Robert Lewis & Joe Hong:

A CalMatters investigation found that schools had wildly different approaches to stimulus spending — from laptops to shade structures to an ice cream truck. No centralized database exists to show the public exactly where the money went. 

When the pandemic closed schools in March 2020 – abruptly ending classes and stranding children and working parents – leaders in Washington and Sacramento scrambled to provide relief.

The result was a series of stimulus measures that allocated $33.5 billion in state and federal funds to California’s K-12 schools to address the devastation of the pandemic. It was a staggering amount of one-time funding for the state’s cash-strapped schools, equal to a third of all the money they got the year before the pandemic. 

Imagine your boss giving you a check equal to four months of your salary and telling you to spend it quickly or risk giving it back. For schools, this was money for things like laptops, air filters and mental health counselors – money to help kids.

But much of the funding has come with limited oversight and little transparency, according to a CalMatters investigation. No centralized state or federal database exists to show how schools have spent this money. And data from the districts’ quarterly spending reportsprovided to the state are so broad as to be virtually useless in tracking this COVID relief money.

Robert Lewis & Joe Hong:

A CalMatters investigation found that schools had wildly different approaches to stimulus spending — from laptops to shade structures to an ice cream truck. No centralized database exists to show the public exactly where the money went. 

When the pandemic closed schools in March 2020 – abruptly ending classes and stranding children and working parents – leaders in Washington and Sacramento scrambled to provide relief.

The result was a series of stimulus measures that allocated $33.5 billion in state and federal funds to California’s K-12 schools to address the devastation of the pandemic. It was a staggering amount of one-time funding for the state’s cash-strapped schools, equal to a third of all the money they got the year before the pandemic. 

Imagine your boss giving you a check equal to four months of your salary and telling you to spend it quickly or risk giving it back. For schools, this was money for things like laptops, air filters and mental health counselors – money to help kids.

But much of the funding has come with limited oversight and little transparency, according to a CalMatters investigation. No centralized state or federal database exists to show how schools have spent this money. And data from the districts’ quarterly spending reportsprovided to the state are so broad as to be virtually useless in tracking this COVID relief money.

Andrew Sullivan:

Elite imposition of the new social justice religion — indoctrinating children in the precepts and premises of critical race and gender theory — has also met ferocious backlash as parents began to absorb what their kids were being taught: that America is a uniquely evil country based forever on white supremacy; that your race is the most important thing about you; that biological sex must be replaced by socially constructed genders of near-infinite number; and that all this needs to be taught in kindergarten. Yes, some of this was politically exploited or hyped by the right. But if you think there is no there there in this concern about schooling, you’re dreaming.

Across the country, school boards are thereby in turmoil, with those supporting less ideological education on the march. On the question of trans rights, there is broad support for inclusion — but most Americans are understandably uncomfortable with pre-pubescent kids having irreversible sex changes, and with trans women competing with women in sports. For which those normies are called “hateful.”

And many people have now experienced firsthand what happens to a workplace when crusades for “social justice” trump every other value. The Washington Post this week was convulsed by public infighting — initiated by a reporter, Felicia Sonmez, whose crusade to dismantle the “oppressive systems” she endures at the WaPo went on for a week of public name-calling, vitriol, and victim-mongering. As a professed victim of sexism, Sonmez felt fully justified in destroying any shred of civility or decorum — because she assumed she couldn’t be punished. The same applies to the unethical journalism of Taylor Lorenz, another social justice warrior at the WaPo.

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

There can be little doubt that the history profession is experiencing a turn to the pre- sent. The post-2016 “crisis of democracy” has only dramatized it. Long-standing anx- ieties over presentism have crumbled under the weight of recent events.1 They have proven little match for Brexit, Trump, the rise of strongmen in the world writ large, racial injustice, and the pandemic. The turn to the present, however, is at times marked by undeniable provincialism—one that consistently offers a narrow perspec- tive for understanding new and emerging global realities. Some historians, for instance, have taken on the role of liberal watchmen ready to strike the tocsin against suspected fascism, but they regularly do so by focusing on Europe’s fascist past of the 1930s to explain the contemporary order.2 Or consider the economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. In the search for solutions, scholars proved quick to make historical comparisons to the great war economies of World Wars I and II, but appeared little bothered by the possibility that taking inspiration from Europe’s age of extremes might “lead us to look for enemies and scapegoats.”3

David Kane:

Kane’s Free High School Data Science Bootcamp will run from Tuesday, June 1st through Thursday, June 24th. The expected workload is 13 hours per week: 2.5 hours in class with Harvard Preceptor David Kane, lecturing live at around 8:00 PM EDT and 10.5 hours of work completed by students on their own. By the end of this bootcamp, students will be able to do basic data science! The course covers the first three weeks or so in Kane’s introductory data science class, Gov 1005: Data.

There are no prerequisites. The programming language we will be using is R. You must have a computer with R, RStudio and Git installed.

Sign up for our e-mail list to receive updates as we move forward.

Guthrie Gray-Lobe, Anthony Keats, Michael Kremer, Isaac Mbiti, Owen Ozier

We examine the impact of enrolling in schools that employ a highly-standardized approach to education, using random variation from a large nationwide scholarship program. Bridge International Academies not only delivers highly detailed lesson guides to teachers using tablet computers, it also standardizes systems for daily teacher monitoring and feedback, school construction, and financial management. At the time of the study, Bridge operated over 400 private schools serving more than 100,000 pupils. It hired teachers with less formal education and experience than public school teachers, paid them less, and had more working hours per week. Enrolling at Bridge for two years increased test scores by 0.89 additional equivalent years of schooling (EYS) for primary school pupils and by 1.48 EYS for pre-primary pupils. These effects are in the 99th percentile of effects found for at-scale programs studied in a recent survey. Enrolling at Bridge reduced both dispersion in test scores and grade repetition. Test score results do not seem to be driven by rote memorization or by income effects of the scholarship.

Nomenklatura was series of posts/institutions filled by Communist party. Who you knew was important. In US now, someone goes from fed bureaucracy, to industry dependent on govt (Boeing), lobbying firms, media. Who you know. And so FBI monitoring school boards isn’t surprising.

— FischerKing (@FischerKing64) June 11, 2022

Chris Rickert:

The free charter school is required to meet minimum instructional hour requirements contained in state law, which Davis said the school exceeds because its school day runs from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and its year from Sept. 1 to July 31, longer than most traditional public schools. The school will continue to exceed those minimums under the new schedule, he said.

It’s not clear what other traditional public, public charter or private schools in the state’s voucher program might have similar alternative staff schedules or are planning for them.

Nearby Oconomowoc High School changed their teaching and compensation model nearly 10 years ago.

Robert Lewis and Joe Hong:

When the pandemic closed schools in March 2020 – abruptly ending classes and stranding children and working parents – leaders in Washington and Sacramento scrambled to provide relief.

The result was a series of stimulus measures that allocated $33.5 billion in state and federal funds to California’s K-12 schools to address the devastation of the pandemic. It was a staggering amount of one-time funding for the state’s cash-strapped schools, equal to a third of all the money they got the year before the pandemic. 

Imagine your boss giving you a check equal to four months of your salary and telling you to spend it quickly or risk giving it back. For schools, this was money for things like laptops, air filters and mental health counselors – money to help kids.

BLS.Gov:

The all items index increased 8.6 percent for the 12 months ending May, the largest 12-month
increase since the period ending December 1981. The all items less food and energy index rose
6.0 percent over the last 12 months. The energy index rose 34.6 percent over the last year, the
largest 12-month increase since the period ending September 2005. The food index increased 10.1
percent for the 12-months ending May, the first increase of 10 percent or more since the period
ending March 1981.

Tommy Benghazi

OPT is a 12-month, temporary employment programthat foreign college students can participate in either pre- or post-graduation. There is a 24-month extension for foreign students who completed a Science, Technology, Engineering, or Mathematics (STEM) degree that brings the visa duration to 3 years. Additionally, if an OPT participant is waiting on a decision to be made on an H-1B visa, they can stay for another 6 months. This brings the total OPT work period to a maximum of 42 months before the new Biden rule is implemented. When that comes into effect, the maximum extension will be 54 months.

The top companies who hire OPT students are tech and consulting companies. However, these jobs are not measly internships. Most are highly sought after jobs that Americans want. How many foreign STEM graduates do you think take jobs that American college graduates won’t do? The answer is zero, and if you think that the vast majority of these workers will leave the country after their OPT has expired, you are mistaken. Biden’s rule gives them another year, and many will just overstay their visas anyways. In fact, there are nearly as many visa overstays in the US as there are illegal border crossings.

Biden’s new Ministry of Truth would assure you that OPT is a compassionate way to attract the best and the brightest students from foreign countries as a temporary way of culturally enriching our workforce and investing sorely needed human capital into our STEM jobs. This narrative is the dismissive equivalent of the old, “they are taking jobs that no Americans will do! Shut up and like it!” The reality is that companies employ OPT workers over similarly qualified American workers because they are subsidized to do so by our government and no labor standards exist for OPT.

Paul Thacker:

This of course, is laughable. We have plenty of evidence that medical boards are incapable of regulating physician behavior simply by looking at the history of drug scandals in America, none of which could have occurred without the complicity of corrupt doctors—few if any of whom were later sanctioned by their own profession.

Anyone notice a medical board going after Duke University’s Dr. Ralph Snyderman for aiding the Sacklers’ opioid scheme and helping spread disinformation that these highly addictive drugs are NOT…highly addictive?

Of course not. Snyderman built up Duke University into the 3rd most prestigious medical school in the States. Despite spreading disinformation about opioids that killed tens of thousands of Americans, he’s obviously a great doctor.

The NEJM’s essay writers were most exercised about physicians spreading COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. Not because they have any special insight about COVID-19, vaccines, or misinformation, but because everyone in medicine today knows that the most important thing to get exercised about is COVID-19 vaccine misinformation:

On July 29, 2021, the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), the umbrella organization of state and territorial licensing boards, issued a policy statement that “Physicians who generate and spread COVID-19 vaccine misinformation or disinformation are risking disciplinary action by state medical boards, including the suspension or revocation of their medical license.”

Alan M. Dershowitz:

The Supreme Court, in its next term, will render a decision in Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, which will determine the legality of Harvard’s race-based affirmative-action program. The plaintiffs claim that, by creating a floor for certain racial and ethnic groups in its admissions, Harvard created a ceiling for Asian-Americans. The result is that Asian-Americans who are academically qualified become victims of discrimination.

If the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, as many experts believe it will, Harvard and many universities around the country will have to continue their quests for increased racial diversity without violating the specific terms of the decision.

The time has come, however, for universities to abandon their efforts to achieve superficial, artificial diversity based on race. The coming decision would provide American schools with an opportunity to develop admission criteria based on academic achievement and potential—while abolishing such non-merit-based criteria as legacy status, athletics, geography and other nonacademic preferences. There would be resistance to getting rid of these advantages, but it could be done.

I believe the result of a merit-based policy would be more meaningful diversity. The result of such a policy would likely give way to more political, ideological, geographic, religious and other types of diversity that are at least as relevant to the educational mission of the university as race and ethnicity. I certainly am not asking for a return to “the good old days” of WASP dominance—those days were anything but good—but I am asking for an approach rarely attempted by American universities: pure meritocracy.

Marty Makary:

People don’t trust the CDC. Here’s one example illustrating why. Two weeks ago, with no outcomes data on COVID-19 booster shots for 5-to-11-year-olds, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) vigorously recommended the booster for all 24 million American children in that age group. The CDC cited a small Pfizer study of 140 children that showed boosters elevated their antibody levels—an outcome known to be transitory.

When that study concluded, a Pfizer spokesperson said it did not determine the efficacy of the booster in the 5-to-11-year-olds. But that didn’t matter to the CDC. Seemingly hoping for a different answer, the agency put the matter before its own kangaroo court of curated experts, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).

I listened to the meeting, and couldn’t believe what I heard. At times, the committee members sounded like a group of marketing executives. Dr. Beth Bell of the University of Washington said “what we really need to do is to be as consistent and clear and simple as possible,” pointing out that the committee needed “a consistent recommendation which is simple.”

Other committee members similarly emphasized the importance of a universal booster message that applies to all age groups. Dr. David Kimberlin, editor of the American Academy of Pediatrics Red Book, speaking on his own behalf, said “Americans are yearning for, are crying out for a simpler way for looking at this pandemic.” He suggested that not recommending boosters for young children would create confusion that “could also bleed over to 12-to-17-year-olds, and even the adult population.”

gov.uk

What actually is going on?

Despite the popular narrative, it’s not true that social mobility is getting worse on all counts. In reality the picture is complex. On some measures it is doing better than others, and on some – such as occupational mobility – it has been fairly stable for decades

There have been big changes in the economy, as the service industry has grown. In the latter part of the twentieth century, the occupational structure shifted considerably – creating more white-collar than blue-collar jobs. So more people were able to move “up” the occupational hierarchy compared to their parents.

But more recently, while we are still generating professional and managerial jobs, the rate has slowed. There are fewer people born into families who have routine and manual occupations, and more born into families with professional and managerial jobs. There is competition from those wishing to “move up” at the same time as more people being “at risk” of moving down. This is often referred to as the problem of “less room at the top”, which makes it look like social mobility is worsening when it might not be.

Of course, occupational mobility is only one aspect. There is less consensus about mobility in income and in other things like housing or wealth.

Given this evidence, we need to stop presenting social mobility in this way. For some people it feeds the view that the country is less open to talent than it has been in the past. There are clearly areas where we need to improve, but there are also areas where we are doing relatively well. As usual, the truth is more complex.

Those born nearer to the top have advantages over those born nearer to the bottom. But we need to be careful about moving from this general observation to the conclusion that nobody has agency, or that the gaps and disparities between the “disadvantaged” and everyone else are set in stone.

We need a more analytical approach if we want to understand what is going on.

Exactly.

Because they just make stuff up. https://t.co/dJ4uYnqmRr

— Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) June 10, 2022

Ruy Teixeira:

Finally, there is perhaps the key issue for many Asian voters: education. It is difficult to overestimate how important education is to Asian voters, who see it as the key tool for upward mobility—a tool that even the poorest Asian parents can take advantage of. But Democrats have become increasingly associated with an approach to schooling that seems anti-meritocratic, oriented away from standardized tests, gifted and talented programs and test-in elite schools—all areas where Asian children have excelled.

This of course was a huge issue in San Francisco, where the School Board pushed this approach up to and including replacing the rigorous entrance test for the famed Lowell School with a lottery. That move, combined with the School Board’s bizarre obsession with an “anti-racist” school renaming project even as schools remained closed and students suffered, angered Asian parents and others so much that they took the lead in successfully recalling three of the ringleaders of this approach, a clear precursor to the current recall.

So Democrats are hemorrhaging support among Asian voters, alienating other nonwhite voters with their lax approach to public safety and losing many formerly loyal white liberals and moderates who are “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”. What to do?

The answer seems clear to me. It’s time for Democrats to adopt former UK prime minister Tony Blair’s felicitous slogan: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. Conservative outlets like Fox News may exaggerate but voters really do want law and order—done fairly and humanely, but law and order just the same. Democrats still seem reluctant to highlight their commitment to cracking down on crime and criminals because that is something that, well, Fox News would say.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Josef Aschbacher:

It is the one that if we don’t get widespread buy-in and risk-tolerance fast, then the other priorities become quite irrelevant. This of course applies to projects or programmes that one may consider in the NewSpace domain. Having said that, there will always be domains where the commercial sector has no interest to invest and where projects will follow the more traditional space project development scheme. I would put high precision, cutting edge, long-term missions with fundamental technology development needs into this category, like BepiColombo, Aeolus, or Mars Sample Return.

But in many other domains, where technology is more mature and markets ready to pay for services or information, industry has completely changed its approach and has become very pro-active in co-developing and/or co-funding space projects. I have seen many incredibly encouraging examples where this is happening right now. 

When I look at the European space sector, I see a huge talent base, with many engineers and scientists having incredibly innovative ideas which they want to bring to fruition. I would claim that Europe’s human resource excellence is unique world-wide with some of the brightest talents among them. Where Europe is weak though is easy access to funding and speed in implementing projects. Lower readiness to take risk is often linked to these deficits. 

The overall European space economy could be at risk if Europe doesn’t respond to this evolution. Let’s take for instance the case of European-bred start-up Spire, founded by three Europeans educated in Europe. Spire was created 8 years ago, ultimately choosing Silicon Valley over Europe due to lack of substantial financial funding opportunities here but has in the meantime expanded very impressively and was listed at the NYSE just last month. According to market expectations the company may be valued at up to 1.6B US$, with more than 200M US$ of new cash to invest. As much as I am happy about this success for Spire and for space in general, I regret that the financial backing has been made primarily by Silicon Valley investors (I said primarily – not totally).

Max Larkin:

With takeover threats in the air, state officials have made clear that they expect brisk and broad improvement in the Boston Public Schools in problem areas identified in a recent report, including fuller inclusion of students with disabilities, more punctual school buses and safer, cleaner school buildings.

But in the two competing draft plans for achieving reforms, the state itself is cast in very different roles. Commissioner Jeff Riley’s initial May 20 draft imagines his agency — the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education — primarily as overseer and enforcer, while Boston Mayor Michelle Wu asks for DESE’s “partnership” and “support” in her counter-proposal from May 25.

Alex Usher:

Okay, now down to three books that really made me think. The first was Reforms, Organizational Change and Performance in Higher Education: A Comparative Account from the Nordic Countries (Pinheiro et al, eds), which I mentioned here. It provides top-notch mixed-methods comparative research into how educational institutions are actually managed, a field which in North America often relies too much on discussion about “neoliberalism.” Elizabeth Buckner’s Degrees of Dignity: Arab Higher Education in the Global Era was also excellent. I didn’t agree with everything in there, but it contains some excellent insights and I think Dr. Buckner found an appealing way to write about “regional” higher education and hope her style gets copied far and wide. Finally, there is Seeing the World: How US Universities Make Knowledge in a Global Era (Stevens, Miller-Idriss and Shami). This intriguing book is ostensibly about area studies and how geographically-based knowledge gets systematically devalued in big traditional disciplines like Political Science and Economics in favour of universal “placeless” knowledge. That in itself is interesting, but perhaps more intriguing is the way they document how this fight plays out bureaucratically inside universities, when well-funded and secure disciplinary “departments” can behave imperiously towards more precarious cross-disciplinary “centres”. Clocking in at around 140 pages, this one is well worth the time of anyone seeking to better understand the politics of knowledge inside social science and humanities disciplines.

Scott Girard:

That model would be similar to the foundation’s Teacher Support Network fund, which helps provide school supplies for staff to help them avoid spending their own money on needs. Stensland said the Play Every Day initiative grew out of the work on the support network, as they heard from staff about the “other needs” at schools, including physical education equipment.

Giving each school its own budget to spend helps avoid the foundation needing to identify what needs are there.

“I’m not going to come in and decide every school must need 500 basketballs,” she said. “We could do that, we could source things and deliver them but maybe they don’t need that, maybe they need something else. We want to give every school that agency, that decision making power to use the funds that their school community needs the most.”

Matthews, once again pointing to his soccer experience while in school, said that he has developed friendships while in the NBA with stars like Luka Dončić and Giannis Antetokounmpo through a mutual interest in the game.

Betsy Morris:

Dr. Sinclair has been criticized by other scientists for hyping the results of some of his findings, like the antiaging effects found in the compound resveratrol, claims he rebuts. He says that he doesn’t overstate his research findings and that the resveratrol research was published in leading scientific journals. He has co-founded more than a dozen biotech companies and is invested in most of them, including some that are developing therapeutics that target the biology of aging.

Segterra Inc.’s InsideTracker, a personalized-nutrition company founded by scientists from Harvard, Tufts University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, calculates biological age by having users take blood tests and analyzing the samples for markers of conditions like inflammation, heart health and liver or kidney disorder. Those who test as older than their years get recommendations to adjust diet, exercise and supplements.

Many other health startups are offering testing that purports to calculate biological age, sometimes with little scientific backing, and designing supplements aimed at boosting youthfulness.

Stephen Roberts, a winery owner in France, tested himself earlier this year with an at-home blood test by U.K.-based biotech company GlycanAge Ltd. The test was part of an effort by Mr. Roberts to improve his health at age 51.

“I drink. I sometimes smoke and party and eat what I want,” he says, so he expected his biological age to be a lot older than his calendar age.

Benjamin Yount:

“As proficiency has plummeted under his tenure, Governor Evers is forced to point to outdated data to back up his claims that he has been an effective leader on education,” Will Flanders with the Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty told The Center Square.

Flanders added that Gov. Evers’ approach to public schools has had a darker impact than the report suggests.

“The sectors that actually are doing better – choice and charter – have been the subject of repeated attempts by the governor to bring them to an end,” Flanders added. “School shutdowns during COVID, which the governor did nothing to stop, have exacerbated already huge achievement gaps among minority and low income students. None of this is reflected fully in the data for this ranking.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

US Department of Homeland Security (PDF):

The spread of disinformation’ presents serious homeland security risks:

Conspiracy theories about the validity and security of elections may undermine trust in core democratic institutions, amplify threats against election personnel, and jeopardize the voting rights of vulnerable communities.

Disinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks undercuts public health efforts to combat the pandemic.

Foreign terrorists, nation-states, and domestic violent extremist (DVE) groups leverage disinformation narratives to amplify calls to violence, including racially or ethnically motivated and anti-government/anti-authority violence. These actors often amplify and exploit narratives that already exist in public discourse, such as disinformation surrounding the validity of the 2020 election underpinning calls to violence on January 6, 2021.

Disinformation can complicate the performance of core DHS missions. Falsehoods surrounding U.S. Government immigration policy drive vulnerable populations to pay smugglers to bring them on the dangerous journey to our southern border. Disinformation can hamper emergency
responders in the aftermath of natural disasters or other incident responses. DHS efforts to combat disinformation must account for the sensitivities inherent to this mission:

DHS efforts to combat disinfonnation must account for the sensitivities inherent to this mission:

The Department must ensure its counter-disinformation efforts do not have the effect of chilling or suppressing free speech and free association or of infringing on individuals’ privacy or other First Amendment protected activity.

The protection of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties must be incorporated into every step of this work and any overarching framework guiding its execution.

New whistleblower documents describe the scope of the planned operations of the Biden Admin's Ministry of Truth.

1) The Ministry would regulate “[d]isinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks."

[1/3]https://t.co/aadxSL8VjG

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) June 9, 2022

Tim Hayward:

What does propaganda have to do with academic research and teaching? Citizens can reasonably expect the academic community to generate scholarly understanding and public awareness of what propaganda is and how propaganda operates. Academics should certainly aim to ensure their own research and teaching are not influenced by it. But how well does the academic community actually deal with propaganda? Addressing this question means considering both how propaganda should be dealt with and how academics actually deal with it.

Given the distinctive social role of academics, there are five general responsibilities that it is reasonable to expect them to fulfil in relation to propaganda. The most basic is to engage in research and teaching with methods of developing and communicating knowledge quite different from those that constitute propaganda. Whereas propaganda involves strategically communicating information selected on the basis of a prior agenda, the methods of science and scholarship involve collaborative deliberation and openness to new discoveries. A second general responsibility directly follows: academics should endeavour not to succumb to the influence of propaganda in their teaching and research. While seemingly a negligible risk in some fields of inquiry, something to be alert to regarding topics of public controversy is how an academic may, unaware, have passively absorbed assumptions and framings of propagandistic genesis. A third responsibility is to avoid reproducing propaganda, even inadvertently, in teaching and written works. A fourth, more imperative still, is the responsibility not to engage in the active (re)production of propaganda.

The four responsibilities just referred to do come with certain caveats: not all forms of propaganda are necessarily pernicious; perhaps not all instances of it will ever be fully identified; and academics are not necessarily less vulnerable to being deceived by propaganda than are their fellow citizens. But while there is scope for discussion of caveats, the important point is to be clear about the responsibilities themselves. While recognizing a place for reasoned critiques of particular studies of propaganda, in fact, we need also to be aware of one further general responsibility, namely, to ensure that the critical study of propaganda is not actively obstructed or attacked. This distinct fifth responsibility unfortunately needs mentioning because, as we will see, the active discouragement of critical study of certain cases of propaganda comes not only from representatives of vested interests outside academia but even sometimes from people who hold positions within.

US DoJ:

Myers acknowledged in court that on almost every Election Day, Myers transported Beren to the polling station to open the polls. During the drive to the polling station, Myers would advise Beren which candidates he was supporting so that Beren knew which candidates should be receiving fraudulent votes. Inside the polling place and while the polls were open, Beren would advise actual in-person voters to support Myers’ candidates and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls.

During Election Day itself, Myers conferred with Beren via cell phone while she was at the polling station about the number of votes cast for his preferred candidates. Beren would report to Myers how many “legit votes,” meaning actual voters, had appeared at the polls and cast ballots. If actual voter turnout was high, Beren would add fewer fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates. From time to time, Myers would instruct Beren to shift her efforts from one of his preferred candidates to another. Specifically, Myers would instruct Beren “to throw support” behind another candidate during Election Day if he concluded that his first choice was comfortably ahead.

Bari Weiss:

Amazingly, this story competed with another Post drama from the weekend: The paper issued three corrections to a story by the technology columnist Taylor Lorenz, which still contains at least one obvious falsehood. The paper claims that Lorenz reached out to a source for comment, which the source says she didn’t do, and Lorenz later admitted she didn’t do (but the story still contains the lie). Even a CNN media reporter said it was “weird WaPo can’t get this basic detail straight.” Lorenz freaked out about CNN noting the correction debacle and said that doing so was “irresponsible & dangerous.” Yes: Dangerous! 

So let’s get this straight: at the paper that cracked wide open the biggest presidential scandal in history, the paper that has long defined great political reporting, the paper of Katherine Graham and Ben Bradlee and David Broder, journalists lie and publicly attack their colleagues and remain comfortably in their positions. And a reporter is suspended without pay for a retweet.

ChinaTalk:

Lesser known are cases involve an increasingly common scheme of private sector-driven urbanization in China. In this case, private sector actors take charge of the coordination and development process of urbanization.

Companies such as China Fortune Land Development (CFLD) are developing industrial towns as private-public partnerships (PPP) with local governments. CFLD has developed around 100 industrial towns mostly in China with a few in South East Asia. 

CFLD recently came into the public spotlight due to its critical financial situation which mirrors one of many of the large conventional real estate developments in China. CFLD and its PPP model have also become the object of academic research (see e.g., ‘Towards Urban economic vibrancy – patterns and practices in Asia’s new cities’ by Siqi Zheng and Zhengzhen Tan and ‘Rising private city operators in contemporary China: A study of the CFLD model’ by Yongli Jiao and Yang Yu). 

Besides the PPP model, there is also a fully privatized model in which the local government signs a concession agreement with a private firm responsible for developing and operating the city including the provision of public services and receipt of taxes. 

This fully privatized model is still little studied and known outside of China, but the Journal for Special Jurisdictions is about to publish a special volume on the topic of these Chinese private cities later this year. 

One of the main success cases of this model is Jiaolong.

The absolute state of American education today. pic.twitter.com/uWIRehSHk6

— Asabiyyah Promoter (@asabiyyahfan) June 7, 2022

Michael T. Nietzel:

The decline in college enrollment is worsening. According to a just released report by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC), total postsecondary enrollment, including both undergraduate and graduate students, decreased by 4.1% – equal to about 685,000 students – in spring 2022 compared to spring 2021. Overall postsecondary enrollment now stands at about 16.2 million students.

Added to the 3.5% drop that was seen in spring 2021, the overall two-year decline in college enrollment has reached 7.4%, or nearly 1.3 million students since spring 2020. The deepening slide dashed hopes that the worst of the pandemic-era erosion of enrollment was over and, instead, raised concerns that other factors – such as growing skepticism over the value of college – may be keeping students away.

Joe Schoffstall:

Walensky’s calendar shows that she also had contact with unions beyond the NEA before the guideline’s release, further illustrating the administration’s coziness with unions during its COVID-19 pandemic guidance process. 

“At every turn, the CDC has told the American people that they have followed the science, but with every record we receive, we see further proof that the CDC keeps turning to teachers unions for guidance instead,” said Caitlin Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, who provided Walensky’s calendar to Fox News Digital.

NY Daily News:

A New York nonprofit, Upsolve, started out helping automate the bankruptcy process for low-income Americans. Then it stumbled into a related problem: Many of the families it served were on the receiving end of a barrage of intimidating letters, calls and lawsuits from debt collectors insisting they owed boatloads. Knowing that many of these mistake-riddled cases would have been easy to dismiss if only their clients had been able to afford lawyers, Upsolve sought to offer a helping hand, in the form of free legal advice.

That’s when they ran head-first into state statutes that make it a felony, punishable by up to four years in prison, to engage in the unauthorized practice of law.

Now, with the help of fully credentialed attorneys, they are challenging that law in Manhattan federal court. Tuesday, they scored an early victory, as Judge Paul Crotty granted Upsolve’s motion for a preliminary injunction, ruling on First Amendment grounds that the state cannot enforce its prohibition against the free advice program.

Victor Davis Hanson:

One day historians will look back at the period beginning with the COVID lockdowns of spring 2020 through the midterm elections of 2022 to understand how America for over two years lost its collective mind and turned into something unrecognizable and antithetical to its founding principles.

“Sovietization” is perhaps the best diagnosis of the pathology. It refers to the subordination of policy, expression, popular culture, and even thought to ideological mandates. Ultimately such regimentation destroys a state since dogma wars with and defeats meritocracy, creativity, and freedom. 

The American Commissariat

Experts become sycophantic. They mortgage their experience and talent to ideology—to the point where society itself regresses. 

The law is no longer blind and disinterested, but adjudicates indictment, prosecution, verdict, and punishment on the ideology of the accused. Eric Holder is held in contempt of Congress and smiles; Peter Navarro is held in contempt of Congress and is hauled off in cuffs and leg-irons. James Clapper and John Brennan lied under oath to Congress—and were rewarded with television contracts; Roger Stone did the same and a SWAT team showed up at his home. Andrew McCabe made false statements to federal investigators and was exempt. A set-up George Papadopoulos went to prison for a similar charge. So goes the new American commissariat.

Examine California and ask a series of simple questions.

Judicial Watch:

Judicial Watch announced today that it received 2369 pages of records from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealing over two dozen cases where research involving recombinant or synthetic nucleic acid (r/sNA) molecules was conducted in America without proper approval and in violation of NIH guidelines.

Recombinant or synthetic nucleic acid (r/sNA) molecules are constructed outside of living cells. The molecules are made by joining DNA or RNA segments (natural or synthetic) to DNA or RNA molecules that can replicate within a living cell. They may also result from replication of previously constructed recombinant molecules.

NIH guidelines detail safety practices and containment procedures for basic and clinical research involving recombinant or synthetic nucleic acid molecules – including the creation and use of organisms and viruses containing recombinant or synthetic nucleic acid molecules. These guidelines require that any significant problems, violations, or any significant research-related accidents and illnesses be reported to NIH within 30 days.

The documents further showed that the research, which occurred at Biosafety Level 1/2/3 laboratories, led to dozens of dangerous mishaps, accidents, and spills.

Wall Street Journal:

Pennsylvania law says voters must “fill out, date and sign” the ballot declaration. The state judiciary has held that dating is mandatory. But last month in a dispute over a 2021 judicial election, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that undated ballots are valid if they arrived on time. The court cited the Civil Rights Act, which says officials may not “deny the right of any individual to vote” based on a paperwork error that “is not material in determining whether such individual is qualified under State law.”

This is a good opportunity for the Supreme Court to make clear that judges shouldn’t rush into ballot-counting rooms without a compelling reason. The Third Circuit hadn’t even written a publishable opinion when it issued a judgment in that 2021 case. The timing, three days after Pennsylvania’s primary, suggests intent to upend the way that ballots were being tallied.

Sgt Mom

The post at Legal Insurrection (link) says in part, that the goal is to “…to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.”
So basically, this is an administrative rubber-stamping a passing grade on the report cards of black students who can’t be arsed to attend class, behave properly as students when they do, or turn in required assignments. Frankly, one wonders why such students even bother with school anyway, if they are so vehemently disinclined towards the life intellectual, but truant law and free daycare for such parental units as they have probably account for it, as well as money for butts in seats on the part of the school itself. At this rate of scholastic malpractice, urban schools might just as well hand out high school graduation certificates as if they were Pokemon cards, one to a customer and save themselves time and effort in the classroom. Any serious education of pupils appears as merely a happy afterthought to a means of employing large numbers of administrators, assistant principals and teachers whose union membership is vastly more important to the powers that be than imparting knowledge to that handful of rare-as-hen’s-teeth pupils who seriously want to learn.

This particularly unfortunate notion to enforce the mystical quality of “equity” on students of color will backfire of course. Future employers, associates, neighbors and professional will regard those students of color who hold such useless bits of paper as worthless, illiterate, and dumber than dirt, which will no doubt make those public-school products feel even more disrespected, resentful, and inclined to casual criminality and general uselessness as citizens than they already are. Just call me Cassandra, if you please.

Honestly, home school looks better and better all the time, as many otherwise well-intentioned, well-paid and ambitious-for-the-children parents discovered during sessions of remote learning and home lockdown, exactly and to their vast disgust what kind of sex-ed and racial-theory lunacies were romping untrammeled through the classrooms.

Josh Verges:

An architect and planning manager promoted to director in 2014, Parent has overseen a sudden increase in spending on St. Paul’s school buildings — from $30 million a year in 2016 to around $112 million each year since.

Starting in 2014, facilities staff met with schools and sketched out plans to improve the look and function of every building in the district. The resulting Facilities Master Plan was approved by the school board in 2016 and laid out $484 million in school renovations, expansions and maintenance projects to tackle over the next five years.

Besides modern heating and plumbing systems, schools are getting secure and welcoming entrances, more natural light, gender-neutral restrooms and more functional learning space.

The district is borrowing to pay for the increased spending by issuing long-term bonds. The average homeowner was told to expect a series of $30 property-tax increases each year.

But the initial five-year plan quickly went off track as costs soared and numerous future projects were postponed.

Shannon Whitworth

Recently, in my high school Business Communication class, I had one of the most disheartening conversations I’ve ever had with my students. It was regarding the effects of the pandemic lockdowns. Policymakers and leaders need to listen to these experiences, get students back on track and develop new strategies if we ever have a challenge similar to the COVID-19 pandemic in the future.

 

It was apparent during this conversation that many children under 18 cannot do school by computer.  My students admitted that they regularly checked in with their teachers and then either turned off their camera or checked out after attendance. Many students said the isolation shortened their attention spans and made it difficult to stay on task. This is reflected in recent research as well. The Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard released a study in May based on two years’ worth of data, from 2019 through 2021. Over that timeframe students who attended school in-person for the 2020-21 school year—and were only remote for the spring of 2020—lost about 20% of their learning in math, while students who were remote for the majority of that time lost close to 50% of their learning. That is a disaster.

 

Two students shared about taking the ACT exam and how they just wanted to give up in the middle of the test because in the last year they “hadn’t learned anything.” By far, this was the saddest statement shared within the discussion. When I revealed to them that schools in their surrounding suburbs were allowed to go back to in-person instruction much sooner than Milwaukee Lutheran, I saw anger in their eyes. They feel the policymakers and community leaders bailed on them, and they won’t forget it.

I’ve been getting a lot of notes and inquiries so I’ll tell you what I know about the end of APM Reports. 1/5 pic.twitter.com/GMQTxMJjYc

— Emily Hanford (@ehanford) May 29, 2022

Emily Hanford links.

Scott Girard:

Simkin suggested one example is in the student use of cell phones in classrooms, something teachers have expressed concerns about this school year. The BEP already prohibits the use of unauthorized, non-educationally required devices that disrupt learning, but Simkin said that teachers “don’t have what they need to implement this and it’s greatly impacting the learning of students.”

“This is something huge that needs to be addressed this summer,” she said. “I don’t think this is something that waits until we work on implementation over the course of next year. We need to talk about the disruption of these devices.”

Much of the other criticism from board members Monday was grounded in a lack of data. Board member Christina Gomez Schmidt said she wanted to see how the moratorium on suspensions at elementary schools this school year affected schools before voting to put it in the plan.

“I was expecting when this came back to us that we would definitely have data about how that has been working this year,” she said. “We don’t have anything that you have given us to show us what these changes in policy have done in practice in the schools.”

Elizabeth Beyer:

But board member Nicki Vander Meulen pushed back against the proposed changes, saying the district hadn’t sought board input until the policy was finalized.

“The Behavior Education Plan needs to be formed with the board who runs the policy, not the administration. It has to be done with us, together,” Vander Meulen said. “(The BEP) doesn’t work, and our students who are most vulnerable are the ones who are getting bullied, the ones who aren’t feeling safe at school, are the ones who are paying the price.”

Board member Nichelle Nichols expressed concern about the lack of data presented along with the policy revisions and asked for a contingency plan if the district isn’t adequately staffed to make the BEP effective in the coming school year.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Laura Camera:

“While nearly all educators act with extraordinary care and professionalism, many state-level policies and practices can and must be strengthened to ensure greater protections for our young people,” Deputy Assistant Secretary Ruth Ryder said in a statement. “Gaps in many of these policies and variability in policies between states remain significant challenges.”

The Education Department has been under increasing pressure to release the report, which was started during the Trump administration, by congressional lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who see this as a growing problem.

There is no national database for this type of incident. According to estimates by some advocacy groups, 95% of educator sexual misconduct cases are handled internally and not reported to law enforcement or reported by the media. A recent analysis of all local new stories by Fox News found that at least 135 teachers and teachers’ aides have been arrested on child sex-related crimes in 41 states between Jan. 1 and May 13.

Josh Gerstein

An advocacy group that has spent more than two decades fighting for free expression on college campuses is broadening its efforts to fight so-called cancel culture and other perceived threats to free speech across American society.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is renaming itself the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and keeping the “FIRE” acronym as it launches a drive to promote greater acceptance of a diversity of views in the workplace, pop culture and elsewhere. Part of the push may challenge the American Civil Liberties Union’s primacy as a defender of free speech.

Atif Ansar & Bent Flyvbjerg:

How should government and business solve big problems? In bold leaps or in many smaller moves? We show that bespoke, one-off projects are prone to poorer outcomes than projects built on a repeatable platform. Repeatable projects are cheaper, faster, and scale at lower risk of failure. We compare evidence from 203 space missions at NASA and SpaceX, on cost, speed-to-market, schedule, and scalability. We find that SpaceX’s platform strategy was 10X cheaper and 2X faster than NASA’s bespoke strategy. Moreover, SpaceX’s platform strategy was financially less risky, virtually eliminating cost overruns. Finally, we show that achieving platform repeatability is a strategically diligent process involving experimental learning sequences. Sectors of the economy where governments find it difficult to control spending or timeframes or to realize planned benefits – e.g., health, education, climate, defence – are ripe for a platform rethink.

Wall Street Journal:

Now the Florida Department of Health Office of Inspector General has exonerated Mr. DeSantis. The IG interviewed more than a dozen people who worked with state Covid data, including Ms. Jones’s supervisors. None corroborated her claims.

Some said she had told them she was pressured to alter Covid case and death counts, but her allegations didn’t make sense to them, not least because she didn’t have access to the raw data to do so. Ms. Jones, a geographer by training who previously worked on hurricane tracking systems, merely assisted with the Covid data’s online dashboard.

“If the complainant or other DOH staff were to have falsified COVID-19 data on the dashboard, the dashboard would then not have matched the data in the corresponding final daily report,” the IG explained, adding that “such a discrepancy” would surely have been detected by Bureau of Epidemiology staff, researchers or the media. The IG found no truth to any of Ms. Jones’s accusations.

One reason so many Americans don’t trust the media is because they have figured out that partisan narratives drive too much reporting. We wish they were wrong.

Wall Street Journal:

All of this has been another failure of progressive economics. By focusing solely on macroeconomic demand, while ignoring supply-side and regulatory bottlenecks, their policies fueled the inflation we have today. They also ignored the role of excess money, forgetting economist Milton Friedman’s famous lesson. As President Biden declared in an April 2020 interview, “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” That is one campaign promise he has kept.

Progressives pushed the same agenda for months even as evidence of inflation became too obvious to ignore. Inflation was supposedly “transitory.” The White House kept pressing its Build Back Better (BBB) plan for nearly $5 trillion in new spending—and even claimed it would be a cure for inflation.

No fewer than 17 Nobel prize winners in economics endorsed all this in a remarkable “open letter” last September. The White House broadcast the letter far and wide, and Mr. Biden referred to it often as an appeal to authority. “Because this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressures,” said the letter.

We list the names of the letter’s signers nearby. They are all notable economists, and some have written for these pages. Since BBB didn’t pass, they can say the predictions in their letter were never tested. But their inability to see in September that inflation was already rising fast makes their claims almost worse as a failure of expertise. Annual inflation hit 6.2% in October last year and is now above 8%.

Josh Christensen:

The top 40 percent of wage earners hold the majority of student debt. Of student-debt holders between the ages of 25 and 40, the top 40 percent bears half of the total debt, meaning the richest young adults carry the most.

The liberal push for student debt cancellation comes as the United States faces 40-year high inflation and record-breaking gas prices, which have doubled since Biden took office in January 2021.

Alliance Defending Freedom:

Description:  The Harrisonburg City Public School Board in Virginia is usurping parents’ right to direct the upbringing of their children and forcing school staff to violate their religious beliefs by affirming the board’s view on gender identity. Upon a child’s request, school district policy requires staff to immediately begin using opposite-sex pronouns and forbids staff from sharing information with parents about their child’s request, instead instructing staff to mislead and deceive parents.

Freedom House:

This image shows one of several signs that were hung up on Huashan Road in Shanghai by three unknown individuals on the evening of April 17, with slogans mocking the CCP’s COVID-19 lockdown of the city. The banner shows a hand-painted WeChat error message that is displayed when a post has been censored, and reads, “This content cannot be viewed due to violations.” Several other signs criticizing the city’s draconian lockdown measures were hung before police removed them, though photos were widely shared online. The three individuals who hung the signs were reportedly detained by police for several hours and had their phones confiscated. (Credit: Unknown)

Liah Greenfield

Since the 1990s, there has been talk of a mental-health epidemic in the U.S., particularly among young people. The mass shootings last month in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, N.Y., carried out by 18-year-old gunmen, have heightened fears that something’s gone horribly wrong. But the problem isn’t new. American psychiatrists have been studying rates of functional mental illness, such as depressive disorders and schizophrenia, since the 1840s. These studies show that the ratio of those suffering from such diseases to the mentally healthy population has been consistently rising. 

Ten years ago, based on the annual Healthy Minds studyof college students, 1 in 5 college students was dealing with mental illness. Between 2013 and 2021, according to Healthy Minds, the share of U.S. college students affected by depression surged 135%. During the same period, the share of students afflicted by any psychiatric illness doubled to more than 40%. “America’s youth,” wrote journalist Neal Freyman in April, “are in the midst of a spiking mental health crisis, and public health experts are racing to identify the root causes before it gets even worse.”

Wall Street Journal:

“State leaders have lowered expectations for students and redefined success for both students and schools,” says the report, and that’s for sure. In 2017 the Virginia Board of Education reduced the importance of grade-level proficiency in school accreditation.

The education board also voted to lower proficiency standards on state exams. This has exacerbated Virginia’s “honesty gap,” which is the difference in student proficiency levels between state tests and the NAEP. While other states have closed these gaps, “Virginia is the only state to define proficiency on its fourth-grade reading test below the NAEP Basic level and also sets the lowest bars in the nation for fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading,” says the report.

Perhaps the most shocking is Interlochen, a music camp for teenagers, where Epstein was touted as a key supporter. He had his own house on the campus. He groomed victims right there. (I’m not aware of anybody paying any price for this).

5/

— Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) June 5, 2022

Allie Simon ’22 and Emily Fowler ’23:

All 30 universities have raised prices at least once since the 2019-2020 academic year, which coincided with the COVID-19 outbreak in America. 

That school year aligned with the spring 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. 

A Campus Reform analysis of 2019-2022 tuition figures from U.S. News & World Report found that Vanderbilt University increased its tuition the most in that timeframe. 

At the start of COVID-19, Vanderbilt charged $52,070. As of the 2022-2023 academic year, tuition at the Tennessee university is up approximately 11.64% from 2019-2020 to $58,130.

2022-2023 figures in the analysis come directly from the universities’ websites. 

Only Harvard University and Duke University have lowered tuition for the 2022-2023 academic year. The University of Michigan is keeping its same tuition rate.

The University of Virginia is decreasing its in-state tuition but is increasing its out-of-state tuition. 

The chart below tracks tuition and fee rates from the last four academic years. In-state and out-of-state tuition rates are both included for public universities.

Matthew Inglis:

Stereotype threat has been proposed as one cause of gender differences in post-compulsory mathematics participation. Danaher and Crandall argued, based on a study conducted by Stricker and Ward, that enquiring about a student’s gender after they had finished a test, rather than before, would reduce stereotype threat and therefore increase the attainment of women students. Making such a change, they argued, could lead to nearly 5000 more women receiving AP Calculus AB credit per year. We conducted a preregistered conceptual replication of Stricker and Ward’s study in the context of the UK Mathematics Trust’s Junior Mathematical Challenge, finding no evidence of this stereotype threat effect. We conclude that the ‘silver bullet’ intervention of relocating demographic questions on test answer sheets is unlikely to provide an effective solution to systemic gender inequalities in mathematics education.

Justin E H Smith:

Under the new regime, a significant portion of the decisions that, until recently, would have been considered subject to democratic procedure have instead been turned over to experts, or purported experts, who rely for the implementation of their decisions on private companies, particularly tech and pharmaceutical companies, which, in needing to turn profits for shareholders, have their own reasons for hoping that whatever crisis they have been given the task of managing does not end.

Once again, in an important sense, much of this is not new: it’s just capitalism doing its thing. What has seemed unprecedented is the eagerness with which self-styled progressives have rushed to the support of the new regime, and have sought to marginalize dissenting voices as belonging to fringe conspiracy theorists and unscrupulous reactionaries. Meanwhile, those pockets of resistance—places where we find at least some inchoate commitment to the principle of popular will as a counterbalance to elite expertise, and where unease about technological overreach may be honestly expressed—are often also, as progressives have rightly but superciliously noted, hot spots of bonkers conspiracism.

This may be as much a consequence of their marginalization as a reason for it. What “cannot” be said will still be said, but it will be said by the sort of person prepared to convey in speaking not just the content of an idea, but the disregard for the social costs of coming across as an outsider. And so the worry about elite hegemony gets expressed as a rumor of Anthony Fauci’s “reptilian” origins, and the concern about technological overreach comes through as a fantasy about Bill Gates’s insertion of microchips into each dose of the vaccine. Meanwhile we are being tracked, by chips in our phones if not in our shoulders, and Fauci’s long record of mistakes should invite any lucid thinker to question his suitability for the role of supreme authority in matters of health.

Dissenters risk being labeled not only conspiracy theorists, but eugenicists or even advocates of genocide, should they venture any reflection on the costs and benefits of public health policy other than what we might call “COVID maximalism”: the view that we must keep social-distancing restrictions in place wherever there is any risk of harm to the elderly or immunocompromised, no matter what other risks such restrictions cause, whack-a-mole-like, to pop up in turn. But as anyone who is familiar with the literature in medical ethics, or who served on hospital ethics boards before the pandemic, can tell you: there has always been prioritization and triage, and this is not necessarily a reflection of injustice, though of course it can be that.

Do no harm:

Why are so many medical schools violating civil rights? That’s the question Do No Harm is asking in five complaints filed on Wednesday with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. These schools offer scholarships that are eligible to people of certain races, which is incompatible with the Constitution and federal law.

The medical schools in question are affiliated with the University of Florida, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Utah, and the University of Minnesota, as well as the Medical College of Wisconsin. While more than 140 medical schools and institutions nationwide offer questionable scholarships, these five medical schools are particularly noteworthy.

Consider the scholarship at the University of Florida College of Medicine. It is available to members of certain “racial and ethnic populations.” They spell out what that means – people who are “African Americans and/or Black, American Indian, Alaska Native, Naive Hawaiian, Hispanic/Latinx, and Pacific Islander.” The application also asks for an applicant photograph!

Ryan Mac:

In his email to SpaceX employees, Mr. Musk told workers that they were required to “spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week.” Those who did not do so would be fired, he wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The New York Times.

“The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence,” Mr. Musk said. “That is why I spent so much time in the factory — so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, SpaceX would long ago have gone bankrupt.”

In his memo to Tesla’s executive staff, which was posted by two pro-Tesla Twitter accountsand which the billionaire appeared to confirm, Mr. Musk also wrote that “anyone who wishes to do remote work” must be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours a week. Those who decline should “depart Tesla,” he added.

Matthew Crawford:

Throughout history, there have been crises that could be resolved only by suspending the normal rule of law and constitutional principles. A “state of exception” is declared until the emergency passes — it could be a foreign invasion, an earthquake or a plague. During this period, the legislative function is typically relocated from a parliamentary body to the executive, suspending the basic charter of government, and in particular the separation of powers.

The Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben points out that, in fact, the “state of exception” has almost become the rule rather than the exception in the Western liberal democracies over the last century. The language of war is invoked to pursue ordinary domestic politics. Over the past 60 years in the United States, we have had the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on Covid, the war on disinformation, and the war on domestic extremism.

Maria Colombo:

A 2021 report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) noted that Student Services costs “often also include diversity and inclusion initiatives.”

Corroborating Campus Reform’s findings in North Carolina, the ACTA report determined that, “Increases in per-student spending on instruction, administration, and student services were each correlated with an increase in tuition for the next academic year, even after controlling for levels of appropriations and institutional characteristics.”

At Duke, for example, the Office of Institutional Equity produces “Affirmative Action Plans,” DEI workshops, and trainings on anti-racism and microaggressions.

Duke also has a Center for Sexuality and Gender Diversity that, among other university-sponsored activities, hosts an annual “Coming Out Day”.

Wake Forest’s Intercultural Center hosts “Identity Development Initiatives” that include programs such as “Making Meaning of Men & Masculinities” and a “Women Encouraging Empowerment” group that “validate students’ value as members of the Wake Forest University community.”

UNC and NC State also dedicate substantial resources to such non-educational student services.

Wall Street Journal:

Obama Administration officials then complained the college wasn’t producing documents fast enough, and the Education Department cut off federal student aid. This drove Corinthian into bankruptcy and stranded tens of thousands of Corinthian students.

The Obama Administration then agreed to forgive $171 million in government loans for Corinthian students still in school. In 2016 a state judge handed Attorney General Harris a default judgment against Corinthian, which she flogged during her campaign for U.S. Senate. What a clever legal strategy: Bankrupt a company so it can’t defend itself.

But progressives, never satisfied, have demanded that the feds cancel the debt of every borrower who attended Corinthian since its founding in 1995. The Trump Administration refused this as a horrendous precedent that would let students off the hook for repaying loans if their college is accused of fraud.

The Biden Administration has no such qualms. On Wednesday the Education Department announced it would forgive $5.8 billion in debt for 560,000 former Corinthian students. “The action is the largest single loan discharge the Department has made in history,” the Department boasted, crediting Ms. Harris, who took a victory lap on Thursday at a press conference.

Eugene Volokh:

“[T]hese threats to due process and academic freedom are matters of life and death for our great universities. It is incumbent upon their leaders to reverse the disturbing trend of indifference to these threats, or simple immobilization due to fear of internal constituencies of the ‘virtuous’ determined to lunge for influence or settle scores against outspoken colleagues.”

[A]s alleged, this case describes deeply troubling aspects of contemporary university procedures to adjudicate complaints under Title IX and other closely related statutes. In many instances, these procedures signal a retreat from the foundational principle of due process, the erosion of which has been accompanied—to no one’s surprise—by a decline in modern universities’ protection of the open inquiry and academic freedom that has accounted for the vitality and success of American higher education.

This growing “law” of university disciplinary procedures, often promulgated in response to the regulatory diktats of government, is controversial and thus far largely beyond the reach of the courts because of, among other things, the presumed absence of “state action” by so-called private universities. Thus insulated from review, it is no wonder that, in some cases, these procedures have been compared unfavorably to those of the infamous English Star Chamber.

Natalie Wexler:

No single ready-made curriculum can do all of that, she said. Wit & Wisdom has provided a crucial “backbone” of curriculum materials that build knowledge in a thoughtful sequence—and ideally teachers help students connect their own lives to whatever they’re studying. But the district has also supplemented Wit & Wisdom with a social studies curriculum it created called “BMore Me,” which highlights the role of Black and brown communities in Baltimore’s history.

One of the most gratifying results of the new curriculum, Santelises said, is hearing from parents who are impressed by what their children are learning: “Parents love knowing their children know something they don’t know. Particularly in communities that have been underserved by the institution of school, that ability to see that your child is moving further than you is a very human need.”

Under the previous curriculum, students often never even learned to sound out words, because teachers hadn’t been trained in the systematic phonics instruction that many kids need. Some teachers still resist phonics, but Santelises says it’s important to let them know that historically, some Blacks in the South were prevented from learning phonics as a way of ensuring their continued oppression.

Matt Taibbi:

So as we’re getting ready to go on the air — MSNBC president Erik Sorenson had hired me earlier — we had gone to the Super Bowl and were driving up to LA and he said something really interesting to me. He said, “You know when I hired you, I got phone calls from two people, way up in the echelon of the Dems and Repubs. I won’t tell you who they were.” He wouldn’t reveal it to me. But he said, “They wanted to know why we were giving you a national forum.”

Virginia Gewin:

On 4 March, Christopher Jackson tweeted that he was leaving the University of Manchester, UK, to work at Jacobs, a scientific-consulting firm with headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Jackson, a prominent geoscientist, is part of a growing wave of researchers using the #leavingacademia hashtag when announcing their resignations from higher education. Like many, his discontent festered in part owing to increasing teaching demands and pressure to win grants amid lip-service-level support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He is one of many academics who say the pandemic sparked a widespread re-evaluation of scientists’ careers and lifestyles. “Universities, spun up to full speed, expected the same and more” from struggling staff members, he says, who are now reassessing where their values lie. The demands add to long-standing discontent among early-career researchers, who must work longer and harder to successfully compete for a declining number of tenure-track or permanent posts at universities. And Jackson had another reason. He received what was, in his opinion, a racially insensitive e-mail that constituted harassment and alluded to using social media to police staff opinions, which, he says, was the last straw. Jackson filed a formal complaint and the University of Manchester responded: “The investigation has now concluded. We have made Professor Jackson aware of its findings as well as the recommendations and actions we will be taking forward as an institution.”

Carey Goldberg:

Simone Collins knew she was pregnant the moment she answered the phone. She was on her sixth round of in vitro fertilization treatments and had grown used to staffers at Main Line Fertility starting this kind of call with the words “Oh, hi, Simone,” in a subdued tone, voices brimming with sympathy. This time, though, on Valentine’s Day, the woman on the other end belted out a cheery “Oh, hi, Simone!” Embryo 3, the fertilized egg that Collins and her husband, Malcolm, had picked, could soon be their daughter—a little girl with, according to their tests, an unusually good chance of avoiding heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and schizophrenia.

This isn’t a story about Gattaca-style designer babies. No genes were edited in the creation of Collins’s embryo. The promise, from dozens of fertility clinics around the world, is just that the new DNA tests they’re using can assess, in unprecedented detail, whether one embryo is more likely than the next to develop a range of illnesses long thought to be beyond DNA-based predictions. It’s a new twist on the industry-standard testing known as preimplantation genetic testing, which for decades has checked embryos for rare diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, that are caused by a single gene.

Chang Che:

Until 2022, Shanghai was called “the enchanted city.” It was a land of Gucci bags and French wine and weekend jogs along the Bund. It was a land of restless nights spent in the company of eclectic strangers. It was a land of coffee and convenience, of cloud-kissing skylines and flash-delivery bubble tea. There is an old cliché that the Shanghainese are an especially proud bunch, but it’s easy to see why: in a country with a xenophobic past and a revanchist nationalism, the cosmopolitan pleasures of the city bordered on the magical.

It was this pride that broke the magic spell. In March, when the Omicron variant penetrated China’s iron walls, other cities such as Shenzhen and Changchun locked down under a policy known as “dynamic zero-Covid,” which seeks to snuff out all virus transmissions. When cases began to rise in Shanghai, however, officials hesitated, believing China’s main financial hub too vital for a wholesale closure. They chose a retail approach, shuttering neighborhoods one by one as cases emerged. But by the end of March, it was clear the improvised plan had failed. As cases spilled into neighboring provinces, Beijing authorities took matters into their own hands. They ousted Shanghai’s more outspoken officials the way nature sent Icarus—wax-winged and recalcitrant—tumbling back to earth.

Twenty-five million residents—over twice the population of Greece—have paid the price ever since. For nearly two months, the city has been a ghost town. Shop front doors are bolted shut, and windows are strewn with black tarp. Sidewalks are hemmed by white tape, and neighborhood doors are patrolled by security guards. For an older generation who had witnessed the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, this was all too familiar. Food had to be rationed. Door-knocks became the stuff of nightmares. The Red Guards had returned—this time adorning white.

MD Kittle:

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has long been a haven of leftist thought and policy. Increasingly, the agency has become politically weaponized in the pursuit of its woke diversity, equity and inclusion agenda.

Most recently, DPI launched an investigation into a Milwaukee Public Schools counselor whose alleged crime is that she spoke passionately in opposition to “gender identity ideology.” At a feminist rally in Madison.

DPI is investigating whether the counselor should lose her license for “immoral conduct.”

“The state is, quite simply, trying to punish a public-school counselor for her views on gender ideology. This is a classic, clear-cut, violation of the First Amendment and the state can expect a federal lawsuit if it proceeds,” said Luke Berg, attorney at the Milwaukee-based Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. On Wednesday, the civil rights law firm sent a letter warning DPI of the legal perils it faces in attacking an educator’s First Amendment rights.

Marissa Darlingh, the MPS counselor, spoke at a feminist rally at the state Capitol on April 23, 2022.  She said she “oppose[s] gender ideology” in elementary schools and that young children should not be “exposed to the harms of gender identity ideology” or given “unfettered access to hormones—wrong-sex hormones—and surgery.”

She told rally-goers that she “exist[s] in this world to serve children” and “to protect children,” and does not support social or medical transition of young children. Darlingh, apparently in a moment of passion, declared “f… transgenderism,” referring to the “gender identity ideology” that she believes harms children.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

.@newskag said she had an editor who didn’t like education coverage. Thought it was too soft. I think that’s a misguided belief. School districts are largest employer in most communities with the largest budgets & often the most corrupt govt bodies. #RowanJournalismConference

— Scott Travis (@smtravis) June 4, 2022

Alexander Shur:

The company insured the vast majority of school districts before former Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 in 2011 blocked unions from negotiating over benefits, which led school districts to shop for cheaper alternatives, resulting in a stark revenue loss for the company. Conservatives heralded the change, saying it saved school districts tens of millions of dollars around the state.

“For years taxpayers across the state were getting a raw deal,” Walker said in a 2012 press release. “Collective bargaining stymied competition for benefits in the health insurance market, and instead directed property tax revenue to those affiliated with big government union bosses,” adding taxpayers were saving millions with the changes he enacted.

WEA Trust has since expanded to cover state, county and municipal workers.

WEA Trust spokesperson Steve Lyons said Act 10 had nothing to do with the company’s decision to pull out of the health insurance market in Wisconsin.

2014: 25.62% of Madison’s budget to be spent on benefits.

Chris Rickert:

LeMonds said the base rate for summer school staff is $28 per hour, or 12% higher than in previous years. But the relief money last year allowed the district to pay $40 an hour. The district’s teachers’ union, Madison Teachers Inc., had not responded to requests for comment.

Wednesday’s district email said “chronic staff shortages in education continue to impact the (district) community and school districts across the country.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Go read the lengthy, multi-pronged Washington Post “corrections” of the Taylor Lorenz story. They don’t describe reckless errors the way she’s displayed on so many other occasions. They describe outright fraud: deliberate, self-interested lying.https://t.co/lSWor7cnCO pic.twitter.com/DnQUFApCje

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 3, 2022

Ann Althouse: The Washington Post and the ACLU really did behave awfully.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

The Sunshine State attracted over $41.1 billion in Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) from 624,000 new residents (tax filers and their dependents) that moved into Florida in 2020. On the flip side, Florida lost $17.4 billion in AGI from 457,000 people who left. Overall, Florida came out ahead with 167,000 net new people and $23.7 billion in net new taxable income.

That’s a total gain of about 3.3 percent of the state’s total 2019 AGI ($711 billion).

Texas was the runner up with a net income gain of $6.3 billion, followed by Arizona with $4.8 billion. North and South Carolina rounded out the top five with net gains of $3.8 billion and $3.6 billion, respectively.

Alex Tabarrok

Nevertheless, the lesson I take is that information revelation is rarely pure. Information revelation is strategic–what is revealed and when it is revealed are choices in a game that may have complex and counter-intuitive equilibria.

Robert Pondisco:

Every teacher of struggling readers hasexperienced the moment when a student says, “I read it, but I didn’t get it.” It can be a bewildering experience. Why don’t they get it?

For several decades, elementary schools in New York City and across the country have turned to Columbia University education professor and acclaimed reading guru Lucy Calkins to answer that question. But in recent years, her influential and best-selling “Units of Study” curriculum has faced an intense barrage of criticism from experts who complain its “balanced literacy” approach is ineffective and gives short shrift to phonics — teaching children to look at pictures and guess words, for example, instead of sounding them out.

Schools Chancellor David Banks has announced plans to move literacy instruction in New York City away from Calkins’ curriculum in favor of approaches based on the “science of reading,” including phonics. Perhaps as a result, Calkins now appears to have conceded the argument, promising in a lengthy New York Times article to include “daily structured phonics lessons” in her program. That’s welcome news, but it’s not enough.

The South Bronx elementary school where I taught 5th grade for several years was a proponent of Calkins’ approach. We adopted her teaching methods and employed her literacy coaches for years, to very little effect. Her greatest sin against literacy comes after kids learn to “decode” the written word, whether or not they are taught with phonics, which is just the starting line for reading.

Pierre Baldi

Today there exists no public, freely downloadable, comprehensive database of all known chemical reactions and associated information. Such a database not only would serve chemical sciences and technologies around the world but also would enable the power of modern AI and machine learning
methods to be unleashed on a host of fundamental problems. In time, this could lead to important scientific discoveries and
economic developments for the benefit of humanity. While ideally such a repository ought to be created and maintained by an
international consortium, in the near future, it may be easier to begin the process through governmental agencies such as the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. Working together, we could use a multipronged approach that
could combine negotiations with commercial stakeholders, crowd-sourcing efforts, automated extraction methods, and legislative actions.

T. Keung Hui:

A Wake County teacher has resigned amid the controversy over the use of LGBTQ themed flash cards in her preschool classroom.

The preschool teacher, who was not immediately identified by the Wake County school system, resigned from Ballentine Elementary School in Fuquay-Varina on Friday, according to Lisa Luten, a district spokeswoman.

Some critics on social media had demanded that the teacher be fired, but a parent in that special-needs preschool class praised the teacher as being a caring educator.

“She is an amazing teacher who has worked tirelessly in an unpredictable school year to provide a safe, loving and inclusive classroom for our children to grow,” Jackie Milazzo, whose child is in the preschool class, said in an interview Tuesday.

The issue came to light on Friday, when N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore issued a press release saying Rep. Erin Paré was contacted by a constituent that the flash cards were being used to teach colors to children in a preschool class at Ballentine.

Laura Spinney:

When the great library at Alexandria went up in flames, it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true. Exactly how the library met its end, and whether it even existed, have been subjects of speculation for more than 2,000 years. For two millennia, we’ve been haunted by the idea that what has been passed down to us might not be representative of the vast corpus of literature and knowledge that humans have created. It’s a fear that has only been confirmed by new methods for estimating the extent of the losses.

The latest attempt was led by scholars Mike Kestemont and Folgert Karsdorp. The Ptolemies who created the library at Alexandria had a suitably pharaonic vision: to bring every book that had ever been written under one roof. Kestemont and Karsdorp had a more modest goal – to estimate the survival rate of manuscripts created in different parts of Europe during the middle ages.

Using a statistical method borrowed from ecology, called “unseen species” modelling, they extrapolated from what has survived to gauge how much hasn’t – working backwards from the distribution of manuscripts we have today in order to estimate what must have existed in the past.

The numbers they published in Science magazine earlier this year don’t make for happy reading, but they corroborate figures arrived at by other methods. The researchers concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd (also known as Siegfried) – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains.

Harini Logan was eliminated from the #SpellingBee, reinstated on appeal, and made it all the way to the first ever 90 second spell-off, basically a tiebreak. Spelled 26 words in 90 seconds, got 21 correct.

A must-watch clutch performance: pic.twitter.com/bJI1fl63ew

— Andrew Eccles (@AJEccles) June 3, 2022

John Pfeiffer:

7 habits of highly effective people

1. be proactive
2. “begin with the end in mind” (envision the goal)
3. “put first things first” (order and prioritize)
4. “think win-win” (good outcomes for everyone)
5. “Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood” (listen, then persuade)
6. “synergize” (teamwork)
7. “sharpen the saw” (sustainable balance)

Tom Moran

There is a lot that we don’t know about William Shakespeare, but there is one fact concerning him about which nearly everyone appears to be in full agreement. They agree with Shakespeare’s great contemporary Ben Jonson in his poem about his fellow playwright included at the beginning of the 1623 First Folio that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek”:

For if I thought my judgment were of years
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honor thee I would not seek
For names, but call forth thund’ring Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us…

It is one of the few statements about Shakespeare that is almost universally considered to be uncontroversial and accepted as fact. The editors of The Norton Shakespeare footnote the line, claiming that “The underrating of Shakespeare’s Latin was likely influenced by Jonson’s pride in his own impressive classical learning.” Even Jonson’s most recent biographer, Ian Donaldson, accepts the line at face value, claiming that Jonson was utilizing a rhetorical strategy that he had gleaned from the Roman rhetorician Quintilian: namely, that you should point out a person’s shortcomings (such as Shakespeare’s having “small Latin and less Greek”) before building up his virtues.

Pupaweb:

The leavers classifier detects messages that explicitly express intent to leave the organization, which is an early signal that may put the organization at risk of malicious or inadvertent data exfiltration upon departure. Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance helps organizations detect explicit code of conduct and regulatory compliance violations, such as harassing or threatening language, sharing of adult content, and inappropriate sharing of sensitive information. Built with privacy by design, usernames are pseudonymized by default, role-based access controls are built in, investigators are explicitly opted in by an admin, and audit logs are in place to help ensure user-level privacy. More info

Mine Bloomberg:

The message to educators and elected officials could hardly be clearer: Too many public schools are failing, parents are voting with their feet, and urgent and bold action is needed. Until now, however, the only governmental response has been to spend more money — too much of which has gone to everyone but our children.

Since 2020, Congress has sent an additional $190 billion to schools, in part to help them reopen safely and stave off layoffs. But in many districts, union leaders resisted a return to in-classroom instruction long after it was clear that classrooms were safe. And by and large, remote instruction was a disaster. By one analysis, the first year of the pandemic left students an average of five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, with much larger gaps for low-income schools.

It’s abundantly clear that money was far from the biggest challenge facing public schools. The U.S. spends more per pupil on public education than virtually any other country, and many districts have struggled to spend all the federal funds they’ve received. Others have splurged on sports.

Alex Gutentag:

The collapse of educational pathways and structures has had a particularly brutal effect on the poorest students, who can least afford to have their schooling disrupted. High-poverty schools had the lowest levels of in-person instruction, causing low-income students to fall even further behind their more affluent peers. The entirely foreseeable ways in which bad COVID-19 policy choices exacerbated inequality perversely led many public school systems to try to hide their mistakes by dismantling programs for gifted and talented students along with entrance tests and other standardized testing regimens—piling on more bad policy choices that deprive economically disadvantaged students of opportunity.

The available numbers tell a worrying story of educational slippage that is likely to keep large numbers of kids from acquiring the basic skills, both intellectual and social, that they will need to hold decent jobs. Recent test scores have dramatically declined, with one report finding that in districts offering distance learning, the decline in passing rates for math was 10.1 percentage points greater than in districts that offered in-person instruction. In Maryland, 85% of students now are not proficient in math, and in Baltimore the figure is 93%. Michigan, Washington, and other states have found dramatic declines in their test scores. In Los Angeles, the decline has been worse for younger students, with 60% of third and fourth graders not meeting English standards compared to 40% of 11th graders. Overall, the youngest children were most profoundly impacted by lockdowns and school disruptions, and some of them now lack basic life skills.

As the severity of these repercussions comes to light, some outlets—notably those that most aggressively advocated for lockdowns and masking—have been eager to suggest that we are now aware of the overwhelmingly negative consequences of these policies thanks to “new research” that has only just become available to fair-minded people, who can therefore be forgiven for having adopted the course they did. But to many doctors and scientists, the damage to kids caused by COVID-19 panic was neither inevitable nor surprising. Rather, it was the result of the public health establishment’s conscious choice to eschew rational cost-benefit analysis in favor of pet cultural theories and political gamesmanship. For those who applied the scientific method to the available evidence, the consequences were already clear just a few weeks into the pandemic. “It was not at all true that people in healthcare and public health were unaware of what was going on with children,” Dr. Noble told me. “They were not ignorant.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Sahaj Sharda:

Politicians sometimes talk about breaking up companies, but it rarely happens. There are lots of reasons for this. Firstly, a lot of companies are really hard to break up. Sometimes this is just a natural fact about companies. But other times, break ups are made artificially harder. For example, Facebook (now Meta) deliberately made itself hard to break up as a defensive business strategy. Essentially, when political discourse about breaking up Big Tech started heating up, Facebook worked on integrating Messenger into Instagram and its other products. It tried to tie all the code together in a hard to untangle web so that regulators would get scared by the challenge and give up on untangling the company’s previously separate product lines. 

Beyond business challenges inherent to breaking up firms, there are also legal challenges. Essentially, breaking up companies on antitrust grounds is nearly impossible because the courts have adopted a radically narrow standard of consumer harm. Further, courts hate to drastically intervene in markets. As a result, few antitrust cases ever result in breakups anymore. Because of the challenges inherent in breaking up firms, natural, artificial, and legal, breakups rarely happen. This is why when politicians talk about breakups, few voters really believe them. 

But elite colleges are different. They’re quite easy to break up, and you don’t need to go through the courts. Essentially, the key component of elite colleges isn’t their campuses, nor is it their professors, nor is it even their qualified student bodies. There are plenty of campuses, professors, and qualified students to go around. The key component of elite colleges is their resources, also known as endowments. These resources enable elite colleges to maintain strong brands by being ranked higher than other schools. The endowments allow elite colleges to afford things that other schools can’t. Furthermore, the large endowments operate through flywheel effects, because the more resources a school has, the higher its ranking, and therefore the more resources it is likely to attract from donors and others.

Peter Sullivan

“Right before the election, people would get notices of big premium increases, and that will certainly not reflect well on Democrats,” said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation. 

Vulnerable Democratic lawmakers are trying to sound the alarm. A group of 26 House Democrats from swing districts, led by Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.), sent a letter to leadership last week urging the extra subsidies to be extended.  

“I’m worried that we’re running up on a cliff,” said Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), one of the signers of the letter, who compared it to the expanded child tax credit that was allowed to expire at the start of this year. “We’re suddenly going to lose that ability. It’s similar to the child tax credit, which, you know, just kind of came and went, the expiration of it. I just don’t want to see that happen. I think it is absolutely game-changing.”

Given Republican opposition to any increased spending on ObamaCare, an extension of the subsidies would have to be included in a party-line package using the reconciliation process to bypass a GOP filibuster in the Senate.  

The problem for Democrats is that negotiations over that broader package with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the key swing vote, have shown few signs of progress for months.   

But the health care cliff is adding increased urgency for Democrats to find a way forward on the package.

AnnMarie Hilton and Sophia Voight:

As Kim Konen was driving to pick up her daughter at the designated safe spot, she felt a flurry of emotions. She was scared. She was furious. She was happy, and relieved, to know her daughter was OK.

Since the first bomb threat was made against the Kiel school system last week, five others have followed targeting the Kiel Public Library, city hall, the homes of school district employees, roads and utility companies throughout the city.

So far, no bombs have been found, but school has been canceled for the remainder of the year, the Memorial Day parade that usually has residents lining the street and stopping by the local VFW for a brat didn’t happen and graduation for the class of 2022 is postponed.

Ambarish Chandra and Tracy Beth Høeg

Our study replicates a highly cited CDC study showing a negative association between school mask mandates and pediatric SARS-CoV-2 cases. We then extend the study using a larger sample of districts and a longer time interval, employing almost six times as much data as the original study. We examine the relationship between mask mandates and per-capita pediatric cases, using multiple regression to control for differences across school districts. 

Findings: Replicating the CDC study shows similar results; however, incorporating a larger sample and longer period showed no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates. These results persisted when using regression methods to control for differences across districts. Interpretation: School districts that choose to mandate masks are likely to be systematically different from those that do not in multiple, often unobserved, ways. We failed to establish a relationship between school masking and pediatric cases using the same methods but a larger, more nationally diverse population over a longer interval. Our study demonstrates that observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables. Randomized studies can more reliably inform public health policy.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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”

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Charlottesville:

As of May, only 67 students were enrolled in CCS Virtual, Katina Otey, the district’s chief academic officer, said. Almost a third of those students are currently in fifth grade. The number of students interested in continuing online next year is lower still — only 15.

“We know so much more about COVID and about how it spreads and how we can take care of ourselves,” said Paula Culver-Dickinson, the district’s digital knowledge and professional learning coordinator. “We believe we can bring everyone back safely.”

What’s more, ending the program will ease the district’s severe substitute teacher shortage, Culver-Dickinson said. Ending the program means the existing subs will have fewer classes to cover.

Jiang Xueqin joins us in this episode to discuss ideology in schools, the effort to turn Chinese universities into “world-class” institutions, and cross-national educational projects and international schools in an era of Covid-19 and US-China decoupling.https://t.co/sIxBnYrrAW

— Jeremiah Jenne (@JeremiahJenne) June 1, 2022

Virginia Gewin

On 4 March, Christopher Jackson tweeted that he was leaving the University of Manchester, UK, to work at Jacobs, a scientific-consulting firm with headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Jackson, a prominent geoscientist, is part of a growing wave of researchers using the #leavingacademia hashtag when announcing their resignations from higher education. Like many, his discontent festered in part owing to increasing teaching demands and pressure to win grants amid lip-service-level support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He is one of many academics who say the pandemic sparked a widespread re-evaluation of scientists’ careers and lifestyles. “Universities, spun up to full speed, expected the same and more” from struggling staff members, he says, who are now reassessing where their values lie. The demands add to long-standing discontent among early-career researchers, who must work longer and harder to successfully compete for a declining number of tenure-track or permanent posts at universities. And Jackson had another reason. He received what was, in his opinion, a racially insensitive e-mail that constituted harassment and alluded to using social media to police staff opinions, which, he says, was the last straw. Jackson filed a formal complaint and the University of Manchester responded: “The investigation has now concluded. We have made Professor Jackson aware of its findings as well as the recommendations and actions we will be taking forward as an institution.”

West Cook News:

Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will require teachers next school year to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.

School board members discussed the plan called “Transformative Education Professional Development & Grading” at a meeting on May 26, presented by Assistant Superintendent for Student Learning Laurie Fiorenza.

In an effort to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.

“Traditional grading practices perpetuate inequities and intensify the opportunity gap,” reads a slide in the PowerPoint deck outlining its rationale and goals.

It calls for what OPRF leaders describe as “competency-based grading, eliminating zeros from the grade book…encouraging and rewarding growth over time.”

Hillary Leung:

Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) has overwhelmingly polled in favour of a motion relating to press freedom. More than half of the board members abstained from the vote.

The non-binding motion was raised at the club’s annual general meeting on Monday, just weeks after the FCC made the decision to scrap the Human Rights Press Awards over legal concerns. The move was widely criticised and sparked questions about the club’s commitment to upholding press freedom in the city.

Claire Cain Miller and Bianca Pallaro

American schoolchildren’s learning loss in the pandemic isn’t just in reading and math. It’s also in social and emotional skills — those needed to make and keep friends; participate in group projects; and cope with frustration and other emotions.

In a survey of 362 school counselors nationwide by The New York Times in April, the counselors — licensed educators who teach these skills — described many students as frozen, socially and emotionally, at the age they were when the pandemic started.

“Something that we continuously come back to is that our ninth graders were sixth graders the last time they had a normative, uninterrupted school year,” said Jennifer Fine, a high school counselor in Chicago. “Developmentally, our students have skipped over crucial years of social and emotional development.”

Nearly all the counselors, 94 percent, said their students were showing more signs of anxiety and depression than before the pandemic. Eighty-eight percent said students were having more trouble regulating their emotions. And almost three-quarters said they were having more difficulty solving conflicts with friends.

Share of school counselors who said they noticed these student behaviors more often, compared with before the pandemic

One fact that clearly emerged from the trial: the Amber Heard op-ed in the @washingtonpost that the jury just found defamed Johnny Depp was ghost-written by @ACLU, after Heard promised to pay them $7 million (a promise she never fulfilled).

They have a lot to answer for.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 1, 2022

The real loser in the Heard-Depp trial is @aclu, which ghostwrote Heard's @washingtonpost op-ed–without which none of this would have happened–after Heard pledged to pay @aclu $3.5M. Just so gross. https://t.co/eN0qG6xP8D

— Lara Bazelon (@larabazelon) June 1, 2022

Deflation at work
Aspiring @TheEconomist interns used to have to submit a sample article of 1000 words in 2002, now just 500 words. pic.twitter.com/vwpTMfhVUB

— Stanley Pignal (@spignal) June 1, 2022

Tdarb.org

By shifting towards a purely "open" software stack, schools then have the ability to purchase older, cheaper hardware. Instead of running bloated spyware (Windows) IT departments could opt to use any one of the lightweight Linux distros available.

This would reduce e-waste, save school districts significant amounts of money (no need to purchase Windows licenses or beefy hardware to be able to even _run_ the operating system) all while still maintaining a high level of user/network security.

Heck, you could even have a fleet of Raspberry Pi devices as your main student "computers". The cost of replacement also becomes less significant (these are children using these devices remember).

Andrew:

The acceleration in tuition costs in the past 30 years has a surprisingly simple origin, mostly stemming from Title IV of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993:

Title IV: Student Loan ERISA Provisions — Subtitle A: Direct Student Loan Provisions — Student Loan Reform Act of 1993 — Amends the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA) to replace the Federal Family Education Loan Program, under which loans made by private lenders are guaranteed by the Government with a Federal Direct Student Loan Program, to be partially phased in over a five-year transition period.

Up until 1993, the federal government merely guaranteed/backed student loans that private lenders gave. This meant that only in the case of someone defaulting on their loan would the government be on the hook, stepping in and paying the college what’s owed.

This amendment completely overhauled that system, making it so that for the vast majority of student loans, the federal government directly made the loans to students. More specifically, the federal government pays the universities/colleges up front, and the student then owes the government that money.

This represented a large shift in the alignment of incentives. When the loans come from the federal gov, there’s much less pressure on schools to compete on price. This is especially true since “increasing max student loan size => making college more accessible to everyone” is a political argument that both major parties benefit from in terms of optics.

Cecilia Kang:

Ahead of the 2020 elections, Connecticut confronted a bevy of falsehoods about voting that swirled around online. One, widely viewed on Facebook, wrongly said absentee ballots had been sent to dead people. On Twitter, users spread a false post that a tractor-trailer carrying ballots had crashed on Interstate 95, sending thousands of voter slips into the air and across the highway.

Concerned about a similar deluge of unfounded rumors and lies around this year’s midterm elections, the state plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting, and to create its first-ever position for an expert in combating misinformation. With a salary of $150,000, the person is expected to comb fringe sites like 4chan, far-right social networks like Gettr and Rumble, and mainstream social media sites to root out early misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral, and then urge the companies to remove or flag the posts that contain false information.

“We have to have situational awareness by looking into all the incoming threats to the integrity of elections,” said Scott Bates, Connecticut’s deputy secretary of the state. “Misinformation can erode people’s confidence in elections, and we view that as a critical threat to the democratic process.”

Scott Williams:

The new policy in Burlington was developed in consultation with the Racine County District Attorney’s Office. Other police departments in the county say they, too, have been advised by the DA to withhold public disclosures on any case headed to court.

That means that the public will not be allowed any information about criminal cases until trial, unless law enforcement officials choose to release information.

Kate Brumbach:

CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales said in a statement that “states’ standard election security procedures would detect exploitation of these vulnerabilities and in many cases would prevent attempts entirely.” Yet the advisory seems to suggest states aren’t doing enough. It urges prompt mitigation measures, including both continued and enhanced “defensive measures to reduce the risk of exploitation of these vulnerabilities.” Those measures need to be applied ahead of every election, the advisory says, and it’s clear that’s not happening in all of the states that use the machines.

2022 MIDTERM ELECTIONSSupreme Court order could affect Pennsylvania Senate countElection returns show state senator losing by single voteNearly one third of Idaho voters cast ballots in May primaryOregon county complete counting blurred primary ballots

University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman, who wrote the report on which the advisory is based, has long argued that using digital technology to record votes is dangerous because computers are inherently vulnerable to hacking and thus require multiple safeguards that aren’t uniformly followed. He and many other election security experts have insisted that using hand-marked paper ballots is the most secure method of voting and the only option that allows for meaningful post-election audits.

“These vulnerabilities, for the most part, are not ones that could be easily exploited by someone who walks in off the street, but they are things that we should worry could be exploited by sophisticated attackers, such as hostile nation states, or by election insiders, and they would carry very serious consequences,” Halderman told the AP.

Kashmir Hill:

What happened, however, was more complicated than a simple algorithmic mistake. It involved several humans, academic bureaucracy and an automated facial detection tool from Amazon called Rekognition. Despite extensive data collection, including a recording of the girl, 17, and her screen while she took the test, the accusation of cheating was ultimately a human judgment call: Did looking away from the screen mean she was cheating?

The pandemic was a boom time for companies that remotely monitor test takers, as it became a public health hazard to gather a large group in a room. Suddenly, millions of people were forced to take bar exams, tests and quizzes alone at home on their laptops. To prevent the temptation to cheat, and catch those who did, remote proctoring companies offered web browser extensions that detect keystrokes and cursor movements, collect audio from a computer’s microphone, and record the screen and the feed from a computer’s camera, bringing surveillance methods used by law enforcement, employers and domestic abusers into an academic setting.

Honorlock, based in Boca Raton, Fla., was founded by a couple of business school graduates who were frustrated by classmates they believed were gaming tests. The start-up administered nine million exams in 2021, charging about $5 per test or $10 per student to cover all the tests in the course. Honorlock has raised $40 million from investors, the vast majority of it since the pandemic began.