Chris Lau, Gawon Bae, Jake Kwon and Nayoon Kim:

For a country with the world’s lowest fertility rate – one that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to encourage women to have more babies – the idea of barring children from places like cafes and restaurants might seem a little counterproductive.

But in South Korea, “no-kids zones” have become remarkably popular in recent years. Hundreds have sprung up across the country, aimed largely at ensuring disturbance-free environments for the grown-ups.

There are nearly 80 such zones on the holiday island of Jeju alone, according to a local think tank, and more than four hundred in the rest of the country, according to activist groups.

Doubts, though, are beginning to creep in about the wisdom of restricting children from so many places, fueled by concerns over the country’s growing demographic problems.

In addition to the world’s lowest birthrate, South Korea has one of the world’s fastest aging populations. That has left it with a problem familiar to graying nations across the world, namely: how to fund the pension and health care needs of a growing pool of retirees on the tax income generated by a slowly vanishing pool of workers.

Rick Pearson

Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi owns a million-dollar, 120-year-old Prairie-style, two-story home on a spacious corner lot on the eastern side of Oak Park’s Frank Lloyd Wright Historic District.

Within a five-block area of Kaegi’s residence, neighbors with similar homes saw their properties’ assessed value — used to figure local property taxes — increase by an average of 32% this year compared with 2020 in the every-three-year reassessment of Oak Park Township.

But the home of Kaegi, in his fifth year as the person responsible for running the office that decides the value of homes ahead of Cook County property tax bills being mailed, saw the assessed value of his home drop by 5.3%, county records show.

ObamaCare was sold to Americans as something that would increase options, and allow people to keep plans they liked. Like most government programs, this has since been proven a lie. https://t.co/8YInTRGBbQ

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 26, 2023

James Fishback:

Once upon a time, the National Speech & Debate Association, or NSDA, was the country’s premier debating organization, touching the lives of two million high school students across its nearly hundred-year history. Its famous alumni include Oprah Winfrey, and Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The NSDA, formerly known as the National Forensics League, currently has 140,000 young debaters on its roster—but now, rather than teaching them to debate, it is teaching them to self-censor and conform their arguments to a new politically correct standard.

The NSDA has allowed hundreds of judges with explicit left-wing bias to infiltrate the organization. These judges proudly display their ideological leanings in statements—or “paradigms”—on a public database maintained by the NSDA called Tabroom, where they declare that debaters who argue in favor of capitalism, or Israel, or the police, will lose the rounds they’re judging.

This has fundamentally changed the culture of high school debate—or so scores of students are telling me. One of them is former high school debater Matthew Adelstein, a rising sophomore studying philosophy at the University of Michigan, who was a member of the NSDA in high school. 

Adelstein told me that, in April 2022, he competed at the prestigious Tournament of Champions in Lexington, Kentucky, where he debated in favor of the federal government increasing its protection of water resources.

In his final round of the two-day tournament, Matthew was shocked to hear the opposing team levy a personal attack against him as their central argument. The opposing team argued: “This debate is more than just about the debate—it’s about protecting the individuals in the community from people who proliferate hatred and make this community unsafe.”

Bridget Phetasy

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably witnessed the backlash to Pride. There have been mass boycotts of Bud Light after the beer company partnered with trans woman and TikTok influencer, Dylan Mulvaney, sending her a custom can to celebrate her first year of “girlhood.” Target was next to come under fire for its Pride display targeting children and their “tuck-friendly” bathing suits for women. 

This set the stage for the most divisive Pride month in some time. First, the boycotts. Then videos of angry parents at school boards went viral. Conservative radio hosts and commentators vowed to make Pride “toxic” to brands. But it’s not just conservatives who are pushing back; according to a recent Gallup poll, even Democrats have seen a drop in the acceptance of same-sex relations.

Which begs the question: what happened to Pride? After decades of progress for gay rights, growing acceptance of gay marriage and the normalization of same-sex relationships, Pride is unexpectedly political again. Why? 

In search of an answer, I spoke to prominent LGBT thinkers and writers, many of them dissenting voices when judged against the views of many LGBT advocacy groups. Their answers surprised me. Across the board they all said some version of “this was inevitable.”

“When it comes to gay issues, conservatives largely lost the culture war,” Katie Herzog observes. “But something about recent trends has reignited that passion — and issues that seemed resolved are up for debate again. I guess the Nineties really are back.”

“The core reason for the backlash is pretty simple: children,” Andrew Sullivan explains. “The attempt to indoctrinate children in gender ideology and to trans them on the verge of puberty has changed the debate. Start indoctrinating and transing children… and you will re-energize one of the oldest homophobic tropes there is: ‘gays are child molesters.’”

Uri, Joe, & Leif

This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino.

In 2021, we and a team of anonymous researchers examined a number of studies co-authored by Gino, because we had concerns that they contained fraudulent data. We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020).

In the Fall of 2021, we shared our concerns with Harvard Business School (HBS). Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.

The process that ensued at HBS is confidential (for us also). But here are some things we know:

(1) As you can see on her Harvard home page (.htm), Gino has gone on “administrative leave”, and the name of her chaired position at HBS is no longer listed.

(2) We understand that Harvard had access to much more information than we did, including, where applicable, the original data collected using Qualtrics survey software. If the fraud was carried out by collecting real data on Qualtrics and then altering the downloaded data files, as is likely to be the case for three of these papers, then the original Qualtrics files would provide airtight evidence of fraud. (Conversely, if our concerns were misguided, then those files would provide airtight evidence that they were misguided.)

Scott Girard

In total, the 2023-24 preliminary budget spends $581 million. The board will vote on a final budget in October after enrollment is finalized.

The budget includes a deficit of $15 million for this year, but $11.5 million in ongoing costs are covered by one-time federal COVID-19 relief money that won’t be available next fall — meaning the 2024-25 budget is starting in a much larger hole.

That means the district will likely need to make cuts and ask voters in another referendum for more property taxes to fund operations. Former School Board member Christina Gomez Schmidt, who led the committee that developed the budget this spring until she left her seat in April, said during public comment Monday that “overextending the current budget will create challenging budgets going forward.”

“This budget will make the fiscal cliff even higher without a plan that I can see to address the long-term shortfall it will create,” she said, acknowledging the importance of investing in staff.

Current board members have also acknowledged the difficult year ahead, and interim Superintendent Lisa Kvistad, at her first full board meeting in the role Monday, said the budget “demonstrates how we value our staff” and invests in classrooms.

“While federal pandemic funding will go away after this fiscal year, our needs will not,” Kvistad said. “Therefore, the board of education, myself and my cabinet will continue to look at where we can adjust, repurpose and find additional sources of revenue.

“We have decisions to make, and we can make them together.”

Tax rates will drop from $9.97 per $1,000 of property value to $9.10. With home assessments increasing, though, the average homeowner will pay an additional $104.05 toward the school district, according to the preliminary budget.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

We went from school board members bemoaning how parents showed so little interest in meetings to restricting access because of too much interest.

Of course they call them "safety measures" https://t.co/0XZ1LFDgPH

— Erika Sanzi (@esanzi) June 27, 2023

Do girls have rights anymore in public school? Can they have their own showers? Their own sports teams?
Join @WILawLiberty attorneys today to learn about Biden's disastrous plans to re-write Title IX, a law aimed at protecting girls in our schools. @CoryJBrewer @lukeberg https://t.co/GSk4T5Waob

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) June 27, 2023

🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING: the @unfoundation is funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to the @GovEvers Administration to fund its radical climate agenda. Did executive branch bureaucrats intentionally mislead the Legislature about this scheme to cover it up?🔎🧵👇 pic.twitter.com/trgrRZW1wD

— IRG Center for Investigative Oversight (@IRG_CIO) June 27, 2023

Redistributed taxpayer fund$ via federal “grants” drive many topics in the education world.

"In holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."

— the other big thing Eisenhower warned about

— Balaji (@balajis) June 27, 2023

Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government

“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure, so building that resilience to misinformation and disinformation, I think, is incredibly important.”
– CISA Director Jen Easterly, November 10, 2021.1

The First Amendment recognizes that no person or entity has a monopoly on the truth, and that the “truth” of today can quickly become the “misinformation” of tomorrow. Labeling speech “misinformation” or “disinformation” does not strip it of its First Amendment protection. As such, under the Constitution, the federal government is strictly prohibited from censoring Americans’ political speech. The government also may not use third parties to bypass the First Amendment and conduct censorship by proxy.2

The Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government have been conducting an investigation into government-induced censorship on social media. Although the investigation is ongoing, information obtained to date has revealed that the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)—an upstart agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—has facilitated the censorship of Americans directly and through third-party intermediaries.

Founded in 2018, CISA was originally intended to be an ancillary agency designed to protect “critical infrastructure” and guard against cybersecurity threats.3 In the years since its creation, however, CISA metastasized into the nerve center of the federal government’s domestic surveillance and censorship operations on social media.4 By 2020, CISA routinely reported social media posts that allegedly spread “disinformation” to social media platforms.5 By 2021, CISA had a formal “Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation” (MDM) team.6 In 2022 and 2023, in response to growing public and private criticism of CISA’s unconstitutional behavior, CISA attempted to camouflage its activities, duplicitously claiming it serves a purely “informational” role.7
This interim staff report details, among other things, that:

CISA is “working with federal partners to mature a whole-of-government approach” tocurbing alleged misinformation and disinformation.8
• CISA considered the creation of an anti-misinformation “rapid response team” capable ofphysically deploying across the United States.9
• CISA moved its censorship operation to a CISA-funded non-profit after CISA and theBiden Administration were sued in federal court, implicitly admitting that its censorshipactivities are unconstitutional.10
• CISA wanted to use the same CISA-funded non-profit as its mouthpiece to “avoid theappearance of government propaganda.”11
• Members of CISA’s advisory committee agonized that it was “only a matter of timebefore someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.”12
The Committee and the Select Subcommittee are responsible for investigating “violation[s] of the civil liberties of citizens of the United States.”13 In accordance with this mandate, this interim staff report on CISA’s violations of the First Amendment and other unconstitutional activities fulfills the obligation to identify and report on the weaponization of the federal government against American citizens. The work, however, is not done. CISA still has not adequately complied with a subpoena for relevant documents, and much more factfinding is necessary. In order to better inform the Committee’s legislative efforts, the Committee and Select Subcommittee will continue to investigate CISA’s and other Executive Branch agencies’ entanglement with social media platforms.

This is hilarious:

John Kerry is on a tour flamboyantly depicting Russia as a rouge state for invading a sovereign country, only for French journalist @DariusRochebin to remind him the US has invaded multiple countries, and Kerry himself voted to authorize the Iraq War. Watch: https://t.co/i90JH3KAyO

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 26, 2023

Rick Hess and Caitlyn Aversman

• An analysis of 100 news stories from five major newspapers regarding President Joe Biden’s proposal to unilaterally “forgive” $400 billion in student loan debt finds a strong pro-administration bias in the coverage.
• Democratic officials, progressive advocates, and borrowers (all of whom were overwhelmingly supportive) accounted for over two-thirds of the coverage’s quotes. Democratic officials were quoted more than four times as often as Republican ones.
• The coverage gave short shrift to the proposal’s legality, fairness, or inflationary impact. For instance, fewer than one in five news accounts even mentioned the 2003 Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, which the White House used to justify its unprecedented action; only one in three alluded to its regressive nature; and just 24 percent noted its inflationary impact.

Patrick Congdon:

Anti-Monopoly is now produced by San Francisco-based University Games. Hasbro retains the Monopoly trademark, though it’s been the subject of frequent litigation. Pilon wrote that Anspach and University Games found the game difficult to distribute widely because of agreements between Hasbro and top game retailers.

So where is Minnesota’s Anti-Monopoly graveyard?

Blue Earth County Historical Society Executive Director Jessica Potter dug up the address (as well as the old Free Press clips). Once headquartered at 600 Summit Av., the former landfill is east of Hwy. 169 and north of Hwy. 14. The area has since been redeveloped into an industrial park, but humps of earth from its landfill past still rise from the southern Minnesota landscape.

Jonah Goldberg:

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”—Marcel Proust

Nostalgia, a term that originated as a medical diagnosis for Swiss mercenaries suffering from homesickness, is the sorrowful longing for a lost past. An April Pew survey found that nearly 6 out of 10 Americans (58 percent) think the country was better off for people like them 50 years ago. For Republican and Republican-leaning respondents, nostalgia for the early 1970s reached 72 percent. 

This is bad—but not for the reasons you might think. First, some context. In 1939, Gallup found that 62 percent of Americans thought people were better off in the horse-and-buggy era (though only 25 percent said they’d actually want to live then). 

Indeed, Americans have always had a thing for the “good old days.” The problem is that what—or when—constitutes the “good old days” is a constantly moving target. It often seems to be about five decades earlier from right now.

Stephen Buranyi:

In 2011, Claudio Aspesi, a senior investment analyst at Bernstein Research in London, made a bet that the dominant firm in one of the most lucrative industries in the world was headed for a crash. Reed-Elsevier, a multinational publishing giant with annual revenues exceeding £6bn, was an investor’s darling. It was one of the few publishers that had successfully managed the transition to the internet, and a recent company report was predicting yet another year of growth. Aspesi, though, had reason to believe that that prediction – along with those of every other major financial analyst – was wrong.

The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

But Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.

The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.

Sophia Cai:

Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd may be a long shot to be the Republican nominee for president, but his entry into the race Thursday was a benchmark: Of the 12 major GOP candidates, half are people of color. 

Why it matters: It’s a historic turn for Republicans, who in recent years have made a point of trying to recruit more minorities for public office — and have made slight gainsamong minority voters in recent election

More.

Wall Street Journal:

These changes bring the scholarships to 73% of per-pupil union school funding from about 61%, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL). It’s the biggest school-choice advance in the state in years. Charter schools also get a per-pupil boost of $1,727 to $10,991. A voucher program for special needs students increases by about $1,600 to $14,671 per student. A proposal at play in the Legislature’s budget negotiations could increase the voucher and charter amounts hundreds of dollars more.

Based on a survey of school leaders with School Choice Wisconsin last year, WILL estimates that at least 18,000—and likely thousands more—voucher seats could be created thanks to the larger scholarships. At least one private high school in Milwaukee that closed last year cited “inadequate” state funds as a factor. Some high school leaders interviewed by School Choice Wisconsin said their schools’ viability was in doubt without an increase in the voucher amount.

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has been hostile to school choice, including attempting to freeze enrollment at schools that take the vouchers. But he signed the bill last week, and part of the deal is $1 billion in additional funding for union-run schools. Two Democrats in each chamber also voted for the bill.

Associated Press:

Two dermatologists at the University of California, San Francisco — one of whom remains at the university — conducted the experiments on men at the California Medical Facility, a prison hospital in Vacaville that’s about 50 miles (80.47 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco. The practice was halted in 1977.

The university’s Program for Historical Reconciliation issued a report about the experiments earlier this month, writing that the doctors engaged in “questionable informed consent practices” and performed procedures on men who did not have any of the diseases or conditions that the research aimed to treat. The San Francisco Chronicle first reported the program’s findings Wednesday.

“UCSF apologizes for its explicit role in the harm caused to the subjects, their families and our community by facilitating this research, and acknowledges the institution’s implicit role in perpetuating unethical treatment of vulnerable and underserved populations — regardless of the legal or perceptual standards of the time,” Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Dan Lowenstein said in a statement.

The report said further analysis is needed to determine the extent of harms caused to the prisoners as a result of the experiments and what the university should do in response.

San Francisco’s math de-tracking successes have now been shown to be a mirage, based on faulty data.

I’m not sure people realize how much this one district success story has influenced the field. https://t.co/f2n3TR92I9

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) June 25, 2023

Josh Blackman:

Last year, there was a bit of a stir when Justice Alito cited Sir Matthew Hale in the Dobbs draft, as ultimately in the published opinion. The well-known seventeenth century English judge sentenced two women to death for witchcraft. Therefore, everything the jurist wrote should be cancelled.

For those who still care about these things, Justice Sotomayor’s dissent in Pugin v. Garland, which was joined by Justices Gorsuch and Kagan, also cites Hale. She cites Blackstone too. I’m sure he said some misogynistic things.

Although the Court quotes Blackstone’s statement that ” ‘dis-suad[ing] a witness from giving evidence’ ” was an ” ‘impedimen[t] of jus-tice’ ” in support of its position, ante, at 8, Blackstone actually supports this dissent. The Court ignores that in historical usage “giving evidence” meant “testifying” at a proceeding. See, e.g., 3 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 305 (1768) (“[E]very defence, which cannot be thus specially pleaded, may be given in evidence, upon the general issue at the trial”); 2 M. Hale, History of the Pleas of the Crown 280 (1736) (“If a reward be promised to a person for giving his evidence before he gives it, this, if proved, disables his testimony”). The majority also ignores that the Blackstone passage is discussing “[c]ontempts against the king’s . . . courts of justice.” 4 Blackstone, Commentaries, at 124 (1769). This context confirms Blackstone is referring to impeding a wit-ness from testifying at a proceeding, because otherwise it would not be a contempt against the king’s courts.

Kagan had cited Hale in the past as well. Is there a problem? Hale no.

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, at a time when almost no one was talking about the issue, WRN began scrutinizing Chisholm’s sky-high non-prosecution rate. We discovered that he wasn’t prosecuting some 60% of felony cases, using his own data. After our story, Chisholm’s office stopped putting updating non-prosecution data online. That made us wonder: WHO is Chisholm refusing to prosecute?

Jess Bidgood:

Chase Eastman woke up at 5:30 one morning this month, relieved that the second of the five alarms he had set had stirred him. He pulled on the rainbow-cuffed hoodie he had worn every day in June, and, with the notes he would need for his science final tucked into his backpack, climbed into the car, determinedto make his feelings very, very visible.

A 15-year-old freshman at Arrowhead High, Chase can’t drive himself, so he sat in the passenger seat as a parent drove and beds ofwild daisies flew by outside the window. He was about to join his first protest. At 6:45 a.m., a school board committee was going to take up a proposed policy that would ban anything deemed “race-dividing” or “promoting a sexual or gender preference” from the walls of this high school in the conservative Milwaukee suburbs. If the policy passed as written, Black Lives Matter posters, Pride flags, and “safe space” stickers would all be taken down or scrubbed away.

Boston Globe Ownership History. Jess Bidgood notes and links.

Boston Globe Ownership History.

This story is insane. We know kids who go to #Hartland Arrowhead and they’ve been talking about graduation, prom, friendships and Summerfest. This isn’t even on their radar. Politics hasn’t changed education. However, we support the school board’s effort to keep politics OUT of… https://t.co/RJ31KMuOsk

— Wisconsin Right Now (@wisconsin_now) June 25, 2023

“And that is Socialism my friends, a race to the bottom”

Brilliant story brilliantly told…

pic.twitter.com/dVDTHYDHoc

— Melinda Richards 🇦🇺🇺🇸 (@goodfoodgal) June 24, 2023

English 10

Scott Calvert:

Vir­ginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin built his suc­cess­ful 2021 run for gov­er­nor in large part on pledges to ban crit­i­cal race the­ory and boost parental con­trol in pub­lic schools such as in Loudoun County, the scene of rau­cous school-board de­bates over is­sues such as Covid-19 mask poli­cies and race-re­lated in­struc­tion.

On his first day in of­fice he is­sued ed­u­ca­tion-re­lated ex­ec­u­tive or­ders. One aimed to ban the teach­ing of crit­i­cal race the­ory—a view that the legacy of white su­premacy is en­trenched in U.S. laws and in­sti­tu­tions. He signed lawsthat ended mask man­dates and re­quired par­ents to be no­ti­fied of sex­u­ally ex­plicit in­struc­tional ma­te­r­ial. The state school board, with a ma­jor­ity of Youngkin ap­pointees, ap­proved new statewide so­cial-stud­ies stan­dards.

Af­ter the first full school year of his term ended this month, the di­rec­tion of the state’s schools is far from set­tled. In-class in­struc­tion in Loudoun County has gone on with­out much change.

The new so­cial-stud­ies stan­dards, which echo Youngkin’s cam­paign call for “non­ide­o­log­i­cal and age-ap­pro­pri­ate” learn­ing, won’t take ef­fect un­til the 2025-26 school year. One teacher said his­tory cour­ses re­main the same. A con­ser­v­a­tive mem­ber of the school board says he still sees el­e­ments of crit­i­cal race the­ory be­ing taught. Some par­ents still clamor for more over­sight of class­room in­struc­tion.

Youngkin’s back­ers say gu­ber­na­to­r­ial clout can only go so far to spark change in lo­cal­ized school boards. Other sup­port­ers are urg­ing him to fur­ther push the lim­its of the power he has.

“As far as the pol­icy is­sues, there’s not much that has changed,” said Ian Prior, ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of Fight for Schools, a Loudoun-fo­cused po­lit­i­cal-ac­tion com­mit­tee that op­poses what it claims is a pivot from aca­d­e­mic rigor.

“That’s just ul­ti­mately the way lo­cal gov­ern­ment works,” said Prior, who spoke at Youngkin cam­paign events in Loudoun, among the high­est-in­come coun­ties in the na­tion and one that has trended De­mo­c­ra­tic.

Tommy Thompson

When I was UW System president, I asked whether our facilities, personnel and educational offerings were making the best use of taxpayer funds. I argued that they were not, and called for a blue-ribbon commission to recommend a better way to deploy and fund statewide higher education, This is particularly important because the number of college-age people in the state is projected to decline.

I renew that call and point to two situations in support of my position.

Washington County officials are seeking a solution in West Bend where the campuses of UW-Milwaukee at Washington County and Moraine Park Technical College are separated by only a couple miles. UW enrollment there has significantly declined, but Moraine Park enrollment has remained robust. Of more concern, the West Bend School District today has 500 seniors but only 350 kindergartners.

Abby Machtig;

How do you plan to address the achievement gaps between students in Madison schools, specifically around literacy?

We put brand new, high-quality standards-aligned materials in every single teacher’s classroom. We also had to support teachers to actually use those because that is a lift. … Do we always get it right the first time? No. But the good news is we can fix it, we can go back, we can learn, we can try again. We got some federal funding related to COVID and used much of that one-time money to make these initial investments in these materials. We didn’t always have that opportunity.

There is an explicit focus on literacy, and it’s not just literacy in the classroom, it’s also how we communicate about that to families. Families always want to be able to help their child read regardless of age. So that is not something that is done in isolation just in the classroom, it is about literacy in the community as well.

How do you plan to address declining student enrollment across the district? Going along with that, what is your plan for attracting and retaining teachers to the district amid a systemic teacher shortage?

I believe that our Board of Education has made a historic investment in our staff with the 8% cost-of-living increase. So, I believe that speaks volumes to our ability to retain and attract high-quality staff. It is a fact we are declining in enrollment. I think that there are some choices that we have to make around budget and ways of working over the coming year that we will do together.

Scott Girard.

Legislation and Reading: the Wisconsin Experience 2004 –

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

A programmer’s perspective

A question I often ask myself lately is wether I am the person that I want my children to grow up to be. Children, and human beings in general, learn mostly by imitation. We look at how others behave and we try to emulate their behaviour. Small children copy everything their parents do. The good parts and the bad parts. This is why it’s very important to stop and ask yourself if your behaviour is the right behaviour you want emulated in your children.

“Do you want your children to be like you?” This simple question is useful to reflect, discover and fix our imperfections. We are all full of all sorts of bad behaviour. Instead of accepting our faults we should strive to fix them, so that we don’t pass them onto our children.

Accepting that one has an imperfection is the first necessary step towards improvement. Some are easy to fix while some might take years. But we need to first accept that we have them and then try to fix them.

Every one of us has mountains of undiscovered potential. Sadly, we often don’t believe in our own potential. We think we already reached the end of our abilities. This is why children are amazing. They have so much potential. And it’s so visible, beautiful and exciting. It is our duty as parents to help them reach their potential.

Csail.MIT.edu

On June 15th, Iddo Drori posted on arXiv a working paper associated with a dataset of exams and assignments from dozens of MIT courses. He did so without the consent of many of his co-authors and despite having been told of problems that should be corrected before publication. One of us only learned of the posting on Sunday June 18 after traveling over the weekend.

In the process of addressing this matter, we discovered that contrary to what Iddo Drori had conveyed to us and to the students collecting data for the project, Iddo did not have permission from all the instructors to collect the assignment and exam questions that made up the dataset that was the subject of the paper. Instructors for some of those courses only learned of the existence of this dataset and the inclusion of their course material in it when the paper appeared on social media and when Iddo posted samples of the data online without permission from anyone.

These are serious matters that are being addressed through institutional channels, so we did not take lightly making such a public statement about them, but we feel it is important to explain why this paper should never have been published and must be withdrawn. We have asked Iddo to withdraw the paper from arXiv and have also contacted arXiv directly explaining the situation.

Peter Wood:

Why does anyone go to college? The most popular answer given by American college freshmen from 1991 to 2019 was, “To be able to get a better job.” The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA, which conducted an annual survey of full-time students at some 200 four-year colleges, routinely found 75 to 85 percent gave that answer, though many also said, “To make more money.” The next most popular answer during those decades was, “To learn more about things that interest me.” Trailing these answers but still widely endorsed was the ambition, “To gain a general education and appreciation of ideas.”

I don’t have access to more recent results but I suspect the students are still saying much the same. Those answers, however, merely scratch the surface. The real reasons, then and now, that students go to college are hidden in a mixture of social expectations, family dynamics, ambitions, emotional longing, and inertia, covered with a veneer of socially acceptable rationalizations.

That mixture is powerful enough to move more than 60 percent of high-school graduates to enroll in college instead of entering the workforce, joining the military, apprenticing for a trade, or dubious options such as idling at home, wandering around, online gaming, or a life of crime.

Going to college still looks to most Americans as a better choice than going to war or a life of dissolution, but recent evidence suggests that students completing high school are beginning to rethink the idea that college is necessarily the best path. “More High-School Grads Forgo College in Hot Labor Market” declares the Wall Street Journal. There’s that, but American higher education—and perhaps education throughout the Anglophone world—is in the midst of a transformation that goes beyond the vagaries of the job market.

Jonathan Turley:

This week, former U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) went on MSNBC to issue a furious warning to everyone looking into Hunter Biden and the influence peddling scandal: “Everybody needs to back off!”

Newly released evidence from the investigation indicates that McCaskill was not the only powerful figure issuing that warning. Two whistleblowers reportedly detailed highly disturbing actions from top officials to slow walk and undermine the investigation.

Many of us have already noted the absence of certain charges in the plea deal given to Hunter Biden. In addition to the lack of any charge as an unregistered foreign agent, there is no evidence that the Justice Department seriously investigated the influence-peddling efforts of the Biden family despite allegations of millions generated from foreign sources.

Now these whistleblowers are reportedly telling Congress that they were actively frustrated in their efforts to investigate as Merrick Garland was insisting that there was no interference or limitations.

This included preventing an effort to search a guest house of President Joe Biden. IRS official Gary Shapley allegedly recalled that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf agreed that there was “more than enough probable cause for the physical search warrant there, but the question was whether the juice was worth the squeeze.”

Wolf allegedly said that they could never get approval for the search despite the sufficiency of the evidence.

Joanne Jacobs:

Thirty-eight percent of teacher-education programs are failing to prepare future teachers to teach reading using the most effective methods, according to a new report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, writes Kate Rix on The 74. Fifty-one percent of programs earned an “F” or “D,” while 23 percent received an “A.”

Teaching reading is the top priority in the early grades. As districts and states shift to what’s called the “science of reading,” many veteran teachers — trained to use “balanced literacy” or “whole language” methods that don’t work very well — need to retraining. You’d think the new teachers would be prepared, but many ed schools are slow to change.

Teachers need to understand how to teach phonemic awareness (hearing and manipulating sounds in words), phonics (matching sounds with letters), fluency (reading without much effort), vocabulary and comprehension, says NCTQ. Most teacher-prep programs don’t cover all five adequately: Phonemic awareness is the most neglected.

Eva Moskowitz:

American students continue to suffer the effects of pandemic learning loss, as this week’s miserable National Assessment of Educational Progress scores demonstrate. But school closures and lockdowns explain only so much. If you truly wish to understand the dysfunction plaguing U.S. public schools, consider the remarkable story of Joel Greenblatt. A hedge-fund manager with no training or experience in education, Mr. Greenblatt nevertheless figured something out 20 years ago that New York City’s sprawling $38 billion school system is only now starting to realize—phonics is the key to early childhood literacy.

In 2005, as chairman of the City Council’s Education Committee, I heard about a school in Queens where the proportion of fourth-graders reading proficiently had doubled, from 36% to 71%, in four years. This school, P.S. 65, was using a phonics-based curriculum called Success for All that had been developed in the 1970s by Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden at Johns Hopkins University. The curriculum’s design was ingenious. It broke down reading skills into bite-sized pieces that children could understand. Students were evaluated every six weeks, placed into small groups at the same level of reading mastery, and taught exactly what they needed to progress to the next level. Success for All’s materials were so detailed and clear that even a relatively inexperienced teacher could use them.

Implementing Success for All didn’t require tons of money or brilliant teachers making heroic sacrifices. All it required was some modest additional funding so that students could learn in small groups for 100 minutes a day. Mr. Greenblatt, who picked up the tab, thought the school could make the money go further by asking other educators—such as the assistant principal or the art teacher—to pitch in.

Kendall Tietz:

“If you ask, ‘Who’s the most likely to take this republic down?’ It would be the teachers’ unions, and the filth that they’re teaching our kids, and the fact that they don’t know math and reading or writing,” Pompeo said of teachers unions and the state of education in the U.S. 

Weingarten went on to say she was “very offended” that he called what teachers teach “filth,” stating that those who are trying to create a more inclusive society are unfairly called pedophiles or groomers. 

“Every time somebody attempts to, and teachers attempt to, or society attempts to, create a more inclusive society, those who are trying to do that are called pedophiles or groomers or teaching filth,” Weingarten said. “It’s trying to scare people and that’s part of this leveraging of what has happened in terms of COVID for political advantage.”

Roberts pointed to scores from the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) that show U.S. schools have seen the largest average score decline in reading since 1990 and the first average score decline in math since 1989, as evidence that children in the American education system are falling behind. 

In response, Weingarten admitted that the scores went down because of COVID and that she was wrong when she said there was no learning loss, but claimed that Los Angeles Unified School District, which stayed closed longer than any other school district in the country, fared better than schools in the state of Florida.

Vince Bielski:

What’s more, most of these states have also enacted education savings accounts, or ESAs. They give families much more freedom than traditional tuition vouchers, depositing state funds into private accounts to spend on virtually anything related to learning, from homeschooling and online classes to therapy and supplies. 

The universal laws amount to a bracing change in school choice. Such programs have existed for decades but until now have been limited to a narrow set of students, such as those from low-income families, or in poor performing public schools, or in need of special education. 

By making all students eligible, regardless of their ability to pay for a private education, universal programs in the eight states expand the pool of possible participants by about 4 million students, according to an estimate by EdChoice, an advocacy group. That’s a 40% increase in eligibility since 2021, bringing the total to 13.6 million students after the programs start in the next few years.

Went on a college tour with my son today. Tour began with a Native American land acknowledgment ceremony, all the speakers announced their pronouns, etc etc etc. Good way to show potential students and parents your campus has been overtaken by the nuttiest 10% of progressives.

— Christian Schneider (@Schneider_CM) June 24, 2023

Federal Register

It would seize control of:

•All commodities and products that are capable of being ingested by either human beings or animals”
•“All forms of energy”
•“All usable water from all sources”
•“Health resources – drugs, biological products, medical devices, materials, facilities, health supplies, services and equipment”
•Forced labor ( or “induction” as the executive order delicately refers to military conscription)
•Moreover, federal officials would “issue regulations to prioritize and allocate resources.”
•Each government bureaucracy “shall act as necessary and appropriate.”

More.

Matt Taibbi:

This is a very American thing, the idea that rights aren’t conferred, but a part of us, like our livers, and you can’t take them away without destroying who we are. That’s why in other contexts you’ll hear some of us say things like, “I’ll give you this gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands!”

Some people roll their eyes and think that sounds crazy, but we know that guy actually means it, and to a lot of us it makes sense. We’re touchy about rights, especially about the first ones: speech, assembly, religion, the free press.

But we’re not here tonight to debate the virtues of American speech law versus the European tradition. Instead, Michael and I are here to tell a horror story that concerns people from all countries. Last year, he and I were offered a unique opportunity to look at the internal documentation of Twitter.

I entered that story lugging old-fashioned, legalistic, American views about rights, hoping to answer maybe one or two questions. Had the FBI, for instance, ever told the company what to do in a key speech episode? If so, that would be a First Amendment violation. Big stuff!

But after looking at thousands of emails and Slack chats, I first started to get a headache, then became confused. I realized the old-school Enlightenment-era protections I grew up revering were designed to counter authoritarianism as people understood the concept hundreds of years ago, back in the days of tri-cornered hats and streets lined with horse manure.

Miranda Dunlap:

Houston ISD Superintendent Mike Miles unveiled a dramatically expanded plan for the district this week, announcing 150 schools will see “wholesale systemic reform” by 2025. 

The scope of Miles’ plan is much larger than the one he shared at the beginning of the month, when Texas Education Commissioner Mike Morath appointed him and nine new school board members to lead HISD as part of sweeping sanctions against the district. Miles initially said he will begin with major changes to 28 campuses this upcoming school year, nearly all of which are located on the city’s largely lower-income northeast side.

Miles’ plans for the 150 schools, equal to slightly more than half of HISD’s campuses, largely mirror those outlined in recent weeks for the 28 campuses. They include significantly raising teacher pay, restructuring the responsibilities of teachers to give them more time to focus on classroom instruction, and standardizing lesson plans and curricula. The campuses would see additional staff dedicated to more routine tasks, such as making copies and grading papers.

Principals, meanwhile, would be expected to spend more time in classrooms coaching teachers. Miles compared principals to football coaches, saying coaches don’t show up to practice every few weeks, but rather they’re constantly on the field giving instruction.

Miles also said he wants to decrease the number of students in pre-kindergarten classrooms to 15, beginning with the 28 schools and HISD’s eight early childhood centers.

Erich Hartmann:

There was a brief moment in Spring 2020, just a few days into “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” when we had a chance to change our trajectory. A distinct inflection point where if we had done just one thing differently, and caught the crazy COVID coaster before it got locked in its tracks, things could have turned out very differently over these last three plus years.

In the third week of March a secret emergency meeting was scheduled to take place between President Donald Trump, the COVID Task Force, and eight of the most eminently qualified public health experts in the world. This elite group of scientists was slated to present the highest-level decision-makers in our government with an alternative POV to lock down; a much-needed second opinion on national turtling.

We didn’t know it at the time, but this would have been the most important meeting of the COVID-19 era. But it never occurred.

What happened?

This has been a nagging question ever since July 27, 2020 when BuzzFeed News broke the news in an article by Stephanie M. Lee: “An Elite Group Of Scientists Tried To Warn Trump Against Lockdowns In March.” In her article Ms. Lee framed this aborted meeting as a dodged bullet, and the scientists as unhelpful meddlers, but for many of us the fact that there even wasan attempted meeting like this was extremely heartening. 

Because for months we had been led to believe that this novel, authoritarian response was unanimous, that “the science was settled” and yet here we find out that some of the most famous scientists in the world didn’t quite agree with “the science.” Not only that, but they had major issues with the process, they questioned the data, and they were extremely concerned about the downstream, long-term effects to our society from locking down. But Lee’s article didn’t even attempt to answer the one big glaring, nagging question left in her article: “Why?”

Stanley Ridgley:

The contretemps, two and a half years ago, over First Lady Jill Biden’s problematic degree and her too-earnest desire to be addressed as “Doctor” opened discussion about a problem in higher education that didn’t go quite far enough.

Just what is this “EdD,” and why is this chit so important to so many people—but only the people who clutch it tightly, even as they behave as if, at any moment, they may be found out?

It is impolite and sometimes impolitic to point out the clear and documented deficiencies of advanced degrees in “higher education,” of the people who teach in these programs, and of the folks who complete them. But this unnecessary extension of courtesy has had a predictably deleterious impact on the university in general.

Witness the ludicrous spectacle of Whoopie Goldberg lauding Jill Biden, EdD, as a viable candidate for Surgeon General.

Says cultural critic Roger Kimball, “It is generally understood, though seldom mentioned in polite society, that the less distinguished one’s academic institution, the more likely one will insist upon the honorific ‘Dr.’” And that’s the actual doctorate, not the EdD, which isn’t actually a “doctorate” in the same sense as, say, a PhD in physics or in quantum mechanics or even in economics or business. It’s little more than a me-too “certificate,” not far removed from the master’s degree in education, which isn’t really that far removed from the bachelor’s.

And yet, the uninitiated at times believe the EdD to be far more than it possibly could. Witness the ludicrous spectacle of television personality Whoopie Goldberg lauding Jill Biden, EdD, as a viable candidate for U.S. Surgeon General, seemingly unaware of the difference between the EdD and the MD.

Academy for Science and Freedom

The Covid-19 pandemic revealed a lack of critical thinking skills in medicine and public health. Group thinking and herd mentality dominated over evidence-based medicine, critical examination of available research and vigorous scientific debate. The problem manifested itself in school closures, harmful lockdown measures, insufficient protection of older, high-risk Americans, compulsory mask orders, vaccine mandates, and withholding of effective therapeutics. It is important that the future generation of physicians and public health professionals are trained in critical thinking and evidence-based medicine.

Yup, Milwaukee not paying into its pension, and giving sweetheart pension deals to its employees was Republican’s fault. You heard it hear first. https://t.co/k4yhoI6aqe

— Scott Kelly (@TheScottKelly) June 23, 2023

David Blaska:

“A concerned Dane County citizen sent me an e-mail and photograph alleging that a child was allowed to participate in Madison’s Naked Bike Ride. The photograph shows what appears to be a child, surrounded by naked adults riding bicycles around the Wisconsin Capital. I have e-mailed Sheriff Barrett and have asked that his department investigate this matter.  In addition, I have filed a complaint with the Madison Police Department. 

“Our law enforcement officers need to investigate this matter and enforce our laws. If a child was allowed to participate in this naked bike ride, any and all adults who supported and condoned this need to be arrested immediately.”

The Economist:

Yet the trends may not be real. Instead, according to Patrick Ruffini, a pollster at the Republican-aligned firm Echelon Insights, they mainly reflect a change in how the Journal conducts its polling. In the past it had joined forces with nbc News to field a nationally representative poll by telephone, a practice that grew expensive and prone to error as response rates plunged. So the newspaper recently turned to norc, which over the past decade has developed polls that collect responses over the internet from a representative sample of Americans recruited by mail.

The problem arises when the types of people contacted by phone and the internet can be representative of Americans demographically, but statistical weirdos in other ways. Studying the differences in populations from telephone and online surveys—which industry insiders call “mode” effects—the Pew Research Centre in 2019 pointed out that its own online panellists may have been more honest about key metrics than its telephone respondents and less subject to “social desirability bias”, a phenomenon where people are more honest about things like their financial situation and height when asked anonymously than they are over the phone. Pew found that on the same question, among the same respondents, it got different responses by mode.

Emily Fowler:

With the anniversary of the overturn of Roe v. Wade just around the corner, Campus Reform reached out to student leaders of pro-life organizations across the country to see what the campus climate has been like since the landmark Dobbs decision was handed down. 

Three out of five students Campus Reform interviewed stated that they have experienced more vandalism and backlash since Roe was overturned on June 24 of last year.  

Campus Reform Interviewed student leaders from Penn State University, the College of William and Mary in Virginia, Kennesaw State University in Georgia, North Carolina’s Campbell University, and Rider University in New Jersey.

Campus Reform first asked interviewees to reflect on what their overall experience has been like this past year with any backlash, vandalism, or related incidents on their campus.

Kale Ogunbor, Vice President of Penn State Students for Life and Campus Reform correspondent, replied that her group has “experienced vandalism and backlash quite a few times, especially during the fall semester, after the reversal of Roe.”

“Early in the fall semester our chapter decided to host a ‘Cemetery for the Innocents’ exhibit,” Ogunbor related. “Hundreds of blue and pink flags were placed on our campus lawn representing the victims of abortion in the United States … Students from the [Penn State Planned Parenthood] club mocked and verbally denigrated us, and sat on and in between the flags that each represented 2000 boys and girls that had been aborted every year leading up to the reversal of Roe.”

David Deming:

The U.S. college wage premium doubles over the life cycle, from 27 percent at age 25 to 60 percent at age 55. Using a panel survey of workers followed through age 60, I show that growth in the college wage premium is primarily explained by occupational sorting. Shortly after graduating, workers with college degrees shift into professional, nonroutine occupations with much greater returns to tenure. Nearly 90 percent of life cycle wage growth occurs within rather than between jobs. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of human capital investment where workers differ in learning ability and jobs vary in complexity. Faster learners complete more education and sort into complex jobs with greater returns to investment. College acts as a gateway to professional occupations, which offer more opportunity for wage growth through on-the-job learning.

More.

Senay Boztas:

As Britain voted to leave the EU, Dutch universities began offering more courses in English and foreigners streamed in.

But with 122,287 international students in higher education in the Netherlands – 15% of all the country’s students – the government is proposing a cap on the number of students from outside the European Economic Area in some subjects and forcing universities to offer at least two-thirds of the content of standard bachelor’s degrees in Dutch, unless a university justifies an exemption.

Preston Cooper:

• Rising employer demand for bachelor’s degrees in occupations which did not previously require them is called degree inflation.
• Degree inflation closes job opportunities to the 62 percent of Americans without four-year degrees, exacerbates labor shortages, and reduces the financial return on investment of a college education.
• The proportion of upper-middle-class workers— those earning between $60,000 and $80,000 in today’s dollars — with a bachelor’s degree rose from 38 percent in 1990 to 52 percent today.
• Managers, registered nurses, computer software developers, salespersons, and secretaries have experienced the most degree inflation since 1990.
• To address degree inflation, state governments should eliminate statutory degree requirements wherever possible. The federal government should ensure a level playing field between traditional colleges and alternative education providers.

Emily Grosvenor:

As a feng shui consultant and design magazine editor and lifelong book obsessive, I am often asked by clients what to do when a collection of books moves from a state of abundance into what feels like a design problem. That moment arrives when people notice they are emotionally overwhelmed by the visual of overflowing bookshelves, or when they have encountered advice elsewhere about how to style shelves and the visual example shelf has only three books on it.

First, let’s all agree that for passionate readers, a personal library is nothing less than a soulful archive of the ever-changing self. We book lovers catalog our transformations, our influences, our ways of being, and our interests through our volumes and develop relationships—perceived or existing—with the people who created them.

Where once a library might have been a way to signal status to visiting society, today, a room full of books tells us a story about us: Where we came from, how we have struggled, what has lifted us, what we know for sure.

Jessica Grose:

The number of school-age children in America is declining. At least one reason is the fallingbirthrate after the Great Recession. And declining university enrollment based on a lower school-age population — which has been described as a “demographic cliff” — is something that some colleges are already grappling with.

K-12 public school systems around the country are facing a similar demographic reality. Declining enrollment hit cities like Chicago and states like Michigan before Covid, and the pandemic hit many other school systems — Philadelphia, New York City, Seattle and several districts in the Boston suburbs — like a wrecking ball. As The Times’s Shawn Hubler reported in May, “All together America’s public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020,” according to a survey from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

Choose Life.

David Blaska:

Big hulking 17-year-old was roaming the halls for 2 ½ hours. School brass is monitoring. Situation escalating. Student told to go to the principal‘s office. Kid threatens violence. Kid stands 6-feet 4-inches, weighs 230 pounds. Saffold removes his glasses to avoid injury. Assisted by other school employees, takes the student to the floor. Kid bites Saffold, draws blood. Kid gets cuffed. What’s this? (!!!) The school district has a policy against handcuffs? (!!!) A non-violent means of restraint to protect everyone? Saffold, a black man, neatly encapsulated the issue:

Chester Finn:

Yet the complacency of most Americans regarding the performance of our K–12 system has long been noted, as have the many structural, institutional, and contractual obstacles to changing that system in ways that might actually alter performance. This dates back at least to 1983’s Nation at Risk report. One reform effort after another gets opposed, diluted, or repealed—or turns out to be sorely incomplete because, for example, it fails to address the school-and-classroom implementation changes that are also essential if it’s to succeed.

Covid-related learning losses and what (if anything) to do about them are the latest example. Despite being flush with federal “recovery” dollars, most places aren’t doing much or doing “more of the same” or using the “lite” version or making it optional. They’re proving unable or unwilling to agree to actions that would truly alter behavior.

As the MacGillis piece makes clear, we shouldn’t dismiss this failure as mere structural rigidities or lack of leadership, although those definitely play roles almost everywhere. But the Richmond example is one of visionary leadership and what appear to be workable plans to retool the school year in ways that would facilitate recovery, especially among students who would get additional learning time, while also tackling such enduring problems as “summer learning loss” and kids getting into trouble due to endless weeks of no school.

What killed the year-round plan in Richmond (save for a tiny pilot version that finally slipped through, affecting just two of the districts’ fifty-four schools and potentially one thousand out of 22,000 pupils) was a witch’s brew of complacency, timidity, resignation, incomprehension, union resistance, and school board politics, plus a soupcon of condescension or obviousness among elites to the true circumstances of disadvantaged families.

Related: Harrison Bergeron:

Micah Walker:

Behind the smiles and jokes, the school’s lone band, orchestra and piano teacher was masking her sadness and frustration. Thomas spent the last two months fighting for her job at Bates, a K-8 school on Detroit’s northwest side. 

Thomas said Bates Principal David Bailey notified her April 12 that she would be leaving Bates at the end of the school year and transferring to another school in the Detroit Public Schools Community District. Thomas believes she’s being reassigned over too many absences throughout the year, absences the teacher said are protected under the Family and Medical Leave Act, a federal law that affords employees unpaid leave for specified family and medical reasons. Thomas said she takes FMLA time each year to care for her 10-year-old son with disabilities, but needed to take a six-week leave for herself earlier this year due to health reasons.

“Why would you take away a program that’s highly successful?” Thomas said. “We’re one of the premier schools.”

Related: Harrison Bergeron:

I’m an educator. Masters in elementary ed, NYS certified. @ehanford knows far more about reading instruction than most of us, who weren’t properly trained to teach reading effectively. She’s done the field an immeasurable service. https://t.co/xkGg1Yd3F3

— Robert Pondiscio (@rpondiscio) June 23, 2023

Every high school student should be required to pass the *same* 128-question civics test required of legal immigrants to become citizens. The fact that this is controversial in America is a damning indictment of our Republic’s health. See test questions below & try it yourself. pic.twitter.com/Hgqdv7FsYT

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 23, 2023

Kelly Meyerhofer and Molly Beck:

“UW System ought to be teaching them different things, such as critical thinking and problem-solving, teamwork and collaboration, professionalism and communication skills,” he said.

UW System pushed back on claims that campuses aren’t teaching students those types of skills.

“Our graduates are in high demand by employers precisely because they have developed these critical thinking skills and the talent needed to adapt in an ever-evolving workplace,” UW System spokesperson Ethan Schuh said. “Employers are sharing those stories everyday in their communities, and quite frankly, on our social media.”

The UW System could recoup the $32 million cut in the upcoming year by presenting a spending plan focused on workforce initiatives that lawmakers would need to approve, according to the motion approved by committee Republicans.

Kimberly Strassel:

In December 2020 the team wanted to search a storage unit in Virginia where Hunter had moved business documents. Ms. Wolf again objected, then tipped off Hunter’s defense counsel, “ruining our chance to get to evidence before being destroyed, manipulated, or concealed,” Mr. Shapley said. Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters also tipped Hunter’s Secret Service team to a proposed “day of action” in which members of U.S. Attorney David Weiss’s team intended to conduct surprise interviews of witnesses—including Hunter. This gave a group “close to Hunter” the opportunity to “obstruct the approach,” and of the “12 interviews we hoped to conduct on our day of action, we only got one substantive interview.” Hunter lawyered up.

Along the way, according to Mr. Shapley’s testimony, Ms. Wolf told investigators not to ask any questions about “dad” or “the big guy.” They were blocked from pursuing leads about the financial transactions of Hunter’s children, since she said they’d get “into hot water if we interview the president’s grandchildren.” They were ordered not to look into evidence of campaign-finance violations. They were told to take Hunter’s name off official document requests, which Mr. Shapley said was “absolutely absurd.” The second whistleblower told the committee that he became “sick of fighting to do what’s right.”

The IRS team nonetheless prepared a document in late 2021 covering tax years 2014-19, in which it recommended charging Hunter with felony tax evasion, felony false tax returns, and failures to pay tax. Mr. Shapley says this was partially based on Hunter’s “textbook” tax evasion of declaring his income from the Ukrainian firm Burisma as a “loan.” Mr. Shapley says the team was also looking into a Foreign Agents Registration Act case.

Sarah Neville:

On a rainy evening in Copenhagen last year, a diminutive woman in jeans, ankle boots and a casual shirt waited offstage at the Koncerthuset, a vast venue renowned for its acoustics. She had been invited by Science & Cocktails, a Danish non-profit that pairs lectures with drinks chilled in dry ice. Many in the audience were decades her junior and the mood was more rock concert than lecture as a voice over the loudspeaker announced, “The one and only — Shanna. Fucking. Swan!”

Swan, who turned 87 last month, walked on to the thump of a techno track, whoops and applause. “Wow. I have to say” — she chuckled gamely — “I’ve never had an introduction like that. And it’s wonderful.” As the hall quietened, she began to speak, calmly and without notes, about the animating purpose of her professional life. “I’m going to tell you a mystery story,” she said. “And hopefully, you’ll help me to solve it along the way.” 

The mystery is this. Since the late 1930s, sperm counts around the world appear to have dropped significantly. While the decline was initially observed in western countries, there is evidence of the same phenomenon in the developing world, and it seems to be accelerating. Swan, a Berkeley-trained statistician-turned-epidemiologist, believes she knows why.

For more than two decades she has devoted her life to studying the effects of “endocrine disrupting” chemicals (EDCs), which can interfere with the body’s natural hormones. These include pesticides, bisphenols, which harden plastic so it can be used in food storage containers and baby bottles, and phthalates, which soften plastic for use in packaging and products such as garden hoses. In recent years, traces of EDCs have been found in breast milk, placental tissue, urine, blood and seminal fluid.

In the glare of orange spotlights, Swan led the Copenhagen audience to her conclusion: that the innocuous products in your kitchen cupboard, bathroom cabinet or garden shed may be lowering sperm counts. They could also affect the reproductive systems of your unborn children. The implications of EDCs for human health don’t stop there: they can disrupt thyroid function, trigger cancer and obesity.

Brian Jacob, Damon Jones & Benjamin J. Keys

We explore how much borrowers value student debt relief, in the setting of the federal Teacher Loan Forgiveness (TLF) program, and further document whether information and eligibility for this program affect teacher employment decisions. The program cancels between $5,000 and $17,500 in debt for teachers who remain employed in a high-need school for five consecutive years. Using both quasi-experimental evidence and a randomized control trial, we find that neither eligibility nor a targeted information intervention result in changes in teacher employment decisions, despite the presence of sizable student loan balances in our sample. Information was found, however, to increase application and receipt rates for teachers who had already accrued the five years of eligibility. Additional evidence from contingent valuation surveys suggests that teachers do in general value possible debt relief. Incorporating qualitative evidence from focus groups, we conclude that take-up may be constrained by program complexity and administrative barriers that involve knowing which schools qualify, tracking employment records, having employers sign off, and coordinating with loan servicers.

Sarah Marshall Perry:

In a June like none other, where the LGBTQ agenda has been crammed at increasing velocity down the throats of unwitting Americans, everyday folks are reaching their limits.

With two more weeks to go in “Pride Month,” this is bad news for the rainbow mafia. But it’s a sign of character and courage that the rest of us can take hope in—especially when demonstrated by families in the direct line of propagandistic fire.

In response to the Left’s “sex-and-gender-everything” policies, parents and kids are both flexing their muscles in opposition to schools that are all in on “Pride.”

Earlier this month, a group of students at Marshall Simonds Middle School in Burlington, Massachusetts, reportedly protested a “Pride Month” event by tearing down LGBTQ “Pride” signs and banners and chanting, “USA are my pronouns.” 

This prompted the Equity Coalition, an LGBTQ advocacy group, to demand that the Burlington school district discipline students involved in the protest and fill the district’s vacant position of director of diversity, inclusion, and equity, or DEI.

Josh Blackman:

In any event, the latest story from Joan Biskupic and Devan Cole includes a few worthwhile revelations about Lawrence v. Texas.

First, believe it or not, Justice Kennedy’s draft opinion had even more cringeworthy rhetoric. And the Court’s progressives objected!

Kennedy also withdrew language that some of his colleagues regarded as awkward or out of place, such as, “The sexual instinct is of endless fascination for the human. Its beauty and power are best respected when the individual has substantial freedom to explore it to attain a better understanding of the concept of self and the place he or she has in a larger universe.”

His final opinion, instead, said in that section, “When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring. The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to make this choice.”

Justice Scalia, preach:

If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,” I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.

And to paraphrase Scalia and Bismarck, “no one should see how sausages or Kennedy opinions are made.”

Second, at conference, Justice Breyer only wanted to grant cert if there were five votes to reverse Bowers:

Glenn Reynolds:

“Allowing space for ideas we hate and ideas propounded by people we are inclined to hate not only trains our mind to refrain from lash[ing] out reflexively at unwelcome arguments, it more importantly frees us from the compulsion to do so,” wrote Reynolds (pictured).

“And freedom from that compulsion is not only good for free speech, it is also good for the soul,” he wrote, citing Justice Louis Brandeis’s dissent in Whitney v. California(1927): “Men feared witches and burned women, and it is the function of [free] speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.”

Reynolds points out that the top comment to a New York Times story regarding a federal judge who was recently shouted down at Stanford Law School is a first-hand account from a reader about how in 1969 a group of well-behaved high school students were able to sit through a lecture from members of the American Nazi Party then skillfully humiliate and school them during the Q&A.

“Yes, humiliating Nazis with your learning and knowledge is true empowerment, of a sort not to be found in persuading administrators to silence them. … [However] nowadays those administrators refer to speech as ‘harmful’ or ‘violent.’ Such labels cause students to feel that they are in danger and must be protected from the speech in question,” he wrote. “Teaching people that hostile speech is something they have the resources to overcome on their own is far more empowering than teaching that they must be protected by their elders from ideas they cannot cope with by themselves.”

Ultimately, Reynolds added, one must exercise “the muscles of tolerance, on both an individual and a societal level.”

“’Use it or lose it,’ as the bodybuilders say, and we have every reason to think that our societal tolerance muscles have grown rather flabby in recent years.”

A pack of teenagers raped and murdered a random woman in the public park in the middle of the day in Milwaukee. One of them took video of the attack and posted it on Facebook. The reason you didn’t hear about it is because the assailants are black and the victim was Asian. https://t.co/zrJx1AnH1B

— Daniel Friedman (@DanFriedman81) June 22, 2023

Christopher Rufo

have been engaged in an ongoing dialogue with a physician who works in a major children’s hospital in a blue city. This physician has witnessed firsthand how transgender ideology has captured the medical profession and jeopardized the first commandment of the healing sciences: do no harm.

He has now chosen to speak out, on condition of anonymity, because he is alarmed by the sudden corruption of the medical community. His colleagues, many of whom oppose transgender interventions, have so far chosen to stay silent. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Christopher Rufo: Please begin by setting the scene. What’s it like in a major children’s hospital in the United States regarding transgender interventions for children?

Physician: I think the best way to answer that question is to talk about the cultural shift that happened in 2020, because transgender ideology and Covid are inextricably linked. Normally, doctors operate by the authority of the professional societies that govern our specific practice. That worked because the individuals in those institutions were reliable, intelligent, and thoughtful. But with Covid in 2020, we started getting medical decrees without peer review or evidence—you saw this with masks, social distancing, and emergency-use authorizations. These decrees were expressed as something that everyone had to do, without justification based on sound science. The other thing was censorship. If you were to ask questions or express doubt about these medical decrees, you would be ostracized within your department, and you stood a good chance of being publicly humiliated, severely reprimanded, or fired.

That’s when transgender ideology really took off. Within these academic institutions, so-called experts in the field of transgender medicine would simply declare that puberty blockers and other interventions were the gold standard of care. The evidence to support this is completely fraudulent, but no dissent was permitted. Everyone within the medical community knew that if he questioned transgender ideology, he would suffer the same type of repercussions that had happened during Covid. The best way to describe the environment would be as an authoritarian, censorious culture that discourages any meaningful debate and encourages the demonization of anyone who asks questions.

Rufo: What are the main tenets of transgender medical theory that are enforced as the conventional wisdom? And how have those tenets changed medical practice?

Andrew Hill and Andrew Jack

Francesca Gino is one of HBS’s best-known behavioural scientists and author of Rebel Talent, a 2018 book with the subtitle “Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life”.

The controversy, which centres on the use of allegedly fraudulent data in published papers, is the latest to hit the field of behavioural science and psychology research. Some well-publicised findings in the discipline have proved hard to replicate, casting a shadow over the highly modish branch of management studies and social science.

Gino, whose work has been widely cited, including in the Financial Times, has been a professor of business administration at HBS since 2014. Her HBS profile was recently altered to indicate that she is on administrative leave. She did not respond to FT requests for comment via email and social media. A Harvard Business School spokesman said: “We have no comment at this time.”

A group of academics who compile the Data Colada blog about the evidence behind behavioural science has started publishing a series of posts in which they say they will detail “evidence of fraud in four academic papers” co-authored by Gino. “We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data,” they wrote in the first post of the series, which appeared on June 17.

The allegations, first reported in the The Chronicle of Higher Education, have unsettled US behavioural scientists. Katy Milkman of University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, shared the first Data Colada post on Twitter, urging anyone in the field to read it immediately. Alongside a nauseated-face emoji, she said: “We have to do better.”

Alliance for education Waukesha:

The School District of Waukesha is doing harm to the students, but it’s not as simple as the School Board blaming pride flags, or disaffected teachers blaming the Superintendent. The system itself is a cancer that has metastasized and crept into every classroom across this massive district, and we know it’s doing harm to students because they show us that it does. To begin to scratch the surface of these problems, we have to identify the goals of the elected school board members, who overwhelmingly support the agenda of the nationally infamous Moms for Liberty organization. Board policies reflect a drive to adopt a curriculum that whitewashes any discussion of discrimination, whether it’s related to race or gender identity. Their narrative has always been to equate the discussion of racism with “critical race theory;” or a student grappling with gender dysmorphia, confiding in their teacher with “grooming.” Material ways that we can observe how this narrative harms students, includes implementing StudySync and TCI into our English and Social Studies curriculum. These so-called “rich” and “complex” texts offer highly outdated and disengaging views of history and literature. TCI, which my class dealt with this year, is three miles wide, and a half-inch deep, so there is no chance to engage in deep inquiry, or time to create projects. Truthfully, the problem isn’t the curricular resource itself, rather the fervor with which it was implemented. At the beginning of the school year, all of the English and Social Studies teachers were gathered for a meeting where school board policies were laid out in front of us, saying that every supplemental resource outside of the aforementioned would have to be approved by our supervising administrator. Every article, video, political cartoon, activity, had to be vetted for indoctrination. What did this meeting tell us? Well, the Director of Secondary Learning told me personally, when I expressed how this would ultimately cause students to disengage, “Rusty, your days of autonomous teaching are behind you.”

So began a cycle: Enforcement of milquetoast curriculum gives way to teachers feeling mistrusted and undervalued, which gives way to subpar instruction, which results in classrooms of disengaged learners who see no incentive to rise to the task. Ultimately, it returns to the problem of curriculum and policy, where the many factors causing these problems are not considered valid in the eyes of many of our stakeholders. In a discussion I held with my classes during final exams, the students reported that they noticed that some of their teachers appear to be phoning it in. Some teachers are asking for work in an unreasonable amount of time; others are too exhausted to lead engaging lessons. Regardless of the way this burnout is expressed, it is not their fault. What we are seeing is neither the students’ fault, nor is it teachers’ fault, because many of Waukesha’s best educators are seeking asylum elsewhere. In some cases, teachers are shifting to different buildings, others to different districts, and some, sadly, are leaving the profession entirely. I am leaving for a school that bears no resemblance to SDW, and I am glad of it. Education is too important to lose learning over culture wars, and students know this. Conservative students and Liberal students at South understand better than any that they have to exist on the same plane, and so they do far more to bridge their differences than the adults, and ultimately they found themselves agreeing with one another in a class discussion that regardless of what their ideology is, they are the ones who are getting the raw deal.

🧵Incredible rewrite of South Korean history by the @nytimes that completely eliminates FIVE critical facts. 1) Korea was a Japanese COLONY. 2) Korea was DIVIDED by the US (unilaterally) in 1945 so US forces could accept Japan’s surrender in the south and the USSR in the north. pic.twitter.com/pJvIKsqQLK

— Tim Shorrock (@TimothyS) June 22, 2023

Also in the Sulzberger New York Times:

“They Literally Know Nothing’: Ben Rhodes Bragged About Manipulating Clueless Reporters”

Joel Kotkin:

Like earlier apostates, religious or scientific, ours face an uphill struggle. They must contend with forces within the C-suite and, particularly, academia, where even the sciences are now constrained by ideological edicts. This is where the money flows, often to a host of non-profits, some secretly funded, that spread the gospels of censorship, police reduction, indoctrination in schools and an apocalyptic environmental agenda. One problem the apostates face is therefore an obvious one: despite often impressive media resumes, their research rarely makes it into the mainstream, their voices being carried no further than Twitter, Substack and the more broad-minded corners of the media.

This pushback comes at a propitious time, extending beyond a few dissident intellectuals to the grassroots and business moguls such as Elon Musk, Ken Griffinand Bernie Marcus. The latter, in particular, understand that the new progressive orthodoxy undermines the entire system by embracing anti-capitalist memes and reducing the role of merit in a system built around it. And so a critical front has been the rebellion against ESG (environmental, social, governance) standards. Many US states have moved to take their pension funds out of firms that embrace this ideology; some investment houses, notably Vanguard and upstart Thrive Asset Management, are eschewing corporate policies that stress climate change and other issues over fiduciary obligation to investors.. The fact that returns to ESG firms have been poor, when compared with those tied to fossil fuels and basic industries, could presage a further awakening among financial and business leaders that the balance sheet, rather than ideological back-slapping, constitutes the primary mission of business.

More important still, apostasy is also rising among the general population. The pressure for reparations, for example, is opposed by upwards of two-thirds of Americans. All major ethnic groups, notes Pew, reject race quotas, including African-Americans; overall, almost three in four oppose this, as do a majority of both Democrats and Republicans.

“The problem has never been about school choice. It’s about who has it.”
Howard Fuller
60 years of service fighting for equity in education
The Freedom Coalition for Charter Schools pic.twitter.com/6NTZIWUyfm

— david p. hardy (@davidphardy) June 22, 2023

🇧🇷

Here’s a new @FT report on how the Biden State Dept, the CIA and the Pentagon engaged in “very unusual” efforts to shape Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, and specifically to undermine Bolsonaro’s narrative about election integrity and fraud:https://t.co/kuXGG5uvXv

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 21, 2023

NYT interviews beneficiaries of affirmative action.

One black study entering Columbia Law School is “unapologetic” about getting in with low test scores, is committed to making a career practicing civil rights law.

His dad was the dean of a law school. https://t.co/aKdgMI1Rjx pic.twitter.com/kb3OKyp4Mu

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) June 21, 2023

Please quit repeating this lie. Biden forced millions of women to take an experimental shot as a condition of employment. https://t.co/sNBfw7xoUY

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) June 21, 2023

Samuel A. Alito Jr.

Pro­P­ub­lica has lev­eled two charges against me: first, that I should have re­cused in mat­ters in which an en­tity con­nected with Paul Singer was a party and, sec­ond, that I was ob­lig­ated to list cer­tain items as gifts on my 2008 Fi­nan­cial Dis­close Re­port. Nei­ther charge is valid.

Re­cusal. I had no oblig­a­tion to re­cuse in any of the cases that Pro­P­ub­lica cites. First, even if I had been aware of Mr. Singer’s con­nec­tion to the en­ti­ties in­volved in those cases, re­cusal would not have been re­quired or ap­pro­pri­ate. Pro­P­ub­lica sug­gests that my fail­ure to re­cuse in these cases cre­ated an ap­pear­ance of im­pro­pri­ety, but that is in­cor­rect. “There is an ap­pear­ance of im­pro­pri­ety when an un­bi­ased and rea­son­able per­son who is aware of all rel­e­vant facts would doubt that the Jus­tice could fairly dis­charge his or her du­ties” (State­ment on Ethics Prin­ci­ples and Prac­tices ap­pended to let­ter from the Chief Jus­tice to Sen­a­tor Durbin, April 25, 2023). No such per­son would think that my re­la­tion­ship with Mr. Singer meets that stan­dard. My rec­ol­lec­tion is that I have spo­ken to Mr. Singer on no more than a hand­ful of oc­ca­sions, all of which (with the ex­cep­tion of small talk dur­ing a fish­ing trip 15 years ago) con­sisted of brief and ca­sual com­ments at events at­tended by large groups. On no oc­ca­sion have we dis­cussed the ac­tiv­i­ties of his busi­nesses, and we have never talked about any case or is­sue be­fore the Court. On two oc­ca­sions, he in­tro­duced me be­fore I gave a speech—as have dozens of other peo­ple. And as I will dis­cuss, he al­lowed me to oc­cupy what would have oth­er­wise been an un­oc­cu­pied seat on a pri­vate flight to Alaska. It was and is my judg­ment that these facts would not cause a rea­son­able and un­bi­ased per­son to doubt my abil­ity to de­cide the mat­ters in ques­tion im­par­tially.

Sec­ond, when I re­viewed the cases in ques­tion to de­ter­mine whether I was re­quired to re­cuse, I was not aware and had no good rea­son to be aware that Mr. Singer had an in­ter­est in any party. Dur­ing my time on the Court, I have voted on ap­prox­i­mately 100,000 cer­tio­rari pe­ti­tions. The vast ma­jor­ity re­ceive lit­tle per­sonal at­ten­tion from the jus­tices be­cause even a cur­sory ex­am­i­na­tion re­veals that they do not meet our re­quire­ments for re­view. See Sup. Ct. R. 10. To en­sure that I am not re­quired to re­cuse, mul­ti­ple mem­bers of my staff care­fully check the names of the par­ties in each case and any other en­ti­ties listed in the cor­po­rate dis­clo­sure state­ment re­quired by our rules. See Supreme Court Rule 29.6. Mr. Singer was not listed as a party in any of the cases listed by Pro­P­ub­lica. Nor did his name ap­pear in any of the cor­po­rate dis­clo­sure state­ments or the cer­tio­rari pe­ti­tions or briefs in op­po­si­tion to cer­tio­rari. In the one case in which re­view was granted, Re­pub­lic of Ar­gentina v. NML Cap­i­tal, Ltd., No. 12-842, Mr. Singer’s name did not ap­pear in ei­ther the cer­tio­rari pe­ti­tion, the brief in op­po­si­tion, or the mer­its briefs. Be­cause his name did not ap­pear in these fil­ings, I was un­aware of his con­nec­tion with any of the listed en­ti­ties, and I had no good rea­son to be aware of that. The en­ti­ties that Pro­P­ub­lica claims are con­nected to Mr. Singer all ap­pear to be ei­ther lim­ited li­a­bil­ity cor­po­ra­tions or lim­ited li­a­bil­ity part­ner­ships. It would be ut­terly im­pos­si­ble for my staff or any other Supreme Court em­ploy­ees to search fil­ings with the SEC or other gov­ern­ment bod­ies to find the names of all in­di­vid­u­als with a fi­nan­cial in­ter­est in every such en­tity named as a party in the thou­sands of cases that are brought to us each year.

• Re­port­ing. Un­til a few months ago, the in­struc­tions for com­plet­ing a Fi­nan­cial Dis­clo­sure Re­port told judges that “[p]er­sonal hos­pi­tal­ity need not be re­ported,” and “hos­pi­tal­ity” was de­fined to in­clude “hos­pi­tal­ity ex­tended for a non-busi­ness pur­pose by one, not a cor­po­ra­tion or or­ga­ni­za­tion, . . . on prop­erty or fa­cil­i­ties owned by [a] per­son . . .” Sec­tion 109(14). The term “fa­cil­i­ties” was not de­fined, but both in or­di­nary and le­gal us­age, the term en­com­passes means of trans­porta­tion. See, e.g., Ran­dom House Web­ster’s Unabridged Dic­tio­nary of the Eng­lish Lan­guage 690 (2001) (defin­ing a “fa­cil­ity” as “some­thing de­signed, built, in­stalled, etc., to serve a spe­cific func­tion af­ford­ing a con­ve­nience or ser­vice: trans­porta­tion fa­cil­i­ties” and “some­thing that per­mits the eas­ier per­for­mance of an ac­tion”). Le­gal us­age is sim­i­lar. Black’s Law Dic­tio­nary has ex­plained that the term “fa­cil­i­ties” may mean “every­thing nec­es­sary for the con­ve­nience of pas­sen­gers.” Fed­eral statu­tory law is sim­i­lar. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C §1958(b) (“ ‘fa­cil­ity of in­ter­state com­merce’ in­cludes means of trans­porta­tion”); 18 U.S.C §2251(a) (re­fer­ring to an item that has been “trans­ported us­ing any means or fa­cil­ity of in­ter­state com­merce”); Kevin F. O’­Mal­ley, Jay E. Grenig, Hon. William C. Lee, Fed­eral Jury Prac­tice and In­struc­tions §54.04 (Feb­ruary 2023) (“the term ‘uses any fa­cil­ity in in­ter­state com­merce’ means em­ploy­ing or uti­liz­ing any method of . . . trans­porta­tion be­tween one state and an­other”).

This un­der­stand­ing of the re­quire­ment to re­port gifts re­flected the ex­pert judg­ment of the body that the Ethics in Gov­ern­ment Act en­trusts with the re­spon­si­bil­ity to ad­min­is­ter com­pli­ance with the Act, see 5 U.S.C. App. §111(3). When I joined the Court and un­til the re­cent amend­ment of the fil­ing in­struc­tions, jus­tices com­monly in­ter­preted this dis­cus­sion of “hos­pi­tal­ity” to mean that ac­com­mo­da­tions and trans­porta­tion for so­cial events were not re­portable gifts. The flight to Alaska was the only oc­ca­sion when I have ac­cepted trans­porta­tion for a purely so­cial event, and in do­ing so I fol­lowed what I un­der­stood to be stan­dard prac­tice.

For these rea­sons, I did not in­clude on my Fi­nan­cial Dis­clo­sure Re­port for 2008 ei­ther the ac­com­mo­da-tions pro­vided by the owner of the King Salmon Lodge, who, to my knowl­edge, has never been in­volved in any mat­ter be­fore the Court, or the seat on the flight to Alaska.

In brief, the rel­e­vant facts re­lat­ing to the fish­ing trip 15 years ago are as fol­lows. I stayed for three nights in a mod­est one-room unit at the King Salmon Lodge, which was a com­fort­able but rus­tic fa­cil­ity. As I re­call, the meals were home­style fare. I can­not re­call whether the group at the lodge, about 20 peo­ple, was served wine, but if there was wine it was cer­tainly not wine that costs $1,000. Since my visit 15 years ago, the lodge has been sold and, I be­lieve, ren­o­vated, but an ex­am­i­na­tion of the pho­tos and in­for­ma­tion on the lodge’s web­site shows that Pro­P­ub­li­ca’s por­trayal is mis­lead­ing.

As for the flight, Mr. Singer and oth­ers had al­ready made arrange­ments to fly to Alaska when I was in­vited shortly be­fore the event, and I was asked whether I would like to fly there in a seat that, as far as I am aware, would have oth­er­wise been va­cant. It was my un­der­stand­ing that this would not im­pose any ex­tra cost on Mr. Singer. Had I taken com­mer­cial flights, that would have im­posed a sub­stan­tial cost and in­con­ve­nience on the deputy U.S. Mar­shals who would have been re­quired for se­cu­rity rea­sons to as­sist me.

More:

ProPublica styles itself as “an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism with moral force.” Let me translate “moral force” for you: ambushing conservatives with misleading accounts of dated accusations that, at worst, concerned good faith attempts to comply with the rules. I’ve lost count of the number of times that wild accusations against Justice Thomas have fallen apart. I think the only upshot of this breathless reporting is that the public has become tired/bored/numb to this “moral force.”

ProPublica’s latest research target is (you guessed it) Justice Alito. On Friday, ProPublica contacted Justice Alito, and asked him to respond to questions by a deadline of noon EDT Tuesday. Justice Alito provided such a response–in the Wall Street Journal.

Alito’s decision was a masterstroke. Rather than providing comments to ProPublica, which can be cherry-picked and quoted out of context, Alito spoke directly to the public. Indeed, I long ago decided that if any outlet were running a hit job on me, and asks me for comment, I would pre-empt their story and post my reply on the blog. Alas, most of the hit jobs on me never bother seeking comment. But such is life.

Propublica funding:

“It is no coincidence that several organizations smearing Justice Thomas are funded generously by many of the same donors,” Parker Thayer, an investigative researcher at Capital Research Center, told the DCNF. “The ‘pop-up’ public pressure campaign, where just a few donors pay dozens of ‘grassroots’ activist groups to give the appearance of broad public support for a particular issue, has long been a favored tactic of the Left’s wealthy special interests.”

The Sandler Foundation, which launchedProPublica in 2007 and is the news outlet’s largest donor, has given it almost $40 million since 2010 for general support. The Sandler Foundation has also given over $7.5 million to the Campaign Legal Center (CLC) since 2015 and over $6 million to American Constitution Society (ACS) for general support since 2010, according to tax forms.

The Sandler Foundation was formed by Herbert and Marion Sandler, who, according to Forbes Magazine, “instituted borrowing practices that were largely blamed for the housing market collapse.” Time Magazine listed the Sandlers among the “25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis.”

CLC wrote a letter to the Judicial Conference in April requesting the body refer Thomas to the Department of Justice (DOJ) “for potential criminal and civil penalties” after ProPublica reported that Thomas did not disclose expense-paid trips he took with Crow—allegations that legal experts told the DCNF did not demonstrate wrongdoing. American Constitution Society President Russ Feingold backed this call for a DOJ investigation in April, and he argued Congress “has a duty to check the Supreme Court” by imposing ethics rules and “rigorously investigating violations of federal law and flagrant ethics lapses.”

Glenn Reynolds

Another day, another hit piece on the Supreme Court, this time with ProPublica targeting Justice Samuel Alito. 

A few weeks back, commenting on a substanceless media attack on Justice Clarence Thomas, law professor Josh Blackman commented, “Wait for the next empty shoe to drop.”

Well, here it is. And honestly it’s not much of a shoe. Nor even a flipflop.

Since the Supreme Court shifted right, media coverage has, well, flip-flopped from hagiography to hit pieces fast enough to make your head spin. 

When the court was reliably liberal, things like Justice Hugo Black’s fomer Klan membership, or William O. Douglas’ history of sexual misbehavior and shady connections to Vegas “businessmen” didn’t matter. 

Now that it’s leaning the other way, the press has stopped swallowing camels and started straining at gnats

More.

Jonathan Kay

It’s now been more than two years since Canada was convulsed by claims that 215 unmarked graves of Indigenous schoolchildren had been discovered on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. No actual bodies or human remains were in evidence—just ground-penetrating radar data indicating regularly-spaced soil dislocations. But you wouldn’t have known that from the breathless manner in which the story was reported at the time. A Global News headline announced the “Discovery of Human Remains at Kamloops Residential School Grounds.” Another, at the Toronto Star, declared, “The Remains of 215 Children Have Been Found.” 

I was one of the many Canadians who believed these headlines. The racist abuses meted out by Canada’s 19th- and 20th-century-era residential-school system, which had been created to “civilize” Indigenous people and strip them of their culture, has been widely discussed for decades. Given this dark history, it wasn’t hard to believe that some of the priests and educators who ran these schools hadn’t just been cruel and negligent (this much was already known), but also had committed acts of mass murder against defenceless children.

Without waiting for the hard evidence to be sprung from the earth, flags were lowered, July 1st Canada Day celebrations were cancelled, Justin Trudeau took a knee for the cameras, and the whole nation went into an utterly unprecedented collective period of self-flagellation. Before the summer was over, Trudeau pledged more than $300 million in new funding for Indigenous communities, so they could complete the grim task of scouring the earth for child corpses. The Canadian Press later called it the story of the year.

NBC news

YouTube said Monday that it had removed a video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaking with podcast host Jordan Peterson for spreading what the company said was vaccine misinformation. 

The decision is the latest challenge for Kennedy as he seeks to find support for a Democratic presidential run after years as an anti-vaccine crusader. The video was removed amid a broader tug-of-war online between vaccine conspiracy theorists and prominent doctors. 

YouTube’s policies against hosting false medical information are long-standing. 

“We removed a video from the Jordan Peterson channel for violating YouTube’s general vaccine misinformation policy, which prohibits content that alleges that vaccines cause chronic side effects, outside of rare side effects that are recognized by health authorities,” YouTube said Monday in a statement.

Gustaf B. Skar, Steve Graham, …Arne Johannes Aasen:

The current study examined the effectiveness of a writing is caught approach with young developing writers in Norway. This method is based on the premise that writing competence is acquired naturally through real use in meaningful contexts. Our longitudinal randomized control trial study tested this proposition by examining if increasing first grade students’ opportunities to write in various genres for different purposes and for a range of audiences over a two-year time period improved the quality of their writing, handwriting fluency, and attitude towards writing. The study included data from 942 students (50.1% girls) in 26 schools randomly assigned to the experimental treatment, and 743 students (50.6% girls) in 25 schools randomly assigned to the business-as-usual (BAU) control condition. Across Grades 1 and 2, experimental teachers were asked to supplement their typical writing instruction by implementing 40 writing activities designed to increase students’ purposeful writing. Increasing experimental students’ writing over the two-year period did not result in statistically detectable differences in the writing quality, handwriting fluency, and attitude towards writing of students in the experimental and BAU control conditions. These findings did not provide support for the effectiveness of the writing is caught approach. Implications for theory, research, and practiced are discussed.

Larissa MacFarquhar

When I finally completed my second novel, Something Happened, The New York Timesinterviewed me about having finished the book, and I talked to them about Bob’s value to me as an editor. The day the interview ran, Bob called me and said he didn’t think it was a good idea to talk about editing and the contributions of editors, since the public likes to think everything in the book comes right from the author. That’s true, and so from that time on, I haven’t.

Charlie Meyer:

I’m posting this on my last day teaching high school computer science. In the past two years, I’ve worked with over 200 students and for many, my class was their first experience coding.

I did not succeed in getting 100% of my students interested in programming. (Not even close)

By the end of my class, many were determined to never try coding again in their lives.

As I leave teaching to start Pickcode (a new platform for teaching CS), my primary concern is how to design the product to engage a higher proportion of students. I don’t need every student who tries Pickcode to become a software engineer, but I want every student who uses it to understand the joy of using coding to create programs they’re proud of.

Python Music and Engagement

While I failed to get 100% of students to enjoy coding, almost every student had a couple of “on” days.

Take Braeden, who took my intro to CS class as a junior and found absolutely every opportunity to goof off in class. His final project for our App Inventor unit was a soundboard app with one button: a picture of Pitbull that made the Taco Bell ding when clicked. (He completed this in 25 minutes and played web games for the other three weeks available for the project)

When it came time to learn Python, Braeden was almost universally disinterested. Project 3.10 however, was called “Python Music” and he was tasked with composing a song using a small library I made to wrap a Python waveform package.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

No ‘silver bullet’ to solve small schools’ problems

Eric Fulcomer has heard predictions about a looming wave of college closures throughout the three decades he’s worked in higher education. He now leads the Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, an organization that represents the state’s private schools.

Nationally, a handful of institutions close every year. But the predicted mass wave hasn’t happened.

Tyler Katzenberger:

The new version of the bill, passed Wednesday afternoon by the Assembly in 67-27 vote, would prescribe an “intensive” personal literacy plan, including summer classes, for incoming fourth graders who failed to meet third-grade reading benchmarks. Students would exit the plan after they pass a grade-level reading test and their parents agree the plan is no longer needed.

Eight Democrats voted for the bill: Reps. Deb Andraca of Whitefish Bay, Sue Conley of Janesville, Dave Considine of Baraboo, Dora Drake of Milwaukee, Tip McGuire of Kenosha, Tod Ohnstad of Kenosha, Sylvia Ortiz-Velez of Milwaukee, and Shelia Stubbs of Madison. Two Republicans, Reps. Shae Sortwell of Two Rivers and Joy Goeben of Hobart, voted against the GOP-authored bill.

Assembly Democrats tried and failed during debate Wednesday to send the bill back to committee, arguing it needed more work.

“This bill is so close. It is very very close,” Andraca said. “But we just got an amendment literally an hour or so ago, and it fundamentally changed a number of things. I haven’t had a chance to hear from school districts in my district how they feel about this bill. Why? Because they’re teaching.”

The changes introduced Wednesday were “a very short amendment” to a measure that’s remained largely the same since it was first introduced earlier this month, Kitchens responded. Both he and the DPI previously told the Journal Sentinel they’ve been working on the reading overhaul since last November.

Wispolitics:

State Superintendent Jill Underly after the bill’s passage called it a “step in the right direction.” She said the Department of Public Instruction had “very productive” conversations with legislators in crafting the agreement.

AB 321 would establish an Office of Literacy to contract 64 full-time literacy coaches who would help teachers implement a newer model based on phonics, vocabulary building, reading fluency, and oral language development, among other things.

The body rejected Dems’ request to refer the measure back to committee. Dems argued the bill needs more work and criticized the addition of another amendment. 

The amendment added today includes measures to require students who read below grade level to have individualized reading plans until they catch up and to include the percentage of third-grade students who read at grade level on school report cards. 

Rep. Christine Sinicki said there is no reason to rush the process. 

“It’s our responsibility to make sure we’re doing the work here that gives our teachers and our schools the tools they need to succeed,” the Milwaukee Dem said. 

She said while she didn’t want to oppose the bill, the amendment didn’t address all of her concerns, such as an intensive summer reading program for those with the lowest reading scores. She questioned how it would be paid for.

Co-author Rep. Joel Kitchens, chair of the Assembly Education Committee, said he would challenge anyone to name a bill that has had as much collaboration as the reading bill. 

“It’s a very complicated bill, it’s very long, there’s always going to be something someone doesn’t like, but we need to get this done,” the Sturgeon Bay Republican said.

He also said spending more time on the measure would kill the bill, urging lawmakers to “do the right thing.”

Legislation and Reading: the Wisconsin Experience 2004 –

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

📣Republicans in Wisconsin:
Hold the Line on DEI cuts to the WOKE UW System💪🏽

The UW System has unfortunately become a cesspool of woke indoctrination. Yet Democrats want over $300 million more tax dollars and ZERO spending cuts in UW’s 32 million budget for “Diversity, Equity… pic.twitter.com/3BZi4MPX56

— Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) June 21, 2023

Kiera Butlers

Ten years ago, Marilyn Muller began to suspect that her kindergarten daughter, Lauryn, was struggling with reading. Lauryn, a bright child, seemed mystified by the process of sounding out simple words. Still, the teachers at the top-rated Massachusetts public school reassured Muller that nothing was wrong, and Lauryn would pick up the skill—eventually. Surely they knew what they were talking about. Their reading curriculum was well-regarded, and one that encouraged children to use context clues when they couldn’t decode a word. The class was organized into leveled reading groups—bronze, silver, gold, and platinum—with everyone starting out the year in the bronze group. By year’s end, everyone had moved up to a new level—except Lauryn. Muller’s daughter was the only kindergartner stuck in bronze all year.

First grade was no better. The teachers continued to brush off Muller’s concerns—but she couldn’t help but worry for all sorts of reasons, especially because not being able to read was starting to affect her daughter emotionally. Tears started each day, as Lauryn began to refuse to go to school in the mornings. Finally, Muller brought Lauryn in for a private neuropsychological evaluation, and the psychologist who tested her found that her daughter was dyslexic. After a long battle with the school, Muller eventually convinced them to provide appropriate services—something to which all students are entitled by law.

In Lauryn’s case, this meant that her current reading curriculum should have been replaced by a method of known as the structured literacy approach. Instead of guessing and looking for context clues, structured literacy—also known as phonics—teaches students how to map sounds onto letters to decode words. There was only one problem: Muller discovered that the teacher the school assigned to Lauren wasn’t trained in structured literacy. Lauryn continued to struggle.

Muller didn’t know it at the time, but she had stumbled into an educational controversy that in recent months has turned into something of a scandal. A spate of recent reporting—in podcasts, national magazines, and major newspapers—has highlighted new research finding that the balanced literacy approach wasn’t as effective as a phonics-based approach for most students—learning disabled or typical. And the national embrace of balanced literacy was particularly bad for low-income students of color. Today, a staggering third of all children—and half of all Black children—read below grade level. In May, leaders in the country’s largest school system of New York City officially announced plans to transition away from a balanced literacy curriculum and apologized for the harm they had caused. Addressing students and parents in a recent New York Times interview, Chancellor David C. Banks said, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault. This is the beginning of a massive turnaround.” Understandably, parents are outraged.

“In a 2020 report, a team of reading researchers at the educational consulting group Student Achievement Partners (SAP) concluded that Calkins’ approach was only effective for students who had already received outside reading instruction.” https://t.co/P5tyNUVg7w

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) June 21, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

WM Briggs:

Here’s why.

Heard about the formal peer-reviewed paper “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases” by Suzanna Diaz & J. Michael Bailey in the Archives of Sexual Behavior?

It was canceled. 

Or, in science speak, retracted. Because why? Not because of any gross error. Because “activists” (i.e. true believers) hated it.

Rapid onset gender dysphoria is the kind of madness that for instance strikes classrooms full of girls, who, under the tutelage of a purple-haired “educator”, or even on their own, suddenly all “discover” they are boys. 

Article says “Parents reported that they had often felt pressured by clinicians to affirm their AYA [adolescents and young adults] child’s new gender and support their transition. According to the parents, AYA children’s mental health deteriorated considerably after social transition.”

Which is no surprise to any sane person. But truth is not a beloved entity in our Regime. So the paper had to go. 

Even more amusing is that “Suzanna Diaz” is a fake name. Imagine. A scholar so frightened of other academics she, or he, had to use a nom de guerre. (There is no typo here.)

You can read all about the cancelling elsewhere. Which is one among many.

Now you and I, dear reader, have looked at hundreds of papers over the years, nearly all bad. Most with mistakes so egregious even Kamala Harris would blush at them. All of them committing scientific sins far in excess in any found in the Rapid Gender Madness paper. None of them have been retracted.

Kevin Mahnken:

COVID-19’s cataclysmic impact on K–12 education, coming on the heels of a decade of stagnation in schools, has yielded a lost generation of growth for adolescents, new federal data reveal. 

Wednesday’s publication of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — America’s most prominent benchmark of learning, typically referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — shows the average 13-year-old’s understanding of math plummeting back to levels last seen in the 1990s; struggling readers scored lower than they did in 1971, when the test was first administered. Gaps in performance between children of different backgrounds, already huge during the Bush and Obama presidencies, have stretched to still-greater magnitudes.

The bad tidings are, in a sense, predictable: Beginning in 2022, successive updates from NAEPhave laid bare the consequences of prolonged school closures and spottily delivered virtual instruction. Only last month, disappointing resultson the exam’s history and civics component led to a fresh round of headlines about the pandemic’s ugly hangover. 

But the latest release, highlighting “long-term trends” that extend back to the 1970s, widens the aperture on the nation’s profound academic slump. In doing so, it serves as a complement to the 2020 iteration of the same test, which showed that the math and English skills of 13-year-olds had noticeably eroded even before the emergence of COVID-19.

Seems like huge spending increases during COVID didn't help.

We need to hold students & teachers accountable and not let the rampant social promotion in K-12 schools continue. https://t.co/krIJY1DgzV

— Robin Vos (@repvos) June 21, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Alex Halderman:

Our report explains how attackers could exploit the flaws we found to change votes or potentially even affect election outcomes in Georgia, including how they could defeat the technical and procedural protections the state has in place. While we are not aware of any evidence that the vulnerabilities have been exploited to change votes in past elections, without more precautions and mitigations, there is a serious risk that they will be exploited in the future.

The report was filed under seal on July 1, 2021 and remained confidential until today, but last year the Court allowed us to share it with CISA—the arm of DHS responsible for election infrastructure—through the agency’s coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) program. CISA released a security advisory in June 2022 confirming the vulnerabilities, and Dominion subsequently created updated software in response to the problems. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been aware of our findings for nearly two years, but—astonishingly—he recently announced that the state will not install Dominion’s security update until after the 2024 Presidential election, giving would-be adversaries another 18 months to develop and execute attacks that exploit the known-vulnerable machines.

Beyond these implications for election practice, our work is scientifically significant. It is the first study in more than 10 years to comprehensively and independently assess the security of a widely deployed U.S. voting machine, as well as the first-ever comprehensive security review of a widely deployed ballot marking device. Security researchers studied numerous U.S. voting machines 10-20 years ago, and their findings clearly established that voting equipment tends to suffer from security flaws. Yet one might wonder whether election equipment sold today is more secure than equipment produced in decades past. Our findings suggest that the answer is no. This highlights the need for further enhancements to the software engineering, testing, and certification processes for U.S. voting equipment, and it underscores the importance of conducting rigorous post-election audits of every major electoral contest, as recommended by the National Academies.

The Fire

The University of California, Berkeley used diversity statements to weed out candidates for faculty positions, according to public records the university finally released more than two years after FIRE requested them.

Many universities now require or invite current or prospective faculty todemonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion — often through written statements that factor into hiring, research, evaluation, promotion, or tenure decisions.

As FIRE explained in a public statement last year, these diversity statement requirements can too easily function as ideological litmus tests and cast a pall of orthodoxy over campuses.

Berkeley is no exception. The university expects all new faculty hires to “be committed to advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging[.]” During the 2018-19 academic year, Berkeley’s life sciences departments launched an initiative to advance faculty diversity. As part of the initiative, applicants for full-time faculty positions were required to submit statements on their “contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion,” including information about their “understanding of these topics,” “record of activities to date,” and “specific plans and goals for advancing equity and inclusion.” 

These statements informed the hiring committee’s first round of review: If applicants’ contributions to DEI did not meet a high standard, they were eliminated from consideration.

Minneapolis School Voices

The district’s lack of transparency has limited our ability to report about Minneapolis Public Schools. 

Since launching in November of 2022, Minneapolis Schools Voices strives to provide accurate, timely and useful information about Minneapolis Public Schools’ district administration, school board, and schools for readers. We aim to reach a diverse group of sources and audience members who are parents, educators and community members in the district. 

For over two decades, student academic data has shown a large, persistent racialized gap in the outcomes of the district’s students. In recent years, the chronic, inequitable, underfunding by the State of economically, racially and linguistically diverse school districts in Minnesota, like Minneapolis Public Schools, has become more apparent. The district is on the precipice of a financial crisis, long in the making, and delayed by the pandemic. At the same time, the district is working to become a more welcoming place for the diverse communities it serves. And, it is searching for a new superintendent to lead the district through an as yet unspecified “transformation.”

Amidst everything happening at the nearly 70 schools serving about 30,000 children in Minneapolis, MPS has a transparency problem.

The district has faced consistent criticism for years about its lack of communication with families, staff and community. Given the challenges ahead for the district, and the likely disruption to students, families and staff as the district confronts its large, structural budget deficit, it is even more important for the public to have factual, timely information.

Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja

Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication. And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.

***

We’re all familiar with the culture wars that pit progressive Leftists against centrists and those on the Right. In the past, those skirmishes dealt with politics and sociocultural issues and in academia were restricted largely to the humanities. But—apart from the “sociobiology wars” of the seventies and our perennial battles against creationism—we biologists always thought that our field would avoid such struggles. After all, scientific truth would surely be immune to attack or distortion by political ideology, and most of us were too busy working in the lab to engage in partisan squabbles.

We were wrong. Scientists both inside and outside the academy were among the first to begin politically purging their fields by misrepresenting or even lying about inconvenient truths. Campaigns were launched to strip scientific jargon of words deemed offensive, to ensure that results that could “harm” people seen as oppressed were removed from research manuscripts, and to tilt the funding of science away from research and toward social reform. The American government even refused to make genetic data—collected with taxpayer dollars—publicly available if analysis of that data could be considered “stigmatizing.” In other words, science—and here we are speaking of all STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)—has become heavily tainted with politics, as “progressive social justice” elbows aside our real job: finding truth.

Neil Johnston and Blathnaid Corless

Lockdown ‘damaged a generation’, says former chief medical officer. Dame Sally Davies holds back tears as she apologises before Covid inquiry and admits ‘economic and social’ factors weren’t fully considered

NYC had a test for teachers. Whites passed at a higher rate than minorities. Now the city has set aside over $1.8 billion to pay failed applicants

One woman failed 10 times. When she heard about the lawsuit, she felt vindicated because she learned the test was the problem. pic.twitter.com/AkCGAD3v0O

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) June 20, 2023

Just arrived in Kensington in Philly. Rampant drug use in plain sight on the middle of streets. Sheer misery. pic.twitter.com/kChe6K6aIg

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 20, 2023

Jenny Holland:

In March 1984, 14-year-old Karen Slattery was babysitting two children in a Florida home when Duane Owen broke in. He repeatedly raped her and then stabbed her to death. Two months later, Owen broke into the home of Georgianna Worden, before raping the 38-year-old mother and murdering her with a hammer. She was found in her bed the next morning by one of her children. 

Last week, after he had spent three decades on death row, the state of Florida executed Owen for his crimes. On the day of the execution, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a statement on social media decrying Florida’s actions. Did the ACLU condemn the use of the death penalty? No. Did it allege that the killer had not received a fair trial? Also no.

Instead, the ACLU’s main complaint was that the Florida prison service was unwilling to provide Owens with the gender-reassignment treatment he had requested before his execution. According to the ACLU, the denial of this ‘medically necessary treatment [caused] her enormous suffering’ (sic).

The ACLU of old used to fight for principles like free speech, gay rights, civil rights and the right to a fair trial. The ACLU of today, however, is fighting for the right of a sexual sadist and murderer to obtain taxpayer-funded breast implants. And it insists on calling that murderer a woman, to boot. What a time to be alive.

An underrated problem with the US education system, microcasmically evinced by this interview, is that the people running it are often quite stupid. https://t.co/AfY4lCw3eJ

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) June 19, 2023

Abigail Anthony:

A large contingent of parents of graduating seniors who sat through Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber’s recent commencement address described it as hypocritical and a “woke sermon” in interviews with The College Fix.

They scoffed at his claim that the Ivy League institution is a bastion of free speech and bristled at his embrace of all kinds of diversity except intellectual diversity.

“President Eisgruber’s commencement speech was a disgrace,” a mother of a graduating senior told The College Fix in an email. “The primary assault on free speech takes place on every campus in this country – including Princeton.”

“It takes the form of blocking and shouting down faculty and invited speakers who dare to stray from the liberal orthodoxy,” she said. “…He chose to use his 2023 commencement address to deliver the rantings of a demagogue.”

Eisgruber told the audience “we must stand up and speak up together for the values of free expression and full inclusivity for people of all identities.”

“There are people who claim, for example, that when colleges and universities endorse the value of diversity and inclusivity or teach about racism and sexism, they are ‘indoctrinating students’ or in some other way endangering free speech,” he said.

Eisgruber also criticized Florida legislation without specifying which bills, suggesting students in Florida are now living in fear. He denounced other newly passed laws across the nation that have reined in illiberalism.

Kaare Brandt Petersen and Michael Syskind Pedersen

What is this? These pages are a collection of facts (identities, approxima- tions, inequalities, relations, …) about matrices and matters relating to them. It is collected in this form for the convenience of anyone who wants a quick desktop reference .
Disclaimer: The identities, approximations and relations presented here were obviously not invented but collected, borrowed and copied from a large amount of sources.

These sources include similar but shorter notes found on the internet and appendices in books – see the references for a full list.
Errors: Very likely there are errors, typos, and mistakes for which we apolo- gize and would be grateful to receive corrections at cookbook@2302.dk.

Its ongoing: The project of keeping a large repository of relations involving matrices is naturally ongoing and the version will be apparent from the date in the header.

Corrinne Hess

In the 2021-22 school year, Wisconsin’s public schools received a total of $16,859 per student, which came from a combination of local property taxes, federal sources and the state. Of that, about $7,728 came from the state, according to the Department of Public Instruction.

“In fact, some of the federal funding factored into that district per pupil calculation is required to be used for services for private school students, meaning it does not support the kids attending public schools in that district,” said Abigail Swetz, DPI spokeswoman. “It is not legitimate for the Republican legislators to take credit for funds that come from local and federal sources, and if the Republican legislators and voucher advocates are claiming that the state provides $14,000 per student, that is patently untrue.”

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has said he will sign the bill.  

The Wisconsin Coalition for Education Freedom praised Republicans and Evers for including funding for school choice in the proposal.  

The coalition represents several groups including School Choice Wisconsin, the Badger Institute, Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.  

Will Flanders, research director with WILL and a coalition member, said the additional funds will allow private choice schools to be more competitive with teacher retention and hiring. And he said the increased funding may open more slots for students at choice schools.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

School Choice Under Attack: Minocqua Brewing Company’s $1 million Super PAC just announced plans to file a new lawsuit to eliminate school choice in Wisconsin – citing the new liberal Supreme Court majority.
Permalink here: https://t.co/9BTEyAv7da pic.twitter.com/AC4pJVaT3s

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) June 20, 2023

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators (2010)

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

If I were @PeterHotez, I’d also refuse to debate anyone with knowledge to hold me accountable for past acts.

What he did – demand everyone stay home even for protests: until a protest emerged that he liked, then encouraged everyone to go out – destroyed trust in health experts: https://t.co/wv2esTn9JF

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 20, 2023