Each school district and open-enrollment charter school shall provide for the use of a phonics curriculum that uses systematic direct instruction in kindergarten through third grade to ensure all students obtain necessary early literacy skills (TEC §28.0062)
The numbers prove Cuomo’s lockdowns hurt NYers on EVERY metric — while Florida flourished
Our finding: States with more severe government interventions did not have better health outcomes than less restrictive states.
But imposing more severe lockdowns led to much worse economic outcomes — increased unemployment and decreased gross domestic product — and much worse education outcomes — less in-person schooling, which studies show leads to decreased test scores and long-term, possibly permanent, educational and economic disadvantages.
In just the last two years, Hurst said, the number of children under 13 coming into her department with suicidal ideation has gone up 77%. And over the last decade, the number of pediatric visitors needing psychiatric care has nearly tripled, with the majority of cases the result of suicidal ideation, drug or alcohol intoxication, and overdoses.
The numbers prove Cuomo’s lockdowns hurt NYers on EVERY metric — while Florida flourished
Our finding: States with more severe government interventions did not have better health outcomes than less restrictive states.
But imposing more severe lockdowns led to much worse economic outcomes — increased unemployment and decreased gross domestic product — and much worse education outcomes — less in-person schooling, which studies show leads to decreased test scores and long-term, possibly permanent, educational and economic disadvantages.
Taxpayers spending more for less: Adams Friendship K-12 edition
Another interesting point about “Adams-we’re going out of business if you don’t raise taxes-Friendship” is that 76% of their students cannot read at grade level, and 74% of their students can’t do math at grade level. What exactly are taxpayers paying for? @oherken https://t.co/612WTC21nJ
— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) February 21, 2023
Taxpayers spending more for less: Adams Friendship K-12 edition
Another interesting point about “Adams-we’re going out of business if you don’t raise taxes-Friendship” is that 76% of their students cannot read at grade level, and 74% of their students can’t do math at grade level. What exactly are taxpayers paying for? @oherken https://t.co/612WTC21nJ
— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) February 21, 2023
Why are adolescents so unhappy?
Using PISA 2018 data from nearly half a million 15-year-olds across 72 middle- and high-income countries, this study investigates the relationship between economic development and adolescent subjective well-being. Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction. The negative nexus stands in stark contrast to the otherwise positive relationship found between GDP per capita and adult life satisfaction for the same countries. Results are robust to various model specifications and both macro and micro approaches. Moreover, our analysis suggests that this apparent paradox can largely be attributed to higher learning intensity in advanced countries. Effects are found to be more pronounced for girls than for boys.
Notes on US high school achievement
According to nationwide MAP testing, the average high school student in the United States learns… nothing. 👇
— Austin Scholar (@AustinScholar) February 17, 2023
Library of Congress Digitization Strategy: 2023-2027
The following post was co-authored with Steve Morris, Chief of Digital Collections Management and Services and Tom Rieger, Manager of Digitization Services.
The Library of Congress has a new Digitization Strategy for its collections. As we did for the Library’s Digital Collections Strategy, we are excited to share this overview of it with readers of The Signal blog. We get a lot of questions about what we digitize and why, and hopefully this provides a little bit of insight into our institutional plans and priorities.
The Library has expanded the amount and throughput of our digitization efforts dramatically over the past three decades. In 2020 we finished digitizing the last of our presidential papers – all of the personal papers of the presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge are now available to anyone with an internet connection. In 2021, we opened a new Digital Scan Center, which significantly increased digital image production capabilities and postproduction processes. So far, we have digitized more than nine million items in our collections, with particular strengths in newspaper issues, manuscripts, and pictorial materials.
Over the next five years, the Library will expand, optimize, and centralize its collections digitization program to significantly expand access to users across the country to rare, distinctive, and unique collection materials which can be made openly available online and use digitization as a core method for preservation reformatting of rights restricted collection materials. Below are the five guiding strategic objectives for this work.
Library of Congress Digitization Strategy: 2023-2027
The following post was co-authored with Steve Morris, Chief of Digital Collections Management and Services and Tom Rieger, Manager of Digitization Services.
The Library of Congress has a new Digitization Strategy for its collections. As we did for the Library’s Digital Collections Strategy, we are excited to share this overview of it with readers of The Signal blog. We get a lot of questions about what we digitize and why, and hopefully this provides a little bit of insight into our institutional plans and priorities.
The Library has expanded the amount and throughput of our digitization efforts dramatically over the past three decades. In 2020 we finished digitizing the last of our presidential papers – all of the personal papers of the presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge are now available to anyone with an internet connection. In 2021, we opened a new Digital Scan Center, which significantly increased digital image production capabilities and postproduction processes. So far, we have digitized more than nine million items in our collections, with particular strengths in newspaper issues, manuscripts, and pictorial materials.
Over the next five years, the Library will expand, optimize, and centralize its collections digitization program to significantly expand access to users across the country to rare, distinctive, and unique collection materials which can be made openly available online and use digitization as a core method for preservation reformatting of rights restricted collection materials. Below are the five guiding strategic objectives for this work.
We need to bring honour back
Over lunch recently a fellow writer uttered a word that rather took me by surprise. My companion described the trend of people making private digital communications public — such as Kanye West’s recent leaking of text messages from his personal trainer, or a Vox journalist’s decision to publish Twitter messages from the former crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried — as plain “dishonourable”.
The idea that our behaviour should be guided not solely by respect for the law, nor even by a certain moral code, but by a sense of honour is an unfashionable one. Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks the frequency with which words and phrases are used in books from 1800 onwards, shows a sharp decline in the use of the words “honour”, “honourable” and “dishonourable” from the early 19th century to the present day. Usage of all three words has fallen by about 90 per cent over the period.
When members of the British parliament sling insults at the “honourable” members sitting across the chamber from them — or indeed at their own side — we are not, one assumes, expected to take this descriptor seriously.
Yet while it might be an antiquated notion, if these members of parliament did have a sense that they should behave with honour, we would have much better politicians, who were more concerned with telling the truth and doing the right thing even when they thought they could get away with the opposite.
Notes on US high school achievement
According to nationwide MAP testing, the average high school student in the United States learns… nothing. 👇
— Austin Scholar (@AustinScholar) February 17, 2023
Gov. Mike DeWine enters the ‘reading wars’ with budget proposal to fund change to ‘science of reading’
His budget proposal contains $162 million over the next two years to get the science of reading instructional approach into all of Ohio’s public schools.
At the same time, Ohio State University has been an epicenter of the approach to reading instruction that DeWine wants to get away from – known as “balanced literacy” or “whole language” – since 1984, holding a trademark for an intervention program used to catch struggling readers up with their peers. Hundreds of thousands of students across the country have been educated using the program – called Reading Recovery – which OSU professors take into local schools across the country.
Balanced literacy encourages students, when they encounter a word they don’t know, to use strategies such as looking at the book’s pictures and considering context, sentence structure and the word’s letters.
But DeWine, in his State of the State speech, cited the most recent results of Ohio’s State Test as a reason for schools to change their approach. Just 60.1% of third-grade students scored proficient or higher on reading.
Note that spending increases annually, with Madison taxpayers supporting at least $23,000 per student.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
“An emphasis on adult employment”
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
The Ethics of Higher Education
Earlier this week I had dinner with a small group of MIT professors from a variety of scientific disciplines. Among other topics, they shared their concerns about threats to the culture of free inquiry and the intellectual playfulness and audacity on which it depends. Whatever the form of threat—and they vary—these scientists worry that the institute is letting its concern for protecting its brand and pleasing government funders trump its dedication to scientific inquiry. In response, I recalled this talk I gave at a FIRE conference in, I believe, 2017. I’ve long thought I’d expand it into a “real article,” backed by more research, but never have. Until that day comes, I’m posting it here. (For more on FIRE, now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, visit their website here.)
I am speaking this afternoon (Thursday, February 16) at Brown. Details here.
Two stories to start, one about academic ethics and intellectual safety, and the other about how strange an American university seems to a foreigner.
First story: When I was a senior in college, I took a graduate class in Elizabethan drama. When we got to the final paper, I had a big problem. The Christopher Marlowe plays that I found most interesting were already the subject of my senior thesis. I wasn’t inspired by the Shakespeare comedies that made up most of the other good stuff in the course and, while I liked Richard II, I had nothing interesting to say about it. The only play I found thought-provoking enough for a paper was The Merchant of Venice. That presented another problem: The professor had written a whole book about it. To make matters worse, I disagreed with his thesis, and even though it wasn’t exactly what I set out to write, once I’d read his book that disagreement inevitably became the subject of my paper.
I wasn’t trying to be obnoxious. I just didn’t have anything to say about the other plays.
There are two problems with writing a paper disagreeing with your professor’s book. The first is that he has spent years, not weeks, thinking about the subject. He’s the expert and you are not. He will find every flaw in your argument and you won’t find every flaw in his. Plus he has a whole book to make his case and you have only a few pages. The second, of course, is that he could get mad and give you a bad grade just for disagreeing with him.
I worried a little about the first but not at all about the second.
Issues and Commentary with “elites”
1)There is a perception that the multiple ladders of success which have existed in American society are increasingly being collapsed into a single ladder, with access tightly controlled via educational credentials
2)It is increasingly observed that these credentials actually have fairly low predictive power concerning an individual’s actual ability to perform important tasks and make wise judgments about institutional or national issues. The assumption that school-based knowledge generally trumps practical experience seems increasingly questionable as the sphere of activity for which this assertion is made has expanded, and is indeed increasingly viewed with suspicion or with outright disdain.
3)It is observed that people working in certain fields arrogate to themselves an assumed elite status despite the fact that their jobs actually require relatively little in terms of skill and judgment. Ace of Spades cites a history writer on class distinctions in Victorian England:
She noted, for example, that a Bank of England clerk would be a member of the middle/professional class, despite the fact that what he did all day was hand-write numbers into ledgers and do simple arithmetic and some filing work and the like, whereas, say, a carpenter actually did real thinking, real planning, at his job, with elements of real creativity. And yet it was the Bank of England clerk who was considered a “mind” worker and the carpenter merely a hand-laborer.
Ace suggests that “that distinction has obviously persisted, even in America, with the ingrained sort of idea that a low-level associate producer making crap money and rote choices on an MSNBC daytime talk show was somehow “above” someone making real command decisions in his occupation, like a plumber. And this sort of idea is very important to that low-level producer at MSNBC, because by thinking this way, he puts himself in the league of doctors and engineers.”
Issues and Commentary with “elites”
1)There is a perception that the multiple ladders of success which have existed in American society are increasingly being collapsed into a single ladder, with access tightly controlled via educational credentials
2)It is increasingly observed that these credentials actually have fairly low predictive power concerning an individual’s actual ability to perform important tasks and make wise judgments about institutional or national issues. The assumption that school-based knowledge generally trumps practical experience seems increasingly questionable as the sphere of activity for which this assertion is made has expanded, and is indeed increasingly viewed with suspicion or with outright disdain.
3)It is observed that people working in certain fields arrogate to themselves an assumed elite status despite the fact that their jobs actually require relatively little in terms of skill and judgment. Ace of Spades cites a history writer on class distinctions in Victorian England:
She noted, for example, that a Bank of England clerk would be a member of the middle/professional class, despite the fact that what he did all day was hand-write numbers into ledgers and do simple arithmetic and some filing work and the like, whereas, say, a carpenter actually did real thinking, real planning, at his job, with elements of real creativity. And yet it was the Bank of England clerk who was considered a “mind” worker and the carpenter merely a hand-laborer.
Ace suggests that “that distinction has obviously persisted, even in America, with the ingrained sort of idea that a low-level associate producer making crap money and rote choices on an MSNBC daytime talk show was somehow “above” someone making real command decisions in his occupation, like a plumber. And this sort of idea is very important to that low-level producer at MSNBC, because by thinking this way, he puts himself in the league of doctors and engineers.”
Free speech and governance policies: university edition
The free speech advocacy organization FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) creates an annual ranking of colleges from best to worst environments for free speech on campus. 2022/2023’s list, based on responses from 45,000 students at more than 200 schools, placed University of Chicago in the top spot, meaning the school “promotes and protects the free exchange of ideas” more than any other college on the list. Columbia University was dead last, with “by far, the lowest score,” and its speech climate rated as “abysmal.”
There are a few notable things about the rankings (a detailed methodology, highlights, summary, and full list is available here). Many of our nation’s most prestigious private universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Amherst, Vassar, Johns Hopkins, Penn, and Northwestern, are in the bottom twenty percent. Conversely, the majority of the top fifth of the list are public and state schools.
It seems pretty clear that while the alumni of fancy colleges may get to enjoy humblebragging and an easier acceptance into top graduate programs or certain professional tracks, if a student is interested in an environment that encourages a diverse range of views and in becoming a heterodox thinker they’re likely better off elsewhere.
But, as someone who has investigated and writtenextensively about Covid-19 vaccines, and vaccine mandates, there’s something even more intriguing about the list:
Free speech and governance policies: university edition
The free speech advocacy organization FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) creates an annual ranking of colleges from best to worst environments for free speech on campus. 2022/2023’s list, based on responses from 45,000 students at more than 200 schools, placed University of Chicago in the top spot, meaning the school “promotes and protects the free exchange of ideas” more than any other college on the list. Columbia University was dead last, with “by far, the lowest score,” and its speech climate rated as “abysmal.”
There are a few notable things about the rankings (a detailed methodology, highlights, summary, and full list is available here). Many of our nation’s most prestigious private universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Amherst, Vassar, Johns Hopkins, Penn, and Northwestern, are in the bottom twenty percent. Conversely, the majority of the top fifth of the list are public and state schools.
It seems pretty clear that while the alumni of fancy colleges may get to enjoy humblebragging and an easier acceptance into top graduate programs or certain professional tracks, if a student is interested in an environment that encourages a diverse range of views and in becoming a heterodox thinker they’re likely better off elsewhere.
But, as someone who has investigated and writtenextensively about Covid-19 vaccines, and vaccine mandates, there’s something even more intriguing about the list:
Now, in fear of revolt, the leaders of these countries are mounting an opposite campaign
At the same time, Rouleau refused to confine “misinformation and disinformation” to protesters:
Protest organizers’ mistrust of government officials was reinforced by unfair generalizations from some public officials that suggested all protesters were extremists… Where there was misinformation and disinformation about the protests, it was prone to amplification in news media… The fact that protesters could be at once both the victims and perpetrators of misinformation simply shows how pernicious misinformation is in modern society.
In the report you also find significant criticism of Canda’s Covid-19 policies and heavy-handed emergency measures like allowing Canada’s Border Services Agency (CBSA) to keep foreigners out. Rouleau even said he came to his main conclusion, that Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Order was legal, “with reluctance.”
But such musings have no propaganda benefit, and Rouleau’s report was reduced to a single thought, that Trudeau’s Emergencies Order “Met the Threshhold.” This was almost exactly like the American press reaction to the 2019 report by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, which tore into FBI malfeasance for hundreds of pages but gave the press the headline it wanted: “Justice Watchdog Finds Russia Probe Was Justified, Not Biased Against Trump.”
“AI” update
1/ Trying to signal boost w a short 🧵
Amateur Go player Kellin Pelrine can consistently beat “KataGo”, an AI system that was once classified as “strongly superhuman”.
Strikingly, the strategies employed to beat the AI do not foil other amateur players. https://t.co/2AgK3gKVYP pic.twitter.com/couAi5sHfG
— Dan Elton (@moreisdifferent) February 18, 2023
“AI” update
1/ Trying to signal boost w a short 🧵
Amateur Go player Kellin Pelrine can consistently beat “KataGo”, an AI system that was once classified as “strongly superhuman”.
Strikingly, the strategies employed to beat the AI do not foil other amateur players. https://t.co/2AgK3gKVYP pic.twitter.com/couAi5sHfG
— Dan Elton (@moreisdifferent) February 18, 2023
Four Reasons Why Heterodox Academy Failed
The purge of heretical scholars and ideas in academia is intensifying.1 Many job applications now require loyalty oaths to woke orthodoxy in the form of “diversity statements.”2 In the humanities and social sciences, large numbers of faculty are being hired to engage in what is effectively leftist activism.3Simply ranting about how much you hate conservatives, Christians, or straight white men can be considered “scholarship” and the basis for a distinguished career. Entire departments devoted to ideology-driven fields like gender studies have been established to promote “social justice” and provide sinecures to activists.4 Academic papers that undermine the woke narrative are being retracted,5 and journals are adopting implicit or explicit polices to ensure that crimethink is never published again.6 Many undergraduate and graduate programs have stopped asking for standardized test scores and are increasingly making admissions decisions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and ideological conformity.
Seven years ago, Heterodox Academy (HxA) came on the scene to promote “ideological diversity” in academia. Cofounder Jonathan Haidt—a prominent social psychologist who is now chair of the board of directors and the person most associated with the organization—spoke forcefully about the scholarship-corrupting effects of liberal groupthink. The leaders of HxA led people to believe that they were going to organize a meaningful resistance.
Seven years later, you can count HxA’s accomplishments in promoting heterodoxy on the fingers of zero hands. It has focused mainly on aggrandizing celebrity academics who hold conventional leftist views, and giving a platform to liberals to engage in empty virtue signaling about their alleged commitment to free inquiry. Scholars whose work is genuinely heterodox have been systematically marginalized. In at least one instance, a psychologist known for his work on race differences (Helmuth Nyborg) was denied membership.
Four Reasons Why Heterodox Academy Failed
The purge of heretical scholars and ideas in academia is intensifying.1 Many job applications now require loyalty oaths to woke orthodoxy in the form of “diversity statements.”2 In the humanities and social sciences, large numbers of faculty are being hired to engage in what is effectively leftist activism.3Simply ranting about how much you hate conservatives, Christians, or straight white men can be considered “scholarship” and the basis for a distinguished career. Entire departments devoted to ideology-driven fields like gender studies have been established to promote “social justice” and provide sinecures to activists.4 Academic papers that undermine the woke narrative are being retracted,5 and journals are adopting implicit or explicit polices to ensure that crimethink is never published again.6 Many undergraduate and graduate programs have stopped asking for standardized test scores and are increasingly making admissions decisions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and ideological conformity.
Seven years ago, Heterodox Academy (HxA) came on the scene to promote “ideological diversity” in academia. Cofounder Jonathan Haidt—a prominent social psychologist who is now chair of the board of directors and the person most associated with the organization—spoke forcefully about the scholarship-corrupting effects of liberal groupthink. The leaders of HxA led people to believe that they were going to organize a meaningful resistance.
Seven years later, you can count HxA’s accomplishments in promoting heterodoxy on the fingers of zero hands. It has focused mainly on aggrandizing celebrity academics who hold conventional leftist views, and giving a platform to liberals to engage in empty virtue signaling about their alleged commitment to free inquiry. Scholars whose work is genuinely heterodox have been systematically marginalized. In at least one instance, a psychologist known for his work on race differences (Helmuth Nyborg) was denied membership.
Tuition Revenue Has Fallen at 61% of Colleges During the Pandemic
Net-tuition revenue — the money that institutions earn through enrollment minus any discounts and allowances provided to students — is the lifeblood of many universities.
It’s the largest source of revenue for private four-year institutions, and it accounts for just over $1 of every $5 of revenue for public four-year institutions, about the same, on average, as their combined earnings from state grants, contracts, and appropriations.
Budget Season: Notes on Wisconsin’s Substantial Tax & Spending growth
Walker [17-19] Last Biennial Budget: $76 billion
Evers[19-21] First Biennial Budget: $87.5 billion
Evers [23-25] Proposed Biennial Budget: $103.8 billionWill you get $27.8 BILLION more value from govt? Sell underused properties, consolidate overlapping agencies. $0 INCREASE! pic.twitter.com/DNXG1aSozd
— Will Martin, Business Owner & Govt Reformer (@willmartinWI) February 20, 2023
- Massive Spending Growth: Governor Evers proposed budget increases spending by 18.5% compared to the previous budget. GPR spending would rise by 22.85% compared to the previous budget.
- Agency GPR Growth: Some agencies would see massive growth in GPR spending. For example, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation’s GPR allocation would grow by 3351%. The Department of Tourism would have a 1027% increase in GPR spending.
- Voucher Freeze: The governor proposes freezing enrollment in Wisconsin’s school choice programs at 2024 enrollment levels. This would shut the school house door on thousands of families in Wisconsin desperate for options stuck in schools that aren’t working for them.
- DEI Positions: Governor Evers wants to spend more than $2.9 million of taxpayer dollars on 15 new executive-tier positions whose mandate is to use government activity to increase “equity.”
- Work Requirements: Able-bodied adults are required to participate in the Food Share Employment and Training program to continue receiving Food Share benefits after the first three months. Governor Evers would repeal this requirement despite the economic and personal benefits they bring to the state and its participants.
Yet:
Note that spending increases annually, with Madison taxpayers supporting at least $23,000 per student.
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?
Budget Season: Notes on Wisconsin’s Substantial Tax & Spending growth
Walker [17-19] Last Biennial Budget: $76 billion
Evers[19-21] First Biennial Budget: $87.5 billion
Evers [23-25] Proposed Biennial Budget: $103.8 billionWill you get $27.8 BILLION more value from govt? Sell underused properties, consolidate overlapping agencies. $0 INCREASE! pic.twitter.com/DNXG1aSozd
— Will Martin, Business Owner & Govt Reformer (@willmartinWI) February 20, 2023
Peabody DIE Office responds to MSU shooting with email written using ChatGPT
UPDATED: This piece was updated on Feb. 17, 2023, at 7:30 p.m. CST to include an apology from the EDI Office. It was further updated on Feb. 17, 2023, at 9:05 p.m. CST to include a statement from the university about its use of AI in generating messages.
A note at the bottom of a Feb. 16 email from the Peabody Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion regarding the recent shooting at Michigan State Universitystated that the message had been written using ChatGPT, an AI text generator.
Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Nicole Joseph sent a follow-up, apology email to the Peabody community on Feb. 17 at 6:30 p.m. CST. She stated using ChatGPT to write the initial email was “poor judgment.”
“While we believe in the message of inclusivity expressed in the email, using ChatGPT to generate communications on behalf of our community in a time of sorrow and in response to a tragedy contradicts the values that characterize Peabody College,” the follow-up email reads. “As with all new technologies that affect higher education, this moment gives us all an opportunity to reflect on what we know and what we still must learn about AI.”
The initial email emphasizes the importance of maintaining safe and inclusive environments amid ongoing gun violence across the country. It states that “respect” and “understanding” are necessary for doing so.
Peabody DIE Office responds to MSU shooting with email written using ChatGPT
UPDATED: This piece was updated on Feb. 17, 2023, at 7:30 p.m. CST to include an apology from the EDI Office. It was further updated on Feb. 17, 2023, at 9:05 p.m. CST to include a statement from the university about its use of AI in generating messages.
A note at the bottom of a Feb. 16 email from the Peabody Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion regarding the recent shooting at Michigan State Universitystated that the message had been written using ChatGPT, an AI text generator.
Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Nicole Joseph sent a follow-up, apology email to the Peabody community on Feb. 17 at 6:30 p.m. CST. She stated using ChatGPT to write the initial email was “poor judgment.”
“While we believe in the message of inclusivity expressed in the email, using ChatGPT to generate communications on behalf of our community in a time of sorrow and in response to a tragedy contradicts the values that characterize Peabody College,” the follow-up email reads. “As with all new technologies that affect higher education, this moment gives us all an opportunity to reflect on what we know and what we still must learn about AI.”
The initial email emphasizes the importance of maintaining safe and inclusive environments amid ongoing gun violence across the country. It states that “respect” and “understanding” are necessary for doing so.
Correcting Carter’s Mistake: Removing Cabinet Status from the U.S. Department of Education
Lindsey Burke, Ph.D. and Jonathan Butcher
The U.S. Department of Education opened its doors on May 4, 1980. Forty years after its establishment, academic achievement remains largely unimproved, and gaps in achievement outcomes between low-income children and their higher-income peers persist. Elevating education to Cabinet-level status has not led to education excellence; rather, it has codified education decision making in Washington among government officials who have less knowledge than state and local school leaders of the needs of local schools. Devolving the department and housing remaining programs at other agencies can make space for a return to education subsidiarity, enabling local actors to determine which policies meet local needs. Remaining federal involvement should focus primarily on gathering education statistics. In the spirit of the “Education at a Crossroads” report published in 1998, this Backgrounder maps out a plan for eliminating the agency and restoring state, local, and parental control of education.
Correcting Carter’s Mistake: Removing Cabinet Status from the U.S. Department of Education
Lindsey Burke, Ph.D. and Jonathan Butcher
The U.S. Department of Education opened its doors on May 4, 1980. Forty years after its establishment, academic achievement remains largely unimproved, and gaps in achievement outcomes between low-income children and their higher-income peers persist. Elevating education to Cabinet-level status has not led to education excellence; rather, it has codified education decision making in Washington among government officials who have less knowledge than state and local school leaders of the needs of local schools. Devolving the department and housing remaining programs at other agencies can make space for a return to education subsidiarity, enabling local actors to determine which policies meet local needs. Remaining federal involvement should focus primarily on gathering education statistics. In the spirit of the “Education at a Crossroads” report published in 1998, this Backgrounder maps out a plan for eliminating the agency and restoring state, local, and parental control of education.
civics: Reflecting on Taxpayer funded censorship
As Taibbi has written, the Twitter Files “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let us consider just three installments and their related implications: the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the suspension of Trump, and the deputization of Twitter by the FBI. Together, these stories reveal not just a social media company willing to do the bidding of an out-of-control federal bureaucracy, but a federal bureaucracy openly hostile to the First Amendment.
civics: Reflecting on Taxpayer funded censorship
As Taibbi has written, the Twitter Files “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.”
The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let us consider just three installments and their related implications: the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the suspension of Trump, and the deputization of Twitter by the FBI. Together, these stories reveal not just a social media company willing to do the bidding of an out-of-control federal bureaucracy, but a federal bureaucracy openly hostile to the First Amendment.
A decline in “woke academic” output?
Data show that there was a significant uptick in research focused on various forms of bias and discrimination starting in 2011, but the rate of production of scholarly papers exploring these topics seems to have slowed in recent years.
After 2011, there was a rapid change in discourse and norms around social justice issues, particularly among knowledge economy professionals (i.e., people who work in fields like journalism, the arts, entertainment, law, tech, finance, consulting, education, and research).
As I detail in my forthcoming book, this “awokening” manifested in everything from poll and survey responses, to media outputs, to changes in political alignments, and beyond. Within academia, there was a sharp increase in student protest activity beginning in 2011, accompanied by growing tensions around “cancel culture” and self-censorship. There were ballooning investments in (demonstrably ineffective) mandated diversity-related training and rapid expansions of campus “sex bureaucracies.”
Changes were also apparent in research outputs.
In a recent paper for the National Association of Scholars, computer scientist David Rozado analyzed 175 million scholarly abstracts from articles published from 1970 to 2020. He found that, after 2011, there was a sharp increase in the use of prejudice-denoting terms. This held for virtually all forms of bias and discrimination (racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia, ableism, ageism, fatphobia, and derivatives of the same). Statistical analyses suggested that a single underlying shift, likely among the people who produce academic research, could explain most of the observed change across all of these terms since 2011.
Make Yale Democratic Again
Yale University played a prominent role in the American fight for democracy, with four graduates signing the Declaration of Independence. Now some Yalies want to bring a more modest revolution to campus by re-introducing an element of democracy for the Yale Board of Trustees, known as the Yale Corporation.
The Yale Daily News reports that nearly 90% of Yale students overwhelmingly voted “yes” to two questions on a referendum. These were: “Should the board of trustees for Yale Corporation consist of democratically elected trustees?” and “Should students, professors, and staff be eligible to vote for candidates for the board of trustees for Yale Corporation?”
It’s the latest backlash against Yale’s May 2021 decision to eliminate a process that had allowed alumni to become candidates for the board if they submitted 4,394 signatures (3% of alumni) on a petition. Now only candidates nominated by the official Alumni Fellow Nominating Committee qualify. A Connecticut lawsuit filed by two alumni accuses Yale of voter suppression and will proceed to trial some time this spring.
The Yale Corporation consists of the president, six trustees elected by alumni, 10 appointed members and two ex-officio members (Connecticut’s governor and lieutenant governor). Even when Yale allowed alumni candidates by petition, the last one to be elected to the board was William Horowitz in 1965—the first Jewish trustee.
Blessed Sacrament’s Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya defends Madison All-City Spelling Bee title
After having to fight for his first win last year, Blessed Sacrament seventh-grader Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya swiftly defended his All-City Spelling Bee title the second time around, pushing past his fellow top-three finishers in less than 10 minutes Saturday.
The awards presentation at the All-City Spelling Bee on Saturday, Feb. 18, 2023.
The 12-year-old powered through the spelling of “milliner,” “comprimario,” and “amyloid” as he faced runner-up Jay Jadhav, seemingly keeping his cool until the very end.
“There’s a lot of mixed thoughts as you’re going up there,” Wijeyakulasuriya said after the competition. “What was going through my head was, ‘I never heard some of those words.’ What I do, I just focus on my breathing, focus on the word and just forget about what the outcome will be.”
Maybe that’s to be expected of a kid whose favorite word is “cynghanedd” — an intricate system of patterning of consonants, accents and rhymes.
Note that spending increases annually, with Madison taxpayers supporting at least $23,000 per student.
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?
Notes on legacy media, school district spending and current events
When you see “school district could shut it’s doors” headlines, be sure to google per pupil funding levels. You won’t learn this from the article. Then google the local budgets of your high achieving choice school. https://t.co/gATUrXRFVU pic.twitter.com/snXeikpsGK
— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) February 19, 2023
The article.
Note that spending increases annually, with Madison taxpayers supporting at least $23,000 per student.
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?
Civics: elected official censorship
TWITTER FILES #16
Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment pic.twitter.com/Knp0UjfaMp— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
Civics: elected official censorship – Angus King edition
TWITTER FILES #16
Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment pic.twitter.com/Knp0UjfaMp— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT—and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in producing what we might consider to be meaningful text. I should say at the outset that I’m going to focus on the big picture of what’s going on—and while I’ll mention some engineering details, I won’t get deeply into them. (And the essence of what I’ll say applies just as well to other current “large language models” [LLMs] as to ChatGPT.)
The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.”
So let’s say we’ve got the text “The best thing about AI is its ability to”. Imagine scanning billions of pages of human-written text (say on the web and in digitized books) and finding all instances of this text—then seeing what word comes next what fraction of the time. ChatGPT effectively does something like this, except that (as I’ll explain) it doesn’t look at literal text; it looks for things that in a certain sense “match in meaning”. But the end result is that it produces a ranked list of words that might follow, together with “probabilities”:
What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT—and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in producing what we might consider to be meaningful text. I should say at the outset that I’m going to focus on the big picture of what’s going on—and while I’ll mention some engineering details, I won’t get deeply into them. (And the essence of what I’ll say applies just as well to other current “large language models” [LLMs] as to ChatGPT.)
The first thing to explain is that what ChatGPT is always fundamentally trying to do is to produce a “reasonable continuation” of whatever text it’s got so far, where by “reasonable” we mean “what one might expect someone to write after seeing what people have written on billions of webpages, etc.”
So let’s say we’ve got the text “The best thing about AI is its ability to”. Imagine scanning billions of pages of human-written text (say on the web and in digitized books) and finding all instances of this text—then seeing what word comes next what fraction of the time. ChatGPT effectively does something like this, except that (as I’ll explain) it doesn’t look at literal text; it looks for things that in a certain sense “match in meaning”. But the end result is that it produces a ranked list of words that might follow, together with “probabilities”:
Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege
In 2009, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then a top executive at the biotechnology company Genentech, was the primary author of a scientific paper published in the prestigious journal Nature that claimed to have found the potential cause for brain degeneration in Alzheimer’s patients. “Because of this research,” read Genentech’s annual letter to shareholders, “we are working to develop both antibodies and small molecules that may attack Alzheimer’s from a novel entry point and help the millions of people who currently suffer from this devastating disease.”
But after several unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the research, the paper became the subject of an internal review by Genentech’s Research Review Committee (RRC), according to four high-level Genentech employees at the time; two were senior scientists and two were scientists who also served as executives. Three spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the allegations and non-disclosure agreements. The scientists, one of whom was an executive who sat on the review committee and all of whom were informed of the review’s findings at the time due to their stature at the company, said that the inquiry discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public.
Internal review found ‘falsified data’ in Stanford President’s Alzheimer’s research, colleagues allege
In 2009, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, then a top executive at the biotechnology company Genentech, was the primary author of a scientific paper published in the prestigious journal Nature that claimed to have found the potential cause for brain degeneration in Alzheimer’s patients. “Because of this research,” read Genentech’s annual letter to shareholders, “we are working to develop both antibodies and small molecules that may attack Alzheimer’s from a novel entry point and help the millions of people who currently suffer from this devastating disease.”
But after several unsuccessful attempts to reproduce the research, the paper became the subject of an internal review by Genentech’s Research Review Committee (RRC), according to four high-level Genentech employees at the time; two were senior scientists and two were scientists who also served as executives. Three spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the allegations and non-disclosure agreements. The scientists, one of whom was an executive who sat on the review committee and all of whom were informed of the review’s findings at the time due to their stature at the company, said that the inquiry discovered falsification of data in the research, and that Tessier-Lavigne kept the finding from becoming public.
Race Neutrality in academic hiring
Today CNN did a segment on Texas Tech’s decision to stop using diversity statements in faculty hiring, citing my report. https://t.co/h9d5kuqiAa
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) February 16, 2023
Race Neutrality in academic hiring
Today CNN did a segment on Texas Tech’s decision to stop using diversity statements in faculty hiring, citing my report. https://t.co/h9d5kuqiAa
— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) February 16, 2023
Notes on academic publishing discrimination
Moreover, why should someone get preferential treatment because they’re missing a leg or something? Why should they be forced to disclose such a private, personal thing as their sexual orientation just to not lose an edge with their submission?
For a lot of people, they’re upset at the fact that this is ultimately discriminatory, and I get that. I’m not thrilled with it either.
However, one can’t help but see a lot of people feeling pressured to reveal something about themselves that they might not be ready to share with the world, all for a prestigious placement in the journal.
Then we have to face the fact that we’re living in Clown World, where what we used to call someone with normal, traditional values regarding sex is “demi-sexual.” It’s almost as if anyone can fall under the LGBT+ umbrella, so that means anyone could get oppression points they can use for the journal, right?
So it seems to me that if that’s the case, this effort is nothing but a way to force people to disclose things about themselves whether they want to or not.
Sorry, but I’m unamused.
Notes on academic publishing discrimination
Moreover, why should someone get preferential treatment because they’re missing a leg or something? Why should they be forced to disclose such a private, personal thing as their sexual orientation just to not lose an edge with their submission?
For a lot of people, they’re upset at the fact that this is ultimately discriminatory, and I get that. I’m not thrilled with it either.
However, one can’t help but see a lot of people feeling pressured to reveal something about themselves that they might not be ready to share with the world, all for a prestigious placement in the journal.
Then we have to face the fact that we’re living in Clown World, where what we used to call someone with normal, traditional values regarding sex is “demi-sexual.” It’s almost as if anyone can fall under the LGBT+ umbrella, so that means anyone could get oppression points they can use for the journal, right?
So it seems to me that if that’s the case, this effort is nothing but a way to force people to disclose things about themselves whether they want to or not.
Sorry, but I’m unamused.
The price of soft on discipline policies
I’m into my seventh year teaching. I’ve taught in rich schools and poor schools, private and public, middle school and high school. My class schedule has been both unforgivingly busy and also free to the point of leaving me bored at midday. I’ve had great administrators and terrible ones. I’ve used more curricula than I care to count. I’ve spent entire Saturdays and Sundays grading and prepping. But nothing has left me more stressed or anxious than student discipline.
It was worst in my first year of teaching, when both my classroom management skills were at their weakest and the school in which I taught was distinctly weak-kneed. Every day was chaos, and the unpredictability of it scared me the most. What insult would fly across the room? Would I have to break up a fight today? For what educational failure or emotional damage was I responsible because of the chaos in this room? I still remember one student laughing at me after I asked him to sit down.
But it wasn’t just me. An experienced educator across the hall quit that year and checked into a mental hospital because of the verbal abuse she suffered from students. The shift from “these students are disrespectful” to “I am unworthy of respect” comes quickly, and it’s emotionally crushing.
Civics: election meddling
Three journalists – from Radio France, Haaretz and TheMarker – approached Team Jorge pretending to be consultants working on behalf of a politically unstable African country that wanted help delaying an election.
The encounters with Hanan and his colleagues took place via video calls and an in-person meeting in Team Jorge’s base, an unmarked office in an industrial park in Modi’in, 20 miles outside Tel Aviv.
Hanan described his team as “graduates of government agencies”, with expertise in finance, social media and campaigns, as well as “psychological warfare”, operating from six offices around the world. Four of Hanan’s colleagues attended the meetings, including his brother, Zohar Hanan, who was described as the chief executive of the group.
In his initial pitch to the potential clients, Hanan claimed: “We are now involved in one election in Africa … We have a team in Greece and a team in [the] Emirates … You follow the leads. [We have completed] 33 presidential-level campaigns, 27 of which were successful.” Later, he said he was involved in two “major projects” in the US but claimed not to engage directly in US politics.
Skills Beat Degrees for Government Jobs
The latest move toward rational hiring is in Georgia, where the state Senate voted last week to pursue the removal of unnecessary requirements from certain government jobs. The bill directs the Department of Administrative Services to review the minimum level of education, training and experience needed for every state job, and to reduce requirements when reasonable.
“We used to mandate a college degree for almost everything,” said state Sen. John Albers, the lead sponsor. “Now we’re looking at that differently.” The state House and Gov. Brian Kemp are also likely to back the bill, which passed the Senate 49 to 1, including yes votes from 17 Democrats.
The bipartisan support is no fluke. If Mr. Kemp signs on, he’ll join two Republican Governors and two Democrats who have cut degree requirements in their states since last year. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order last month to focus state job postings on experience and skills rather than education. It was one of the first policy moves by the newly inaugurated Democrat.
“Whether you went to college or gained experience through work, on-the-job training or an apprenticeship, we value what you bring to the table,” he said.
Democrats tend to describe cutting job restrictions as a way to spread opportunity. That goes for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who reformed government hiring practices last April.
Republicans put more emphasis on efficiency. Take former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who started the trend when he reformed state hiring last March. As a former real-estate executive, he aimed to “find new ways to build a steady pipeline of talented, well-trained, skilled workers,” and he gutted restrictions to widen the applicant pool. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox made the same point when he nixed degree requirements for many state jobs in IT and health services.
These are status-quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life
Status-quoists believe that any decline in quality one might observe at Yale or The Washington Post or the Food and Drug Administration or the American Federation of Teachers are simply problems of personnel, circumstance, incompetence, or lack of information. Times change, people come and go, status-quoists believe—this outfit screwed up COVID policy, yes, and that place has an antisemitism problem, agreed. But they will learn, reform, and recover, and they need our help to do so. What isn’t needed, and is in fact anathema, is any effort to inject more perceived radicalism into an already toxic and polarized American society. The people, ideas, and institutions that led America after the end of the Cold War must continue to guide us through the turbulence ahead. What can broadly be called the “establishment” is not only familiar, status-quoists believe; it is safe, stable, and ultimately enduring.
These are status-quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life
Status-quoists believe that any decline in quality one might observe at Yale or The Washington Post or the Food and Drug Administration or the American Federation of Teachers are simply problems of personnel, circumstance, incompetence, or lack of information. Times change, people come and go, status-quoists believe—this outfit screwed up COVID policy, yes, and that place has an antisemitism problem, agreed. But they will learn, reform, and recover, and they need our help to do so. What isn’t needed, and is in fact anathema, is any effort to inject more perceived radicalism into an already toxic and polarized American society. The people, ideas, and institutions that led America after the end of the Cold War must continue to guide us through the turbulence ahead. What can broadly be called the “establishment” is not only familiar, status-quoists believe; it is safe, stable, and ultimately enduring.
A decline in “woke academic” output?
Data show that there was a significant uptick in research focused on various forms of bias and discrimination starting in 2011, but the rate of production of scholarly papers exploring these topics seems to have slowed in recent years.
After 2011, there was a rapid change in discourse and norms around social justice issues, particularly among knowledge economy professionals (i.e., people who work in fields like journalism, the arts, entertainment, law, tech, finance, consulting, education, and research).
As I detail in my forthcoming book, this “awokening” manifested in everything from poll and survey responses, to media outputs, to changes in political alignments, and beyond. Within academia, there was a sharp increase in student protest activity beginning in 2011, accompanied by growing tensions around “cancel culture” and self-censorship. There were ballooning investments in (demonstrably ineffective) mandated diversity-related training and rapid expansions of campus “sex bureaucracies.”
Changes were also apparent in research outputs.
In a recent paper for the National Association of Scholars, computer scientist David Rozado analyzed 175 million scholarly abstracts from articles published from 1970 to 2020. He found that, after 2011, there was a sharp increase in the use of prejudice-denoting terms. This held for virtually all forms of bias and discrimination (racism, sexism, transphobia, Islamophobia, ableism, ageism, fatphobia, and derivatives of the same). Statistical analyses suggested that a single underlying shift, likely among the people who produce academic research, could explain most of the observed change across all of these terms since 2011.
Speech is violence? Not if we want a liberal, intellectual society
In 1989, the novelist Salman Rushdie went into hiding. The supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwā calling on “all valiant Muslims wherever they may be in the world” to kill the writer without delay, for which the assassin would receive a bounty of $1 million.
Rushdie’s offense was writing a novel. Called the Satanic Verses, the story depicted the prophet Muhammad (and his wives) in ways that incensed parts of the Muslim community and turned the author into the world’s most infamous heretic. As the story circulated through international media, Western intellectuals often offered muddled responses.
Of course it was wrong for Khomeini to call for the murder of a novelist who had merely written a book, most agreed. But few liberal-minded commentators seemed eager to say Rushdie was entirely without fault. The Indian-born writer had, after all, deeply offended the religious beliefs of millions of Muslims, in nations where values like piety and respect for authority had long been deemed more important than free expression.
The controversy highlighted the longstanding philosophical chasm between the Islamic and Western worlds: fundamentalism versus liberalism. But for the journalist and author Jonathan Rauch, the most revealing part of the Rushdie affair was not the cultural clash of values. It was the failure of Western critics to understand the nature of their own liberal intellectual system.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Growing Federal Taxpayer Funded Deficits amidst rising tax receipts
The budget deficit more than tripled to $3.14 trillion in fiscal 2020 owing to numerous Covid bills. It fell slightly to $2.7 trillion in 2021 because individual and corporate income tax revenue surged—not because of spending discipline. As pandemic welfare payments expired, the deficit last year clocked in at $1.4 trillion.
During his State of the Union, Mr. Biden blamed deficits on his predecessor. But the deficits during the first three years of the Trump Presidency totalled $2.5 trillion—less than in the first year of Mr. Biden’s. The deficit is on a path to increase again this year owing to the infrastructure bill, Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and end-of-year omnibus blowout.
and Mike Crapo:
Moreover, corporate taxes are only one slice of the federal revenue pie, which hit new records after 2017. In the years since, federal tax revenue averaged about 17.3% of gross domestic product, according to the Tax Foundation. This was “higher than most years” before the tax cut and higher than the post-war average of 17.2%. For the most recent fiscal year, which ended in September 2022, federal tax collections were at a multidecade high of approximately 19.6% of GDP. In all of U.S. history, federal tax collections have only been that high three times. Once, during the dot-com bubble, it hit 20%. The other two times were midway through World War II: Revenue hit 20.5% of GDP in 1943 and 19.9% in 1944.
The Diversity of Institutions Conducting Biomedical Research
Biomedical research in the United States has contributed enormous- ly to science and human health and is conducted in several thousand institutions that vary widely in their histories, missions, operations, size, and cultures. Though these institutional differences have important consequences for the research they conduct, the organizational taxonomy of US biomedical research has received scant systematic attention. Consequently, many observers and even participants are surprisingly un- aware of important distinguishing attributes of these diverse institutions. This essay provides a high-level taxonomy of the institutional ecosystem of US biomedical re- search; illustrates key features of the ecosystem through portraits of eight institutions of varying age, size, culture, and missions, each representing a much larger class exhibiting additional diversity; and suggests topics for future research into the research output of institutional types that will be required to develop novel approaches to improving the function of the ecosystem.
The Joy of Abstraction
Dr. Cheng would like to give people an opportunity to ask questions and get help with understanding the book. The book club will be hosted by the Topos Institute and will be run asynchronously. They will go at an approximate rate of one chapter per week. You can submit questions for each chapter according to the published schedule. Questions for the first chapter are due February 19, 2023. They will collate the questions and Dr. Cheng will make a video each week addressing the questions for that chapter. You will remain anonymous when asking the questions, so please don’t hesitate to ask questions that might feel “stupid”. They welcome any question that comes from you wanting to understand something better!
Each video will be posted at
during the week following the deadline for questions. If you are ahead of schedule you are welcome to submit questions in advance, but they will only be addressed in the video for that chapter.
To submit questions, please fill in this Google form. Include a page reference for your question, if relevant, so that Dr. Cheng can address the questions in order in the video.
This book club is open to everyone everywhere. Please spread the word!
Note that the schedule may change, but the deadlines for each chapter will only become later, never earlier.
Eliminating Advanced Classes in the name of equity: Madison’s English 10 deja vu “This is a sound pedagogical approach to education”
The parental pushback in Culver City mirrors resistance that has taken place in Wisconsin, Rhode Island and elsewhere in California over the last year in response to schools stripping away the honors designation on some high school classes.
School districts doing away with honors classes argue students who don’t take those classes from a young age start to see themselves in a different tier, and come to think they aren’t capable of enrolling in Advanced Placement classes that help with college admissions. Black and Latino students are underrepresented in AP enrollment in the majority of states, according to the Education Trust, a nonprofit that studies equity in education.
Culver City High School eliminated honors English classes to try to improve racial equity, but many parents disagree with the move.
Since the start of this school year, freshmen and sophomores in Culver City have only been able to select one level of English class, known as College Prep, rather than the previous system in which anyone could opt into the honors class. School officials say the goal is to teach everyone with an equal level of rigor, one that encourages them to enroll in advanced classes in their final years of high school.“Parents say academic excellence should not be experimented with for the sake of social justice,” said Quoc Tran, the superintendent of 6,900-student Culver City Unified School District. But, he said, “it was very jarring when teachers looked at their AP enrollment and realized Black and brown kids were not there. They felt obligated to do something.”
Culver City English teachers presented data at a board meeting last year showing Latino students made up 13% of those in 12th-grade Advanced Placement English, compared with 37% of the student body. Asian students were 34% of the advanced class, compared with 10% of students. Black students represented 14% of AP English, versus 15% of the student body.
My honors English teacher encouraged me to publish my first letter to the editor. Reducing excellence in education is not equality of opportunity or liberalism. We need to invest to empower those who are left out, not tear down those who are doing well. https://t.co/bW8a9U6bzk
— Ro Khanna (@RoKhanna) February 19, 2023
Related: Madison’s English 10 expedition (Mid 2000’s)
2017, yet Madison’s long term, disastrous reading results continue (despite spending about $23k/student).
Madison’s recent attempt to eliminate honors classes.
Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron is worth a read.
Political Bias and ChatGPT, among others
I have previously documented the left-leaning political biases embedded in ChatGPT as manifested in the bot responses to questions with political connotations. I have also shown the unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation system, by which derogatory comments about some demographic groups are often flagged as hateful while the exact same comments about other demographic groups are flagged as not hateful.
Here, I describe a fine-tuning of an OpenAI GPT language model with the specific objective of making the model manifest right-leaning political biases, the opposite of the biases manifested by ChatGPT. Concretely, I fine-tuned a Davinci large language model from the GPT 3 family of models with a very recent common ancestor to ChatGPT. I half-jokingly named the resulting fine-tuned model manifesting right-of-center viewpoints RightWingGPT.
Political Bias and ChatGPT, among others
I have previously documented the left-leaning political biases embedded in ChatGPT as manifested in the bot responses to questions with political connotations. I have also shown the unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation system, by which derogatory comments about some demographic groups are often flagged as hateful while the exact same comments about other demographic groups are flagged as not hateful.
Here, I describe a fine-tuning of an OpenAI GPT language model with the specific objective of making the model manifest right-leaning political biases, the opposite of the biases manifested by ChatGPT. Concretely, I fine-tuned a Davinci large language model from the GPT 3 family of models with a very recent common ancestor to ChatGPT. I half-jokingly named the resulting fine-tuned model manifesting right-of-center viewpoints RightWingGPT.
Research, Teaching and DIE
Diversity statements—short essays that express one’s past contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and future plans to advance the cause—have become ubiquitous in academia. As I’ve written before, many universities embrace these requirements not only for faculty hiring but also for all levels of employment. And in a recent piece for the Wall Street Journal, I exposed how Texas Tech University used the statements as functional ideological screening tools.
But the policy is also shrouded in ambiguity. When the Academic Freedom Alliance called for an end to mandatory diversity statements, it noted that a temporary moratorium might be appropriate, given the general lack of transparency surrounding the practice. Even though the Texas Tech case provides a moment of clarity, it’s often unclear how the statements are used elsewhere.
A recent article in the journal Communications Biology provides another moment of clarity, showing that diversity statements can make or break a would-be professor’s job prospects. In the article, biologists at Emory University explain how they assessed their job applicants’ contributions to DEI at multiple points while hiring two new biology professors. The article makes clear that a scholar or scientist’s contributions to DEI are just as important as his ability to research and teach.
For the Emory search, the job application required a diversity statement, and the hiring committee began by narrowing down its initial applicant pool from 585 to about 45 candidates by scoring three categories equally: teaching, research, and contributions to DEI. A diagram depicts a three-legged stool. On the seat is the word “Excellence.” One leg is labeled “Teaching,” another “Research,” and another “Actions toward DEI.”
Civics: A digital bill of rights
It’s not a question of whether we should have digital rights anymore; it’s over what they will be. https://t.co/byvZYM81fh
— John Robb (@johnrobb) February 16, 2023
Civics: Taxpayer Subsidized Censorship – State Department Edition
The U.S. government evidently values this work; in fact, the State Department subsidizes it. The National Endowment for Democracy—a nonprofit that has received $330 million in taxpayer dollars from the State Department—contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to GDI’s budget, according to an investigation by The Washington Examiner‘s Gabe Kaminsky.
Should the State Department spend public money to help an organization pressure advertisers to punish U.S. media companies? The answer, quite obviously, is no: The First Amendment prohibits the U.S. government from censoring private companies for good reason, and government actors should not seek to evade the First Amendment’s protections in order to censor indirectly or exert pressure inappropriately.
The Washington Examiner, which was included on GDI’s list of risky media outlets, confirmed that it has lost out on revenue due to advertisers heeding GDI’s federally subsidized concerns. (An internal GDI memosingles out Amazon for purchasing ad space on an Examiner article that allegedly included right-wing misinformation.)
But GDI evidently considers Reason even more threatening than The Washington Examiner. Reason is listed among GDI’s 10 allegedly absolute “riskiest online news outlets,” alongside the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, The Daily Wire, The Blaze, One America News Network, The Federalist, Newsmax, The American Spectator, and The American Conservative.
Computer science curriculum: free for all, designed for you.
CMU CS Academy is an online, graphics-based computer science curriculum taught in Python provided by Carnegie Mellon University. We create novel, world-class Computer Science education for your classroom —and it’s entirely free.
About 240,000 children may be truant or unreported home-schoolers
Districts have lost track of thousands of students who left public schools since the pandemic began, and it is unclear how many of them are truant or unreported home-schoolers, according to a new study.
An analysis of enrollment data conducted by Stanford University in collaboration with the Associated Press found that there were no records last school year for more than 240,000 school-age children living in 21 states and the District of Columbia, which provided recent enrollment details.
Nationwide, public-school enrollment in kindergarten through grade 12 fell by roughly 1.2 million students between fall 2019 and fall 2021, according to the study’s analysis of Education Department data.
The study published this week sought to find out where students who left public schools went, and the degree to which changes in demographics and new schooling choices by families may account for the enrollment decline.
An estimated 26% of children who left public schools during the first two years of the pandemic switched to home-schools, the research found.
Private-school enrollment grew less, climbing 4% higher from the 2019-20 school year to the 2021-22 school year, while home-school enrollment jumped by 30%, according to the study by Thomas S. Dee, a Stanford University professor who specializes in the economics of education.
Student-Loan Forgiveness Risks Losing a Rationale as Biden Ends Pandemic Emergency
The Biden administration’s decision to end the Covid-19 national emergency declaration could undermine a central justification for its student-debt forgiveness plan as the Supreme Court prepares to decide the fate of the program.
Mr. Biden outlined a plan in August to cancel up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt for borrowers making under $125,000 a year. Unable to pass the plan in Congress, the White House relied on expanded executive powers tied to the emergency declaration to enact the plan, and Mr. Biden said his intent was to “address the financial harms of the pandemic.”
Republican officials from six states sued to stop the plan on the grounds that it was an unlawful use of presidential authority that would harm state tax revenues.
Individual borrowers backed by conservative groups also sued, arguing they didn’t have a chance to weigh in on the forgiveness program’s eligibility criteria. Lower courts blocked the plan from being implemented. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case on Feb. 28, with a ruling expected by this summer.
College naming rights controversy: Richmond edition
Robert C. Smith is not happy with the University of Richmond.
Smith, a Richmond lawyer who graduated from the university’s law school, is the great-great grandson of T.C. Williams, one of the school’s early and prominent benefactors. Until last year, the official name of the university’s law school was the T.C. Williams School of Law.
Students suing elite U.S. colleges seek ‘wealth favoritism’ information
The prospective class action filed last year against 17 schools alleged a price-fixing conspiracy in which schools restricted financial aid, causing a class of potentially more than 200,000 students to over-pay for tuition by tens of millions of dollars. The lawsuit survived an early bid by the schools to dismiss it.
The schools have long denied taking a would-be student’s financial need into account as part of the admission process.
Kennelly’s order “will allow the plaintiffs to develop the evidence to prove our case,” plaintiffs’ lawyer Bob Gilbert, on the team leading the case, said on Thursday.
Attorneys for Brown and the other five schools did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment. Representatives from those schools either declined to comment or did not respond to similar requests.
Notes on Parents and Math Rigor
On RussianMathTutors.com, a site promoting a Soviet-era style of math instruction, a sample question involves Masha, a mom who bakes a batch of unmarked pies: three rice, three bean and three cherry. The student must determine how Masha can find a cherry pie “by biting into as few tasteless pies as possible.”
While Masha is biting pies, American parents are eating it up.
In the smarter, faster, better quest that is child-rearing in the United States, goal-oriented moms and dads eager to give their children an academic edge have long looked beyond U.S. borders for math education. Singapore math promotes concept mastery and critical thinking. Japanese math espouses the discipline of daily study. Now, another turbocharged math style is having its moment. Russian math, which uses reasoning and abstract concepts to build understanding, is lighting up parent group chats as the country emerges from a pandemic that left children zoning out over Zoom and schools prioritizing social-emotional recovery over homework.
“I always think for students it’s great to aim higher,” said Andrea Campbell, a mother from Newcastle, Calif. Her three children have studied with $20-an-hour instructors from Russian Math Tutors for the past two years as they pursue math competitions. “For math, you can’t do enough.”
Math Forum Audio / Video
Madison’s Math Task Force
21% OF UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN SYSTEM FRESHMAN REQUIRE REMEDIAL MATH
(2009) What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level mathematics placement?
Related: Singapore Math.
Does Mathematics need a Philosophy?
At a meeting some years ago of the Trinity Mathematical Society, Imre Leader and Thomas Forster gave introductory talks on “Does Mathematics need a Philosophy?” to a startlingly large audience, before a question-and-answer session. The topic is a very big one, and the talks were very short. After the event, I wrote up a few after-thoughts (primarily for maths students such as the members of TMS, though others might be interested …). I had occasion to revisit my remarks just recently. Rough and ready though they were, I’m happy enough to stand by their broad message, so here they are again, just slightly tidied up for new readers!
Imre did very briskly sketch a couple of philosophical views about mathematics, which he called platonism and formalism. And he suggested that mathematicians tend to be platonist in their assumptions about what they are up to (in so far as they presume that they are exploring a determinate abstract mathematical universe, where there are objective truths to be discovered) but they turn formalist when writing up their proofs for public consumption.
Now, platonism comes in various stripes, and we could argue the toss about which variety (if any) tends to be presumed by working mathematicians. And there’s a further issue about how far, if at all, the presumption of platonism is doing any mathematical work: is it just an idle philosophical wheel?
K-12 Tax & Spending Clinate: New York vs Florida Resident Burden
New York vs Florida, by the numbers https://t.co/kmuN12Ar1E pic.twitter.com/8czv6E1s37
— Bruce Mehlman (@bpmehlman) February 15, 2023
The Causes and Consequences of Test Score Manipulation: Evidence from the New York Regents Examinations
By Thomas S. Dee, Will Dobbie, Brian A. Jacob, and Jonah Rockoff∗
We show that the design and decentralized scoring of New York’s high school exit exams – the Regents Examinations – led to system- atic manipulation of test scores just below important proficiency cutoffs. Exploiting a series of reforms that eliminated score manip- ulation, we find heterogeneous effects of test score manipulation on academic outcomes. While inflating a score increases the probabil- ity of a student graduating from high school by about 17 percentage points, the probability of taking advanced coursework declines by roughly 10 percentage points. We argue that these results are con- sistent with test score manipulation helping less advanced students on the margin of dropping out but hurting more advanced students that are not pushed to gain a solid foundation in the introductory material.
In the United States and across the globe, educational quality is increasingly measured using standardized test scores. These standardized test results can carry extremely high stakes for both students and educators, often influencing grade retention, high school graduation, school closures, and teacher and administrator pay. The tendency to place high stakes on student test scores has led to concerns among both researchers and policymakers about the fidelity of standardized test results (e.g., National Research Council 2011, Neal 2013). A particular concern is that the consequences associated with these tests can sometimes lead to outright cheating as evidenced by incidents such as the 2009 cheating scandal in Atlanta.1
Why I chose OpenAI over academia
At the end of my job search, I did something I totally wasn’t expecting. I turned down all my academic job offers and signed the OpenAI offer instead.
I was nervous and stressed out during my decision-making process — it felt like a U-turn at the time — but in the end I’m really happy with how things turned out. There were two key factors at play for me:
1) I felt like I could best pursue the work I’m passionate about at OpenAI, and
2) San Francisco — where OpenAI is — is an amazing city for my partner and I to live and work.
I’ll discuss my decision-making process more in this post.
Civics: rights destroying tech
“I never thought a massive automated rights-destroying surveillance apparatus would destroy *My* rights” say people who built massive automated rights-destroying surveillance apparatus. https://t.co/EVypMBU69Z
— Dr Damien P Williams, Spirit of “A.I.” Yet to Come (@Wolven) February 13, 2023
The Legend of Abraham Wald
Following his undergraduate studies in mathematics, Wald applied to (but was barred from entering) the University of Vienna for graduate studies. The university had quotas for Jewish students. Nonetheless, Wald still travelled to Vienna. He entered an engineering school for a year before reaching out to the mathematical institute at the University of Vienna in 1927. As mathematician Karl Menger (1902-85) later wrote:
“In the fall of 1927, a man of 25 called at the Mathematical Institute of the University of Vienna. Since he expressed a predilection for geometry he was referred to me. He introduced himself as Abraham Wald. In fluent German, but with an unmistakable Hungarian accent, Wald explained that he had carried on most of his studies at the elementary and secondary school levels at home, mainly under the direction of his older brother Martin, a capable electrical engineer […] He had just arrived in Vienna in order to study mathematics at the university. Geometry had interested him ever since he was fourteen.”
– Excerpt, The Formative Years of Abraham Wald and his Work in Geometry by Karl Menger (1952)
Wald shared with Menger, by then professor of geometry, that he had been reading David Hilbert (1862-1943)’s Grundlagen der Geometrie (Foundations of Geometry) and saw possibilities for improving Hilbert’s work by “omitting some postulates and weakening others”. Menger suggested to Wald that he write up his results, which Wald did. The paper was later published in the third volume of Ergebnisse eines Mathematischen Kolloquium, the proceedings of Menger’s mathematics colloquium (read: Karl Menger’s Vienna Colloquium, 1928-36). Wald’s proofs, one of which was later incorporated in the seventh edition of Hilbert’s book, were included in the paper:
- Wald, A. 1931. Über das Hilbertsche Axiomensystem der Geometrie (“On Hilbert’s Axioms of Geometry”) Ergebnisse eines Math. Kolloquiums 3, pp. 23-24.
Although Menger was sufficiently impressed to ensure that Wald could enrol for graduate studies studies in his department, the professor would not see much of his student as Wald shortly thereafter was called to serve in the Romanian army. However, as Menger wrote, “the system of complete freedom which at the time prevailed in the universities of Central Europe kept the gifted students from wasting semesters on courses the content of which they could absorb in a few weeks of concentrated reading”. Thus, Wald was still able to keep up with his studies while in the army. In the four years that he studied under Menger he only attended three courses, on metric geometry, dimension theoryand lattice operations. Wald graduated in 1931 with a Ph.D. in mathematics. His thesis was entitled Über das Hilbert’sche Axiomensystem (“On Hilbert’s System of Axioms“) (Düppe & Weintraub, 2015) and dealt with a question of axiomatics (Wolfowitz, 1952).
The Little Learner
A Straight Line to Deep Learning
Daniel P. Friedman and Anurag Mendhekar:
The Little Learner introduces deep learning from the bottom up, inviting students to learn by doing. With the characteristic humor and Socratic approach of classroom favorites The Little Schemer and The Little Typer,this kindred text explains the workings of deep neural networks by constructing them incrementally from first principles using little programs that build on one another. Starting from scratch, the reader is led through a complete implementation of a substantial application: a recognizer for noisy Morse code signals. Example-driven and highly accessible, The Little Learner covers all of the concepts necessary to develop an intuitive understanding of the workings of deep neural networks, including tensors, extended operators, gradient descent algorithms, artificial neurons, dense networks, convolutional networks, residual networks, and automatic differentiation.
Wisconsin Governor Evers proposes a 17% jump in taxpayer funded k-12 spending
By Jack Kelly, Scott Girard and Jessie Opoien:
Evers’ budget will include a per pupil revenue limit increase of $350 next fiscal year, which begins July 1, and an additional per pupil bump of $650 in the second year of the biennium. The governor’s office said the increases would represent the largest per pupil adjustments since revenue limits were adopted.
Even with the extra funds, many districts around Wisconsin face a challenging budget season this spring as they plan for 2023-24 amid high inflation, which translates to higher costs for employee pay and benefits, among other budget items.
With two years of a $0 per pupil increase in the revenue limit in the current state budget, many districts relied on one-time COVID-19 relief funding to pay for ongoing expenses like pay increases or academic programs, leaving themselves in a difficult position now.
Madison Metropolitan School District Chief Financial Officer Ross MacPherson said Monday that even with the most optimistic budget, which Evers’ proposal would be, the district will face a gap to continue its current spending. That will force MMSD to make cuts, and if they can’t find enough, consider using one-time funds that would leave the district with a structural deficit for 2024-25 before planning even begins.
Evers would spend $10 million to train new literacy coaches, and $3 million to support the Wisconsin Reading Corps, an AmeriCorps program that provides one-on-one reading tutoring for students in kindergarten through third grade.
Note that spending increases annually, with Madison taxpayers supporting at least $23,000 per student.
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?
Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 30 schools
Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner:
The absolute failure to teach even a single child to read and do math in so many schools is yet another indictment of the state’s educational system. At Wirepoints, we covered in detail the failures of Illinois education across the state in Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system.
The data comes straight from the Illinois State Board of Education.
This column focuses on schools where zero percent of kids are able to read or do math. But we could have just as easily looked at the 622 schools where only 1 out of 10 kids or less can read at grade level. That’s a whopping 18 percent of the state’s 3,547 schools that tested students in 2022.
And only 1 out of 10 kids or less can do math at grade level in 930 schools…that’s more than a quarter of all schools in the state.
Defenders of the current system are sure to invoke covid as the big reason for the low scores. But a look at the 2019 numbers show that the reading and math numbers were only slightly better than they are now.
Take Spry, for example. Just 2 of the school’s 127 students in 2019 could read at grade level before the pandemic. In math, zero students were proficient.
The failure isn’t about money, either. Data from the Illinois State Board of Education shows spending at Spry was already at $20,000 per student before the pandemic. Today it spends $35,600.
IQ tests used to solve this problem
In the olden days, you didn’t need a college degree to get a real job. You took an IQ test to get a job. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co, the far left wing Supreme Court all but outlawed these tests.
Employers thus started to required university degrees for jobs that a smart and ambitious 19 year old could have begun learning via on-the-job training and mentorship.
All the smart kids were forced to attend college. Most of them realized, “If I am going to go through all this hassle, I may as well sell insurance for State Farm upon graduation.”
Banning IQ tests for jobs, more than any other policy, hollowed out the middle. Millions of smart kids got left behind. We should care not for their sake, but our own.
Using Wisconsin Fund 80 for Child Care
More than 50% of Wisconsinites, including 70% of rural residents, live in a child care “desert,” where there is only one licensed available child care slot for three or more children under age 5. In response, communities are using innovative approaches to address their child care needs, including the use of a taxing option through their school district, called Fund 80.
Local school boards can vote to utilize Fund 80 (Community Program and Services) to provide funding support for initiatives and programs that benefit the broader community, like child care.
In order to utilize Fund 80, a school board must establish a Community Service Fund and adopt a budget for it. Any tax necessary to operate the fund is considered an operation levy on the school’s property tax base outside of state revenue caps.For more information on Fund 80, visit the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s website.
Civics: Disinformation recipe; “inconvenient people”
Ann Althouse summarizes:
Politico deliberately distorted what we said. It was clear in paragraph five.”
NEWS: Joe Rogan and Matt Taibbi talk about media’s reaction against Elon Musk for reinstalling freedom of speech on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/RulHPv5DCB
— T(w)itter Takeover News (@TitterTakeover) February 14, 2023
Cheating Teachers
New York’s Regency exam is a statewide system of standardized, exit exams for secondary school students. Traditionally, the exam was graded by teachers from the same school as the student, i.e. the student’s teachers. The exam had two cutoffs, 55 for a “local diploma” and 65 for the higher-level “Regent’s diploma.” The distribution of grades during the home-school grading period shows clear spikes in the number of students just passing the 55 and 65 point cutoffs (and consequent dips in the number of students just failing). From an excellent paper by Dee, Dobbie, Jakob and Rockoff.
Is this altruism on the part of the teachers? Maybe. But the teachers are also graded on the number of their students who pass the exam.
The home-school grading system was dropped around 2011 due to bad publicity about the rampant cheating. It’s quite amazing that not a single good reason has been given for returning to the home-school grading system but the teacher’s union has been pressuring to return to the easier to manipulate system.
A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell
On the sunny first day of seminar, I sat at the end of a pair of picnic tables with nervous, excited 17-year-olds. Twelve high-school students had been chosen by the Telluride Association through a rigorous application process—the acceptance rate is reportedly around 3 percent—to spend six weeks together taking a college-level course, all expenses paid.
The group reminded me of the heroes of the Mysterious Benedict Society books I was reading to my daughter: Each teenager, brought together for a common project, had some extraordinary ability and some quirk. One girl from California spoke and thought at machine-gun speed and started collecting pet snails during the pandemic; now she had more than 100. A girl from a provincial school in China had never traveled to the United States but had mastered un-accented English and was in love with E.M. Forster. In addition to the seminar, the students practiced democratic self-governance: They lived together and set their own rules. Those first few days, the students were exactly what you would expect, at turns bubbly and reserved, all of them curious, playful, figuring out how to relate to each other and to the seminar texts.
Four weeks later, I again sat in front of the gathered students. Now, their faces were cold, their eyes down. Since the first week, I had not spotted one smile. Their number was reduced by two: The previous week, they had voted two classmates out of the house. And I was next.
“I was guilty of countless microaggressions.”
Recall charges against 3 Richland School Board members are too egregious to ignore
Audra Byrd and Semi Bird were elected in 2021 on a wave of frustration over the state mask mandate. But there also were parents and citizens who were grateful for the extra caution and protective measures being taken, especially while hospitals were overrun with COVID patients and the death count from the disease continued to climb. The division in the community was reflected at school board meetings, which often turned ugly, exhausting and even frightening. At one point, school officials started making sure there was a security officer attending the meetings just to help keep control. The last thing Richland needs is a repeat of those bitter times. The recall is not about masks and it’s not about how Gov. Jay Inslee managed the pandemic. It’s about how Byrd, Williams and Bird put themselves above the law, and they did it with a vote the public didn’t see coming.
The Case Against Admissions Selectivity
It’s time to do away with selective college admissions for undergraduate education.
Now, let’s get the caveats out of the way. When it comes to specific training that requires particular skills (as with engineering or the performing arts) or courses of study where social benefit makes the case for some screening (as with nursing programs or the military academies), there’s an obvious case for performance-based selectivity. These are instances where prerequisites and demonstrated performance have an obvious, discernible import. Likewise, when it comes to professional schools or graduate training, that’s a different conversation.
But should we embrace selectivity in undergraduate education writ large? Nah. It’s time for the Stanfords, Swarthmores, and state flagships to show that they’re actually effective at educating students and not just at vacuuming up high-achievers, parking them in lecture halls and TA-led sections for four years, and then handing them off to consulting firms and graduate schools—all while charging students massive sums for the privilege of being selected.
It’s time for colleges to show that they’re effective at educating students, not just vacuuming up high-achievers.
After all, what’s the rationale for allowing these heavily subsidized institutions to pick and choose their student bodies? There are at least four claims that commonly get made, but none are especially persuasive.
Inside the University of Pennsylvania’s Precedent-Setting Effort To Revoke Tenure From Its Most Controversial Professor
Wax’s views are undeniably controversial. She said in a 2017 interview that black law students “rarely” finish in the top half of their class. She has arguedthat black poverty is self-inflicted and, in the context of immigration policy, expressed a preference for “fewer Asians,” citing their “indifference to liberty” and “overwhelming” supportfor Democrats. She even invited Jared Taylor, a self-described “white identity” advocate, to speak to her class on conservative thought, saying his views were “well within the subject matter of the course.”
But tenure is intended to protect provocative speech. It came about in the 1920s after many professors were fired for endorsing then-controversial ideas like evolution, atheism, and free love. Robust job security meant academics could speak and teach freely about charged subjects, even if doing so was considered blasphemous.
That’s why Wax’s case has raised alarm about the future of academic freedom and the power of tenure to protect it. Unlike Princeton University’s Joshua Katz, whom the school sacked ostensibly over his consensual relationship with a former student, Wax is under the microscope only for what she’s said. Her dismissal would set a new precedent, signaling that tenured professors can be booted for airing views that students or administrators deem offensive.
“This is a game-changer, because it’s a pure case of speech,” Wax told the Free Beacon. “If they succeed in punishing me for that, it will eviscerate academic freedom as we know it.”
Faculty across the political spectrum echo that warning. Wax’s defenders include the conservative Princeton professor Robert George and the liberal Harvard Law professor Janet Halley, both of whom say Penn is playing with fire. “Statements on issues of law and public policy”—and the act of “inviting a controversial speaker” to class—are “unquestionably protected by academic freedom,” Halley wrote in July on behalf of the Academic Freedom Alliance, a nonprofit that defends faculty speech rights.
George, who cofounded the alliance, said that punishing Wax for either would have a chilling effect. “The message to faculty and students alike will be clear,” he said. “You had better not defy the campus orthodoxies, because if you do, the consequences could be severe.”
Legacy Media and Colorado’s Woodland Park School District
After being targeted by a dishonest corporate media smear campaign on behalf of left-wing teachers unions, Colorado’s conservative Woodland Park School Board and parents are fighting back and correcting the record.
Home to Merit Academy, the school chartered by parents for education in valor and responsibility, the Woodland Park School District earned the ire of the propaganda press after it decided against using Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book “Between the World and Me” in its teaching. The book, district leaders said, violated state and local social study standards, which aim to teach kids “so they may become worthy of their ancestors by becoming full members of the American republic … self-reliant citizens who respect the dignity and the rights of their fellow Americans, who love their country, and who cherish our liberties and our laws.”
These standards, of course, cut against left-wing narratives, so MSNBC’s Chris Hayes aimed his fire at the conservative district last week. “Even in states that aren’t laying down edicts about teaching about race, local school boards are pursuing that agenda,” Hayes said, “like in Woodland Park, Colorado, where a school board member grilled a high school teacher about one of the texts taught in a history elective.”
The school-choice movement, riding a wave of parental rights campaigns, is resurgent
For years, school-choice advocates toted up small victories in their drive to give parents taxpayer money to pay for private school. Now, Republican-led states across the country are leaving the limitations of the past behind them as they consider sweeping new voucher laws that would let every family use public funds to pay for private school.
Ken Burns’s The U.S. and the Holocaust distorts the historical record in service of a political message.
The film assigns responsibility for the restriction drive and the 1920s culture of racism to Johnson-Reed’s signatory, Calvin Coolidge. “America must be kept American,” said Coolidge, who had become president on Harding’s sudden death. This line apparently suffices to damn Coolidge in the filmmakers’ eyes, though many of us, even if we express and understand the concept differently, share the sentiment. To buttress its anti-Coolidge case, the film juxtaposes footage of the president with footage of the Ku Klux Klan on the march, of the genuine racist Henry Ford, and of the Landsberg cell where Hitler worked on Mein Kampf. The association between the mild Coolidge and professional race-mongers is crafted so tightly that some in the press, reacting to the Burns film, twinned Coolidge with Ford. An MSNBC reporter claimed that “Henry Ford and President Calvin Coolidge were just a few of the well-known figures who espoused blatant antisemitism.”
In Coolidge’s case, some facts and background are missing. Congress backed Johnson-Reed so overwhelmingly (the vote in the Senate was 69–9) that any presidential veto would have been overridden. As for Japanese exclusion, Coolidge shared the concern about its impact on Japan’s future, even announcing publicly: “If the exclusion provision stood alone I should disapprove it.”
On Academic Freedom
This week I want to talk a bit about academic freedom. There has been a lot of discussion lately about academic freedom being under threat. In the latest, Hameline University fired an adjunct instructor of art history for showing (with warning!) a historical painting of the prophet Muhammad, produced as an act of devotion. In a pleasant surprise, nearly the whole of the great and the good of academia lined up to loudly protest; in an unpleasant surprise Hamline University president Fayneese Miller largely told the rest of academia to drop dead. Meanwhile, closer to home, the UNC-system proposed a rule change which would likely block the use of diversity statements in academic hiring or admissions. Controversy there is likely to be more complex, with some seeing this as a political infringement on the traditional prerogative whereby departments chose their members and thus an infringement on academic freedom; alternately others will argue that this actually protects academic freedom since diversity statements can be little more than political litmus tests thinly disguised.1 Meanwhile in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ‘war on wokeness‘ has extended to laws aimed at constraining the speech of university professors, to the fear and consternation of the academy. DeSantis has argued in court that, “A public university’s curriculum is set by the university in accordance with the strictures and guidance of the State’s elected officials. It is government speech” which does not seem consistent to me with existing supreme court precedent which has tended to find fairly wide free speech rights for professors in their classrooms, though I am not a lawyer. Academic freedom is under attack!
And I don’t mean that last statement facetiously; academic freedom and campus free speech are under attack. But what I want folks to understand is thatacademic freedom has always been under attack: it has always been so.
Researchers are excited but apprehensive about the latest advances in artificial intelligence.
Chris Stokel-Walker & Richard Van Noorden
Fluent but not factual
Some researchers think LLMs are well-suited to speeding up tasks such as writing papers or grants, as long as there’s human oversight. “Scientists are not going to sit and write long introductions for grant applications any more,” says Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a neurobiologist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, who has co-authored a manuscript2 using GPT-3 as an experiment. “They’re just going to ask systems to do that.”
Tom Tumiel, a research engineer at InstaDeep, a London-based software consultancy firm, says he uses LLMs every day as assistants to help write code. “It’s almost like a better Stack Overflow,” he says, referring to the popular community website where coders answer each others’ queries.
Math Challenges and the Monroe School District Referendum
The District’s “Fact Sheet,” under the “How much will it cost?” section, put the following statement in bold and a separate box, indicating that this was the net effect voters needed to know: “A levy rate increase of $.13 would equate to $13 for a $100,000 home and $26 for a $200,000 home.”
Based on these statements from the District, the Monroe Times ran a piece, shortly before the referendum, with a headline emphasizing the net effect to voters: “Taxes to go up just $13 per year on $100k house should referendum pass.”2 The Superintendent spoke to the paper for the piece, and told the paper he “hopes voters see the minimal price hike of taxes and vote ‘yes’”—again, connecting the $.13 mill rate increase to the relevant net effect for voters.
After the referendum passed, taxes increased by much closer to the $199 per $100,000 figure mentioned above. From the tax bills we have reviewed, the net effect was a tax increase of between $160 and $190 per $100,000 in home value (using the 2021 valuations).3 In other words, while there was a small “offset” from the state aid and TIF district, it was nowhere near as large as the District suggested it would be. Voters understandably felt misled, and the District eventually issued an apology, claiming that it made a mistake and that it did not “underst[and] the impact” that “unprecedented increase[s] in valuation” would have on property taxes.
A “science of reading” quiz
Want to test your knowledge of the science of reading? Try the quiz:https://t.co/10n7miXuFW
— Nate Joseph (@NateJoseph19) February 11, 2023
Why 65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read
Many parents saw America’s public education system crumble under the weight of the pandemic. Stringent policies—including school closures that went on far too long, and ineffective Zoom school for kindergarteners—had devastating effects that we are only just beginning to understand.
But, as with so many problems during the pandemic, COVID didn’t necessarily causethese structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with.
How broken? Consider the shocking fact that 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids can barely read.
American Public Media’s Emily Hanforduncovers this sad truth with her podcast, Sold a Story. She investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a bunk idea and a flawed method for teaching reading to American kids. She exposes how educators across the country came to believe in a system that didn’t work, and are now reckoning with the consequences: Children harmed. Tons of money wasted. An education system upended.
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?
A letter to ayate Galleries
Speak-up exercised in an environment where the vast majority just looks the other way! Role model. Chapeau, @Baroness_Nichol https://t.co/s9JpqOHdHX
— Rainer Ohler (@roblagnac) February 12, 2023
Civics: Spending more for less
Yet, believe it or not, Florida’s state budget as measured in the latest proposals from the two governors, is only half the size of New York’s. This is in part a reflection of their tax burden, which in Florida is much smaller. If Florida politicians want to spend more, the state’s economy has to grow more. New York’s politicians can raise income taxes, as they do with great frequency.
Florida has no state income tax, while New York’s top tax rate is 10.9%. In New York City, the top rate is 14.8%, while in Miami it’s zero. Any guess why Ken Griffin moved his Citadel hedge fund to Miami instead of New York when he was looking for an alternative to Chicago? Florida has a 6% sales tax, higher than New York’s, but New York City’s combined state and city sales tax is 8.875%.
One of New York’s biggest budget busters is Medicaid, with 38.6% of the population on the rolls at the end of 2022. The state spent $26.47 billion on the joint state-federal program, or $73.27 billion with the federal contribution. Contrast that with Florida, where 25% of the population is on Medicaid and the cost is about two-thirds less than New York’s. We doubt the quality of medical outcomes is vastly different for Medicaid patients in the two states, despite the disparity in funding.
Federal agencies have become too comfortable using disinformation
It behooved the United States and China to hold the now-canceled talks, led by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, postponed because of the balloon incident, for all the reasons that others have said: to allay tensions, to reduce the risk of a military confrontation that neither government wants.
For those who couldn’t figure out why I devoted four columns to the Pentagon UFO debate, this is why. It became clear that, whether from serendipity or design, national security agencies were using UFOs to hide something they didn’t want us to see. That something, it has slowly dribbled out since last May, was Chinese surveillance in U.S. airspace. Suspected Chinese drones have been a sometimes daily presence in U.S. military training sites going back perhaps a decade or more. We learn now of multiple balloon incursions too.
How ‘Diversity’ Policing Fails Science
At Texas Tech University, a candidate for a faculty job in the department of biological sciences was flagged by the department’s search committee for not knowing the difference between “equality” and “equity.” Another was flagged for his repeated use of the pronoun “he” when referring to professors. Still another was praised for having made a “land acknowledgment” during the interview process. A land acknowledgment is a statement noting that Native Americans once lived in what is now the United States.
Amidst the explosion of university diversity, equity and inclusion policies, Texas Tech’s biology department adopted its own DEI motion promising to “require and strongly weight a diversity statement from all candidates.” These short, written declarations are meant to summarize an academic job seeker’s past and potential contributions to DEI efforts on campus.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: ?half of the states will have cut rates on income within three years.K-12 Tax & Spending Climate”
Each of these states has at least one neighbor where tax rates have dropped recently, and competition is sustaining the trend. “We were the cool kid on the block 15 years ago when we moved to 5% flat,” said Rusty Cannon, president of the Utah Taxpayers Association, referring to his state’s flat income-tax rate this month. But in the past two years Colorado has adopted a 4.4% top rate on income, and Arizona dropped its rate to 2.5%. “We’re no longer the cool kid on the block at all,” said Mr. Cannon.
The tax-cutting trend took off in 2021 as state revenues boomed, driven by postpandemic reopening, rising stock prices and capital gains, and federal aid. By September 2022, 31 states were outperforming their prepandemic revenue trajectories, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts. Twenty-one states have cut their income taxes in this period, according to the Tax Foundation, and they’re betting that returning revenue to taxpayers will spur faster economic growth.
Thousands of kids are missing from school. Where did they go?
BIANCA VÁZQUEZ TONESS and SHARON LURYE:
She’d be a senior right now, preparing for graduation in a few months, probably leading her school’s modern dance troupe and taking art classes.
Instead, Kailani Taylor-Cribb hasn’t taken a single class in what used to be her high school since the height of the coronavirus pandemic. She vanished from Cambridge, Massachusetts’ public school roll in 2021 and has been, from an administrative standpoint, unaccounted for since then.
She is among hundreds of thousands of students around the country who disappeared from public schools during the pandemic and didn’t resume their studies elsewhere.
An analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee found an estimated 240,000 students in 21 states whose absences could not be accounted for. These students didn’t move out of state, and they didn’t sign up for private school or home-school, according to publicly available data.
In short, they’re missing.
“Missing” students received crisis-level attention in 2020 after the pandemic closed schools nationwide. In the years since, they have become largely a budgeting problem. School leaders and some state officials worried aloud about the fiscal challenges their districts faced if these students didn’t come back. Each student represents money from the city, state and federal governments.
@GavinNewsom . @TonyThurmond. Barbara Ferrer and @lapublichealth. @UTLAnow. @austinbeutner. You don’t see Florida on this list, do you? A complete and predictable result from California’s COVID policies. pic.twitter.com/cyqWwttKTX
— LA Uprising (@UprisingLa) February 10, 2023
Civics: taxpayer funded disinformation
The irony is the entire field of “disinformation studies” itself has the features of an inorganic astroturfing operation. Disinformation “labs” cast themselves as independent, objective, politically neutral resources, but in a shocking number of cases, their funding comes at least in part from government agencies like the Department of Defense. Far from being neutral, they often have clear mandates to play up foreign and domestic threats while arguing for digital censorship, de-platforming, and other forms of information control.
Worse, messages from these institutions are parroted more or less automatically by our corporate press, which has decided that instead of a network of independent/adversarial newspapers and TV stations, what the country needs is one giant Voice of America, bleating endlessly about “threats to democracy.” I’ve come to believe a sizable percentage of reporters don’t know that their sources are funded by the government, or that they’re repeating government messaging not just occasionally but all the time. The ones who don’t know this truth need to hear it, and the ones who knew all along need to be exposed. This project is about both of those things, too.
Foreign state media is labeled on platforms like Twitter.
I want to put labels on our own propaganda, and need your help to do it.
This Private Equity Firm Is Amassing Companies That Collect Data on America’s Children
Vista Equity Partners has been buying up software used in schools. Parents want to know what the companies do with kids’ data
