Steve Kirsch:

Georgia State Law School put together a “Restoring trust in the CDC and the FDA” conference in Atlanta. 

I think I can help with that but I was not asked to speak for some reason. I thought I have a valuable perspective to share.

I will be there with a cameraman and will try to see if I can help them with the “restoring trust” part. It will be fun.

You can attend too. It’s free. You can register for free.

Dell Cameron:

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has acknowledged for the first time that it purchased US location data rather than obtaining a warrant. While the practice of buying people’s location data has grown increasingly common since the US Supreme Court reined in the government’s ability to warrantlessly track Americans’ phones nearly five years ago, the FBI had not previously revealed ever making such purchases. 

The disclosure came today during a US Senate hearing on global threats attended by five of the nation’s intelligence chiefs. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, put the question of the bureau’s use of commercial data to its director, Christopher Wray: “Does the FBI purchase US phone-geolocation information?” Wray said his agency was not currently doing so, but he acknowledged that it had in the past. He also limited his response to data companies gathered specifically for advertising purposes. 

“To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising,” Wray said. “I understand that we previously—as in the past—purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that’s not been active for some time.” He added that the bureau now relies on a “court-authorized process” to obtain location data from companies.

Brooke Allen:

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet. Cyber-cheating, even assuming they wanted to indulge in it, is impossible. But more important, they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones. My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.

Douglas Murray:

In recent weeks I have been trying out a mental exercise. Perhaps you might join me? Cast your mind back to 1999. We were standing on the dawn of a new millennium. True, there was a strange fear that all the computers might crash because of a bug called Y2K. But aside from that there seemed to be a tremendous optimism. One of the biggest causes for this was the nature of information technology: specifically, the internet.

Imagine if someone had said to you then: “We are heading into a world where almost anything can be…

Betsy Woodruff Swan:

Carrie Bachner, formerly the career senior legislative adviser to the DHS under secretary for intelligence, said the fact that the agency is directly questioning Americans as part of a domestic-intelligence program is deeply concerning, given the history of scandals related to past domestic-intelligence programs by the FBI.

Bachner, who served as a DHS liaison with Capitol Hill from 2006 to 2010, said she told members of Congress “adamantly” — over and over and over again — that I&A didn’t collect intelligence in the U.S.

“I don’t know any counsel in their right mind that would sign off on that, and any member of Congress that would say, ‘That’s OK,’” said Bachner, who currently runs a consulting firm. “If these people are out there interviewing folks that still have constitutional privileges, without their lawyer present, that’s immoral.”

DHS Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis Kenneth Wainstein, a former federal prosecutor who took the helm of I&A last June, said in a statement that his office is addressing its employees’ concerns. An I&A spokesperson provided POLITICO with a list of steps the office has taken since September 2020 to address internal complaints, including conducting a number of new trainings and hiring two full-time ombudsmen.

Suzy Weiss:

When it was time for Sam Beyda, then a freshman at Columbia University, to take his Calculus I midterm, the professor told students they had 90 minutes. 

But the exam would be administered online. And even though every student was expected to take it alone, in their dorms or apartments or at the library, it wouldn’t be proctored. And they had 24 hours to turn it in.

“Anyone who hears that knows it’s a free-for-all,” Beyda told me. 

Beyda, an economics major, said students texted each other answers; looked up solutions on Chegg, a crowdsourced website with answers to exam questions; and used calculators, which were technically verboten. 

He finished the exam in under an hour, he said. Other students spent two or three hours on it. Some classmates paid older students who had already taken the course to do it for them. 

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.

Texit: “a referendum on the ballot during the next general election, allowing the people of Texas to vote on whether or not the State should investigate the possibility of Texas independence.” https://t.co/WC5Zdfy9he

— Balaji (@balajis) March 7, 2023

11. Who’s in the Censorship-Industrial Complex? Twitter in 2020 helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020.

The National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, are key: pic.twitter.com/7lLlL2tcjN

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023

15. The report was co-authored by Katie Couric and Chris Krebs, the founder of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yoel Roth of Twitter and Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook were technical advisors. Prince Harry joined Couric as a Commissioner. pic.twitter.com/lV8coy43Hn

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023

16. Their taxpayer-backed conclusions: the state should have total access to data to make searching speech easier, speech offenders should be put in a “holding area,” and government should probably restrict disinformation, “even if it means losing some freedom.” pic.twitter.com/YTVu98FPLV

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023

44. Twitter told this to reporters who asked about the story contemporaneously. Moreover, after the story broke, Twitter’s Roth wrote:

“There have been other instances in which domestic actors created fake accounts… some are fairly prominent in progressive circles.” pic.twitter.com/qMnjpKVLZl

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) March 9, 2023

Matt Taibbi’s opening statement on the Twitter Files and the censorship industrial complex:

“Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation requests from every corner of government, from the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global… https://t.co/WiLeCYXmvx pic.twitter.com/BbMoSYNiR2

— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 9, 2023

Rep. Dan Bishop plays a clip of Richard Stengel, the founder of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, saying:

“I’m not against propaganda. Every country does it; they have to do it to their own population, and I don’t think it’s that awful.”https://t.co/kH613j4NGq pic.twitter.com/zvllaC8b5D

— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 9, 2023

The Washington Post, which is the newspaper of record for our nation’s capital and charges $416/yr for daily delivery, is now featuring TikTok retread listicles as their section front lead stories. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ pic.twitter.com/QbR3cbVhfi

— David Hobby (@strobist) March 9, 2023

Summer Allen:

A new study finds that high school students identify more with math if they see their math teacher treating everyone in the class equitably, especially in racially diverse schools. The study by researchers at Portland State University, Loyola University Chicago and the University of North Texas was published in the journal Sociology of Education. Dara Shifrer, associate professor of sociology at Portland State and former middle school math teacher, led the study.

Who can do well in math? How you answer that question may depend on where you live. Whereas people in East Asian countries tend to believe that hard work can lead anyone to succeed at math, people in the United States are more likely to believe that people need natural talent in the subject to succeed. This perception means that students in the U.S. may be particularly susceptible to racial and gender stereotypes about who is and is not “good at math.”

“Americans don’t realize what strange stereotypes we have about math,” says Shifrer. “It really sets kids up for failure here.”

The fact that some high school students are more likely to give up on math than others has important implications for their individual futures and for the lack of diversity in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers.

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

http://seattlemathgroup.blogspot.com/.

Discovery Math

Connected math.

Singapore Math

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

Ann Althouse:

“… to disclose that video and they did not do so. And all the while, they were actively representing to the court and the American people that Jake was a leader, leading the charge into the Capitol….They did not disclose that footage because it ran contrary to their rote narrative…. I’ve never seen anything so vile as what I’m seeing right now…. It’s a departure from a pretty high standard they’ve maintained for a long time. Anyone who needs to have belief in the integrity of our justice system, whether they’re a left-wing New England academic or a raging right-winger, needs to say that this is really wrong and f—ing it up for everyone.”

Josh Christenson

Nearly 6,000 US public schools are employing guidance policies that block parents from knowing whether their child identifies as a different gender in the classroom — which could become federal policy if President Biden’s Title IX proposals are approved in May.

At least 168 school districts nationwide have rules on the books that prevent faculty and staff from disclosing to parents a student’s gender status without that student’s permission, according to a list compiled by the conservative group Parents Defending Education and shared with The Post.

More than 3.2 million students are affected by such policies in all kinds of districts — large and small, affluent and poor, urban and rural, red and blue — stretching from North Carolina to Alaska.

When I saw this graph, I felt like I finally understood the phenomenon of woke mobs. pic.twitter.com/VVfhPrrxPW

— Paul Graham (@paulg) March 6, 2023

David Foster

Reading the above, the first thing that struck me was that a university dean, especially one who is an English professor, should not view the 19th century as ‘a very long time ago’…most likely, though, she herself probably does not have such a foreshortened view of time,  rather, she’s probably describing what she observes as the perspective of her students (though it’s hard to tell from the quote).  It does seem very likely that the K-12 experiences of the students have been high on presentism, resulting in students arriving at college  “with a sense that the unenlightened past had nothing left to teach,” as a junior professor who joined the faulty in 2021 put it.  One would hope, though, that to the extent Harvard admits a large number of such students, it would focus very seriously on challenging that worldview.  I do not get the impression that it actually does so.

In a discussion of the above passage at Twitter, Paul Graham @PaulG said:

One of the reasons they have such a strong “orientation toward the present” is that the past has been rewritten for a lot of them.

to which someone responded: 

that’s always been true! it’s not like the us didn’t rewrite the history of the civil war to preserve southern feelings for 100 years. what’s different is that high schools are no longer providing the technical skills necessary for students to read literature!

Kimberly Wethal:

The city of Madison is gearing up to sue carmakers Kia and Hyundai for creating a public nuisance by failing to equip their vehicles with anti-theft software, which it says led to a sharp uptick in the theft of the companies’ vehicles last year.

The City Council on Tuesday passed a resolution authorizing the city to hire outside legal counsel to file a federal lawsuit against Kia and Hyundai for what the city in a statement called their “role in creating a public nuisance.”

Car thefts dropped by 5% in Madison last summer, compared to the prior year, but thefts of Kia and Hyundai vehicles increased by 270%, making up 45% of all stolen auto cases in July and August. Rates of Kia and Hyundai thefts are even higher in Milwaukee, where the two brands comprise 60% of all stolen autos.

Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Sydney are marvels of machine learning. Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought. These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity and every other distinctively human faculty.

That day may come, but its dawn is not yet breaking, contrary to what can be read in hyperbolic headlines and reckoned by injudicious investments. The Borgesian revelation of understanding has not and will not — and, we submit, cannot — occur if machine learning programs like ChatGPT continue to dominate the field of A.I. However useful these programs may be in some narrow domains (they can be helpful in computer programming, for example, or in suggesting rhymes for light verse), we know from the science of linguistics and the philosophy of knowledge that they differ profoundly from how humans reason and use language. These differences place significant limitations on what these programs can do, encoding them with ineradicable defects.

It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.

Noah Smith:

Despite the relentless hype, I think AI overall is underhyped. The long-term effects of AI will affect our society to a greater degree than electricity and fire, but its full effects will take centuries to play out. That means that we’ll be arguing, discussing, and wrangling with the changes brought about by AI for the next 10 decades. Because AI operates so close to our own inner self and identity, we are headed into a century-long identity crisis.

Michael Worobey:

We should instead be asking: What is the chance that a big Chinese city like Wuhan would have a lab doing the kind of research that has come under suspicion? The answer is, the vast majority of the biggest cities in China have labs involved in such research. If COVID had emerged in, say, Beijing, there would be no fewer than four such labs facing suspicion.

I remain open to any and all evidence supporting a laboratory origin of the pandemic. So far, we have no such evidence.

Philip Greenspun:

We are informed that racism is a public health emergency (example from Minneapolis; and “Declare Racism a Public Health Emergency” (New York Times)). Yet, according to the above chart, the emergency is not so severe as to preclude a “Pause for February Vacation”. It is okay to sit on the beach in Aruba while daily oppression continues.

The white background indicates that white is the default and/or preferred race? One good thing about our former town is that I’m pretty sure almost everyone there is qualified as an expert on the Day 4 subject: “What is Whiteness?” Also note that the next step after identifying as 2SLGBTQQIA+ is joining the military (days 18 and 19).

Tyler Cowen:

The evidence is striking. One study of CEOs of large Swedish companies found that on average they ranked at the 83rd percentile of measured IQ (for CEOs of smaller companies, the rank was the 66th percentile). That’s above average, but it’s hardly a cluster at the top of the distribution. Many CEOs undoubtedly achieved their position through hard work, charisma, people skills and other abilities, not to mention luck.

In the broader distribution, the connection between IQ and income is also positive but underwhelming. One study concluded that moving from the 25th to the 75th percentile of IQ correlates with a 10% to 16% boost in earnings. That may feel significant when you get it, but it doesn’t push you into a whole new socioeconomic class.

Glenn Reynolds:

I was right about all that, though it was worse than I anticipated.  And yet Covid was, it turned out, not as bad as I anticipated.  In the early days, I was a Covid hawk, but I was wrong to be.  It seemed right at the time.  The Chinese called it a “grave” threat, and their tendency had always been to downplay bad things in China.  There were reports of death rates ranging from 4% to 10%.

Sure, Anthony Fauci and Nancy Pelosi and Bill DeBlasio were telling us not to worry and go visit Chinatown, but I lacked confidence in them.  (Hey, I was right about that.)  They reversed course like a week later.

It turned out, of course, that Covid’s mortality rate was significantly less than 1/10 of those early reports, and those deaths were mostly concentrated among the obese, the elderly, and those with heart failure and diabetes.  (Even in those early days, just about exactly three years ago now, my yoga teacher told me that her son-in-law, an ER doc in New Orleans, said that all his Covid ICU patients were morbidly obese).  Neither the lockdowns nor the masking requirements did any good, really, though they caused a lot of trauma, inconvenience, and colossal economic destruction.

In retrospect, I should have been more skeptical.  It’s hard to believe that I, of all people, trusted the government too much, but there you are.  Well, lesson learned.

In mitigation, I should note that co-bloggers Sarah Hoyt and Charlie Martin were as skeptical as I should have been. There were people who wanted me to shut them down, but that’s not how we work at InstaPundit, and even then I was open to – and hopeful for – the prospect that they might be right, as of course they were, and I might be wrong, as of course I was.

Kadjata Bah, age 18

new documentary film called The Right to Readadds to growing national debates about literacy and the science of reading. This timely and compelling film is streaming for free until March 9, 2023.

Directed by Jenny Mackenzie and produced by LeVar Burton, the film follows a long-time activist, a teacher, and two families as they navigate the future of education.

Kareem Weaver is an Oakland-based activist with the NAACP. He is an experienced educator, and his mission is to create a world where 95% of children can read. Working with Sabrina Causey, a rookie first grade teacher in Oakland, the two make a case for a new curriculum for their students based in the science of reading.

The film comes right as the “reading wars” of the 1990s have come to another head. The debate between the research-based science of reading and the whole language or balanced literacy approach now holds more dire consequences for the crisis American children face.

Currently, 37% of fourth graders in the U.S. read below grade level. While literacy is a concern for all children, gaps are especially pronounced among children of color. In fact, about 50% of all Black students graduate high school reading below grade level. Illiteracy is not only an academic burden as research shows that people who cannot read proficiently are more likely to end up in prison, homeless, and unemployed.

“Imagine being in the Stone Age and you ain’t got no stone. Imagine being in the Bronze Age and you ain’t got no bronze. We’re in the Information Age right now—and you can’t read the information,” said Weaver while explaining the current reading crisis.

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?

Andrew Stauffer:

In “Church Going”—Philip Larkin’s 1955 poem on the fade-out of religious faith in the modern world—the narrator wonders why, despite his own apathy and ignorance, he keeps visiting churches. Bicycling on Sunday afternoons, he finds himself “tending to this cross of ground,” even as he recognizes they no longer have the power to hold “unspilt . . . what since is found / Only in separation.” Looking forward, he wonders “when churches will fall completely out of use / What we shall turn them into,” imagining most of them slowly crumbling to ruin amid rain and sheep, with only “a few cathedrals” kept “chronically on show.” The poem ends as he tries to foresee “who / Will be the last, the very last,” to seek a church “for what it was,” the final representative of beliefs wedded to practices within “the special shell” created to house them.

Larkin’s poem has been coming to mind lately as I visit libraries, and I’ve begun to wonder to what extent my interactions with them and their contents are becoming anomalous, a twilit posture. Many institutions have moved, or are on the verge of moving, significant portions of their collections off-site. Some are embarking on large-scale book de-accessioning projects, a process by which books are removed permanently from a collection. Across North America, academic library buildings themselves are being reconfigured as “information hubs” and “learning spaces.” 

Going forward, what will be the claim of printed materials on our resources, our scholarship, and our imaginations?

The Times:

Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race.

Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matildaand Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.

Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle.

Bob McManus:

n mid-January, when Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez grandly announced it will no longer be necessary to do college-level academic work to receive graduation credit at CUNY’s seven community colleges.

How long it will take for that policy to migrate to the institution’s 11 senior colleges is anybody’s guess; entropy being what it is, however, it’ll happen soon enough — if it hasn’t already.

Here’s a summary of the sad facts.

CUNY’s student body overwhelmingly is drawn from the New York City public-school system. Way back in the day, when city schools more or less worked, CUNY freshmen arrived more or less prepared for college-level instruction.

Dr. Tomas Aragón

Decision-making is our most important activity.¹“A decision is a choice between two or more alternatives that involves an irrevocable allocation of resources.” Decisions drive vision, strategy, policy, and transformational change. Every decision has causal assumptions, predictions, trade-offs, and an opportunity cost—the lost benefit of the better option(s) not chosen or not considered. Some decisions have extreme time constraints under deep uncertainty.

Decision intelligence is using ethics, science, and technology to improve individual and team decisions for finding and solving problems, and achieving objectives and key results in challenging, including VUCA,² environments (Figure 1).

David Zweig:

Long famous as the core of Silicon Valley, Santa Clara County, California, also earned the distinction in the last three years as perhaps the most aggressive and punitive enforcer of pandemic restrictions in the country. On March 16, 2020, Santa Clara, along with a half-dozen other Bay Area counties, was the first in the nation to announce a shelter in place order, commanding all citizens to remain at home other than for specific activities that the county deemed essential, such as food shopping or medical care. It wasn’t until mid-October — seven months after the initial order — that Sara Cody, the head of the county’s public health department, began allowing indoor gatherings at churches, provided they were no more than 100 people or 25 percent of a facility’s capacity, whichever was fewer. At these limited gatherings face coverings and social distancing were required, and singing was banned.

San Jose’s Calvary Chapel, led by its pastor, Mike McClure, brazenly defied these orders. On May 24, 2020, McClure stated publicly that he would reopen the church the following week, regardless of the health department’s orders, and that he would never close the church again. After two months of isolation, many congregants were teetering toward despair. They were suffering greatly from loneliness, depression, and crippling anxiety — the church was their community, and returning to the normalcy of its rituals and in-person fellowship was vital for their mental, spiritual, and physical well-being. 

True to McClure’s word, at the end of May Calvary began holding indoor gatherings, often with hundreds of worshipers, a large portion of whom were without masks, in breach of distancing rules, and singing. This set off a collision between the openly defiant church and the county that culminated in two lawsuits. One, in federal court, in June 2020, by the church against the county, claiming the restrictions violated a list of constitutional rights, and the other, in state court, in October 2020, by the county against the church, for “flagrantly and repeatedly” violating public health orders and nonpayment of fines.

Lowest excess deaths in Europe over 2020 to 2022 goes to … Sweden, the one country that did not panic and toss out all wisdom.https://t.co/ue0cm8Qn1C pic.twitter.com/vzGW0msDKd

— Mark Changizi (@MarkChangizi) March 5, 2023

Joanne Jacobs:

Math scores are way down: The Education Recovery Scorecard estimates students lost half a year. But Boaler believes it doesn’t matter. It’s “quite clear” the students gained “knowledge and insights about the world, health challenges, global upheaval, exponential growth, technology, and ways to help their families and navigate complex social situations,” she writes.

This is not clear to me at all. If anything, it’s quite clear that many lost the ability to navigate complex — or even simple — social situations, and I’m dubious about their knowledge and insights too. Screen time soared. That doesn’t mean they’re masters of technology. Physical and mental health declined.

Learning math matters, responds Fordham’s Nathaniel Grossman. Two decades of growth was “wiped out in just three years,” NAEP scores revealed. If we don’t do something about learning loss, this generation could be locked out of high-paying STEM careers, he writes. “One Stanford economist estimates that it’ll reduce the lifetime earnings of students by $70,000 and cause a $28 trillion hit to the American economy.”

Ryan Tracy:

The Federal Trade Commission has demanded Twitter Inc. turn over internal communications related to owner Elon Musk, as well as detailed information about layoffs—citing concerns that staff reductions could compromise the company’s ability to protect users, documents viewed by the Wall Street Journal show.

In 12 letters sent to Twitter and its lawyers since Mr. Musk’s Oct. 27 takeover, the FTC also asked the company to “identify all journalists” granted access to company records and to provide information about the launch of the revamped Twitter Blue subscription service, the documents show.

The FTC is also seeking to depose Mr. Musk in connection with the probe.

“We are concerned these staff reductions impact Twitter’s ability to protect consumers’ information,” an FTC official wrote to Twitter’s lawyers on Nov. 10 following an initial wave of layoffs, according to a copy of the letter viewed by the Journal.

DPI response to critic’s audit. https://t.co/4Yl1AvS6og

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) March 8, 2023

About 25 to 27 minutes into the program.

Jeff Mayers: “You want a big hunk of the surplus to go to K-12, you’ve already talked about that along with the state school Superintendent. I want to focus a bit on the reading program. Last session you vetoed a bi-partisan bill to boost reading scores. This time around, there’s something in the budget about that. I’m wondering, what is your approach vs what that approach was? How does it differ? What’s your view as a former school Superintendent on the state of reading in Wisconsin?

Governor Evers: “Well, I’ll start with the latter, it has to be better. It cannot exist as it does right now. Certainly the pandemic played a huge role in that, but at the end of the day, we’ve struggled with reading outcomes for some time. We need to take a different look at it. The difference between that bill and what’s in the budget now is frankly that I thought the bill took away authority from the local boards of education in the State which I think is the wrong approach.

This is more about retraining teachers and providing support to teaching staff as it relates to reading, and I think its a winner, I think it adopts practices that we’ve seen working across the country. I think its a step in the right direction. It’s pricey, there’s no question about that. But education is where our economy starts and ends, frankly. If we don’t invest and take care of issues that are difficult we are hurting our state’s economy and our quality of life.”

Jeff Mayers: “There does seem to be a consensus building around that.” Governor Evers: “Yes, that’s a good thing.”

Governor Evers vetoed AB446 during the fall of 2021.

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?

Audio

Transcript

One of the line items in Wisconsin Motion 57 directly connects to our ED prep programs and reading. It states that Wisconsin will [00:11:00] contract with a vendor who will conduct an analysis of reading program coursework in our UW institutions. After engaging in our very robust and required state procurement process, the Department of Administration selected a vendor for that work.

[00:11:15] That vendor is TPI Today, March 2nd, ironically, national Read Across America Day. Uh, that vendor is meeting with the deans of our Schools of Education in the UW system in order to provide details and timelines about that opportunity. The other thing that Motion 57 provides for is additional funds for grants for those UW systems that want to make changes to their courses.

Based on the findings and the report of that vendor, T P I us, I bring this to your attention to remind us of an existing policy that is currently in the early stages of implementation that could also have a real impact on [00:12:00] reading achievement in Wisconsin. We are definitely taking both and approaches in every step of the way.

…..

[00:27:25] Senator John Jagler: So to, to that end. If you’ve already kind of identified some that you would recommend, and they’re not the local, we are a local control state. I ran for state senate, not for Watertown school, district School board. But having said that, if 80% of the school districts aren’t recommending what youth put out there on, on a general level, would you then support a, a type of bill that had included a package that, that eliminated some of the bad programs and curriculum, the queuing method, fountain and Pinnell as, as the professor recommended.

…..

[00:45:09] It’s important to note here that while while many states, um, went in the direction of eliminating lifetime teaching licenses in order to add professional learning requirements, in Wisconsin, we did the opposite. We used to have professional learning requirements for our educators, and we eliminated those in the favor of having lifetime licenses.

Additional testimony: Mark Seidenberg Kymyona Burk Instructional Coach Kyle Thayse

3 Minute Summary by Senator Duey Stroebel

Transcript

mp3 Audio Entire hearing video.

An interesting excerpt, regarding their use of the discredited Lucy Caulkins Reading Curriculum (see Sold a Story):

Senator John Jagler. Thank you. I, as I talked to, to my local administrators, [00:21:00] um, I’m fascinated. Curriculum choices that have been made and continue to be made.

[00:21:06] And I’m, I’m, I’m quite honestly surprised you, you, you double down on one of the bad actors, uh, not my words, I’m not an expert, but identified Lucy Calkins in this units of study as one of the bad actors, a bad actors in this, um, whole fight on the science of reading. Why did you go there? Why did you go back to, to you, you know, went back to her version 2.0, which her critics would say, were only done because the spotlight was being shined on her by, by others.

[00:21:42] Kyle Thayse: I knew this question was coming today, so I kind of prepared myself. I thought that that was gonna be asked. So, um, you know, there was, there’s a couple, a couple of reasons. I think as a district, we, we, we made that decision. Um, and I’ll be honest, I was, I was, I was for it. Um, and, and a lot of it is, The, um, the [00:22:00] professional development that, um, I feel like we were able to lead through the district outside of the curriculum problems.

[00:22:08] Kyle Thayse: The what, what the curriculum brought to the table as far as the growth of our teachers, the tightness, the, the tightness, and the, uh, the collegial conversations about learning that happened on a daily basis in, in our classrooms. It was brought upon by that, by the models of that. and, um, above that second grade level, we, we don’t have, there’s, there’s no real issues, you know, with the curriculum.

[00:22:32] Kyle Thayse: It’s, it’s, it’s robust, it has great topics. Um, kids are exposed to a lot of different vocabulary with within it, and even at the lower levels it is too. Um, we did identify those problems that were in there and, uh, we didn’t, we didn’t take the full leap of faith right away. We purchased first the, the manuals and, um, I tasked myself with reading.

[00:22:50] Kyle Thayse: Every kindergarten manual, every first grade manual said to me, those were the two most important, uh, manuals. Every unit in that manual to identify in there, do, do I find [00:23:00] any of this at all? And, um, there was one little spot that I was concerned and I thought we were gonna have an issue. . Um, but what ended up happening was the, that part of the unit was actually more of an emergent reader.

[00:23:10] Kyle Thayse: Early, early literacy before students are even learning sounds, portion of the curriculum, um, where students were, were learning. Uh, the, the pattern part of the book was more of the memorization, the storytelling part where kids learn how stories go. This is like 4K, early kindergarten curriculum stuff. And, um, And past that, there were, I, they, there was the use of decodable texts.

[00:23:30] Kyle Thayse: There was, um, there was not any of the use of, of of, of the, uh, use the picture to solve the word. There was, um, a lot, uh, actually I would say almost triple the amount of lessons on phonics and emmic awareness within the actual reading curriculum. I mean, this is outside of the phonic tum that we already used.

[00:23:46] Kyle Thayse: Um, so once we saw that all in there, um, the price tag on a whole new curriculum, uh, the professional development that goes along. Um, and, and, and the time that it would take, uh, we thought we would be able to move faster as long [00:24:00] as the right tools were in there and we felt the tools were there.

Additional testimony: Mark Seidenberg Kymyona Burk DPI

3 Minute Summary by Senator Duey Stroebel

Scott Girard:

An effort that began in summer 2021 to gauge the Madison Metropolitan School District’s equity work found that students, parents and staff are aware of some district efforts toward diversity, equity and inclusion but want more involvement and more communication with district administration.

The district partnered with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University, for the work, which included interviews of 380 people. Jackson was the director of the Wisconsin Equity & Inclusion Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin-Madison until last summer when he left for MSU.

On Monday, Jackson presented the findings to the Madison School Board along with seven recommendations:

• Develop and disseminate a DEI strategic plan

• Create systems of rewards and accountability for MMSD DEI efforts

• Generate a strategy for hiring and retaining teachers of color

• Engage families in DEI efforts

• Review and standardize DEI curriculum and implementation efforts across the MMSD

• Emphasize and advance diversity in all its forms

• Provide transparent, accessible, and safe opportunities for feedback to MMSD leaders

District officials and School Board members suggested changes in response to the audit must work in conjunction with changes resulting from the recent human resources report and the ongoing strategic framework recalibration process. Superintendent Carlton Jenkins said moving toward equity will require a “collaborative effort” with the board, administration and community involved.

“This has got to be all in,” Jenkins said.

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?

Bianca Vasquez Toness

“I’m sad and disappointed,” Joseph said through an interpreter. “It’s only because I was assigned an educational advocate that I know this about my son.”

It’s widely known from test scores that the pandemic set back students across the country. But many parents don’t realize that includes their own child.

Schools have long faced criticism for failing to inform certain parents about their kids’ academic progress. But after the COVID-19 school closures, the stakes for children have in many ways never been greater. Opportunities to catch up are plentiful in some places, thanks to federal COVID aid, but won’t last forever. It will take better communication with parents to help students get the support they need, experts say

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?

Holly Else

In 2018, an influential group of research funders announced a bold pledge: the scientists they fund should publish their peer-reviewed papers outside journal paywalls. The initiative, called Plan S, caused an instant uproar over its aim of ending journal subscription models — the means by which many scholarly publications have financed their existence. Its intended start date in 2020 was delayed, and its details were tweaked. But after much sparring over policy, the project formally began in 2021, with 25 funding agencies rolling out similar open-access (OA) mandates.

Steven Goldsmith:

I sit at the bedside grieving over medicine as it expires into a soulless technocracy. I watch its extremities cyanose as it struggles for air, its body reeking with the stench of commingled corruption and cowardice. Yet I hope for its resuscitation.

Exhibit A. Medical students report rates of depression up to 30% higher than the general population. About 400 U.S. physicians commit suicide annually, with the rate for female physicians four times higher than among other female professionals. A 2015 survey reported that 13% of male physicians and 22% of female physicians suffered from alcohol abuse or dependence. A 2021 study found that 63% of U.S. physicians experienced burnout, with one in five intending to leave their practice within two years. These statistics attest to medicine’s core problem that affects the welfare of patients and the health, sanity, and professional longevity of physicians. It is this: we physicians have traded in our former gods for ersatz idols.

At my initial medical evaluation at a Kaiser hospital in Los Angeles, billed as a “Meet and Greet,” a fortyish man in a white coat entered my exam room and marched directly to a computer screen. There he sat without once looking at me, introducing himself, or shaking hands. He lobbed a litany of rote questions at me without a glance away from the screen. He seemed to be conversing with it, not with me. Was I watching a sci-fi depiction of intergalactic medical care on Alpha-Zebulon? I toyed with the notion of answering him in the beeps and whistles of R2-D2. Instead, after a few minutes I rose, said, “We’re done here,” and walked out. I don’t think he noticed.

The above scenario recurs daily in thousands of medical offices. Sir William Osler said, “The good physician treats the disease; the great physician treats the patient who has the disease.” Most modern doctors are not Osler’s healers of people but normalizers of data. Physicians comb computer printouts of molecular titers for hieratic meaning. Internists may order such tests before they even see a patient. However, only whole human beings reveal ultimate clinical truths. In atomizing patients into their tiniest components, MDs disconnect from patients and themselves. If docs spent more than five minutes per appointment and peppered their interviews with interest and caring, those pesky lumps of flesh on the exam table could sprout into actual people. What patients can reveal if given a chance would surprise clinicians and obviate hundreds of tests. Unless doctors start treating whole people, AI will displace them, and no one will know the difference.

Tat Bellamy-Walker

“Adding more AAPI history curriculums would solidify the fact that Asians are Americans and Asians belong here,” Fedor said. “Had a lot of my classmates learned about AAPI being called ‘yellow peril’ in the past or about the Chinese Exclusion Act or the plague outbreak in San Francisco’s Chinatown — had they learned about that, maybe they would have thought back before they said these insensitive comments.” 

New Jersey is slated to become the second state to mandate Asian American history as part of its public school curriculum, after Illinois did so in July. Ohio, California, New York, Florida and Connecticut have ignited similar pushes for curricula that are inclusive of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Last year, lawmakers in California passed legislation requiring ethnic studies, which focuses on Asian Americans and other racial groups, in high school.

According to California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, the lessons include dismantling the model minority myth, xenophobia, bigotry and other forms of institutional privilege. 

“It presents a false narrative that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) have overcome racism and prejudice,” the lesson plan read. “Students will understand how this label for AAPIs becomes a hindrance to expanding democratic structures and support, and worst how it creates a division among the AAPI community and places a wedge between them and other oppressed groups.” 

Chronicle:

“Defeated,” “exhausted,” “overwhelmed” — these were typical responses when TheChronicle asked faculty members how their students were faring. Professors reported widespread anxiety, depression, and a lack of motivation in their classrooms. Recent survey data from the Center for Collegiate Mental Health show a rise in students’ reports of their social anxiety and academic worries. Professors, meanwhile, are frustrated by their inability to reach those students. And they’re worn out from trying. “It feels like I’m pouring energy into a void,”

Heather MacDonald:

Sometimes a single incident efficiently summarizes a larger trend. So it is with New York University’s selection of its new president, Linda Mills, a licensed clinical social worker and an NYU social work professor. She researches trauma and bias, as well as race and gender in the legal academy. She is a documentary filmmaker and teaches advocacy filmmaking. She serves as an NYU vice chancellor and as a senior vice provost for Global Programs and University Life. In all these roles, Mills is the very embodiment of the contemporary academy. The most significant part of her identity, however, and the one that ties the rest of her curriculum vitae together, is that she is female, and thus overdetermined as NYU’s next president.

Mills is part of the Great Feminization of the American university, an epochal change whose consequences have yet to be recognized. Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.

These female leaders emerge from an ever more female campus bureaucracy, whose size is reaching parity with the faculty. Females made up 66 percent of college administrators in 2021; those administrators constitute an essential force in campus diversity ideology, whether they have “diversity” in their job titles or not. Among the official diversity bureaucrats installed in their posts since July 2022, females predominate: the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at the University of California, San Diego; the vice chancellor for equity, diversity, and inclusion at UCLA; the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Maryville University in Missouri; the chief diversity officer and vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the School of Education at the College of Charleston in South Carolina; the vice president for diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at Kansas State University; the associate dean of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging at the University of Kansas School of Law; the vice chancellor for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of California, Santa Cruz; the vice president for inclusion and community impact at Herzing University in Wisconsin; the associate provost for faculty and diversity initiatives at Muhlenberg College (this associate provost also became Muhlenberg’s first chief diversity officer); the first chief officer of culture, belonging, and community building at Delta College in Michigan; the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion at the State University of New York, Plattsburgh; the vice provost for faculty diversity, equity, and inclusivity at the University of Texas, Austin (a lateral move from the position of managing director of diversity in UT’s office of the executive vice president and provost); the vice president for equity, culture, and talent at Prince George’s Community College—all are female.

Brian Flood, Joseph Wulfsohn and David Rutz:

CNN has long referred to itself as “the most trusted name in news” and famously launched its “Facts First” campaign during the Trump era, but like many other outlets, that sentiment fell by the wayside when it came to the COVID lab-leak theory.

In recent days, the theory that COVID originated from a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology has been embraced by FBI Director Christopher Wray and a bombshell report indicated that the U.S. Energy Department believes the virus likely started in the lab, a sentiment expressed by top Trump administration officials nearly from the outset.

But in the early months of the pandemic, then-CNN president Jeff Zucker would not allow his network to chase down the lab-leak story because he believed it was a “Trump talking point,” according to a well-placed CNN insider. 

“People are slowly waking up from the fog,” the insider told Fox News Digital. “It is kind of crazy that we didn’t chase it harder.”

NEW: The University of Houston System has ended the use of DEI statements in hiring and promotion.

“[W]e will not support or use DEI statements or factors in hiring or promotion anywhere in the University of Houston System.” pic.twitter.com/4fsUtTOgZD

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) March 6, 2023

WSBT:

Police say 28-year-old Thomas Jurgens, who works as a staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center, was one of only two Georgia residents involved in the chaos.

Virginia Postrel:

Most of the coverage of Japan’s aging population focuses on the current low birth rate and its implications for the future. In January, prime minister Fumio Kishida told legislators that the country is “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” because of its falling birth rate. “In thinking of the sustainability and inclusiveness of our nation’s economy and society, we place child-rearing support as our most important policy,” he said.

But even if the government succeeds in goosing the birth rate, the effects will be felt decades from now. Japan has an immediate problem that dates back to policies adopted in 1948. People over 75 now make up 15 percent of the population, and they don’t have a lot of kids to take care of them. Japan’s postwar baby boom lasted only about two years. By contrast, the U.S. experienced high birth rates from 1946 to 1964. 

In 1948, the Diet passed the Eugenic Protection Law. It made abortions legal and cheap, about $10. “Critics assert that it is easier for a woman to avoid an unwanted child in this way than to have her tonsils re­moved,” The New York Times reported in 1964. “One result of the prac­tice has been the virtual elimi­nation of illegitimate births.”

Transcript:

$pending, K-12 Governance, Ed Schools and Reading Outcomes
[00:00:00] Senator Duey Stroebel: Actually looking at, uh, US census data, all funds, all sources. Um, Wisconsin’s at about $13,000 and Mississippi is about $9,200. So there’s significant that’s per the US census data, all funds, all sources. So pretty clear there. I think it’s, uh, we’re 23rd. They’re 47th. So, which I think bears out with her, uh, slide up there that showed that we spend, uh, about 37% more in education.

[00:00:29] Uh, than than they do. But, um, one thing I want to talk about, you know, we’re here to talk about, okay, how are we gonna improve reading and what’s the best technique to do that? And you talk about reading coaches and the resources and the things we’re doing to improve reading. It kind of seems like we’re beating the head against beating, we’re beating our head against the wall when we’re really not using the right techniques.

[00:00:53] I mean, we can throw all the money in the world and if we’re not doing it the right. , we’re not gonna see results. I mean, do you agree? Am I off the, [00:01:00] am I crazy about that? Or what?

[00:01:02] Laura Adams (Wisconsin DPI) We absolutely agree. Which is why that, why we are advocating not only for a recommended instructional materials list, but also resources to address the how, how our educators use those materials in order to provide the instruction to implement the evidence-based early reading, uh, instructional practices, and.

[00:01:23] The same thing at at higher ed, not only looking at the state statute to ensure that what we’re requiring of our higher ed programs includes all of the components of early evidence-based early reading practices, but that we also are in the position of providing them with some of the how.

Duey Stroebel: 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.

[00:01:52] I mean, I don’t. You know, that’s weird. Um, you’d think they should be the ones who would know the innovative ways to teach. Not that us [00:02:00] legislators have to create legislation to tell them how to teach the way, uh, scientific data shows should be taught. So I guess my point is that, you know, yes. Blaming on universities.

[00:02:12] Sure. Um, but we’re, um, spending money on all these things and we’re really not doing it right. So I, I guess the focus. I mean, the 15 million they do a year. I mean, that’s a drop in the bucket. But you know, when you look at the overall spending and when you look at what we’re spending now today to teach, uh, a curriculum that’s ineffective, I think maybe we really wanna focus on, okay, how do we, sad to say, have to retrain our teachers from what they learned at the university system.

[00:02:43] And, um, I, I think that that should be our focus. And after that, I feel very confident that once our teachers have been trained, That they’re gonna be able to deliver this content and our kids are gonna be able to excel. So, um, I’m not sure, you know, if it’s that much, uh, [00:03:00] money that we’re really even talking about here, considering when you look at the overall big picture on spending and kind of the fundamental flaw that we’re really trying to tackle at this point in time.

[00:03:10] So I guess that’s what, uh, I’d have to say. Thanks.

Earlier testimony: Kymyona Burk and Mark Seidenberg.

Related: 2021 Wisconsin AB446.

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?

Additional testimony: Mark Seidenberg Kymyona Burk DPI Instructional Coach Kyle Thayse

By Alicia Parlapiano, Margot Sanger-Katz and Josh Katz:

The federal deficit is expected to be so large over the next decade that it would take about $16 trillion in spending reductions or new revenues to balance the budget by 2033. That’s about the size of the entire Social Security program. Or the entire Medicare program in addition to every anti-poverty program and refundable tax credit. Those outlandish examples come from a recent analysis from the committee.

Balancing the budget without tax increases, or cuts to the military, Medicare or Social Security, would mean cutting the rest of the budget by a whopping 70 percent. Cuts of that magnitude would mean the firings of most federal workers in agencies like the F.B.I., the Parks Service and the State Department, and huge reductions in food assistance and military retirement.

John Dunlosky, Katherine A. Rawson, […], and Daniel T. Willingham

Many students are being left behind by an educational system that some people believe is in crisis. Improving educational outcomes will require efforts on many fronts, but a central premise of this monograph is that one part of a solution involves helping students to better regulate their learning through the use of effective learning techniques. Fortunately, cognitive and educational psychologists have been developing and evaluating easy-to-use learning techniques that could help students achieve their learning goals. In this monograph, we discuss 10 learning techniques in detail and offer recommendations about their relative utility. We selected techniques that were expected to be relatively easy to use and hence could be adopted by many students. Also, some techniques (e.g., highlighting and rereading) were selected because students report relying heavily on them, which makes it especially important to examine how well they work. The techniques include elaborative interrogation, self-explanation, summarization, highlighting (or underlining), the keyword mnemonic, imagery use for text learning, rereading, practice testing, distributed practice, and interleaved practice.

To offer recommendations about the relative utility of these techniques, we evaluated whether their benefits generalize across four categories of variables: learning conditions, student characteristics, materials, and criterion tasks. Learning conditions include aspects of the learning environment in which the technique is implemented, such as whether a student studies alone or with a group. Student characteristics include variables such as age, ability, and level of prior knowledge. Materials vary from simple concepts to mathematical problems to complicated science texts. Criterion tasks include different outcome measures that are relevant to student achievement, such as those tapping memory, problem solving, and comprehension.

Mark Judge:

There is a simple step America’s educators can take to improve civic awareness dramatically. Teach history backward.

That’s how I learned it. One of the best teachers I ever had was a man who taught me high school history. On the first day of class, he announced that we would be learning U.S. history starting with recent events. We began with Watergate and the Vietnam War, then moved back through the 1950s, the Red Scare, and the Korean War. From there, we covered World War II, the Great Depression, then the 1920s. Eventually, near the end of the school year, we found ourselves in the American Revolution.

It was a curriculum that worked brilliantly. It was the early 1980s, and Vietnam was something very real to those of us in high school and college. Many of us had friends, neighbors, and family members who had served in the war. It was exciting to study the conflict.

It also made liberal bias very difficult to weaponize. When the topic being taught involves living people who can challenge the accuracy of the curriculum, it makes it hard to bowdlerize the truth the way something like the “1619 Project” does.

In high school, I saw this in action. Our teacher presented both sides of the Vietnam War, both the anti-war movement and the men who had gone over there to fight. One memorable afternoon, we had, as a guest speaker, a Vietnam veteran. When one of the faculty members in the assembly got up to give a lecture about the “immoral war,” the man shot back: “All I know is we were there to fight communism and things got a lot worse when we left.”

Andy Kessler:

“I’m a capitalist,” President Biden said in the State of the Union address. Yeah, right. He then added, “But pay your fair share.” He’s missing the fashionable modifiers for capitalism: late, sustainable, patrimonial, state-directed. Real capitalism is, by definition, a meritocracy in which money flows to those providing the highest returns. No modifiers needed.

Why do I suspect this? Because Jared Bernstein—the economist who, like an old REO Speedwagon T-shirt, has been hanging around Joe Biden seemingly forever—said the quiet part out loud. Just before being nominated to run the Council of Economic Advisers, Mr. Bernstein told the Brookings Institution, “We’re trying to do, you know, what we believe, what the president believes . . . is really great, important policy on behalf of strengthening workers. And sometimes that’s not necessarily all kosher economics, sometimes it’s political economics. And sometimes you have to do things that may not be as aesthetically appealing in a neoclassical model.” Lael Brainard, nominated as director of the National Economic Council, worries about “irreversible ‘tipping points’ that introduce new climate shocks.” These aren’t the people who should be making economic policy.

What kickbacks? Start with up to $20,000 in student-loan forgiveness for tens of millions of voters who took on debt to overpay for college. Those who saved and paid retail get nothing. While it’s likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court, it’s also a kickback to universities that constantly raise prices and hire more administrators. In 2021 the average university had 45 diversity, equity and inclusion officers, according to a Heritage Foundation report.

Transcript

mp3 audio

www site

Additional testimony: Mark Seidenberg Instructional Coach Kyle Thayse DPI

3 Minute Summary by Senator Duey Stroebel

Steven Hayward:

You will get denounced as the wrong kind of elitist (by self-appointed elitists of the left being massively overproduced these days) if you dare to suggest that too many people are going to college because in fact a lot of high school graduates being pushed onto the college track are not suited for it. This becomes even more salient when pondering the liberal arts rightly understood, especially as the expectation or demand that everyone attend college today had led to the excessive growth of universities that leads in turn to the homogenization and dumbing down of higher education.

Hence, Leo Strauss from “Liberal Education and Responsibility”:

Paul Seddon:

Parents should face child benefit cuts if they fail to ensure their children turn up at school, cabinet minster Michael Gove has suggested.

Speaking at a think tank, the levelling up secretary said the idea could help restore an “ethic of responsibility”.

Mr Gove – who first proposed the idea in 2014 – said it would help tackle anti-social behaviour. 

Downing Street said parents could already be fined for children missing school.

The idea of cutting benefits for parents of truants was first suggested by Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2002, but it was dropped in favour of the current fines system.

Going on @SundayFutures now. Biden’s student loan forgiveness disaster is effectively a regressive tax disguised as a progressive policy. It’s also a symptom of what the U.S. Dept of Education does every day: tilting the scales in the wrong direction. That’s why I’ll shut it down https://t.co/vCzWxXqsSQ

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) March 5, 2023

Antonia Cundy:

Oxford university has continued to court the Sackler family over the past two years, bucking a trend for institutions to cut ties with the owners of the company at the heart of the deadly US opioid epidemic.

Documents seen by the Financial Times — including letters, bank statements and event attendee lists from 2020 to late last year — reveal how the elite university has extended exclusive invitations to a Sackler family member and accepted funds from Sackler family charities as it maintained the Sacklers’ naming rights on university buildings and fellowships.

They cover a period during which members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma have negotiated a multibillion-dollar bankruptcy settlement over their role in an epidemic estimated to have claimed more than half a million lives since 1999.

For years, aggressive marketing of OxyContin, the family firm’s prescription painkiller, played down its addictive qualities while netting the company tens of billions of dollars in revenue.

The documents relate to departments and colleges across the collegiate university, including the Ashmolean Museum, the university’s museum of art and archaeology, and Worcester College.

Suzy Weiss:

“Professors just don’t care,” he told me.

For decades, campus standards have been plummeting. The hallowed, ivy-draped buildings, the stately quads, the timeless Latin mottos—all that tradition and honor have been slipping away. That’s an old story. Then Covid struck and all bets were off. With college kids doing college from their bedrooms and smartphones, and with the explosion of new technology, cheating became not just easy but practically unavoidable. “Cheating is rampant,” a Princeton senior told me. “Since Covid there’s been an increasing trend toward grade inflation, cheating, and ultimately, academic mediocrity.” 

Now that students are back on campus, colleges are having a hard time putting the genie back in the bottle. Remote testing combined with an array of tech tools—exam helpers like Chegg, Course Hero, Quizlet, and Coursera; messaging apps like GroupMe and WhatsApp; Dropbox folders containing course material from years past; and most recently, ChatGPT, the AI that can write essays—have permanently transformed the student experience.

“It’s the Wild West when it comes to using emerging technologies and new forms of access to knowledge,” Gregory Keating, who has a joint appointment at USC’s Department of Philosophy and Gould School of Law, told me. “Faculties and administrations are scrambling to keep up.” 

Amy Kind, a philosophy professor at Claremont McKenna, said that, at the prestigious liberal arts college just east of Los Angeles, “Cheating is a big concern among the faculty.”

Nor do students have much incentive to turn back the clock: they’re getting better grades for less work than ever.

Margaret Peppiat:

Over 1,300 colleges and universities nationwide manage student behavior records about various “things related to a student’s conduct and well-being” with the same software company: Maxient.

Established in 2003, the software company provides client schools with the ability to create online reporting forms and keep records regarding student behavior.

“Whether it’s student discipline, academic integrity, care and concern records, Title IX matters, or just an ‘FYI’, Maxient’s Conduct Manager has you covered for all things related to a student’s conduct and well-being,” the company’s website states.

Lance Watson, senior client support specialist at Maxient, told The College Fix via email “the schools using a Maxient system have control over how they utilize it and even how they customize it,” such as how they might label the types of processes or issues being tracked.

They eliminated standardized testing before they eliminated legacy admissions. Tells you all you need to know. https://t.co/L9PgXqsi8p

— Rob Henderson (@robkhenderson) March 2, 2023

Michael Burke:

California’s community colleges do not employ enough full-time faculty and in some cases districts are misspending state funds allocated for those faculty instead on too many part-time adjuncts, according to a newly released report from California’s state auditor.

The audit, ordered last year by state lawmakers, probed hiring practices for full-time faculty at four community college districts: Foothill-De Anza, Kern, Los Rios and San Diego. Auditors also reviewed how those districts have spent state dollars, including $100 million provided by the Legislature in 2021 to help districts hire more full-time faculty.

California has had a longstanding goal that 75 percent of community college classes should be taught by full-time faculty, but the audit found that the districts are falling well short of that. At the San Diego district, just 50 percent of instruction is taught by full-time faculty. The district with the highest share, Sacramento-based Los Rios, was still only at 63 percent.

Freddie deBoer:

Columbia University is the latest high-profile university to abandon the SAT. As these institutions always are, they’re cagey about why, couching everything in buzzwords and euphemism. But you can be sure that the most powerful force driving the widespread effort to drop the SAT is the insistence that the SAT is an engine of racial inequality. This has been the claim, again and again, that we need to drop the SAT because its results are racially stratified. As I’ve argued at length, the gaps in SAT results are actually smaller than people on social media like to claim (which is unsurprising because most of them have never read the relevant literature). But the movement to get rid of the SAT and replace it with greater emphasis on high school GPA marches on. What remains utterly bizarre about all of this is that high school GPA is racially stratified too! The correlations aren’t even particularly different from those in SAT data. It’s so utterly mindless; how can you justify replacing a metric because it’s racially stratified so that you can further emphasize a metric that’s also racially stratified?

As Sutton et al say, “Racial/ethnic minority students, boys, and especially black boys, receive lower grades than other groups… young black men are a highly marginalized racial/ethnic and gender subgroup throughout schooling.” This general condition is decades old. The ranking and gaps in high school are about the same as those observed on the SAT:

• Asian/Pacific Islander: 3.26
• White: 3.09
• Hispanic: 2.84
• Black: 2.69

If you’d like a visual, this is from the Nation’s Report Card, data pretty old at this point but as I said the underlying situation hasn’t changed much:

Heidi Ledford

Despite that tantalizing future, it will be impossible to shake the shadow cast by the previous summit, in 2018. That meeting convened just a day after biophysicist He Jiankui announced that he had edited the genomes of three embryos that developed into living babies. The stunt ultimately earned him three years in prisonfor breaking China’s laws on medical experiments.

Nearly five years later, researchers tell Nature that they do not expect a similar revelation at this year’s summit — if only because He’s experience will dissuade rogue researchers from going public with controversial genome-editing experiments. But that doesn’t mean that such experiments aren’t happening: “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other children that have been created with CRISPR–Cas9 in the years since 2018,” says Eben Kirksey, a medical anthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

Since then, technological aspects of using genome editing to alter human embryos for reproductive purposes have not fundamentally changed, says Robin Lovell-Badge, a reproductive biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who is chairing the summit. “It’s still an unsafe technique,” he says, echoing a widespread scientific consensus that genome-editing technology is not ready for use in human embryos.

Heidi Ledford

Despite that tantalizing future, it will be impossible to shake the shadow cast by the previous summit, in 2018. That meeting convened just a day after biophysicist He Jiankui announced that he had edited the genomes of three embryos that developed into living babies. The stunt ultimately earned him three years in prisonfor breaking China’s laws on medical experiments.

Nearly five years later, researchers tell Nature that they do not expect a similar revelation at this year’s summit — if only because He’s experience will dissuade rogue researchers from going public with controversial genome-editing experiments. But that doesn’t mean that such experiments aren’t happening: “I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other children that have been created with CRISPR–Cas9 in the years since 2018,” says Eben Kirksey, a medical anthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK.

Since then, technological aspects of using genome editing to alter human embryos for reproductive purposes have not fundamentally changed, says Robin Lovell-Badge, a reproductive biologist at the Francis Crick Institute in London who is chairing the summit. “It’s still an unsafe technique,” he says, echoing a widespread scientific consensus that genome-editing technology is not ready for use in human embryos.

Scott Girard:

Wisconsin requires 437 hours of direct instruction to kindergartners, at least 1,050 hours of direct instruction in grades one through six, and at least 1,137 hours of direct instruction in grades seven through 12.

In a message to families about the most recent change, Associate Superintendent of Teaching and Learning Cindy Green wrote that they “can expect more information and guidance on the changes to be provided from your school” in the coming weeks.

“In the event there are additional unanticipated school closures, the district will be exploring virtual and asynchronous options moving forward,” Green wrote.

Last year’s schedule changes were due largely to a delayed return from winter break amid the Omicron outbreak, which cost the district three school days. This year, it’s been all weather-related closures.

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?

RAS

All articles published in the RAS journals portfolio, from the very first volumes published in 1827 to the latest articles, will be free to read in their entirety. As the scientific community works ever harder to ensure barriers to cutting edge science are eliminated, facilitating openness, dissemination, and reproducibility of impactful academic research, the Society is excited to be a key contributor to the open science movement, helping to drive discoverability and change.

Jill Tucker:

The Oakland school district might be hurtling toward a fiscal cliff after the board failed this week to make budget cuts needed to give teachers raises and ward off a future financial crisis. 

In an unexpected outcome, the board rejected recommended cuts at a Tuesday meeting, including the elimination of dozens of vacant special education teacher and aide positions, as well as future trims to classroom funding. The board, by a slim majority, also rejected the merger over the next two years of five pairs of schools currently co-located on the same campuses. Without the budget cuts, the district currently has no way to pay for salary increases.

Richard Vedder:

So how are colleges killing themselves, committing unintentional suicide? Five ways.

First are the high fees they charge. The tuition fees of colleges today are nearly triple what they were a half-century ago after correcting for inflation. [Editor’s note: Cheers to UNC for freezing tuition for the seventh year in a row.] Since the 1980s, the rise in tuition fees has exceeded the growth in family incomes, meaning college has become less affordable. While air travel and electronic gadgets have all become more affordable, college attendance is now a bigger financial burden.

Totally dysfunctional federal student financial assistance programs have played a big role by allowing colleges to aggressively raise their fees.

How have colleges used rapidly growing student-fee income? Not to fund or improve the main purpose of colleges—to promote the growth of knowledge, wisdom, and civility through instruction and research provided by faculty.

Fifty years ago, a typical college had far more instructors than administrative support personnel—registrars, deans, librarians, etc. Today, at many campuses, there are far more administrators than teachers. Moreover, a growing proportion of that vast administrative army is anti-academic, anti-merit, and anti-learning. Especially harmful are the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” apparatchiks, who believe campuses should be defined especially by the racial, gender, and other biological traits that students possess, not by academic accomplishments. These new anti-academicians increasingly control campus decisionmaking.

Matt Taibbi:

1. Government Agencies and NGOsCISA: The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)CENTCOM: Central Command of the Armed ForcesODNI: Office of the Director of National IntelligenceFITF: Foreign Influence Task Force, a cyber-regulatory agency comprised of members of the FBI, DHS, and ODNI“OGA”: Other Government Agency, colloquially — CIAGEC: Global Engagement Center, an analytical division of the U.S. State Department USIC: United States intelligence community HSIN: Homeland Security Information Network, a portal through which states and other official bodies can send “flagged” accountsEIP: Election Integrity Project, a cyber-laboratory based at Stanford University that sends many reports to TwitterDFR: Digital Forensic Research lab, an outlet that performs a similar function to the EIP, only is funded by the Atlantic Council IRA: Internet Research Agency, the infamous Russian “troll farm” headed by “Putin’s chef,” Yevgheny Prigozhin

Jeffrey Tucker:

Suddenly, lockdowns were on the table. And we know what happened next. Fauci and Dr. Birx worked over the coming weeks to warm Trump up to the idea, culminating in the March 16, 2020, press conference that announced lockdowns to the nation. 

Two weeks earlier, from March 3, 2020, at least, we had very good reports of the evidence out of China concerning the risk profiles of people who were vulnerable to the virus. 

Chris Hedges:

The commercial model of journalism has changed from when I began working as a reporter, covering conflicts in Central America in the early 1980s. In those days, there were a few large media outlets that sought to reach a broad public. I do not want to romanticize the old press. Those who reported stories that challenged the dominant narrative were targets, not only of the U.S. government but also of the hierarchies within news organizations such as The New York Times. Ray Bonner, for example, was reprimanded by the editors at The New York Times when he exposed egregious human rights violations committed by the El Salvadoran government, which the Reagan administration funded and armed. He quit shortly after being transferred to a dead-end job at the financial desk. Sydney Schanberg won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Cambodia on the Khmer Rouge, which was the basis for the film “The Killing Fields.” He was subsequently appointed metropolitan editor at The New York Times where he assigned reporters to cover the homeless, the poor and those being driven from their homes and apartments by Manhattan real estate developers. The paper’s Executive Editor, Abe Rosenthal, Schanberg told me, derisively referred to him as his “resident commie.” He terminated Schanberg’s twice-weekly column and forced him out. I saw my career at the paper end when I publicly criticized the invasion of Iraq. The career-killing campaigns against those who reported controversial stories or expressed controversial opinions was not lost on other reporters and editors who, to protect themselves, practiced self-censorship.

But the old media, because it sought to reach a broad public, reported on events and issues that did not please all of its readers. It left a lot out, to be sure. It gave too much credibility to officialdom, but, as Schanberg told me, the old model of news arguably kept “the swamp from getting any deeper, from rising higher.”

CBS

The Right To Read” executive producer LeVar Burton and director Jenny Mackenzie join “CBS Mornings” to discuss their new documentary about the literacy crisis in the U.S. and how there is a disconnect between the science and how kids are taught to read in schools.

Video

mp3 Audio
Transcript

Additional testimony: Kymyona Burk Instructional Coach Kyle Thayse DPI

3 Minute Summary by Senator Duey Stroebel

2021’s AB446 was mentioned.

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:

But the 187 pages still feature plenty of suggestions for MMSD to improve how it works with students with disabilities, with some staff reporting pressure to pass students no matter what, criticism of the usefulness of district guidance and data highlighting the longstanding disparities for students by race and special education status. Its overarching findings were:

• Students with disabilities, especially students of color with disabilities, are not achieving or graduating at levels the district can celebrate.

• The district’s instructional and administrative infrastructure is not conducive to improved outcomes for students with disabilities.

• The district has many strengths upon which to build, which are outlined throughout the report.

• While much progress has been made on the (2016 special education) plan, and many of the goals have been met, doubling down on it, in collaboration with general education partners, is necessary, especially in light of recent leadership turnover and the pandemic.

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?

Abby White:

When director Jenny Mackenzie began working on her latest documentary, The Right to Read, it was a story focused on kindergarten readiness and pre-literacy. But once she met Kareem Weaver, a former educator and member of the Oakland NAACP Education Committee, the documentary’s game-changing story clicked into place. 

And it’s an angle that doubles as a powerful and eye-opening challenge to much of the way America’s literacy crisis has historically been perceived and addressed. The Right to Read focuses on the civil rights work of Kareem, as well as the efforts of several Black and brown families in cities across the country facing lower literacy rates to ensure their children’s success in school and beyond.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

The Economist:

Should you wish to know the best way to carry a hot coffee or avoid backache, Britain’s employers have you covered. But set your sights a bit higher than health-and-safety briefings—on courses that risk making you better at your job, say—and the chance of disappointment soars. 

According to data from Eurostat, the EU’s statistics agency, British firms spend only half as much on training per employee as European ones. They train fewer workers, and give each of them less time in class. Most of these metrics are going backwards. The Learning and Work Institute, a think-tank, reckons that in 2019 bosses in Britain spent 28% less in real terms training workers than they did in 2005 (while spending in Europe went up).

Becky Dernbach:

Minneapolis Public Schools will open for in-person instruction as usual Monday, after a week of disruptions from “technical difficulties” and snow.

In an email to families and students, Minneapolis Public Schools described the technical issues as an “encryption event.” 

What is an “encryption event”?

“I don’t have any specifics past that,” a district spokesperson told Sahan Journal.

The problems affected the operability of systems including internet, phones, cameras, badge access, copiers/printers, and building alarms, the district said in its email to Minneapolis families. All of these systems have been restored, or soon will be. Some systems may still be down Monday as the district assesses protective measures.

“To date, our investigation has found no evidence that personal information was compromised as a result of this event,” the district’s email continued. “If it is determined that personal information has been impacted, we will notify those specifically impacted individuals.”

Laurence Cawley:

Diagnosed with autism and global development delay in his early years, Jason Arday was unable to speak until he was 11 years old and could not read or write until he was 18. Now aged 37, he is about to become the youngest black person ever appointed to a professorship at the University of Cambridge.

Although he could not speak, the young Jason fervently questioned the world around him.

“Why are some people homeless?” he remembers wondering. “Why is there war?”

Born and raised in Clapham, south-west London, Prof Arday, a sociologist, says formative moments included watching Nelson Mandela’s release from prison on television and South Africa’s symbolic triumph in the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

Rebecca Carballo

Mayor Sylvester Turner said Wednesday morning that he has heard from multiple sources in the Legislature that the state intends to take over Houston ISD, and some sources say the move could come, as early as next week.

“I’m talking to legislators, and what they’re saying to me is that the state intends to takeover the district, replacing the entire board, replacing the superintendent, and I find that totally alarming,” said Turner, who spent two decades as a state representative. “HISD has 273 schools. How do you come in and take over the largest school district in Texas and do it successfully?”

Here are several young people who respectively studied at @UNSW @uniofwarwick @UniWestminster @GoldsmithsUoL. After returning to China, they have all been arrested and detained after participating in protests late last year 2/ pic.twitter.com/dZ4nL6myY4

— Vicky Xu / 许秀中 (@veryvickyxu) February 28, 2023

Jon Brown:

The Delaware Supreme Court lowered the passing score on the state’s bar exam amid other changes reportedly intended to increase racial diversity among the state’s lawyers.

The 200-question multiple-choice exam will be offered twice instead of once a year beginning in 2024 – and its passing score will be lowered from 145 to 143, according to local outlet WHYY.

The number of essays on the exam will be decreased from eight to four, and the number of essay topics will be reduced from 14 to 10.

The clerkship requirement is also being lowered from 21 weeks to 12 weeks, and the mandatory list of 25 legal proceedings that potential lawyers must attend has been shortened to 18 out of 30 possible items.

WILL:

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, enrollment in Wisconsin schools has dropped by more than 3%, with some districts suffering even greater declines. But an antiquated school funding system means that Wisconsin taxpayers are still paying for students that are no longer in the system. Wisconsin uses what is known as the “Three-Year Rolling Average” to count students for the purposes of calculating school district revenue limits. Under this system, three years of enrollment data are used in calculating how much money the district is able to collect from state and local taxpayers. In an era of rapid enrollment declines across Wisconsin, this system means that substantial amounts of funding are misallocated to districts for students who no longer attend school in the district. This paper attempts to quantify just how costly this is for Wisconsin taxpayers, and offers some alternatives.

The “Three-Year Rolling Average” is an antiquated system of school attendance, costing taxpayers millions. These days, we know where each student is every day in Wisconsin. Our school funding system should reflect that rather than being years behind.

Statewide, Wisconsin funds more than 20,000 “ghost students,” children outside of the school system who are still counted as being enrolled. Statewide, a net of about 20,703 students who are no longer in the system are funded by state taxpayers.

More than $359 million dollars is misallocated to “ghost students” in Wisconsin.
Due to the three-year rolling average, Wisconsin taxpayers are on the hook for hundreds of millions for students that no longer exist in the school system.

Our report outlines a pathway for a better system. Wisconsin should move to a more dynamic funding system that funds students where they are rather than where they used to be. Student counts should be updated more regularly and funding should be based on those amounts.

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?

Richard Dawkins:

Not surprisingly, this adolescent virtue-signalling horrified New Zealand’s grown-up scientists and scholars. Seven of them wrote to the Listener magazine. Three who were fellows of the NZ Royal Society were threatened with an inquisitorial investigation. Two of these, including the distinguished medical scientist Garth Cooper, himself of Māori descent, resigned (the third unfortunately died). I was delighted to meet Professor Cooper for lunch, with others of the seven. His resignation letter cited the society’s failure to support science against its denigration as ‘a western European invention’. He was affronted, too, by a complaint (not endorsed by the NZRS) that ‘to insist Māori children learn to read is an act of colonisation’. Is there an implication here – condescending, if not downright racist – that ‘indigenous’ children need separate, special treatment?

Perhaps the most disagreeable aspect of this sorry affair is the climate of fear. We who don’t have a career to lose should speak out in defence of those who do. The magnificent seven are branded heretics by a nastily zealous new religion, a witch-hunt that recalls the false accusations against J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock. Professor Kendall Clements was removed from teaching evolution at the University of Auckland, after the School of Biological Sciences Putaiao Committee submitted the following recommendation: ‘We do not feel that either Kendall or Garth should be put in front of students as teachers. This is not safe for students…’ Not safe? Who are these cringing little wimps whose ‘safety’ requires protection against free speech? What on earth do they think a university is for?

Guillaume Blanc :

According to Alfred Sauvy, the French demographer who coined the term ‘third world’, in 1962, the decline in fertility is ‘the most important fact of the history of France’. France was eclipsed as Europe’s only real superpower by the relative growth of its rivals, most importantly England and Germany, in the nineteenth century.

France’s emergence as a major global power spanned several centuries, from the foundation and expansion of the Kingdom of the Franks under Clovis and Charlemagne in the fifth and ninth centuries to Napoleon. During the Hundred Years’ War in the fourteenth century, London was by far the most populous city in medieval England, but Rouen, only France’s second city, may have been as large as it.

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, under the long-lived Louis XIV France boasted the continent’s largest population and the world’s second largest colonial empire, after Spain. It was so dominant that it prompted multiple coalitions, or grand alliances, of all the other major European powers together to challenge it. And even then the first Grand Alliance was unable to make significant gains in the Nine Years’ War at the end of the seventeenth century. In the War of the Spanish Succession soon after, the French could field 400,000 troops at times, almost as many as the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, England, and the Netherlands.

Choose life.

John Sailer:

The day after the Journal published my article “How ‘Diversity’ Policing Fails Science,” which exposed how Texas Tech University used job applicants’ diversity statements as ideological litmus tests, the university announced it would end its use of such statements for faculty hiring. Other universities would be well advised to follow Texas Tech’s lead. But it is unlikely they will. The federal government is spending nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to promote the practice Texas Tech jettisoned.

In 2020 the National Institutes of Health created the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program “to enhance and maintain cultures of inclusive excellence in the biomedical research community.” The program will give 12 institutions a total of $241 million over nine years for diversity-focused faculty hiring. Under the terms of the grants, only candidates who demonstrate “a strong commitment to promoting diversity and inclusive excellence” can be hired through the program. To apply, candidates must submit a diversity statement.

More.

Eugene Ryan

At the start of the year, I decided to write more consistently and figured I might as well get better at it. Thus, I compiled a writing curriculum and studied some of the best books, essays, and videos on writing non-fiction.

I was surprised how much I didn’t learn about writing (at school). No, I’m not talking about grammar, punctuation, or essay structure. I’m talking about how to write for a wider audience, at a regular pace.

Here, I’ll share some of the uncommon and best advice I’ve come across. You won’t just be hearing from me—I’ve included many quotes from great thinkers, writers, and authors who have mastered the craft of writing. Whether you’re just starting to write or an old hand, I hope this will be helpful to you.

College Fix

Democrats in the Virginia state legislature put on hold a bill that would require schools teach about communism and its victims.

Although House Bill 1816, the “Standards of Learning; instruction on dangers and victims of communism,” passed the House of Delegates with some Democrat support, it ultimately met its demise in the Democrat-controlled Senate of Virginia, Fox News reports.

The bill was “passed by indefinitely” by the Committee on Education and Health, which means it could be reconsidered at a later date. If it isn’t, the bill essentially will be dead.

Democrats in both legislative chambers voted “nay” following the Virginia Education Association’s claim that the bill might lead to negative reactions against Asian students.

Strangely, the “League of Women Voters” lobbied against (!) AB446 recently, despite our long term, disastrous reading results.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Rising crime is the number one crisis facing Chicago today. More specifically, the city’s propensity for murder. Chicago was the nation’s extreme outlier for homicides in 2022, with 697 deaths. More people were murdered here than anywhere else. 

What’s worse, Chicago has out-paced the entire nation in murders for 11 years in a row. It’s become an embedded, chronic wound for the city.

That’s not a surprising result given the failed policies of Chicago’s leadership in recent years, from a dramatic drop in arrests to ever-fewer prosecutions to reduced sentencing. The pursuit of “equity” and “social justice,” instead of actual justice, has only increased the protection of criminals, crushed police morale and increased the violence inflicted on ordinary Chicagoans.

Nicola Woolcock

Children will be allowed to quote from work generated by ChatGPT in their essays, a leading qualification body has revealed.

The International Baccalaureate said it will not ban the AI chatbot, which can be used for plagiarism, suggesting it was similar to dealing with cheating parents and essay mills.

Matt Glanville, head of assessment principles and practice at the IB, said children can use work generated by ChatGPT so long as they do not pass it off as their own.

James Freeman:

Over the next three decades, the Social Security system is scheduled to pay benefits $21 trillion greater than its trust fund will collect in payroll taxes and related revenues. The Medicare system is projected to run a $48 trillion shortfall. These deficits are projected to, in turn, produce $47 trillion in interest payments to the national debt. That is a combined shortfall of $116 trillion, according to data from the Congressional Budget Office. (To inflation-adjust these figures, trim by roughly one-third.)

Ivy Exile:

(I once asked Sig Gissler, the longtime prize administrator, why we hadn’t retracted the infamous award to Walter Duranty, the New York Timescorrespondent whose dishonest dispatches from the Soviet Union were critics’ go-to talking point. No way we’d give the right wing that satisfaction, he told me.)

As a free agent now I can’t emphasize enough how empty the prizes had become even a decade ago—Thomas Friedman sauntering from car service up to Pulitzer Hall’s famed World Room—and that was before the bottom really fell out. They were a sad cartoon well ahead of Donald Trump descending that golden escalator.

For years I attended prize luncheons at Columbia’s Low Library as reporter and warm body filling photo ops in exchange for rubbery chicken with mashed potatoes and wine. University President Lee C. Bollinger would boast of his First Amendment scholarship and landmark Supreme Court case, followed by awardees waxing poetic about their own historic significance.

Whether the beat was race, refugees or the environment, the prescription was almost always the same: more expert administrators and many more grants and subsidies for selfless global truthtellers like them, along with doing more to suppress disinformation from the bad guys. Accordingly, the arts prizes went largely to poets, playwrights, et al peddling variations on the same theme.

1. South Africa has collapsed, here’s why:

Part 1: Intro
Part 2: The wasteland
Part 3: Societal collapse
Part 4: Final outcome
Part 5: Doing good

— #zombieland (@k9_reaper) February 28, 2023

Gray Mirror:

The business of philanthropy is turning money into power. Unfortunately, the kind of people who have a lot of money tend to be super into metrics. Money is super easy to measure. Power is super hard to measure—and the more measurable or even visible it is, the weaker it tends to be.

To really plant acorns, you have to get as far upstream of power as you can. While, as a donor, obviously your goal in funding the arts is world domination, there is no way at all to measure this impact. In art, the delay between action and impact can be decades.

And yet… the golden rule of fashion is that fashion flows downward. Do you want your ideas to be the ideas of a billion people, taught in a million schools? Then who are the first hundred people you want to infect?

Status is a pyramid. You want your ideas to start at the top and saturate every level of the pyramid before it moves down to the next. You want to traverse this pyramid in what computer scientists call a breadth-first search, not a depth-first search.

Every idea is a social network—the network of people it has infected—and the quality of a social network can only decline. People only want to join a network of people who are cooler than them. When we consider the capitalization of this network, the value of every eyeball is not equal. Celebrities are diamonds. Losers represent negative capital.

WILL:

WILL has learned that DPI goes beyond these requirements in evaluating new school applications. Even if schools submit accurate and sufficient information according to our state law, if they do not comply in precisely the manner that DPI requires, their applications are often denied. WILL sees no justification for the practice of DPI exceeding its lawful authority in such a way that keeps schools, and in turn families, out of the parental choice programs.

More on the Letter: WILL and School Choice Wisconsin’s letter indicates we are filing an open records request for information regarding any new private school applications to the Wisconsin Parental School Choice program for the 2023-24 school year; and how DPI ruled on each application. We are also requesting all records related to appeals for denied applications. As for future litigation, the letter asks DPI to either discuss a possible solution, or let us know if such a conversation would not be productive so that a lawsuit challenging the requirements can be filed.

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?

Kaleem Caire, via email:

February 28, 2023

Dear One City Parents,

This is an important time for One City Schools and for education across the state of Wisconsin. Over the next several months our legislature and governor will be engaging with one another and individuals and organizations from across the state to inform what will be Wisconsin’s state budget for the 2023-2025 Biennium. In order for One City to sustain our public charter schools and build upon our mission, we must secure more state funding for our schools.

To do this, we must convince our state legislators and governor that schools like One City and the children and families that are part of our community, deserve equal funding! Students who attend independent public charter schools should not be funded at a rate lower than students attending traditional public schools. In 2020-21, One City received just $10,203 per student in public funding to support our “public” charter school compared to the $25,877 in public funding that the Madison Metropolitan School District received. Yet, we both spent a similar amount per student, with One City spending more on innovation in the classroom, on our healthy school meals program, and our longer school day and year.

How does One City currently fill this significant funding gap? We do so through private fundraising – by asking local businesses, philanthropy and supporters like you to give financially to our schools. In 2020-21, we had to raise $15,000 per student privately to educate our students. We are now joining together with other independent public charter schools statewide to tell our legislature why it is not fair to require us to raise so much money for our “public” schools.

Convincing our legislature and governor requires telling our story. They must know why One City is special, why families choose One City and why the state should invest and fund schools like One City.

We need your help over the next few months to tell One City’s story!

If you are interested in this opportunity to be one of our Parent Advocates please complete this form.

During this Spring session we will organize to engage in direct advocacy activities such as meetings with legislators, attending public hearings and more.

We are partnering with City Forward Collective who will offer a series of zoom trainings during the month of March to get us started. Please mark your calendars for March 2, March 9, March 16, and March 23rd. See this flier (and below) for more details about these training sessions. Those who sign up via the link above will be added to the list for the training.

Please consider joining us to do this important work on behalf of our One City community. If you have any questions regarding this information, please contact One City’s Chief of Staff, Latoya Holiday at lholiday@onecityschools.org.

Onward.

Latoya Holiday
Chief of Staff
One City Schools

Marilyn Ruffin
VP of Family and Student Engagement
One City Schools

Kaleem Caire
Founder and CEO/Superintendent
One City Schools

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?

Natalia Lopez Maya:

Rice and sugar seem to have launched a competition in Cuba to see which increases the most in price on the informal market. While rice already exceeds 200 pesos ($8.30) a pound in several areas of the Island, sugar, once the national emblem, is on its heels and also sells for around that number and, in some provinces, even exceeds it.

“I sell 17 pounds of sugar at 180 pesos if you buy them all; if you only want a part then it’s 190,” reads an ad published in a sales group on Facebook that in a few hours accumulated dozens of comments. “It’s in Central Havana and I don’t have home service,” said the informal merchant, who shortly after updated the information with a brief message: “Sold, and I don’t have any more.”

In the previous harvest, the production of Cuban sugar mills barely reached 480,000 tons of sugar out of the 911,000 that were planned, a failure to meet the target that caused a deficit of 60,000 tons for national consumption and seriously affected exports.

Given the disastrous numbers, the product has been even more restricted in the ration stores in recent months. “They only sold me one pound, and they say that this month it’s not my turn anymore,” a lamented a retiree this Friday, noting that she buys her basic normal basket in a place on Conill Street, in the municipality of Plaza de la Revolución.

Ilya Somin

As I have pointed out before, the Biden Administration and its supporters have—in this case—been pushing ultra-narrow theories of standing traditionally associated with the political right.  Those theories were wrong when advanced by conservatives, and are still wrong today.

While there may be a majority for granting standing in Biden v. Nebraska, the oral argument suggests there probably isn’t one in Department of Education v. Brown, the somewhat screwy case brought by the conservative Job Creators Network on behalf of two plaintiffs who complain that the Biden program isn’t generous enough, excluding one of them completely and forgiving less of the other’s debt than might have otherwise been the case. They argue they have standing because administration adopted the plan without going through the “notice and comment” procedure arguably required by the Administrative Procedure Act, which would have given them an opportunity to argue that the program should have been more generous to them.

Étienne Fortier-Dubois

So there are reasons for scientists to write well. There is also no shortage of resources to learn how to do that, from writing guides to professional coaching and editing services. Despite this, most scientists don’t master the art of communicating with clarity and style – at least not beyond whatever it takes to get acceptance from a journal. Many will recognize that writing better would be nice, in theory, but they don’t have the time. 

Thus there are deeper, more structural forces at play. Is it worth fixing those? Would society as a whole benefit from scientific institutions that produced better writing on average? Here it is useful to make a parallel with two existing movements: open access and plain language.

Geoff Manaugh

Lidar – short for light detection and ranging – has emerged as one of the most widely used technologies for rapid archaeological documentation. Lidar works by sending pulses of light out from a transmitter often mounted to the skid of a helicopter, then recording how long it takes for those pulses to return to a sensor. A virtual 3D map can be generated from a single large-scale survey in less than a day. Archaeological sites that would require years and years of fieldwork to excavate can now be mapped in a single afternoon, their every surface feature captured down to millimeter-scale resolution.

Archaeological sites that would require years and years of fieldwork to excavate can now be mapped in a single afternoon

Thickets and woods, even entire rainforests, are no obstacle. Because individual bursts of light can pass through the tiniest gaps separating branches and leaves in a forest canopy, lidar is also able to map archaeological features beneath heavily overgrown landscapes. The technique’s accuracy, combined with its declining cost as new devices and firms enter the market, means that lidar has found enthusiastic uptake in everything from urban mapping projects and geological hazard management – such as finding previously unknown fault lines – to, of course, archaeology.

Meghan Cox Gurdon:

He, like his contemporary Roald Dahl, came from an era when people valued clarity in speech and writing and believed words should reveal meaning rather than conceal it. Puffin Books has made the passing of that era obvious by subjecting Dahl’s books to a ghastly process of social-justice blandification.

The Telegraph reports that Puffin functionaries and hired “sensitivity readers” have combed through Dahl’s works for children—including whizbang novels such as “Matilda,” “The Twits,” and “James and the Giant Peach”—and cut all references to fatness, craziness, ugliness, whiteness (even of bedsheets), blackness (even of tractors) and the great Rudyard Kipling, along with any allusion to acts lacking full and enthusiastic consent. Some male characters have been made female; female villains have been made less nasty; women in general have been socially elevated; while mothers and fathers, boys and girls have dwindled into sexless “parents” and “children.”

Dahl, who died in 1990, didn’t agree to these changes—consent came from Netflix, which bought Dahl’s estate in 2018. Many of the edits reveal a total failure to understand why children love the spiky and opinionated British writer and why they gobble his stories as fast as his porcine characters eat sweets. Dahl’s writing flashes with menace and tenderness; it’s funny, exciting and unpredictable.

Douglas Belkin:

The backlash began last month, when a student reading “Mein Kampf,” the autobiographical manifesto of Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler, was reported through the school’s “Protected Identity Harm” system.

The reporting system has been in place since the summer of 2021, but faculty say they were unaware of it until the student newspaper wrote about the incident and the system, spurring a contentious campus debate.

“I was stunned,” said Russell Berman, a professor of comparative literature who said he believes the reporting system could chill free speech on campus and is ripe for abuse. “It reminds me of McCarthyism.”

The Economist:

In 2011 Ben Mol, a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Monash University, in Melbourne, came across a retraction notice for a study on uterine fibroids and infertility published by a researcher in Egypt. The journal which had published it was retracting it because it contained identical numbers to those in an earlier Spanish study—except that that one had been on uterine polyps. The author, it turned out, had simply copied parts of the polyp paper and changed the disease.

“From that moment I was alert,” says Dr Mol. And his alertness was not merely as a reader of published papers. He was also, at the time, an editor of the European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and frequently also a peer reviewer for papers submitted to other journals. Sure enough, two papers containing apparently fabricated data soon landed on his desk. He rejected them. But, a year later, he came across them again, except with the fishy data changed, published in another journal.

Keith Whittington

That’s a lot of “reform.” Hard to imagine that this kind of micromanagement of how universities operate will be very workable in practice, even if it were a good idea. It is not quite as terrible as some critics are already claiming, but it poses a serious threat to tenure protections and faculty hiring. There will also be some substantial constitutional challenges to several provisions of this bill if it gets adopted in anything like its current form. In the name of prohibiting political litmus tests for faculty, the reform will wind up imposing political litmus tests for faculty.