; a deeply reported feature on a 1982 fraternity road trip gone wrong and its devastating ripple effects over a quarter-century; and all the reader comments posted below each story, which in the years before social media could evoke the voice of the Charlottesville community, former staffers say.
A truly motivated researcher might find the dusty print copies of these articles in a library (or Spencer’s attic). But an average reader curious to learn about those subjects won’t find any of these stories when searching the web.
“Journalism is supposed to be the rough first draft of history,” said Sean Tubbs, a journalist who relied on the Hook’s old stories to build a database for the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society. “When someone ostensibly paid to kill the archive, they cut off a direct link for the public to learn from these articles.”
It’s a bit of “a murder mystery,” said McNair, who joined forces with Spencer, Stuart and other old colleagues from the Hook this summer to investigate what happened.
As catalogued on a Harvard University-hosted database called Lumen, the requests continued through late August and targeted 18 different webpages that reference alleged violent incidents at U-Va. The vast majority of the pages have one common denominator: the Ofori case.
There are many public and private organizations that host restorative justice programs inside of Wisconsin prisons.
In 2006, the Prison Ministry Project out of First Congregational, located next to Camp Randall, formed a restorative justice program.
Restorative justice operates in a few different ways. Most programs bring together a victim of a crime with the perpetrator of that crime and ask them to engage in a healing dialogue. Those sessions focus on the effect the crime had on the victim, as well as their family and friends, the community and the perpetrator.
“The gold standard of restorative justice is usually victim-offender dialogues,” said Jerry Hancock, a pastor at First Congregational Church and the program’s founder. “For example, the family survivors of a murder will go to a prison and in a very structured setting, meet with the person who killed their loved one and honestly engage in dialogue where the perpetrator answers questions that a victim’s family has. That way it’s possible for healing to begin.”
Like stochastic terrorism, brand safety isn’t a completely new concept; it has existed in marketing circles for some time. But just like fake news or stochastic terror, “brand safety” has become a buzzword. The term has absolutely erupted in popularity in just the last few years. The Wikipedia page for “brand safety” was only created in April 2019. The page itself is brief and thinly-sourced. At the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group for websites hosting online ads, the page for Brand Safety is only a few years old and only included the thinnest gruel of content as of late 2020.
A cursory look online reveals that the concept of “brand safety” is absolutely everywhere now—principally in the context of attacking and threatening Elon Musk for loosening censorship on Twitter.
I am a student, not an expert on 5GW, but I certainly am getting rapidly trained in the school of hard knocks. Consequently, in trying to make sense our of this new form of warfare, I have had to rely on true experts. With that in mind, please forgive the following extended quote from “Fourth- and Fifth-Generation Warfare: Technology and Perceptions”, published in 2019 by Dr. Waseem Ahmad Qureshi. Advocate Supreme Court of Pakistan, in the San Diego International Law Journal (Volume 21). Dr. Qureshi’s highly footnoted and referenced article can be downloaded for free (PDF) here. For those seeking additional information and context, I also recommend reading “The Handbook of 5GW: A Fifth Generation of War?” by Daniel Abbott.
The Biden Justice Department had asked the Court to vacate a lower-court injunction against the loan cancellation. Instead the Justices deferred that request and agreed to hear the constitutional challenge brought by several states (Biden v. Nebraska). The Court agreed to Justice’s request to hear the case in expedited fashion, so the challenge will skip further proceedings in lower courts and go directly to the Supremes, with oral argument in February. A ruling is likely by the end of June.
This is excellent news. President Biden has tried to pull a constitutional trick for the ages by ordering the forgiveness of up to $20,000 per borrower on his own authority. Congress had given the executive no such power, as even Mr. Biden had previously noted.
But an election loomed, Democrats looked to be in trouble, and in August the President declared one of the greatest vote-buying exercises of all time. The Education Department located a heretofore obscure corner of the 2003 Heroes Act that supposedly justified mass loan cancellations owing to the Covid emergency. It’s a classic example of a political need in rampaging search of a legal excuse.
Did she pick up that point of view in her training? Is it supported by the MMSD administration? is it engrained in the culture of her school? Wherever it originated from it’s a huge problem and my worries about MMSD, eased by the idea that districts we compete with don’t have stand-alone honors classes, were redoubled by that point of view.
Two other points are worth noting. First, 45% of honors class students are non-white. The fundamental reason for eliminating the classes is that they’re not diverse enough, but when almost half the students aren’t white that strikes me as pretty diverse.
Second, that figure is a couple of years old and it doesn’t include more detailed breakdowns. The State Journal requested more recent data, but District spokesperson Tim LeMonds said the paper would have to file an open records request to get the data. This continues a pattern of lack of transparency that I’ve noted in this space more than a couple of times in the past. Why not just hand over the public’s information to the public, especially given the fact that you will eventually have to comply with the FOIA request anyway?
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 “time is now” to eliminate standalone honors classes in Madison high schools, according to Superintendent Carlton Jenkins. At a Dec. 5 school board meeting, Jenkins said a “racist attitude” underlies support for keeping separate classes that offer more rigorous coursework to students.
“We are no longer going to uphold what is considered to be a segregated mentality,” Jenkins said. “We should work together to get it done.”
To replace traditional honors classes, Jenkins wants to expand the district’s current Earned Honors program to all core classes — English, math, science and social studies — offered to Madison freshmen and sophomores. Earned Honors started in 2017 and is at different stages of implementation at each high school. The program allows students to receive an honors credit on their transcript by doing extra work while enrolled in a non-honors class.
District officials first informed the board in April 2021 that they were planning to phase out traditional honors classes for 9th and 10th graders. But administrators in February “hit pause” on that plan “to allow for more time to review this strategy, obtain student and community input, and board involvement.” This fall, however, staff began moving forward with plans to expand Earned Honors while sunsetting standalone honors classes for freshmen in 2023 and sophomores in 2024.
The policy shift didn’t need board approval but, according to The Capital Times, members Christina Gomez Schmidt and Nicki Vander Muelen requested a vote. Board president Ali Muldrow now says it’s “likely” the board will vote on two issues at its meeting on Dec. 19: whether to expand the Earned Honors program and whether to eliminate standalone honors classes.
Deja vu: one size fits all: English 10.
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?
His stand-alone classes didn’t give him that much deeper of an understanding of a subject than earning honors did, Hernandez said.
In his general Western civilization class, for example, he had to read an additional book to earn his honors credits, which allowed him to gain more knowledge than he normally would have.
“(Stand-alone) honors does feel slightly more rigorous, but usually still manageable,” West High senior Holly Wright said.
Wright said she liked the earned honors format, though, because it allowed her to dive deeper into classes and subjects she enjoyed without it feeling like too much additional work.
Honors classes are often seen as precursors for Advanced Placement, or AP, classes that students take later on, but the two are separate.
AP classes are designed by the College Board to give students the chance to earn college credit when they perform well on the exam given at the end of the course. Students have the option to take the test or not, and AP courses are most often offered to juniors and seniors.
Deja vu: one size fits all: English 10.
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?
“You can’t insist that the immediate economic benefits of ending a pregnancy should be counted in Roe v. Wade’s favor, but any of the larger negative shifts in mating and marriage…””… and child rearing associated with abortion can’t be considered as part of the debate…. [Consider a] world clearly shadowed by the effects of family breakdown and social atomization, with loneliness and despair stalking young and old alike… population aging, population decline, childless cities and empty hinterlands and a vast inverted demographic pyramid on the shoulders of the young…. [And look at] the most influential voices in our aging, unhappy, stagnation-shadowed society — the most educated and impassioned and articulate, the most self-consciously devoted to the idea of progress — committing and recommitting themselves to the view that nothing is so important as to continue ensuring that hundreds of thousands of unborn lives can be ended in utero every year…. … I beseech you to consider that you are making a mistake.”
Choose life.
This was a massive change. From antiquity to modernity, scientists wrote letters and circulated monographs, and the main barriers stopping them from communicating their findings were the cost of paper, postage, or a printing press, or on rare occasions, the cost of a visit from the Catholic Church. Scientific journals appeared in the 1600s, but they operated more like magazines or newsletters, and their processes of picking articles ranged from “we print whatever we get” to “the editor asks his friend what he thinks” to “the whole society votes.” Sometimes journals couldn’t get enough papers to publish, so editors had to go around begging their friends to submit manuscripts, or fill the space themselves. Scientific publishing remained a hodgepodge for centuries.
(Only one of Einstein’s papers was ever peer-reviewed, by the way, and he was so surprised and upset that he published his paper in a different journal instead.)
That all changed after World War II. Governments poured funding into research, and they convened “peer reviewers” to ensure they weren’t wasting their money on foolish proposals. That funding turned into a deluge of papers, and journals that previously struggled to fill their pages now struggled to pick which articles to print. Reviewing papers before publication, which was “quite rare” until the 1960s, became much more common. Then it became universal.
This discussion guide, created by a teacher, invites educators, parents, community members and kids to have a conversation about the podcast.
By Margaret Goldberg and Emily Hanford
You’ve listened to Sold a Story and now you have questions, thoughts, things you want to talk about. Maybe you want to organize a listening party, a professional development session, or a meeting at your child’s school. This discussion guide is designed to help you facilitate a conversation about ideas and themes in the podcast.
A note from Emily:
We turned to an experienced educator, Margaret Goldberg, to help us put this together. If you’ve listened to our previous reporting on reading instruction, you’ve met Margaret. She was the literacy coach in Oakland, California featured in our 2019 audio documentary At a Loss for Words. Margaret is also the co-founder of the Right to Read Project, a group of teachers and researchers committed to improving reading instruction in American schools. I encourage you to read Margaret’s blog. Some of my favorites — especially relevant to themes brought up in Sold a Story — include:
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?
nonpartisan audit released Wednesday called on Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers to be more transparent about how he distributes billions of dollars in federal COVID-19 relief funds.
The Legislative Audit Bureau said Evers’ Department of Administration did not provide information it claimed the governor based his decisions on when handing out some $3.7 billion in pandemic aid over the past two years. Republican lawmakers have criticized the governor’s spending choices and tried to give themselves control of the money.
The Evers administration received $5.7 billion between March 2020 and June 2022 in federal coronavirus relief from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, the American Rescue Plan Act and the Consolidated Appropriations Act.
Huriya Jabbar, Carlton J. Fong and Michelle Devall
School-choice policies are expected to generate healthy competition between schools, leading to improvements in school quality and better outcomes for students. However, the empirical literature testing this assumption yields mixed findings. This systematic review and meta-analysis tests this theory by synthesizing the empirical literature on the competitive effects of school choice on student achievement. Overall, we found small positive effects of competition on student achievement. We also found some evidence that the type of school-choice policy and student demographics moderated the effects of competition on student achievement. By examining whether school competition improves outcomes, our findings can inform decisions of state and local policymakers who have adopted or are considering adopting school-choice reforms.
Paul Mozur, Adam Satariano and Aaron Krolik:
The emails provide a rare glimpse into a propaganda machine that is perhaps Russia’s greatest wartime success. Even as the country faces battlefield losses, mounting casualties, economic isolation and international condemnation, state-run television channels have spun a version of the war in which Russia is winning, Ukraine is in shambles and Western alliances are fraying. Along with a fierce crackdown on dissent, the propaganda apparatus has helped President Vladimir V. Putin maintain domestic support for a war that many in the West had hoped would weaken his hold on power the longer it dragged on.
To create this narrative, producers at the state media company cherry-picked from conservative Western media outlets like Fox News and the Daily Caller, as well as obscure social media accounts on Telegram and YouTube, according to the records. Russian security agencies like the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., fed other information, creating an alternative version of events such as the bombing of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.
New York politicians are slapping a badge on my chest. A law going into effect Saturday requires social-media networks, including any site that allows comments, to publish a plan for responding to alleged hate speech by users.
The law blog I run [The Volokh Conspiracy] fits the bill, so the law will mandate that I post publicly my policy for responding to comments that “vilify, humiliate, or incite violence against a group” based on “race, color, religion, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” It also requires that I give readers a way to complain about my blog’s content and obligates me to respond directly.
I don’t want to moderate such content and I don’t endorse the state’s definition of hate speech. I do sometimes delete comments, but I do it based on my own editorial judgment, not state command. Still, I’m being conscripted. By obligating me to do the state’s bidding with regard to viewpoints that New York condemns, the law violates the First Amendment. …
I started the Volokh Conspiracy to share interesting and important legal stories, not to police readers’ speech at the government’s behest. By challenging this law, I hope I can put down the badge and go back to my keyboard—because legislators can fight crime and respond to hate without violating the First Amendment or drafting me into the speech police.
Is the college essay dead? Are hordes of students going to use artificial intelligence to cheat on their writing assignments? Has machine learning reached the point where auto-generated text looks like what a typical first-year student might produce?
And what does it mean for professors if the answer to those questions is “yes”?
These and other questions have flooded news sites and social media since the nonprofit OpenAI released a tool called ChatGPT, which promises to revolutionize how we write. Enter a prompt and in seconds it will produce an essay, a poem, or other text that ranges in quality, users say, from mediocre to pretty good. It can do so because it has been trained on endless amounts of digital text pulled from the internet.
It was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were for years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today, on account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt.
A couple weeks back, alleging proof Twitter acted with gross political bias, and in a manner that influenced U.S. elections (!), Elon Musk opened his new company’s internal communications to a small handful of journalists. They set immediately to breaking a series of major stories that have rewritten the history of Trump-era tech. Long story short, Twitter leadership lied to the public, relentlessly, for years, and everything the most paranoid among us ever said about the platform was true. “Trust and safety” is a euphemism for political censorship, with “expert” teams comprised almost exclusively of the most radical, joyless grievance studies majors you ever met in college. Their goal is to reshape American politics by dominating the bounds of what the public is permitted to consider American politics. In these efforts, they have mostly been succeeding.
On December 2nd, Matt Taibbi shared conversations from the company’s “trust and safety” team that led to Twitter’s suppression of the New York Post’s infamous Hunter Biden laptop story. While interesting, Taibbi’s most notable revelation came almost as a side: both major political parties, as well as the White House, maintained direct lines of communication with Twitter, which they used to formally request content be removed from the platform. The company responded enthusiastically to many of these requests, and the examples we have (for now) come from the Democratic Party. Critics have been quick to point out Trump was in the White House at the time, though less interested, for some reason, in what — if anything — he removed from the site.
Finally, over the last few days, Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari have all reported out pieces of Donald Trump’s deplatforming, which is easily the most famous digital unpersoning in history. It is also the least compelling story in the series. While it’s good to finally know exactly what happened, it really just was what everyone assumed: Trump was not banned for violating policy. Trump was banned because Twitter employees, who donated literally 99% of their political contributions to the Democratic Party, demanded it be done regardless of their own rules.
Altogether, the Twitter Files — an ongoing story — paint a portrait of clear and inevitable partisan bias at one of the most dominant speech platforms in history. A small handful of very left-wing executives, who naturally perceived most opinion right of center as dangerous, worked tirelessly to limit those opinions from view. Empowered to censor “unsafe” content, and protected by a team of people who shared their political orientation, the executives produced, in a legal and decentralized manner, a key component of our defacto state censorship apparatus. While we don’t know for sure this is also happening at Google, Meta, or TikTok (which is for some reason still allowed to operate in this country), I think it’s a safe bet we’re looking at an industry-wide affliction.
But I do have questions.
The Congressional Budget Office recently reported on the 2022 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30:
Net outlays for interest on the public debt increased by $121 billion (or 29 percent), because higher inflation this year has resulted in large adjustments to the principal of inflation-protected securities and because interest rates rose, increasing the costs of securities issued during the fiscal year.
Such annual outlays will soon surpass the total amount the federal government spends on Medicaid. Ms. Litvan reports on the possibilities for reform:On spending, lawmakers could seek bipartisan accord on a deal placing new spending caps on the programs under Congress’s discretion similar to the 2011 deal that ended the debt-ceiling showdown, Thune said… On entitlement program changes, Thune said Congress should weigh an increase in the Social Security retirement age. But he didn’t rule out a deal that might simply start the process of making key changes, pointing to a proposal… for a task force to examine what needs to be done.
“Even creating a process by which that gets dealt with would be progress and at least a baby step,” Thune said.
Let’s hope he doesn’t settle for baby steps. The senator should have the confidence to walk like a man after the events of recent weeks. Stephen Groves reported for the Associated Press this month from Sioux Falls:
The left’s second failing is hypocrisy. The “not in my backyard” instinct is hidden everywhere in plain sight. It explains why ultraliberal San Francisco’s housing is unaffordable: rich people do not want their property values marred by construction or their neighbourhoods filled with the wrong people. It explains why residents of the wealthy holiday island of Nantucket are blocking an offshore wind farm on the flimsy claim that it would disturb the local whales. The reality is they do not want their view spoiled. This could have been America’s first major offshore wind farm. The previous attempt in nearby Cape Cod was partly killed by the late Ted Kennedy, the local senator and scion of the family’s Hyannis Port compound.
Nimbyism captures both of the left’s worst traits: it is often those who most loudly profess their principles who are quickest to veto any disruption to their own lives. The economist Tyler Cowen labels the problem “Banana” — build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything. The left and Republicans are strewing banana skins in the way of America’s clean energy transition.
Under a 1970 environmental policy act, projects take an average of 4.5 years to complete their impact assessments. That is before litigation and other overruns. The law’s key flaw is that it emphasises the views of local communities over the benefits to millions who live elsewhere. Time and again, experience shows that “community participation” is captured by wealthy retirees and lawyers with time on their hands. The law was written before global warming became the issue.
The biggest mistake I made was continuing to invest in building tools for us to manage the public conversation, versus building tools for the people using Twitter to easily manage it for themselves. This burdened the company with too much power, and opened us to significant outside pressure (such as advertising budgets). I generally think companies have become far too powerful, and that became completely clear to me with our suspension of Trump’s account. As I’ve said before, we did the right thing for the public company business at the time, but the wrong thing for the internet and society. Much more about this here:
What historical feudalism has in common with today’s neo-feudalism:
• concentration of nearly all wealth in very few hands
• very small and harried middle class (some skilled craftsmen, etc.) with very limited rights
• the vast majority of people were serfs who “owned nothing and will be [un]happy”
• religious fundamentalism: Church then — environmentalist, gender,… now
• demographics: no growth then because of high child mortality, now because of low fertility rates
• the clerisy and the feudal oligarchs had different agendas and their fights in the Middle Ages just like now, but join hands to keep everybody else in their place
Amid growing revelations about government involvement in social-media censorship, it’s no longer enough to talk simply about tech censorship. The problem should be understood as gov-tech censorship. The Biden White House has threatened tech companies and federal agencies have pressed them to censor disfavored opinions and users. So it’s time to ask about accountability.
Will there be legal consequences for government officials, for the companies, or for their personnel who cooperate in the gov-tech censorship of dissent on Covid-19, election irregularities or other matters? Cooperation between government officials and private parties to suppress speech could be considered a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights. The current administration won’t entertain such a theory, but a future one might.
Amy Parsons, a former senior administrator at Colorado State University at Fort Collins, will in all likelihood become the university’s next president, a selection that some professors criticize as misguided.
Parsons, an alumna of CSU, worked as CSU’s deputy general counsel before becoming vice president for university operations in 2009. She held the role until 2015, when she became executive vice chancellor of the CSU System. She left that post in 2020 to become the founding chief executive officer of Mozzafiato LLC, an e-commerce company.
Examples:
* Reflection symmetry -> suffices to test odd and even functions separately.
* Translation invariance -> suffices to test individual plane waves (i.e., to inspect the Fourier multiplier symbol).
New research on post-pandemic student achievement presents a sobering picture, offering a reality check for anyone who might think recovery is proceeding apace.
The study, from CALDER at the American Institutes for Research, NWEA and Harvard University, suggests school districts should do more. “We need more kids to get more hours of interventions,” said CALDER’s Dan Goldhaber.
Taken together, the dozen mid-to-large sized school districts investigated enroll more than 600,000 students across 10 states in every region in the country. And they serve higher proportions of students of color and students attending high-poverty schools than national averages. The districts range from Alexandria City Public Schools in Virginia to Dallas Independent School District, Guilford County Schools in North Carolina, and Tulsa Public Schools in Oklahoma.
A judge recently ruled that a former Virginia Tech women’s soccer player can continue a lawsuit against her former coach after she was allegedly benched and pressured to leave the team for declining to kneel during a pregame social justice demonstration.
Kiersten Hening, who was a midfielder/defender for the Hokies from 2018 to 2020, sued coach Charles “Chugger” Aidair in 2021 on First Amendment grounds, which federal Judge Thomas Cullen announced on Dec. 2 can proceed to trial.
Hening alleged that Adair was not a fan of her political views and that she often differed from her teammates on social justice issues during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.
Hening further explained in the lawsuit that while she “supports social justice and believes that black lives matter,” she “does not support BLM the organization,” citing its “tactics and core tenets of its mission statement, including defunding the police.”
There’s a new job for those 87,000 new employees at the Internal Revenue Service, and it isn’t chasing billionaires. It’s digging around to discover if you reported that extra $600 you made from selling grandma’s heirlooms at your garage sale.
The IRS is reminding Americans that the reporting rules have changed for payment-card and third-party payment network transactions. This means that if you received a payment of more than $600 via such networks as Venmo, PayPal, Amazon or Square, you will probably receive a Form 1099-K this year. The reporting limit for receiving a Form 1099-K used to be $20,000 a year.
You can thank the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act, the $1.9 trillion spending blowout that did so much to spur inflation. Democrats unleashed the IRS to find the money to pay for this spending, and apparently their belief is that tens of millions of you are hiding income from your side hustle or selling old furniture.
Americans are obliged to report all of their income, whether they receive a 1099 or not. But chasing after transactions as low as $600 means more hassle for you and millions of others, though we wonder how much money this effort will raise.
Those totals don’t include the Madison Metropolitan School District or Milwaukee Public Schools, both of which passed operational referendums in 2020 that continue to allow them to surpass the revenue limit. Both districts are among those that are increasing their total tax levies and contributing to the statewide rise, WPF notes.
“Property tax levies increased 3.7% on December tax bills in those districts that have adopted referenda since 2020 while they fell 1.3% in districts that have not,” the report states.
State leaders are expected to begin discussing the next biennial budget early next year. Regardless of what they do with the revenue limit, there are two factors to watch for their impact on property taxes toward K-12 schools.
The first is the soon-to-sunset federal COVID-19 relief funding that has boosted school budgets over the past two years. Most funds must be spent by September 2024, which could leave holes in some district budgets if they’ve used the influx of one-time money on operational 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?
The Madison School Board will “most likely” take two votes later this month on changes to the district’s high school honors learning program.
Board president Ali Muldrow said Friday that she expects the board will split the elimination of ninth and 10th grade standalone honors classes from an expansion of earned honors programming into two, separate decisions, rather than combining them into one vote at the Dec. 19 meeting. Until this point, the changes have been discussed in concert with each other.
But the first piece of the potential change — eliminating standalone honors for ninth and 10th grades — has proven much more controversial.
Watch @RepNancyMace destroy trans activist Alejandra Caraballo with “her” own tweets 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/ignohVS6vH
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 13, 2022
While teacher shortages dominated education news coverage during the summer, the tremendous amount of federal pandemic-relief money that states and school districts are pouring into the profession—and the funding’s substantial consequences for longstanding policies and practices in the more-than-three-million-member occupation—has received far less attention. Local education agencies are on pace to spend as much as $20 billion on instructional staff under the 2021 federal American Rescue Plan, making teachers the single largest investment under the plan nationwide.
To understand state and local policymakers’ strategies for bolstering teaching resources in the wake of the pandemic, FutureEd analyzed the Covid-relief spending plans of 5,000 school districts and charter organizations representing
74 percent of the nation’s public-school students. And we examined additional documents and conducted a range of interviews to gauge how the nation’s 100 largest school districts plan to reinforce their teaching ranks with American Rescue Plan aid.
The result is a comprehensive picture of state and local spending of recovery resources on the nation’s teaching force. And it’s clear that momentum is building behind several spending strategies with important policy implications, including an emerging commitment to extra pay for longer hours, and bonuses that break with traditional pay schedules to combat widespread teacher shortages.
Associate Director Phyllis Jordan and Policy Analyst Bella DiMarco researched and wrote the report. Nathan Kriha provided research assistance. And Merry Alderman, Molly Breen, Jackie Arthur provided editorial and design support.
One by one, they go to start their business day only to find a baffling message from their payments app informing them: “You can no longer do business with PayPal.”
There is little or no explanation. They have somehow offended the sensibilities of someone somewhere deep inside the bureaucracy.
They are simply told via an email from PayPal’s Risk and Compliance Department that, after an internal review, “we decided to permanently limit your account as there was a change in your business model or your business model was considered risky.”
In case there is any doubt, the email adds: “You’ll not be able to conduct any further business using PayPal.”
These trainings are not some two-to-four week corporate offsites, but up to one and a half years long!
Yet, despite all this extra cost and personnel hassle, Chang believes this is a “very good sign” and the right thing to do. That’s because these are the “people problems” and “cultural problems” that he learned the hard way 25 years ago when trying to open TSMC’s first American fab, located in Camas, Washington – an experience he called “a dream fulfilled became a nightmare fulfilled”. TSMC Arizona is now investing up front to avoid the same mistakes.
Beyond the talent shortage problem, there is also an equipment shortage and supplier shortage problem, so much so that TSMC has been shippingas many tools and equipment as possible, directly from Taiwan to Arizona. TSMC has voiced these and other concerns in a letter last month, sent to the NIST bureau of the Commerce Department (an agency I happened to have served in during the Obama administration). Of course, you wouldn’t hear about any of this if you only listen to Gina Raimondo.
Do you want to be a professor? Countless PhD students harbor this dream. However, a firsthand look at the nature of academic hiring is enough to change the minds of many. A new research paper published in Nature, which explicitly analyzes faculty hiring, certainly won’t help matters: The picture it paints of the academic hiring market is not pretty.
Large universities maintain departments in most academic fields, and the competition for prestige and ranking between departments is ferocious. The paper examines 387 U.S. universities, containing more than 10,000 departments, with nearly 300,000 faculty coming and going over the ten years under study. (Here the term faculty represents a person who is tenured, or in a tenure trackposition, which gives them a shot at tenure. This excludes part-time instructors and other adjunct positions with no chance of obtaining tenure.)
One might be tempted to believe that a PhD is a PhD; that is, once you have a “golden ticket,” you are employable as a faculty member. This is not so. The top five universities, which might be expected to produce roughly 1.3% (5/387) of all eventual faculty hires, produce 13.7% (53/387) — more than ten times what is expected. Continuing down the list, the top 3% of universities produce 27% of all professors; the top 10% produce 58% of professors.
Faculty diversity is positively associated with student success across a variety of metrics. Black and Latino students are more likely to graduate when they see themselves represented in their instructors, for instance. But the benefits of faculty diversity aren’t just evident among historically underrepresented students: research suggests that engaging with diverse instructors, perspectives and ideas benefits all students—including in the development of empathy and problem-solving skills.
So how are institutions doing with respect to faculty diversity? Not great, says a new report from the Education Trust, a nonprofit organization that promotes high academic achievement for all students.
As part of the analysis, researchers examined faculty diversity relative to student diversity, as well as hiring equity, tenure equity and changes in faculty representation over time for Black and Latino faculty members at 543 public, four-year institutions. The colleges and universities were given a score of zero to 100 based on faculty diversity, hiring equity and tenure equity. Numerical ratings were then translated to letter grades, with 60 being the threshold for failing (F).
If there was one thing Maria Montessori hated, it was play. She also disapproved of toys, fairy tales and fantasy. This came as a surprise to me. I had the impression – from the hippyish reputation of modern Montessori schools – that the essence of the Montessori method was ‘learning through play’. Indeed, this is the way her philosophy is often summarised, including by her admirers. When you read her own words, however, you realise that the foundation of Montessori’s methods was a belief in work: effortful, concentrated, purposeful work. In her view, the work of children was more focused than the work of adults. Many adults were lazy, working only because they were paid to and doing as little as possible. But in her schools, she wrote, ‘we observe something strange: left to themselves, the children work ceaselessly … and after long and continuous activity, the children’s capacity for work does not appear to diminish but to improve.’ The fierce concentration Montessori observed in children had much in common with what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called ‘flow’: the state of being completely absorbed in an activity for its own sake. More recently, some psychologists studying children on the ADHD and autistic spectrums have used the word ‘hyperfocus’. For Montessori, this phenomenon was something that all children were capable of, as creatures of God.
Montessori’s educational theory is both less playful than one might assume and, as Cristina de Stefano’s biography shows, more deeply rooted in Catholicism. She wrote that the task of education was to find in the child ‘the true spirit of man, the design of the Creator: the scientific and religious truth’. She often contrasted her own methods with those of the German education theorist Friedrich Froebel, who died in 1852 (Montessori was born in 1870). Froebel coined the word ‘Kindergarten’ in 1840 to describe preschool establishments where children would spend their days at play. He created a series of sets of objects called ‘play gifts’ (Spielgaben) suitable for children of different ages. For example, ‘gift one’ consisted of balls of coloured yarn and ‘gift three’ consisted of eight identical wooden cubes. Many of Froebel’s gifts were the same objects Montessori used in her schools. The difference was the meaning assigned to them. Froebel thought a child should be encouraged to arrange a set of toy bricks as if they were horses and a stable, and then to rearrange them as a church. To Montessori, such fancies could only result in ‘mental confusion’ and even ‘savagery’ on the part of the child. For her, a brick was a brick was a brick and it was liberating for a child not to have to pretend otherwise.
Central States last year was only 17% funded and projected to collapse in a few years. The federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC) insures pensions up to $12,870 a year for participants with 30 years on the job. But it, too, is under-funded. If Central States failed, its liabilities could have taken down the PBGC, which insures multi-employer pensions for 11.2 million workers and retirees.
Congress in 2014 acted to prevent this death spiral by passing bipartisan legislation that let sick plans reduce benefits and make other changes to avoid insolvency. Eighteen plans took advantage of the law, but Democrats then had second thoughts and decided to ding taxpayers instead.
Still, the Legislative Fiscal Bureau in a June 2021 memo projected that school levies would fall by 2.6 percent on the bills sent out a year ago and 1.9 percent this year.
Instead, they went up 0.3 percent last year and 1.5 percent this year.
In all, 219 districts will see their levies go up on this December’s bills, 186 will see decreases and 16 will see them remain the same.
It is the 11th straight year that statewide school property taxes will rise.
According to the report, voters have approved 456 referendum questions since 2018. That includes 246 for operating budgets and 210 for capital projects.
Levies increased 3.7 percent in the districts that have adopted referendums since 2020, while they fell 1.3 percent in those that have not.
Watching through a camera, a proctor monitors a Chinese student taking an English exam. Sitting in a Beijing living room, the student appears to be taking the test seriously. They frown during the listening session, as if trying hard to think about the answer. And for the written portion, their arms move about, with the tapping of a keyboard being heard.
But the student wasn’t typing anything. They weren’t even looking at the screen. Sitting next to the student, just outside of the camera’s field of view, was 34-year-old Tony Wang. As he’d done for dozens of students before, Wang was answering the questions by typing on a wireless keyboard, sometimes while eating barbecued skewers. For the speaking portion, he’d type the answers on an iPad or a smartphone for students to read out. And students who couldn’t speak English at all would silently move their lips while Wang invisibly spoke aloud the answer on their behalf.
Wang, who runs an agency that helps Chinese students study abroad, told Rest of World he had helped more than 100 students cheat on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (Toefl) exam since at-home tests became available in 2020. “To insiders like us, ETS online testing is just a joke,” Wang said. (ETS, or Educational Testing Service, is the New Jersey-based company that administers Toefl and the GRE graduate school entry exam.)
why have the past 50 years of technological change had so little impact on schooling?
The English word “lecture” derives from Medieval Latin’s “lectura” and is cognate with words like “lecteur” (French) and “lector” (Spanish) which mean “reader.” A lecturer, in other words, is a reader.
Today, giving a lecture that consisted of simply standing at a podium reading a book would be considered bad practice. But several hundred years ago, books were extremely expensive because hand-copying manuscripts doesn’t scale. What does scale, at least to an extent, is the human voice. So an institution could serve the very useful function of providing a place where students could gather to hear a person read out loud from a book and write down what the lecturer was saying, securing knowledge.
An institution like that would need to have a lot of books on hand and a scholar would need ready access to books, so producing scholarship was highly complementary to lecturing. The scholars take books as inputs but also produce books as outputs. To earn money, they would lecture — which is to say, read the books — to students. The students themselves would benefit not only from learning about what the books say but also from some kind of formal certification. And thus was born the familiar university bundle that combines libraries, scholarship, teaching, and certification.
This is a somewhat rickety pile of in-principle-separate ideas that really does seem vulnerable to technological disruption. On its face, the relevant disruptive technology should have been the printing press, and the disruption should have happened three or four hundred years ago. But not only did the basic structure of the university persist, but most of the world’s leading universities are also much newer than the printing press. Harvard and Yale are really old by the standards of American institutions, but they’re not older than printing — and many other prestigious American universities date from the second half of the nineteenth century. By the time Stanford and the University of Texas were founded, it was already extremely clear that people could study books at home (or in libraries) and then take exams administered by certifying bodies that had nothing to do with teaching or research.
Mr. Agresto, 76, is a lifelong champion of liberal-arts education—the subject of his new book, “The Death of Learning: How American Education Has Failed Our Students and What to Do About It.” It’s an unpopular cause: According to U.S. Education Department data, students who majored in English, history, philosophy, foreign languages or literature constituted only 4% of college graduates in 2020. The number of degrees awarded in each of these disciplines declined by between 15% and 34% between 2012 and 2020, while the total number of degrees rose by 14%.
Many young Americans—old ones, too—don’t see the point of liberal arts: “We are suspicious, because we don’t know what good they are and we don’t know what use they are,” Mr. Agresto says in a Zoom interview. But for those students in Iraq, this was the first time they were “allowed to think about how you build a democracy, or what’s the place of religion in society or what is the role of my having a free and inquisitive mind” while also being “a person who obeys what the imam says. Once they got a taste of the liberal arts, that changed everything.”
Failure on tests apparently means the test, not the test taker, is found wanting.
What follows is the erosion of meritocracy and competence. And that reality is starting to explain the great unraveling: why our bridges take decades to build rather than a few years, why train tracks are not laid after a decade of “planning,”and why to drive down a once brilliantly engineered, but now crammed and dangerous road is to revisit the “Road Warrior” of film. Sam Bankman-Fried and Elizabeth Holmes are the apt characters of our age.
7. There were dissenters inside Twitter.
“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee on January 7, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.” pic.twitter.com/LtonK0gfS3
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) December 12, 2022
6. It is a war fought not with weapons but with illegitimate rules, wicked economic policies, and intolerable limitations of natural rights.
— Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò (QTE) (@ArchbpVigano) December 11, 2022
The official stated reason for doing this is that we have too many White people. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s Biden on the matter: “We must ensure that voters of color have a choice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window.” Under the new math, South Carolina, with a Black population of 26.7%, leapfrogs New Hampshire on the primary calendar, which has a Black population of just under 2%. Which party is obsessed with race again?
The most interesting topological materials are topological insulators, which are materials that are insulating in the bulk, but conducting on the surface. In these materials, the conducting channels where the electronic current flows are very robust. They persist independently of some external disturbances that one can have in experiments, such as weak disorder or temperature fluctuations, and they’re also independent of size. This is very interesting because it means these materials have a constant resistance, a constant conductivity. Having such tight control of the electronic current is useful for many applications.
I’m generally happy with my level of English. I’m fluent at speaking, I’ve been using the language at work for the past 24 years. I’ve spoken at conferences and read a good number of books rarely resorting to a dictionary. I believe that my first job as a junior developer at Philips was granted to me for being garrulous at the interview, rather than for any other skills.
About 3 weeks ago I realized it was not enough any more.
The expression “resorting to”, which I used a couple of sentences prior, would not just pop up in my head in the middle of an otherwise lively English conversation. I actually had to look it up.
In Russian, I would use the expression “to resort to” without even thinking.
This puts together my main point. When speaking my mother tongue, I’m used to expressing my thoughts in somewhat more sophisticated ways. I enjoy myself trying to keep an engaging conversation, using resonating words and phrasal expressions, putting in an occasional wordplay, or cracking a joke. And all that is mostly hidden from me when I use English. So, I plan to change that.
I’ve remained skeptical of AI code generation for a long time, until I began chatting with ChatGPT last week. It effortlessly worked through problems in Java, Python, C++, and helped me solve a configuration issue in Pickcode’s backend. Plenty has been written about how impressive this is, and there are hundreds of examples being shared online every day. The quick summary of all of this is that AI code completion and large language models will be an invaluable tool to everyone writing software going forward, and I certainly agree.
The important question for me is how does ChatGPT change computer science education? For seemingly the first time, computers have achieved supremacy in writing nested loops in Java to print out Xs and Os in alternating order. ChatGPT is also demonstrably better at writing Python programs to calculate a basketball player’s free throw percentage, and every other intro to programming assignment you might think of. This does not mean that we can hand every kid Copilot or Replit Ghostwriter and watch them code circles around Linus Torvalds. This means we need to rethink what it means to learn how to program.
Unlike Dr. Bhattacharya, I am not a medical expert. Normally I wouldn’t insert myself into someone else’s domain, but the nation’s health authorities had no problem inserting themselves into mine. They meddled in my business, my church, my kids’ education, my health, my grocery store, my gym, my coffee shop, my barber. In each case, some government entity was there with strangling regulations or an order to shut down entirely.
So I formed a ragtag group of activists, analysts, experts and parents, all trying to get our lives back to normal. We called our group Rational Ground and worked to amplify common-sense Covid policies. We published interactive charts, highlighted data refuting the stay-at-home orders, and pointed out the low risk of the virus for children. It was a lonely and difficult fight, but Dr. Bhattacharya was a calm and steady ally.
By the fall of 2020 we focused our efforts to support Scott Atlas, a Stanford colleague of Dr. Bhattacharya and a key adviser to the Trump administration on Covid. After President Trump lost the election, the momentum Dr. Atlas had won was seemingly lost. The Biden administration pushed for restrictions and for censorship of those who disagreed with the government’s official position.
In July 2021, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced, “We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.” Ms. Psaki also revealed that senior staff for President Biden were a part of the White House’s efforts to suppress free speech.
This week’s revelations about Twitter add to the evidence that something bad was afoot. Dr. Bhattacharya expressed shock on learning his account had been targeted for censorship. “The thought that will keep me up tonight: censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt,” he tweeted. Remembering the adage that sunlight is the best disinfectant, Elon Musk, whose takeover of Twitter led to this and a series of other revelations, replied to Dr. Bhattacharya, “The Sun is coming.”
I spent the afternoon yesterday at Twitter HQ at the invitation of @elonmusk to find out more about the trend "blacklist" that twitter placed on me & more. A short thread on what I found out follows.
1/4— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 11, 2022
Levitz, like most people in the media who are not explicitly conservative, must play a delicate game. The game is to engage in enough nuance and care in your writing to still be able to look yourself in the mirror, to preserve some integrity, without getting right-coded in the culture war. Once a person finds himself on the wrong side of culture war debates enough times, they will be regarded as a reactionary no matter what their actual beliefs. They fall into the Maw. I am in almost every matter of substance you can think of a generic leftist. It’s difficult to name a single left-right issue on which I don’t land comfortably on the left. But I’m right-coded by the Maw. This has been financially remunerative for me but makes little sense as a matter of basic political intelligibility. The Maw shreds nuance and destroys complexity and, more than anything, forces everyone to constantly arrange their self-presentation in a way that ensures they don’t fall on the wrong side of the culture war faultline. I think there are a lot of interesting conversations to be had about the Twitter files and how they are being reported. The Maw insists that there’s nothing there at all.
We have received numerous inquiries from readers as to whether the Gibsons had been paid.
We have confirmed with the Gibsons’ lawyers that the Gibsons have, indeed, finally been paid. The money was wired recently.
That payment, while large, hardly compensates the family for the pain they went through for over 6 years, and the loss of David and Grandpa after the verdict but before the appeals were resolved.
Compared to what children need and should be getting? There is more stability in Grantosa’s school leadership and in the teaching staff, and improved services from a school psychologist, a guidance counselor and others. But more than half the teachers are new to the school since the 2019-20 school year, including five first-year teachers currently. There are two classes with teachers who are not permanent members of the staff. And the availability of counselors and others still falls short of what would be best for these children. On these scores, things are cheery in a limited way.
How about the basic matter of the school’s 538 students showing up on a regular basis? Attendance through Nov. 30 was 83.7%, compared to 75.4% a year ago. Obviously, that’s an improvement, but it still means about one in six students is missing on a typical day. That’s much below the average in elementary schools statewide. More limited cheeriness.
Alongside other Apple Daily staff, Lai was arrested in August 2020 after the Chinese government cracked down on Hong Kong and ended its previous status as a semiautonomous free city. In a telling move, the authorities went so far as to destroy Lai’s media company and the paper, not just arrest its leadership.
But Lai’s arrest wasn’t inevitable. Perhaps the most haunting yet inspiring part of his story, as told by Gigot, is that Lai had the opportunity to flee Hong Kong before he was arrested. He chose to remain and face the perverse “justice” that awaited him rather than run from the forces working against democracy and freedom. That takes a level of bravery that’s difficult to comprehend.
What does any of this have to do with Americans?
Well, for one thing, Lai’s only hope of release seems to be some form of negotiation from the U.S. government. Given our support as a nation and government for the freedom cause in Hong Kong, the Biden administration should do whatever it can to help his cause. But more broadly, Lai’s story should remind us why a free press is so important.
Not only are there hoards of Eeny Meenies, there are just as many counting-out schemes that share the same DNA. “Hinty, minty, cuty, corn, wire, briar, limber lock” (United States). “Eenty, teenty, ithery, bithery” (England). “Ippetty, sipetty, ippetty sap, ipetty, sipetty, kinella kinack” (Scotland). And I’d be remiss in omitting “One potato, two potato, three potato, four / Five potato, six potato, seven potato, more,” which flirts with replacing eeny meeny as the counting-out gold standard in the United States.
In the canonical Eeny Meeny, “tiger” is standard in the second line, but this is a relatively recent revision. If it doesn’t seem to make sense, even in the gibberish Eeny Meeny world, that you’d grab a carnivorous cat’s toe and expect the tiger to do the hollering, remember that in both England and America, children until recently said “Catch a nigger by the toe.” The nigger-to-tiger shift is one of the rare instances where changes in the rhyme happen in such an explicit and pointed fashion. The rhyme morphs constantly, but usually ad hoc, and each kickball court has its own particular flavor based more on random chance; one child’s popular improvisation might catch on and change the rhyme in a certain region for decades.
Still trying to process my emotions on learning that @twitter blacklisted me. The thought that will keep me up tonight: censorship of scientific discussion permitted policies like school closures & a generation of children were hurt.
1/2— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) December 9, 2022
Related: the great Barrington declaration.
and:
UW’s Oct. 18 response to PPT estimated it would take five months to fulfill two requests for Starbird’s communications and hinted it could take longer, pledging to notify PPT if “additional time is needed,” according to the suits filed in King County Superior Court.
The first request names Alex Stamos and Renee DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, which leads EIP with CIP; Emerson Brooking and Graham Brookie of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab; and Ben Nimmo and Camille Francois of social media analytics firm Graphika.
The Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan bill on Wednesday to override an existing law and update requirements for government agencies to write communications in easy-to-understand language.
Specifically, the Clear and Concise Content Act, backed by Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chair Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), zeroes in on the use of plain writing in government content about benefits and services or filing taxes, provided on paper or digitally.
“This bill does exactly what its name implies – it makes government communications easier to understand,” said Peters in a statement.
“Stop the ‘government speak,’” said Lankford in a statement. “Federal agencies don’t need to use jargon, countless legal citations and confusing references to laws so only ‘insiders’ can understand.”
The bill defines plain writing as “writing that is clear, concise, well-organized” and follows best practices to make the content understandable to an audience, “including an audience who may be disabled, may not be proficient in English or may otherwise be disadvantaged or traditionally underserved.”
Ann Althouse on the suppression of Stanford professor Dr Jay Bhattacharya:
He sounds like any intelligent American who isn’t drawn to party politics. We may even be the majority! If only the New York Times could stop catering to the Democratic Party and write for us.
Often, it seems, his posts are motivated by personal pique, not political philosophy….
Great! An actual human being. Some people love them.
ARTHUR KOESTLER RICHARD WRIGHT LOUIS FISCHER, IGNAZIO SILONE ANDR E GIDE STEPHEN SPENDER
we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it’s all about.” And with that the talk veered to why so-and-so had ever become a Communist, and why he had or had not left the Party. When the argument began to boil up again, I said, ‘Wait. Tell me exactly what happened when you joined the Party-not what you feel about it now, but what you felt then.” So Koestler began the strange story of his meeting with Herr Schneller in the Schneidemiihl paper-mill; and suddenly I interrupted, “This should be a book,” and we began to discuss names of ex Communists capable of telling the truth about themselves.
At first our choice ranged far and wide, but before the night was out we decided to limit the list to half a dozen writers and journalists. We were not in the least interested either in swelling the Hood of anti-Communist propaganda or in pro viding an opportunity for personal apologetics. Our concern was to study the state of mind of the Communist convert, and the atmosphere of the period-from 1917 to 1939-when con version was so common. For this purpose it was essential that each contributor should be able not to relive the past-that is impossible-but, by an act of imaginative self-analysis, to recreate it, despite the foreknowledge of the present. As I well know, autobiography of this sort is almost impossible for the practical politician: his self-respect distorts the past in terms of the present. So-called scientillc analysis is equally mislead ing; dissecting the personality into a set of psychological and sociological causes, it explains away the emotions, which we wanted described. The objectivity we sought was thepower to recollect-if not in tranquillity, at least in “dispassion” and this power is rarely granted except to the imaginative writer.
The Weiss installment, on the other hand, offers significant evidence of something that many people merely suspected was taking place: wholesale blacklisting of Twitter accounts that were perceived to be causing harm.
Weiss provides several examples of ways in which the platform limited the reach of various high-profile users: Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of medicine who opposed various COVID-19 mandates and lockdowns, was on a “trends blacklist,” which meant that his tweets would not appear in the trending topics section; right-wing radio host Dan Bongino landed on a “search blacklist,” which meant that he did not show up in searches; and conservative activist and media personality Charlie Kirk was slapped with a “do not amplify” label. At no point did anyone at Twitter communicate to these individuals that their content was being limited in such a manner.
These actions, of course, sound a lot like “shadow banning,” which is the theory that Twitter surreptitiously restricts users’ content, even in cases where the platform has not formally issued a ban or suspension. For years, various figures on the right and contrarian left have complained that the reach of their tweets had substantially and artificially diminished for nonobvious reasons, contrary to the stated claims of top-level Twitter staffers who steadfastly asserted: “We do not shadow ban.”
This claim depends upon how the term is defined. To be clear, Twitter has publicly admitted that it suppresses tweets that “detract from the conversation,” though the platform’s plan was to eventually move toward a policy of informing users about suppression efforts—a move that never took place.
Researchers are reporting that disinformation on Twitter, Facebook, and mainstream news sources is already down by 92% in the wake of a 24-hour writer’s strike at the New York Times.
“We always wondered where all this harmful disinformation was coming from,” said Darryl Ball, a researcher with the Center for Combatting Bad Things Online. “Turns out, it was all coming from those knuckleheads at the Times. Who knew?”
Several studies indicate the country has seen a sharp decrease in hate speech, foreign propaganda, and shockingly dumb hot takes since the entire writing staff walked out of the building in New York City, which experts believe could lead to an outbreak of peace and harmony across the nation.
“All this time, the threat to democracy was us all along!” said NYT Union Boss Fuggs Crullers to reporters from other news organizations not on strike. “We have begun negotiations with leadership to pay us more money to never come back to work in hopes of saving America.”
At publishing time, all other news outlets around the country reported feeling “lost” as they were so used to just copying and pasting from the New York Times each morning.
As with ChatGPT’s essay-writing ability, the current best use of the AI is to take its output as a starting point, from which humans can then edit it, and add their own knowledge and critical thinking ability.
But that will likely change down the road.
As Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution notes, humans working with computer assistance were once better at playing chess than unaided humans, or computers alone. But for a while now, computers alone have been better at chess than even humans working along with computers.
The same thing, he notes, has happened with facial recognition. A study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that humans no longer provide added value in matching an identity with a photo. Instead, a computer working alone now has less error.
Last week I reported on two volcanoes, Mauna Loa and Kilauea, that were simultaneously erupting on the Big Island of Hawaii.
As I projected in that report, lava is continuing to flow toward the main highway on the island. However, there are no current plans to control the flow.
Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he has undertaken a rapid restructuring that few large technology companies would attempt unless faced with an immediate liquidity crisis. Minutes after closing his purchase of the company, he started a process that reduced the workforce from 7,500 to 2,500 in 10 days.
Media pundits immediately slammed him, arguing that his slash-and-burn strategy would destroy one of the world’s most important social-media platforms—already in danger under the burden of $14 billion in debt. Much of this criticism came in the form of tweets, as the irony of using Twitter to denounce Twitter apparently escaped Mr. Musk’s critics. But the restructuring of Twitter won’t destroy the company.
Self-interest can lead people to believe and justify nearly anything. Think about businesses trying to survive competition being run by people trying to prove their career worth, and the incentive to run with the option that provides the cleanest path to the next win is huge, even when that option is something you wouldn’t accept in less-stressful circumstances. I have seen investors justify strategies and sales techniques they fiercely argued against at previous employers, coming around the moment their career depended on it. These are good, honest people. But self-interest is a freight train of persuasion. When you accept how powerful it is you become more skeptical of promotion, and more empathetic to those doing the promoting.
While subtle, if you look closely at this chart, you might notice a slight bias: pic.twitter.com/QAC0GexiNz
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2022
At oral argument in the recent affirmative action cases, attorneys for the defendants argued that although they do ask applicants to check a racial/ethnic box, they do not limit their consideration of diversity just to those classifications, but also to religion, ideology, and other aspects of identity that affect viewpoint. (For example, Mr. Waxman for Harvard: “Harvard greatly values religious diversity.”) That’s what they tell the courts. Here, however, is how Yale Law School describes its upcoming “Diversity Homecoming:”
Please join us for Yale Law School’s Diversity Homecoming, a two-day event in New Haven that fosters a dialogue on diversity among the YLS community.
The programming in New Haven, spanning Friday evening through Saturday evening, will feature remarks by Dean Heather Gerken, alumni and faculty presentations, and opportunities to engage with Yale Law School student affinity groups, including the Asian Pacific American Law Students’ Association; the Black Law Students’ Association; Latinx Law Students’ Association; the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students’ Association; the Native American Law Students’ Association; and the South Asian Law Students’ Association.
In a development that should surprise no one, YLS does not include religious or ideological groups in their list of student groups that contribute to diversity. Of course, Yale Law School isn’t UNC or Harvard, the defendants in the case. And Yale does include the South Asian and MENA groups, for which there are no boxes on application forms. But I think we all know that Yale Law’s narrow view of the sort diversity that contributes to the university experience is shared by other elite educational institutions.
To start, defining who should or shouldn’t be on a list gets complicated fast.
For instance, the Board, in its analysis, says Meta should do more to “prioritize expression that is important for human rights, including expression which is of special public importance.” Meta is criticized for not having a “comprehensive system in place to systematically assess which journalists, human rights defenders or civil society figures in a particular geography should be subject to ERSR.”
Yeah – that’s because not only defining who a journalist is, let alone the real security risks of Meta having a clean taxonomy of journalists and activists worldwide. While I understand that the Board doesn’t see it as part of their job to write policies, I wish they gave a little more guidance on how they would want Meta to define and find who these people are. An opt-in system would help some – but you still need a way to confirm that the people asking for protection should get protection and ensure you are covering those who may not realize they can request it.
We ran into the same problem in defining who a politician is. Let’s create a list of every politician and government page worldwide. Sounds so simple at first blush, right? Surely someone has built this. Nope. They still haven’t.
Of the four options given above, I think option A is the best, then D is the second best, but the best choice is not completely clear. The trouble with option A is that the norespondents might not respond even after encouragement. The trouble with option D is that the nonrespondents can differ from the respondents. Options B and E are fine too, as they both involve gathering more data, but presumably the new data will still have noresponse issues.
Usual good practice would be to gather available data on the respondents and use this information to adjust the sample to the population. We discuss this in chapter 17 of Regression and Other Stories. This would go beyond what is taught in high school, though. I actually don’t like this sort of message that says that nonrandom samples are bad but without a discussion of how to fix the problems. I hope someday to design a high-school-level statistics course, but I’m not there yet.
Until 2018, Oregon was one of 23 states without right-to-work protections for government workers, meaning teachers and thousands of other public employees were required to financially support union activities.
That changed in 2018 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Janus v. AFSCME, affirmed that mandatory union payments violate public employees’ First Amendment rights.
Knowing members could suddenly walk away without losing their jobs, OEA and other government unions could have responded by simply working harder to provide a service worth paying for.
But of course, that is not what happened.
John Guillory’s Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study, out in January from the University of Chicago Press, promises to be a landmark in the study of higher education. Or perhaps an epitaph. This sprawling amalgam of disciplinary history with the sociology of institutions would be of interest even if the future of its subject, academic literary study, were assured. But the book, which largely collects and reworks essays published over the last three decades, gains a note of poignant urgency because the topic it devotes so much learning and intelligence to may well be in permanent eclipse. Although Guillory is analytically detached about the fact that, as he says, large and irremediable forces “have irreversibly transformed the social conditions of literary study and relegated literature to a smaller place in the educational system and in society,” the attentive reader will hear Guillory’s characteristically subdued lament.
But a few years later, I helped to write a Senate report on ghostwriting in biomedicine and realized how common and damaging to public health this practice is. After we released the report, I met for coffee with the NIH congressional affairs person and demanded that Collins do something about ghostwriting. Ghostwriting was unethical and dangerous for public health, I pointed out. While Collins didn’t realize this, he had put his name on a paper that had been ghostwritten for him by an NIEHS employee who was not given credit for her work.
Collins needed to act.
Shortly after, I left my job in Congress to work at the Project on Government Oversight. When I uncovered the court documents showing ghostwriting that involved NIH-funded scientists, I wrote a letter to Collins detailing what I had found in the documents.
I then called the NIH congressional affairs employee and reminded him of our talk over coffee and what I knew about the Science paper with Collins’ name on it. If Collins ignored my letter, if he ignored this problem with ghostwriting, I was going public about that paper in Science and how it had been ghostwritten by a low-ranking woman at the NIEHS.
When Collins wrote me back, I kept my end of the agreement and remained silent.
As long as college students are considered entitled customers, their complaints about their professors will be taken seriously by administrators. That’s because happy students boost college applications, affect the closely-watched U.S. News & World Report annual rankings, and are part of the corporatization of higher education.
The latest example involves Maitland Jones Jr. and his organic chemistry course at NYU. When 82 of the professor’s 350 students signed a petition charging that his course was too hard, the deans terminated his contract and allowed students to withdraw from the class retroactively. This highly unusual step ignited an equal and opposite reaction from both the chemistry faculty, who protested the decision, and pro-Jones students.
Not surprisingly, professors who have yet to achieve tenure are reluctant to disappoint students.
The controversy surrounding Jones has far-reaching implications for higher education today as it attempts to handle its Gen-Z student body. There was a time when college administrators paid little attention to student dissatisfaction. Their opinions were largely written off as a sign of their immaturity. But things have changed because of the high stakes involved. Students believe that they are entitled to all A’s while putting in little effort because they are paying soaring tuition. Not surprisingly, professors who have not yet achieved tenure are reluctant to disappoint students out of fear that poor ratings will be used against them. In contrast, tenured professors simply dig in their heels, citing lowering standards.
Although learning is the shared responsibility of students and professors, students are the easier target. They study only 13 hours per week on average, or less than two hours per day in a typical semester, according to Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning On College Campuses. That’s half as much as their peers in the early 1960s. More than 80 percent of their time, on average, is spent on work, clubs, socializing, and sleeping. No wonder they struggle to master rigorous work, particularly in the hard sciences and math.
Loudoun County Superintendent Scott Ziegler was fired by the school board Tuesday night in response to a grand jury report on the district’s handling of two sexual assaults committed by the same student.
The Northern Virginia district drew national attention last year after a father accused it at a school board meeting of covering up his daughter’s sexual assault in which a biological boy wearing a skirt raped her in the girls’ bathroom. The suspect then transferred to another school in the district and assaulted another girl, and faced charges in both cases.
The father alleged the district had attempted to cover up his daughter’s assault to advance its transgender policy, which had been subject to parental protests at LCPS school board meetings.
The grand jury report released Monday said the district was looking out for its own interests instead of the best interests of its students and that the school system “failed at every juncture.”
🚨NEW LOUDOUN COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOLS 🧵
— Ian Prior (@iandprior) December 9, 2022
1: The Loudoun County School Board CLAIMS there were things in special grand jury report that weren't in its own report from an "independent review" and that's why it didn't fire Superintendent Ziegler earlier.
Let's review some receipts⬇️
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?
Keep the above in mind when you read about Twitter’s role in suppressing accounts linked to the GBD. There is a compelling public interest right now to investigate the government’s role in pressuring social media companies to censor.https://t.co/umy5Ut6l5C
— Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) December 9, 2022
According to newly unredacted emails, after Collins and Fauci reviewed multiple drafts of the paper over several weeks, the study’s lead author then thanked the two for their “advice and leadership” on the paper before publishing the piece in Nature Medicine without noting their participation. After helping with the manuscript, both Collins and Fauci then cited the paper as proof of a natural origin for COVID-19—Collins in a post on the NIH Director’s blog, and Fauci during a White House pandemic briefing with President Donald Trump.
Last week, I sent copies of these unredacted emails, as well a link to Collin’s 2011 letter, and asked HHS and NIH a series of questions about how they handle evidence of ghostwriting and plagiarism as defined by Collins. Both HHS, NIH have refused to respond.
The purpose of this article and its associated downloadable Powerpoint is to make available, for parents, educators, and all who care about K-12 education, information about some of the potentially harmful ideas and practices around race that have become increasingly prevalent in K-12 education. For convenience, we call these new ideas and practices “DEI,” that is, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” Other terms you may have seen for roughly the same phenomenon include “Critical Race Theory (CRT),” “(critical) social justice,” “diversity work,” and “antiracism.” This is not to say that there are no constructive alternative-DEI / alternative-to-DEI frameworks out there. There are, and we discuss some in the final section. It is merely to say that the broad mainstream of the DEI industry, now asserting itself in classrooms everywhere, tends to evince some unsettling features. Some of these features are the subject of this post.
In the following six sections, we explore six of these unsettling features of DEI as it manifests in K-12. A final coda offers some alternatives to traditional DEI that are worth exploring. This post is long. We hope, however, that you find it to be a useful resource. Each section is independent of the others and so may be consulted independently. You may click on a section number to jump to that section:
1. "Oppressed vs. oppressor" framing
2. "White supremacy culture" framing
3. Segregating children by race or ethnicity in “affinity groups”
4. Constructive vs. Critical/Liberated Ethnic Studies
5. Lowering/eliminating standards in math education
6. Misrepresentation of “Implicit Bias”
Coda: For what may we hope? Alternatives to DEI
In a Zoom interview with The Michigan Daily, Galen Metzger, University of Denver student and prominent ET user, described ET as a community “where a whole bunch of nerdy 20-somethings routinely have the most accurate information and predictions about elections as a group.”
It’s difficult to dispute this. Twitter user @umichvoter (who, in a Zoom interview with The Michigan Daily, requested anonymity after being doxxed before) is a University of Michigan Class of 2021 graduate — yet in late August, they correctly predicted the makeup of the Senate and the margins in the House within a few seats, back when many outlets were handing control of Congress to the GOP.
And they’re just one example. Similar accounts have been cited by networks like TIME, AP, MSNBC and more, and have been recognized for their work by prominent figures such as Rachel Maddow.
Despite this, ET hasn’t been widely written about outside of its own sphere. The community has existed in some capacity since the early days of Twitter, but many active users seem to have gotten their start sometime between 2018 and 2020. Considering Gen Z’s increased voter engagement since 2018, this makes sense.
James Miles Coleman, the associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia, said in a Zoom interview with The Michigan Daily that Twitter was one of his main sources of election news.
“One of the best resources we have when it comes to making sense of these races,” Coleman said, “is people on (Election) Twitter … and these are oftentimes college kids.”
So some audience members were shocked when Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, lauded a transgender teenager for committing suicide.
In an address about “standing up for gender-affirming care,” Ladinsky eulogized Leelah Alcorn, an Ohio 17-year-old who, in Ladinsky’s words, “stepped boldly in front of a tractor trailer, ending her life,” in 2014, after leaving a suicide note that “went viral, literally around the world.”
Ladinsky’s remarks were captured on video by a horrified onlooker, Oregon pediatrician Dr. Julia Mason, who expressed outrage on Twitter that Ladinsky was “glorifying suicide,” an act she described as “unprofessional and dangerous.”
That isn’t just Mason’s opinion. Technically speaking, it is also the official stance of the AAP, whose website for parents, healthychildren.org, explicitly warns that “glorifying suicide” can have a “‘contagious’ effect” and inspire others to take their own lives.
Reached for comment, Ladinsky expressed “regret” about her choice of words and said it was “never my intent” to glorify self-harm.
But how did this esteemed doctor wind up telling a group of physicians that a teen had, as she put it, “boldly ended her life?”
In any large organization, some members are bound to hold fringe views. But Ladinsky, who has devoted her career in part to facilitating the gender transition of teenagers including by challenging state laws that restrict the kinds of treatment physicians can provide to them, is hardly an outlier at the AAP. And the AAP is an organization that matters a great deal.
Remarkable to see doctors and public health experts from the big country at the bottom of this table constantly try to lecture doctors and public health experts from countries at the top of this table about child well-being and health. https://t.co/NuH6w1ihOr pic.twitter.com/GY4u2NytgS
— Anthony LaMesa (@ajlamesa) December 7, 2022
Indeed, within a decade, ordinary people will have more capabilities than a CIA agent does today. You’ll be able to listen in on a conversation in an apartment across the street using the sound vibrations off a chip bag. You’ll be able to replace your face and voice with those of someone else in real time, allowing anyone to socially engineer their way into anything. Bots will slide into your DMs and have long, engaging conversations with you until it senses the best moment to send its phishing link. Games like chess and poker will have to be played naked and in the presence of (currently illegal) RF signal blockers to guarantee no one’s cheating. Relationships will fall apart when the AI lets you know, via microexpressions, that he didn’t really mean it when he said he loved you. Copyright will be as obsolete as sodomy law, as thousands of new Taylor Swift albums come into being with a single click. Public comments on new regulations will overflow with millions of cogent and entirely unique submissions that the regulator must, by law, individually read and respond to. Death-by-kamikaze drone will surpass mass shootings as the best way to enact a lurid revenge. The courts, meanwhile, will be flooded with lawsuits because who needs to pay attorney fees when your phone can file an airtight motion for you?
Hong Kong schools were forced to cut more than 40 Form One classes this academic year, a 20 per cent increase compared with the previous one, due to a shrinking student population, renewing calls to open enrolment to pupils in mainland China and Southeast Asian countries.
According to a report published on Tuesday by the Committee on Home-School Co-operation, 46 Form One classes at secondary schools were axed in the 2022-23 academic year, compared with 38 in the previous year.
Twelve additional classes were added this year for reasons such as a higher number of students in some areas or a school’s growing popularity.
Since back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’, a fake-news flag was something of a badge of honour. And, as with those claims, the ‘disputed’ information in my article has been borne out by the evidence.
After a brief burst of incredulous coverage in the spring of 2020, the media soon lost interest in the hypothesis that smokers are less likely to get Covid-19, but dozens of studies have been quietly published in the past two-and-a-half years which confirm it. I have been listing them on my blog and last week added the hundredth study. It seems a good time to stop. By any reasonable standard, the jury is in.
Of the 100 studies from around the world, 87 of them show a statistically significant reduction in SARS-CoV-2 infection risk among current smokers as compared to non-smokers. Seven of them found no statistically significant association either way. Two of them found mixed results. Four of them found a positive association between smoking and infection, although three of these looked at people with a genetic propensity to smoke rather than at smokers themselves.
The studies used a range of methodologies. Very few of them set out to look at the effect of smoking specifically, but epidemiologists tend to ask people if they smoke as a matter of course and so the association kept popping up. Some of the studies looked at specific outbreaks of Covid-19, such as on a French aircraft carrier. Several of them looked at healthcare workers, such as this one from Germany and this one from Chile. Others looked at groups of hospital patients, such as psychiatric patients in New York or HIV patients in South Africa. A large number of them used seroprevalence surveys to see who had antibodies and, therefore, who had been infected in the past (prior to the vaccines).
Several Chinese graduate students have invented a plain-looking, low-cost coat that can hide the human body, day or night, from security cameras monitored by AI, according to the team.
The InvisDefense coat can be seen by human eyes but is covered in a pattern that blinds cameras in the day and sends out unusual heat signals at night, according to the team.
Their work won first prize in a creative work contest on November 27 sponsored by Huawei Technologies Co as part of the China Postgraduate Innovation and Practice Competitions.
The project was overseen by Professor Wang Zheng, of the school of computer science at Wuhan University, and the developers’ paper on the invention has been accepted by AAAI 2023, a top academic conference on artificial intelligence.
This document, which was just leaked to me, is from the Portland Public Schools Social Sciences Adoption Committee, which approves new curricular materials for over 45,000 students. @realchrisrufo pic.twitter.com/2QWKQlejCo
— Peter Boghossian (@peterboghossian) November 30, 2022
NBC News dedicated 39 minutes to the royal visits, ABC News 20 minutes, CBS news 12 minutes, and CNN 25 minutes. (Note: These figures do not include ABC, NBC, and CBS’s online only streaming platforms. If it did the number would likely be much greater.) Both Harry and William took separate trips to Boston, which producers at America’s leading TV news networks determined was of urgent and top news priority. NBC News and The Today Show, in particular, covered each and every move of the Princes’ visit like they were the moon landing.
It wasn’t just puffy morning shows either. Ostensibly hard news programs like NBC Nightly News ran two different segments on the Royal visits. ABC World News Tonight ran two segments, and CBS Evening News ran three. None of the network evening news shows have mentioned the California academic strike at all.
The strike, which is now entering its 22nd day, has seen over 48,000 teaching assistants, researchers, postdoctoral scholars and other university workers demanding minimum living wages amidst a crushing California housing crisis. In a recent union survey, according to the New York Times, “92 percent of graduate student workers said housing consumed more than a third of their income. For 40 percent of them, it was more than half.” Yesterday, 17 strikers were arrestedstaging a sit-in in the lobby of the UC president’s office in Sacramento.