Lindsey Burke:

Two years ago, Heritage Foundation Senior Research Fellow Jay Greene was retained
by the state of New York to write an expert report as part of its defense in New Yorkers for Students’ Educational Rights, et al. v. The State of New York.1 The Heritage Foundation is now able to publish that report, enabling Americans to see the evidence debunking the claim that increasing education spending generally leads to improved student outcomes.

This claim has become almost a matter of consensus among education policy research- ers, more than 450 of whom signed a group letter stating, “Research is abundantly clear that money matters for student achievement and other important life outcomes, and this is especially the case for low-income students.”2 That sentence contains four citations, all of which refer to research conducted by Kirabo Jackson, an economics professor at North- western University. Jackson also served as an expert witness in New Yorkers for Students’ Educational Rights, et al. v. The State of New York, but on behalf of the plaintiffs. The report reproduced below by Jay Greene is a rebuttal of Jackson’s claims about the effects of increasing school spending.

Scott Wong, Frank Thorp V and Ryan Nobles

“I think the idea that it is some great breakthrough to hear from the biggest monopolists in the world — and that they are going to share with us their great wisdom — I just think the whole framework is wrong,” said Hawley, who announced a bipartisan AI framework with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

“You got to take it with a grain of salt. You got to realize that they’re interested parties, right? They stand to make a lot of money on this, which is fine,” he continued, “but you got to know that I just think the whole framing that ‘Oh, aren’t we so graced by their presence?’ — I mean, give me a break. These people are — they’ve done bad things for our country.”

Charlene Pele:

 As young children went back to school across Sweden last month, many of their teachers were putting a new emphasis on printed books, quiet reading time and handwriting practice and devoting less time to tablets, independent online research and keyboarding skills.

The return to more traditional ways of learning is a response to politicians and experts questioning whether the country’s hyper-digitalized approach to education, including the introduction of tablets in nursery schools, had led to a decline in basic skills. 

Swedish Minister for Schools Lotta Edholm, who took office 11 months ago as part of a new center-right coalition government, was one of the biggest critics of the all-out embrace of technology.

The minister announced last month in a statement that the government wants to reverse the decision by the National Agency for Education to make digital devices mandatory in preschools. It plans to go further and to completely end digital learning for children under age 6, the ministry also told The Associated Press. 

Although the country’s students score above the European average for reading ability, an international assessment of fourth-grade reading levels, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, highlighted a decline among Sweden’s children between 2016 and 2021.

Benjamin Breen:

In the long term, I suspect that LLMs will have a significant positive impact on higher education. Specifically, I believe they will elevate the importance of the humanities. 

If this happens, it will be a shocking twist. We’ve been hearing for over a decade now that the humanities are in crisis. When faced with raw data about declining enrollments and majors like this and this, it is difficult not to agree. From the perspective of a few years ago, then, the advent of a new wave of powerful AI tools would be expected to tip the balance of power, funding, and enrollment in higher education even further toward STEM and away from the humanities. 

But the thing is: LLMs are deeply, inherently textual. And they are reliant on text in a way that is directly linked to the skills and methods that we emphasize in university humanities classes. 

What do I mean by that? One of the hallmarks of training in history is learning how to think about a given text at increasingly higher levels of abstraction. We teach students how to analyze the genre, cultural context, assumptions, and affordances of a primary source — the unspoken limits that shaped how, why, and for whom it was created, and what content it contains.

Dang le

Fort Worth resident Maria Gonzalez knew her daughter’s grades were off. 

Gonzalez’s 8-year-old daughter, Citlalic, got perfect scores at school. Her teacher said she was doing great. 

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But Gonzalez knew something else from observation — her daughter couldn’t read. 

“I guess I was just, in a way, making it easier for me, because I was just going through what they were telling me,” she said.  

Gonzalez was among about three dozen parents who flew balloons at Ella Mae Shamblee Library to mourn Fort Worth’s low literacy rate. Only 44% of students across all school districts and charters in the city of Fort Worth are reading at grade level. The next day, Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker proclaimed Sept. 8 as International Literacy Day in the city.

Fort Worth is committed to students’ success by creating youth library programming, providing free community Wi-Fi in underserved neighborhoods and providing safe walking routes to schools, Parker said.

“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?

Jim Piwowarczyk & Jessica McBride

I have deep concerns for the future of this department and its ability to retain the most valuable resource it doesn’t know it has: the experienced and proficient officers and immediate supervisors who serve the community every day by responding to calls for service. You know who you are, you are the ones who do more than just show up.

I know that you do these things while balancing the standards that you hold for yourselves with the expectations placed on you by the department and the community. You are tasked with providing a high quality of service to the community with respect, dignity and proficiency; core values of this department.

However, more often than not, those same tenets are not afforded to you. The nature of this job is that you are asked to lay your lives on the line and take significant risks that involve the assertion of lawful authority in the scope of what we have been trained and sworn to do. In the event that we must take those risks, regardless of the outcome of our mission, the potential to be put under review or offered discipline is so great that it often overshadows the risk in the first place.

Christopher Rufo

Last week, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into New College of Florida, where I serve as a trustee, regarding alleged “disability discrimination.”

The investigation was prompted by a complaint by ACLU attorney Jennifer Granick, alleging that the college’s trustees and administrators violated civil rights law by removing “gender neutral” signage from bathrooms, defunding the DEI and gender studies programs, and “misgendering” the former DEI director and a former student, who use “ze/zir” and “they/them” pseudo-pronouns, respectively. According to the complaint, these actions constitute discrimination “based on perceived disability and gender prejudice.”

As a tactical matter, the complaint is a clear attempt to disrupt the conservative reforms at New College, which represent a threat to the Left’s hegemony over higher education. Since January, when the new board of trustees was announced, New College has secured record funding from the state legislature, begun a campus-wide renovation, launched a new core curriculum, and recruited the largest incoming class in the college’s history. For left-wing activists, who had previously considered New College as an outpost for social-justice activism, this state of affairs—conservative leaders implementing conservative reforms—was intolerable. They might chant for “democracy” in theory, but, in practice, they are more than willing to use anti-democratic tools to restrict any democratic action that might undermine their cultural power.

Beeline:

Is this a possible reason the media leans so far left?

They are angry about their career and the freedom they had in this country to make their own choice?

Dawn Floyd:

Rhiannon Howard graduated in October 2021, and did not realize until this year that she made $100,000 in her first year of work, she said.

This club is already exclusive and to be a part of it you must earn $100,000 your first year out of KWI. Howard explained she showed her pay stubs as proof to KWI and joined the club.

When joining the $100K Club, your old welder hood gets hung in a place of honor on the wall at KWI and the new club member receives a new hood.

Director of the KWI welding program, Ashley Applegate, said Howard is now part of the ‘golden arms’ and made a special mention of Howard as the first female to be a part of the $100K Club when addressing students at a recent event.

“The $100K Club is something we implemented in our first year. That welding trade school graduates can make $100,000 in their first year is like a myth to some people but when we had our first student make $108,000 in their first year we decided that we wanted to do something special, that’s why we retire their old hood and give them a new hood to make their next $100,ooo with,” Applegate said.

David Malpass

But the central bank has become part of the growth problem—in part because of policy changes after the 2008-09 financial crisis. Today’s Fed is silent on, or even enables, inflationary fiscal policies. After 2008 the central bank began paying interest on trillions of dollars borrowed from banks and money-market funds—it will pay more than $23 billion in September alone. The Fed bought huge tranches of government bonds as if it were a hedge fund, exposing taxpayers to massive losses when rates eventually came back up. The bond buying heavily subsidized Washington and other elite bond issuers but contributed directly to the global wave of inequality and excess government debt. At the same time, the Fed greatly intensified its regulatory control over bank lending, pushing banks away from the short-term working capital lending needed for robust growth. 

In essence, the central bank is picking winners and losers. The New York Federal Reserve Bank’s April Open Market Operations report describes a plan to buy trillions more in government bonds, further entwining fiscal and monetary policy, concentrating capital, and channeling it to one of the biggest winners—government.

Present policy envisions high short-term interest rates, permanent central-bank ownership of bonds, and silence on the dollar and fiscal policy. We need the opposite. Rather than setting rates even higher—or, worse, changing the inflation target from 2% to 3%—the Fed should create a path to rate cuts through policies that provide price stability and faster supply growth. This would curb inflation through an economic expansion rather than a contraction.

Alicia Demers, Ira Nichols-Barrer and Elisa Steele:

KIPP middle schools had a positive impact on enrollment in four-year college programs, but the effect was not statistically significant.

Among our first two cohorts, for whom we can observe college persistence patterns for five years, students who received an admission offer to a KIPP middle school graduated from a four-year degree program, or were on-track to graduate, at rates similar to those of students not offered admission.
Students who received an admission offer to a KIPP middle school usually attended a KIPP middle school, and many went on to attend a KIPP high school.

Attending both a KIPP middle school and a KIPP high school had large, positive impacts on students’ college enrollment and college persistence rates.
KIPP middle and high schools also had a large and statistically significant combined effect on college graduation rates.

Previous research on KIPP high schools and interviews with KIPP college support staff suggest that these findings may be driven by the college preparatory culture at network high schools, as well as college-related supports delivered to KIPP high school students and alumni.

Bezos WaPo:

“[A]n analysis homing in on the inaugural group of Mississippians subject to the state’s rule concluded that repeating third grade resulted in significantly higher reading scores in sixth grade — with Black and Hispanic students showing particular improvement…. [But i]t is impossible to disentangle retention itself from all that comes with it… after-class tutoring, for example, or specialized instruction during the school day… In Mississippi, literacy coaches have been painstakingly selected, trained and monitored by the state and dispatched to perform one job: supporting teachers as they learn, and learn to teach, the science of reading…. [R]etention done absent such a strategy is retention done wrong — and it might hurt more than it helps. That’s why obsessing over retention as some sort of magic solution to learning loss is the wrong approach….”

Commentary

“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?

Heika Mrema:

A New Hampshire university president recently wrote that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs benefit higher education, but some scholars argue that evidence suggests otherwise.

Plymouth State University President Donald L. Birx argues in an opinion editorial published Aug. 28 that DEI programs equip students with the skills needed to ‘advance’ the United States, and lawmakers imposing restrictions should ‘think twice.’

“By incorporating diversity of thinking, background, and culture in a positive way as part of the college experience, we’re preparing students to be creative leaders who know how to work with others and have the skills to advance our nation,” Birx writes. 

Birx, a former vice president for research and professor of physics in New Mexico says that significant developments occur when diverse ideas come together and that the same concept can be applied to DEI.

Helen Dale & Lorenzo Warby:

The working class has been squeezed out of active political participation—literally so in the House of Commons, which has seen the number of MPs with working-class backgrounds dwindle.

This divide between different types of capital3
interacts uneasily with another social divide. That divide—to use social analyst David Goodhart’s formulation—is between progressive Anywheres (around a quarter of the population) and locality-centred Somewheres (around half the population). That is, folk whose professions and connections are not anchored in a particular locality—and have networks that regularly cross national boundaries—and those whose lives, jobs and connections are much more centred on their local communities.

William Arkin

That surprising nugget is quietly revealed in the Department of Homeland Security‘s latest Annual Performance Report, which not only talks about the enormous growth in the number of people in “trusted traveler” programs—TSA Pre and Global Entry—but also the number of those travelers who have been kicked out of the program. The reason? The Department vets more than seven million travelers every day, looking for derogatory information or other information that might indicate changes in “risk” status, and thus disqualify people for expedited travel. Travelers with neither Global Entry nor TSA PreCheck are still vetted against the watch list and no-fly list. Even those flying on domestic flights are checked

Harry Waters

Just over seven years ago the United Nations developed the 2030 agenda. The central theme of this agenda was the development of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). But what are the SDGs? Why are they relevant to my English classroom? And how can I incorporate them into the curriculum? 

Let’s take a look at how, when and why we should be using the Sustainable Development Goals. We’ll change them from simply being a poster on the wall to being an effective learning tool and look at how to genuinely encourage students to engage in and connect with the 17 SDGs.

“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?

Jay Bhattacharya:

Unfortunately, during the pandemic, the American government violated my free speech rights and those of my scientist colleagues for questioning the federal government’s pandemic policies. 

My parents had taught me that people here could criticize the government, even over matters of life and death, without worry that the government would censor or suppress us. But over the past three years, I have been robbed of that conviction. American government officials, working in concert with big tech companies, have attacked and suppressed my speech and that of my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies—criticism that has been proven prescient. 

On Friday, at long last, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled that we were not imagining it—that the Biden administration did indeed strong-arm social media companies into doing its bidding. The court found that the Biden White House, the CDC, the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, and the FBI “engaged in a years-long pressure campaign [on social media outlets] designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints.” 

The judges described a pattern of government officials making “threats of ‘fundamental reforms’ like regulatory changes and increased enforcement actions” if we did not comply. The implication was clear. To paraphrase Al Capone: Nice company you have there. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.

It worked. According to the judges, “the officials’ campaign succeeded. The platforms, in capitulation to state-sponsored pressure, changed their moderation policies.”

Joseph Cox:

That country “requested its participation be kept confidential,” according to a document I previously obtained. The document said the third country was a European Union member but did not name the country itself. “The FBI is neither now nor in the future in a position to release the identity of the aforementioned third country,” the document added.

That country was Lithuania, 404 Media has learned from a source briefed on the operation but who did not work on it on the U.S. side.

The revelation provides important clarity on the complex technological and legal arrangements that facilitated the largest law enforcement sting operation in history, where more than 9,000 law enforcement officers sprung into action on June 7, 2021 as part of the globally coordinated arrests of many of Anom’s criminal users. Recently, defense lawyers in the U.S. have argued that they need to know the identity of the third country in order to scrutinize the legality of evidence collected against their clients. The government has so far not provided that information to defense teams.

Wall Street Journal:

Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates has called school choice racist and made it her mission to kill an Illinois scholarship program for low-income children. So how did Ms. Gates try to explain herself this week after press reports that she has enrolled her son in a private Catholic high school?

“Dear Union Sibling,” began her email to fellow teachers. She said that black students have “limited” options on the city’s south and west sides: “It forced us to send our son, after years of attending a public school, to a private high school so he could live out his dream of being a soccer player while also having a curriculum that can meet his social and emotional needs.”

Ms. Gates’s desire to do what’s best for her child is laudable. What’s not is to do that while denying other families the same choice. The school where her son is enrolled reportedly costs her $16,000 a year. What about those who can’t afford such a school? Illinois’s Invest in Kids program funds about 9,000 scholarships, and last year it had 31,000 applications. But the program is scheduled to sunset, and that’s exactly what the teachers unions have demanded.

“Here is the truth: If you are a Black family living in a Black community, high-quality neighborhood schools have been the dream, not the reality,” Ms. Gates’s email says. There’s no arguing about that. For some schools on the south side, the percentage of students who can read or do math at grade level is in the single digits. But then she insists, as the teachers unions always do, that the answer is spending yet more money to “undo the decades of systemic underinvestment.”

Patrick Mcilheran:

The series of day-long webinars, four per school year, is an initiative of the DPI, the regulator of every Wisconsin school. The agency says it doesn’t necessarily endorse everything said by every one of the academics it invites, but since racial equity is the first quality it mentions in its mission statement, one can see why 2,500 people signed up last school year to hear what was said under the sponsorship of the agency that controls Wisconsin teachers’ licenses.

One clear theme is the installing of a new definition of racism, one most Americans do not agree with, one that says racism isn’t an injustice committed by an individual who treats some people worse on account of their skin but, rather, the inescapable structure of American society.

This “structural racism” idea — “Racism Without Racists,” to quote the title of a book by one of the series’ regular speakers — leads to some remarkable conclusions.

It means, said the book’s author, Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, that when white people don’t racially discriminate, it’s “color-blind racism,” a “covert, subtle or even unconscious” evil.

Next spring, the series will feature Ibram X. Kendi, the best-selling author who preaches that society must go out of its way to treat some people worse than others on account of their race, to make things even. In January, it features Robin DiAngelo, famous for accusing any objectors to such a new order of being afflicted with “white fragility.” She’ll discuss her latest book, which says white Americans who try hard to treat minorities fairly are really “nice racists” who, if they avoid giving offense, are guilty of racist “carefulness.”

“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?

Virginia Governor

“Scott Smith is a dedicated parent who’s faced unwarranted charges in his pursuit to protect his daughter. Scott’s commitment to his child despite the immense obstacles is emblematic of the parental empowerment movement that started in Virginia,” said Governor Glenn Youngkin. “In Virginia, parents matter and my resolve to empower parents in unwavering. A parent’s fundamental right to be involved in their child’s education, upbringing, and care should never be undermined by bureaucracy, school divisions or the state. I am pleased to grant Scott Smith this pardon and help him and his family put this injustice behind them once and for all.” 

In his commitment to the parents and students of Loudoun County, the Governor issued an executive order on his first day in office to initiate an investigation into the sexual assaults in Loudoun County. Following the Attorney General’s incriminating investigation into the sexual assault cover-up, Superintendent Ziegler has been fired. Under Governor Youngkin’s leadership and actions, Loudoun County parents are getting the accountability and transparency they deserve.

Greg Bensinger:

For more than 70 years, India and Pakistan have waged sporadic and deadly skirmishes over control of the mountainous region of Kashmir. Tens of thousands have died in the conflict, including three just this month.

Both sides claim the Himalayan outpost as their own, but Web surfers in India could be forgiven for thinking the dispute is all but settled: The borders on Google’s online maps there display Kashmir as fully under Indian control. Elsewhere, users see the region’s snaking outlines as a dotted line, acknowledging the dispute.

Ian Wienand

In a nutshell, what you are reading is intended to be a shop class for computer science. Young computer science students are taught to “drive” the computer; but where do you go to learn what is under the hood? Trying to understand the operating system is unfortunately not as easy as just opening the bonnet. The current Linux kernel runs into the millions of lines of code, add to that the other critical parts of a modern operating system (the compiler, assembler and system libraries) and your code base becomes unimaginable. Further still, add a University level operating systems course (or four), some good reference manuals, two or three years of C experience and, just maybe, you might be able to figure out where to start looking to make sense of it all.

Lichess:

A big reason chess isn’t so popular in Japan is the existence of two games which are far more popular: Shōgi, also called Japanese chess, and Go. They’ve been a part of Japanese culture for centuries, and have enthusiasts around Japan in the millions.

Charlie Wood:

Imagine winding the hour hand of a clock back from 3 o’clock to noon. Mathematicians have long known how to describe this rotation as a simple multiplication: A number representing the initial position of the hour hand on the plane is multiplied by another constant number. But is a similar trick possible for describing rotations through space? Common sense says yes, but William Hamilton, one of the most prolific mathematicians of the 19th century, struggled for more than a decade to find the math for describing rotations in three dimensions. The unlikely solution led him to the third of just four number systems that abide by a close analog of standard arithmetic and helped spur the rise of modern algebra.

The real numbers form the first such number system. A sequence of numbers that can be ordered from least to greatest, the reals include all the familiar characters we learn in school, like –3.7, √5 and 42. Renaissance algebraists stumbled upon the second system of numbers that can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided when they realized that solving certain equations demanded a new number, i, that didn’t fit anywhere on the real number line. They took the first steps off that line and into the “complex plane,” where misleadingly named “imaginary” numbers couple with real numbers like capital letters pair with numerals in the game of Battleship. In this planar world, “complex numbers” represent arrows that you can slide around with addition and subtraction or turn and stretch with multiplication and division.

The Economist:

In 1980 roughly 12% of the population lived in places that were especially rich or especially poor. By 2013, one-third did. That made local schools less of a melting pot. Meanwhile colleges became a sorting machine for adults. Low and high-wage workers rarely work in the same sectors. And though some high-paid men used to marry their secretaries, they now wed fellow executives whose paychecks resemble their own. An American in the top income quintile might come across people from different backgrounds at the post office or Starbucks, but they are unlikely to encounter an American from the poorest fifth.

In his book, “Coming Apart”, Charles Murray, a political scientist, argued that over the past several decades, upper- and lower-class white people “have diverged so far in core behaviours and values that they barely recognise their underlying American kinship”. That does not bode well for the worse-off. Drawing on a data set of 70m Facebook accounts, Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard, and his research team found that people who had friends across the economic strata were more likely to finish high school and earn a better salary; girls were less likely to get pregnant as teens. Those inter-class bonds, they found, are far more predictive of a youngster’s chances of escaping poverty than being a member of a civic organisation or volunteering, which previous research identified as drivers of upward mobility.

In theory, Americans ought to encounter each other in public institutions. That a restaurant offering something called “family-style Italian dining” should do a better job might have surprised Andrew Carnegie, who funded 1,700 “palaces for the people” (as he called public libraries) in America, or Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York City’s Central Park as a space for rich and poor to congregate.

US Fifth Circuit:

For the last few years—at least since the 2020 presidential transition—a group of federal officials has been in regular contact with nearly every major American social-media company about the spread of “misinformation” on their platforms. In their concern, those officialshailing from the White House, the CDC, the FBI, and a few other agenciesurged the platforms to remove disfavored content and accounts from their sites. And, the platforms seemingly complied. They gave the officials access to an expedited reporting system, downgraded or removed flagged posts, and deplatformed users. The platforms also changed their internal policies to capture more flagged content and sent steady reports on their moderation activities to the officials. That went on through the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2022 congressional election, and continues to this day.

Enter this lawsuit. The Plaintiffs—three doctors, a news website, a healthcare activist, and two states1 —had posts and stories removed or downgraded by the platforms. Their content touched on a host of divisive topics like the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine sideeffects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story. The Plaintiffs maintain that although the platforms stifled their speech, the government officials were the ones pulling the strings—they “coerced, threatened, and pressured [the] social-media platforms to censor [them]” through private

Wirepoints:

His answer: “I personally don’t give a lot of attention to grades…. My responsibility is not merely to just grade the system but to fund the system. That’s how I am ultimately going to grade whether our public school system is working — based upon the investments we make to the people who rely on it.”

He offered nothing further about how to grade the schools or educational outcomes.

That answer was not an offhand comment taken out of context. It was a thoughtful answer that he explained. See for yourself. The question and answer start at the 47.3 mark in the video of his appearance.

After saying, “I personally don’t give a lot of attention to grades, he went on to explain that, instead, “we have to establish a rubric that speaks to the needs as well as the unique dynamics that exist.” He described some of the special challenges Chicago schools face, and said “but, unfortunately, we have had this standardization of our schools that has sucked out our imagination.” He asked how we can “grade a system when the system has not fulfilled its basic obligation of providing an equitable system that speeks to the needs?”

Elizabeth Stauffer:

Understandably, Murnan’s hiring has caused quite a commotion among parents and district officials alike. The state’s superintendent of education, Ryan Walters, spoke to Fox about what the sane among us see as a crisis. Walters calls the choice of Murnan “unimaginable” and said, “This individual is not fit to lead a school district. It has to stop. … This is the liberal insanity every parent wants out of the classroom.”

Jon Caldera:

There’s a lot to unfold with one Gadsden flag.

The most surprising and disappointing point about this kerfuffle is that, even at a reputable charter school with a classical curriculum, with an emphasis on teaching historic accuracy, staff needs to be schooled by parents that one of America’s founding flags has nothing to do with slavery.

The considerably greater takeaway is parents should record their encounters with school officials. It might be the thing that guarantees an education for your child.

If you missed the story, 12-year-old Jaiden Rodriguez is a student at the Vanguard School in Colorado Springs, a public charter school. His backpack is adorned by many patches including one of the Gadsden flag.

I loved this flag long before it was made popular by the Tea Party movement. Its truly American slogan of “Don’t tread on me” sings to my soul.

Ron Amadeo:

Don’t let Chrome’s big redesign distract you from the fact that Chrome’s invasive new ad platform, ridiculously branded the “Privacy Sandbox,” is also getting a widespread rollout in Chrome today. If you haven’t been following this, this feature will track the web pages you visit and generate a list of advertising topics that it will share with web pages whenever they ask, and it’s built directly into the Chrome browser. It’s been in the news previously as “FLoC” and then the “Topics API,” and despite widespread opposition from just about every non-advertiser in the world, Google owns Chrome and is one of the world’s biggest advertising companies, so this is being railroaded into the production builds.

Anna Wilde Mathews:

Health-insurance costs are climbing at the steepest rate in years, with some projecting the biggest increase in more than a decade will wallop businesses and their workers in 2024.

Costs for employer coverage are expected to surge around 6.5% for 2024, according to major benefits consulting firms Mercer and Willis Towers Watson, which provided their survey results exclusively to The Wall Street Journal.

Such a boost could add significantly to the price tag for employer plans that already average more than $14,600 a year per employee, driving up health-insurance costs that are among the biggest expenses for many American companies and a drain on families’ finances.

Employers worry the hike might signal a new trajectory, with health costs resuming the rapid upward march of the early 2000s. Now, though, big increases would come on top of a total annual cost per covered family that is often equivalent to the purchase price of a small car. These increases come at a time when employers are reluctant to add to out-of-pocket charges that have left some of their workers in debt or unable to get care they needed.

“It’s much worse than we’ve seen over the last decade,” said Elizabeth Mitchell, chief executive of the Purchaser Business Group on Health. “It comes out of wages and core business.”

MacIver:

While the numbers of administrators increased, instructional faculty and staff have decreased.

Years of DEI focus has pushed down enrollment of white students so they are now underrepresented.

Unrestricted PR balances are higher than they were when the legislature uncovered the secret slush fund a decade ago.

Admissions changes have brought in more underprepared students and increased remediation expenses.

State GPR support per UW student has increased at a faster rate than state budget spending.

The three campuses looking at layoffs and furloughs all increased their administrative staffing over 50% while enrollments declined.

UW System President Jay Rothman, warned during budget deliberations that 11 of 13 campuses are running a cumulative deficit of nearly $60 million and they were in desperate need of a large increase in state funds. This is the same guy who hired a new, cabinet-level Diversity, Equity and Inclusion VP in the middle of these same budget deliberations where he was begging for cash, when legislators had made it clear that DEI indoctrination spending was not on their priority list and they wanted to see DEI positions cut.

Rothman is just another in a long line of System leaders who make it their business to cry poverty and blame legislators – who they hold in clear contempt, though some are better at hiding it than others – for driving the institution into poverty and disrepute.

This year, the UW requested a $436 million increase in tax dollars; Governor Evers’ massive budget provided only $306 million more. The legislature kept funding steady, withholding $32 million that the UW is spending on a raft of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) staff, pending a report to the finance committee.

Arthur Jones II, Tal Axelrod, and Jay O’Brien

Learning to read isn’t fair.

It comes naturally for some students. But for others it’s a frustrating, agonizing process that, if left unaddressed, can cause long-standing academic problems.

Ask D’Mekeus Cook Jr., a fourth grader from Louisiana, who was reading at a kindergarten level when he started second grade two years ago. Or Journey, another fourth grader from Ohio, who said when she comes across an unfamiliar word it makes her feel “sad.” They have both struggled to read — and they’re not alone.

A combination of under-funded schools, educator shortages, inadequate teacher preparation and months of lost learning due to pandemic school closures have caused a resurgence of concern about kids’ reading ability. But Department of Education data reviewed by ABC News show this reading problem has persisted in America for decades.

According to the Education Department’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as “The Nation’s Report Card,” roughly one-third of American fourth graders read at or below what’s considered the basic level. This has been the case since 1992.

Scores slightly increase as students get older, but not by much. In eighth grade, about one-fourth of students do not read at what’s considered the basic achievement level. That percentage stays about the same for high schoolers.

“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?

Brittany Bernstein:

A federal appeals court ruled Friday that the Biden administration likely violated the First Amendment by pressuring social-media platforms to censor posts about Covid-19 and elections. 

The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruling says that the White House likely “coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences.” The panel of three judges found that the administration “significantly encouraged the platforms’ decisions by commandeering their decision-making processes, both in violation of the First Amendment.”

A lower court previously placed restrictions on the Biden administration’s communications with social-media platforms; those restrictions applied to a number of government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services, the State Department, Homeland Security, and the U.S. Census Bureau.

After temporarily blocking the order, the Fifth Circuit judges have now modified the order to apply only to the White House, the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FBI.

Karol Markowicz

The lives of our children were destroyed by lockdowns — and long lockouts — from school during the pandemic.

This policy was largely forced through by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. 

But we now know that President Biden and his wife-teacher, Jill Biden, were the ones who overruled their own medical experts to give Weingarten what she wanted — and threw American kids out the window.

It begins on the administration’s first day, when Jill Biden invited Weingarten and Becky Pringle, head of the National Education Association, to the White House, telling them, “I told you I was going to bring you with me to the White House. And on day one, you’re here,” according to a new book by Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer, “The Last Politician.”

There they were, making sure kids didn’t get to have an education.

Foer is, of course, a partisan Democrat, and the portrayal of the Biden White House is comical in its friendliness. 

In retelling the story of Jill meeting with two women, Foer repeats the disgusting canard, “In upper-middle-class neighborhoods . . . there was a sense that the unions were acting in a spirit of selfishness.”

That’s obviously a joke. Upper-middle-class people, in areas unlucky enough to be under teachers unions’ thumb, had every option available to their children.

and:

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.”

Matt Taibbi:

When you know you’re being censored, you can protest. But what to do about silent editorial punishment, dished without announcement, by tech platforms that appear to be learning fast how to avoid public outcry?

A year ago, this site had to throw a public fit to resolve a preposterous controversy involving videographer Matt Orfalea and YouTube. The issue centered around the above video, “‘Rigged’ Election Claims, Trump 2020 vs. Clinton 2016,” which despite total factual accuracy was cited under its “Elections Misinformation” policy. YouTube in July of last year demonetized Orf’s entire channel over his content, saying “we think it violates our violent criminal organizations policy.”

Christopher Rufo

The fight for New College of Florida has taken another turn. Earlier today, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into the Sarasota-based university, where I serve as a trustee, for alleged “discrimination on the basis of disability.”

The investigation stems from a complaint by unnamed “students, faculty, and staff” alleging, in part, that the college’s trustees and administrators violated civil rights law by removing “gender neutral” signage from bathrooms, defunding the DEI and gender studies programs, and “misgendering” the former DEI director, who uses “ze/zir” pseudo-pronouns.

This is a brazen attempt to subvert the democratic governance of New College and entrench left-wing ideological programs under the guise of civil rights law. Although the complaint is wholly without merit, this does not mean it will automatically fail. The Biden Administration has demonstrated repeatedly that it is willing to weaponize the federal law enforcement apparatus against school board parents and other conservative reformers.

We are ready for the fight. When Governor DeSantis appointed the new board of trustees, he told us: “If the media isn’t attacking you, you’re not doing your job.” The same could be said of the Biden Administration.

Andy Rotherham

To get right to it: That’s wrong. More importantly it’s also counterproductive if we want to pay teachers more (or get people to take education policy seriously or be able to take a serious stand on using evidence or….you get the idea). We do have a teacher compensation problem, yes, but it’s a lot more complicated than political rhetoric, and especially political rhetoric in 280 characters. 

Why is it wrong? Well for starters second jobs are a good talking point but a fractional issue in practice. Less than one in five teachers taking a second job during the school year and one in three in the summer is not “most.” It’s also not a huge source of income. It’s actually more common among private school teachers. The seasonal patterns and patterns among different teachers might not be what you’d expect either. 

More fundamentally, the very EPI analysis this rests on (which is funded by the teachers unions it should be noted) places the salary differential at 14% when you factor in benefits – defined benefit pensions, which are deferred compensation, being a crucial part of that although health care costs are also an issue. Still real, but not quite as compelling a tweet. But this part of compensation is a key part of this whole issue (another key part is overall numbers of teachers, more on that below). It’s a significant part of why in many places public dollars for overall teacher compensation continue to steadily climb but teachers are not seeing this in their paychecks every month. You can’t wish this part of the issue away or ignore it.

Anvar Sarygulov

The West has been below replacement fertility once before. Then came the Baby Boom. Understanding that boom may help us deal with today’s bust.

In 1800, the average British woman had 4.97 children over the course of her life, about the same amount as the average woman living in Burkina Faso today. A century later, Britain’s fertility rate had slipped to 3.9 children per woman. And thirty years later, in 1935, it had plummeted to 1.79, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 – the number of children per woman needed to keep the population steady.

This trend occurred across Europe. By the 1920s, over half of Europeans lived in a country with a below-replacement fertility rate, including Sweden, Germany, and the Czech Republic. The US and Canada also saw steady declines in family sizes throughout the nineteenth century. In 1800, the average American woman had over seven children. By 1900, she had fewer than four, and, by 1930, fewer than three. 

France’s fertility rate had begun slipping even earlier, to great alarm. In 1896, an organisation called the Alliance nationale pour l’accroissement de la population française was born. Created expressly to combat denatalité – essentially, de-population – it had attracted some 40,000 members by the 1920s with novelist Emile Zola an early recruit. The Alliance nationale was merely one of many organisations, local and national, established to resist France’s apparent progress towards what demographer and statistician Dr Jacques Bertillon despairingly called ‘the imminent disappearance of our country’. 

French pronatalists frequently and vividly campaigned on the issue as a serious matter of national security. In 1914, the Alliance nationale published over a million posters showing two Frenchmen being bayoneted by five Germans. The poster bore a caption explaining that for every five German soldiers born, only two French soldiers were. 

The French were not the only nation to chafe against a new reality of smaller family sizes and quieter maternity wards. The British government established the National Birth Rate Commission in 1912. In fascist Italy, the ‘Battle for Births’ was named one of Mussolini’s four key economic campaigns in 1922.

Diana Fleischman, Ives Parr, Jonathan Anomaly, and Laurent Tellier:

This is where a new technology comes in: preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders (PGT-P) or polygenic screening, which may inform which embryo parents choose and who is born. Because embryo choice is so consequential, polygenic screening—like other, new reproductive technologies before it—attracts more than its share of controversy and critics, many of whom use the label of eugenics as a smear, to suggest that parents electing to screen their own embryos are somehow akin to Nazis endorsing sterilization and murder. Progressives who criticize polygenic screening tend to use accusations of eugenics inconsistently, applying it to reproductive technology like polygenic screening but not abortion.

Other similar reproductive technologies are less controversial today than when first introduced. For example, most couples using IVF choose to genetically test their embryos for an abnormal number of chromosomes, known as “aneuploidy.” One reason for this genetic screening is that aneuploid embryos almost always result in a miscarriage. Another reason is that the few cases that do not miscarry result in life-long, incurable syndromes, such as Down Syndrome—associated with health problems, disability, and shorter lifespan. While aneuploidy screening is not entirely uncontroversial, this screen is far more widely accepted than when it was first introduced decades ago, and criticism of screening out Down Syndrome as “eugenics” is increasingly a fringe position. 

Another commonly accepted embryo screen is for monogenic disorders, that is for diseases caused by single genes. For example, couples can screen out embryos with Tay-Sachs, a devastating neurological disorder that kills young children. Carriers of Huntington’s disease—a degenerative neurological disease that, on average, kills its victims in their early sixties – also often choose to use IVF to screen out embryos likely to be afflicted. For most people, it is clear today why future parents would not want their children to have chromosomal abnormalities or monogenic disorders. But the acceptance of these tests has taken time and was far from universal when these tests were introduced in the 1990s.

Mark McNeilly:

In many red-leaning states around the country, lawmakers have proposed modifying or ending tenure. In my home state of North Carolina, House Bill 715 was under consideration but appears to be stalled. Bills in other states have also been sidelined, at least for now. But the persistence of these attempted reforms, alongside growing conservative distrust of academia, suggests more tenure battles ahead.

The arguments against tenure run the gamut. Some policymakers worry about complacent faculty coasting by with scant contributions to teaching and research. Others worry about long-term costs, the creation of a caste system between overworked contract professors and overpaid tenured dons, and the inability to shift university resources as the interests and priorities of students change. And, of course, many lawmakers are quick to point out that few other professions enjoy the kind of protections afforded to tenured faculty.

As a fixed-term professor in a professional school, I’ve had my doubts about tenure’s value.Advocates for tenure point to its vital role in securing academic freedom, allowing faculty to pursue controversial lines of research and argument without worrying about arbitrary dismissal. Tenure also plays a role in attracting talent and allowing universities to trade off paying lower salaries to talented scholars and researchers in return for job security and intellectual freedom.

I have long been intrigued by the question of whether tenure truly works as a means of promoting academic freedom and intellectual curiosity. As a fixed-term professor in a professional school, I’ve had my doubts about tenure’s value, based mainly on the fact that I know plenty of professors with tenure who still self-censor on important topics.

Collin Binkley

At George Mason, fewer students are getting into calculus — the first college-level course for some majors — and more are failing. Students who fall behind often disengage, disappearing from class. 

“This is a huge issue,” said Maria Emelianenko, chair of George Mason’s math department. “We’re talking about college-level pre-calculus and calculus classes, and students cannot even add one-half and one-third.”

For Jessica Babcock, a Temple University math professor, the magnitude of the problem hit home last year as she graded quizzes in her intermediate algebra class, the lowest option for STEM majors. The quiz, a softball at the start of the fall semester, asked students to subtract eight from negative six.

“I graded a whole bunch of papers in a row. No two papers had the same answer, and none of them were correct,” she said. “It was a striking moment of, like, wow — this is significant and deep.”

Before the pandemic, about 800 students per semester were placed into that class, the equivalent of ninth grade math. By 2021, it swelled to nearly 1,400.

Patrick Brown:

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

To put it bluntly, climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.

Sarah Schwartz

The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, the instructional consultancy housed at Columbia University and founded by the popular and controversial literacy icon Lucy Calkins, will soon be shutting its doors, Teachers College announced Sept. 1. 

The college is dissolving TCRWP and Calkins will step down as director. Calkins, who remains a tenured faculty member at Teachers College, will be on sabbatical for the 2023-24 academic year.

Teachers College is creating a new division offering reading and writing professional development, the Advancing Literacy unit, which several former TCRWP staff will lead, according to the college’s announcement.

Commentary.

“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?

College Fix summary:

CBS Colorado notes that while the JeffCo Public Schools district says it is “unclear” whether surveys about “preferred pronouns” are in violation of state law, it advised teachers against using them as lawsuits are ongoing.

Federal and state law forbid mandatory surveys that ask about kids’ “protected information,” and voluntary surveys must include a parent opt-out.

But an email from the Jefferson County Education Association told teachers that if they give such surveys, to make sure to they are pencil and paper … because “any digital records are more permanent and may be requested under federal law.”

The email also “encouraged” teachers to “make […] notations about students and not hold on to the documents.”

Amelia Hill:

Father’s Day is dangerous for Robert Nurden. Childless not through choice but, as he puts it, “complacency, bad luck, bad judgment”, he tries to stay indoors and ignore the family celebrations outside.

But one year, he went for a walk. “I met family after family. There were children everywhere,” he remembered. “It was terrible. Just so painful. So many ambushes and triggers for my anguish.”

There is very little research into men who have not had children, although that is beginning to change. Research by Dr Robin Hadley has found that 25% of men over 42 do not have children – 5% more than women of the same age group.

Half of the men who are not fathers but wanted to be describe a huge grief and isolation from society. Almost 40% have experienced depression and a quarter feel a deep anger.

Now 72, Nurden had a sheltered upbringing. Reaching adulthood, there was a lot he wanted to experience. “Having children was a very low priority. I was complacent: I just assumed it would happen,” he said.

Joe Miller:

The architect of the Supreme Court victory against affirmative action at US universities is now targeting recruitment practices at the nation’s largest law firms, in a strategic ploy that could pave the way for broader challenges to corporate America’s diversity and inclusion schemes.

Edward Blum, a conservative campaigner who in June won a decades-long battle to end racially-conscious admissions at US colleges, has already sued global firms Perkins Coie and Morrison Foerster, arguing that prestigious fellowships designed to attract “historically under-represented” applicants are illegal. He told the Financial Times he was gearing up to potentially file lawsuits against similar firms “over the next few weeks”.

While other activists, including Stephen Miller, a former adviser to Donald Trump, have led efforts to sue over diversity practices at larger companies such as Kellogg’s, Starbucks and Target, the 72-year-old Blum has focused his latest efforts on the legal profession, which he sees as a crucial pillar of a push that gained momentum in recent years with the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“Over the last 10 years, especially with [the murder of] George Floyd — the tragedy of that — we saw corporations initiating racially exclusive hiring promotion policies, policies in which managers’ bonuses were tied to specific racial outcomes in their hiring and promotion,” Blum said. Outside counsel, he added, “have been blessing these corporate diversity quotas”.

Ray Carter:

An announcement that the state of Oklahoma has an “ongoing partnership” with PragerU to provide supplemental materials for history lessons in state schools has caused some officials and groups on the political left to have a social-media meltdown.

But many parents and teachers working on the front lines welcomed the news.

The website for PragerU says it is a nonprofit organization that promotes “American values through the creative use of educational videos that reach millions of people online,” and says its content provides “a free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media, and education. Whether you’re searching for a deeper understanding, a new perspective, or a way to get involved, PragerU helps people of all ages think and live better.”

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters recently announced that the state is partnering with PragerU to make its materials available to teachers, which appears to primarily consist of providing a link to Prager materials on the “social studies” page on the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s website.

Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby:

Last Monday, the Pennridge School Board, located outside of Philadelphia, imposed a new social studies curriculum that will require teachers to incorporate lessons from the 1776 Curriculum, a controversial K-12 course of study developed by Hillsdale College, a private Christian institution that promotes right-wing ideologies.
The curriculum was developed in part by Jordan Adams, an educational consultant with no experience developing curricula for public schools. Adams launched his company, Vermilion Education, in March 2023. The Pennridge School Board hired Adams in April, paying $125 per hour for his services. The contract includes no limit on the number of hours, no specific deliverables, and no termination date.
Adams holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Hillsdale College and a master’s in humanities from another private conservative school, the University of Dallas. He does not hold any degrees in education. After graduating, Adams returned to Hillsdale College as an employee, where he promoted the 1776 Curriculum. On July 1, in a private presentation to Moms for Liberty, a far-right organization that pushes for changes in educational policy, Adams described himself as a “fox..in the henhouse.” He bragged that “the right people are freaking out” about his contract with Pennridge Schools. As of a few months ago, Adams had no other public school clients.
Although Adams does not have the qualifications to write curriculum, it was revealed during a Pennridge School Board meeting on August 21 that Adams independently wrote aspects of the new social studies curricula.
Adams’ proposed curriculum faced opposition from several members of the Pennridge School Board and the district’s own academic experts. Jenna Vitale, the K-12 social studies supervisor, cited concerns in a recent school board meeting about the “age-appropriateness of the elementary curriculum [developed by Adams], highlighting… the lack of the appropriate history background for incoming fourth and fifth graders and the elimination of 19th century U.S. history from the secondary social studies curriculum.” Vitale also cited concerns about Adams’ proposal to shift the third-grade curriculum from a focus on Native Americans to “Colonial America.”

Frederick Hess

America’s high schools have just endured a decade of dramatic grade inflation, according to a new study from ACT. This coincided with a decade of declining academic achievement, raising hard questions for those concerned about instructional rigor, inflated graduation rates, and the integrity of selective college admissions.

Between 2010 and 2022, there was evidence of steady grade inflation among high schoolers. During that period, even as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the “Nation’s Report Card”) recorded steady declines in reading, math, and U.S. history achievement, student GPAs climbed steadily higher. The average adjusted GPA increased from 3.17 to 3.39 in English; from 3.02 to 3.32 in math; from 3.28 to 3.46 in social studies; and from 3.12 to 3.36 in science. In 2022, more than 89% of high schoolers received an A or a B in math, English, social studies, and science.

Justin B. Kinney and Richard H. Ebright

Laboratory accidents happen. They happen because scientists are human, and humans make mistakes. The overwhelming majority of scientific research is safe, and only a small fraction of laboratory accidents pose risks to the public. But accidents involving potential pandemic pathogens can have catastrophic consequences. Potential pandemic pathogens are viruses and bacteria that, if released, could cause a devastating pandemic.

A bill before the Wisconsin Legislature, Senate Bill 401, will protect the public from the most significant hazards of research on potential pandemic pathogens — without having significant costs or adverse impacts. The bill is commonsense legislation that deserves broad-based support.

SB 401 contains two important provisions.

The first provision will establish public transparency for research on potential pandemic pathogens. Currently, laboratories doing this research are not required to inform state or local governments about where the research is performed, which pathogens they possess or the potential public health impacts if a pathogen escapes. SB 401 will require these laboratories to provide this information to the state Department of Health Services.

Sean Stevens

Simply put, Harvard has never performed well in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings, finishing below 75% of the schools surveyed in each of the past four years. 

In 2020, Harvard ranked 46 out of 55 schools. In 2021, it ranked 130 out of 154 schools. Last year, it ranked 170 out of 203 schools. And this year, Harvard completed its downward spiral in dramatic fashion, coming in dead last with the worst score ever: 0.00 out of a possible 100.00. This earns it the notorious distinction of being the only school ranked this year with an “Abysmal” speech climate.

What’s more, granting Harvard a score of 0.00 is generous. Its actual score is -10.69, more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania. (Penn obtained an overall score of 11.13.) 

This raises the question: Why did Harvard do so poorly? In light of its historically low ranking, the reasons are many.

Hillsdale:

C.S. Lewis’s writings bring the great questions of the Christian faith to life. Through his imaginative and invigorating style, Lewis answers these questions in ways that are compelling to those outside Christianity and energizing to those within the Christian faith.

In this free, seven-lecture course, Professor Michael Ward—a leading scholar of C.S. Lewis—will explore Lewis’s:

Timothy Lee and Sean Trott:

When ChatGPT was introduced last fall, it sent shockwaves through the technology industry and the larger world. Machine learning researchers had been experimenting with large language models (LLMs) for a few years by that point, but the general public had not been paying close attention and didn’t realize how powerful they had become.

Today almost everyone has heard about LLMs, and tens of millions of people have tried them out. But, still, not very many people understand how they work.

If you know anything about this subject, you’ve probably heard that LLMs are trained to “predict the next word,” and that they require huge amounts of text to do this. But that tends to be where the explanation stops. The details of how they predict the next word is often treated as a deep mystery.

One reason for this is the unusual way these systems were developed. Conventional software is created by human programmers who give computers explicit, step-by-step instructions. In contrast, ChatGPT is built on a neural network that was trained using billions of words of ordinary language.

Ted Balaker:

It’s back to school time, and for some of us that means back to home school. 

In recent years homeschooling has enjoyed a fairly well-publicized upswing. But the surge in interest has also sparked some narrow-minded backlash. Like the other areas I cover, education suffers from plenty of groupthink. 

My family of three is a homeschool family. My wife and I have one child, an eight-year-old son, and having an “only” makes homeschooling sometimes harder and sometimes easier. We live in an area where homeschooling is quite common, and being part of a larger community has been very helpful. 

We experimented with four different types of more traditional schooling and exposed ourselves to an array of less conventional models. After some back-and-forth between schooling and homeschooling (courtesy of California’s lockdowns), we settled on homeschooling as the best fit for our son. As much as we tout it, we’re not dogmatic. If we come across something better, we’ll switch. 

We’ve been lucky that the vast majority of our friends and family support our decision to homeschool. In general, the better they know us, the more supportive they are. That’s because they see that it’s working for our son. 

But we’ve also experienced some rather bewildered reactions. Such reactions typically come from people who have experienced nothing but traditional schooling. One person asked if our son had any friends, but nobody who knows him well would ask that. Although many worry that homeschooling hampers socialization, our experience has been quite the opposite.

Nancy Scola:

At those same moments, another set of advocacy groups was beginning to have conversations about where to go next. Among them was Sleeping Giants, a loose, semi-anonymous online collective that calls itself “a campaign to make bigotry and sexism less profitable.” The group had developed a reputation for taking down powerful targets with a fairly simple tactic: show their advertisers exactly what their ad dollars are supporting and quickly gin up, using social media, public pressure to get them to stop. Starting in 2016, the group had waged successful campaigns against Breitbart News and Bill O’Reilly.

James Pethokoukis:

A brief reminder: Back in the summer of 2020, I tried to hammer home the point that preventing kids from going to school full-time and in-person during the coming school year would be a terrible idea with serious consequences for the kids and the country. School is more than just a place where younger students stay while their parents work, or a way for older students to get a certificate that helps them find better jobs. Deep economic research has shown that education really matters in helping kids grow into productive adults, including as workers in a complex, globalized economy. Those findings are seen to be as true today as when they were first identified in the 1950s. Indeed, a 2018 World Bank analysis shows the benefits increasing since 2000.

We now have a pretty good, albeit unsurprising, idea of the impact of the move to online learning and hybrid schedules. Here are some key takeaways from the Richmond Fed review:

• “Learning progress slowed substantially in the U.S. during the pandemic.” According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test of U.S. eight graders, the average score of students rose by 20 points in the 30 years before the pandemic. But between 2019 and 2022, the average score went down by 8 points, which means that they lost almost half of what they had gained before.

Jackie Valley, Ariel Gilreath, Claire Bryan, Trisha Powell Crain, Maura Turcotte and Talia Richman:

“I don’t really like math but I kind of do,” James says. “It’s challenging but I like it.”

Across the country, schools are scrambling to get students caught up in math as post-pandemic test scores reveal the depth of kids’ missing skills. On average students’ math knowledge is about half a school year behind where it should be, according to education analysts.

Children lost ground on reading tests, too, but the math declines were particularly striking. Experts say virtual learning complicated math instruction, making it tricky for teachers to guide students over a screen or spot weaknesses in their problem-solving skills. Plus, parents were more likely to read with their children at home than practice math.

The result: Students’ math skills plummeted across the board, exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequities in math performance that existed before the pandemic. And students aren’t bouncing back as quickly as educators hoped, supercharging worries about how they will fare as they enter high school and college-level math courses that rely on strong foundational knowledge.

Students had been making incremental progress on national math tests since 1990. But over the past year, data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “nation’s report card,” showed that fourth graders and eighth graders’ math scores slipped to the lowest levels in about 20 years.

“Another way to put it is that it’s a generation’s worth of progress lost,” says Andrew Ho, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

Ray Dalio:

It is an ominous picture because these conditions are classic symptoms of stage 5 of the internal order- disorder cycle, which is just before stage 6 which is when there are great internal conflicts—typically some form of civil war. That is because most people willingly follow rules and laws rather than fight for what they want only when they believe that the people overseeing the system are good and fair. Without these beliefs, they are inclined to fight for what they want and believe in. When that happens, terrible fighting ensues, and order is lost. Since we recognize how bad the trust in the system has become and the behaviors of certain people are, and we can imagine what that could lead to, perhaps we will take actions to improve things – like demand truthfulness and objectivity from politically elected officials and the media and reaffirm our commitment to the legal system to judge us. 

I thank all of you who gave me your assessments. I read many excellent comments and perspectives, the best of which I hope to share at some point. I invite those of you who haven’t read my piece, “Declines of Truth, Trust, and the Rule of Law Have Throughout History Led to, and Are Now Leading to, Disorder,” and/or haven’t shared your perspective on it to do so here. 

As you probably know from my study of history and observations of what is now happening, I believe that the five “Big Cycle” evolutionary forces—1) the financial/economic force, 2) the domestic order-disorder force, 3) the international order-disorder force 4) the nature-climate force, and the 5) technology force—have always interacted, and are now interacting, to make very big changes in the world order. I believe that it is critically important to understand and manage these changes well. In my book and YouTube video, I showed how these have worked over the last 500 years of history and in my posts and articles, I try to show how things are transpiring relative to the template explained in the book and the video. This most recent article was about the growing domestic disorder. The one before that was about the financial-economic force. The next one will probably be on the nature-climate force.

Jason Riley:

Yes, this is another September “back to school” column. My apologies. But someone needs to keep pointing out that our national debate over which books to allow in classrooms, or how to teach slavery to middle-schoolers, is far less consequential than the continuing inability of most youngsters to read or do math at grade level.

In Florida, where GOP governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has taken lumps for a couple sentences in a 200-page black-history curriculum, only 39% of Miami-Dade County fourth-graders are proficient in reading, according to a Miami Herald report last year on standardized test results. By eighth grade the number drops to 31%, and math scores are just as bad. Who cares if kids have access to books by Toni Morrison or Jodi Picoult if most of them can’t comprehend the contents?

These dismal outcomes have persisted nationwide for decades, and the racial achievement gap is even more disturbing. The U.S. Education Department reported last year that in 2022 the average reading score for black fourth-graders in New York on the National Assessment of Educational Progress trailed that of white fourth graders by 29 points. This “performance gap was not significantly different from that in 1998,” the report added.

The progressive left’s response to these outcomes has been to wage war on meritocracy rather than focus on improving instruction. The goal is to eliminate gifted-and-talented middle-school programs, high-school entrance exams and the use of the SAT in college admissions. One defense of racial preferences in education for black students is that recipients, including those who go into teaching, are more likely to work in low-income minority communities after graduation. That’s true, but is it what economically disadvantaged students really need, more second-rate teachers?

Jay Matthews:

There is a battle in American education over two loaded adjectives, “gifted” and “advanced.” It has raged behind the scenes for decades, but that may change.

The issue made an important appearance recently in a scholarly paper by a national panel of experts on education and other topics — some liberal, some conservative — that strongly argued we should get rid of “gifted” and replace it with “advanced.” Their reasoning provides an opportunity to assess where we are with school learning in America after decades of confusion about what works and what doesn’t.

Related: English 10.

Will Flanders:

Total staff in schools has increased since 2017. The number of full-time equivalents (FTEs) in Wisconsin schools has grown by 2.67% over this time frame, even as statewide enrollment declined by 3.6%.

Student-teacher ratios have declined across the state. Despite staffing shortages, the dramatic decline in student enrollment over the past five years resulted in student-teacher ratios declining from 14.60 to 13.67 over the past five years.

Teachers with Master’s Degrees do not improve student performance. Although teachers who have earned a Master’s degree receive higher pay, student proficiency is not higher in districts that have more teachers with Master’s degrees.

“Woke” positions are among the largest areas of growth.

While the absolute number of FTEs in these areas remains relatively low, the number of FTEs employed in connection with buzzwords like “Social-Emotional Behavioral Interventions/Support” and “Multicultural Education/Equity” are among the five fastest growing areas over the past five years.

Administrative staff varies extensively by district.

It is difficult to assess whether a district is investing taxpayer dollars wisely in staffing when administrative staff percentages vary drastically across the state. For example, about 47% of FTEs in Gibraltar School District were administrative—compared with about 8% in Shawano School District.

Meanwhile, Madison taxpayers have long supported substantial, well above average $pending – now greater than $25k per student!

“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?

Kayla Huynh:

Students’ usual feelings of excitement toward the start of the school year have been marred by anxiety after an unknown number of assailants brutally attacked a University of Wisconsin-Madison student downtown Sunday.   

At the university’s convocation event Tuesday, marking the beginning of thousands of incoming students’ college careers, Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said it wasn’t the start of the school year she had hoped for. 

Days before UW-Madison’s start of the fall semester, a student was hospitalized after she was brutally attacked and sexually assaulted. 

The woman, whose name has not been released to the news media, was found along the 500 block of West Wilson Street around 3:20 a.m. Sunday, according to the Madison Police Department incident report. A person living in the area called the police after noticing the victim was severely beaten. 

“I know there are so many of us in this room — and your parents and families — (who) are feeling anger and grief and anxiety,” Mnookin told incoming students at the convocation. 

“You may also be wondering if you can feel safe here,” she said. “The answer is mostly yes. Madison is generally quite a safe city, but no place is completely safe, including Madison.”

Mnookin directed students to the Dean of Students Office for resources and support regarding the incident. But incoming freshman Jisela Marquez said she wished the chancellor had gone into more detail. Some students, she said, would have found it helpful to hear about SAFEwalk, a walking companionship program that runs in the evenings until 1 a.m.

Paul Tough:

In the fall of 2009, 70 percent of that year’s crop of high school graduates did in fact go straight to college. That was the highest percentage ever, and the collegegoing rate stayed near that elevated level for the next few years. The motivation of these students was largely financial. The 2008 recession devastated many of the industries that for decades provided good jobs for less-educated workers, and a college degree had become a particularly valuable commodity in the American labor market. The typical American with a bachelor’s degree (and no further credential) was earning about two-thirds more than the typical high school grad, a financial advantage about twice as large as the one a college degree produced a generation earlier. College seemed like a reliable runway to a life of comfort and affluence. 

A decade later, Americans’ feelings about higher education have turned sharply negative. The percentage of young adults who said that a college degree is very important fell to 41 percent from 74 percent. Only about a third of Americans now say they have a lot of confidence in higher education. Among young Americans in Generation Z, 45 percent say that a high school diploma is all you need today to “ensure financial security.” And in contrast to the college-focused parents of a decade ago, now almost half of American parents say they’d prefer that their children not enroll in a four-year college.

The numbers on campus have shifted as well. In the fall of 2010, there were more than 18 million undergraduates enrolled in colleges and universities across the United States. That figure has been falling ever since, dipping below 15.5 million undergrads in 2021. As recently as 2016, 70 percent of high school graduates were still going straight to college; now the figure is 62 percent. 

Outside the United States, meanwhile, higher education is more popular than ever. Our global allies and competitors have spent the last couple of decades racing to raise their national levels of educational attainment. In Britain, the number of current undergraduates has risen since 2016 by 12 percent. (Over the same period, the American figure fell by 8 percent.) In Canada, 67 percent of adults between 25 and 34 are graduates of a two- or four-year college, about 15 percentage points higher than the current American attainment rate. 

Britain and Canada are not the outliers on this point; we are. On average, countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have increased their college-degree attainment rate among young adults by more than 20 percentage points since 2000, and 11 of those countries now have better-educated labor forces than we do, including not only economic powerhouses like Japan and South Korea and Britain but also smaller competitors like the Netherlands, Ireland and Switzerland. Americans have turned away from college at the same time that students in the rest of the world have been flocking to campus. Why? What changed in the last decade to make a college education — and higher education as an institution — so unappealing to so many Americans?

Harriet Agnew and Arjun Neil Alim:

The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has agreed to buy UK wealth manager Seven Investment Management, as one of Canada’s biggest investors bets on a sector that is rapidly consolidating.

OTPP is acquiring 7IM, which was founded in 2002 and manages about $21bn in assets, from Caledonia Investments, the companies said on Tuesday. The deal gives 7IM an enterprise value of about £450mn, according to people familiar with the matter.

The move by OTPP comes as wealth and asset managers are bulking up amid rising costs and downward pressure on fees. However, Iñaki Echave, senior managing director at OTPP, said the fund had spent three years looking to buy a UK wealth manager, pointing to several potential tailwinds for the sector.

“Further flows will be supported by pension reforms, wealth advisors are having increased demand and demographic trends mean the government will continue incentivising savings,” he said.

Following the deal, OTPP will own 90 per cent of the business with 7IM’s management holding the rest. 7IM was bought eight years ago by Caledonia, an investment trust linked to the Cayzer family that made its fortune in the shipping business. Caledonia’s stake in 7IM was valued at £187mn as of March 31.

Ann Althouse

As this article — and every other article on this subject — points out, the Supreme Court’s opinion explicitly says it shouldn’t be “construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”

By clouding the question, the NYT burdens non-white applicants, who shouldn’t have to feel they might be doing something wrong by discussing their race. But clouding the question is part of critiquing the Court, and that is, apparently, the priority.

Andrew Campa:

A Monterey County school district has settled a lawsuit that alleged middle school staff “convinced” a student to identify first as bisexual and then as transgender, without informing the 11-year-old’s mother. 

The Spreckels Union School District, which encompasses an elementary and middle school in the Salinas area, paid nearly $100,000 to a Monterey County mother and daughter over an alleged violation of the parent’s 14th Amendment right to raise her child.

The settlement, agreed to in mid-June and approved by a federal judge Aug. 3, brings an end to the legal action pursued by Jessica Konen and her daughter Alicia, who went by the initials A.G.

Ruth Conniff:

Still, the inequities among public schools in richer and poorer property tax districts are nothing compared to the existential threat to public education from a parallel system of publicly funded private schools that has been nurtured and promoted by a national network of right-wing think tanks, well funded lobbyists and anti-government ideologues.

For decades, Wisconsin has been at the epicenter of the movement to privatize education, pushed by the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, a mega-wealthy conservative foundation and early backer of Milwaukee’s first-in-the-nation school voucher program. That program has expanded from fewer than 350 students when it launched in 1990 to 52,000 Wisconsin students using school vouchers today.

This year school privatization advocates scored a huge victory when Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, a longtime ally of public schools, agreed to a budget bargain that includes a historic bump in the amount of tax money per pupil Wisconsinites spend on private school vouchers. The rate went up from $8,399 to $9,874 for K-8 students and from $9,405 to $12,368 for high schoolers.

Not only is the amount of money taxpayers spend on private education increasing, in just a couple of years all enrollment caps come off the school choice program. We are on our way to becoming an all-voucher system. 

This makes no sense, especially since, over the last 33 years, the school voucher experiment has failed to produce better outcomes in reading and math than regular public schools.

——-

Meanwhile, Madison taxpayers have long supported substantial, well above average $pending – now greater than $25k per student!

“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?

Wall Street Journal:

Tina Descovich found herself surrounded by “Muslim dads.” The scene was a school-board meeting late last year in Dearborn, Mich. Local parents were angry about sex-themed books at the school library, which they regarded as “pornography.”

After chatting with Ms. Descovich for a few minutes, a Dearborn dad realized she was a founder of Moms for Liberty, a nonprofit parents’ rights group that came into being on Jan. 1, 2021. He shook his head and told her she didn’t “seem like a racist at all.”

“That’s because I’m not,” she replied.

With its dogged focus on school reform, hostility to teachers unions and opposition to Covid shutdowns and mandates, the group is hated on the left and typecast as far-right—or worse—by much of the media. I speak with Ms. Descovich, a 49-year-old mother of five, at Moms for Liberty’s headquarters here, between Miami and Jacksonville. Seated with her is Tiffany Justice, 44, the group’s co-founder and a mother of four. The modest office has no external signage to identify its occupants. Both women have received such a deluge of threats—by email, voicemail and even handwritten letters—that there’s a deputy at the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office whose main job is to review each one. “Someone calling himself Satan writes to me every week,” Ms. Descovich says wryly. “He lives in Denver.”

A more influential antagonist is the Southern Poverty Law Center. The SPLC, founded in 1971, has a storied history of fighting the Ku Klux Klan via civil lawsuits and cooperation with law enforcement. The media uncritically describe it as a civil-rights group, even though in recent decades its has shifted its focus to smearing conservative organizations as hate groups.

In June it labeled Moms for Liberty as “extremist” and “antigovernment.” It stated in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2022” that the organization’s “primary goals” are to “fuel right-wing hysteria and to make the world a less comfortable or safe place” for students who are “Black, LGBTQ or who come from LGBTQ families.”

….

“The reading proficiency rates we have in America right now pose the greatest national-security threat of anything for the future of this country.

Mark Steyn:

~And so in 2023 the Danish Government plans to re-introduce blasphemy laws – but for the incoming state religion. And it barely makes the papers.

Frustrated Danes burn Korans because what else can you do? The gradual but remorseless Islamization of European societies would seem unlikely to end well. But what options do you have if you’re minded to disagree? You can’t talk about it, honestly, on British or Continental TV or radio. You can vote for anti-immigration parties, but, even if they win, nothing significant ever seems to happen. So a couple of blokes burn Korans – and the establishment reacts by further insulating Islam from the rough-and-tumble of free societies.

I have profound admiration for all those who have resisted the grim retreat into darkness these last two decades: Flemming Rose, the commissioning editor at Jyllands-Posten; the late Kurt Westergaard and the other cartoonists; Lars and Katrine and Marie; and all the dead and vanished across the Continent. But it is a lonely business: as I said way back in 2005, when the cartoon controversy was front-page news but the cartoons themselves weren’t, if Le Monde and The New York Times and Der Spiegel had simply reported this as they would any other story, that would have been an effective response: they can’t kill us all. But, because the only other publications to re-print the Motoons were Charlie Hebdo and my own magazine in Canada The Western Standard, they were able instead to silence us one by one.

To the point where, less than two decades later, a European country introducing an Islamic blasphemy law isn’t even a story at all.

Leonard Sloane:

The potential boost to young people’s ability to save for retirement, meanwhile, is another benefit of the rule change. “This is a very valuable tool and an opportunity for young people to start a Roth IRA,” says Ian Berger, an IRA analyst at Ed Slott & Co., a tax consulting firm in Rockville Centre, N.Y. “But beware of the restrictions,” Berger adds.

First, the Roth IRA must be in the name of the beneficiary, not the owner of the 529 account (if the two are different). There also is a lifetime maximum amount, $35,000, that can be transferred to the Roth from the 529.

Another restriction: The 529 plan must have been open for more than 15 years. And rollover funds cannot include any contributions to the 529 account and earnings on those contributions made in the previous five years.

Rollovers, moreover, are subject to the annual Roth IRA contribution limit. While the 2024 limit has not yet been announced, the limit this year is $6,500. So it would take a number of years before being able to take full advantage of the $35,000 rollover allowance. Of course, the 529 plan beneficiary must have compensation in the year of the rollover at least equal to the amount transferred.

Robin Lange:

Note: the dates of past events are only approximate. The other half of the timeline is wildly speculative and hypothetical.

Heather Hollingsworth:

Beyond third grade, fewer teachers each year know how to help students who are lacking key foundational reading skills, said Elizabeth Albro, an executive at the U.S. Department of Education’s independent research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences.

Nationally, students suffered deep learning setbacks in reading and math during the pandemic. Last year’s third-graders, the kids who were in kindergarten when the pandemic started, lost more ground in reading than kids in older grades and were slower to catch up. With federal pandemic relief money, school systems added class time, brought on tutors, trained teachers in phonics instruction and found other ways to offer extra support to struggling readers.

But even after several years of recovery, an analysis of last year’s test scores by NWEA found that the average student would need the equivalent of 4.1 additional months of instruction to catch up to pre-COVID reading levels.
The one bright spot was for incoming fourth-graders, who made above-average gains and would need about two months of additional reading instruction to catch up. Karyn Lewis, who leads a team of education policy researchers at NWEA, described them as “a little bit less worse off.”

Jeff Stein:

From August 2022 to this July, the federal government spent roughly $6.7 trillion while bringing in roughly $4.5 trillion. That represents a total increase in spending of 16 percent relative to last year and a 7 percent decrease in revenue, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

The deficit fell dramatically the year before in large part because of the expiration of trillions in emergency covid aid approved during the Trump and Biden administrations. But even as covid spending continued to fall this year, other factors pushed overall spending up.

Think you can tame the national debt? Play our budget game.

The Treasury Department is also on track to take in substantially less in new revenue this year, in part because of the stock market’s slump last year. In 2021, amid a cryptocurrency bubble and an explosion in housing prices driven by rock-bottom interest rates, investors recorded huge gains that led them to pay capital gains taxes at record levels. But then the bubble burst, leading to a sharp drop in capital gains tax revenue. Automatic adjustments to the tax brackets to account for inflation also reduced tax obligations for many Americans, resulting in less incoming revenue relative to last year.

Then a number of other spending increases contributed to the rising deficit — Social Security payments increased because they are indexed to inflation; the government spent more on education, veterans benefits and health care; and the bipartisan infrastructure law, as well as the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, started sending billions of dollars out from the government’s accounts.

Experts are fiercely divided on the extent to which the higher deficit amounts to a pressing problem for the economy.

Federal tax receipt and spending data.

James Freeman:

The best way to prevent politicians and bureaucrats from ever again inflicting on American kids the learning losses, social isolation and staggering financial burden of the Covid lockdowns is to ensure a just reckoning for the destruction they caused. Perhaps this is beginning to happen.

John Fensterwald reports in the Bakersfield Californian:

This fall, in a courtroom in Oakland, lawyers will reexamine the pandemic’s impact on K-12 schools in California — a subject many people might prefer to forget about but can’t because, like COVID itself, the effects are inescapable.
The state of California defends itself over accusations that it mishandled remote learning during COVID, starting in the spring of 2020, and then failed to alleviate the harm its most vulnerable children experienced then and still experience.
Alameda County Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman denied the state’s request to dismiss the case outright earlier this month. There’s no dispute that low-income students of color, in particular, had less access to remote learning during the nine-plus months they learned from home, Seligman wrote in a 12-page ruling. The question that needs answering, he said, is whether the state’s level of response is so insufficient that it violated the children’s right to an equal opportunity for an education under California’s constitution.
The case is Cayla J. v. the State of California, the State Board of Education, the California Department of Education, and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond. Cayla J., a Black 8-year-old twin in third grade in Oakland when the lawsuit was filed in November 2020, is the lead of 15 unnamed student plaintiffs from Oakland and Los Angeles. The trial is scheduled to begin Nov. 13.
Of course the California government has responded to the lawsuit with a spirit of good faith and a commitment to transparency.

Just kidding. The editorial board of the San Diego Union-Tribune writes:

State education officials didn’t just reject the idea they bore any blame for the nightmares faced by many students in Los Angeles and Oakland. They threatened Stanford Graduate School of Education professor Thomas Dee — and other education researchers given access to state data — with legal action if they provided information used in this or any lawsuit deemed “adverse” to the California Department of Education.
To insist that researchers can only use school data in a way that is neutral or makes the department look good is perverse and antithetical to what should be the goals of public education. Had such policies been in place 20 years ago, they could have kept the lid on perhaps the worst scandal in the history of public schools in California: the 2005 report by Harvard researchers that credibly alleged the state had for years knowingly exaggerated graduation rates, especially among Latino and Black students, by relying on what was plainly “misleading and inaccurate” information.
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Thankfully, on Aug. 17, the EdSource website reported that the state had mostly backed away from its threats against Dee and others. But given state officials’ history, there is simply no reason to believe this resulted from a realization the threats were wrong. Instead, they were embarrassed by the optics of the flap.

It would be nice if the entire lockdown regime led by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D., Calif.) and other similarly reckless governors nationwide could be put on trial. It might be useful to have officials acknowledge under oath just how small the Covid risks to children really were—and also how small the benefits of societal shutdowns turned out to be, especially in light of titanic costs. But Judge Brad Seligman’s order denying the California government’s motion for summary judgment suggests that the issue in his court is the way California educators implemented the destructive lockdown, not the decision to impose it:

This case does not address any overarching claims about state’s response to the COVID epidemic, nor the closures of schools that were the result of emergency orders. This case is also likewise not about historic inequities suffered by students of color or lower socio-economic means. The narrow focus of this case targets the period of time when the schools were physically closed and learning was available only remotely.

Related: Taxpayer supported Dane County Madison Public Health mandates & 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?

Allysia Finley:

Remember Hillary Clinton’s line that it takes a village to raise a child? Now the left is trying to exile parents from the village. Consider its crusade against minority parents in Chino, Calif., a predominantly minority working-class community east of Los Angeles.

Last week California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the Chino Valley Unified School Board of Education over its new policy—adopted by a 4-1 vote at a July 20 meeting—that requires schools to inform parents if their child requests to use a name different from that on his birth certificate or to be referred to by opposite-sex or nonstandard pronouns. A district spokesperson says the policy provides an exception requiring staff to notify Child Protective Services and law enforcement if “the student is in danger or has been abused, injured, or neglected due to their parent or guardian knowing of their preferred gender identity.”

Tony Thurmond, California’s state superintendent of schools, declared at the public meeting: “The policy you consider tonight may not only fall outside of privacy laws but may put our students at risk.” That’s false, but Mr. Bonta makes the same arguments in his lawsuit.

The attorney general contends, among other things, that Chino Valley’s policy violates students’ putative right to “informational privacy” under the state constitution. Under this novel legal theory, teachers wouldn’t be able to notify parents of misbehavior or bullying. Report cards would be unconstitutional too.

Liberals claim Chino Valley’s policy was driven by right-wing bigots, but the district is by no stretch a conservative bastion. Republicans make up only about a third of voters, and only 12% of students are white. The policy was spurred by parents of all colors and political stripes who complained that school employees were encouraging their children to adopt opposite-sex identities.

Bruce Schneier:

A used government surveillance van is for sale in Chicago:

So how was this van turned into a mobile spying center? Well, let’s start with how it has more LCD monitors than a Counterstrike LAN party. They can be used to monitor any of six different video inputs including a videoscope camera. A videoscope and a borescope are very similar as they’re both cameras on the ends of optical fibers, so the same tech you’d use to inspect cylinder walls is also useful for surveillance. Kind of cool, right? Multiple Sony DVD-based video recorders store footage captured by cameras, audio recorders by high-end equipment brand Marantz capture sounds, and time and date generators sync gathered media up for accurate analysis. Circling back around to audio, this van features seven different audio inputs including a body wire channel.

dave cieslewicz

The point is that labor is not synonymous with unions, a fact that you could easily miss with all the coverage of union Labor Day picnics. Consider these facts provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

• Only 10% of American workers are union members. 
• That’s down by half since 1983 when one-in-five workers belonged to a union. 
• Only 6% of private sector employees is in a union.
• A third of all public sector employees are unionized. 
• The image of union members that persists is a guy in a hard hat or a coal miner, but the reality is cop, a firefighter or a teacher. Those are the most prominent unionized occupations.

Josh Moody:

By eliminating electives, BYU-Idaho will bring five three-year programs online in April: applied business management, family and human services, software development, applied health, and professional studies. Ensign will offer two such programs: communication and information technology. Both institutions are owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and operated by the Church Educational System.

The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities approved the seven programs—each of which requires between 90 and 94 credit hours instead of the standard 120—at its June meeting and sent a formal approval letter late last month.Most Popular Stories

Now BYU-Idaho and Ensign College are advancing a rare concept in the higher education world. The two institutions are the first among a dozen participants in a three-year degree pilot program to win accreditor approval, sparking hope for other colleges that intend to bring similar proposals before their respective accreditors at some point in the future.

:

In particular there’s been an awakening among Asian-Americans who have learned they are the most likely victims of substituting race for merit. Asian-Americans were crucial to keeping the ban on race preferences in 2020, and they are better organized today. They are also backed by public opinion: In June a Pew Research survey reported that “by more than two-to-one, Americans say considering race and ethnicity makes college admissions less fair than more fair.”

The Supreme Court’s June decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard also means that an exception to the state’s constitutional ban on racial preferences would likely be struck down in federal court. But it’s ridiculous that California has to have this fight all over again.

This is an exercise in bad faith. Voters have made clear they don’t want racial preferences, and the courts say they are illegal. Let’s hope Californians let their legislators know they’ll hold them accountable at the voting booth if they insist on going through with it.

Paul Caron:

The University of Toronto and its law faculty are returning a US$450,000 donation from Amazon following The Logic’s reporting that the gift went undisclosed and unreported to academics and students.

“The Faculty of Law upheld the University’s firm commitment to academic freedom, institutional autonomy and integrity. Nonetheless, we acknowledge the important questions raised about the lack of full transparency pertaining to the gift, and the perception of external influence on our academic activities,” wrote law dean Jutta

in a statement published on the university website.  “For that reason, I have decided, together with [U of T] President [Meric] Gertler, to return the gift to Amazon.”

The university has also pledged to publicly disclose all future philanthropic donations from corporations. 

Brunnée’s statement was also shared with the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), the organization representing 72,000 university academics and staff across the country. The CAUT was considering censuring the university as a result of the donation, which it said was “a serious violation of basic standards of academic integrity and academic freedom.” CAUT executive director David Robinson had a meeting with Gertler on Tuesday afternoon regarding the donation.

Dave Cieslewicz

In an August 30th piece, liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof laments liberal disdain for Anthony’s song. Kristof writes: “Liberals are properly attentive to racial injustice, but have a blind spot about class, driven in part by unfair stereotypes that members of the white working class are invariably bigots. In fact, you can’t think seriously about inequality in America without contemplating race, but that’s also true of class. And as the Harvard professor Michael Sandel has noted, one of the last acceptable prejudices is disdain for the less educated… It’s partly this condescension that has driven many working-class voters, initially white voters and more recently brown and Black ones as well, into the arms of conservative politicians who would shaft them even more. If we’re going to achieve a more progressive agenda, then we need to win elections — and that means respecting workers rather than scorning them, insulting their faith and casually dismissing them as bigots. If we believe in empathy, let’s show some.”

Jennifer Williams:

Ministers imposed local lockdowns on Oldham on and off through 2020, in an attempt to quell the spread of disease. As a result, more face-to-face school hours were lost in the area than elsewhere in the country. Potts discovered that some children had begun riding around on the Greater Manchester tram network, using its free WiFi to do their homework. When that service was switched off, they moved to McDonald’s.

Then, as the pandemic abated, the cost of living crisis and rising inflation bore down on the same families. School attendance levels were poor. Some kids started turning up late, telling teachers they couldn’t afford to ride the bus. The school had to step in in the case of one exam-age pupil who had been working so many hours a week it broke the law.

But the jam kids presented a particular challenge. At first, the staff at Newman rang the parents of the students who had been turning up without lunch money, to investigate. Eventually, Potts decided the school would begin absorbing the cost of feeding the extra pupils, seating them in a separate classroom to avoid the indignity of the queue.

There is something reminiscent of military precision to Potts’s controlled demeanour. As he moves through Newman’s corridors, he orders children to tuck in their shirts or tie their shoelaces. His manner with the kids is not brusque but brisk, as if he is reminding them of a standard they’ve mutually agreed to uphold. In his office, I’d noticed a copy of Soul Fuel for Young Explorers, a best-selling, adventure-themed devotional written by the explorer Bear Grylls. Before he was a teacher, Potts was indeed briefly in the army and still serves as a volunteer cadet. He is a born problem-solver.

Shaun Boyd:

Some parents in Jefferson County say teachers are breaking state and federal laws and their union is helping them get away with it.

At issue are student surveys about gender identity. While the school district says it’s unclear whether surveys about students’ preferred pronouns are illegal, there are several lawsuits regarding the issue. So, administrators told teachers – just don’t go there.

The teachers union told them something else. An email from Jefferson County Education Association (JCEA) to teachers says, “if you do a questionnaire, please make it a paper and pencil activity – any digital records are more permanent and may be requested under federal law.” 

The union also encouraged teachers to “make your notations about students and not hold on to the documents.”

Denice Crawford, who has three kids in the school district, says she was encouraged when the district sent an email to all employees before the school year started reminding them state and federal law prohibits mandatory surveys that ask kids about protected information and even voluntary surveys, it said, are illegal unless parents can opt out.

When her son came home with a survey asking about his gender identity she was more than surprised.

More. And. More. And. More.

Paul Taske:

For example, California presents its Age-Appropriate Design Code as a privacy regulation. Yet, the law imposes obligations on websites to deploy algorithms, designs, and features in a certain way or face fines. Of course, algorithms, features, and designs are the means by which websites develop, display, and disseminate speech. 

Arkansas contends that its Social Media Safety Act regulates social media as a “place.” Arkansas seeks to keep minors out of this place just like it restricts their access to bars and casinos. But there is a fundamental distinction between social media and a bar or casino. Social media sites are speech sites. They are designed to facilitate the creation, consumption, and distribution of speech. Bars and casinos, by contrast, are not. 

When challenged, both Arkansas and California refused to concede that their laws are censorial. In fact, California boldly proclaimed that its law has “nothing to do with speech.” In both cases, the government’s entire position depends on courts ignoring reality and the crucial role algorithms and social media play in creating, curating, and disseminating online speech. Fortunately, courts are not so naive.

Zvi Moshowitz

Assuming as Alexander does that the No Response are the 0s above, this says that almost no currently single people, less than 20%, go on multiple first dates in a year. 

I am not saying that dating is easy or that I found it to be easy. I will go ahead and say it is not once-a-year level hard for most people to find worthwhile first dates. 

What I especially find curious is that one is the most popular response rather than zero. It would make sense to me that the answer is frequently zero dates, because you are not trying and aren’t ‘date ready’ in various senses. What’s super weird is that the vast majority did go on the one first date, but mostly they didn’t go on a second, and only half of those went on a third. It is as if people are capable of getting a date, then they go on one and recoil in ‘oh no not that again’ horror for about a year, then repeat the cycle? Or their friends set them up every year or so because it’s been too long, or something? None of that makes sense to me.

Alternatively, what the data is also saying is that getting a first date is indeed the primary barrier to finding a relationship. If you went on four or more first dates in the past year, which is one every three months or ~1% of nights, then it is highly unlikely you are single.

James Freeman:

Why do so many media folk who constantly warn that our form of government is under attack also constantly promote misleading attacks on our form of government? This week the opinion editors of the
New York Times
, who seem to care more about particular, arbitrarily selected “democratic norms” than about democracy itself, published an ill-informed case against our constitutional republic and the entire concept of voting.

The Times published contributor Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, who writes:

On the eve of the first debate of the 2024 presidential race, trust in government is rivaling historic lows. Officials have been working hard to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity. But if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether.
If you think that sounds anti-democratic, think again. The ancient Greeks invented democracy, and in Athens many government officials were selected through sortition — a random lottery from a pool of candidates. In the United States, we already use a version of a lottery to select jurors. What if we did the same with mayors, governors, legislators, justices and even presidents?

Having claimed the authority of the ancient Athenians, the psychologist then goes on to make various claims about the alleged virtues of disenfranchising the entire American electorate.

Some readers may wonder why the Times called on Mr. Grant for this assignment. Were all of Penn’s historians away for the summer? Let’s hope that at least a few of them have been reacting with horror at this slipshod justification for shoving U.S. voters out of the political process.

Abbey Machtig:

The Madison School District bought the land for $6.4 million and construction was estimated to cost about $25 million, financed by a 2020 facilities referendum. Landscaping and playground construction at Southside Elementary are continuing, according to the district website.

The school serves an especially diverse population. Of the students in the area, 81% are from low-income households, 89% are students of color and 50% are English learners, according to district data from February. The school’s location at the center of the community “provides one of the best walking options available,” according to the district. 

Mullen said attendance was an ongoing issue at Allis: If students missed the bus, they often had to miss school altogether that day. 

Having a school closer to home will also create more opportunities for families to meet face to face with educators and see their students’ school, she said.

“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?

John Hindraker:

Poll data suggest that many young people, in particular, live in fear of global warming. But in this case, knowledge is power, or at least sanity. Bjorn Lomborg highlights a study that finds knowledge about the climate is inversely correlated to climate change anxiety:

Study shows that

people who possess 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 overall environmental knowledge or climate-specific knowledge experience 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 climate change anxiety

(and less knowledge, more anxiety)

Can we go back to educating our kids instead of scaring them?https://t.co/ERN03rPvGzpic.twitter.com/duVEbcOfjQ

— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) August 31, 2023

That makes sense, obviously. We might say that it is one instance of a broader proposition: the more one knows about any subject, the less likely one is to swallow liberal propaganda on that issue.

by Pierluigi Bizzini

Italy has a problem with teachers. The number of teachers on short-term contracts across pre-school and high-school education has doubled in six years. Of a total of 907,929 teachers in the 2020/2021 school year, one in five had a short-term contract, up from one in nine in 2015. Moreover, recruitment is not keeping pace with schools’ need for teachers, thus leaving hundreds of classroom positions vacant which is affecting the educational progress of students all over Italy.

Since 2012, several governments have tried to fix the school system and one administration introduced an algorithm. In summer 2020, during the Conte Bis government, the former Minister of Education Lucia Azzolina introduced the GPS algorithm for schools, a digitised and automatic procedure that would simplify and improve teacher recruitment. The algorithm rests on two rankings. The first is the Graduatorie Provinciali per le Supplenze (GPS) specifically designed for substitute teachers. The second is the Graduatorie Provinciali a Esaurimento (GAE) which is for teachers holding a teaching qualification. The algorithm evaluates teachers’ CVs and cross-references their preferences for location and class with schools’ vacancies. If there is a match, a provisional assignment is triggered, but the algorithm continues to assess other candidates. If it finds another matching candidate with a higher score, that second candidate moves into the lead. The process continues until the algorithm has assessed all potential matches and selected the best possible candidate for the role.

Hoover:

Google “Shoplifting in San Francisco” and you will find more than 100,000 hits. And you will find lots of YouTube videos, where you can watch a single thief, or an entire gang, walk into an SF Walgreens or CVS and empty the shelves. Most walk in, go about their pilfering, and then walk out, though at least one thief rode their bike into the store and departed the same way, carefully navigating their two-wheeler down a narrow aisle.

We probably shouldn’t call it shoplifting anymore, since that term connotes the idea of a person trying to conceal their crime. In San Francisco, there is no attempt to conceal theft, and there is almost never any effort by store employees, including security personnel, to confront the thieves. The most they do is record the thefts with their cell phones.

Why is shoplifting so rampant? Because state law holds that stealing merchandise worth $950 or less is just a misdemeanor, which means that law enforcement probably won’t bother to investigate, and if they do, prosecutors will let it go.

Dana Kennedy:

After two years of horror stories about the alleged mass graves of Indigenous children at residential schools across Canada, a series of recent excavations at suspected sites has turned up no human remains. 

Some academics and politicians say it’s further evidence that the stories are unproven.

Minegoziibe Anishinabe, a group of indigenous people also known as Pine Creek First Nation, excavated 14 sites in the basement of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows Catholic Church near the Pine Creek Residential School in Manitoba during four weeks this summer.

The so-called “anomalies” were first detected using ground-penetrating radar, but on Aug. 18, Chief Derek Nepinak of remote Pine Creek Indian Reserve said no remains were found. 

He also referred to the effort as the “initial excavation,” leading some who were skeptical of the original claims to think even more are planned. 

“I don’t like to use the word hoax because it’s too strong but there are also too many falsehoods circulating about this issue with no evidence,” Jacques Rouillard, a professor emeritus in the Department of History at the Université de Montréal, told The Post Wednesday.

Sophie Culpepper:

Since September 2022, just before the U.S. midterm elections, Spring has maintained social media accounts that correspond to five different “voter profiles” she developed using Pew Research Center data:

• Larry, a “faith and flag” conservative, is a 71-year-old white retired insurance broker living in Oneonta, Alabama.
• Britney, a 50-year-old white school secretary living in Texas, is a Populist Right voter.
• Gabriela, a 44-year-old Hispanic nanny living in Florida, is a “stressed sideliner” who is not that interested in politics.
• Michael, a 61-year-old Black protestant and a teacher in Milwaukee, is a “Democratic mainstay.”
• Emma, a 25-year-old graphic designer who lives in New York City with her girlfriend, is a Progressive Left voter.

Each character’s accounts are confined to a single phone to avoid contaminating Spring’s findings. The reporter maintains accounts with computer-generated profile photos on a range of platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (now X), TikTok, and YouTube — and, essentially, lurks. She likes posts, but the accounts are all private and are not “messaging people or commenting on stuff,” she said. “They’re very much passive social media users to an extent — so all I have to do is feed the algorithm: watch content, like content, follow content. But they’re not deceiving people in any way.”

Paul Caron:

At its August 17-18, 2023, meeting, the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar of the American Bar Association (the “Council”) considered the status of Baylor University School of Law (the “Law School”).

In accordance with Rule 11(a)(1), the Council concluded that the information provided by the Law School was sufficient to demonstrate compliance with Standard 206(b), with respect to part-time faculty. Accordingly, the Council removed the requirements of the specific remedial actions imposed on the Law School and cancelled the Rule 17 hearing in accordance with Rule 20(d).

Baylor University School of Law remains an approved law school.

ABA Journal, 1 of 3 Law Schools Dinged For Diversity Standard Demonstrates Compliance:

The Baylor University School of Law has demonstrated compliance with an accreditation standard requiring that schools demonstrate “concrete action” showing a commitment to having a diverse and inclusive faculty and staff. …

According to the law school’s Standard 509 Information Report, 9.59% of the part-time faculty were people of color. Based on data from the prior year’s report, 9.52% of the part-time faculty were people of color. …

Christopher Rufo:

In recent years, I have devoted considerable time to exposing the radical Left’s politics of “whiteness,” which posits that white identity, culture, and power are irredeemably oppressive and must be “abolished” in favor of alternative modes of being. “Whiteness” represents the metaphysical essence of left-wing race politics: an irreducible force of evil, a master synonym for racism, oppression, inequality, and suffocating bourgeois norms; anything saturated with its properties can be automatically categorized and condemned. In practice, the politics of whiteness has translated into the demonization of European-Americans in primary school curricula, the performance of elaborate “white privilege” rituals in the workplace, and outright segregation in many public institutions. All of it is done to solve “the problem of whiteness.”

Some pushback has resulted. In the years following the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, conservatives have exposed the poisonous politics of left-wing racialism, shutting down some of the bureaucracies that push it and proposing a reaffirmation of the ideal of colorblind equality. Unfortunately, some on the right would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, preferring instead to adopt the basic framework of identity politics and simply reverse its polarity. Dismayingly, a sentiment is rising in some corners of conservative politics that the answer to left-wing identity politics is right-wing identity politics.

Melissa Korn and Kris Maher:

West Virginia University’s student population has been shrinking for years. Its proclivity to spend money has not.

Now facing a $45 million budget deficit, administrators have proposed eliminating dozens of programs, including the mathematics Ph.D. and the entire world languages department. Students staged a spirited protest on campus last week, and faculty are pleading with the school’s governing board to reject the recommended cuts.

West Virginia reflects a broader pattern of flagship schools increasing expenditures far faster than they did enrollment, as detailed in a recent Wall Street Journal investigation. The proposed cuts have caused concern over the direction of education in the state, among the nation’s poorest, and the school’s role as a steppingstone for local students into the global economy.

University President E. Gordon Gee and current and former members of the board blame the institution’s financial challenges on the pandemic and state funding cuts, as well as competition and demographic changes.

A review of university financial records, however, shows that its spending habits and expansion plans set it on a path to instability.

Gee said in 2014 that the university, which at the time enrolled about 33,000 full- and part-time students across its three campuses and online, should grow to 40,000. That would require new investments.

Benjamin Bloom

Lily May Newman:

In December, Apple said that it was killing an effort to design a privacy-preserving iCloud photo-scanning tool for detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the platform. Originally announced in August 2021, the project had been controversial since its inception. Apple had first paused it that September in response to concerns from digital rights groups and researchers that such a tool would inevitably be abused and exploited to compromise the privacy and security of all iCloud users. This week, a new child safety group known as Heat Initiative told Apple that it is organizing a campaign to demand that the company “detect, report, and remove” child sexual abuse material from iCloud and offer more tools for users to report CSAM to the company. 

Today, in a rare move, Apple responded to Heat Initiative, outlining its reasons for abandoning the development of its iCloud CSAM scanning feature and instead focusing on a set of on-device tools and resources for users known collectively as Communication Safety features. The company’s response to Heat Initiative, which Apple shared with WIRED this morning, offers a rare look not just at its rationale for pivoting to Communication Safety, but at its broader views on creating mechanisms to circumvent user privacy protections, such as encryption, to monitor data. This stance is relevant to the encryption debate more broadly, especially as countries like the United Kingdom weigh passing laws that would require tech companies to be able to access user data to comply with law enforcement requests.

“Child sexual abuse material is abhorrent and we are committed to breaking the chain of coercion and influence that makes children susceptible to it,” Erik Neuenschwander, Apple’s director of user privacy and child safety, wrote in the company’s response to Heat Initiative. He added, though, that after collaborating with an array of privacy and security researchers, digital rights groups, and child safety advocates, the company concluded that it could not proceed with development of a CSAM-scanning mechanism, even one built specifically to preserve privacy.

“Scanning every user’s privately stored iCloud data would create new threat vectors for data thieves to find and exploit,” Neuenschwander wrote. “It would also inject the potential for a slippery slope of unintended consequences. Scanning for one type of content, for instance, opens the door for bulk surveillance and could create a desire to search other encrypted messaging systems across content types.”

Greg Ip:

The burden of that debt has been relatively low because the Treasury could borrow so cheaply. But 67% of the debt matures within five years, according to TD Securities. TD estimates the U.S. pays an average rate of 3.4% on that debt, well below current interest rates.