Jay Greene:

In the past, state officials refrained from addressing the rise of DEI bureaucracies in public universities, not out of an inability to do so legally but from a conviction that it was somehow inappropriate for them to interfere. DeSantis’s innovation was to recognize that this self-restraint was unnecessary, counterproductive, and based largely on a misunderstanding of what DEI bureaucracies actually are. 

DEI units at universities are not faculty, nor are they engaged in the core functions of teaching and conducting research. They are staff with the ostensible purpose of helping welcome students, faculty, and staff from different backgrounds to campus and creating conditions that facilitate their success. DEI staff members develop a set of practices and inculcate related dispositions that university leaders believe are necessary for welcoming diverse groups and ensuring that they thrive. One might say that DEI staff members articulate and enforce a university-approved orthodoxy regarding a set of divisive political concerns.

Jonathan Turley:

Below is my column in the Hill on moves by some states to create greater choice and control for parents over the education of their children. The move to use funding to change the status quo could soon be used in higher education. Not only are alumni beginning to withhold contributions to schools with little or no diversity or tolerance on their faculties, but states could reduce their levels of support.

Here is the column:

What if they offered public education and no one came? That question, similar to the anti-war slogan popularized by Charlotte E. Keyes, is becoming more poignant by the day.

This month, Florida is moving to allow all residents the choice to go to private or public schools. Other states like Utah are moving toward a similar alternative with school vouchers. I oppose such moves away from public schools, but I have lost faith in the willingness of most schools to restore educational priorities and standards.

Faced with school boards and teacher unions resisting parental objections to school policies over curriculum and social issues, states are on the brink of a transformative change. For years, boards and teacher unions have treated parents as unwelcome interlopers in their children’s education.

The Economist

The university of california, Berkeley is currently advertising for a “director of cell culture, fly food, media prep and on-call glass washing facilities”. Applicants need an advanced degree and a decade of research experience, and must submit a cv, a cover letter and a research statement. They must also send in a statement on their contributions to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. Seemingly everyone (this director, the next head of preservation for the library, anyone who dreams of a tenured professorship) must file a statement outlining their understanding of diversity, their past contributions to increasing it and their plans “for advancing equity and inclusion” if hired.

Not long ago, such statements were exotic and of marginal importance. Now they are de rigueur across most of the University of California system for hiring and tenure decisions. Studies claim that as many as one in five faculty jobs across America require them. And government agencies that fund scientific research are starting to make grants to labs conditional upon their diversity metrics and plans.

Proponents argue that such things are needed to advance concepts normally invoked by abbreviation: diversity, equity and inclusion (dei), sometimes with “belonging” appended (deib), or “justice” (deij), or else rearranged in a jollier anagram (jedi). Critics—typically those with tenure rather than those seeking it—think mandatory statements constitute political litmus tests, devalue merit, open a back door for affirmative action, violate academic freedom and infringe on First Amendment protections for public universities. “There are a lot of similarities between these diversity statements as they’re being applied now and how loyalty oaths [which once required faculty to attest that they were not communists] worked,” says Keith Whittington, a political scientist at Princeton University. Who is right?

Ben Cohen:

One way to learn how the world’s biggest building projects work—or don’t—is to start with some of the smallest building blocks: Legos.

In the 1950s, when Lego decided to make one product the centerpiece of its business, the Danish company went looking for a single toy that could be the foundation of an empire. It picked the colorful plastic bricks that have captured the imagination of children ever since. It was a wise choice. It was also a fitting corporate strategy: Lego turned a small thing into something much bigger.

“That’s the question every project leader should ask: What is the small thing we can assemble in large numbers into a big thing?” says University of Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg. “What’s our Lego?”

He understands the power of Legos better than anybody, and not just because he is also Danish. Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert in the planning and management of “megaprojects,” his name for huge efforts that require at least $1 billion of investment: bridges, tunnels, office towers, airports, telescopes and even the Olympics. He’s spent decades wrapping his mind around the many ways megaprojects go wrong and the few ways to get them right, and he summarizes what he’s learned from his research and real-world experience in a new book called “How Big Things Get Done.”

Spoiler alert! Big things get done very badly.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Scott Girard:

“Most teachers are still learning how to teach reading from the commercial materials that they’re being supplied,” he said. “These materials are defective. What teachers have traditionally learned from them is poor practices.

“What’s the effect? Some kids are going to learn to read anyway, but for a lot of children it makes it harder to succeed.”

Kymyona Burk, a senior policy fellow for early literacy at the Foundation for Excellence in Education, also presented on the changes other states have made to surpass Wisconsin in reading growth over the past three decades.

She showed during her presentation that on the latest “nation’s report card” exam results, while Wisconsin students remained ahead of the national average for reading scores, they were falling behind states like Mississippi, which invested in early interventions for struggling readers in 2013.

“In order for us to improve we have to know where we are,” Burk said. “This is not data-shaming, this is an opportunity for us to learn from where we’ve been, to know where we need to be.”

Burk, noting Mississippi’s rise “wasn’t overnight,” stressed that while funding is important, it has to be targeted at the right things. Once it is, it takes a lot of people to make it effective.

“It’s going to take an interconnected system from policy to practice,” Burk said. “Legislators have the job of passing policy, the rest of us have the job of ensuring that we’re making it work and that we’re actually doing it and implementing it effectively.”

The conversations included state legislators, who attended both events. Sen. John Jagler, R-Watertown, suggested he and his colleagues want to do something about this, but aren’t certain what the state’s role should be and whether they can come to agreement with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers.

Seidenberg said it’s key to not cast blame on anyone in the conversation about what’s happened in the past and instead focus on working together to solve the problem. Hanford, the journalist, suggested state legislators visit schools in Wisconsin “that are making changes and trying to figure it out and start there.”

“Don’t feel like you have to go back to your office and do something today,” Hanford said. “Go learn some more, go give this some more thought. Talk to your colleagues, but go and talk to the educators who are really trying to do something good; they might not be doing the perfect thing, but they’re trying and they’re dealing with what’s hard.

“They can tell you what they need.”

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?

Jonathan Turley:

I recently wrote about how public schools and boards are making the case for school choice advocates with failing scores and rising controversies. The latest shocking statistic was released this week that 23 schools in Baltimore City had zero students who tested proficient in math. Those schools include 10 high schools, eight elementary schools, three Middle/High schools and two Elementary/Middle schools. The state found that 2,000 students who took the state test could not do math at grade level.

We previously discussed the Baltimore public educational system as an example of where billions of dollars have been spent on a system that continues to have appalling scores and standards. Recent data now offers another chilling statistic: 41 percent of students in the Baltimore system have a 1.0 (D) GPA or less.

We also discussed how a high school student almost graduated near the top half of his class after failing every class but three in four years. He had a 0.13 GPA. His mother objected and went public.

The top spending public school districts are also some of the worst performing school districts.  New York topped the per capita spending at $24,040 per kid. Washington, D.C. is close at $22,759.  Baltimore is often ranked in the top three per capita spending districts. The total budget for Baltimore public schools is roughly $1.2 billion. That is for a city with a total population of roughly 600,000 (The greater Baltimore metropolitan area is 2.8 million). In 2015, the school population was 84,000 kids.

Faced with school boards and teacher unions resisting parental objections to school policies over curriculum and social issues, states are on the brink of a transformative change. For years, boards and teacher unions have treated parents as unwelcome interlopers in their children’s education.

Victor Fiorillo:

Here is the relevant part of the message, as posted on Twitter by one Temple University graduate student, who couldn’t be reached for comment:

Dear Temple Student:

As a result of your participation in the TUGSA strike, your tuition remission has been removed for the Spring semester. You now owe the full balance listed in TUpay, which is due by Thursday, March 9.

If your balance is not paid in full by the due date, you will be assessed a $100 late payment fee and a financial hold will be placed on your student account. This hold will prevent future registration.

“Can this possibly be real?” one colleague asked me when she saw the tweet.

It sure is, as Temple officials have confirmed. Many commenters in the Tweet thread suggested that this is downright illegal. And the national coalition Higher Education Labor United put out a statement declaring that “removing tuition remission would destroy [Temple University] — grad workers would be forced to leave en masse. This is an unenforceable and absolutely vile threat. This is cutting off your nose to spite your face. Way to make it clear WHY [the student union] is striking.”

We reached out to Temple administrators to see if we could sort all this out, and their responses couldn’t have been more straightforward.

Joel Kotkin:

The world may not be turning upside down, but it’s certainly tilting. In the long shadow of the pandemic, with war on the European continent and the West and China entering a new cold war, the “new economy” of bits and bytes that was supposed to connect and shape the world has hit a rough patch. Meanwhile, the much disdained “old” economy of manufacturing, agriculture and energy is thriving.

Today, it’s not steel companies or gas plants that are experiencing mass layoffs, but firms such as Goldman Sachs, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Snap and Google. Last year,…

Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Why an Experimental Vaccine was Added to the Childhood Schedule

“The reason ACIP recommended…getting the COVID-19 vaccine on the pediatric schedule, it was ONLY because it was the only way it could be covered in our ‘Vaccines for Children’ program” pic.twitter.com/k1CVf4cv09

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) February 8, 2023

Paul Fanlund:

In the end, my position on objectivity comes down to this. First, different experiences and perspectives of journalists should be welcomed and acted upon when debating what to cover and how to approach it.

But once that process moves to a story’s execution, best practices remain the same. At last fall’s Idea Fest, Bernstein described how as a reporter he boldly pursued sources, knocked on doors and voraciously consumed documents, all without preconceptions about where his story would eventually lead.

I don’t think telling readers that journalism needs to move beyond objectivity aligns with that.

Talal Ansari:

Nearly 1,000 children separated from their parents at the U.S. border under the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance policy on illegal immigration haven’t been reunited, federal data shows, despite a multiyear effort to do so.

The federal program has reunited 600 migrant children with their parents, according to numbers released by the Department of Homeland Security on Thursday, the second anniversary of the establishment of the Family Reunification Task Force by President Biden soon after he assumed office.

Of the 998 children who remain separated from their families, 148 are in the process of being reunited, DHS said. The task force has also worked with nongovernmental organizations to inform 183 families of the opportunity to reunify.

“We understand that our critical work is not finished,” Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement Thursday.

David Blaska:

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Used to be that some fairly accomplished individuals sought to serve in public office. Think of Mary Burke, former executive with the Trek bicycle company, and James Howard, an economist with the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory, not that long ago. On the other hand, they hired Jennifer Cheatham!

More.

Scott Girard:

In total, the district took about 14 months from Cheatham’s announcement to find the person that would become its next superintendent, with the pandemic playing a key role in that timeline.

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?

Nic Carter:

These purchases, made with dollars summoned out of thin air, come with a giant asterisk – they do not derive from organic demand for our debt. They are only sustainable as long as inflation is tolerably low, which it no longer is (in February, it hit a 40-year high of 7.5%).

The exact explanation for the lost appetite among foreigners for U.S. dollars and U.S. debt is hard to pin down. It may have been a delayed reaction from the 2008 crisis, when the Fed made it clear it had the ability to print unlimited dollars to support domestic markets (at the expense of foreigners). It might have been the aggressive sanctions the U.S. instituted against Russian banks after Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 – the most economically powerful nation the U.S. had ever targeted in such a manner.

Previously, sanctions had been reserved for small, economically unimportant nations. At the time, the U.S. threatened to exclude Russia from the SWIFT international transfer system entirely but backed down due to the severity of the measure. Russia took the threat to heart, and its central bank divested most of its U.S. Treasury exposure and set up a SWIFT alternative called SPFS.

Even as the Russians took steps to free themselves from dependence on the dollar system, the U.S. wisely walked back from the brink, realizing that American and European banks were hopelessly intertwined with Russian ones. At the time, President Obama laid out a prescient warning regarding the risk to the dollar system that arbitrary exclusions could pose. In 2015, he cautioned, in the context of unilateral Iran sanctions:

Jeffrey Penney:

Numerous studies have found that students who are of the same race as their teacher experience increased academic achievement. In this paper, I attempt to explain when these benefits occur and which students are most likely to achieve the largest gains. Using exogenous variation in student–teacher matches and classroom composition from Tennessee’s Project STAR experiment, I find that below average achieving students benefit most from having a teacher of the same race, but the benefits from matching can be substantially reduced in smaller classes. Moreover, the effect is decreased in racially homogeneous classes where the teacher is the majority race.

Wing Kuang

Chinese American physicist Xiaoxing Xi is still haunted by the memory of an early morning in 2015, when a group of FBI officers surrounded his home in Pennsylvania. 

The agents pointed guns at his wife and two daughters and then handcuffed him.

The former chair of Temple University’s physics department was charged with leaking sensitive technology to the Chinese government.

Prosecutors accused Professor Xi of secretly sharing the design of a pocket heater for a supercomputer with scientists in China.

Overnight, Professor Xi’s face was splashed across US media and he was branded a “Chinese spy”.

He faced up to 80 years in prison if found guilty.

But just four months later, Professor Xi’s case came to a dramatic turning point.

Before the trial had even kicked off, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) dropped all charges against Professor Xi, with a document filed in court explaining that “additional information came to the attention of the government”.

According to Professor Xi’s lawyer Peter Zeidenberg, the scientist had never shared secret technology with Chinese colleagues.

The Economist:

hen seeking a job to teach in the University of California system, academic excellence is not enough. Applicants must also submit a diversity, equity and inclusion (dei) statement, explaining how they will advance those goals. That sounds fair enough, except that a promise to treat everyone equally would constitute a fail. Meanwhile in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and the state legislature are trying to ban the teaching of critical-race theory, an approach to studying racism with which they disagree. While this has been going on, a row has broken out (also in Florida) over a new pre-college course in African-American studies. These three developments have one thing in common: they are attempts to win arguments by controlling the institutions where those arguments take place.

Threats to academic freedom in America can come from many directions. Students sometimes object to being exposed to ideas they deem troubling. Some even try to get faculty members fired for allowing such ideas to be voiced. Donors occasionally threaten to withdraw funding, which has a chilling effect on what can be taught. Speakers can be banned. Academics may self-censor, or succumb to groupthink. Occasionally American society demands restrictions on academic freedom, as when professors in the 1950s were asked to take loyalty tests to prove they were not communist sympathisers.

Dave Cieslewicz

But having now cleared my throat, I’m glad that DeSantis took on the College Board over its proposed African American Studies AP course. The course materials, which were being piloted in 60 high schools around the country, were extensive, consisting of four units. Only the last unit, which tackled contemporary issues, came in for criticism from DeSantis and others. (You can form your own opinion by reading the proposed study guidance here.)

That last unit deserved a closer look because it did, in fact, present just one side of current debates. For example, it included arguments in favor of reparations for slavery, but no counter arguments. It included a host of hard-left writers, like Kimberle Crenshaw, Michelle Alexander and Ta-Nehisi Coates, but no moderate or conservative Black thinkers, like John McWhorter, Shelby Steele or Robert Woodson. 

DeSantis got his state’s education department to reject the proposed curriculum because of what was in that one unit. They had no objections to the rest. In response to DeSantis and other feedback, those most controversial topics were stripped out, but what remains is still pretty good.

Dave cieslewicz:

Anybody who serves as Madison Schools Superintendent deserves our thanks. I’ve always thought that it’s the toughest job in Madison, even tougher than being mayor. 

Yesterday Carlton Jenkins announced his retirement effective at the end of July, after only three years on the job. Let’s thank him for his service and wish him well on his retirement, but let’s also be clear on what we need in the next superintendent. 

I hope the school board looks for five qualities. 

First, someone who will care about all the kids and parents in the schools. Jenkins and his predecessor, Jennifer Cheatham, never expressed any interest or concern for the majority of average kids who just want to learn or for the taxpayers who want value for their investment. The district is shedding enrollment in a growing community and we need a superintendent who sees that as the first problem to tackle. 

Second, someone who will make school safety and good order a priority. The last two superintendents have been obsessed, not with the racial achievement gap which is real, but with graduate-level race theory. I’ll stop short of calling it Critical Race Theory, but it’s in that ballpark. Jenkins did nothing to improve on the awful Behavioral Education Plan dreamed up by Cheatham. As a result our schools have too much disorder when they don’t have actual violence and teachers are demoralized because they feel helpless to do anything about it. 

Third, someone who will be the Luke Fickell of school superintendents. The new Badger football coach is a dynamic guy who is attracting talented players and coaches. Madison is in competition for great teachers. This needs to become a place where those teachers want to be and nobody has more to say about that than the superintendent.

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?

Ryan Quinn:

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we clearly have a world-class faculty that exists and teaches students and creates leaders of the future,” Boliek said. “We, however, have no shortage of left-of-center, progressive views on our campus, like many campuses across the nation. But the same really can’t be said about right-of-center views. So this is an effort to try to remedy that with the School of Civic Life and Leadership, which will provide equal opportunity for both views to be taught.”

That interview came two days after his board passed a resolution asking Chapel Hill’s administration to “accelerate its development of a School of Civic Life and Leadership,” with “a goal of a minimum of 20 dedicated faculty members and degree opportunities for undergraduate students.” The evening that passed, the Wall Street Journal editorial board was already praising the university for planning “to build a syllabus free from ideological enforcers.”

“Students will be able to choose the new classes to fulfill university core requirements,” the Wall Street Journal board wrote. “Those who aren’t interested can stay in the existing courses.”

The editorial’s headline and a Fox News chyron during Boliek’s interview were the same: “UNC Takes on the University Echo Chamber.”

Kevin Bardosh, Alex de Figueiredo, Rachel Gur-Arie, Euzebiusz Jamrozik, James Doidge, Trudo Lemmens, Salmaan Keshavjee, Janice E Graham, Stefan Baral

Vaccination policies have shifted dramatically during COVID-19 with the rapid emergence of population-wide vaccine mandates, domestic vaccine passports and differential restrictions based on vaccination status. While these policies have prompted ethical, scientific, practical, legal and political debate, there has been limited evaluation of their potential unintended consequences. Here, we outline a comprehensive set of hypotheses for why these policies may ultimately be counterproductive and harmful. Our framework considers four domains: (1) behavioural psychology, (2) politics and law, (3) socioeconomics, and (4) the integrity of science and public health. While current vaccines appear to have had a significant impact on decreasing COVID-19-related morbidity and mortality burdens, we argue that current mandatory vaccine policies are scientifically questionable and are likely to cause more societal harm than good. Restricting people’s access to work, education, public transport and social life based on COVID-19 vaccination status impinges on human rights, promotes stigma and social polarisation, and adversely affects health and well-being. Current policies may lead to a widening of health and economic inequalities, detrimental long-term impacts on trust in government and scientific institutions, and reduce the uptake of future public health measures, including COVID-19 vaccines as well as routine immunisations. Mandating vaccination is one of the most powerful interventions in public health and should be used sparingly and carefully to uphold ethical norms and trust in institutions. We argue that current COVID-19 vaccine policies should be re-evaluated in light of the negative consequences that we outline. Leveraging empowering strategies based on trust and public consultation, and improving healthcare services and infrastructure, represent a more sustainable approach to optimising COVID-19 vaccination programmes and, more broadly, the health and well-being of the public.

Wall Street Journal:

Florida rejected the last version of the curriculum, which featured topics on “Black Queer Studies,” “‘Postracial’ Racism,” and “the case for reparations.” That framework suggested teens read a text from an academic exponent of critical race theory. “We believe in teaching kids facts and how to think,” Mr. DeSantis said, “but we don’t believe they should have an agenda imposed on them.”

Even as it deletes this academic theorizing, the College Board denies it’s reacting to Florida’s criticism. The other explanation is that it arrived at a similar conclusion on its own. Mr. DeSantis’s critics have accused him of trying to erase black history, though he was doing nothing of the sort. If the revised AP framework actually was drawn up in December, then the curriculum committee had already decided that none of this nonsense was needed for teaching black history to high-schoolers.

The College Board’s CEO is calling the revised course “an unflinching encounter with the facts and evidence of African-American history.” One thing driving the changes, he said, was that students in the pilot class were engaged by primary sources, but they found the academic theories “quite dense.”

AI means a brilliant doctor on your phone. Who can diagnose you instantly, for free, privately, using only your locally stored medical records.

Do you think the doctors will be happy about that? Or the lawyers? The artists? The others that AI disrupts?

They’ll fight it. Hard.

— Balaji (@balajis) February 10, 2023

TPI-US:

In 2022, TPI-US was awarded a contract to conduct statewide literacy coursework, “landscape analysis,” through which TPI-US will invite all 13 University of Wisconsin educator preparation programs to participate in a study of evidence-based early reading instructional practices. Participation by EPPs is an entirely voluntary opt-in, and reports will only be shared with the participating EPP.

For the Wisconsin landscape analysis, TPI-US has been asked to:

Secure voluntary opt-in participation by UW EPPs

Develop a literacy-focused rubric, making sure it’s aligned to relevant WI teacher prep standards, and train review teams

Conduct up to 13 reviews

Provide confidential reports to each participating UW institution

Deliver a roll-up report of overall findings and recommendations to DPI by November 30, 2023, that will not identify individual institutions.

Benefits to UW institutions of participating in the landscape analysis

A confidential, no-cost assessment of reading coursework and training strengths and any potential areas for improvement weaknesses from a respected national organization that is independent and employers reviewers that are literacy and teacher preparation experts.

DPI grants of up to $100k to each participating institution

$50k to the institution at the completion of its landscape analysis

$50k on the adoption of a program improvement plan responsive to findings and recommendations

The Summary Report of findings provided to DPI will be anonymous and identify trends, but not institutions.

Much more in the 3 page pdf document.

Roth says that it would not surprise him if “visibility filters” were placed on the accounts of elected officials without their knowledge.

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) February 8, 2023

Evan Gorelick & Janalie Cobb

A Yale College Council referendum, which opened Jan. 30, saw students vote overwhelmingly in favor of more democratic trustee elections.

Over 2,000 students — almost 90 percent of referendum participants — voted in the affirmative to the referendum’s two yes-or-no questions: “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?” Approximately 30 percent of Yale’s undergraduate population voted in the online referendum. 

The Yale College Council sent a letter to the Board of Trustees on Feb. 6 with the results of the referendum and several policy recommendations aimed at “achieving democratization.” These recommendations do not directly address the trustee election process. Rather, they are intended to “open the door” to the possibility of achieving democratic trustee elections in the future, according to the letter. 

“The connection between Board members and members of the Yale community has dissolved,” the YCC letter reads. “Democratization is something that may take a long time — longer than our time spent here as undergraduates. As members of the Yale College Council, we believe we must restore the link between the Board and the students, faculty and staff at Yale.” 

The Yale Corporation, also known as the Board of Trustees, consists of the University President, 10 “successor trustees” appointed by the current Board and six “alumni trustees” elected by University alumni from the broader community. The governor and lieutenant governor of Connecticut retain positions on the Board.

The Economist:

The University of California, Berkeley is currently advertising for a “director of cell culture, fly food, media prep and oncall glass washing facilities”. Applicants need an advanced degree and a decade of research experience, and must submit a CV, a cover letter and a research statement—as well as a statement on their contributions to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion. Seemingly everyone (this director, the next head of preservation for the library, anyone who dreams of a tenured professorship) must file a statement outlining their understanding of diversity, their past contributions to it and their plans “for advancing equity and inclusion” if hired.

Not long ago, such statements were exotic and of marginal importance. Now they are de rigueur across most of the University of California system for hiring and tenure decisions. Studies claim that as many as one in five faculty jobs across America require them. And government agencies that fund scientific research are starting to make grants to labs conditional upon their diversity metrics and plans.

Wayne Carlson:

This book was developed in an attempt to maintain in one location the information and references that point to the many important historical developments of the short life of the computer graphics world as we know it.

Julie Jargon:

Seeing a child endure drama over group chats is enough to send parents lunging for their kid’s phone. After all, we have the skills to resolve disputes diplomatically, the words to make it all better. If only we could just…

Nope, don’t even think about it.

Writing texts as your child is a bad idea, and what’s more, texting in momspeak isn’t going to fool kids more accustomed to acronyms and emojis. It also isn’t going to teach kids how to resolve differences themselves, in their own words, as awkward as they might be.

When 13-year-old Hannah Yeatman wasn’t sure how to respond to some friend drama in a group chat, her mother, Lilly Yeatman, offered suggestions. Her wording didn’t fly with Hannah.

“If my mom had sent the message, she would have put in a bunch of punctuation,” says Hannah, a seventh-grader in Los Angeles. “We don’t really do that.”

Ilenia Martini

In the centre of Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s old town, surprisingly close to the Royal Palace, between charming narrow cobbled streets, stands a beautiful 18th-century building echoing the vision of a classic, elegant Scandinavian architecture. Stepping in Jesper Kouthoofd’s glorious four-metre ceiling height, light-filled apartment, housing large-scale original affresco paintings covering wall after wall, I see a luscious universe with an eclectic colour palette filled with artworks, books, iconic references to the masters of industrial design and, gently taking over like a statement centrepiece, instruments and audio equipment growing into the space in the form of a home studio. Between the apartment’s original features, blending in unpretentiously, some awe-inspiring design objects from Joe ­Colombo, Virgil Abloh and Arne Jacobsen. Overall, this vast space resembles a symphony produced by an orchestra rather than a flat note. Observing the contrast of bold colours, I think, ”how fitting geometry and organic shapes blend into a recurring home theme.”

Today, living there with his wife and two children, Jesper Kouthoofd, who is not only the co-founder and CEO of Teenage Engineering, the leading Swedish consumer electronics brand, internationally renowned for beautifully designed audio products, but also an exceptionally creative individual brilliant at recognizing the vibrancy of the ebbs and flow of life, turning them into unexpected connections between ordinary things and creative ideas. I had met Jesper a few years back in 2017 at a presentation in Älmhult for IKEA introducing their upcoming collaboration and already back then, the fascination began with this creative entrepreneur who is able to design electronic instruments in such an effortless way that feels everything but intimidating. You know you’re onto something interesting when you are knee-deep in the research process and there’s minimal information about the founders, yet there are millions of likes and a growing number of international artists raving about Teenage Engineering’s first product — the op-1. Fans include Bon Iver, Swedish House Mafia, Thom Yorke, St. Vincent, Bonobo, Reggie Watts — believe me, the list goes on. Although Jesper has had plenty of experience being the spokesperson for the brand, you can understand that I felt intimidated yet extremely curious about his personality and professional background — thankfully we share a love for Italian design which broke the ice as we sat down in his kitchen and started talking. I immediately felt as if for Jesper it’s less about doing more than about doing things more creatively.

John Sailor:

Texas Tech’s Department of Biological Sciences passed a resolution titled “Prioritizing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty in the Department of Biological Sciences, Texas Tech University.” The motion mandated that faculty search committees require diversity statements and heavily value them in the hiring process. It also called for every faculty search committee to provide “a report on the evaluation of the required diversity statements.” Through a Freedom of Information Act Request, I have acquired these DEI evaluation reports from eight separate faculty searches.

In my latest article for the Wall Street Journal, “How ‘Diversity’ Policing Fails Science,” I unpack these documents and their implications. Simply put, they perfectly illustrate the case against diversity statements. These documents show how the biology department penalizes some job candidates for not adopting the language of identity politics. They also reveal horribly misplaced priorities.

The evaluations are embedded below. Readers are encouraged to peruse the documents for themselves, but a few of the DEI “strengths” and “weaknesses” that the search committees named are worth highlighting here.

Candidates’ weaknesses included:

• “Mentioned that DEI is not an issue because he respects his students and treats them equally. This indicates a lack of understanding of equity and inclusion issues.”
• “Poor understanding of the difference between equity and equality, even on re-direct, which suggested rather superficial understanding of DEI more generally.”
• “Wasn’t a lot of discussion of the nuances between D, E, and I and how they (inter)related.”
• “Didn’t distinguish well between international and domestic students and their DEI needs.”
• “Conflation of international with diversity without explaining any subtlety.”
• “Diversity was only defined as country of origin and notably never mentioned women.”
• “Not during DEI meeting but observed multiple examples of microaggressions towards women faculty, including assuming one junior faculty was a graduate student and minimizing the difficulties of women in the US by comparing to worse situations elsewhere.”

Their strengths, meanwhile, include:

More, here.

Glenn Reynolds:

Can graft and racial politics save public schools? Just maybe. Let me explain.

Public schools face an exodus of students. Even before COVID, parents were pulling their kids out of failing (and often unsafe) public schools in favor of private schools that cost more money but offered better and safer educations. Other parents were pulling their kids out for homeschooling, which is more work for parents but also can offer better — and certainly safer — education.

This trend put public schools at risk. The parents pulling their kids out were, on average, the parents most interested in their kids’ educations, the parents who’d been most likely to support school funding, to volunteer, to donate and to be voices for public education. With them, the schools not only lost student bodies — a blow in itself since funding depends in part on enrollment — but also vital political and financial support.

Those losses, naturally enough, encourage other parents to pull their kids. As schools lost the kids with the most involved parents — kids who tend to be the better students — even “good” schools faced a reputation hit. The result was a self-reinforcing spiral that in a book a few years back I called a “K-12 implosion.”

As I noted at the time, public schools’ potential salvation lay in charter schools. They’re publicly funded and part of the public-school system, but they have many of private schools’ virtues. To the extent that public schools could attract students to charters over private schools or homeschooling, they were keeping those students in the system and thus preserving funding and parental support.

Jeremy Tate:

The es­say hasn’t been ban­ished from clas­si­cally minded in­sti­tu­tions. Rather, the more per­son­al­ized, dis­cus­sion-cen­tric model of in­struc­tion by its na­ture ren­ders es­says a sec­ondary tool. Stu­dents that skip their home­work won’t be able to hide for long when asked to of­fer an opin­ion on last night’s read­ing.

For cen­turies, the clas­si­cal cur­ricu­lum was the norm, rather than the ex­cep­tion. In the mod­ern era, how­ever, the march to­ward fac­tory-style ed­u­ca­tion re­placed the old ways with more spe­cial­ized stud­ies de­liv­ered in lec­ture form. Per­haps it’s time to re­think this change. The clas­si­cal method sur­vived as long as it did be­cause it fos­tered crit­i­cal-think­ing skills that can then be ap­plied to any cat­e­gory of spe­cial­ized study.

I requested copies of the contracts related to Madison’s latest reading program on May 19, 2022. Curiously, I just received a response to this simple request yesterday – after numerous email and phone followup attempts.

The April, 2022 Madison School Board presentation on the latest reading program – an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results.

PDF document

PDF document

PDF Document

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?

Shanahan on literacy:

I admire Emily Hanford and her work. I’ve been interviewed several times by her over the years. She always has treated me respectfully. She asks probing questions and relies on relevant research for the most part. In my experience, her quotes are accurate and fitting.

That doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with all her views or even how she frames some of her arguments. Nevertheless, in my opinion, she usually gets things right, and I’m sympathetic with most of her conclusions since I believe they’re more in tune with what research reveals about reading instruction than the positions of her supposedly expert critics.

The major thrust of her work (not just the documentaries you note, but also earlier productions) has been that readers must translate print (orthography) into pronunciation (phonology) and that explicit teaching of phonics helps kids learn to do this. She also emphasizes that many schools are not providing such instruction and that many teachers aren’t prepared to teach it. Finally, she’s revealed that the currently most popular commercial reading programs ignore or minimize phonics instruction, and teach approaches to word reading that science has rejected (like 3-cueing, in which students are taught to read words by looking at the pictures or guessing from context).

Those positions are sound; well supported by lots of high-quality research. My disagreements with Ms. Hanford’s work are more around the edges. I think she puts too much emphasis on the motivations of those who’ve advanced theories that don’t stand the test of evidence. Also, her reports tend to imply greater consequences of the problems identified than is prudent (something I might write about soon).

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?

Dan Mcquillan:

Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in ‘The cat sat on the [BLANK]’). Despite the impressive technical ju-jitsu of transformer models and the billions of parameters they learn, it’s still a computational guessing game. ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a ‘bullshit generator’. If a generated sentence makes sense to you, the reader, it means the mathematical model has made sufficiently good guess to pass your sense-making filter. The language model has no idea what it’s talking about because it has no idea about anything at all. It’s more of a bullshitter than the most egregious egoist you’ll ever meet, producing baseless assertions with unfailing confidence because that’s what it’s designed to do. It’s a bonus for the parent corporation when journalists and academics respond by generating acres of breathless coverage, which works as PR even when expressing concerns about the end of human creativity. 

Unsuspecting users who’ve been conditioned on Siri and Alexa assume that the smooth talking ChatGPT is somehow tapping into reliable sources of knowledge, but it can only draw on the (admittedly vast) proportion of the internet it ingested at training time. Try asking Google’s BERT model about Covid or ChatGPT about the latest developments in the Ukraine conflict. Ironically, these models are unable to cite their own sources, even in instances where it’s obvious they’re plagiarising their training data. The nature of ChatGPT as a bullshit generator makes it harmful, and it becomes more harmful the more optimised it becomes. If it produces plausible articles or computer code it means the inevitable hallucinations are becoming harder to spot. If a language model suckers us into trusting it then it has succeeded in becoming the industry’s holy grail of ‘trustworthy AI’; the problem is, trusting any form of machine learning is what leads to a single mother having their front door kicked open by social security officialsbecause a predictive algorithm has fingered them as a probable fraudster, alongside many other instances of algorithmic violence. 

Of course, the makers of GPT learned by experience that an untended LLM will tend to spew Islamophobia or other hatespeech in addition to talking nonsense. The technical addition in ChatGPT is known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RHLF). While the whole point of an LLM is that the training data set is too huge for human labelling, a small subset of curated data is used to build a monitoring system which attempts to constrain output against criteria for relevance and non-toxicity. It can’t change the fact that the underlying language patterns were learned from the raw internet, including all the ravings and conspiracy theories. While RLHF makes for a better brand of bullshit, it doesn’t take too much ingenuity in user prompting to reveal the bile that can lie beneath. The more plausible ChatGPT becomes, the more it recapitulates the pseudo-authoritative rationalisations of race science. It also shows that despite the boast that LLMs are largely self-training, any real world system will require precaritised ‘ghost work’ to maintain its plausibility. It turns out that AI is not sci-fi but a techologised intensification of existing relations of labour and power. The $2/hour paid to outsourced workers in Kenya so they could be “tortured” by having to tag obscene material for removal is figurative of the invisible and gendered labour of care that always already holds up our existing systems of business and government.

The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEChttps://t.co/z6h5975anw

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 6, 2023

Wall Street Journal:

In her debate during last year’s race for Governor, Democrat Kathy Hochul answered “yes” when asked if she supported lifting New York’s cap on charter schools. Last week she followed through with a proposal that would allow more charters to open, mostly in New York City. But she’ll have to spend political capital to get it through the state Legislature where unions hold sway.

In her budget proposal released last week, Ms. Hochul didn’t touch the overall cap of 460 charters statewide. But she did propose eliminating the regional charter caps. The bottom line is that New York City—which hit its cap of 275 charters in 2019—would have as many as 85 slots for new schools. Ms. Hochul would also reallocate slots now held by “zombie” charters that have closed, which would allow roughly two dozen other new charter openings.

These steps are modest but badly needed. They would also be popular. Last week Democrats for Education Reform released a poll showing that New York City Democrats favor lifting the cap by 51% to 27%. The margins for Hispanics (53% to 26%) and African-American New Yorkers (48% to 23%) are more than 2 to 1 in favor. Nearly two-thirds of parents (64%) support raising the cap.

The polling is a bitter reminder that the only reason there is a cap is because of the teachers unions. In January New York City parents were sold out by Mayor Eric Adams, when the city at the last minute killed plans to co-locate three Success Academy charters in vacant public-school building space in Queens and the Bronx.

Javeria Salman:

Hidden in more than 4,000 pages of the omnibus appropriations bill that President Biden signed in December is funding for a key education initiative that advocates have been pushing for decades.

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Department of Education’s statistics, research and evaluation arm, received $40 million in new money for research and development, a portion of which must be used to “support a new funding opportunity for quick-turnaround, high-reward scalable solutions.”

While the language may be vague, many advocates see it as a major step toward developing, for education, the federally-funded research and development capabilities that have long existed in other fields.

Going back several administrations, there’s been interest in creating an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Education (ARPA-Ed), akin to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that supports innovations for the military. But the initiative kept getting lost in politics, said Mark Schneider, director of IES.

That changed when the pandemic put schools to the test — one that many failed — and demonstrated how essential education R&D funding is, he said. Covid “shined an incredibly bright light on the systemic failures that education has had,” said Schneider. “The normal processes of education research and teaching and learning were not up to the crisis.”

Chan Ho-him:

The episode, which first aired in October last year during the show’s latest season, was unavailable on the Disney Plus streaming platform in Hong Kong, the Financial Times has learned.

This appears to be the second time an episode from the show, which is produced by the Disney-owned 20th Television Animation, has been omitted from the streaming platform.

The decision of @RitchieTorres to become some sort of social media star on behalf of DNC talking points – and honestly, that’s how members of Congress have the most influence these days – has obscured how closely involved he was with Sam Bankman-Fried and his guru @SeanMcElwee https://t.co/MQO8j3ytU2

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 6, 2023

Julia Angwin:

At The Markup we pioneered an array of scientifically inspired methods that used automation and computational power to supercharge our journalism. Reflecting on our work, I came up with 10 of the most important lessons I’ve learned using this approach.

1) Important ≠ secret

In a resource-constrained world, choosing a topic to investigate is the most important decision a newsroom makes. 

At The Markup, we developed an investigative checklist that reporters filled out before embarking on a project. Top of the checklist was not novelty, but scale—how many people were affected by the problem we were investigating. In other words, we chose to tackle things that were important but not secret. 

For instance, anyone using Google has probably noticed that Google takes up a lot of the search result page for its own properties. Nevertheless, we decided to invest nearly a year into quantifying how much Google was boosting its own products over direct links to source material because the quality of Google search results affects nearly everyone in the world. 

This type of work has an impact. The European Union has now passed a law banning tech platforms from this type of self-preferencing, and there is legislation pending in Congress to do the same.

Ben Smith & Louise Matsakis:

The move comes as the Kennedy School has sought various ways to find a safe space in a difficult political landscape. In January of 2021, Elmendorf asked New York Rep. Elise Stefanik to resign from an advisory committee because she had made false statements about voter fraud. Elmendorf more recently blocked the appointment of the human rights advocate Kenneth Roth to a fellowship over, Roth said, criticism of Israel. Elmendorf last month reversed that decision.

While there’s no formal indication that Donovan’s lightning-rod status played a role in her dismissal from Harvard, an email Elmendorf sent her this January 6, 2023 hints at that concern. In the email, he cites “my earlier decision about not raising the profile of your projects.”

Commentary.

revólver:

We won’t test you with more historical minutiae, but the key principle is easily deduced, and it applies to far more than just warfare: in any battle, whether military or political, speed, surprise, and decisiveness matter far more than mere strength.And at this very moment, Ron DeSantis and Chris Rufo in Florida are putting on a masterclass of this principle in action.

The domain of battle is education.

A month ago, nobody had ever heard of the New College of Florida, a tiny, “progressive” public college in Sarasota. Of the roughly 340,000 people in the State University System of Florida, the New College has fewer than 700 of them.

Now, the school is a national news story, because DeSantis’s administration is demonstrating that zombie left-wing institutions do not have to live forever. They can be torn down and remade, or defunded, if only there is sufficient will to act.

Despite its name, the New College isn’t new. It was founded in the 1960s, and until this month was a premier example of a taxpayer-funded university that was institutionally far-left down to its core. Like many such schools, it has a novel structure: instead of grades, students get written evaluations, and every semester students sign a “contract” to pass a certain number of classes. Students also have to complete an undergraduate thesis. Of course, the school puts a ridiculous emphasis on the buzzwords you’d expect these days: diversity, inclusion, equity, and so on. The New York Times itself bluntly described New College as Florida’s “most progressive” public college… a funny label to affix to a taxpayer-backed institution that is supposed to be politically neutral.

But the label won’t be around for long. In early January, out of nowhere, DeSantis announced a sweeping series of appointments to the New College’s board. In one day, six new trustees were named. Among them were Rufo, who should need no introduction, as well as Hillsdale government professor Matthew Spalding, and Claremont Review of Books editor Charles Kesler.

Mere days after his appointment, Rufo published a piece for City Journal laying out sweeping planned changes for the school:

Gregory Gundersen

Imagine we want to compute the square root of a number n. The basic idea of Heron’s method, named after the mathematician and engineer, Heron of Alexandria, is to find a number g that is close to n​and to then average that with the number n/g, which corrects for the fact that g either over- or underestimates n​.

I like this algorithm because it is simple and works surprisingly well. However, I first learned about it in (Benjamin & Shermer, 2006), which did not provide a particularly deep explanation or analysis for whythis method works. The goal of this post is to better understand Heron’s method. How does it work? Why does it work? And how good are the estimates?

The algorithm

Let’s demonstrate the method with an example. Consider computing the square root of n=33. We start by finding a number that forms a perfect square that is close to 33. Here, let’s pick g=6, since 62=36. Then we compute a second number, b=n/g. In practice, computing b in your head may require an approximation. Here, we can compute it exactly as 33/6=5.5. Then our final guess is the average of these two numbers or

Monica Sager and Susanti Sarkar Medill News Service:

Since the COVID-19 pandemic forced children to stay at home for months on end, students lagged in social development. This was especially seen in kindergartners entering school for the first time, and it put an extra strain on teachers. One of the reasons students with disabilities fell behind is because it was harder to meet their needs online, educators say. Platforms like Zoom, Google Classrooms and Google Meet are not always suited for people with hearing or visual impairments.

Pandemic effects

Some exhausted parents see Individualized Education Programs as a way to fix the effects of the last two years, Kling said.

“Our only concern is that people are doing that out of a knee jerk reaction because of the pandemic where kids might be behind in their learning or might have exhibited some behavioral issues, but it might not be indicative of a disability,” said Eisenberg.

Before the pandemic, about 12% to 13% of students across the country were in special education, Eisenberg said. Now, more children are frequently evaluated for consideration.

I did not see geographic differences mentioned vis a vis taxpayer funded mandates.

In Eugene, Oregon, a school board member wanted to talk about board members communicating with encrypted text messages that disappear. It did not go well. https://t.co/X7y25y1XkW

— Washington Coalition for Open Government (@WashingtonCOG) February 5, 2023

Marc Keuschnigg, Arnout van de Rijt, Thijs Bol

Are the best-paying jobs with the highest prestige done by individuals of great intelligence? Past studies find job success to increase with cognitive ability, but do not examine how, conversely, ability varies with job success. Stratification theories suggest that social background and cumulative advantage dominate cognitive ability as determinants of high occupational success. This leads us to hypothesize that among the relatively successful, average ability is concave in income and prestige. We draw on Swedish register data containing measures of cognitive ability and labour-market success for 59,000 men who took a compulsory military conscription test. Strikingly, we find that the relationship between ability and wage is strong overall, yet above €60,000 per year ability plateaus at a modest level of +1 standard deviation. The top 1 per cent even score slightly worse on cognitive ability than those in the income strata right below them. We observe a similar but less pronounced plateauing of ability at high occupational prestige.

St Johns:

St. John’s College is best known for its reading list and the Great Books curriculum that was adopted in 1937. While the list of books has evolved over the last century, the tradition of all students reading foundational texts of Western civilization remains. The reading list at St. John’s includes classic works in philosophy, literature, political science, psychology, history, religion, economics, math, chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, music, language, and more. Learn more about classes at St. John’s and the subjects students study.

Tessa Lena:

Enable technology to work on the worker (and the team). The traditional view of technology as a substitute or supplement for human labor is too narrow. Moving forward, you need to harness technologies that help your people and teams become the best possible versions of themselves. This means nudging them to learn new behaviors, correct old behaviors, and sharpen skills. For example, successful and error-free surgeries in the operating room (OR) require finesse, but determining the exact amount of pressure to apply on the instrument is challenging for surgeons. Technology provides surgeons with smart scalpels and forceps that allow them to gauge and adjust pressure in real time, subsequently improving precision and patient outcomes.

Victoria Ludwin:

The federal government’s investment in higher education is now more than $115 billion per year. Today, students owe $1.6 trillion in federal student loan debt. The student loan system has become more complicated, rising tuition has far outpaced increases in the cost of living, and the schools that enroll federally aided students too often leave students without a credential of value. Yet, the Higher Education Act has not adapted to address these problems. 

With the start of the new Congress, a host of new and returning committee members and hardworking staffers are back on Capitol Hill. With their return comes the possibility of bipartisan progress on one of the largest, most comprehensive pieces of legislation in higher education — and Arnold Ventures is excited to engage in those discussions. 

At Arnold Ventures, we see the next reauthorization of the Higher Education Act as a moment to shore up measures that create value for students — through more transparency about the outcomes colleges provide to their students, greater accountability for institutions, a better and more efficient student loan system, and the broader use of evidence-based practices to support students as they work to complete their degrees. 

“With huge challenges facing higher education, the need for reform is greater than ever before,” says Vice President of Higher Education Kelly McManus. ​“These priorities for improvements to the Higher Education Act offer common-sense, straightforward solutions to hold institutions accountable for ensuring that students’ and taxpayers’ investments are in high-value programs.”

Here is a look at our biggest priorities as well as our policy agenda.

Krista Johnson:

Established in December 2022, the association was formed through a partnership between the Muhammad Ali Center, Berea College, Kentucky State University and the Thomas D. Clark Foundation. On Wednesday, Cummings plans to celebrate the start of Black History Month at the Ali Center, meeting with Lt. Gov. Jacqueline Coleman and Jefferson County Public Schools Superintendent Marty Pollio to share more about the association’s mission.

The association’s formation comes at a time when teaching Black history has been opposed in some communities. Last month Florida’s Department of Education blocked an Advanced Placement course on African American studies from being taught in its public schools, saying it is “inexplicably contrary” to Florida law and “significantly lacks educational value.”

“Continuing to improve education in the Commonwealth to reflect the complexities of current events and their historical context is critical and should include awareness of the Black experience in Kentucky,” a release from the Ali Center about Wednesday’s event stated.

The association has launched a website where teachers can find lesson plans focused on Black history that align with the state’s mandated standards, and it is forming an advisory committee of educators to build upon the association’s collaboration with Kentucky teachers.

Kayla Huyhn:

A majority of University of Wisconsin System students don’t feel free to share their opinions about controversial topics or are unwilling to consider views they disagree with, according to results released Wednesday from a survey that has stirred controversy across the 13 campuses.

Initial pushback led the System to postpone the first iteration of the survey last spring, though it was later sent to over 83,000 UW System students in November. Nearly 10,500 students completed the survey, a 12.5% response rate. 

The survey asked students their perceptions of viewpoint diversity, self-censorship and freedom of expression on campus. It also included questions about how likely students are to consider viewpoints they disagree with, including on abortion, COVID-19 vaccines, racial inequity and transgender issues. 

The results showed that most students hadn’t learned about the First Amendment in any of their courses, and that some believed it was acceptable for their university to ban speakers who’ve made offensive and harmful statements.

Tim Hardwick:

All Apple Watch models include a stock Calculator app that offers a couple of handy features for working out how much you should tip when eating out and how much each person in a group owes if you’re splitting the bill.

Mark Bauerlien:

On Tuesday, we trustees of the New College of Florida removed the college’s leadership, recommended a figure close to the governor as the next president, and called for a comprehensive review of diversity, equity, and inclusion activities on campus. I believe the latter should be scrapped, particularly in areas of personnel (New College faculty job openings contain a diversity statement that applicants must complete, a kind of loyalty oath to progressive doctrine), and I expect the Florida legislature will act to ban them in the coming months.

The votes we took weren’t very close, and the message is clear that the board intends sweeping change. New College is tiny, with only 700 students, but more than 30 media outlets attended the meeting, and the implications of the vote are reverberating widely. Our actions sound to many like a top-down, hostile takeover, a hasty imposition of political control over what should remain an independent body run by locals.

Leftists think it’s straight-out tyranny flowing from Tallahassee, but they aren’t the only ones concerned. South Carolina philosophy professor Jennifer Frey, a liberal conservative, issued a warning in a tweet: “I guess some people think Florida will be in Republican hands forever. I’m gonna go out on a limb and question that. People who cheer on state control of universities might be singing a different tune when power switches hands unexpectedly.”

It’s a good point. What if leftists were to take over the universities, purge conservatives, and use the institutions to promote their ideology? In a follow-up tweet, Frey proposed a better way: “A different model is not one of ‘vanquishing’ anyone, but dialogue, accountability, and transparency. You can guess which model I prefer.”

Kevin Bass:

I was wrong. We in the scientific community were wrong. And it cost lives.

I can see now that the scientific community from the CDC to the WHO to the FDA and their representatives, repeatedly overstated the evidence and misled the public about its own views and policies, including on naturalvs. artificial immunity, school closures and disease transmission, aerosol spread, mask mandates, and vaccine effectiveness andsafety, especially among the young. All of these were scientific mistakes at the time, not in hindsight. Amazingly, some of these obfuscations continue to the present day.

But perhaps more important than any individual error was how inherently flawed the overall approach of the scientific community was, and continues to be. It was flawed in a way that undermined its efficacy and resulted in thousands if not millions of preventable deaths.

Behold! A complete list of how much OpenAI likes various groups based on how often questions are called “hateful”. It’s basically a list of how popular such groups are in the collective leftist worldview. In other words, protected classes.https://t.co/92K9h5UW5h pic.twitter.com/R35XhMAJwB

— Emil O W Kirkegaard (@KirkegaardEmil) February 2, 2023

Javier’s Salman:

Epstein said that one of the biggest problems in education is a “misalignment” between how student learning is assessed and “what we actually care about.” An expanded R&D unit, he said, could help develop better ways to conduct assessments, like testing students on the skills and capabilities they need in today’s society.

A new research division would also help schools overcome the “collective action problem” they currently face when deciding which technology or product to invest in, Epstein said.

Mike Cernovich:

Fewer people are reading books (or any long form content) today than ever. Why? As someone who sold a lot of books and buys even more books, here are my top theories:

• Publishing houses, which are controlled by alcoholic CNN watchers, discriminate against men. This leads to fewer great books making it to bookstores, which has a secondary effect of reducing foot traffic into bookstores.
• Podcast are 3x easier to do and 10x-100x more lucrative.
• Why write a book for $5 royalty per copy sold when you can Substack? (My current situation.)

We will go into detail on all of the above. But first, some numbers on Big Book.

Alexander Riley:

Recently, one of the departments on my campus invited an academic “expert,” who, among other specializations, “advise[s] on the ethical aspects of telescope siting,” to give a talk entitled “How Research Harms.”

The advertisements for the event summarized the speaker’s perspective with the declaration, “We ought to be restricting research based on a number of unique and underacknowledged harms … [which] are poorly understood and lack clear definitions.” Prominent among these “harms” are unspecified “psychological, social and moral hazards.”

This is but one example of a growing phenomenon in higher education. The perspective in question—that some sizable quantity of scientific research is causing undefined harms and must therefore be prevented on ethical grounds—has become widespread. It marks a significant departure from an earlier academic culture that celebrated the open-ended pursuit of truth as the fundamental value of higher education.

The creation of the IRB system marked the first stage of the effort to exert overarching ethical control over scientific and academic inquiry.

Julia Carpenter:

An income-driven repayment (IDR) plan calculates your monthly student loan payment based on your income and family size. Currently, any debt remaining on many of the existing IDR plans can be wiped out after 20 years of payment. Under the new plan, the term would be reduced to 10 years for borrowers with balances under $12,000.

Currently, the Education Department offers four income-driven repayment plans: the Revised Pay as You Earn Plan, which the proposed rule would effect, and three others: the Pay as You Earn, Income-Contingent Repayment and Income-Based Repayment plans. The new regulations would phase out those latter three plans and put most borrowers into the Revised Pay as You Earn plan, or the Repaye plan.

How will my repayment terms change?

Previously, the Repaye plan required borrowers to make payments equivalent to at least 10% of their discretionary income. The new rule proposes cutting that number in half, allowing borrowers to pay 5% of their discretionary income on undergraduate loans.

Additionally, those with incomes below 225% of the federal poverty guidelines—or around the annual equivalent of a $30,600 income for a single borrower or about $60,000 for a family of four, according to U.S. Department of Education—wouldn’t have to make monthly payments on their loans at all. The months of $0 payments would count toward the 10- or 20-year threshold for forgiveness.

Maxim Lott:

Why would the OECD dataset show such different numbers from the OWID and WHO datasets? 

(Note: WHO’s dataset hasn’t been updated for 2022, so I’ll focus on OWID from here on out.)

OECD fails to consider all Swedish deaths 

After a lot of cross-checking, I noticed one straightforward issue with the OECD data. While they correctly and precisely copy weekly deaths as reportedby the Swedish government, they fail to consider deaths which were not classified with any week. 

As OWID notes in their methodology: 

“Sweden has a significant number of deaths which occurred in an “unknown” date (and thus week) in all years. However, 95% these have a known month of death.”

So OWID reasonably assigns those deaths to weeks within the month that they happened. It’s not perfect (it can’t be, since the exact date isn’t known) but it seems much better than ignoring such deaths.

I applied that change to OECD’s dataset, and doing so causes their estimate to rise — eliminating about half of the gap between excess mortality predictions.

In the below graph, the dark blue OCED line would rise to the light-blue line:

Ben Adida:

So OpenAI just released a detector of AI-generated text, I assume because of concerns in education / homework.

Maybe this is good?

No, it’s very bad.

David Catron:

During the last few years, most conservatives have become at least dimly aware that leftist ideology, in the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), has infected public education. It’s unlikely, however, that many Americans realize just how far the disease has advanced. It has long since spread beyond a few courses embedded into the social studies curricula of secondary schools and elite colleges. Public school students as young as 9 and 10 years of age effortlessly recite leftist shibboleths even as they descend into functional illiteracy in reading, writing, math, and science.

If this sounds like “right-wing extremism,” consider this: Last fall, hundreds of Philadelphia-area fourth- and fifth-grade students participated in an essay contest, sponsored by the Rendell Center for Civics and Civic Engagement, in which they were asked to outline proposals for a hypothetical new amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Their amendment proposals included abolishing the Electoral College, providing everyone with free health care, limiting gun possession to individuals who need them for military and hunting uses, guaranteeing a living wage to everyone, and imposing term limits on U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Sound familiar?

The winners of the contest were announced on the website of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, in a recent post titled, “What Should Be the 28th Amendment to the Constitution? These Students Have Some Ideas.” But the ideas are obviously not those of the students. These kids simply regurgitated items from a leftist wish list that “educators” fed them instead of teaching critical skills that students need to know and parents want them to learn. But the public-education establishment doesn’t see its mission in such terms, as the following Facebook meme posted by a school board member from Iowa’s Linn-Mar district illustrates:

Kenneth R. Koedinger, Paulo Carvalho, Ran Liu, Elizabeth A. McLaughlin

Leveraging a scientific infrastructure for exploring how students learn, we have developed cognitive and statistical models of skill acquisition and used them to understand fundamental similarities and differences across learners. Our primary question was why do some students learn faster than others? Or do they? We model data from student performance on groups of tasks that assess the same skill component and that provide follow-up instruction on student errors. Our models estimate, for both students and skills, initial correctness and learning rate, that is, the increase in correctness after each practice opportunity. We applied our models to 1.3 million observations across 27 datasets of student interactions with online practice systems in the context of elementary to college courses in math, science, and language. Despite the availability of up-front verbal instruction, like lectures and readings, students demonstrate modest initial pre-practice performance, at about 65% accuracy. Despite being in the same course, students’ initial performance varies substantially from about 55% correct for those in the lower half to 75% for those in the upper half. In contrast, and much to our surprise, we found students to be astonishingly similar in estimated learning rate, typically increasing by about 0.1 log odds or 2.5% in accuracy per opportunity. These findings pose a challenge for theories of learning to explain the odd combination of large variation in student initial performance and striking regularity in student learning rate.

Associated Press:

Most students who responded to a survey about free speech on University of Wisconsin campuses said they’re afraid to express their views on controversial topics in class because they fear other students won’t agree or it could hurt their grades, according to key findings released Wednesday.

A third of respondents, meanwhile, said they’ve felt pressure from an instructor to agree with a certain viewpoint. Almost half said they don’t agree or only agree a little that administrators should bar controversial speakers if some students find the message offensive.

Matt Taibbi:

The Hamilton 68 team also “did not individually review or verify” all the names, because their “focus” was “aggregate networks,” not “specific accounts.”

So, nobody looked at the list. 

The list that was “the fruit of more than three years of observation and monitoring.”’

Sounds solid. 

Yes? No?

Jack Pfefferkorn:

University of Chicago Professor Casey Mulligan, formerly the chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers, has spent the past several years highlighting the predictable damage of COVID-19 lockdowns. He recently participated in a moving Committee to Unleash Prosperity panel discussionon lessons learned from the pandemic and published a Wall Street Journal op-ed detailing the deadly consequences of the “draconian steps taken to mitigate” COVID.

In their early January Journal op-ed, Mulligan and Rob Arnott note that “CDC data show the rate of non-Covid excess deaths in the first half of 2022 was even higher than 2020 or 2021. These deaths therefore likely already exceed 250,000, disproportionately among young adults.”

“Non-Covid excess deaths have shown no signs of diminishing, at least through mid-2022,” Mulligan and Arnott ominously observe.

Months earlier, in late October 2022, Mulligan joined Scott Atlas, a radiologist and former advisor on the White House Coronavirus Task Force, and Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at the Johns Hopkins University, for a Committee to Unleash Prosperity discussion on the long-term impacts of COVID and politicians’ response to the virus.

The Predictable Damage of COVID Lockdowns

According to Dr. Atlas, the panel’s public health expert, U.S. lockdown policy bucked existing pandemic response literature. He highlighted a 2006 paper by epidemiologist Dr. Thomas Inglesby, who evaluated several potential disease mitigation measures in the event of an influenza-like pandemic and concluded that travel restrictions were “historically ineffective” and that communitywide cancelation of public events is “inadvisable.” 

Moreover, the Inglesby paper ruled that extended school closures are “not only impracticable but carry the possibility of a serious adverse outcome.”

Among the Lincoln Project’s 2022 top vendors:

$1.7M Lever Communications (Joe Trippi)
$792K Summit Strategic (Reed Galen)
$595K Manhattan Creative (Joey Wartnerchaney)
$501K Message Mountain (Stu Stevens)
$450K Intrepid Media (Rick Wilson)
$445K Third Act Media (Ben Howe) https://t.co/d4kxg2kQbb

— Rob Pyers (@rpyers) January 31, 2023

Leonard Downie Jr.:

PmAmong the news leaders who told Heyward and me that they had rejected objectivity as a coverage standard was Kathleen Carroll, former executive editor of the Associated Press. “It’s objective by whose standard?” she asked. “That standard seems to be White, educated, fairly wealthy. … And when people don’t feel like they find themselves in news coverage, it’s because they don’t fit that definition.”

More and more journalists of color and younger White reporters, including LGBTQ+ people, in increasingly diverse newsrooms believe that the concept of objectivity has prevented truly accurate reporting informed by their own backgrounds, experiences and points of view.

Rev. David Buchs:

It has never been a question of if, but how.

The last several years, many parents have found themselves wondering if they should homeschool their children. Whether it was on account of Covid policies or Marxism or mere inefficiency, lots of folks who had never considered homeschooling started to wonder: should we? If we were to homeschool, how would we know if we succeeded? If we were to take full responsibility for the formation of our children into well-adjusted adults, would we be up for it?

Buried in all those questions is a faulty premise extraordinarily common in our day, which is hard to shake. The premise is that there’s some question of if, when, in fact, it’s only a question of how.

The idea that the home is not the primary place for child-rearing is strange and senseless. This is true even when children spend the majority of their time outside the home. When dad and mom choose to bus their kids to the neighborhood elementary school or to the local Lutheran school or to the classical academy in the next town over, that choice is made in the home. And it’s a choice that teaches. It is that choice which sets the stage for everything that follows. That choice comes first, long before any instruction takes place in a classroom or any homework gets discussed around the dinner table. From the outset parents are teaching their children at home. That is why there’s never been a question of if families should homeschool, but rather of how.

To be clear, this is not an article about homeschooling. It is an article about home catechesis. Entertain a thought experiment with me. Consider a typical Lutheran parish in the Midwest. Worship is followed by Sunday School for the kids and Bible class for the adults. Maybe there’s a weekday Bible Study, and on Wednesday afternoon during the school year there’s Confirmation. Attendance is fairly dutiful, at least for Sunday School and Confirmation. In fact, even when families miss Sunday worship or don’t stick around for Bible Class, they’ll drop their kids off for Sunday School and consider Confirmation attendance non-negotiable.

Douglas Belkin:

On Wednesday, the College Board said its revisions had been completed in December in consultation with more than 300 professors of African-American Studies from 200 colleges.

“No states or districts have seen the official framework that is released, much less provided feedback on it,” the College Board said. “This course has been shaped only by the input of experts and longstanding AP principles and practices.”

The curriculum was released on the first day of Black History month and one day after Mr. DeSantis proposed a legislative agenda that would ensure higher education would eliminate any hint of critical race theory and diversity efforts while mandating teachings based on Western civilization, which is rooted in European history.

Democrat Politician Agrees with DeSantis, Calls Rejected AP Course “Trash”

Zac Howard:

 One of Governor Ron DeSantis’ most vocal critics supports the state’s decision to reject the College Board’s AP African American Studies course for high schoolers. When asked his thoughts on the recent controversy, Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor blasted the course as “trash,” according to Tallahassee Reports.

“There is grave concern about the tone and the tenor of leadership’s voice from the highest spaces in our state being hostile to teaching of African American history. Well frankly I’m against the College Board’s curriculum,” Proctor said.

“I think it’s trash. It’s not African American history. It is ideology,” he continued. “I’ve taught African American history, I’ve structured syllabuses for African American history. I am African American history. And talking about ‘queer’ and ‘feminism’ and all of that for the struggle for freedom and equality and justice has not been no tension with queerness and feminist thought at all.”

Proctor has been an ardent opponent of the governor and believes that serious racial problems still plague America. Last April, he penned an op-ed in the Tallahassee Democrat where he called DeSantis a “clear warrior against the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.”

Beth Mole:

Americans spend an exorbitant amount of money on health care and have for years. As a country, the US spends more on health care than any other high-income country in the world—on the basis of both per-person costs and a share of gross domestic product. Yet, you wouldn’t know it from looking at major health metrics in years past; the US has relatively abysmal health. And, if anything, the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated the US health care system’s failures relative to its peers, according to a new analysis by the Commonwealth Fund.

Joanne Jacobs:

Jessica Bradshaw’s daughter — now a son — was diagnosed as on the autism spectrum, as well as with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, PTSD and anxiety, the California mother told Baker. Her teenager “had struggled with loneliness during the pandemic” and “repeatedly changed his name and sexual orientation.” School officials had put her child “on a path the school wasn’t qualified to oversee,” rather than let the family decide what was best, Bradshaw said. She resents being made to feel like a bad parent.

. . . dozens of parents whose children have socially transitioned at school told The Times they felt villainized by educators who seemed to think that they — not the parents — knew what was best for their children. They insisted that educators should not intervene without notifying parents unless there is evidence of physical abuse at home. Although some didn’t want their children to transition at all, others said they were open to it, but felt schools forced the process to move too quickly, and that they couldn’t raise concerns without being cut out completely or having their home labeled “unsafe.”

Quinton Klabon:

The coronavirus pandemic was a 2-year catastrophe for children. Students suffered through virtual schooling, quarantined teachers, and emotional misery. Academic results, the lowest this century, still have not recovered.

After sending $860 million to help Wisconsin public schools manage through spring 2021, Congress sent a final $1.49 billion to get students back on track.

The goal? Do whatever it takes to catch kids up by September 2024.

The problem? No one knows how schools have directed it or not directed it…until now.

Madison’s $42M? Have a look.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Scott Girard and Jessie Opoien:

The results, as Vos mentioned, have been poor. Reading and math scores on what’s known as the Nation’s Report Card dropped across the country last year, including in Wisconsin, where the gap in scores between Wisconsin’s Black and white students is the highest of any state, with only Washington, D.C. having a wider “opportunity gap.”

“When you look at the scores in Wisconsin, especially the gap between the races, it’s just unacceptable,” said Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay, who will lead the Assembly education committee during this legislative session. “We have to do better, and we started to try to address it (in the last session). The governor vetoed that bill.

“But we really, really need to be able to work together, because I don’t see how we can address it if we don’t know that the governor is going to agree to what we do. So, I’m really hopeful we can for once work together on that.”

Kitchens was referring to a bill that would have significantly increased the number of literacy tests students must take and required the development of personalized reading plans for students deemed an “at-risk” reader. In his veto message, Evers said the bill didn’t provide adequate funding for its mandates.

“I want to go back and rehash that and say, ‘Why’d you veto this? What was the tweak that you need, right, or how can we make it better?’” Vos said of the proposal.

Republicans and those pushing for “reform” often focus on school choice, whether that’s voucher funding, charter schools or open enrollment opportunities. Public school advocates contend those options siphon money out of the public schools that need it.

To those advocates, the focus should be on making up for the past 14 years in which school spending increases were not tied to inflation — like they had been previously. If they had been, districts around Wisconsin would have been able to spend an additional $3,000 per student this school year.

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?

Wall Street Journal:

ov. DeSantis announced a plan Monday to pass a Teachers’ Bill of Rights and spend an extra $200 million on teacher pay in the coming school year. The funds will bring the total the state has spent on teacher salaries to more than $3 billion from 2020 to 2024. They’ll also lift the minimum salary to more than $48,000, eighth-highest among states according to the National Education Association.

Addressing a classroom in a Jacksonville school, the Governor said the money would help ward off a teacher shortage. “The nationwide average is three vacancies for every school,” he said, while Florida has kept average openings to about half that level.

Yet the plan devotes as much attention to making sure teachers get the full benefit of the their pay raise. It proposes a policy known as paycheck protection, which blocks schools from extracting member dues on unions’ behalf. Teachers would still be free to join or decline the union, but they would get a clearer sense of what they’re paying if they do.

The change would make a difference since Florida teachers can pay as much as $700 in annual dues, according to the Orlando Sentinel. “If you want to do it, send money—that’s fine,” as Gov. DeSantis put it. But the Florida Education Association (FEA) spends millions of dollars on political causes and candidates that many teachers don’t support, such as its unsuccessful 2020 lawsuit to block school reopenings.

The Governor also wants to ensure that teachers get their raises on time. “Not every school district has raised the teacher salaries like they’re required to,” he said of his previous expansions of school budgets. It’s common for schools to leave such funds undisbursed during internal budgeting squabbles, but boosting recruitment and retention requires making the pay available fast.

Christopher F. Rufo Ilya Shapiro Matt Beienburg:

There is a lot that state legislatures can do to reverse the illiberal takeover of higher education through Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) offices that, ironically, stifle intellectual diversity, prevent equal opportunity, and exclude anyone who dissents from a rigid orthodoxy. Here are four proposals for reforming public universities:

1. 1. Abolish DEI bureaucracies.
    
2. 2. End mandatory diversity training.
    
3. 3. Curtail political coercion.
    
4. 4. End identity-based preferences.

These rather straightforward reforms would go far in pushing back on some of the negative trends that have afflicted higher education.[1]

Jeff Gerth:

They both grew out of stories in the first weeks of 2017 about Trump and Russia that wound up being significantly flawed or based on uncorroborated or debunked information, according to FBI documents that later became public. Both relied on anonymous sources.

Before the 2016 election, most Americans trusted the traditional media and the trend was positive, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer. The phrase “fake news” was limited to a few reporters and a newly organized social media watchdog. The idea that the media were “enemies of the American people” was voiced only once, just before the election on an obscure podcast, and not by Trump, according to a Nexis search.

Today, the US media has the lowest credibility—26 percent—among forty-six nations, according to a 2022 study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. In 2021, 83 percent of Americans saw “fake news” as a “problem,” and 56 percent—mostly Republicans and independents—agreed that the media were “truly the enemy of the American people,” according to Rasmussen Reports.

Trump, years later, can’t stop looking back. In two interviews with CJR, he made it clear he remains furious over what he calls the “witch hunt” or “hoax” and remains obsessed with Mueller. His staff has compiled a short video, made up of what he sees as Mueller’s worst moments from his appearance before Congress, and he played it for me when I first went to interview him, just after Labor Day in 2021, at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.

During my interview with Trump, he appeared tired as he sat behind his desk. He wore golf attire and his signature red MAGA hat, having just finished eighteen holes. But his energy and level of engagement kicked in when it came to questions about perceived enemies, mainly Mueller and the media.

He made clear that in the early weeks of 2017, after initially hoping to “get along” with the press, he found himself inundated by a wave of Russia-related stories. He then realized that surviving, if not combating, the media was an integral part of his job.

“I realized early on I had two jobs,” he said. “The first was to run the country, and the second was survival. I had to survive: the stories were unbelievably fake.”

The Clinton campaign put out a statement on Twitter, linking to what it called the “bombshell report” on Yahoo, but did not disclose that the campaign secretly paid the researchers who pitched it to Isikoff. In essence, the campaign was boosting, through the press, a story line it had itself engineered.

Indira Dammu and Bonnie O’Keefe

In Making Change: A State Advocacy Playbook for Equitable Education Finance, we share lessons from advocacy leaders in six states — California, Connecticut, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, and Nevada — on the conditions that paved the way for positive changes in their education finance systems. We identified five common conditions across these states:

• Coalitions: A strong, diverse coalition in support of change
• Champions: Political leadership that champions funding changes
• Research: A shared body of evidence demonstrating problems in the current finance system
• Economics: Economic factors that necessitate state action
• Lawsuits: Pressure or judicial mandates from funding lawsuits

This playbook can help advocates learn from successful efforts across the country so that they too can pursue funding reform in their communities.

Wisconsin public school principal goes on racist rant, lecturing parents that all “white students need to know that they have enormous power and privilege,” & whiteness is like an “unlimited ATM that never runs out.”
63% of his students, mostly white, can’t read at grade level. pic.twitter.com/vvMsdzJj4d

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) January 28, 2023

Wall Street Journal:

Harvard, Stanford and Columbia universities, the University of Pennsylvania and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai said they would stop cooperatingwith U.S. News & World Report’s medical-school rankings.

That followed the decision last year by universities including Yale, Georgetown, Harvard, Stanford, Columbiaand California, Berkeley to quit cooperating on the publication’s law-school rankings.

Critics are cheering the exodus from a process they say leads students to focus on external prestige rather than education quality and encourages schools to game rankings at the expense of students. The schools that are withdrawing say the rankings are elitist, and penalize institutions that admit strong candidates without high test scores.

“In the 40 years of rankings, this is the biggest shock to the system—that gives me hope,” said Colin Diver, a former president of Reed College, which has long abstained from the U.S. News ranking. Mr. Diver is the author of “Breaking Ranks: How the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What to Do About It.”

But hopes that this marks the death knell for college rankings are likely to be in vain. The reality is that what the schools themselves contribute to the rankings is relatively small: The data includes test scores, alumni giving, financial information and so on. But most of the data used to determine the rankings can be derived from publicly available information, or surveys conducted by U.S. News itself. Indeed, U.S. News has revised the survey over the years in response to criticism. There is a case to be made that the less the schools contribute, the more objective the rankings might become, in some respects. …

Www.

Regarding the current status of sh1mmer:
The prebuilt binaries have been taken off of the official mirror (dl.sh1mmer.me), mostly due to copyright concerns, and from now on you’ll have to build it from source.

John McKinnon

The Har­vard-ed­u­cated Mr. Chew, who once in­terned at Meta Plat­forms Inc.’s Face­book, agreed to tes­tify vol­un­tar­ily and will be the sole wit­ness at the hear­ing, the spokesman said.

“Tik­Tok has know­ingly al­lowed the abil­ity for the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Party to ac­cess Amer­i­can user data,” Rep. Cathy Mc­Mor­ris Rodgers (R., Wash.), who chairs the com­mit­tee, said in a writ­ten state­ment. “Amer­i­cans de­serve to know how these ac­tions im­pact their pri­vacy and data se­cu­rity, as well as what ac­tions Tik­Tok is tak­ing to keep our kids safe from on­line and off­line harms.”

Laurie Roberts:

Charter schools would be exempt from the cuts. They didn’t exist in 1980 and so they aren’t subject to the spending cap. Ditto for the state’s universal voucher program. The kids who are getting public money to attend private schools would see no decline in state support.

Only the children who attend traditional public schools would be penalized.

Horne told legislators that would be a “travesty,” but some of the Legislature’s most conservative members aren’t likely to see it that way.

“Eliminating and/or lifting the Aggregate Expenditure Limit (AEL) is a betrayal of our duty to every taxpayer in the state,” Rep. Jacque Parker, R-Mesa, tweeted last month. “Lifting taxpayer protections so government schools can spend endlessly without transparency is unacceptable.”

Sure, penalize the children.

Some Republican leaders say not to worry. (It’s worth noting that Senate President Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, was among the 20 Republicans who opposed waiving the spending cap last year.)

“Hear us now: Schools will not lose out on the money we have allocated for them,” House Majority Leader Leo Biasiucci, R-Lake Havasu City, said on Jan. 11. “We will address this. But we will not rush the process.”

Beni Edwards:

Thanks to a free web app called calligrapher.ai, anyone can simulate handwriting with a neural network that runs in a browser via JavaScript. After typing a sentence, the site renders it as handwriting in nine different styles, each of which is adjustable with properties such as speed, legibility, and stroke width. It also allows downloading the resulting faux handwriting sample in an SVG vector file.

The demo is particularly interesting because it doesn’t use a font. Typefaces that look like handwriting have been around for over 80 years, but each letter comes out as a duplicate no matter how many times you use it.

During the past decade, computer scientists have relaxed those restrictions by discovering new ways to simulate the dynamic variety of human handwriting using neural networks.