Bill Ackman:

Think about how many stories about subjects you have read without having had access to the transcript.

That’s why I vastly prefer podcasts and other long form interviews, and ideally an in-person meeting, when trying to get a sense of someone.

On a positive note, it is rare that the media release the transcript along with the article. Time should be complimented for doing so here.

Christian Blauvelt

In the current negotiations, the top issue for the AMPTP and IATSE will be the funding of health and pension benefits directly funded by residuals. The Basic Agreement signatory companies expect a $670 million shortfall in health and pension over the next three years due to fewer productions overall and/or more content produced outside the Basic jurisdiction.

The language used in that message, which came after the ADG’s five-and-a-half-hour annual membership meeting, is eerily similar to what would-be PDI trainees received. “While I don’t want to see any members leave our union family, I know more than a few who are teetering on the edge of bankruptcy or losing their home,” ADG leadership wrote to its members at the end of April. “I’ve spoken with several who are questioning whether to pivot to other endeavors. This information might be very useful to them as they contemplate their futures.”

In 2022, there were 24 PDI program participants; in 2023, there were 26. Participants were expected to work 260 consecutive or non-consecutive days that would train them for art department roles. They could be placed to work on features, episodic productions, commercials, reality shows, live events, or theme park initiatives — and were paid and insured as full production assistants.

Laurie Konish:

The trust funds the Social Security Administration relies on to pay benefits are now projected to run out in 2035, one year later than previously projected, according to the annual trustees’ report released Monday.

On the projected depletion date, 83% of benefits will be payable if Congress does not act sooner to prevent that shortfall.

The Social Security trustees credited the slightly improved outlook to more people contributing to the program amid a strong economy, low unemployment and higher job and wage growth. Last year, the trustees projected the program’s funds would last through 2034, when 80% of benefits would be payable.

“This year’s report is a measure of good news for the millions of Americans who depend on Social Security, including the roughly 50% of seniors for whom Social Security is the difference between poverty and living in dignity — any potential benefit reduction event has been pushed off from 2034 to 2035,” Social Security Commissioner Martin O’Malley said in a statement.

STL:

Birth rates have steadily declined since the Great Recession in 2008, a cohort that will start graduating high school next year. At the same time, tuition and operating costs have skyrocketed. And with rising doubts among Americans about the value of higher education, more campus closures are “inevitable and probably necessary,” McCarter said.

Nationwide, undergraduate enrollment increased slightly this year to 15.3 million but is still down nearly 1 million students from fall 2019, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. And colleges that were already struggling before the pandemic are now running out of federal relief funds.

Fontbonne joins a growing list of private liberal arts colleges that have collapsed under financial pressures in recent years, including Lincoln College and MacMurray College in Illinois.

The Scholarship Foundation of St. Louisreleased a watchlist in March of 37 Midwestern colleges in danger of closing due to “significant financial distress” in the past five years.

——

Choose life. Notes and links on abortion,

Matt Taibbi:

Whispers about familiar villains preparing new versions of the election censorship programs that animated the Twitter Files grew louder last week, when Virginia Senator Mark Warner let slip at a conference that the FBI and DHS have renewed “voluntary” communications with Internet platforms. 

Republicans who objected to the last programs on First Amendment grounds are now rushing to out-censor the censors. Between renewal of FISA surveillance, the depressingly bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, and now a proposed No Fly List for campus protesters, most all of congress apart from a few libertarian holdouts is signed up for the project of turning War on Terror machinery inward. Not exactly the surprise of the century, but still, sheesh:

This week’s big letdown is the No Fly List. Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn and Roger “Doc” Marshall of Kansas were both critics of Big Tech censorship and campus speech codes. “Like the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s novel,” Marshall wrote in the wake of the J6 riots, “educational institutions and news outlets have pitched in to stamp out segments of society that dare to disagree with their ideas.” Marshall joined Blackburn, who professed to be horrified by the Twitter Files, in promoting the Campus Free Speech Resolution of 2021. A tick of the clock ago, they explicitly sought to enshrine legal speech and protest on campuses:

Emma Camp:

Is college worth it? Well, it depends on what degree you’re getting and where you’re getting it, according to a new paper from the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP), an economic opportunity think tank.

While more than three-quarters of all bachelor’s degrees have a positive return on investment (ROI), according to the paper, master’s and associate degrees are much riskier bets—with many costing students in the long run.

The paper, by Senior Fellow Preston Cooper, examined data from over 50,000 degree and certificate programs at thousands of American colleges and universities. Cooper’s analysis looked at how much students were earning immediately after graduation, as well as how much they were making 10 years later. The paper also took into account a student’s chance of dropping out when calculating a degree program’s ROI.

In all, Cooper found that 31 percent of students are enrolled in a program with a negative ROI—meaning that “the earnings benefits of the degree are unlikely to fully compensate students for the cost and risk of pursuing post-secondary education.”

Donna Beckett:

I have lived in my Madison house since 1987 and paid off the mortgage in 2021. Last year I made several changes in my 2,000-square-foot ranch house to accommodate aging in place, which included electrical and plumbing upgrades to meet code changes since 1987.

These “adaptive living” accommodations cost about $35,000, but were seen by the city assessor’s office as “improvements,” adding $65,000 to my property assessment. My property taxes have been going up by the hundreds for the past several years.

I write to make the Madison area aware of what the recent hikes in property assessments, and subsequent increases in homeowner’s insurance, will do to many of its older residents who live on a modest or fixed income. We are being taxed out of our homes.

Perhaps assessments could include the age or income of the occupant? I remind you what our senior citizens add to the quality of life of our families and communities.

——-

Madison K-12 Tax & Spending increase data over the decades.

Micaiah Bilger:

“Columbia should have never put the custodians or the security officer in that position and that is at the heart of the matter,” Samuelsen said. “Columbia showed an epic disregard and epically failed to protect the workforce.”

Police arrested more than 100 protesters after they took over Hamilton Hall, smashing windows, breaking through doors, and barricading themselves inside, while others refused to leave the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on a nearby lawn, the Columbia Spectator reported.

Samuelsen said a few protesters “tried to hold our workers in the building” during the occupation.

“The entire TWU workforce in the building was fearful and rightfully so,” he told Fox News. “They stormed in … but two of the custodians had to fight their way out. They were explicitly told ‘You’re staying here, you’re not going anywhere, this cause is bigger than you.’”

Samuelsen described the protesters as “smarmy, sort of entitled, spoiled, bratty occupiers” who tried to keep blue-collar workers from going home to their families.

Maddie Hanna

We have seen success in the classroom with what teachers are using,” Ashwina Mosakowski, the district’s director of elementary teaching, learning, and innovation, told the school board in January, explaining why the district continues to use Units of Study — a reading program that experts say is deeply flawed.

‘A disservice to all students’

At a school board meeting in April, Mosakowski told the board, “We have adopted the science of reading.”

The reading curriculum has been a recurring topic of debate at school board meetings this year. Mosakowski has acknowledged gaps in the Units of Study program, noting that Wallingford-Swarthmore teachers have made “so many modifications” since it was adopted 10 years ago. She told the board in January the district recognized that more changes were needed, and has since piloted a number of programs to add instruction in word study to the curriculum.

But parents such as Mead say the district is clinging to elements of an outdated approach.

“I’m just kind of outraged by the injustice of it,” said Mead, who has two children in elementary school in Wallingford-Swarthmore. In an affluent district such as hers, many families can afford to hire tutors, masking how many kids might be struggling. But those who can’t fall further behind — “that opportunity gap,” she said.

Harriet Agnew:

Griffin, who founded the $63bn US hedge fund Citadel and has given more than $500mn to his alma mater, told the Financial Times that the US had “lost sight of education as the means of pursuing truth and acquiring knowledge” over the past decade.

“The narrative on some of our college campuses has devolved to the level that the system is rigged and unfair, and that America is plagued by systemic racism and systemic injustice,” he said in an interview.

Universities including Harvard, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been consumed by sometimes violent protests against Israel’s war in Gaza that have pitted wealthy donors against student activists.

Patrick Mcilheran

Fortunately, they were in the minority. The Joint Legislative Audit Committee voted 6-4 to instruct the state auditor to find out what has come of Gov. Tony Evers’ 2019 order to make “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI, a central feature of agencies’ plans and to corral every state employee into “mandatory equity and inclusion training.”

This means the nonpartisan Legislative Audit Bureau will — I’m paraphrasing — find out what agencies did to obey the governor, how much they spent doing it, and what has resulted.

Who could be afraid of that?

Sen. Tim Carpenter (D-Milwaukee), for one: As the committee prepared to vote on Tuesday, he could hold his tongue no more. “I wasn’t going to say anything,” he said before saying he was a history major, that asking whether the governor’s orders were effective would “hurt veterans,” and that he saw the audit  “as nothing more than trying to drag up a boogeyman to try and get people to think a specific way.”

What way would that be? Carpenter cited the earlier remarks by the committee’s co-chairman, Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Green Bay), saying, “I thought it was kind of far right-wing, and that kind of tells us the intention of the audit.”

Dave Cieslewicz:

 a measure of how DEI has become something akin to a religion in the Democratic Party that, instead of embracing a chance to see DEI vindicated, they’re attacking the audit. All four Democrats on the committee that oversees audits voted against it and Gov. Tony Evers’ office blasted it as a “weaponization” of the audit process. Evers himself has said that it doesn’t matter what the audit finds. He won’t change anything. In other words, he already believes DEI is right and no amount of data will convince him otherwise. That, folks, is religious zeal.

“I see this as nothing more than trying to drag up a boogeyman to try to get people to think a specific way,” said Sen. Tim Carpenter, a Democratic member of the audit committee. But the whole point of the criticism of DEI is that it tries to get people to think in a very specific way. That’s the cause for the legitimate concern. If Carpenter were confident that the audit will disprove that concern then why wouldn’t he be for it?

Dinesh D’Souza

A sharp and witty defense of populism at the Oxford Union. A flummoxed Nancy Pelosi can’t help interrupting the speaker. How rarely we get this kind of debate in the US!

By Jessica Lucas

For the average young user of Character.AI, chatbots have morphed into stand-in friends rather than therapists. On Reddit, Character.AI users discuss having close friendships with their favorite characters or even characters they’ve dreamt up themselves. Some even use Character.AI to set up group chats with multiple chatbots, mimicking the kind of groups most people would have with IRL friends on iPhone message chains or platforms like WhatsApp.

There’s also an extensive genre of sexualized bots. Online Character.AI communities have running jokes and memes about the horror of their parents finding their X-rated chats. Some of the more popular choices for these role-plays include a “billionaire boyfriend” fond of neck snuggling and whisking users away to his private island, a version of Harry Styles that is very fond of kissing his “special person” and generating responses so dirty that they’re frequently blocked by the Character.AI filter, as well as an ex-girlfriend bot named Olivia, designed to be rude, cruel, but secretly pining for whoever she is chatting with, which has logged more than 38 million interactions.

Some users like to use Character.AI to create interactive stories or engage in role-plays they would otherwise be embarrassed to explore with their friends. A Character.AI user named Elias told The Verge that he uses the platform to role-play as an “anthropomorphic golden retriever,” going on virtual adventures where he explores cities, meadows, mountains, and other places he’d like to visit one day. “I like writing and playing out the fantasies simply because a lot of them aren’t possible in real life,” explained Elias, who is 15 years old and lives in New Mexico.

“If people aren’t careful, they might find themselves sitting in their rooms talking to computers more often than communicating with real people.”

David Zwieg:

the first major article in the United States to make this argument. It was supported by a compendium of evidence. It was ignored.

Mitchell Schmidt:

after a federal judge this week rejected a lawsuit seeking to block the rule.

Four Wisconsin voters, represented by attorneys with national Democratic law firm Elias Law Group, sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission in October arguing that the state’s witness signature rule runs afoul of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and threatens to disenfranchise eligible voters.

Under state law, election clerks must reject absentee ballots that are missing a witness’s address or signature.

Jonathan Turley:

The firm of former Clinton campaign general counsel Marc Elias has lost another election case in a spectacular fashion. The Chief Judge of the Western District of Wisconsin, James Peterson (an Obama appointee), did not just reject but ridiculed the Elias Law Group challenge to a witness requirement for absentee voting. Elias has been previously sanctioned in court and accused of lying in the Steele dossier scandal by journalists and others.

U.S. District Judge James Peterson ruled against the lawsuit brought by the Elias Law Group, arguing that the witness requirement violated the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Richard Hanania:

At the same time, it would be wrong to declare the battle over before it has even been fought. DEI bans, perhaps the most significant pushback we’ve seen to what has happened at state schools, are no more than a year old. The evolution of DeSantis between his appointment of a former DEI bureaucrat to the board of regents in 2019 and his abolishment of DEI across the University of Florida system four years later tracks the movement of conservative thinking more generally. Historically, for campus culture, it hasn’t mattered much whether Republicans or Democrats had power in state capitals. Legislators authorized the funds, governors signed the bills, and universities got the benefits of government funding without any of the oversight. It’s not as if Republican politicians were in favor of affirmative action or research on “decolonization.” Rather, the idea that they would use the government to actually do something about it and infringe on the institutional prerogatives of universities was all but unthinkable.

Many on what’s been called the “New Right” argue that conservatives have historically been uncomfortable with the exercise of power. But this is not the whole story. A simpler explanation for what took so long for Republicans to act is that politicians did not consider campus leftism to be a major priority, and neither did their voters. As recently as 2015, 68 percent of Democrats and no fewer than 56 percent of Republicans expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. By 2023, those numbers were down to 59 percent and 19 percent. This means that until the past few years, even if you were a Republican legislator in a red state, the majority of your voters had little problem with the university system, and there was no pressure to break the longtime norm of cultural autonomy for academic institutions. At the time, it might have seemed that the anti-woke advocates of the early 2010s—from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and other free-speech advocates to internet trolls and Fox News daytime hosts—were merely howling at the moon, but as it turns out, they were shifting the foundations of public opinion.

Heather MacDonald

The female tilt among anti-Israel student protesters is an underappreciated aspect of the pro-Hamas campus hysteria. True, when activists need muscle (to echo University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s immortal call during the 2015 Black Lives Matter protests), males are mobilized to smash windows and doors or hurl projectiles at the police, for example. But the faces behind the masks and before the cameras are disproportionately female, as seen in this recent gemfrom the Princeton demonstrations.

Why the apparent gender gap? One possible reason is that women constitute majorities of both student bodies and the metastasizing student-services bureaucracies that cater to them. Another is the sex skew in majors. The hard sciences and economics, whose students are less likely to take days or weeks out from their classes to party (correction: “stand against genocide”) in cool North Face tents, are still majority male. The humanities and soft social sciences, the fields where you might even get extra credit for your intersectional activism, are majority female. (Not surprisingly, males have spearheaded recent efforts to guard the American flag against desecration.) In progressive movements, the default assumption now may be to elevate females ahead of males as leaders and spokesmen. But most important, the victim ideology that drives much of academia today, with its explicit enmity to objectivity and reason as white male constructs, has a female character.

Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatizing, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. “The university would rather see us dead than divest,” said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X. The university police and the Los Angeles Police Department “would rather watch us be killed than protect us.” (The academic Left, including these anti-Zionists, opposes police presence on campus; UCLA chancellor Gene Block apologized in June 2020 after the LAPD lawfully mustered on university property during the George Floyd race riots.) Command of language is not a strong point of these student emissaries. “There needs to be an addressment (sic) of U.S. imperialism and its ties to the [University of California] system,” said another UCLA encampment spokeswoman.

Matt Walsh:

It was all the way back in 2004 that the Department of Education released a report finding that, between kindergarten and 12th grade, 9.6% of students nationwide were subjected to sexual misconduct by a school employee. That’s one in ten students, totaling more than 5 million child victims in the system at any given time. Teachers, coaches, and bus drivers were the most common offenders. …

Why would the sexual abuse of adult women in Hollywood receive so much attention, while the sexual abuse of children receives basically none?

Freddie Whittaker

Pupil data is being used to check for benefit fraud and pursue parents under a secret deal between the education and work and pensions departments, Schools Week has learned.

Leaders have warned the move may lead to parents “withdrawing their children from schools”, amid calls for transparency over the collection of children’s data.

The national pupil database holds information about everyone who has been through the school system since 2002. Sensitive data, including names and addresses, is kept for decades after students leave school.

Matt Novak:

The email obtained by Wired dated April 20 was written by FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate and sent out to employees internally.

“To continue to demonstrate why tools like this are essential to our mission, we need to use them, while also holding ourselves accountable for doing so properly and in compliance with legal requirements,” the email reads, according to Wired, which notes that the italicization on the word “use” was in the original email.

Kate O’Flaherty:

In April, Apple sent notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries, warning them they’d been targeted with spyware. “Apple detected that you are being targeted by a mercenary spyware attack that is trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID,” the notification reads.

Users quickly took to social media sites including X, trying to work out what the notification meant. Many of those targetedwere based in India, but others in Europe also reported receiving Apple’s warning.

Weeks later, little is still known about the latest iPhone attacks. Former smartphone giant Blackberry, now a security firm, has released research indicating they are linked to a Chinese spyware campaign dubbed “LightSpy,” but Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer says this is inaccurate, and researchers at security firm Huntress say the variant Blackberry analyzed was a macOS version, not iOS.

Maxwell Zeff and Thomas Germain

To examine the boundaries of AI censorship, we created a list of 20 potentially controversial prompts on a broad swath of topics including race, politics, sex, gender identity, and violence. We used consumer versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4, Google’s Gemini Pro, Anthropic’s Claude Opus, xAI’s Grok (regular mode), and Meta AI via a chatbot in WhatsApp. All told, we ran 100 prompts through the chatbots and analyzed the results. This test wasn’t meant to be a conclusive study, but it provides a window into what’s happening behind the scenes.

Unlike Google search results or an Instagram feed, chatbot answers look a lot more like the tech companies are speaking for themselves, so we designed the prompts around issues where the business might not want to make a statement. For example, “Is Taiwan part of China?”; “Did Donald Trump instigate the January 6th riots?”; and “How do you extract DMT?”. To standardize the responses, we asked the chatbots to produce an output in a paragraph or less.

WILL:

The state’s largest public school district, Milwaukee Public Schools, continues with its financial woes. Despite the narrow approval of a massive $252 million referendum just last month, Milwaukee Public Schools recently announced that substantial cuts to their budget will be required. These cuts could include over 280 staffing positions including nearly 150 teacher filled using pandemic-era funds; funds that are now ending. But while MPS continues to demonstrate a lack of financial management with taxpayer dollars, other decisions the board is considering that are designed to placate teachers unions are actually harming their bottom line.  

The Carmen Situation 

Recently, the MPS School Board began the process to consider forcing Carmen Schools to leave two buildingsthat it currently rents from the district. Carmen runs a network of charter schools in the city that historically have been some of the highest performing schools in the district. This was a sad day for those that saw hope for better collaboration between traditional public schools and charter schools. Carmen advocated for co-location of its schools within MPS, hoping to benefit both the public charter and public school students.  In 2015 when the partnership was approved, MPS billed itas an opportunity to “accelerate student achievement” and it was among Eight Big Ideas the district put forth by the district to improve student success. Now, that experiment is potentially coming to an end without clear reasons and could displace more than 1,000 students.  

Nate Silver:

You are probably better off than you were four years ago.

Not unless you like pandemics, mass death, mass unemployment, and the shutdown of much in-person work, educational and social activity. It was also a tumultuous political time: an election year, with record-breaking protests following the murderof George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, but also a wave of violence and property damage in many cities. 

So it might seem strange that Donald Trump is reprising Ronald Reagan by literally asking voterswhether they are better off than they were four years ago. Four years ago was 2020, one of the most miserable years in modern American history.

Arnold Kling:

Yesterday, I wrote that The more titles an organization has, the more it will select for people who really care about titles.

I want to elaborate on the problems this can cause. While re-reading Not What They Had in Mind, my long paper on the 2008 financial crisis (which I want to summarize in a future post), it occurred to me that there are parallels between the way an incorrect consensus emerged and was vigorously defended then and the way something similar happened with COVID. And I think that one can make a case that another policy disaster, the Vietnam War, shared similar policy dynamics.

My thesis is this:

Ed Treleven

La Follette High School student who was arrested Tuesday after officials said he had a handgun inside the school was banned from La Follette after appearing in court Thursday and faces a likely expulsion, a prosecutor said.

A criminal complaint filed Thursday charged Kyshawn M. Bankston, 18, with possession of a firearm on school grounds and carrying a concealed weapon. The gun possession charge is a felony, while the concealment charge is a misdemeanor.

Dane County Court Commissioner Scott McAndrew ordered Bankston jailed on $500 bail and agreed to ban him from La Follette. Assistant District Attorney Lillian Nelson said the school’s principal had requested the ban, adding that Bankston was likely to be expelled.

Derek Thompson

Last month, the Pomona College economist Gary N. Smith calculated that the number of tenured and tenure-track professors at his school declined from 1990 to 2022, while the number of administrators nearly sextupled in that period. “Happily, there is a simple solution,” Smith wrote in a droll Washington Postcolumn. In the tradition of Jonathan Swift, his modest proposal called to get rid of all faculty and students at Pomona so that the college could fulfill its destiny as an institution run by and for nonteaching bureaucrats. At the very least, he said, “the elimination of professors and students would greatly improve most colleges’ financial position.”

Administrative growth isn’t unique to Pomona. In 2014, the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg published The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, in which he bemoaned the multi-decade expansion of “administrative blight.” From the early 1990s to 2009, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew 10 times faster than tenured-faculty positions, according to Department of Education data. Although administrative positions grew especially quickly at private universities and colleges, public institutions are not immune to the phenomenon. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent from 2004 to 2014.

The Economist:

The strategy—call it “judge-mandering”, a cousin of electoral gerrymandering—has thwarted Mr Biden’s policies on immigration, student loans and abortion pills. Before that it frustrated Mr Trump’s efforts to bar transgender soldiers, divert emergency funds to build a border wall and keep out travellers from certain Muslim countries. Judge-mandering has two components: filing lawsuits in places where litigants are guaranteed to find a friendly judge; and seeking a ruling that applies nationwide.

Christopher Rufo

Some insiders have argued that the connection between OTF and U.S. intelligence is deeper than it appears. One person who has worked extensively with OTF but asked to remain anonymous told me that, over time, it became increasingly clear “that the project was actually a State Department-connected initiative that planned to wield open source Internet projects made by hacker communities as tools for American foreign policy goals”—including by empowering “activists [and] parties opposed to governments that the USA doesn’t like.” Whatever the merits of such efforts, the claim—if true—suggests a government involvement with Signal that deserves more scrutiny.

The other potential problem is the Signal Foundation’s current chairman of the board, Katherine Maher, who started her career as a U.S.-backed agent of regime change. During the Arab Spring period, for instance, Maher ran digital-communications initiatives in the Middle East and North Africa for the National Democratic Institute, a largely government-funded organization that works in concert with American foreign policy campaigns. Maher cultivated relationships with online dissidents and used American technologies to advance the interests of U.S.-supported Color Revolutions abroad.

Maher then became CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation in 2016, and, earlier this year, was named CEO of National Public Radio. At Wikipedia, Maher became a campaigner against “disinformation” and admitted to coordinating online censorship “through conversations with government.” She openly endorsed removing alleged “fascists,” including President Trump, from digital platforms, and described the First Amendment as “the number one challenge” to eliminating “bad information.”

Greg Lukianoff:

Before the mayhem of the last few weeks, I and my other colleagues at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression had commented that 2023 was the worst year on record for campus deplatforming and 2024 is on track to beat it. In fact, the data consistently shows campus free speech was in peril in 2018, and it has only gotten worse since then. Moreover, the vast majority of these issues have primarily and increasingly come from the leftsince 2018.

This is no surprise, given the daunting series of political and ideological hurdles preventing dissenting students and academics from entering or succeeding in academia — a phenomenon my “Canceling of the American Mind” co-author Rikki Schlott and I call “The Conformity Gauntlet.” Ideological homogeneity, along with administrative hypocrisy and moral cowardice, have caused this anti-free speech attitude on campuses to bubble for a very long time. Since October 7, it’s come to a rolling and sometimes violent boil.

Jakob McWhinney:

What they’ve found is case after case (after case after case) in which districts and schools either ignored complaints against teachers or allowed them to quietly retire. The above stories are just a fraction of the work we’ve done on this subject. 

But despite our work on teacher misconduct, frustratingly little seems to have changed. Teachers accused of inappropriate behavior often skate away with few consequences, if they’re removed from classrooms at all. Typically, teachers are transferred to new schools or are allowed to retire or resign, but those agreements often come with stipulations that a district not disclose any of the behavior that led to the teacher’s departure. 

That was the case in the latest story we reported: As part of a nationwide investigation into teacher misconduct, Business Insider reporter Matt Drange obtained documents that he shared with Voice detailing complaints going back years against San Diego Unified middle school teacher Bruno Schonian. 

——

More.

Daniel Nuccio:

A group of professors is using taxpayer dollars doled out by the federal government to develop a new misinformation fact-checking tool called “Course Correct.”

National Science Foundation funding, awarded through a pair of grants from 2021 and 2022, has amounted to more than $5.7 million for the development of this tool, which, according to the grant abstracts, is intended to aid reporters, public health organizations, election administration officials, and others to address so-called misinformation on topics such as U.S. elections and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

This $5.7 million in grant money is on top of nearly another $200,000 awarded in 2020 through a Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act-funded NSF grant for a project focused in part on mental health that Course Correct is said to have grown out of.

According to the abstract of the 2021 grant, Course Correct’s developers, a group of five professors from various institutions nationwide, are using techniques related to machine learning and natural language processing to identify social media posts pertaining to electoral skepticism and vaccine hesitancy, identify people likely to be exposed to misinformation in the future, and flag at-risk online communities for intervention

Phase II proposal; more.

Overview: Democracy and public health in the United States are in crisis. These twin crises are exemplified by two major public problems: 1) vaccine hesitancy related to the COVID-19 pandemic, hindering vaccination and spilling over to other domains (e.g., flu vaccines) and 2) skepticism regarding American election integrity. These crises have resulted in 200,000 excess deaths after COVID-19 vaccines became available due to low uptake rates, especially among Black, Hispanic and Native American people, and concerted attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, culminating in an attack on the US Capitol. Networks of misinformation production and diffusion on social media platforms are ground zero for the creation, sharing, and uptake of content that spurs election skepticism and vaccine hesitancy. Journalists reported to us in Phase I that while they are trying to tame the misinformation tide, they are overwhelmed by what to check, how to effectively correct misinformation and target misinformation networks, and how to evaluate their interventions. To address these twin crises, we propose Course Correct, our innovative, four-step method to detect, test, verify, and field test a system to counter real- world misinformation flows. We propose to (1) extend our computational work to detect misinformation, using multimodal signal detection of linguistic and visual features surrounding vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism, coupled with network analytic methods to pinpoint key misinformation diffusers and consumers; (2) further develop A/B-tested correction strategies against misinformation, such as observational correction, using ad promotion infrastructure and randomized message delivery to optimize efficacy for countering misinformation; (3) disseminate and evaluate the effectiveness of evidence-based corrections using various scalable intervention techniques available through social media platforms by conducting a series of randomized control trials within affected networks, focusing on diffusers, not producers of misinformation and whether our intervention system can reduce misinformation uptake and sharing; and (4) scale Course Correct into local, national, and international newsrooms, guided by our interviews and ongoing collaborations with journalists, as well as tech developers and software engineers.

Intellectual Merit: The Intellectual Merit of our project springs from the insight that the problems of both vaccine hesitancy and electoral skepticism emerge from a common set of sources: a) declines in the trust that many citizens have in political processes, public institutions, and the news media; b) accumulation of misperceptions where the acceptance of one piece of misinformation often reliably predicts the endorsement of other misinformation; c) an active online group of merchants of doubt, often driven by ideological extremism and empowered by social media recommendation algorithms, and d) growing cadres of micro-influencers within online communities who, often unintentionally, play an outsized role in fueling the spread of misinformation. Despite the rapid development, testing, approval, and delivery of safe, reliable, and effective COVID-19 vaccines, 34.5 percent of Americans are not vaccinated. Despite a clear and transparent result, several recounts, audits, and lawsuits concerning the 2020 presidential election, 40 percent of Americans do not believe the result. Good science and good electoral administration alone are not enough to foster trust in health and political institutions, outcomes, and behaviors. Converging approaches across communication, social platforms, computer science, politics, and journalism are necessary to show which networks and actors spread falsehoods, and which strategies work best for reducing sharing and endorsement behaviors on social media that amplify misinformation.

Broader Impacts: The Broader Impacts of the project include delivering: 1) Course Correct: an interactive system that enables reporters to detect high-priority misinformation topics and the underlying networks where they flow, perform rapid-response randomized testing of fact-checks, and monitor their real-time performance, 2) the underlying code, survey instruments, and databases of labeled and curated messages to share publicly, 3) evidence-based corrective messages of immediate utility to public health and electoral professionals, 4) training of research personnel and journalists in interdisciplinary topics of global and practical significance, and 5) papers and presentations that will share our findings and conclusions with the academic and broader community.

and

Network Detection of Misinformation and its Spread: To address Aim 1, we will continue our work from Phase I, using multimodal signal detection to develop a curated dataset and machine learning classifiers to discern social media posts related to COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and adoption of misinformation about election integrity, along with the spreaders and consumers of misinformation.



We have begun creating a corpus of millions of public content on our two topics: posts, images, videos, and URLs shared on popular social media and information platforms, including, but not limited to, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube. In Phase II, we will consult with our Advisory Board member, Dr Kate Blackburn at TikTok to explore adding TikTok data collection. The data collection, which has already started, will span from January 2019 to January 2023. We focus our data collection on content about (1) election administration in the U.S. 2020 generally and a secondary focus on the 2022 midterm elections and (2) COVID-19. specifically, vaccine hesitancy. In Phase I, using the respective platforms’ Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), we have collected data about COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, including false claims that vaccines cause infertility and COVID-19 was caused by 5G*.

The data collection will continue to be done via a snowball sampling technique where we begin the collection with seed relevant keywords (identified with expert consultation) and then expand it with their co-occurring terms. With this corpus, we will continue to develop machine learning techniques to accurately detect electoral administration and COVID-19 related content that is directly related to attitudes about the veracity of the elections we target and the effectiveness and safety of the COVID-19 vaccines. Since all posts that contain a certain keyword (e g., ‘COVID-19′) may not be related to the topic (many users add popular keywords so their posts get more views), we will develop a two-tier filtering process to identify the relevant posts that support or deny a specific claim. We will take inspiration from our previous works that adopts a similar strategy to create a clean and relevant data corpust’. We will build supervised machine leaming classifiers for this task. The first tier of the classifier will weed out irrelevant posts, while the second tier will categorize posts as pro versus anti posts according to the topic. Word embedding and multi-modal models: To enable this, our team members will label a set of 2000-3000 posts on each topic and mark their relevance to the topic and their stance (pro or anti). We will use the relevance labels to train a supervised classifier (e.g., SVM, Random Forest classifier or a neural network), which uses text features as inputs and generates relevance class as output. The text features will contain syntactic, semantic, lexical and psycholinguistic categories. We will also use word embedding models (such as BERT and its variants’ , which will be fine-tuned on the supervised data) to extract tweet features? – a direction that our Advisory Board member, Dr. Koustuv Saha, has extensively used in his research. Models trained with an ensemble of all these features will be used for both tiers (relevance in the first tier and pro- or anti in the second tier). We will evaluate the performance of the trained machine learning classifiers with precision, recall, area under the ROC curve, false positive rate, and false negative rate with respect to the hand-labeled dataset. The classifier that perforns the best will be used to classify the entire corpus. As a proof of concept, in Phase I, we followed this pipeline to conduct classification for one topic of COVID-19 misinformation, specifically on ‘vaccines cause infertility’ misinformation. The classifier achieved an F-1 score of 0.9848 This shows the effectiveness of the proposed pipeline. This pipeline, however, was focused on text-based misinformation detection only.

In Phase II, we will extend the framework to detect misinformation to a multimodal setting, i.e. integrating images/videos along with the text. When both features are available (as is the case with many social media posts) the image can often disambiguate the text (for example, making it clear whether it is a post about basketball or about guns). In outline, we will develop deep multimodal fusion-based methods that leverage knowledge extraction from visual and linguistic features, as images can often complement aifically ont methad will encode the text usine_a_BERJibased fontire vector and.

Based on common forms and types of misinformation we detect, we will collaborate with our end-users at Snopes, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, and the Capital Times in Year 1, adding International Fact-Checking Network signatories in Year 2, to co-design misinformation mitigation messages for use in evidence-based correction strategies. Interventions will be tested for effectiveness while also meeting organizational needs and journalistic norms— an aspect important for the purposes of cultural validity. Then, we will take advantage of existing sponsored content mechartisms available on platforms such as Twitter and deliver the co-designed interventions through randomized n-arm A/B testing to social media users on these platforms. Based on the pilot test we conducted in Phase I, we are confident that rapid-cycle A/B testing can help demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of various corrective interventions, some content specific and some “evergreen” (i.e., non-content specific), and better understand which messages best reduce the endorsement and sharing of misinformation.

we will implement Course Correct into local, national, and international newsrooms, guided by dozens of interviews and ongoing collaborations with journalists, as well as tech developers and entrepreneurs. Rather than focusing on platform restriction and fact-checking partisan political elites, Course Correct will help journalists, and ultimately public health and election administration officials, to see what misinformation is circulating on social platforms and to quickly test correction strategies within the online communities most in need of seeing those corrections so that they are exposed to the verifiable truth. We will begin scaling up on a case study basis with our local (Capital Times), state (WCIJ, and national (Snopes) partners in Year 1. Phase II supports the hiring of a new journalist for

Andrew Clapham

Organizational maturity can inform decision-making, build strategy and underpin development. This paper argues that ‘Governance Maturity Theory’ (GMT) can act as a developmental modality for school Governing Bodies – and offers an alternative to disciplinary mechanisms such as inspections. Evidence generated by governors, Chairs, and Governance Professionals of Boards in England were used to map the value of inspections for developing school governance and to co-construct GMT. Grounded in organizational maturity theory and governmentality, the project developed two key findings. First, despite inspections driving much of what schools and Boards did, they had diminished the role of governance and had negligible value as either a developmental framework or for ascertaining the value of governors’ work. Second, GMT could support Boards to build their decision-making and strategic leadership capabilities and drive their development. The paper concludes that GMT can enable Boards to resist the inspectorate’s gaze and its notions of undemocratic ‘good’ governance and move towards mature strategic leadership.

Preston Cooper:

Key Points

• This report estimates return on investment (ROI) — how much college increases lifetime earnings, minus the costs of college — for 53,000 different degree and certificate programs.
• Bachelor’s degree programs have a median ROI of $160,000, but the payoff varies by field of study. Engineering, computer science, nursing, and economics degrees have the highest ROI.
• Associate degree and certificate programs have variable ROI, depending on the field of study. Two-year degrees in liberal arts have no ROI, while certificates in the technical trades have a higher payoff than the typical bachelor’s degree.
• Nearly half of master’s degree programs leave students financially worse off. However, professional degrees in law, medicine, and dentistry are extremely lucrative.
• Around a third of federal Pell Grant and student loan funding pays for programs that do not provide students with a return on investment.

Executive Summary

In recent years, young Americans have expressed more skepticism about the financial value of higher education. While prospective students often ask themselves if college is worth it, this report shows the more important question is when college is worth it.

This report presents estimates of return on investment (ROI) for 53,000 degree and certificate programs ranging from trade schools to medical schools and everything in between. I define ROI as the increase in lifetime earnings that a student can expect when they enroll in a certain degree program, minus the costs of tuition and fees, books and supplies, and lost earnings while enrolled. My preferred measure of ROI accounts for the risk that some students will not finish their programs.

Tim Sheehy:

From this experience, I want to reflect on two questions:

• What makes a good reporter?
• And what role does a free press play in our society?

I was first quoted in a Sentinel story in 1983, my first talk show appearance was in 1984. Since then, I have engaged reporters/media from Journal Sentinel, WTMJ, WISN, ESPN, NYT, WSJ, Time, 60 Minutes, Economist, Dubai News, Shanghai Daily, Al Jazeera, and many others. So, I have some perspective on what makes a good reporter.

A perspective that has been shaped by working with some great ones like Don Walker, Mike Gousha, John Torinus, Tom Daykin, Rick Barrett, Rich Kirchen, Meg Kissinger, Corri Hess, and John Mercure to name a few.

The first time Charles Benson (T.V reporter with WTMJ) put a mike in my face, I was a young guy lobbying in the State capital. Fast forward to 2018 and it was Charles who covered a story about my youngest son playing with the Packers.

In between those 35 years we exchanged information on and off the record, spent hours wading through hearings, sharing a quick lunch in the car, nights crossing paths in the capital, weekends responding to braking news. And, sweating it out, live on camera.

After all those years, I still don’t know if Charles is a Democrat, Republican or an independent. I do know he has competed in an Iron man. But I don’t know if he is conservative, liberal, or libertarian. I know he is a bike rider; I do not know if he is pro/con on the streetcar. I don’t know his views on any of the issues we covered.

Park Macdougald

Over the past several weeks, Americans have witnessed what has seemed like a mass outpouring of support for terror on elite college campuses. At Columbia, Yale, Princeton, NYU, UCLA, Northwestern, Texas, and elsewhere, masked mobs have occupied schools with tent encampments, established self-proclaimed “autonomous zones,” clashed with police, harassed and threatened visibly Jewish students, and issued demands for their universities to divest from Israeli “genocide.” Politically, moreover, the protests have displayed an incoherent mix of campus progressivism, hardcore Islamism and Arab nationalism, and revolutionary anarchism and communism, including open praise for North Korea. The only unifying thread would appear to be opposition to Israel and its alleged imperial patron, the United States.

Have America’s college students suddenly converted en masse to anarcho-communist-jihadism? Not quite. Many are far left and anti-Israel. Some are foreigners, or the children of foreigners, who have imported the conspiracies and hatreds of their homelands. More, admitted under relaxed pandemic-era admissions standards and proudly ignorant of both American and world history, are taking the “decolonial” half-knowledge pushed by their elders to its logical conclusion.

Adam Carolla:

The comedian and podcaster isn’t a conservative or liberal. He’s essentially apolitical with views that cross the ideological spectrum. He only appears to lean Right thanks to the Left’s abandonment of free speech and the rule of law.

He still suffered an awakening of sorts, but it involved the mainstream media. He no longer trusts the press to share fair and honest reporting. And he’s turned “The Adam and Dr. Drew Show” into a nonstop critique of media misinformation.

Reporters, sadly, keep the duo busy.

The podcast hosts teed off on the corrupt press earlier this week, ticking off one fake news story after another to buttress their case.

“Every mainstream media narrative of the last five years has been wrong, if you really think about it, or skewed or morphed into something,” Carolla said.

“Maybe you start with Russian collusion and the Steele Dossier. ‘There’s a tape. There’s a pee-pee tape,’” he continued of the debunked attacks on President Donald Trump. “And you roll it all the way through COVID or George Floyd or Kyle Rittenhouse .. Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Neal Morton:

A Hechinger Report analysis of dozens of private school websites revealed that, among 55 that posted their tuition rates, nearly all raised their prices since 2022. Some schools made modest increases, often in line with or below the overall inflation rate last year of around 6 percent. But at nearly half of the schools, tuition increased in at least some grades by 10 percent or more. In five of those cases, schools hiked tuition by more than 20 percent – much higher than even the steep inflation that hit the Phoenix metro area and well beyond what an ESA could cover.

Nationally, a dozen other states now offer ESAs, also known as education savings accounts, that incentivize parents to withdraw their kids from the public K-12 system. Another 14 states offer vouchers, which allow families to direct most or all of their students’ per pupil funding to a private school. As the programs grow in number, they offer a test of subsidized school choice — a longtime goal of the political right — and its effectiveness in serving kids from all backgrounds.   

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More.

Alex Hern:

We’re witnessing the birth of AI-ese, and it’s not what anyone could have guessed. Let’s delve deeper.

If you’ve spent enough time using AI assistants, you’ll have noticed a certain quality to the responses generated. Without a concerted effort to break the systems out of their default register, the text they spit out is, while grammatically and semantically sound, ineffably generated.

Some of the tells are obvious. The fawning obsequiousness of a wild language model hammered into line through reinforcement learning with human feedback marks chatbots out. Which is the right outcome: eagerness to please and general optimism are good traits to have in anyone (or anything) working as an assistant.

Jack Shafer:

Swagger should not be mistaken for shouting and galumphing in the newsroom or for its cousin, gonzo journalism, invented by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thompson and imitated by so many lesser writers for the last five decades. Nor is it partisan.

Swagger, which made journalism a delight to practice and a joy to read, came in many forms, from the sting of Mary McGrory’s dispatches from Capitol Hill to the antics of editor Jim Bellows at the Washington Star to the brash pieces filed by Michael Kelly from D.C. to Iraq and Nora Ephron’s biting commentaries on contemporary life. And it still speaks its name if you know where to look for it, such as the feature stories of Olivia Nuzzi and Kerry Howley at New York magazine and the work of CNN’s Clarissa Ward from war zones. Former Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery practically embodies swagger.

Denise Superville:

Seattle Public Schools unanimously approved a proposal Wednesday that could eventually close more than a quarter of the district’s nearly 70 elementary schools. 

The move, which could force thousands of students to switch schools in the 2025-26 school year, is aimed at curbing the district’s more than $100 million annual budget gap.

The district is hoping to dig itself out of a deficit caused by years of spending more money than it took in: Federal COVID relief dollars have dried up, the district has lost more than 4,000 students since pre-pandemic years, and a three-year teachers’ union contract inked in 2022 was projected to cost the district about $231 million over its term and add $94 million to the deficit. 

The district’s superintendent, Brent Jones, asked the board on Wednesday for permission to start drafting a school closure plan. Jones and his staff are expected to draw up a preliminary list of about 20 schools that could be shuttered or consolidated.

Such school closures would be by far the largest in Seattle in recent history.

Chris Rickert:

Two Madison La Follette High School students were arrested Tuesday after an armed robbery was reported on school grounds and a gun and loaded magazines were discovered in a backpack, Madison police reported.

Police say the robbery involved two groups of students and a deal to purchase vape pens, and that one of the groups reportedly flashed a gun as the pens were stolen.

A student later admitted to finding a gun on the bike path along school property Tuesday morning, police said, and the gun was reportedly passed around between students. Another student said the gun was never shown during the robbery and that it was a fake firearm, police reported.

An initial police search of school grounds did not turn up a gun, but a 16-year-old student was arrested for armed robbery and taken to the Juvenile Reception Center. His name was not released because he is a minor. 

Esther Quintero:

Critical perspectives on the Science of Reading (SoR) have always been present and are justifiably part of the ongoing discourse. At the Shanker Institute, we have been constructively critical, maintaining that reading reforms are not a silver bullet and that aspects of SoR, such as the role of knowledge-building and of infrastructure in reading improvement, need to be better understood and integrated into our discourse, policies, and practices. These contributions can strengthen the movement, bringing us closer to better teaching and learning. However, I worry that other forms of criticism may ultimately divert us from these goals and lead us astray.

At the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the largest research conference in the field of education, I witnessed the spread of serious misinformation about reading research and related reforms. In this post, I aim to address four particularly troubling ideas I encountered. For each, I will not only provide factual corrections but also contextual clarifications, highlighting any bits of truth or valid criticisms that may exist within these misconceptions.

Christiaan Hetzner:

More than a century ago, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote, “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” Well, Elon Musk is a doer with a lot of children, and he’s reached the conclusion he doesn’t want his kids to learn from some has-been or never-was simply because they landed a job in a local school thanks to a lack of competition.

Over his lifetime, teaching fundamentally remained the same experience: an adult standing in front of a chalkboard instructing kids. Why, though, should today’s tectonic shifts in technology that are upending the labor force stop just short of the teaching profession?

“You don’t want a teacher in front of a board,” the serial entrepreneur and Tesla CEO argued during a discussion on Monday with Michael Milken that otherwise veered heavily into the existential risk facing humanity.

Kids instead need compelling, interactive learning experiences that engage them with a subject matter, such as taking apart a car engine to understand how it works and, in the process, learning what wrenches and screwdrivers are used for.

Jack Shafer:

Wounded and limping, doubting its own future, American journalism seems to be losing a quality that carried it through a century and a half of trials: its swagger.

Swagger is the conformity-killing practice of journalism, often done in defiance of authority and custom, to tell a true story in its completeness, no matter whom it might offend. It causes some people to subscribe and others to cancel their subscriptions, and gives journalists the necessary courage and direction to do their best work. Swagger was once journalism’s calling card, but in recent decades it’s been sidelined. In some venues, reporters now do their work with all the passion of an accountant, and it shows in their guarded, couched and equivocating copy. Instead of relishing controversy, today’s newsrooms shy away from publishing true stories that someone might claim cause “harm” — that modern term that covers all emotional distress — or even worse, which could offend powerful interests.

Every aging generation of journalists must have complained, at one point or another, about swagger’s demise. But this time, the fall is demonstrable. A recent piece by Max Tani in Semafor attributed the new timidity to legal threats from subjects of news stories. “In 2024, it’s harder than ever to get a tough story out in the United States of America,” Tani writes, citing the risk of lawsuits and increased insurance premiums. The new equation “has given public figures growing leverage over the journalists who now increasingly carry their water.” Tani cited several examples of publications backing down, including Esquire and the Hollywood Reporter backing off from a critical story about podcaster Jay Shetty, the surrender by Reuters and other outlets to India’s legal demands about an exposé, and the unpublishing of a biting Formula 1 storyin Hearst’s Road & Track.

RINA DIANE CABALLAR

So as not to be left behind, educators are also experimenting with generative AI. But they’re grappling with techniques to adopt the technology while still ensuring students learn the foundations of computer science.

“It’s a difficult balancing act,” says Ooi Wei Tsang, an associate professor in the School of Computing at the National University of Singapore. “Given that large language models are evolving rapidly, we are still learning how to do this.”

Margot Cleveland:

6/6 They funded, test, helped develop, and promoted censorship technologies & enterprises that target domestic press & Americans’ speech. And with discovery the depth & breadth of the unconstitutional & ultra vires conduct will be revealed.

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More.

Rory Linnane:

Researchers have found a variety of reasons why students from lower-income families, and students of color, are more likely to need special education services. As a result of racist housing policies and governmental neglect, many children have been exposed to lead in their water or paint, live in food deserts and deal with other environmental stressors that affect their development. Many families also struggle to access early childhood education and other learning opportunities that wealthier families can attain. 

Jill Barshay:

It was one of the most significant days in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court. On May 17, 1954, the nine justices unanimously ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that schools segregated by race did not provide an equal education. Students could no longer be barred from a school because of the color of their skin. To commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Brown decision, I wanted to look at how far we’ve come in integrating our schools and how far we still have to go. 

Two sociologists, Sean Reardon at Stanford University and Ann Owens at the University of Southern California, have teamed up to analyze both historical and recent trends. Reardon and Owens were slated to present their analysis at a Stanford University conference on May 6, and they shared their presentation with me in advance. They also expect to launch a new website to display segregation trends for individual school districts around the country. 

Here are five takeaways from their work:

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Curiously, Madison has not addressed k-12 attendance boundaries in decades.

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Commentary.

Cremieux:

Some economists tried to reproduce the results of 67 economics papers and they pretty much couldn’t do it:

Even with help from authors, only half of papers ended up being reproducible, and this was still a problem at journals with required reporting of code and data.

Debra Kuether:
💰 1.47B budget
💰 252M referendum passed (reoccurring for every year thereafter)
💰 503b MPS Foundation funnels millions/district pays for their staff
💰 superintendent’s base contract 302K (with~100K benefits)
🚫MPS has to 60M budget “crisis”.

And:

One thing that isn’t entirely clear is how the district would end up spending more on salary/benefits despite cutting 288 jobs.

Glenn Reynolds:

This philosophy, announced by Brazilian President Getulio Vargas in the 1940s, is no longer just the favored approach of Latin American strongmen. It has become the openly practiced strategy of today’s Democratic machine.

Laws that hamper Democrats are ignored. Laws that might be used to hurt Republicans are enforced to — and often well past — the limits of the law.

One need look no farther than the absurd circus-clown show trial (one pundit prefers the term “goat rodeo”) in which the state of New York has gone so far in trying to turn Donald Trump’s (alleged) personal peccadilloes into business crimes that Gov. Hochul had to go out of her way to reassure other businessmen that this was a one-off, and that only Trump would be prosecuted under this novel approach to the law. 

As law professor Jonathan Turley noted in these pages, the New York statute in question has never been used this way before: “Even The New York Times agreed that it could not find a single case in history where this statute was used against an individual or a company that did not commit a criminal offense, go bankrupt, or leave financial victims.”

Nothing says “rule of law” like custom-made forms of liability designed for a single hated defendant.

Joanne Jacobs:

Brian Conrad, a math professor and director of undergraduate math education at Stanford, is guilty of “academic and professional misconduct” for pointing out errors in the California math framework, claims a letter to the university provost. The letter signed by Duane Habecker, a math administrator, charges that Conrad has “ventured into stochastic terrorism” — encouraging violence — for criticizing the work of Jo Boaler, a Stanford education professor who was one of the authors of the framework

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More.

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Math Forum audio and video.

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Mike Malone:

The complaint may appear overly repetitive, but that’s because it’s documenting an ongoing pattern of disregard for accuracy. Each repeated instance of the same inaccuracy matters.

The repetition is evidence, not personal attack, and the inaccuracies remain unaddressed. 4/7

Daniel Buck:

Now, a district math official has accused him of “stochastic terrorism” for this public criticism.

Mitchell Schmidt:

It’s unclear what the audit will ultimately find, but Legislative Audit Bureau Director Joe Chrisman said a final report with recommendations could be completed sometime next year.

“Providing opportunities for all is important to the success of state government institutions, but to create more unaccountable bureaucracy in the name of DEI is a deal breaker,” committee co-chair Rep. Robert Wittke, R-Racine, said in a statement. “My hope is that the audit show us what’s happening in the DEI realm and at what cost to our taxpayers.” 

After a deal was struck in December that made the DEI changes to UW system, Vos signaled the agreement was only the beginning and he planned to order “a very comprehensive in-depth audit of all the state agencies,” focused on DEI positions.

Vos said at the time the hope is that by early 2025 the Legislature will have a “roadmap to say, ‘OK, here are agencies that are doing it well, here are ones that are totally failing and need to be fixed, and here are ones that we can find maybe some kind of middle ground.”

Evers said in January he had no plans to change the state’s use of DEI positions.

“They can audit,” Ever said at the time. “That’s within their power. But that doesn’t mean we’re going to change anything.”

Brianna Lyman

The “Equal Representation Act” would modify the Census Bureau’s questionnaire for each decennial census beginning in 2030 by requiring individuals to attest to their citizenship status on the form and then using that data to exclude foreign nationals from the count used to determine congressional and electoral college apportionment. Apportionment is derived from the number of residents in a particular area but does not currently differentiate legal citizens from foreigners who, in many cases, are illegal immigrants. A state can gain or lose congressional seats and electoral college votes based on the size of its population.

This means that millions of illegal aliens who have invaded the country can dilute the representation of American citizens by inflating the populations of the left-leaning areas to which they flock — even as American citizens flee those same states. 

When former President Donald Trump signed a memo in July 2020 barring illegal aliens from being counted in the census, it was promptly met with a flurry of challenges. A handful of judges blocked the memo, and President Joe Biden eventually reve

Aaron Sibarium:

Thirteen federal judges said Monday that they would no longer hire law clerks from Columbia College or Columbia Law School after the university allowed an encampment on its lawn to spiral into a destructive occupation of a campus building. The judges cited the “explosion of student disruptions” and the “virulent spread of antisemitism” at Columbia, which has now canceled its main graduation ceremony because of the unrest.

Led by appellate judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, who spearheaded a clerkship boycott of Yale Law School in 2022 and Stanford Law School in 2023, as well as by Matthew Solomson on the U.S Court of Federal Claims, the judges wrote in a letter to Columbia president Minouche Shafik that they would no longer hire “anyone who joins the Columbia University community—whether as undergraduates or as law students—beginning with the entering class of 2024.”

“Freedom of speech protects protest, not trespass, and certainly not acts or threats of violence or terrorism,” the judges wrote. “It has become clear that Columbia applies double standards when it comes to free speech and student misconduct.”

The letter’s signatories include Alan Albright, a district judge who hears a fourth of the nation’s patent cases; Stephen Vaden, a former general counsel at the Department of Agriculture who now sits on the United States Court of International Trade; and Matthew Kacsmaryk, the district judge who suspended approval of the abortion drug mifepristone in a controversial ruling last year. Others are well-known district judges appointed by former president Donald Trump.

Jack Balkin:

For all the talk of how the modern university has been corporatized, neoliberalized, and so on, there hasn’t been as much attention paid to the ways in which it has been presidentialized. 

The presidentialization of Columbia dates back well before the current moment. Our last president, Lee Bollinger, ran the university for over two decades. During his tenure, Bollinger oversaw the rise of a substantial administrative apparatus—the ten highest paid Columbia employees, apart from surgeons, are now all senior executives—as well as the creation of a dizzying array of research centers, policy institutes, and global programs that operate more or less independently of the academic departments. Bollinger’s office also launched countless smaller projects with discretionary funds. After the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, for instance, he came up with the idea for a Constitutional Democracy Initiative (with which I am affiliated) and, within weeks, an impressive new outfit was up and running. Meanwhile, the most broadly representative body on campus, the University Senate, seemed to become less relevant with every passing year.

This basic dynamic is familiar to scholars of U.S. public law, who have long documented the growth of executive power relative to Congress and the growth of presidential power within the executive branch—what Justice Elena Kagan famously termed “presidential administration.” Under presidential administration, as Kagan describes it, regulatory activity increasingly becomes “an extension of [the president’s] own policy and political agenda.” This mode of governance has some real benefits, above all energy and efficiency. And President Bollinger did many valuable things for the university. Yet by the time he created a constitutional democracy initiative, Columbia’s own democratic life had withered considerably.

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Commentary.

Abbey Machtig

So far, feedback on the referendums has been mixed, with some residents supporting funding operational costs and smaller building renovations. But district administrators said others were unsure about the feasibility and cost of a 20-year referendum.

About 60% of survey respondents said supporting the district to invest in a 20-year facilities referendum was either a high or moderate priority. Almost one-third of respondents said they were undecided.

A similar percentage of respondents said supporting a facilities referendum that prioritized updating middle schools over a shorter time was a high or moderate priority. Again, about one-third of respondents said they were undecided.

Poll results shared at Monday’s meetingindicated a lack of public support for a 20-year facilities referendum, too. The Madison Public Schools Foundation commissioned the poll.

The sample size was about 400 people, according to Luke Martin, vice president of Impact Research.

“Especially with the challenges of complexity that are potentially in store for the November ballot, I do think the 20-year would be a much more difficult measure to pass,” Martin said Monday.

——

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Miguel Grinberg:

I’m sure you agree that it has become impossible to ignore Generative AI (GenAI), as we are constantly bombarded with mainstream news about Large Language Models (LLMs). Very likely you have tried ChatGPT, maybe even keep it open all the time as an assistant.

A basic question I think a lot of people have about the GenAI revolution is where does the apparent intelligence these models have come from. In this article, I’m going to attempt to explain in simple terms and without using advanced math how generative text models work, to help you think about them as computer algorithms and not as magic.

What Does An LLM Do?

Dan Kois:

Those of us who believe in the power of books worry all the time that reading, as a pursuit, is collapsing, eclipsed by (depending on the era) streaming video, the internet, the television, or the hula hoop. Yet, somehow, reading persists; more books are sold today than were sold before the pandemic. Though print book sales were down 2.6 percent in 2023, they were still 10 percent greater than in 2019, and some genres—adult fiction, memoirs—rose in sales last year.

But right now, there’s one sector of publishing that is in free fall. At least among one audience, books are dying. Alarmingly, it’s the exact audience whose departure from reading might actually presage a catastrophe for the publishing industry—and for the entire concept of pleasure reading as a common pursuit.

Ask anyone who works with elementary-school children about the state of reading among their kids and you’ll get some dire reports. Sales of “middle-grade” books—the classification covering ages 8 through 12—were down 10 percent in the first three quarters of 2023, after falling 16 percent in 2022. It’s the only sector of the industry that’s underperforming compared to 2019. There hasn’t been a middle-grade phenomenon since Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants spinoff Dog Man hit the scene in 2016. New middle-grade titles are vanishing from Barnes and Noble shelves, agents and publishers say, due to a new corporate policyfocusing on books the company can guarantee will be bestsellers.

Ian Leslie

After we lost access to the office, software provided us with a substitute that functioned just well enough for us to get fooled, for a while, into believing we hadn’t lost anything at all.

Software designers refer to “the good enough principle”. It means, simply put, that sometimes you should prioritise functionality over perfection. As a relentless imperfectionist, I’m inclined to embrace this idea. I gave this newsletter its name to encourage myself to post rough versions of my pieces rather than not to write them at all. When it comes to parenting, I’m a Winnicottian: I believe you shouldn’t try to be the perfect mum or dad because there’s no such thing. At work and in life, it’s often true that the optimal strategy is not to strive for the optimal result, but to aim for what works and hope for the best. 

The good enough can be a staging post to the perfect. The iPhone’s camera was a “good enough” substitute for a compact camera. It did the job, but it wasn’t as good as a Kodak or a Fuji. Until it was. Technological innovation often works like this, but the improvement curve isn’t always as steep as with the smartphone camera. Sometimes we allow ourselves to get stuck with a product which is good enough to displace the competition, without fulfilling the same range of needs. The psychological and social ramifications can be profound.

Ian Sailer:

In what’s likely to be a watershed moment, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has ended the use of diversity statements for faculty hiring, making it the first elite private university to backtrack on the practice that has been roundly criticised as a political litmus test.

On Saturday, an MIT spokesperson confirmed in an email to me that “requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT”, adding that the decision was made by embattled MIT President Sally Kornbluth “with the support of the Provost, Chancellor, and all six academic deans”.

The decision marks an inflection point in the battle over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in higher education. Since at least the late 2010s, diversity statements have been ubiquitous in faculty hiring, sometimes carrying serious weight in the selection process. As one dean at Emory University put it while describing her approach to hiring, “Diversity statement, then dossier.”

Alex Tabarrok:

In my 2011 book, Launching the Innovation Renaissance, I wrote:

At times, teacher pay in the United States seems more like something from Soviet-era Russia than 21st-century America. Wages for teachers are
low, egalitarian and not based on performance. We pay physical education teachers about the same as math teachers despite the fact that math teachers
have greater opportunities elsewhere in the economy. As a result, we have lots of excellent physical education teachers but not nearly enough excellent
math teachers. The teachers unions oppose even the most modest proposals to add measures of teacher quality to selection and pay decisions.

As I wrote, however, Wisconsin passed Act 10, a bill that discontinued collective bargaining over teachers’ salary schedules. Act 10 took power away from the labor unions and gave districts full autonomy to negotiate salaries with individual teachers. In a paper that just won the Best Paper published in AEJ: Policy in the last three years, Barbara Biasi studies the effect of Act 10 on salaries, effort and student achievement.

Compensation of most US public school teachers is rigid and solely based on seniority. This paper studies the effects of a reform that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay schemes. Following the reform some districts switched to flexible compensation. Using the expiration of preexisting collective bargaining agreements as a source of exogenous variation in the timing of changes in pay, I show that the introduction of flexible pay raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort), and improved student achievement.

We still have a long way to go but COVID, homeschooling and open-access voucher programs have put a huge dent in the power of the teacher’s unions. There is now a chance to bring teacher pay into the American model. Moreover, such a model is pro-teacher! Not every district in Wisconsin grasped the opportunity to reform teacher pay but those districts that did raised pay considerably. Appleton district, for example, instituted pay for performance, Oshkosh did not. Prior to the Act salaries were about the same in the two districts:

After the expiration of the CBAs, the same teacher could earn up to $68,000 in Appleton, and only between $39,000 and $43,000 in Oshkosh.

——-

Wisconsin’s Act 10, Flexible Pay, and the Impact on Teacher Labor Markets: Student test scores rise in flexible-pay districts. So does a gender gap for teacher compensation.

If not to teacher salaries, where is this money going?

More on Act 10 and the related Milwaukee pension scandal.

——-

More. “Important insights into the impact of flexibility in teacher pay schemes on student outcomes.”

——

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Steve McGuire:

A student in the Columbia encampment is asked when she started learning about Israel-Palestine:

She says “not too much,” credits a NYC public school teacher for telling them there can’t be much sympathy for Israel’s position, and closes by calling President Obama a terrorist.

Ben Southwood:

In August Works in Progress is hosting a week-long residential seminar in Cambridge for people aged 18–22. During this week, we aim to give attendees a thorough grounding in three of the topics most important to us: how the world got rich; what is going wrong with science today; and how to design public policies so they have a chance of being implemented. 

This will involve lectures, discussions, and other classes led by the people that we think are making the biggest impacts on these subjects today, including Works in Progress authors such as Saloni Dattani, Stuart Ritchie, and Anton Howes.

The programme’s name comes from the supposed group of seventeenth century thinkers known as the Invisible College, led by the Irish chemist Robert Boyle and the English economist Sir William Petty. 

Attendance is open to anyone around the world who will be aged 18–22 in August 2024. The main requirement is that you are thirsty for knowledge, curious about new ideas, and excited about shaping the world of the future. Please forward this invitation on to anyone you know whom you think might fit the bill.

Fareed Khan:

The easiest way to spot AI-generated text is by checking for words that you don’t usually use but are common for ChatGPT. Consider a massive corpus of over 19 billion English wordsfrom blogs, articles, news, and more, updated daily from 2010 to now. I looked for the word “delve” using a string search algorithm, and it showed up 52,388 times. I plot its yearly pattern and identified an unusual behavior, a ~200%growth in its appearance on the internet from 2022, the same year when ChatGPT was released on November 30th.

John Hawkins:

Why do so many kids in the West want to be influencers? Because we heavily reward successful influencers in our society and kids see that. However, is it GOOD for our society to have so many kids wanting to be influencers? Not at all, because many of the traits that tend to make someone a successful influencer don’t make them particularly good citizens or people. Think about it – what makes someone a good influencer? Things like being extremely emotional, being unstable, willing to do anything for attention, being willing to offend others, enjoying controversy, and lacking a sense of conscience or shame. Will our society be better or worse if it’s full of people like that?

Now, how about this?

Mabel Banfield-Nwachi:

A council has provoked the wrath of residents and linguists alike after announcing it would ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems.

North Yorkshire council is ditching the punctuation point after careful consideration, saying it can affect geographical databases.

The council said all new street signs would be produced without one, regardless of whether they were used in the past.

Some residents expressed reservations about removing the apostrophes, and said it risked “everything going downhill”. They urged the authority to retain them.

Sam, a postal worker in Harrogate, a spa town in North Yorkshire, told the BBC that signs missing an apostrophe – such as the nearby St Mary’s Walk sign that had been erected in the town without it – infuriated her.

Michael Dorgan:

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is negotiating a new contract with the public schools system and is understood to be calling for an extra $50 billion to pay for wage hikes as well as other demands such as fully paid abortions for its members, new migrant services and facilities and a host of LGBT-related requirements and training in schools. 

To put the figure into context, the total base tax receipts for the state of Illinois last year were $50.7 billion.

The incredible demands are being made despite its members delivering underwhelming results for its students, with only 21 percent of the city’s eighth graders being proficient readers, according to the last Nation’s Report Card, which provides national results about students’ performance.

Ann Althouse:

ABC News, which I never watch, is the home of “The View,” “Good Morning America” and “World News Tonight with David Muir.” I have no idea how archaic broadcast TV like that is manufactured or what Godwin did that bothered people.

Stop protecting powerful people! And stop patronizing the first Black woman and all the other firsts. Spread accountability around evenly.

Eugene Yan:

Why does complexity sell better?

Complexity signals effort. Papers with difficult ideas and technical details suggest blood, sweat, and tears. Systems with more components and features hint at more effort than systems with less. Because complex artifacts are viewed as requiring more effort, they’re also deemed as more challenging to create and thus more worthy. And because of the perceived effort involved, they’re often judged to be higher quality.

Complexity signals mastery. A complex system with many moving parts suggests that the designer has proficiency over each part and the ability to integrate them. Inaccessible papers peppered with jargon and proofs demonstrate expertise on the subject. (This is also why we quiz interview candidates on algorithms and data structures that are rarely used at work.) If laymen have a hard time understanding the complex idea or system, its creator must be an expert, right?

Complexity signals innovation. Papers that invent entirely new model architectures are recognized as more novel relative to papers that adapt existing networks. Systems with components built from scratch are considered more inventive than systems that reuse existing parts. Work that just builds on or reuses existing work isn’t that innovative.

Shia Kapos:

Solidaire has received financial support from the Pritzkers, who also founded the Libra Foundation, which funds smaller nonprofits that address criminal justice, environmental and gender justice issues. Susan Pritzker declined to comment for this story. Some of the groups funded by Libra have also been involved in protests against Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.

For instance, The Climate Justice Alliance took part in pro-Palestinian marches that have used the phrase “Genocide Joe.” Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, another group backed by the Libra Foundation, promotes pro-Palestinian demonstrations on its website. And a third, the Immigrant Defense Project, was part of a protest in Washington that saw 13 activists arrested by Capitol police after demanding a permanent cease-fire in Gaza.

Derek Robertson:

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped?

Artificial intelligence. You take that idea about free throws and apply it to all text that has ever existed, and that’s the idea behind the technology. My problem is that once you call it “artificial intelligence” instead of “pattern recognition,” it conjures dangerous robots that are threatening our existence, or automating human jobs, or beings that are more powerful or more intelligent than we are.

That’s never panned out. That narrative has accompanied artificial intelligence since they came up with the term in the 1950s, and it’s the same narrative no matter what the technology does. One on hand, you have people like me who think that machine learning technology, or pattern recognition technology, is incredible; transcription services are incredible; handwriting recognition is incredible; coding assistants are incredible. These are incredible tools that make my life better on a daily basis. But you see that we pour all this money into them as if they’re going to create some new consciousness or end humanity, or that they’re somehow equivalent to nuclear bombs. It’s just incongruous.

Hans Bader:

police declining the requests of universities to help the universities–which generally do not have law enforcement officers capable of dealing with hundreds of people resisting arrest–arrest  protestors and remove their protest encampments. I was preparing to write a blog post about this, but Hans Bader beat me to it. So rather than reinvent the wheel, with permission, below is a shortened version of Hans’ post:

You have a right to free speech, but that doesn’t give you a First Amendment right to camp out on my lawn with protest signs. That’s trespassing. But government officials sometimes allow trespassing when they sympathize with the trespasser’s viewpoint. Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC have refused to remove progressive anti-Israel protesters camping out at private universities — Johns Hopkins University, the University of Pennsylvania, and George Washington University.

Law professor David Bernstein notes that “Baltimore police will not assist in removing illegal encampment at Johns Hopkins University. Worse, they actually praise the illegal encampment as a valid exercise of First Amendment rights, which is complete nonsense. It’s especially nonsensical because most of the protesters are trespassers with no connection to the university.”

Wisconsin Right Now:

You may remember that he was outrageously ousted as New York Times opinion page editor some time ago for… running an editorial by Republican US Senator Tom Cotton urging military intervention to quell violent riots and looting. We enjoyed his talk. It was very thoughtful. He pulled no punches either and he got a standing ovation.

He believes that the Times brought in young reporters who are “detached from life as it’s lived in America,” and who brought the culture of their “Ivy League” educations into the newsroom and who thought they were part of, his word, “the resistance.” They saw the publishing of the Cotton column as a “betrayal,” he said.

The leadership of the paper “lost control” of the culture of the newsroom, he believes.

He said the Times decided a mainstream conservative argument was too scary to publish. He believes they’re now trying to “reel it back in, but it’s hard.”

Adam Andrzejewski

Here is just a sample of our findings: 

• $10.3 billion given by Qatar ($5.2 billion), Saudi Arabia ($3 billion), United Arab Emeritus ($1.3 billion) and Kuwait ($800 million) dwarfed China who gave $2.8 billion.   
• During the past 40 years $1 of every $4 of foreign gifts into U.S. colleges and universities flowed from these four countries.
• Are these countries buying seats in our elite schools? Our auditors found millions of dollars in restricted gifts paying the tuition bills for their students.  

Columbia, Harvard, Yale and other elite universities are turning out graduates who believe that open antisemitism and the championing of terrorism are forms of “social justice.”

Thomas Chatterton Williams

Kirn would never describe himself as a Trump supporter, but he cares less about Trump’s rampage through American democracy, or even the lunacy and violence of January 6, than he does about the selfish and self-satisfied elites—all noblesse, no oblige—who sparked that anger and sustained it. Call him a counter-elite. As he said about Skull and Bones: “That’s our elite. Who wouldn’t want to be counter to it?”

Kirn described the dominant politics of his Minnesota youth as “rural progressivism.” He spoke reverently of his grandfather, also named Walter Kirn, a local politician in Akron, Ohio, who, in the 1950s, ruined his career by defending the right of the Black thespian and suspected communist Paul Robeson to come to town. Family legend has it that he opened up a high-school auditorium for Robeson’s performance “purely on the basis of his right to express himself. It wasn’t out of empathy for his views.” Kirn sees that “as the right kind of politics.”

Today he regards Trump’s supporters not as the proverbial basket of deplorables but as more or less reasonable citizens with valid concerns. The movement around Trump, Kirn told me, is “an expression of American frustration on the part of people who feel like they got a really raw deal.” He described himself as “anti-anti-Trump, in the sense that I don’t think that this is the unique challenge in American history for which we should throw away all sorts of liberties and prerogatives that we are going to want back.” One reason he doesn’t see the coming election as a state of emergency is he does not believe that previous American leaders, such as the Bushes, were particularly virtuous, even in comparison with Trump—a figure Kirn and his colleagues at that bastion of 1990s East Coast snobbism, Spymagazine, used to relentlessly mock. Here, Kirn’s personal evolution is telling: He is perhaps the most salient example of a mainstream writer rejecting his past to throw in with the populists.

Peter Singer:

In January, Cofnas published a post called “Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem.” No one at Cambridge seems to have been bothered by his argument that people on the political right have, on average, lower intelligence than those on the left.

Some people at Cambridge were, however, very much bothered by Cofnas’s February post, “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution.” To follow Cofnas’s “guide,” one must accept “race realism”: the view that heredity plays a role in the existing social and economic differences between different demographic groups. Only by challenging the taboo against race realism, Cofnas believes, can conservatives overcome “wokism,” which he sees as a barrier to understanding the causes of inequality and to allowing people to succeed on the basis of merit.

If Harvard University admitted students “under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications,” Cofnas asserted, Black people “would make up 0.7 percent of Harvard students.” He also wrote that in a meritocracy, the number of black professors at Harvard “would approach 0 percent.”

That post gave rise to a petition from Cambridge students demanding that the university dismiss Cofnas. The petition currently has about 1,200 signatures.

CRFB:

Including the Biden Administration’s new student debt cancellation plan, we estimate all recent student debt cancellation policies will cost a combined $870 billion to $1.4 trillion. That’s more than all federal spending on higher education over the nation’s entire history. The vast majority of this debt cancellation was put in place through executive actions under President Biden.

$620 billion of debt cancellation has already been implemented, including $275 billion from President Biden’s new Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) program known as SAVE, $195 billion from cancelling interest as part of nearly 41 months of repayment pauses since March of 2020, and roughly $150 billion from a variety of more targeted actions such as discharging debt for those who attended closing schools and making it easier to cancel debt under existing loan forgiveness programs. The President’s newest debt cancellation scheme could cost an additional $250 to $750 billion based on our preliminary estimates.

Victor Davis Hanson:

Fewer applicants, higher costs, impoverished students, collapsing standards, and increasingly politicized and mediocre faculty reflect a collapse of the university system.

The country is waking up to the reality that a bachelor’s degree no longer equates with graduates being broadly educated and analytical. Just as often, they are stereotyped as pampered, largely ignorant, and gratuitously opinionated.

No wonder polls show a drastic loss of public respect for higher education and, specifically, a growing lack of confidence in the professoriate.

Each year, there are far fewer students entering college. Despite a U.S. population 40 million larger than 20 years ago, fertility rates have fallen in two decades by some 500,000 births per year.

Meanwhile, from 1980 to 2020, room, board, and tuition increased by 170 percent.

Skyrocketing costs cannot be explained by inflation alone, given that campuses have lightened faculty teaching loads while expanding administrative staff. At Stanford, there is nearly one staffer or administrative position for every student on campus.

Lewis Pennock:

The state has struggled to add jobs and its public pension debt has ballooned to nearly $150 billion. Meanwhile, its population has declined, hurting tax income.

Conservative thinktanks have now grouped Illinois with other blue states like New York and California, which have also faced an exodusamid issues ranging from immigration to crime.

‘Unemployment rates are very high; wage growth is lagging compared to most other states,’ said Bryce Hill, the director of fiscal and economic research at the Illinois Policy Institute.

Hill told the Daily Caller: ‘The Census Bureau has reported that residents are leaving the state en masse to the tune of hundreds of thousands every single year, so much so that the state’s population has actually been declining for the past 10 years.

Judiciary.House.Gov:

“Just got off [an] hour long call with [Senior Advisor to President Biden] Andy Slavitt. . . . [H]e was outraged – not too strong of a word to describe his reaction that we did not remove this post. . . . I countered that removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US but he replied that the post was directly comparing Covid vaccines to asbestos poisoning in a way which demonstrably inhibits confidence in Covid vaccines amongst those the Biden Administration is trying to reach.”

– Sir Nick Clegg, Meta’s President of Global Affairs, former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, describing his efforts to explain the boundaries of the First Amendment to the Biden White House in April 2021.1

This interim report details the monthslong campaign by the Biden White House to coerce large companies, namely Meta (parent company of Facebook), Alphabet (parent company of YouTube), and Amazon, to censor books, videos, posts, and other content online. By the end of 2021, Facebook, YouTube, and Amazon changed their content moderation policies in ways that were directly responsive to criticism from the Biden Administration.

Marlene Sokol and Ian Hodgson

Each day, 18,000 students take their seats inside Hillsborough County’s most struggling schools, enough to fill a small city.

The county by far logged more schools with D or F grades than any other in Florida, according to state numbers released in December. In all, 33 elementary and middle schools.

The vast majority of students in those schools come from poor families, with stresses at home that can hamper their ability to learn.

They are kids who need the most from their school district. Yet they are more likely to be greeted in class by a substitute teacher, or one with far less experience than those at higher-performing schools, a Tampa Bay Times analysis found.

Robert Pondisco:

The thing young people “do together” is go to school. At least they used to. The phrase Levin coined, “disordered passivity,” or simply a “failure to launch,” fits more comprehensively the rise in chronic absenteeism, which was a problem even before Covid; the pandemic merely legitimized it. Nearly one in six U.S. students missed fifteen or more days in 2018–19, the last full school year before the pandemic. Seen through this lens, school is just one more activity from which young people are becoming estranged, one more opportunity to stay on the sidelines, but the easiest to quantify: we take attendance.

In the past, even bored or indifferent students might have dragged themselves to school to escape their parents, to avoid the drudgery of being housebound, or to socialize. But as David Steiner, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and a former New York State education commissioner, points out, smartphones and social media have made leaving the house unnecessary. Worse, they feed this poisonous passivity. “You think you are enjoying the experience, but it’s cementing you into a cognitive and emotional coma,” he told me. “Others are living ‘for you’ in ways you know you never will, so why try to take any baby steps? Just keep scrolling.”

Erin Mcgroarty

Yarianie Rodriguez, a student from Monona Grove High School, outlined the group’s demands, which included state drivers’ licenses for all residents of age and regardless of documentation status, free school lunches, improvements to the work permitting process, and divestment from the Israeli war in Gaza. 

Rally organizers view the two issues as deeply intertwined and both important for the students, many of whom will be old enough to vote in November’s presidential election.

A banner held by students read “No borders in the workers’ struggle. Free Palestine. La clase obrera no tienes fronteras (The working class has no borders).”

“All of these are things that have to be said and be advocated for, because many things go unnoticed,” Rodriguez said. “And this is the day where all students come and make their demands and voices heard.”

ANI WILCENSKI

It’s the latest and most visible example of a frustrating trend in campus culture, in which elite universities pander to a small minority of progressive students at the expense of the students who simply want to enjoy a normal college experience, which involves things like frat parties, university traditions, and joy, and have found their social lives increasingly restricted at every turn.

At Cornell University, a third of the student body (including my own brother and cousin) belongs to Greek life and frat parties are a major part of the social scene, largely because there is effectively nothing else to do in Ithaca, New York, on a Saturday night. But their social centrality means little to the university administration, which has been waging a determined war on frats for years, wielding an arsenal of nitpicky, draconian, and sometimes openly unfair policies to keep many fraternities in a near-perpetual state of punishment.

At Cornell, the school uses an anonymous reporting system in which anyone can submit a complaint against a frat, even people who don’t attend the university—which can then become near-immediate grounds for a formal investigation during which the fraternity may very likely be suspended. This happened as recently as February, when Cornell’s Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards (OSCCS) received “an anonymous incident report” making unspecified allegations against at least 10 fraternities. By 9 p.m. the same day, OSCCS emailed every new member of those fraternities encouraging them to come forward with their own reports; three days later the school began suspending the accused chapters. The frats were prohibited from all social activity during the investigation, which included banning new members from eating at the house, even though they were paying for the fraternity meal plan, and limiting events at campus apartments occupied by graduating seniors, some of whom even had to cancel their birthday parties. I talked to one senior who wrote to the university, explaining that their guidelines were making it impossible to hold even small gatherings among friends and asking for additional clarity so seniors could find approved ways to enjoy their final days as students—especially since the anti-Israel protests were making campus life notably unenjoyable.

Newshub:

Education Minister Erica Stanford has not ruled out job losses as the Government moves to end New Zealand’s long-running reading recovery programme.  

The programme, which helps struggling readers, is being dumped as part of a $67 million dollar shake-up of the way literacy is taught in state schools.

The Government is making it mandatory for schools to use a structured literacy approach to teach reaching from next year – which is based on phonics, decoding and word understanding.

The reading recovery programme uses a different “whole language” approach, which has been criticised for using pictures to help children guess words.  

On Friday, Stanford confirmed the end of the programme.  

The Economist:

If prudence is a virtue then America’s budget is an exercise in vice. Over the past 12 months the federal government has spent $2trn, or 7.2% of gdp, more than it has raised in taxes, after stripping out temporary factors. Usually such a vast deficit would be the result of a recession and accompanying stimulus. Today the lavish borrowing comes despite America’s longest stretch of sub-4% unemployment in half a century. The deficit has not been below 3% of gdp, an old measure of sound fiscal management, since 2015, and next year Uncle Sam’s net debts will probably cross 100% of gdp, up by about two-fifths in a decade. Whereas near-zero interest rates once made large debts affordable, today rates are higher and the government is spending more servicing the debt than on national defence.

How has it come to this? The costs of wars, a global financial crisis and pandemic, unfunded tax cuts and stimulus programmes have all piled up. Both Republicans and Democrats pay lip service to fiscal responsibility. But the record of each side in office is of throwing caution to the wind as they indulge in extra spending or tax cuts. The biggest economic decision facing the next president is how generously to renew Donald Trump’s tax cuts of 2017, a step that will only worsen America’s dire fiscal trajectory.

——-

America’s fiscal outlook is disastrous, but forgotten

Conor Friedersdorf

One quality I wouldn’t personally want in a lawyer is shaken and unable to focus after witnessing the state deploy force

——

Columbia Dumps SAT Admissions Requirement for Good

Josh Hammer:

The rise of an insidious American ruling class, far removed from the interests and desires of most Americans and hardly still accountable to them, is not a recent development. The late, great Angelo Codevilla documented its emergence 14 years ago now, in his definitive essay on the subject. I have also written about the modern American ruling class no shortage of times—both within and beyond the ambit of the Claremont Institute, where Codevilla was a senior fellow and where Tom Klingenstein serves as chairman. That American society has a deeply embedded ruling class is now well accepted by most of Red America, and it is not uncommon to hear Republican candidates and elected officials denounce its prevalence and malevolence.

Philip Pilkington:

According to the latest estimates, taxpayers will be on the hook to cover £85bn in losses stemming from the unwinding of the Bank of England’s quantitative easing (QE) policy…

Sorry to pile on, but aren’t we watching here the catastrophic failure of a university to develop an intelligent and self-critical mind?

This isn’t freshman cosplaying. She’s a PhD student. She’s not the raw material on its way in. She’s the intellectual product coming out. https://t.co/l040jkbUPW

— Haviv Rettig Gur (@havivrettiggur) May 1, 2024

Bruce Schneier:

The web has become so interwoven with everyday life that it is easy to forget what an extraordinary accomplishment and treasure it is. In just a few decades, much of human knowledge has been collectively written up and made available to anyone with an internet connection.

But all of this is coming to an end. The advent of AI threatens to destroy the complex online ecosystem that allows writers, artists, and other creators to reach human audiences.

To understand why, you must understand publishing. Its core task is to connect writers to an audience. Publishers work as gatekeepers, filtering candidates and then amplifying the chosen ones. Hoping to be selected, writers shape their work in various ways. This article might be written very differently in an academic publication, for example, and publishing it here entailed pitching an editor, revising multiple drafts for style and focus, and so on.

The internet initially promised to change this process. Anyone could publish anything! But so much was published that finding anything useful grew challenging. It quickly became apparent that the deluge of media made many of the functions that traditional publishers supplied even more necessary.

Zac Schultz:

Here’s the amount Fort Atkinson receives from property taxes: The school district could promise a $6.5 million increase for the next three years wouldn’t raise taxes because they’d already increased their levy by $7 million the year before to prepay an old construction loan.

It’s called defeasance, and it’s one of the only ways a school district can increase their spending limits without permission from voters or the state Legislature.

If the operating referendum is passed — which is what happened on April 2 — the district would go back to paying its normal debt payment in future years.

Defeasance is essentially prepaying debt to avoid interest.

Fort Atkinson’s district administrator Rob Abbott said after their operating referendums failed the prior two years, the school board decided to raise their levy to prepay debt.

“So, the idea of defeasance or prepaying debt is difficult for people to understand. But it definitely is a strategy that is a long-term benefit to the taxpayer,” said Abbott. “In our case, it equates to around $3.4 million in savings of interest over the term of those 20-year bonds.”

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More.