TOO FAKE TO TELL?
In 2008, the banks were too big to fail.
In 2023, the stats are too fake to tell.

But here’s why @DavidSacks may be onto something.

– They “beat” expectations 14 months in a row[1]
– They admit using statistical models to augment[2]
– They have a 600k… https://t.co/TnrWTTEsk6 pic.twitter.com/c2ebm3Axbh

— Balaji (@balajis) June 3, 2023

“It’s crazy to say people can’t talk about it, but that is what YouTube has been doing.” Many taxpayer supported K-12 systems use Google/YouTube services, including Madison.

Colleen Hroncich

My oldest child is graduating from college tomorrow, so it has me thinking about our educational journey—which could best be described as eclectic. At various times, we used private school, district school, and cyber charter school. But we ultimately landed on homeschooling. That doesn’t mean they were literally learning at home every day. My kids participated in co‐​ops, hybrid classes, dual enrollment, athletics, and more. This gave them access to experts and plenty of social time.

It can be scary taking charge of your children’s education—I remember feeling very relieved when my oldest received her first college acceptance. But today there are more resources than you can imagine to help you create the best education plan for your children’s individual needs and interests. And with the growth of education entrepreneurship, the situation is getting even better.

For starters, you don’t have to go it alone. The growth of microschools and hybrid schools means there are flexible learning options in many areas that previously had none. One goal of the Friday Feature is to help parents see the diversity of educational options that exist. To see what’s available in your area, you can search online, check with friends and neighbors, or connect with a local homeschool group.

Michael Weingrad:

The Seventies were less enlightened.
Back then we thought biology
Determined sex, and (don’t be frightened)
We called men “he” and women “she.”
In general, our social mores
Were still adapting to the forays
Of feminism’s second wave.
We worked out how we should behave,
Though, not from academic panels
Or gender theorists. No, our source
For moral wisdom was of course
That holy trinity of channels
(With PBS a fourth) by which
Our culture spilled into its ditch.

Indeed, the sentimental journey
That was my early childhood
Commenced with Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie
And wandered through the neighborhood
Where Mister Rogers hung his sweaters,
Electric companies taught letters,
And chubbildrubben subbang “zoom.”
Then, seeking some more elbow room
(Just like the song from Schoolhouse Rock goes)
It crossed the ocean to Japan
Where champions like Ultraman,
The Goldar team, and Johnny Sokko’s
Robotic pal would fight to cleanse
The earth of evil aliens.

Eugene Volokh:

There’s been a good deal of comment about the City University of New York law school student graduation speaker (Fatima Mousa Mohammed) who devoted a good deal of her speech to harshly condemning Israel and “Zionism,” as well as capitalism, the New York government, and America more generally. (I include the transcript of the speech and a link to the video at the end of this post.)

Beyond just the criticism, the CUNY Board of Trustees and Chancellor put out a statementsaying,

Free speech is precious, but often messy, and is vital to the foundation of higher education.

Hate speech, however, should not be confused with free speech and has no place on our campuses or in our city, our state or our nation.

The remarks by a student-selected speaker at the CUNY Law School graduation, unfortunately, fall into the category of hate speech as they were a public expression of hate toward people and communities based on their religion, race or political affiliation.

The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York condemns such hate speech.

This speech is particularly unacceptable at a ceremony celebrating the achievements of a wide diversity of graduates, and hurtful to the entire CUNY community, which was founded on the principle of equal access and opportunity. CUNY’s commitment to protecting and supporting our students has not wavered throughout our 175-year existence and we cannot and will not condone hateful rhetoric on our campuses.

A few thoughts:

Harold Robertson:

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society. 

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon. 

By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.

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

Artificial intelligence > artificial stupidity

The American Cultural Revolution is well underway, and an entire generation of medical school graduates has now had their heads filled with abiological nonsense. As @wil_da_beast630 shows below, smart people have been made… https://t.co/lHA0z9Sqol

— Balaji (@balajis) June 1, 2023

Anthony DeBarros::

About 3.66 million babies were born in the U.S. in 2022, essentially unchanged from 2021 and 15% below the peak hit in 2007, according to new federal figures released Thursday.

The provisional total—3,661,220 births—is about 3,000 below 2021’s final count, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics. Final government data expected later this year could turn that small deficit positive.

Experts have pointed to a confluence of factors behind the nation’s recent relative dearth of births, including economic and social obstacles ranging from child care to housing affordability.

Absent increases in immigration, fewer births combined with ongoing baby boomer retirements will likely weigh on the labor force supply within the next 10 years, said Kathy Bostjancic, chief economist at Nationwide, an insurance and financial-services company.

“You’re going to have a real shortage of workers unless we have technology somehow to fill the gap,” Bostjancic said.

A look at the trends in charts:

I’ve long found these posts rather curious in light of I Madison’s “more than most” k-12 tax & spending practices: now > $25k per student, amidst declining enrollment. In 2007, we Madisonians spent 333,101,865 for K-12. Inflation adjusted $486,328,722, today. Yet our current budget is $557,015,538 (it is higher every time I look). Readers interested in a deeper dive might find the topic of cost disease worth a look.

“Wisconsin Watch” channels two sources: the Wisconsin Policy Forum” and “Wisconsin Public Radio”

As ever, we are in budget season:

Ope!

✔️K-12 public school spending saw third-slowest growth in the nation

✔️Improve literacy by funding literacy programs/teachers

✔️Public schools provide the most protection/transparency under the law

✔️Public schools are overseen by elected members of the community https://t.co/KFqozg4xca

— Rep. Kristina Shelton (@RepKristina) May 20, 2023

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

“No More Babies!” – Expert Calls For Ban on Childbirth (1947)
Mrs Margaret Slee was the President of America Planned Parenthood Federation. Mrs. Slee’s proposition was actually that there were no more babies in developing countries for the next ten years.
Source: British Pathé… pic.twitter.com/V2V0kzOoqh

— Wittgenstein (@backtolife_2023) June 4, 2023

Madhumita Murgia

Chiang’s main objection, a writerly one, is with the words we choose to describe all this. Anthropomorphic language such as “learn”, “understand”, “know” and personal pronouns such as “I” that AI engineers and journalists project on to chatbots such as ChatGPT create an illusion. This hasty shorthand pushes all of us, he says — even those intimately familiar with how these systems work — towards seeing sparks of sentience in AI tools, where there are none.

“There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?’ And someone else said, ‘A poor choice of words in 1954’,” he says. “And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the ’50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we’re having now.”

So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics.

“It’s genuinely amazing that . . . these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text,” he says. But, in his view, that doesn’t make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, “but no one wants to use that term, because it’s not as sexy”.

Rob Long:

To all Valley Vista Middle School parents:

As you are no doubt aware, the current cultural and political climate has made it very difficult for our faculty to come up with a summer reading list that can be enthusiastically embraced by all families in our Valley Vista community.

In compiling the following list, we have tried to be sensitive to the needs and concerns of the rainbow of cultures and values that make Valley Vista such a richly diverse place. Working with parents and guardians from all faiths and traditions and balancing the wishes and standards for everyone in the community has been a challenging task, but it’s one we’ve joyfully accepted.

So far, the Post and Politico have corrected their stories. But it would have been really nice if they’d gotten the story right from the start.

🏆 Best Education Journalism of the Week 🏆 (6/2/23) https://t.co/rYFti73t4j pic.twitter.com/sXet9oVzoD

— Alexander Russo (@alexanderrusso) June 2, 2023

David Ress:

The change by the Richmond region’s largest employer will take effect July 1 for the roughly 20,000 openings the state advertises over the course of a year.

“This key reform will expand opportunities for qualified applicants who are ready to serve Virginians,” said Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

“This landmark change in hiring practices for our state workforce will improve hiring processes, expand possibilities and career paths for job seekers and enhance our ability to deliver quality services,” he said.

Stephen J. Ceci, Shulamit Kahn, and Wendy M. Williams

We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. In the most prestigious journals and media outlets, which influence many people’s opinions about sexism, bias is frequently portrayed as an omnipresent factor limiting women’s progress in the tenure-track academy. Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated the empirical evidence for gender bias in six key contexts in the tenure-track academy: (a) tenure-track hiring, (b) grant funding, (c) teaching ratings, (d) journal acceptances, (e) salaries, and (f) recommendation letters. We also explored the gender gap in a seventh area, journal productivity, because it can moderate bias in other contexts. We focused on these specific domains, in which sexism has most often been alleged to be pervasive, because they represent important types of evaluation, and the extensive research corpus within these domains provides sufficient quantitative data for comprehensive analysis. Contrary to the omnipresent claims of sexism in these domains appearing in top journals and the media, our findings show that tenure-track women are at parity with tenure-track men in three domains (grant funding, journal acceptances, and recommendation letters) and are advantaged over men in a fourth domain (hiring). For teaching ratings and salaries, we found evidence of bias against women; although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, they were nevertheless concerning. Even in the four domains in which we failed to find evidence of sexism disadvantaging women, we nevertheless acknowledge that broad societal structural factors may still impede women’s advancement in academic science. Given the substantial resources directed toward reducing gender bias in academic science, it is imperative to develop a clear understanding of when and where such efforts are justified and of how resources can best be directed to mitigate sexism when and where it exists.

Isabela Dias:

His documentary America Lost opens with sentimental home movie footage—Rufo’s young parents holding hands and walking, his father cuddling infant Chris. Rufo narrates how he was “born into the American Dream,” where his penniless immigrant father gained a life of prosperity. Then his tone becomes ominous, and family archival images are replaced with what he calls “the lost American interior”—night scenes of police cars, ambulances, and homeless people. “We are coming apart economically to be sure,” he says, “but we are coming apart as a culture.” As the film progresses, he describes these places as suffering on a “deeply personal, human, even spiritual” level, one hastened by the erosion of religious community and the two-­parent family. He hoped the movie—which received funding from right-wing foundations that support the Manhattan Institute, where Rufo now leads an anti-CRT initiative—would “reshape the way we think about American poverty.”

“I started the film as a libertarian,” Rufo saidduring a 2020 online screening, “and I finished the film as a conservative.” Along with his political evolution, Rufo was contemplating a career change. In his telling, the left-leaning documentary space had become inhospitable for a newfound conservative. He had relocated to blue Seattle, where his Thai-born wife, Suphatra, had a job with Microsoft, and he found an intellectual home within a right-wing network always ready to bring a professed convert into the fold. He secured a 2017 Claremont Institute fellowship (same class as Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe) and a role with the Discovery Institute, a think tank based in his new hometown and known for promoting the anti-evolution concept of “intelligent design,” becoming director of its Center on Wealth & Poverty. Rufo also started writing for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and later landed a fellowship with the Heritage Foundation, whose president, Kevin Roberts, would go on to describe him as a “master storyteller” of the conservative movement.

“My whole world opened up,” he toldpsychologist and conservative guru Jordan Peterson. “I felt like I had the freedom to think for the first time as an adult.” While making a movie took years, channeling his storytelling skills toward commentary on social justice and political issues offered more instant results.

For Rufo, progressive Seattle became a convenient punching bag. His work for the Discovery Institute and City Journal focused on the city’s homelessness crisis, criticizing the “ruinous compassion” of “socialist intellectuals” who pushed for more housing as a salve. “We must look at homelessness not as a problem to be solved, but a problem to be contained,” Rufo wrote in October 2018. “The backlash is coming,” he predicted.

The free market roots of #SchoolChoice are often overlooked in today’s political debates. It’s important to remember that the goal of school choice isn’t the elimination of public schools, but rather the lifting of all ships by providing competition to the public school monopoly. https://t.co/t49It5boHq

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 1, 2023

David Glasser:

The University of Southern California is prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion over merit and talent when awarding funding to students in PhD programs, according to a group of scholars who recently sounded the alarm on the issue as well as a memo that spells out the practice.

While dozens of universities consider DEI when distributing funding to PhD students for research, USC is “particularly extreme” in this regard, USC Professor James Moore, Columbia University Professor Spiro Pantazatos, and former USC doctoral candidate Kursat Christoff Pekgoz wrote in an op-ed for Inside Higher Ed on May 18.

“Our review of more than 30 graduate school websites for leading U.S. research universities suggests that while most leading institutions dedicate some share of resources to funding mostly or exclusively students from underrepresented groups, USC’s reliance on group identity to define eligibility for centralized doctoral support is particularly extreme,” the professors wrote.

A February 2022 memo sent by University of Southern California leaders to graduate program faculty details how. The elite, private school used to have two separate PhD funding programs, one specifically to advance DEI and another largely merit-based.

Harrington Shaw:

Undergraduate student engagement is on the decline. That’s according to the publishing and research firm Wiley, which, in February, released a “State of the Student” survey indicating that student engagement remains a “significant challenge” as universities have returned to in-person instruction. Wiley’s researchers found that more schools are facing enrollment and retention issues, as students are unsure which programs to pursue amid economic and emotional insecurity. Alarmingly, more than half of surveyed undergraduates indicated that they struggle to “stay engaged and interested in their classes,” while nearly half are concerned about keeping up with coursework.

As Inside Higher Ed noted in its own coverage of the study, students’ responses indicated a strong desire for a greater career-preparatory focus in their college classes. Wiley reported that students are “looking for current, relevant content that’s applicable to the real world and promotes interaction.” One-quarter of students stated that their educational experience would be improved if professors focused more on the applications of course material rather than on theoretical study.

Many institutions fail to educate students about the value of a college education.

Students also expressed a desire for more “company-led projects,” demonstrating their increasing focus on job skills, work experience, and professional certificate exam preparation. Activities like case studies, interactions with professionals, and workplace simulations were all suggested by students as productive uses of their instructional time.

There are, of course, solutions to this student engagement crisis, some of which are already in motion. First, higher-education institutions should work to reduce costs so that students can focus on school without having to work outside of class to afford tuition. Enabling students to spend more time studying and socializing will empower them to better understand material and meaningfully participate in class, in addition to forming more tightly knit learning communities.

BREAKING: Fairfax County Parents Association obtained text messages between the CDC Director and the presidents of the nation’s two largest teachers unions (Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle) with a FOIA request.

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) June 2, 2023

Robert Pondisco:

A new study from the Texas Public Policy Foundation is a reminder that the most persuasive argument in favor of school choice is not the promise of higher test scores, the beneficial effects of competition, or even an escape hatch from failing public schools—it’s the power of choice to make a more satisfying range of school cultures and curriculum available than traditional public schools can accommodate.

For years, wonkish arguments for school choice mostly revolved around enhanced performance. Researchers and policymakers have long built the case for (or against) choice based on test scores or other measurable metrics to demonstrate that choice “works.” The rapid growth of charter schools, for example, has long been framed as a moral imperative: a lifeboat to rescue students from failing schools, and a means of pressuring traditional public schools to improve or lose students to competition. More recently, some have offered choice as a means of disarming combatants in our ongoing “culture wars.” This train of thought brings us a little closer to putting school culture and curriculum at the center of the case for choice, but it still treats those things as a means, not an end in itself.

These common arguments for choice are lost on those actually doing the choosing. An analysis of the growth of classical charter schools in Texas by Albert Cheng and Cassidy Syftestad, suggests that parents are choosing those schools because of the intrinsic appeal of an education for their children grounded in the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. The pair surveyed 431 parents with children enrolled in Texas classical charter schools and convened focus groups for 25 of them to discuss their educational priorities for their children and what they liked or disliked about their child’s school. They found that “parents’ educational priorities aligned with the priorities of classical education,” which has seen a big spike in demand in Texas and elsewhere. Parents expressed “strong desires for their children to grow in wisdom and virtue,” they explain.

Interesting… when we use our TeamKennedy email address to set up @instagram accounts we get an automatic 180-day ban. Can anyone guess why that’s happening? pic.twitter.com/0G8oRnoXTv

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 2, 2023

Jeramie Bizzle:

She will teach a course titled “Health Policy, and Leadership,” according to the school. 

“I’m delighted to welcome Mayor Lightfoot to Harvard Chan School as a Menschel Senior Leadership Fellow. As mayor, she showed strong leadership in advocating for health, equity, and dignity for every resident of Chicago, from her declaration of structural racism as a public health crisis to her innovative initiative to bring mental health services to libraries and shelters. And of course, she led the city through the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Michelle A. Williams, Dean of Faculty at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Lightfoot expressed her excitement about her new role.

Defund Harvard. https://t.co/8bYWkxJ1dn

— Scott McNealy (@scottmcnealy) June 1, 2023

Chesa Boudin joins UC-Berkeley Law School

Wall Street Journal:

LinkedIn cited three posts and videos by Mr. Ramaswamy. In one, he argues that if adherents to “climate religion” really cared about the climate, “they’d be worried about, say, shifting oil production from the U.S. to places like Russia and China.” In another he says “fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.” In a third, he says China played the U.S. like a “mandolin” and “weaponized the ‘woke pandemic.’”

You can disagree with such lines or think they are over the top, but they’re well within the realm of political debate. They’re hardly extreme next to President Biden’s argument that Georgia is imposing “Jim Crow 2.0” on its black citizens, or Democrats’ ubiquitous claim that climate change poses an “existential” threat that has to be solved in the next X years, or else kiss humanity goodbye.

Mr. Ramaswamy’s team asked LinkedIn what exactly is misleading about those snippets. The company replied: “We can’t interpret the LinkedIn User Agreement or Professional Community Policies for you or tell you how it would be applied in any hypothetical situation.” The platform promised, however, to unfreeze his account and “grant another chance” if he replied by “expressly stating that you agree to abide by our Terms going forward.”

Eli Mackinnon;

Google replied to the tweet directly, saying, “Bard is an early experiment based on Large Language Models and will make mistakes. It is not trained on Gmail data. -JQ”.Much of the follow-on media coverage ran with this response and dutifully “debunked” Bard’s claim that its training data included Gmail data. Few articles professed skepticism around Google’s public denial of Bard’s claim, despite the fact that Google has been fined on numerous occasions by government agencies around the world specifically for making deceptive claims about its privacy practices that are later proven to be misleading.Given this context, the narrative that Bard’s claim was an open-and-shut case of AI hallucination is, at best, hasty and incomplete. A fuller investigation reveals (i) documented use of Gmail data in otherGoogle AI models that makes speculation around its use in Bard reasonable, and (ii) the habitual use of artfully ambiguous language in its public representations around Bard’s data sources, language that never actually rules out the use of Gmail data in its training set.

William Jacobson:

I was pleased to appear on the Well Said Podcastwith Cherise Trump of Speech First.

We covered many topics in depth, including the structure and projects of Legal Insurrection Foundation (CriticalRace.org and EqualProtect.org), how DEI has penetrated deeply into education, how it is how CRT is put into action, and whether there is hope or not.

Peter Wood:

Every college and university has a history. Students and faculty members typically have only a hazy idea of what came before their time, but that history still bears down on the present. TKC was founded in the 1930s by a popular radio minister. It moved several times before acquiring a campus up the Hudson at Briarcliff Manor. As a consequence of some bad financial planning, the college closed in the mid 1990s, but it kept its New York State charter. In the late 1990s, with financing from the Campus Crusade for Christ (now called “Cru”), the college re-opened on several floors of the Empire State Building. 

At that point the college had a campus of sorts, a handful of staff and faculty, a lot of unwarranted confidence, and very few realistic ideas about how to proceed. It tried a variety of contradictory approaches loosely centered on the idea that it was going to bring Christian higher education to the heart of Manhattan. But it had no coherent curriculum or any compelling reason for students to attend. The figure from Cru who had engineered the college’s re-opening, J. Stanley Oakes, slowly came to grips with the problem. He settled on the idea that TKC would strive to be an academically rigorous college that would serve students whose profiles would have fit them for elite liberal arts colleges but who wanted an explicitly Christian education. “Christian” in this context meant something like “evangelical Protestant” with something of a Baptist flavor. 

I was at the time serving as associate provost and the president’s chief of staff at Boston University. I had never heard of TKC, but Oakes had heard of me, and in his view I fit like a key into the lock: an evangelical Christian with considerable administrative experience in a large secular university. He offered me the provost’s position at TKC and I said no.

But after a few years of saying no and after various unwelcome changes at my secular university, I decided to give TKC a try. Oakes offered me a free hand in recruiting faculty and developing the curriculum, and he was as good as his word. I offered him the prospect of an intellectually demanding curriculum that would quickly weed out the students who were not up for the adventure.

Sophia Cope:

In analyzing the government’s interests in gaining warrantless access to cell phone data at the border, the Smith court considered the traditional justifications for the border search exception: in the words of the judge, “preventing unwanted persons or items from entering the country.” In particular, the government has a strong interest in conducting warrantless searches of luggage and other containers to identify goods subject to customs duty (import tax) and items considered contraband or that would otherwise be harmful if brought into the country such as drugs or weapons. 

Considering these traditional rationales for the border search exception in the context of modern cell phones, the Smith court concluded that the government’s “interest in searching the digital data ‘contained’ on a particular physical device located at the border is relatively weak.”

The court focused on the internet and cloud storage, stating: “Stopping the cell phone from entering the country would not … mean stopping the data contained on it from entering the country” because any data that can be found on a cell phone—even digital contraband—“very likely does exist not just on the phone device itself, but also on faraway computer servers potentially located within the country.” This is different from physical items that if searched without a warrant may be efficiently interdicted, and thereby actually prevented from entering the country.

Richard Vedder:

Intelligent observers of American higher education know that colleges generally are in great trouble: falling enrollments, declining public and political support, often dubious outcomes, and excessive tuition and other costs. Most depressing, the traditional tolerance of widespread viewpoints and commitment to free expression seem to have declined substantially.

While one finds a few encouraging stories dealing with these issues at existing colleges and universities, the overall picture is bleak. It seems that current institutions are doing too little, if anything, to fix the problem. At many, the outlook is palpably worsening.

In the competitive, free-market, private-business sector, lags in innovation or qualitative improvement are remedied by Schumpeterian “creative destruction” and by new competition. Hence Eastman Kodak has nearly died in photography and Tesla has prospered in automobiles as a consequence of changes in technology and taste.

It seems that current institutions are doing little, if anything, to fix higher education’s problems.

So, too, can new entrants into the collegiate market potentially help to reverse the declining higher-education industry in America. I recently attended a summit of higher-education thinkers and philanthropists sponsored by the new University of Austin (UATX). UATX will admit its first class in the fall of 2024, but it is already doing a number of academic activities—for example, running short summer seminars for crackerjack students at other schools—as a trial run for a future as a full-fledged university.

It is not an ordinary group of academics who are leading UATX’s inception. The founding president, Pano Kanelos, was the former president of the “great books” college St. John’s (Annapolis and Santa Fe). Prestigious academics like Charles Calomiris (Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia University) are taking pay cuts to join, full-time, the management and instructional team at UATX.

Scott Girard:

The Madison Metropolitan School District is “committed to doing the hard work and restoring the integrity” of its communications team following the release of an employee complaint against spokesperson Tim LeMonds last Friday.

In an unsigned statement posted to its website Thursday and sent via email to reporters by Communications Manager Ian Folger, the district said it “will conduct a full review of the department operations, structure and human interaction in the coming months,” with no more specific timeline.

“At the same time, the District will have significant leadership changes this summer, and through those transitions we will work to reorganize and restore relationships that are essential to our success,” according to the statement. “We will work to build a positive workplace culture for employees.”

Those leadership changes include Superintendent Carlton Jenkins retiring and longtime administrator Lisa Kvistad taking over as interim superintendent during a search for the next permanent leader. Chief Financial Officer Ross MacPherson and General Legal Counsel Sherry Terrell-Webb are among other top leaders leaving this summer.

.@MMSDschools released a statement this afternoon after last week’s release of an employee complaint against its spokesperson, Tim LeMonds. Says it will “conduct a full review of the (communications) department operations, structure and human interactions in the coming months.” pic.twitter.com/KK3U0r59WY

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) June 1, 2023

Dave Cieslewicz:

In fact, in a story last week in Isthmus by Deborah Kades, she reports that when WMTV reporter Elizabeth Wadas approached Jenkins at a public meeting last winter LeMonds prevented her from reaching him. He told her that the meeting was for the public. Wadas informed him that being a reporter did not make her an alien, but apparently to no avail.

LeMonds also leads a communications department for a district that, beyond just LeMonds, seems intent on not communicating. In 2019 a Madison East educator and trip chaperon was found to have placed hidden cameras in the hotel bathrooms of students. The district conducted an investigation to determine if staff followed policy regarding the reporting and follow up on these incidents. The investigation concluded they had, but the district refused to release the report. Parents and students were, understandably, upset. Even school board members were not allowed to read it. Then, inexplicably and in response to another open records request on yet another camera incident, the district released the full report to Isthmus in August of 2021. LeMonds refused to answer Isthmus reporter Dylan Brogan’s questions about it at the time. 

And over a long period, the MMSD holds the dubious distinction of being the least transparent public agency in the state. In March, the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council “awarded” the district with its No Friend of Openness (Nopee) award. The council wrote: “It’s rare for a public institution that depends on taxpayer support to be as awful as this one when it comes to public records and accountability. The district, through spokesperson Tim LeMonds, has become notorious for outrageous delays and excuses, prompting multiple lawsuits alleging violations of the records law. Tom Kamenick of the Wisconsin Transparency Project has said he has “received more complaints about MMSD than any other government agency.” It is time for the district’s casual contempt for the public’s right to know to come to a screeching halt.”

Tim LeMonds had good reason to fight the release of a complaint against him. Now he should tell his side of the story.

Chris Rickert:

In a statement released Thursday by district officer of internal communication Ian Folger, the district says “the information shared publicly last week was difficult for all individuals mentioned in the documents, as well as for those who interact with them. It is abundantly clear that there are relational problems within the District’s communications department that need to be addressed.”

Folger said LeMonds remains a full-time district employee and that his role with the district has not changed. He said he could not comment on whether LeMonds is under further investigation by the district, but LeMonds said in a Thursday interview that as far as he knew, he is not.

LeMonds — who in the interview said he was speaking only on behalf of himself — said he has not been subject to any disciplinary action in the wake of the documents’ release and “categorically” denied that he called Stephanie Fryer, the spokesperson for the Madison Police Department, an “idiot,” as was alleged in the court documents.

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Nicholas Kristof visits flyover country:

Mississippi’s success has no single origin moment, but one turning point was arguably when Jim Barksdale decided to retire in the state. A former C.E.O. of Netscape, he had grown up in Mississippi but was humiliated by its history of racism and underperformance.

“My home state was always held in a low regard,” he told me. “I always felt embarrassed by that.”

Barksdale cast about for ways to improve education in the state, and in 2000 he and his wife contributed $100 million to create a reading institute in Jackson that has proved very influential. Beyond the money, he brought to the table a good relationship with officials such as the governor, as well as an executive’s focus on measurement and bang for the buck — and these have characterized Mississippi’s push ever since.

With the support of Barksdale and many others, a crucial milestone came in 2013 when state Republicans pushed through a package of legislation focused on education and when Mississippi recruited a new state superintendent of education, Carey Wright, from the Washington, D.C., school system. Wright ran the school system brilliantly until her retirement last year, meticulously ensuring that all schools actually carried out new policies and improved outcomes.

One pillar of Mississippi’s new strategy was increasing reliance on phonics and a broader approach to literacy called the science of reading, which has been gaining ground around the country; Mississippi was at the forefront of this movement. Wright buttressed the curriculum with a major push for professional development, with the state dispatching coaches to work with teachers, especially at schools that lagged.

Meanwhile, we in Wisconsin spend more for less.

“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.

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Housed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Journalism School (along with Marquette University), the formation, affiliation(s) and funding sources of Wisconsin Watch have generated some controversy. Jim Piwowarczyk noted in November, 2022:

“Wisconsin Watch, a 501(c)(3) organization that disseminates news stories to many prominent media outlets statewide and is housed at the taxpayer-funded UW-Madison campus, has taken more than $1 million from an organization founded by George Soros over the years. Wisconsin Right Now discovered that the group is still prominently pushing out stories by a writer, Howard Hardee, who was dispatched to Wisconsin by a Soros-funded organization to work on “election integrity” stories and projects.” When major media outlets like WTM-TV and the Wisconsin State Journal run stories by Wisconsin Watch or Hardee, they fail to advise readers that he’s a fellow with a Soros-linked group. The group says that “hundreds” of news organizations have shared its stories over the years, giving them wide reach.

The Soros family also boasts significant influence over American media. An analysis from the Media Research Center found numerous media outlets employ journalists who also serve on boards of organizations that receive large amounts of funding from Soros.

More recently, and amidst Wisconsin’s biennial budget deliberations including many billions ($11.97B in 2019! [xlsx] excluding federal and other sources) for traditional government K-12 school districts, Wisconsin Watch writer Phoebe Petrovic posted a number of articles targeting choice (0.797%!! of $11.97B) schools:

May 5, 2023: Considering a Wisconsin voucher school? Here’s what parents of children who are LGBTQ+ or have a disability should know. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 5, 2023: False choice: Wisconsin taxpayers support schools that can discriminate. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 20, 2023: Federal, state law permit disability discrimination in Wisconsin voucher schools. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

## May 22, 2023 via a St Marcus Milwaukee sermon [transcript]- a church family whose incredible student efforts are worth a very deep dive. Compare this to Madison, where we’ve tolerated disastrous reading results for decades despite spending > $25k+/student!

## May 23, 2023: Curious (false claims) reporting on legacy k-12 schools, charter/voucher models and special education via Wisconsin coalition for education freedom. (Focus on 99% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 31, 2023: ‘Unwanted and unwelcome’: Anti-LGBTQ+ policies common at Wisconsin voucher schools. (Focus on < 1% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

May 31, 2023: Wisconsin students with disabilities often denied public school options via another Wisconsin Watch writer: Mario Koran. (Focus on 99% of redistributed state taxpayer spending).

WI’s open enrollment program is one of the best in the country, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t limitations. When anti-#SchoolChoice folks use @WisconsinWatch articles to attack, they should also remember the same things happen in public schools. https://t.co/EwPIiwm7CU

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 1, 2023

The free market roots of #SchoolChoice are often overlooked in today’s political debates. It’s important to remember that the goal of school choice isn’t the elimination of public schools, but rather the lifting of all ships by providing competition to the public school monopoly. https://t.co/t49It5boHq

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 1, 2023

Related: Governor Evers’ most recent budget proposals have attempted to kill One City Schools’ charter authorization…… and 2010: WEAC $1.57M !! for four state senators.

June 2, 2023 Wisconsin Watch’s Embarrassing Campaign against Vouchers and Christian Schools

Oops:

“Wisconsin Watch isn’t nonpartisan in a way that a layman would understand the term. Rather, it’s nonpartisan because there isn’t a party far enough to the left to earn its support.” @LutherAbel1 dismantles Petrovic’s reporting.https://t.co/2U1miyLSv7

— Patrick McIlheran (@PaddyMacMke) June 2, 2023

In examining who Wisconsin excludes from school choice, we’ve seen how private voucher schools discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and those w/ disabilities.

Here, @MarioKoran examines how public schools reject kids w/ disabilities from open enrollment https://t.co/gsNYBO6ocX

— Jim Malewitz (@Jmalewitz) June 1, 2023

Yeah, @WisconsinWatch has long leaned left and can easily be similarly accused of avoiding introspection. Lol https://t.co/GBseKikRh6

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) June 3, 2023

Their literal next piece (by a different reporter, true) was on inadequate special needs funding, so it’s suspicious to overlook that when critical of voucher schools and special needs.

The sexuality piece was bad journalism with unfounded logical leaps.https://t.co/A8WQgg2bdP

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) June 3, 2023

Why might civics minded have an interest in funding sources (such as Wisconsin Watch, WILL, ActBlue and so on)?

Two examples:

Billionaire George Soros is taking a stake in the Bernalillo County district attorney’s race, backing Raul Torrez with a $107,000 contribution to an independent expenditure committee.

George Soros, a multibillionaire who has only the most tenuous connection to Colorado, is paying for negative ads against incumbent District Attorney Pete Weir, a Republican, pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the effort.

Mario Koran:

Less talked about, however, is how the state’s biggest choice program, open enrollment, excludes students with disabilities. Roughly 70,000 Wisconsin students attend public schools outside their home districts through the 25-year-old open enrollment program. It allows students to apply to better-resourced public schools outside of district boundaries. But those schools can limit or deny slots for out-of-district students with disabilities.

Wisconsin districts in 2021-22 received 41,554 open enrollment applications, about 14% of which represented students with disabilities, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction data show. Schools rejected about 40% of applications in that category, with lack of special education space as the most common reason for the denials. By comparison, school districts rejected only 14% of applications from students without disabilities. 

Last year, for example, one suburban Madison district announced 115 slots for incoming open enrollment students — but none for children with disabilities.

The denials tie students to their home district school, underscoring how a child’s ZIP code shapes opportunities. The effect is compounded for students with disabilities.

More via the Wisconsin coalition for education freedom.

Kimberly Wethal

Middleton speller Aiden Wijeyakulasuriya has accomplished his personal goal of placing higher at the Scripps National Spelling Bee than his last time there.

Aiden ended his run at the national bee tied with another competitor for 21st as he incorrectly defined “obivate” in the seventh round. Nailing the silent “c” at the start of “ctenidium” in the sixth round, Aiden survived a grueling semifinals round Wednesday that knocked out 34 of 56 competitors.

Getting to the point where the competition was using the Merriam-Webster dictionary as its source material, rather than the spelling bee’s own list, was exciting, Aiden said Wednesday.

“Being able to study and memorize the 4,000 words on one of the champion lists given is one thing, but being able to identify and break down words from anywhere in the 500,000-plus words in the dictionary is another thing,” he said. “I just find it really fun to decode the word.”

Alex Gutentag:

What makes the NEA’s bargaining approach so remarkable is the fact that this union and its counterpart, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have recently inflicted profound racial and social injustice on the country’s school children in the form of extended school closures.

As an Oakland public school teacher, I was a staunch supporter of the teachers union and was a union representative at my school for three years. In 2020, however, I began to disagree with the union when it prevented me from returning to my classroom long after studies proved that school reopening was safe, even without COVID-19 mitigation measures. In my experience, the union’s actions were not motivated by sincere fears, but rather by a desire to virtue-signal and maintain comfortable work-from-home conditions.

Although union bosses like Randi Weingarten continue to obfuscate their role in school closures, the historical record is clear: The union repeatedly pushed to keep schools closed, and areas with greater union influence kept schools closed longer. Politicians, public health officials, and the media certainly had a hand in this fiasco, but the union egged on dramatic news stories, framed school reopening as a partisan issue, and directly interfered in CDC recommendations. Teachers saw firsthand that virtual learning was a farce and that children were suffering. While there may be plenty of blame to go around, teachers’ abandonment of their own students was a special kind of betrayal.

I am well aware that there were many problems plaguing public education before school closures, and that teaching was a challenging and exhausting job. Today, however, the crisis teachers face is an order of magnitude worse than it was in 2019, and this crisis is almost entirely self-inflicted. Public school enrollment is plummeting, kids are refusing to go to school, and disciplinary problems are spiraling out of control.

Many districts are in freefall. In Baltimore, one high school student told the local news that, “The rising number of violence within city public schools has been unfathomable.” More than 80% of U.S. schools have reported an increase in behavior issues. Nearly half of all schools have teacher shortages, and teachers continue to leave in droves.

Nationally, the chronic absence rate doubled, and it is not showing signs of improvement. In one San Francisco elementary school, almost 90% of students were chronically absent in the 2021-22 school year. In New York City, 50% of all Black students and 47% of all Latino students were chronically absent. Parents have no idea how far behind their kids really are, and schools cannot repair learning loss on a mass scale because the available workforce is simply not up to the task.

It’s hopeless listing all the things wrong with this CNN piece, but the biggest is that educator “quits” have been lower every month this school year when compared with the same months in 2022. https://t.co/tDYlkuefXM

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) May 31, 2023

Katherine Cramer:

nal paper: “My conception of what being a good citizen is has greatly evolved over the course of [our course]…I now think that it’s even more necessary to not just understand your own opinions, but also those of other people. Too often, we see politicians, media elites, and even citizens weaponizing our differences as political ammunition for one side or the other instead of appreciating the various perspectives. It certainly takes a lot of conscious effort to approach political discourse with an open mind and resist the urge to argue during the charged political environment we live in, but I’ve come to understand that this is a crucial step in creating a well-functioning democracy.”

Perhaps rather than worry that students on UW campuses are being indoctrinated, we instead should listen to them and follow their lead: Don’t believe everything you hear or read. Take the time to listen to people and understand where they are coming from. And perhaps most importantly, enjoy the feeling of people treating each other with respect.

✅Soros funds @OpenSociety
✅Open Society Foundations Fund @humanrightscam2
✅The HRC publish Corporate Equality Index (CEI) Scores which measure corporate devotion to Woke Ideologies
✅@Target needs a good CEI score to get investments from @BlackRock
✅Target partners with… pic.twitter.com/Q0PCAV418O

— Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) May 30, 2023

Matthew A. Kraft, Alexander J. Bolves, and Noelle M. Hurd:

We document a largely unrecognized pathway through which schools promote human capital development – by fostering informal mentoring relationships between students and teachers, counselors, and coaches. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents, we explore the nature and consequences of natural mentoring relationships by leveraging within-student variation in the timing of mentorship formation as well as differences in exposure among pairs of twins, best friends, and romantic partners. Results across difference-in-differences and pair fixed-effect specifications show consistent and meaningful positive effects on student attainment, with a conservative estimate of a 9.4 percentage point increase in college attendance. Effects are largest for students of lower socioeconomic status and robust to controls for individual characteristics and bounding exercises for selection on unobservables. Smaller class sizes and a school culture where students have a strong sense of belonging are important school-level predictors of having a K-12 natural mentor.

Matthew A. Kraft, Alexander J. Bolves, and Noelle M. Hurd:

We document a largely unrecognized pathway through which schools promote human capital development – by fostering informal mentoring relationships between students and teachers, counselors, and coaches. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of adolescents, we explore the nature and consequences of natural mentoring relationships by leveraging within-student variation in the timing of mentorship formation as well as differences in exposure among pairs of twins, best friends, and romantic partners. Results across difference-in-differences and pair fixed-effect specifications show consistent and meaningful positive effects on student attainment, with a conservative estimate of a 9.4 percentage point increase in college attendance. Effects are largest for students of lower socioeconomic status and robust to controls for individual characteristics and bounding exercises for selection on unobservables. Smaller class sizes and a school culture where students have a strong sense of belonging are important school-level predictors of having a K-12 natural mentor.

Matt Taibbi:

Rule #1: When you think you’re finished, go back and kill 20% of your copy.

Soviet writer Isaac Babel, a fan of what the Dude called “the whole brevity thing,” said a key was using “strong fingers” and “whipcord nerves” to remove parts “you happen to like most, but are needed least.” Babel added writing was “like self-inficted torture” and wondered why he didn’t follow his father into the farm machinery business. You’ll see that sentiment a lot. Most people who actually like writing, overwrite. When you think you’re finished, check the word count. If it’s 1800, target 360 for termination. Your real length is probably 1200, but a 20% kill is a start. Nobody has a 100% smart rate, least of all you. Learn to enjoy it. If loved ones walk in the room during this process, they should see a schizoid gleam in your eye that makes them nervous.

Milky Eggs:

Typically, the disadvantaged groups (exam scores underestimate ability) are thought to be poor, Black, Hispanic, or Native American students, and the advantaged groups (exam scores overestimate ability) are thought to be Asian-Americans.

These motivations are wrong.

However, it is important to be clear about why they are wrong. They are not wrong because I disagree with them on an ideological basis; rather, they are wrong because they conflict with the existing scientific literature on cognitive ability, the heritability of intelligence, and standardized testing. They are empirically wrongand run against decades’ worth of detailed studies spanning the fields of psychology, sociology, education, and modern genetics.

In this post, I outline a clear, step-by-step argument that lays out a strong case for the pro-standardized testing viewpoint. I establish the following points:

1. Intelligence is measured by a single factor, g
2. The majority of differences in intelligence are genetic
3. Common objections to heritability estimates are invalid
4. Standardized test scores are good measures of intelligence
5. Test scores are unaffected by parental income or education
6. Test preparation has a minimal effect on test scores
7. Asian culture does not explain Asian-American exam outperformance

Hartanto, Andree Lee Anne Teo, Nicole Lua, Verity Y. Q. Tay, Keith J. Y. Chen, Nicole R. Y. Majeed, Nadyanna M.:

Existing studies have shown that direct exposure to a real nature environment has a restorative effect on attentional resources after a mentally fatiguing task. However, it remains unclear whether virtual nature simulations can serve as a substitute for real nature experienced in the outdoors to restore executive attention. Given the mixed findings in the literature, the present study sought to examine if viewing videos with natural scenery (vs. a control with urban scenery) restores participants’ working memory capacity—measured by an operation span task—in a high-powered pre-registered within-subject experimental study. Overall, our within-subject experiment did not find any evidence to support the benefit of watching videos with natural scenery on restoration of executive attention. Moreover, the results from our Bayesian analyses further showed substantial support for the null hypothesis. Our study suggests that virtual nature simulations, even with the use of videos, may not be able to replicate the experiences of nature in the outdoors and restore attentional resources. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

B Davis:

Reading Mr. Phelps recent article, “Are English Departments Really Dying”, I was surprised by the conclusions he drew from the data he referenced at the U.S. Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). He tells us, essentially, that the degrees/departments aren’t really dying, but that undergraduate emphasis is shifting from the ‘pure’ / traditional English degree to “more applied, vocational, and skill-based programs.”

I was surprised because this does not really align with my own understanding of the crash & burn we see in the humanities.

So I checked the numbers, using the table he referenced.

And I was surprised all over again to discover what seems to be significant arithmetic errors in Mr. Phelps’ calculations.

He tells us, as an example, that “English bachelor’s degree completion declined from about 7.6 percent of all degrees in 1971 to about 4.3 percent in 2021.” The 7.6% is correct, dividing 63K degrees in English by 839K degrees overall in 1971. But if we divide the English degrees awarded in ’21 (35,762) by the total degrees in ’21 (2,066,445) we find that only 1.7% of all degrees that year were in “English Language & Literature”. (That probably explains the New Yorker’s use of the phrase ‘freefall’ ).