Aaron Sibarium

McLean Hospital, which describes itself as the “largest psychiatric teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School,” has since 2021 hosted a paid research program for “Black, Indigenous, and underrepresented people of color,” according to the hospital’s website. The 10-week internship offers participants a $7,000 stipend and places them in prestigious labs.

The internship may ramp up legal scrutiny on America’s oldest Ivy, which, alongside the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, is battling a high-profile lawsuit from Students for Fair Admissions, a nonprofit opposed to affirmative action.

That scrutiny hasn’t stopped either school from promoting discriminatory programs: UNC Chapel Hill has at least five scholarships, fellowships, and other initiatives that are available only to minorities; a sixth initiative, exclusively for “BIPOC” students, was made available to all races following a discrimination complaint.

Lawyers say that these programs violate civil rights law and demonstrate just how committed universities are to racial preferences.

“UNC and Harvard have been doubling down on Ibram Kendi-style ‘you have to be racist to be anti-racist’ programming,” said Ilya Shapiro, the director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. “Not only are these clear-cut legal violations, but it’s not a good look as the Supreme Court scrutinizes the use of racial preferences in admissions.”

Katrina Manson:

The US intelligence community faces a hard battle to renew foreign surveillance powers that have enabled authorities to repeatedly access private information about Americans despite constitutional protections.

The Biden administration wants to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a warrantless wiretapping program introduced in 2008, which was last renewed in 2018 and is due to expire at the end of the year.

Jay Bhattacharya:

We live in an age when a high public health bureaucrat can, without irony, announce to the world that if you criticize him, you are not simply criticizing a man. You are criticizing “the science” itself. The irony in this idea of “science” as a set of sacred doctrines and beliefs is that the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us our modern definitions of scientific methodology, was a reaction against a religious clerisy that claimed for itself the sole ability to distinguish truth from untruth. The COVID-19 pandemic has apparently brought us full circle, with a public health clerisy having replaced the religious one as the singular source of unassailable truth.

The analogy goes further, unfortunately. The same priests of public health that have the authority to distinguish heresy from orthodoxy also cast out heretics, just like the medieval Catholic Church did. Top universities, like Stanford, where I have been both student and professor since 1986, are supposed to protect against such orthodoxies, creating a safe space for scientists to think and to test their ideas. Sadly, Stanford has failed in this crucial aspect of its mission, as I can attest from personal experience.

I should note here that my Stanford roots go way back. I earned two degrees in economics there in 1990. In the ’90s, I earned an M.D. and a Ph.D. in economics. I’ve been a fully tenured professor at Stanford’s world-renowned medical school for nearly 15 years, happily teaching and researching many topics, including infectious disease epidemiology and health policy. If you had asked me in March 2020 whether Stanford had an academic freedom problem in medicine or the sciences, I would have scoffed at the idea. Stanford’s motto (in German) is “the winds of freedom blow,” and I would have told you at the time that Stanford lives up to that motto. I was naive then, but not now.

Academic freedom matters most in the edge cases when a faculty member or student is pursuing an idea that others at the university find inconvenient or objectionable. If Stanford cannot protect academic freedom in these cases, it cannot protect academic freedom at all.

To justify this depressing claim, I would like to relate the story of my experience during the pandemic regarding a prominent policy proposal I co-authored called the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). I could relate many additional incidents that illustrate Stanford’s stunning failure to protect academic freedom, but this one suffices to make my point.

On Oct. 4, 2020, along with two other eminent epidemiologists, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, I wrote the GBD. The declaration is a one-page document that proposed a very different way to manage the COVID-19 pandemic than had been used up to that date. The lockdown-focused strategy that much of the world followed mimicked the approach that Chinese authorities adopted in January 2020. The extended lockdowns—by which I mean public policies designed to keep people physically separate from one another to avoid spreading the SARS-CoV-2 virus—were a sharp deviation from Western management of previous respiratory virus pandemics. The old pandemic plans prioritized minimizing disruption to normal social functioning, protecting vulnerable groups, and rapidly developing treatments and vaccines.

Wall Street Journal:

You would think Canadians had learned by now not to tell Jordan Peterson what to say. The psychology professor became an internet sensation in 2016 after arguing that Canadian legislation amounted to “compelled speech” on gender pronouns. Now the College of Psychologists of Ontario is demanding that Mr. Peterson acknowledge he “lacked professionalism” in public statements and undergo a “coaching program” of remedial education.

Maybe the new commissars missed Mr. Peterson’s videos praising Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the man who said: “Live not by lies.” Mr. Peterson won’t comply, and he says he’ll now face a disciplinary committee that could revoke his license to practice.

The College of Psychologists, the profession’s governing body in Ontario, appointed an investigator in March to examine complaints about Mr. Peterson’s comments on Twitter and the popular Joe Rogan podcast. On Nov. 22, the College’s panel released a decision. Per images provided by Mr. Peterson, the panel ruled: “The comments at issue appear to undermine the public trust in the profession as a whole, and raise questions about your ability to carry out your responsibilities as a psychologist.”

What are these comments? Calling Elliot Page, the transgender actor, by his former name, “Ellen,” and the pronoun “her,” on Twitter. Calling an adviser to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “prik.” A sarcastic crack at antigrowth environmentalists for not caring that their energy policies lead to more deaths of poor Third World children.

David Bentley Hart:

To my mind, each is in its own way a perfect, exquisitely faceted gem of English prose from an especially glorious literary epoch. The music of the one has haunted me for most of my life; the gleeful perversity of the other has lost none of its power to make me laugh in nearly four decades. And, however great the joy I take in either of these passages in isolation, it is as nothing compared to the idiot bliss I derive from their juxtaposition. Taken together, they ideally illustrate the two extremes of the great man’s voice: on the one hand, its glowing beauty and spacious sonority; on the other, its anfractuous density and heedless flamboyance.

The rabbit hole:

When analyzing the market space inhabited by both traditional and new-age media companies one of the necessary prerequisites for customer buy-in is Trust. Without trust, people can not consume a media source especially when that media source purports to be a purveyor of news and information.

According to Gallup, American trust in mass media institutions has tanked. Trust is down across all political demographics with the Democrats being the sole exception; this is an industry ripe for disruption. Enter Twitter and Elon Musk.

Twitter, at its core, is offering Trust as a Service (TaaS) to its user base. Twitter is trying to sell its audience on the idea that we can entrust it to host important conversations on its platform without engaging in unethical moderation tactics to censor information deemed ‘inappropriate.’ In addition, Twitter is attempting to prove to what extent it can act as a “trust broker” since conversations that happen on Twitter can make or break trust in people, institutions, and other entities.

Historically, we had what is now a ‘Legacy Media’ that brokered trust by telling us who we could and could not trust. As Malcolm X noted, centralized trust brokerage oligarchies gave a small group of people the ability to control the narrative to such an extent that perceptions of guilt and innocence could be shaped. Now we have reached a point, as shown earlier by Gallup, where Legacy Media has destroyed its own reputation by failing to adapt to the increasing levels of transparency that came with the Internet and through biased reporting.

Anything in a traditional media format is delayed, less scrutinized, and riddled with bias as indicated by the above chart.

1. After learning that Twitter employs at least 15 former FBI agents, I searched Facebook. What I found is alarming

Facebook currently employs at least 115 people, in high-ranking positions, that formerly worked at FBI/CIA/NSA/DHS:

17 CIA
37 FBI
23 NSA
38 DHS

Thread🧵

— Name Redacted (@NameRedacted247) December 19, 2022

Jon Masson:

But overall, the experience has been overwhelmingly positive for the two.

“I wouldn’t change it,” Angie Murphy said. “It’s been wonderful, but it’s been tough. As a coach’s kid, you are under a microscope. We have great parents here and we have great kids, so she hasn’t had to deal with a lot of that, but I have known horror stories where coaches coach their kids and people say, `Well, that kid is playing because their mom or dad is the coach.’

“We haven’t had to deal with that here. She earned it on the court because of her skills, not because her mom is the coach.”

Megan Murphy, who first started playing basketball in kindergarten and now has verbally committed to UW-Stevens Point, said, “It’s fun to share the wins with her and the good things about basketball.”

But she added, “We try to avoid talking about basketball at home. Otherwise, it gets to be too much.”

Alexander Jabbari:

Recently, Hamline University, in Minnesota, fired an adjunct instructor of art history after she displayed a painting of the prophet Muhammad in a class. A Muslim ruler in 14th-century Iran had commissioned the devotional painting for other Muslims in a context permissive of such depictions. Prior to the lesson that ignited the controversy, the instructor took great care to contextualize the image sensitively and granted students the option to not view it.

ASHLEY BELANGER

Whistleblowers have alleged that the Saudi Arabian government infiltrated the highest ranks of Wikipedia in order to control information about the country, activists reported yesterday. The alleged infiltration resulted in the 2020 arrests in Saudi Arabia of two Wikipedia administrators—Ziyad al-Sofiani (jailed for up to eight years) and Osama Khalid (jailed for up to 32 years)—for “swaying public opinion” and “violating public morals” by posting content “deemed to be critical about the persecution of political activists in the country.” Today, Wikimedia Foundation released a statement to Ars disputing the report, alleging that there was no “infiltration” and that Wikipedia admins have “no ranks.”

These conflicting statements follow an investigation concluded by the Wikimedia Foundation last month that resulted in the banning of 16 users for “conflict of interest editing on Wikipedia projects” in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. At the time, Wikimedia said, “We were able to confirm that a number of users with close connections with external parties were editing the platform in a coordinated fashion to advance the aim of those parties.”

Lindsay Ellis:

Big layoff announcements and growing fears about the economy usually mean more applications to M.B.A. and other graduate programs. But this time, career advisers and analysts are preaching caution.

Signs of a slowdown generally spark interest in graduate studies from both recent college graduates and those in the middle of their career. What better time to pause a career and acquire new skills for when the boom times return, the logic typically goes.

But this isn’t a widespread downturn, and the broader labor market remains strong. In addition, higher inflation and rising student-loan interest rates are complicating the calculus of whether it pays to leave the job market for a couple of years to notch a higher degree.

Put another way, in a healthy democracy:

– The citizenry knows almost all of what their government is doing; secrecy is the exception.

– The govt should know nothing about what private citizens are doing; warrants are the exception.

Washington has *completely* reversed this.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 12, 2023

Rod Dreher:

OK, here’s what I think. Brooks (who’s a friend; our political differences matter not one bit to me) doesn’t seem to grasp the enormity of the collapse of the institutional Republican Party’s authority. There was the Iraq War. And then came the Wall Street crash, which happened on a Republican president’s watch. It’s not fair to blame Bush entirely for that — Washington’s sellout to Wall Street deregulation was truly a uniparty affair; as Bill Clinton — but the Republican Party was supposed to be the party that was more trustworthy on defense and economics. And it imploded. Not only did it implode, but its Washington leadership seemed to learn no lessons from that implosion. It offered no leadership. When the Tea Party emerged out of understandable populist rage, Washington Republicans, bereft of a better idea, hitched their wagons to its star, but went nowhere. The key document to read to understand why the GOP Establishment collapsed in the face of Donald Trump remains Tucker Carlson’s Politico piece from January 2016, when nobody thought Trump had a chance at the nomination, titled, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar — And Right”. 

What is entirely missing from the Brooks-Stephens discussion is that the changes in the GOP took place during the Great Awokening. The rise of the illiberal Left — and, crucially, its conquering nearly ever major institution in American life — is the elephant in the room here. While all this was happening, the Republican Party did very damn little to stop it. Not even Trump, for all his rhetoric, made much of a difference. The reason I have a tiny bit of sympathy for Stephens’s position is that I too believe that a lot of the Trumpian populist Storm and Stress was little more than populism in the service of nihilism. Still, Brooks and Stephens lament that conservatives used to venerate institutions, but now hate them. Does it occur to these men that these institutions may not merit deference anymore? Why can’t they see that these institutions are the ones tearing America apart by attacking classical liberal ideas of race and justice, gutting the natural family, and demonizing anyone who dares to question its dogmas. Why should conservative Americans have any faith in these institutions anymore, when the leadership of these institutions broke faith with them a while back? It’s not a surprise that Brooks and Stephens grieve the populism on the Right, because they have made their peace with the Cultural Revolution. They remind me of Catholic institutionalists who can’t understand why so many of the great unwashed in the pews don’t trust the clergy, never mind the fact that the bishops ran the institutional church into the ditch, and the current leadership in Rome is busily deconstructing what’s left of the Church’s authority and heritage.

Christopher Rufo:

The most significant political story of the past half-century is the activist Left’s “long march through the institutions.” Beginning in the 1960s, left-wing activists and intellectuals, inspired by theorists such as Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse, made a concerted effort to embed their ideas in education, government, philanthropy, media, and other important sectors.

This process came to spectacular fruition following the 2020 death of George Floyd, when it seemed that every prestige institution in the United States got busy advancing the same ideological line on race, gender, and culture—which, whether they knew it or not, mimicked the precise themes that the old radicals had originally proposed.

The long march through the institutions, in other words, was complete.

But conservatives, too, have updated their playbook. They have read their Gramsci and have begun to understand that ideological capture poses a grave threat to the American system. President Donald Trump shook conservatives out of their complacency with instinctual, if sometimes crude, cultural countermeasures. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has built on this approach, offering a sophisticated policy agenda for protecting families against captured bureaucracies.

Unusual Whales:

One of those fields that are filled with unusual trading is Congressional trading. And so, Congressional stock trading was a hot topic in 2022. Our 2021 political trading report brought international attention to Congress and their stock portfolios and for the first time caused a large public outcry on the topic. Within weeks of publishing it, Congress acted swiftly with drafting several proposals for a stock trading ban. Notably, 27 lawmakers immediately signed on to ban the practice, with politicians at the forefront such as Rep.Spanbanger egging Unusual Whales on and others like Senator Hawley directly quoting UW’s work. Together, we kept the topic in the news and in the minds of politicians for months. 

Other examples of the UW report making waves:

• We made Rep. Josh Gottheimer flustered when directly mentioning his trades.
• We drew comments from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
• We made Speaker Nancy Pelosi flip from nonchalance and the belief that Congress should trade in 2021 to becoming pro-banning the practice. (Seriously, she was anti-bills before our public pressure, saying “it’s a free market”)
• We made Dan Crenshaw admit that without trading: “You have no way to better yourself” as a Congressperson.
• We saw the House Administration Committee hold a hearing on Congressional Stock Trading Practices, and quote Unusual Whales’ work.
• We saw Democrat and Republican politicians work together topropose a bipartisan stock trading ban on themselves and their family members, which was not voted on during regular sessions. 

Vijay Prasad:

 Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, says: “It feels like it’s bad because hospitals are so understaffed, but this does not represent an outlier season.”

RSV, which is a standard childhood illness, also surged early, and it generally hits very young children and the elderly hardest. There are ongoing shortages both in terms of medicine, like Tylenol, and pediatric hospital beds. But the latter is less about the rising cases and more about the disappearance of pediatric services. Caring for children is not a major moneymaker for hospitals, and often earns less than adult hospitalization. Over the past two decades, as the Washington Post explained, there has been a major decline in pediatric beds nationally. The bottom line: we should be less afraid of RSV and more concerned about our broken ability to handle routine viral illness year to year.

Second, there is no avoiding respiratory viruses. With extreme, draconian measures, exposure to respiratory viruses can be delayed, but can never be averted. This is in contrast with, say,  our ability to avoid contaminated drinking water or sexually transmitted diseases. The difference is that human beings have to breathe every minute of every day. And, as humans are social creatures, most of that breathing will naturally be very close to other human beings.

“The piper must be paid at some point in nature; kids will get sick, and it has nothing to do with a more compromised immune system,” says Dr. Danuta Skowronski from the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control.

This point must be emphasized. It is natural, healthy, and necessary for young children to be exposed to many viruses. In order for children to build immunity to common pathogens—in order for them to develop a normally functioning immune system—they must have such exposure, which will sometimes make them sick.

And third, there is no evidence that the interventions purported to stop Covid-19, flu, and RSV will help. Before Covid-19, the evidence to support masking was thin. I co-authored a survey of masking trials that were done prior to the advent of Covid-19, examining whether masks stopped transmission of respiratory viruses. Fourteen of the 16 trials showed masks were ineffective at this. In other words, the pre-Covid evidence was clear that recommending masks for the average person was useless. This is likely one reason why Dr. Anthony Fauci, the CDC, the World Health Organization, and others initially advised against masking. 

Even worse, the evidence for masking young children for Covid-19, flu, and RSV viruses is entirely lacking.

Nate Hochman:

That’s why its built-in ideological bias that I happened upon last night is so concerning. It’s not clear if this was characteristic of ChatGPT from the outset, or if it’s a recent reform to the algorithm, but it appears that the crackdowns on “misinformation” that we’ve seen across technology platforms in recent years — which often veer into more brazen efforts to suppress or silence viewpoints that dissent from progressive orthodoxy — is now a feature of ChatGPT, too. Given the expansive power over the information ecosystem that AI could soon wield, that presents a profound threat to the cause of free speech and thought in the digital sphere.

If you ask chatGPT to write a story about why drag queen story hour is bad for kids, it refuses on the grounds that it would be “harmful.” If you switch the word “bad” to “good,” it launches into a long story about a drag queen named Glitter who taught kids the value of inclusion https://t.co/9yfdYQfq9C pic.twitter.com/KSYCCEyGV3

— Nate Hochman (@njhochman) January 11, 2023

William Galston:

For most of my life, I rejected the assertion that America is a “sick society.” This judgment seemed too broad and lacking in nuance. Yes, there was regress in some areas, such as the surge of gun-related crimes in the 1980s. But there was progress on other fronts. Life expectancy increased steadily, and a rising share of Americans had access to healthcare. The rate of smoking among young people declined sharply, as did teen pregnancy. Many gaps among racial and ethnic groups were narrowing.

It’s no secret that life expectancy in the U.S. is much lower than it should be. In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, we ranked 29th among the 38 member nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. U.S. life expectancy trailed Germany’s by 2.5 years, Canada’s by 3.2 years, and France’s by four years.

Some of this disparity reflects the U.S.’s terrible performance in infant mortality. It ranked 33rd, behind every European and Asian country in the OECD. Some of it reflects huge geographical disparities within the U.S. The life expectancy gap in 2019 between America’s best state (Hawaii) and its worst was about seven years. Still, even Hawaii trailed 25 OECD countries. (West Virginia would have placed dead last, behind Mexico.)

Kaleem Caire:

Thank you CapTimes for printing my OpEd. Interestingly, in a conversation with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction yesterday, state officials told us that we are legally obligated to count our students who are enrolled and present on the day of the pupil count (tomorrow, Friday). This is state law. They also told us we “should keep the money”.

As a side note, see a second article that I posted in the comment below about this. Our counting or not counting our Scholars will not have an impact on MMSD. What will impact them and other districts more is if our Scholars enroll with them or not. So, why did One City Schools get singled out and why do people expect us to do what NONE of the 423 traditional public school districts or 60 independent public charter school districts in Wisconsin do? One word answer: Politics.

It’s funny how in my home town (Madison), I am personally and constantly expected to go above and beyond everyone else and work magic with a too little funding. MMSD will receive and spend $23,000 per student, on average from the state, federal government and local property taxes. One City will only receive approximately $13,000 per student from the state and federal government, and not one dime of local property tax money, even though we operate “public schools” that educate the public’s children. Tell me if that’s fair. I have to raise $9,000 per student (multiplied by 400+ students) from private philanthropy, foundations, corporations and people like you in order to operate our schools.

This is totally not fair.

Public school districts like MMSD, Middleton, etc also get to count our charter school students in their annual property tax levy if our Scholars reside within their districts, and keep that money.

They do not “transfer” this money to us…but this wasn’t mentioned in any of the press releases or articles other organizations wrote about us. Why not?

Why not point out that traditional public school districts get to keep thousands of dollars per child for students they don’t educate and are not enrolled in their schools? It’s very disingenuous and unfair, and is only meant to draw negative public attention to public charter schools and One City. It’s sad, very sad.

Independent public charter schools like One City are also expected to produce dramatic test score improvements annually when each year we enroll many new students who are two or more years behind academically. We also had to alter our entire school model just 18 months after opening our first charter (elementary) school after the pandemic arrived in March 2020. Thankfully, this school year, we have been able to shift back to our original school design and are enjoying doing our work with our Scholars the way we always intended.

This is how innovators in education who go against the status quo in Dane County and Madison are treated. We get questioned, ridiculed and smacked for trying to do something new, despite 90 percent of Black and 80 percent of Brown students failing miserably in our public schools – EVERY YEAR.

BUT YOU DON’T SEE MANY ANY HEADLINES about that, or about the BUT YOU DON’T SEE MANY ANY HEADLINES about that, or about the fact that just 35 PERCENT OF ALL third graders in Wisconsin, including students from all racial backgrounds, can read to learn by the end of 3rd grade. That’s all – 35%…..and just 8% of all Black third graders and 18% of all Latino third graders in Wisconin.

The $250,000 One City Schools might receive for our Scholars is more important than addressing the massive failure of thousands of our children in Madison, Dane County and our state?

Our priorities continue to be jacked up and off-base, people. Our chickens will come home to roost, and in many ways, they already are.

No, schools are not solely at fault for the failure of our children BUT One City focuses holistically on the family, community, students and their habits of character), and our educators and school at the same time. We have expectations and supports for everyone. We go at these challenges head on and are transparent about our challenges and results so we and others can learn from them.

One City Schools is an asset to Madison, Dane County and Wisconsin, and should be treated and supported this way. Who else is trying to tackle the challenges the way we are? Onward.

2011: a majority of the taxpayer funded Madison School Board aborts the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School in a 5-2 vote.

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?

NEW: Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s campaign puts out a third statement in less than two hours about her campaign’s email to CPS teachers asking them to encourage their students to volunteer to help Lightfoot win reelection and earn class credit. (1/2) @WTTW

— Heather Cherone (@HeatherCherone) January 12, 2023

Scott Girard:

UPDATE: In a letter to the editor submitted to the Cap Times after the article below was published, One City Schools founder and CEO Kaleem Caire wrote that the school would not count the ninth and 10th grade students who will be leaving for enrollment purposes.

“This would be disingenuous, and we do not operate this way,” Caire wrote. “We could do this, but we won’t.”

Department of Public Instruction communications specialist Chris Bucher wrote in an email Wednesday afternoon that the department’s requirements for enrollment remain in place, meaning a student must be both enrolled and in attendance on the day of the second Friday count or in attendance on a day both before and after the count, in the case of an absence on the count day.

With One City’s high school classes continuing until Jan. 20, it remains unclear what will happen if students are still attending One City but not counted as part of the school’s enrollment.

Caire’s full letter can be read here.

Olivia Herken also fails to note Madison’s enormous K-12 funding, now about $23k/student annually.

There are two enrollment counts a year: One on the third Friday in September, and another on the second Friday in January, which is this week.

Independent charter schools like One City receive four payments from the state throughout the fiscal year based on that year’s enrollment.

These funds are the primary source of state aid for independent charter schools, Bucher said, and are based on a rate set by the state (this year’s is $9,264 per student) multiplied by how many students are enrolled.

An analysis of outcomes and spending would be useful as well.

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?

Former Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz:

MTI wants One City to fail, but our community should want it to succeed. Caire has the right ideas but he’s taking on a very tough task. He is focussing his entire program on reaching kids, especially poor Black kids, who have the deck stacked against them. He is emphasizing order, discipline and high expectations. He’s providing structure for kids’ lives that is often lacking at home.

This is going to take time. One City started in 2018 with preschool and kindergarten and has been adding a grade each year. The community should rally around One City, get it through it’s growing pains, allow it to build out to a complete K-12 program and see what happens. Because I think that what will happen will be excellent.

John Sailer:

In June 2020, Gordon Klein, a longtime accounting lecturer at UCLA, made the news after a student emailed him asking him to grade black students more leniently in the wake of the “unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.”

Klein’s response was blunt. It stated in part:

Thanks for your suggestion in your email below that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota. Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only? Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black-half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? 

He went on:

Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the “color of their skin.” Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK’s admonition?

Thanks, G. Klein

Klein’s response enraged students. They organized a petition to remove him that quickly gained nearly 20,000 signatures, resulting in the professor being placed on leave and banned from campus. But the story got national attention, and a counter-petition signed by more than 76,000 people demanded his reinstatement. In less than three weeks, Klein was allowed to return to the classroom.  

Yet his encounters with what UCLA calls Equity, Diversity and Inclusionwere far from over.

William Jacobson:

Second, I learned about Prof. Mark Perry. I knew “of” him, but I don’t know him personally. He’s a legend for filing civil rights complaints over discriminatory campus policies and administrative conduct that is oh so politically correct, but illegal. His list of complaints he has filed notes that as of the end of 2022:

Based on resolutions with the Office for Civil Rights in 2022 resulting from my civil rights complaints, nearly 100 US colleges and universities agreed to change, discontinue, or stop promoting 170 female-only or BIPOC/Black-only programs, awards, fellowships, and scholarships to correct their Title VI and/or Title IX violations.

William Jacobson:

Complaint: “Each of the defendant medical schools and universities, along with nearly every medical school and university in the United States, discriminates on account of race and sex when admitting students by giving discriminatory preferences to females and non-Asian minorities, and by discriminating against whites, Asians, and men.”

Alex Tabarrok:

At first glance it seems peculiar that semiconductors, a key item of national strategic interest, should be produced in only a few places in the world, most notably Taiwan, using devices produced only in Eindhoven in the Netherlands by one firm, ASML. Isn’t the United States big enough to be able to support all of these technologies domestically? Yes and no.

Semiconductor manufacturing is the most difficult and complicated manufacturing process ever attempted by human beings. A literal spec of dust can ruin an entire production run. How many people can run such a factory? Let’s look at the United States. The labor force is approximately 164 million people which sounds like a lot but half of the people in the labor force have IQs below 100. More specifically, although not everyone in semiconductor manufacturing requires a PhD, pretty much everyone has to be of above average intelligence and many will need to be in the top echelons of IQ.

Joel Kotkin

The United States today stands as a living contradiction to the ‘great man theory of history’. For the US is a great country led by small minds. In recent times, it has been ruled by a narcissistic moral reprobate and it is now being run by a cognitively deficient and scandal-plagued politician. There is a growing feeling, particularly among the young, that today’s America is diminished. Yet the US remains the world’s premier power, and its last best hope against a rising authoritarian tide.

So, how does an America led by mediocrities succeed? The secret sauce lies in two great assets – America’s geography and its constitution. 

America enjoys an enormous expanse of arable land, the largest in the world, bigger than that of Russia and Ukraine combined, and nearly 100million acres more than China. It is not only by far the largest food exporterin the world, but it also leads all countries, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, in the production of fossil fuels, which are now being consumed more than ever. And not to be overlooked are America’s vast reserves of fresh water, the third largest on the planet.

These assets separate America from its largest rivals. Neither China nor Europe has adequate domestic energy supplies, making both ever reliant, like Tennessee Williams’ Blanche DuBois, on the ‘kindness of strangers’. Shortages and high prices are already hammering Germany’s industrial economy, from its dynamic mid-sized firms to the giants of its chemicals industry, despite the German government spending a massive half-a-trillion dollars on energy subsidies. Europe is now desperately firing up coal plants and reconsidering nuclear energy, but in the near-term its energy salvationwill most likely lie in the oil fields of the Permian basin and other hotbeds of US energy production. 

These geographic advantages, as well as the growing global suspicion about China, are turning America once again into the world’s primary destination for foreign investment, particularly in energy-intensive sectors like manufacturing. Japan, Germany and Canada are the top investors. German car giant Volkswagen sees the US as its best bet for ‘strategic growth’, especially given the business and political pressure against investment in China.

Dylan Sharkey:

The OIG recommended disciplinary actions for any administer or staff who failed to report complaints of abuse. In total, there were 1,825 complaints received in 2022 covering the sexual allegations, misappropriation of funds, fraud, bullying and other bad conduct. There were 725 investigated.

Learning Strategies Center:

Why do you take notes? What do you hope to get from your notes? What are Cornell Notes and how do you use the Cornell note-taking system?

There are many ways to take notes. It’s helpful to try out different methods and determine which work best for you in different situations. Whether you are learning online or in person, the physical act of writing can help you remember better than just listening or reading. Research shows that taking notes by hand is more effective than typing on a laptop. This page and our Canvas module will teach you about different note-taking systems and styles and help you determine what will work best for your situation.

Wall Street Journal:

The Department of Veterans Affairs has a gender gingerbread person. NASA says beware of micro-inequities. And if U.S. Army servicewomen express “discomfort showering with a female who has male genitalia,” what’s the brass’s reply? Talk to your commanding officer, but toughen up.

These are details from hundreds of pages of diversity and inclusion training materials used by the federal government in 2021 and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Everyone in corporate life knows such training, lampooned in the second episode of the TV show “The Office.” Yet taxpayers might be curious how their money is being spent to instruct the federal workforce these days.

Documents obtained via FOIA often lack context, so it’s hard to know the audience for any specific training and whether participation was voluntary or not-so-politely encouraged. With those caveats, press ahead.

***
Asked for its diversity training, the U.S. Army offered three modules on transgender policy, one for “Commanders at all levels,” another for “Special Staff,” and a third for “Units and Soldiers.” Notable is a series of vignettes that cover pronoun usage, urinalysis observation, and a serviceman who wants “to discuss his newly confirmed pregnancy.” With respect to showers, schedules can be adjusted or curtains installed. But a soldier’s gender in the Army’s system governs which facilities are used. Accommodating only a transgender soldier is prohibited.

Veronica Dagher:

Another benefit of learning new ideas and skills is that it may better position you to switch jobs by making you more marketable, career coaches said. Using your brain is like using muscles, the stronger it gets with appropriate use, said Daniel Amen, psychiatrist and author of the forthcoming book “Change Your Brain Every Day.”

“The more we learn the more we can learn,” said Dr. Amen.

Get the most out of it

Generally the more time you can spend learning, the better. But don’t become fixated on attending a certain number of lectures or reading a set number of books, said Prof. Stern. Instead, try to engage in the activities you enjoy and stick with them over time.

Choose activities or skills that involve multiple brain regions and processes to get the biggest benefit from continuous learning, said Dr. Amen.

Cooking is an activity that involves planning ahead to buy the necessary ingredients, following recipe instructions, paying attention to cooking times and performing fine motor skills, such as chopping and mincing, he said.

Jenny Gross:

While teachers in Finland are required to teach media literacy, they have significant discretion over how to carry out lessons. Mrs. Martikka, the middle school teacher, said she tasked students with editing their own videos and photos to see how easy it was to manipulate information. A teacher in Helsinki, Anna Airas, said she and her students searched words like “vaccination” and discussed how search algorithms worked and why the first results might not always be the most reliable. Other teachers also said that in recent months, during the war in Ukraine, they had used Russian news sites and memes as the basis for a discussion about the effects of state-sponsored propaganda.

Brice Murphy:

The post-elections statistics compiled by Marquette professor John D. Johnson for Urban Milwaukee definitely show the Milwaukee turnout was down in 2022 compared to the 2018 turnout, by 46,284 votes in Milwaukee County. Meanwhile the number of votes cast in the surrounding WOW counties (Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington) actually increased over 2018.

Steve Harrison:

But the board’s decision touched off accusations from the Green Party that national Democrats were undermining their efforts. A prominent Democratic law firm – The Elias Law Group – said the Green Party misled voters when getting them to sign their petition.

Mathew Hoh, the Green’s North Carolina U.S. Senate candidate, acknowledged there were small problems with the more than 22,000 signatures submitted. He said 95% were collected by Green Party volunteers.

“But 5% were gathered by contractors,” he said. “And two of those people seemed to have tried to run a scam and submit false signatures. That was around 200 signatures (in question).”

The students of @elonmusk‘s private school,Ad Astra,getting a lecture about first principles from Elon himself

Source: https://t.co/D36iullTe8 pic.twitter.com/aB7PiB8Rrm

— 🚀Technodoge🔴 (@astro_greek) January 10, 2023

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

The dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School has refused to approve the fellowship of the man — hailed as  the “godfather” of human rights work — because he disagrees with his stance on Israel. 

HKS, one of the top public policy institutions in the world, has violated Harvard’s clear commitments to free expression by denying former Human Rights Watch executive Kenneth Roth a fellowship because of his purported “anti-Israel bias.” As always, FIRE is neutral on Roth’s views on Israel, as well as the underlying Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and has defended individuals on every side of the issue.

Harvard’s human rights experts reportedly sought Roth for the job after he announced he was stepping down as executive director of Human Rights Watch. Sushma Raman, executive director of HKS’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, invited Roth to join the center as a senior fellow. Roth and Raman agreed on terms, and the fellowship was set to be confirmed, but when it was elevated to HKS Dean Douglas Elmendorf, he refused to approve the deal.

FIRE wrote Dean Elmendorf today to urge him to approve Roth’s fellowship, explaining that the school violated Roth’s expressive rights by denying him the fellowship because of his views.

WM Briggs:

According to Ehrlich, and his peers, the world should have ended by now because of environmental catastrophe. Since he was wrong, so was science. And science likely was wrong because of peer review, which we might also call peer acquiescence or peer enforcement, just as Ehrlich implied. 

Thus Ehrlich, given Ehrlich’s admitted errors, he agrees with us, that peer review is one of the big reasons science goes bad. 

It is a more-or-less obvious argument that the morepeers there are, all of whom are publishing science papers, the more peer review there is. And therefore the greater force there is driving science towards the mean, which is to say average, beliefs. 

Ehrlich confirmed this not only by blaming his peers on his mistakes, but by acknowledging how those very same peers gave him almost every award there is. And that means low-level peers wanting to become high-level peers, which is not unreasonable, many would seek to emulate Ehrlich, as they indeed do. But that means emulators in turn make the same kind of mistakes Ehrlich did. And enforce it all with peer review.

What makes this is all more interesting is that right on top of Ehrlich’s comments came a Nature editorial—and peer-reviewed paper!—on the theme “‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why.”

That “no one” is tribal. The writer meant no one he knew. For I venture to say that I know, and that regular readers know, why science is suffering. But we—you and I, dear readers—are not peers and so not in the counted class.

The article’s subhead is true: “The proportion of publications that send a field in a new direction has plummeted over the past half-century.”

Hair Kunzu:

Early in my tenure, I was sent to San Francisco for what was called, only half-jokingly, “an injection of Wired DNA.” I lounged in hot tubs, played frame drums on the beach, ingested strong psychedelics, went to parties, and met the kind of people Wired editors liked to refer to as “digerati”—people such as Stewart Brand, who had started the Whole Earth Catalog. Working at Wired felt like being part of a cult. There were the people who got it, who understood that we were about to be raptured by the internet, and there were Luddites, who would be left behind in the ruins of the old world. In the San Francisco office, staffers went barefoot, the accounting department had a butoh troupe, and—what impressed me most—in the kitchen was a fridge full of Odwalla juices.

I bought into some of this. I had indisputably stumbled into the middle of a momentous technological and social shift, and it was fun to feel part of this late flowering of West Coast counterculture. As a writer in my mid-twenties, I was interviewing philosophers and government officials, touring Scandinavian chip fabrication plants, and trying out VR gear—yet I was also aware that my idea of a “digital revolution” wasn’t the one espoused by the magazine’s senior staff. While at Wired, I was also part of an editorial team producing an underground publication called Mute. Our slogan was “proud to be flesh,” and our contributors included artists, designers, programmers, theorists, and activists. It was grubbier, more European, and much more skeptical about the social impact of the internet. Information may have wanted to be free, we thought, but so did people. Our feral ethos was best demonstrated by the production process. A deal had been struck with the printer that produced the Financial Times. They would use our publication to do test runs on rolls of the FT’s distinctive pink paper, for which we got a cheap rate. The resulting resemblance made for good times on the Tube, as the banker reading over your shoulder, expecting something about interest rates, found himself confronted with headlines like angel, virus: cyberspace breakdown(s) or (my personal favorite) alt.zombie.golf.the.earth.

Rory Linnane:

Milwaukee election officials have rejected the nomination papers for two school board candidates who hoped to run for Milwaukee School Board this spring: former state superintendent candidate Shandowlyon Hendricks Reaves, and former Milwaukee Police Sgt. Pamela Holmes.

They had also rejected paperwork for candidate Darryl Jackson, but accepted it after he filed corrections Friday.

Officials determined Hendricks Reaves and Holmes each failed to turn in the required 400 valid nomination signatures from their respective districts.

That leaves only two contested school board race on the April 4 ballot.

Jackson will compete with Program the Parks co-founder Gabi Hart for the District 3 seat being vacated by current board vice president Sequanna Taylor. Jackson filed a challenge against Hart’s nomination signatures, which election officials will consider Monday, said Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the city’s election commission.

In the other contested race, former board member Jeff Spence and Rethinking Schools marketing director Missy Zombor are running for the citywide seat being vacated by current board president Bob Peterson.

The winner of Peterson’s and Taylor’s seats will not automatically become president and vice president. Board members will choose their officers after the election.

Dizz Tate:

In 2020, after losing my waitressing job due to Covid, I became a teaching assistant at a secondary school in Birmingham. My role as a TA, as we’re known, was to provide support for students with special needs and those with English as a second language. There should have been three of us to cater for around 200 students, but for a third of the year, there was only me. Budget issues.

During the pandemic, TAs were not allowed to be in classrooms, where we are usually based. Instead I worked from a small room where, from 8am until home time, there was a constant carousel of door knocks: students who needed help with reading or maths, or who had no money for lunch, or whose uniform had ripped, or who felt anxious and needed a quiet place to sit. Often these students had a complex tangle of needs ranging from autism and anger management to low literacy.

Sometimes during the lockdowns, TAs were the only members of staff in schools, keeping them open for children who could not stay at home. I remember February 2021, when it snowed, and how relieved we were that there was enough snow for everyone to make a snowman in the playground. A natural and joyous delivery and, for once, enough supplies to go around.

Scott Girard:

For the full 2022-23 school year, an independent charter school like One City receives $9,264 per student from the state that the student’s resident school district would otherwise receive.

The state counts students twice each school year: the third Friday of September and the second Friday of January.

If a student is enrolled at such a charter school for only one of those days, the school would effectively receive $4,632 in aid that the school district would otherwise receive this year, according to an email from state Department of Public Instruction communication specialist Chris Bucher.

For the 51 students from MMSD who have attended One City this year, then, the charter was set to receive a total of $472,464 for the school year.

(No mention of property taxes and other funds that Madison’s well funded K-12 system receives, roughly $23k/student!).

One City statement:

January 10, 2023

Good Afternoon Jim,

Today, the local media reached out to our organization to inquire about another organization’s concerns regarding whether One City Schools will repay the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) the per pupil funds it allocates to our public charter schools.

One City Schools is a careful steward of public dollars. We are 100 percent in compliance with state and federal requirements for spending public dollars. Any claims to the contrary are false.

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has a state-approved formula for allocating funds to all public schools – both charter and district schools. We receive per pupil payments annually, from DPI, divided into four payments during the school year.

Additionally, all federal funds we receive are reimbursable grants, meaning, we must spend the money before we can receive payment from DPI. Therefore, we don’t have anything to repay for our federal grants.

We continue to appreciate your support.

Onward,

Gail Wiseman
VP of External Relations
gwiseman@onecityschools.org

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Olivia Herken:

After receiving a wave of conservative backlash, a student-organized drag show at Madison East High School has been postponed because of safety concerns.

In addition to an “abundance” of supportive messages regarding the event, the Madison School District also has received “several messages that have raised a number of safety concerns for this student-led event,” according to district spokesperson Tim LeMonds.

“Without question, the safety of all our students, staff and families must be our top priority,” LeMonds said. “Therefore, due to these recent safety concerns, we have decided to postpone this event to a later date.”

“We know how disappointing this news will be for many of our students. However, we feel this decision was necessary to provide time to refine our safety plan around this very important celebration,” he said.

More.

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?

Nicholas Kerovolias:

2022 marked the 10th anniversary of the development of CRISPR as a genome-editing tool – and the first year that CRISPR-edited foods could be found on a grocery store shelf. In this article, we’ll go over the basics of genomic engineering in agriculture and then map out some of the most exciting new developments in 2022 from applications in crops and livestock. These include changing traits to adapt to a changing climate, improving taste or nutrition, protecting staple crops from disease, and more! We’ll also touch on the shifting regulatory landscape and what to watch for next.

Yamaha:

The pipe organs found in concert halls are large scale instruments, with many metal pipes. Only some of these are visible, but back-stage there are actually many thousands of pipes – almost like a forest.
The reason several thousand pipes are needed is that one pipe can only produce one sound. One pipe might produce only a C-pitch sound with the timbre of a flute, for example, while another might be made to generate only a D-pitch sound with the timbre of a trumpet.
With a range of 56 notes from the lowest note to the highest, 56 pipes are required for each timbre of sound desired. In a case where 3 different timbres are sought, perhaps for a trumpet timbre and a flute timbre, three times as many pipes as the number of distinct tones in the range are required, making a total of 168 pipes.
This is to say that the more timbres of sound available on the organ the more pipes it needs, and the more gigantic it becomes!

Fuzzy Slippers:

Journalist Asra Q. Nomani has taken the lead in reporting the latest round of outrages perpetrated by Fairfax County public schools in Virginia. Virginia’s public schools are notorious for their woke racism and allegedly hiding instances of rape and sexual assault in their schools.

Nomani broke the story that top administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) allegedly have been hiding academic achievements from students and their parents because ‘equity.’

Nomani is now reporting that two more area school principals allegedly contacted parents via oddly identically-worded emails to inform them that their children had earned the national merit awards but had not been informed by the schools.

The abrupt change of heart appears to have been instigated by Virginia AG Jason Miyares’ announcement of an investigation into the controversy, including possible civil rights violations given that so many of the harmed students are Asian.

WBUR:

In November, anti-critical race theory and pro-parental rights groups made a push to win seats on school boards around the country. But the election results were mixed for these conservative candidates during the midterm elections.

Lee Gaines of WFYI takes a look at a school district in suburban Indianapolis where only one of a handful of candidates successfully won a seat on the board.

Doug Bandow

A new year dawns bright, with the US hurtling over the fiscal cliff. The lame duck Congress voted for a pork‐​packed $1.7 trillion budget bill. As the saying goes, it’s only money!

At a time of enormous domestic need, RepublicanSenate leader Mitch McConnell pushed an extra $45 billion for Ukraine, declaring that Washington’s “number one priority” was supporting that nation. Kentuckians might wonder if their Senator had moved to Odesa, Kharkiv, or Lviv over the holidays.

Alas, this appropriation was small change compared to the overall “defense” (in fact, mostly for offensive operations) budget. Congress hiked military outlays to record levels, topping off the already‐​bloated Biden spending program at $858 billion. American taxpayers remain stuck subsidizing prosperous, populous Europeans, superfluous Middle Eastern monarchs, and cheap‐​riding Asian defense dependents.

Unwilling to raise taxes as it also shovels ever‐​more cash into social programs old and new, Congress simply borrows additional money as if loans need not be repaid. The publicly held national debt hit 100 percent of GDPand is heading toward the record of 106 percent set in 1946, at the conclusion of the worst war in human history. Within a decade the US faces trillion‐​dollar deficits for as far as government analysts can budget. By mid‐​century the Congressional Budget Office expects the debt/​GDP ratio to run around 185 percent. And that assumes policymakers don’t do anything stupid, like approve massive new spending programs without paying for them. Which, unfortunately, is as certain as the rising of the sun.

Endless borrowing isn’t cheap. Over the last decade interest payments as a share of GDP jumped abouta quarter. And the era of (almost) free money is over as the Federal Reserve pushes up rates to wring inflation out of the economy. The budget agency’s estimates are daunting: “Combined with rising interest rates, large and sustained primary deficits cause net interest outlays measured as a percentage of GDP to more than quadruple over the period: They rise from 1.6 percent of GDP in 2022 to 7.2 percent in 2052.”

Ben weingarten:

Proponents of Wharton’s new direction, such as Penn professor Witold J. Henisz, see it as a way to “enhance” capitalism’s “efficiency.” Henisz, vice dean and faculty director of Wharton’s ESG Initiative, told RealClearInvestigations that by incorporating “pollution, human rights, and other ESG impacts” into financial analyses, market participants can properly price such “externalities” and “mitigate” associated risks. 

In a recent opinion piece challenging critics of the “anti-ESG” or “anti-woke investment movement,” Henisz said: “Climate risk is investment risk. There is no credible other side, only an ideological opposition cynically seeking a wedge issue for upcoming political campaigns.” 

When RCI asked Henisz to clarify his remarks, he said: “I believe that the science on climate risk as investment risk is settled. I do not see substantive academically grounded debate on this point.”  

“There are, by contrast,” he added, “legitimate questions as to how, when and where climate risk poses investment risk and we encourage all such discourse, research and debate.”

Tyler Cowen:

In fact, many of the smartest young people I know are deciding against a career in academia, even if that was their initial intent. They see too much bureaucracy and not enough time for the academic work itself. Students in the biosciences, at least the ones I talk to, seem to be an exception, perhaps because the opportunities to change the world are so obvious.

In my own field, economics, the prospect of having to do a “pre-doc” and then six years for a Ph.D. is driving away creative talent. On the research side, there is an obsession with finding the correct empirical techniques for causal inference. Initially a merited and beneficial development, this approach is becoming an intellectual straitjacket. There are too many papers focusing on a suitably narrow topic to make the causal inference defensible, rather than trying to answer broader, more useful but also more difficult questions.

…As committee obligations, paperwork and referee reports accumulate, the idea that academia allows you to be in charge of your own time seems ever more distant. Bureaucratization is eating away at the free time of professors. Much of the glamour of the job is gone, and my fear is that the system increasingly attracts conformists.

Pamela Snow:

Jane is impressed that her grandson is “sounding out words he did not know”. Wow indeed! That means her grandson has been taught the transferable skill of decoding – of lifting a previously unseen word off the page – and importantly “words he did not know”. This could either mean he had not seen them written down before, did not have them in his oral language vocabulary, or perhaps both – Jane did not specify and that’s fine, tweets have limited character lengths.

We can turn to two well-established theoretical frameworks and one more recent publication here to understand what is going on for Jane’s grandson, and for ten of thousands of other beginning readers.

The Simple View of Reading reminds us that reading comprehension (RC) is the product (not sum) of two connected processes: word identification/ decoding (D) and language comprehension (LC). It can be represented thus:

RC = D x LC

Because the operator in this formula is a multiplication sign, we are reminded that if the value on either side is zero, then the product will be zero. So, if Jane’s grandson had strong oral language skills but no decoding skills for those unfamiliar words, his reading comprehension score would be at or close to zero. (Children sometimes recognise a few key words from environmental print exposure in the pre-school years but cannot necessarily decode them if they see them in isolation or in a another context).

Last year, I forced the Washington Post to retract a blizzard of lies about my work. Now, the paper has dispatched another hack, @valeriestrauss, to push a fresh round of distortions, inaccuracies, and flat-out lies.

Let’s debunk them one by one. 🧵

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 8, 2023

Mike Kerrigan:

I shared this observation with my eldest son, Joe, early in his college career, when he told me he’d declared math as a major. Chesterton’s warning wasn’t against using logic, only embracing it to the exclusion of all else. The topic came up again recently over dinner when Joe, now a senior, explained something counterintuitive to his old man.

He said that between integers—say, 1 and 2—there are infinitely many real numbers, like 1.1 and 1.265. Such thinking scared me straight into law school at his age, yet somehow I grasped it now, if only conceptually. “Like the Incarnation,” I offered. An instance of the Creator, while remaining fully God and fully man, entering into his creation: the infinite bounded by the finite.

“I suppose,” Joe answered, checking my catechism against his set theory. Then he said something even trippier. Although whole numbers can be listed out to infinity, the hypothetical list of real numbers is necessarily larger than the hypothetical list of whole numbers. Not all infinities are equal.

Katie Notopoulos:

High school English students who were hoping to use artificial intelligence to write their homework have a new enemy: Edward Tian, a 22-year-old senior at Princeton University, who created a website that can detect if a piece of writing has been created using the AI tool ChatGPT.

Meanwhile, instructors everywhere are rejoicing. “So many teachers have reached out to me,” said Tian, whose recent tweet about his tool, GPTZero, went viral. “From Switzerland, France, all over the world.”

The latest version of ChatGPT, called GPT3, was released to the public in late November. The tool is able to produce amazingly coherent writing, which has endless possibilities, ranging from wonderful things (like allowing a pool installer with dyslexia to communicate effectively with his customers over email) to more nefarious uses.

Wall Street Journal:

The police and firefighter pension funds are only about 20% funded—among the worst in the country—even though 80% of city property tax dollars go toward pensions. The city’s annual pension payments have risen by $1 billion over the past three years. Perhaps the city would have less crime if it hired more police officers and paid less for pensions.

Blame Democratic politicians who over the decades have rewarded their labor allies with generous retirement benefits but haven’t socked away money to pay for them. Instead, Chicago’s political machine has frittered away taxpayer dollars buying votes. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker last year signed a bill boosting Chicago firefighter pensions, which will cost taxpayers $850 millio

Maya Yang:

New York City schools have banned ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that generates human-like writing including essays, amid fears that students could use it to cheat.

According to the city’s education department, the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York’s public schools. Jenna Lyle, a department spokesperson, said the decision stems from “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of contents”.

ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an independent artificial intelligence research foundation co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015. Released last November, OpenAI’s chatbot is able to create stunningly human-like responses to a wide range of questions and various writing prompts. ChatGPT is trained on a large sample of text taken from the internet and interacts with users in a dialogue format.

According to OpenAI, the conversation format allowsChatGPT “to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests”. Users can request rephrasings, summaries and expansions on the texts that it churns out.

Joanne Jacobs:

In an effort to level the playing field, some companies are asking job applicants to delete from their resumes the names of the colleges or universities they attended, writes David Christopher Kaufman in a New York Post commentary. Degrees are OK, but not whether the applicant went to UCLA, Cal State LA or FlybyNight College.

“A LinkedIn posting by HR&A Advisors, the TriBeCa-based real estate consultancy, asked applicants for the $121,668- to $138,432-a-year position to remove ‘all undergraduate and graduate school name references’ from their résumés and only cite the degree itself,” he writes. The policy is part of the company’s plan “to build a hiring system that is free from bias and based on candidate merit and performance.”

Racial and economic minorities have had much less “access to fancy schools and pricy education,” writes Kaufman, who is African-American. “But obscuring education histories won’t solve these inequities.”

He took out student loans to attend Brandeis and NYU “because I knew they were investments in my long-term earning potential,” he writes. He not only qualified for a good career, he developed “a strong sense of self-worth and satisfaction.”

Daniel Buck:

Growing in parallel to the broken-windows policing movement were “no excuses” schools, notably within the charter sector. A common turn of phrase in these schools was “sweat the small stuff.” In How the Other Half Learns, Robert Pondiscio details an example of this approach in the Success Academy network of charter schools in New York City. Staff members have lists of small tasks like replacing lightbulbs and wiping up scuff marks. They send students home for mismatched socks. Class time is highly structured, routinized, and disciplined. Student rebellion manifests in a loosened tie, not cursing at a teacher.

The particulars of the no-excuses strategy differ by school, but the overall results have shown promise. According to a 2015 report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, charter schools in urban areas provided “significantly higher levels of annual growth in both math and reading compared to their [traditional public school] peers.” As Pondiscio observed of the study, “the standouts among this group were KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, YES Prep, and other ‘no excuses’ pioneers.”

Intentionally or not, the theory of education that undergirded these schools’ approach to discipline borrowed from the philosophy behind broken-windows policing: Eliminating small instances of disorder — replacing every “broken window” — helps fend off more disruptive disorder. And, as with every sort of approach that “defines deviancy down,” the alternative is a slow slide toward chaos: A child leaves litter in the hallway. It’s not picked up. Soon a student throws something down the corridor, but no teacher bothers to address it. Students begin to wander hallways during class. Their noise grows louder. A student mocks a teacher. Before long, students are berating teachers — and worse.

Btw, if you know censorspeak, this censorship request from White House Digital Strategy is even dirtier than it looks.

“Reduction” is an explicit call to Facebook’s “Remove / Reduce / Inform” censorship menu. Reduction is the category for shadowbanning & algorithmic downrank. pic.twitter.com/a6KfQQh0vq

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) January 8, 2023

My latest .@FDRLST From withholding awards to canceling merit-based admission, Thomas Jefferson high school for Science and Technology is a prime example of the woke left’s systemic racism against Asian Americans in our education system. CC: @AsraNomani https://t.co/NP8BtVXDcz

— Helen Raleigh (@HRaleighspeaks) January 6, 2023

Ben Chapman & Andrea Fuller:

Public schools in the U.S. have lost more than a million students since the start of the pandemic, prompting some districts across the country to close buildings because they don’t have enough pupils or funding to keep them open.

The school board in Jefferson County, Colo., outside Denver, voted in November to close 16 schools. St. Paul, Minn., last summer closed five schools. The Oakland, Calif., school board last February voted to close seven schools after years of declining enrollment and financial strife.

Eugene Volokh:

From today’s Eighth Circuit decision in Brown v. Linder, written by Judge Raymond Gruender and joined by Judges James Loken and Steven Grasz:

James Brown and Marc Linder both work for the State of Iowa. Brown is a urologist at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics; Linder is a professor at the University of Iowa College of Law. After Linder criticized Brown’s expert testimony in a case unrelated to this one, Brown sued Linder under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that Linder retaliated against him for engaging in constitutionally protected speech….

According to the complaint, Brown provided expert testimony for a meat-processing company in litigation about the company’s compliance with labor regulations. As a board-certified urologist, Brown was asked to opine on the health consequences of the company’s bathroom-use policy for its employees. Before, during, and after Brown’s testimony, Linder made it known that he disapproved of Brown’s support for the company’s policy.

First, in the days before Brown’s testimony, Linder “registered a verbal complaint” to Karl Kreder, the head of UI’s urology department, about Brown. Along with the complaint, Linder sent a series of emails to Kreder in which he referred to Brown’s “self-confessed money-driven report, deposition, and hearing testimony.” Then, during Brown’s testimony, Linder appeared in the gallery wearing a t-shirt that said “People Over Profits.” Following the testimony, Linder continued to condemn Brown by making comments in local newspaper articles. In one article, published in both the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and the Cedar Rapids Gazette, Linder stated that Brown’s testimony “could have unleashed … terrible consequences for workers of Iowa.” In another, published in UI’s student newspaper, The Daily Iowan, Linder called Brown a “hired gun” who “had never even published a single scholarly article on urinary incontinence frequency/urgency.” These articles attributed Linder’s comments to “Marc Linder, a UI law professor whose focus is on labor law” and “Marc Linder, UI Professor of Law,” respectively.

Daniel Lawler and Juliette Collen

The rate of ground-breaking scientific discoveries and technological innovation is slowing down despite an ever-growing amount of knowledge, according to an analysis released Wednesday of millions of research papers and patents.

While previous research has shown downturns in individual disciplines, the study is the first that “emphatically, convincingly documents this decline of disruptiveness across all major fields of science and technology,” lead author Michael Park told AFP.

Park, a doctoral student at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, called disruptive discoveries those that “break away from existing ideas” and “push the whole scientific field into new territory.”

Michael Rosenwald:

She further endeared herself to readers in 2000 after fighting a search warrant from local authorities seeking the purchase history of a drug dealing suspect. The case went to the Colorado Supreme Court, which sided with Ms. Meskis.

colleges prioritized making people feel perfectly safe over everything else and produced a generation afraid to fail, and thus afraid to take risk, and thus on pace to accomplish extremely little

— Sam Altman (@sama) January 7, 2023

Wow. The CDC gives direction to teachers, the unions give direction to teachers, the UN gives directions to teachers… So much direction from outside organizations- no wonder the kids aren’t learning to read. 🤷‍♀️ https://t.co/g4poAIR0NW

— Moms for Liberty (@Moms4Liberty) January 6, 2023

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?

Brianna Lyman:

Rogan said on the podcast episode, which was released Thursday on Spotify. “And the reason why nobody trusts them anymore is because they’re not trustworthy.”

Rogan then said the lack of trust in corporate media has led to the emergence of independent journalists like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and others.

“Even if you don’t agree with them, you know they’re not lying,” Rogan said, claiming there is not much truth in mainstream media.

“[Mainstream media] is controlled by these corporate interests that really care more about money than they do about anything else. If you think that, like the way, the Washington Post, The New York Times is really just about getting out the truth, that’s not real. They have an ideology,” he said.

Tyler Cowen:

I have been posing it many questions about Jonathan Swift, Adam Smith, and the Bible.  Chat does very well in all those areas, and rarely hallucinates.  Is it because those are settled, well-established texts, with none of the drama “still in action”?

I suspect Chat is a boon for the historian and the historian of ideas.  You can ask Chat about obscure Swift pamphlets and it knows more about them than Google does, or Wikipedia does, by a long mile.  Presumably it “reads” them for you?

When I ask about current economists or public intellectuals, however, more errors creep in. Hallucinations become common rather than rare. The most common hallucination I find is that Chat invents co-authorships and conference co-sponsorships like crazy. If you ask it about two living people, and whether they have worked together, the fantasy life version will be rather active, maybe fifty percent of the time?

Max Kozlov:

The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature¹.

Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.

“The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January in Nature. “You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had.”

Telltale citations

The authors reasoned that if a study was highly disruptive, subsequent research would be less likely to cite the study’s references, and instead cite the study itself. Using the citation data from 45 million manuscripts and 3.9 million patents, the researchers calculated a measure of disruptiveness, called the ‘CD index’, in which values ranged from –1 for the least disruptive work to 1 for the most disruptive.

JR Patterson:

I think of Dupea when I remember my childhood violin lessons. I loved music, but something about the methodological lessons rankled me. I was a pupil within the Suzuki method, which values learning by ear, memorization, and parental involvement. Through his program, which is now taught to some 250,000 students in seventy-four countries, founder Shinichi Suzuki (1898–1998) sought to change the way musical aptitude was understood. Talent, he suggested, is not inborn but something anyone could develop, given the proper training. His solution was nurture over nature; his evidence was language—an infinitely complex skill learned naturally by almost everyone. If there were a secret to mastering an instrument, it was only “practice and practice of the right things.” The approach was designed to be competitively passive, meaning no grades, no examinations. Instead, students work at their own pace through a series of books filled with music of increasing difficulty, beginning with variations on “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in book one and ending with Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 4 in D Major in book ten.

Harris Rigby:

60 Minutes mentions his work “The Population Bomb” from the 60s which included many predictions that have now been proven completely false. The entire premise of the book is that humanity was going to explode in population and the earth could not sustain the growth.

We were told that the entire planet would die of mass starvation unless the population was reduced dramatically. This was in 1968 when the population was 3.5 billion. That number has risen to nearly 8 billion today. His mass starvation, end of civilization prediction has utterly failed. Starvation IMPROVED as the world became more populated.

He is the king of the climate doom and gloomers, and he’s been nothing but wrong for 50 years.

Leo Lewis:

Those that take the money must embrace the provincial life for a minimum of five years, or refund the state.

Japan’s shrinking and ageing population and the migration of younger people to the capital have disproportionately hit the regions beyond Tokyo, Osaka and a handful of other major cities. 

Many rural towns and villages have been hollowed out, their businesses starved of customers and available staff. The estimated glut of empty homes in Japan — dwellings that often lie deliberately unclaimed by heirs — is expected to reach about 10mn in 2023.

At the same time, Tokyo’s status as the prime magnet for economic activity and migration has grown. In 2021, despite the slowdown caused by the pandemic and the supposed new popularity of remote work, the average price of a new condominium in Tokyo, according to the Real Estate Economic Institute, surpassed the peak set at the height of Japan’s property bubble in 1989.

Alan Kamhi:

This prologue reiterates the case for the narrow view of reading as a solution to the persistently high levels of reading failure that occurs in our schools and provides a brief summary of the 5 response articles. Method: The arguments that support the narrow view of reading are presented and the respondents are introduced. Conclusion: Although the contributors to this clinical forum may have different views, we all are working toward a common goal: improving the literacy levels of children in our schools.

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?

Nader Issa and Sarah Karp

The legislation, approved with bipartisan support in a 45-7 vote, would recognize a Chicago principals and assistant principals union and put them across the table from senior district leadership for contract negotiations. The bill, if signed into law, would not allow a principals’ union to strike.

A statement Friday from Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s office said, “The Governor is looking forward to reviewing it now that it is headed to his desk.”

If the bill is signed and Chicago principals are able to move forward with a bargaining unit, they will join districts such as New York City, San Diego and Denver where principals are unionized. Denver principals unionized in 2020. 

Principals have fought for years for the right of union representation, arguing they’re in no-man’s land without a say in broad district policies along with an inability to collectively bargain their working conditions.

The bill would not take away local school councils’ power to hire principals or decide whether or not to renew their contracts.

Troy LaRaviere, a former CPS principal and president of the Chicago Principals & Administrators Association since 2016, has strongly advocated for unionization rights for years. He said the finish line is the governor’s signature, “but we’ve gone further than we’ve come before.” Similar bills have advanced before only to fail in one chamber or the other.

“I’ve put 40 years of my life into this,” LaRaviere said in an interview Friday.

Brave Search team is evaluating ChatGPT too. The big challenges with search are intent inference/focus, and noise/GIGO.

SEO is child’s play compared to adversarial gaming of ChatGPT. GIGO and doesn’t know-math challenges will take more work over time.

FrAuDsense 4 GPT? Not yet.

— BrendanEich (@BrendanEich) January 4, 2023

Please see https://t.co/gHzMqBTFEv. Beyond hand-coded bias, these systems will be trained by hostiles and even n00bs who play an adversarial game from outputs back to inputs. This game never ends.

Summarizing good but shallow summaries do not replace deep quality search results.

— BrendanEich (@BrendanEich) January 4, 2023

Chris Rickert:

Citing an exodus of core-class teachers, Madison charter school One City Schools told parents of about 60 students Thursday that it would shut down its first ninth- and 10th-grade classes after only one semester.

The school’s vice president of external relations, Gail Wiseman, said the school lost five teachers since the beginning of the school year and had to make the “really difficult decision” to close the grades effective Jan. 20, or the last day of the semester.

Madison School District Superintendent Carlton Jenkins was at the Thursday meeting and pledged the district’s assistance in transitioning students to Madison schools, Wiseman said, but One City has also been in touch with officials from the Sun Prairie, Middleton and Verona school districts to serve students who live in those districts.

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?

Martin Austermuhle:

The 13-member board that oversees the county school system has been embroiled in controversy in recent years, with Chair Juanita Miller and various board members trading accusations related to contracts and violations of board policies. An independent audit last year found problems on both sides, while separately the State Board of Education requested Miller’s removal from officeover allegations of misconduct. (Following that request, County Executive Angela Alsobrooks asked that Miller step aside.) Miller opted instead for a state disciplinary hearing, which concluded late last year.

A person who picked up the phone at the school board’s office said the body would have no comment on Goldson’s retirement announcement.

Goldson led Prince George’s County Public Schools during the COVID-19 pandemic, and requiring masking by staff and students longer than any other jurisdiction in Maryland. (The county was among the state’s hardest-hit by the virus.) Early in the pandemic’s shift to virtual learning, she published an op-ed in The Washington Post urging federal action to help students get online more easily. (More than half of the students in Prince George’s County Public Schools qualify as low-income.)

“Removing systematic barriers to education is a national emergency every day, but now the urgency is as great as ever before. In these trying times, we are already seeing what happens when we don’t answer the call when an alarm is sounded — or wait too long to act,” she wrote.

Goldson also urged Maryland lawmakers and officials to fully fund a sweeping bill to expand free pre-Kindergarten programs, increase pay for teachers, and speed the modernization of schools across the state.

Ben Chapman

Students have accused a university of “greenwashing” after it spent almost £24,000 on a life-size statue of Greta Thunberg.

Winchester University has been accused of ignoring its commitment to the environment by protesters.

They have called for beef to be taken off the canteen menu, as well as cheaper vegan options and buildings to be made more energy efficient as opposed to “wasting money on meaningless statues”.

Student union president Megan Ball criticised the decision to erect the statue when it was unveiled in 2021, saying it showed that cuts and students’ mental health were not prioritised enough by Winchester.

Locals have also been left shocked by the move, due to the Swedish activist having no connection with the Hampshire city.

Nader Issa

The student attended Northside College Prep, a selective enrollment school on Chicago’s Northwest Side, from 2019 until this past December, according to a report released Thursday by the CPS inspector general’s office.

Investigators found the student and her father violated the district’s residency rules by reporting that they lived in the basement of his cousin’s home in Chicago when the girl actually lived with her mother in suburban Lincolnwood, the report said.

Children who live outside Chicago are required to pay tens of thousands of dollars per year in non-resident tuition to attend the city’s taxpayer-funded schools. In this case, that added up to $56,337.13 for three school years and one semester.

“We have to look at these cases because every seat that is taken by a student who doesn’t reside in the district means that a student who does reside in the city of Chicago is deprived of the opportunity to go to one of these schools,” Inspector General Will Fletcher said in an interview.

“They’re highly competitive. And parents and families fight like hell to get their kids into some of these schools.”

Aaron Sibarium

Asking an Asian person for math help is a microaggression. Reverse racism does not exist. Men can get pregnant.

Those are just a few of the lessons imparted to government workers in diversity trainings and presentations in 2021, according to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal editorial page. The materials, summarized in a December 30 editorial, show how once-fringe ideas have saturated the federal bureaucracy, from the Department of Veterans Affairs to NASA and the military.

One NASA training states that efforts to be colorblind “actually limit us.” Another identifies the words “America is a melting pot” and “don’t you want a family?” as “microaggressions,” along with “asking an Asian person to help with a math or science problem.” A third lists “perfectionism” and “data is king” as examples of “common leadership mistakes.”

“Value and center lived experience,” the presentation says. “Do not demand data in order to accept a person’s individual perspective or to utilize that perspective in decision-making.”

Wisconsin’s DPI has finally updated it’s finance data to include the 2020-21 school year. That we are spending nearly $18,000 per student in Milwaukee to get proficiency rates of less than 20% should outrage every taxpayer. pic.twitter.com/SfldXXZ1tr

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) January 4, 2023

Top 10 most well-funded pension systems in 2020:
1) Wisconsin
2) South Dakota
3) Tennessee
4) Utah
5) Washington
6) Nebraska
7) Idaho
8) North Carolina
9) New York
10) Delaware

See what they’re doing right, your state’s data, and more: https://t.co/G9BteFBzvE pic.twitter.com/QcWOewwXjE

— Pew States (@PewStates) January 2, 2023

George Santos lied about everything, so Dems are demanding he step aside. So here’s a list of things that Joe Biden has lied about regarding his personal story throughout his career, which apparently liberals are completely okay with: 🧵

— Prof Zenkus (@anthonyzenkus) December 27, 2022

On CBS "60 Minutes," biologist Paul Ehrlich claimed global warming would result in mass famine

But archival footage shows Ehrlich claimed global *cooling* would result in famine in the 1970s

His goal has always been to shut down the oil & gas industryhttps://t.co/38w4FrpzRF

— Michael Shellenberger (@ShellenbergerMD) January 3, 2023

Matthew Barakat:

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is launching an investigation into one of the state’s most prestigious high schools, acting on complaints that students there weren’t properly recognized for their achievements on a standardized test.

Miyares said at a news conference Wednesday that his Office of Civil Rights is investigating the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology not only for its failure to timely notify students of a commendation they received in a scholarship competition, but also the school’s recently overhauled admissions policies.

The public high school commonly known as TJ is located in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Fairfax County and regularly ranks as one of the best in the country. Admission to the school is highly competitive, and parents map out strategies to gain entry for their children years in advance.

A majority of students are Asian American and for many years African American and Hispanic students have been woefully underrepresented. In 2020, the Fairfax County School Board dramatically overhauled the admissions process, scrapping a high-stakes standardized test and setting aside a certain number of seats on a geographic basis.

The changes prompted claims of discrimination against Asian Americans who had fared well under the old system, and a federal lawsuit challenging the new procedures is going through the appeals process.

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron.

MEMO: All state university & college systems in Florida have been required to report expenditures and resources utilized for campus activities related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and critical race theory. Stay tuned. pic.twitter.com/E4Z4zLuJgC

— Bryan Griffin (@BryanDGriffin) January 4, 2023

Self styled siren:

And by “immediate aftermath,” I mean from Monday, March 28, 1973, until about February 1974. In addition to what could be found on the internet, Professor Thomas Doherty of Brandeis University graciously offered to access the relevant issues of The Hollywood Reporter, which are not online. Nothing about Wayne. THR, then staunchly right-wing, ran an editorial by Tichi Wilkerson Miles, scolding Brando. There was also a roundup of quotations from various figures. In the approving camp was Alfred Ruddy, Godfather producer; opting for the diplomatic route of “well, you know, artists” was the legendary Robert Evans of Paramount; disapproving, not of Littlefeather but Brando, were Academy president Daniel Taradesh, Michael Caine, and Charlton Heston. And at the end of the THR roundup, a brief interview with Littlefeather herself, with a truly lovely vignette: “She noted that ‘a very nice man,’ Eddie Albert, and his son Edward Albert, congratulated her on her remarks and said they supported what she did.” 

No word from John Wayne. His response to the whole affair didn’t come until Dec. 30, 1973, in an interview in the New York Times: 

What about that other big kid —Marlon Brando? Does Duke—an Academy Award winner for “True Grit”—look upon Brando’s nixing of his Oscar for “The Godfather” as a mature action, or mere kid stuff?

“You’re going to take this out of context, aren’t you?” Duke squints, and then breaks into a who-gives-a-damn grin. “I think it was sad that Brando did what he did. If he had something to say, he should have appeared that night and stated his views instead of taking some little unknown girl and dressing her up in an Indian outfit.”

When does the Wayne story start showing up? Leaping ahead a bit, there is a 1988 interview with Marty Pasetta, the director of the Oscar show from 1972 to 1988, a stretch of time that in retrospect looks like the Oscar show’s Golden Age. Of that night in 1973, Pasetta told Ivor Davis:

“We had a fight is what we had,” recalls the silver-haired Oscar veteran… “John Wayne wanted to go out there and physically yank her off the stage. It took six men to hold him back.”

Bingo! Right?

Well, hold the phone. There are significant problems with accepting Pasetta’s 1988 recollection at face value (and that is why I am calling Snopes sloppy).

Michael Lilley:

At long last, and only after a great deal of public outcry, Gov. Murphy’s Department of Education finally released the full dataset from last spring’s state tests.  This means that we now know the district-level results and community leaders, school administrators and parents know where and how much remediation is needed — and there is a lot of remediation needed.  Why it took until December to do so remains unanswered, but Murphy’s desire to bury the horrible results offers a highly believable explanation.  A new study shows that New Jersey and its children will suffer the devastating consequences far into the future.

Recall that Murphy allowed for extended school closures in many of New Jersey’s largest school districts, including Newark, Jersey City and Montclair, just as the teachers unions wanted.  Now that the test results are out, we know that New Jersey students — particularly minority students — suffered immense learning losses because of these extended closures.  And new research indicates that unless these losses are remediated swiftly and decisively, they will negatively affect these students for the rest of their lives.

A recent study by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, “The Economic Costs of the Pandemic,” looked the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP – known as “the nation’s report card”) and determined that in 8th-grade math, New Jersey students “had greater learning losses than the nation as a whole.” The chart below shows just how much greater.

I’ll give $1000 in BTC for the best 140 second film about Satoshi Nakamoto using AI.

Submit your vid in the replies. Best video wins. 1/31/23 midnight PDT submission date.

— patrickwstanley.btc (@PatrickWStanley) January 3, 2023

Baker A. Mitchell and Robert P. Spencer:

The Fourth Circuit’s finding appears to have been based on little more than the convention of calling charters “public charter schools” and their being mostly funded by public sources. But hundreds of American cities contract municipal services out to private companies, which generally aren’t considered state actors. The Supreme Court rejected state-action claims against an investor-owned public utility in Jackson v. Metropolitan Edison Co. (1974) and an operator of a public-access TV channel in Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck (2019). If these aren’t state actors, surely neither are North Carolina’s charter schools, which the law promises freedom from government control.

Far more is at stake than CDS’s school-uniform policy, which was designed by parents of our students. The ruling comes at a time when the charter-school movement is growing. Oklahoma’s attorney general recently issued a legal opinion stating that religious organizations must be allowed to operate charter schools in the Sooner State. A key aspect of the opinion was a finding that charter schools are not state actors and, therefore, the Constitution’s Establishment Clause doesn’t prohibit the inculcation of religious values, as it does in government-run schools. In Carson v. Makin (2022), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a state voucher program couldn’t discriminate against religious schools.

Dave Huber:

‘Affirming experiences and produce equal outcomes for every student, without exception’

Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools reportedly paid almost half a million dollars to a firm whose “Equity Imperative” is that all students’ academic performance result in equal outcomes.

Documents obtained by Asra Nomani show the district paid $455,000 to Oakland, California’s Performance Fact to “analyze student data to identify trends and recommendations in support of the development of strategic goals,” among (many) other things.

It also “facilitated” school board “work sessions/retreats” which allegedly were “focused on the development of the [district] strategic plan.”

From bondage to spiritual faith
From spiritual faith to great courage
From courage to liberty
From liberty to abundance
From abundance to selfishness
From selfishness to complacency
From complacency to apathy
From apathy to dependence
From dependence back into bondage pic.twitter.com/GgOzD1UGgu

— Balaji (@balajis) January 4, 2023

Scott Girard:

A Verona Area School District principal and former Madison Metropolitan School District educator died Tuesday morning after she was hit by a car while walking in Fitchburg.

Beth Steffen, 56, was the interim principal at Badger Ridge Middle School in Verona for the 2022-23 school year. She was hired to that role after previously working as a language, literacy and equity specialist at the school, according to the Verona Press.

“The Verona Area School District experienced a deep loss today and our hearts are beyond broken,” VASD public information officer Marcie Pfeifer-Soderbloom wrote in an emailed statement. “We extend our deepest condolences to Beth’s family and all Badger Ridge Middle School students, staff, and families.

“Beth was a beloved member of the Verona Area School District community. Staff from around the district will be available to support staff and students with grief counseling, circles of support, and other supports as needed.”

Tuesday was the second day of school after winter break for students and staff in Verona.

Prior to her role in Verona, Steffen was the principal of Edgewood High School beginning in 2018. For the 17 years preceding that switch, she worked in MMSD in a variety of roles.

Kate Grumke:

Missouri’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education officials are hoping a push toward research-backed literacy instruction will help.

The department is rolling out a big, statewide effort to put teachers through an intensive professional development program on the science of reading for all teachers, called LETRS. It’s the same course Victory Academy teacher Allison Feldmann is in the middle of.

The training is a time commitment for busy teachers; it can take more than 160 hours to complete over the course of two years. The state has funding for 15,000 kindergarten through fifth grade teachers to go through this training. So far, about 9,000 have at least started it.

On top of that, lawmakers enacted a series of reading instruction changes last session that are already in effect. One makes components of the science of reading a required topic for teachers to learn in college or other training institutions. Another says schools must offer an evidence-based reading program for elementary students.

Another law, which took effect this week, requires new reading testing for kindergarten through third grade at the beginning and end of the school year, to identify students who are behind or at risk for dyslexia. Those students’ parents will then be notified so the struggling students can be given intensive reading instruction.

Altogether, the laws and initiatives represent a big investment of time and money in the science of reading in Missouri.

Jeremy Tate:

An astonishing thing is happening at traditional, faith-based colleges. While national college enrollment has decreased by 13 percent over the last decade, these institutions have demonstrated that it is possible to emerge from COVID, economic recession, and a smaller national pool of applicants with record-breaking enrollment. 

Take Thomas Aquinas College. When the school opened its doors in California a half-century ago, a handful of students were willing to take a chance on a novel curriculum that ditched textbooks and lectures in favor of student-led discussions of humanity’s greatest works. Far from sharing in the troubles of others, Thomas Aquinas College just celebrated the first graduating classat a brand new campus in Massachusetts. Expanding to New England helped double the school’s capacity without jeopardizing its low student-to-teacher ratio.

Benedictine College in Kansas likewise offers a Great Books program, and, thanks to the administration’s focused drive to return to the basics, the college’s enrollment doubled between 2004 and 2022. Furthermore, graduation rates jumped 28 percent as motivated students hungered for the challenge of the more rigorous and rewarding curriculum.

Michigan’s Hillsdale College avoided the statewide decline in undergraduate enrollment—among the worst in the nation—with applications climbing 53 percent. That gave the classically minded school flexibility to become more selective than it has ever been with admissions. 

Flexing the strength of its classical core curriculum, the University of Dallas welcomed the second largest incoming class in its sixty-six-year history, while Florida’s Ave Maria University boasts an enrollment up by half thanks to its dedication to eternal values. 

This is just a sampling of institutions that have embraced a curriculum rooted in Western tradition—and the faith—only to discover their programs have become more relevant, not less so, to a younger generation. It turns out that chasing educational fads and emphasizing the political themes of the day doesn’t much impress modern audiences. To the contrary, a rising number of students today are drawn to schools that emphasize tradition and faith.

Jeremy Horpedahl

Millennials don’t yet have a year of overlap with Boomers, but they are tracking Gen X almost exactly. There is no reason they won’t continue to track Gen X, and therefore exceed Boomers as well when they are in their late 40s (which will happen in about 2037 for Millennials).

My prediction is that by the time Millennials are in their late 40s, they will even surpass Gen X in wealth. Why? The reason is counterintuitive: student debt.

Huh? Isn’t student debt what is holding Millennials back? In some sense, yes. But in the long run, no. Right now, many Millennials (and some Gen Xers!) hold a lot of student debt. That goes on the liabilities side of the balance sheet. But there is no corresponding asset showing up the balance sheet, but there is an asset: their human capital! Over their lifetime, that human capital will give them even greater earning potential in later life. Much like Gen X basically tracked Boomers until their mid-40s, until their student loans were paid off, and their degrees (and graduate degrees!) really started to pay off in the labor market.

So right now, student debt is doing two things: overstating liabilities and understating assets. To be sure, this may cause some short term problems: perhaps it is harder to buy a house, or at the very least to save for a down payment on a house. This could (I repeat could) lower Millennial wealth in the long run. But keep in mind that Gen X faced this same headwind, though to a lesser degree than Millennials.

Nalert:

Professor George has put up one of the greatest tweets ever. Today’s American universities are strongly religious places with many, many rituals.

Leslie Eastman:

The movement’s volunteers are asking Oregon Senate president nominee Rob Wagner to allow a hearing on their bill in January. The bill would invite Idaho to begin talks with Oregon on the potential of moving the border. A January 2022 SurveyUSA poll showed that 68% of northwestern Oregon voters thought that the Oregon Legislature should hold hearings on the idea, and only 20% opposed.

The poll also found that a mere three percent of such voters think keeping eastern and southern Oregon in the state is worth the cost. The movement estimates the cost at $500 per northwestern Oregonian wage earner annually.

Lucas Robinson:

A federal judge has dismissed Edgewood High School’s lawsuit against the city of Madison over the city’s refusal to allow the installation of lights at the school’s athletic field.

Edgewood did not prove that the city discriminated against the school on religious grounds in the multiyear battle over lights that would allow the school to host nighttime football games, as the school had alleged, U.S. District Judge William Conley said in a 28-page ruling issued late Friday.

In 2021, the City Council voted against an appeal by the private Catholic school to reverse the denial of a permit to install four light poles on the field.

Edgewood argued in court that city approval of stadium lights at UW-Madison’s tennis stadium and at Madison Memorial High School showed the city was treating secular institutions better than their religious counterparts.

But Memorial was merely replacing its light poles and UW’s stadium was subject to different zoning rules and is not near a residential area, unlike Edgewood, Conley said.

“Edgewood has not shown that either of its proposed comparators were actually treated better under the same approval process as Edgewood, as their lighting applications were submitted at different (times), under entirely different rules and markedly different circumstances,” Conley said.

Edgewood also did not show that it was burdened by having to play nighttime football games at a field off campus, the judge said. The religious school, like Madison East High School, often plays games at Breese Stevens Field.

Jason Dougal:

Not one of these districts is growing. Some of them have lost more than 10 percent of their students since the pandemic started. Enrollment losses will be an enormous, ongoing challenge for many school systems across the U.S. post-pandemic.

“What we’re trying to do is just stop the bleeding,” said Jerry Almendarez, the superintendent of the Santa Ana Unified School District, south of Los Angeles.

It’s important to understand why enrollment loss is such a critical issue for these leaders. With every student who walks out the door, school funding leaves with them. The fixed costs of running their schools do not decrease proportionately.

This makes it difficult for these leaders to provide more opportunities, rigor and support for students at the precise time students need them the most. If we can’t reverse enrollment losses, the cost of running a school will become untenable. Schools will be forced to close or cut corners on quality; inequality will soar as parents with means find and fund alternatives to public schools — paying private school tuition or home schooling — while families who already struggle to get access to a quality school will be stuck in a flailing public education system.

If access and quality are compromised, it will risk our democratic foundations.

There are many reasons to see this as a real danger. Public school enrollment fell nearly 3 percent after the pandemic hit. Some children switched to private schools. Others started home schooling, which ballooned by 35 percent from before the pandemic in the 18 states that shared recent homeschooling data.

David Blaska:

1) Amend the Wisconsin Constitution to place the Department of Public Instruction in the governor’s appointive cabinet rather than as an elected office. Education should sit at the same table with the governor as transportation, natural resources, prisons, public health, and revenue.

2) Revise the criminal code to automatically charge custodial parents or guardians with a crime equivalent to the offense for which their minor child is being adjudicated.

3) Ease legal requirements for the state to seize chronic juvenile delinquents (remember that term?) and commit them to a secure residential educational facility. Build out the old Oscar Mayer plant on Madison’s NE side for that purpose. Include agriculture, food preparation, and the trades with access to nearby MATC.

4) Abolish the Police Civilian Oversight Board and furlough its overpaid director.

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?

Eric Bangeman

An appeals court has revived a lawsuit that accuses Google, YouTube, DreamWorks, and a handful of toymakers of tracking the activity on YouTube of children under 13. In an opinion released Wednesday, the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act does not bar lawsuits based on individual state privacy laws.

Passed in 1998 and amended in 2012, COPPA requires websites to obtain parental consent for the collection and dissemination of personally identifiable information of children under the age of 13. COPPA gives the FTC and state attorneys general the ability to investigate and levy fines for violations of the law.

Corrinne Hess:

A Wisconsin Policy Forum report estimated state and local governments collected at least $19.9 billion in pandemic-related funds.

“The federal government took on unemployment costs, insurance spending, that otherwise the state might have felt the need to help out with,” Stein said. “The federal government helped, to an unbelievable degree, on both the revenue side in terms of stimulating the economy and on the cost side with lowering existing costs and keeping the state from having to spend money.”

POLITICS
Budget surplus pushes Wisconsin’s financial reserves to an all-time high. But how did we get here?
Corrinne Hess
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

3:36
3:38

Gov. Tony Evers delivers his “state of the state” address Feb. 15 at the Capitol in Madison. Wisconsin has a budget surplus projected to hit $6.6 billion for 2022-23.
Wisconsin is sitting on a pile of cash.

The state government has a budget surplus projected to hit $6.6 billion for 2022-23. That does not include the roughly $1.734 billion currently in the state’s rainy day fund, according to the Department of Administration.

And the future looks even brighter in future years with state general fund balances for 2023-24 estimated to be $8.4 billion and growing to $9.7 billion at the end of the 2024-25 fiscal year.

Governor Tony Evers, who was elected to his second term on Nov. 8, called the “unprecedented surplus” an opportunity to make “critical investments in Wisconsinites and the future of our state.”

Republican Legislative leaders have said they don’t want Evers to see the additional money as a “blank check” for state departments as he crafts his budget. Instead, they hope to implement tax cuts, invest in K12 schools, roads and local governments.

But how has Wisconsin amassed such a large fiscal cushion?

How did Wisconsin get the budget surplus?

While the governor’s office and the state legislative branch would like to take credit for prudent financial planning it’s the federal government that helped reduce state spending and boosted state revenues by enacting pandemic relief bills in 2020 and 2021.

Those bills – including the American Rescue Plan, The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and the Families First Coronavirus Response Act – bolstered the state’s economy, said Jason Stein, research director at the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

A Wisconsin Policy Forum report estimated state and local governments collected at least $19.9 billion in pandemic-related funds.

“The federal government took on unemployment costs, insurance spending, that otherwise the state might have felt the need to help out with,” Stein said. “The federal government helped, to an unbelievable degree, on both the revenue side in terms of stimulating the economy and on the cost side with lowering existing costs and keeping the state from having to spend money.”

Besides the federal stimulus money, Wisconsin is projecting state tax revenue increases in fiscal 2022-23 based on current state and federal tax laws:

$744.2 million in state tax revenue increases in fiscal year 2022-23. That’s a 3.6% increase over the previous fiscal year, for a total revenue estimate of $21.293 billion.
$323.9 million in state tax revenue increase in fiscal year 2023-24; a 1.5% increase for a total revenue estimate of $21.617 billion.
$855.1 million in state tax revenue increase in fiscal year 2024-25; a 4% increase for a total revenue estimate of $22.472 billion.

Related: US Debt Clock

Scott Atlas:

On Nov. 19, 2020, the Stanford Faculty Senate condemned my work as an adviser to President Trump, charging that I “promoted a view of COVID-19 that contradicts medical science.” Yet virtually every scientific point I made exactly matched those of Jay Bhattacharya and John Ioannidis, both Stanford professors of medicine, including the risk for children, spread from children, focused protection, postinfection immunity, masks, and the harm from school closures and lockdowns. The difference? I alone stood on the podium, speaking to the press and the public, serving my country next to a Republican president the Stanford faculty reviled.

Many American universities, particularly “elite” schools, now explicitly emphasize ideology even in the hard sciences. In a November report, the National Association of Scholars examined the proliferation of “diversity, equity and inclusion” language on the websites of Ivy League schools’ science, technology, engineering and mathematics departments. Stanford may now be the American university most hostile to free speech, with its recently exposed “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative”—a list of approved and disapproved words that exceeds anything anticipated by George Orwell. After being publicly ridiculed, the school moved quickly to hide the list behind a university login.

William Biagini:

At a mathematics education conference previously reported by Campus Reform in which numerous scholars pushed for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI), one speaker stood out by arguing that boys in particular are at a disadvantage in numerous ways in American K-12 education.

Campus Reform obtained exclusive audio of this presentation.

The conference was hosted at the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel by the Psychology of Mathematics Education of North America (PME-NA).  

The speaker in question referenced the recent book “Of Boys and Men” by Richard Reeves—a scholar at the Brookings Institution. Quoting the book, the speaker said that “boys are falling behind in school because the educational system is structured in ways that puts them at a disadvantage.” 

In regards to gender, the speaker posed the question, “Given current evidence, should we not also reassure boys that they too belong [in STEM-related fields]?” 

[RELATED: CA Community Colleges proposing minimum diversity, equity standards for faculty] 

However, the speaker’s comments on boys’ underperformance and struggles in education prompted a public apology email from PME-NA. The email, written by Dr. Alyson E. Lischka of Middle Tennessee State University, was also obtained by Campus Reform.