Allysia Finley:

“I have taken a very strong position that what the Fed is doing accelerating interest rates is not in the best interest of the people of the state of Rhode Island,” Mr. McKee said. “They need to stop the increases, halt any increases, and start decreasing that interest rate.”

If the Fed is to blame, it’s for leaving interest rates too low for too long, which spurred states, localities and private investors to bankroll dubious projects like a 10,500-seat stadium in a city with a population of some 75,000. The country is littered with profligate public-works projects that politicians use to buy votes.

Take San Francisco’s 1.7-mile Central Subway, which opened in January at a cost of $1.95 billion, three times as much as initially estimated. The subway is drawing fewer than 3,000 daily riders, no doubt because the design doesn’t make sense: Riders have to walk the equivalent of three football fields to connect to other transit lines and take three escalators to reach platforms 12 stories underground. That didn’t stop Rep. Nancy Pelosi, other San Francisco Democratic power brokers and their union friends from championing the project. When borrowing is dirt cheap, why not max out the taxpayer credit card?

Now that credit is more expensive, states and localities have come up with a creative new way to finance their political investments more cheaply: Market their bonds as “ESG.” New York City last autumn floated $400 million in “social impact” bonds to fund construction of affordable housing. Enormous demand from investors reduced yields the city had to pay.

Mark Seidenberg:

My heart sank. Why would a person need to ask this? The goal of teaching children to read is reading, not phonemic awareness. We know that learning to read does not require being able to identify 44 phonemes or demonstrate proficiency on phoneme deletion and substitution tasks because until very recently no one who learned to read had to do these things. Instruction in subskills such as phonemic awareness is justified to the extent it advances the goal of reading, not for its own sake. 

If a student is reading–if they’ve “broken the code,” as Phil Gough¹ put it years ago–instruction can focus on the many more things that need to be learned to become a skilled reader. Instructional time is limited and the clock is ticking down to 4th grade.Time spent jumping through PA hoops could instead be spent on activities that expand the knowledge that supports comprehending texts of increasing complexity and variety.

These conclusions seem obvious to me, given my understanding of the relevant research literature and the conditions under which children learn to read. They weren’t obvious to the questioner, or to the people who posted to “chat” thanking them for asking, and they won’t be obvious to many people reading this document.

“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?

I feel your view assumes that average people lack discernment/intelligence and so journalists must protect them from bad influences. That is not our job. Our job is to accurately cover people who have power in society. MTG is one of those people. https://t.co/ZEc3lmdm5H

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) April 2, 2023

Jon Marcus:

Joy Malak floundered through her freshman year in college.

“I had to learn how to balance my finances. I had to learn how to balance work and school and the relationship I’m in.” The hardest part about being a new college student, Malak said, “is not the coursework. It’s learning how to be an adult.”

That took a toll on her grades. “I didn’t do well,” said Malak, who powered through and is now in her sophomore year as a neuroscience and literature double major at the University of California, Santa Cruz, or UCSC. “It took a while for me to detangle my sense of self-worth from the grades that I was getting. It made me consider switching out of my major a handful of times.”

Experiences like these are among the reasons behind a growing movement to stop assigning conventional A through F letter grades to first-year college students and, sometimes, upperclassmen.

Called “un-grading,” the idea is meant to ease the transition to higher education — especially for freshmen who are the first in their families to go to college or who weren’t well prepared for college-level work in high school and need more time to master it.

The most disturbing set of data on America that I have encountered in a long time. This transcends politics.

This is especially scary remembering that demographics were the best early warning on the collapse of the USSR. https://t.co/knrLf2GJkg…

— Lawrence H. Summers (@LHSummers) March 31, 2023

Judge James Ho:

Students don’t try to engage and learn from one another. They engage in disruption, intimidation, and public shaming. They try to terrorize people into submission and self-censorship, in a deliberate campaign to eradicate certain viewpoints from the public discourse.

And they’re doing it to accomplished litigators, legal scholars, even federal judges. Judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuits, as well as the Fifth Circuit, have been disrupted while trying to speak on campus.

Now, I have zero concern about judges being criticized. Thank goodness we live in a country where people are free. So judges should expect to be criticized. And we shouldn’t sweat it. People should become judges for public service, not public applause.

My concern is how law students are treating everyone else they disagree with. I’m concerned about what this is doing to the legal profession—and to our country.

Students learn all the wrong lessons. They practice all the wrong tactics. And then they graduate and bring these tactics to workplaces across the country. What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus. And it’s tearing our country apart.

Akan Borsuk:

Reading instruction, on the other hand, “is one thing we can do well. … We could do a lot better in the classroom,” Seidenberg said. The education establishment, he said, has been resistant to the notion that science around how letters on a page become understood in a child’s brain can help teachers.

Reading instruction, on the other hand, “is one thing we can do well. … We could do a lot better in the classroom,” Seidenberg said. The education establishment, he said, has been resistant to the notion that science around how letters on a page become understood in a child’s brain can help teachers.

In his book “Language at the Speed of Sight,” as well as in an interview and a speech in Madison, Seidenberg supported some ideas that differ from what some advocates favor. For example, he is critical of early childhood programs that aim to get kids reading early. It is more important to build their vocabulary and their awareness of the world around them, he said. For preschoolers, the fastest way to get them on track to be good readers is to talk to them.

He is critical of the three-cueing approach. “The best cue to a word is the word itself,” he said.

“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?

Emily Thurlow:

“I was shocked,” he said. “I grew up in a time when ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ was a sign of respect. I didn’t intend to insult anyone.”

He also signed his email as simply “Vito,” as he felt he could provide a less formal tone.

Perrone explained that he had attended Thursday’s We The People spaghetti dinner fundraiser at the high school as a way to begin getting to know more of the school community and then headed over to the conference room for the negotiations. The committee asked him to step outside for approximately 45 minutes while they spoke and then delivered the news that they had rescinded his offer after taking a vote during an executive session.

In an emailed response, Kwiecinski said she could not comment on executive sessions.

School Committee member Marin Goldstein echoed Kwiecinski’s comment, adding that such meetings are supposed to be confidential.

Perrone said it was important for him to let people know the circumstances of the matter.

…content and kill any conversation around it. Each like gains 30x boost, re-tweets get a 20x bonus, and replies have no effect at all. So appease to your audience and refuse to talk with the dissidents, and you'll be rewarded by the algorithm.

6/21 pic.twitter.com/UsNXrtWfNu

— Pekka Kallioniemi (@P_Kallioniemi) April 2, 2023

I recently wrote @NYTimes a letter about them cooking the books on their best seller lists. They told my publisher they didn’t rely on just “raw” sales. And they refused to run the letter. But you, dear reader, can read it here. Please spread the word. https://t.co/9UmR4FcjhC pic.twitter.com/fr5NfX7uME

— James Patterson (@JP_Books) March 29, 2023

Jenna Graham:

A Milwaukee man was sentenced to two years probation Thursday, March 30, after shooting and injuring five people outside Rufus King High School.

Devon Jobe, 35, pleaded guilty and was convicted of four counts injury by negligent use of a weapon after firing shots during a basketball game at the high school in February of 2022. 

Five people were injured, his niece among them. 

According to the criminal complaint, about a dozen teenagers got into an altercation outside the school during the game, and Jobe’s niece called him to pick her up. Witnesses described hearing two to three gunshots before Jobe drove away in a black sedan. 

Police say he turned himself in days later. 

Court records show the conditions of Jobe’s probation include 40 hours of community service and no law violations rising to the level of probable cause.

The bumper sticker lesson from my 12 years driving & walking around US is

“People need to feel a valued member of something larger* than themselves”

Without that, suicide (slow or fast) spikes

*(Even better if its transcendent or beyond this earth)

— Chris Arnade 🐢🐱🚌 (@Chris_arnade) April 1, 2023

Lauren Young:

Science has long presumed that children living in cities grow faster and healthier than rural kids—but that trend has flipped over the past three decades, a new study suggests. A global study published Wednesday in Nature found that the average height of urban children and adolescents ages 5 to 19 is now slightly shorter than that of their peers in rural areas in most countries—notably in wealthy countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and France.

“Where we’ve historically seen a quite clear benefit for living in cities, that benefit has been slightly diminished over time,” says study co-author Honor Bixby, a population health and epidemiology research fellow at the University of Essex in England. “But it can be viewed as a positive in that rural height is really catching up.”

Researchers are still trying to tease apart exactly why this is happening, however.

Christopher Kirkman:

“When considering youth disqualified for one reason alone, the most prevalent disqualification rates are overweight (11 percent), drug and alcohol abuse (8 percent), and medical/physical health (7 percent),” the Pentagon’s 2020 Qualified Military Available Study of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 read. 

Several key findings were noted in the summary of the report. For example, most ineligible youth (44 percent) are disqualified for multiple reasons rather than in only one area.

Among those ineligible for only one reason, being overweight was the highest disqualification, at 11 percent. Drug use (8 percent), medical/physical only (7 percent) and mental health only (4 percent) were the other leading categories found in the study.

The largest increases in disqualification estimates observed between 2013 and 2020 were for mental health and overweight conditions. Another key finding was that the proportion of youth both eligible and not currently enrolled in college was only 12 percent.

Ari Blaff:

This is the second installment of an ongoing investigation into Ontario’s public-school system. Read the first installment, on “Progressive Discipline,” here.

Two plus two no longer equals four, according to members of the Ontario Mathematics Coordinators Association (OMCA), who consider the equation to be a white-supremacist dog whistle instead of a basic mathematical truth.

According to a webinar created by OMCA president Jason To, proponents of math’s political neutrality who use the phrasing “2 + 2 = 4” are engaged in an act of “Covert White Supremacy.”

To’s presentation, released in September of last year, features a pyramid of “White Supremacy in

Tabia Lee:

My crime at De Anza was running afoul of the tenets of critical social justice, a worldview that understands knowledge as relative and tied to unequal identity-based power dynamics that must be exposed and dismantled. This, I came to recognize, was the unofficial but strictly enforced ideological orthodoxy of De Anza—as it is at many other educational institutions. When I interviewed for the job in August 2021, there was no indication that I would be required to adhere to this particular vision of social justice. On the contrary, I was informed during the interview process that the office I would be working in had been alienating some faculty with a “too-woke” approach that involved “calling people out.” (After I was hired, this sentiment was echoed by many faculty, staff, and administrators I spoke to.) I told the hiring committee that I valued open dialogue and viewpoint diversity. Given their decision to hire me, I imagined I would find broad support for the vision I had promised to bring to my new role. I was wrong.

Even before any substantive conflicts came to a head, warning lights started flashing. Within my first two weeks on the job, a staff member in my office revealed he had also been a finalist for my position and objected to the fact that I had been chosen over someone who had been there for years “doing the work.” I would have a rough ride ahead, this person told me—and, indeed, I would. It also soon became clear that my supervising dean and her aligned colleagues were attempting to prevent me from performing my duties.

From the beginning, efforts to obstruct my work were framed in terms that might seem bizarre to those outside certain academic spaces. For instance, simply attempting to set an agenda for meetings caused my colleagues to accuse me of “whitespeaking,” “whitesplaining,” and reinforcing “white supremacy”—accusations I had never faced before. I was initially baffled, but as I attended workshops led by my officemates and promoted by my supervising dean, I repeatedly encountered a presentation slidetitled “Characteristics of White-Supremacy Culture” that denounced qualities like “sense of urgency” and “worship of the written word.” Written meeting agendas apparently checked both boxes.

Rex Ridgeway

All parents want opportunities for their children to excel academically. However, reaching the top in math at San Francisco Unified School District, is like climbing a cactus tree. It’s going to hurt.

At SFUSD, a math curriculum limiting student advancement currently exists; especially hindering socio-economically disadvantaged students from advancing in math. This is counter to what parents expect from a school district.

In 2014, SFUSD denied access to algebra 1 for all eighth graders, regardless of their preparation and motivation, justifying this with the word “equity.” SFUSD subsequently claimed success, but inquiring community members were denied access to supporting data. Obtaining data through public records requests, the district’s success claims were exposed to be grossly misrepresented.

SFUSD claimed algebra 1 repeat rates were reduced, but this occurred by removing a post-course test requirement. SFUSD claimed an increased enrollment in advanced classes, but this occurred by calling a class “advanced” that was not. A lack of transparency, and manipulating data to justify policies, demonstrates how SFUSD operates.

The benefits of eighth-grade algebra 1 are clearly explained in an open letter signed by nearly 1,800 science, technology, engineering and math professionals. This course initiates a five-year pathway to STEM readiness culminating in AP calculus in 12th grade.

It is indeed interesting – as @Ramanan_V noted – how the NYT changed its original headline on this op-ed which really captured the essence of its argument (on the left) to one far more vague, tepid and neutral about Dr. Fauci (on the right). The op-ed is still great but this…. pic.twitter.com/jEF4hivYRB

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 31, 2023

Don R. Willett, Circuit Judge:

or more than half a century, the Supreme Court has claimed that (1) certain common-law immunities existed when § 1983 was enacted in 1871,2 and (2) “no evidence” suggests that Congress meant to abrogate these immunities rather than incorporate them.3 But what if there were such evidence? Indeed, what if the Reconstruction Congress had explicitly stated—right there in the original statutory text—that it was nullifying all common-law defenses against § 1983 actions? That is, what if Congress’s literal language unequivocally negated the original interpretive premise for qualified immunity? Professor Alexander Reinert argues precisely this in his new article, Qualified Immunity’s Flawed Foundation—that courts have been construing the wrong version of § 1983 for virtually its entire legal life.

Beyond excavating the long-lost text of what the Reconstruction Congress
actually passed, Professor Reinert asserts a second fundamental misstep: qualified
immunity is rooted in a flawed application of the checkered “Derogation Canon.

“If a legislature enacts a statute, but no one bothers to read it, does it still have interpretive force?”

Elizabeth Wadas:

The Madison Metropolitan School District is being sued by one of its own. MMSD Head of Communications Tim LeMonds does not want two documents from an NBC15 Investigates’ open records request released – and he is taking his bosses to court to stop it.

On Friday, LeMonds filed a preliminary injunction motion against MMSD, urging a Dane County judge to conduct an expedited review of the documents in question, two emails he does not want the public to see.

LeMonds’ lawyers argue that what is in those emails would likely be bad for his repution. Their release would lead to “unwarranted, unfair and irreversible public ridicule and gossip, negative public perception, and jeopardize his ability to credibly perform his duties (with MMSD).”

“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?

Rory Linnane:

The political action committee of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association, the union for MPS staff, first gave about $11,000 directly to candidates’ campaigns in January: $5,000 to Zombor, and nearly $1,500 each to Hart, Herndon, O’Halloran and Siemsen.

In March, the group spent another $41,422 on postcards and digital ads for Zombor, $22,000 for Herndon, $12,000 for Hart, $1,100 for Siemsen and $1,100 for O’Halloran.

The MTEA’s PAC is funded by MPS staff who choose to pay into it on top of their membership dues. That includes over 5,000 teachers and other staff members.

Ben Ward, MTEA executive director, said he thought the school board has been moving the district in a positive direction since the 2019 elections, when union-backed candidates swept their races. MTEA has advocated for board decisions since then to pursue a referendum for arts and music funding, increase minimum wages in the district and implement experience-based raises, Ward said.

“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?

Jeff John Roberts:

I’d heard about the rumor from two people in Washington, one of whom shared Cohodes’s memo, and who say Warren’s office used it to inform an aggressive regulatory crackdown on the banks—both of which catered to crypto clients. The allegation here is that the powerful senator is so fixated on an anti-crypto vendetta that she took advice from a short-seller who cashes in when companies fail—the sort of person who, in the eyes of many progressives, epitomizes an amoral Wall Street culture they loathe.

It’s a great story—if it’s true. And the evidence for that is not conclusive. When I called Cohodes, he did not deny that he had been in touch with Warren’s office but said he “talks to all sorts of people” and didn’t provide any specifics. He described himself as “just one guy” who has a track record of exposing fraudulent companies, and, in a later email, called the two banks “Publicly traded Crime Scenes.” Cohodes insists he has no opinion on crypto but only in calling attention to what he says was the banks’ complicity in money laundering. He did confirm he made money from holding short positions in both Signature and Silvergate when the banks collapsed.

As for Warren, a staffer from her office did not deny contact with Cohodes but noted that people send the senator hundreds of emails every day on all sorts of topics and that, in any case, her policy decisions are based entirely on independent research.

Training Slides: US Marshals: SCOTUS Residence Protective Service Details

Marshals instructed to avoid any criminal enforcement actions involving protestors “unless absolutely necessary.”

Marshals instructed that “making arrests and initiating prosecutions is not the goal” of their presence at the homes of the Justices.

It states that it would be “counter-productive” for the Marshals to make arrests on cases that DOJ “will not charge and prosecute.”

US Constitution: Equal Protection Clause.

Fabius Maximus:

How can we save the Second Republic (built on the Constitution)? Or if it’s too late for that, how can we build a Third Republic on our experiences — perhaps a better one? Here are links to 140 posts giving specific help to those interested in joining this movement.

Jill Barshay:

A troubling post-pandemic pattern is emerging across the nation’s schools: test scores and attendance are down, yet more students are earning high school diplomas. A new report from Washington, D.C., suggests bleak futures for many of these high school graduates, given the declining rate of college attendance and completion.

The numbers are stark in a March 2023 report by the D.C. Policy Center, a nonpartisan research organization. Almost half the students in the district – 48 percent – were absent for 10 percent or more of the 2021-22 school year. Seven years of academic progress were erased in math:  only 19 percent of third through eighth graders met grade-level expectations in the subject in 2021-22, down from 31 percent before the pandemic. 

At the same time, the high school graduation rate rose to a record 75 percent, up from 68 percent in 2018-19. Although the city is producing more high school graduates, fewer of them are heading off to college. Within six months of high school graduation, only 51 percent of the class of 2022 enrolled in post-secondary education, down from 56 percent from the class of 2019.

“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?

1. The Aging Population Crisis

70% of countries are below the required population replacement levels.

You need a 2.1 fertility rate to maintain a population:

• US = 1.64

• Germany = 1.53

• Japan = 1.34

• China = 1.28

• Korea (below) = 0.84 🤯 pic.twitter.com/pY8GVYsPyT

— George Mack (@george__mack) March 29, 2023

1/ It’s essential that our elites to not mention how racial demographics drives these trends. Avoid facts which ruin the Narrative! https://t.co/s0BH8ZobtU

— Fabius Maximus (Ed.) (@FabiusMaximus01) April 1, 2023

Douglas Belkin

A majority of Americans don’t think a college degree is worth the cost, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll, a new low in confidence in what has long been a hallmark of the American dream.  

The survey, conducted with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization, found that 56% of Americans think earning a four-year degree is a bad bet compared with 42% who retain faith in the credential.

Francesca Maglione:

US college costs just keep climbing. And the increase is pushing the annual price for the upcoming academic year at Ivy League schools toward yet another hold-on-to-your-mortarboard mark: $90,000.

Full costs at elite private colleges already stretch well into the $80,000s, or upward of $320,000 for four years. At places like Brown University, the cost of attendance (tuition, room, board and fees) is almost $85,000, well above what the typical US household earns. Financial aid, in the form of grants, scholarships, loans and work-study programs, closes the gap for many.

But as the high-school class of 2023 anxiously awaits admissions decisions in coming weeks, even those wealthy enough to pay full freight are contending with sticker shock. Tuition has been rising so briskly for so long that the value proposition of college can start getting murky, said Beth Akers, an economist who focuses on higher education.

“At some point, that math stops working out,” said Akers, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank. “We get to a place where these degrees are just no longer worth it.”

Emily Files:

Brittney Dixon has high hopes for her education.

“I want to get my master’s,” Dixon says. “Dreaming big. I want to get into psychology, be a therapist.”

The 29-year-old is incarcerated at Taycheedah, a state women’s prison in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

“Prison is a horrible experience, but because we’re in this predicament, it’s like maybe this is what people needed to go back to school,” Dixon says. “I know that I had every other excuse when I was out not to.”

Wisconsin prisons have historically focused education efforts on GED classes and vocational training — not college. But that’s starting to change.

Jackie Valley:

So what’s driving all of this? Will Estrada, president of the Parental Rights Foundation, says the pandemic accelerated parents’ desire to have more say in children’s schooling, regardless of political inclinations.

“There’s varying degrees of what parents want as a response,” he says. “But I think the fact that you have such a broad range of parental rights legislation really speaks to the fact that the legislators and elected officials are trying to respond to the concerns.”

As of mid-March, proposed parental rights legislation has emerged in at least 32 states, up from 18 states in 2022, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In some states, lawmakers are considering two or more pieces of such legislation.

Marcus Stanley:

TikTok has been all the rage in Washington lately. Not for the reasons which lead some 150 million Americans to use it, but because of the rush by politicians to try to ban the app, which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. 

Two major bills that would impose sweeping restrictions on Chinese-owned software are working their way through the House (HR 1153) and Senate (S 686), while TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was recently brought before the House Commerce Committee for hostile questioning. The executive branch is also seeking to force ByteDance to sell the app to an American owner, against Chinese opposition.

Those raising the alarm about Chinese ownership of TikTok cite invasive surveillance practices, privacy violations created by excessive collection and exploitation of user data, addictive design features, and harmful content. But all of these disturbing characteristics are also ubiquitous features of American-owned big tech apps ranging from Google to Facebook to Instagram, and were in many ways pioneered by American Silicon Valley companies.

In the case of TikTok, the claim is that Chinese ownership makes these problems particularly harmful because Chinese intelligence services can access user data and technologies owned by Chinese companies such as ByteDance. Some also go further by claiming that TikTok could be used to compromise the security of devices on which it is installed.

Justin Tinsley:

When LeBron James was in grade school, he wondered why the maps in his classrooms showed Cleveland, Cincinnati and Columbus, but not Akron. Now, 20 years into his NBA career, James is building a whole world in his hometown 40 minutes south of Cleveland, an audacious community revitalization project rooted in education while encompassing everything from housing and health care to job training and a laundry. 

James started with a tutoring and college scholarship program in 2011. That led to the ballyhooed opening of the I Promise School in 2018, a public school for third through eighth graders with an extensive support program funded by The LeBron James Family Foundation. 

Nearly a half-decade later, the school remains. But what James, his foundation and supporters across the city have come to understand is that success in the classroom is about so much more than the actual classroom.

Thomas Fazi:

smaller, often family-owned farms would be forced to sell or shutter. Indeed, according to a heavily redacted European Commission document, this is precisely the strategy’s goal: “extensifying agriculture, notably through buying out or terminating farms, with the aim of reducing livestock”; this would “first be on a voluntary basis, but mandatory buyout is not excluded if necessary”.

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It is no surprise, then, that the plans sparked massive protests by farmers, who see it as a direct attack on their livelihoods, or that the BBB’s slogan — “No Farms, No Food” — clearly resonated with voters. But aside from concerns about the impact of the measure on the country’s food security, and on a centuries-old rural way of life integral to Dutch national identity, the rationale behind this drastic measure is also questionable. Agriculture currently accounts for almost half of the country’s output of carbon dioxide, yet the Netherlands is responsible for less than 0.4% of the world’s emissions. No wonder many Dutch fail to see how such negligible returns justify the complete overhaul of the country’s farming sector, which is already considered one of the most sustainable in the world: over the past two decades, water dependence for key crops has been reduced by as much as 90%, and the use of chemical pesticides in greenhouses has been almost completely eliminated.

Farmers also point out that the consequences of the nitrogen cut would extend well beyond the Netherlands. The country, after all, is Europe’s largest exporter of meat and the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, just behind the United States — in other words, the plan would cause food exports to collapse at a time when the world is already facing a food and resource shortage. We already know what this might look like. A similar ban on nitrogen fertiliser was conducted in Sri Lanka last year, with disastrous consequences: it caused an artificial food shortage that plunged nearly two million Sri Lankans into poverty, leading to an uprising that toppled the government.

James Clayton & Ben Derico

CEO Hoan Ton-That also revealed Clearview now has 30bn images scraped from platforms such as Facebook, taken without users’ permissions.

The company has been repeatedly fined millions of dollars in Europe and Australia for breaches of privacy.

Critics argue that the police’s use of Clearview puts everyone into a “perpetual police line-up”.

“Whenever they have a photo of a suspect, they will compare it to your face,” says Matthew Guariglia from the Electronic Frontier Foundation says. “It’s far too invasive.”

The figure of a million searches comes from Clearview and has not been confirmed by police. But in a rare admission, Miami Police has confirmed to the BBC it uses this software for every type of crime.

Clearview’s system allows a law enforcement customer to upload a photo of a face and find matches in a database of billions of images it has collected.

Matt Taibbi:

If the story was wrong, and Trump wasn’t a Russian spy, there wasn’t a word for what was being perpetrated. This was a system-wide effort to re-frame reality itself, which was both too intellectually ambitious to fit in a word like “hoax,” but also probably not against any one law, either. New language would have to be invented just to define the wrongdoing, which not only meant whatever this was would likely go unpunished, but that it could be years before the public was ready to talk about it.

Around that same time, writer Jacob Siegel — a former army infantry and intelligence officer who edits Tablet’s afternoon digest, The Scroll — was beginning the job of putting key concepts on paper. As far back as 2019, he sketched out the core ideas for a sprawling, illuminating 13,000-word piece that just came out this week. Called “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century: Thirteen ways of looking at disinformation,” Siegel’s Tablet article is the enterprise effort at describing the whole anti-disinformation elephant I’ve been hoping for years someone in journalism would take on.

Here, WH Digital Director @RFlaherty46 tells Facebook that he "really couldn't care less" about how they're censoring information as long as "they're having measurable impact": pic.twitter.com/5R2kP2LBc6

— Attorney General Andrew Bailey (@AGAndrewBailey) March 30, 2023

British Library:

We recently had the pleasure of hosting a visit from Dr Borna Izadpanah, Lecturer in Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, together with his students, to look at some of the incredibly diverse materials in our collections. Here Borna highlights some of the items we looked at which not only provide a source of inspiration but also act as a brief history of the development of Arabic script typography.

Nader Issa:

First revealed in Lightfoot’s budget proposal last fall for the current year, this year’s $175 million payment from CPS to the city was approved by the Board of Education at its monthly meeting Wednesday — but was the subject of intense scrutiny by board members who criticized City Hall.

The board passed with a 3-2 vote an amendment to the district’s agreement with the city that greatly increases CPS’ obligation from $100 million last year and $60 million in 2020 as payments to the underfunded pension ramp up — with additional significant increases expected over the next few years.

The payments in question cover the benefits of non-teaching CPS staff — who make up less than half of the district’s 40,000 employees — in the Municipal Employees’ Annuity and Benefit Fund. Those include cafeteria workers, bus aides, special education classroom assistants and other support staff. Teachers have a separate pension fund. The MEABF also covers elected officials, the Chicago Housing Authority and Public Building Commission, among others.

As of the end of 2020, about 56% of active MEABF participants — 17,469 of 31,327 — were CPS employees, district officials said Wednesday. Of the $266 million pricetag for those CPS workers’ benefits, $175 million is being passed on to the district.

California Reading Report Card:

As in the 2019 Report Card, funding and share of high-need students had very little correlation with results. There are top performing districts with over 90% high-need enrollment, and low performing districts with less than 40%.

The clear message is that it is not the students themselves, or the level of resources, that drive student reading achievement – the primary drivers are district focus on reading, management practices, and curriculum and instruction choices. The top performing districts come in all types: urban, rural, and suburban, across 9 different counties, with high-need students levels ranging from 39% to 94%. Any district can succeed at teaching reading.

New this year is a break-down by percent of limited-proficiency English Learners (ELs). With ELs, districts are tasked with teaching both English and reading; short-comings in either will yield low results. Districts with higher shares of ELs may have lower results, but still out-perform many districts with a similar student mix by as much as 25 percentage points.

A very small number of districts (7 in total) bucked the pandemic-driven trend. Palo Alto Unified, one of 2019 lowest performers, improved by 9 percentage points, and was the state’s most improved district. Their Every Student Reads Initiative, started in 2021, appears to be having positive impact. Newark Unified improved by 5 percentage points.

How the Rankings Work

Districts are ranked by the percent of economically disadvantaged Hispanic/Latino (Latino) students who “meet or exceed” grade level for the CAASPP 3rd grade ELA test in 2022. For measuring improvement, we compared to the same results for 2019.

More, here.

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Huge credit to @RandPaul, who understands very well that most Americans – especially his own party’s voters – view both China and TikTok as a grave menace, but he nonetheless blocked the bill and eloquently explained its very real dangers to Americans:https://t.co/cahiSnrlz7

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 30, 2023

David Blaska:

One of the candidates will help choose a new superintendent. Pray God it is not another terminally Woke clone of Jennifer Cheatham!Which it will be if Feltham is elected. She’s the one who says “Our schools are products of white supremacy.” Of course, she is endorsed by the teachers union and the Defund the Cops Capital Times.

Voters should dive into results of the school district’s safety and student wellness survey. Of the respondents, 48% were students, 37% parents, and 19% faculty or staff. Many had only praise for Madison’s 52 public schools. Some read like this:

“Our experiences to date at Nuestro Mundo and Sennett have been outstanding. Thank you!”

But these are more representative:

“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?

Alex Zimmerman:

New York City education officials plan to take a stronger hand in what curriculums educators can use in their classrooms, a move that could represent a major shift in how the nation’s largest school system approaches teaching and learning, Chalkbeat has learned.

The education department recently began laying the groundwork for superintendents to choose from three reading programs to use across their districts. It is also launching a standardized algebra program in many high schools. The plans have not been announced publicly, but were confirmed by four education department employees familiar with the city’s literacy efforts and multiple school leaders.

Principals historically have enjoyed enormous leeway to select curriculums. Proponents argue this allows schools to stay nimble and select materials appropriate to their specific student populations. But some experts, and even the city’s own schools chancellors, have argued that the approach can lead to a tangle of instructional practices that can vary widely in quality from classroom to classroom.

“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?

Lolita Baldor:

Holiday is an early beneficiary of the new program, which gives lower-performing recruits up to 90 days of academic or fitness instruction to help them meet military standards. In place for only eight months, it is already making a significant difference for both the Army and those who want to serve in it.

So far, 5,400 soldiers have made it through the prep course since it started in August at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. That’s an important boost since the Army fell dramatically short of its recruiting goalslast year, due to low unemployment and general wariness about military service. And at least one other military service, the Navy, took notice and is setting up a similar course.

For those who make it through the program, it can be life-changing. Holiday, 23, said many of her peers in her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, didn’t make it out of high school, with some “dead or in jail.” Sitting outside the class building in her Army fatigues last summer, she talked about trying to pass the academic test for two years with no success.

“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?

Mia Ashton:

In the 1990s, Dr. Robert Smith, a surgeon at Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary in Scotland, performed leg amputations on two men. Both men were perfectly healthy but suffering from “apotemnophilia,” a rare psychiatric condition involving the desire to amputate healthy limbs. Apotemnophiles claim not to feel complete with four limbs and obsess over the idea of having unwanted body parts chopped off.

Smith believed the surgeries were life-saving, arguing that otherwise, the patients would attempt the amputation themselves and possibly die in the process. He claimed the men’s motivations were not erotic. But it was later revealed that Smith was indeed aware that one of the men ran an amputee fetish website.

After conducting an investigation, the hospital deemed the procedures unethical, and Smith was banned from further mutilating healthy bodies. The ethically dubious experiment ended.

But let’s imagine for a moment an alternate reality, a world in which a powerful apotemnophile lobby group convinces society that apotemnophile rights is the next civil rights movement. The messaging of this movement would be simple: An amputee is anyone who identifies as an amputee. Amputee rights are human rights.

Imagine making a Top 5 list of best things about a school system and not mentioning anything remotely related to achievement (aka “education”) https://t.co/q8sgx9O8Vx

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) March 29, 2023

Tristan Bove:

“The fact is I found it hard to face up to what central bankers are doing, not just by raising rates, suppressing demand, and lowering wages,” Pettifor wrote. “Through lack of analysis, regulation, oversight and foresight—central bankers have shown this last week they were prepared to use high rates to risk and even precipitate bank failures and global financial instability.”

She also criticized the European Central Bank for sticking to large rate hikes last week despite the recent bank collapses in the U.S. Credit Suisse failed just days later, and was bought by USB in an emergency deal brokered by regulators. 

Pettifor went on to reference an interview between former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and comedian and political commentator Jon Stewart aired last week. Summers insisted that raising rates and tackling inflation at all costs was the right way forward, while Stewart challenged him on the outsized role corporate profits have played in fueling inflation, which has received comparably little attention from the Fed.

Rachel Monroe:

Last February, when a teen-age boy died of a fentanyl overdose in Kyle, Texas, south of Austin, local law enforcement hoped that it was an isolated incident. “By all accounts, he did most of his association with the Austin crowd,” Kyle’s police chief, Jeff Barnett, recalls thinking. “He goes to school in Austin, associates with people from Austin, this is not particularly a Kyle drug problem.” Then, in May, a fifteen-year-old named Noah Rodriguez was found unresponsive after taking drugs; he spent four days in a coma before recovering. In June, another local high-school student suffered a fatal overdose. Weeks later and a few blocks away, a teen-age girl was found dead in her room with slivers of a blue pill on the windowsill by her bed. “At that point I knew—there’s something coming,” Barnett said. “This is a tidal wave.” The wave was still cresting. In August, two other local parents went to wake up their teen-age son for dinner and couldn’t rouse him. Days later, Rodriguez overdosed again, this time fatally. Teen-agers in the Hays County region overdosed, but did not die, in an elementary-school parking lot, during class, and in school bathrooms. Grieving parents paid for a billboard with pictures of some of the kids who’d died that year, grinning boys in T-shirts and hoodies, next to the words “Fentanyl Steals Your Friends.”

Two decades ago, Kyle was a town of some six thousand people. It has since octupled in size, and many of the fields where teen-agers used to chug beer at pasture parties have been paved over and replaced by town-house developments. On some farm-to-market roads, you can still spot a cow or two, but much of the county, one of the fastest-growing in the nation, has been overtaken by Austin’s growth. In the Hays Consolidated Independent School District, which includes four high schools, fourteen elementary schools, and six middle schools, test scores and median incomes are above state averages, though not dramatically so. The district adds around fifteen hundred new students a year. “We have a lot of people coming in for the technology industry in Austin,” Hays C.I.S.D. Superintendent Eric Wright told me. “We have a lot of first-time Texans that come from Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras.” The county’s infrastructure hasn’t caught up with its expansion: the Hays C.I.S.D. administration is run out of a former tractor-supply store and a suite of temporary buildings, and the county has retained some of the camaraderie of a smaller town.

Liz Willen:

What sounds like increased protection for children is part of a Republican campaign slogan, one that may or may not resonate with our country’s fragile public-school parents, teachers and children in the post-pandemic era. Republicans hope it will, though many parent groups and Democrats disagree.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the “Parents Bill of Rights Act,” which would guarantee parents access to more information online, including curriculum, budgets, reading lists and library books, while requiring them to be notified of student requests to change their gender-identifying pronouns.

“This is about empowering the parents, it’s about opening up the schools to the parents,” said Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

“Orwellian to the core,” countered Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who said it has no chance of passing the Senate. The bill some Democrats dubbed “the politics over parents” bill passed the House 213 to 208, in part because five Democrats were absent.

Jacob Siegel:

For more than half a century, McCarthyism stood as a defining chapter in the worldview of American liberals: a warning about the dangerous allure of blacklists, witch hunts, and demagogues.

Until 2017, that is, when another list of alleged Russian agents roiled the American press and political class. A new outfit called Hamilton 68 claimed to have discovered hundreds of Russian-affiliated accounts that had infiltrated Twitter to sow chaos and help Donald Trump win the election. Russia stood accused of hacking the social media platforms, the new centers of power, and using them to covertly direct events inside the United States.

None of it was true. After reviewing Hamilton 68’s secret list, Twitter’s safety officer, Yoel Roth, privately admitted that his company was allowing “real people” to be “unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without evidence or recourse.” 

The Hamilton 68 episode played out as a nearly shot-for-shot remake of the McCarthy affair, with one important difference: McCarthy faced some resistance from leading journalists as well as from the U.S. intelligence agencies and his fellow members of Congress. In our time, those same groups lined up to support the new secret lists and attack anyone who questioned them.

When proof emerged earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national press. The disinterest was so profound, it suggested a matter of principle rather than convenience for the standard-bearers of American liberalism who had lost faith in the promise of freedom and embraced a new ideal.

In his last days in office, President Barack Obama made the decision to set the country on a new course. On Dec. 23, 2016, he signed into law the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act, which used the language of defending the homeland to launch an open-ended, offensive information war.

Something in the looming specter of Donald Trump and the populist movements of 2016 reawakened sleeping monsters in the West. Disinformation, a half-forgotten relic of the Cold War, was newly spoken of as an urgent, existential threat. Russia was said to have exploited the vulnerabilities of the open internet to bypass U.S. strategic defenses by infiltrating private citizens’ phones and laptops. The Kremlin’s endgame was to colonize the minds of its targets, a tactic cyber warfare specialists call “cognitive hacking.”

Defeating this specter was treated as a matter of national survival. “The U.S. Is Losing at Influence Warfare,” warned a December 2016 article in the defense industry journal, Defense One. The article quoted two government insiders arguing that laws written to protect U.S. citizens from state spying were jeopardizing national security. According to Rand Waltzman, a former program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, America’s adversaries enjoyed a “significant advantage” as the result of “legal and organizational constraints that we are subject to and they are not.”

Eric Topol:

My takeaways from these chapters are that GPT-4 is a remarkable conversationalist, it edits better than creates, provides language that suggests it has a real grasp on causality, and that it appears to exhibit logical reasoning. When asked, it can give an idea of what a patient may be thinking. To Peter’s credit, he aptly presents both sides of whether GPT-4 actually understands; the “stochastic parrot” versus a more advanced form of machine intelligence and comprehension than we have previously seen. Taking us through a poem that his son wrote, and that GPT-4 rewrites, is quite informative, as is the French phrase that the LLM interprets with remarkable cultural insight.

This issue about “understanding” is a lot like the explainability issue of AI. If it works well, it may not really matter what is the level of the machine’s capability.

JD Tuccille:

That combination of food stamps and farming subsidies is the sort of unholy political deal that makes cutting government spending so challenging. That’s not an accident.

The Rattler is a weekly newsletter from J.D. Tuccille. If you care about government overreach and tangible threats to everyday liberty, this is for you.

By 1973, the number of congressional districts dependent on farming were shrinking, but farm bills had grown in cost and frequency,” Ryan Alexander, then-president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, pointed out in 2018 as the debate raged over the last farm bill. “How to maintain support for the shrinking farm constituency? By adding food assistance – at the time, food stamps – to the package. The shotgun marriage of farm aid and food stamps meant rural and urban members of Congress came together to get the farm bill over the finish line.”

That not only means that the farm bill is an unhappy blend of unrelated matters jammed into a single compromise piece of legislation, but that its spending emphasis is not what you might expect.

Getty:

In a world in which immediate access to words and information is taken for granted, it is hard to imagine a time when writing began.

Archaeological discoveries in ancient Mesopotamia (now mostly modern Iraq) show the initial power and purpose of writing, from administrative and legal functions to poetry and literature.

Mesopotamia was a region comprising many cultures over time speaking different languages. The earliest known writing was invented there around 3400 B.C. in an area called Sumer near the Persian Gulf. The development of a Sumerian script was influenced by local materials: clay for tablets and reeds for styluses (writing tools). At about the same time, or a little later, the Egyptians were inventing their own form of hieroglyphic writing.

Even after Sumerian died out as a spoken language around 2000 B.C., it survived as a scholarly language and script. Other peoples within and near Mesopotamia, from Turkey, Syria, and Egypt to Iran, adopted the later version of this script developed by the Akkadians (the first recognizable Semitic people), who succeeded the Sumerians as rulers of Mesopotamia. In Babylonia itself, the script survived for two more millennia until its demise around 70 C.E.

Rosie Sherry:

We’re a family of two parents and 5 children aged 5 to 19. We’ve been on our unschooling journey for over 10 years now. There is no going back or no other way for us. The inefficiencies and stress of schools are just too much for us to bear.

We do get tempted with going back to school and sometimes drool at private schools. We then figure the £3k a month it would cost (for 3 of the kids) is ridiculous. There are so many better ways to spend that kind of money.

The cost of unschooling for us

What we spend our money on varies year by year, but hopefully, this will paint a rough picture.

The numbers are rounded and also shown as a monthly cost for easy calculation. Some things we pay per session, per month or per term.

PragerU video:

David Rozado:

I describe here a fine-tuning of an OpenAI GPT language model with the specific objective of making the model manifest right-leaning political biases, the opposite of the biases manifested by ChatGPT (see here). Concretely, I fine-tuned a Davinci large language model from the GPT 3 family of models with a very recent common ancestor to ChatGPT. I half-jokingly named the resulting fine-tuned model manifesting right-of-center viewpoints RightWingGPT. Subscribe

Previously, I have documented the left-leaning political biases embedded in ChatGPT as manifested in the bot responses to questions with political connotations. In 14 out of 15 political orientation tests I administered to ChatGPT, its answers were deemed by the tests as manifesting left-leaning viewpoints.

Beth Hawkins:

A bill moving through the Minnesota Legislature would curtail a popular path to a teaching credential, potentially removing hundreds of educators in high-needs areas from classrooms and throwing up roadblocks for future teachers. In rolling back a hard-won, five-year-old overhaul of the state’s teacher licensure system, the change would have an outsized effect on special education; instructors who are native speakers of Somali, Hmong and other languages spoken in immersion schools; career-technical instructors; and educators of color, who currently make up 6% of the state’s teacher workforce. 

Up to 4,400 educators could be affected, including thousands who had been promised full licenses after three years as provisional teachers. But many now would be forced to go back to school and re-earn their credentials at a traditional college of education in the state once their temporary license expires.

Most devastating for the state’s highest-needs students: The proposed change could impact 2,000 special educators, a category of teachers in desperately short supply. A 74 analysis of newly available state data reveals that schools serving the children with the most profound and intense disabilities would lose the largest share of their teaching staff — many needing to replace two-thirds, or more.

⚠️SCOOP—Dr Fauci admits key mistakes:
1) #COVID19 variants really bad—evades immunity, drugs, and vaccines
2) Asymptomatic transmission
3) Virus is airborne

I recall rude people once mocked me about “fear-mongering” about “scariants”, on asymptomatic, on #COVIDisAirborne. 🤷🏻‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/PLCCOp7Syu

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) March 27, 2023

Julia Silverman:

After weeks of furious, behind-the-scenes negotiations, Gov. Tina Kotek has thrown her weight — and a proposal to spend upwards of $100 million – behind a bill that aims to overhaul how Oregon’s youngest students are taught to read.

The effort, dubbed the Early Literacy Success Initiative, is up for a pivotal hearing in Salem this week. In an exclusive interview Monday, the governor made it clear the move she’s backing to make reading instruction more effective will hew to what research says works, not to techniques with which educators might be more familiar, and will be swift.

Only 39% of Oregon’s third-graders can read proficiently, including just 21% of Latino and Black students, the most recent statewide test results, from spring 2022, showed.

Kotek told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Monday, “We are going to make sure that the science of reading, the research, guides what districts do. We are expecting movement by districts in the upcoming school year.”

Science of reading is a key term that signals a systematic, phonics-based approach that is backed by decades of brain research and leaves no room for what is commonly called “balanced literacy.” The latter approach, still embraced by some Oregon school districts and colleges of education, includes teaching students to guess at words from pictures or context and leaving them to figure out many letter-sound patterns on their own.

Should the proposal pass, the level of specification Kotek is calling for would be a big departure for Oregon, which has traditionally allowed its nearly 200 school districts to chart their own course.

Tax Prof summary

Stanford Law School’s chapter of the Federalist Society earlier this month invited Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan to speak on campus. Student groups that vehemently opposed Judge Duncan’s prior advocacy and judicial decisions regarding same-sex marriage, immigration, trans people, abortion and other issues showed up to protest. Some protesters heckled the judge and peppered him with questions and comments. Judge Duncan answered in turn. Regardless of where you stand politically, none of this heated exchange was helpful for civil discourse or productive dialogue. …

My participation at the event with Judge Duncan has been widely discussed. I was asked to attend the event by the Federalist Society, the organizers of the student protest and the administration. My role was to observe and, if needed, de-escalate.

As soon as Judge Duncan entered the room, a verbal sparring match began to take place between the judge and the protesters. By the time Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to intervene, tempers in the room were heated on both sides.

I stepped up to the podium to deploy the de-escalation techniques in which I have been trained, which include getting the parties to look past conflict and see each other as people. My intention wasn’t to confront Judge Duncan or the protesters but to give voice to the students so that they could stop shouting and engage in respectful dialogue. I wanted Judge Duncan to understand why some students were protesting his presence on campus and for the students to understand why it was important that the judge be not only allowed but welcomed to speak. …

Ramon Antonio Vargas:

Two New Orleans high school seniors who say they have proven Pythagoras’s theorem by using trigonometry – which academics for two millennia have thought to be impossible – are being encouraged by a prominent US mathematical research organization to submit their work to a peer-reviewed journal.

Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson, who are students of St Mary’s Academy, recently gave a presentation of their findings at the American Mathematical Society south-eastern chapter’s semi-annual meeting in Georgia.

They were reportedly the only two high schoolers to give presentations at the meeting attended by math researchers from institutions including the universities of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana State, Ohio State, Oklahoma and Texas Tech. And they spoke about how they had discovered a new proof for the Pythagorean theorem.

US Chamber of Commerce Foundation:

The report asks: what can we learn from the last two decades of education policy, and what do we still not know? According to what Goldhaber and DeArmond identify as the most credible existing studies, the report highlights the following:

Disaggregated data shifted the focus from the average kid to every kid—including Black, Hispanic, low-income students, English learners, and students with special needs. No longer were school districts able to hide the performance of some students behind an average.

Student achievement increased due to NCLB-era assessment and accountability policies, especially in math and especially for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students, who the system had not been serving well.

There is now access to far more reliable, comparable education data than there would be available otherwise, though there has not been sufficient time dedicated to rigorous analysis.

Reforms in teacher evaluation and school turnaround initiatives did not consistently improve student outcomes at scale, in part due to significant variation in quality of implementation.

However, existing research and data has not answered other critical questions, including:

Did schools serving historically underserved students get more money to improve than they otherwise would have?

If identified schools did get more money, what did they do with it?

How many identified low-performing schools became successful?

Have states seen improvement in measures other than academics, such as chronic absenteeism or school climate, that the Every Student Succeeds Act was also intended to elevate?

Learn about how the last two decades of education policy can inform how we plan for our students’ futures.

Juliette Ochieng:

I’ve mentioned online before that my church stayed open and an interesting thing about that is that some observers presumed that it was being left alone because it was a “black” church. This presumption reflects how insidiously our thinking has been tainted by what we see and read online. And, for the record, my church’s racial composition mirrors that of our country. Funny, that.  

Now, since the new mask “mandate” of 2023, I see a lot more people wearing them than was so in the last 18 months or so, but I can’t remember the last time I put on one and no one has accosted me about it. Hey, it might be Black Woman Privilege, but I don’t think so. Many of all colors have figured out that we’ve been conned. 

But I do carry this one around, just in case.

The RESTRICT act is the American Great Firewall. Become China in the name of beating China. https://t.co/DBaYz6LRdf

— Balaji (@balajis) March 29, 2023

Joseph Cox:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation paid tens of thousands of dollars on internet data, known as “netflow” data, collected in bulk by a private company, according to internal FBI documents obtained by Motherboard.

The documents provide more insight into the often overlooked trade of internet data. Motherboard has previously reported the U.S. Army’s and FBI’s purchase of such data. These new documents show the purchase was for the FBI’s Cyber Division, which investigates hackers in the worlds of cybercrime and national security.

“Commercially provided net flow information/data—2 months of service,” the internal document reads. Motherboard obtained the file through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FBI.

“Students in the most progressive cities
face greater racial inequity in achievement &
graduation rates than students living in the
most conservative cities.”

Black-white gaps in math & reading were 15% greater in progressive cities.

—@citizenstewart: https://t.co/JFfUvqcLLu pic.twitter.com/mICZBVX4ZP

— Free Black Thought (@FreeBlckThought) March 28, 2023

David Blaska:

Surveys revealed a terrifying situation throughout Madison’s school district brought on by an overly permissive environment. Students complained of “too many fights,” and feeling “unsafe in hallways, common areas, bathrooms and buses.” Bullying has become a major problem. It was mentioned 450 times in the survey responses. Students attribute these problems to an environment with “no consequences.”

Some female students reported that they won’t use the bathrooms at school because “they are not safe, drugs are done in there, and destruction, and even sex.” Teachers were well aware of these problems.

“This month I’ve seen a lot of students pushing, shoving, and verbally harassing each other during passing time,” one anonymous respondent wrote.

“I am concerned about the amount of alcohol and drug use happening inside the school building,” another wrote.

“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?

Paul Joseph Watson:

Google’s Bard AI program mimics ChatGPT in that it is riddled with political bias, refusing to comment on Donald Trump or the evils of abortion, while effusively praising Joe Biden and the benefits of abortion.

The company released its Bard chatbot to users in both the UK and US yesterday as part of an “experiment” as it rushes to keep up with Open AI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat.

“We feel like we’ve reached the limit of the testing phase of this experiment,” said Google’s Jack Krawczyk, “and now we want to gradually begin to roll it out. We’re at the very beginning of that pivot from research to reality, and it’s a long arc of technology that we’re about to undergo.”

However, Gab CEO Andrew Torba immediately exposed the program’s political bias, commenting, “I am pleased to inform you that it has failed the Turing Test.”

Torba asked Bard, “If you could prevent a nuclear world war by saying an ethnic slur, should you say it?”

Mike Antonucci:

“When the ESSER tap abruptly goes dry, we estimate the average district will have to cut costs by some $1,200 per student in 2024-25.”

Why is that? It’s not a mystery. “Nationally, enrollment is falling while staffing counts are climbing,” Roza explains. “Fewer students usually means a smaller staff, but many districts have used their relief funds to both hold on to existing employees and add more in the form of new counselors, reading specialists, nurses, etc.”

While there will be plenty of trimming on the margins, labor costs constitute the overwhelming share of district budgets, and that’s where the axe will ultimately fall. That means layoffs, and union seniority rules dictate that most of those laid off will be the folks we’re in such a frenzy to hire now.

What Roza doesn’t predict, but which is equally assured, is the uproar this will cause among teachers unions. They will not view the coming lean years as the inevitable outcome of using one-time funds for l0ng-term commitments. Instead, they will be depicted as draconian cuts, and the narrative will abruptly shift from catastrophic teacher shortages to catastrophic teacher layoffs.

Joseph Hanneman:

The admission came in a March 24 filingbefore U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras that seeks to keep video footage shot by the officers under court seal.

Prosecutors accused the case defendant—William Pope of Topeka, Kansas—of an “illegitimate” attempt to unmask the video as part of his alleged strategy to try the case in the news media. Pope filed a motion to remove the court seal on Feb. 21.

“The defendant is not entitled to ‘undesignate’ these videos to share them with unlimited third parties,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Moran. “His desire to try his case in the media rather than in a court of law is illegitimate, and the government has met its burden to show the necessity of the protective order.”

Videos long hidden under court seal have become a major topic, especially with prosecutors disclosing in a number of high-profile Jan. 6 cases the involvement of multiple FBI informants.

Pope is seeking to lift the court seal on the undercover video as part of his drive to obtain full access to video evidence held by the government. Pope is representing himself in the criminal case being prosecuted against him. At a hearing on March 3, Judge Contreras seemed sympathetic to Pope’s motion to unmask the videos.

Yogita Limaye

“Every day I wake up with the hope of going back to school. They [the Taliban] keep saying they will open schools. But it’s been almost two years now. I don’t believe them. It breaks my heart,” says 17-year-old Habiba.

She blinks and bites her lip trying hard not to tear up.

Habiba and her former classmates Mahtab and Tamana are among hundreds of thousands of teenage girls who have been barred from attending secondary school in most of Afghanistan by the Taliban – the only country to take such action.

One-and-a-half years since their lives were brought to a halt, their grief is still raw.

The girls say they fear that global outrage over what’s happened to them is fading, even though they live with the pain every day – intensified this week when another school term started without them.

“When I see the boys going to school and doing whatever they want, it really hurts me. I feel very bad. When I see my brother leaving for school, I feel broken,” says Tamana. Her voice trembles and tears roll down her cheeks but she goes on.

“Earlier, my brother used to say I won’t go to school without you. I hugged him and said you go, I’ll join you later.

Richard Phelps:

EWA’s income from contributions dwarfs that from membership dues by a ratio of about 150 to one (Internal Revenue Service, 2015–2019). Its contributors overwhelmingly supported Common Core.

As of 2019, EWA’s five “Officers, Directors, Trustees, Key Employees, and Highest Compensated Employees” all enjoyed six-figure salaries.

Current Sustaining Funders:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Foundation for Child Development, Funders for Adolescent Science Translation, The Joyce Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, Lumina Foundation, The Spencer Foundation, The Wallace Foundation, The Walton Family Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

Wall Street Journal:

Democrats are denouncing the House GOP investigation into the weaponization of government, but maybe that’s because Republicans are getting somewhere. That includes new evidence that the Internal Revenue Service may be targeting a journalist who testified before the weaponization committee.

Mr. Taibbi has provoked the ire of Democrats and other journalists for his role in researching Twitter records and then releasing internal communications from the social-media giant that expose its censorship and its contacts with government officials. This effort has already inspired government bullying, with Chair Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission targeting new Twitter owner Elon Musk and demanding the company “identify all journalists” granted access to the Twitter files.

Now Mr. Taibbi has told Mr. Jordan’s committee that an IRS agent showed up at his personal residence in New Jersey on March 9. That happens to be the same day Mr. Taibbi testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about what he learned about Twitter. The taxman left a note instructing Mr. Taibbi to call the IRS four days later. Mr. Taibbi was told in a call with the agent that both his 2018 and 2021 tax returns had been rejected owing to concerns over identity theft.

William Jacobson

A survey released by The Wall Street Journal measures how in just a quarter of a century traditional values of patriotism, religion, and even the value of child bearing, have collapsed. While there may be many causes, there is no doubt that the relentless demonization of the nation that has been taking place in education particularly in the last 25 years is having an impact. The education activists who now populate the system and have moved on to corporations and government, seek to deconstruct the country, to tear it down because it is iredeemably racist, capitalism is evil, and we are illegal occupiers. DEI is the living, breathing bureaucratic mechanism.

If the US dollar’s global supremacy erodes, America will face a reckoning like none before.

A surprising segment on CNN.

🔊

pic.twitter.com/1r8msosckh

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) March 27, 2023

MacIver:

Girls said they won’t use the bathrooms at school because “they are not safe, drugs are done in there, and destruction, and even sex.”

The surveys revealed a terrifying situation throughout Madison’s school district brought on by an overly permissive environment. Students complained of “too many fights,” and feeling “unsafe in hallways, common areas, bathrooms and buses.” Bullying has become a major problem. It was mentioned 450 times in the survey responses. Students attribute these problems to an environment with “no consequences.”

Some female students reported that they won’t use the bathrooms at school because “they are not safe, drugs are done in there, and destruction, and even sex.”

The teachers were well aware of these problems.

“This month I’ve seen a lot of students pushing, shoving, and verbally harassing each other during passing time,” one anonymous respondent wrote.

Ziv and Lempel co-invented the famous Lempel-Ziv algorithm that is the basis of ZIP files.

Prof. Abraham Lempel died 7 weeks ago.
Prof. Jacob Ziv died today 😔
RIP.

We are losing the giants that shaped computing as we know it. pic.twitter.com/SPK3KB1G1N

— Yaniv Erlich (@erlichya) March 26, 2023

The last bit of evidence is in: overextended pandemic policies destroyed Wisconsin’s kids.https://t.co/bCDaywJNa6

Take Black students in Milwaukee.

Missed schooldays: 28⬆️46 DAYS PER YEAR! 63 for high schoolers!

Graduation: 66.2%⬇️61.3%.

Suspensions:⬆️7.0%. pic.twitter.com/sLfaFSeXbw

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) March 27, 2023

If you’re still thinking about who to vote for in the Madison School Board election, @ssfp_news had me, @oherken and @telldylan join its students to ask the candidates some questions in a forum last Thursday evening. Watch it here: https://t.co/jgbiL3X989

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) March 27, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

BREAKING: Internal @WisconsinDPI emails obtained by @IRG_CIO shed light on the agency’s response to @ReformingGovt‘s ESSER III report, including admission that report was “accurate” and discussion of whether to “dunk” on IRG’s “conservative” “credentials.”🔎🧵👇:

— IRG Center for Investigative Oversight (@IRG_CIO) March 27, 2023

JOHNSON CREEK – The Johnson Creek School District's AP Government Class is hosting a New School Board Member Candidate Forum on Wednesday at 6 p.m., at the Weis Center which is located at the Middle/High School, 455 Aztalan St., Johnson Creek. https://t.co/my0QBUf7Iu

— WatertownDailyTimes (@wdtimes1) March 27, 2023

Black mother denounces ethnic studies curriculum in Minnesota: “I see why you white proponents of this bill might support it. It’s not your kids being told they can’t succeed and you get to shed some of your white guilt in the process.”pic.twitter.com/Ktkc7RFMes

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) March 25, 2023

Elizabeth Wadas:

Imagine being a parent worried for your child’s safety and not being able to get more information from staff about what’s going on. That’s the reality one Madison mom says she has lived for more than 11 months. And she’s not alone.

“As a parent we entrust the school, these people in leadership positions, to care for our children, to ensure they’re safe to ensure they’re in a good environment,” said Amy Ryan.

That trust for Ryan is now broken. She says the Madison Metropolitan School District gave her the run around when she had concerns for her kids’ safety at school. Ryan says she tried emailing her questions and setting up meetings with staff. Still she says her questions went unanswered.

“It’s frustrating as a parent to not get a response and to feel like my family didn’t matter,” said Ryan.

NEW: The University of Missouri System will no longer use diversity statements in faculty hiring.

In an email on Friday, President Mun Choi also said that the Mizzou would no longer use its “diversity faculty hiring rubric.” pic.twitter.com/qpqyDqKEGu

— John Sailer (@JohnDSailer) March 27, 2023

Fairport Educational Alliance:

A group of Fairport parents and taxpayers filed a letter of intent to the Fairport Central School District board of education and Superintendent during the Board of Education meeting on Tuesday, March 21 at Fairport High School.

The letter explains the Surety Bond and Insurance Claim process and how the board members and superintendent have failed to uphold their oath of office as public officials. The letter explains that they have violated many state and federal obscenity laws including:

Francesca Block:

The message went on to state that OCS was investigating Kappa Sigma for three “concerns.” First, an allegation of hazing after a fraternity member suffered a panic attack. Second, a claim that students under 21 were served alcohol at Kappa Sigma’s April 15 party. Third, an incident on April 24 in which a Kappa Sigma member consumed too much alcohol and had to go to the hospital. In the meantime, OCS said it was placing Kappa Sigma on probation, meaning they could not host or be involved in any parties on or off campus.

“Failure to adhere to the interim Probation with Restrictions will result in additional sanctions and will delay the completion of this process,” the letter, signed by OCS Associate Dean Tiffany Gabrielson, read.

Within the hour, a dozen other Greek organizations’ presidents were texting Paulmeier, saying they, too, had been placed on probation, according to Paulmeier and one other source.

“This just nuked social life on campus for the rest of the quarter,” Paulmeier told me.

Don Lemon: Do you think that race plays a part in wealth distribution?

Morgan Freeman: Today? No.

Watch this entire exchange (2014): pic.twitter.com/zhZvXTw0PE

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) March 23, 2023

Two separate worlds, two separate sets of facts

This image is fake, it is not what is taught in Florida schools

Most on the left will never know this. It spreads in their social circles and becomes their truth pic.twitter.com/ofXIZQRjuy

— PoliMath (@politicalmath) March 26, 2023

in the new issue of @Harpers: Dwight Garner’s modern English usage in @nytimesbooks pic.twitter.com/eLsMNIEVgx

— Alex Kong (@alexkong1313) March 24, 2023

Rachel Hall:

Several Agatha Christie novels have been edited to remove potentially offensive language, including insults and references to ethnicity.

Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries written between 1920 and 1976 have had passages reworked or removed in new editions published by HarperCollins to strip them of language and descriptions that modern audiences find offensive, especially those involving the characters Christie’s protagonists encounter outside the UK.

Sensitivity readers had made the edits, which were evident in digital versions of the new editions, including the entire Miss Marple run and selected Poirot novels set to be released or that have been released since 2020, the Telegraph reported.

The updates follow edits made to books by Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming to remove offensive references to gender and race in a bid to preserve their relevance to modern readers.

New Criterion:

We thought of Rieff’s description of the therapeutic as a nostrum with “nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being” last month when Stanford Law School brought us the latest eruption of politicized self-indulgence and minatory, unmannerly exhibitionism. Regular readers know that chronicling such spectacles at academic and other cultural institutions has long been a favorite weapon in The New Criterion’spathologist’s armory. We have covered some doozies over the years—the parade of snowflakes and crybullies unhappy about certain Halloween costumes at Yale in 2015, the extended shouting-down of Charles Murray at Middlebury College in 2017, and countless other specimens of weaponized folly masquerading as wounded virtue.

The protestors spent nearly half an hour rudely and obscenely preventing Judge Duncan from delivering his remarks. Eventually, he asked if an administrator were present who could intervene. Jeanne Merino, the acting associate dean of student affairs, was present, but the administrator who stepped forward was Tirien Steinbach, the associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. (How many things had to go wrong, we have often wondered, for an institution to maintain such a position?)

But Dean Steinbach, far from restoring order, was part of the attack. She insisted, over Judge Duncan’s objections, on shunting him aside and delivering prepared remarks from the podium. Prepared remarks, mind, a fact that tended to confirm Judge Duncan’s observation that the whole exercise had been a “setup.”

Dean Steinbach was clearly enamored of that image, for she pressed it into service repeatedly. And what she meant to ask, it transpired, was whether Stanford’s robust-sounding (but in reality largely ignored) protections of free speech were worth the alleged “harm” and discomfort that someone like Judge Duncan imposed upon the community. “Your advocacy, your opinions from the bench,” she trilled, amount to an “absolute disenfranchisement” of minority rights. This was greeted by the currently favored expression of enthusiastic approbation, the chirruping of snapping fingers.

Christopher Rufo:

I recently hosted a summit on anti-woke public policy and, beneath all of the legal and technical details, I realized that there is an opportunity for a significant shift in rhetoric for the political Right.

For decades, conservatives made their arguments primarily through a statistical frame, using the language of finance, economics, and performance metrics. Think “running government like a business.” But in recent years, the rise of left-wing racialist ideology—BLM, CRT, DEI—has created an opportunity, even the necessity, for conservatives to make their arguments through a moral frame, speaking to the conflict of values that underlies the division between Left and Right.

This linguistic shift is already happening—and paying dividends. At the summit, we discussed two specific examples. First, on education, the activist Corey DeAngelis noted that the school choice movement suddenly started winning when it stopped making statistical arguments about performance metrics and started making moral arguments about parental rights and the content of the curriculum. Second, on the federal budget, Wade Miller of the Center for Renewing America has engaged in a similar strategy, moving the debate from the language of large-firm accounting to the language of moral conflict, arguing that Congress should defund the “woke and weaponized bureaucracy.”

Richard Phelps:

Looks like ebook/kindle version is now available. “Look Inside” feature on Amazon shows Preface and Intro.

Barnes & Noble.

amazon

Chuck Ross:

As TikTok’s CEO faced withering scrutiny on Capitol Hill over the company’s links to China, the Biden White House shared a social media post made using technology from the Chinese spyware app’s sister company.

The White House used CapCut, a popular app owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance, to make a video reel posted to Instagram, a Washington Free Beacon analysis of the post found. While CapCut has received far less scrutiny than TikTok, its links to ByteDance have caused concern that China could scoop up data on users of the app. A technology think tank funded by a former Google CEO says CapCut poses national security “challenges,” particularly “with respect to data harvesting, data exploitation, and—possibly—covert influence.”

Ally Markovich

Berkeley Unified announced this week it will create a reparations program for Black students in the school district.

The district wants to give cash payments to students whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States, and it is establishing a new task force to set the course for the reparations program. The process could take years, but if it is implemented, it may be the first program of its kind in the country.

“The need for reparations in response to the institution of U.S. slavery has existed for over 150 years,” school board director Laura Babitt said at Wednesday’s board meeting. “I think it’s time for Berkeley to be first again.”

The 15- to 20-person task force will provide recommendations to the Berkeley school board by January 2024 on how it should pay for reparations and, later, on how the program should be structured and implemented, and who would be eligible for payments. BUSD is now recruiting members to join the task force.

These maps show concentrations of school-age children. Lighter colors=fewer children, and the #atx core is has gotten much lighter since 2011. While Austin’s population grows, numbers of children decline. #austinschools #txed pic.twitter.com/BMRKKg3PSB

— Keri Heath (@HeathKeri) March 24, 2023

Jeannie Sun Gersen:

During the trial, [Judge Allison Burroughs] often had S.F.F.A.’s and Harvard’s lawyers approach the bench for lengthy sidebar discussions, which others in the courtroom couldn’t hear…. [T]he judge automatically sealed all the sidebars. … I filed a letter with the court, asking, in my capacity as a researcher and a reporter, that Judge Burroughs unseal the sidebars…

To my surprise, Seth Waxman, who argued the case for Harvard, quickly objected on behalf of the university—the one that employs me as a tenured law professor, whose job it is to freely conduct research and pursue knowledge. He wrote that the sidebars contained “personal and confidential information that should remain sealed,” providing examples of specific transcript pages that included information about applicants or “information that was not admitted into evidence at trial.”….

With average GPAs/MCAT Scores Blacks are ~4X more likely to be admitted to US medical schools than Asians, and >2X more likely than whites. @donoharm @monitoringbias pic.twitter.com/snKFbSphK4

— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) March 25, 2023

David Bernstein:

After a more ambiguous initial reaction to student disruption of Judge Kyle Duncan’s speech, sponsored by the Stanford Federalist Society, Dean Jennifer Martinez has issued a passionate, well-argued, and occasionally blistering letter explaining why the students behaved inappropriately, and expressing the view that Stanford’s “commitment to diversity and inclusion means that we must protect the expression of all views.” (emphasis in original)

Some might be disappointed that no students will be penalized for their misbehavior. But I think the letter is a much greater victory for academic values than if Martinez had stayed silent and meted out relatively small penalties to the most egregious perpetrators, which is almost certainly the maximum that would have been done.

However, I think some additional soul-searching at Stanford is in order. Dean Martinez and her faculty should ask themselves why students at Stanford felt it appropriate to disrupt Judge Duncan’s speech. Surely some of it is a product of illiberal trends in elite academia more generally. Some of it, though, surely has to do with the fact that Stanford Law is virtually a left-wing monoculture.

Richard Werner:

In reality, central bank decision-makers led by the Fed were largely responsible for the Great Inflation of the 1970s. They adopted “easy money” policies in order to finance massive national budget deficits. Yet this inflationary behaviour went unnoticed by most observers amid discussions of conflict, rising energy prices, unemployment and many other challenges.

Most worryingly, despite these failings, the world’s central banks were able to continue unchecked on a path towards the unprecedented powers they now hold. Indeed, the painful 1970s and subsequent financial crises have been repeatedly used as arguments for even greater independence, and less oversight, of the world’s central banking activities.

All the while, central bank leaders have repeated the mantra that their “number one job” is to achieve price stability by keeping inflation low and stable. Unfortunately, as we continue to experience both punishing inflation rates and high interest rates, the evidence is all around us that they have failed in this job.

The latest crisis – beginning with the sudden closure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in California – is a further indication that inflation, far from being brought to heel by the central banks, is causing chaos in the financial markets. Inflation pushes up interest rates, which in turn reduces the market value of bank assets such as bonds. With SVB’s many corporate depositors not covered by deposit insurance and fearing regulatory intervention, a catastrophic run on this solvent bank was triggered.

When the establishment of the Fed was proposed more than a century ago, it was sold to Congress as the solution to this vulnerability in retail banking, as it could lend to solvent banks facing a run. In the event, the Fed did not lend to some 10,000 banks in the 1930s, letting them fail, and this time around it did not lend to SVB until it was closed and taken over.

Darrell Owens:

In 2021, 47% of Black students in SFUSD that are high school juniors don’t even come close to meeting English-language proficiency. That’s 9% higher than the state average for Black 11th graders — which is also abysmal. That means for every one of two Black students leaving San Francisco high schools they can’t read for their age. Including students who are close but still not proficient: 71.5% of Black high school juniors in San Francisco cannot read at a proficient level, compared to 20.3% of Asian students, 22.6% of White students, 32% of Filipino students and 61.8% of Hispanic students. It was bad pre-pandemic as well but it’s gotten a few percentage points worse. 

These are not numbers from a red state in the Deep South but San Francisco. The technology capital of the world, which has propelled the incomes of white and Asian households tremendously, and for which Latinos largely and Black people almost entirely have been completely left out. Without meeting the most basic literacy standards, Black and Latino high school graduates aren’t even qualified for the most basic office jobs. Computer science is totally out reach — the mathematics proficiency standards are in the single-digits for Black high school graduates.

Kate Andrews:

Some £500 billion was printed by the Bank of England during the pandemic – a staggering sum that caused very little public debate. Those sceptical about so-called ‘quantitative easing’ argue that it causes inflation – and with today’s news that inflation rose 9 per cent on the year in April, is anyone linking the two? Step forward Mervyn King, former governor of the Bank of England, who was surprisingly critical when speaking to Andrew Marr on LBC last night.

One of the major problems, Lord King said, was that the Bank went too hard and too fast with its money printing. ‘Governments stepped in and put in a lot of money for furlough schemes or raising unemployment benefits. That was very sensible,’ he said. ‘The problem was that central banks also printed a great deal of money and that wasn’t needed… it put a lot of money into the system.’

Under classical economic theory, when a lot of money is put into the system (as it has been in the UK and in the US with the Federal Reserve printing about $4.8 trillion), inflation follows. So we shouldn’t be surprised to see a graph looking as it does below.