Influencers and financial decisions

Committee on the Judiciary

Has the right’s vision of “education freedom” really triumphed? And at what cost to students?

Jennifer Berkshire:

We owe the concept of school vouchers to libertarian economist Milton Friedman. In a 1955 essay and manifesto, Friedman argued that it was time for the “denationalization” of schools. The government should get out of the business of running schools, he wrote, and instead give parents vouchers that they could use at the public or private school of their choosing. But Southern conservatives had already seized upon a similar idea as a way of resisting court-ordered integration. In the lead-up to the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, voucher-like programs that paid for white students to attend private schools not subject to the same federal oversight as public schools exploded in popularity. As historian Steve Suitts has documented, by 1965, legislators across the South had passed as many as 450 laws and regulations aimed at blocking, discrediting, or evading school desegregation, many through school vouchers or tax credits. As for Friedman, he addressed the issue of segregation directly in a lengthy footnote to his essay, in which he stated his opposition to both “forced segregation” and “forced nonsegregation.” The solution, he argued, was a private system in which “exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools” could develop according to the preferences of parents.

The cause of school choice has long been a right-wing priority, attracting the support and the funds of a familiar cast of deep-pocketed conservatives—the Bradleys, the DeVoses, the Kochs. But the idea of giving money directly to families to pay for schooling also appealed to a surprisingly diverse political coalition. As Fitzgerald traces the history of school vouchers from the libertarian and far-right fringe to the mainstream, she brings to life a lesser-known cast of characters who rallied around versions of school choice. In Wisconsin, for instance, a Jesuit priest named Virgil Blum was urging the government to subsidize the cost of religious education. Blum was ahead of his time. His argument for religious school vouchers, based on the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom, was the same one the Supreme Court would embrace three decades later. But he died in 1990, just months before the Milwaukee voucher program was enacted, lamenting that his crusade for state-funded religious schools had gone nowhere.

Notes on Massachusetts’ K-12 Tax & $pending model

James Vaznis:

Nearly five years after Massachusetts lawmakers overhauled the state’s school funding formula, districts are struggling to balance their budgets for the upcoming school year, prompting many to consider cutting programs and staff or asking taxpayers to dig deeper.

The chief culprit, district leaders and advocates say, is the high rate of inflation that hit the US economy in recent years, much higher than the adjustments used in the new funding formula that was revamped to reflect modern-day costs.

The failure of the new formula to accurately capture inflation could be collectively costing districts hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, according to Colin Jones, deputy policy director at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center, a nonpartisan research institute.

“The whole project is offensive and wrong-headed”

Dave Cieslewicz

The Madison Parks Commission has made a terrible mistake. They’ve allowed a mural to go up in an East Side park lionizing Tony Robinson. Nine years ago, only a couple blocks from that park, Robinson, who had a criminal record, was high on a mixture of hallucinogens and other drugs when he attacked a Madison police officer in a dark stairwell. He was responsible for his own ensuing death.

“externalizing the difficult responsibility of censorship”

But NSF’s taxpayer funding for this potential automated censorship is only half of the story. The Committee and the Select Subcommittee have also obtained, via document requests and subpoenas, nonpublic emails and other documents that reveal a years-long, intentional effort by NSF to hide its role in funding these censorship and propaganda tools from media and political scrutiny. From legal scholars, such as Jonathan Turley, to conservative journalists, NSF tracked public criticisms of its work in funding these projects. NSF went so far as to develop a media strategy that considered blacklisting certain American media outlets because they were scrutinizing NSF’s funding of censorship and propaganda tools.

The First Amendment prohibits the government from “abridging the freedom of speech.” 3 Thus, “any law or government policy that reduces that freedom on the [social media] platforms . . . violates the First Amendment.” 4 To inform potential legislation, the Committee and Select Subcommittee have been investigating the Executive Branch’s collusion with thirdparty intermediaries, including universities, non-profits, and businesses, to censor protected speech on social media. The Committee and Subcommittee have uncovered serious violations of the First Amendment throughout the Executive Branch, including:

The Biden White House directly coercing large social media companies, such as Facebook, to censor true information, memes, and satire, eventually leading Facebook to change its content moderation policies;

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Banning phones and the Internet for kids would mean that everything they get outside the family is from official authority figures, which would make everything worse. Seriously, check out today’s authority figures.

Notes on Math Curriculum

John Fensterwald:

An influential committee of the University of California Academic Senate weighed in again last month on the contentious issue of how much math high school students must take to qualify to attend a four-year California state university.

It ruled that high school students taking an introductory data science course or Advanced Placement Statistics cannot substitute it for Algebra II for admission to the University of California and California State University, starting in the fall of 2025.

The Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools, or BOARS, reaffirmed its position by accepting the recommendations of a workgroup of math and statistics professors who examined the issue. That workgroup determined that none of these courses labeled as data science “even come close” to qualifying as a more advanced algebra course.

Notes on Teacher Turnover

Matt Burns:

“This is still a discouraging story,” said Katharine Strunk, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. ”I don’t think this level of consistent attrition is sustainable for the school system.”

National teacher exit data is released only sporadically, and many states don’t produce timely figures. But the Journal obtained information from 10 states, the most comprehensive recent compilation, that shows turnover typically followed a postpandemic pattern: a drop in the summer of 2020, followed by a spike in 2022.

In all 10 states, attrition fell last fall, as the current school year began. But in nine states, turnover still remained higher than in 2019, the last year before the pandemic.

Truth and Influence: 2024

Balaji:

8) Again, this isn’t small stuff. The level of insanity that society had gotten to was at the level of Orwell’s 2+2=5. People were denying that XX != XY. If they can lie about that, if they can convince themselves they are telling the truth even as they lie, they can lie about anything. And yes, many are still lying about it, but they have lost the high ground of Twitter. So they are losing ground.

10) The process is messy, too. Solzhenitsyn wrote about this. As breathing and consciousness return, as the nervous system of the body politic comes back online, as cells talk to each other freely again, it’s like a foot waking up after a long time asleep. It might stumble a bit, as it moves for the first time in a while.

11) And that’s why many of the new voices you hear are saying seemingly obvious things, like “wokeness is bad” or “XX != XY”. It takes a while for a decentralized system to synchronize, so people start with basic broadcast messages (again, of ideas that were unspeakable even a year ago).

New numbers show falling standards in American high schools

The Economist:

Low-achieving pupils may suffer the most

Springfield, Massachusetts, might seem an improbable setting for an education miracle. The city of 155,000 along the Connecticut river has a median household income half the state average; violent crime is common. Yet graduation rates at the city’s high schools are surging. Between 2007 and 2022 the share of pupils at the Springfield High School of Science and Technology who earned a diploma in four years jumped from 50% to 94%; at neighbouring Roger Putnam Vocational Technical Academy it nearly doubled to 96%.

Alas, such gains are not showing up in other academic indicators. At Springfield High scores on the SAT, a college-admissions test, have tumbled by 15% over the same period. Measures of English and maths proficiency are down, too. The pass rate on advanced-placement exams has fallen to just 12% compared with a national average of 60%.

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“We have banded together to oppose the escalating panic around AI”

Brian Chau:

AFTF will work to inform the media, lawmakers, and other interested parties about the incredible benefits AI can bring to humanity. We will oppose stagnation and advocate for the benefits of technological progress in the political arena.

For decades, stagnation has been the root cause of our greatest national problems: the loss of the American dream for the normal person and the spiteful, zero-sum thinking which dominates politics.

The problem is, it’s more rewarding to be wrong

Frederick Hess:

The upshot is that, if you bet against the long-term success of any given school reform or educational innovation, you’ll generally be right at least 80% of the time. Hell, if you could bet on this stuff at Vegas sportsbooks, edu-skeptics would be laughing all the way to the bank.

So, for me, a crucial but oft-ignored question is this one: Given the track record, why is it so easy to find enthusiasts eager to leap aboard each new reform train?

Well, it turns out that there are a lot of rewards for jumping on board—even if the train is headed off the rails—and precious few rewards for refusing to do so. Embracing the promise of the new new thing means lining up shoulder-to-shoulder with enthusiastic funders, vendors, experts, and school and system leaders confident that this time we’re going to get it right.

K-12 Tax & $pending Climate: Federal Reserve Policy Notes

Balaji:

One more Keynesian trick is to print the money, dilute down everyone in the economy, and then when those who were stolen from have to raise prices on each other…to then swoop in as the government on one side and attack the businesses for raising prices and shrinking portions.

In short, the Fed’s scam steals invisibly from everyone and turns society against each other. In the example below, Coke employees were diluted down just like you were. Both were made poorer by Powell. But you can only see the company’s actions and not the state’s inflation which led to those actions.

The New York Times is targeting Wordle clones with legal takedowns

Jess Weatherbed:

Hundreds of games inspired by Wordle, the popular web-based word puzzle, are at risk of being deleted due to copyright takedowns issued by The New York Times. As reported by404 Media, The New York Times — which purchased Wordle back in 2022 — has filed several DMCA notices over Wordle clones created by GitHub coders, citing its ownership over the Wordle name and copyrighted gameplay including 5×6 tile layout and gray, yellow, and green color scheme.

Two takedown requests were issued in January against unofficial Korean and Bosnian-languageversions of the game. Additional requests were filed this week against Wirdle — a variant created by dialect group I Hear Dee in 2022 to promote the Shaetlan language — and Reactle, an open-source Wordle clone built using React, TypeScript, and Tailwind. It was developed prior to the Times’ purchase of the game, according to its developer, Chase Wackerfuss.

The Reactle code has been copied around 1,900 times, according to GitHub, allowing developers to build upon it to create a wide variety of Wordle-inspired games that use different languages, themes, and visual styles, some of which 404 Media says are “substantially different” from Wordle. The DMCA notice against Reactle also targets all of these games forked from the original Reactle code on GitHub, alleging that spinoffs containing the Wordlename have been made in “bad faith” and that “gameplay is copied exactly” in the Reactlerepository. Numerous developers commenting on a Hacker News thread also claim to have been targeted with DMCA takedowns.

The NYPD Sent a Warrantless Subpoena for a Copwatcher’s Social Media Account, but Won’t Defend It in Court

Nick Pinto:

The NYPD sent a sweeping subpoena seeking information from the social media account of the president of a New York City police accountability organization in February, records reviewed by Hell Gate show, only to withdraw its subpoena when told they would need to justify the subpoena in court.

Michael Clancy, better known to friends on and off social media as Rabbi, received a notice last month from X, formerly known as Twitter, alerting him to the fact that the NYPD had sent X a subpoena requesting “all records consisting but not limited to all subscriber name(s), Email address(s), Phone number(s), account creation date, IP logs with timestamps (IP address of account logins and logouts), all logs of previous messages sent and received.” The subpoena also requested “all videos sent and received, including but not limited to meta-data. exit data about the messages and videos” for the account.

The notification included a copy of the subpoena, which warned X not to tell Clancy of its existence. “You are not to disclose or notify any customer or third party of the existence of this subpoena or that records were provided pursuant to this subpoena,” the document read.

But X, following its own corporate policy, told Clancy anyway, and suggested he might want to get some legal representation to fight the subpoena, recommending the American Civil Liberties Union.

40 years of programming

Lars Wirzenius:

This essay discusses some of the things I’ve learned about how to successfully build software. These are things I’ve learned from my own experience; I’m not a researcher, and there are few references to sources, and this is largely not supported by evidence. I’m basing this essay on my own experience, and if you disagree, that’s fine.

My goal in this essay is to get the reader to think, to research, to learn, to ponder. My goal is not to tell the reader how to think, what to think, how things are, or to give the answer to every question about every aspect of the process of building software.

“by a “foreign adversary” by which the President and or Attorney General determines is a threat to the national security of the United States”

HR7521

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Just like the Restrict Act (Tammy Baldwin supported…):

The RESTRICT Act is not limited to just TikTok. It gives the government authority over all forms of communication domestic or abroad and grants powers to “enforce any mitigation measure to address any risk” to national security now and in any “potential future transaction”

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Rather curious in light of

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The Dutch Law on Intelligence and Security Services defines a broad set of powers. It is also a somewhat odd law with a long

Non profit fundraising and Portland school districts

Julia Silverman

In a Dec. 8, 2023 letter that The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained via a public records request, the seven superintendents wrote that they would no longer partner and share data with All Hands Raised.

“At this time, our seven K-12 districts collectively are in agreement that the work of All Hands Raised has pivoted away from its original purpose and is no longer in alignment with our districts’ needs or priorities,” they wrote.

The letter was signed by then-Portland Public Schools Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero, who left his post in February, as well as Multnomah Education Service District Superintendent Paul Coakley and the superintendents of the Gresham-Barlow, Centennial, Parkrose, David Douglas and Reynolds school districts, which collectively serve some of Oregon’s most diverse and highest need student populations.

Coakley, who has been at the helm of the Multnomah Education Service District since fall 2021 and made $228,941 in 2023, according to public records, is the first signature on the letter. Marifer Sager, Coakley’s communications director, refused multiple requests for an interview seeking more details, saying that his schedule was full and that he had no further context to offer beyond the letter. Superintendents from the Reynolds and Gresham-Barlow districts also declined interview requests.

Subsequently, an attorney representing the education service district sent a letter to The Oregonian/OregonLive complaining about the news organization’s attempts to interview Coakley and review relevant public records.

When it came to debating Covid lockdowns, Veritas wasn’t Harvard’s guiding principle.

Martin Kulldorff:

I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.

On March 10, 2020, before any government prompting, Harvard declared that it would “suspend in-person classes and shift to online learning.” Across the country, universities, schools, and state governments followed Harvard’s lead.

Yet it was clear, from early 2020, that the virus would eventually spread across the globe, and that it would be futile to try to suppress it with lockdowns. It was also clear that lockdowns would inflict enormous collateral damage, not only on education but also on public health, including treatment for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health. We will be dealing with the harm done for decades. Our children, the elderly, the middle class, the working class, and the poor around the world—all will suffer.

Schools closed in many other countries, too, but under heavy international criticism, Sweden kept its schools and daycares open for its 1.8 million children, ages one to 15. Why? While anyone can get infected, we have known since early 2020 that more than a thousandfold difference in Covid mortality risk holds between the young and the old. Children faced minuscule risk from Covid, and interrupting their education would disadvantage them for life, especially those whose families could not afford private schools, pod schools, or tutors, or to homeschool.

Test-optional admits had a first semester GPA 0.86 points lower than those who submitted SAT/ACT. A whole grade!

Max Meyer:

The median SAT of those who asked not to have their score considered for admission was nearly 300 points lower than those who wanted them considered (1160 vs 1420). That’s more than a standard deviation!

PragerU

Lisa Hagen:

Despite the suggestive sound of its name, PragerU is not a university. It’s a content creator. The conservative media nonprofit makes short, well-produced videos crafted to appeal to college students and young people. It has polished animations and titles like “What Radical Islam and the Woke Have in Common” and “Is There Really a Climate Emergency?”

Recently, news headlines have focused on its PragerU Kids content.

Arizona recently became the latest state where education officials have embraced online videos produced by PragerU. It follows at least four other states that approved Prager’s material for use in public school classrooms last year, though it’s unclear how many students have watched these videos.

“At least 79% of school districts surveyed by @WisconsinDPI in 2021 said they use a curriculum that is either not rated or is negatively rated by EdReports”

Danielle Duclos

With low reading proficiency scores across the state, USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin is exploring the causes and consequences of low literacy. This article is part of the By the Book series, which examines reading curriculum, instructional methods and solutions in K-12 education to answer the questions: Why do so many Wisconsin kids struggle to read, and what can be done about it?

To read other stories in the series, click here.

Wisconsin’s Joint Committee on Finance approved Monday a list of four reading curricula schools can adopt to be in compliance with the state’s new reading law, Act 20. The curricula approved are those recommended by the state’s Early Literacy Curriculum Council, a nine-member council created to specifically evaluate K-3 reading curriculums for their compliance with Act 20.

The four curricula approved are:

Core Knowledge Language Arts K-3
Our EL Education Language Arts
Wit and Wisdom with Pk-3 Reading Curriculum
Bookworms Reading and Writing K-3

Act 20, signed into law last summer, requires curriculum to be backed by the “science of reading”: a decades-old body of research that explains how the brain learns to read. It includes an emphasis on phonics, which teaches students the sounds letters make and how those sounds combine in predictable patterns to form words.

The law’s changes are aimed at improving reading proficiency in the state, which has been low for years. Fewer than half of students at the state’s five largest school districts are considered proficient in reading, according to state exam scores since 2018.

Part of the law’s revamping of reading instruction requires schools to use specific instructional methods that are systemic and explicit by next school year. This instruction must include fluency, phonological awareness, phonemic awareness, phonics, oral language development, vocabulary, writing, comprehension and building background knowledge.

Earlier: Legislation and Literacy: Wisconsin Early Reading Curriculum Selection

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Legislation and Literacy: Wisconsin Early Reading Curriculum Selection

mp3 audio | transcript.

Corri Hess:

Most school districts in the state now use a balanced literacy approach called “three-cueing,” that will now be illegal in all public and private schools.

The change comes at a time when fewer than 40 percent of third graders were proficient in reading on the most recent Wisconsin Forward Exam. Wisconsin’s achievement gap between Black and white fourth grade students in reading has often been the worst in the nation.

Quinton Klabon:

Joint Finance Committee FINALIZES reading curriculum list with the highest-quality options! 🎆🎇🎇🎆

Amplify: Core Knowledge
Great Minds: Wit And Wisdom and Geodes and Really Great Reading
Open Up: Bookworms
Open Up: EL

Karen Vaites:

Wisconsin’s 2024 curriculum list is final:

The ELCC recommendations carry the day, giving Wisconsin the strongest ELA curriculum list in the country! 👏

Also, the lobbyist box is empty. 👏

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Curious local media coverage.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Chicago Teacher Union Tax Increase Vote Activity

Austin Berg:

The Chicago Teachers Union is planning to take Chicago Public Schools students out of class this Friday to vote for Mayor Brandon Johnson’s $100 million real estate transfer tax hike.

To do this, the union is partnering with @BringChiHome, a political organization spending millions of dollars pushing a “yes” vote on Johnson’s tax hike proposal.

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Linda Carnine, Susie Andrist, and Jerry Silbert

Free speech at the UW- Madison

WILL:

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and Mountain States Legal Foundation (MSLF) are demanding that the University of Wisconsin-Madison treat all student organizations fairly and not punish a conservative organization for its viewpoints.

Young America’s Foundation (YAF) is hosting Daily Wire conservative commentator and author Mike Knowles on Wednesday, March 13th. The University is asking the organization to cover “security” costs –estimated at over $4,000 – despite never charging YAF or any other student organization (Left or Right leaning) for these costs before.

The Quotes: Dan Lennington, WILL Deputy Counsel stated, “Freedom of speech is not negotiable. Charging a conservative group thousands of dollars for a so-called ‘controversial’ speaker is ridiculous, especially since UW-Madison routinely hosts—and even pays—controversial leftwing speakers. UW-Madison should be happy to support multiple viewpoints and a robust exchange of ideas.”

Harrison Wells, chairman of Young Americans for Freedom at UW-Madison, stated, “Despite following policy and playing by the rules, our YAF chapter is treated unfairly by the University of Wisconsin and has faced intimidation, discrimination, and undue burdens that other clubs on campus do not face. We want to show students that there is more than the liberal bias they see on campus and UW has a responsibility to ensure our constitutional right to do so.”

Notes on the Milwaukee K-12 Tax and $pending increase referendum

Rory Linnane:

At the same time, the biggest reason funding for MPS has dropped, the report says, is that MPS doesn’t have as many students as it used to. That’s partly because there are fewer children in the city, and partly because of the growth of non-MPS schools, like independent charter schools and private schools that get tax-funded vouchers. When students leave MPS, the funding goes with them.

Mark Lisheron:

Add to that the district’s almost total lack of accounting for the $87 million referendum voters approved in 2020, with the final $3 million payout this year. Or the $772 million the district received from three COVID “emergency” bills, $506 million of that from the American Rescue Plan Act, which will allow the district to spend federal dollars through 2026.

“It’s like they looked at it and said ‘Let’s just shoot for the moon’ with this referendum, Andrekopoulos told the Badger Institute. “At some point, don’t you have to say ’No’?”

Merit vs DIE: The US taxpayer funded CHIPs Act

Alex Tabarrok:

The Hill has a good op-ed by Matt Cole and Chris Nicholson on how labor and DEI regulations are strangling the CHIPS act. It’s somewhat over the top, failure is overdetermined, but this is an important op-ed and directionally correct.

What was Project Follow Through?

Project Follow Through was probably the largest study of educational interventions that was ever conducted, either in the United States or elsewhere. While it is now largely forgotten, at the time it embodied many of the hopes and ideals of those who wanted a more just and equitable society and believed that education had an important role to play in those endeavors. Follow Through emerged from President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” announced in his 1964 State of the Union address in Congress.

Project Follow Through was originally conceived as a service project that would extend the types of support provided in Head Start to students in the primary grades. When it became clear that the cost of such an endeavor would be very large, the purpose was changed to determining the most effective educational interventions for students from low-income households. The Office of Education developed a research design, called “planned variation.” In contrast to a carefully controlled laboratory setting, this design would involve the implementation of educational innovations in real-life settings, but in the very best way possible. Sponsors of these innovations were required to “provide the community with a well-defined, theoretically consistent and coherent approach that could be adapted to local conditions,” and implement a “total program, rather than a small fragment, with a resulting possibility for a major impact on the child’s life.” Participating districts received supplemental funding of $750 for each Follow Through student to support additional costs for aides, materials, and staff travel. In addition, all children were provided health and dental care as well as nutritious food through meal programs. In total, Follow Through served over 10,000 students from low-income households in 180 communities at a cost, at that time, of 500 million dollars, a research expenditure that will likely never again be matched.

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

By Leon Yin, Davey Alba and Leonardo Nicoletti

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

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

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

“my participation because my commentary has been “focused on the idea of cancel culture”

Greg Lukianoff:

A profile of yours truly in The Hill! Protecting free speech on campus from attacks from both sides

“We knew that this would be a case so unpopular, that it might very well lead to the failure of FIRE because, essentially, we knew that at that young age, defending someone that unpopular, that might mean that nobody would want to donate to us anymore,” he added.

“And we said, ‘OK if this is the end at the beginning, we can live with that,’ and had a motto come out of it that said, ‘We’d rather crash this bus into a wall rather than be unprincipled.’”

Milwaukee Public Schools put out an “anonymous” community survey

Debbie Kuether:

Here is the raw data.

Audio Fingerprinting

Sergey Mostsevenko

Did you know that browsers can produce audio files you can’t hear, and those audio files can be used to identify web visitors? Apple knows, and the company decided to fight the identification possibility in Safari 17, but their measures don’t fully work.

Identifying with audio

The technique is called audio fingerprinting, and you can learn how it works in our previous article. In a nutshell, audio fingerprinting uses the browser’s Audio API to render an audio signal with OfflineAudioContext interface, which then transforms into a single number by adding all audio signal samples together. The number is the fingerprint, also called “identifier”.

The audio identifier is stable, meaning it doesn’t change when you clear the cookies or go into incognito mode. This is the key feature of fingerprinting. However, the identifier is not very unique, and many users can have the same identifier.

How One Texas School District Is Repurposing Staff Development Time to Embrace the Science of Reading

Edna Cruz & Alaura Mack

In 2020, the Aldine Independent School District became the first district in Texas to adopt a high-quality, knowledge-based reading curriculum. It was a seismic change for teachers, who had been using a familiar balanced literacy program with skills-focused lessons and leveled readers for several years. But it was a necessary change for students — in 2018-19, just 30 percent of Aldine third graders were reading at or above grade level.
Despite the challenges of COVID-19 and its effect on academic achievement, we have made strides by implementing the Amplify CKLA curriculum. Today, teachers lead highly structured, thematic units that focus on the same content over a period of weeks. All students work with the same knowledge-rich, grade-level texts, whether they read them independently or with support. That gives every student the opportunity to build vocabulary and a base of common knowledge, which boosts reading comprehension and fosters inclusive communities of learning.
Our students have made rapid progress — within the first two years, 50 percent of third graders were reading at or above grade level. The percentage of third graders scoring “well below” benchmark dropped from 48 percent to 36 percent. These are heavy lifts in Aldine, where about 90 percent of students are economically disadvantaged and more than half are English language learners.

How Fear of Regret Influences Our Decisions

Geoffrey Engelstein

One of the primary motivators of human behavior is avoiding regret. Before the legendary behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky formalized prospect theory and loss aversion, they believed that regret avoidance was at the root of the human behaviors they were studying. However, they learned that there are behaviors that regret avoidance could not explain and were led to a broader picture.

Let’s take a look at a simple game that sheds a bit more light on the psychology of regret.

I have two dice — one red, one white — and two identical cups. I secretly place one die under each cup (no trickery), mix them up, and ask you to select the cup with the red die. You did not see me put the dice under the cups, so you have absolutely no information on which to base your decision. If you make the right choice, I give you $5. If not, you gain nothing.

On “Cultural Taxation”: The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion arsenal has a new weapon.

Mariusz Ozminkowski

After decades of the academy’s never-ending stream of new jargon, one can’t be blamed for ignoring another entry. But as with all the others, what begins as a crackpot idea quickly finds its way into university rules and regulations. That’s what’s happening with “cultural taxation.”

For a few years now, individual campuses of California State University have been considering turning what seemed like just another grievance into an opportunity to promote a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda.

What begins as a crackpot idea often finds its way into university regulations.A typical university policy statement (such as this one from California State University, Fullerton) reads, “Faculty members from traditionally underrepresented groups may experience additional demands on their time, a phenomenon termed ‘cultural taxation.’ Cultural taxation involves the obligation to demonstrate good citizenship towards the institution by serving its needs for ethnic representation and cultural understanding, often without commensurate institutional rewards.”

An article promoted by the California Faculty Association further explains that “minority faculty are expected to serve as role models and mentors for minority students.” It adds, “Clearly, serving on university and department committees as the ‘minority’ representative is taxing in itself. But being expected to ‘speak for your people’ as well, is a form of ‘taxation without representation’ at whose mere consideration, would make most faculty shudder” [sic].

OPENAI GPT Tests show that there is a racial bias

When asked to rank those resumes 1,000 times, GPT 3.5 — the most broadly-used version of the model — favored names from some demographics more often than others, to an extent that would fail benchmarks used to assess job discrimination against protected groups. While this test is a simplified version of a typical HR workflow, it isolated names as a source of bias in GPT that could affect hiring decisions. The interviews and experiment show that using generative AI for recruiting and hiring poses a serious risk for automated discrimination at scale.

Before Claudine Gay retroactively corrected her plagiarized PhD thesis… there was Terrell Strayhorn

Christopher Brunet:

So, what prompted his major downgrade from Ohio State to LeMoyne-Owen College in 2018?

LeMoyne-Owen College is not even ranked and has a 98% acceptance rate for undergrads.

Of course, there are always idiosyncratic preferences and family reasons for moving to lower schools, but in general, no rational tenured professor would voluntarily accept such a major downgrade in status and salary.

The answer is that Strayhorn was ‘’ousted’’ from Ohio State in 2017 over financial misconduct.

Inequality Within Countries is Falling: Underreporting-Robust Estimates of World Poverty, Inequality and the Global Distribution of Income

Maxim Pinkovskiy, Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Kasey Chatterji-Len & William H. Nober

Household surveys suffer from persistent and growing underreporting. We propose a novel procedure to adjust reported survey incomes for underreporting by estimating a model of misreporting whose main parameter of interest is the elasticity of regional national accounts income to regional survey income, which is closely related to the elasticity of underreporting with respect to income. We find this elasticity to be substantial but roughly constant over time, implying a large but relatively constant correction to survey-derived inequality estimates. Underreporting of income by the bottom 50% of the world income distribution has become particularly important in recent decades. We reconfirm the findings of the literature that global poverty and inequality have declined dramatically between 1980 and 2019. Finally, we find that within-country inequality is falling on average, and has been largely constant since the 1990s.

A Milwaukee K-12 Referendum Event

Wisconsin policy Forum:

Join us Friday, March 22, for our popular virtual event series, Forum Friday! This installment will focus on the April 2 referendum that will ask city of Milwaukee voters whether the Milwaukee Public Schools should be allowed to exceed state revenue limits by $252 million annually after a phase-in over four years.

We’ll begin with a brief presentation that will lay out the facts about the ballot question and its impacts on taxpayers. Then we’ll interview MPS’ superintendent on the need for additional dollars and how they would be spent. We’ll follow that up with a discussion with three panelists who have extensive knowledge of K-12 education in Milwaukee and MPS’ financial needs.

The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken

Simon Willison:

Four weeks ago, GPT-4 remained the undisputed champion: consistently at the top of every key benchmark, but more importantly the clear winner in terms of “vibes”. Almost everyone investing serious time exploring LLMs agreed that it was the most capable default model for the majority of tasks—and had been for more than a year.

Today that barrier has finally been smashed. We have four new models, all released to the public in the last four weeks, that are benchmarking near or even above GPT-4. And the all-important vibes are good, too!

Those models come from four different vendors.

University of Virginia Spends $20 Million On 235 DEI Employees, With Some Making $587,340 Per Year

Adam Andrzejewski

The University of Virginia (UVA) has at least 235 employees under its “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)” banner — including 82 students — whose total cost of employment is estimated at $20 million. That’s $15 million in cash compensation plus an additional 30-percent for the annual cost of their benefits.

In contrast, last Friday, the University of Florida dismissed its DEI bureaucracy, saving students and taxpayers $5 million per year. The university terminated 13 full-time DEI positions and 15 administrative faculty appointments. Those funds have been re-programmed into a “faculty recruitment fund” to attract better people who actually teach students.

No such luck for learning at Virginia’s flagship university – founded by Thomas Jefferson no less. UVA has a much deeper DEI infrastructure.

Reform or abolition must await this summer’s anticipated changes in the school’s Board of Visitors. At least until then, the very highly compensated, generally non-teaching, DEI staffers are safely embedded throughout the entire university – while costing students and taxpayers a fortune.

Our team of auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reviewed the university payroll file for 2023 to sort out the DEI position head counts, compensation, and then estimated the cost of benefits.

Notes on Taxpayer funded Censorship and Primary Sources

Joy Pullman:

NewsGuard announced last week it’s using AI to automatically prevent American citizens from seeing information online that challenges government and corporate media claims about elections ahead of the 2024 voting season.

“[P]latforms and search engines” including Microsoft’s Bing use NewsGuard’s “ratings” to stop people from seeing disfavored information sources, information, and topics in their social media feeds and online searches. Now censorship is being deployed not only by humans but also by automated computer code, rapidly raising an Iron Curtain around internet speech.

Newsguard rates The Federalist as a “maximum” risk for publishing Democrat-disapproved information, even though The Federalist accurately reports major stories about which NewsGuard-approved outlets continually spread disinformation and misinformation. Those have already included the Russia-collusion hoax, the Brett Kavanaugh rape hoax, numerous Covid-19 narratives, the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and the deadly 2020 George Floyd riots.

——

Trevor Aaronson, Eric L. VanDussen

But the truth about the Whitmer kidnapping case is far more complicated. This story is based on thousands of pages of internal FBI reports and more than 250 hours of undercover recordings obtained by The Intercept. The secret files offer an extraordinary view inside a high-profile domestic terrorism investigation, revealing in stark relief how federal agents have turned the war on terror inward, using informant-led stings to chase after potential domestic extremists just as the bureau spent the previous two decades setting up entrapment stings that targeted Muslims in supposed Islamist extremist plots. The files also suggest that federal agents have become reckless, turning a blind eye to public safety risks that, if addressed, could disrupt the government’s cases.

The FBI documents and recordings reveal that federal agents at times put Americans in danger as the Whitmer plot metastasized. In one instance, the FBI knew that Wolverine Watchmen militia members would enter the Michigan Capitol with firearms — and agents suspected that one man might even have had a live grenade — but did not stop them. (The grenade turned out to be nonfunctional.) Another time, federal agents intervened when local police officers in Michigan were about to confiscate firearms from two of the FBI’s targets, who were on a terrorist watchlist. Local law enforcement had received reports from concerned citizens who saw the men loading their guns before entering a hardware store.

The files also raise questions about whether the FBI pursued a larger, secret effort to encourage political violence in the run-up to the 2020 election. At least one undercover FBI agent and two informants in the Michigan case were also involved in stings centering on plots to assassinate the governor of Virginia and the attorney general of Colorado.

The FBI refused to answer a list of questions. “Unfortunately, due to ongoing litigation, we are unable to comment,” said Gabrielle Szlenkier, a spokesperson for the FBI in Michigan. Robeson, through his lawyer, also declined to comment.

Federal agents paid Robeson nearly $20,000 to participate in a conspiracy that evolved into a loose plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan, according to the documents. But FBI agents knew that two other informants and some of the defendants in the Whitmer case believed that Robeson was the plot’s true architect.

Notes on North Carolina school Governance

Gary Robertson:

While the state superintendent is head of the Department of Public Instruction, statewide school policy is left to the State Board of Education, for which the governor makes the most appointments.

Truitt, whose committee outspent Morrow, was Gov. Pat McCrory’s education adviser and chancellor of Western Governors University in North Carolina.

While the election “did not go the way I had hoped, I’m deeply proud of what we accomplished and I am gratified by the support of educators, parents, school and legislative leaders and so many others from across the state,” Truitt wrote on Facebook on Wednesday. Her term ends at the end of the year.

Morrow participated in the march on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to protest Joe Biden as the 2020 presidential winner, but she said she left the area when ordered by authorities and didn’t enter the building, The News & Observer of Raleigh reported.

Associate professor says she wants to ‘expose’ how UK universities are ‘conceding to censorship demands of some Chinese students’

Robert Mendick:

A leading UK university has banned an academic from teaching a “provocative” course involving China to protect its commercial interests, The Telegraph can disclose…

——-

Houston Principle Accountability

Sam Gonzales Kelly:

Miles argues that current student achievement data broadly suggests principal performance at HISD does not meet the highest standards, and that the urgency of a principal’s work “requires a high level of responsibility and accountability for results.”

“Our premise is that a high percentage of proficient or distinguished principals should be correlated to significant improvements in student achievement across the District,” Miles wrote in the LEAD guidebook. “While we hope to have more than 80 percent of the principals at the proficient level or higher someday, current student achievement data suggest that the percentage of proficient and distinguished principals is lower.”

The evaluations are taking place against the backdrop of dozens of principal departures that have already occurred since Miles was appointed to his position by the Texas Education Agency on June 1. Some principals were removed by Miles’ administration for their perceived inability to adhere to his strict demands; others left of their own accord, saying their schools had become a hostile workplace.

McDonough said that the timing of the announcement, just two days before the district goes on spring break, could damage employees’ already fragile morale.

Chicago Teacher union demand list

Illinois Policy:

Leaked 142-page list of Chicago Teachers Union demands approved by delegates.

Last week, Stacy Davis Gates said it would cost $50 billion.

Some thought it was a joke. But it could cost even more.

Suspensions are up 25 percent in 2024 in Milwaukee Public Schools

by Julien Johnson

As suspensions increase in Milwaukee Public Schools, Student Resource Officers are still waiting to be implemented in these schools. Institute for Reforming Government’s Quinton Klabon joined WTMJ’s Political Power Hour to discuss why the process is being stalled.

Klabon said the original deadline to decide on implementing 25 SROs into Milwaukee Public Schools was January 1st. He went to the latest MPS Board meeting on February 29th to see what they’re doing about the endeavor.

“[They said], ‘We’re working on it,’” he said. “‘We went to Washington D.C., we went to Atlanta, we asked what they’re doing, we talked to students and… we’re working on it.’”

Like everything else in Sulzberger’s paper, the NYT bestseller list is fake.”

Balaji:

They were forced to admit in court that it’s not a ranked list. It’s actually “editorial content” and they can exclude books they don’t like.
killzoneblog.com/2019/01/cracki…

Notes on Google’s Culture

David Kiferbaum:

Google used to be a place to ask questions. “You must make it safe to ask the tough questions and to tell the truth at all times, even when the truth hurts,” wrote Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg in their 2014 book How Google Works. “When you learn of something going off the rails, and the news is delivered in a timely, forthright fashion, this means — in its own, screwed-up way — that the process is working.”

Inside Google today, the process is not working.Previously accessible Google executives have disappeared, once acceptable questions can’t be asked, and a dispassionate arrogance has taken hold. Unsurprisingly, the company’s deficient culture is showing up in the product, most vividly in its recent Gemini debacle. As a user and shareholder, I’m concerned.

——-

Many taxpayer funded k-12 systems use Google Services, including Madison.

New court documents claim brother of Laken Riley murder suspect likely a member of Venezuelan gang

WSB Radio:

A new motion requesting the detention of the brother of a man accused of murdering a 22-year-old nursing student on the University of Georgia campus reveals new details about the case.

Laken Riley was beaten to death as she ran on a trail on the UGA campus on Feb. 22. Venezuelan national Jose Ibarra was arrested the next day and charged with her murder.

His brother, Diego Ibarra, was also detained after police determined he showed them a fake green card.

On Thursday, Diego Ibarra is set for a probable cause and detention hearing. The U.S. Attorney’s Office will also present the government’s motion to detain him at 10 a.m. in Macon.

New court documents reveal that after Riley’s death, officers circulated photos of a man in a distinctive baseball cap they considered a suspect. The cap had an Adidas logo on it.

WordPress data mining and sharing

Jason Koebler:

Update: After this article was published, Automattic told 404 Media that it is “deprecating” the Firehose: “SocialGist is rolling off as a firehose customer this month and the remaining customers are winding down in the coming months, both things that were already in motion for different reasons,” an Automattic spokesperson said. “We’re in the process of updating our developer page to indicate that we have been deprecating the old firehose for several months.” The spokesperson did not answer the original questions we posed to them about the data supply chain for the Firehose.

In September 2023, WordPress.com quietly changed the language of a developer page explaining how to access a “Firehose” of roughly a million daily WordPress posts to add that the feeds are “intended for partners like search engines, artificial intelligence (AI) products and market intelligence providers who would like to ingest a real-time stream of new content from a wide spectrum of publishers.” Before then, this page did not note the AI use case.

This is notable because of the fervor and confusion that has arisen this week after we broke the news that Automattic, which owns WordPress.com and Tumblr, was preparing to send user data to OpenAI and Midjourney. Since then, there has been much discussion about which WordPress blogs would be included, which would not, whether data was already sent, and whether people who opt out would have their data redacted retroactively.

Mysteries of a giant, moving Moroccan star dune

Steven Morris:

They are impressive, mysterious structures that loom out of deserts on the Earth and are also found on Mars and on Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan.

Experts from universities including Aberystwyth in Wales have now pinpointed the age of a star dune in a remote area of Morocco and uncovered details about its formation and how it moves across the desert.

Prof Geoff Duller of the department of geography and earth sciences at Aberystwyth said: “They are extraordinary things, one of the natural wonders of the world. From the ground they look like pyramids but from the air you see a peak and radiating off it in three or four directions these arms that make them look like stars.”

Milwaukee Achievement Gap Reduction

Isral debruin

Looking at the latest “Achievement Gap Reduction” program report from MPS.

Reading outcomes are really troubling — looks like reading performance slid from 2023 to 2024 in 3 of 4 grade levels.

Literacy experts started Wisconsin’s curriculum list. Will lobbyists finish it?

Karen Vaites:

In recent weeks, we’ve wondered which curriculum list would prevail in Wisconsin.

Would it be the list proposed by the expert Early Literacy Curriculum Council (four programs, widely acclaimed in the literacy community) or the list proposed by Wisconsin DPI (eleven curricula, the top-rated programs on the increasingly-under-fireEdReports review site), which DPI’s own staff characterized as meeting “minimal level” quality standards?

Today brought good news: wisdom prevailed in Wisconsin’s Joint Finance Committee, which rejected DPI’s proposal. The four high-quality curricula proposed by ELCC seem to remain on the table. Local literacy advocates are cheering.

But the story doesn’t end there. Lobbyists have been hard at work, and the quality of the list may yet be watered-down with programs from large publishers.

And when districts go to select curriculum, we have no reason to believe that the cream will rise to the top in America’s Dairyland. Usually, the opposite happens.

Here’s what Wisconsinites need to know.

——-

More. And. DDWI.

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Notes on DIE and academia: “The problems are very real, and very urgent, but the biggest of them are best fixed from the outside”

David Butterfield:

DEI, EDI, DIE — whatever order the acronym comes in — advances a conformist system bereft of intellectual depth: in an academic context, Diversity means uniformity, Equality equity, and Inclusion exclusion of those who challenge the narrative.

This ideological system is unquestionably obstructing freedom in academia: “DEI statements” are now tied in with job applications, grant proposals, and criteria for promotion. For a handful of academics, writing these is an act of reverence, for most one of rhetoric; for some, it is a ritual of humiliation, since their traditional and technical work is simply unable to talk the talk of modern progressivism.

Those who set about “delivering diversity” — rather than teaching the subjects they are paid to — very often combine statistical ignorance with a complete lack of curiosity about cause and nuance. Blithe assumptions are made about what a given identity group may want introducing to, or removing from, the syllabus; patronising and offensive claims are made about what is and is not appropriate for teaching and reading; crude categories are dreamt up and imposed, and only carefully scrutinised when the results seem to point in the right direction of “representation”. Yet the question is not even posed, let alone answered, of what pool of people demands representation, and why.

——

“while a sad bigotry of low expectations grows.”

“Meanwhile, class time is taken up by teaching skills that used to be instilled in school: the ability to read critically, write clearly, and structure arguments. “

It is no accident that the Humanities survived for millennia in a context where they formed an essential part of liberal education; it is no accident that most universities were founded with some religious commitment undergirding their studies. Harvard’s motto Veritas (Truth), Yale’s Lux et veritas (Light and truth), Princeton’s Dei sub numine viget (She thrives under God’s power), Oxford’s Dominus illuminatio mea (The Lord is my light) and Cambridge’s hinc lucem et pocula sacra(From here light and sacred draughts) are not idle formulations that sounded good to spin doctors. All are born from the historic importance of Christianity in the university sector.

Wisconsin Act 20 Literacy Curriculum Update

Quinton Klabon:

Joint Finance Committee REJECTS the curriculum lists presented to them.

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

K-12 tax & $pending climate: US salaries are falling. Employers say compensation is just ‘resetting’

By Alex Christian:

Salaries for new roles are stagnating – and in some cases, falling. Some employers may be looking to cut costs, but the lack of wage growth may be a matter of post-pandemic correction.

The mass US layoffs of the past few years are continuing. In 2024 alone, thousands of workers across many sectors, including media and technology, have lost their jobs and are on the hunt for new ones. But some are finding an unwelcome surprise as they scan listings for open roles. A salary bump is all but impossible; in many cases, wages seem lower than their previous pay – even for the same jobs.

They aren’t imagining things. A 2023 report on pay trends from ZipRecruiter showed 48% of 2,000 US companies surveyed lowered pay for certain roles.

—-

The taxpayer funded Madison School District and City of Madison are planning substantial tax & $pending increase referendums.

“The mantra of Madison leaders in 2024 seems to be that whatever the problem, doing away with zoning restrictions is at least part of the answer”

Paul Fanlund:

The west area plan appears to be stealthily moving ahead with what seems like two goals: to proactively remove possible homeowner zoning objections to ever-more apartment density, and to make life more difficult for autos by narrowing streets and adding bicycle lanes. The latter seems to be part of a city effort to put us on — catch this insulting euphemism — a “road diet.”

Now, I can predict the blowback. Yes, my house is within walking distance of the Hill Farm Swim Club. We were once members. I will be called a selfish, not-in-my-backyard oldster. That same criticism came when I wrote skeptically about the massively disruptive and expensive bus rapid transit project.

My point is that whether the housing shortage is any more a “crisis” today than it has been through previous decades, the views of homeowners should not be so quickly dismissed.

Think the city’s approach is even-handed? Consider this.

In my view, city government has come to be dominated by a worldview hellbent against car drivers and single-family homeowners in a way that feels generational. Older, property-owning Madisonians are to be patronized, condescended to, and dismissed as NIMBYs. Their objections are ignored or belittled.

Groups such as the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce and Downtown Madison Inc. are cheerleading for more apartment density to accommodate an expected influx of young workers.

“education for its own sake is a bit dodgy”; notes on the Humanities

David Butterfield

It has long been a cliché to speak of a crisis in the Humanities. As long ago as 1964, J.H. Plumb published a collection of essays under that title. Six decades later, and an article about external crises for the humanities writes itself: declining numbers, declining funding, declining societal value, declining autonomy and declining expectations.

These issues are rehearsed every year, drifting, unabated, in depressing directions. Yet what is rarely spoken of is the crisis within the Humanities: many of those entrusted with nurturing and propagating these disciplines have lost all sense of shared purpose.

To start with first principles: “Humanities” is not modern branding. The term comes from the very epicentre of Roman culture: in a law court of 63 bc, Cicero first spoke of studia humanitatis (“the pursuits of humanity”) to highlight the learning of his adversary, the austere Stoic grandee Marcus Cato. Fundamentally, humanitas meant the human condition, but it evolved to describe both humane conduct and a liberal education — synonymous with the artes liberales.

With tuition fees now far higher, many have thought it wiser to follow the money

But the emergence, and mind-boggling expansion, of career administrators has put paid to that. They, without question, are in charge.

These embarrassing decisions were made during those topsy-turvy days when an Education Secretary (Charles Clarke) could opine that “education for its own sake is a bit dodgy”, that government funding should be reserved for studies that have “clear usefulness”, and that “the medieval concept of a community of scholars seeking truth” might deserve one per cent of their current funding to keep them going as “an adornment to our society”. This destructive attitude, though mocked at the time, has now infiltrated the Humanities.

——

Trevor Aaronson, Eric L. VanDussen

Civics: The Informant at the Heart of the Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Plot Was a Liability. So Federal Agents Shut Him Up.

“A saying we have in my office is, ‘Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,’ right?” Despite federal and state trials involving the kidnapping plot, this recording — which goes to the heart of questions about whether the FBI entrapped the would-be kidnappers — was never allowed into evidence. The Intercept exclusively obtained the full recording and is publishing key portions for the first time.

America’s elite universities are bloated, complacent and illiberal

The Economist:

The struggle over America’s elite universities—who controls them and how they are run–continues to rage, with lasting consequences for them and the country. Harvard faces a congressional investigation into antisemitism; Columbia has just been hit with a lawsuit alleging “endemic” hostility towards Jews. Top colleges are under mounting pressure to reintroduce rigorous test-based admissions policies, after years of backsliding on meritocracy. And it is likely that the cosy tax breaks these gilded institutions enjoy will soon attract greater scrutiny. Behind all this lies a big question. Can American universities, flabby with cash and blighted by groupthink, keep their competitive edge?

America Enters the Samizdat Era

Matt Taibbi:

Ten years ago PBS did a feature that quoted a Russian radio personality calling Samizdat the “precursor to the Internet.” Sadly this is no longer accurate. Even a decade ago Internet platforms were mechanical wonders brimming with anarchic energy whose ability to transport ideas to millions virally and across borders made episodes like the Arab Spring possible. Governments rightly trembled before the destabilizing potential of tools like Twitter, whose founders as recently as 2012 defiantly insisted they would remain “neutral” on content control, seeing themselves as the “free speech wing of the free speech party.”

As writers like former CIA analyst Martin Gurri began noticing long before the election of Donald Trump, the Internet gave ordinary people access to information in ways that before had never been allowed. The inevitable result was that populations all over the world began to see more clearly the warts of leaders and governments that had previously been covered up, thanks to tight control over the flow of information. It also made communication and organization of dissident movements much easier. We started to see this with Occupy and the Tea Party in the United States, and the aforementioned Arab Spring, but the election of Donald Trump was the Rubicon-crossing event for information overlords.

I had the privilege (misfortune?) of seeing how presidential campaign journalism worked before the Internet took over. Politicians needed the mainstream press to reach high office. Sitting among the traveling press on campaigns of people like John Kerry and Barack Obama, I heard how campaign reporters talked, how they thought of their jobs. They were fiercely protective of their gatekeeping role, which gave them enormous power. If reporters didn’t think a candidate was good enough for them — if he was too “kooky” like Ron Paul, too “elfin” like Dennis Kucinich, or too “lazy” as just a handful of influential reporters decided about Fred Thompson — the “Boys on the Bus” would snort and trade cutting remarks in riffing sessions before and after events. Campaigns would be elevated or die in these moments. I thought it was crazy, and said so in print, which made me a pariah, and I never thought it would end.

“There is actually no role for lockdowns,”

Joe Nocera and Bethany McLean

Michael Osterholm, the prominent epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, also doesn’t think lockdowns did any good. “There is actually no role for lockdowns,” he says. “Look at what happened in China. They locked down for years, and when they finally relaxed that effort, they had a million deaths in two weeks.” As for flattening the curve, “that’s not a real lockdown,” Osterholm says. “You’re just reducing contact for a few weeks to help the hospitals.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci was probably the best-known defender of lockdowns as a life-saving measure. But the policy continues to have many defenders within the public health establishment. Howard Markel, a doctor and medical historian at the University of Michigan, believes they succeeded. “The amount of lives saved was just incredible,” he says. Markel pointed to an August 2023 study by the Royal Society of London that concluded that “stay-at-home orders, physical distancing, and restrictions on gathering size were repeatedly found to be associated with significant reduction in SARS-CoV-2 transmission, with more stringent measures having greater effects.”

Still, the weight of the evidence seems to be with those who say that lockdowns did not save many lives. By our count, there are at least 50 studies that come to the same conclusion. After The Big Fail went to press, The Lancet published a studycomparing the COVID infection rate and death rate in the 50 states. It concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths disproportionately clustered in U.S. states with lower mean years of education, higher poverty rates, limited access to quality health care, and less interpersonal trust — the trust that people report having in one another.” These sociological factors appear to have made a bigger difference than lockdowns (which were “associated with a statistically significant and meaningfully large reduction in the cumulative infection rate, but not the cumulative death rate”).

In all of this discussion, however, there is a crucial fact that tends to be forgotten: COVID wasn’t the only thing people died from in 2020 and 2021. Cancer victims went undiagnosed because doctors were spending all their time on COVID patients. Critical surgeries were put on hold. There was a dramatic rise in deaths due to alcohol and drug abuse. According to the CDC, one in five high-school students had suicidal thoughts during the pandemic. Domestic violence rose. One New York emergency-room doctor recalls that after the steady stream of COVID patients during March and April of 2020, “our ER was basically empty.” He added, “Nobody was coming in because they were afraid of getting COVID — or they believed we were only handling COVID patients.”

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Notes on school discipline

Daniel Buck:

A teacher discovers that rewards and consequences work…

Civics: Freedom of Speech at the New York Times

Jonathan Turley:

The Cotton column led to editors being forced out after public confessions and recriminations. Now, after Democratic politicians actually ordered such a deployment, the Times has offered little more than a journalistic shrug.

Hochul announced she will be deploying 750 members of the National Guard to New York City’s subway system to assist the New York Police Department (NYPD) in the crackdown on crime, including bag searches at the entrances of busy train stations.

I have previously written on the hypocrisy of the Times in how it has handled the Cotton affair. The column itself was historically accurate. Indeed, critics never explained what was historically false (or outside the range of permissible interpretation) in the column. Moreover, writers Taylor Lorenz, Caity Weaver, Sheera Frankel, Jacey Fortin, and others said that such columns put black reporters in danger and condemned publishing Cotton’s viewpoint.

——

Related: “I did not examine the evidence” from an “esteemed public educator” and “proud product of the public school system.”

Civics: Federal attorneys and the FBI now control academic information about sensitive science programs involving disinformation research and virus bioweapons studies.

Paul Thacker:

The federal government is now tracking public universities’ release of public information involving federally funded science programs for “disinformation research” and bioweapons virus science. Both “disinformation research” and biodefense virus studies have come under increasing scrutiny from Congress and the public —“disinformation research” for helping the government censor Americans and bioweapons research for potentially causing the pandemic by funding dangerous gain-of-function virus studies in Wuhan, China.

Officials are deleting the data we need for a more sensible debate

Neil O’Brien:

Whatever you think about migration policy, the one thing most people can agree on is that we should try to improve the data available to policymakers.

But that is not what’s happening. Quite the reverse.

HMRC used to publish data on the amount of tax paid by nationality (together with data on tax credit and child benefit claims). In fact I have used this data in previous posts.

At the start of December I emailed HMRC asking when the data for 2021 would be published. I got an email back from HMRC today, saying it won’t be: in fact it has been discontinued, and won’t be published again:

“The book dives into trying to figure out why kids are having so many mental health problems”

Jason Helmes:

A few key takeaways from the book:

A constant attention on how kids are “feeling” or “thinking” is causing negative outcomes.

Constantly ruminating on your emotions and how you feel negatively impacts your mental health. If all you do is focus on your emotions, you are destined to be anxious or depressed.

We incessantly ask kids how they’re feeling, if they’re happy, how their mental health is, etc, and this is creating kids who think they’re fragile instead of resilient.

Trying to solve every problem for kids has caused a generation who can’t do anything for themselves.

We (Gen X) were told to “suck it up” or “you’ll live” or “rub some dirt on it” all the time. Many of us came to the conclusion this is “bad parenting” because our feelings were neglected, and we vowed not to do this to our own children.

Because of that, kids immediately over-dramatize everything that happens to them, making mountains out of molehills, and thinking the world must revolve around their emotions and feelings.

You develop confidence and strong mental health by doing things, not by thinking or via therapy.

On Reforming Harvard

By Frederick Hess and Michael Q. McShane

Former Harvard President Lawrence Summers recently tweeted, “I cannot think of a worse stretch in Harvard history than the last few months.”

He has a point.

Last summer, the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard that the university’s race-based admissions criteria violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment. Then in December, President Claudine Gay struggled to condemn the harassment and threats that Jewish students faced on campus from pro-Palestinian activists after Hamas instigated a war against Israel. Apparently, the university rated as the worst in the nation for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression had finally encountered some speech it felt obliged to protect.

Harvard has also come under justifiable criticism for suspect and inconsistent academic standards. Gay resigned in January when reports emerged that her sparse publication record was rife with plagiarism. The university’s chief diversity officer and a prominent neuroscientist there are also facing serious allegations of research malpractice.

In the wake of all this, it can be tempting to just say, “Burn it all down.” For years, progressives at Harvard and its peers have sought to use these institutions as a platform to promote political and social agendas, cultivate groupthink, and marginalize conservative thought.

“only to be told someone had already voted in her name”

Sarah Smith:

Harris County Clerk Teneshia Hudspeth issued a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter, pointing out that voters are asked to review and confirm the information on the iPad screen when they are being qualified.

“In this instance, the DA’s partner must not have noticed that the information was not hers, and proceeded to sign in and vote under DA Ogg’s name,” Hudspeth said in a statement. “Clerical errors can occur at the polls. It is the voter’s responsibility to verify that their information in the iPad screen is correct.”

Hudspeth said Ogg’s partner signed her own name as confirmation. The clerk’s office was able to rectify the error and said Ogg has been able to vote since 8:24 a.m. The poll book was corrected so that Ogg could cast a ballot.

Taxpayer Funded Madison Schools Underperform

Dave Cieslewicz:

A few weeks ago I wrote about a study that showed that Madison public schools are underperforming both state and national averages for math scores. And while everyone is bouncing back a bit after COVID, Madison students’ improvement has severely lagged.

Now comes a Wisconsin State Journal report on absenteeism. It’s bad everywhere but again worse in Madison. The three charts below, from the State Journal story written by reporter Chris Rickert, compare Madison to Middleton and Sun Prairie.

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Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

By Max Abelson, Simone Foxman, and Ava Benny-Morrison

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?

Notes on Censorship at the BBC

Gordon Raynor:

A former BBC journalist was subjected to a disciplinary process for tweeting that there was no scientific support for the idea that “males can be women”.

Cath Walton revealed that she was called before an internal BBC hearing after she also said that the issue of gender identity was “contested”.

Edgewood gives Guard members half-off deal for teaching degrees

By Kayla Huynh

In an effort to address the state’s teacher shortage, Edgewood College is launching an online program to help Wisconsin National Guard members and their spouses earn their master’s degrees and state teaching licenses.

The program allows the state’s 10,000 National Guard members — including those in its Army and Air Force branches — as well as their spouses, to earn a 30-credit master’s degree for nearly half the cost as they work toward becoming fully licensed educators.

“The teacher shortage is a pressing and critical need,” said Michael Meissen, Edgewood’s senior director of education, who worked in public schools for nearly 40 years, including 14 as principal of La Follette High School. “We’re taking an all hands on deck approach to partner with any and all we can to meet the needs in the classroom.”

The partnership comes as Wisconsin schools have continued to struggle to fill teacher vacancies. For years, districts have faced historic teacher shortages, with fewer students pursuing education degrees in the U.S. and districts reporting smaller applicant pools.

“raise reading levels of forgotten tweens, teens and adults”

Eric Nixon:

Storyshares is a literacy hub with a mission to raise awareness about literacy and support reading and learning among school students and adults.

Utilizing “Remix Decodables,” the first ever decodable chapter book series, the company reinforces sounds and syllables for early and foundational literacy skills. The program prompts higher phonetic engagement for developing readers at third grade level and beyond, said CEO Louise Baigelman.

“That includes adult learners who have the same, if not bigger disconnect between what they want to read about or the characters in the books being relatable in another adult character, but still having the story told in an easy to read way.”

Ace of Aces: or, why you should Do Maths as a game designer

Kit Barry:

There are no dice, no counters, no moving parts. You don’t even need to be in the same place as your opponent, you just need to be able to give each other page numbers. It takes less than a minute to learn how to play—even though you now have full control over a pretty sophisticated flying machine—and creates quick-fire play that makes total sense in the seat-of-your-pants early aviation era.

Error correction is effortlessly built in: if you don’t end up on matching page numbers, one of you goofed.

Wall Street’s DIE Retreat Has Officially Begun

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has made a surprising change to its “Possibilities Summit” for Black college students: It’s opened the program to White students.

At Bank of America Corp., certain internal programs that used to focus on women and minorities have been broadened to include everyone.

Leap Year Notes

Rachel:

It’s that time again, when code written in the past four years shows up in our lives and breaks something. Still, while you’re enjoying the clown show of game companies telling people to manually set the clocks on their consoles and people not being able to fill up their cars, keep one thing in mind:

Only half of the fun of a leap year happens on February 29th.

The rest of it happens in ten months, when a bunch more code finds out that it’s somehow day 366, and promptly flips out. Thus, instead of preparing to party, those people get to spend the day finding out why their device is being stupid all of the sudden.

How Computers Entered the Classroom, 1960–2000

Carmen Flury and Michael Geiss

In the history of education, the question of how computers were introduced into European classrooms has so far been largely neglected. This edited volume strives to address this gap. The contributions shed light on the computerization of education from a historical perspective, by attending closely to the different actors involved – such as politicians, computer manufacturers, teachers, and students –, political rationales and ideologies, as well as financial, political, or organizational structures and relations.

The case studies highlight differences in political and economic power, as well as in ideological reasoning and the priorities set by different stakeholders in the process of introducing computers into education. However, the contributions also demonstrate that simple cold war narratives fail to capture the complex dynamics and entanglements in the history of computers as an educational technology and a subject taught in schools.

Oregon Decriminalized Hard Drugs. Now It’s Reversing Course.

Jim Carlton:

On Friday, the Oregon Senate voted to make possession of small amounts of hard drugs a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. The bill, which was the result of months of discussions by lawmakers in both parties, passed the state House on Thursday.

Grayber, who is also a Democratic member of the state House, used her experience on the streets to explain why she voted yes.

“I’ve worked so many overdoses,” Grayber said in a speech to her fellow legislators before the bill passed the state House. “I came into this building two weeks ago knowing that we had to do something, because the status quo of what we are doing is not working.”

Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek has previously said she is open to restoring criminal penalties for drug possession. Her office didn’t respond to a request for comment on the bill.

Backers of the 2020 ballot measure, which passed with 58% support, successfully convinced their fellow residents of the left-learning state that decriminalization would mean fewer nonviolent drug addicts in prison and more in treatment.

“At some point, don’t you have to say ‘No’?”

Mark Lisheron:

How in good conscience, former Milwaukee Public Schools superintendent Bill Andrekopoulos wonders, can the school district ask taxpayers for $252 million without considering closing a single school?

The district’s School Support Referendum website can tell you why district leaders say the money is needed and, generally, how and when the money would be used. The site also tells voters who are being asked on April 2 to support the referendum how much of a tax hit they will take, $367 on a home assessed at the $170,000 median price of a home in Milwaukee.

Everything in the pitch to taxpayers down to the penny is predicated on the status quo, as schools across the district are grossly under-enrolled and enrollment continues to sink, he says.

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Competitive school board races in Monona (Madison are uniparty – uncontested of course)

David Wahlberg:

The Monona Grove School Board candidate forum will be from 1 to 2:30 p.m. Four candidates are running for three three-year terms. They are incumbents Eric Hartz and Philip Haven, and challengers Katie Moureau and Janice Stone.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Notes on taxpayer supported by Madison’s K-12 budget plans

Abbey Machtig:

Board members and administration, however, have begun talking more seriously about adding referendum questions to the November ballot to help remedy the financial uncertainty. If the district moves forward with referendums and voters approve the measures, local property taxes will increase beyond the levy limits set by the state.

This proposal from the district comes after the 8% wage increase MTI and the district ultimately agreed to in 2023. MTI teachers and staff rallied in support of the 8% increase after the district initially offered 3.5%.

—-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

How an alarm at 4 a.m. “builds confidence” for this state-bound Edgewood junior

Jon Masson:

Madison Edgewood junior Erin Schauer likes to get a jump on the day.

Schauer, a 5-foot-9 guard for the Edgewood girls basketball team, regularly gets up around 4:30 a.m. and gets in a workout at a fitness club before starting the school day and diving into her coursework. She finds a basket and works on her shooting and also might lift weights, depending on the day.

“It’s definitely become a routine, getting up early,” Schauer said. “I like to be productive in the morning. I get some shooting in before the school day and then you have practice after. I feel more prepared to know I can count on my shooting. It builds confidence getting extra reps in.”

The Near Impossibility Of Defending Yourself Against Charges Of Climate Change

Briggs

I was recently pre-fired from a job helping with the defense of a very large company in its fight over being charged with the same non-crime detailed below.

My point has nothing to do with myself, per se, but on the increasing difficulty, and even impossibility, of defending oneself from non-crimes when people like me are prevented from helping with the defense.

Which sounds confusing. Let me explain.

The non-crime is “climate attribution”. That somehow companies not publicly wringing their hands over “climate change” caused the public not to care, which in turn caused “climate change” to grow worse, which in turn caused “climate change” to cause bad weather.

Which in turn gave dark-souled unscrupulous midwits something to sue over.

I was “pre-fired” (and not for the first time), because the defense was concerned my thought-crimes unrelated to climate attribution studies would become the focus of any cross examination or deposition. Thought-crimes such as my public writings on covid, transgenderism, Equality, race, and so on. And thus all my cogent, and damning, arguments against climate attribution would be ignored.

“$50 billion dollars and three cents for the Chicago Teachers Union

Austin Berg:

Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates says the union’s contract demands from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson will cost the city more than $50 billion. ⬇️

“$50 billion dollars and three cents…”

“And so what?”

“That’s audacity.”

For context, total base tax receipts for the state of Illinois last year were $50.7 billion.

Campus Deplatforming: A Data Bonanza

Greg Lukianoff:

Whenever people argue that we’re exaggerating or overemphasizing the free speech crisis on campus, we have to take a deep breath and count to 50 — sometimes 100. We have been pummeling the public with numbers and data about shout downs, heckler’s vetoes, and disinvitations and deplatforming of campus speakers for years, and it can be exhausting to hear people continue to dismiss it as a non-issue.

But honestly, all we have to do is wait — because you can set a watch to the emergence of new examples that prove our point. As we will show below, 2023 was the worst year on record for deplatforming attempts and successes, and 2024 is unfortunately already looking like it can top it.

The last couple of weeks alone have been absolutely terrible, and it’s no surprise why. Campuses exploded in the wake of Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, with attempts to deplatform speakers coming in about equal numbers from both sides. However, as of this moment we are not aware of a pro-Palestine event being disrupted by pro-Israel students. The most recent examples we have are all pro-Palestinian protestors shutting down pro-Israel speech.

On Feb. 21, a lecture by Democratic Representative Derek Kilmer at the University of Puget Sound was interrupted and ultimately canceled when a group of protesters forced their way into the lecture hall — past security, metal detectors, and doors — and onto the stage. Chaplain Dave Wright, along with other students and university staff, were injured as a result of the protests. And because protesters also attempted to enter other buildings, University Security Services locked the campus down for over an hour.

Former Green Bay Schools Superintendent Claude Tiller speaks out for the first time since his resignation

Danielle DuClos

In the nearly two-hour-long radio interview, Tiller talked about student mental health, applying for the superintendent job, re-energizing clubs for students and staff of color, the need to hire more teachers of color and his vision to make the Green Bay School District known for its education.

During one of the commercial breaks captured on the Facebook Live video, Tiller referenced an employee who he said was being targeted by a district principal. In the video, Tiller said he has to move the employee just to protect him.

“This wicked witch … she’s leaving at the end of this year,” he said, referring to the principal. “She’s doing everything in her possible to get him.”

Then Berry said that people don’t want to have those kinds of conversations, to which Tiller agreed.

“The first thing they say, ‘Who me?’ Well, B-I-T-C-H, of course it’s you,” Tiller said in the video.

Debt per student growth

Matthew Ladner:

Texas won the debt per student national championship! Some question $19,009 in debt per pupil given a decade plus long slide in TX academic achievement. Bless their little hearts but those people need to get their priorities straight #FootballUberAlles

The Case Against Geometric Algebra

Alex Kritchevsky:

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a long time. Normally I haunt the comment section on Hacker News and whenever an article about GA comes up I post something to the effect of: “GA is okay but it’s not as good as those people say, there’s something wrong with it, what you really want is the wedge product on its own!” Which is not especially productive and probably slightly unhinged. So today I want to actually make that point in one central place that I can link to instead.

To be clear I’m not opposed to GA per se. What I have a problem with is some of the details of GA, and the fact that the proponents of GA haven’t fixed those details yet.

In particular: Hestenes’ “geometric product” is a bad mathematical operation that needs to be discarded, and doing so is way overdue. Meanwhile GA is producing more and more enthusiasts every year, and it will take those people a while to realize the things a lot of us have realized, and in the meantime they will go on selling other people on GA and repeating the cycle. As a result GA is stuck in a sort of mediocrity. My purpose in writing this is to push it to improve and address those problems.

Here’s my basic stance:

The Surprising Effect Friends Have on Our Finances

Julia Carpenter:

It is human nature to judge your financial health against your friends. Just know they probably aren’t giving you a full accounting.

How we measure up against our friends and peers has an outsize effect on our financial perception, economists and researchers say—especially as people spend more time scrolling social media. These comparisons can make our finances seem inadequate even when things are going fairly well.

This effect is playing a part in the disconnect leading many consumers to feel dour about the economy despite several promising factors, such as cooling inflation, a strong labor market and a U.S. economy that grew 3.1% over the past year.

In some ways, the more downbeat viewpoint reflects financial realities. Millions of Americans are paying more in rent, while food is taking up a larger share of income than it has in decades. But the disconnect is also exacerbated by our friends and the way many of them present only the rosiest view of their finances and families on social media.

A recent report from Edelman Financial Engines surveyed more than 2,000 people regarding their attitudes about their wealth. Around a quarter said they feel less satisfied with the amount of money they have because of social media, and a third said they have spent more than they could afford to “keep up with the Joneses” on Instagram and other apps.

The (big) void in Madison’s k-12 Governance

Years ago, a former Madison Superintendent lamented the lack of business community substantive engagement in our well funded k-12 system.

Has anything changed?

2024 brings another year of uncontested Madison School board elections.

Madison has another new Superintendent – Joe Gothard– due to start soon.

Meanwhile:

A scorecard.

More on Madison’s well funded K-12 system.

Accountability? A Milwaukee business leader says that it is time to vote no on their tax and $pending increase referendum. Madison business leaders: radio silence.

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Politics and the taxpayer funded DPI.

Wisconsin DPI Reading Curriculum Evaluation list

——-

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

Underly and our long term disastrous reading results….

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

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

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

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

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

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

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

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?

Rejecting this referendum is not a rejection of public schools; it is a call for long-needed accountability.

John Schlifske

Imagine that there is a barber or salon where you’ve been going to get your hair cut for years. However, over time the quality of the haircut has been declining. A few years ago, the owner told you he was increasing prices so that he could invest in his store and do a better job. You started paying more, but little changed. In fact, the quality kept going down and even fewer customers stayed loyal. Now, he’s asked you again to accept a second larger price increase to get back on track. He promises that this time it will be different, although he won’t offer any concrete explanations of what is going to change. Would you keep going to his shop or would you move on?

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