schoolinfosystem.org
David Sacks: At least when you have multiple strong private sector players, that gets harder. By contrast, winner-take-all dynamics are more likely to produce Orwellian outcomes. — There is likely to be a major role for open source. These models excel at providing 80-90% of the capability at 10-20% of the cost. This tradeoff will […]
Wall Street Journal: Democrats are denouncing the House GOP investigation into the weaponization of government, but maybe that’s because Republicans are getting somewhere. That includes new evidence that the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee. Mr. Taibbi has provoked the ire of Democrats and other journalists for […]
Matt Taibbi:
Bari Weiss: Maybe most unusual of all, Khanna’s policies on Big Tech are not exactly the ones you’d imagine coming from the congressman whose neighbors are the creators of the next Googles and Facebooks. Not only does he think Big Tech needs to be broken up, he was also one of the only Democrats to […]
WILL: The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has filed a lawsuit against the State Bar of Wisconsin for promoting discriminatory DEI practices including its “Diversity Clerkship Program,” which offers premier internship opportunities based primarily on race. WILL’s client must pay mandatory and annual State Bar dues, which not only fund this internship program, but […]
US Courts: Including deleted DM’s.
Matt Taibbi: In one damning email, an unnamed Facebook executive wrote to Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sandberg: We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the White House and the press, to remove more Covid-19 vaccine discouraging content. We see repeatedly in internal communications not only in the email above, but in the Twitter […]
Margot Cleveland I “felt as if the FTC was trying to influence the outcome of the engagement before it had started,” a CPA with nearly 30 years of experience with the Big Four accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY) testified last month. The FTC’s pressure campaign left EY partner David Roque so unsettled that he […]
ACLU More.
Karl Salzmann: The IRS targeted journalist Matt Taibbi on two occasions while he was exposing information about censorship efforts by the government and Twitter. The agency launched an investigation into Taibbi, a liberal journalist who has criticized left-wing censorship of conservative and moderate voices, on December 24, 2022, according to a Wednesday letterfrom House Judiciary Committee […]
Wall Street Journal: One theme from the internal Twitter files being released by Elon Musk is the government’s gnawing fear that armies of foreign trolls and bots might be changing real people’s opinions. After Twitter said it was investigating false claims circulating in 2020 of a communications blackout in Washington, D.C., the FBI reached out […]
Jonathan Turley: It is not clear what is more chilling: the menacing role played by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Twitter’s censorship program or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role. This week saw another FBI “nothing-to-see-here” statement to the release of files detailing how it actively sought to suppress the Hunter Biden […]
Jonathan Adler and Congressman Ro Khanna: Twitter banned links to the story and suspended accounts that shared it, including President Trump’s press secretary and the New York Post itself—arguing that the story violated company policy because it contained information obtained through illegal means. Under the same logic, they’d have to suspend any account that posted […]
More fun publisher surveillance: Elsevier embeds a hash in the PDF metadata that is *unique for each time a PDF is downloaded*, this is a diff between metadata from two of the same paper. Combined with access timestamps, they can uniquely identify the source of any shared PDFs. pic.twitter.com/D9KxnXkMVu — 𝚓𝚘𝚗𝚗𝚢﹏𝚜𝚊𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜 (@json_dirs) January 25, 2022
Brian Krebs: In a post on Twitter, DDoSecrets said the BlueLeaks archive indexes “ten years of data from over 200 police departments, fusion centers and other law enforcement training and support resources,” and that “among the hundreds of thousands of documents are police and FBI reports, bulletins, guides and more.” Fusion centers are state-owned and operated entities […]
Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison: It includes emails, invoices, contracts and bank transfers that reveal more than 50 million profiles – mostly belonging to registered US voters – were harvested from the site in the largest ever breach of Facebook data. Facebook on Friday said that it was also suspending Wylie from accessing the platform […]
Matt Taibbi: One of my regrets about the Twitter Files is that I think we failed to convey the scale of the ideas being envisaged, like common international databases of speech offenders or the use of “content moderation” to re-shape the public’s understanding not just of news, but history. and: This clip by Obama hits […]
Matt Taibbi: It’s possible it’s coincidence that the IRS opened a case on me on Saturday, Christmas Eve, 2022, the same day as the Twitter Files story about the FBI/CIA, then visited my home exactly as I was testifying in Congress about the same thing. Could be unrelated, absolutely.
transcript (machine generated)meta/Facebook blog post: More speech and fewer mistakes. John Robb: There’s a reason people don’t trust Mark. He doesn’t have a highly evolved digital ledger on X. People learn to trust the digital ledger before they trust the person. more: It won’t work. There’s not enough flow/dynamism on the platform anymore (since they […]
Balaji: Remember, federal agencies evolved over decades to obfuscate their internals to nosy humans. But they have no natural resistance to AI. Indeed, no agency can withstand this kind of AI interrogation. So, this is how a small group of Elon-directed engineers can carve a path through DC, without the aid of a single corrupt […]
TASCHA SHAHRIARI-PARSASHARE Shortly before Eghbariah’s article was scheduled to go live, our journal’s president made the unprecedented decision to delay and ultimately block the piece. After hours of debate, a majority of our editors voted to sustain that decision. 25 of my fellow editors and I publicly objected. Two of my peers resigned. And yet, we were […]
Michael Shellenberger: Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department analyst working for the RAND Corporation, had given the two newspapers top-secret documents. They showed not only that the US was losing the war in Vietnam but that the Pentagon had known the US couldn’t win the war for many years and kept fighting it anyway. The Pentagon […]
Shannon Bonds hourly news plug 15 June 2024 16:00ET: [short audio clip] Academic group studying disinformation is facing an uncertain future after political attacks. A campaign by Republicans is targeting research. NPRs Shannon Bond reports the Stanford Internet Observatory studies how social media platforms are abused. Its investigated thorny issues including child exploitation and the […]
Matt Taibbi Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan said a person suspected of funding al-Qaeda and caught in the Philippines could be considered “part of the battlefield” and subject to indefinite detention without trial, which sounded a lot like Bushian legal theory. Similarly, when new Attorney General Eric Holder was asked if he agreed that a […]
Matt Taibbi: Whispers about familiar villains preparing new versions of the election censorship programs that animated the Twitter Files grew louder last week, when Virginia Senator Mark Warner let slip at a conference that the FBI and DHS have renewed “voluntary” communications with Internet platforms. Republicans who objected to the last programs on First Amendment grounds are now rushing […]
Matt Taibbi: Katherine Maher, the new head of NPR, was a minor character in the Twitter Files. She was CEO of Wikimedia when the company was (like Twitter) being invited to election tabletop exercises at the Pentagon and “Industry meetings” with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. She also scored the rare personal […]
Michael Shellenberger: What Lula and de Moraes are doing is an outrageous violation of Brazil’s constitution and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. At this moment, Brazil is not yet a dictatorship. It still has elections and the Brazilian people have other means at their disposal to confront authoritarianism. But the Federal Supreme Court […]
Matt Taibbi: I almost blew a top reading Brandy Zadrozny’s NBC piece that claimed it was “conspiracy theory” to suggest organizations like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) acted as “proxies” for government censorship. Three different groups — Twitter Files reporters, staffers for House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan’s Weaponization of Government Committee, and lawyers in the […]
Matt Taibbi: Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and other Twitter Files reporters discovered the key elements of the Twitter Files reports, from the “industry calls” held between the FBI and Internet platforms like Twitter, to the role of Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, to the role of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center in sponsoring “anti-disinformation” work, in the […]
Matt Taibbi: Last March, right as Michael Shellenberger and I were preparing to testify in Washington about digital censorship, former NGO worker-turned-Racket-contributor Andrew Lowenthal found Twitter Files emails pertaining to something called the Virality Project. An analog to the earlier “Election Integrity Partnership” content-moderation program that worked with thr Department of Homeland Security and the […]
Matt Taibbi: On June 8th, the Washington Post ran, “These academics studied falsehoods spread by Trump. Now the GOP wants answers,” a story about how “records requests, subpoenas and lawsuits” were wielded as “tools of harassment” against “scholars” in the “field of disinformation.” In photo portraits, Kate Starbird of the University of Washington stared plaintively in the […]
1. TWITTER FILES EXTRA: BIG BROTHER IS FLAGGING YOU New House report and previously unpublished Twitter Files show: Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership was a front for government censorship pic.twitter.com/3db6sCOX7K — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) November 9, 2023
Matt Taibbi: If you read this morning’s Racket article about Senator Amy Klobuchar’s letter to Jeff Bezos asking for “proactive measures” to suppress sites like Substack or Rumble, you probably gathered I’m in a mood. I’ve had it. Whether it’s NewsGuard slapping “anti-US” labels on Joe Lauria and Consortium News, or Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Aaron […]
1. Twitter Files: Who Are the People Claiming RFK Jr. is “Disinformation”? Let's look at what I found inside Twitter's internal documents. pic.twitter.com/fnzgPu7giQ — Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) July 18, 2023
Chris Hedges: The persecution of Julian Assange, along with the climate of fear, wholesale government surveillance and use of the Espionage Act to prosecute whistleblowers, has emasculated investigative journalism. The press has not only failed to mount a sustained campaign to support Julian, whose extradition appears imminent, but no longer attempts to shine a light into […]
1. TWITTER FILES: Internal documents from @Twitter find Brown University’s @cward1e provides research that helps censor. pic.twitter.com/cxeMWGbc0Z — Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) June 14, 2023
Matt Taibbi: CNN had the gall the other day to run a story called, “Twitter’s own lawyers refute Elon Musk’s claim that the ‘Twitter Files’ exposed US government censorship.” The plummeting cable network, which consistently refused to cover any of the Twitter Files revelations in real time, is citing a legal motion filed by Twitter that, shockingly, does not […]
Michael Shellenberger Ever since journalist Matt Taibbi and I testified before Congress on April 10, critics of the Twitter Files have claimed that we were making a big deal about nothing. We were being paranoid, they said, to imagine that the U.S. government was involved in spying on ordinary Americans and demanding censorship. The various […]
William Briggs We told you this was happening when it was happening. Not everybody believed it; indeed, most (and here I exclude regular readers) did not. And, worse, most still do not, and never will, such is the power of propaganda. This: Twitter Files #18 and #19 focus on the Virality Project, an “anti-vaccine misinformation” effort […]
William Briggs: We told you this was happening when it was happening. Not everybody believed it; indeed, most (and here I exclude regular readers) did not. And, worse, most still do not, and never will, such is the power of propaganda. This: Twitter Files #18 and #19 focus on the Virality Project, an “anti-vaccine misinformation” effort […]
11. Who’s in the Censorship-Industrial Complex? Twitter in 2020 helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020. The National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, are key: pic.twitter.com/7lLlL2tcjN — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023 15. The report was co-authored by […]
John Daniel Davidson As Taibbi has written, the Twitter Files “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.” The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let us consider […]
John Daniel Davidson As Taibbi has written, the Twitter Files “show the FBI acting as doorman to a vast program of social media surveillance and censorship, encompassing agencies across the federal government—from the State Department to the Pentagon to the CIA.” The Twitter Files contain multitudes, but for the sake of brevity let us consider […]
TWITTER FILES #16 Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment pic.twitter.com/Knp0UjfaMp — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
TWITTER FILES #16 Comic Interlude: A Media Experiment pic.twitter.com/Knp0UjfaMp — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 19, 2023
Matt Taibbi: Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank […]
Martin Gurri: The name of our Substack publication, Public came from the 2018 book, Revolt of the Public by a former CIA media analyst named Martin Gurri. It is perhaps the best book ever written about the impact of the Internet on social and political life. If you haven’t already, we encourage you to watch Leighton’s video about Martin’s great book […]
Chris Bray: And on and on and on. Twitter has been constantly flooded with requests from at least dozens of separate federal entities, all of them needy and pushy and consuming the company’s time and energy: CENTCOM wants a meeting this week and CDC wants a meeting this week and NIH wants a meeting this week and […]
1. THREAD: THE TWITTER FILES: HOW TWITTER RIGGED THE COVID DEBATE – By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy – By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed – By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data* — David Zweig (@davidzweig) December 26, 2022
Mike Solana: It was a dark alliance of estates, accurate descriptions of which were for years derided as delusional, paranoid, even dangerous. But today, on account of a single shitposting billionaire, the existence of the One Party’s decentralized censorship apparatus is now beyond doubt. A couple weeks back, alleging proof Twitter acted with gross political bias, and […]
Freddie deBoer Levitz, like most people in the media who are not explicitly conservative, must play a delicate game. The game is to engage in enough nuance and care in your writing to still be able to look yourself in the mirror, to preserve some integrity, without getting right-coded in the culture war. Once a […]
Camus: “They created a portal, managed by the FBI, to directly pressure social media companies.” Internal correspondences show executives at Facebook and Instagram were “appalled,” calling the demands “illegal.” Yet, they complied. RFK Jr.’s Instagram account, with nearly one million followers, was removed. The reason? He explains, “Not a single post was factually inaccurate. Every […]
Free Beacon: Jimmy Kimmel has gotten a lot of attention in recent days. A new Senate report reveals how the Biden administration silenced Americans without the power to fight back. The agency had received an email from the Washington secretary of state’s communications director, Kylee Zabel, flagging the post as “potential misinformation.” CISA had solicited […]
Daniel Buck: To argue that schools of education have gone bonkers is akin to penning an op-ed that the Titanic sank. The fact is given. Does anyone dispute it? The most-assigned books and essays for prospective teachers are a heady mixture of race essentialism, gender theory, and outright Marxist kookery. Trainees learn much of critical-consciousness raising, Marxist […]
Alex Gutentag: On May 17, the Oakland, California, teachers union ended a two-week strike—the union’s third strike in five years. The district offered a substantial salary increase for teachers before the strike even began, but negotiations remained deadlocked for days over the union’s other demands. The Oakland Education Association (OEA) put forward several “common good” proposals that included drought-resistant […]
Chris Rickert: Under current district policy, students in fourth or eighth grade who have failed to meet certain academic standards can be forced to repeat those grades, even over the objections of parents. A decision to hold a student back can be appealed to the “superintendent or his/her designee,” but that official’s decision on the matter […]
Kayla Huynh Lighthouse is now home to the largest number of voucher students in Madison. A majority of the school’s students identify as Hispanic or Black, and nearly all are from low-income households. The school’s website says, “We are facing unprecedented demand with 150 children on our waitlist as of fall 2024.” Lighthouse and other private voucher schools have […]
Pfizer/White House Files: But the crucial “fifth strike” and permanent censoring of my account caught them by surprise – because a Twitter lobbyist who was the company’s closest White House contact pushed it through in hours. The lobbyist, Todd O’Boyle, acted outside Twitter’s normal safeguards for actions against large accounts like mine. Instead, O’Boyle repeatedly […]
James Rushmore: What is the Media Forensics Hub? Described as “an interdisciplinary team of researchers working to study and combat online deception,” the project kicked off in 2017. That was the year communications professor Darren Linvill and economics professor Patrick Warren joined forces to “uncover and expose” millions of tweets they attributed to Russian trolls. […]
NCLA: “Today, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 6-3 to vacate a historic preliminary injunction granted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in the case of Murthy v. Missouri, finding that the Respondents protected by the injunction lacked standing to support injunctive (that is, future) relief. The injunction had barred officials from […]
CISA A lack of public understanding about elections (!) can undermine confidence in election security, increase risks to cybersecurity and physical security of election infrastructure, and potentially lead to disruption of election operations. As the official source of information about their jurisdiction’s elections, election officials can mitigate these risks through regular and consistent public communication, […]
Kyle Cheney: X Corp. is asking the justices to consider whether social media services can be forced to share data about their users with government investigators while being barred from informing those users about the requests. Trump’s material, the company noted, might have been subject to claims of executive privilege. But other users might have […]
Jacob Sullum: Last month, I noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had repeatedly exaggerated the scientific evidence supporting face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook attached a warning to that column, which it said was “missing context” and “could mislead people.” According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations, and federal officials that […]
Henry Oliver: The argument against smartphones and social media is familiar and repetitive: they steal our time, harvest our attention, farm our data. Tech companies are called attention merchants and algorithmic exploiters; we are all supposed to be hooked on dopamine which is immiserating us. And now the psychologist Jonathan Haidt is promoting the idea that […]
Mark Tapscott: Officials from the National Science Foundation tried to conceal the spending of millions of taxpayer dollars on research and development for artificial intelligence tools used to censor political speech and influence the outcome of elections, according to a new congressional report. The report looking into the National Science Foundation (NSF) is the latest […]
David Randall: The statement also specifies that “Historians hold this view not because they believe that all interpretations are equally valid, or that nothing can ever be known about the past, or that facts do not matter. Quite the contrary. History would be pointless if such claims were true.” An old debate is where to […]
We link geospatial data on 3G coverage over time with 2.3 million student-level PISA records from 82 countries. PISA urbanicity data + pop. density data + 3G coverage shapefiles = within-country variation in 3G coverage over time. Here’s how this linkage looks in Czech Repub. pic.twitter.com/5RCqNfj414 — Sam Stemper (@samstemper) December 19, 2023
THE YOUTUBE FILES PART 1. BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESSURED YOUTUBE TO CENSOR AMERICANS. Internal docs from Google (YouTube’s parent company) obtained by @JudiciaryGOP and @Weaponization show that the Biden White House wanted Americans censored. 🧵 Thread:https://t.co/tM1IdEIJCG — Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) November 30, 2023
Sophie Culpepper: Since September 2022, just before the U.S. midterm elections, Spring has maintained social media accounts that correspond to five different “voter profiles” she developed using Pew Research Center data: Each character’s accounts are confined to a single phone to avoid contaminating Spring’s findings. The reporter maintains accounts with computer-generated profile photos on a range of platforms […]
THE FACEBOOK FILES, PART 1: SMOKING-GUN DOCS PROVE FACEBOOK CENSORED AMERICANS BECAUSE OF BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESSURE 🧵 Thread: — Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 27, 2023 There isn't any ambiguity. The paper was a political project designed to put an end to the debate. There was not only the "not plausible" line but this […]
Andrew Lowenthal and Matt Taibbi: Yesterday witnessed another bizarre display of cartoon authoritarianism on the part of the Democratic Party, as members beat up one of their own presidential candidates, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, in a hearing of the House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Bezos is reportedly taking a direct interest […]
Matt Taibbi: I know I said I wasn’t going to do this, but since I’m persona non grata on Twitter these days and this material needs to get out in the wake of the ruling in the Missouri v. Biden internet censorship case, I’m invoking a political necessity exception to post #TwitterFiles emails that may […]
At the May 9th SFUSD BoE meeting, the BoE included its handling of the PAC as a “significant exposure to litigation.” I asked for the documents. Turns out, SFUSD destroyed the documents. That’s one approach I guess. But given there are multiple Uniform Complaints… pic.twitter.com/UAw0rlnjGx — Greg Chopskie (@GAChopskie) June 25, 2023 Meanwhile: In 2021, […]
Laura Testino: Eight of the board members voted for the change in the job requirements. The ninth, Vice Chair Sheleah Harris, abstained from the vote and denounced the board’s decision. Then she announced she would quit her elected seat. Before the amendments approved Tuesday, board policy required candidates to have a certain amount of in-school experience and […]
I’ve long found these posts rather curious in light of I Madison’s “more than most” k-12 tax & spending practices: now > $25k per student, amidst declining enrollment. In 2007, we Madisonians spent 333,101,865 for K-12. Inflation adjusted $486,328,722, today. Yet our current budget is $557,015,538 (it is higher every time I look). Readers interested […]
Matt Taibbi: I read Special Counsel John Durham’s “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns” yesterday in a state I can only describe as psychic exhaustion. As Sue Schmidt’s “Eight Key Takeaways” summary shows, the stuff in this report should kill the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory ten […]
Matt Barnum Eric Hanushek, a leading education researcher, has spent his career arguing that spending more money on schools probably won’t make them better. His latest research, though, suggests the opposite. The paper, set to be published later this year, is a new review of dozens of studies. It finds that when schools get more […]
How did @DrJillStein get on Twitter’s creepy “inferred Russians” list – a.k.a. is_russian? Read the new #TwitterFiles thread by @0rf: https://t.co/6eWOhYX33z — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 26, 2023
Ziv and Lempel co-invented the famous Lempel-Ziv algorithm that is the basis of ZIP files. Prof. Abraham Lempel died 7 weeks ago. Prof. Jacob Ziv died today 😔 RIP. We are losing the giants that shaped computing as we know it. pic.twitter.com/SPK3KB1G1N — Yaniv Erlich (@erlichya) March 26, 2023
Jacob Sollum: Last month, I noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had repeatedly exaggerated the scientific evidence supporting face mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook attached a warning to that column, which it said was “missing context” and “could mislead people.” According to an alliance of social media platforms, government-funded organizations, and federal officials that […]
Governor Jay Inslee PDF: “Key Take-Aways Programs that offer alternative methods to complete high school provide a pathway for students to achieve their dreams. A larger proportion of students in institutional education need to catch up on credits. Students often need more access to timely special education evaluations and supports.” Commentary.
Robby Soave: The Weiss installment, on the other hand, offers significant evidence of something that many people merely suspected was taking place: wholesale blacklisting of Twitter accounts that were perceived to be causing harm. Weiss provides several examples of ways in which the platform limited the reach of various high-profile users: Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford […]
Matt Bivens: Could a single, late-breaking corruption allegation really have dictated a presidential election’s outcome? Yes, and it has happened before. The 2020 election was razor close — but four years earlier, in 2016, the election had also been razor close, and many later blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss on the FBI’s last-minute announcement that she was back […]
Is the NY media going to cover the release of NY state test data or will they let the NY Ed Dept succeed in obscuring the results by releasing them in inaccessible files? https://t.co/Yt4e8k23AO — Marc Porter Magee 🎓 (@marcportermagee) October 28, 2022
Rachel Cohen: There were early signs that this narrative didn’t explain the full story. If allegiance to former President Donald Trump (in schools that opened) or teacher unions (in those that stayed closed) were all that mattered, why did support for reopening schools also drop among Republican voters over the summer? And what about the conflicting recommendations coming from […]
Matt Taibbi: Probably the funniest effort along those lines was this passage: We need regulation… to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication. That was Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, railing against Musk in the pages of… the Washington Post! A newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos complaining about rich people controlling “channels […]
Dana Goldstein: The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year’s reading emergency. As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic. In Virginia, one study found that early […]
I downloaded all the data Amazon has on me, and honestly the creepiest thing about it is that they sent me the *actual audio files* of every time I spoke* to Amazon Alexa *years ago when I was young and foolish about surveillance pic.twitter.com/XH4Lp4bDob — Alina Utrata (@AlinaUtrata) January 23, 2022
Corrinne Hess: At the urging of Milwaukee Public Schools and area restaurants, a Milwaukee Common Council committee moved forward an ordinance Friday for a city-wide mask mandate. Under the plan, a face covering would be required for anyone 3 years old and up inside a public building whenever the rate of transmission of the COVID-19 virus […]
WILL The News: Governor Tony Evers vetoed curriculum transparency legislation (SB 463/ AB 488), Friday, denying parents access to the classroom materials in our public schools. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) supported the legislation to require all public schools to publicly provide access to the material taught in our public-school classrooms. The Quotes: WILL Director of […]
Elizabeth Beyer: The new priority area, target group outcomes, replaced closing achievement gaps. The new priority area, DPI said, sheds additional light on students in schools with low test scores. The measure was designed to help focus support on the learners who need it most, while also improving outcomes for all students, according to DPI. “I […]
Alan Cole: Kitschelt and Rehm would not be surprised by the anti-tax language deployed by the SALT Democrats. They argue that high-income voters—even the high-education kind that vote for Democrats—are generally skeptical of taxation and redistribution. So the SALT coalition’s rhetoric makes sense: they are representing their voters in the language that most appeals to […]
Joel Kotkin: For millennia the family has stood as the central institution of society—often changing, but always essential. But across the world, from China to North America, and particularly in Europe, family ties are weakening, with the potential to undermine one of the last few precious bits of privacy and intimacy. Margaret Mead once said, “no […]
Deanna Fisher: In the battle of local juridictions versus teachers’ unions over school reopening, the unions are glorying in their upper hand while the students sit at home. After years and years of catering to the teachers’ unions, the bureaucracy that is purportedly in charge lacks the spine to force the issue. The teachers’ union, […]
Edward Ongweso, Jr.: On Friday, digital rights group Fight for the Future unveiled an open letter signed by 2,000 parents calling on McGraw-Hill Publishing to end its relationship with Proctorio, one of many proctoring apps that offers services that digital rights groups have called “indistinguishable from spyware.” As the pandemic has pushed schooling into virtual classrooms, a host of […]
Update: @MilwaukeeMPS administration is recommending schools start bringing students back to classrooms in-person in January, using a hybrid model. The school board will discuss it tomorrow: https://t.co/XCwhMjCGYL — Emily Files (@emilyrfiles) October 26, 2020
Elizabeth Beyer: Enrollment in the Madison School District has dropped by more than 1,000 students for the 2020-2021 school, the district said Friday. The decrease in enrollment is significant compared to the previous school year when the district lost only 33 students between 2018-2019 and 2019-2020. The drop in enrollment could spell trouble for district […]
Colin Kalmbacher: Former Republican Rep. Justin Amash (L-Mich.) and progressive Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) have joined forces to introduce a bill in the House of Representatives that would eliminate the controversial doctrine of qualified immunity for police officers. “As part of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, Congress allowed individuals to sue state and local officials, including police officers, who violate […]
Public Counsel: A historic agreement was reached today between the plaintiffs and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in the Gary B. v. Whitmer literacy suit. The agreement will preserve a groundbreaking opinion by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals which held that a basic minimum education, including literacy, is a Constitutional right, and includes an immediate […]
The ultimate nightmare scenario for teachers unions isn’t a case like Janus but large numbers of African-American parents rejecting them as legitimate and not viewing them as partners in a shared cause. And this is why the Warren affair is so important. — James Merriman (@JamesMerriman6) November 25, 2019 Item 10.11: $100,000 contract to WestEd […]