Stolen Youth



Glenn Reynolds:

Karol Markowicz and Bethany Mandel are the authors of a new book, Stolen Youth: How Radicals Are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation.  Writers, thinkers, and mothers, the pair look at what’s being done to children today by schools, Hollywood, government, and the medical profession.  Because Helen is interested in this stuff too – she stole the review copy when it arrived and I had to work hard to get it back – she’s contributed some questions to this interview, too.

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Glenn:  You had rather a rough childhood both before and after immigrating. Can you tell us a little about it? Does that have something to do with your concern for how today’s kids are treated?

Karol: It’s funny because while it was rough, in so many ways, I always felt like being a child was an important time and that childhood was something the people around me were trying to protect for me. What I saw during the pandemic was a reverse of that. Children were put last, again and again, especially in New York City where we were living. I knew I could save my own kids but because I had grown up poor, in a bad neighborhood, I knew there were so many people who couldn’t just easily form a pod for their kid or get them a tutor or move to their beach house to have space and sanity. I couldn’t forget about those people and I could not forget about their children. 

Helen: I was stunned when I read about the hardships you dealt with as a child.  You had to endure a lot of childhood trauma with a sick mom and an absent Dad yet you proved yourself resilient. Why are so many young people unable to cope with life these days?

Bethany: My mother was a social worker and prided herself on raising me tough. There was no wallowing, there was only moving forward. I was praised for working hard and she deeply resented the participation trophies they handed out to us as kids. In the last chapter, I talked about the therapist that “tough loved” me into not just self-identifying as an orphan and a victim. Now, kids are praised for their victimhood status; they’re encouraged to marinate in the bad parts of life.




Declining US IQ?



Shelby Kearns:

A recent study suggests that, for the first time in nearly 100 years, Americans’ average intelligence quotient (IQ) is declining. 

The professors who authored the study theorize that the quality of education could play a role in reversing the IQ gains enjoyed by previous generations.

The study, published in a spring 2023 edition of Intelligence, measures IQ test results among 18- to 60-year-olds to examine the phenomenon first observed by philosopher James Flynn. 

Professors from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and the University of Oregon in Eugene explain the Flynn effect: starting in 1932, average IQ scores increased roughly three to five points per decade. In other words, “younger generations are expected to have higher IQ scores than the previous cohort.”

Data from the sample of U.S. adults, however, imply that there is a reverse Flynn effect. From 2006 to 2018, the age groups measured generally saw declines in the IQ test used by the study, the International Cognitive Ability Resource (ICAR).

Overall declines held true across age groups after controlling for educational attainment and gender, but the study shows that the loss in cognitive abilities is steeper for younger participants. “[T]he greatest differences in annual scores were observed for 18- to 22-year-olds,” the authors write.




Higher Education Governance






“If enough of these kids get into the legal profession,” he said, “the rule of law will descend into barbarism.”



Aaron Sibarium:

The protest is perhaps the most extreme example yet of law students shouting down conservative speakers. A similar incident occurred at Yale Law School last year when Kristen Waggoner, a prominent Supreme Court litigator, was drowned out by hundreds of students protesting her views on transgender issues. Also last year, students at the University of California-Hastings disrupted a talk with the libertarian law professor Ilya Shapiro, shrieking and jeering each time he opened his mouth.

The tactics used against Duncan were nearly identical. Nearly everyone in the room showed up to disrupt the proceeding, according to Duncan and two members of the Federalist Society, and many of the hundred or so students on hand were holding profane signs, including one that declared: “Duncan can’t find the clit.”

Each time Duncan began to speak, the protesters would heckle him with insults, shouting things like “scumbag!” and “you’re a liar!”

The din became so loud that Duncan asked for an administrator to keep order, according to video of the event. That’s when Steinbach, the associate diversity dean, delivered her remarks. While she reminded students of the law school’s free speech policies, which prohibit the disruption of speakers, she proceeded to stand by while students continued to  heckle Duncan, videos from the event show.

She also expressed sympathy for students who wanted to “reconsider” those free speech policies, given the “harm” Duncan’s appearance had caused.

At least three other administrators—associate dean of student affairs Jory Steele, associate director of student affairs Holly Parish, and student affairs coordinator Megan Brown—were present throughout the event, according to Tim Rosenberger, a member of Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter. None of them told the students to allow Duncan to speak without interruption.

Eventually, one of the leaders of the protest instructed the students to “tone down the heckling slightly so we can get to our questions,” a video obtained by the Free Beacon shows. So began a contentious question and answer session between Duncan, who never got to read his prepared remarks, and his critics, who continued to disrupt and jeer as he spoke.




DIE Speech Suppression at Stanford



Audio.

David Lat:

What did Judge Duncan have to say for himself in general? In a phone interview this afternoon, he made several points to me:

  • “I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me because I had to endure a bunch of people jeering at me. I did think it was outrageous and unacceptable, but nobody should feel sorry for me. I’m still going to be a judge, and I’m still going to decide my cases.”

  • “I do feel bad—and outraged—for the Stanford FedSoc students. They are awesome people who just want to invite interesting judges to come talk to them. They’re a small group, obviously way outnumbered. They are the ones who lack power and status at Stanford Law. It’s ridiculous that they can’t get treated with civility, and it’s grotesquely unfair.”

  • “I get where my critics are coming from, and I understand why they don’t like me. They claim that I am marginalizing them and not recognizing their existence. But this is hypocritical of them, since that’s exactly what they are doing to their classmates in FedSoc.”

  • “I get the protesters, they are socialized into thinking the right approach to a federal judge you don’t agree with is to call him a f**ker and make jokes about his sex life. Awesome. I don’t care what they think about my sex life. But it took a surreal turn when the associate dean of DEI got up to speak…. She opens up her portfolio and lo and behold, there is a printed speech. It was a set up—and the fact that the administration was in on it to a certain degree makes me mad.”

  • “I later heard that the associate dean of DEI was claiming two things. First, she claimed that I didn’t have a prepared speech and was just there to stir up trouble. It was a long flight out to Stanford, I’m not a professional rabble-rouser like Milo Yiannopoulos, and I’m not trying to sell a book. I actually had a speech, it was on my iPad, and I was going to be talking about controversial cases handled by the Fifth Circuit that present difficult issues because the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on them is in flux.”

  • “Second, she claimed that the fact that two U.S. marshals showed up at the event was a sign that I’m a rabble-rouser and disruption always happens when I speak. But I didn’t bring or invite these marshals; these marshals from the Northern District of California just showed up after getting a tip-off. I have never been protested like that at any other law school, I have known of other conservative judges who have spoken at Stanford without any problems, and I spoke there in 2019 without any problems. So I was lulled into a false sense of security.”

  • “You don’t invite someone to your campus to scream and hurl invective at them. Did I speak sharply to some of the students? I did. Do I feel sorry about it? I don’t.”




Civics: the politics of independence and self reliance



James Pogue:

“When people who would abort a baby the day it’s born, threw kids under the bus during the pandemic, take kids to drag shows, and saddle our children with crippling debt,” Mr. Massie tweeted in October, “tell you how to live because they’re concerned about sea levels in 100 years, hide your children.”

It’s a debate that cuts to the heart of American politics. Mr. Massie’s version of being the “greenest member of Congress” is an explicit throwback to a Jeffersonian vision — of America as a country of people who live and work close to the land, with minimal government interference and a maximum of personal responsibility for the future of the nation. It is also a vision of rugged self-reliance that has long informed back-to-the-landers on the left, but that many on that side of politics now regard as the most insidious of American political poisons, one that has made collective action on issues like climate change impossible to achieve in this country.

“If Thomas Jefferson could have had solar panels at Monticello, he’d have had solar panels,” Mr. Massie told the libertarian economist and podcaster Matt Kibbe in 2019. “The less you have to go to the store and buy, the less dependent you are on Walmart — it’s not just that you’re greener, but you’re more independent.”




Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest



Jon Haidt:

In May 2014, Greg Lukianoff invited me to lunch to talk about something he was seeing on college campuses that disturbed him. Greg is the president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), and he has worked tirelessly since 2001 to defend the free speech rights of college students. That almost always meant pushing back against administrators who didn’t want students to cause trouble, and who justified their suppression of speech with appeals to the emotional “safety” of students—appeals that the students themselves didn’t buy. But in late 2013, Greg began to encounter new cases in which students were pushing to ban speakers, punish people for ordinary speech, or implement policies that would chill free speech. These students arrived on campus in the fall of 2013 already accepting the idea that books, words, and ideas could hurt them. Why did so many students in 2013 believe this, when there was little sign of such beliefs in 2011?

Greg is prone to depression, and after hospitalization for a serious episode in 2007, Greg learned CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). In CBT you learn to recognize when your ruminations and automatic thinking patterns exemplify one or more of about a dozen “cognitive distortions,” such as catastrophizing, black-and-white thinking, fortune telling, or emotional reasoning. Thinking in these ways causesdepression, as well as being a symptom of depression. Breaking out of these painful distortions is a cure for depression. 

What Greg saw in 2013 were students justifying the suppression of speech and the punishment of dissent using the exact distortions that Greg had learned to free himself from. Students were saying that an unorthodox speaker on campus would cause severe harm to vulnerable students (catastrophizing); they were using their emotions as proof that a text should be removed from a syllabus (emotional reasoning). Greg hypothesized that if colleges supported the use of these cognitive distortions, rather than teaching students skills of critical thinking (which is basically what CBT is), then this could cause students to become depressed. Greg feared that colleges were performing reverse CBT.




Civics: How Press Bias Fed FISA Abuse in the Trump-Russia Panic



Stewart Baker:


It looks like we’re in the morning-after stage of media coverage of former President Trump and his Russia connections. Most recently, the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) published a harsh analysis of the press’s role in stoking the Trump-Russia panic. The author, Jeff Gerth, is a respected former journalist, and the CJR is more or less the official organ of mainstream media, but the piece is an unsparing chronicle of how the media’s hostility to Trump led it to overhype the Trump-Russia connection. 

Gerth concludes that entering into an “undeclared war” with Trump has saddled the U.S. press with a lasting credibility problem. What’s been unnoticed until now is how the press’s unremitting hostility to Trump also hurt the credibility of the FBI and its intelligence operations. 

The Trump-Russia media saga began with a bit of journalistic malpractice. As the GOP convention was preparing to nominate Trump, Gerth tells us, the Washington Post ran one of the early attacks on Trump for kowtowing to Russian interests: a July 18 opinion column from Josh Rogin headlined, “Trump campaign guts GOP’s anti-Russian stance on Ukraine.” It was wrong. In Gerth’s understated words:




Civics: Anatomy of Misinformation






Education fads will make learning decline worse



Joanne Jacobs

“As bad as the pandemic was for student learning,” some education fads will make it worse, writes Greg Richmond, superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Across the country, schools are moving away from homework, grades, attendance and academic honors, he writes. “Numerous public school districts now prohibit teachers from giving students a score of less than 50% on homework,” even if the student does nothing or turns in plagiarized work. 

Parents who want a traditional education — grades and all — can turn to Catholic schools, Richmond writes. “As measured in last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress, Catholic schools’ eighth-grade reading scores increased during the pandemic, while public school scores declined,” he writes. 

“If Catholic schools were a state, they would be the highest performing in the nation on all four NAEP tests,” Kathleen Porter-Magee, superintendent of Partnership Schools, a network of Catholic schools in New York and Ohio, tweeted in October.

Many parents want a safe, orderly school that respects their role in raising their children.




Here’s the Ugly Truth About Why Middle Class Kids Aren’t Getting Into Harvard



Revolver:

Reading the comments leads to an army of angry replies claiming the story is phony. Admittedly, it’s an unnamed person sharing an account from an unnamed source, so of course it’s unproven. But anybody who finds Keenan’s story to be unlikely, or a surprise, is not paying attention to the reality at American colleges today. 

Critics of Keenan’s post pointed out that, thanks to 1996’s Proposition 209 (which survived a repeal push in 2020), California’s public universities are not allowed to use race as a factor in admissions. The response of those with a brain is simple: If you think the UC system is strictly following that law, you’re an idiot.




“Government adds approximately $88,500 to the average cost of each new-built home in the Midwest”



WILL:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) issued a new policy report,Priced Out of House and Home: How Laws and Regulation Add to Housing Prices in Wisconsin. The report examines the ways in which government regulation has contributed to the rising cost of home prices in Wisconsin. The report makes recommendations for both state and local policy makers to remove barriers to the development of more affordable market-rate housing. 

The Quote: WILL Policy Director, Kyle Koenen, said, “Arbitrary government regulations that restrict property rights and depress the supply of affordable, market-rate housing options are pricing more and more families out of their version of the American dream. Policymakers at all levels of government should work to remove unnecessary barriers that contribute to the growing costs of homes nationwide.” 

Background: Over the past few years, the rising cost of housing has been a growing concern amongst Americans, particularly those looking to purchase their first home. Fewer Americans believe that now is a good time to buy a home than those who believed this during the Great Recession. Furthermore, a record low number of Americans believe they are ever going to own a home. Historically, low levels of housing inventory suggest that the lack of supply plays a key role in the shortage of affordable market-rate housing options. In a nation where homeownership has historically been one of the primary means of wealth creation for lower- and middle-class families, the increase of people being crowded out of the housing market has the potential to obstruct upward mobility in the long-run.  

This tight supply can be attributed to a number of factors, including the inflation of construction materials and a lack of qualified labor. However, for developers that prepare land for housing and builders that build the homes, government regulations from the local, state and federal level make it more difficult and expensive to develop affordable-market rate housing.




K-12 Governance notes: reform edition



Christopher Rufo:

But now, five years later, the IDW has become a spent force. As the group was confronted with a series of real-world political decisions—the rise of Trump, the COVID crisis, and the anti-CRT movement—it fractured, splintered, and decomposed. With some notable exceptions, such as Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, and Bret Weinstein, the “centrists” of the IDW could never move from the domain of criticism to the domain of action. They acted as if they could solve political problems through interminable podcast debates and failed to offer a viable theory of change. 

Consequently, the IDW was overtaken by events. Although the movement deserves credit for pointing out the problem of left-wing overreach in America’s institutions, this critique is now part of conventional wisdom and is no longer sufficient. As I explain in my new video essay, the lesson of the IDW’s disintegration is clear: opponents of left-wing orthodoxy must grapple with the reality that, in a two-party democratic system, the path to reform must go through politics. If they want results, they must be willing to get their hands dirty.




Dropping the SAT Requirement Is a Luxury Belief



Rob Henderson:

The writer claims standardized tests penalize poor kids who get good grades. He calls it a “barrier.”1
 
I rarely see discussions about the reverse situations. There are poor kids who get bad grades but find a path upward because of standardized testing.

A 2016 study found that implementing a standardized testing requirement increased the number of poor and nonwhite kids in gifted programs. In other words, an IQ test administered to all students revealed that previously overlooked students from disadvantaged backgrounds qualified as academically gifted. 

Similarly, a British study found that when relying on their own impressions, teachers tended to view a kid from a low-income background as less academically competent even when they had the same test score as a rich kid. The objectivity of scores can serve as a useful corrective to the subjective nature of teacher evaluations.




Why Elite Law and Medical Schools Can’t Stand U.S. News



Eric Gentler:

Choosing the right school is one of the most important decisions students will ever make. Besides being a significant investment of time and money, it is a critical first step to ensuring a student’s future career opportunities, earning potential, and quality of life. But absent U.S. News’s academic rankings, it’s difficult to find accurate, comprehensive information that empowers students to compare institutions and identify the factors that matter most to them. We are one of the few places that do.

Our rankings don’t capture every nuance. Academic institutions aren’t monolithic or static; comparing them across a common data set can be challenging. But we reject our critics’ paternalistic view that students are somehow incapable of discerning for themselves from this information which school is the best fit.

Moreover, the perspective of elite schools doesn’t fit with that of the broader law- and medical-school community. Our editors held meetings with 110 law deans following the outcry over our rankings. Excepting the top 14 law schools, almost 75% of the schools that submitted surveys in 2022 did so in 2023. For medical schools, the engagement level was higher.




The unresponsive taxpayer supported Madison School District






In A Country With A Lot Of Parents, Why Can’t Democrats Even Cough Up The Words ‘Parent’s Rights?’
It’s reactionary, tone deaf, and not good for young people



Andrew Rotherham:

I was recently having lunch with a friend, who was a senior hand in the Carter White House. We were noting that in those days if you had predicted there would be a TV network where much of the guest talent was former military, CIA and other spooky types, FBI, and assorted other national security players and the audience lapping it up would be mostly Democrats you’d be laughed at. You’d be ridiculed even more if you then added that when the Russians invaded a sovereign nation many Republicans and conservatives would advocate against supporting efforts to counter Russian military force.

Yet here we are. It’s hard to miss how as a feature of the partisan hardening in this country our politics are becoming predictably and sometimes comically reactionary. There are counterexamples, sure, Joe Biden on crime and policing for instance cuts against the activist grain of the Democratic Party. But in general there is a reaction – counter-reaction problem. How many people died because they wouldn’t follow “Democratic” public health advice? When Donald Trump would call for due process Twitter would light up with people who formerly were at least nominally on board with civil liberties shouting him down. (Reader, even toxic losers deserve due process, it’s basically the whole idea). The ongoing January 6th saga is a depressing, and dangerous, example. Not long ago the Twitter spectacle would have freaked out liberals.

Here in education, one place this reactionary trend shows up a lot is around “parents rights.” Like “Make America Great Again” it’s one of these slogans that it’s sort of politically suicidal to be against yet people do it anyway. (I’m not talking about “MAGA” and 1/6 and all that, but just the 2016 version with those four words and their plain meaning.) When confronted with “Make America Great Again” Democrats could have said, yes, we should do that and here’s our agenda for how. Instead, prominent voices started arguing America wasn’t really ever great, and ridiculing people who love their country. Or, worse, claiming those who believe in American greatness are racist or deplorable and openly or secretly hoping to resurrect a pre-civil rights America. Sure, those types exist, but, not surprisingly this sentiment didn’t sit well with a lot of people who don’t think like that and also love their country. It helped turn a consequential election and drive a brutal wedge in our politics and culture. It’s why “ultra” MAGA or whatever stupid nomenclature is now being road tested.




Civics: The FBI Just Admitted It Bought US Location Data



Dell Cameron:

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged for the first time that it purchased US location data rather than obtaining a warrant. While the practice of buying people’s location data has grown increasingly common since the US Supreme Court reined in the government’s ability to warrantlessly track Americans’ phones nearly five years ago, the FBI had not previously revealed ever making such purchases. 

The disclosure came today during a US Senate hearing on global threats attended by five of the nation’s intelligence chiefs. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, put the question of the bureau’s use of commercial data to its director, Christopher Wray: “Does the FBI purchase US phone-geolocation information?” Wray said his agency was not currently doing so, but he acknowledged that it had in the past. He also limited his response to data companies gathered specifically for advertising purposes. 

“To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising,” Wray said. “I understand that we previously—as in the past—purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that’s not been active for some time.” He added that the bureau now relies on a “court-authorized process” to obtain location data from companies.




Georgia State Law School is putting together a conference on “Restoring trust in the CDC and FDA”



Steve Kirsch:

Georgia State Law School put together a “Restoring trust in the CDC and the FDA” conference in Atlanta. 

I think I can help with that but I was not asked to speak for some reason. I thought I have a valuable perspective to share.

I will be there with a cameraman and will try to see if I can help them with the “restoring trust” part. It will be fun.

You can attend too. It’s free. You can register for free.




DeWine’s laudable K-12 proposals on literacy instruction should not be mandatory for schools: editorial



Cleveland Plain Dealer:

In the two-year state budget he’s proposed, Republican Gov. Mike DeWine is asking the General Assembly to heavily invest in reading instruction as a cornerstone of Ohio’s schooling.

In doing so, the governor is coming down on one side of a longtime debate over which teaching strategy for reading — phonics instruction, now also known as “science of reading,” or “whole-language” strategies — is optimal. DeWine has cast his vote for phonics.

Pedagogical debates aside, there’s little wonder the governor is concerned. As DeWine said in his annual State of the State address, “Tragically, today 40% of all Ohio third-grade students are not proficient in reading — 40 percent!” There’s no Ohioan who can find that circumstance acceptable, least of all parents.

That’s why DeWine is calling for a “renewed focus on literacy — and on the way we teach reading in the state of Ohio.” On that front, the governor said the “evidence is clear, the verdict is in,” about the “great value and importance of phonics.”

To be sure, not all professional educators agree with that approach, but that’s what the pending state budget, if passed as proposed by DeWine, opts for. Decisively.




S.F. bureaucrats give woman a choice: Remove free library or pay $1,400 after one anonymous complaint



Heather Knight

For more than a decade, Susan Meyers’ front sidewalk proved a cheerful hub in her Lower Pacific Heights neighborhood — until one anonymous grump called 311. In this city notorious for giving tremendous credence to solitary complainers — who have the right to halt housing projects, foil their neighbors’ housing remodels and stall emergency transit projects — that one call compelled a visit from a Public Works inspector.

And soon, Meyers’ adorable little library had a notice affixed to it with bright blue tape giving her two choices: Remove the bench and the library or pay $1,402 for a “minor encroachment permit.”




Why school choice won’t get here fast enough



Tom Knighton:

When I was in school, I went to public school bookended by stints at private school. I’ve seen a bit of everything, in that regard, including secular and religious instruction, to some degree.

So when I tell people I’m a school choice supporter, they need to understand I’ve seen both sides of it.

But there’s another reason to support school choice, and that’s the fact that progressive policies have made so many public schools into Thunderdome.

From National Review:

A 200-pound Ontario middle schooler was getting ready to pummel his classmate when a group of teachers escorted him to an office where they hoped to calm him down — instead, he proceeded to ram into the two adults, a man and a woman, for the better part of an hour, leaving them shaken and bruised. He never faced any consequences.




Civics: notes on YouTube (google) censorship



Amy:

What was the content? A somewhat geeky episode in which Benjamin and I explored the epistemological implications of an analogy between a specific aspect of the Dominion v. Fox News defamation case, and an accusation commonly leveled at COVID-19 mRNA “vaccine skeptics.” Apparently, during the course of this long-form discussion on the contextual nature of the onus of proof, Benjamin or I shared Super Dangerous Medical Misinformation. Watch it if you dare on Rumble:




Madison East High School senior wins Journalist of the Year award



Wyatt Bandt:

A Madison high school student was named Journalist of the Year by the Wisconsin Journalism Education Association.

Kadjtata Bah, a senior from Madison East High School, was given the title for her “outstanding background in journalistic work.” 

She began writing about topics she was interested in for the Simpson Street Free Press at the age of 11. Now, she’s one of the publication’s Senior Teen Editors, and she helps writers as old as seven grow their skills. Bah’s written on historical, cultural, political and community-focused topics.

She’s also been an intern for the Dane County Land and Water Resources Department, The Cap Times and Madison Magazine. She also works as a volunteer reporter for the Eastside news, is a staff writer for her school’s yearbook and is a staff member for her school’s broadcast program.




Our public education system has abandoned excellence for ideology



Scott Yenor:

Scenes from the Loudoun county, Virginia, school board meetings riveted Americans during 2021. A girl had been raped in a school bathroom by a boy dressed as a girl. For fear of running afoul of transgender ideologues, the district covered up the crime. Soon after her father was arrested for complaining bitterly at a school board meeting, the National Association of School Boards asked the U.S. Department of Justice to treat complaining parents as domestic terror threats. An early draft of the Association’s letter called on the federal government to deploy the National Guard and military police to restrain parents at school board meetings.

Luke Rosiak’s Race to the Bottom shows that such episodes are produced by an educational system that has abandoned excellence for ideology. The proximate causes of the equity agenda include zealots in the ranks of teachers, principals, and board members. But, Rosiak shows, the ultimate cause is a system funded from top to bottom by social justice crusaders determined to transform the public schools in order to transform the country.

An investigative reporter for the Daily Wire who broke stories putting a national spotlight on Loudoun County public schools, Rosiak reveals “the secret forces destroying American public education,” as his subtitle promises. The book also shows how the Left “marches through”—captures and controls—powerful governing institutions. Once you see this process in detail here, you will see it everywhere.




Civics: Texit






Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?



Suzy Weiss:

When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes. 

But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.

“Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me. 

Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten. 

He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them. 

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.




Civics: Collecting information from Americans raises ongoing civil liberties concerns.



Betsy Woodruff Swan:

Carrie Bachner, formerly the career senior legislative adviser to the DHS under secretary for intelligence, said the fact that the agency is directly questioning Americans as part of a domestic-intelligence program is deeply concerning, given the history of scandals related to past domestic-intelligence programs by the FBI.

Bachner, who served as a DHS liaison with Capitol Hill from 2006 to 2010, said she told members of Congress “adamantly” — over and over and over again — that I&A didn’t collect intelligence in the U.S.

“I don’t know any counsel in their right mind that would sign off on that, and any member of Congress that would say, ‘That’s OK,’” said Bachner, who currently runs a consulting firm. “If these people are out there interviewing folks that still have constitutional privileges, without their lawyer present, that’s immoral.”

DHS Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Kenneth Wainstein, a former federal prosecutor who took the helm of I&A last June, said in a statement that his office is addressing its employees’ concerns. An I&A spokesperson provided POLITICO with a list of steps the office has taken since September 2020 to address internal complaints, including conducting a number of new trainings and hiring two full-time ombudsmen.




Thomas Jefferson and the smoothening of the American mind



Douglas Murray:

In recent weeks I have been trying out a mental exercise. Perhaps you might join me? Cast your mind back to 1999. We were standing on the dawn of a new millennium. True, there was a strange fear that all the computers might crash because of a bug called Y2K. But aside from that there seemed to be a tremendous optimism. One of the biggest causes for this was the nature of information technology: specifically, the internet.

Imagine if someone had said to you then: “We are heading into a world where almost anything can be…




College Should Be More Like Prison



Brooke Allen:

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet. Cyber-cheating, even assuming they wanted to indulge in it, is impossible. But more important, they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones. My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.




Civics: Diving into the US “Censorship Industrial Complex“






Notes on math education



Summer Allen:

A new study finds that high school students identify more with math if they see their math teacher treating everyone in the class equitably, especially in racially diverse schools. The study by researchers at Portland State University, Loyola University Chicago and the University of North Texas was published in the journal Sociology of Education. Dara Shifrer, associate professor of sociology at Portland State and former middle school math teacher, led the study.

Who can do well in math? How you answer that question may depend on where you live. Whereas people in East Asian countries tend to believe that hard work can lead anyone to succeed at math, people in the United States are more likely to believe that people need natural talent in the subject to succeed. This perception means that students in the U.S. may be particularly susceptible to racial and gender stereotypes about who is and is not “good at math.”

“Americans don’t realize what strange stereotypes we have about math,” says Shifrer. “It really sets kids up for failure here.”

The fact that some high school students are more likely to give up on math than others has important implications for their individual futures and for the lack of diversity in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers.

Much more on the successful citizen lawsuit overturning the Seattle School District’s use of Discovery Math, here.

http://seattlemathgroup.blogspot.com/.

Discovery Math

Connected math.

Singapore Math


Local links: Math Task Force, Math Forum Audio/Video and West High School Math Teachers letter to Isthmus.




Civics: “And they posed as democracy preservationists!”



Ann Althouse:

“… to disclose that video and they did not do so. And all the while, they were actively representing to the court and the American people that Jake was a leader, leading the charge into the Capitol….They did not disclose that footage because it ran contrary to their rote narrative…. I’ve never seen anything so vile as what I’m seeing right now…. It’s a departure from a pretty high standard they’ve maintained for a long time. Anyone who needs to have belief in the integrity of our justice system, whether they’re a left-wing New England academic or a raging right-winger, needs to say that this is really wrong and f—ing it up for everyone.”




Thousands of US public schools hide child’s gender status from parents



Josh Christenson

Nearly 6,000 US public schools are employing guidance policies that block parents from knowing whether their child identifies as a different gender in the classroom — which could become federal policy if President Biden’s Title IX proposals are approved in May.

At least 168 school districts nationwide have rules on the books that prevent faculty and staff from disclosing to parents a student’s gender status without that student’s permission, according to a list compiled by the conservative group Parents Defending Education and shared with The Post.

More than 3.2 million students are affected by such policies in all kinds of districts — large and small, affluent and poor, urban and rural, red and blue — stretching from North Carolina to Alaska.




21-day antiracism, inclusion, diversity, and equity challenge at our former public school in Maskachusetts



Philip Greenspun:

We are informed that racism is a public health emergency (example from Minneapolis; and “Declare Racism a Public Health Emergency” (New York Times)). Yet, according to the above chart, the emergency is not so severe as to preclude a “Pause for February Vacation”. It is okay to sit on the beach in Aruba while daily oppression continues.

The white background indicates that white is the default and/or preferred race? One good thing about our former town is that I’m pretty sure almost everyone there is qualified as an expert on the Day 4 subject: “What is Whiteness?” Also note that the next step after identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+ is joining the military (days 18 and 19).




I called for more research on the COVID ‘lab leak theory.’ Here’s what I found out



Michael Worobey:

We should instead be asking: What is the chance that a big Chinese city like Wuhan would have a lab doing the kind of research that has come under suspicion? The answer is, the vast majority of the biggest cities in China have labs involved in such research. If COVID had emerged in, say, Beijing, there would be no fewer than four such labs facing suspicion.

I remain open to any and all evidence supporting a laboratory origin of the pandemic. So far, we have no such evidence.




Radical Optimist: Kevin Kelly



Noah Smith:

Despite the relentless hype, I think AI overall is underhyped. The long-term effects of AI will affect our society to a greater degree than electricity and fire, but its full effects will take centuries to play out. That means that we’ll be arguing, discussing, and wrangling with the changes brought about by AI for the next 10 decades. Because AI operates so close to our own inner self and identity, we are headed into a century-long identity crisis.




“The false promise of ChatGPT, et al”



Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought. These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity and every other distinctively human faculty.

That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.

It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.




Civics: Taxpayer Supported City of Madison plans to sue Carmakers over theft vulnerability….



Kimberly Wethal:

The city of Madison is gearing up to sue carmakers Kia and Hyundai for creating a public nuisance by failing to equip their vehicles with anti-theft software, which it says led to a sharp uptick in the theft of the companies’ vehicles last year.

The City Council on Tuesday passed a resolution authorizing the city to hire outside legal counsel to file a federal lawsuit against Kia and Hyundai for what the city in a statement called their “role in creating a public nuisance.”

Car thefts dropped by 5% in Madison last summer, compared to the prior year, but thefts of Kia and Hyundai vehicles increased by 270%, making up 45% of all stolen auto cases in July and August. Rates of Kia and Hyundai thefts are even higher in Milwaukee, where the two brands comprise 60% of all stolen autos.




Reflecting on learning, yesterday and today



David Foster

Reading the above, the first thing that struck me was that a university dean, especially one who is an English professor, should not view the 19th century as ‘a very long time ago’…most likely, though, she herself probably does not have such a foreshortened view of time,  rather, she’s probably describing what she observes as the perspective of her students (though it’s hard to tell from the quote).  It does seem very likely that the K-12 experiences of the students have been high on presentism, resulting in students arriving at college  “with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach,” as a junior professor who joined the faulty in 2021 put it.  One would hope, though, that to the extent Harvard admits a large number of such students, it would focus very seriously on challenging that worldview.  I do not get the impression that it actually does so.

In a discussion of the above passage at Twitter, Paul Graham @PaulG said:

One of the reasons they have such a strong “orientation toward the present” is that the past has been rewritten for a lot of them.

to which someone responded: 

that’s always been true! it’s not like the us didn’t rewrite the history of the civil war to preserve southern feelings for 100 years. what’s different is that high schools are no longer providing the technical skills necessary for students to read literature!




How I Was Wrong About Covid; When even libertarians trust the government too much.



Glenn Reynolds:

I was right about all that, though it was worse than I anticipated.  And yet Covid was, it turned out, not as bad as I anticipated.  In the early days, I was a Covid hawk, but I was wrong to be.  It seemed right at the time.  The Chinese called it a “grave” threat, and their tendency had always been to downplay bad things in China.  There were reports of death rates ranging from 4% to 10%.

Sure, Anthony Fauci and Nancy Pelosi and Bill DeBlasio were telling us not to worry and go visit Chinatown, but I lacked confidence in them.  (Hey, I was right about that.)  They reversed course like a week later.

It turned out, of course, that Covid’s mortality rate was significantly less than 1/10 of those early reports, and those deaths were mostly concentrated among the obese, the elderly, and those with heart failure and diabetes.  (Even in those early days, just about exactly three years ago now, my yoga teacher told me that her son-in-law, an ER doc in New Orleans, said that all his Covid ICU patients were morbidly obese).  Neither the lockdowns nor the masking requirements did any good, really, though they caused a lot of trauma, inconvenience, and colossal economic destruction.

In retrospect, I should have been more skeptical.  It’s hard to believe that I, of all people, trusted the government too much, but there you are.  Well, lesson learned.

In mitigation, I should note that co-bloggers Sarah Hoyt and Charlie Martin were as skeptical as I should have been. There were people who wanted me to shut them down, but that’s not how we work at InstaPundit, and even then I was open to – and hopeful for – the prospect that they might be right, as of course they were, and I might be wrong, as of course I was.




The link between IQ and income is overrated



Tyler Cowen:

The evidence is striking. One study of CEOs of large Swedish companies found that on average they ranked at the 83rd percentile of measured IQ (for CEOs of smaller companies, the rank was the 66th percentile). That’s above average, but it’s hardly a cluster at the top of the distribution. Many CEOs undoubtedly achieved their position through hard work, charisma, people skills and other abilities, not to mention luck.

In the broader distribution, the connection between IQ and income is also positive but underwhelming. One study concluded that moving from the 25th to the 75th percentile of IQ correlates with a 10% to 16% boost in earnings. That may feel significant when you get it, but it doesn’t push you into a whole new socioeconomic class.




Film Review: Review: The Right to Read



Kadjata Bah, age 18

new documentary film called The Right to Readadds to growing national debates about literacy and the science of reading. This timely and compelling film is streaming for free until March 9, 2023.

Directed by Jenny Mackenzie and produced by LeVar Burton, the film follows a long-time activist, a teacher, and two families as they navigate the future of education.

Kareem Weaver is an Oakland-based activist with the NAACP. He is an experienced educator, and his mission is to create a world where 95% of children can read. Working with Sabrina Causey, a rookie first grade teacher in Oakland, the two make a case for a new curriculum for their students based in the science of reading.

The film comes right as the “reading wars” of the 1990s have come to another head. The debate between the research-based science of reading and the whole language or balanced literacy approach now holds more dire consequences for the crisis American children face.

Currently, 37% of fourth graders in the U.S. read below grade level. While literacy is a concern for all children, gaps are especially pronounced among children of color. In fact, about 50% of all Black students graduate high school reading below grade level. Illiteracy is not only an academic burden as research shows that people who cannot read proficiently are more likely to end up in prison, homeless, and unemployed.

“Imagine being in the Stone Age and you ain’t got no stone. Imagine being in the Bronze Age and you ain’t got no bronze. We’re in the Information Age right now—and you can’t read the information,” said Weaver while explaining the current reading crisis.

Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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




Civics: FTC Twitter Investigation Sought Elon Musk’s Internal Communications, Journalist NamesCivics:



Ryan Tracy:

The Federal Trade Commission has demanded Twitter Inc. turn over internal communications related to owner Elon Musk, as well as detailed information about layoffs—citing concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company’s ability to protect users, documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal show.

In 12 letters sent to Twitter and its lawyers since Mr. Musk’s Oct. 27 takeover, the FTC also asked the company to “identify all journalists” granted access to company records and to provide information about the launch of the revamped Twitter Blue subscription service, the documents show.

The FTC is also seeking to depose Mr. Musk in connection with the probe.

“We are concerned these staff reductions impact Twitter’s ability to protect consumers’ information,” an FTC official wrote to Twitter’s lawyers on Nov. 10 following an initial wave of layoffs, according to a copy of the letter viewed by the Journal.




Math challenges



Joanne Jacobs:

Math scores are way down: The Education Recovery Scorecard estimates students lost half a year. But Boaler believes it doesn’t matter. It’s “quite clear” the students gained “knowledge and insights about the world, health challenges, global upheaval, exponential growth, technology, and ways to help their families and navigate complex social situations,” she writes.

This is not clear to me at all. If anything, it’s quite clear that many lost the ability to navigate complex — or even simple — social situations, and I’m dubious about their knowledge and insights too. Screen time soared. That doesn’t mean they’re masters of technology. Physical and mental health declined.

Learning math matters, responds Fordham’s Nathaniel Grossman. Two decades of growth was “wiped out in just three years,” NAEP scores revealed. If we don’t do something about learning loss, this generation could be locked out of high-paying STEM careers, he writes. “One Stanford economist estimates that it’ll reduce the lifetime earnings of students by $70,000 and cause a $28 trillion hit to the American economy.”




Civics: Santa Clara County, California, imposed some of the harshest Covid restrictions in America. A church and its members defied them — and became the targets of an unprecedented surveillance operation



David Zweig:

Long famous as the core of Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County, California, also earned the distinction in the last three years as perhaps the most aggressive and punitive enforcer of pandemic restrictions in the country. On March 16, 2020, Santa Clara, along with a half-dozen other Bay Area counties, was the first in the nation to announce a shelter in place order, commanding all citizens to remain at home other than for specific activities that the county deemed essential, such as food shopping or medical care. It wasn’t until mid-October — seven months after the initial order — that Sara Cody, the head of the county’s public health department, began allowing indoor gatherings at churches, provided they were no more than 100 people or 25 percent of a facility’s capacity, whichever was fewer. At these limited gatherings face coverings and social distancing were required, and singing was banned.

San Jose’s Calvary Chapel, led by its pastor, Mike McClure, brazenly defied these orders. On May 24, 2020, McClure stated publicly that he would reopen the church the following week, regardless of the health department’s orders, and that he would never close the church again. After two months of isolation, many congregants were teetering toward despair. They were suffering greatly from loneliness, depression, and crippling anxiety — the church was their community, and returning to the normalcy of its rituals and in-person fellowship was vital for their mental, spiritual, and physical well-being. 

True to McClure’s word, at the end of May Calvary began holding indoor gatherings, often with hundreds of worshipers, a large portion of whom were without masks, in breach of distancing rules, and singing. This set off a collision between the openly defiant church and the county that culminated in two lawsuits. One, in federal court, in June 2020, by the church against the county, claiming the restrictions violated a list of constitutional rights, and the other, in state court, in October 2020, by the county against the church, for “flagrantly and repeatedly” violating public health orders and nonpayment of fines.




Civics: California Public Health is building a “decision support” system



Dr. Tomas Aragón

Decision-making is our most important activity.1“A decision is a choice between two or more alternatives that involves an irrevocable allocation of resources.” Decisions drive vision, strategy, policy, and transformational change. Every decision has causal assumptions, predictions, trade-offs, and an opportunity cost—the lost benefit of the better option(s) not chosen or not considered. Some decisions have extreme time constraints under deep uncertainty.

Decision intelligence is using ethics, science, and technology to improve individual and team decisions for finding and solving problems, and achieving objectives and key results in challenging, including VUCA,2 environments (Figure 1).




Reducing Rigor at CUNY



Bob McManus:

n mid-January, when Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez grandly announced it will no longer be necessary to do college-level academic work to receive graduation credit at CUNY’s seven community colleges.

How long it will take for that policy to migrate to the institution’s 11 senior colleges is anybody’s guess; entropy being what it is, however, it’ll happen soon enough — if it hasn’t already.

Here’s a summary of the sad facts.

CUNY’s student body overwhelmingly is drawn from the New York City public-school system. Way back in the day, when city schools more or less worked, CUNY freshmen arrived more or less prepared for college-level instruction.




Roald Dahl ebooks ‘force censored versions on readers’ despite backlash



The Times:

Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matildaand Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.

Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle.




Libraries can’t escape the push for digitization, but we still need actual books on shelves



Andrew Stauffer:

In “Church Going”—Philip Larkin’s 1955 poem on the fade-out of religious faith in the modern world—the narrator wonders why, despite his own apathy and ignorance, he keeps visiting churches. Bicycling on Sunday afternoons, he finds himself “tending to this cross of ground,” even as he recognizes they no longer have the power to hold “unspilt . . . what since is found / Only in separation.” Looking forward, he wonders “when churches will fall completely out of use / What we shall turn them into,” imagining most of them slowly crumbling to ruin amid rain and sheep, with only “a few cathedrals” kept “chronically on show.” The poem ends as he tries to foresee “who / Will be the last, the very last,” to seek a church “for what it was,” the final representative of beliefs wedded to practices within “the special shell” created to house them.

Larkin’s poem has been coming to mind lately as I visit libraries, and I’ve begun to wonder to what extent my interactions with them and their contents are becoming anomalous, a twilit posture. Many institutions have moved, or are on the verge of moving, significant portions of their collections off-site. Some are embarking on large-scale book de-accessioning projects, a process by which books are removed permanently from a collection. Across North America, academic library buildings themselves are being reconfigured as “information hubs” and “learning spaces.” 

Going forward, what will be the claim of printed materials on our resources, our scholarship, and our imaginations?




Wisconsin Governor Evers Comments on our Long Term, Disastrous Reading Results



About 25 to 27 minutes into the program.

Jeff Mayers: “You want a big hunk of the surplus to go to K-12, you’ve already talked about that along with the state school Superintendent. I want to focus a bit on the reading program. Last session you vetoed a bi-partisan bill to boost reading scores. This time around, there’s something in the budget about that. I’m wondering, what is your approach vs what that approach was? How does it differ? What’s your view as a former school Superintendent on the state of reading in Wisconsin?

Governor Evers: “Well, I’ll start with the latter, it has to be better. It cannot exist as it does right now. Certainly the pandemic played a huge role in that, but at the end of the day, we’ve struggled with reading outcomes for some time. We need to take a different look at it. The difference between that bill and what’s in the budget now is frankly that I thought the bill took away authority from the local boards of education in the State which I think is the wrong approach.

This is more about retraining teachers and providing support to teaching staff as it relates to reading, and I think its a winner, I think it adopts practices that we’ve seen working across the country. I think its a step in the right direction. It’s pricey, there’s no question about that. But education is where our economy starts and ends, frankly. If we don’t invest and take care of issues that are difficult we are hurting our state’s economy and our quality of life.”

Jeff Mayers: “There does seem to be a consensus building around that.” Governor Evers: “Yes, that’s a good thing.”

Governor Evers vetoed AB446 during the fall of 2021.

Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.

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?




DPI Testimony, Q&A Wisconsin Education Committee



Audio

Transcript

One of the line items in Wisconsin Motion 57 directly connects to our ED prep programs and reading. It states that Wisconsin will [00:11:00] contract with a vendor who will conduct an analysis of reading program coursework in our UW institutions. After engaging in our very robust and required state procurement process, the Department of Administration selected a vendor for that work.

[00:11:15] That vendor is TPI Today, March 2nd, ironically, national Read Across America Day. Uh, that vendor is meeting with the deans of our Schools of Education in the UW system in order to provide details and timelines about that opportunity. The other thing that Motion 57 provides for is additional funds for grants for those UW systems that want to make changes to their courses.

Based on the findings and the report of that vendor, T P I us, I bring this to your attention to remind us of an existing policy that is currently in the early stages of implementation that could also have a real impact on [00:12:00] reading achievement in Wisconsin. We are definitely taking both and approaches in every step of the way.

…..

[00:27:25] Senator John Jagler: So to, to that end. If you’ve already kind of identified some that you would recommend, and they’re not the local, we are a local control state. I ran for state senate, not for Watertown school, district School board. But having said that, if 80% of the school districts aren’t recommending what youth put out there on, on a general level, would you then support a, a type of bill that had included a package that, that eliminated some of the bad programs and curriculum, the queuing method, fountain and Pinnell as, as the professor recommended.

…..

[00:45:09] It’s important to note here that while while many states, um, went in the direction of eliminating lifetime teaching licenses in order to add professional learning requirements, in Wisconsin, we did the opposite. We used to have professional learning requirements for our educators, and we eliminated those in the favor of having lifetime licenses.

Additional testimony: Mark Seidenberg Kymyona Burk Instructional Coach Kyle Thayse

3 Minute Summary by Senator Duey Stroebel




Instructional Coach Kyle Thayse Wisconsin Education Committee Testimony; Q&A; Lucy Calkins




Transcript

mp3 Audio Entire hearing video.

An interesting excerpt, regarding their use of the discredited Lucy Caulkins Reading Curriculum (see Sold a Story):

Senator John Jagler. Thank you. I, as I talked to, to my local administrators, [00:21:00] um, I’m fascinated. Curriculum choices that have been made and continue to be made.

[00:21:06] And I’m, I’m, I’m quite honestly surprised you, you, you double down on one of the bad actors, uh, not my words, I’m not an expert, but identified Lucy Calkins in this units of study as one of the bad actors, a bad actors in this, um, whole fight on the science of reading. Why did you go there? Why did you go back to, to you, you know, went back to her version 2.0, which her critics would say, were only done because the spotlight was being shined on her by, by others.

[00:21:42] Kyle Thayse: I knew this question was coming today, so I kind of prepared myself. I thought that that was gonna be asked. So, um, you know, there was, there’s a couple, a couple of reasons. I think as a district, we, we, we made that decision. Um, and I’ll be honest, I was, I was, I was for it. Um, and, and a lot of it is, The, um, the [00:22:00] professional development that, um, I feel like we were able to lead through the district outside of the curriculum problems.

[00:22:08] Kyle Thayse: The what, what the curriculum brought to the table as far as the growth of our teachers, the tightness, the, the tightness, and the, uh, the collegial conversations about learning that happened on a daily basis in, in our classrooms. It was brought upon by that, by the models of that. and, um, above that second grade level, we, we don’t have, there’s, there’s no real issues, you know, with the curriculum.

[00:22:32] Kyle Thayse: It’s, it’s, it’s robust, it has great topics. Um, kids are exposed to a lot of different vocabulary with within it, and even at the lower levels it is too. Um, we did identify those problems that were in there and, uh, we didn’t, we didn’t take the full leap of faith right away. We purchased first the, the manuals and, um, I tasked myself with reading.

[00:22:50] Kyle Thayse: Every kindergarten manual, every first grade manual said to me, those were the two most important, uh, manuals. Every unit in that manual to identify in there, do, do I find [00:23:00] any of this at all? And, um, there was one little spot that I was concerned and I thought we were gonna have an issue. . Um, but what ended up happening was the, that part of the unit was actually more of an emergent reader.

[00:23:10] Kyle Thayse: Early, early literacy before students are even learning sounds, portion of the curriculum, um, where students were, were learning. Uh, the, the pattern part of the book was more of the memorization, the storytelling part where kids learn how stories go. This is like 4K, early kindergarten curriculum stuff. And, um, And past that, there were, I, they, there was the use of decodable texts.

[00:23:30] Kyle Thayse: There was, um, there was not any of the use of, of of, of the, uh, use the picture to solve the word. There was, um, a lot, uh, actually I would say almost triple the amount of lessons on phonics and emmic awareness within the actual reading curriculum. I mean, this is outside of the phonic tum that we already used.

[00:23:46] Kyle Thayse: Um, so once we saw that all in there, um, the price tag on a whole new curriculum, uh, the professional development that goes along. Um, and, and, and the time that it would take, uh, we thought we would be able to move faster as long [00:24:00] as the right tools were in there and we felt the tools were there.

Additional testimony: Mark Seidenberg Kymyona Burk DPI

3 Minute Summary by Senator Duey Stroebel




DIE and the taxpayer supported Madison School District



Scott Girard:

An effort that began in summer 2021 to gauge the Madison Metropolitan School District’s equity work found that students, parents and staff are aware of some district efforts toward diversity, equity and inclusion but want more involvement and more communication with district administration.

The district partnered with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University, for the work, which included interviews of 380 people. Jackson was the director of the Wisconsin Equity & Inclusion Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until last summer when he left for MSU.

On Monday, Jackson presented the findings to the Madison School Board along with seven recommendations:

• Develop and disseminate a DEI strategic plan

• Create systems of rewards and accountability for MMSD DEI efforts

• Generate a strategy for hiring and retaining teachers of color

• Engage families in DEI efforts

• Review and standardize DEI curriculum and implementation efforts across the MMSD

• Emphasize and advance diversity in all its forms

• Provide transparent, accessible, and safe opportunities for feedback to MMSD leaders

District officials and School Board members suggested changes in response to the audit must work in conjunction with changes resulting from the recent human resources report and the ongoing strategic framework recalibration process. Superintendent Carlton Jenkins said moving toward equity will require a “collaborative effort” with the board, administration and community involved.

“This has got to be all in,” Jenkins said.

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?




“But Joseph, a Haitian immigrant raising him by herself, did not know how far behind he was in reading — in the 30th percentile”



Bianca Vasquez Toness

“I’m sad and disappointed,” Joseph said through an interpreter. “It’s only because I was assigned an educational advocate that I know this about my son.”

It’s widely known from test scores that the pandemic set back students across the country. But many parents don’t realize that includes their own child.

Schools have long faced criticism for failing to inform certain parents about their kids’ academic progress. But after the COVID-19 school closures, the stakes for children have in many ways never been greater. Opportunities to catch up are plentiful in some places, thanks to federal COVID aid, but won’t last forever. It will take better communication with parents to help students get the support they need, experts say

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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




A guide to Plan S: the open-access initiative shaking up science publishing



Holly Else

In 2018, an influential group of research funders announced a bold pledge: the scientists they fund should publish their peer-reviewed papers outside journal paywalls. The initiative, called Plan S, caused an instant uproar over its aim of ending journal subscription models — the means by which many scholarly publications have financed their existence. Its intended start date in 2020 was delayed, and its details were tweaked. But after much sparring over policy, the project formally began in 2021, with 25 funding agencies rolling out similar open-access (OA) mandates.




What happens when people live to be very old and don’t have a passel of kids to take care of them?



Virginia Postrel:

Most of the coverage of Japan’s aging population focuses on the current low birth rate and its implications for the future. In January, prime minister Fumio Kishida told legislators that the country is “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” because of its falling birth rate. “In thinking of the sustainability and inclusiveness of our nation’s economy and society, we place child-rearing support as our most important policy,” he said.

But even if the government succeeds in goosing the birth rate, the effects will be felt decades from now. Japan has an immediate problem that dates back to policies adopted in 1948. People over 75 now make up 15 percent of the population, and they don’t have a lot of kids to take care of them. Japan’s postwar baby boom lasted only about two years. By contrast, the U.S. experienced high birth rates from 1946 to 1964. 

In 1948, the Diet passed the Eugenic Protection Law. It made abortions legal and cheap, about $10. “Critics assert that it is easier for a woman to avoid an unwanted child in this way than to have her tonsils re­moved,” The New York Times reported in 1964. “One result of the prac­tice has been the virtual elimi­nation of illegitimate births.”




Civics: Credibility crisis: CNN boss ordered staff not to chase down COVID lab leak theory as pandemic unfolded



Brian Flood, Joseph Wulfsohn and David Rutz:

CNN has long referred to itself as “the most trusted name in news” and famously launched its “Facts First” campaign during the Trump era, but like many other outlets, that sentiment fell by the wayside when it came to the COVID lab-leak theory.

In recent days, the theory that COVID originated from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been embraced by FBI Director Christopher Wray and a bombshell report indicated that the U.S. Energy Department believes the virus likely started in the lab, a sentiment expressed by top Trump administration officials nearly from the outset.

But in the early months of the pandemic, then-CNN president Jeff Zucker would not allow his network to chase down the lab-leak story because he believed it was a “Trump talking point,” according to a well-placed CNN insider. 

“People are slowly waking up from the fog,” the insider told Fox News Digital. “It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”




The feminization of the American university is all but complete.



Heather MacDonald:

Sometimes a single incident efficiently summarizes a larger trend. So it is with New York University’s selection of its new president, Linda Mills, a licensed clinical social worker and an NYU social work professor. She researches trauma and bias, as well as race and gender in the legal academy. She is a documentary filmmaker and teaches advocacy filmmaking. She serves as an NYU vice chancellor and as a senior vice provost for Global Programs and University Life. In all these roles, Mills is the very embodiment of the contemporary academy. The most significant part of her identity, however, and the one that ties the rest of her curriculum vitae together, is that she is female, and thus overdetermined as NYU’s next president.

Mills is part of the Great Feminization of the American university, an epochal change whose consequences have yet to be recognized. Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.

These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not. Among the official diversity bureaucrats installed in their posts since July 2022, females predominate: the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at the University of California, San Diego; the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at UCLA; the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Maryville University in Missouri; the chief diversity officer and vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the School of Education at the College of Charleston in South Carolina; the vice president for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at Kansas State University; the associate dean of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at the University of Kansas School of Law; the vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the vice president for inclusion and community impact at Herzing University in Wisconsin; the associate provost for faculty and diversity initiatives at Muhlenberg College (this associate provost also became Muhlenberg’s first chief diversity officer); the first chief officer of culture, belonging, and community building at Delta College in Michigan; the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh; the vice provost for faculty diversity, equity, and inclusivity at the University of Texas, Austin (a lateral move from the position of managing director of diversity in UT’s office of the executive vice president and provost); the vice president for equity, culture, and talent at Prince George’s Community College—all are female.




Student Engagement Crisis



Chronicle:

“Defeated,” “exhausted,” “overwhelmed” — these were typical responses when TheChronicle asked faculty members how their students were faring. Professors reported widespread anxiety, depression, and a lack of motivation in their classrooms. Recent survey data from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health show a rise in students’ reports of their social anxiety and academic worries. Professors, meanwhile, are frustrated by their inability to reach those students. And they’re worn out from trying. “It feels like I’m pouring energy into a void,”




Asian American Studies



Tat Bellamy-Walker

“Adding more AAPI history curriculums would solidify the fact that Asians are Americans and Asians belong here,” Fedor said. “Had a lot of my classmates learned about AAPI being called ‘yellow peril’ in the past or about the Chinese Exclusion Act or the plague outbreak in San Francisco’s Chinatown — had they learned about that, maybe they would have thought back before they said these insensitive comments.” 

New Jersey is slated to become the second state to mandate Asian American history as part of its public school curriculum, after Illinois did so in July. Ohio, California, New York, Florida and Connecticut have ignited similar pushes for curricula that are inclusive of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Last year, lawmakers in California passed legislation requiring ethnic studies, which focuses on Asian Americans and other racial groups, in high school.

According to California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, the lessons include dismantling the model minority myth, xenophobia, bigotry and other forms of institutional privilege. 

“It presents a false narrative that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) have overcome racism and prejudice,” the lesson plan read. “Students will understand how this label for AAPIs becomes a hindrance to expanding democratic structures and support, and worst how it creates a division among the AAPI community and places a wedge between them and other oppressed groups.” 




Doctors must reject Big Pharma’s soulless treatment model.



Steven Goldsmith:

I sit at the bedside grieving over medicine as it expires into a soulless technocracy. I watch its extremities cyanose as it struggles for air, its body reeking with the stench of commingled corruption and cowardice. Yet I hope for its resuscitation.

Exhibit A. Medical students report rates of depression up to 30% higher than the general population. About 400 U.S. physicians commit suicide annually, with the rate for female physicians four times higher than among other female professionals. A 2015 survey reported that 13% of male physicians and 22% of female physicians suffered from alcohol abuse or dependence. A 2021 study found that 63% of U.S. physicians experienced burnout, with one in five intending to leave their practice within two years. These statistics attest to medicine’s core problem that affects the welfare of patients and the health, sanity, and professional longevity of physicians. It is this: we physicians have traded in our former gods for ersatz idols.

At my initial medical evaluation at a Kaiser hospital in Los Angeles, billed as a “Meet and Greet,” a fortyish man in a white coat entered my exam room and marched directly to a computer screen. There he sat without once looking at me, introducing himself, or shaking hands. He lobbed a litany of rote questions at me without a glance away from the screen. He seemed to be conversing with it, not with me. Was I watching a sci-fi depiction of intergalactic medical care on Alpha-Zebulon? I toyed with the notion of answering him in the beeps and whistles of R2-D2. Instead, after a few minutes I rose, said, “We’re done here,” and walked out. I don’t think he noticed.

The above scenario recurs daily in thousands of medical offices. Sir William Osler said, “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.” Most modern doctors are not Osler’s healers of people but normalizers of data. Physicians comb computer printouts of molecular titers for hieratic meaning. Internists may order such tests before they even see a patient. However, only whole human beings reveal ultimate clinical truths. In atomizing patients into their tiniest components, MDs disconnect from patients and themselves. If docs spent more than five minutes per appointment and peppered their interviews with interest and caring, those pesky lumps of flesh on the exam table could sprout into actual people. What patients can reveal if given a chance would surprise clinicians and obviate hundreds of tests. Unless doctors start treating whole people, AI will displace them, and no one will know the difference.




3 Minutes: $pending, ED Schools & Reading Outcomes



Transcript:

$pending, K-12 Governance, Ed Schools and Reading Outcomes
[00:00:00] Senator Duey Stroebel: Actually looking at, uh, US census data, all funds, all sources. Um, Wisconsin’s at about $13,000 and Mississippi is about $9,200. So there’s significant that’s per the US census data, all funds, all sources. So pretty clear there. I think it’s, uh, we’re 23rd. They’re 47th. So, which I think bears out with her, uh, slide up there that showed that we spend, uh, about 37% more in education.

[00:00:29] Uh, than than they do. But, um, one thing I want to talk about, you know, we’re here to talk about, okay, how are we gonna improve reading and what’s the best technique to do that? And you talk about reading coaches and the resources and the things we’re doing to improve reading. It kind of seems like we’re beating the head against beating, we’re beating our head against the wall when we’re really not using the right techniques.

[00:00:53] I mean, we can throw all the money in the world and if we’re not doing it the right. , we’re not gonna see results. I mean, do you agree? Am I off the, [00:01:00] am I crazy about that? Or what?

[00:01:02] Laura Adams (Wisconsin DPI) We absolutely agree. Which is why that, why we are advocating not only for a recommended instructional materials list, but also resources to address the how, how our educators use those materials in order to provide the instruction to implement the evidence-based early reading, uh, instructional practices, and.

[00:01:23] The same thing at at higher ed, not only looking at the state statute to ensure that what we’re requiring of our higher ed programs includes all of the components of early evidence-based early reading practices, but that we also are in the position of providing them with some of the how.

Duey Stroebel: Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.

[00:01:52] I mean, I don’t. You know, that’s weird. Um, you’d think they should be the ones who would know the innovative ways to teach. Not that us [00:02:00] legislators have to create legislation to tell them how to teach the way, uh, scientific data shows should be taught. So I guess my point is that, you know, yes. Blaming on universities.

[00:02:12] Sure. Um, but we’re, um, spending money on all these things and we’re really not doing it right. So I, I guess the focus. I mean, the 15 million they do a year. I mean, that’s a drop in the bucket. But you know, when you look at the overall spending and when you look at what we’re spending now today to teach, uh, a curriculum that’s ineffective, I think maybe we really wanna focus on, okay, how do we, sad to say, have to retrain our teachers from what they learned at the university system.

[00:02:43] And, um, I, I think that that should be our focus. And after that, I feel very confident that once our teachers have been trained, That they’re gonna be able to deliver this content and our kids are gonna be able to excel. So, um, I’m not sure, you know, if it’s that much, uh, [00:03:00] money that we’re really even talking about here, considering when you look at the overall big picture on spending and kind of the fundamental flaw that we’re really trying to tackle at this point in time.

[00:03:10] So I guess that’s what, uh, I’d have to say. Thanks.

Earlier testimony: Kymyona Burk and Mark Seidenberg.

Related: 2021 Wisconsin AB446.

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?

Additional testimony: Mark Seidenberg Kymyona Burk DPI Instructional Coach Kyle Thayse




K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Federal Taxpayer borrowing and spending analysis



By Alicia Parlapiano, Margot Sanger-Katz and Josh Katz:

The federal deficit is expected to be so large over the next decade that it would take about $16 trillion in spending reductions or new revenues to balance the budget by 2033. That’s about the size of the entire Social Security program. Or the entire Medicare program in addition to every anti-poverty program and refundable tax credit. Those outlandish examples come from a recent analysis from the committee.

Balancing the budget without tax increases, or cuts to the military, Medicare or Social Security, would mean cutting the rest of the budget by a whopping 70 percent. Cuts of that magnitude would mean the firings of most federal workers in agencies like the F.B.I., the Parks Service and the State Department, and huge reductions in food assistance and military retirement.




The Rise of Kickback Capitalism



Andy Kessler:

“I’m a capitalist,” President Biden said in the State of the Union address. Yeah, right. He then added, “But pay your fair share.” He’s missing the fashionable modifiers for capitalism: late, sustainable, patrimonial, state-directed. Real capitalism is, by definition, a meritocracy in which money flows to those providing the highest returns. No modifiers needed.

Why do I suspect this? Because Jared Bernstein—the economist who, like an old REO Speedwagon T-shirt, has been hanging around Joe Biden seemingly forever—said the quiet part out loud. Just before being nominated to run the Council of Economic Advisers, Mr. Bernstein told the Brookings Institution, “We’re trying to do, you know, what we believe, what the president believes . . . is really great, important policy on behalf of strengthening workers. And sometimes that’s not necessarily all kosher economics, sometimes it’s political economics. And sometimes you have to do things that may not be as aesthetically appealing in a neoclassical model.” Lael Brainard, nominated as director of the National Economic Council, worries about “irreversible ‘tipping points’ that introduce new climate shocks.” These aren’t the people who should be making economic policy.

What kickbacks? Start with up to $20,000 in student-loan forgiveness for tens of millions of voters who took on debt to overpay for college. Those who saved and paid retail get nothing. While it’s likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court, it’s also a kickback to universities that constantly raise prices and hire more administrators. In 2021 the average university had 45 diversity, equity and inclusion officers, according to a Heritage Foundation report.




Want to cure American amnesia? Teach history backward



Mark Judge:

There is a simple step America’s educators can take to improve civic awareness dramatically. Teach history backward.

That’s how I learned it. One of the best teachers I ever had was a man who taught me high school history. On the first day of class, he announced that we would be learning U.S. history starting with recent events. We began with Watergate and the Vietnam War, then moved back through the 1950s, the Red Scare, and the Korean War. From there, we covered World War II, the Great Depression, then the 1920s. Eventually, near the end of the school year, we found ourselves in the American Revolution.

It was a curriculum that worked brilliantly. It was the early 1980s, and Vietnam was something very real to those of us in high school and college. Many of us had friends, neighbors, and family members who had served in the war. It was exciting to study the conflict.

It also made liberal bias very difficult to weaponize. When the topic being taught involves living people who can challenge the accuracy of the curriculum, it makes it hard to bowdlerize the truth the way something like the “1619 Project” does.

In high school, I saw this in action. Our teacher presented both sides of the Vietnam War, both the anti-war movement and the men who had gone over there to fight. One memorable afternoon, we had, as a guest speaker, a Vietnam veteran. When one of the faculty members in the assembly got up to give a lecture about the “immoral war,” the man shot back: “All I know is we were there to fight communism and things got a lot worse when we left.”




Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology



John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, […], and Daniel T. Willingham

Many students are being left behind by an educational system that some people believe is in crisis. Improving educational outcomes will require efforts on many fronts, but a central premise of this monograph is that one part of a solution involves helping students to better regulate their learning through the use of effective learning techniques. Fortunately, cognitive and educational psychologists have been developing and evaluating easy-to-use learning techniques that could help students achieve their learning goals. In this monograph, we discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. We selected techniques that were expected to be relatively easy to use and hence could be adopted by many students. Also, some techniques (e.g., highlighting and rereading) were selected because students report relying heavily on them, which makes it especially important to examine how well they work. The techniques include elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarization, highlighting (or underlining), the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice.

To offer recommendations about the relative utility of these techniques, we evaluated whether their benefits generalize across four categories of variables: learning conditions, student characteristics, materials, and criterion tasks. Learning conditions include aspects of the learning environment in which the technique is implemented, such as whether a student studies alone or with a group. Student characteristics include variables such as age, ability, and level of prior knowledge. Materials vary from simple concepts to mathematical problems to complicated science texts. Criterion tasks include different outcome measures that are relevant to student achievement, such as those tapping memory, problem solving, and comprehension.




Cut parents’ benefits over school truancy, suggests Michael Gove



Paul Seddon:

Parents should face child benefit cuts if they fail to ensure their children turn up at school, cabinet minster Michael Gove has suggested.

Speaking at a think tank, the levelling up secretary said the idea could help restore an “ethic of responsibility”.

Mr Gove – who first proposed the idea in 2014 – said it would help tackle anti-social behaviour. 

Downing Street said parents could already be fined for children missing school.

The idea of cutting benefits for parents of truants was first suggested by Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2002, but it was dropped in favour of the current fines system.




Strauss on Liberal Education



Steven Hayward:

You will get denounced as the wrong kind of elitist (by self-appointed elitists of the left being massively overproduced these days) if you dare to suggest that too many people are going to college because in fact a lot of high school graduates being pushed onto the college track are not suited for it. This becomes even more salient when pondering the liberal arts rightly understood, especially as the expectation or demand that everyone attend college today had led to the excessive growth of universities that leads in turn to the homogenization and dumbing down of higher education.

Hence, Leo Strauss from “Liberal Education and Responsibility”:




Beyond CRISPR babies: How human genome editing is moving on after scandal



Heidi Ledford

Despite that tantalizing future, it will be impossible to shake the shadow cast by the previous summit, in 2018. That meeting convened just a day after biophysicist He Jiankui announced that he had edited the genomes of three embryos that developed into living babies. The stunt ultimately earned him three years in prisonfor breaking China’s laws on medical experiments.

Nearly five years later, researchers tell Nature that they do not expect a similar revelation at this year’s summit — if only because He’s experience will dissuade rogue researchers from going public with controversial genome-editing experiments. But that doesn’t mean that such experiments aren’t happening: “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other children that have been created with CRISPR–Cas9 in the years since 2018,” says Eben Kirksey, a medical anthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

Since then, technological aspects of using genome editing to alter human embryos for reproductive purposes have not fundamentally changed, says Robin Lovell-Badge, a reproductive biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who is chairing the summit. “It’s still an unsafe technique,” he says, echoing a widespread scientific consensus that genome-editing technology is not ready for use in human embryos.




Beyond CRISPR babies: How human genome editing is moving on after scandal



Heidi Ledford

Despite that tantalizing future, it will be impossible to shake the shadow cast by the previous summit, in 2018. That meeting convened just a day after biophysicist He Jiankui announced that he had edited the genomes of three embryos that developed into living babies. The stunt ultimately earned him three years in prisonfor breaking China’s laws on medical experiments.

Nearly five years later, researchers tell Nature that they do not expect a similar revelation at this year’s summit — if only because He’s experience will dissuade rogue researchers from going public with controversial genome-editing experiments. But that doesn’t mean that such experiments aren’t happening: “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other children that have been created with CRISPR–Cas9 in the years since 2018,” says Eben Kirksey, a medical anthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

Since then, technological aspects of using genome editing to alter human embryos for reproductive purposes have not fundamentally changed, says Robin Lovell-Badge, a reproductive biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who is chairing the summit. “It’s still an unsafe technique,” he says, echoing a widespread scientific consensus that genome-editing technology is not ready for use in human embryos.




“you want to replace the SAT because it’s racially stratified with a metric that’s… also racially stratified”



Freddie deBoer:

Columbia University is the latest high-profile university to abandon the SAT. As these institutions always are, they’re cagey about why, couching everything in buzzwords and euphemism. But you can be sure that the most powerful force driving the widespread effort to drop the SAT is the insistence that the SAT is an engine of racial inequality. This has been the claim, again and again, that we need to drop the SAT because its results are racially stratified. As I’ve argued at length, the gaps in SAT results are actually smaller than people on social media like to claim (which is unsurprising because most of them have never read the relevant literature). But the movement to get rid of the SAT and replace it with greater emphasis on high school GPA marches on. What remains utterly bizarre about all of this is that high school GPA is racially stratified too! The correlations aren’t even particularly different from those in SAT data. It’s so utterly mindless; how can you justify replacing a metric because it’s racially stratified so that you can further emphasize a metric that’s also racially stratified?

As Sutton et al say, “Racial/ethnic minority students, boys, and especially black boys, receive lower grades than other groups… young black men are a highly marginalized racial/ethnic and gender subgroup throughout schooling.” This general condition is decades old. The ranking and gaps in high school are about the same as those observed on the SAT:

  • Asian/Pacific Islander: 3.26
  • White: 3.09
  • Hispanic: 2.84
  • Black: 2.69

If you’d like a visual, this is from the Nation’s Report Card, data pretty old at this point but as I said the underlying situation hasn’t changed much:




California community colleges rely too much on part-time faculty and misspend funds, audit finds



Michael Burke:

California’s community colleges do not employ enough full-time faculty and in some cases districts are misspending state funds allocated for those faculty instead on too many part-time adjuncts, according to a newly released report from California’s state auditor.

The audit, ordered last year by state lawmakers, probed hiring practices for full-time faculty at four community college districts: Foothill-De Anza, Kern, Los Rios and San Diego. Auditors also reviewed how those districts have spent state dollars, including $100 million provided by the Legislature in 2021 to help districts hire more full-time faculty.

California has had a longstanding goal that 75 percent of community college classes should be taught by full-time faculty, but the audit found that the districts are falling well short of that. At the San Diego district, just 50 percent of instruction is taught by full-time faculty. The district with the highest share, Sacramento-based Los Rios, was still only at 63 percent.




Maxient: tracking college students’ behavior



Margaret Peppiat:

Over 1,300 colleges and universities nationwide manage student behavior records about various “things related to a student’s conduct and well-being” with the same software company: Maxient.

Established in 2003, the software company provides client schools with the ability to create online reporting forms and keep records regarding student behavior.

“Whether it’s student discipline, academic integrity, care and concern records, Title IX matters, or just an ‘FYI’, Maxient’s Conduct Manager has you covered for all things related to a student’s conduct and well-being,” the company’s website states.

Lance Watson, senior client support specialist at Maxient, told The College Fix via email “the schools using a Maxient system have control over how they utilize it and even how they customize it,” such as how they might label the types of processes or issues being tracked.




Dishonor Code: What Happens When Cheating Becomes the Norm?



Suzy Weiss:

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.

For decades, campus standards have been plummeting. The hallowed, ivy-draped buildings, the stately quads, the timeless Latin mottos—all that tradition and honor have been slipping away. That’s an old story. Then Covid struck and all bets were off. With college kids doing college from their bedrooms and smartphones, and with the explosion of new technology, cheating became not just easy but practically unavoidable. “Cheating is rampant,” a Princeton senior told me. “Since Covid there’s been an increasing trend toward grade inflation, cheating, and ultimately, academic mediocrity.” 

Now that students are back on campus, colleges are having a hard time putting the genie back in the bottle. Remote testing combined with an array of tech tools—exam helpers like Chegg, Course Hero, Quizlet, and Coursera; messaging apps like GroupMe and WhatsApp; Dropbox folders containing course material from years past; and most recently, ChatGPT, the AI that can write essays—have permanently transformed the student experience.

“It’s the Wild West when it comes to using emerging technologies and new forms of access to knowledge,” Gregory Keating, who has a joint appointment at USC’s Department of Philosophy and Gould School of Law, told me. “Faculties and administrations are scrambling to keep up.” 

Amy Kind, a philosophy professor at Claremont McKenna, said that, at the prestigious liberal arts college just east of Los Angeles, “Cheating is a big concern among the faculty.”

Nor do students have much incentive to turn back the clock: they’re getting better grades for less work than ever.




Oxford university stuck with Sacklers as opioid deaths led others to cut ties



Antonia Cundy:

Oxford university has continued to court the Sackler family over the past two years, bucking a trend for institutions to cut ties with the owners of the company at the heart of the deadly US opioid epidemic.

Documents seen by the Financial Times — including letters, bank statements and event attendee lists from 2020 to late last year — reveal how the elite university has extended exclusive invitations to a Sackler family member and accepted funds from Sackler family charities as it maintained the Sacklers’ naming rights on university buildings and fellowships.

They cover a period during which members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma have negotiated a multibillion-dollar bankruptcy settlement over their role in an epidemic estimated to have claimed more than half a million lives since 1999.

For years, aggressive marketing of OxyContin, the family firm’s prescription painkiller, played down its addictive qualities while netting the company tens of billions of dollars in revenue.

The documents relate to departments and colleges across the collegiate university, including the Ashmolean Museum, the university’s museum of art and archaeology, and Worcester College.




“is work completed without a teacher necessarily present, unlike “synchronous” instruction that features a live lesson”



Scott Girard:

Wisconsin requires 437 hours of direct instruction to kindergartners, at least 1,050 hours of direct instruction in grades one through six, and at least 1,137 hours of direct instruction in grades seven through 12.

In a message to families about the most recent change, Associate Superintendent of Teaching and Learning Cindy Green wrote that they “can expect more information and guidance on the changes to be provided from your school” in the coming weeks.

“In the event there are additional unanticipated school closures, the district will be exploring virtual and asynchronous options moving forward,” Green wrote.

Last year’s schedule changes were due largely to a delayed return from winter break amid the Omicron outbreak, which cost the district three school days. This year, it’s been all weather-related closures.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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




A glossary of Twitter files terms



Matt Taibbi:

  1. Government Agencies and NGOsCISA: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)CENTCOM: Central Command of the Armed ForcesODNI: Office of the Director of National IntelligenceFITF: Foreign Influence Task Force, a cyber-regulatory agency comprised of members of the FBI, DHS, and ODNI“OGA”: Other Government Agency, colloquially — CIAGEC: Global Engagement Center, an analytical division of the U.S. State Department USIC: United States intelligence community HSIN: Homeland Security Information Network, a portal through which states and other official bodies can send “flagged” accountsEIP: Election Integrity Project, a cyber-laboratory based at Stanford University that sends many reports to TwitterDFR: Digital Forensic Research lab, an outlet that performs a similar function to the EIP, only is funded by the Atlantic Council IRA: Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll farm” headed by “Putin’s chef,” Yevgheny Prigozhin



Self-inflicted wounds, not changing demographics, are undermining the higher-ed sector.



Richard Vedder:

So how are colleges killing themselves, committing unintentional suicide? Five ways.

First are the high fees they charge. The tuition fees of colleges today are nearly triple what they were a half-century ago after correcting for inflation. [Editor’s note: Cheers to UNC for freezing tuition for the seventh year in a row.] Since the 1980s, the rise in tuition fees has exceeded the growth in family incomes, meaning college has become less affordable. While air travel and electronic gadgets have all become more affordable, college attendance is now a bigger financial burden.

Totally dysfunctional federal student financial assistance programs have played a big role by allowing colleges to aggressively raise their fees.

How have colleges used rapidly growing student-fee income? Not to fund or improve the main purpose of colleges—to promote the growth of knowledge, wisdom, and civility through instruction and research provided by faculty.

Fifty years ago, a typical college had far more instructors than administrative support personnel—registrars, deans, librarians, etc. Today, at many campuses, there are far more administrators than teachers. Moreover, a growing proportion of that vast administrative army is anti-academic, anti-merit, and anti-learning. Especially harmful are the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” apparatchiks, who believe campuses should be defined especially by the racial, gender, and other biological traits that students possess, not by academic accomplishments. These new anti-academicians increasingly control campus decisionmaking.




Living in a fantasy world’: Oakland school board rejects budget cuts, leaving fiscal future uncertain



Jill Tucker:

The Oakland school district might be hurtling toward a fiscal cliff after the board failed this week to make budget cuts needed to give teachers raises and ward off a future financial crisis. 

In an unexpected outcome, the board rejected recommended cuts at a Tuesday meeting, including the elimination of dozens of vacant special education teacher and aide positions, as well as future trims to classroom funding. The board, by a slim majority, also rejected the merger over the next two years of five pairs of schools currently co-located on the same campuses. Without the budget cuts, the district currently has no way to pay for salary increases.




Royal Astronomical Society announces all journals to publish as open access from 2024



RAS

All articles published in the RAS journals portfolio, from the very first volumes published in 1827 to the latest articles, will be free to read in their entirety. As the scientific community works ever harder to ensure barriers to cutting edge science are eliminated, facilitating openness, dissemination, and reproducibility of impactful academic research, the Society is excited to be a key contributor to the open science movement, helping to drive discoverability and change.




Civics: “the death spiral of American Journalism”



Chris Hedges:

The commercial model of journalism has changed from when I began working as a reporter, covering conflicts in Central America in the early 1980s. In those days, there were a few large media outlets that sought to reach a broad public. I do not want to romanticize the old press. Those who reported stories that challenged the dominant narrative were targets, not only of the U.S. government but also of the hierarchies within news organizations such as The New York Times. Ray Bonner, for example, was reprimanded by the editors at The New York Times when he exposed egregious human rights violations committed by the El Salvadoran government, which the Reagan administration funded and armed. He quit shortly after being transferred to a dead-end job at the financial desk. Sydney Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Cambodia on the Khmer Rouge, which was the basis for the film “The Killing Fields.” He was subsequently appointed metropolitan editor at The New York Times where he assigned reporters to cover the homeless, the poor and those being driven from their homes and apartments by Manhattan real estate developers. The paper’s Executive Editor, Abe Rosenthal, Schanberg told me, derisively referred to him as his “resident commie.” He terminated Schanberg’s twice-weekly column and forced him out. I saw my career at the paper end when I publicly criticized the invasion of Iraq. The career-killing campaigns against those who reported controversial stories or expressed controversial opinions was not lost on other reporters and editors who, to protect themselves, practiced self-censorship.

But the old media, because it sought to reach a broad public, reported on events and issues that did not please all of its readers. It left a lot out, to be sure. It gave too much credibility to officialdom, but, as Schanberg told me, the old model of news arguably kept “the swamp from getting any deeper, from rising higher.”




What Might Have Been: Calm, Protection, and Care



Jeffrey Tucker:

Suddenly, lockdowns were on the table. And we know what happened next. Fauci and Dr. Birx worked over the coming weeks to warm Trump up to the idea, culminating in the March 16, 2020, press conference that announced lockdowns to the nation. 

Two weeks earlier, from March 3, 2020, at least, we had very good reports of the evidence out of China concerning the risk profiles of people who were vulnerable to the virus. 




Wisconsin Education Committee Hearing March 2, 2023: Mark Seidenberg’s Talk, and Q&A



Video

mp3 Audio
Transcript

Additional testimony: Kymyona Burk Instructional Coach Kyle Thayse DPI

3 Minute Summary by Senator Duey Stroebel

2021’s AB446 was mentioned.

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?




Special Education and the taxpayer supported Madison School District



Scott Girard:

But the 187 pages still feature plenty of suggestions for MMSD to improve how it works with students with disabilities, with some staff reporting pressure to pass students no matter what, criticism of the usefulness of district guidance and data highlighting the longstanding disparities for students by race and special education status. Its overarching findings were:

• Students with disabilities, especially students of color with disabilities, are not achieving or graduating at levels the district can celebrate.

• The district’s instructional and administrative infrastructure is not conducive to improved outcomes for students with disabilities.

• The district has many strengths upon which to build, which are outlined throughout the report.

• While much progress has been made on the (2016 special education) plan, and many of the goals have been met, doubling down on it, in collaboration with general education partners, is necessary, especially in light of recent leadership turnover and the pandemic.

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?




LeVar Burton, ‘The Right to Read’ Director Jenny Mackenzie on the Underbelly of the American Literacy Crisis



Abby White:

When director Jenny Mackenzie began working on her latest documentary, The Right to Read, it was a story focused on kindergarten readiness and pre-literacy. But once she met Kareem Weaver, a former educator and member of the Oakland NAACP Education Committee, the documentary’s game-changing story clicked into place. 

And it’s an angle that doubles as a powerful and eye-opening challenge to much of the way America’s literacy crisis has historically been perceived and addressed. The Right to Read focuses on the civil rights work of Kareem, as well as the efforts of several Black and brown families in cities across the country facing lower literacy rates to ensure their children’s success in school and beyond.

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?




Delaware lowers passing score on bar exam in push for racial diversity: ‘Not supposed to be a barrier’



Jon Brown:

The Delaware Supreme Court lowered the passing score on the state’s bar exam amid other changes reportedly intended to increase racial diversity among the state’s lawyers.

The 200-question multiple-choice exam will be offered twice instead of once a year beginning in 2024 – and its passing score will be lowered from 145 to 143, according to local outlet WHYY.

The number of essays on the exam will be decreased from eight to four, and the number of essay topics will be reduced from 14 to 10.

The clerkship requirement is also being lowered from 21 weeks to 12 weeks, and the mandatory list of 25 legal proceedings that potential lawyers must attend has been shortened to 18 out of 30 possible items.




TEA plans takeover of Houston ISD as soon as next week, Mayor Sylvester Turner says



Rebecca Carballo

Mayor Sylvester Turner said Wednesday morning that he has heard from multiple sources in the Legislature that the state intends to take over Houston ISD, and some sources say the move could come, as early as next week.

“I’m talking to legislators, and what they’re saying to me is that the state intends to takeover the district, replacing the entire board, replacing the superintendent, and I find that totally alarming,” said Turner, who spent two decades as a state representative. “HISD has 273 schools. How do you come in and take over the largest school district in Texas and do it successfully?”