Frank Landymore:

It’s no secret that OpenAI’s gangbusters chatbot ChatGPT has become the bane of educators trying to get their pupils to turn in some honest work. Cheating will never go away, but chatbots just make it more tempting and easy than ever.

The thing with being a cheat, though, is that a good one has to be careful to cover their tracks — something that some lazy students relying on an AI that does all the work for them appear not to be bothering with.

“I had answers come in that said, ‘I am just an AI language model, I don’t have an opinion on that,'” Timothy Main, a writing professor at Conestoga College in Canada, told The Associated Press.

Sandra:

Since 2015, our understanding of what’s possible in the world of education — and in our world more generally — has changed. And so, at CZI, our education efforts must change too. Navigating these changes is humbling and challenging, but ultimately, necessary. The truth is, the depth of needs and the complexity of our education system requires constant questioning, strong partnerships, and the willingness to iterate. No single organization can accomplish all of what is needed for systems change — and at CZI, we want to sharpen who we are and how we can best serve through our educational research investments, our relationships with educators and students, and our ability to build useful applications with our technology team.

Matt Taibbi:

The federal government’s pro-censorship arguments seemed to take a hit in a contentious, fascinating hearing in New Orleans

Fresh air:

Washington Post reporter Laura Meckler tells the story of Shaker Heights, Ohio, a town with high-performing, diverse schools — and also a pronounced achievement gap between white and Black students. Meckler’s book is Dream Town.

Daniel Buck:

Can we stop with the learning stations already? My teacher prep endorsed them. My first instructional coach trained me in them. Every school that I’ve ever worked at has incorporated them. Look them up on Teachers Pay Teachers and you’ll find scores of activities for various literacy stations, each one promising that they are proven effective.

Unfortunately, this idea—that a teacher should only teach for a few minutes before setting kids loose to transition through a maze of stations full of glitter, glue, and razzmatazz—is a glossy, inefficient, ineffective use of class time.

Stroll through a classroom that uses learning stations and you’ll see students engaged in all sorts of seemingly compelling activities and projects. Look more closely, and one sees a hodgepodge of the promising and the pointless, tasks that demand thinking beyond realistic expectations and tasks that require no mental effort at all: some extended writing or structured practice and lots of needless coloring or word searches.

Consider just one concrete example. In a video on the influential site Edutopia, which specializes in instructional advice, one station-based classroom exhibits high student engagement and seamless routines. But a critical consideration of what’s actually happening at these centers raises concerns. What’s the point of a twenty-minute station where students spend their time cutting, pasting, and writing in rainbow letters? And that doesn’t even touch on the copious references to kinesthetic, visual, auditory, and other ways of learning, allusions to the myth of “learning styles,” which has as much basis in reality as homeopathic medicine.

Aaron Sibarium

The group’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which accredits all law schools in the United States, proposed the rule after hundreds of students at Stanford Law School shouted down a sitting federal judge in March, prompting House Republicans to call on the bar association to investigate the school. Those events were “in the background” of the draft requirement, according to an August 2 memo from the bar association. Yale Law Schooland the University of California Hastings Law School experienced similar disruptions in 2022, each instigated by progressive students upset about a conservative speaker.

The accreditation standard reads as a direct response to those incidents. Law schools must “protect the rights of faculty, students, and staff to communicate ideas that may be controversial or unpopular,” the draft requirement states, including through public demonstrations. At the same time, the standard would prohibit protests that stifle “free expression by preventing or substantially interfering with the carrying out of law school functions or approved activities.”

The proposal comes amid accusations that the bar association has stifled free speech through its accreditation process. The group drew criticism last year when it required all law schools to instruct students that they have a duty to eliminate racism, a move that many law professors, including 10 at Yale, said would imperil academic freedom and result in compelled speech. It also considered requiring law schools to “diversify” their student bodies—only to axe the proposal a month before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the case that outlawed race-based college admissions.

Michael Oher disliked being portrayed as 'dumb' in the #Blindside film.

Where did that stigma around Oher originate?

Listen to the author of the Blindside book – Michael Lewis – speak of Oher's academic achievements to a group at Google.

Full talk: https://t.co/IfBQgaDFN2 pic.twitter.com/cYT8D5DVD2

— Nancy French (@NancyAFrench) August 15, 2023

John Hawkins:

And guess what? Things have gotten significantly worse since then because the Fed printed so much money during COVID that it massively spiked inflation. Supposedly, the yearly target number for inflation is 2% and it reached a high of 9.1% in June of last year, but since the government has a lot of leeway in determining which products count towards the consumer price index, it’s very easy to rig the numbers – and they do. Big time:

Vinay Prasad:

There’s a new paper in Jama Network Open that calls out misinformation spread by Physicians. Of course the key question is what counts as misinformation. Shall we look?

Here are things that the authors consider misinformation:

1. Claiming that “COVID-19 vaccines were ineffective at preventing COVID-19 spread” is misinformationUnfortunately, covid 19 vaccines were ineffective at preventing spread.  See also: we all got covid anyway and/or escape variants
2. “Claims that myocarditis was common in children who received the vaccine and that the risks of myocarditis outweighed the risk of vaccination were also unfounded.”Myocarditis does outweigh the benefits of vaccinations for some ages, in men, and some doses. We proved that here.

Allison Li:

The modern notion of a black hole has been with us since February 1916, three months after Albert Einstein unveiled his theory of gravity. That’s when the physicist Karl Schwarzschild, in the midst of fighting in the German army during World War I, published a paper with astonishing implications: If enough mass is confined within a perfectly spherical region (bounded by the “Schwarzschild radius”), nothing can escape such an object’s intense gravitational pull, not even light itself. At the center of this sphere lies a singularity where density approaches infinity and known physics goes off the rails.

In the 100-plus years since, physicists and mathematicians have explored the properties of these enigmatic objects from the perspective of both theory and experiment. So it may be surprising to hear that “if you took a region of space with a bunch of matter spread out in it and asked a physicist if that region would collapse to form a black hole, we don’t yet have the tools to answer that question,” said Marcus Khuri, a mathematician at Stony Brook University.

Don’t despair. Khuri and three colleagues — Sven Hirsch at the Institute for Advanced Study, Demetre Kazaras at Duke University, and Yiyue Zhang at the University of California, Irvine — have released a new paper that brings us closer to determining the presence of black holes based solely on the concentration of matter. In addition, their paper proves mathematically that higher-dimensional black holes — those of four, five, six or seven spatial dimensions — can exist, which is not something that could confidently have been said before.

Alma Cohen:

This paper seeks to contribute to the long-standing debate on the extent to which the ideology of federal circuit court judges, as proxied by the party of the president nominating them, can help to predict case outcomes. To this end, I combine and analyze a novel dataset containing about 670,000 circuit court cases from 1985 to 2020. I show that the political affiliation of judges is associated with outcomes, and thus can help to predict them, throughout the vast universe of circuit court cases – and not only in the ideologically contested cases on which prior empirical research has focused.
In particular, I find an association between political affiliation and outcomes in each of six categories of cases in which the two litigating parties could be perceived by judges to have unequal power. In each of these six case categories, which together add up to more than 550,000 cases, the more Democratic judges a panel has, the higher the odds of the panel siding with the seemingly weaker party.
Furthermore, I identify evidence of polarization over time in circuit court decisions. Consistent with such growing polarization, in the important subset of published cases, the identified patterns are more pronounced in the last two decades of the examined period than earlier.

Liz Rowlinson:

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/b6077200-ca54-46c1-8c3a-2e93195b28ca

During the pandemic, Despina and Taso decided that the US public school system wasn’t working for their eight-year-old daughter. The Greek-American family took a “leap of faith” and moved from Massachusetts to the Monferrato wine region of Piedmont in northern Italy, where a new Village Forest School had just opened.

“We can work from anywhere and were culturally drawn back to Europe. The new school offered the sort of education we dreamt of: letting children remain children for longer,” says Despina — now also the mother of twin boys — who declined to give her surname. “It’s been a massive change for the family but we now have a lifestyle more closely aligned with our values of living a slower life more closely connected with the natural world and the people around us.”

A typical school day starts with the children singing songs together, combining counting and language skills, before two blocks of classroom-based lessons: maths, history, geography etc, taught by both an Italian and an English teacher. Lunch is based on the nose-to-tail, non-processed food principles of the Weston Price diet — there’s rice soaked in bone broth, for example, or a ragù made from the whole organs of a cow or pig. After lunch there will be art, crafts, woodwork, maybe horseriding and even grape-picking at harvest time.

Sara Randazzo & Scott Calvert:

In the race to fix a nationwide reading crisis that worsened during the pandemic, more states are threatening to make students repeat third grade to help them catch up.

Tennessee, Michigan and North Carolina are among at least 16 states that have tried in recent years to use reading tests and laws requiring students to repeat third grade to improve literacy. Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama and Nevada have all passed similar laws that will go into effect in the coming years.

Politicians and educational officials say the goal isn’t to hold children back, but to create an incentive to do well while also reducing social promotion.

Tennessee state Rep. Mark White, a Memphis Republican who co-sponsored a 2021 law that went into effect for students entering fourth grade this fall, said the threat of retention brings needed accountability.

“We cannot continue to kick the can down the road when it comes to reading literacy and proficiency with young people,” he said, citing a desire from businesses for a better-educated workforce.

Reading by the end of third grade is considered a pivotal benchmark, because students must be able to read in subsequent grades to learn math, science, social studies and other subjects. Third-graders who lack reading proficiency are four times more likely to drop out of high school, according to a 2011 study by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Reading scores dropped last year on a federal reading test known as the Nation’s Report Card, with 33% of fourth-graders scoring proficient or higher in 2022, down from 35% in 2019.

Tying fourth-grade advancement to reading has fallen in and out of favor over the decades. Opponents say the policies cause families unnecessary stress and social turmoil for children, and can disproportionately impact minority students.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ameillia Wedward:

Janet Protasiewicz’ recent confirmation as a member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court earlier this month has conservatives worried about the possible end of a decade of conservative reforms, from Act 10 to voter ID laws. But another concern receiving less attention is the prospect of challenges to Wisconsin’s school choice programs.

School choice has stood against challenges in the past, but now that it’s at stake in state court, taxpayer dollars are on the line.

While there are several cases and laws that reaffirm Wisconsin’s choice programs from a religious angle — and Wisconsin’s own governor signed into law increases to choice earlier this summer — the current concern is that school choice will face scrutiny from a financial standpoint: Can the state fund both school choice and public schools simultaneously?

Currently, under the Wisconsin constitution, local funds must be used for local schools. Although the state finances the choice program, when a student leaves the public school system to participate, the state subtracts that pupil’s funding from their respective district, which then has to make up the revenue loss by increasing property taxes. In other words, to fund both systems, taxpayers end up paying twice: once to fund the school choice program and again to pay the district’s tax hikes.

Some have argued that this violates the state constitutional requirement that property taxes fund “common schools.” But concerns like this ignore a plausible funding mechanism that could appease school choice and public school advocates alike while sparing the taxpayer’s wallet. By decoupling private choice funding from property taxes and funding students instead, the state could reduce costs for local taxpayers. Under a decoupling plan, students that use school choice would be financed fully by the state, and all property tax implications would be removed.

This isn’t a new idea. By the 2024-25 school year, the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program will be funded directly via the state. By the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s conservative estimations — before the new law and under the old voucher amount — if the state followed the same model, decoupling would cut property taxes over $168 million statewide.

“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?

William Jacobson:

First, we find out insurance companies are refusing to reimburse Oberlin College for the $36 million it had to pay Gibson’s Bakery,Oberlin College Sues Insurers For Refusing To Cover $36 Million It Paid Gibson’s Bakery For Defamation And Other Torts (Update)

Now, the First Circuit just rejected a $15 million insurance claim by Harvard University against its insurance company for legal fees incurred in defending the Students For Fair Admissions case that ended up with a sweeping defeat for Harvard (and win for equality and equal protection) in the Supreme Court.

From the Opinion in Harvard University v. Zurich American Insurance Co.:

With $15,000,000 in coverage at stake, this case requires us to apply Massachusetts law to determine the effect of a failure to give notice as specified in an excess insurance policy affording coverage on a “claims made and reported” basis. Where, as here, a federal court sits in diversity jurisdiction, tasked with following state law, it is not free to innovate but, rather, must apply state substantive rules of decision as those rules have been articulated by the state’s highest tribunal….

In this instance, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (SJC) has spoken directly to the critical issue…. Staying within the borders of this well-beaten path, we hold that the failure to give notice according to the policy’s terms and conditions forfeits any right to coverage. Consequently, we affirm the district court’s entry of summary judgment in favor of the insurer….

Jon Askonas:

There have been two dominant narratives about the rise of misinformation and conspiracy theories in American public life.

What we can, without prejudice, call the establishment narrative — put forward by dominant foundations, government agencies, NGOs, the mainstream press, the RAND corporation — holds that the misinformation age was launched by the Internet boom, the loss of media gatekeepers, new alternative sources of sensational information that cater to niche audiences, and social media. According to this story, the Internet in general and social media in particular reward telling audiences what they want to hear and undermining faith in existing institutions. A range of nefarious actors, from unscrupulous partisan media to foreign intelligence agencies, all benefit from algorithms that are designed to boost engagement, which winds up catering misinformation to specific audience demands. Traditional journalism, bound by ethics, has not been able to keep up.

The alternative narrative — put forward by Fox News, the populist fringes of the Left and the Right, Substackers of all sorts — holds almost the inverse. For decades, mainstream political discourse in America has been controlled by the chummy relationship between media, political, and economic elites. These actors, caught up in trading information, access, and influence with each other, fed the American people a thoroughly sanitized and limited picture of the world. But now, their dominance is being broken by the Internet, and all of the dirty laundry is being aired. In this view, “misinformation” and “conspiracy theory” are simply the establishment’s slanders for inconvenient truths it can no longer suppress. Whether it’s the Biden administration establishing a Disinformation Governance Board within the Department of Homeland Security or the New York Times’s Kevin Roose calling for a federal “reality czar,” the establishment is desperate to put the Humpty Dumpty of controlled consensus reality back together again.

As opposed as they seem, in fact both of these narratives are right, so far as they go. But neither of them captures the underlying truth. There is indeed a dark matter ripping the country apart, shredding our shared sense of reality and faith in our democratic government. But this dark matter is not misinformation, it isn’t conspiracy theories, and it isn’t the establishment, exactly. It is secrecy.

Truth Decay

In discussions of online misinformation, one inevitably comes across some version of a ubiquitous quote by the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” This is often mustered at the climax of some defense of “journalism” or “science” against “fake news.” But the bon mot is always tossed out without any interest in Moynihan himself. Defenders of the social importance, and the ongoing possibility, of a fact-based democratic culture would do well to consider how the quote holds up against one of the major preoccupations of this great legislator and intellectual.

The Moynihan quote captures an important dichotomy between facts and opinions, one that has been blurred by the rise of alternative media, the explosion of “news-commentary” in newspapers and on television, and an influencer-centric media economy. But at the same time, hanging like the sword of Damocles over our shared sense of reality, is an invisible and unspoken third category, one on which Moynihan became increasingly fixated.

Born in 1927, Moynihan had government roles for most of his career, serving in the Navy, on the staff of New York Governor Averell Harriman, in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and then to India, and finally a quarter-century as a U.S. Senator from New York. Late in his political career, in the 1990s, Moynihan became deeply concerned about government secrecy. Beyond particular worries about the legal and practical consequences of an explosion of classified documents, Moynihan believed that expansive secrecy was deleterious to our form of government. The 1997 Moynihan Secrecy Commission Report warned:

Jill Barshay:

One of the great debates in education spans more than two millennia.  

Around 370 B.C., Plato wrote that his teacher Socrates fretted that writing things down would cause humans to become ignorant because they wouldn’t have to memorize anything. (Ironically, the only reason we know this is because it was written down in Plato’s “Phaedrus,” still available today.)  

Albert Einstein argued the opposite in 1921. “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts,” the Nobel laureate said, according to his biographer Philipp Frank. “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”

But neither of these great thinkers could anticipate how the debate would play out in the Age of Google. Not long after the search engine company was founded in 1998, psychologists began to wonder how the ability to have so much information instantly available was changing our brains. A seminal 2011 paper established the so-called “Google effect,” our tendency to forget information that we can easily look up on the internet.

Liv Finne:

The COVID school shutdowns are being blamed for current shortages of nurses, engineers, customer service representatives, seasonal workers, and army recruits.  

A recent WSJ article notes that since 2020 the pass rates on certification exams taken by engineers, office workers, soldiers and nurses have all fallen. This means fewer engineers and other skilled workers on the job, and a lower degree of competency among those who make it: 

“It is one reason that professional service jobs are going unfilled, and goods aren’t making it to market. It also helps explain why national productivity has fallen for the past five quarters, the longest contraction since at least 1948, according to the U.S Labor Department.”  

These facts do not even begin to describe the psychological and mental distress suffered by teenagers isolated from their friends for nearly two years, a harm that may linger throughout their lives. 

Parents aren’t fooled by the falsehoods being told by Washington’s school officials. The families of 46,000 students have withdrawntheir children from the public schools, among the highest out-migration from the public schools in the nation. 

Across the country lawmakers are trying to help parents. They are responding to the COVID school shutdowns, and to the radical CRT agenda now in the public schools, by passing school choice programs to give parents an alternative to public schools.

Kevin Truong:

These properties are among the most iconic in San Francisco, but what they also have in common is their owners are applying for dramatic cuts in their assessed values in a worrying sign for the city’s fiscal health. 

At Chase Center, property owners are attempting to cut the city’s assessed $1.48 billion value for the stadium by some 58% to $635 million. 

The owner of the Transamerica Pyramid, New York developer Shvo, which purchased the building in 2020, is seeking a 53% reduction in its assessed value from $485.5 million to $227 million. 

The Westin St. Francis Hotel owners are applying for a more than 90% decrease in its assessed value of $787 million all the way down to $76 million.

According to @BryceSpaceTech, SpaceX lifted nearly 10 times as much mass to orbit in the second quarter of this year as its closest competitor, the nation of China.https://t.co/2HXcqt9wYe pic.twitter.com/L6QtJCsaZd

— Eric Berger (@SciGuySpace) August 16, 2023

Adam Popescu:

Louis Weathers came into this world 70 years after the Civil War ended, 70 years after slavery was abolished in the United States. And yet in 1935, when his mother went into labor, the local hospital in Evanston, Illinois, wouldn’t admit her because of her skin color. Louis’s father had to drive her two hours to a hospital that would let a black woman give birth to her baby.

In the early 1950s, Weathers was the first black kid to go to the local public high school. The teacher picked on him; so did the white kids. 

“If I raised my hand, she wouldn’t call on me, because she didn’t want the white kids to see I knew the answer,” Weathers told me. “She called on me when I kept my hand down to make me look stupid.”

When he tried to buy a house, years later, white real estate agents steered him away from the better neighborhoods with better schools, where you almost never saw cops and it was safe to take an evening stroll. Even if he’d been able to visit those neighborhoods, it wouldn’t have mattered; the discriminatory practice of redlining made it nearly impossible for a black applicant to get a mortgage for a house outside black neighborhoods.

Nick Collins:

Reaction times – a reliable marker of general intelligence – have declined steadily since the Victorian era from about 183 milliseconds to 250ms in men, and from 187ms to 277ms in women. 

The slowing of our reflexes points to a decrease in general intelligence equivalent to 1.23 IQ points per decade since the 1880s or about 14 IQ points overall, researchers said. 

Actual IQ scores from different decades cannot be directly compared because people today enjoy better teaching, health and nutrition which would help improve their results, the scientists explained. 

But the reaction times signify that the genetic component of general intelligence – which leads to the type of creativity and invention typical of the Victorian era – has been dwindling over the past century. 

Dr Michael Woodley, who led the study published in the Intelligence journal this month, identified the trend by comparing reaction times from trials conducted by Victorian scientists against those carried out in recent decades.

Our declining intelligence is most likely down to a “reverse” in the process of natural selection, he explained. The most intelligent people now have fewer children on average than in previous decades, while there are higher survival rates among people with less favourable genes.

Emilie Raguso:

The recall committee, dubbed Save Alameda For Everyone (SAFE), formed last month, but Tuesday’s filing is the first concrete sign that the recall effort will proceed.

Now it will be up to the Alameda County registrar of voters to certify materials submitted Tuesday by the committee. That includes the first 100 signatures for the recall petition. 

Once certification happens, the broader signature collection can begin. 

“As an advocate for families who have lost loved ones, what I see now is something I have never seen before,” said Brenda Grisham, a recall committee member and the mother of Christopher LaVell Jones, who was killed in Oakland in 2010. “DA Price is destroying the safety of our community and trampling on victims. We are here to bring balance back — and that starts with recalling DA Price.”Save Alameda For Everyone (SAFE) recall committee members file their notice of intent, Aug. 15, 2023. From left: Virginia Nishita, Brenda Grisham, Carl Chan, Letifah Wilson and Lorie and Eric Mohs. SAFE

Pamela Price supporters have said she is doing what she was elected to do as a progressive prosecutor and Alameda County’s first Black district attorney.

Christopher Campos and Caitlin Kearns:

Does a school district that expands school choice provide better outcomes for students than a neighborhood-based assignment system? This paper studies the Zones of Choice (ZOC) program, a school choice initiative of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that created small high school markets in some neighborhoods but left attendance-zone boundaries in place throughout the rest of the district. We study market-level impacts of choice on student achievement and college enrollment using a differences-in-differences design. Student outcomes in ZOC markets increased markedly, narrowing achievement and college enrollment gaps between ZOC neighborhoods and the rest of the district. The effects of ZOC are larger for schools exposed to more competition, supporting the notion that competition is a key channel. Demand estimates suggest families place substantial weight on schools’ academic quality, providing schools with competition-induced incentives to improve their effectiveness. The evidence demonstrates that public school choice programs have the potential to improve school quality and reduce neighborhood-based disparities in educational opportunity.

Commentary.

Matt Egan:

US inflation has had a snowballing effect on family budgets.

The typical American household spent $709 more in July than they did two years ago to buy the same goods and services, according to Moody’s Analytics. 

That figure underscores the cumulative impact high inflation has had on consumer finances — even as price growth has cooled considerably in recent months.

“High inflation of the past 2+ years has done lots of economic damage,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, wrote in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Most of that increase in spending is driven by housing costs, which have surged, Zandi told CNN in an email on Friday. He added that families are also spending more at the grocery store; on buying, maintaining and insuring vehicles and on recreational services like cable.

US Courts:

Including deleted DM’s.

Mike Hlas:

“Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream,” the 1990 non-fiction bestseller by H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger about a prominent west Texas high school football team and societal issues in its Odessa, Texas home is one of 19 books recently removed from school shelves in Mason City.

Others include Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”

“I’m flattered to be in the same company,” Bissinger said by phone Wednesday. “These are great, great books.”

The rest of what he said wasn’t so flattering, and with good reason.

Iowa Senate File 496, passed this year, requires every book available to students be “age-appropriate” and free of any “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” according to Iowa Code 702.17.

Mason City Community School District Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum and Instruction Bridgette Exman said it was “simply not feasible to read every book and filter for these new requirements.” So, as Popular Science reported this week, that district is using ChatGPT. That’s an artificial intelligence software, to help provide textual analysis of each title.

“This use of AI is ridiculous,” Bissinger said, “There’s no sex at all. I’ve never depicted a sex act. I don’t know what the (expletive) they’re talking about. I purposely stayed away from that.”

As for the book possibly not being age-appropriate?

“My book is being falsely depicted,” said Bissinger. “The tragedy is, this is a great book for kids. It is a great book for teenage males because they don’t like to read anything. But they devour this book, and I know because I’ve had over 30 years of emails telling me that.

YouTube's new policy is that it will censor you if you disagree with World Health Organization.

YouTube recognizes that WHO's "guidance" might change. But if it does, it won't be because of debate on YouTube.

YouTube isn't a social media platform, it's a propaganda platform. https://t.co/4YMCWxbII9

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) August 16, 2023

David Deming:

Cognitive endurance reframes grit as a skill that is developed through practice rather than as a mindset to be shifted. The difference is more than semantic. If we are going to build higher-order skills in children, we need to better understand the science of how to do it.

It has taken more than 100 years to develop a science of teaching reading, and even today, lots of ink is spilled on how to do it better. Why should we expect anything less for grit, or teamwork, or problem-solving? More research is needed to take the “soft” out of soft skills.

David Deming:

This week I want to talk about Larry Katz, a man who has a profound influence on my scholarly career and on the careers and lives of countless others. The impetus is a chapter that David Autor and I just completed for the Palgrave Companion to Harvard Economics, entitled “A Young Person’s Guide to Lawrence F. Katz”. If you are an economist (current or aspiring), or a person who cares about education, skills, technology, labor markets, neighborhoods, or economic inequality (which seems likely, given that you’re reading this newsletter), you should really read the entire paper.

My purpose today is partly tribute, and partly intellectual history. Larry is responsible for some of the most important ideas and findings in modern labor economics. He’s also served as a steward of the profession through his editorship of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and his mentorship of more than two hundred PhD students over the years, two of whom are David Autor and me. In his time at Harvard, Larry has served on an average of 6 dissertation committees per year. That’s staggering! He’s advised multiple John Bates Clark medal winners and MacArthur “genius” grant winners and dozens of scholars at top economics departments all around the country.

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is the top journal in economics, with an impact factor nearly double the next highest competitor. But it was not always so. When Larry took over as coeditor of the QJE in 1991, it was ranked below the average of the other “top 5” journals.1 As the figure below shows, the “treatment effect” of Larry Katz in an event study framework is positive and (probably) statistically significant. By 2022, the QJE had an impact factor more than double the average of the other top 5 journals.

I will praise Larry in this post because he deserves it. But I also want to use this opportunity to explain two important lessons that we should all learn from Larry’s work.

The first half of my Katz encomium focuses on his contribution to helping us think about wage differences between workers with different levels of education. Part two, airing next week, covers his contribution to our understanding of the benefits of living in a better neighborhood, along with some meta-commentary about the importance of a principled, scientific approach to tackling difficult questions.

The Race between Education and Technology

Why does education increase earnings? And why does the return to education vary so much across places and over different periods in history? The college wage premium ranges from 15 percent in Denmark and Sweden to 63 percent in the U.S. and 179 percent in Chile.

Jeannine Mancini:

The voiceover provides a clue: “When you live with moderate or severe Crohn’s disease or ulcerative colitis, your day can be full of reminders of your condition. Never knowing, always wondering.” And there’s another hint: the woman keeps grimacing and clutching her belly.

But these clues may not be enough. What’s never explained in this ad is that abdominal pain and sudden diarrhea are among the most common symptoms of Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, conditions known collectively as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The “never knowing, always wondering” refers to the way people with these conditions often have unpredictable bouts of diarrhea and an urgent need to get to a restroom. And that’s why there are toilets everywhere.

Jonathan Adler:

Today the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit revived a lawsuit agaisnt the District of Columbia for selective enforcement of the district’s defacement ordinance in violation of the First Amendment. Judge Rao wrote for the court in Frederick Douglass Foundation v. District of Columbia, joined by Judge Childs, reversing the district court’s dismissal of the Foundation’s First Amendment claim, but affirming dismissal of an Equal Protection claim. Judge Wilkins concurred in the judgment.

Judge Rao’s opinion for the court summarizes the case and decision as follows:

The First Amendment prohibits government discrimination on the basis of viewpoint. “To permit one side … to have a monopoly in expressing its views … is the antithesis of constitutional guarantees.” City of Madison Joint Sch. Dist. No. 8 v. Wis. Emp. Relations Comm’n, 429 U.S. 167, 175–76 (1976). The protection for freedom of speech applies not only to legislation, but also to enforcement of the laws. This case concerns a constitutional challenge to the selective enforcement of the District of Columbia’s defacement ordinance against some viewpoints but not others.

In the summer of 2020, thousands of protesters flooded the streets of the District to proclaim “Black Lives Matter.” Over several weeks, the protesters covered streets, sidewalks, and storefronts with paint and chalk. The markings were ubiquitous and in open violation of the District’s defacement ordinance, yet none of the protesters were arrested. During the same summer, District police officers arrested two pro-life advocates in a smaller protest for chalking “Black Pre-Born Lives Matter” on a public sidewalk.

Chuck Ross:

Elias alleged that “irregularities” in voting machines switched votes from Brindisi to Tenney. The case drew some national attention because the argument mirrored Republicans’ baseless claims that voting machine irregularities were responsible for Donald Trump losing to President Joe Biden in some states.

A judge ruled in favor of Tenney on Feb. 5 after finding insufficient evidence of any widespread problems with voting machines.

Elias, a partner at the firm Perkins Coie, is perhaps best known outside Democratic circles for his links to the Steele dossier.

Rich Cromwell:

Oliver Anthony’s viral song “Rich Men North of Richmond” is clever on several levels. First, there’s the wordplay between “rich men” and “Richmond.” Second, there’s the district north of Richmond, one not known for its relative poverty, but for its indifference to both the material and spiritual poverty experienced outside of its borders. Third, there’s the lyrical content, telling tales of the men and women whose lives are shaped by those who occupy the district that wields far too much control over our culture and economic well-being.

While the song has been heralded by Fox, the Blaze, and here at The Federalist, neither the artist nor the song are about the battles between conservatives vs. liberals, but about the battles between the elites and everyday citizens. Anthony even said in a conversation with Rolling Stone that he is “pretty dead center down the aisle on politics” and that “it seems like both sides serve the same master — and that master is not someone of any good to the people of this country.” Naturally, Rolling Stone titled the piece “Right-Wing Influencers Just Found Their Favorite New Country Song.”

There are also people on Twitter claiming the musician’s overnight success must be the result of right-wing astroturfing. Maybe, though the better explanation is the return of norms aside, the populist anger captured in the Sanders-Trump voters of 2016 has not gone away, especially in light of the failures of elected officials to address the shared concerns that led to that overlap in the first place. In other words, while David Brooks may have recently remembered them, albeit in the way an amateur primatologist remembers a group of chimps he once observed, it’s Jon Gabriel who gets to the heart of why Anthony’s song resonates.

Writing at Discourse, Gabriel says:

“As it slowly replaced the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant aristocracy, meritocracy promised to reward ability over pedigree. In many cases, this goal was realized. But the system has devolved into a new caste system stressing academic accreditation and boutique beliefs over simple merit and hard work. An Ivy League student garners degrees, builds a social network and marries a similarly educated spouse. Through their high-salary professions, these members of the meritocracy lavish advantages on their offspring, who matriculate to the same elite schools. Once the cycle repeats for a generation or two, you start referring to common cold cuts as ‘charcuterie.’”

It’s not that they refer to meat and cheese plates as charcuterie or that we have elites, Gabriel notes, but that the quality of our current crop has gotten so poor. “Elites of previous eras won world wars, established lasting peace, raised prosperity around the globe and transformed a backwater set of colonies into a global hegemon,” he adds. “Today’s crew can’t defeat third-world foes, police our cities, pay their bills, or keep the power on.”

change.org:

On Thursday, 11 May 2023, the state of Florida enacted a law that bans research that is “reasonably likely to create an enhanced potential pandemic pathogen,” or ePPP. The law, Florida Statues section 381.875, is the first of its kind in the US and marks a major victory in the fight to prevent future lab-generated pandemics.

We, the undersigned, applaud the new Florida law banning ePPP research.  We urge other US states to adopt similar legislation.

Potential pandemic pathogens are viruses, bacteria, or other microorganisms that are highly virulent and highly transmissible. Examples include the viruses that cause COVID-19, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Marburg, and Lassa fever. An ePPP is a potential pandemic pathogen that scientists have manipulated (e.g., for scientific, commercial, or military applications) and made even more virulent or more transmissible than the naturally occurring strain. Laboratory accidents that happen during the course of ePPP research have the potential to trigger devastating pandemics.

ePPP research is scientifically unethical, as it places the public at risk without their consent. ePPP research also has limited benefits, as it does not meaningfully contribute to the development of vaccines or disease treatments. The US federal government has, for decades, failed to enact legislation that meaningfully protects US citizens and the global public from the dangers of ePPP research. Indeed, the US federal government actively puts its citizens and the global public at risk by continuing to fund ePPP research, both in the US and in other countries. This funding continues despite multiple US federal agencies assessing that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) may have originated as an ePPP that accidentally escaped from a research lab that had been funded by the US federal government.

Bill has been introduced in the Wisconsin state legislature to ban gain-of-function research on potential pandemic pathogens.

This is an important step. Legislators in all 50 states should pass state bans on enhancing potential pandemic pathogens (while White House dithers). pic.twitter.com/RboMuGsXgb

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) August 15, 2023

U Wisconsin claims that enhanced potential pandemic pathogen research "is needed and highly regulated" and that regulation will "limit..ability of..authorities to prepare and respond to threats" and "hamstring..growth of..biotech and biomedical sector."

These claims are false. pic.twitter.com/K436MvA944

— Richard H. Ebright (@R_H_Ebright) August 15, 2023

Alex Tabarrok:

What’s going on in WV is thus a reflection of national trends, magnified by West Virginia’s own decline in population. Full paying foreign students from China are also way down. Now add to declining college demographics, budgets hit by the great recession and then the pandemic. Now add in the rise of online learning which means that universities can outsource low-demand classes to other universities and save money and quite likely increase quality. (Indeed, the local teacher might have been teaching online anyway so why not substitute with a world expert and great teacher who has the backing of an entire team of delivery experts?) Finally, add in the fact that a substantial part of the electorate would like to see a decline in programs they see as politicized.

Jeffrey Carter:

There are so many arguments about teacher pay. Everywhere in the country, Democrats are shilling for more teacher pay which is really a sell-out to the Teacher’s Union. Democrats fight school choice at every single turn. They hurt underprivileged and poor kids when they do. Yet, many of those same people active in killing school choice send their kids to private schools.

No one is saying teachers do not provide a service. The reason they are paid what they are paid is that they are unionized, and it’s simply not that difficult to become a teacher compared to say a lawyer, accountant, or doctor. Other professions that make a lot of money have significantly higher degrees of risk. There is no risk of losing your entire year’s worth of salary if you are a teacher. There is one on Wall Street. Salespeople can work years on one sale that will bring them a big commission and it can fall through. 

The other thing to remember about salaries is that the higher you go in a public company, the more influence you have over the bottom line. Doesn’t it make sense that someone who is a C-Suite executive that has responsibility for billions in assets makes more than a teacher?

Daniel Solove:

In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.

Wall Street Journal:

That’s the news from a less-redacted internal FBI document released Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee. Chairman Jim Jordan wants more information from the FBI on how broad this investigation really was.

This story began in February when a whistleblower leaked a heavily redacted January report from the FBI’s Richmond office: “Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities.”

The document defined “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as those who attend the Latin Mass and who frequently adhere to “anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ, and white supremacist ideology.” The agents relied on half-baked “open-source” reporting from liberal outlets to justify more bureau investigation.

FBI headquarters quickly said the report didn’t meet its “exacting standards” and had been withdrawn. FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Judiciary Committee in July that the report was “a single product by a single field office.” He added that “as soon as I found out about it, I was aghast and ordered it withdrawn and removed from FBI systems,” and he said he began an internal probe.

Benicia Freedom:

The Progressive Democrats of Benicia Treasurer wrote to my corporate headquarters demanding they respond to her by May 1 or she would publish defamatory items about me and the company. You can read the letter here.

Since the day OpenAI debuted ChatGPT, I've been screaming one soon day it will be promoted as the ultimate tool to censor the Internet.

Today, the day I warned of is here:https://t.co/mhmxr7KO5d

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) August 15, 2023

Benjamin Yount:

A new report on reading in Wisconsin shows many schools across the state continue to use reading lessons shown to leave students behind.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is out with a new report called Trust the Science? The Use of Outdated Reading Curricula in Wisconsin Schools. It looks at how whole-language reading curricula have performed over the years.

“Forward Exam scores show that Wisconsin students are struggling in reading. Currently statewide, only about 36.8% of students scored proficient or higher on the Forward Exam, meaning the majority of students are falling behind. Reading problems cut across all socioeconomic and racial lines,” the report states. “This paper takes advantage of a new dataset available from the Department of Public Instruction that details the curricula used in each district around the state. We correlate reading outcomes on the Forward Exam with some two of the most widely criticized curricula that rely on “Whole Language” techniques – Lucy Calkins and Fountas and Pinnell.”

“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?

Melissa Korn:

The University of Chicago has agreed to pay $13.5 million to settle a lawsuit in which it was accused of illegally colluding with other top universities to limit financial aid to students, making it the first defendant in the case to settle, according to a court filing Monday. 

The lawsuit, filed in Illinois federal court in January 2022, accuses 17 colleges and universities, including most members of the Ivy League, Duke University, Vanderbilt University and the California Institute of Technology, of engaging in price fixing by using a shared methodology to calculate applicants’ financial need.

Frederick Hess

Across the land, parents are starting to get their kids ready for the new school year. In talking to parents, you can hear relief—and an undercurrent of angst. The last few years have been tumultuous for the relationship between parents and schools. The disruptions of school closure and spotty remote learning were followed by masking fights, learning loss, and fierce culture clashes.

It’s been a trying time for parents and educators, alike. But it’s one that also offers the much-needed opportunity, as I suggest in The Great School Rethink, to reset the dysfunctional relationship between families and schools.

AbdulAzeez Sherif

In programming, an algorithm is a set of instructions or a procedure for solving a specific problem or achieving a specific task. Algorithms can be expressed in any programming language and can be as simple as a sequence of basic operations or as complex as a multi-step process involving different data structures and logic. The main goal of an algorithm is to take in input, process it and provide an output that is expected. Algorithms can be classified based on the time and space complexity, the technique used for solving the problem, and the type of problem it solves. Examples of algorithm are sorting, searching, graph traversals, string manipulations, mathematical operations, and many more.

Algorithms we will be talking about:

Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, John Friedman

Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from families in the top 1% are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, and Chicago) as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores. Two-thirds of this gap is due to higher admissions rates for students with comparable test scores from high-income families; the remaining third is due to differences in rates of application and matriculation. In contrast, children from high-income families have no admissions advantage at flagship public colleges. The high-income admissions advantage at private colleges is driven by three factors: (1) preferences for children of alumni, (2) weight placed on non-academic credentials, which tend to be stronger for students applying from private high schools that have affluent student bodies, and (3) recruitment of athletes, who tend to come from higher-income families. Using a new research design that isolates idiosyncratic variation in admissions decisions for waitlisted applicants, we show that attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work that found smaller causal effects using variation in matriculation decisions conditional on admission. Adjusting for the value-added of the colleges that students attend, the three key factors that give children from high-income families an admissions advantage are uncorrelated or negatively correlated with post-college outcomes, whereas SAT/ACT scores and academic credentials are highly predictive of post-college success. We conclude that highly selective private colleges currently amplify the persistence of privilege across generations, but could diversify the socioeconomic backgrounds of America’s leaders by changing their admissions practices.

JT Cestkowski

A report from the Wisconsin Policy Forum (WPF) found that the Madison area lost over 8,000 jobs between 2019 and 2022, led in part by declines in the technology sector.

WPF released the report, which broke down the statewide labor market using data from the federal Department of Labor Statistics, Thursday.

It showed Wisconsin lost 52,220 jobs compared to pre-pandemic employment levels. This despite the fact that the state unemployment rate remains near a historic low of 2.5 percent.

Joe Peterangelo, a senior researcher with WPF said that Wisconsin workers made wage gains that outpaced inflation over the three year period focused on in the report. 

The report also broke down employment numbers for Wisconsin’s three largest metropolitan areas: Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay.

Chase:

In English, it turns out that how a word is spelled has some confusing and often inconsistent rules with respect to how the word should sound. A notorious example of this incongruity is with the letters “ough”. It turns out that this can be pronounced in 9 different ways, as shown by these representative words: rough, plough, through, though, thought, thorough, cough, hiccough, and lough (ends in a “k” sound!).

You may have heard of the “long” and “short” vowels, perhaps in elementary school. These words aren’t that precise, because these phonemes aren’t always stated for a longer or shorter time. But it’s a quick way to remember 10 phonemes – the long and short versions of “a”, “e”, “i”, “o”, “u”. With respect to spelling, I did want to point out one surprising thing. In the American dialect, the “short o” phoneme (/ɑ/) does not involve rounding your lips. Say “top” or “box” out loud, and you’ll see what I mean. “Nacho” and “father” also use this, too. In British english, “top” and “box” use the rounded version of this phoneme: /ɒ/. It’s possible you’re slightly in between the two.

Ed Pozzuoli:

As public schools across Florida get ready to open, parents have greater choices and control than ever for their children. This state policy providing parents more and better educational choices started over 20 years ago and continues today. The focus on student achievement, as opposed to adult interests, has launched Florida students to the top of class. 

According to U.S. News & World Report, Florida ranks No. 1 nationally this year for education, with higher education, in particular, top-ranked. The state recently earned its highest-ever NAEP rankings for grades 4 and 8, with top-five scores in key categories — all along with the continuation of two decades of narrowing “achievement gaps” for minority, low-income and disabled students. 

While high-profile national political leaders take issue with a couple words in Florida’s new 216-page Black history curriculum, Florida continues to make learning and achievements gains on behalf of all students, particularly students of color. Florida is one of only a few states committed to teaching Black history as an expressed part of the required curriculum.

Keri Ingraham:

Teachers unions and education bureaucrats hail public schools for being open to all children while condemning private schools for limiting access. But most “public” schools aren’t public at all.

In most communities, children are restricted to a single assigned school based on their home address and arbitrary boundary lines. Private schools often have academic, behavioral or other admissions standards, but they don’t keep children out simply based on where they live.

The cost of tuition is the primary barrier to parents who want to enroll their children. Nine states—Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia—have enacted universal or near-universal school choice into law, thus the financial barrier for families to enroll their children in private schooling—whether traditional, online, hybrid or micro schools—is crumbling.

Yet unions, bureaucrats and their political allies continue to insist not only on keeping kids in the public system but restricting them to a single assigned “public” school, even if it is failing to educate children or keep them physically safe.

Parents have been charged with stealing public education, fined and sentenced to jail time. Sixteen parents in Maryland and Virginia were charged for providing fraudulent addresses for their children to attend a public school other than their specifically assigned school without paying nonresident tuition of $10,000 to $14,000 a year. A recent report found that in at least 24 states, parents can be criminally prosecuted for providing false home address information to enroll their children in a “public” school.

By Reihan Salam

I don’t begrudge Biden for doing whatever he could to secure his granddaughter’s admission to a prestigious university, an admirable act of grandfatherly devotion, or Gutmann for having been receptive to his entreaties, as her job was in no small part to add luster to the University of Pennsylvania. The relationship between them is striking nevertheless. One would normally expect a university president to be solicitous toward a former vice president of the United States, not the other way around.

But Gutmann wasn’t the president of just any university. She was the president of an Ivy League university, and that made all the difference. Her relationship with the Biden family is a perfect distillation of the immense influence of the Ivy League and its peer institutions—and it points to how that influence might come undone.

Armed with billion-dollar endowments, America’s most selective universities have in recent decades transformed themselves into “the makers of manners” for the nation’s mass affluent population. By mixing the children of the rich and powerful with the children of designated disadvantaged groups, they’ve given rise to a new progressive elite that holds enormous sway over the nation’s cultural and political life. Now, as Ivy-plus admissions practices come under intense scrutiny from left and right, this potent alchemy is at risk, opening  the door for a new set of elite-making institutions.

One of Gutmann’s distinguished predecessors as U.S. ambassador to Germany is James Bryant Conant, who served as the U.S. high commissioner for Germany and then as the first U.S. ambassador to the Federal Republic at the dawn of the Cold War. In a neat parallel, Conant took on the role after a highly consequential 20-year tenure as president of Harvard University.

Between Conant’s era and Gutmann’s, elite higher education in America reached the zenith of its power. But Conant’s vision for Harvard and Gutmann’s vision for Penn were strikingly different.

By Paulina Cachero and Claire Ballentine

Federal student loan bills return in October. But a growing chorus of borrowers say they simply can’t, or won’t pay.

That includes Amanda Acevedo, 37, who is raising three kids on a radiographer’s salary and has $40,000 in student debt. For the past three years, she and millions of other Americans didn’t need to worry about student loans after payments were paused at the start of the pandemic. The forbearance allowed her to pay off credit card debt and save for a down payment on a house in Orlando.

Mpsprd:

We have two kids who were raised essentially screen-free until 3, then on a 1hr a week diet until 6. We worried all the time about the transition to school, and the cultural norm of allowing a lot more screen time. This was an imagined dragon – this has not been an issue at all. My oldest just got a Switch, she plays less than 1/2hr a day – then she walks away without issue. She has friends with phones and iWatches (she has neither) and her envy level is zero.

My point here is not that we’ve done anything right, or wrong, or to emulate. Instead, I say this point out the I’ve had to learn to worry about, and address, the real issues – when they become real. There are not enough hours in the day to worry about all theoretical mistakes I’m making as a a parent. I choose to focus on the actual, observable, issues we are having.

For what it’s worth – many of our neighbors have kids that play all the time on the Switch, have phones, and watch TV every car ride anywhere, and those kids are LOVELY. They aren’t screen demons – and they aren’t behind in math, reading, eating vegetables… I think it could be it doesn’t really matter as much as it gets focused on.

Samuel Velasco:

They looked exactly as expected: a wall of white, peppered with black specks for smaller integers. “We expected the black dots to peter out,” Stange said. Rickards added, “I thought maybe it would even be possible to prove they peter out.” He speculated that by looking at charts that synthesized many packings together, the team would be able to prove results that weren’t possible when they looked at any one packing on its own.

While Stange was away, Haag wound up plotting every pair of remainders — about 120. No surprises there. Then she went big.

Haag had been plotting how 1,000 integers interact. (The graph is bigger than it sounds, since it involves 1 million possible pairs.) Then she cranked the dial up to 10,000 times 10,000. In one graph, regular rows and columns of black specks refused to dissolve. It looked nothing like what the local-global conjecture would predict.

The team met on a Monday after Stange returned. Haag presented her graphs, and they all focused on the one with the weird dots. “It was just a continual pattern,” Haag said. “And that was when Kate said, ‘What if the local-global conjecture isn’t true?’”

"Crypto magnate Sam Bankman-Fried was scheduled to speak to a Stanford class this winter, The Daily has learned. The topic of the course? Tech ethics." This and more previously unreported details in my latest piece:https://t.co/ObbD8alY4z

— Theo Baker (@tab_delete) August 13, 2023

Amelia Ferrell Knisely

West Virginia University leaders have recommended discontinuing 32 of its majors at its Morgantown campus as the school is feverishly working to make up for a multi-million budget shortfall. 

The preliminary recommendations, released Friday afternoon, said 12 of those programs are undergraduate majors and 20 are graduate-level majors. Other programs were told to reduce their faculty size — 169 faculty jobs are on the line for cuts. 

Programs marked for discontinuation included: master’s and doctorate in Mathematics; master’s and doctorate in Higher Education Administration; master’s of Public Administration; master’s of fine arts in Creative Writing; and a bachelor’s in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Resources.

The Department of World Languages, Literatures and Linguistics, which includes Spanish, Russian and Chinese studies, was marked to be completely dissolved.

“My colleagues and I are still in shock; it’s inconceivable that our state flagship, R1, land-grant university, the place where we’ve all built our homes, careers and lives is completely eliminating the teaching of languages,” said Lisa Di Bartolomeo, a teaching professor of Russian Studies. 

The university is also reviewing plans to eliminate the language requirement for all majors. “Eliminating language instruction will close avenues of opportunity, career advancement, and personal fulfillment for current and future WVU students,” she added.

Kansas Reflector:

In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher’s home.

Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”

The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.

The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.

Chris Freeland:

Four months after the disappointing decision on summary judgment in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a number of papers were filed today in the district court, and then the judge is expected to make his final judgment. We expect that, at least while the appeal is pending, there will be changes to our lending program, but the full scope of those changes is a question pending with the district court. We will provide an update on those changes once the district court decision is final.

Our fight is far from over—We remain steadfast in our belief that libraries should be able to own, preserve, and lend digital books outside of the confines of temporary licensed access. We believe that the judge made errors of law and fact in the decision, and we will appeal.

New Reform:

Would not an argument for wrongful harassment depend on your showing that Wax made the alleged disparaging statement to Allen precisely because Allen was a Black person? But you do not allege that—in fact, the real “problem” is not that Professor Wax had singled out Professor Allen or other Black members of the Penn community, but that Professor Wax makes these statements in public, all the time, to one-and-all. The real “problem” is that you disagree with the purportedly illiberal content of her alleged statements.

If your point is that Professor Wax broke an academic norm because she made a disparaging statement about gay people to Professor Wolff, a gay person, but her statement would otherwise be A-OK had her audience been entirely absent any gay person, then you are (again) advocating intellectual apartheid for your university. Would not an argument for wrongful harassment depend on your showing that Wax made the alleged disparaging statement during the panel discussion precisely because Wolff, her fellow panelist, was a gay person? But you do not allege that—in fact, the real “problem” is not that Professor Wax had singled out Professor Wolff or other gay members of the Penn community, but that Professor Wax makes these statements in public, all the time, to one-and-all. The real “problem” is that you disagree with the purportedly illiberal content of her alleged statements.

Your framing the issue here, i.e., Professor Wax’s speech, in terms of discriminatory conduct or harassment is simply a cover—to make the censorship of ideas in an academic setting appear palatable.

William Jacobson:

Varney (00:04): The University of Nebraska Lincoln was just hit with a civil rights complaint. It’s over a program for black filmmakers. William Jacobson is the Cornell University law professor and joins me now. Professor, is it legit that a university in America today has a program specifically for black filmmakers? Is that okay with you?

WAJ (00:28): No, it’s not okay. And that’s why we have filed a complaint over it, because this is a program which is racially exclusionary.  You can only apply for it if you are a black filmmaker. If you just reverse the roles, if they had a program that was only for white filmmakers, it would be a national story. It would be outrage everywhere. But for some reason, universities seem to think discrimination is okay, depending which direction it targets.

Varney (00:54): It seems like we’re trying to end all racial preferences, whether it’s in corporations or colleges or high schools or wherever. Is that your goal?

Dave Karpf:

Let’s dip back into the pages of 90s-era WIRED magazine. There are a pair of articles that illustrate who the old WIRED ideology was aligned against . Both stories use grandstanding wagers to make a broader point about the expected trajectory of society.

I’ve written previously about who the heroes were in the 90’s tech optimist narrative. I’ve also written about the continued relevance of the worldview. The magazine is no longer the intensely ideological outfit that it once was, but today’s tech moguls are staunch disciples of its teachings.

So today I want to talk about the people who get framed as villains in this narrative. The villains represented everything that WIRED’s masthead thought was ailing contemporary society. They were worriers, instead of optimists. They believed governments, not entrepreneurial capitalists, ought to be the main arena for sorting through social transformations. Instead of showing faith in the emancipatory potential of Moore’s Law and the gospel of abundance economics, they fretted over the “limits to growth.”

It’s something that has occasionally bogged me down while reading through the WIRED back catalog.

Arbesman

Searching for Computing Wonders

Beneath the utilitarian purpose of computation, computing is also a source of delight and wonder. Software is not just databases and mail merges or SaaS and spreadsheets; it’s creative coding and simulated cities, code poetry and bulletin board systems. It’s websites that dazzle and iPhone apps that make the heart sing. And it’s sometimes even spreadsheets, coerced to dance and do all manner of weirdness. All of these approaches to computing are what am collecting here, and bundling under the term “garden of computational delights.” This is a list of places that collect or catalyze sources for being enraptured by the web, programming, and the wider world of computing. Or, as per Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan, this is a garden of all the different places you might discover where “the computer is a feeling.”

Matt Taibbi:

“[Judge] Willett put the mob analogy in even plainer language, saying the government’s behavior was a “fairly unsubtle kind of strong-arming,” as in, “That’s a really nice social media platform you got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.””

more:

that statements from White House officials about content like, “[I’m] wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP” do not constitute coercion. At one point Tenny was among other things saying the state couldn’t be coercing social media companies if, for instance, the FBI only succeeded in getting material taken down 50% of the time. “The idea that social media companies had to bend to the FBI’s will, when half the time they didn’t, just doesn’t support those theories.”

This inspired the following exchange between Tenny and Judge Don Willett:

WILLETT: Does coercion necessarily entail a threat, either overt or covert? Isn’t a directive itself enough to constitute unconstitutional coercion, absent an “or else” consequence?

TENNY: I guess I’m not sure what a directive means without a threat like—

WILLETT: “Do this, why haven’t you done this? Get this done. F-bomb do this.”

Willet was referring to a series of emails that included a July 15, 2021 communication from White House official Rob Flaherty reading, “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today”:

Eric Winsberg:

In 2023, nothing seems more obvious than the fact that doctors should wash their hands in between patients. But this wasn’t always the case. And we owe our knowledge of this “obvious” fact to one of the most famous scientific dissidents in history: Ignaz Semmelweis. In 1846, the Vienna General Hospital had two free obstetric clinics, where underprivileged women, including prostitutes, could go to receive not only child-birthing services, but also free postpartum care for their infants. In return for the free services, the new mothers agreed to be used as subjects for the training of doctors (in the first clinic) and midwives (in the second). But giving birth in the first clinic was extremely dangerous.

Matt Taibbi:

Two sets of figures, collected four years apart by the research firm SSRS, for CNN: 

• Donald Trump, September, 2019: Strongly Disapprove, 48%. Strongly Approve, 28%
• Joe Biden, August, 2023: Strongly Disapprove, 42%. Strongly Approve, 15%

Plunging numbers for Trump prompted stories like, “Tldr: Trump’s in 2020 Trouble.” Biden headlines this week try to speak an upbeat narrative into reality, the most humorous probably being “Biden Heads West For a Policy Victory Lap” and “Biden Goes West to Tout The Economy.” According to a slew of reports the president’s “touting” trip celebrates “growth in manufacturing,” and opportunities afforded by the Inflation Reduction and Chips and Science Acts. “You can expect us to highlight more groundbreakings of projects, more ribbon-cuttings,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Natalie Quillian told the Washington Post.

Laura McKenna:

Has the Neurodiversity Movement Forgotten The Most Disabled and Their Parents?

When Ian was three, the local school district sent him to a neurologist to see why he couldn’t talk. After a few background questions for me about my pregnancy and his birth, she turned to Ian, and said, “okay, let’s see what’s going on here.” She pulled out a wooden puzzle with a dozen barnyard animals and dumped them on ground. I smiled and said, “wait until you see this.” 

Ian glanced down at the puzzle pieces of the cow and the dog, picked up one by the little peg, and slapped into the wooden puzzle board without hesitating or jiggling the piece to fit it into place. Slap. And it was in. And then he did it again and again. Fast and perfect, without looking at us once to register our reaction and without any comments at all. I handed him a candy reward.

“Wow,” said the neurologist. At the end of the appointment, she said that he couldn’t talk because he was smart. (Yes, doctors really did say that twenty years ago.) As we later learned, Ian is smart, and he’s also autistic. But autism looks differently in every person, and few have Ian’s combination of strengths and weaknesses. 

In a viral article for The Free Press — Bari Weiss’s substack — Jill Escher writes that the neurodiversity movement, which celebrates autism and normalizes it, has done real damage to her family. Escher say that those autism advocates do not speak for her or her two profoundly autistic adult-children, completed derailed the effort to find causes of autism, and distracted from the real desperate need to create programs for adults with autism. 

The neurodiversity movement, which gathered steam in 2010, maintains that autism is not a disability, but a feature of normal human variation, and in some cases, an evolutionary advantage. I once joked described that this movement should be renamed, Woke Autism, but they’ve been very successful in reshaping the terms of the debate and even transformed advocacy at the mega-foundation, Autism Speaks.

Annika Bahnsen

Placentia–Yorba Linda Unified will leave the California School Boards Association, a statewide coalition that provides school districts with training, advocacy and policy analysis assistance, a school board majority decided Tuesday, Aug. 8.

PYLUSD will be the only district in Orange County that is not a member of the CSBA. According to the CSBA’s website, more than 96% of California school district . . .

Denise-Marie Ordway

Resourceful journalists find other ways to get that information. Here are eight of them.

1. Go to the Library

Public libraries often subscribe to academic journals and anyone with a library card can read them. The good news for busy journalists is some libraries allow their users to access online databases of peer-reviewed research from any location.

US colleges and universities provide online access to academic journals through their academic libraries. State university libraries generally are open to the public. Private institutions often extend library privileges to alumni.

2. Ask Academic Journals for a Free Account

Many of the most popular journals give journalists complimentary access, although some limit free accounts to journalists covering specific topics or beats. The American Economic Association (AEA), for instance, offers news media professionals free access to all eight of its journals, including the American Economic Review. You can request an account through the association’s press page.

Meg Kinnard;

Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamyon Thursday voiced support for changing the overall U.S. voting age to 25, unless younger Americans fulfill at least six months of service in the military or as a first responder — or pass the same citizenship test administered to those seeking to become naturalized citizens.

Ramaswamy’s campaign announced the biotech entrepreneur and “anti-woke” activist’s push for a U.S. Constitutional amendment promoting “civic duty voting,” which he announced in a news release and detailed during a campaign event in Urbandale, Iowa.

Revising the Constitution is no simple task, requiring overwhelming support in Congress and in state legislatures. Still, Ramaswamy said in his release that the “absence of national pride is a serious threat to the future of our country” and argued his proposal “can create a sense of shared purpose and responsibility amongst young Americans to become educated citizens.”

On Twitter during his Iowa event, Ramaswamy acknowledged, “I understand not everyone will like this proposal and that it will take persuasion to convince many of its merits, but I’m ready to take that on.”

BIANCA VÁZQUEZ TONESS

Across the country, students have been absentat record rates since schools reopened during the pandemic. More than a quarter of students missed at least 10% of the 2021-22 school year, making them chronically absent, according to the most recent data available. Before the pandemic, only 15% of students missed that much school. 

All told, an estimated 6.5 million additional students became chronically absent, according to the data, which was compiled by Stanford University education professor Thomas Dee in partnership with The Associated Press. Taken together, the data from 40 states and Washington, D.C., provides the most comprehensive accounting of absenteeism nationwide. Absences were more prevalent among Latino, Black and low-income students, according to Dee’s analysis.

The absences come on top of time students missed during school closures and pandemic disruptions. They cost crucial classroom time as schools work to recover from massive learning setbacks.

Absent students miss out not only on instruction but also on all the other things schools provide — meals, counseling, socialization. In the end, students who are chronically absent — missing 18 or more days a year, in most places — are at higher risk of not learning to read and eventually dropping out. 

“The long-term consequences of disengaging from school are devastating. And the pandemic has absolutely made things worse and for more students,” said Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit addressing chronic absenteeism.

Related: Taxpayer funded Dane County Madison public health mandates and closed schools.

“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?

Why is a teachers union impeding the ability of a private group to meet? Is it because that group would highlight the literal decades of failure in Milwaukee overseen by the MTEA? https://t.co/drkUYuySuS

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) August 10, 2023

Larissa Phillips

If it wasn’t the Covid closures, maybe it was the recording of a contentious school board meetingthat went viral. Or a TikTok video posted by a woke teacher. Or perhaps the relentless reports of declining academic standards. Given the heated discourse around almost every aspect of public education, it’s hardly surprising that more and more families are opting out. According to the Census Experimental Household Pulse survey, in the last three years, the families of 1.8 million children made the switch, totaling 4.3 million American children homeschooled in 2022. The growth is steady and expected to continue. But glib calls to jump ship gloss over some persistent challenges inherent in homeschooling.

I discovered these challenges firsthand thirteen years ago when my family moved from Brooklyn to rural upstate New York and began homeschooling our kids, then six and eleven. We were less motivated by school board battles or declining academic standards than a general dissatisfaction with the one-size-fits-all classroom model. In Brooklyn, my kids had gone to a lively, sought-after public school that emphasized project-based learning within an otherwise traditional classroom. Even that school had been a poor fit for my quirky older child. I thought he was neither nurtured to his full potential nor assisted in his difficulties coping with the rhythms of the school day. My younger child was sociable, poised, and academically adept, which meant she was often ignored by teachers and partnered with difficult kids to keep them focused. The fault, I thought, lay not in the choice of teachers or curriculum, but in the very concept of assembly-line education for children, a common complaint of homeschooling enthusiasts. Coloring my opinion was the memory of my own uninspiring school years. We were ready for something different. We jumped in.

Paul Sperry:

The original article by the Washington Post’s chief fact checker, Glenn Kessler, was published the same day as the New York Post’s pre-election scoop revealing that Joe Biden had attended a 2015 dinner with a top executive of a Ukrainian energy firm, Burisma, which was paying his son $83,000 per month. Kessler’s fact-check involved interviews with a host of Biden aides who vehemently disputed the vice president’s attendance at the dinner and advanced the theory that the source of the information – a laptop Hunter had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop – was untrustworthy and possibly a Russian plant.

That conspiracy theory was quickly embraced by 51 former intelligence officials, who signed an open letter dismissing the New York Post’s scoop as having “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” This letter and the Washington Post fact check were used by the Biden campaign, other media outlets, and social media platforms to discredit the information contained on the laptop in the final days of the campaign. The article, Kessler would later boast, was “one of the most read articles in our 13-year history” of the fact-checking feature.

But Kessler’s fact check has not aged well. Just last week Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer, testified before Congress that the article was “not correct reporting.” Instead of retracting the article – as the Post did with some of its debunked Russiagate coverage – or running a straightforward correction, the paper has appended a series of “updates” to its reporting.

More, here.

David Mastio

This fall, the University of California system is growing its freshman class by 3,017 slots from 85,268 students to 88,285. Black students aren’t getting a single one of the new slots according to preliminary University of California data analyzed by The Center Square.

• Hispanics gained 1,435 slots in the newly expanded freshman class.
• Whites gained 982 spots in the class.
• Asian Americans grew by 359 positions.
• Native Americans obtained 60 additional admissions.

African-Americans remained exactly the same with 4,855 spots in the freshman class in 2022 and 2023 while their percentage of those admitted to the freshman class declined 17% from 6% of all incoming freshmen in 2022 to 5% of freshmen in 2023. If Blacks had remained the same proportion of the class, they would have gained more than 150 seats in freshman classrooms.

Jimmy Ewing:

It worked like this: an enterprising homeschool mom compiled a list of all the moms’ home phone lines because nobody, except rich dads, had cell phones. She would take that list to Kinko’s and make duplicates to distribute at the next homeschool gathering. When something interesting happened, whoever discovered the interesting thing would call the next person on the list and tell her all about that thing with breathless abandon. At no point were dads involved, ever. A man’s voice on the other end of the line would have caused panic and a run on the local banks. Thus, the dissemination of vital information was effected and dads were kept entirely in the dark for as long as possible. 

Unfortunately, hardly anyone owned answering machines until well into the 90s, so number 6 on the list might be forced to skip number 7 and go straight to 8 who sent her to 10 because she knew 9 was out of town and 7 had kids with strep. This went on in a round-robin format until, finally, the voice on the other end of the line said “Yes, I know about the thing; I’m the one who initiated the phone tree.” It was pure chaos. This phenomenon is likely being actively studied in laboratory rats today. I don’t know. 

Fortunately for me, Katherine Koonce’s generous offer to teach literature to homeschoolers trickled through the phone tree to my house, and I was sent up to the front lines. I have no idea what could possibly have possessed her to want to help us, but she did, and to say that the impact she had on my life was “profound” would be a dramatic understatement.

Great conversation about the meteoric explosion of high schoolers taking college classes with @MLynchOnAir at @KMOX, one of the largest talk radio stations in the country. Listen to the 7-min segment on dual enrollment here: https://t.co/Q9OgAYlRHw

— Jill Barshay (@jillbarshay) August 9, 2023

Kelly Meyerhofer:

In Wisconsin, few colleges and universities consider “legacy” status in admissions decisions, according to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel review. And because most Wisconsin schools accept far more students than they reject, it’s likely many legacy students would have gotten in regardless of their family’s history of attendance.

But there’s another way in which legacy can benefit already advantaged students: Some schools offer scholarships specifically for students with a family member who graduated from there. At least 13 Wisconsin institutions do, according to the news organization’s review of 28 school scholarship websites.

Richard Kahlenberg, a nonresident scholar at Georgetown University and longtime critic of legacy preference, called legacy scholarships “equally troubling.” He urged institutions to phase them out, especially if scholarship criteria don’t consider other factors, too, such as financial need.

“To the extent that (schools are) trying to diversify in new ways after the Supreme Court ruling, then having a scholarship for legacy students seems counterproductive,” he said.

Melissa Korn, Andrea Fuller and Jennifer S. Forsyth

The nation’s best-known public universities have been on an unfettered spending spree. Over the past two decades, they erected new skylines comprising snazzy academic buildings and dorms. They poured money into big-time sports programs and hired layers of administrators. 

Then they passed the bill along to students.

The University of Kentucky upgraded its campus to the tune of $805,000 a day for more than a decade. Its freshmen, who come from one of America’s poorest states, paid an average $18,693 to attend in 2021-22. 

Pennsylvania State University spent so much money that it now has a budget crisis—even though it’s among the most expensive public universities in the U.S. 

The University of Oklahoma hit students with some of the biggest tuition increases, while spending millions on projects including acquiring and renovating a 32,000-square-foot Italian monastery for its study-abroad program.

The spending is inextricably tied to the nation’s $1.6 trillion federal student debt crisis. Colleges poured out money in part by raising tuition prices, leaving many students with few options but to take on more debt. That means student loans served as easy financing for university projects.

“Students do not have the resources right now to continue to foot the bill for all of the things that the university wants to do,” said Crispin South, a 2023 Oklahoma graduate. “You can’t just continue to raise revenue by turning to students.”

Rather, they raised prices far beyond what was needed to fill the hole. 

For every $1 lost in state support at those universities over the two decades, the median school increased tuition and fee revenue by nearly $2.40, more than covering the cuts, the Journal found.

SHOCK: Livingston, NJ @LivSchools school board called the police on me after I revealed I had been secretly recording their board meeting led by Superintendent Matt Block @DocBlockLPS exposing his diversity, equity and inclusion “audit” conducted by a mysterious firm called “A2Z” pic.twitter.com/qRjOpQtnpY

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) August 10, 2023

Conor Friedersdorf

Though accused of naked partisanship, the Court handed down multiple significant rulings where justices appointed by presidents of different parties were in the majority and minority together. Multiple majority decisions featured GOP-appointed justices ruling against the actions of GOP legislators. The Court generally ruled in ways that were consistent with the popular will, not at odds with it. (Polls aggregated by The New York Times suggest that just one ruling strayed significantly from public opinion––a case that recognized the Environmental Protection Agency’s statutory jurisdiction over permanent bodies of water while ruling that the Clean Water Act does not give it jurisdiction over wetlands.)

As for ideology, the Court’s judicial reasoning and outcomes alike suggest majorities that are more informed by small-l liberal values than the “right wing” or “extremist” values some antagonists allege. The justices safeguarded election integrity and voting rights in decisions that many Democrats cheered. And in two of the decisions that progressives complained about most, the Court stopped two powerful institutions from flagrantly discriminating against a racial-minority group and reined in a president who willfully exceeded his lawful authority by forgiving debt in a way that transferred wealth, overall, from poorer Americans to richer Americans.

Taken together, the majority decisions of 2023 reflected the justices reasoning their way to legally defensible and practically workable conclusions, whether or not you happen to agree with them. Nothing about those rulings provides any basis at all for calling the legitimacy of the Court into question, and those doing so are being as misleading as they are shortsighted and imprudent.

Jack Smith not only demanded access to Trump’s Twitter account, he demanded Twitter be barred from telling anyone about it for at least 6 months. Notice when these privacy-invading demands are made by countries such as Turkey, no one has any trouble decrying it as “authoritarian” pic.twitter.com/PwjpKg7Pza

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) August 9, 2023

"Why do we act more on Trump's tweets… and less on some clearly violating tweets from other world leaders?"

Twitter's Internal Communications head forwarded this from an employee to CEO Jack Dorsey on October 30, 2020. Trump was being "visibility filtered" before the vote. pic.twitter.com/Vd8DF5kypk

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) August 9, 2023

Today, @GovRonDeSantis suspended State Attorney Monique Worrell for dereliction of duty and incompetence.

Here are some examples of her policies or practices in action.

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) August 9, 2023

Daton Viel was arrested in March 2023 for sexual battery on a minor, as well as Lewd and Lascivious Molestation.

That arrest was made while Viel was on probation for another offense. Viel was still let out on bond.

This past weekend, Viel shot two Orlando Police Officers. pic.twitter.com/gMTIVgZvcS

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) August 9, 2023

Mr. Larry was released after all these arrests.

Worrell’s office did not act on any of these charges until *after* he killed his girlfriend and their unborn child.

— Will Chamberlain (@willchamberlain) August 9, 2023

.@Mike_Pence says today he was “deeply offended” that I don’t trust that the government told us the full truth in the 9/11 Commission Report. Well, I find it offensive that our government repeatedly lies to us. Here’s the TRUTH: the FBI quietly declassified documents in 2021… https://t.co/cfCAc44mJi

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) August 9, 2023

Thomas McKenna:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology used funding from a twice-sanctioned Chinese company to advance components of facial recognition technology, which its Chinese benefactor has reportedly used to track and imprison Uyghurs, a Washington Free Beacon review found.

China’s largest facial recognition company, SenseTime, donated an undisclosed amount of money to MIT in 2018. Twenty of the 22 research papers that donation funded, the Free Beacon found, focused on or mentioned “neural networks,” which are used in facial recognition technology. Fourteen of the papers, meanwhile, covered image data or image recognition algorithms. Two researchers associated with Zhejiang University, which works on classified projects for the Chinese military, co-authored one paper with MIT researchers on “artificial neural networks.”

While it’s unclear how SenseTime may have used the research it funded, the company’s facial recognition technology has reportedly helped China commit genocide. SenseTime’s tech is part of a “vast, secret system” the Chinese use to “track and control” Uyghurs, the New York Times reported in 2019. The Trump administration that year blacklisted SenseTime for its role in the “repression, mass arbitrary detention and high-technology surveillance” of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, preventing it from receiving technology or exporting it to the United States. Two years later, in 2021, the Biden administration banned U.S. investment in SenseTime.

Joanne Jacobs:

Juab School District in Utah focused on supporting students emotionally when schools reopened in fall of 2020. “We took care of our kids,” said Royd Darrington, assistant superintendent for Juab Schools. “I’ll be honest, academics was not at the forefront of what we were pushing our teachers to push to their students. It really wasn’t. It was, how do we build a sense of community?”

Wasatch School District, 100 miles away, focused on academics and continuity. “Our academic goals did not change one bit throughout the pandemic,” said Superintendent Paul Sweat. Extra Covid funding went for teacher training.

Ashlynn Warta:

In July of 2020, UNC-Chapel Hill’s chancellor sent an email to the university’s leadership cabinets requesting responses to three questions regarding “structural racism.” Through public records requests, the Martin Center obtained a copy of the many responses submitted over the following days by Chapel Hill’s academic and administrative units. Our previous article on this subject introduced the chancellor’s DEI questionnaire and examined some of the more extreme proposals supplied by respondents. Below, we look in greater detail at the “solutions” proposed by Chapel Hill’s various divisions and schools.

The questions posed by Chancellor Guskiewicz were as follows:

1. What are the strengths and weaknesses of Carolina’s scholarly, co‐curricular, administrative and service efforts to identify and eliminate structural racism on our campus and beyond?

2. What should we be doing/what can you do to stand against structural racism and stand for equity within our/your school/unit?

3. How can we learn from and partner with other schools/units, institutions, organizations or communities in the region to be agents of change against structural racism?

The original email was sent to 40 people and garnered 38 responses. Those who submitted responses included (but were not limited to) the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, the Kenan-Flagler Business School, the School of Information and Library Science, the UNC School of Government, the Office of the Provost, the UNC School of Nursing, the UNC School of Medicine, the Hussman School of Journalism and Media, and the UNC School of Law.

Nearly all of the replies to Chancellor Guskiewicz’s questions were long-winded word salads.

Wall Street Journal:

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro disappointed thousands of parents on Thursday when he vetoed a $100 million voucher proposal he had supported before caving to unions and the Democratic-run House. But a pair of defections from anti-voucher ranks suggest the scholarships aren’t dead if Republicans use their legislative leverage.

Jared Gould:

With the Supreme Court recently banning the use of affirmative action in college admissions, some Americans are exploring alternative approaches to diversify university campuses, with some even supporting a shift toward income-based admissions.

A recent Intelligent.com survey involving 1,095 American respondents reveals that 1 in 3 Americans support the idea of college admissions taking an applicant’s socioeconomic status into account.

Support for using socioeconomic background hinges on the idea that lower-income students face greater educational challenges, lessening a poorer applicant’s chance of being admitted into college.

A small but positive development in the Massachusetts budget – @maura_healey vetoed the Reading Recovery earmark! Great call. More & more #MaEdu embraces early literacy instruction supported by the evidence. pic.twitter.com/xEXKl1Dgeo

— Michael Moriarty (@mmoriarty61) August 10, 2023

Notes and links on Reading Recovery (Madison is a long time user).

Scott Girard:

“I think that calculators are more similar to spellcheck than this,” said Edgerton High School English teacher Sue White. “This feels different because people are tricked into thinking that it can think.”

ChatGPT, which can be accessed online, allows users to ask a question or submit a prompt and receive an artificial intelligence-generated response. The language model, launched in November, is “capable of generating human-like text based on context and past conversations,” according to its developer, OpenAI.

Mars Subola, who teaches English at Madison East High School, described themself as somewhat naive about the artificial intelligence chatbot throughout the last school year. That changed in the year’s final weeks, as Subola noticed a “huge influx of writing that just didn’t seem like my kids’ writing.”

Subola discovered that more than a dozen students had ChatGPT write their papers for them.

“It just kind of felt like … they didn’t have the trust in themselves or in myself that we could create a solution to whatever problem they were facing,” Subola said. “They didn’t have to resort to ChatGPT and it just felt like these are really, really, really talented, intelligent, skilled writers who found a way out, I guess.”

The next time someone argues “public schools are for everyone,” show them this. Some are so desperate to keep families locked out of options that they hire PIs to investigate them. https://t.co/VMB8LL3SHo

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) August 9, 2023

David Zweig:

On April 17, 2020, with much of the country still in some form of lockdown and news of overwhelmed hospitals dominating the headlines, Dr. Anthony Fauci, then a member of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, was asked a question toward the end of a White House press briefing: Was there a possibility that this novel virus came from a lab in Wuhan, China?

“There was a study recently,” Fauci said confidently, “where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve, and the mutations that it took to get to where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” In other words, it wasn’t from the lab.

This moment set the template for much that would follow from Fauci over the next three years. That is, evasion, deception, and misdirection about his support of high-risk virology research and its connection to the possibility that a lab leak in Wuhan caused a worldwide catastrophe.

Fauci, who was the face of the public health community during the crisis, pushed the idea that the evidence strongly indicated that the virus was just a tragic, natural occurrence. He insisted, repeatedly, that an epidemic that started in Wuhan was unlikely to have been the result of an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). 

But Fauci had an incentive to arrive at his conclusion about the deadly pandemic that started in Wuhan. The WIV was known for doing high-risk virology research studying and manipulating coronaviruses. Fauci, as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for almost 40 years, had funded such research at the WIV.

Fauci’s posture—dismissive toward the theory of the lab leak, and later, condescending toward those who entertained it—set what became the accepted narrative about the origins of the pandemic. It was a narrative that was parroted by the government, public health officials, and the media, and even enforced by social media platforms at the request of the Biden White House.

But last month, a trove of explosive emails and other documents were released by the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. These revealed evidence of Fauci’s and other officials’ behind-the-scenes involvement with scientists and journalists, demonstrating their efforts to quash the lab leak theory.

Joshua Grossman, Sabina Tomkins, Lindsay C. Page, and Sharad Goel.

we estimate the odds that Asian American applicants were admitted to at least one of the schools we consider were 28% lower than the odds for white students with similar test scores, grade-point averages, and extracurricular activities. The gap was particularly pronounced for students of South Asian descent (49% lower odds). We trace this pattern in part to two factors. First, many selective colleges openly give preference to the children of alumni, and we find that white applicants were substantially more likely to have such legacy status than Asian applicants, especially South Asian applicants. Second, after adjusting for observed student characteristics, the institutions we consider appear less likely to admit students from geographic regions with relatively high shares of applicants who are Asian.

Commentary.

Sebastian Gutierrez:

Math is amazing in that there is a very clear learning path from 6 years old until a Math Ph.D. qualification exam, with everything in between.

So when you start to help a kid who loves math, do more math, it is very easy to start accelerating your kid down the math path from arithmetic to Calculus and beyond.

If you’re not familiar with it, it’s basically arithmetic all the way to pre-algebra, then algebra, geometry, algebra II, trigonometry, pre-calculus, and then calculus. You can more in-depth information about the USA’s  Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (PDF, Nov 2022) in the linked document.

This works great until the kid starts to get too far ahead of the school and then your kid runs into a bunch of related problems:

by JILL BARSHAY

Around 370 B.C., Plato wrote that his teacher Socrates fretted that writing things down would cause humans to become ignorant because they wouldn’t have to memorize anything. (Ironically, the only reason we know this is because it was written down in Plato’s “Phaedrus,” still available today.)  

Albert Einstein argued the opposite in 1921. “It is not so very important for a person to learn facts,” the Nobel laureate said, according to his biographer Philipp Frank. “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”

But neither of these great thinkers could anticipate how the debate would play out in the Age of Google. Not long after the search engine company was founded in 1998, psychologists began to wonder how the ability to have so much information instantly available was changing our brains. A seminal 2011 paper established the so-called “Google effect,” our tendency to forget information that we can easily look up on the internet.

The researchers didn’t actually study how people use Google or any internet search engine. Instead they drafted a list of trivia items, such as the fact that an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain. Then, in a series of experiments, they documented how university students were less likely to recall these facts when they thought they had saved them in a computer file for future reference. Students who were told they wouldn’t be able to refer to the trivia later did much better on recall assessments.

Eugene Volokh:

“Unfairly treated,” I take it, means in context treated in ways that the law recognizes as unfair and therefore civilly actionable. Who might benefit from that? (I focus here on American law, since that’s the only sort of law I know.)

[1.] Many people are unaware of this, but many states, counties, and cities ban even private employers from firing or otherwise disciplining their employees based on the employees’ speech or political activity. What’s covered varies widely: Some jurisdictions protect a very broad range of speech; others protect “political activity” defined broadly enough to protect a wide range of speech related to political matters; others protect only election-related speech (whether about candidates or ballot measures). There’s a map available here, and I also tried including it in this post (right after this paragraph), but a glitch is keeping it from appearing for at least some readers.

I lay out many such statutes in Private Employees’ Speech and Political Activity: Statutory Protection Against Employer Retaliation (2012) (note that Utah has since enacted such a statute), and discuss the policy arguments for and against such statutes in Should the Law Limit Private-Employer-Imposed Speech Restrictions?(2022). It’s also possible that a federal statute would protect people who Tweeted for or against political candidates, though that’s not clear (see pp. 320-24 of my 2012 article).

Scott Girard:

The complaint was made public in May following a public records request by NBC15 reporter Elizabeth Wadas, whom LeMonds allegedly said was “quickly becoming the sleaziest journalist in Madison” and whom he called “a pig of a journalist.” LeMonds tried to fight the release of the complaint, which was responsive to Wadas’ records request, in court, arguing it did not meet the balancing test for what the public needed to know compared with the damage it would cause.

A judge ruled against him, however, and the documents related to the initial investigation were released in late May.

He remained working in his role until mid-June, when he was placed on paid leave. The letter placing him on leave, dated June 12, was also provided as part of Tuesday’s released records.

Chris Rickert:

The staff also told district investigators that LeMonds frequently expressed his disdain toward certain reporters, all of them women.

On Oct. 6, 2022, he allegedly told members of the district’s communications department that there was “no way” he would respond to three interview requests from an unnamed reporter, described as a woman of color, because he “didn’t like her.” In that same meeting, he asked staff to share any negative experiences they had with former Wisconsin State Journal reporter Elizabeth Beyer, whom he called “a horrible human being.”

He also reportedly called WMTV (Ch. 15) reporter Elizabeth Wadas “a pig of a journalist,” who was “quickly becoming the sleaziest journalist in Madison.”

LeMonds in June pointed to the district’s initial investigation findings as proof absolving him of the claims. Two months earlier he’d sued his employer to prevent the release of the records including those claims. That bid was denied in late May.

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?

Scott Girard:

Community members can now weigh in on the type of leader they’d like as the next Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent.

The district’s website now includes a “leadership profile” survey that will help the Madison School Board and its consultant on the search, Alma Advisory Group, develop a job description for the position when it’s posted this fall. Alma will also hold focus groups in early October with staff and “other stakeholders.”

The 14-question survey, open until early October, asks respondents to rate on a 1-5 scale the importance of various listed priorities for a superintendent and skills required for someone in the position.

Priorities listed on the survey include developing leaders, maintaining district financial health, closing the achievement gap, meeting student social and emotional needs, preparing students for college or careers, supporting staff, improving academic performance and ensuring student safety.

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?

Victor Davis Hanson:

We are in the midst of one of the most radical revolutions in American history. It is as far-reaching and dangerous as the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s or the 1930s. Every aspect of American life and culture is under assault, including the very processes by which we govern ourselves, and the manner in which we live.

The Revolution began under the Obama administration that sought to divide Americans into oppressed and oppressors, and then substitute race for class victimization. It was empowered by the bicoastal wealth accrued from globalization, and honed during the COVID lockdown, quarantine-fed economic downturn, and the George Floyd riots and their aftermath. The Revolution was boosted by fanatic opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump. And the result is an America that is unrecognizable from what it was a mere decade ago.

Here are 10 upheavals that the Left has successfully wrought.

Free expression. In large swatches of American society—particularly the corporation, the media, the government, the public schools, and the university—it is suddenly dangerous to speak freely. At a DEI workshop, politely object that “whiteness” does not account for all the challenges of “marginalized peoples,” and you will become either ostracized, reprimanded, or perhaps fired.

Suggest to a class that man-made climate change and the state remedies for it, are still under debate—and your career and livelihood are endangered. In 2020, state that Covid lockdowns would do more eventual damage than the virus—and your career was through. Express doubt that there are more than two biological sexes, and if an athlete or high school principal you will be shunned or rendered professionally inert.

The government, in league with social media, censors the news. “Liberal” universities often first require McCarthy-era type “diversity” statements for one to be hired. Commissars review syllabi to spot incorrect or improper speech or insufficient DEI zeal.

The Left now seeks to modify the First Amendment, and its empowerment of “hate speech,” defined as most anything impeding the progressive project. The state and the universities properly issue word lists of approved vocabularies.

The old ACLU or Sen. Church Committee would now probably be deemed rightwing. The methodologies of Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover are the preferred models, once they were rebooted to the right cause.

Christopher Rufo:

America is trapped in the loop of 1968. The politics of that fateful year have set the patterns and bounds of our national life for decades.

It’s as though we have lived an endless recurrence: the Black Panther Party reappears as the Black Lives Matter movement; the Weather Underground pamphlets launder themselves into academic papers; the Marxist-Leninist guerrillas trade in their bandoliers and become managers of an elite-led revolution in manners and mores. The ideology, narrative, and aesthetics of the left-wing social movements of that earlier time, though now often degraded through cynicism and repetition, have maintained the position of a jealous hegemon.

The cultural revolution that began a half-century ago, now reflected in a deadening sequence of acronyms—CRT, DEI, ESG, and more—has increasingly become our new official morality. Many conservatives have made an uneasy peace with this transformation of values, even as the culture around them has, in many places, collapsed.

This attitude no longer suffices. It is time to break the loop of 1968. We need a counterrevolution.

This is the word that haunts the revolutionary mind. The French Revolution fell to the forces of Thermidor; the Revolution of 1848 fell to the empire of the bourgeoisie; the Bolshevik Revolution fell to the democratic-capitalists, the imperialist-backed juntas, and the forces of global capitalism. Marx himself viewed counterrevolution as an overwhelming threat. “Every important part of the revolutionary annalsfrom 1848 to 1849 bears the heading: Defeat of the revolution!” he lamented.

The urgent task for the political Right today is to comprehend the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution and to create a strategy for dislodging the New Left ideology of 1968, which has solidified control over the most fundamental structures of American society. The challenge must be met not solely in the realm of policy debate but on the deepest political and philosophical grounds.