“In a supreme irony, the scientists hired to stamp out the “lab leak” theory may vindicate the politician most tarred as a conspiracy theorist for keeping the theory alive”



Matt Taibbi:

When Public and Racket obtained hundreds of pages of communications between the scientists who published perhaps the most influential Nature Medicine paper about the origins of Covid-19, one of the first things we noticed was the scientists’ fixation with hits and Internet traffic. If Heathers had been written for the Instagram age, the script would have read a lot like the Slack chats between Drs. Kristian Andersen, Andrew Rambaut, Bob Garry, and Eddie Holmes.




Civics: “urging him to begin openly ignoring the Supreme Court”



Charles Cooke:

Mark Tushnet, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School, a former president of the Association of American Law Schools, and the author of many of the books that America’s law students use while in college, has joined forces with a political-science professor from San Francisco State University to write an open letter to President Biden urging him to begin openly ignoring the Supreme Court:

We urge President Biden to restrain MAGA justices immediately by announcing that if and when they issue rulings that are based on gravely mistaken interpretations of the Constitution that undermine our most fundamental commitments, the Administration will be guided by its own constitutional interpretations.

I contended recently that the Left has no comprehensible judicial philosophy. This is a good example of that problem. There is no principle on display here, and there is no use pretending otherwise. By “mistaken interpretations,” Tushnet means decisions that he personally dislikes. By “fundamental commitment,” he means political outcomes that he personally desires. By “MAGA justices,” he means members of the Supreme Court whom he personally wishes had not been nominated and confirmed. He provides no rubrics, frameworks, standards, canons, doctrines, or objective arguments of any sort in the course of his proposition. Why not? Because he doesn’t have any.

As Tushnet goes on to confirm:




Closing the Credentials Gap: The affirmative action ruling represents real progress.



Gail Heriot:

My friends call me a pessimist. But if you’re concerned that this piece is going to be a downer, in which I list all the ways universities will circumvent the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions ruling, relax. I’m very pleased with the Court’s decision.

Opponents of race-preferential admissions haven’t won the war, and things could still go awry. But we’ve gained some important legal weaponry, and we stand a decent chance of adding to the arsenal. (Forgive all the military metaphors: I’ve been “in the trenches” on this issue for almost three decades.)

Provided that “win” is defined realistically, the fight seems a lot more winnable now than it did before SFFA v. Harvard. Yes, colleges and universities will try to get around the ruling. But 100 percent compliance isn’t necessary for positive things to flow from the Court’s decision.

Here are some predictions for the coming year or so.

Some schools will experiment with doing away with standardized tests, but those that hope to be viewed as academically rigorous will quickly decide that they don’t like the results and will reverse course. MIT has already done so (after abandoning the SAT during the Covid-19 lockdowns). Some schools will experiment with preferences based on social class. They will find that there are a lot more low-income Asian Americans and whites than they realized (and that most of their African American and Latino applicants are not low-income). That may dampen their enthusiasm. But if they try to get around the problem by defining social class in a way that privileges one racial group over another, they will risk being a target in the next wave of lawsuits (which is surely coming).




Science Has a Nasty Photoshopping Problem



Elisabeth Bik:

One evening in January 2014, I sat at my computer at home, sifting through scientific papers. Being a microbiologist, this wasn’t unusual, although I certainly didn’t expect to find what I did that night.

These particular papers were write-ups of medical research, with many including photographs of biological samples, like tissue. One picture caught my eye. Was there something familiar about it? Curious, I quickly scrolled back through other papers by the same authors, checking their images against each other.

There it was. A section of the same photo being used in two different papers to represent results from three entirely different experiments.

What’s more, the authors seemed to be deliberately covering their tracks. Although the photos were of the same sample, one appeared to have been flipped back-to-front, while the other appeared to have been stretched and cropped differently.




To stop woke discrimination, states must create anti-DEI statutes with teeth.



Louis Bonham:

At long last, some state legislatures have begun reacting to the “wokeness” epidemic that has consumed both K-12 and higher education.

Unfortunately, many of these bills are likely doomed to accomplish little or nothing because they fail to address an essential issue: enforcement. Particularly in the context of public universities, expecting state employees to simply obey laws that forbid practices they consider moral imperatives is naïve.

Expecting state employees to simply obey anti-affirmative-action laws is naïve.

Take California’s ban on affirmative action. For decades, it has been illegal for California institutions to give racial preference in admissions, hiring, or contracting. Despite this clear, politically popular law, have California state universities ended their use of racial preferences? Anyone familiar with the UC System will tell you they have not.

Instead, state employees violate the law and continue such practices. UC Berkeley’s law-school dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, typifies this prevailing attitude. In a recently surfaced video from earlier this year, this head of a public law school admits he and his school violate California law, via a process he calls “unstated affirmative action”:




“The Left Is Reengineering the Human Soul. Our Children Are the Guinea Pigs”



Christopher Rufo:

The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin raised his glass to a group of artists assembled at the home of famed writer Maxim Gorky in 1932. “The ‘production’ of souls is more important than the production of tanks,” he said, explaining that the communists desired not only to remake the world of politics and economics, but to reshape human nature according to the dictates of left-wing ideology. “And so,” he continued, “I raise my glass to you, writers, the engineers of the human soul.”

This concept—the ruthless application of politics to the most intimate recesses of the human spirit—would drive the communist regimes for the middle part of the twentieth century. The Soviets had their artists. The Chinese had their propagandists. The Third World armies had their pedagogists. All were committed to the creation of the New Man.

The Marxists in the West, such as Paulo Freire, held the same philosophy. Freire and his disciples believed that the critical pedagogies could reengineer the human soul and inspire a revolution from the bottom up. But in contradiction to their counterparts in the East, the dividing line between oppressor and oppressed in the West was not social class, but racial identity. 

“Although [Freire]’s early work was understandably rooted in an almost exclusive concern with class, many of us realized that it had theoretical shortcomings in dealing with the central issues shaping the multicultural debate,” explained Freire’s closest American collaborator, Henry Giroux. “Many of us began to expand the notion of social justice to include a discourse about racial justice. That is, justice could not be taken up solely in terms of the ownership of the means of production, or strictly around questions of labor or the division of wealth. These were very important issues, but they excluded fundamental questions about racism, colonialism, and the workings of the racial state.”




Taxpayer funded censorship, continued






Reading Reform Across America: A Survey of State Legislation



Shankar Institute:

raction due to the joint efforts of educators, parents, and state leaders. This movement for better reading instruction has helped to fuel a wave of legislation to address widespread and persistent reading deficits of American students. While reading difficulties cut across socioeconomic lines, they disproportionately affect students living in poverty as well as those from black, brown, and indigenous communities.

Reading Reform Across America documents how state legislatures nationwide have responded to these challenges. Specifically, the report examines reading-related legislation enacted between 2019 and 2022. We analyzed a total of 223 bills enacted in 45 states and the District of Columbia, examining over 40 features, such as teacher preparation, professional development, and curriculum, to name a few.

Our objective is to provide a robust and granular description of states’ efforts to enhance reading instruction, with the following goals:

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-




CriticalRace.org rolls out its Medical School database: “The ideological capture of over two-thirds of medical schools demonstrates that CRT/DEI has become a part of the fabric of medical education. We are training future doctors to look at patients through a racial lens, with potentially frightening consequences for society.”



William Jacobson:

CriticalRace.org, a project of the Legal Insurrection Foundation, has unique and unparalleled interactive maps and databases demonstrating how Critical Race Theory and its progeny, such as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and Ibram Kendi’s misnamed “anti-racism,” have deeply penetrated every corner of academia. The racialization of education is all but complete




District Court Strikes Down Race Preference in USDA’s and SBA’s Contracting Schemes



Eugene Volokh:

From Judge Clifton Corker’s opinion today in Ultima Servs. Corp. v. U.S. Dep’t of Agric. (E.D. Tenn.):

This case concerns whether, under the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection, Defendants the United States’ Department of Agriculture (“USDA”) and the Small Business Administration (“SBA”) may use a “rebuttable presumption” of social disadvantage for certain minority groups to qualify them for inclusion in a federal program that awards government contracts on a preferred basis to businesses owned by individuals in those minority groups.

The court generally answers this “no”; here’s an excerpt, though if you’re interested in the details you should read the whole opinion:

“The liberty protected by the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause contains within it the prohibition against denying to any person the equal protection of the laws.” United States v. Windsor (2013); see also Bolling v. Sharpe (1954); Ctr. for Bio-Ethical Reform v. Napolitano, 648 F.3d 365, 379 (6th Cir. 2011) (“The Fifth Amendment, of course, does not itself contain a guarantee of equal protection, but instead incorporates, as against the federal government, the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”). Courts, therefore, “evaluate equal protection claims against the federal government under the Fifth Amendment just as [they] would evaluate equal protection claims against state and local governments under the Fourteenth Amendment.” …

To satisfy the compelling-interest prong [of the strict scrutiny applicable to race classifications], the government must both identify a compelling interest and provide evidentiary support concerning the need for the proposed remedial action. The Supreme Court has held that the government has a compelling interest in “remediating specific, identified instances of past discrimination that violated the Constitution or a statute.” Students for Fair Admissions, Inc.Additionally, the government must present goals that are “sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny.”




Politics and Reading: the latest from Wisconsin



Mitchell Schmidt:

Ultimately, bill author Rep. Joel Kitchens, R-Sturgeon Bay, amended the measure to only require those students to take part in summer instruction or repeat third-grade reading courses while in fourth grade.

“This bipartisan plan could not have been accomplished without the countless hours put in by staff to craft a well thought out product as well as the input from DPI and other stakeholders,” bill co-author Sen. Duey Stroebel, R-Cedarburg, said in a statement. “The Right to Read Act will transform the way we teach reading in Wisconsin, helping better prepare our students for college and career readiness while setting them up (for) lifelong success.”

The bill creates a Council on Early Literacy Curricula within DPI that would be charged with recommending early literacy curricula and instructional materials to be used in schools. The council would consist of nine members, with three selected by the state superintendent of public instruction and three chosen by each of the leaders of the GOP-controlled Assembly and Senate.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004–

“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?




Low Expectations for all



Tom Knighton

When I was in middle school here in Georgia, they did something kind of smart. They broke us all into classes based on our grades. All the “A” students were in one group, “B” students in another, and so on.

The result was that those who excelled could excel and those who needed special help weren’t holding anyone else back.

Apparently, someone thought that was horribly unfair and the schools stopped doing it, which is a big problem.

You see, while the term “equity” wasn’t really a thing when this happened, it was the same mentality. If everyone couldn’t succeed academically, it seems, no one should.

It sounds stupid, but it’s the crab bucket mentality. The crabs pull down all the other crabs lest someone else escape.

Frankly, I could deal with it if I knew that was the end of it, but the practice continues to go on. Take this example from Massachusetts:

“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?




Refusing to teach kids math will not improve equity



Noah Smith:

“The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.” — John Dewey

A couple of weeks ago, Armand Domalewski wrote a guest post for Noahpinion about how the new California Math Framework threatened to dumb down math education in the state — for example, by forbidding kids from taking algebra before high school:

Well, I’m going to write another post about this subject, because the direction in which math education is trending in America under “progressive” guidance just frustrates me so deeply. 

A few days after Armand’s post, the new California Math Framework was adopted. Some of the worst provisions had been thankfully watered down, but the basic strategy of trying to delay the teaching of subjects like algebra remained. It’s a sign that the so-called “progressive” approach to math education championed by people like Stanford’s Jo Boaler has not yet engendered a critical mass of pushback. 

And meanwhile, the idea that teaching kids less math will create “equity” has spread far beyond the Golden State. The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts recently removed algebra and all advanced math from its junior high schools, on similar “equity” grounds.

It is difficult to find words to describe how bad this idea is without descending into abject rudeness. The idea that offering children fewer educational resources through the public school system will help the poor kids catch up with rich ones, or help the Black kids catch up with the White and Asian ones, is unsupported by any available evidence of which I am aware. More fundamentally, though, it runs counter to the whole reason that public schools exist in the first place.

The idea behind universal public education is that all children — or almost all, making allowance for those with severe learning disabilities — are fundamentally educable. It is the idea that there is some set of subjects — reading, writing, basic mathematics, etc. — that essentially all children can learn, if sufficient resources are invested in teaching them.

Related: Madison’s various one size fits all schemes:

Connected Math

Discovery math:

Not, Singapore math, however.




The 74’s look at 15 school systems shows some promising investments, but also a slew of questionable expenditures and a breakdown of transparency.



Linda Jacobson & Asher Lehrer-Small:

But a 10-month examination by The 74 shows that many districts haven’t used the funds with the urgency intended. Some have barely tapped monies advocates say are critical for academic recovery, while others have pumped millions of dollars into major classroom additions, upgrading athletic fields and other expenditures unrelated to the pandemic. 

With just over a year left to allocate the funds, the question isn’t only if districts will hit the September 2024 deadline, but whether the unprecedented windfall will leave students better off. 

Districts have not made it easy to answer those questions. Despite the unprecedented expense, Congress said little about districts’ responsibility to keep the public informed.

“Are districts with the biggest declines in student achievement spending their money the way you hope they would?” asked Matthew Steinberg, an education professor at George Mason University. “We just don’t know.”

A recent government report said gaps in spending data “make it difficult for the oversight community, decision-makers, and American taxpayers to fully understand where the money went and how it was used.”




The Buckeye State makes vouchers universal and boosts charter schools.



Wall Street Journal:

More than 100,000 students attend Ohio’s charter schools, which are especially important for the state’s inner-city students. Out of 26 cities measured, Cleveland students posted the biggest drop in National Assessment of Educational Progress reading scores last year compared to 2019. Cleveland also has its own school voucher program, and one common-sense measure from the Legislature was to allow students to take the vouchers to any private school—not only schools within the district.

Ohio has expanded its school choice offerings from cities to suburbs over the years. Good for Gov. DeWine and the Legislature for making private schools available to more families, and let’s hope they have their eye on education savings accounts next.




“felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started.”



Adam Townsend:

The FTC was so “adamant” with EY, conveying that “this is absolutely what you will do and this is going to occur, and you’ll produce a report at the end of the day” that would be negative about Twitter, that senior EY leaders feared that, if EY resigned as the independent assessor, “the FTC would take exception to [EY’s] withdrawal and create ‘other’ challenges for EY over time.”

A private litigant who engaged in such conduct might well be facing charges of witness tampering. As the Plaintiff in this civil enforcement action, the FTC should not receive preferential treatment. There simply is no way to square the striking record of bias recounted above, along with other evidence described in this motion, with any semblance of the impartiality, due process, or equitable conduct that the law requires from administrative agencies like the FTC when they act pursuant to court-authorized and -supervised consent orders. 

This Court should intervene to stop the FTC’s ongoing improper conduct.

The alarming recent developments in this case occur against the backdrop of a consent order between the FTC and Twitter (now X Corp) entered more than a decade ago to resolve allegations that Twitter had not adequately safeguarded user information.




New Statistical Evidence Supports the “Minneapolis Effect” as an Explanation for Increases in Homicides



Paul Cassell:

It is well known that there were significant spikes in homicides in 2020, particularly in major urban areas. In an article I published in 2021, I attributed these spikes to what I dubbed the “Minneapolis Effect”–specifically reductions in proactive policing as police pulled back in the wake of the George Floyd protests. I blogged about my article here.

A few days ago, an important new statistical study found corroboration for my hypothesis in New York City. Professor Dae-Young Kim’s article “Did De-Policing Contribute to the 2020 Homicide Spikes?” answers the question posed in the title in the affirmative.

Professor Kim’s article examines NYC homicide data from 2017 through 2020. It divides homicides into six different categories: gun, non-gun, domestic, non-domestic, gang, and non-gang. It assesses the connection between homicide rates in those categories and a significant reduction  in NYPD police stops of pedestrians. In NYC, stops fell from 13,453 in 2019 to 8,375 in 2020–a 30% decrease in proactive policing.

Professor Kim’s article found that the reduction in stops led to an increase in three homicide categories:




Newly released chats and emails between the authors of a crucial scientific paper leave no doubt: an unprecedented official disinformation campaign accompanied the arrival of Covid-19



MATT TAIBBI, LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE, ALEX GUTENTAG, AND MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER

Chats showing Proximal Origins authors saying things like “The truth will never come out (if lab escape is the truth)” were published first by independent researcher Francisco Del Asis of the independent investigatory group DRASTIC, after which the story was picked up by Ryan Grim of The Intercept. From there, health officials did their best to ignore the material — “Many of them remained silent with this revelation,” is how De Asis puts it — almost as if they were waiting for another shoe to drop. 

That other shoe is dropping. Public and Racket last week obtained a full complement of the “Proximal Origins” communications examined by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, revealing a story far worse than previously believed. While today’s Public story details the unprecedented scientific cover-up, the letters and chats examined here at Racket show how health officials and scientists constructed perhaps the most impactful media deception of modern times, exceeding even the WMD fiasco both in scale and brazen intentionality. Because House investigators uncovered such a wealth of material, some of the Proximal Origin communications — which shed light on other Covid-related controversies — will be addressed in a second part of this series later this week. For now, however, the degree to which these communications blow up years of news stories stands out.




I wanted to see for myself: could ChatGPT-4 pass my freshman year at Harvard?



Maya Bodnick

Two weeks ago, I asked eight Harvard professors and teaching assistants to grade essays written by ChatGPT-4 in response to a prompt assigned in their class.2 Here are the summarized prompts with links to the essays:

  • Microeconomics and Macroeconomics(Professors Jason Furman and David Laibson): Explain an economic concept creatively (300-500 for Micro and 800-1000 words for Macro).
  • Latin American Politics (Professor Steven Levitsky): What has caused the many presidential crises in Latin America in recent decades (5-7 pages)?
  • The American Presidency (Professor Roger Porter): Pick a modern president and identify his three greatest successes and three greatest failures (6-8 pages).
  • Conflict Resolution (Professor Daniel Shapiro): Describe a conflict in your life and give recommendations for how to negotiate it (7-9 pages).
  • Intermediate Spanish (Preceptor Adriana Gutierrez): Write a letter to activist Rigoberta Menchú (550-600 words).
  • Freshman Seminar on Proust (Professor Virginie Greene): Close-read a passage from “In Search of Lost Time” (3-4 pages).
  • Freshman Expository Writing (instructor chose to remain anonymous): Close-read a passage from “Middlemarch” (4-5 pages).

I told these instructors that each essay might have been written by me or the AI in order to minimize response bias, although in fact they were all written by ChatGPT-4. I submitted exactly what ChatGPT-4 wrote, except that I sequenced multiple responses in order to meet the word count (ChatGPT-4 only writes about 750 words at a time). Finally, I told the professors and TAs to grade these essays normally, except to ignore citations, which I didn’t include.




Affirmative Action Bred Hypocrisy and Victimhood



Bobby Jindal:

The elevation of victimhood over achievement has led many to misrepresent their racial and gender identities in pursuit of advantages in professional and academic positions. Students at selective colleges are identifying as non-heterosexual at rates several times higher than historic or national averages, though University of London political scientist Eric Kaufmann noted that there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in sexual behavior tied to those identities. I’ve heard of parents at elite private high schools using genetic testing services hoping to identify any ethnic heritage that would boost their children’s college applications and of young professionals falsely identifying as bisexual for a career boost.

Racial and gender quotas result in liberals’ willful hypocrisy and convoluted rationalizations when they are confronted with the reality that aptitudes, interests and effort aren’t always evenly distributed among their superficial and shifting politicized racial categories. Liberals have translated their calls for increased diversity into demands that colleges admit and employers hire black and Hispanic applicants in proportion to their group’s share of the U.S. population.




“federal entities, from the White House to the CIA, had developed a “formal system” to convey their demands to the digital platforms regarding what could be said online and who could say it”



Martin Gurri:

Federal intervention in digital speech followed a tendentious pattern. Any opinion that offended establishment sensibilities was a target for suppression. That included left-wing populist views and eccentrics like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., but most of the heretical voices belonged to Donald Trump and his Republican supporters. During the 2020 campaign, Trump was “deamplified” by Twitter—meaning that he was essentially talking to himself. After the January 6 riots in Washington, Twitter booted him off the platform, though it never identified how he had violated its terms of service. FBI personnel took jobs with Twitter in significant numbers, intensifying the partisan tilt. James Baker, who played a leading role in the Trump investigation while at the FBI, became a persistent advocate of expelling Trump after moving to Twitter.

At the same time, the speech police protected from criticism members in good standing of the establishment, with a special fondness for Anthony Fauci. It did that for Joe Biden, too, before and after his election to the presidency. There’s no need to repeat here the sordid details of the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco, but given that the predicate for censorship has been the defense of truth, the bare facts of the story should be noted: the FBI lied to Twitter, and Twitter passed the lie on to the public. If it was a disinformation operation, it succeeded completely.

As Taibbi and Shellenberger observed, these maneuvers were unprecedented in the lifetimes of those assembled at the hearing. Even Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist frenzy encountered strong opposition from elements of the political and media establishment. The new censorship seemed to rely on universal elite conformity. No debates had been held, no enabling laws passed. The federal government’s standing legal authority had been used to silence, in secret, the online opinions of an untold number of Americans. Whatever the Republicans’ motivation, one would think this to be a worthy subject of conversation for the House.




“We don’t co-parent with the government”



Joanne Jacobs:

Founded less than three years ago to fight masking mandates, the Moms for Liberty — with 120,000 members and nearly 300 chapters in 45 U.S. states — is now a political force, he writes. Members believe “malign forces in public schools — gender ideology, critical race theory, Marxism, anti-Americanism — have come for their children, and they’re having exactly none of it.” 

Republican presidential hopefuls showed up at the summit to woo members. No doubt they remember that “school choice moms” helped Ron DeSantis win in his first run for governor of Florida, and Democrat Terry McAuliffe lost the race for Virginia governor in 2021 after saying “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

In breakout sessions, Moms learned “how to run for school boards — and if they win, how to advance their agenda even when in the minority,” Pondiscio writes. “More than half of the 500 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed for local school board elections last year won their races.”




40 years since “A Nation at Risk,” reform measures are more disruptive



Rick Hess:

While it’s not widely remembered today, the apocalyptic language in “A Nation at Risk” was married to an intense faith in the conventional schoolhouse. What do I mean? Consider the report’s major recommendations:

  • Increase the number of Carnegie units that students complete in high school in core subjects.
  • Resist grade inflation, encourage colleges to raise admissions standards, and test students at key transition points.
  • Extend the school day and school year.
  • Raise teacher pay, make pay performance-based and market-sensitive, and require teachers to demonstrate content mastery.

All of these recommendations sought to make the traditional school systems more rigorous, time-consuming, and demanding. None of it envisioned any fundamental alterations to the schoolhouse as understood by Horace Mann or the architects of David Tyack’s One Best System. One consequence was that, especially in a less polarized era, leading figures on the left and right basically agreed on the merits of more courses, more testing, more minutes in school, and more pay for teachers. (Whether this agreement led to the kind of change they hoped for, or even any change at all, is another story.)

Today? For better or worse, the conversation about school improvement has fundamentally changed. Instead of more rigor, time, or testing, the most popular proposals tend to be more controversial and more disruptive to familiar routines.




Seeking True DIE



College Fix:

Perry told The Chronicle, “He’s simply trying to end the ‘selective enforcement’ of federal civil-rights laws, in which the rights of favored groups are vigorously protected, while the rights of other groups are routinely violated.”

“He casts himself as a civil-rights advocate, standing up for those male white and Asian students, faculty, and staff who are being excluded from programs and awards and are too scared to challenge their colleges themselves,” The Chronicle reported.

“I’m trying to pursue justice for everybody and hold universities accountable to their legal obligations, and their mission of true diversity, equity and inclusion,” Perry said.




Notes on politics, education and outcomes



“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?




Civics: Presidential Candidate Judicial Appointment List






It’s in social media, human rights, speech and algorithms



Sriram Krishnan

As a technologist, my hope is that the answers lie in code rather than lawyers and that we see creative technology solutions to help keep the internet open.

For far too long, the online world has been in stasis limited to a few options dominated by a few large companies. Technological breakthroughs and unrest were needed to shake things up, and that has happened. A pessimist might say that this is going to lead to chaos and challenges. As an optimist who invests in technology entrepreneurs for a living, I believe we are in for an age of major innovation, with all of us having more options and say in how things are run online.

Either way, it’s going to be one heck of a ride.




73% of Businesses Say Students Graduating from the Public K-12 System are Unprepared for the Workforce



Wisconsin Employer Survey

A new survey of Wisconsin businesses paints an unflattering picture of the education system in the state. According to the Wisconsin Employer Survey, nearly three-quarters of businesses think students graduating from the public K-12 system are not prepared for the workforce. Making matters worse, 56 percent of respondents said they have employees who struggle with the ability to read or do math.

The unsettling new information sadly reflects the fact that more than 60 percent of students cannot read or do math at grade level in Wisconsin.

“Not only is this new data disappointing, but it should also make all of us outraged,” said WMC Senior Director of Workforce, Education & Employment Policy Rachel Ver Velde. “Wisconsin’s public school system is failing our children, and it is having an outsized impact on our workforce and economy.”

With young people set up for failure, employers are now having to step in to provide remedial education for workers on top of the technical training they already offer. Forty-one percent of businesses said they have provided employees with additional education or tutoring because their K-12 education did not prepare them with the basic skills needed for a career.

The educational failures are also impacting Wisconsin’s already challenging workforce shortage. According to the survey, nearly two-thirds of employers said they have reduced hiring requirements in an effort to get more job applicants.

“Wisconsin taxpayers should be asking themselves what our return is on the billions of dollars we spend each year on public education,” added Ver Velde. “We cannot measure success by how much money is spent. Instead, we need to start focusing on what students are learning and if they are being set up to succeed upon graduation.”

“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?




Therapists who judge, recoil, or quietly rage at their patients can’t provide effective therapy.



Andrew Hartz:

A patient came to a clinic where I worked a few years ago. He was looking for help with depression but also told his therapist that he was feeling frustrated after having lost out on a research fellowship. The patient, who was white, felt the reason was affirmative action. The therapist was Arab. A group of psychiatrists, social workers and psychologists discussed the case at a clinic-wide meeting and came to an apparent consensus: Confront the patient and tell him that if he didn’t overcome his biases, he would be transferred elsewhere. They argued that it would be unfair for a clinician of color to have to provide therapy to a “racist” patient.




Civics: Biden’s FTC Punished Twitter For Seceding From The Censorship Complex



Margot Cleveland

I “felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started,” a CPA with nearly 30 years of experience with the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) testified last month. The FTC’s pressure campaign left EY partner David Roque so unsettled that he sought guidance from another partner concerning controlling ethical standards for CPAs to assess whether his independence had been compromised by the federal agency. 

Roque’s testimony prompted attorneys for Twitter to seek documents from the FTC to assess whether the federal agency had repeated its pressure campaign with EY’s successors, but the agency refused to provide any details to the social media giant. Twitter responded last week by filing a “Motion for a Protective Order and Relief From Consent Order.” 

That motion and its accompanying exhibits provide shocking details of an abusive agency targeting Twitter. When those facts are coupled with the report on the FTC issued earlier this year by the House Weaponization Subcommittee, it seems clear the Biden administration is targeting Twitter because Musk seceded from the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

FTC’s Pre-Musk Enforcement Actions

Thursday’s motion began with the background necessary to appreciate the gravity of the FTC’s scorched-earth campaign against Twitter. 

More than a decade ago, the FTC entered into a settlement agreement with Twitter after finding Twitter had violated the Federal Trade Commission Act by misrepresenting the extent it protected user information from unauthorized access. That 2011 settlement agreement resulted in a consent order that required Twitter to establish a “comprehensive information security program” that met specific parameters. The 2011 consent order also required Twitter to obtain an assessment from an independent third-party professional confirming compliance with the terms of the settlement agreement.




Food and the taxpayer funded Madison School District



Scott Girard:

From the quality of the food to communication about what was on the menu, parents and school staff sounded the alarm last fall about what schools were serving to students. One teacher described the lunches as “awful” and another parent said her “kid came home starving from school” as the food served differed from what was on the menu sent to parents.

District Director of Food Services Josh Perkins said this summer is “totally different” from last, when he had just taken over the job and the department was short-staffed.

“We spent 2022 in a period of stabilizing things,” Perkins said. “In fall 2023, the goals of the department are to establish a much higher level of confidence and trust with the Madison community in the school meals.”




The non-prosecution of street crime has allowed gangs to believe themselves beyond the law



Florian Sohnke:

When Cook County State’s Attorney Bernard Carey was approached with the grim news venality and corruption had adulterated Cook County courts, one of his first acts was to speak with Thomas P. Sullivan, who was the then-United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. Recalling the exchange with Carey, Sullivan revealed decades later Carey’s appeal for assistance to contend with the fetid pool of corruption sweeping through the court system was based on Carey’s realization his office was insufficiently staffed and funded to shoulder a probe of such scale.  

A notable prosecutor, Sullivan applied his calm, methodical legal mind to what would become known as Operation Greylord. Following President Jimmy Carter’s defeat in the 1980 election, Sullivan was replaced by Dan Webb, who, with a social scientist’s detachment and dispassion, embarked on a complex, lengthy, and challenging investigation. Over the next four years, Webb and FBI agents uncovered a preponderance of evidence demonstrating a massive case-fixing scheme involving judges, Cook County prosecutors, lawyers, court bailiffs, clerks, and a state lawmaker. Working undercover, federal agents posing as prosecutors, criminal defense attorneys, victims of crimes, and criminals, fabricated criminal cases to ensnare — amongst others — corrupt public officials and defense attorneys involved in bribery, kickbacks, and fraud.




Cost disease, K-12 and outcomes






University of Florida and DIE policies



James Reinl

University of officials massively downplayed the scale of their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in official filings to Ron , one of the governor’s appointees has alleged to DailyMail.com.

Christopher Rufo, a DeSantis education hire, accused university bosses of ‘lying through their teeth to the governor’ by declaring they had some 30 DEI schemes costing $5million a year – when they were really running more than 1,000.




Ohio college employees could be held ‘personally liable’ for violating affirmative action ban: attorney general



Maggie Kelly:

“I am writing to stress the need to comply strictly with the decision’s holding,” Yost wrote to public colleges and universities the following day, according to The Dispatch.

“And to warn the higher education community about the dangers that institutions of higher education and institutional employees face by failing to do so.”

Employees found guilty of such practices as employing application essays to discern an applicant’s race “might not be protected by qualified immunity, a doctrine that protects public officials from being personally liable in certain situations,” Yost wrote, according to The Dispatch.




Legacy Media and language






Why Match School And Student Rank?



Astral Codex Ten:

Matt Yglesias’ five-year old son asks: why do we send the top students to the best colleges? Why not send the weakest students to the best colleges, since they need the most help? This is one of those questions that’s so naive it loops back and becomes interesting again.

To avoid corrupting the youth, we might provide an optimistic answer: anyone can teach addition, any college math major can teach calculus, but it takes a world expert to teach ten-dimensional hypertopology. We want to take the few students smart enough to learn hypertopology and connect them to the few experts smart enough to teach it. But this seems false; most of the classes at top colleges are the same material that gets taught everywhere else; you don’t get into subjects that need world experts until postgrad.

Another answer, still somewhat optimistic: we want to maximize the chance of geniuses doing revolutionary work. If we give a mediocre student the world’s best writing teacher, and a genius a mediocre writing teacher, they might each write a pretty good novel. But if we give a mediocre student a mediocre writing teacher, and the genius the world’s best writing teacher, then we might get one mediocre novel and one work of staggering genius which revolutionizes literature forever. Likewise, if we connect the world’s most talented young scientists to the world’s best science teachers and labs, maybe they’ll cross some threshold of understanding where they can discover a cure for cancer. I think this is the best explanation that sticks to optimistic prosocial answers.




Cambridge eliminates advanced middle school math



Christopher Huffaker:

Martin Udengaard wants more for his son, and he doesn’t think Cambridge schools can deliver.

Cambridge Public Schools no longer offers advanced math in middle school, something that could hinder his son Isaac from reaching more advanced classes, like calculus, in high school. So Udengaard is pulling his child, a rising sixth grader, out of the district, weighing whether to homeschool or send him to private school, where he can take algebra 1 in middle school.

Udengaard is one of dozens of parents who recently have publicly voiced frustration with a years-old decision made by Cambridge to remove advanced math classes in grades six to eight. The district’s aim was to reduce disparities between low-income children of color, who weren’t often represented in such courses, and their more affluent peers. But some families and educators argue the decision has had the opposite effect, limiting advanced math to students whose parents can afford to pay for private lessons, like the popular after-school program Russian Math, or find other options for their kids, like Udengaard is doing.“The students who are able to jump into a higher level math class are students from better-resourced backgrounds,” said Jacob Barandes, another district parent and a Harvard physicist. “They’re shortchanging a significant number of students, overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.”




DIE and continuing legal education



more.




Civics: Are Authorities Using the Internet to Sap Our Instinct for Freedom?



Matt Taibbi:

A brief story sums up my theory of journalism: 

In 1991 I was trying to work as a freelance reporter in newly ex-communist St. Petersburg, Russia. I heard a hot rumor. After decades of deprivation, gorillas at the city zoo were to be given bananas.

I thought Western editors would go crazy. I’d been rejected for more negative stories about the arrival of heroin, or gun violence. Bananas were positive! 

I went to the zoo, and interviewed a zookeeper. Then I did what journalists do: I hovered around the gorilla cage looking creepy before mustering the courage to ask a few strangers in broken Russian what they thought about gorillas and bananas. (The newly ex-Soviet Russians had funny answers, like, “How come nobody’s given me bananas?”) When this man on the street portion was done, I stood wondering what to do next. I remember having the thought, “Well, I can’t interview the gorilla.”

I shrugged, went home, wrote it up, and got rejected, but that’s not the point. The point is, journalism isn’t rocket science. You show up, talk to a few people, give your best guess at what you’re looking at, and when you get to the “there’s no one left to interview but the gorilla” moment, you move on.

Thirty years later — at the end of last year — I was in San Francisco looking at content moderation requests sent to Twitter by the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Obviously, the degree of difficulty had gone up a bit, but the job was more or less the same: “Tech Company Gets Unpleasant Bananas.”




Civics: “felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started.”



US vs Twitter; X Corp motion for relief

This motion asks the Court to rein in an investigation that has spiraled out of control and become tainted by bias, and to terminate a misfit consent order that no longer can serve any proper equitable purpose. As detailed below, the FTC has engaged in conduct so irregular and improper that Ernst & Young (“EY”)—the independent assessor designated under a consent order between Twitter and the FTC to evaluate the company’s privacy, data protection, and information security program—“felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started.” Recent sworn testimony details how the FTC, through a series of interactions with EY immediately after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, attempted to co-opt EY’s independent assessment in order to generate evidence of “deficiencies in Twitter’s privacy and information security program.” These efforts included dictating to EY “very specific types of procedures that they expected” EY to perform and “[conveying] expectations … about what th[e] results should be before [EY] had even begun any procedures.” The FTC was so “adamant” with EY, conveying that “this is absolutely what you will do and this is going to occur, and you’ll produce a report at the end of the day” that would be negative about Twitter, that senior EY leaders feared that, if EY resigned as the independent assessor, “[t]he FTC [would] take[] exception to [EY’s] withdrawal and create[] ‘other’ challenges for EY over time.”

A private litigant who engaged in such conduct might well be facing charges of witness tampering. As the Plaintiff in this civil enforcement action, the FTC should not receive preferential treatment. There simply is no way to square the striking record of bias recounted above—along with other evidence described in this motion—with any semblance of the impartiality, due process, or equitable conduct that the law requires from administrative agencies like the FTC when they act pursuant to court-authorized and -supervised consent orders. This Court should intervene to stop the FTC’s ongoing improper conduct.




“Discrimination By Algorithm Is The Future Of Affirmative Action”



William Jacobson

Parlaying that into the topic at hand, which is the biggest professional networking platform out there. LinkedIn, another social media application in its own right, is now being accused or found to have manipulated candidate pools for jobs that are available on the website based on race and other EEOC protected categories. And I think this is not, again, not a surprise. We’ve seen another big ruling that just came out reversing affirmative action. And I think things like this will continue where you still, you strike things down, but you’re gonna have admissions policies or LinkedIn, algorithms that are still gonna hold true to what they believe.

WAJ:

Well, this is something that we raised at Equal Protection Project, which is their diversity in recruiting program at LinkedIn. And what it is, they have tweaked their algorithms. Nobody sees it, nobody really knows what’s going on, but they do it, admit it. They tweak their algorithms so that when they present pools of potential employees, candidates, potential hires, job seekers to employers, they manipulate those pools to give a diverse pool.

So if you’re an engineer and you’re applying for a job, their algorithms don’t just look at your grades in college or your job experience, or where you worked or what your specialty is. It will also consider, if you’ve consented, which probably most people do, they check the box that LinkedIn can use your demographic information, they will then tweak that pool and take into account other things. So they’re basically discriminating against people on the base of race and other factors as part of this Diversity In Recruiting program. And that’s how they’re manipulating it.

And getting to your point about what the Supreme Court just decided, this is how the Supreme Court’s admonition that you can’t use race as a factor in admission and by implication other ways is going to be evaded. They’ll plug it into their algorithms, they’ll plug it into their artificial intelligence, they’ll plug it into their [computer] program, and you will never know. And that’s why I think what’s happening at LinkedIn is so important.

***

… It’s not even clear how much the employers know about what’s going on. LinkedIn has not been forthcoming with that information.




Sunak to force English universities to cap numbers of students on ‘low-value’ degrees



Richard Adams and Aubrey Allegretti

Rishi Sunak will force universities to limit the number of students taking “low-value” degrees in England, a measure which is most likely to hit working class and black, Asian and minority ethnic applicants.

Courses will be capped that do not have a high proportion of graduates getting a professional job, going into postgraduate study or starting a business, the prime minister will announce on Monday.

But vice-chancellors say the measures will act as a “red flag to students”, who will be turned off the idea of entering a capped course as they feel it will damage their life chances, at considerable cost to institutions.

The numbers cap is unlikely to affect the bulk of courses offered by Oxbridge or Russell Group universities, whose students tend to go on to “highly skilled” jobs requiring a degree and above-average earnings.




K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: outcomes



Mary Rice Hasson:

Wake up, friends. America’s stubborn commitment to progressive-controlled government education has already abandoned “the vast majority” of our children “to the progressive cause” for well over a decade. The results have been disastrous.

For starters, schools have failed abysmally in their fundamental task — teaching basic academic skills — despite spending staggering sums. In 2019, annual expenditures for K–12 public schools totaled almost $800 billion, but, according to the Nation’s Report Card, barely one-third of public school students were “proficient” in math and reading pre-COVID, a dismal track record that worsened significantly post-COVID. Nationally, just 26 percent of eighth graders are proficient in math, with 31 percent proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 3 percent of fourth graders are mathematically proficient, while twenty-three Baltimore public schools reported exactly zero math-proficient students. Government schools, which enroll almost nine out of ten American children, repeatedly fail to deliver on their promises but are rewarded with big budgets and near-monopolistic power.

The most troubling aspect of our government school system, however, is not what it has failed to teach but what it has succeeded in teaching.

As cultural revolutionaries have long known, it is far easier to capture and mold the beliefs of children than to change the minds of adults. The evidence is in: the cultural revolutionaries are winning. A recent Wall Street Journal/NORC poll found disturbing gaps in the values embraced by Americans under thirty compared to those espoused by older adults. While majorities of older Americans say patriotism, religion, and having children are “very important,” shockingly few young people agree. Among Americans under thirty, just 23 percent consider patriotism and having children to be very important, while only 31 percent say the same of religion. The shift in the values and beliefs of younger Americans is dramatic but hardly surprising, as it tracks the leftward swing of our public education — indoctrination — system.




Civics: Tax preparers that shared private data with Meta, Google could be fined billions



Ashley Belanger:

Yesterday, Congress members revealed the results of a seven-month investigation into tax-filing companies. Lawmakers found that H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer “recklessly shared” potentially hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ sensitive personal and financial data with Google and Meta “for years” in apparent violation of laws prohibiting tax preparers from sharing tax return information without customers’ consent.

In a press release provided to Ars from the office of Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), lawmakers alleged a “massive, likely illegal breach of taxpayer privacy.” Insisting upon urgent redress, lawmakers are now calling upon the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Federal Trade Commission, and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration to “fully investigate this matter and prosecute any company or individuals who violated the law.”

The Congress members’ report said that “any tax return preparer who ‘knowingly or recklessly discloses'” tax return information “is subject to a fine up to $1,000 per violation, and a prison term of up to one year.”




Curtailing University Graft Can Prevent Student Debt Debacle



Ari Kaufman:

Conservatives and common-sense Americans cheered last month when the Supreme Court correctly ruled that Joe Biden’s abominable attempt to “forgive” $430 billion in college debt for over 25 million borrowers was unlawful.

The White House plan was purely unconstitutional and insulting to Americans. Legislation that Congress designed for a small number of military members in the wake of 9/11 should not be applied to a large portion of the population two decades later.

It was also regressive, robbing blue-collar workers who saved their money and giving to wealthier doctors, lawyers, and teachers. Biden engaged in left-wing class warfare on behalf of the affluent. Or, as Senate Leader Mitch McConnell said, a way for Biden to “pad the pockets of his high-earning base and make suckers out of working families.”

Knowing that transferring college debt can lure ignorant young voters in 2024, Team Biden attempted a political scam to transform attending college from bettering your future prospects through learning to partisan political allegiance. The effort was appalling.

Student debt doled out by schools, and the government is indeed abusive; however, the problem with Biden’s plan is that, like many callous liberal ideas, it does nothingto stop the problem and instead sets a precedent that presidents can erase large portions of student debt.




Who’s Afraid of Moms for Liberty?



Robert Pondiscio:

It’s an astonishing display of political drawing power, considering Moms for Liberty didn’t even exist three years ago. The candidates have all come to pay obeisance to the animating idea that has galvanized these women: that parents—not the government—should be in charge of how their children are raised and educated. 

If you want to understand why these politicians have come, you need to go to the breakout sessions, away from the camera’s gaze, where, hour after hour, Moms for Liberty chapter leaders and foot soldiers learn how to run for school boards—and if they win, how to advance their agenda even when in the minority. There are talks on messaging strategies and mining school board minutes for signs of “woke indoctrination.” There are workshops on how to file public records requests and navigate the legal system. 

They aren’t messing around. More than half of the 500 candidates Moms for Liberty endorsed for local school board elections last year won their races. “School choice moms” provided the margin of victory in DeSantis’ first run for Florida governor in 2018. Democrat Terry McAuliffe was leading the race for Virginia governor in 2021 before his debate remark that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” handed the win to Republican Glenn Youngkin. 

Moms for Liberty is the beating heart of this country’s movement of angry parents—and American education has never seen anything quite like it. 




School Choice and Student Outcomes



Will Flanders

As private school choice programs expand at a rapid pace across the nation, a common complaint is that they will harm public schools. In Wisconsin, where a large increase in private school choice funding was recently passed, a state senator claimed that public schools would be “defunded,” despite $1 billion in public school increases being passed at the same time. In Iowa, where a ground-breaking Education Savings Account was passed earlier this year, the director of Iowa’s School Board Association complained that the funding “can be better spent serving the 485,000 students in public schools, given the needs that they have.” With school choice options growing across the nation, it is important for policymakers to know whether these complaints are valid. Fortunately, new research is able to answer this question.  

We analyzed data from Wisconsin, where one of the nation’s oldest school choice programs began in Milwaukee in 1990. In addition to the Milwaukee program, Wisconsin has been home to a statewide school choice program since 2013, providing a lengthy time frame to study. We compared public school proficiency outcomes across districts as enrollment in school choice increased. Contrary to the doom-and-gloom predictions of some choice opponents, we found that there was no impact on math outcomes, and a positive relationship to reading outcomes—as choice enrollment in a district increased, so did public school test scores. In other words, the growth of school choice did not harm public schools and may have even helped them.




Civics: more on FBI censorship



Matt Taibbi:

I know I said I wasn’t going to do this, but since I’m persona non grata on Twitter these days and this material needs to get out in the wake of the ruling in the Missouri v. Biden internet censorship case, I’m invoking a political necessity exception to post #TwitterFiles emails that may be germane to the suit.




Nearly 400 Penn State faculty protest white professor’s lawsuit against race-based grading



College Fix:

Nearly 400 Pennsylvania State University professors have signed a letter that defends antiracism teaching and administrative practices targeted in a lawsuit objecting to giving black students inflated grades.

The four-paragraph “Letter in Support of Antiracist Faculty at Penn State” denigrates a recent lawsuit filed against the university by Zack De Piero, who taught English at the school’s Abingdon campus and has since filed a lawsuit that alleges he was discriminated against because of his race. He is white.

The 36-page lawsuit details a June 2020 exercise in which white faculty were told they are privileged because they can “breathe” while George Floyd could not.




White Flight from Asian Immigration: Evidence from California Public Schools



Leah Platt Boustan, Christine Cai, and Tammy Tseng:

Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but we know little about how Asian immigration has affected cities, neighborhoods and schools. This paper studies white flight from Asian arrivals in high-socioeconomic-status Californian school districts from 2000-2016 using initial settlement patterns and national immigrant flows to instrument for entry. We find that, as Asian students arrive, white student enrollment declines in higher-income suburbs. These patterns cannot be fully explained by racial animus, housing prices, or correlations with Black/Hispanic arrivals. Parental fears of academic competition may play a role.

Commentary




Litigation on Ivy League Admission Policies



Andrew Jack:

In the days since the US Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in higher education, Adam Nguyen has been emailing warnings to the Asian clients that he advises on US elite college admissions.

“There’s a perception now that it’s easier for them to get in. That’s false,” he said. “They still have to distinguish themselves on subjective measures. I don’t want my clients to be lulled into complacency.”

America’s highest court last month ruled that it was unconstitutional for Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) to use race as a basis for admissions. The decision was cheered by some who claimed that affirmative action discriminated against Asian students.




Portugal is now having doubts for decriminalizing drugs



Anthony Faiola and Catarina Fernandes Martins

Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe, with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage. In Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from city streets surged 24 percent between 2021 and 2022, with this year on track to far outpace the last. Crime — including robbery in public spaces — spiked 14 percent from 2021 to 2022, a rise police blame partly on increased drug use.

Commentary




“STEM majors at public universities make more money than social science or humanities majors at elite private schools”



John Rigolizzo

A Los Angeles Times article comparing outcomes at community colleges and elite universities garnered a colorful response in the letters page.

The original piece, written June 21, compared the financial outcomes of college graduates at state vs private schools; and in STEM fields and vocational training vs humanities and social sciences. The data showed that graduates of the hard sciences and even the trades vastly outearn some graduates of California’s elite universities.

The original article began with a story of a young man who took a one-year-long training course at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College to become a power lineman. Upon completion, he is set to make about $105,000 a year, and $165,000, not including overtime, as a journeyman in 3-4 years. In the same amount of time, a graduate of Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in political science will earn a median income of $75,500; a graduate of UC Berkeley with a sociology degree earns about $64,000; a UCLA graduate in history will make about $47,900.




AI Safety and the Age of Dislightenment



Jeremy Howard:

Proposals for stringent AI model licensing and surveillance will likely be ineffective or counterproductive, concentrating power in unsustainable ways, and potentially rolling back the societal gains of the Enlightenment. The balance between defending society and empowering society to defend itself is delicate. We should advocate for openness, humility and broad consultation to develop better responses aligned with our principles and values — responses that can evolve as we learn more about this technology with the potential to transform society for good or ill.




Politics and school choice



Kyle Morris:

Democrats have ‘gotten away with using and abusing the black community,’ Mesha Mainor told Fox News Digital

FIRST ON FOX: A Peach State lawmaker who angered her Democratic colleagues in the Georgia state House of Representatives over her support for a recent school choice bill is expected to announce that she is officially switching parties.

Mesha Mainor – a Democrat who has represented District 56 in the Georgia state House since January 2021 – will announce shortly before noon Tuesday that she will switch her party registration to Republican.

“When I decided to stand up on behalf of disadvantaged children in support of school choice, my Democrat colleagues didn’t stand by me,” Mainor explained of her decision in a statement to Fox News Digital. “They crucified me. When I decided to stand up in support of safe communities and refused to support efforts to defund the police, they didn’t back me. They abandoned me.”




Racial preferences in faculty hiring is common. Schools that do it are likely to find themselves in the constitutional crosshairs.



Anthony LoCoco

The University of Wisconsin-Madison, the flagship of the UW system, proudly operates the so-called Target of Opportunity Program (TOP). It allows academic departments to obtain waivers from the requirement to post job positions publicly and instead hire “diverse” candidates directly. The university provides the irresistible incentive of salary funding for approved hires. Public records of internal TOP requests obtained by my group, the Institute for Reforming Government, show blatant, widespread and pernicious racial classification of faculty applicants that is difficult to reconcile with the Supreme Court’s recent decision. 

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Similar to Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s admissions policies, the actions of several UW departments approximated racial balancing, which the court called “patently unconstitutional.” The university’s business school supported its proposal for TOP funding with a helpful chart showing faculty race by percentage with categories such as “Asian,” “White,” and “African American” and expressed a desire that faculty and student racial diversification proceed “at the same rate.” The school of medicine and public health argued that a targeted hire was necessary in part because “there are only 4.2% of dermatologists of Hispanic origin compared with 16.3% in the general American population.” 

“As recently as five years ago,” boasted the department of gender and women’s studies in another TOP proposal, “our department had only one faculty member who identified as a person of color. Through targeted recruiting and lucky opportunities, roughly 30 percent of our faculty now so identify.” Perhaps those recruits whose race unlocked a separate hiring track felt lucky. It’s doubtful the rest of the applicants did.




The Birth-Weight Pollution Paradox



Alex Tabarrok:

Maxim Massenkoff asks a very good question. If pollution reduces birth weight as much as the micro studies on pollution suggest, why aren’t birth weights very low in very polluted cities and countries? Figure 1, for example, shows birth weights in a variety of highly polluted world cities. The yellow dashed and blue lines show “predicted” birth weights extrapolated from the well-known Alexander and Schwandt “Volkswagen study” which looked at the effects of increased pollution in the United States. Despite the fact that every one of the highly-polluted cities is much more polluted than the most polluted US city, birth weight is not tremendously lower in these cities. Indeed, there is no obvious correlation between birth weight and pollution at all.




A federal judge has blocked a Wisconsin school district from requiring transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth



AP:

A federal judge has blocked a Wisconsin school district from requiring transgender students to use bathrooms and locker rooms that match the sex they were assigned at birth while a lawsuit plays out against the school.

U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman said Thursday that the Mukwonago Area School District must allow a transgender student to use facilities that align with their gender identity, temporarily blocking a policy approved last month by the school board, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.

The order comes in a lawsuit brought anonymously by an 11-year-old transgender student and her mother. The judge ruled that the school’s policy was causing emotional and mental harm to the student, who was described as a boy at birth but has identified as a girl since she was 3 years old.




For a library with a future



Zukunft-der-sub

Saving Göttingen State and University Library as an interface between research and infrastructure

Göttingen State and University Library (SUB Göttingen) is one of the most prominent and powerful academic libraries in Germany with a wide range of offers and services far beyond Göttingen. It is valued worldwide for its appeal as a location for unique holdings and as a node for innovative developments in research and information infrastructures within an international network and ecosystem.

We need and support the SUB Göttingen as an established and excellent partner, whose supra-regionally significant role should not be limited by a local process of administrative optimization. After all, a modern, high-performance information infrastructure can only function through an international network of cooperating institutions.




Wisconsin schools that went remote for longer saw expanded gaps in graduation rates



Baby Vinick:

Wisconsin schools that had a longer period of virtual or hybrid learning during the pandemic saw graduation rates rise among wealthier students and fall among those at an economic disadvantage, a new study found.

The study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published in the journal Educational Researcher, analyzed data from 429 public high schools in the state during the 2020-21 school year and two years before then.

It found that between September 2020 to May 2021, a full school year, virtual or hybrid learning increased the socioeconomic gaps in high school graduation rates by nearly 5 percent. Students are considered economically disadvantaged if they are from a household eligible for free or reduced-price meals under the National School Lunch Program. 

Ran Liu, a UW-Madison education professor and author of the study, called the finding that affluent students’ graduation rates increased surprising. But she said disparities in access to resources is likely part of the explanation. And it’s possible that future events – not just a pandemic – could cause new disruptions.  

“We need to understand that in-person schooling may have merits that cannot be replaced by virtual and hybrid learning mode,” Liu said.

Dane County Madison Public Health mandate summary.

“Dance studio complaint”

“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?




My Research on Gender Dysphoria Was Censored. But I Won’t Be.



Michael Bailey:

I am a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. I have been a professor for 34 years, and a researcher for 40. Over the decades, I have studied controversial topics—from IQ, to sexual orientation, to transsexualism (what we called transgenderism before 2015), to pedophilia. I have published well over 100 academic articles. I am best known for studying sexual orientation—from genetic influences, to childhood precursors of homosexuality, to laboratory-measured sexual arousal patterns. 

My research has been denounced by people of all political stripes because I have never prioritized a favored constituency over the truth. 

But I have never had an article retracted. Until now.

On March 29, I published an article in the prestigious academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. Less than three months later, on June 14, it was retracted by Springer Nature Group, the giant academic publisher of Archives, for an alleged violation of its editorial policies.

Retraction of scientific articles is associated with well-deserved shame: plagiarism, making up data, or grave concerns about the scientific integrity of a study. But my article was not retracted for any shameful reason. It was retracted because it provided evidence for an idea that activists hate.

The retracted article, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” was coauthored with Suzanna Diaz, who I met in 2018 at a small meeting of scientists, journalists, and parents of children they believed had Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD). 

ROGD was first described in the literature in 2018 by the physician and researcher Lisa Littman. It is an explanation of the new phenomenon of adolescents, largely girls, with no history of gender dysphoria, suddenly declaring they want to transition to the opposite sex. It has been a highly contentious diagnosis, with some—and I am one—thinking it’s an important avenue for scientific inquiry, and others declaring it’s a false idea advocated by parents unable to accept they have a transgender child.




School Choice and improving education



Richard Hanania

The first thing to point out about public education is that it involves an extreme restriction of liberty beyond anything we usually accept. How common is it for government to force you to be in a certain place at a certain time? What I call “time-place” mandates are rare. Sometimes you have to go to the DMV, but even then you spend a short amount of time there, and can generally choose when to go. Sometimes people have to respond to subpoenas or jury duty, but those are uncommon events in most people’s lives. Government says to do your taxes, though you only have a deadline and can fill out the paperwork whenever and under whatever conditions you want.

The only substantial populations of individuals who have their lives structured according to time-place mandates in a free society like ours are prisoners, members of the military, and children. The mandates for children have gotten less strict over the years now that all states allow homeschooling, but opponents of school choice for all practical purposes want to do what they can to shape the incentive structures of parents so that they all use public schools (liberal reformers tend to like vouchers that can be used at charter schools, but not ESAs, which give parents complete control). Of course, children don’t have the freedom of adults, and so others are by default in control of how they spend most of their time. But it’s usually parents, not the government, that we trust in this role. Given the unusual degree to which public education infringes on individual liberty and family autonomy, the burden of proof has to be on those in favor of maintaining such an extreme institution.

Commentary




Shop Class 2.0: Rethinking High School to Accelerate Electrification



Jeff Eiden:

But there’s a major problem undercutting our progress. We don’t have nearly enough skilled workers to get this job done at the speed required. It’s estimated that we’re going to need 1 million more electricians and 400 thousand new HVAC technicians in the next ten years. 

Tradespeople are the true lifeblood of the clean energy transition — they do the critical on-the-ground work to rewire homes, upgrade electrical panels, and put solar panels up onto roofs. Without enough of them, we risk falling short of our climate goals, while frustrating the very early adopting customers we need to kickstart the transition to fully electrified buildings.


“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?




We Weren’t Ready for a 710% Rise in Tuition Costs



Arman Madani:

The resulting $1.78T of debt includes $1.65T that is federally owned (93%). 45M Americans have federal student loan debt. Roughly half of all the debt belongs to individuals with graduate degrees while the other half belongs to individuals with undergraduate degrees; though it’s worth noting that there are fewer graduate students overall so the debt held per student is higher for graduates:




The proposal “is probably in trouble under American law”



Dave Huber:

A constitutional law professor at Georgia State University recently said it’s “unfortunate” that the Michigan “pronouns” bill making its way through the state legislature is likely unconstitutional.

Georgia State College of Law Professor Eric Segall told Newsweek this was his “personal view” regarding House Bill 4474, which would criminalize sparking “frightened” feelings in someone in a protected class such as sexual orientation or gender identity.

The proposal “is probably in trouble under American law. I also think that’s unfortunate because my personal view is the law should be constitutional, but I think it’s likely not,” he said.

“In a sane world, which is most free countries on Earth, you just outlaw all threats,” said Segall (pictured). “And if you threaten somebody, you go to jail. It’s much more complicated in America. Guns and free speech. America is crazy about both.”

But the author of “Originalism as Faith and Supreme Myths: Why the Supreme Court is not a Court and its Justices are not Judges” emphasized what makes the U.S. rather unique regarding free speech.




Last parent in lawsuit over Madison Schools gender identity guidance drops appeal



Mitchell Schmidt:

The parent, only identified in the ruling as Jane Doe 4, was the last of 14 parents who initially sued the district in 2020 over a policy that’s part of a guidance document on student gender identity. The policy covered topics that include communication with the families of transgender and nonbinary students about their identities.

The issue of whether the 14 parents who initially sued in 2020 could do so anonymously went to the state Supreme Court, which ruled 4-3 last summer that the parents’ identities must be disclosed to attorneys involved in the case, but not to the public. All but one parent ultimately dropped out of the case.

Dane County Circuit Judge Frank Remington in November ruled that the parent cannot sue the district because she had not identified any harm she’s suffered or was likely to suffer as a result of the policy.

“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?




Wisconsin DPI data from 2021-22 shows 76 percent of students physically restrained have a disability



Corinne Hess:

Wisconsin schools reported nearly 6,000 instances of seclusion and nearly 7,000 occurrences of physical restraint during the 2021-22 school year, according to the latest data available from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

Among those instances, 1,920 students at 32 percent of Wisconsin’s schools were secluded and 2,856 students at 44 percent of the state’s schools were physically restrained, DPI data shows. The data does not indicate whether these incidents occurred simultaneously.

Students with individualized education programs, or IEPs, comprised 79 percent of all seclusion incidents and 76 percent of all physical restraint incidents reported for the 2021-22 school year, according to DPI. 

Children in elementary schools were also involved in a higher percentage of instances of seclusion and/or physical restraint than other levels of school.

“Reading this report and seeing these numbers can be difficult, but that is nothing in comparison with the emotional difficulty these numbers represent in the lived experiences of students and staff,” State Superintendent Dr. Jill Underly said in a written statement.




Deputy U.S. Marshal Pleads Guilty to Obtaining Cell Phone Location Information Unlawfully



Justice Department

A deputy U.S. Marshal pleaded guilty today to misusing a law enforcement service to obtain cell phone location information for personal use.

According to court documents, Adrian Pena, 49, of Del Rio, Texas, used a law enforcement service to locate individuals with whom Pena had personal relationships and their spouses. Pena obtained the cell phone data by uploading blank and random documents to a system operated by Securus Technologies exclusively for authorized law enforcement purposes. Pena falsely certified that those documents were official and that they granted Pena permission to obtain the individuals’ data.




“Trauma Dumping”



Ann Althouse:

Umaretiya’s observation is based on what he saw colleges and applicants doing before the Supreme Court’s new decision came out. After the decision, there will be even more emphasis on the applicant’s personal essay, and what can students do but tell the best story of their life as a victim of society?

Even before the decision, [Umaretiya] had seen anxious classmates at his selective high school, Thomas Jefferson High School, in Alexandria, Va., making up stories about facing racial injustice.

What’s the difference between framing your life story in terms of victimhood and making up stories? Umaretiya says he saw — how did he see? — his own classmates making up stories. That’s the NYT paraphrase. Who knows? Maybe every applicant is honest or no more dishonest than to pick a tale of woe out of context and describe it colorfully. But the heavy reliance on the personal essay as the new way to pursue racial diversity creates far too much temptation and strikes me as quite unfair to those who are scrupulously honest. But who cares? Honest people are all alike. You want diversity.




Correcting the record on Mississippi’s historic education gains



Carey Wright:

Former State Superintendent of Education Dr. Carey Wright rebuts a recent column in the L.A. Times claiming Mississippi “gamed its national reading test scores.”

Like educators in Mississippi and across the nation, I was shocked by the deeply cynical column in the Los Angeles Times about Mississippi’s well documented achievements in education over the past decade.

While the author acknowledges Mississippi’s historic, and sustained, gains in fourth-grade reading, he attempts to negate this achievement with a critique of unrelated social and health policies in the state. 

Mississippi’s achievements in fourth-grade reading include student scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) rising from the bottom nationally to ranking to 21st in the nation. In addition, Mississippi students living in poverty scored higher than their peers nationally. This achievement holds steady across all the state’s major racial and ethnic groups: Black, white and Hispanic students from low-income homes in Mississippi achieved higher scores than their peers nationally.

The author takes issue with the fact that some political leaders and journalists call these achievements the “Mississippi Miracle” because the state has more work to do to improve educational outcomes for all students.  

Educators do not call these achievements a “miracle” because we know Mississippi’s progress in education is the result of strong policies, the effective implementation of a comprehensive statewide strategy and years of hard work from the state to the classroom level. We also know Mississippi has more work to do to improve student achievement in all grades, especially among Black and Hispanic students and students living in poverty. Though every state struggles to close achievement gaps, particularly among racial groups, Mississippi ranks No. 2 in the nation for closing the fourth-grade reading achievement gap between students in low-income families and their wealthier peers.

“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?




Americans’ Confidence in Higher Education Down Sharply



Megan Brenan:

Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, sharply lower than in two prior readings in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%). In addition to the 17% of U.S. adults who have “a great deal” and 19% “quite a lot” of confidence, 40% have “some” and 22% “very little” confidence.

The latest decline in the public’s trust in higher education is from a June 1-22 Gallup poll that also found confidence in 16 other institutionshas been waning in recent years. Many of these entities, which are tracked more often than higher education, are now also at or near their lowest points in confidence. Although diminished, higher education ranks fourth in confidence among the 17 institutions measured, with small business, the military and the police in the top three spots. This was also the case in 2018, the last time higher education was included in the list of institutions.




K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: health care costs



Hayden Dublois

But in 2022, a Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA) review of more than 6,400 hospitals found that nearly two-thirds were not complying with price transparency requirements.3 More recent records suggest that most hospitals are still not compliant today.4Other organizations have suggested as many as 75 percent of hospitals are ignoring the price transparency rule.5 The Biden administration has come under fire from lawmakers for failing to enforce the rule with publicly accessible information, with one member of Congress noting that, “we can get more information about a local restaurant from Yelp than you can get about your local hospital from CMS.”6

Thousands of pages of new records obtained by FGA have shined a light on precisely why so few hospitals are compliant with price transparency requirements. These CMS records—which include detailed warnings, notices of violations, corrective action plan requests, and monetary penalties—span more than 250 hospitals in 46 states and Washington, D.C. The conclusion drawn from the records is clear: CMS simply does not take price transparency seriously.

CMS is providing substantial deference to hospitals on price transparency requirements

Despite the price transparency rule taking effect in January 2021, the Biden administration waited four months before CMS began taking any action, with the first batch of warnings issued in mid-April 2021.7 Even so, only a handful of hospitals received warnings in this first month of action—a lackluster start to price transparency enforcement.

Healthcare costs have long been an issue in K-12 budgets.




Civics: Journalists Abandoned Julian Assange and Slit Their Own Throats



Chris Hedges:

The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into the inner workings of power. This failure is not only inexcusable, but ominous. 

The U.S. government, especially the military and agencies such as the CIA, the FBI, the NSA and Homeland Security, have no intention of stopping with Julian, who faces 170 years in prison if found guilty of violating 17 counts of the Espionage Act. They are cementing into place mechanisms of draconian state censorship, some features of which were exposed by Matt Taibbi in the Twitter Files, to construct a dystopian corporate totalitarianism.  

The U.S. and the U.K. brazenly violated a series of judicial norms and diplomatic protocols to keep Julian trapped for seven years in the Ecuadorian Embassy after he had been granted political asylum by Ecuador. The CIA, through the Spanish security firm UC Global, made recordings of Julian’s meetings with his attorneys, which alone should invalidate the extradition case. Julian has been held for more than four years in the notorious Belmarsh high-security prison since the British Metropolitan Police dragged him out of the embassy on April 11, 2019. The embassy is supposed to be the sovereign territory of Ecuador. Julian has not been sentenced in this case for a crime. He is charged under the Espionage Act, although he is not a U.S. citizen and WikiLeaks is not a U.S.-based publication. The U.K. courts, which have engaged in what can only be described as a show trial, appear ready to turn him over to the U.S. once his final appeal, as we expect, is rejected. This could happen in a matter of days or weeks.




Obama calling for Censorship






UC Santa Cruz’s rubric for applicants warns them they must agree with “the view that treating individuals differently based on their race or sex is desirable,” the lawsuit states.



Joanne Jacobs:

Requiring would-be professors to swear allegiance to a political ideology is a free-speech violation, charges a lawsuit filed in May. John D. Haltigan applied to teach psychology at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He had to submit a “diversity, equity and inclusion ” (DEI) statement, which the suit compares to loyalty oaths required of faculty members during the Red Scare of the ’50s.

Haltigan posted his DEI statement online. It started:

I am committed to colorblind inclusivity, viewpoint diversity, merit-based evaluation, and value outreach to underrepresented groups in higher education. Across all of my teaching and mentorship, I have endeavored to treat students and mentees equally, without regard to identity-based characteristics.




Social Promotion in New York



Amanda Geduld:

When high school teacher Rachel King welcomed a new cohort of 10th graders to her classroom in the fall of 2021, she made a discovery: a number of her students had never completed their coursework from the previous year. 

At the time, the 36-year-old taught English at The Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women in downtown Brooklyn. It was her 13th year teaching and her third at the all-girls middle and high school, which serves predominantly Black and Latino children from low-income households.

When schools first shifted to remote learning in March 2020, it quickly became clear that students were struggling to log on to their classes and complete assignments. Thousands lacked access to devices, WiFi, or a quiet place to work. As worry spread that many could get left behind, education department officials announced new academic guidelines. Attendance and testing requirements would be waived for the remainder of the year. No student would fail a course.




Massachusetts Public Health Spyware Android app litigation



NCLA:

The New Civil Liberties Alliance is challenging the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) in federal court for coordinating with Google to automatically install spyware on the smartphones of more than one million Commonwealth residents, without their knowledge or consent, in a misguided effort to combat Covid-19. A newly-released video details how DPH’s actions have violated fundamental constitutional rights.




Moms for Liberty Threatened, Treated as ‘Subhuman,’ After SPLC Attack



Tyler O’Neil

Moms for Liberty has received countless death threats, but the messages spiked after the Southern Poverty Law Center put the parental rights group on its “hate map,” its cofounders say. 

“It gave people permission to treat us as subhuman,” Tiffany Justice, one of the group’s cofounders, told The Daily Signal. She accused Moms for Liberty’s critics of trying “to whip people up into such a frenzy that they end up sending death threats to me and to the members and our children.”

“Designating us as a hate group gives people permission to dehumanize us, and the SPLC knows it,” Justice added.

The SPLC brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. In June, it added a slew of parental rights organizations to that “hate map” for 2022 and labeled them “antigovernment groups,” part of an “anti-student inclusion movement.” 

As I wrote in my book “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the SPLC has faced multiple scandals and defamation lawsuits. In 2019, after the SPLC fired its cofounder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal, a former employee called the hate accusations a “highly profitable scam.”




Legacy preferences hurt the less well-off but aid what really matters to the university: its endowment.



Allysia Finley:

When the Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson accused her colleagues of having “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness.” Her assessment of the case is as confused as the metaphor. It is Harvard and other elite schools that have been behaving like snooty royalty. Now they will no longer be able to have their cake and eat it too.




Civics: Administrative Preferences; RBG and the rest



Abbie VanSickle and Steve Eder

But he is hardly alone among his colleagues in accepting benefits from rich friends and sympathetic organizations.

“Ruth Bader Ginsburg disclosed more trips than any other justice in 2018. During a trip to Israel, she was a guest of the Israeli billionaire Morris Kahn; the year before, the court had given his company a victory by declining to take up a case.”

More.




A surge in absentee students might require a radical rethink of schools



Bezos Washington Post:

The coronavirus pandemic kept kids home from school for months. Many of them still haven’t really come back — at least not full time.

Chronic absenteeism isn’t a new problem in the United States: The number of students who miss 10 percent or more of the academic year (the amount that most experts agree puts them at risk of falling dangerously behind) was high before 2020. But the situation was improving until covid disrupted good attendance habits that had developed over years of hard work.

By last year, the estimated 8 million students who were chronically absent pre-pandemic had doubled to an estimated 16 million, or about 33 percent of students nationwide. In D.C., according to a recent report, an astonishing 48 percent of kids reached that 10 percent mark — up from 29 percent three years earlier. Obviously, covid’s diminished impact on everyday life hasn’t reversed the patternsdeveloped at the disease’s peak.

The causes of chronic absenteeism, which includes both excused and unexcused absences, can be opaque. The results, however, are as clear as they are concerning.




Microsoft and the censorship industry