Austin Henley:

We identified 6 categories of pain points:

• Where are students struggling? It is a huge challenge for instructors to know when students are struggling. There is often not an effective feedback loop since instructors often rely on students to ask questions. However, two instructors expressed why this doesn’t work: “I can’t see where they get stuck and many don’t ask questions” and “students are doing lots and lots of things but I can’t process all they are doing”.
• Answering student questions. In contrast, instructors and TAs are overwhelmed with responding to questions and problems. These questions are often last minute, repetitive in nature, and require technical troubleshooting. For example, “Why does Python no longer exist?”.
• Limited TA support. You might be thinking that teaching assistants will just solve all these challenges! Sadly, most departments are understaffed with TAs, if they have any at all, despite growing enrollments. Instructors said that even when they have TAs, they sometimes require considerable time to manage and may not be reliable.
• Grading and feedback. Nearly every instructor brought up the time and tedium of grading. In fact, one instructor told us “grading is probably the biggest burden of the courses”. Instructors also described how critical it is to design a rubric and feedback mechanism that is transparent and minimizes lawyering.
• Course material preparation. Instructors lamented about the high cost of creating and maintain course materials, such as lectures, assignments, and quizzes. They often don’t update them over the years because they “just don’t have the resources”. The shift to online courses because of COVID-19 required significant upfront investment, though instructors complained they saw little engagement from students.
• Administrative tasks. The grunt work of running a course includes managing social dynamics, accreditation tasks, enforcing academic honest policies, dealing with LMS issues, etc. Several instructors said they wished they could spend this time improving the course instead. Dealing with cheating was probably the least favorite task of all!

THREAD🧵: New docs obtained by @America1stLegal show DHS plan to produce videos training bystanders to take action against political speech by “Middle-Aged Pro Life Advocates” & “Old High School Friends” who are “Budding Conspiracy Theorists.”

Report: https://t.co/cI20CKPMYC

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) May 9, 2023

MD Kittle:

The Star News Network is suing the Federal Bureau of Investigation alleging the law enforcement agency has broken a critical First Amendment guard in repeatedly denying Freedom of Information Act requests seeking the Covenant School killer’s manifesto.

Filed Wednesday, the federal lawsuit asks the U.S. District Court for Middle Tennessee to order the FBI to release Audrey Elizabeth Hale’s manifesto and related documents and to issue a declaration that the agency violated FOIA in denying the request for the information.

The Milwaukee-based Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is representing three plaintiffs, Nashville-based Star News Digital Media, Inc., which owns and operates The Star News Network, Michael Patrick Leahy and Matt Kittle.

Robert Nozick:

What percentage of people would choose to live under socialism? The communist countries do not help us to answer this question, for neither through elections nor through emigration do they offer their people any choice. What about the electoral experience of democratic societies such as England or Sweden? Even this does not enable us to disentangle (imagined) self-interest from our topic: the desire to participate in socialist interpersonal relations of equality and community.

To find out what percentage of people especially want to live under socialism, we need a situation where people have a reasonably attractive socialist option and also a reasonably attractive nonsocialist one. If it is not precisely the optimal experiment to answer our question, the Israeli experience with kibbutzim comes as close as the real world can.

Not only have the kibbutzim offered socialist personal relations in a socialist community, but these communities have been widely admired for performing the important functions of reclaiming the land, aiding Jewish self defense, and “normalizing” the occupational structure of the Jewish people. Unlike 19th-century utopian communities in America or 20th-century “communes, membership in a kibbutz brought respect and support from the wider society, aiding members through difficulties. Furthermore, no natural population provides a more fertile ground for socialist commitment than the Ashkenazi Jewish population. No people is more prone to being captured by an “idealistic” ideological position, especially one emphasizing group solidarity. Indeed, there was selective entry into Israel early in the century; many came in order to help build socialism and did their best to instill their ideals in their children.

Skrable, Kenneth; Chabot, George; French, Clayton¹

After 1750 and the onset of the industrial revolution, the anthropogenic fossil component and the non-fossil component in the total atmospheric CO₂concentration, C(t), began to increase. Despite the lack of knowledge of these two components, claims that all or most of the increase in C(t) since 1800 has been due to the anthropogenic fossil component have continued since they began in 1960 with “Keeling Curve: Increase in CO₂ from burning fossil fuel.” Data and plots of annual anthropogenic fossil CO₂ emissions and concentrations, C(t), published by the Energy Information Administration, are expanded in this paper. Additions include annual mean values in 1750 through 2018 of the ¹⁴C specific activity, concentrations of the two components, and their changes from values in 1750. The specific activity of ¹⁴C in the atmosphere gets reduced by a dilution effect when fossil CO₂, which is devoid of ¹⁴C, enters the atmosphere. We have used the results of this effect to quantify the two components. All results covering the period from 1750 through 2018 are listed in a table and plotted in figures. These results negate claims that the increase in C(t) since 1800 has been dominated by the increase of the anthropogenic fossil component. We determined that in 2018, atmospheric anthropogenic fossil CO₂ represented 23% of the total emissions since 1750 with the remaining 77% in the exchange reservoirs. Our results show that the percentage of the total CO₂ due to the use of fossil fuels from 1750 to 2018 increased from 0% in 1750 to 12% in 2018, much too low to be the cause of global warming.

Via Wispolitics:

Accordingly, I am directing that each of you take action to eliminate the requirement for a mandatory diversity statement as part of any written employment application at your respective university. Please effect this change for all postings on or after June 30, 2023.

Wall Street Journal:

The union also wants reparations for black students to remedy alleged historic injustices. How about instead remedying the enormous learning deficits the union has caused by protecting bad teachers and closing schools during the pandemic? Perhaps the district could extend the school year, or, better yet, provide families with private school vouchers?

Instead, the union wants the first week of school each year to focus on creating a “positive school culture,” whatever that means, rather than instruction. It is also demanding a “Climate Justice Day for standards-based teach-ins, workshops, action, and field trips.” Maybe kids can’t read, but they can be unemployed climate warriors. 

The Oakland union is taking cues from the National Education Association. “When we expand the continuum of bargaining, we build power, and go on the offense in order to fight for social and racial justice, for our kids, for our schools, for our communities, and for the future,” the NEA states on its website. 

Tired of being criticized for prioritizing their own interests over those of children, unions are now pretending to promote what they call the “common good.” Yet in doing so they are substantiating the Supreme Court’s landmark Janus decision (2018), which held that government collective-bargaining implicates workers’ First Amendment rights.

“An emphasis on adult employment”

More.

If Legacy Media is going to shove bigotry porn down our throats it should at least do so in an honest manner so people have an accurate understanding of racial dynamics.

Time and time again, Legacy Media has failed to do just that.

H/T: @DavidRozado pic.twitter.com/bsB6rVV7Yn

— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) May 9, 2023

Scott Gerber

Franz Kafka’s “The Trial” tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested, prosecuted and killed by an inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. I’m Josef K.

Around 1 p.m. on Friday, April 14, Ohio Northern University campus security officers entered my classroom with my students present and escorted me to the dean’s office. Armed town police followed me down the hall. My students appeared shocked and frightened. I know I was. I was immediately barred from teaching, banished from campus, and told that if I didn’t sign a separation agreement and release of claims by April 21, ONU would commence dismissal proceedings against me. The grounds: “Collegiality.” The specifics: None.

Josef K. never learns what he’s alleged to have done wrong. The offenses I’ve allegedly committed haven’t been revealed to me, either. But I have an educated guess.

Like many universities, ONU is aggressively pursuing “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives. I have objected publicly as vice chairman of the University Council, an elected faculty governance body, and in newspaper op-eds and on television, to DEI efforts that don’t include viewpoint diversity and would lead to illegal discrimination in employment and admissions. The same week I was led out of my classroom by police and campus security, I published an op-ed defending Justice Clarence Thomas’s right to have friends—even rich ones. …

George Orwell:

MOST people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent, and our language—so the argument runs—must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer. Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now habitually written.

Daniel Wiessner

A union for U.S. federal government employees filed a lawsuit on Monday claiming a law setting a $31.4 trillion debt ceiling is unconstitutional as political leaders seek to avoid a historic default expected as soon as next month.

The National Association of Government Employees (NAGE) says the debt limit law adopted in 1917 violates the U.S. Constitution’s separation of powers because it forces the president in the event of a default to cut spending already authorized by Congress.

Ross Douthat

In recent months, there have been several instances of elite universities or their faculty members offering some kind of institutional pushback to a censorious progressivism. Prominent examples include Cornell’s refusal to create a trigger warning requirement demanded by the undergraduate student assembly, the formation of a Harvard faculty group defending academic freedom and Stanford’s official condemnation of the disruptions at a conservative judge’s law school talk.

These developments dovetail with the argumentmade earlier this year by Musa al-Gharbi at Columbia, a perceptive observer of the culture war, that the Great Awokening as a period of intense moral fervor may be winding down — that after “10 straight years of heightened unrest in knowledge-economy institutions and knowledge-economy hubs” we’re seeing a partial depoliticization, a diminishment of ideological policing and cancellation attempts. And they also dovetail, to some extent, with an essay this week from Matt Yglesias, the Vox co-founder turned Substacker, arguing that critics of wokeness risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy if they constantly emphasize the obstacles to free speech and the professional penalties for heterodoxy, rather than simply encouraging journalists and academics to have courage and recognize that you can take a controversial position without being immediately professionally disappeared.

I agree with al-Gharbi that the recent intellectual trends within liberal institutions are somewhat more favorable to free debate, and I agree with Yglesias that intellectual courage is necessary and that the language of anti-wokeness sometimes encourages people to imagine a more Soviet situation than actually exists. But I also think that there are different ways that an era of “heightened unrest” and ideological revolution can give way to relative cultural peace.

In some situations, the revolution might be rolled back or resisted or collapse of its own accord. But in others, peace might arrive because the revolution feels confident in its path to ultimate victory and no longer feels an urgent need to make examples of its enemies; it can move comfortably to entrenchment, the institutional long march.

Alex Zimmerman:

New York City’s elementary schools will be required to use one of three reading curriculums, a tectonic shift that education officials hope will improve literacy rates across the nation’s largest school system.

Beginning in September, elementary schools in 15 of the city’s 32 districts will be required to use one of three programs selected by the education department, Chancellor David Banks and Mayor Eric Adams announced Tuesday. By September 2024, all of the city’s roughly 700 elementary schools will be required to use one of the three. Chalkbeat first reported the plans in March. 

The new mandate won support from the teachers union, whose leaders expressed faith in the city’s efforts to train thousands of teachers on new materials. Training for the first year is expected to cost $35 million, though city officials declined to provide an estimate of the effort’s overall price tag, including the cost of purchasing materials.

Meanwhile, the plan earned a strong rebuke from the union representing principals, who have long had wide latitude to choose which materials their teachers use. That freedom has allowed school leaders to use programs that vary widely in their approach and quality, Banks has argued.

SUSAN SCHMIDT, ANDREW LOWENTHAL, TOM WYATT, TECHNO FOG, AND 4 OTHERS

This is why the Trump-Russia scandal in the United States will likely be remembered as a crucial moment in 21st-century history, even though the investigation superficially ended a non-story, fake news in itself. What the Mueller investigation didn’t accomplish in ousting Trump from office, it did accomplish in birthing a vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to stopping “mis-, dis-, and malinformation,” while smoothing public acquiescence to the emergence of a spate of new government agencies with “information warfare” missions. 

The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.

Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy. 

They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like “toxicity monitoring,” replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a “nose for news” with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like “newsworthy claim extraction,” and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the “redirect method,” which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward “constructive alternative messages.”

Florian Sohnke:

And the worst part is that the agency for whom I work has backed literally every policy change that has the predictable, and predicted, outcome of more crime and more people getting hurt.

Bond reform designed to make sure no one stays in jail while their cases are pending with no safety net to handle more criminals on the streets, shorter parole periods, lower sentences for repeat offenders, the malicious and unnecessary prosecution of law enforcement officers, the overuse of diversion programs, intentionally not pursuing prosecutions for crimes lawfully on the books after being passed by our legislature and signed by a governor, all of the so-called reforms have had a direct negative impact, with consequences that will last for a generation.

Many years ago, my family found a nice corner of the suburbs. Now my son, who is only 5, hears gunfire while playing at our neighborhood park, and a drug dealer is open-air selling behind my house (the second one in two years). If it were just me to consider, I’d stick it out. I’ve been through enough stupid State’s Attorney policies before. But this Office’s complete failure to even think for a moment before rushing into one popular political agenda after another has put my family directly in harm’s way.

The current people in charge of this state, including the SAO, suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding…we live in a society with adversarial court and criminal justice processes. Defense attorneys, legal aid clinics, Public Defenders, defendant advocate groups…they fight like hell to protect the rights of criminal defendants. Andy they should. Their work is as noble as ours. But we have an obligation to fight like hell on behalf of the People. It should go without saying that this must be done ethically and evenhandedly. When both sides vigorously defend their positions, a balance is reached between protecting rights while preserving some sort of order and safety. Once we start doing too much of the defense’s job, once we pull our punches, once we decide it’s worth risking citizens’ lives to have a little social experiment, that balance is lost. The unavoidable consequences are what we are witnessing in real time, an increase in crime of all kinds, businesses and families pulling up the stakes, and the bodies piling up; the whole time with a State’s Attorney who insists there is nothing to see here, and if there is, it must be someone else’s fault. And then they wonder why they cannot retain experienced prosecutors or even hire new ones…it’s because any true prosecutor recognizes the importance of this balance, and they will not be permitted to be a prosecutor under this administration.

Stevens Malange

Public school districts across the United States closed for unprecedented periods during the Covid-19 pandemic. Enrollments plunged, as students either headed to private schools or stayed home for schooling. Other children simply disappeared from schools and remain unaccounted for even today by school officials. Now, because of this exodus, school districts nationwide are grappling with another kind of closing: empty classrooms and underused school buildings are prompting waves of school shutdowns, as education officials look to downsize their operations in response to smaller student populations and disappearing Covid bailout funds. In many communities, the process is messy, with parents, teachers, and teachers’ unions objecting. But failing to act will only worsen budget deficits at a time of economic uncertainty.

According to an international study, American schools closed for an average of 70 weeks during the pandemic—far longer than schools shut down in most European countries, though the length of closures varied by state. Schools in Texas and Florida, for example, were closed for just a fraction of the time that schools in California and New York were shuttered. In all, public schools lost some 1.2 million students in the first two years of the pandemic. Some migrated to private institutions, where enrollments grew by 4 percent, while homeschool numbers rose by 30 percent.

Among states sustaining the biggest losses are California, which saw public school enrollment shrink by some 245,000 in two pandemic years, and New York, where enrollments fell 80,000 in the same period. In these states and elsewhere, Covid accelerated a trend already underway. School enrollment had peaked in many states in the mid-2010s and begun slipping shortly after, a result of fewer births, outmigration, and modest growth in homeschooling and alternative schools. New York State, for instance, has lost about 6 percent of its students, or 120,000 children, since 2016. California’s enrollment has dropped by 382,000 students since the 2014 school year.

Tania Branigan:

Chongqing saw some of the era’s fiercest fighting, with the rift between Red Guards descending into warfare. The Kuomintang had made it their capital while battling the Japanese occupation, and it was home to multiple munitions plants; when armed struggles broke out in 1967, the military backed one side and helped its fighters seize what they needed. The factions battled with grenades, machine guns, napalm, tanks and ships upon the river – everything except planes, a resident recalled.

They executed in cold blood too: even the injured, even the pregnant. Tens of thousands fled the city and at least twelve hundred people died, though the true toll was probably much higher. Some were caught in the violence by chance, like the eight-year-old killed by a ricocheting bullet as he played on the street. The others were not so much older, and you could blame chance there too, even if they saw themselves as soldiers. They never thought it would be so serious, that people would die, that so many would die. By the time they saw their friends fall they’d been battling for hours. They were numb; none of it seemed possible. Had it really happened at all?

Stanley Druckenmiller:

Let me give you some facts. The share of fiscal spending going to seniors has been growing dramatically since the 1960’s when Medicaid and Medicare joined social security as federal entitlements. Today we spend 6x more per senior than per child in the US. Think social security vs education. Almost 40% of all our taxes are spent on seniors, and this trend is only starting. As the chart shows {Slide #2 below}, we are just getting under way in terms of the fiscal consequences of the grey boom. In 25 years, spending on seniors will grow to take 70% of all taxes. Effectively, with entitlements compounding away, everything else gets squeezed.
In this context, the fiscal recklessness of the last decade has been like watching a horror movie unfold. Look at this chart {Slide #3 below}. During the last decade, our debt grew from $15T to $31T today… a level of indebtment only comparable to that after WWII. But what is worse is that this debt does not account for what the government has promised it will pay you in terms of social security and Medicare. It actually assumes these payments will be ZERO. In the 1950s this “off‐the‐book” debt was small as baby boomers were just being born so actual debt was a reasonable measure of the country’s indebtedness. Not anymore. There are credible estimates that if you assume the government will pay the same to seniors in the future as it is paying today, the present value of that debt approaches $200T. That’s trillion with a “T”.
What makes the last 10 years particularly horrific is that we had some golden opportunities to reduce the fiscal gap ahead of the demographic storm that is under way. After WWI and II, the US quickly repaid its debt by raising taxes and restricting spending. Contrast that with today. After the GFC but pre covid {Slide #4 below}, when the economy boomed in 2018 and the unemployment rate hit a 50‐year low, and even under a Republican administration, the deficit could not go lower than 5% of GDP! And then post covid, we had a booming economy where tax revenues were augmented by high inflation, nominal growth of

NEWS: Tucker Carlson is bringing his show to Twitter. https://t.co/f9HqNNCbDh

— T(w)itter Daily News  (@TitterDaily) May 9, 2023

Busqueros:

I had a meeting arranged with one of my undergraduate students for 10am last Friday. At around 9.30 I received an email from her saying that since she was “struggling with [her] mental health” she wouldn’t be able to physically come to the building. It would be “too much”. So could we please have the meeting via Zoom instead?

This kind of thing has become completely normal. Vast swathes of students have diagnoses of ADHD or the ubiquitous ‘anxiety and depression’; the rest, who don’t, still feel no compunction in disclosing their ‘struggles’ at the drop of a hat. Working around these issues is now simply a fact of life for academics. We confront them literally on a daily basis.

Debate around the mental health crisis among the young tends to bifurcate into two camps – which, unusually in our times, doesn’t tend to cleave neatly to the political Left or Right. On the one hand, there are those who think it is real and that the conditions young people grow up in (too much screen time, too little socialising, too much pressure in school, family breakdown, consumer capitalism, structural racism or sexism, worries about climate change, take your pick) are conducive to bad mental health. On the other there are those who think the issue is overblown and probably a matter of overdiagnosis (either because adults are too soft or because of financial incentives for child psychologists and doctors and ultimately ‘Big Pharma’).

Robert Rudolf & Dirk Bethmann

Using PISA 2018 data from nearly half a million 15-year-olds across 72 middle- and high-income countries, this study investigates the relationship between economic development and adolescent subjective well-being. Findings indicate a negative log-linear relationship between per-capita GDP and adolescent life satisfaction. The negative nexus stands in stark contrast to the otherwise positive relationship found between GDP per capita and adult life satisfaction for the same countries. Results are robust to various model specifications and both macro and micro approaches. Moreover, our analysis suggests that this apparent paradox can largely be attributed to higher learning intensity in advanced countries. Effects are found to be more pronounced for girls than for boys.

Commentary.

Norden and Van den Keere:

Both sets of maps ended up in the collection of Robert (1661-1724) and Edward (1689-1741) Harley, the 1^st and 2^nd Earls of Oxford, thousands of manuscripts, printed books and associated materials which became one of the founding collections of the British Museum in 1753. Norden’s work, produced for and originally owned by James VI and I, came into the Harleys’ possession in 1710, whilst Van der Keere’s maps reached the collection in 1725.

In addition to their shared provenance, it is interesting to note that the two mapmakers knew and worked with each other. As well as his surveying work and devotional writing, Norden conceived of a grand multi-volume county-by-county geography or ‘chorography’ of Britain, having recognised, like others, the public appetite for maps and geographical writings following the success of Christopher Saxton’s atlas of 1579. Norden’s Speculum Britannia was not completed, but he started work on a number of counties, and even published some of them. The first published county, in 1593, was Middlesex, containing maps including ones of London and Westminster engraved by one Pieter Van den Keere.

Troy Closson:

In a recent interview, Mr. Banks said that the city’s approach had been “fundamentally flawed,” and had failed to follow the science of how students learn to read.

“It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault,” Mr. Banks said. “This is the beginning of a massive turnaround.”

Over the next two years, the city’s 32 local school districts will adopt one of three curriculums selected by their superintendents. The curriculums use evidence-supported practices, including phonics — which teaches children how to decode letter sounds — and avoid strategies many reading experts say are flawed, like teaching children to use picture clues to guess words.

The move represents a sea change in a city where principals have historically retained authority over approaches to teaching at their individual schools.

Half of the districts will begin the program in September; the others will start in 2024. Waivers to opt out will only be considered for schools where more than 85 percent of students are proficient in reading, a threshold that only about 20 schools meet.

WILL

• Of Wisconsin-based teachers, 88.5% of donations went to Democratic candidates or organizations. Even when considering only those who list a Wisconsin address, donations still disproportionally favor Democrats.
• 100% of donations from the Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC) Conduit went to Democrats. This is via the donation pass-through organization of state teachers’ unions. Those who give to the intermediary organization “WEAC We Can Do It” have donations earmarked to specific candidates that are “pro-public education.”
• WILL has created a map of donations from teachers on our website. This will allow policymakers to take a more granular look at teacher ideology in their own communities.
• The position of teachers’ unions on issues like school choice is at odds with the general public. As of February 2022, a School Choice Wisconsin survey found that 77% of Republicans expressed support for school choice, as did 53% of Independents and 36% of Democrats.
• This paper also serves to highlight further potential evidence of the leftward leanings of Wisconsin classrooms. With public school teachers overwhelmingly giving donations to Democrat candidates, it is highly likely that their ideology flows into the teaching they provide to students across the state, at least to some extent. WILL has previously highlighted this.

Political Contributions of Wisconsin Teachers and Education Reform

“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?

NEW: New College of Florida will begin accepting the Classic Learning Test (CLT) as an alternative to the SAT and ACT. We are building America’s first public classical liberal arts college and recruiting students from classical K-12 schools, including homeschool students. pic.twitter.com/JTyQtNLWO8

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) May 8, 2023

more, here.

Caroline Dade:

27 News has asked the Sun Prairie Area School District to share its current policies and practices for locker room use. However, the district’s attorney responded and said the district will not share anything beyond its original statement about the incident

Rob Garver:

Providing further proof that U.S. children suffered significant learning loss when schools were closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Assessment Governing Board released a report Wednesday that showed test scores measuring achievement in U.S. history and civics fell significantly between 2018 and 2022.

The tests, part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the “nation’s report card,” were given to thousands of eighth-grade students across the country. Scores on the U.S. history assessment were the lowest recorded since 1994, while the scores on the civics test fell for the first time ever.

Only 13% of students tested in U.S. history were considered proficient, meaning that they had substantially mastered the material expected of them. That was 1 percentage point lower than in 2018. Another 46% tested at the NAEP “basic” level, meaning they had partial mastery of the material, down 4 percentage points. The remaining 40% of students tested did not meet the bar for basic knowledge, an increase of 6 percentage points.

In civics, 20% of students tested qualified as proficient, and 48% had basic knowledge of the material — both down 1 percentage point from 2018. Another 31% failed to demonstrate even basic knowledge, an increase by 4 percentage points over 2018.

Sarah DiGregorio;

The idea of Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, as the prototypical nurse—this mythic origin story—has served to further white supremacy in nursing and to strip nursing history of its truer, broader kaleidoscopic power. The real history of nursing is utterly radical in its vastness—and in what it says about the care we owe each other. Maybe that radicalness is why that history has been so elided, even as nursing historians have sought to bring it forward.

Jennifer Kingson:

What they’re saying: “What the research generally shows is that this is a net negative for student achievement, mostly in scho0ls that see a big drop in instructional time as a result,” Thompson says.

Zoom out: The 4-day school week “unambiguously hurts student achievement over time,” Christopher Doss, a RAND policy researcher, tells Axios.

Reasonable! Related, the 2023 staff reports just came out.https://t.co/gPn9sS4F5Phttps://t.co/jfzTRe5GOp

2023 student-staff ratio/2022 teacher salaries:
Racine: 6.3/$60,320
Madison: 6.5 (155th)/$61,284 (68th)
Green Bay: 7.0/$60,243
Milwaukee: 7.9/$70,162
Kenosha: 8.0/$62,627

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) May 8, 2023

MacIver:

Questions That Need To Discussed And Answered:

• Are local governments truly destitute and in desperate need of a massive increase of taxpayer funding? See charts above.   
• Why should state taxpayers bail out the lavish and reckless pension plans of the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County?
• How much has the City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County paid towards their pension plans for the last twenty years? Is this a case where the irresponsible local politicians, rather than fully paying for the pension they promised their government employees, just kicked the can down the road to create this bailout crisis?
• Since all the locals that testified said it wasn’t enough, how long before the state is back at the table with another influx? 
• During negotiations, how much did the locals say it would take to actually solve the problems?
• Was there any consideration of placing limits on local governments preventing them from allowing outside funding and administration of elections?
• Some of these communities have gone to referendum to ask for more money and been denied.  Towns under 3,000 population, and there are more than a thousand of them, can raise taxes by a vote at an annual meeting.  Does the state want to be in the business of second-guessing the residents, and simply taking tax dollars out of a different pocket?

<

The @OaklandNAACP is right. Learning disruption has devastating effects and, as an organization that has been fighting racial injustice for over a century, they are well aware of how this strike will impact Black families disproportionately in Oakland. pic.twitter.com/XW37Mv7cc0

— Lakisha Young (@LakishaYoungCEO) May 8, 2023

History Today:

While we might take issue with the idea that there is less local news, it is undeniable that there is a decline in the legacy local newspaper with which we associate its delivery. This decline is in the numbers of titles and also, significantly, in their visibility. The move to digital has put papers online and also removed the surrounding trappings, such as town centre offices or newspaper sellers, from our streets. Financial pressures mean fewer staff, who are reliant on remote methods of communication rather than being visible in communities.

This loss of the physical newspaper is significant to the historian because the local newspaper’s physical legacy is that most often accessed by both professional and amateur historians. I would suggest, though, that we need a more nuanced understanding of where we are in the decline of the local newspaper. For instance, the peak number of local titles was in 1914, while newspaper wars meant circulations reached their peak in the mid-1970s. In the 19th century, titles were dominated by reports of national affairs or lengthy verbatim reports of Parliament; hardly the stuff of local record. Evidence suggests that local, targeted content only became the dominant feature of local newspapers in the early 20th century to support the sale of advertising. By the 1990s, the continued consolidation of the local newspaper industry meant that, while there were still numerous titles, many were being condemned as, in the words of Bob Franklin, ‘local in name only’. This lack of local content recalls the origins of the provincial press in the 18th century when publishers relied on ‘cut and paste’ content lifted from other newspapers rather than producing content about their own circulation areas.

Mdmakowsky:

To become an academic researcher is to make an enormous upfront investment in human capital, often remaining in school until someone’s late 20s, even early 30s. These are people who often have a relatively high opportunity cost of time, even early in their careers, and they do this while also staring down the possibility of technical obsolescence within a decade of graduation. An academic, if they make a major contribution, often knows it will happen before they turn 40 (30 if they’re a mathematician). This is not a trivial endeavor or decision.

Building a critical mass of high quality employees when such high opportunity costs underlie the requisite labor pool presents a financial challenge. In the face of these costs, as much as half of academic compensation takes the form of non-pencuniary benefits (lifestyle, freedom, flexibility, status, etc). And there’s one more problem, and it might be the biggest. For those in more technical fields, the full career’s worth of (discounted) wages would have to be collected in their first 8 years on the job. To put it another way,for the academic labor market to clear absent these non-pecuniary benefits, salaries would have to double or more.

Christina M Roberts, David A Klein, Terry A Adirim, Natasha A Schvey, Elizabeth Hisle-Gorman:

Our results suggest that >70% of TGD individuals who start gender-affirming hormones will continue use beyond 4 years, with higher continuation rates in transfeminine individuals. Patients who start hormones, with their parents’ assistance, before age 18 years have higher continuation rates than adults.

Andrew Rotherham:

In related news, new NAEP data on history and civics out today, it’s not good news. Some of the data suggest our social divides are getting worse with students furthest from opportunity more impacted. 

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona made the following statement:

“The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading. It tells us that now is not the time for politicians to try to extract double-digit cuts to education funding, nor is it the time to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes. We need to provide every student with rich opportunities to learn about America’s history and understand the U.S. Constitution and how our system of government works. Banning history books and censoring educators from teaching these important subjects does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction.”

This stirred up a little tempest on Twitter. People are doing gymnastics to try to argue this isn’t a politicized response. NAEP expert Tom Loveless thinks it’s a sign of coming attractions with the new timing on NAEP releases. I hope he’s wrong but he’s probably right. Marty West says stop worrying, they’re on it.

Dave Cieslewicz

The fundamental problem with these programs is that the ideology behind them conflicts with both common sense and long-held American values. As Vos said, the vast majority of us want a color blind society and most of us recognize that, while we’ve made great progress toward that goal, we’ve still got a ways to go. 

But the “cutting edge” view in the DEI world is that we can’t address past discrimination without discriminating now to make up for it. Too many of these programs ask people to accept their own deep-seated racism or “unconscious bias.” There is a huge disconnect here. You’re asking people who have grown up believing that being a racist is one of the very worst things you can be to accept the notion that they’re racists simply because of the color of their skin. Whatever you might actually think, whatever you might actually have done as an individual doesn’t matter. It’s about identity groups, good ones and bad ones. 

Nobody outside of DEI staff views the world this way. In fact, it’s ludicrous. So when your company or your department forces you into one of these programs you leave it changed for the worse. It’s natural for employees to feel resentful and wrongfully accused. If you weren’t a racist going in, you might well be one coming out.

Rory Linnane:

Eilbes said the decision was made by Steve Hancock, the head of school, after conferring over the past year with members of the school’s board of trustees, legal and insurance consultants, security experts and local police. Asked whether parents were consulted, Eilbes said there wasn’t any “formalized” outreach.

“We didn’t want to run the risk of the rumor mill,” Eilbes said. “Ultimately, we really wanted to play into the fact that families do give us a lot of leeway. They have a trust in us as a school.”

In a letter to families, Hancock said the move was a response to “the devastating rise in school shootings nationwide.”

“Through extensive analysis and thorough research, along with a strong recommendation from the River Hills Police Department, the unanimous recommendation was to arm a small number of school safety officers,” Hancock wrote.

Rich Lowry:

The long era of the dominance of the SAT in college admissions is coming to an end.

The test is increasingly being shelved not because it failed but because it succeeded in all the wrong ways.

According to a survey from an anti-testing outfit, more than 80% of four-year colleges won’t require standardized tests for admissions this coming fall. 

Many have made the tests optional, and some won’t consider them at all. 

In a swath of academia, the pandemic expedient of dropping the tests has seamlessly transitioned to a permanent change.

If this isn’t a leap forward for fairness or rationality, it is another ringing victory for the equity of “diversity, equity and inclusion” fame. 

With homework now on the chopping block for not being equitable enough — kids with involved parents tend to actually do their homework — it shouldn’t be a surprise that the SAT is being shown the door.

Shelby Kearns;

The University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW Madison) awarded a $5,000 residency to Kay LeClaire, a woman recently exposed for faking her Native American ancestry. 

LeClaire is the latest “pretendian” who profits by providing art or expertise to universities, museums, or other institutions, all of which are pushing for inclusivity in curriculum, faculty makeup, and exhibitions. 

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that LeClaire served as “community leader in residence for the Center for Design and Material Culture,” a residency dedicated to “the development of a toolkit and curriculum around cultural appropriation.”  

John Lucas with UW-Madison Communications told Campus Reform that “LeClaire is a prominent figure in the community,” and the university learned about her faked ancestry “through reports on social media and local media.”

“LeClaire’s campus residency was ending at the end of 2022,” he continued. “She resigned before the formal end date. It will not be renewed.”

Transcript below.

QUESTION
My question for you today is the following.

As you know, the US national debt is currently at an estimated $31 trillion, making up about 125% of the US GDP. In the meantime, over the past few years, the Federal Reserve has telegraphed, that they…

— Balaji (@balajis) May 7, 2023

MSU:

Last summer, researchers at Michigan State University reported that one in five Michigan adults, or about 1.7 million people, don’t want children and therefore are child-free. Although that number was surprisingly large to many data has now been confirmed in a follow-up study.

“We found that 20.9% of adults in Michigan do not want children, which closely matches our earlier estimate of 21.6%, and means that over 1.6 million people in Michigan are child-free,” said Jennifer Watling Neal, MSU professor of psychology and co-author of the study. “Michigan is demographically similar to the United States as a whole, so this could mean 50 million to 60 million Americans are child-free.”

The new study published in PLOS ONE attempted to replicate the original study by using the same methods, but with a new sample of people. The researchers used data from a representative sample of 1,000 adults who completed MSU’s State of the State Survey, conducted by the university’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research. To avoid any risk of cherry-picking results, the researchers preregistered the study by recording in advance exactly how the study would be conducted and what they expected to find.

“Many adults are child-free, and there do not seem to be differences by age, education or income,” said Zachary Neal, associate professor of psychology at MSU and co-author of the study. “However, being child-free is somewhat more common among adults who identify as male, white or who have always been single.”

Bruce Ivan Gudmundsson:

The same is true for academic lectures. As much as I delight in viva voce exposition delivered before a properly proximate audience, I am much more likely to listen to lectures while driving, cooking, or making illustrations for the Tactical Notebook. (How’s that for a shameless plug for my other Substack?) Indeed, if I wished to replace the two or three learned podcasts I enjoy each day with scholarly speeches of the old fashioned kind, I would have to hire an adjunct professor.

Hung Cao:

In fiscal year 2022, the Army missed its recruitment goals by 25 percent. The Navy was able to barely meet its quota by rolling forward recruits and padding their numbers before the end of the fiscal year. This caused a deficit for fiscal year 2023, so the Navy’s solution was to accept recruits with lower entry level test scores.

With the strategic mistakes of President Biden, such as the Afghanistan retreat, paired with puzzling Pentagon priorities, it’s no wonder recruitment is at an all-time low.

I watched in horror as the images of the fall of my native Saigon repeated themselves in 2021 in Kabul. A few short months after my last combat deployment, the Afghans I worked with clung desperately to aircraft and pounded at the airport gates. The worst image of all was when eleven Marines, one sailor and one soldier were killed by a suicide bomber outside Abbey Gate of Hamid Karzai International Airport as the evacuation occurred. These servicemen and women were left out there to guard a patch of land their commander-in-chief had given up. Days later, as their bodies were ceremonially paraded off a C-17, he was seen checking his watch when he should have been paying his respects. Why would anyone join the military when the ethos of “leave no one behind” is just a catchy phrase that no longer holds any substance?

This administration has a growing obsession with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, or DEI, a college campus fad that teaches America is fundamentally racist and can only be fixed by discriminating against American males with European ancestry. DEI is unpopular in the military, a place where troops may be rightfully hesitant to serve under a commander selected for the color of his skin rather than the content of his character.

Elite organizations and individuals are not inclusive. They are rigidly exclusive. Not everyone gets to be a doctor, or an astronaut, a Navy SEAL or a starting center in the NBA. We respect those professions for the same reason recruits are drawn to them, because those who make the cut have worked hard and earned their place. It’s unsurprising that the service that is consistently hitting its recruitment target, the Marines, pride themselves on being the best of the best. Their very slogan is exclusive in nature, “the few, the proud, the Marines.” It is not “join the Marine Corps, any schlub can do it.” 

When announcing their priorities in 2021, the Biden Pentagon ranked odd and naked political priorities right next to China in terms of importance. Climate change, right-wing extremism and Covid-19 were considered just as a dire a threat as the People’s Liberation Army. Young Americans don’t join the Army to fight climate change, that is a job for scientists and engineers. They don’t join to root out domestic extremists, that is a job for law enforcement. And they don’t join to obsess over gender, sexual orientation and skin color, that is a job for weird humanities professors.

Bilal Mahmood:

Charles Sylvester has been a special-education teacher for over 20 years in San Francisco Unified School District. He’s seen plenty of ups and downs during that time, but in 2023 he encountered a career first.

The district misreported his taxes. Thousands of dollars of payments were effectively missing.

In SFUSD, payroll is not as straightforward as the private sector.

Due to labor agreements, there are dozens of rules governing how staff can be paid. This creates a complex array of processes that need to be documented.

One problem: almost nothing is documented in SFUSD.

— Bilal Mahmood 馬百樂 (@bilalmahmood) May 6, 2023

Freddie DeBoer:

where men are far more comfortable being more educated and higher-income than their partners. (With many exceptions.) And you can imagine how this dynamic plays out in specific dating pools: as more hard-charging women flood a given dating market, while the number of eligible men drags behind because of increasing advantages for women in school and the workplace, fewer and fewer women are likely to find themselves with a partner they consider marriageable. To make matters worse, since this dynamic hands men an advantage in the romantic marketplace, they may put off partnering for the long term even further, playing the field for years more because it favors them, and in doing so making matters even worse for ambitious women.

Reeves cites data that suggests that something like 30% to 40% of the decline in marriage rates is driven by the inability of women to find mates that they see as stable, smart, good earners, or otherwise up to their standards. We can certainly lament the degree to which dating markets still reflect the notion that men have to provide while women don’t – it’s a kind of regressive attitude far fewer people still explicitly hold than they once did – but that expectation remains a reality. And anecdotally, there certainly seems to be a lot of men who want only to play video games and watch porn, even if they are employed. So career women are faced with a growing structural disadvantage of insufficient suitable partners, which is exacerbated as they age because of men’s continuing preference for younger women. (Another reality we may lament but can’t really deny.) My guess is that this dynamic falls heaviest on Black women, perversely, because they’ve been doing so well lately.

Jonathan Turley:

Over its almost 200 years of existence, Oberlin College has faced a civil war, an economic depression and pandemics. But until this year, it had never faced the likes of Kalinda Watson. Student editors on The Oberlin Review have risen up against the addition of Watson to the college ranks as an existential threat.

No, Watson is not a conservative or a Republican — groups that haven’t been welcome on campus for many years. Oberlin is ranked in the top three most liberal colleges in the country, and finding a conservative professor is about as likely as finding a licensed, practicing wizard.

No, Watson is far, far worse. She is a risk management expert.

The panic over the arrival of a risk management expert in this small college is that she may be working … wait for it … to lower the risk of lawsuits at the college. Oberlin, it appears, attracts lawsuits as much as liberals.

The students fear that she will create “risk aversion” that could chill future protests.

Indeed, some of us have written about Oberlin for years as a case study of why higher education is declining in America. The college has yielded to the mob in past controversies that have cost the school a fortune.

Mark Judge:

Yet all three reporters themselves exemplify how the media have killed themselves over the last several years and why the rise of the internet and social media has stripped reporters of the credibility they used to have. The ink-stained wretches just can’t get away with anything anymore.

The reporters Dowd interviews for her piece represent exactly why no one trusts the press anymore and why their replacements, which include people such as Matt Taibbi, Aaron Matte, Mollie Hemingway, and even Joe Rogan, are better, more accountable reporters and pundits. “Community Notes,” the new feature that lets users correct false claims in real time on Twitter, has done more for journalism than MSNBC and the Washington Postcombined.

Isikoff and Mayer, in particular, were main drivers of the Steele dossier, the absurd 2016 opposition research file paid for by the Clintons and used against former President Donald Trump. Isikoff would finally admit that he made a huge mistake in falling for the dossier — but only after it had been publicly debunked.

Eric Kaufman:

White progressives in America, as in Britain, avoid diverse neighborhoods and are more likely to leave diverse places than white conservatives. In effect, they don’t practice what they preach. These are the findings from large-scale quantitative research in the United States and Britain, recently published in my academic article, “White flight from immigration?: Attitudes to diversity and white residential choice.”

Diversity is a core value for white progressives in America and other Western countries. Over 60 percent of them support increasing immigration. As the Manhattan Institute’s Zach Goldberg shows, they are the only major part of the population to feel warmer toward other racial groups than toward their own: they rate whites as more lazy and violent, and less intelligent, than blacks. Among white progressives, 87 percent say that having an “increasing number of people of many different races, ethnic groups and nationalities” makes the U.S. a better place to live, while virtually none says that it makes the country worse.

You would think that aversion to one’s racial group would prompt white progressives to flee disproportionately white areas for more diverse ones. Surveys do show that white progressives are more likely than white conservatives to indicate that they want to live in diverse places. Studies that present Americans with showcards of stylized houses as a proxy for race —some colored white, some black, with the proportion of the latter varied—find that those with progressive racial attitudes say that they prefer more diverse places than conservatives. These findings have been replicated in Britain and the Netherlands.

But when the rubber hits the road, white liberal attitudes don’t translate into behavior.

Princetonians for free speech:

Princeton’s Awkward Similarities to Communist Romania

An edited excerpt from a video interview with Princeton Professor Sergiu Klainerman

“At Princeton today you see a penetration of diversity, equity and inclusion in every department and office of the university. They are a bit like the Party functionaries. Every organization [in Romania] no matter how small, had to have someone who represented the Party. They were activists, not interested in education or research or whatever they were supposed to be doing, they were activists and of course they had power.”

What does this mean for university life?  Klainerman’s answer goes well beyond the mandatory courses at Princeton on topics such as sexual harassment that he finds both “triggering” and insulting, and has so far resisted.  His main concern is corruption.

“There is an aspect of [what is happening] which I think people don’t talk enough about. Suppose you are a very bright minority kid. You come from a school which unfortunately, for whatever reasons, didn’t give you a very good education. But you are very bright and you really have aspiration and enthusiasm and you are accepted at Princeton, even though in principle you don’t have the credentials for Princeton. And you want to do mathematics.

“So suppose such a kid gets to Princeton and then he/she realizes that they just don’t have the background. They have to compete against winners of international Olympiads from China, Taiwan, Pakistan and Iran. They compete with people who are 5 – 7 years ahead of them. What do you think is going to happened? They’re going to feel dejected. They’re going to feel depressed. They feel they have no chance. And in the end, they give up. … I think it is a disservice to them, to be put in the position to have to compete in situations where they just simply don’t have the background to do well. You prepare them for failure. I’m not afraid to mention this, because I think it’s true.

The open, explicit contempt the Dem Party has for every voter who isn’t blindly loyal to them is amazing to see.

This contempt is most often directed at the party’s disaffected “progressive” wing, because they know – thanks to Bernie and AOC – they have them on total lockdown: https://t.co/K8Lh8ym5xj

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 5, 2023

The @UWSystem spends $15.9million tax dollars/year on leftwing DIVERSITY/EQUITY positions. That’s 227 employees w/full-time salaries for 13 campuses. That’s 17 DEI employees/campus making $70k/year on average. @MacIverWisc @wisconsin_now @DukePesta @SenRonJohnson @RepDaveMurphy pic.twitter.com/l6aY0FATGZ

— Vicki McKenna (@VickiMcKenna) May 5, 2023

Matt Taibbi:

Following the release of today’s article about news organizations junking the “Pentagon Papers Principle,” reader Ben O’Neill made a good observation that should have been in the piece. In the newly-found summary emailed by an Aspen Institute figure in September 2020, “Partnership for a Healthy Digital Public Sphere,” the section about “hack-and-dump” exercises asks [emphasis mine]: “What happens when fabricated documents are released alongside genuine (stolen) content? How can social feeds avoid serving as promoters of foreign or other adversarial entities?” 

First of all, this notion that there may be fabrications mixed in with real content is a suggestion that pops up somewhere in nearly every one of these leak stories, even if all the material proves to be real (old friend Malcolm Nance did the job in 2016 in suggesting the Podesta leaks were “riddled with forgeries”). More importantly however, that last line is a great example of what former cybersecurity official and Foundation for Freedom Online head Mike Benz calls the “foreign-domestic switcheroo.” 

It’s the basic rhetorical trick of the censorship age: raise a fuss about a foreign threat, using it as a battering ram to get everyone from congress to the tech companies to submit to increased regulation and surveillance. Then, slowly, adjust your aim to domestic targets. You can see the subtlety: the original Stanford piece tries to stick to railing against “disinformation” and information from “foreign adversaries,” but the later paper circulated by Aspen slips in, ever so slightly, a new category of dubious source: “foreign or other adversarial entities.” 

These rhetorical devices are essential. It would be preposterous to form (as Stanford did) an “Information Warfare Working Group” if readers knew the “war” being contemplated was against domestic voices. It would likewise seem outrageous to suggest, as Stanford did, that journalists respond to a domestic threat by taking a step as drastic as eliminating intra-title competition, and “forming partnerships with other organizations to pool resources.” But if you start by focusing on Russians and only later mention as an afterthought “other adversarial entities,” you can frame things however you want, from espionage to warfare. As reader O’Neill correctly pointed out, “they are now getting close to being explicit about the fact that their motivation for suppressing news is to fight domestic political adversaries.”

One other small note I left out for space reasons. The “Information Warfare Working Group” that produced the original paper by Janine Zacharia proposing the end of the “Pentagon Papers Principle” includes such anti-disinformation luminaries as Renee DiResta and Michael McFaul. In that summer of 2019, the working group also put out a paper by Dr. Amy Zegart, titled, “Spies, Lies, and Algorithms.” Her co-author? Michael Morell.

Dave Utbanski:

A California public school teacher said she was told to deceive “suspicious” parents about their children’s stated gender identities at school — and now she’s suing.

What are the details?

“It’s unfortunate that I have to go toe-to-toe and stand up against a community of people that I love,” teacher Elizabeth Mirabelli told Fox News. “I’ve been there for 25 years. This is a community of people I care about, people I’ve served for a long period of time. And so that gives me pause to have to stand up, but I felt that I had to make that choice.”

The cable network said attorneys for Mirabelli and fellow teacher Lori Ann West — both of whom taught for decades at Rincon Middle School in Escondido — filed a federal lawsuit last week against the school’s leadership, claiming they were effectively required to lie to parents whose children assumed different gender identities at school.

Javier Moscoso:

What does it mean to tell the story of this instrument? The history of the swing reveals how an object of disorientation became instrumentalised across the long arc of human culture, appearing in different territories and cultures throughout time. But this history is not just the story of an object. It’s also one of many untold histories of bodies in motion that seek to unveil forgotten, overlooked or concealed gestures – human history is not only populated with words and objects. The swing allows us to begin telling the long cultural story of moving back and forth through time and space.

Once we start looking, the swing appears in the most unexpected places. It shows up in ancient Greek swinging festivals, and cave paintings made in western India during the 5th century. It is illustrated in Chinese hand scrolls from the Song dynasty, from around the 11th and 12th centuries.It fills Hindustani and Punjabi paintings, such as Lady on a Swing in the Monsoon (1750-75), in which a woman joyously swings through the air, clothes fluttering behind her, as dark clouds grow in the distance. The swing also finds its way into the origin stories of the Persian Nowruz New Year celebrations, when people swung to mimic the way the legendary Shah Jamšīd rode his chariot through the air. It also turns up in Thailand’s Chakri dynasty in the 18th century, when a giant version was built by Rama I. And it is spread across the pages of Western literature and philosophy – Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra(1883-5), James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), Sigmund Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality(1905), and Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens (1938).

NEW: On May 12, I was going to speak on DEI at the Medical College of Wisconsin, alongside Sen. Ron Johnson and State Rep. Dave Murphy.

Last night, the president of the college announced he has “rescind the use” of the its facilities for the event, citing disruptions and safety. pic.twitter.com/bSgbBQvjUn

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) May 5, 2023

Laurel White:

Remote learning during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic was more likely to negatively affect the high school graduation rates of students from lower-income households than their higher-income peers, according to a new UW–Madison study. 

The study, published in Educational Researcher, found a longer time in virtual or hybrid learning environments during the 2020–21 school year decreased overall high school completion rates and increased the gap in completion rates between economically disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged students.

“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;

The encouragement comes as the union and the Madison Metropolitan School District disagree over a proposed wage increase in next year’s budget, among other items. Hundreds of MTI members and supporters showed up to the April School Board meeting, where the 2023-24 budget proposal was made public, to demand an 8% increase in base wages and smaller class sizes.

In a challenging budget cycle full of uncertaintyover what the state will provide, the district’s current proposal includes a 3.5% base wage increase.

Teacher Appreciation Week runs May 8-12 this year. Last year during Teacher Appreciation Week, MTI and the district officially exchanged proposals for base wage increases that were significantly far apart.

“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?

Stanley Goldfarb:

For better or worse, I have had a front-row seat to the meltdown of twenty-first-century medicine. Many colleagues and I are alarmed at how the DEI agenda—which promotes people and policies based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and sexual orientation rather than merit—is undermining healthcare for all patients regardless of their status.

Five years ago I was associate dean of curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, and prior to that, codirector of its highly regarded kidney division. Around that time, Penn’s vice dean for education started to advocate that we train medical students to be activists for “social justice.” The university also implemented a new “pipeline program,” allowing ten students a year from HBCUs (historically black colleges or universities) to attend its med school after maintaining a 3.6 GPA but no other academic requirement, including not taking the MCAT (Medical College Admission Test). And the university has also created a project called Penn Medicine and the Afterlives of Slavery Project(PMAS) in order to “reshape medical education. . . by creating social justice-informed medical curricula that use race critically and in an evidence-based way to train the next generation of race-conscious physicians.” Finally, twenty clinical departments at the medical school now have vice chairs for diversity and inclusion.

Michael Anton:

Gaslighting getting you down? Feel like the regime has dialed the Megaphone up to, and past, eleven? You’re not crazy. It’s definitely happening and likely to get worse as our masters’ ability to cope with reality further worsens—or worse, they gain the complete and absolute control they seek. They’re both scornful and terrified of dissent, which explains why they incessantly shriek at us and lie to our faces.

So, to help you navigate the twitstorm, I present a guide to seven of the regime’s most common, oft-deployed lies. This is not meant to be comprehensive. I’m sure there are tactics they use that either I haven’t crystalized or that aren’t front-of-mind at the moment. I encourage others to expand the catalogue with their own observations. The better we can understand how they try to manipulate us, the better we can resist and counter it all.

Let’s start with the Unholy Trinity of ruling class horse manure. These first three are similar, but subtle differences determine the ways they’re used in differing circumstances.

Richard Hamming:

Dick is one of the all time greats in the mathematics and computer science arenas, as I’m sure the audience here does not need reminding. He received his early education at the Universities of Chicago and Nebraska, and got his Ph.D. at Illinois; he then joined the Los Alamos project during the war. Afterwards, in 1946, he joined Bell Labs. And that is, of course, where I met Dick – when I joined Bell Labs in their physics research organization. In those days, we were in the habit of lunching together as a physics group, and for some reason this strange fellow from mathematics was always pleased to join us. We were always happy to have him with us because he brought so many unorthodox ideas and views. Those lunches were stimulating, I can assure you. 

While our professional paths have not been very close over the years, nevertheless I’ve always recognized Dick in the halls of Bell Labs and have always had tremendous admiration for what he was doing. I think the record speaks for itself. It is too long to go through all the details, but let me point out, for example, that he has written seven books and of those seven books which tell of various areas of mathematics and computers and coding and information theory, three are already well into their second edition. That is testimony indeed to the prolific output and the stature of Dick Hamming. 

I think I last met him – it must have been about ten years ago – at a rather curious little conference in Dublin, Ireland where we were both speakers. As always, he was tremendously entertaining. Just one more example of the provocative thoughts that he comes up with: I remember him saying, “There are wavelengths that people cannot see, there are sounds that people cannot hear, and maybe computers have thoughts that people cannot think.” Well, with Dick Hamming around, we don’t need a computer. I think that we are in for an extremely entertaining talk. 

THE TALK: “You and Your Research” by Dr. Ri

Sarah Belle Lin:

“A lot of kids are not aware of how to put a bank account together, balance a checkbook, or what an expense and revenue sheet is,” Comrie told amNewYork Metro. “These are critical things that need to be taught to all students so they can be aware of the challenges that they will all face as young adults.”

The initiative to bring financial literacy to New York middle and high schools has been discussed in the state legislature since 2009. 

“I’m disappointed that the State Department of Education hasn’t been embraced it,” Comrie said. “I expect that it will be embraced by more members [state legislators] this year.”

Peng, who teaches geometry and the math team at Stuyvesant High School, studied finance in college and was inspired to share the knowledge he learned about mortgages and student loans with students. He told amNewYork Metro that he had the idea in his mind, but just needed a push. That push came from a Stuyvesant student, Anisha Singhal, who penned an op-ed in January 2021 in the school newspaper called “Calculus Before Checkbooks?” Peng was convinced.

Singhal, who was finally able to enroll in the personal finance class after being waitlisted in the class’ first year, said her interest in financial literacy grew after she received her first paycheck. She didn’t think twice about the taxes and just assumed “this is why adults are always complaining.” But once she later found out from a family friend about tax refunds, she realized the importance of financial literacy.

Why are teachers going on strike?

OEA is going on strike to protest unfair labor practices of the school district, which union leaders say include negotiating in bad faith by coming to bargaining sessions unprepared and not making meaningful counter-proposals. The union filed an unfair labor practice charge against OUSD in March with the California Public Employee Relations Board, which oversees negotiations between public agencies and employees.

Jill Tucker:

Union officials have demanded a 23% raise for all members of the bargaining unit. District officials had offered up to a 22% raise, but not for all 3,000 educators. They have also tied a 10% retroactive raise to more instructional minutes for elementary school students.

The district’s offer also included paying 15% more for health benefits, in addition to required pensions costs equaling more than 19% of salaries.

On Wednesday, in a statement, district officials said all members of the union would get a 13% to 22% raise, as well as a one-time bonus and backpay.

Under the proposal, according to the district Wednesday, beginning teachers would get a $10,700 raise, plus $8,700 in back pay and one-time bonus. Veteran teachers would see an annual increase of $15,432, plus $11,600 in back pay and one-time bonus.

Other union members, including counselors, psychologists and nurses, would also get significant increases in salary.

More:

With few exceptions, schools across California saw significant declines in standardized test scores this year compared with pre-pandemic levels, with less than half of students proficient in reading and a third performing at grade level in math.

Josh Blackman

In recent years, there has been a rise in law students heckling speakers. In 2018, I was shouted down at the CUNY Law School in New York. In 2022, Ilya Shapiro was shouted down at the law school formerly known as Hastings. And more recently, Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit was shouted down at Stanford Law School.

We were protested for speaking on different topics, but there was a common thread: Students at each institution insisted that we were not welcome on campus; that our mere presence made them feel unsafe; and that our messages were not worth the pain and suffering we would cause. Thus, the students refused to let us speak.

Who is to blame for these protests? Of course, the students who heckled speakers, in clear violation of university policy, were at fault. But the blame goes much deeper. These students have been taught from the earliest age that harmful speech has no place in educational institutions. …

Universities and faculties in particular should take decisive action to prevent [DEI administrators] from subverting the core principles of academic inquiry. At this inflection point, I propose a five-course action plan.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

The UW System spends about $13.6 million annually on 185 administrators related to DEI, with most of the positions concentrated at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee, according to records first reported on by WisPolitics. The $13.6 million in salaries represents about 0.2% of the UW System’s $6.9 billion annual operating budget.

Vos called for eliminating funding for all of the DEI positions, saying the offices are a waste of public tax dollars and teach students to view the world entirely through the lens of race. He cited examples he has heard where people had to fill out DEI statements to apply for a UW job and students had to discuss white privilege at freshmen orientation.

“The university has gone from being an institute of higher education to an institute of indoctrination,” he said.

Vos said he met with UW System President Jay Rothman and chancellors to offer his ideas on how the UW System can make good on his request.

The UW System could, for example, internally reallocate the money funding DEI offices to other programs it is seeking funding for, such as nursing, engineering and other high-demand fields.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai

Cicero’s De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum (“On the Ends of Good and Evil”) is a true classic – a text that many people own but few ever bother to read. Yet if you are interested in translation, you probably want to read the first few pages of Book One at the very least. Here Cicero discusses a few of the problems involved with writing a philosophical work in the Roman world; one of these is the Romans’ inferiority complex when it came to Classical Greek. He describes intellectuals who scorn to read philosophy in their native language, yet have no problem with Greek literary texts translated word-for-word (ad verbum e Graecis expressas) into Latin.

The discussion is interesting in part because Cicero frankly acknowledges just how bad a lot of translations were in his day. He defends Latin as a language, and has a few positive-sounding things to say about the Latin literary tradition, even though he seems tacitly to accept its inferiority to Greek literature. But there seems to have been no point in sticking up for most contemporary translations of Greek books. Or was there? Cicero himself was a brilliant translator, particularly of Plato. He thought hard about the relationship between Latin and Greek. Perhaps, though, his contemporaries were less conscientious than he was. He didn’t just provide mechanical, literal-minded translations: he wanted the Greek Classics to sound like themselves when rendered into his own language. Then again, translators who succeed at this task are rare in every age.

Allison Parshall:

If you want to trust a prediction, you need to understand how all the computations work. For example, in health care, you need to know if the model even applies to your patient. And it’s really hard to troubleshoot models if you don’t know what’s in them. Sometimes models depend on variables in ways that you might not like if you knew what they were doing. For example, with the power company in New York, we gave them a model that depended on the number of neutral cables. They looked at it and said, “Neutral cables? That should not be in your model. There’s something wrong.” And of course there was a flaw in the database, and if we hadn’t been able to pinpoint it, we would have had a serious problem. So it’s really useful to be able to see into the model so you can troubleshoot it.

When did you first get concerned about non-transparent AI models in medicine? 

My dad is a medical physicist. Several years ago, he was going to medical physics and radiology conferences. I remember calling him on my way to work, and he was saying, “You’re not going to believe this, but all the AI sessions are full. AI is taking over radiology.” Then my student Alina [Barnett] roped us into studying [AI models that examine] mammograms. Then I realized, OK, hold on. They’re not using interpretable models. They’re using just these black boxes; then they’re trying to explain their results. Maybe we should do something about this.

So we decided we would try to prove that you could construct interpretable models for mammography that did not lose accuracy over their black box counterparts. We just wanted to prove that it could be done.

The community note here is significantly more accurate and provides readers with much better context than the Politifact fact-check. It’s a perfect example of why people feel media fact-checkers focus more on pushing spin than providing the facts and letting readers decide. https://t.co/ZsqcvrGLY0

— AG (@AGHamilton29) May 4, 2023

Credit to @exjon for the chart.

It’s arguably better than the typical debt-to-GDP ratio, because it shows debt-to-revenue. GDP is more like GMV of a marketplace, whereas revenue is what the debt would actually get paid out of. https://t.co/WM2uG0KxcV

— Balaji (@balajis) May 2, 2023

I don’t mind health authorities got so much wrong. COVID was a novel pandemic.

What is inexcusable is they banned dissent by pressuring Big Tech to remove any posts questioning their false decrees.

And only now are media figures like this CNN host willing to question them. https://t.co/XhVp1m5CAv

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 3, 2023

The new data on students’ knowledge of history and civics is abysmal. There’s no other way to describe it. These are the lowest scores ever recorded:

➡️13% are proficient in U.S. history
➡️20% are proficient in civics pic.twitter.com/WzweyhVXsS

— Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVos) May 3, 2023

Rick Hess:

The “Nation’s Report Card” is out with new results on what our eighth-graders know about U.S. history and civics, and the results are grim. The National Assessment of Educational Progress today reported that this is the first time civics results declined significantly on the quarter-century-old exam. In history, the results continued a nearly decade-long decline.

The U.S. history test covers key figures, dates, and events, as well as student familiarity with key historical ideas and movements. The civics test gauges students’ knowledge, their ability to take or defend positions on political issues, and their understanding of democratic participation. The tests were administered in spring 2022, with a nationally representative sample of 8,000 eighth-graders who took the history test and 7,800 the civics exam.

An elementary school counselor should not have 3,432 pages of emails talking about gender.

And it should not cost me $2,559.75 to see them. pic.twitter.com/kFr8DdxkLl

— Nicole Solas Domestic Terrorist! (@Nicoletta0602) April 30, 2023

Vipul Shekhawat:

What makes GPT good for learning?

Let’s contrast GPT’s chat interface with static learning resources, like webpages or textbooks.

Interactive learning. The modern world is a complicated place, and it’s simply not possible to learn about everything to the utmost depth. All too often, I end up in a deep, dark Wikipedia rabbit hole reading about string theory when I just was curious about the basics of how something works.

Using GPT makes learning interactive. The main benefit is that the information it provides is tailored to the specific questions you have. By contrast, static learning resources have to make a best guess of what you’re trying to learn about, which is always subject to tensions of depth and breadth:

Fritz François & Gbenga Ogedegbe

Such claims aren’t supported by evidence. The ranking methodology, as currently constructed, includes consideration of students’ Medical College Admission Test scores and undergraduate grade-point averages, as well as other criteria. But medical schools have always been free to admit anyone they choose, regardless of their rankings. It’s true that diversity isn’t a criterion in the U.S. News methodology, but why should that stop schools from recruiting minority applicants or establishing a campus culture that encourages and values diversity? There is nothing in a thoughtful admissions process that explicitly prevents medical schools from assembling a student body based on anything other than academic performance, holistic reviews and interviews of candidates. …

What these schools are really saying is that meritocracy can’t coexist with diversity. This is a presumptuous—and dangerous—perpetuation of the negative stereotype that students from backgrounds that are underrepresented in medicine are of lesser quality or unable to compete.

Scott Girard:

The work at La Follette, led by Findorff Project Engineer Courtney Cates, features a new gym, weight room and “athletics entry” space that includes concessions and a trophy case. That entry area will also feature pieces of the wood floor from the current spectator gym, which will be turned into classroom space, and will allow officials to more easily close off the rest of the building from those there to play or watch a game.

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?

Frederick Hess:

The reason for this success isn’t hard to fathom. During the pandemic, mediocre remote learning, bureaucratic inertia, and school closures taught many parents that they couldn’t count on school districts when families needed them most. 

Parents were left hungry for alternatives, especially amidst bitter disagreements over masking and woke ideology. This was all immensely practical. It wasn’t about moral imperatives or market abstractions. It was about empowering families to put their kids in schools that address their needs, reflect their values, and do their job. And it came even as families continued to voice support for their local public schools. 

There are important lessons here, several of which I discuss at more length in The Great School Rethink. The biggest may be the simplest: Families can want more options and still like their local schools. 

Polling consistently shows that the lion’s share of parents say they’d grade their kids’ schools an A or a B. At the same time, last year, more than seven in ten endorsed education savings accounts, school vouchers, and charter schools.In short, parents tend to like both their child’s public school and school choice policies. They don’t see a tension between the two.

This is the right discussion to have.

I agree that “if we control spending and technology continues to bail us out” then everything is fine.

But (a) the establishment is blocking new technology and (b) it is not controlling spending. https://t.co/ccFdzdfnx0 pic.twitter.com/lADlTZlCaF

— Balaji (@balajis) May 2, 2023

Amy Schwabe:

Wauwatosa Catholic School will be closing its doors at the end of this school year, according to a letter sent to parents Friday by principal Nicolle Schroeder.

The school, at 1500 N. Wauwatosa Ave., has existed since 2011 as a partnership between two Wauwatosa Catholic churches, St. Bernard Parish and St. Pius X Parish.

In her letter, Schroeder laid out three reasons for the school’s closing: enrollment, demographics and finances.

The school projects only 110-120 students for the 2023-24 school year, rather than the 140 students that administrators had wanted. Father Paul Portland, the pastor of St. Pius X Parish, noted in a related letter to parishioners that this is down from 200 students pre-pandemic. Further, most grades are at 10 students or fewer, and there were only seven projected K3 students and five K4 students enrolled for coming school year, creating little hope that enrollment in the years ahead would grow.

Bethan Stanton:

On Tuesday, Chegg’s shares plunged by half and the warning rattled other companies, with shares in London-listed Pearson falling 15 per cent, language-learning platform Duolingo down by 10 per cent and US-listed education company Udemy dropping by more than 5 per cent.

The stock moves come as businesses are grappling with the opportunity and threat posed by generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, which produces highly sophisticated text outputs in response to short human prompts.

Chegg’s admission marks one of the first instances of a company acknowledging a hit to its finances as a direct result of advances in generative AI.

Big tech companies are racing to develop superior versions of the technology, with Google launching its ChatGPT competitor Bard in March. The previous month, shares in Google parent Alphabet plummeted after Microsoft unveiled a new version of its Bing search engine that included advanced new AI-driven features.

Kevin Carey:

Between 2000 and 2018, some 200 colleges and universities adopted similar policies. It was hardly a groundswell — there are about 2,300 public and private four-year colleges and universities in the US — but it cracked the door to a different future for standardized testing.

Covid-19 pushed that door wide open. The pandemic scrambled the logistics of test administration and caused most colleges to go “test-optional.” Covid had the same effect on mandatory admissions testing that it had on the practice of requiring white-collar workers to go to the office five days a week: It transformed a growing but not-yet-mainstream trend into a sudden sea change.

Kimberly Wethal:

Higher rates of chronic absenteeism are largely driving the increase, as about 98% of the district’s 2,231 at-risk students have been deemed “habitually truant,” defined as missing more than 10% of days in an academic year. The number of students considered habitually truant during the 2021-22 school year more than tripled from the year before, according to data presented to the Madison School Board Monday night.

Students in grades five through 12 are considered at risk by the state when they either have dropped out or can be classified in two or more categories considered detrimental to their education, including being:

• One or more years behind their peers in the number of high school credits earned.
• Two or more years behind in basic skill levels.
• Pregnant or a parent.
• An eighth-grader who scored below “basic” on state exams.
• Habitually truant.

The number of students in each category increased in 2021-22, with the exception of students who are pregnant or parenting, a number that’s fallen from 40 five years ago to just a handful now. About 1,714 students, or more than 10%, had fallen behind by two school years, an increase from 946 students in 2018-19, the last year before the pandemic. The number of eighth graders scoring low on state exams has doubled since then.

The number of at-risk students each year is based on data collected the year prior. In 2021-22, there were 14,980 students in grades five through 12 in the district.

“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?

European Review of Books:

Whenever I leave my Berlin apartment, the first thing I see is a sign saying CHICKEN HAUS BURGER; the second is a café blackboard announcing: « You can’t buy happiness but you can buy CROIFFLE and that’s kind of the same thing. » A billboard advertises an upcoming film as « ein STATEMENT für GIRLPOWER »; one shop promises a wide range of Funsocken. Rather more disturbing — particularly here in Neukölln, a neighbourhood copiously populated by leftie Americans and families from the Middle East — is the Arabic-German barber shop called WHITE BOSS. And when I go downtown to the bookstore where I occasionally host readings, the only good coffee nearby is served by a place unbelievably named PURE ORIGINS.

Josh Blackman:

To quote Justice Alito:

It “undermines confidence in the government,” Justice Alito says. “It’s one thing to say the court is wrong; it’s another thing to say it’s an illegitimate institution. You could say the same thing about Congress and the president. . . . When you say that they’re illegitimate, any of the three branches of government, you’re really striking at something that’s essential to self-government.”

There have been no actual allegations that judges assigned to the Amarillo or Wichita Falls divisions have engaged in any judicial misconduct. (And no, authorship of a law review article that a judge did not actually write does not actually matter.) These judges have not been mandamused or reassigned by the court of appeals. None of the progressive judges on the Fifth Circuit have, in dissent, charged these judges with malfeasance. And no bar complaints have been filed against the Texas Attorney General or other plaintiffs who have filed in these forums. DOJ has filed motions to transfer cases in these divisions. And, those motions have been denied. In doing so, these courts have rejected the premise of Schumer’s letter: that single-judge divisions undermine public confidence in the judiciary. Senator Schumer is, in effect, seeking reconsideration of what Judges Tipton, Kacsmaryk, and others have already ruled. The chief judge of a federal district cannot sit in judgment of another district judge in his district. That job belongs to the court of appeals alone.

David Blaska:

“The governor’s request comes at a time when diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs are under fire in higher education, business, and in government for fundamental unfairness and divisiveness and a failure to achieve their intended goals,” the Badger Institute notes.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is riddled with DEI bureaucrats.Madison’s flagship campus has an entire administrative division devoted to the subject, headed by a deputy vice chancellor for Diversity and Inclusion (salary $131,852 as of 2021), supported by a “Gender and Sexuality Campus Center,” a multi-cultural student center, and an Office of Inclusion Education. And that’s only at the top. Every school, every college — education, engineering, business, nursing, pharmacy, letters & science, veterinary medicine, law, and agriculture — has its own DEI bureaucrats. Don’t forget the athletics department!

Journal of Controversial Ideas:

Merit is a central pillar of liberal epistemology, humanism, and democracy. The scientific enterprise, built on merit, has proven effective in generating scientific and technological advances, reducing suffering, narrowing social gaps, and improving the quality of life globally. This perspective documents the ongoing attempts to undermine the core principles of liberal epistemology and to replace merit with non-scientific, politically motivated criteria. We explain the philosophical origins of this conflict, document the intrusion of ideology into our scientific institutions, discuss the perils of abandoning merit, and offer an alternative, human-centered approach to address existing social inequalities.

Commentary.

Scott Girard:

This fall, the new three-story school off of Rimrock Road will house students currently attending Frank Allis Elementary School. That building will then be used for Nuestro Mundo Elementary School, MMSD’s dual-language immersion charter that currently leases a Monona school building.

The school’s soon-to-come opening is monumental for the south side, which hasn’t had an elementary school in the neighborhood before, leaving students in that area with long bus rides.

Those hundreds of Allis students will move from one of the district’s oldest facilities to its newest. It will feature plenty of natural light beyond the skylight, with floor-to-ceiling windows in a library on one corner of the building.

Anna Hansen:

hen Danielle Hairston-Green first moved to the Madison area, many people told her they hoped she didn’t have any children, warning her to avoid the Madison School District.

So, when the Urban League of Greater Madison held an event on the State of Black Students in the Madison School District on Saturday, Hairston-Green — now a grandmother— joined many others in calling for accountability among educators and government officials at local, state and federal levels.

“Change is hard for anyone,” Hairston-Green said. “We will (create) change if we trust the change-makers.”

Black educators, parents and community leaders gathered in Madison College’s Goodman Community Center to strategize over issues that include literacy and graduation rates, teacher recruitment and retention, and communication between faculty and families.

Benjamin Lee:

Steven Spielberg has criticised the idea that older films should be re-edited to appease modern sensibilities.

Speaking at Time’s 100 Summit in New York City, the 76-year-old film-maker expressed regret over taking out guns from a later release of his 1982 sci-fi blockbuster ET: The Extra Terrestrial. In the 20th anniversary edition, agents saw their firearms replaced with walkie-talkies.

“That was a mistake,” he said on stage. “I never should have done that. ET is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through.”

In 2011, Spielberg had already explained that the guns would be returning for the 30th anniversary release, explaining that he was “disappointed” in himself.

Anna Hansen :

When Danielle Hairston-Green first moved to the Madison area, many people told her they hoped she didn’t have any children, warning her to avoid the Madison School District.

So, when Blacks for Political and Social Action of Dane County held an event on the State of Black Students in the Madison School District on Saturday, Hairston-Green — now a grandmother— joined many others in calling for accountability among educators and government officials at local, state and federal levels.

“Change is hard for anyone,” Hairston-Green said. “We will (create) change if we trust the change-makers.”

Black educators, parents and community leaders gathered in Madison College’s Goodman Community Center to strategize over issues that include literacy and graduation rates, teacher recruitment and retention, and communication between faculty and families.

Dr. Judith E. FitzGerald:

Wisconsin has a reading problem, especially for those whose home language is not mainstream English, which is the language of instruction, government and business.

Every year we have watched our literacy scores and state ranking suffer as other states pursue teacher training and education legislation. Illiteracy has multiple causes including poverty and other socioeconomic factors. But inadequate teacher preparation leading to poor classroom reading instruction is one of the most glaring but fixable conditions.

Many states have conducted extensive reviews of their educator preparation programs to ensure that they are aligned with modern reading research. In Wisconsin, an independent consultant (TPI-US) has been awarded a contract to conduct a statewide literacy “landscape analysis” in which all 13 of the University of Wisconsin educator preparation programs could voluntarily opt-in for a comprehensive review of early literacy instructional practices. Each institution would receive a “confidential no-cost assessment of reading coursework quality and how well course instructors model evidence-based early reading instructional practices” and “where appropriate, institutional reports will offer specific recommendations for improvement.”

The Department of Public Instruction will grant $50,000 to the institution on completion of its landscape analysis and another $50,000 on the adoption of a “program improvement plan.”

Wisconsin’s children and future educators deserve UW’s full participation.

Dr. Judith E. FitzGerald, Madison

Morph123:

Either a horticulturalist/permaculturist or an industrial electrician.

Both are and will be required skills for the foreseeable future (next 200 years or so).

Knowing how to grow food and maintain a healthy environment is becoming a lost skill. “Grounding” has science now saying it’s a good thing for your blood, heart and brain (don’t have link on hand but when connected to ground scientists have found blood physically changes and can be seen in microscope).

Electricians are usually a licensed trade. This makes it more protected but also makes you more useful.

You can branch into engineering later if you wish, and you usually make for a better engineer cause you know a 630mm^2 cable doesn’t fit in a 20mm gland.

Substation automation based on IEC61850 is everywhere and more common. It consists of servers, gateways, IEDs (which also need programming), Ethernet, VLANS, switches etc. so you get a technology knowledge base you can relate to other areas of yours, or your friends and families life.

Do No Harm Medicine

The bill’s findings clearly state that “public medical institutions of higher education best serve the state when providing meritorious education and training that positions future healthcare professionals to serve all patients adequately and to the best of their ability.” Do No Harm could not agree more.

To ensure that happens, the bill includes several key provisions:

• No DEI Statements: Applicants for employment and admission cannot be required to submit DEI Statements, which medical schools increasingly use to weed out candidates who don’t toe the woke party line. This helps ensure that students and faculty are chosen by merit, not politics. And getting rid of these statements will create a more intellectually diverse campus environment where students and their teachers are open to exploring new research ideas.
• No DEI Spending: Medical schools are prohibited from using state funds for fees, dues, subscriptions, or travel relating to an organization that requires an individual to endorse or promote a divisive concept – i.e., that a certain race or sex is inherently superior to another or that the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist. This ban covers essentially every medical association. This puts pressure on groups like the AMA and AAMC to drop their increasingly discriminatory demands. Most taxpayers don’t realize their hard-earned dollars fund woke national organizations that focus on progressive activism over patient outcomes.

There are even more victories in the bill, including welcoming campus speakers with differing views, banning discrimination against student groups based on their ideologies, requiring DEI officers to focus on workforce training and promote intellectual diversity, and notifying students and teachers of their rights, among others.

Mark Sherman:

The Supreme Courtseemed likely Wednesday to give a 94-year-old Minneapolis woman another day in court to try to recoup some money after the county kept the entire $40,000 when it sold her condominium over a small unpaid tax bill.

The justices seemed in broad agreement with arguments by the lawyer for Geraldine Tyler that Hennepin County, Minnesota, violated the Constitution’s prohibition on the taking of private property without “just compensation.”

“At bottom, she’s saying the county took her property and made a profit on her surplus equity. It belongs to her,” Justice Clarence Thomas said.

Tyler, who now lives in an apartment building for older people, owed $2,300 in unpaid taxes, plus interest and penalties, when the county took title to the one-bedroom apartment in 2015. The county said she did nothing to hold onto her one-time residence. The apartment sold the next year.

Justices Elena Kagan and Neil Gorsuch said the county’s position appeared to be that it could seize million-dollar properties over tiny tax bills. “So a $5 property tax, a million dollar property, good to go?” Gorsuch asked Neal Katyal, representing the county.

Cockburn:

Fauci, as usual, showed himself a master of illusion. Take his assertion that “only 68 percent of the country is vaccinated. If you rank us among both developed and developing countries, we do really poorly.” Really? Well that depends on what you mean by “vaccinated”. If that means you got the first shot — the only one that actually provided transmission protection — then the US actually did quite well, with 80 percent receiving at least one dose. Germany, Luxembourg and Austria are at 78 percent, and progressives’ favorite Scandinavian country, Sweden, sits at 76 percent. Even if you assume he meant “fully vaccinated” with the latest jab, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the Baltic states are all pretty darn close to the US’s 68 percent.

He plays the same game with the lab leak theory. Asked about the “lab leak versus natural origin” debate, Fauci said, “until you have a definitive proof of one or the other, it is essential to have an open mind. And I have been this way from the very beginning, David, notwithstanding the criticisms to the contrary.” Is that so? Cockburn certainly does not remember that, and neither, apparently, does Doctor Robert Redfield, the CDC director at the time, who claims that Fauci slammed the door shut on the lab leak hypothesis pretty early on. 

And that’s not all! Fauci, in response to an inquiry about gain of function funding, claimed:

…..

“Well, I sleep fine, I sleep fine”, he added, before defending the research as “not conceived by me as I was having my omelet in the morning. It is a grant that was put before peer review of independent scientists whose main role is to try to get data to protect the health and safety of the American public and the world.” Whatever the facts are in this case, the response is a microcosm of the broader problem: Fauci cannot seem to accept any culpability, it is always someone else’s fault — the politicians, the Republicans who “don’t like to be told what to do,” or the “independent scientists” — and rarely his own. 

Cockburn, more than anything else, would just like to see Fauci show — even if it’s feigned — some understanding of the concerns his critics bring to the table, some recognition of his own faults. That would require introspection, though, and despite all of his skills, that one is conspicuously lacking.

Jerry A. Coyne and Anna I. Krylov:

Until a few months ago, we’d never heard of the Journal of Controversial Ideas, a peer-reviewed publication whose aim is to promote “free inquiry on controversial topics.” Our research typically didn’t fit that description. We finally learned of the journal’s existence, however, when we tried to publish a commentary about how modern science is being compromised by a de-emphasis on merit. Apparently, what was once anodyne and unobjectionable is now contentious and outré, even in the hard sciences.

Merit isn’t much in vogue anywhere these days. We’ve seen this in the trend among scientists to judge scientific research by its adherence to dominant progressive orthodoxies and in the growing reluctance of our institutions to hire and fund scientists based on their ability to propose and conduct exciting projects. Our intent was to defend established and effective practices of judging science based on its merit alone.

Joel Catkin:

But the Valley has slowly left the industrial battlefield — it has lost over 160,000 manufacturing positions over the past two decades. It bought into the idea that the unique genius of its financial and corporate culture would be enough for it to thrive and profit as production headed first to Japan, then China and, more recently, to other parts of North America.

This is a familiar story. Consider, for example, how British industry lost its edge: the Industrial Revolution created a new class of tycoons; then the tycoons’ sons sought a return to the aristocratic past, eschewing dirty factories for elegant postings in the City or a relaxed life in their country estates. More recently, Detroit’s world-beating automotive industry squandered its technological and manufacturing advantages in a rush, pushed by Wall Street and its own financial managers, to earn easy profits from inferior products.

To be clear, the Valley is not done as a major tech center. It still boasts a venture capital community, a remarkable concentration of engineering and other management talent, powerful universities and the headquarters of some of the biggest companies in the world. And it remains home to many of the tech giants that now exploit their monopolistic advantages. But that is not the same thing as being the place where the world looks for a vision of the future, as it once was. Even if the Valley still matters, it may no longer dominate the future as its denizens once assumed it would. Instead, it will face fierce competition for tech supremacy — from other countries, and other parts of this one.

This reflects two different phenomena: rising competition from other regions — and an internal rot that has infected the Valley. In its first few remarkable decades, the Valley was defined by its openness, its culture of competition and connection to the general economy. The people who built it, such as David Packard and Bill Hewlett, Fairchild Semiconductor co-founder Robert Noyce, and Apple’s Steve Jobs were, foremost, industrialists. They had a vision of how to use new technology to enhance productivity and make money.

Wall Street Journal:

Gov. Ron De­San­tis is cred­ited with forc­ing a re­write of a new high-school AP class in African-Amer­i­can Stud­ies, af­ter Flor­ida balked at such les­son top­ics as “Black Queer Stud­ies.” Deny­ing pres­sure, the Col­lege Board said the re­vi­sions were ped­a­gog­i­cal: “This course has been shaped only by the in­put of ex­perts and long-stand­ing AP prin­ci­ples and prac­tices.”

Yet its own fac­ulty ad­vis­ers pri­vately cas­ti­gated this as dis­hon­est spin, ac­cord­ing to emails we ob­tained via open-records laws. “I have pa­tiently and qui­etly watched the ubiq­ui­tous in­ter­views and me­dia as­ser­tions that AP would not make changes at the be­hest of any group be­yond pro­fes­sors, teach­ers, and stu­dents,” wrote Nis­hani Fra­zier, a Uni­ver­sity of Kan­sas pro­fes­sor who sits on the AP course’s de­vel­op­ment com­mit­tee. “If this is so, which stu­dent, pro­fes­sor, or teacher sug­gested adding black con­ser­v­a­tives to the course over Com­ba­hee River Col­lec­tive?”

Elon Musk and Bill Maher discuss the Woke Mind Virus and free speech.

“I can’t emphasize this enough. We must protect free speech… the thing about censorship, for those who advocate for it, at some point that will be turned on you.”

The woke mind virus “has been going on for… pic.twitter.com/9UE9mXj0kQ

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 29, 2023

Vinay Prasad:

Fauci’s next claim is that he always wanted school reopened. This is contradicted by a detailed timeline of his position on schools, which was consistently to fearmonger about kids and keep them closed.

In the summer of 2020, Fauci was still opposed to schools.

In spring 2020, when DeSantis reopened Fauci went on multiple news outlets to sabotage those efforts

As for Randi, the most accurate comment was in this clip from a distressed parent, pls click link below to watch it (substack not embedding it well).

Wall Street Journal:

It’s no secret that Randi Weingarten opposes co-locating charter schools in buildings that have a district public school. But the president of the American Federation of Teachers sits on the board of University Prep Charter Schools—a charter run by the local teachers union. On Wednesday New York’s Department of Education approved University Prep Charter’s bid for a permanent co-location for its middle school with a district school and another charter school.

The backdrop points to the stunning hypocrisy. Under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York approved dozens of co-locations for the simple reason that this is usually the speediest way to get these charters up and running. The unions understand that too, which is why they fight it.

This year the unions have succeeded in pressuring Mayor Eric Adams to cancel three co-location proposals for Success Academy charter schools by ginning up opposition. Success Academy is one of the city’s best-performing charter networks. Now the unions have brought a lawsuit to void two other Success Academy co-locations that were already approved. Well over a third of the city’s 275 charters are co-located because that is where the unused space is.