👎🏼why Wisconsin’s kids can’t read👎🏼

I’m incredibly disappointed to see Kenosha @kusd, Wisconsin’s 3rd-largest district, explicitly push back against @ehanford‘s SOLD A STORY podcast and mainstream news’ attention to PHONICS.

(Kenosha ranks 403rd on 2022 Wisconsin report cards.) pic.twitter.com/Ln52kLcsrV

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) April 24, 2023

Reading proficiency of Wisconsin students has been generally stagnant for more than two decades, with some declines in the last several years, associated by many people with the effects of the pandemic on education. Achievement of low-income students and Black and Hispanic students has been especially weak; in the case of Black students, it is among the weakest in the nation. 

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Clare Asbury:

For many young people, the pandemic was the first crisis they faced. It affected everyone to some degree, from the loss of family and friends to uncertainty about jobs and daily life. In many ways, it aged young Americans and they are now turning to the same comfort previous generations have turned to during tragedies for healing and comfort.

Believing in God “gives you a reason for living and some hope,” says Becca Bell, an 18-year-old college student from Peosta, Iowa.

Ms. Bell, like many in her age group, doesn’t attend Mass regularly as she did as a child because of studies and work. But she explores her faith by following certain people on social media, including one young woman who talks openly about her own life and belief, which Ms. Bell, who was raised Catholic, says she finds more meaningful and relevant.

The Springtide survey uses the term “higher power,” which can include God but isn’t limited to a Christian concept or specific religion, to capture the spectrum of believers. Many young adults say they don’t necessarily believe in a God depicted in images they remember from childhood or described in biblical passages, but do believe there is a higher benevolent deity.

Other polls, including Gallup, ask specifically about believing in God and show a decline in young adults who believe in God.

End of invincibility

The Rev. Darryl Roberts, pastor of the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., says the pandemic, racial unrest, fears of job loss and other economic worries, stripped away the protective layers that many young people felt surrounded them. No longer feeling invincible, he says, some are turning to God for protection.

Mara Hvistendahl and Benjamin Mueller:

What is now clear is that the study was not removed because of faulty research. Instead, it was withdrawn at the direction of Chinese health officials amid a crackdown on science. That effort kicked up a cloud of dust around the dates of early Covid cases, like those reported in the study.

“It was so hard to get any information out of China,” said one of the authors, Ira Longini, of the University of Florida, who described the back story of the removal publicly for the first time in a recent interview. “There was so much covered up, and so much hidden.”

That the Chinese government muzzled scientists, hindered international investigations and censored online discussion of the pandemic is well documented. But Beijing’s stranglehold on information goes far deeper than even many pandemic researchers are aware of. Its censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge, a New York Times investigation found.

Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions. Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons, a review by The Times of over a dozen retracted papers found.

Groups including the World Health Organization have given credence to muddled data and inaccurate timelines.

The Economist:

Big is beautiful. That was the message of post-second-world-war science. The model was the Manhattan Project to build the first atom bombs. When hostilities ended, it continued with larger and larger particle accelerators, to probe matter at smaller and smaller scales—and bigger telescopes to do that probing at the largest scales imaginable. And, of course, there was the space race, which at its height in the mid-1960s absorbed more than 4% of America’s federal budget. After the Apollo Moon landings it went on to spawn the space shuttle and the International Space Station, as well as a programme of uncrewed missions to explore the nether reaches of the solar system.

Nice for scientists, then. But so 20th century. For all of these projects were essentially about physics. By the late 1980s biologists were gaining confidence that the next century would belong to them. Biotechnology—the ability to tweak DNA itself to make useful products—was taking wing. The number of biologists in training was booming. Some in the field were looking enviously at the physicists and asking themselves where they might queue up to dip their bread in the gravy.

The answer, after the usual political haggling, was the Human Genome Project (HGP), an American initiative globalised through the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium of 20 laboratories, eight of which were outside the United States. Though cheap by the standards of big physics (its projected cost of $3bn would barely have bought a couple of shuttle launches to the space station), it gave biology a taste of the big time.

Abigail Anthony

“Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees.”

Princeton’s diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are misnamed: They divide, exclude, and ostracize students of all political affiliations by rendering it socially dangerous to express any criticism of progressive mantras. Thirty-one academic departments have DEI committees, which could explain the land acknowledgementsin syllabi and the deluge of departmental anti-racism statements that inform students what can and can’t be said in class. The university’s McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning offers recommendations for “inclusive teaching” and encourages instructors to “address blatantly offensive and discriminatory comments and hold students accountable for their behavior,” which seems to contravene the university’s adoption of the University of Chicago’s Free Speech Principles. Princeton’s Office of the Provost encourages departments to “develop a departmental procedure for the regular examination of syllabi to ensure the representation of a diverse array of scholars in the field” and to “redesign the curriculum to address inequities in access and retention.”

In the name of diversity, some requirements have been dropped and others have been added. In 2021, the Princeton classics department began “removing barriers to entry” and stopped requiring study of Greek or Latin, while the politics department introduced a Race and Identity track. The Provost recommendsboosting the number of “underrepresented discipline-specific scholars and researchers to participate in departmental events.”

To ensure that faculty hiring results in a diverse work force, academic departments (possibly illegally) appoint a search officer who is the “only individual who can see the confidential individual, self-identified demographic data, including data about gender, race, and ethnicity,” and the officer should “monitor the recruitment and selection processes for tenure-track and tenured faculty positions.” The guidance states that “before the short list is sent to the associate dean for academic affairs or the deputy dean, the search officer must review it for gender and racial/ethnic representation.”

The search officer indicates to the search committee whether the applicant pool is diverse enough and recommends specific individuals without explicitly stating why, thereby circumventing federal and state laws prohibiting race-based hiring. Unsurprisingly, the university has documented a rise in Asian and black tenure and tenure-track faculty since fall 2018, while the white tenure and tenure-track faculty fell by 4.4 percent. Although Princeton doesn’t require diversity statements for hiring, the university has developed guidelines for departments that do wish to ask for such affirmations.

Don Surber:

AP reported, “Former Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum is on trial in federal court on charges of corruption and lying to the FBI, facing a potentially long prison sentence if convicted of multiple wire fraud counts and conspiracy.”

Paragraph 4 said, “Prosecutors also say Gillum lied about his interactions with undercover FBI agents posing as developers who paid for a 2016 trip he and his brother took to New York, which included a ticket to the hit Broadway show Hamilton. Gillum is accused of falsely telling the FBI later that he never received anything from these undercover ‘developers’ and that his brother provided the Broadway ticket.

2016?

The FBI created a sting on a politician and held off prosecution for 7 years. Not only that but the FBI lied to him and then charged him with lying to the FBI. What a piece of blackmail the FBI would have held over a governor — if Gillum had been elected.

In this case, the FBI had evidence of what it now calls a crime in 2018 when Gillum almost became governor. No bust was made. The FBI — which has the ability to leak like a colander — said nothing to the press.

Imagine what power the bureau would have had in Florida if it could hold this over the head of a governor. Maybe it does. Who knows what dirt the FBI has in its files? The FBI tried to get Martin Luther King to kill himself once the bureau learned of his illicit affairs.

Rick Tobey:

After the top pick for Easthampton’s superintendent lost his job offer when he used the term “ladies” in an email, the second choice for the district has withdrawn herself from running the school system amid students reporting her past Facebook posts.

The Easthampton School Committee is back to the drawing board following this latest chapter in the chaotic search for a new leader of the school district.

Erica Faginski-Stark, the director of Curriculum and Instruction at Ludlow Public Schools, is no longer in line to take over as superintendent.

Lucy Kellaway:

Some years ago, shortly before I left the Financial Times, I gave a talk at a literary event in Oxford. Put up your hand, I said to the audience, if you are useless at maths — whereupon the arms of around a third of them shot into the air. At the time, I wrote a column saying something had gone badly wrong when so many people in one of the most intellectually rarefied towns on the planet were not only dunces at maths but wore their inadequacy as if it were a charming quirk.

This week, the prime minister made the same point when he railed against the country’s “anti-maths mindset”. Rishi Sunak’s solution is to force all teenagers to study the subject until they are 18; mine was to roll my sleeves up and become a maths teacher myself.

The difference between our approaches is that mine did no harm. I tried my hardest to get teenagers to learn probability and algebra but after a year, with the relief that comes from deciding to do what you love, I switched to teaching economics and business instead. Sunak’s scheme may be equally well intentioned, but coercing students to go on doing what they hate will be ruinously expensive, counterproductive and borderline cruel.

Sunak, whose formative experience of maths was from his own school days at Winchester, would have done well to visit me as I entirely failed to teach standard-form maths to a Year 10 bottom set in an inner London comp. He would have witnessed a struggling student asking the million-dollar question: “Miss, why are we doing this?” There was no earthly reason. None of them would ever need standard form again. Surely Sunak would have seen that his first task was to do something about the 30 per cent of students nationally who fail to get the lowest pass at maths GCSE.

These teenagers are now required to retake the exam over and over until they pass or turn 18 — with the result that 100,000 students each year will have spent two years notching up successive failures, leaving most of them at 18 feeling they are not only failures at maths, but at life.

Related:

Remedial math at the University of Wisconsin.

“used surveys in early 2020 to assess how students felt in their math classes and what teachers thought about their own efforts to help students feel like they belong”

Much more on the successful citizen lawsuit overturning the Seattle School District’s use of Discovery Math, here.

http://seattlemathgroup.blogspot.com/.

Discovery Math

Connected math.

Singapore Math

Local links: Math Task Force, Math Forum Audio/Video and West High School Math Teachers letter to Isthmus.

The Fire:

Io Dodds:

The problem, he concedes, is that falling birth rates are also a common preoccupation of neo-Nazis and other ethno-nationalists, who believe they are being outbred and ‘replaced’ by other races. ‘A lot of alleged concerns about fertility decline are really poorly masked racist ideas about what kinds of people they want on the planet,’ says demographer Bernice Kuang of the UK’s Centre for Population Change.

The Collinses strongly disavow racism and reject the idea that any country’s population should be homogenous. Still, Babu finds that many in the rationalist and EA community, which skews pale and male, are wary of exploring pronatalism – lest they be ‘tarred with the brush of another white man who just wants an Aryan trad-wife’.

Another issue is what you might call the Handmaid’s Tale problem. From Nazi Germany’s motherhood medals to the sprawling brood of infamous, Kansas-based ‘God hates fags’ preacher Fred Phelps, a zeal for large families has often been accompanied by patriarchal gender politics. For liberal Westerners, the idea that we need to have more babies – ‘we’ being a loaded pronoun when not all of us would actually bear them – may conjure images of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead.

Emma Camp:

This week, the James Madison University debate team made a surprising announcement for, well, a debate team.

The group condemned an upcoming speech on “transgenderism” by conservative commentator Liz Wheeler, arguing that she is “attempting to antagonize and harass highly at-risk groups like transgender students” and calling on the student group sponsoring the event to revoke their support. While there is a lot to criticize about Wheeler’s position on transgender people, it’s nonetheless troubling that a student group devoted to debate and “free speech” would so fiercely call for the cancellation of an event based purely on a speaker’s political beliefs.

Wheeler’s event, hosted by JMU’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), is set to take place on April 26. The lecture, which has already had to move location due to security concerns, will focus on “the ideology of transgenderism,” according to the chapter’s social media posts. Soon after the event was announced, many took to social media to express their disapproval and get the university administration to cancel the event.

DRAKE BENTLEY:

In her letter, Underly stated, “Whether you realize it or not, you are, under the guise of protection, causing undue harm to students and staff. However, this damage is reversible. It is paramount that you change course now.”

Underly requested that the administration reverse the policy to “foster inclusive environments,” saying the controversial issues policy is “eliminating conversation on topics that you have in the past deemed controversial.”

Reversing the policy “will send a clear message to the residents of Waukesha and all of Wisconsin about the high priority you place on ensuring a well-rounded education for your students that reflect the pluralistic nature of our society,” Underly wrote.

Last week, the administration placed first-grade dual-language teacher Melissa Tempel on administrative leave after she spoke out about the district’s decision to ban “Rainbowland.”

Underly addressed Tempel’s leave in her letter by citing the text from the controversial issue policy. She said the district needs to re-evaluate its decision to place Tempel on leave and should recognize that “‘acknowledging the rights of (the district’s) professional staff members as citizens in a democratic society’ is, in fact, in the best interests of the School District of Waukesha.”

Thank you to @SenatorKapenga, Rep Allen, Rep Neylon, and Senator Hutton for issuing this reminder to @DrJillUnderly. When over half of Wisconsin kids can’t read or do math at grade level, she needs to focus on improving public education and not issue veiled political threats. pic.twitter.com/TbksgMBA6n

— Nicole (@BigNicEnergy) April 22, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Chris Rickert:

The email did not say what parts of the story were inaccurate or address the allegations in WILL’s letter.

WILL spokesperson Erin Voelkel said the firm is declining to release the names of the freshmen “at this time” but provided a screen shot of an email from Sun Prairie East Principal Renee Coleman that appears to reference the incident and reportedly included a district policy on the use of bathrooms and locker rooms by transgender students.

“Let me reiterate that the situation your daughter was in should not have happened, and we will continue to work to ensure no one has a similar experience,” she said.

WILL has filed a public records request with the district seeking email and other communication related to the incident.

Details, here

more.

Freddie deBoer:

I also saw students go from quietly doing work to lifting a heavy desk off of the ground to bash one of their peers within a matter of seconds. There too I had to physically intervene, or else another kid would have been badly injured. In that year I think I probably had to physically restrain a kid less than a half-dozen times, but it did happen. Nobody liked it. Everyone would have rather done anything else. But sometimes there was just no choice; the idea of verbally de-escalating a kid who’s genuinely trying to kill another kid is not a serious response to an immediate problem. But there’s been a number of arguments in the media that insist that physical restraint is 100% unacceptable at all times. I wrote about this frustrating tendency here.

I got an opportunity to hash this out with a critic of physical restraint late in my grad school experience. There was a symposium or conference or whatever that I attended about special ed, and there was a panel about physical restraint. One of the people on the panel was a crusading type who insisted that there was never a moment when educators had to physically intervene to stop a child from hurting themselves or others. I brought my personal experience to bear, asking her what she would have done when one of my students was already engaged in violence. She said that she would have verbally de-escalated them. I told her that these were moments where harm was already being done, by children with serious documented behavioral issues who were often so exercised that they were incapable of listening at all. She said that she would have verbally de-escalated them. I said that there were legitimately situations where the choice was between physically intervening or allowing a child to endure major injury. She simply said, once again, that she would verbally de-escalate any child.

Just realized this: The Biden campaign-backed Hunter Biden 2020 intelligence letter was crafted by the same “Beacon Global Strategies” intel officials involved in the 2016 Hillary campaign effort declaring Bernie as a threat to national security https://t.co/mbSGNjxVLI

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) April 21, 2023

EJ Antoni:

He also noted the average American family has lost the equivalent of more than $7,000 in annual income.

There is a direct link between spending, borrowing and printing trillions of dollars, and these disastrous results for Americans.

President Biden has spent trillions of dollars the nation didn’t have.

These unchecked costs drove the deficit to record highs and pushed the debt over $31 trillion. 

Wall Street Journal:

They tend to say be­lief in God is im­por­tant. Two-thirds de­scribe them­selves as very or mod­er­ately re­li­gious, com­pared with less than half of adults over­all.

WILL:

Dear Members of the Board of Education:

Our attorneys at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) recently became aware of an alarming incident involving a violation of freshman girls’ privacy while in a Sun Prairie East High School (EHS) locker room. Although the parent who reached out to WILL attempted to resolve this issue with Sun Prairie Area School District (SPASD or “District”) administrators, the response by the District to date has been completely inadequate. We are calling on you to address this immediately and put policies in place that will protect the safety and privacy of all students (and provide public notice of what those policies are).

In the interests of privacy, we will not share student or parent names in this letter, but your employees at EHS are well-aware of all persons involved and your District’s refusal to act.

March 3 Incident
On Friday, March 3, 2023, four freshman girls at EHS participated in a swim unit as part of their first-hour physical-education class. After the class, the girls entered the girls’ athletic locker room to shower and change for class. Upon entering, they noticed a senior male student in the area containing lockers and benches. It is our understanding this male was 18 years old at the time of the incident. According to the girls, this student was not in the first-hour PE class they were participating in. While the girls were surprised to see him in the locker room, they had a general idea that this student identifies as transgender and has used girls’ bathrooms before. While they were uncomfortable, they proceeded to the shower area without interacting with the student.

Dave Zweifel:

Although you might never know it by last week’s meeting of the Madison School Board, school districts are very much included in the law that requires government — which belongs to and is paid for by the public after all — needs to be transparent in all that it does. There is no room for secrets unless specifically exempted under the law.

To me, the meeting to discuss the embarrassing failure of the Madison Metropolitan School District’s response to open records requests was an embarrassment itself. Administrators tried to explain why the district has become a laggard in fulfilling openness requests, often simply denying access or stonewalling for months to release records that “shall be honored as soon as practicable and without delay.”

They revealed that the job that long ago was designated as the records custodian, the person responsible for releasing requested public records, no longer exists. Instead, the district’s legal department has been taxed with the job and apparently is overwhelmed by other tasks.

That’s patently unacceptable, and I’m surprised School Board members didn’t demand an accounting. No governmental body can just ignore the law because it refuses to assign adequate staff to comply with it.

Wisj:

But one of the lawsuits was actually filed by the district’s own spokesman, Tim LeMonds. After the district determined it had to release a complaint against LeMonds by his staff, the tight-lipped LeMonds — whose job is supposed to be communicating with the public — sued his employer to stop disclosure.

You can’t make this stuff up — or justify it.

More, here.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

There is a big debate over who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline. Instead of allowing the debate, Facebook has decided to take a side. It is censoring Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. And instead of explaining, Facebook sends readers to an article in Norwegian. Watch pic.twitter.com/nN18HovBPR

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) April 19, 2023

The Economist:

According to Jonathan Kennedy, the author of “Pathogenesis”, there is a better explanation for why H. sapiens prevailed: their immune systems were superior. As their populations boomed, genetic diversity increased and, since they lived in Africa, much closer to the equator than other humans, H. sapiens would have been exposed to a greater array of animals carrying a variety of microbes. Some of those microbes would have been pathogenic. (Indeed, the majority of bugs that infect humans are zoonotic—ie, they jump the species barrier from other animals.)

As H. sapiens moved across the world, they would have been protected against the diseases carried by the other humans they met. The converse was not true, however, meaning Neanderthals and other humans were less resistant to the diseases carried by H. sapiens.

Len Gutkin:

Sharp declines in the English major (as well as in other majors across the humanities) have occasioned a great deal of coverage in recent years; Nathan Heller’s widely read New Yorkeressay, “The End of the English Major,” published in February, read like a monumental epitaph to the discipline. The big picture is undeniably bleak: “During the past decade,” Heller writes, “the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third.” But American higher education is vast, and sectorwide statistics might mask local successes. That was one of the points of Sarah Blackwood’s essay in

If it becomes a cultural expectation that they won’t be able to read them, it could become self-fulfilling. I think it is a massively exaggerated assumption. I am surprised by how much literature many students are willing to do. https://t.co/tabO6xmdRz

— Clayton Burns (@ClaytonBurnsPhD) April 18, 2023

Len Gutkin:

Sharp declines in the English major (as well as in other majors across the humanities) have occasioned a great deal of coverage in recent years; Nathan Heller’s widely read New Yorkeressay, “The End of the English Major,” published in February, read like a monumental epitaph to the discipline. The big picture is undeniably bleak: “During the past decade,” Heller writes, “the study of English and history at the collegiate level has fallen by a full third.” But American higher education is vast, and sectorwide statistics might mask local successes. That was one of the points of Sarah Blackwood’s essay in

Tyler Cowen:

The marshaled evidence is convincing, and I will be blogging more about this book. While some stiff competition is coming, this could be the most important economics and policy book of this year. And yes it is remarkable that such a book is so needed, but yes it is. And here is Melissa on Twitter.

Matt Taibbi:

Back from vacation I made the mistake of scanning the news and was shocked by the media’s ongoing orgy of self-congratulation and Two-Minutes-Hating, in response to the capture of “Pentagon Leaker” Jack Teixeira. Glenn Greenwald has already covered a lot of this on System Update, but this represents a major new progression in the ongoing mutation of news media, from public advocate to cop.

The New York Times and Washington Posttrumpeted roles in helping identify Air National Guardsman Teixiera for the FBI. “We’re delivering him to you with his head on a platter,” is how Glenn put it. 

It’s an awful look for the press. This isn’t tracking down a serial killer or exposing Enron’s fraud. The alleged “crime” here is releasing true information, information that belongs to the American public and is secret only by official designation. At most, a newspaper might decide not to publish such information, but to help jail the leaker? It’s nuts. Reporters are supposed to be interested in everything and listen to information without judgment, like doctors, yet the whole industry is working itself into a moral frenzy because a bunch of overgrown Minecraft enthusiasts were privately passing around a few truths like a joint.

Jeffrey Carter:

As the Democrats worked to exert power, they used the government as a cudgel over the head of the citizens. Get out of line, your garbage didn’t get picked up. Get out of line, a city inspector would visit your business and let you know it would be a shame for something to happen to your business. 

They also stole lots of elections. As John Kass has expertly pointed out, who gets what office in Chicago isn’t competitive. It’s moving pieces around a chessboard. There are no surprises in the Chicago elections. The only drama is a faux drama created by the media and press. Today’s press in Chicago is merely a rubber stamp, a tool of the woke left. There are no true journalists in Chicago employed by the mainstream media. Not one. 

They are either willing Marxists or bought.

As time moved along, the Democratic Machine saw it fortuitous to tie social issues to their power in order to promote guilt. By any means necessary right? The Bill Ayers/ Bernadine Dohrn wing of the Democratic Party took over the intellectual elite. They were readily accepted at the nice parties in Chicago and were accepted by the left-wing academics. The terrorists became respected. They played the long game and nationwide have fundamentally changed public school education in the entire United States.

Democrats in the city harnessed the Chicago street gangs to get out the vote. As long as the gangs got the vote out, the city brass would look the other way. By any means necessary.

Greg Jacobs:

I was disappointed in 2021 to read that Stanford had been sued by a number of its athletes when the school, without warning, told them it had decided to drop 11 varsity sports teams. Those sports included men’s volleyball, wrestling and rowing. Women were to lose sports like synchronized swimming, rowing and fencing. President Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Provost Persis Drell and Athletic Director Bernard Muir said the cut was a budget necessity, and was needed to keep Stanford “competitive” with other schools. That turned out not to be true. In fact, the school rejected alumni financing of the sports. I was further angered when I read that Tessier-Lavigne may have co-authored a number of scientific papers with “manipulated images.” I was then saddened to read about Stanford soccer player Katie Meyer, who had committed suicide last March after a badly botched disciplinary action Stanford attempted to take against her. Her parents filed a lawsuit against Stanford in October.  

These are some of the more serious scandals involving the school in the last three years. There have been less severe missteps taken by those who are supposedly in the business of running an elite, world renowned university, but even these smaller mistakes seem to indicate a larger problem. One of my classmates (I graduated in 1970) complains that the administration is of late “rudderless,” stumbling from one crisis to another. He may not make his annual donation to the school as a result. I think it is time to ask: exactly who manages Stanford? And how are they making decisions? Is it the President? The Board of Trustees? Or a small group of individuals known only to a few?

Jordan McGillis:

Chicago’s pension spending has nearly tripled in the past ten fiscal years, from around $15,700 per full-time employee to more than $45,000. Pension expenditures now total more than $1.5 billion—over 12 percent of the city’s total revenue. For every person Chicago employs, in other words, it is effectively paying $45,000 to a city employee who has already retired. And the problem will worsen in the years to come, with the city’s pension debts exceeding those of 45 states and the recent market downturn intensifying its funding shortfalls. As these costs rise, they limit the revenue available for needed services.

Reagan on PARENTAL RIGHTS:
“Isn’t it the parents right to give counsel and advice to keep their children from making mistakes that may affect their entire lives? Many of us in government would like to know what parents think about this intrusion in their family by government.… pic.twitter.com/EdbiIyk61T

— Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) April 18, 2023

Maciver:

The non-partisan Wisconsin Legislative Council confirmed something about tax increment financing (TIF) that the MacIver Institute has been warning taxpayers about for years: tax increment financing directly results in higher property tax bills for all taxpayers in that community. This contradicts what local and state government officials have claimed for years, that TIF is a win-win for taxpayers.

Legislative Council released the memo that explains everything on Nov. 29, 2022, which the MacIver Institute obtained through a records request. It explains that anytime there’s construction within a TIF district (TID), the mill rate goes up for the entire community. Essentially, local governments use the net new construction (NNC) that occurs within TIF districts to justify higher tax levies, but then exclude that new property value in the TIDs when calculating the new mill rate.

As the Legislative Council’s memo explains, “When a TID exists, and all NNC occurs within the TID, the mill rate will increase from the prior year, because the mill rate’s numerator increases while the denominator stays the same.”

Kelly Meyerhofer and Drake Bentley:

Cardinal Stritch University, which has been serving students since 1937, is closing its doors at the end of the spring semester, the college president announced Monday.

“We’re all devastated by this development, but after examining all options this decision was necessary,” President Dan Scholz said in a video announcement. “I wish there was a different path we could pursue. However, the fiscal realities, downward enrollment trends, the pandemic, the need for more resources and the mounting operational and facility challenges presented a no-win situation.”

The university Board of Trustees recommended the closure to the Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi after determining the Fox Point school “could no longer provide high-quality educational experiences our students deserve,” he said. The Sisters accepted the recommendation and set the closing in motion, Scholz said.

The announcement came as a shock to the close-knit campus, and to its broader community.

J Patrick Coolican:

Walker recounts in the letter how after the news conference, House DFL spokesman Matt Roznowski “approached Mr. Callaghan and, in front of his colleagues from other news organizations, upbraided him for his comment and threatened to call his editor. Mr. Callaghan perceived Mr. Roznowski to be visibly angry and physically aggressive and responded with a profanity.” 

House DFL responded by removing Callaghan from its press release email list, which left him in the dark as to the goings-on in the House. The move was later rescinded. 

On February 17, a House DFL official and the House director of human resources accused Callaghan of discrimination and harassment based on his objection to the end of the press conference. (Callaghan’s objection to ending the news conference, Walker writes, was both race and gender neutral.) In support of their accusation, the House officials cited a policy that applies to House members and employees, not independent media.

House leadership then sent a letter to MinnPost, asserting Callaghan’s comment during the news conference raised “serious concerns” under the House policy on discrimination and harassment. “House counsel, the House Sergeant at Arms, and Capitol Security were notified,” the letter reads.

Robert Zimmerman

This is a followup on a March 2023 blacklist column. Though the school district had previously welcomed the Good News Clubs, a Christian afterschool program run by the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), to use school facilities for meetings, in 2021 school district officials blacklisted it without explanation, and then stonewalled CEF officials as well as the school’s principal (who wanted the club in his school) for almost two years. Meanwhile, the district was allowing many other clubs, some very leftwing, access to facilities.

In March CEF enlisted the legal non-profit Liberty Counsel and filed a lawsuit [pdf] against the school district as well as its superintendent, Dr. Javier Montanez.

The lawsuit had demanded that CEF be given immediate access to district facilities “equal to access provide to similarly situation nonreligious organizations,” payment of “actual damages in accordance with the evidence at trial,” nominal damages of $100, and payment of any legal costs.

BBC:

A group of advisers, including mathematicians and business representatives, will examine the “core maths content” taught in schools.

It will also consider whether a new maths qualification is necessary.

But opposition parties attacked the government’s record of recruiting maths teachers. 

Outlining the review in a speech, the prime minister admitted more maths teachers were needed, and this was “not going to happen overnight”.

He wants all school pupils in England to study some maths until 18 – although it will not be compulsory to study the subject at A-level.

George Leef:

Not so long ago, free speech on college campuses was not a matter of controversy. Of course, there were heated disputes over what people said, but everyone accepted that people were entitled to speak their minds—and then face criticism as those who disagreed spoke theirs. Sadly, that has changed dramatically.

The first prominent dissent as to the value of free speech came from Professor Herbert Marcuse, who argued in 1969 that campuses (and society) should not tolerate some speech. In particular, Marcuse, a Marxist, said that speech that supported existing socioeconomic arrangements should be suppressed so that dissident voices could be heard.

Today, we find many academics echoing Marcuse and calling for severe restrictions on “hate speech,” which could mean any communication they find disagreeable. And we still find many who advocate unrestricted freedom of speech, agreeing with Justice Louis Brandeis that the remedy for bad speech is more speech.

Caroline Chen:

Thousands of campaign flyers, dozens of Fizz posts and one executive debate later, preliminary results of the 2023 Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) election were announced via email and linked on the ASSU website on Sunday.

Candidates elected in the 2023 election will serve their positions for the 2023-2024 academic year.

While the voter turnout of this year’s general election, at 24.72%, was significantly higher than the previous two years’ turnout of around 17%, turnout has yet to return to 2020 levels when total voter turnout was at 36.64%. This year, 39.44% of undergraduate students and 12.83% of graduate students cast ballots. In 2020, 53.76% of undergraduates and 23.02% of graduates cast ballots.

“We saw an increase in turnout this year from last year, which was one of my big goals, and I think reflective of a lot of engagement on the part of the candidates running — we had more candidates for both UGS and GSC than last year, which certainly helped,” ASSU Election Commissioner Whit Froehlich J.D. ’24 wrote in a statement to The Daily. “There’s still room for improvement, though, particularly among graduate students, many of whom still either don’t know they can vote or just aren’t as aware of ASSU and what it does.”

Leelila Strogov:

There’s a growing aversion to attending college in politically conservative states. What the Chronicle of Higher Education calls the “red-state disadvantage” in higher education is affecting the decisions of both potential students and staff alike.

Anecdotally, I can attest that this is real. In my work coaching college applicants, I have noticed an increased likelihood that applicants in states that vote Democratic in elections won’t apply to universities in states that vote Republican.

One reason is certainly the perceived prestige gap between colleges in blue and red states. A majority of the most highly selective colleges are located in blue states, including Ivy League schools, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and so on.

Another possible reason is that students may prefer colleges where they believe they will feel more “comfortable,” and moving to a red state can entail more than just being around people with different opinions.

In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, some students may think that going to school in a red state will limit their reproductive freedom. Similarly, queer and trans students may be concerned about their rights in places where laws may offer them fewer protections.

It’s an understandable concern, and all students should seek and apply to schools where they believe they can thrive and feel secure. Still, I strongly urge students from blue states to think seriously about applying to colleges in red states because it boosts their chances of getting into a good school and enjoying long-term career success — and also increases the odds of something else: helping to combat one of the defining social issues of our time, political polarization.

Belmont Abbey

Without the ability to remain financially independent and secure, we place our faith-based practices at risk from a federal government both increasingly intrusive to private institutions and increasingly hostile to faith.

The mission of Belmont Abbey College is rooted in a desire to fill society with graduates prepared to restore the culture for the greater glory of God and create a world where charity and goodness thrive.

William Briggs

We told you this was happening when it was happening. Not everybody believed it; indeed, most (and here I exclude regular readers) did not. And, worse, most still do not, and never will, such is the power of propaganda. This:

Twitter Files #18 and #19 focus on the Virality Project, an “anti-vaccine misinformation” effort led by Stanford and bringing together elite academia, NGOs, government, and experts in AI and social media monitoring, with six of the biggest social media companies on the planet. They went far beyond their “misinformation” remit. Twitter Files show the Virality Project pushed platforms to censor “stories of true vaccine side effects”.

Experts.

“Reporting side effects of the now-pulled Johnson & Johnson vaccine would have been labelled ‘misinformation’ under Virality Project decrees.” And was. I tried showing deleterious vex effects using the CDC’s own data all through 2021, with this being one of the most interesting posts. Of course, these efforts were whacked on social media, and the post(s) died quiet deaths. Just like…but never mind.

Aaron Renn:

South Korea is a particularly interesting case study. It has the world’s lowest fertility rate, with a total fertility rate or TFR of 0.78 (2.1 is needed just to keep population constant). It has also developed particularly unhealthy gender relations, elements of which we see echoed in our own country. As here, these have even started to carry over into politics. 

What we see in South Korea is that post-familialism can produce unhappiness and dysfunctional social and political dynamics. Things are not necessarily fated to play out the same way elsewhere, of course. But the case of South Korean shows that we shouldn’t be blasé about embracing a post-familial future for the United States.

Tim Newcomb:

Americans’ IQ scores are trending in a downward direction. In fact, they’ve been falling for over a decade.

According to a press release, in studying intelligence testing data from 2006 to 2018, Northwestern University researchers noticed that test scores in three out of four “cognitive domains” were going down. This is the first time we’ve seen a consistent negative slope for these testing categories, providing tangible evidence of what is known as the “Reverse Flynn Effect.”

In a 1984 study, James Flynn noticed that intelligence test scores had steadily increased since the early 1930s. We call that steady rise the Flynn Effect. Considering that overall intelligence seemed to be increasing faster than could be explained by evolution, the reason increase became a source of debate, with many attributing the change to various environmental factors.

Hyerim Bianca Nam:

This faith is shared, it seems, by both ends of the ideological spectrum. One of the angriest moments I’ve had at Yale was last year’s Bulldog Days, when I saw a table on cross campus that was manned by members of a pro-life club. Grouped around the table, which was spread with sonograms and fetal diagrams, the students were inviting passersby to engage in logical debates about fetal personhood and abortion ethics. They were polite. They held their voices low and spoke slowly and calmly. They had relaxed, open smiles.

“Would you like to discuss this? Let’s talk about it respectfully,” they insisted. “We can debate about this.” Their smug civility was infuriating; their invitations for debate, inflammatory. I could barely seethe out my opinion about the misogyny of holding such a debate at all; simpering, the male students gestured to the only female student with them. Their wide, innocent eyes asked the unspoken question: how could they possibly be misogynist when one of their club members was a woman? 

I think that interaction, which took place a bare week before the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked in May, took a few years off my life — and really, it’s my fault for biting the bait. I regret talking with them. I should not have entered such a space and entertained such discourse; to bring the legality of abortion into question, then frame the debate around whether and when a fetus became a person was a red herring, a false path meant to distract someone from the true issue and its massive repercussions for bodily autonomy and reproductive rights. The discussion never should have been entertained, because simply opening space for this “logical, respectful” debate itself is a threat to human rights that should never be up for debate.

Medieval – Mind

I was reading this thread about the collapse of the American education system, and it made me wonder a few things: Do you all agree that the American education system is currently in a state of collapse? If not, what is your definition of collapse? And if it is, when did that collapse begin – or rather, what was the straw that broke the camel’s back, if you will?

Aeon:

High-quality video is an invaluable way of transporting viewers to the past and helping to put the world in context. From the late 19th century to today, cameras have been there to capture some of history’s most important moments, from pivotal battles, to civil rights marches, and even moonwalks. However, as A History of the World According to Getty Images details, some of the most extraordinary footage ever shot is locked away behind paywalls by a few companies that charge exorbitant fees for access and usage – even in cases where the material has entered the public domain, or was never even owned by anyone at all. In his riveting video essay, the UK filmmaker Richard Misek sets out to release these images from ‘captivity’. Starting with a montage of dramatic historical footage followed by a roundup of the high price-tag they command, Misek then dives into a series of clips one at a time to detail their history, including how visual media companies have exploited them. Ultimately, he makes a compelling argument that this murky practice has major public interest implications that extend far beyond the high price-tag for filmmakers.

Sarah Mervosh:

About one in three children in the United States cannot read at a basic level of comprehension, according to a key national exam. The outcomes are particularly troubling for Black and Native American children, nearly half of whom score “below basic” by eighth grade.

“The kids can’t read — nobody wants to just say that,” said Kareem Weaver, an activist with the N.A.A.C.P. in Oakland, Calif., who has framed literacy as a civil rights issue and stars in a new documentary, “The Right to Read.”

Science of reading advocates say the reason is simple: Many children are not being correctly taught.

A popular method of teaching, known as “balanced literacy,” has focused less on phonics and more on developing a love of books and ensuring students understand the meaning of stories. At times, it has included dubious strategies, like guiding children to guess words from pictures.

The push for reform picked up in 2019, when national reading scores showed significant improvement in just two places: Mississippi and Washington, D.C. Both had required more phonics.

But what might have remained a niche education issue was supercharged by a storm of events: a pandemic that mobilized parents; Covid relief money that gave school districts flexibility to change; a fresh spotlight on racial disparities after the murder of George Floyd; and a hit education podcast with a passionate following.

“There is this urgency around the story, this unbelievable grief,” said Emily Hanford, a journalist at American Public Media. Her podcast, “Sold a Story,” detailed how stars of the literacy world and their publisher diverged from scientific research. It racked up nearly 5 million downloads.

The movement has not been universally popular. School districts in Connecticut and teachers’ unions in Ohio, for example, pushed back against what they see as heavy-handed interference in their classrooms.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Scott Girard:

Two months after announcing his retirement, outgoing Madison Superintendent Carlton Jenkins has been named a finalist for the top job in a Tennessee school district.

Chalkbeat Tennessee, an education news website, reported Saturday that Jenkins is among three finalists to be the next Memphis-Shelby County Schools superintendent. The School Board there, however, was not happy with the list of three finalists selected by a search firm, including Jenkins.

“After a public meeting that at times turned tense, the board announced it would pause plans to interview finalists for the position until it receives the names of all 34 applicants,” Chalkbeat reported, adding that board members questioned the process rather than the credentials of any specific candidates during their Saturday meeting.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

The Economist:

ONE LETTER does not normally cause controversy, yet a single squiggle has set the Spanish-speaking chattering classes to nattering. A new textbook issued in Mexico seemed to bless a non-standard ending on second-person singular verbs in the past tense: dijistes (you said), with an extra “s”, rather than the standard dijiste, and so on with other verbs. The squabble is instructive, and well beyond the Hispanophone world.

For critics, the sin was twofold. First, the textbook “approved” a usage that, though widespread, is not the official form, which is to say approved by the Royal Spanish Academy and observed by most Spanish-speakers (especially in writing). The second misdeed was that Mexico’s education authorities, by acting alone, threatened the unity of the Spanish-speaking world.

Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, reacted with his own hauteur, saying that critics were trying to tell ordinary people to “speak physics” rather than in their natural way. He even played, as is his wont, an indigenous-versus-European card, saying that the Spanish spoken in Mexico “has to do with the roots of ancient cultures”.

The Economist:

Yet, resilient as the growth record has been, there are shadows. The middle class has seen its post-tax incomes rise by less than those of both the poorest and the richest. A group of people have fallen into hard times. The share of prime-age American men who are not in work has been rising for years and is higher than in Britain, France and Germany. And life expectancy in America lags shamefully behind others in the rich world, mainly on account of too many younger people dying from drug overdoses and gun violence. Tackling such problems should be easier when the economy as a whole is growing. But America’s poisonous politics are no help.

In addition, the more that Americans think their economy is a problem in need of fixing, the more likely their politicians are to mess up the next 30 years. Although America’s openness brought prosperity for its firms and its consumers, both Mr Trump and Mr Biden have turned to protectionism and the politics of immigration have become toxic. Subsidies could boost investment in deprived areas in the short term, but risk dulling market incentives to innovate. In the long run they will also entrench wasteful and distorting lobbying. The rise of China and the need to fight climate change both confront America with fresh challenges. All the more reason, then, to remember what has powered its long and successful run.

America’s $800bn climate splurge is feeding a new lobbying ecosystem.

Terrence Jeffrey:

The federal deficit topped $1 trillion in the first six months of fiscal 2023 (October through March), according to the Monthly Treasury Statement released today.

This was despite the fact that federal tax revenues in the first six months of this fiscal year were $2,048,196,000,000, which was the second-highest in the nation’s history (when compared to the inflation-adjusted numbers for the tax revenues collected in the first six months of previous fiscal years).

From February to March, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement, the fiscal 2023 federal deficit increased by $378,077,000,000, climbing from $722,627,000,000 to $1,100,704,000,000.

I had a strong feeling that the NYT’s military reporter, @David_Philipps, would end up deleting his tweet (or being told to delete it) given what a revealing admission he made. So I screen-shot it last night just in case. It’s actually an amazing and important confession: pic.twitter.com/XyjVmI6fgv

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 15, 2023

Craig Simpson:

Jeeves and Wooster books have been rewritten to remove prose by PG Wodehouse deemed “unacceptable” by publishers, the Telegraph can reveal.

Original passages in the comic novels have been purged or reworked for new editions issued by Penguin Random House.

Trigger warnings have also been added to revised editions telling would-be Wodehouse readers that his themes and characters may be “outdated”.

One warning states that the writer’s prose has been altered because it was judged to be “unacceptable” by Penguin, a publishing house which enlists the services of sensitivity readers.

The disclaimer printed on the opening pages of the 2023 reissue of Thank you, Jeeves states:  “Please be aware that this book was published in the 1930s and contains language, themes and characterisations which you may find outdated.

“In the present edition we have sought to edit, minimally, words that we regard as unacceptable to present-day readers.”

Patrick Mcilheran

Among the winks and nudges offered by Janet Protasiewicz on her way to the Supreme Court was that Act 10, the Gov. Scott Walker labor reforms, are toast.

Fist holding different denominations of US currency against a blue background.
“I marched at the Capitol in protest of Act 10,” she said.

Would she appropriately sit out a relitigation?

“Maybe.”

Wink, wink.

Democrat-friendly media spelled out that this isn’t just about public-sector unions at issue in Act 10, but a raft of policies that includes “an anti-union right-to-work law,” as a New York Times columnist put it.

Only 7.1% of Wisconsin employees are union members nowadays. But given how progressives, soon in majority on the Supreme Court, apparently see it as a free-range editor of laws they don’t like, Wisconsinites’ legal ability to be uninterested in joining a union is endangered. So what are unions like?

Let’s look to the federal agency they more or less own, the Department of Labor, which has an online primer, “Unions 101.” Across the screen is the welcoming portrait of the labor secretary and a line of people — all brandishing fists. As everyone saw during the 2011 progressive freakout over Act 10, unions love fist imagery. The thug vibe isn’t a stereotype; it’s branding.

Notes and links on act 10.

Joseph Workman, Paul T. von Hippel, Joseph Merry

It is widely believed that (1) children lose months of reading and math skills over summer vacation and that (2) inequality in skills grows much faster during summer than during school. Concerns have been raised about the replicability of evidence for these claims, but an impression may exist that nonreplicable findings are limited to older studies. After reviewing the 100-year history of nonreplicable results on summer learning, we compared three recent data sources (ECLS- K:2011, NWEA, and Renaissance) that tracked U.S. elementary students’ skills through school years and summers in the 2010s. Most patterns did not generalize beyond a single test. Summer losses looked substantial on some tests but not on others. Score gaps—between schools and students of different income levels, ethnicities, and genders—grew on some tests but not on others. The total variance of scores grew on some tests but not on others. On tests where gaps and variance grew, they did not consistently grow faster during summer than during school. Future research should demonstrate that a summer learning pattern replicates before drawing broad conclusions about learning or inequality.

Theresa Machemer:

Dasia Taylor has juiced about three dozen beets in the last 18 months. The root vegetables, she’s found, provide the perfect dye for her invention: suture thread that changes color, from bright red to dark purple, when a surgical wound becomes infected.

The 17-year-old student at Iowa City West High School in Iowa City, Iowa, began working on the project in October 2019, after her chemistry teacher shared information about state-wide science fairs with the class. As she developed her sutures, she nabbed awards at several regional science fairs, before advancing to the national stage. This January, Taylor was named one of 40 finalists in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, the country’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors.

As any science fair veteran knows, at the core of a successful project is a problem in need of solving. Taylor had read about sutures coated with a conductive material that can sense the status of a wound by changes in electrical resistance, and relay that information to the smartphones or computers of patients and doctors. While these “smart” sutures could help in the United States, the expensive tool might be less applicable to people in developing countries, where internet access and mobile technology is sometimes lacking. And yet the need is there; on average, 11 percent of surgical wounds develop an infection in low- and middle-incoming countries, according to the World Health Organization, compared to between 2 and 4 percent of surgeries in the U.S.

Hacker News:

Zachary Steiber

Slavitt and other White House officials questioned during one meeting with Twitter why Berenson hadn’t been “kicked off” from the platform, a Twitter employee said in an internal message. Rob Flaherty, one of the officials, recently recalled Slavitt “expressing his view that Twitter was not enforcing its content guidelines with respect to Alex Berenson’s tweets, and that employees from Twitter disagreed with that view.”

Hannah Grossman:

“Physicians who provide GAC will face a greater burden due to constraints in certain states… work to criminalize GAC for adolescents,” the article stated. “Especially as certain states work to criminalize GAC for adolescents, there will be an increased flux of patients traveling to seek care in states with more open legislation.” 

It called for more clinics to be opened up with targeted knowledge on the gender-affirming model. They outlined several steps “to improve capacity for this patient population” since “there will be an increased flux of patients traveling to seek care in states with more open legislation.”

Tony Oreglia

The first category is introspective journaling which is inward focused. It is generally retrospective. It is characterised by flow — that is, writing continuously without a filter. Just getting the naturally occurring thoughts onto the page. The purpose is to increase clarity by untangling thought and emotions. This approach is fundamentally meditative in that it externalises mental activity.

One great example of introspective journaling is the Daily Morning Pages as described in the book, “The Artist’s Way”.

If you want to try this method:

Amy Washbush:

I’ve recently started volunteering during my kid’s elementary school lunch as a small way to help make the MMSD school meals program better. I help out at service with the kindergarten, first, and second grades. I’ve learned a lot already about what this program is really like and also what change will require.

First, I’ve corrected some of my own misconceptions:

• The quality of the food is generally pretty good, at least comparable to what I see served at my workplace’s cafe or from the to-go counter of a typical grocery store. I’ve been impressed by the salads and other fresh produce like carrots and cherry tomatoes. The hot food often looks less appetizing but I really believe this is about the packaging more than anything. Really, can any meal look good steamed up inside a plastic container.
• At least at our school, the lunch environment is fun, casual, and fairly calm, not chaotic. Kids eat and talk with their friends, and the school staff assigned to lunch help open packages and visit with them. I enjoy sitting down and having chats with kids in ways that I can’t if I’m helping out in the classroom.
• Kids have enough time to eat (again, at least at our school). Kids have about 20-25 minutes to eat their food and they don’t seem rushed. Of course, some eat more quickly than others, but I don’t see kids cramming food in their faces or complaining of not having enough time. (In other words: If you pack your kids’ lunch and some of it’s coming home untouched, it’s likely because they didn’t like it. And if you give them a sweet treat in their lunch, I guarantee you they’re eating that first!)

NY Post:

Families could have used that money to send their kids to private schools, likely with better results.

New York’s nation-leading per-student outlays have long been off the rails, but began soaring wildly as early as 2016. 

Between then and 2022, they grew 46.9% — more than double inflation.

With funding bloated by $7 billion in DC pandemic aid, and already-declining enrollments plummeting even faster, fiscal year 2022 spending per student rose 15.2% over the year before.

Olivia Herken:

As time runs out on the use federal COVID-19 relief funding, Wisconsin school districts are in a peculiar spot: The funds have eased, but also complicated, districts’ financial positions.

The funds have been a lifeline for financially strapped schools, but they come with expiration dates. School districts have looming deadlines by which they have to use the money, and when the money runs out, districts may be barreling toward fiscal cliffs, trying to find ways to sustain staff and services with insufficient funds.

Public schools across Wisconsin received nearly $2.4 billion in three rounds of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER funds, which are meant to help schools recover and emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Holy shit: this NYT news article by @michaelcrowley has 2 gigantic, glaring factual errors in the first 3 paragraphs:

1) Snowden didn’t give the archive to WikiLeaks for publication, but rather to me and Laura Poitras.

2) The Merkel story didn’t come from the Snowden archive: https://t.co/NV8Oj3l0ty pic.twitter.com/9beBloZQZN

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 14, 2023

Quinn Clark:

After he lost the Elmbrook School Board election by 0.3%, Gregg Eberhardt on Wednesday sought a recount, citing “potential irregularities or illegalities,” in his recount petition.

The Board of Canvassers of the School District of Elmbrook, the same people who counted the first time, will recount the votes Friday, April 14 at 9 a.m. at the district office at 3555 North Calhoun Road, Brookfield. The recount is open to the public, but can also be streamed live at www.elmbrookschools.org/live.

Eberhardt ran against Dr. Preetha Kurudiyara for the Area 3 seat. In the end, Kurudiyara garnered 9,847 votes (50.1%) to Eberhardt’s 9,799 (49.8%).

Matt Taibbi:

On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times:

Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, researchers say.

Well, clearly we can’t have dark humor or innocuous memes! Gitmo cages for all!

The New York Times summarized key points in the secret defense documents, which among other things suggested “Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their government has acknowledged publicly.” Reading what’s out there, it’s not easy to parse what’s a legitimate intelligence concern in reaction to these leaks and what’s mere embarrassment at having been caught lying, to the public, to would-be U.S. allies the documents show we’ve been spying on, etc.

You’ll read a lot in the coming days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups, which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act, the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.

Notes and links on the restrict act.

Shelby Kearns:

Americans’ faith in college has reached a ten-year low, according to a new poll from The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and NORC.

The WSJ reported results from over 1,000 respondents on Mar. 31. Since 2013, The WSJ and NORC, a data and research center at the University of Chicago, have documented the dwindling percentage of Americans who think that college is worth its cost. In the latest poll, only 42 percent of respondents say that it is.

Crushing student loan debt, the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, and low graduation rates are cited by The WSJ’s report as possible reasons behind Americans’ pessimism.

Bryan Caplan, a George Mason University economist, told The WSJ that “[c]olleges have squandered a lot of good will by pushing a dogmatic left-wing religion.”

Irene Loewenson, Geoff Ziezulewicz:

The annals of U.S. military valor feature scores of heroes who concealed part of their medical history to serve their country.

Consider President John F. Kennedy. As a young man, he suffered a host of painful, disqualifying physical ailments, such as back pain and ulcers, but leaned on his father’s connections to get around the required Navy medical exams.

Lt. Kennedy went on to command a patrol torpedo boat that a Japanese warship sheared in half during World War II, and he later received a Purple Heart and Navy and Marine Corps Medal.

In recent decades, the lies told to enlist haven’t approached those extremes.

Nonetheless, fudging medical histories has been a key step on many troops’ path from applicant to recruit, according to a group of active-duty military recruiters who spoke with Military Times for this story.

“What it takes to get in the Army is, quite frankly, a lot of fraud and perjury,” one recruiter said.

The military comic strip “Terminal Lance” in 2021 poked fun at lying to enlist. (Adapted, with permission, from Terminal Lance creator Maximilian Uriarte.) 

But this tacit tradition — technically a crime — largely stopped in 2022, the same year the military’s recruiting numbers fell precipitously and today’s recruiting crisis came to the fore.

That year, the Defense Department brought a new medical records platform, known as Military Health System Genesis, online at Military Entrance Processing Stations, where applicants are medically examined before they can sign up.

Jarrett Stepman:

Why should American taxpayers be on the hook to pay for a highly partisan and ideological media outlet?

That’s an important discussion to be had after Twitter last week slapped a “state affiliated media” tag on National Public Radio’s Twitter profile. The move was met with much anger and frothing.

“NPR and our member stations are supported by millions of listeners who depend on us for the independent, fact-based journalism we provide,” John Lansing, NPR’s president and CEO, said in a statement. “NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable.”

Uh huh. So, what do the powerful have to say about this situation?

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierredefended NPR, saying that while she wouldn’t comment on the specific policy, “there’s no doubt of the independence of NPR’s journalists.”

“NPR journalists work digitally to hold public officials accountable and inform the American people,” she continued.

A government official gushing about a media outlet is such an excellent way to disabuse people of the notion that it’s connected to the state.

NPR literally said “Federal funding is essential to public radio” on their own website (now taken down).

What hypocrites! pic.twitter.com/kYAXW0zpyl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 12, 2023

Florian Trame`r† Nicholas Carlini Daphne Ippolito Chiyuan Zhang‡ Matthew Jagielski‡ Milad Nasr Christopher A. Choquette-Choo Katherine Lee:

Groups of the same authors often publish papers together. Many times, there is a clear first author or last author, and then a blob of people who all contributed equally, or whose contributions are too varied and nuanced to offer up an obvious ordering. In this work, we present several methods for choosing an author order given these constraints.

Robert Pondisco:

A remarkable long-term study by University of Virginia researchers led by David Grissmer demonstrates unusually robust and beneficial effects on reading achievement among students in schools that teach E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge sequence. The working paper offers compelling evidence to support what many of us have long believed: Hirsch has been right all along about what it takes to build reading comprehension. And we might be further along in raising reading achievement, closing achievement gaps, and broadly improving education outcomes if we’d been listening to him for the last few decades.

I’ve described countless times how teaching fifth grade in a low-scoring New York City public school made me a Hirsch disciple and a Core Knowledge enthusiast. Hirsch’s work—and only Hirsch’s work—described uncannily what I saw every day in my South Bronx classroom: children who could decode written text but struggled with reading comprehension. 

My school’s staff developers, district consultants and coaches, ed school professors, and the literacy gurus they assigned us to read and study had different explanations for students’ reading struggles: Children were bored by required texts that didn’t reflect their interests and personal experiences. If we let them read what they wished, it would be more pleasurable and they’d spend more time at it. Classroom instruction was built around an all-purpose suite of reading “skills and strategies” that students could apply to any book. We were to “teach the child not the lesson,” make them fall in love with books and develop a “lifelong love of reading.” When students who appeared to be successful under this “child-centered” vision of literacy struggled on standardized tests, there was an answer for that, too: test anxiety and “inauthentic” assessments.

For more than four decades, Hirsch has responded to all this with a simple, cognitively unimpeachable, hiding-in-plain sight rejoinder: No, it’s background knowledge. Sophisticated language is a kind of shorthand resting on a body of common knowledge, cultural references, allusions, idioms, and context broadly shared among the literate. Writers and speakers make assumptions about what readers and listeners know. When those assumptions are correct, when everyone is operating with the same store of background knowledge, language comprehension seems fluid and effortless. When they are incorrect, confusion quickly creeps in until all meaning is lost. If we want every child to be literate and to participate fully in American life, we must ensure all have access to the broad body of knowledge that the literate take for granted.

Clare Halloran, Claire E. Hug, Rebecca Jack & Emily Oster:

The COVID-19 pandemic caused significant disruption in schooling in the U.S., and student test scores showed dramatic declines by the end of the 2020-21 school year. We use state test score data to analyze patterns of test score recovery over the 2021-22 school year. On average, we find that 20% of test score losses are recovered in English language arts (ELA) by 2022, compared to 37% in math. These recovery rates do not significantly vary across demographic characteristics, baseline achievement rates, in-person schooling rates in the pandemic school year, or category-based measures of recovery funding allocations. We observe large state-level variation in recovery rates in ELA – from full recovery to further losses. This evidence suggests state-level factors play an important role in students’ academic recovery, but we are unable to isolate particular state factors. Future work should focus on this variation to facilitate a broader recovery effort.

The WPost urges the Biden DOJ to find and punish the leaker. It’s always bizarre to watch journalistic outlets urge the state to imprison leakers, especially ones whose motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness”™, all while admitting the docs reveal little:https://t.co/eFwlVgY2MY

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 11, 2023

Paul Caron:

Following up on yesterday’s post, U.S. News Releases Preview Of 2024 Law School Rankings: Top 14 And New Methodology:  Every year, U.S. News sends reputation ballots to three groups of recipients provided by law schools:

• Peer Assessment Score (25% of last year’s overall ranking): Law schools provide names of deans, deans of academic affairs, chairs of faculty appointments, and the most recently tenured faculty member.
• Lawyers and Judges Assessment Score (15% of last year’s overall ranking): Law schools provide names of ten law firm hiring partners, lawyers, and judges.
• 13 Legal Specialties (100% of each specialty ranking): Law schools provide names of faculty in each specialty area.

From my earlier post, U.S. News Provides Additional Information On Forthcoming Law School Rankings:

With a steady drip of evidence showing the massive amount of uniformed and undercover agents as well as informants, DOJ pushing hard against entrapment defense. Here’s one filing in case of Mark Sahady: pic.twitter.com/FxPvbqSoix

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) April 12, 2023

Journal of Free Black Thought:

A Minnesota mother resists Liberated Ethnic Studies

Kofi Montzka

Editors’ note: There are two models of Ethnic Studies curricula. “Liberated Ethnic Studies” (sometimes called “Critical Ethnic Studies”) presents the experiences of various ethnic groups in the USA in terms of “oppression” and endorses “resistance” by way of far-left political activism. In contrast, “Constructive Ethnic Studies” (sometimes called “Inclusive Ethnic Studies”) presents the contributions and accomplishments of ethnic groups without shying away from racism and bigotry but also without advocating any specific ideology or practice as the only appropriate response to such challenges. (For more on these two models of Ethnic Studies, see our discussion here.)

The “liberated” model of Ethnic Studies is currently being considered for adoption in Minnesota. Earlier this year, two bills, HF 1502, authored by Rep. Samantha Sencer-Mura (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), and HF 1476, authored by Rep. Mary Kunesh (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), were introduced in Minnesota’s legislature. These bills would mandate Ethnic Studies in elementary schools and middle schools and as a condition for graduation from high school and set up an Ethnic Studies Working Group to devise an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. A third bill, HF 1269, proposed by Governor Tim Walz (Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party), would require Ethnic Studies to be integrated into existing K-12 courses or to be the subject of new courses.

All three bills define Ethnic Studies in identical language (see below). This language is taken, with minor adaptations, from a definition supplied to the MN Department of Education by the Minnesota Ethnic Studies Coalition (MESC). MESC along with coalition member Education for Liberation Minnesota support these bills. Among other things, the latter organization publishes a resource for teaching police abolition in K-12, “Teaching Abolition in the Classroom.” 

Alison Young:

And yet in late 2011 the world learned that two scientific teams – one in Wisconsin, led by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka, and another in the Netherlands, led by virologist Ron Fouchier – had potentially pushed the virus in that direction. Each of these labs had created H5N1 viruses that had gained the ability to spread through the air between ferrets, the animal model used to study how flu viruses might behave in humans.

The ultimate goal of this work was to help protect the world from future pandemics, and the research was supported with words and funding by two of the most prominent scientists in the United States: Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, and Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Kawaoka contended it would be “irresponsible not to study” how the virus might evolve in nature. “Some people have argued that the risks of such studies – misuse and accidental release, for example – outweigh the benefits. I counter that H5N1 viruses circulating in nature already pose a threat,” he said at the time.

Yet these groundbreaking scientific feats set off a heated international debate over the ethics and safety of “gain of function” research. The controversy continues to this day.

Concerns about the safety of biological research have taken on heightened urgency in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and growing acceptance of the possibility that it was caused by a lab accident in China. In February, it was revealed that analysts at the U.S. Department of Energy had joined the FBI in leaning toward a lab accident as the most likely source of the pandemic, though other U.S. intelligence agencies lean toward a natural origin or are undecided.

Cliff Stoll:

Two generations ago a standard uniform identified engineers: white shirt, narrow tie, pocket protector and slide rule. The shirt and tie evolved into a T-shirt sporting some software advertisement. The pocket protector has been replaced by a cell phone holster. And the slide rule has become an electronic calculator.

Take another look at that slide rule. Pull it out of the drawer you stashed it in 30 years ago or make one of your own [see box on next page]. You’ll see why it was once so valuable.

Before the 1970s the slide rule, or slipstick, was as common as the typewriter or the mimeograph machine. A few seconds of fiddling let scientists and engineers multiply, divide and find square and cube roots. With a bit more effort, techies could also compute ratios, inverses, sines, cosines and tangents.

Inscribed with a dozen or more function scales, the slide rule symbolized the mysteries of arcane science. Truth is, though, two scales did most of the work, as many technical jobs boiled down to multiplication and division. A pianist might play most of the ivories on the keyboard, but rarely did any engineer use all the scales on his (almost never her) slide rule.

Rutgers has to stop relying on low paid adjuncts to teach its undergrad, liberal arts classes. The majority of my son’s first two years of classes were taught by low wage, transient profs who would open complain about wages in the middle of class. https://t.co/a734bMdRRZ

— Laura McKenna (@laura11D) April 10, 2023

Vinay Prasad:

I know the pandemic is winding down when I see ‘science influencers,’ ‘debunkers’ and the‘misinformation police’ return to focusing on issues that match their skill set: debunking vitamins, supplements, cupping, homeopathy, electric fields and other clearly unproven and implausible medical interventions. 

Previously, John Horigan called these the ‘soft targets’. He drew a distinction between non-mainstream, biologically-implausible interventions promoted by random individuals on the internet (soft targets) and the unproven interventions that pervade traditional medicine, and are sold based on exaggerated or distorted data (e.g. stenting stable coronary disease, or the use of aortic balloon pumps, selenexor in combination with velcade and dex, etc. etc.). These are the hard targets. They constitute the larger, more pervasive and caustic misuse of medical spending, often involving insurers to reallocate society’s resources rather than personal spending choices.

Jenni Younes:

According to the autopsy report, the cause of Junior’s death was an “enlarged heart.” Upon receiving the news, Ramirez lost all desire to go on living. But after the initial shock subsided, Ramirez decided to travel and speak about Junior’s fate, in hopes that he could help other families avoid similar tragedies.

That plan proved more difficult than Ramirez anticipated. In September 2021, GoFundMe removed an account he had opened to raise money for a trip to the nation’s capital to share his son’s story. “The content of your fundraiser falls under our ‘Prohibited Conduct’ section,” the company’s email explained. Ramirez lost the donations he had thus far received. Two months later, Twitter took down a photograph Ramirez had posted depicting him standing beside Junior’s open casket, along with the caption “My good byes to my Baby Boy” followed by three brokenheart emojis. Even a father’s simple expression of grief was apparently forbidden by the social media platform’s government-supported censorship regime.

Around that time, Ramirez met Brianne Dressen, a 40-year-old woman who had volunteered for the AstraZeneca vaccine trials and suffered a severe adverse reaction diagnosed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as “post-vaccine neuropathy.” Her varied and acute symptoms at times required use of a wheelchair and drastically curtailed her ability to participate in her young children’s lives.

For a time after her diagnosis, Dressen fell into a severe depression. However, during the spring of 2021, she discovered online support groups for vaccine-injured individuals and their family members. Connecting to others who understood her plight greatly improved her outlook on life, and she began serving as an administrator of several of the groups.

But in July 2021, less than 24 hours after Dressen participated in a press conference with U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Facebook shut down one support group’s account. Though participants had merely discussed their often-harrowing personal experiences and shared medical treatments that they found helpful, Facebook claimed they were spreading harmful “misinformation” that warranted the group’s removal.

The cascade of shutdowns of support groups and accounts belonging to the vaccine injured on Facebook and other social media platforms continues to this day. Ramirez, Dressen, and others learned that when their accounts weren’t suspended or removed, they were shadow-banned—meaning that the platforms’ algorithms buried their posts so that they were rarely, if ever, viewable, even to like-minded individuals facing similar health problems. In Dressen’s words: “The constant threat of having our groups shut down and our connections pulled apart left me and many other members and leaders frozen, unable to communicate and connect with those who needed our help the most. We spent more time managing the chaos of the censorship algorithms that continued to evolve, than we did actually helping people through the trauma of their injuries.”

Jessica Clements & Kari Nixon:

No coffee. No seafood. No bicycles. No deli meat. No alcohol. Almost as soon as she sees the telling double lines, the pregnant woman in modern America is bombarded with new regulations for her body. The dynamic, ever-changing nature of pregnancy seems to induce a state of risk aversion that demonstrates a key argument of our book “Optimal Motherhood and Other Lies Facebook Told Us” quite well: In spaces where scientific evidence is incomplete or unclear, the default is to subject women to more — not fewer — restrictions.

This dynamic is the result of a complex braid of U.S. risk aversion, the legacy of the Victorian Cult of True Womanhood (more on that in a bit), and a neoliberal culture that reveres a reductive version of science that does not make room for complex, nuanced answers. Like the Cult of True Womanhood and its new transfiguration, what we call Optimal Motherhood, these restrictions have a history.

Beginning with the development of germ theory and bacteriology in the 1880s, Western society increasingly believed that if risks could be identified, they could by definition be avoided. The formula was deceptively simple for a society still rocked by post-Darwinian secularism and on the lookout for new modes of understanding and thriving in an often chaotic world. Although the Victorians of the 1880s did not yet have antibiotics or other effective cures for infectious disease, product advertisements in periodicals, often promoting a variety of antiseptic panaceas, spoke to the instantaneous development of a fantasy of a risk-free life. This fantasy (for it remains and will always be a fantasy) was only emboldened by ever-evolving Western medicine, which, as the century rolled over, began to develop cures only imagined in the 1880s.

Patrick Healy, Kristen Soltis Anderson and Adrian J. Rivera

Seniors play an outsize role in politics: On Jan. 20, 2025, Joe Biden will be 82 years old, and Donald Trump will be 78. More than half of current U.S. senators are 65 or older, and millions of seniors make their voices heard every election cycle. But despite these facts, we don’t hear enough directly from regular Americans 65 or older.

That’s why we invited 12 seniors, ages 71 to 88 and from several states, to tell us about what it’s like to be an older person in American society today. For an hour and a half, they discussed and argued about the promise of aging, the perils of ageism and their views on the direction of the country today (and whether it should be led by a man in his 80s or late 70s).

Though many of our participants pointed to their favorite decades in the past, there was also a general sense that the so-called golden years really are golden. “Freedom from worry, struggle — this is the best decade of my life,” said Eugene, 80, one of the participants. “People should look forward to the future,” said Francis, 83. “I’m just going to make memory after memory.”

The participants were split on how old is too old to run for and hold elected office. “I go for younger ones. Get those old ones out of there,” said Elizabeth, 82. “For me,” said Elaine, 83, “it depends on the person. It’s not the age. It’s where they come down on these issues.”

Asked whether politicians cared very much about the needs of Americans in their 70s and 80s, not a single participant thought politicians did. “They take one look at a senior and say, ‘He’s not producing a thing. He’s doing nothing good for the people.’ And it’s wrong. They just look at us like we’re numbers,” said Francis. “So they look at us as irrelevant, I guess is the word. That’s how I feel,” said Elaine. We hope this focus group — and your reading it — is a step toward combating that feeling of irrelevance.

Scott Girard

The public records request came from NBC15 reporter Elizabeth Wadas, who requested all emails from Dec. 19, 2021, through Dec. 19, 2022, that contained her name or references to an NBC15 reporter. The district released hundreds of records related to the request, but per open records law notified LeMonds that the complaint would be part of the release and allowed him time to challenge that.

He did so, with his attorney arguing that the October 2022 complaint and related documents are “technically” responsive to the request, but were “not, themselves, the subject of the request.” The filing further argued that releasing the documents “would almost certainly cause irreparable harm to him, his reputation, the public’s perception of him, his standing in the community, and within MMSD itself.”

The briefing also states that an investigation of the complaint by the district’s legal and human resources department found that the accusations were “without merit.”

Olivia Herken:

A meeting in which the Madison School Board was to discuss its open records policy was effectively held behind closed doors Monday after a problem with its livestream kept the public from being able to see it.

The meeting was scheduled for 5 p.m. Monday and was legally noticed as a virtual meeting, with only school board members attending in person. But when officials couldn’t get the public’s livestream for the meeting to start, they decided to proceed with the meeting anyway and post a recording of it later.

A recording of the meeting has since been posted on the board's YouTube page.

I'm about 15 minutes into it so far, and there is no video, just audio, and it's been silent for at least the last 10 minutes.

— Olivia Herken (@oherken) April 11, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Interesting to see how newbie journalists frame issues with US reading instruction:

“Reading Recovery may be like a keto diet: you get results, you get them fast, but you’re not building the fundamentals needed to make sustainable, long-term progress” https://t.co/bxImGrLViu

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) April 10, 2023

Keith McNulty:

This is because their proof uses trigonometry.

Now why is that such a big deal? Well, many of our trigonometric identities and laws depend on the Pythagorean Theorem, and so a number of mathematicians have suggested that any proof of the theorem using trigonometry is circular logic. Put another way, they argue that using trigonometry to prove Pythagoras is basically using A to prove B, when A already depends on B. One strong proponent of this point of view was the mathematician Elisha Loomis, who published a book in 1927 full of non-trigonometric proofs of the theorem, and explicitly stating that trigonometric proofs were impossible.

However, this point of view has been increasingly questioned in recent decades, and a few trigonometric proofs of Pythagoras have made the rounds since then. Claims in the media that Johnson and Jackson’s proof is the first trigonometric proof of Pythagoras are overblown, but their proof could well be the most beautiful and simplest trigonometric proof we have seen to date, and is clearly the work of young, sharp minds uncomplicated by the years of deep research that characterise the work of many experienced mathematicians.

Luke Burgis:

Everyone is fighting for “rights” and the freedom to make various choices, yet few people seem to believe that we actually have any.

All ideas are in some sense correlated. In other words, your idea about one thing—especially something as fundamental as whether creation is good, or whether humans have the ability to act freely, or other metaphysical stances like a belief in the dignity of all human life, regardless of merit—affect your ability to accept or even to grasp other ideas. 

Some ideas are more correlated than others. They tend to create a cascade effect of other ideas and beliefs. For instance: if you accepted the idea that you have smoked too long and that “the damage is already done, so there is no use in quitting”, your actions are going to look very different than someone who has not accepted that idea—someone who believes change and recovery is possible. Ideas matter.

David Zweig:

The Elizabeth Ann Clune Montessori School of Ithaca, set amid a pastoral idyll of rolling fields, a pond, and dandelion-stippled meadows, is just a few minutes’ ride from Ithaca College and Cornell University. Serving more than 220 students from preschool through eighth grade, the school features classrooms bathed in natural light, populated with the offspring of professors, doctors, and lawyers. And since the fall of 2020 through today, those children must be masked during class and on the playground, and have been barred from speaking during lunch.

Like every other school in the country, this private school—which charges between $11,000 to $18,000 a year, depending on the student’s age—closed to in-person classes in the spring of 2020. That fall, around the time the local public schools brought kids back, so did EACMSI, but with a list of mitigations. Some were typical and required by the state, such as distancing and indoor masking. But others, at least after a while, were less common or not recommended by health authorities—specifically, outdoor masking and a ban on speaking during lunch.

Scott Langford

Tennessee hasn’t just trained teachers, we’ve given them the right tools: curriculum.

Teacher training has become increasingly-popular as a means to bring the Science of Reading into classrooms, for good reason. Tennessee didn’t forget this; our Reading360 initiative trained 30,000 Tennessee teachers over the last two summers, and our teachers have raved about the experience.

However, training isn’t enough. If you simply tell teachers what needs to change without giving them the tools to do it, you become that coach that yells, “Run” or “Tackle” on the sidelines, without providing the plays and the playbook required for success.

By 2019, the “Best for All” initiative ensured that all districts now use high-quality ELA curriculum.  This has been a game-changer. Curriculum enables the changes we’ve asked teachers to make to be tangible and feasible. It is the proverbial playbook.

This is the cornerstone of our improvement, and the backbone for everything else that follows.

Anyone paying taxes should watch this carefully. “You are not in charge. You are not allowed to question. You don’t understand. Just keep paying your taxes. And trust your government.” Government should be descoped massively. https://t.co/PyC1T1Cw28

— Scott McNealy (@scottmcnealy) April 10, 2023

Fitchburg Star:

FREE Movie for Parents about Dyslexia. Hosted by Feller School at Fitchburg Library. Reading experts from various literacy organizations on-site to offer guidance, help and solutions for your child.

“Blame it on Gutenberg,” is a documentary produced by Black Pearl Productions for parents with children struggling to learn to read with or without a dyslexia diagnosis. An eye opening introduction into the systems and bureaucracy that families face when dealing with dyslexia, other learning challenges and unresponsive school districts. If your child is not reading at grade level, come and watch this free movie. If your child is guessing at words consistently, come and see this movie. Do not wait for your child to fail or fall behind. Meet reading experts from various literacy organizations that can support you and your child in the journey of learning to read, write and spell to help empower your child’s future.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model’s largest supporter is the CEO of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management. The former CEO of Microsoft and an Enron/hedge fund trader are the other two.
Really great piece about how Washington works.https://t.co/pLNbTyOuJa

— David Dayen (@ddayen) April 10, 2023

related:

KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.

and:

Policymakers often come to us before they write bills. It’s very clear when our footprint is on those bills, because we give feedback—usually off the record—about what the impacts would be if they try to achieve something one way versus another.”

Washington Monthly

We rank four-year schools (national universities, liberal arts colleges, baccalaureate colleges, and master’s universities) based on their contribution to the public good in three broad categories: social mobility, research, and providing opportunities for public service. We also rank Best Bang for the Buck colleges, which help non-wealthy students obtain marketable degrees at affordable prices. Click here to read our methodology. Click here to read our 2022 College Guide magazine issue.

Estes

The SpaceX Falcon 9 is the world’s first human-rated reusable launch vehicle. This two-stage rocket can lift payloads to LEO and geosynchronous orbits, or even to Mars. There’s nothing else like it in the world! And now, Estes and SpaceX have collaborated to create a highly accurate 1:100 scale flying model of the remarkable Falcon 9 rocket topped with a Dragon Crew spacecraft. Looks great on its custom display stand or soaring up to 300 feet on a recommended Estes engine.

J Scott Turner:

How thoroughly has diversity, equity and inclusion penetrated the sciences? “To the core!” at least if the recent travails of the National Audubon Society are any indication. For over two years, a woke storm has roiled the Society over whether it should purge its namesake, John James Audubon, from its title. After a year-long review, the Society’s Board of Directors recently announced its decision: Audubon’s name will stay.

The Society’s CEO, Elizabeth Gray, defended the decision on the sensible grounds that, for whatever his faults, Audubon remains a pivotal figure in the history of science in our once young republic. His legacy includes establishing ornithology as the burgeoning field that it is today, which draws both on professional experts and passionate amateurs. The board concluded that the Society’s mission, and ornithology in general, would best be served by keeping his name and the tradition it represents, while honestly acknowledging the man and who he was. This was accompanied by a promise to devote $25 million to the Society’s efforts to expand DEIB(Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, to use the Society’s rendering). This has not mollified the cancel campaigners, of course. Threats to rename state affiliate chapters, to withhold results from the Society’s famed Christmas Bird Count, and other retaliatory measures remain hot topics on Twitter.

One might ask: isn’t this just a small quibble among prickly and persnickety birdwatchers, much ado about nothing? Perhaps. But sometimes small controversies can provide great insights because they allow more detailed scrutiny than would be possible with a larger problem.

The brief against Audubon includes the usual tropes. He owned slaves. He had doubts about the emancipation of slaves. He was a plagiarist and a fabulist. He harbored other impure thoughts. The counter-argument is also familiar: he was a man of his times (1785-1851). This idea, that one cannot judge people by future moral standards (was Audubon a transphobe?), and that we are all capable of making our own judgments on gleaning the good men do from the chaff they leave, carries no water for the cancel campaigners. To say it’s all or nothing is to miss the point: nothing can stand in the face of such absolutism.

It turns out Stanford stationed administrators at Duncan’s talk to prevent students from disrupting it, per @vimalnyt. That tells us two things:

1) Stanford did not trust its own students to obey university policy.

2) Some officials at the event were specifically there to… pic.twitter.com/7oi0lZRELL

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) April 9, 2023

Anna Nawaz:

• Well, clearly not enough. And it is a time of unprecedented resources.There are lots of things we can debate in education, but we know high-dosage tutoring, whether it’s physically, virtually, hybrid, works well. What our children need now is more time. So, what is more time? Being tutored after school, on weekends, or summer school. Our children missed so much time during the pandemic.I think we’re in a sprint between April and August, April and September, the next four or five months, to close this gap as much as we can, so children can enter the next school year ready to be successful. It’s got to be a massive sense of urgency on this. It’s not something we can wait on or discuss or debate.We have to get to work, use those resources to help parents and help kids get where they need to be.
• Amna Nawaz:There are some folks who look at the way the money’s been spent, and they see there are tutoring programs available. There have been virtual help lines set up.And the uptake has been pretty low in a number of places.Secretary Spellings, when you just look at staffing shortages, right, recent numbers from the end of last year showed 45 percent of public schools were operating without a full teaching staff. So, what can parents be advocating for, when most of them don’t seem to be taking up the virtual learning or the help lines that are there right now, and teaching staff isn’t at capacity?

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Tim Rosenberger

Asserting that Stanford’s very small and very moderate right-of-center contingent is “far-right” is precisely the kind of irrational intolerance that erodes the fabric of our discourse.

Washington Post:  Stanford Should Work on Diversity, But Bad-Faith Arguments Don’t Help (Part 2), by Robert Doubek (University of Illinois):

Tess Winston’s April 5 Wednesday Opinion essayreminded me of an experience I had at Georgetown’s law school 50 years ago, after having served in Vietnam. Among the few opportunities to really learn how to function as a lawyer were legal “clinics,” in which students actually would appear in court. Having applied and interviewed for all, to my chagrin, I was rejected by all.

Years later, I was drinking with a friend of a friend, who happened to be a professor running one of the clinics. He confirmed that we Vietnam veterans were rejected outright as we all were presumed to be right-wing zealots who would use the clinic experience to become prosecutors.

Wall Street Journal, First, Depoliticize the Stanford Admissions Office:

The law dean is playing with Marquess of Queensberry rules against social revolutionaries.

In Employers Need to Put the Squeeze on Woke Intolerance, Gerard Baker was right to point out that Stanford diversity dean Tirien Steinbach’s clarification in your pages (Diversity and Free Speech Can Coexist at Stanford) is at best a case of “sorry, not sorry,” and at worst a doubling down on her hypothesis that freedom of speech might not be worth defending if feelings are hurt in the process.

Scott Girard:

Seven years later, Bah had improved her writing and journalism skills enough to receive the Wisconsin Journalism Education Association’s “2023 Wisconsin Journalist of the Year” recognition and is now competing for the title of National High School Journalist of the Year through the national Journalism Education Association.

Bah recently spoke with the Cap Times about the award and her budding journalism career, as she hopes to pursue English, journalism or “something in that realm” at a to-be-determined college next year.

Stella Paul:

Stanford University’s reputation is in freefall as this once-revered university makes headlines for all the wrong reasons. Recently, a mob of law school students shut down a conservative judge’s speech, screeching insults at him to the approval of a Diversity Dean and the disgust of the country. Then there’s the FTX fiasco, in which a Stanford-linked cryptocurrency company collapsed amidst lurid charges of fraud and money laundering. Victor’s Davis Hanson’s lament “What Happened to Stanford?” adds other disasters to the list, including the arrest of a Chinese agent and the disclosure of $64 million in Chinese donations.

✅ Have the Biden Admin ignore court rulings they dislike

✅ Censor opponents in collusion with US Security State and Big Tech

✅ Imprison their leading political opponents (Lock Him Up!)

✅ Bankrupt main opposition media outlet

✅ Fight authoritarianism and fascism https://t.co/Wk7HqtUrXl

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 8, 2023

Janet Adams:

“No matter how much they increase your pay, everything else is going up,” said Kristy Morrow, a coordinator for a hospital who lives in Big Spring, Texas. “I do fear that for the kids.”

Which of the following best describes your financial situation?
My finances are in better condition than I expected for this stage in my life
In worse condition than I expected
About where I expected

Ms. Morrow, 37, said she’s concerned her children will be worse off because deep divisions in America have left people unable to fix the country’s problems. The single mother of two young boys and an adult daughter, who earns about $45,000 a year, said she traded her Chevrolet Tahoe for a GMC Terrain to lower her gas costs and is teaching her boys the importance of spending money on needs, not wants.

The findings showed fresh anxiety about the strength of the job market, which was a rare point of economic optimism as recently as last year. More than half of respondents said it wouldn’t be easy to find another job with comparable pay and benefits. That was the highest level since 2010, according to NORC’s General Social Survey.

Recent economic data show the labor market is strong despite job-cut announcements from large technology companies. Employers added more than 800,000 jobs in the first two months of the year and the unemployment rate is trending near a half-century low. Available jobs exceed the number of unemployed Americans seeking work and a broad gauge of layoffs is holding at low levels.