Rory Linnane:

Eilbes said the decision was made by Steve Hancock, the head of school, after conferring over the past year with members of the school’s board of trustees, legal and insurance consultants, security experts and local police. Asked whether parents were consulted, Eilbes said there wasn’t any “formalized” outreach.

“We didn’t want to run the risk of the rumor mill,” Eilbes said. “Ultimately, we really wanted to play into the fact that families do give us a lot of leeway. They have a trust in us as a school.”

In a letter to families, Hancock said the move was a response to “the devastating rise in school shootings nationwide.”

“Through extensive analysis and thorough research, along with a strong recommendation from the River Hills Police Department, the unanimous recommendation was to arm a small number of school safety officers,” Hancock wrote.

Shelby Kearns;

The University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW Madison) awarded a $5,000 residency to Kay LeClaire, a woman recently exposed for faking her Native American ancestry. 

LeClaire is the latest “pretendian” who profits by providing art or expertise to universities, museums, or other institutions, all of which are pushing for inclusivity in curriculum, faculty makeup, and exhibitions. 

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that LeClaire served as “community leader in residence for the Center for Design and Material Culture,” a residency dedicated to “the development of a toolkit and curriculum around cultural appropriation.”  

John Lucas with UW-Madison Communications told Campus Reform that “LeClaire is a prominent figure in the community,” and the university learned about her faked ancestry “through reports on social media and local media.”

“LeClaire’s campus residency was ending at the end of 2022,” he continued. “She resigned before the formal end date. It will not be renewed.”

Rich Lowry:

The long era of the dominance of the SAT in college admissions is coming to an end.

The test is increasingly being shelved not because it failed but because it succeeded in all the wrong ways.

According to a survey from an anti-testing outfit, more than 80% of four-year colleges won’t require standardized tests for admissions this coming fall. 

Many have made the tests optional, and some won’t consider them at all. 

In a swath of academia, the pandemic expedient of dropping the tests has seamlessly transitioned to a permanent change.

If this isn’t a leap forward for fairness or rationality, it is another ringing victory for the equity of “diversity, equity and inclusion” fame. 

With homework now on the chopping block for not being equitable enough — kids with involved parents tend to actually do their homework — it shouldn’t be a surprise that the SAT is being shown the door.

Transcript below.

QUESTION
My question for you today is the following.

As you know, the US national debt is currently at an estimated $31 trillion, making up about 125% of the US GDP. In the meantime, over the past few years, the Federal Reserve has telegraphed, that they…

— Balaji (@balajis) May 7, 2023

Eric Kaufman:

White progressives in America, as in Britain, avoid diverse neighborhoods and are more likely to leave diverse places than white conservatives. In effect, they don’t practice what they preach. These are the findings from large-scale quantitative research in the United States and Britain, recently published in my academic article, “White flight from immigration?: Attitudes to diversity and white residential choice.”

Diversity is a core value for white progressives in America and other Western countries. Over 60 percent of them support increasing immigration. As the Manhattan Institute’s Zach Goldberg shows, they are the only major part of the population to feel warmer toward other racial groups than toward their own: they rate whites as more lazy and violent, and less intelligent, than blacks. Among white progressives, 87 percent say that having an “increasing number of people of many different races, ethnic groups and nationalities” makes the U.S. a better place to live, while virtually none says that it makes the country worse.

You would think that aversion to one’s racial group would prompt white progressives to flee disproportionately white areas for more diverse ones. Surveys do show that white progressives are more likely than white conservatives to indicate that they want to live in diverse places. Studies that present Americans with showcards of stylized houses as a proxy for race —some colored white, some black, with the proportion of the latter varied—find that those with progressive racial attitudes say that they prefer more diverse places than conservatives. These findings have been replicated in Britain and the Netherlands.

But when the rubber hits the road, white liberal attitudes don’t translate into behavior.

Jonathan Turley:

Over its almost 200 years of existence, Oberlin College has faced a civil war, an economic depression and pandemics. But until this year, it had never faced the likes of Kalinda Watson. Student editors on The Oberlin Review have risen up against the addition of Watson to the college ranks as an existential threat.

No, Watson is not a conservative or a Republican — groups that haven’t been welcome on campus for many years. Oberlin is ranked in the top three most liberal colleges in the country, and finding a conservative professor is about as likely as finding a licensed, practicing wizard.

No, Watson is far, far worse. She is a risk management expert.

The panic over the arrival of a risk management expert in this small college is that she may be working … wait for it … to lower the risk of lawsuits at the college. Oberlin, it appears, attracts lawsuits as much as liberals.

The students fear that she will create “risk aversion” that could chill future protests.

Indeed, some of us have written about Oberlin for years as a case study of why higher education is declining in America. The college has yielded to the mob in past controversies that have cost the school a fortune.

Freddie DeBoer:

where men are far more comfortable being more educated and higher-income than their partners. (With many exceptions.) And you can imagine how this dynamic plays out in specific dating pools: as more hard-charging women flood a given dating market, while the number of eligible men drags behind because of increasing advantages for women in school and the workplace, fewer and fewer women are likely to find themselves with a partner they consider marriageable. To make matters worse, since this dynamic hands men an advantage in the romantic marketplace, they may put off partnering for the long term even further, playing the field for years more because it favors them, and in doing so making matters even worse for ambitious women.

Reeves cites data that suggests that something like 30% to 40% of the decline in marriage rates is driven by the inability of women to find mates that they see as stable, smart, good earners, or otherwise up to their standards. We can certainly lament the degree to which dating markets still reflect the notion that men have to provide while women don’t – it’s a kind of regressive attitude far fewer people still explicitly hold than they once did – but that expectation remains a reality. And anecdotally, there certainly seems to be a lot of men who want only to play video games and watch porn, even if they are employed. So career women are faced with a growing structural disadvantage of insufficient suitable partners, which is exacerbated as they age because of men’s continuing preference for younger women. (Another reality we may lament but can’t really deny.) My guess is that this dynamic falls heaviest on Black women, perversely, because they’ve been doing so well lately.

Bilal Mahmood:

Charles Sylvester has been a special-education teacher for over 20 years in San Francisco Unified School District. He’s seen plenty of ups and downs during that time, but in 2023 he encountered a career first.

The district misreported his taxes. Thousands of dollars of payments were effectively missing.

In SFUSD, payroll is not as straightforward as the private sector.

Due to labor agreements, there are dozens of rules governing how staff can be paid. This creates a complex array of processes that need to be documented.

One problem: almost nothing is documented in SFUSD.

— Bilal Mahmood 馬百樂 (@bilalmahmood) May 6, 2023

MSU:

Last summer, researchers at Michigan State University reported that one in five Michigan adults, or about 1.7 million people, don’t want children and therefore are child-free. Although that number was surprisingly large to many data has now been confirmed in a follow-up study.

“We found that 20.9% of adults in Michigan do not want children, which closely matches our earlier estimate of 21.6%, and means that over 1.6 million people in Michigan are child-free,” said Jennifer Watling Neal, MSU professor of psychology and co-author of the study. “Michigan is demographically similar to the United States as a whole, so this could mean 50 million to 60 million Americans are child-free.”

The new study published in PLOS ONE attempted to replicate the original study by using the same methods, but with a new sample of people. The researchers used data from a representative sample of 1,000 adults who completed MSU’s State of the State Survey, conducted by the university’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research. To avoid any risk of cherry-picking results, the researchers preregistered the study by recording in advance exactly how the study would be conducted and what they expected to find.

“Many adults are child-free, and there do not seem to be differences by age, education or income,” said Zachary Neal, associate professor of psychology at MSU and co-author of the study. “However, being child-free is somewhat more common among adults who identify as male, white or who have always been single.”

Mark Judge:

Yet all three reporters themselves exemplify how the media have killed themselves over the last several years and why the rise of the internet and social media has stripped reporters of the credibility they used to have. The ink-stained wretches just can’t get away with anything anymore.

The reporters Dowd interviews for her piece represent exactly why no one trusts the press anymore and why their replacements, which include people such as Matt Taibbi, Aaron Matte, Mollie Hemingway, and even Joe Rogan, are better, more accountable reporters and pundits. “Community Notes,” the new feature that lets users correct false claims in real time on Twitter, has done more for journalism than MSNBC and the Washington Postcombined.

Isikoff and Mayer, in particular, were main drivers of the Steele dossier, the absurd 2016 opposition research file paid for by the Clintons and used against former President Donald Trump. Isikoff would finally admit that he made a huge mistake in falling for the dossier — but only after it had been publicly debunked.

Bruce Ivan Gudmundsson:

The same is true for academic lectures. As much as I delight in viva voce exposition delivered before a properly proximate audience, I am much more likely to listen to lectures while driving, cooking, or making illustrations for the Tactical Notebook. (How’s that for a shameless plug for my other Substack?) Indeed, if I wished to replace the two or three learned podcasts I enjoy each day with scholarly speeches of the old fashioned kind, I would have to hire an adjunct professor.

Hung Cao:

In fiscal year 2022, the Army missed its recruitment goals by 25 percent. The Navy was able to barely meet its quota by rolling forward recruits and padding their numbers before the end of the fiscal year. This caused a deficit for fiscal year 2023, so the Navy’s solution was to accept recruits with lower entry level test scores.

With the strategic mistakes of President Biden, such as the Afghanistan retreat, paired with puzzling Pentagon priorities, it’s no wonder recruitment is at an all-time low.

I watched in horror as the images of the fall of my native Saigon repeated themselves in 2021 in Kabul. A few short months after my last combat deployment, the Afghans I worked with clung desperately to aircraft and pounded at the airport gates. The worst image of all was when eleven Marines, one sailor and one soldier were killed by a suicide bomber outside Abbey Gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport as the evacuation occurred. These servicemen and women were left out there to guard a patch of land their commander-in-chief had given up. Days later, as their bodies were ceremonially paraded off a C-17, he was seen checking his watch when he should have been paying his respects. Why would anyone join the military when the ethos of “leave no one behind” is just a catchy phrase that no longer holds any substance?

This administration has a growing obsession with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, a college campus fad that teaches America is fundamentally racist and can only be fixed by discriminating against American males with European ancestry. DEI is unpopular in the military, a place where troops may be rightfully hesitant to serve under a commander selected for the color of his skin rather than the content of his character.

Elite organizations and individuals are not inclusive. They are rigidly exclusive. Not everyone gets to be a doctor, or an astronaut, a Navy SEAL or a starting center in the NBA. We respect those professions for the same reason recruits are drawn to them, because those who make the cut have worked hard and earned their place. It’s unsurprising that the service that is consistently hitting its recruitment target, the Marines, pride themselves on being the best of the best. Their very slogan is exclusive in nature, “the few, the proud, the Marines.” It is not “join the Marine Corps, any schlub can do it.” 

When announcing their priorities in 2021, the Biden Pentagon ranked odd and naked political priorities right next to China in terms of importance. Climate change, right-wing extremism and Covid-19 were considered just as a dire a threat as the People’s Liberation Army. Young Americans don’t join the Army to fight climate change, that is a job for scientists and engineers. They don’t join to root out domestic extremists, that is a job for law enforcement. And they don’t join to obsess over gender, sexual orientation and skin color, that is a job for weird humanities professors.

Princetonians for free speech:

Princeton’s Awkward Similarities to Communist Romania

An edited excerpt from a video interview with Princeton Professor Sergiu Klainerman

“At Princeton today you see a penetration of diversity, equity and inclusion in every department and office of the university. They are a bit like the Party functionaries. Every organization [in Romania] no matter how small, had to have someone who represented the Party. They were activists, not interested in education or research or whatever they were supposed to be doing, they were activists and of course they had power.”

What does this mean for university life?  Klainerman’s answer goes well beyond the mandatory courses at Princeton on topics such as sexual harassment that he finds both “triggering” and insulting, and has so far resisted.  His main concern is corruption.

“There is an aspect of [what is happening] which I think people don’t talk enough about. Suppose you are a very bright minority kid. You come from a school which unfortunately, for whatever reasons, didn’t give you a very good education. But you are very bright and you really have aspiration and enthusiasm and you are accepted at Princeton, even though in principle you don’t have the credentials for Princeton. And you want to do mathematics.

“So suppose such a kid gets to Princeton and then he/she realizes that they just don’t have the background. They have to compete against winners of international Olympiads from China, Taiwan, Pakistan and Iran. They compete with people who are 5 – 7 years ahead of them. What do you think is going to happened? They’re going to feel dejected. They’re going to feel depressed. They feel they have no chance. And in the end, they give up. … I think it is a disservice to them, to be put in the position to have to compete in situations where they just simply don’t have the background to do well. You prepare them for failure. I’m not afraid to mention this, because I think it’s true.

The @UWSystem spends $15.9million tax dollars/year on leftwing DIVERSITY/EQUITY positions. That’s 227 employees w/full-time salaries for 13 campuses. That’s 17 DEI employees/campus making $70k/year on average. @MacIverWisc @wisconsin_now @DukePesta @SenRonJohnson @RepDaveMurphy pic.twitter.com/l6aY0FATGZ

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) May 5, 2023

The open, explicit contempt the Dem Party has for every voter who isn’t blindly loyal to them is amazing to see.

This contempt is most often directed at the party’s disaffected “progressive” wing, because they know – thanks to Bernie and AOC – they have them on total lockdown: https://t.co/K8Lh8ym5xj

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 5, 2023

Dave Utbanski:

A California public school teacher said she was told to deceive “suspicious” parents about their children’s stated gender identities at school — and now she’s suing.

What are the details?

“It’s unfortunate that I have to go toe-to-toe and stand up against a community of people that I love,” teacher Elizabeth Mirabelli told Fox News. “I’ve been there for 25 years. This is a community of people I care about, people I’ve served for a long period of time. And so that gives me pause to have to stand up, but I felt that I had to make that choice.”

The cable network said attorneys for Mirabelli and fellow teacher Lori Ann West — both of whom taught for decades at Rincon Middle School in Escondido — filed a federal lawsuit last week against the school’s leadership, claiming they were effectively required to lie to parents whose children assumed different gender identities at school.

Matt Taibbi:

Following the release of today’s article about news organizations junking the “Pentagon Papers Principle,” reader Ben O’Neill made a good observation that should have been in the piece. In the newly-found summary emailed by an Aspen Institute figure in September 2020, “Partnership for a Healthy Digital Public Sphere,” the section about “hack-and-dump” exercises asks [emphasis mine]: “What happens when fabricated documents are released alongside genuine (stolen) content? How can social feeds avoid serving as promoters of foreign or other adversarial entities?” 

First of all, this notion that there may be fabrications mixed in with real content is a suggestion that pops up somewhere in nearly every one of these leak stories, even if all the material proves to be real (old friend Malcolm Nance did the job in 2016 in suggesting the Podesta leaks were “riddled with forgeries”). More importantly however, that last line is a great example of what former cybersecurity official and Foundation for Freedom Online head Mike Benz calls the “foreign-domestic switcheroo.” 

It’s the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets. You can see the subtlety: the original Stanford piece tries to stick to railing against “disinformation” and information from “foreign adversaries,” but the later paper circulated by Aspen slips in, ever so slightly, a new category of dubious source: “foreign or other adversarial entities.” 

These rhetorical devices are essential. It would be preposterous to form (as Stanford did) an “Information Warfare Working Group” if readers knew the “war” being contemplated was against domestic voices. It would likewise seem outrageous to suggest, as Stanford did, that journalists respond to a domestic threat by taking a step as drastic as eliminating intra-title competition, and “forming partnerships with other organizations to pool resources.” But if you start by focusing on Russians and only later mention as an afterthought “other adversarial entities,” you can frame things however you want, from espionage to warfare. As reader O’Neill correctly pointed out, “they are now getting close to being explicit about the fact that their motivation for suppressing news is to fight domestic political adversaries.”

One other small note I left out for space reasons. The “Information Warfare Working Group” that produced the original paper by Janine Zacharia proposing the end of the “Pentagon Papers Principle” includes such anti-disinformation luminaries as Renee DiResta and Michael McFaul. In that summer of 2019, the working group also put out a paper by Dr. Amy Zegart, titled, “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms.” Her co-author? Michael Morell.

Javier Moscoso:

What does it mean to tell the story of this instrument? The history of the swing reveals how an object of disorientation became instrumentalised across the long arc of human culture, appearing in different territories and cultures throughout time. But this history is not just the story of an object. It’s also one of many untold histories of bodies in motion that seek to unveil forgotten, overlooked or concealed gestures – human history is not only populated with words and objects. The swing allows us to begin telling the long cultural story of moving back and forth through time and space.

Once we start looking, the swing appears in the most unexpected places. It shows up in ancient Greek swinging festivals, and cave paintings made in western India during the 5th century. It is illustrated in Chinese hand scrolls from the Song dynasty, from around the 11th and 12th centuries.It fills Hindustani and Punjabi paintings, such as Lady on a Swing in the Monsoon (1750-75), in which a woman joyously swings through the air, clothes fluttering behind her, as dark clouds grow in the distance. The swing also finds its way into the origin stories of the Persian Nowruz New Year celebrations, when people swung to mimic the way the legendary Shah Jamšīd rode his chariot through the air. It also turns up in Thailand’s Chakri dynasty in the 18th century, when a giant version was built by Rama I. And it is spread across the pages of Western literature and philosophy – Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra(1883-5), James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality(1905), and Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938).

NEW: On May 12, I was going to speak on DEI at the Medical College of Wisconsin, alongside Sen. Ron Johnson and State Rep. Dave Murphy.

Last night, the president of the college announced he has “rescind the use” of the its facilities for the event, citing disruptions and safety. pic.twitter.com/bSgbBQvjUn

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) May 5, 2023

Laurel White:

Remote learning during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was more likely to negatively affect the high school graduation rates of students from lower-income households than their higher-income peers, according to a new UW–Madison study. 

The study, published in Educational Researcher, found a longer time in virtual or hybrid learning environments during the 2020–21 school year decreased overall high school completion rates and increased the gap in completion rates between economically disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students.

“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?

Scott Girard;

The encouragement comes as the union and the Madison Metropolitan School District disagree over a proposed wage increase in next year’s budget, among other items. Hundreds of MTI members and supporters showed up to the April School Board meeting, where the 2023-24 budget proposal was made public, to demand an 8% increase in base wages and smaller class sizes.

In a challenging budget cycle full of uncertaintyover what the state will provide, the district’s current proposal includes a 3.5% base wage increase.

Teacher Appreciation Week runs May 8-12 this year. Last year during Teacher Appreciation Week, MTI and the district officially exchanged proposals for base wage increases that were significantly far apart.

“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?

Stanley Goldfarb:

For better or worse, I have had a front-row seat to the meltdown of twenty-first-century medicine. Many colleagues and I are alarmed at how the DEI agenda—which promotes people and policies based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation rather than merit—is undermining healthcare for all patients regardless of their status.

Five years ago I was associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, and prior to that, codirector of its highly regarded kidney division. Around that time, Penn’s vice dean for education started to advocate that we train medical students to be activists for “social justice.” The university also implemented a new “pipeline program,” allowing ten students a year from HBCUs (historically black colleges or universities) to attend its med school after maintaining a 3.6 GPA but no other academic requirement, including not taking the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). And the university has also created a project called Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery Project(PMAS) in order to “reshape medical education. . . by creating social justice-informed medical curricula that use race critically and in an evidence-based way to train the next generation of race-conscious physicians.” Finally, twenty clinical departments at the medical school now have vice chairs for diversity and inclusion.

Michael Anton:

Gaslighting getting you down? Feel like the regime has dialed the Megaphone up to, and past, eleven? You’re not crazy. It’s definitely happening and likely to get worse as our masters’ ability to cope with reality further worsens—or worse, they gain the complete and absolute control they seek. They’re both scornful and terrified of dissent, which explains why they incessantly shriek at us and lie to our faces.

So, to help you navigate the twitstorm, I present a guide to seven of the regime’s most common, oft-deployed lies. This is not meant to be comprehensive. I’m sure there are tactics they use that either I haven’t crystalized or that aren’t front-of-mind at the moment. I encourage others to expand the catalogue with their own observations. The better we can understand how they try to manipulate us, the better we can resist and counter it all.

Let’s start with the Unholy Trinity of ruling class horse manure. These first three are similar, but subtle differences determine the ways they’re used in differing circumstances.

Sarah Belle Lin:

“A lot of kids are not aware of how to put a bank account together, balance a checkbook, or what an expense and revenue sheet is,” Comrie told amNewYork Metro. “These are critical things that need to be taught to all students so they can be aware of the challenges that they will all face as young adults.”

The initiative to bring financial literacy to New York middle and high schools has been discussed in the state legislature since 2009. 

“I’m disappointed that the State Department of Education hasn’t been embraced it,” Comrie said. “I expect that it will be embraced by more members [state legislators] this year.”

Peng, who teaches geometry and the math team at Stuyvesant High School, studied finance in college and was inspired to share the knowledge he learned about mortgages and student loans with students. He told amNewYork Metro that he had the idea in his mind, but just needed a push. That push came from a Stuyvesant student, Anisha Singhal, who penned an op-ed in January 2021 in the school newspaper called “Calculus Before Checkbooks?” Peng was convinced.

Singhal, who was finally able to enroll in the personal finance class after being waitlisted in the class’ first year, said her interest in financial literacy grew after she received her first paycheck. She didn’t think twice about the taxes and just assumed “this is why adults are always complaining.” But once she later found out from a family friend about tax refunds, she realized the importance of financial literacy.

Richard Hamming:

Dick is one of the all time greats in the mathematics and computer science arenas, as I’m sure the audience here does not need reminding. He received his early education at the Universities of Chicago and Nebraska, and got his Ph.D. at Illinois; he then joined the Los Alamos project during the war. Afterwards, in 1946, he joined Bell Labs. And that is, of course, where I met Dick – when I joined Bell Labs in their physics research organization. In those days, we were in the habit of lunching together as a physics group, and for some reason this strange fellow from mathematics was always pleased to join us. We were always happy to have him with us because he brought so many unorthodox ideas and views. Those lunches were stimulating, I can assure you. 

While our professional paths have not been very close over the years, nevertheless I’ve always recognized Dick in the halls of Bell Labs and have always had tremendous admiration for what he was doing. I think the record speaks for itself. It is too long to go through all the details, but let me point out, for example, that he has written seven books and of those seven books which tell of various areas of mathematics and computers and coding and information theory, three are already well into their second edition. That is testimony indeed to the prolific output and the stature of Dick Hamming. 

I think I last met him – it must have been about ten years ago – at a rather curious little conference in Dublin, Ireland where we were both speakers. As always, he was tremendously entertaining. Just one more example of the provocative thoughts that he comes up with: I remember him saying, “There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.” Well, with Dick Hamming around, we don’t need a computer. I think that we are in for an extremely entertaining talk. 

THE TALK: “You and Your Research” by Dr. Ri

Why are teachers going on strike?

OEA is going on strike to protest unfair labor practices of the school district, which union leaders say include negotiating in bad faith by coming to bargaining sessions unprepared and not making meaningful counter-proposals. The union filed an unfair labor practice charge against OUSD in March with the California Public Employee Relations Board, which oversees negotiations between public agencies and employees.

Jill Tucker:

Union officials have demanded a 23% raise for all members of the bargaining unit. District officials had offered up to a 22% raise, but not for all 3,000 educators. They have also tied a 10% retroactive raise to more instructional minutes for elementary school students.

The district’s offer also included paying 15% more for health benefits, in addition to required pensions costs equaling more than 19% of salaries.

On Wednesday, in a statement, district officials said all members of the union would get a 13% to 22% raise, as well as a one-time bonus and backpay.

Under the proposal, according to the district Wednesday, beginning teachers would get a $10,700 raise, plus $8,700 in back pay and one-time bonus. Veteran teachers would see an annual increase of $15,432, plus $11,600 in back pay and one-time bonus.

Other union members, including counselors, psychologists and nurses, would also get significant increases in salary.

More:

With few exceptions, schools across California saw significant declines in standardized test scores this year compared with pre-pandemic levels, with less than half of students proficient in reading and a third performing at grade level in math.

The community note here is significantly more accurate and provides readers with much better context than the Politifact fact-check. It’s a perfect example of why people feel media fact-checkers focus more on pushing spin than providing the facts and letting readers decide. https://t.co/ZsqcvrGLY0

— AG (@AGHamilton29) May 4, 2023

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The UW System spends about $13.6 million annually on 185 administrators related to DEI, with most of the positions concentrated at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, according to records first reported on by WisPolitics. The $13.6 million in salaries represents about 0.2% of the UW System’s $6.9 billion annual operating budget.

Vos called for eliminating funding for all of the DEI positions, saying the offices are a waste of public tax dollars and teach students to view the world entirely through the lens of race. He cited examples he has heard where people had to fill out DEI statements to apply for a UW job and students had to discuss white privilege at freshmen orientation.

“The university has gone from being an institute of higher education to an institute of indoctrination,” he said.

Vos said he met with UW System President Jay Rothman and chancellors to offer his ideas on how the UW System can make good on his request.

The UW System could, for example, internally reallocate the money funding DEI offices to other programs it is seeking funding for, such as nursing, engineering and other high-demand fields.

Josh Blackman

In recent years, there has been a rise in law students heckling speakers. In 2018, I was shouted down at the CUNY Law School in New York. In 2022, Ilya Shapiro was shouted down at the law school formerly known as Hastings. And more recently, Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit was shouted down at Stanford Law School.

We were protested for speaking on different topics, but there was a common thread: Students at each institution insisted that we were not welcome on campus; that our mere presence made them feel unsafe; and that our messages were not worth the pain and suffering we would cause. Thus, the students refused to let us speak.

Who is to blame for these protests? Of course, the students who heckled speakers, in clear violation of university policy, were at fault. But the blame goes much deeper. These students have been taught from the earliest age that harmful speech has no place in educational institutions. …

Universities and faculties in particular should take decisive action to prevent [DEI administrators] from subverting the core principles of academic inquiry. At this inflection point, I propose a five-course action plan.

Allison Parshall:

If you want to trust a prediction, you need to understand how all the computations work. For example, in health care, you need to know if the model even applies to your patient. And it’s really hard to troubleshoot models if you don’t know what’s in them. Sometimes models depend on variables in ways that you might not like if you knew what they were doing. For example, with the power company in New York, we gave them a model that depended on the number of neutral cables. They looked at it and said, “Neutral cables? That should not be in your model. There’s something wrong.” And of course there was a flaw in the database, and if we hadn’t been able to pinpoint it, we would have had a serious problem. So it’s really useful to be able to see into the model so you can troubleshoot it.

When did you first get concerned about non-transparent AI models in medicine? 

My dad is a medical physicist. Several years ago, he was going to medical physics and radiology conferences. I remember calling him on my way to work, and he was saying, “You’re not going to believe this, but all the AI sessions are full. AI is taking over radiology.” Then my student Alina [Barnett] roped us into studying [AI models that examine] mammograms. Then I realized, OK, hold on. They’re not using interpretable models. They’re using just these black boxes; then they’re trying to explain their results. Maybe we should do something about this.

So we decided we would try to prove that you could construct interpretable models for mammography that did not lose accuracy over their black box counterparts. We just wanted to prove that it could be done.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai

Cicero’s De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”) is a true classic – a text that many people own but few ever bother to read. Yet if you are interested in translation, you probably want to read the first few pages of Book One at the very least. Here Cicero discusses a few of the problems involved with writing a philosophical work in the Roman world; one of these is the Romans’ inferiority complex when it came to Classical Greek. He describes intellectuals who scorn to read philosophy in their native language, yet have no problem with Greek literary texts translated word-for-word (ad verbum e Graecis expressas) into Latin.

The discussion is interesting in part because Cicero frankly acknowledges just how bad a lot of translations were in his day. He defends Latin as a language, and has a few positive-sounding things to say about the Latin literary tradition, even though he seems tacitly to accept its inferiority to Greek literature. But there seems to have been no point in sticking up for most contemporary translations of Greek books. Or was there? Cicero himself was a brilliant translator, particularly of Plato. He thought hard about the relationship between Latin and Greek. Perhaps, though, his contemporaries were less conscientious than he was. He didn’t just provide mechanical, literal-minded translations: he wanted the Greek Classics to sound like themselves when rendered into his own language. Then again, translators who succeed at this task are rare in every age.

Credit to @exjon for the chart.

It’s arguably better than the typical debt-to-GDP ratio, because it shows debt-to-revenue. GDP is more like GMV of a marketplace, whereas revenue is what the debt would actually get paid out of. https://t.co/WM2uG0KxcV

— Balaji (@balajis) May 2, 2023

I don’t mind health authorities got so much wrong. COVID was a novel pandemic.

What is inexcusable is they banned dissent by pressuring Big Tech to remove any posts questioning their false decrees.

And only now are media figures like this CNN host willing to question them. https://t.co/XhVp1m5CAv

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2023

The new data on students’ knowledge of history and civics is abysmal. There’s no other way to describe it. These are the lowest scores ever recorded:

➡️13% are proficient in U.S. history
➡️20% are proficient in civics pic.twitter.com/WzweyhVXsS

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) May 3, 2023

Rick Hess:

The “Nation’s Report Card” is out with new results on what our eighth-graders know about U.S. history and civics, and the results are grim. The National Assessment of Educational Progress today reported that this is the first time civics results declined significantly on the quarter-century-old exam. In history, the results continued a nearly decade-long decline.

The U.S. history test covers key figures, dates, and events, as well as student familiarity with key historical ideas and movements. The civics test gauges students’ knowledge, their ability to take or defend positions on political issues, and their understanding of democratic participation. The tests were administered in spring 2022, with a nationally representative sample of 8,000 eighth-graders who took the history test and 7,800 the civics exam.

Bethan Stanton:

On Tuesday, Chegg’s shares plunged by half and the warning rattled other companies, with shares in London-listed Pearson falling 15 per cent, language-learning platform Duolingo down by 10 per cent and US-listed education company Udemy dropping by more than 5 per cent.

The stock moves come as businesses are grappling with the opportunity and threat posed by generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, which produces highly sophisticated text outputs in response to short human prompts.

Chegg’s admission marks one of the first instances of a company acknowledging a hit to its finances as a direct result of advances in generative AI.

Big tech companies are racing to develop superior versions of the technology, with Google launching its ChatGPT competitor Bard in March. The previous month, shares in Google parent Alphabet plummeted after Microsoft unveiled a new version of its Bing search engine that included advanced new AI-driven features.

This is the right discussion to have.

I agree that “if we control spending and technology continues to bail us out” then everything is fine.

But (a) the establishment is blocking new technology and (b) it is not controlling spending. https://t.co/ccFdzdfnx0 pic.twitter.com/lADlTZlCaF

— Balaji (@balajis) May 2, 2023

Frederick Hess:

The reason for this success isn’t hard to fathom. During the pandemic, mediocre remote learning, bureaucratic inertia, and school closures taught many parents that they couldn’t count on school districts when families needed them most. 

Parents were left hungry for alternatives, especially amidst bitter disagreements over masking and woke ideology. This was all immensely practical. It wasn’t about moral imperatives or market abstractions. It was about empowering families to put their kids in schools that address their needs, reflect their values, and do their job. And it came even as families continued to voice support for their local public schools. 

There are important lessons here, several of which I discuss at more length in The Great School Rethink. The biggest may be the simplest: Families can want more options and still like their local schools. 

Polling consistently shows that the lion’s share of parents say they’d grade their kids’ schools an A or a B. At the same time, last year, more than seven in ten endorsed education savings accounts, school vouchers, and charter schools.In short, parents tend to like both their child’s public school and school choice policies. They don’t see a tension between the two.

Scott Girard:

The work at La Follette, led by Findorff Project Engineer Courtney Cates, features a new gym, weight room and “athletics entry” space that includes concessions and a trophy case. That entry area will also feature pieces of the wood floor from the current spectator gym, which will be turned into classroom space, and will allow officials to more easily close off the rest of the building from those there to play or watch a game.

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?

Vipul Shekhawat:

What makes GPT good for learning?

Let’s contrast GPT’s chat interface with static learning resources, like webpages or textbooks.

Interactive learning. The modern world is a complicated place, and it’s simply not possible to learn about everything to the utmost depth. All too often, I end up in a deep, dark Wikipedia rabbit hole reading about string theory when I just was curious about the basics of how something works.

Using GPT makes learning interactive. The main benefit is that the information it provides is tailored to the specific questions you have. By contrast, static learning resources have to make a best guess of what you’re trying to learn about, which is always subject to tensions of depth and breadth:

An elementary school counselor should not have 3,432 pages of emails talking about gender.

And it should not cost me $2,559.75 to see them. pic.twitter.com/kFr8DdxkLl

— Nicole Solas Domestic Terrorist! (@Nicoletta0602) April 30, 2023

Amy Schwabe:

Wauwatosa Catholic School will be closing its doors at the end of this school year, according to a letter sent to parents Friday by principal Nicolle Schroeder.

The school, at 1500 N. Wauwatosa Ave., has existed since 2011 as a partnership between two Wauwatosa Catholic churches, St. Bernard Parish and St. Pius X Parish.

In her letter, Schroeder laid out three reasons for the school’s closing: enrollment, demographics and finances.

The school projects only 110-120 students for the 2023-24 school year, rather than the 140 students that administrators had wanted. Father Paul Portland, the pastor of St. Pius X Parish, noted in a related letter to parishioners that this is down from 200 students pre-pandemic. Further, most grades are at 10 students or fewer, and there were only seven projected K3 students and five K4 students enrolled for coming school year, creating little hope that enrollment in the years ahead would grow.

Fritz François & Gbenga Ogedegbe

Such claims aren’t supported by evidence. The ranking methodology, as currently constructed, includes consideration of students’ Medical College Admission Test scores and undergraduate grade-point averages, as well as other criteria. But medical schools have always been free to admit anyone they choose, regardless of their rankings. It’s true that diversity isn’t a criterion in the U.S. News methodology, but why should that stop schools from recruiting minority applicants or establishing a campus culture that encourages and values diversity? There is nothing in a thoughtful admissions process that explicitly prevents medical schools from assembling a student body based on anything other than academic performance, holistic reviews and interviews of candidates. …

What these schools are really saying is that meritocracy can’t coexist with diversity. This is a presumptuous—and dangerous—perpetuation of the negative stereotype that students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in medicine are of lesser quality or unable to compete.

Kevin Carey:

Between 2000 and 2018, some 200 colleges and universities adopted similar policies. It was hardly a groundswell — there are about 2,300 public and private four-year colleges and universities in the US — but it cracked the door to a different future for standardized testing.

Covid-19 pushed that door wide open. The pandemic scrambled the logistics of test administration and caused most colleges to go “test-optional.” Covid had the same effect on mandatory admissions testing that it had on the practice of requiring white-collar workers to go to the office five days a week: It transformed a growing but not-yet-mainstream trend into a sudden sea change.

Kimberly Wethal:

Higher rates of chronic absenteeism are largely driving the increase, as about 98% of the district’s 2,231 at-risk students have been deemed “habitually truant,” defined as missing more than 10% of days in an academic year. The number of students considered habitually truant during the 2021-22 school year more than tripled from the year before, according to data presented to the Madison School Board Monday night.

Students in grades five through 12 are considered at risk by the state when they either have dropped out or can be classified in two or more categories considered detrimental to their education, including being:

• One or more years behind their peers in the number of high school credits earned.
• Two or more years behind in basic skill levels.
• Pregnant or a parent.
• An eighth-grader who scored below “basic” on state exams.
• Habitually truant.

The number of students in each category increased in 2021-22, with the exception of students who are pregnant or parenting, a number that’s fallen from 40 five years ago to just a handful now. About 1,714 students, or more than 10%, had fallen behind by two school years, an increase from 946 students in 2018-19, the last year before the pandemic. The number of eighth graders scoring low on state exams has doubled since then.

The number of at-risk students each year is based on data collected the year prior. In 2021-22, there were 14,980 students in grades five through 12 in the district.

“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?

Josh Blackman:

To quote Justice Alito:

It “undermines confidence in the government,” Justice Alito says. “It’s one thing to say the court is wrong; it’s another thing to say it’s an illegitimate institution. You could say the same thing about Congress and the president. . . . When you say that they’re illegitimate, any of the three branches of government, you’re really striking at something that’s essential to self-government.”

There have been no actual allegations that judges assigned to the Amarillo or Wichita Falls divisions have engaged in any judicial misconduct. (And no, authorship of a law review article that a judge did not actually write does not actually matter.) These judges have not been mandamused or reassigned by the court of appeals. None of the progressive judges on the Fifth Circuit have, in dissent, charged these judges with malfeasance. And no bar complaints have been filed against the Texas Attorney General or other plaintiffs who have filed in these forums. DOJ has filed motions to transfer cases in these divisions. And, those motions have been denied. In doing so, these courts have rejected the premise of Schumer’s letter: that single-judge divisions undermine public confidence in the judiciary. Senator Schumer is, in effect, seeking reconsideration of what Judges Tipton, Kacsmaryk, and others have already ruled. The chief judge of a federal district cannot sit in judgment of another district judge in his district. That job belongs to the court of appeals alone.

European Review of Books:

Whenever I leave my Berlin apartment, the first thing I see is a sign saying CHICKEN HAUS BURGER; the second is a café blackboard announcing: « You can’t buy happiness but you can buy CROIFFLE and that’s kind of the same thing. » A billboard advertises an upcoming film as « ein STATEMENT für GIRLPOWER »; one shop promises a wide range of Funsocken. Rather more disturbing — particularly here in Neukölln, a neighbourhood copiously populated by leftie Americans and families from the Middle East — is the Arabic-German barber shop called WHITE BOSS. And when I go downtown to the bookstore where I occasionally host readings, the only good coffee nearby is served by a place unbelievably named PURE ORIGINS.

David Blaska:

“The governor’s request comes at a time when diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs are under fire in higher education, business, and in government for fundamental unfairness and divisiveness and a failure to achieve their intended goals,” the Badger Institute notes.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is riddled with DEI bureaucrats.Madison’s flagship campus has an entire administrative division devoted to the subject, headed by a deputy vice chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion (salary $131,852 as of 2021), supported by a “Gender and Sexuality Campus Center,” a multi-cultural student center, and an Office of Inclusion Education. And that’s only at the top. Every school, every college — education, engineering, business, nursing, pharmacy, letters & science, veterinary medicine, law, and agriculture — has its own DEI bureaucrats. Don’t forget the athletics department!

Journal of Controversial Ideas:

Merit is a central pillar of liberal epistemology, humanism, and democracy. The scientific enterprise, built on merit, has proven effective in generating scientific and technological advances, reducing suffering, narrowing social gaps, and improving the quality of life globally. This perspective documents the ongoing attempts to undermine the core principles of liberal epistemology and to replace merit with non-scientific, politically motivated criteria. We explain the philosophical origins of this conflict, document the intrusion of ideology into our scientific institutions, discuss the perils of abandoning merit, and offer an alternative, human-centered approach to address existing social inequalities.

Commentary.

Scott Girard:

This fall, the new three-story school off of Rimrock Road will house students currently attending Frank Allis Elementary School. That building will then be used for Nuestro Mundo Elementary School, MMSD’s dual-language immersion charter that currently leases a Monona school building.

The school’s soon-to-come opening is monumental for the south side, which hasn’t had an elementary school in the neighborhood before, leaving students in that area with long bus rides.

Those hundreds of Allis students will move from one of the district’s oldest facilities to its newest. It will feature plenty of natural light beyond the skylight, with floor-to-ceiling windows in a library on one corner of the building.

Dr. Judith E. FitzGerald:

Wisconsin has a reading problem, especially for those whose home language is not mainstream English, which is the language of instruction, government and business.

Every year we have watched our literacy scores and state ranking suffer as other states pursue teacher training and education legislation. Illiteracy has multiple causes including poverty and other socioeconomic factors. But inadequate teacher preparation leading to poor classroom reading instruction is one of the most glaring but fixable conditions.

Many states have conducted extensive reviews of their educator preparation programs to ensure that they are aligned with modern reading research. In Wisconsin, an independent consultant (TPI-US) has been awarded a contract to conduct a statewide literacy “landscape analysis” in which all 13 of the University of Wisconsin educator preparation programs could voluntarily opt-in for a comprehensive review of early literacy instructional practices. Each institution would receive a “confidential no-cost assessment of reading coursework quality and how well course instructors model evidence-based early reading instructional practices” and “where appropriate, institutional reports will offer specific recommendations for improvement.”

The Department of Public Instruction will grant $50,000 to the institution on completion of its landscape analysis and another $50,000 on the adoption of a “program improvement plan.”

Wisconsin’s children and future educators deserve UW’s full participation.

Dr. Judith E. FitzGerald, Madison

Anna Hansen :

When Danielle Hairston-Green first moved to the Madison area, many people told her they hoped she didn’t have any children, warning her to avoid the Madison School District.

So, when Blacks for Political and Social Action of Dane County held an event on the State of Black Students in the Madison School District on Saturday, Hairston-Green — now a grandmother— joined many others in calling for accountability among educators and government officials at local, state and federal levels.

“Change is hard for anyone,” Hairston-Green said. “We will (create) change if we trust the change-makers.”

Black educators, parents and community leaders gathered in Madison College’s Goodman Community Center to strategize over issues that include literacy and graduation rates, teacher recruitment and retention, and communication between faculty and families.

Anna Hansen:

hen Danielle Hairston-Green first moved to the Madison area, many people told her they hoped she didn’t have any children, warning her to avoid the Madison School District.

So, when the Urban League of Greater Madison held an event on the State of Black Students in the Madison School District on Saturday, Hairston-Green — now a grandmother— joined many others in calling for accountability among educators and government officials at local, state and federal levels.

“Change is hard for anyone,” Hairston-Green said. “We will (create) change if we trust the change-makers.”

Black educators, parents and community leaders gathered in Madison College’s Goodman Community Center to strategize over issues that include literacy and graduation rates, teacher recruitment and retention, and communication between faculty and families.

Benjamin Lee:

Steven Spielberg has criticised the idea that older films should be re-edited to appease modern sensibilities.

Speaking at Time’s 100 Summit in New York City, the 76-year-old film-maker expressed regret over taking out guns from a later release of his 1982 sci-fi blockbuster ET: The Extra Terrestrial. In the 20th anniversary edition, agents saw their firearms replaced with walkie-talkies.

“That was a mistake,” he said on stage. “I never should have done that. ET is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through.”

In 2011, Spielberg had already explained that the guns would be returning for the 30th anniversary release, explaining that he was “disappointed” in himself.