Wall Street Journal:

“Rules for thee but not for me” seems to be the phrase these days when it comes to criticizing Supreme Court justices. Politico adds to the double standard in its recent story that attacks Justice Amy Coney Barrett for not providing a client list from her husband’s law firm on her annual financial disclosure form. 

Disclosing such clients is neither required nor appropriate, but that didn’t stop Gabe Roth of the group Fix The Court, which was funded by a left-wing money outfit connected to Arabella Advisors, from bemoaning the supposed loss of public trust in the court resulting from the lack of information about the clients of Jesse Barrett’s firm. And I don’t recall Mr. Roth, or anyone else on the left, hand-wringing over a lack of disclosure from the law firms of the spouses of liberal justices.

The Politico story makes much of Mr. Barrett’s continuing to practice law after moving to Washington when his wife joined the Supreme Court. But by sticking with his Indiana-based firm, SouthBank Legal, Mr. Barrett hasn’t raised any appearance issues. SouthBank Legal doesn’t have a Supreme Court practice and has never represented clients before the court.

MATTHEW DeFOUR, MATT MENCARINI, and JACOB RESNECK Wisconsin Watch:

Helping fuel the concern over ineligible voters is the case of Sandra Klitzke, a resident of the Brewster Village nursing home in Outagamie County, who voted in the November 2020 and April 2021 elections, even though a court had removed her right to vote in February 2020.

On March 31, the Thomas More Society filed a complaint with WEC on behalf of Klitzke and her daughter, Lisa Goodwin, who stated she “could not explain why the WisVote voting records would have indicated that my mother voted” in 2020 or 2021.

Normally the county register in probate mails notification of an ineligible voter to the WEC, according to Jennifer Moeller, president of the Wisconsin Register in Probate Association. The WEC then updates its information and notifies the local clerk, who is the only official authorized in Wisconsin to deactivate a voter’s registration.

It’s unclear why Klitzke’s name was not switched to “ineligible” in the WEC voter file, although it appears to have been an administrative error. Court records related to Klitzke’s guardianship information are confidential under state law

A contract to centralize voter data was given to Accenture under former Governor Jim Doyle. After that failed, the State built an in house system. Yet, this public data requires a $10,000 payment for each request.

The “Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism” or Wisconsin Watch, has received substantial funding from George Soros:

Wisconsin Watch, a 501(c)(3) organization that disseminates news stories to many prominent media outlets statewide and is housed at the taxpayer-fundedUW-Madison campus, has taken more than $1 million from an organization founded by George Soros over the years. Wisconsin Right Now discovered that the group is still prominently pushing out stories by a writer, Howard Hardee, who was dispatched to Wisconsin by a Soros-funded organization to work on “election integrity” stories and projects.

When major media outlets like WTM-TV and the Wisconsin State Journal run stories by Wisconsin Watch or Hardee, they fail to advise readers that he’s a fellow with a Soros-linked group. The group says that “hundreds” of news organizations have shared its stories over the years, giving them wide reach.

THREAD: DHS coordinated with a group called the “Election Integrity Partnership” to censor Biden’s opponents. I’m on the EIP’s list with @charliekirk11 @RepMTG @DonaldJTrumpJr @JackPosobiec & more. I was censored while I ran for Congress. Biden’s regime paid EIP groups 12M+! 🧵

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) October 4, 2022

I agree with Steve on this (the changes since the 1990s have made the SAT more test-prepable & Asians have benefited accordingly), but I’m basing it on the psychometric nature of the changes. Does anyone have a good cite on the subject using real data? https://t.co/oN48rlhTHg

— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) October 6, 2022

Neil Richards:

Neil Richards thinks privacy is much more than being left alone. Whatever it is, how do we achieve it in our modern, surveillance filled world, and just as importantly, should we? Is the difference between our revealed and real preferences significant enough to justify companies watching us around the clock?

Mary Chastain:

Over 400 people attended Wednesday’s school board meeting. More than 40 of the people who spoke to the board showed support for Cusato:

“My uncle Daren is standing up for what is right, even though he is standing by himself. I am thoroughly embarrassed that South Side School District has taken this arbitrary stance in choosing to align with the one percent,” his niece said.

“I am standing up here tonight to ask you to separate these two things: the very divisive but trendy topic of pronouns and the precedent that you are setting, which is that teachers need to modify their engagement of students based on how that student feels,” another said.

One woman derided the district for acting in what she perceived to be a fear of “getting sued.”

“We shouldn’t be afraid of being sued. Fine. If you want to sue us, sue us. Let’s take it to the Supreme Court. Let’s take it all the way,” she said.

Susan Edelman:

Schools Chancellor David Banks quietly promoted Mayor Adams’ girlfriend to a top job at the Department of Education, just months after Adams hired Banks’ girlfriend as a deputy mayor, The Post has learned.

Banks named Tracey Collins — Adams’ longtime partner and NYC’s unofficial First Lady — the DOE’s “senior advisor to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” Desmond Blackburn. She started the new job in July, and got a giant, 23% raise to $221,597 a year, records show.

Hizzoner named Banks’ girlfriend, Sheena Wright, and four other women deputy mayors last Dec. 21. Deputy mayors made $251,982 in FY 21. 

Both women’s advancement underscores the tight inner circle of the Adams administration.

Wright, 52, previously CEO of United Way of NYC, helped lead Adams’ transition team. Banks and Wright live together in Harlem. Banks and Adams took office on Jan. 1.

A Queens teacher was stunned to learn of the quid pro beau.

Aaron Terr:

UPDATE (Oct. 7, 2022): Instead of rethinking its arbitrary policing of users’ expression in the wake of the Free Speech Union incident, PayPal is doubling down: The company has now informed users of changes to its acceptable use policy, including the addition of new categories of prohibited speech. These changes take effect on Nov. 3. 

The new policy dramatically expands PayPal’s power to take action against users for activity on the service involving disfavored speech. That includes “any messages, content, or materials that, in PayPal’s sole discretion” are “harmful” or “objectionable,” depict or even appear to depict nudity, “depict, promote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups,” present a risk to a user’s “wellbeing,” “promote misinformation,” or are, in PayPal’s opinion, “otherwise unfit for publication.” 

That last provision effectively means PayPal can slap you with a violation of its acceptable use policy for anything you say as part of a transaction and any expressive content or materials for which you seek payment through PayPal. (FIRE accepts PayPal donations and hopes the company will not find that this blog is “unfit for publication.”) To amplify the chilling effect, each violation of the policy may subject a user to a $2,500 penalty, which PayPal reserves the right to debit directly from the user’s account. 

As FIRE explains in our statement on free speech and online payment processors:

When these companies appoint themselves the arbiters of what speech and views are acceptable, shutting people and organizations out of the online financial ecosystem for wrongthink, they seriously undermine our culture of free expression.

We will continue to monitor this space.

Clark Ross:

In June 2014, I wrote a piece entitled “Reform Intro Economics” for Inside Higher Ed. There, I arguedthat then-current introductory economics courses were little changed from those of decades past. I further stated that the students of 2014 found the unrevised course somewhat unsatisfactory:

Today’s students are … not accustomed to sitting through 50-minute lectures, taking detailed notes of material and techniques, the value of which has yet to be demonstrated to them. Thus, it is little wonder that more students do not elect [to take] introductory economics or, following the course, do not take more economics.

I would argue that this student dissatisfaction persists today, perhaps at an even higher level. What I have noticed, post-pandemic, is that general student interest and student performance in introductory economics have been dropping. (I teach economics at Davidson College and have done so for more than 40 years.) I say “general student interest” because we still have some economics majors who truly enjoy the subject. However, the typical student, taking the course to satisfy a requirement or to assess a possible interest in economics, is not the equal of his or her peer from the year 2000 where course performance is concerned.

Andres Guadamuz:

As AI creative tools are becoming widespread, the question of copyright of AI creations has also taken centre-stage. But while copyright nerds obsess over the authorship question, the issue that is getting more attention from artists is that of copyright infringement.

AI is trained on data, in the case of graphic tools such as Imagen, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, and MidJourney, the training sets consist of terabytes of images comprising photographs, paintings, drawings, logos, and anything else with a graphical representation. The complaint by some artists is that these models (and accompanying commercialisation) are being built on the backs of human artists, photographers, and designers, who are not seeing any benefit from these business models. The language gets very animated in some forums and chats rooms, often using terms such as “theft” and “exploitation”. So is this copyright infringement? Are OpenAI and Google about to get sued by artists and photographers from around the world?

This is a question that has two parts, the input phase and the output phase.

Akil Bello:

Last month U.S. News & World Report released its 2023 college rankings. The most notable move belonged to Columbia University, which for decades had been steadily rising in the ranks toward the very top of the list. This year it tumbled from No. 2 to No. 18.

That’s better than might have been expected. After a blog post in February by Michael Thaddeus, a math professor at the university, showed that Columbia had provided fraudulent data to the magazine, U.S. News summarily unrankedit. When the university was able to update only some of the data in time for the latest rankings, the editors “

SCOOP: Ithaca College is offering a racially-segregated “antiracism” program, with separate sessions for whites and minorities.

“Because Ithaca College is a predominantly white institution, much of the Institute’s work is focused on unpacking the impact of centering whiteness.” pic.twitter.com/BIXWwmwgKO

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) October 5, 2022

Heather Heying

Sometimes, in fact, sex is observed before birth. Most commonly, this happens via ultrasound imaging of the fetus. Less commonly, it is possible to look at the karyotype—a visual representation of fetal chromosomes, organized roughly by size—which has been obtained through the usefully diagnostic but somewhat risky mid-pregnancy procedure known as amniocentesis.

All mammals have “Genetic Sex Determination,” which means that we have chromosomes dedicated to starting us down the path of maleness or femaleness. They are called sex chromosomes, in contrast to the autosomes which comprise most of our genetic makeup, and which do not vary predictably by sex. A tiny number of mammals—the echidnas, and the duck-billed platypus—have several pairs of sex chromosomes. The remaining several thousand of us mammals, however—everything from bats to koalas, kangaroos to whales—all the many thousands of other species of mammals have just one pair of sex chromosomes in each of our cells. Humans are mammals, so we have Genetic Sex Determination. Humans are neither echidnas nor duck-billed platypi, so we have just the one pair of sex chromosomes.

The number of chromosomes in each of our cells varies between species. Ocelots and margays have 18 pairs of chromosomes, for instance, while most other cats have 19 pairs1. Most of the great apes, including chimps, have 24 pairs of chromosomes, but humans have only 23. That is: humans have 22 pairs of autosomes, and at that 23rd position: one pair of sex chromosomes.

Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes in almost all of our cells. Gametes—sex cells—are a notable exception to this2, however, having only 23 chromosomes each, instead of 23 pairs. If you’re female, your gametes are called eggs; if you’re male, they’re called sperm. If successful (as the vast majority are not), an egg or a sperm will combine with a gamete of the other type and make a new life. As such, so as not to create a new life with double the chromosomes of their parents, gametes have halfthe chromosomal complement of somatic (body) cells: one copy of chromosome 1, one copy of chromosome 2, etc., all the way down to chromosome 23.

Chris Rickert:

A state-authorized public charter school in Madison initially refused to work with police after a student found a gun in a school employee’s backpack, according to a recently released police report, and the employee refused to answer questions about the incident.

Police ultimately closed their investigation of the June 1 incident involving Milestone Democratic School teacher Art Richardson, saying they did not have enough evidence that Richardson knew he had the gun in his backpack and after Richardson put off speaking to them and then cut off communication entirely.

Knowingly bringing a firearm into a school is a Class I felony under state law, punishable by up to three and a half years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000 or both.

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?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

Scott Girard:

Two years into the job, Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent Carlton Jenkins received praise from the Madison School Board for his handling of the district’s 2022-23 budget and leadership.

A summary of the board’s annual performance review of the district’s top staff member was released Wednesday evening. While most of the review was in praise of Jenkins’ work, the board wrote that it “would like to partner with Dr. Jenkins to build upon and enhance district-community relationships.”

“This would bolster community perceptions of district accountability and transparency,” the board wrote. “Superintendent Jenkins has begun to proactively increase his team’s work in partnering with community members and business leaders.”

HEDI RUDD and RUTHIE HAUGE:

This, in a way, encapsulates the secret recipe that many Madison charter schools use to create environments that don’t fit a traditional educational model. To explore what that looks like, photographers Hedi Rudd and Ruthie Hauge recently visited three local charter schools.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

CDR Salamander

Anyone who has studied the left’s march through the institutions and the regular examples of the O’Sullivan’s Law in action, knows the drill knows what happens to previously non-political or even conservative institutions.

The signs of their socio-political presence shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. They are just less bloody versions of what Orwell, Huxley, Dith Pran, and others warned us about.

While you were paying attention to other things, their world view is already deep in our military institutions of higher learning, specifically today the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA.

What already is well past the nose in the tentinvolves in not just narrowing the Overton Window of acceptable speech, but is now compelling speech through membership filtering, fear, and humiliation.

It demands written and spoken self-criticisms – and later (see any of the required DEI training events) often confessions of crimes you did not commit. Like the religious original sin, it is something you simply have by being and must atone for and perhaps never wash the stain away.

Yes, it is socio-political, but mostly political. It is its religious aspects that folds in to the compelled speech – you have to say certain words in certain ways in order to be accepted. A leftist Shahada, in a fashion.

CDR Salamander

Anyone who has studied the left’s march through the institutions and the regular examples of the O’Sullivan’s Law in action, knows the drill knows what happens to previously non-political or even conservative institutions.

The signs of their socio-political presence shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. They are just less bloody versions of what Orwell, Huxley, Dith Pran, and others warned us about.

While you were paying attention to other things, their world view is already deep in our military institutions of higher learning, specifically today the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA.

What already is well past the nose in the tentinvolves in not just narrowing the Overton Window of acceptable speech, but is now compelling speech through membership filtering, fear, and humiliation.

It demands written and spoken self-criticisms – and later (see any of the required DEI training events) often confessions of crimes you did not commit. Like the religious original sin, it is something you simply have by being and must atone for and perhaps never wash the stain away.

Yes, it is socio-political, but mostly political. It is its religious aspects that folds in to the compelled speech – you have to say certain words in certain ways in order to be accepted. A leftist Shahada, in a fashion.

Joanne Jacobs:

Instead, the graduate students, who are seeking certification as teachers, will be offered an alternative class taught by a non-heretic.

All but one of Christy Hammer’s students walked out of her Sept. 14 class, “Creating a Positive Learning Environment.” In a discussion the previous week, the professor and one student had argued that biological sex is not “on a spectrum.”

A non-binary student, Elizabeth Leibiger, who’d missed the previous class, brought up the issue on Sept. 14.

Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart

Lise attended a promotion-and-tenure committee meeting where the dean asked for a volunteer to write the recommendation report and one of the few women in attendance agreed to do it. Laurie walked into the first meeting of an important university committee to find only women in the room. Brenda mentored countless junior staff members, many who weren’t even in her department. Linda was asked to serve on the institutional review board, a request made even more difficult because everyone else had declined. “Service” assignments like those — or, to use our term, “non-promotable tasks” (NPTs) — are important to the college or university. They help it run smoothly, improve its culture, and foster a productive workplace. But an overload of NPTs can have significant negative effects on a faculty member’s progress since this work rarely enters into performance evaluations or promotion and tenure decisions.

One of the most fascinating things about the modern age we live in is the population of journalists almost exclusively being from mega rich families and the fact they have done such a good job of hiding it from the internet.

— NevilleTheCat (@FearTheFloof) October 5, 2022

Tyler Durden:

To put that number into context, at this point in fiscal 2021 the Treasury’s interest expense stood at $356 billion. That represents a 30%  year-on-year increase. Interest expense ranks as the sixth largest budget expense category, about $250 billion below Medicare. If interest rates remain elevated or continue rising, interest expenses could climb rapidly into the top three federal expenses. (You can read a more in-depth analysis of the national debt HERE.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, this is exactly what will happen. It projects interest payments will triple from nearly $400 billion in fiscal 2022 to $1.2 trillion in 2032. And it’s worse than that. The CBO made this estimate in May. Interest rates are already higher than those used in its analysis.

Meredith Kolodner and Annie Ma:

When she asked why he couldn’t stay for the rest of the day, Manwell said the school told her they would call child protective services if she didn’t take him home.

The call was just one of a dozen that Manwell received last fall telling her John couldn’t stay in school because of behaviors she says stemmed from his disability. Many schools have promised to cut down on suspensions, since kids can’t learn as well when they aren’t in class. But none of these pickups were ever recorded as suspensions, despite the missed class time.  

The practice is known as informal removal, defined by the U.S. Department of Education as an action taken by school staff in response to a child’s behavior that excludes the child for part or all of the school day – or even indefinitely.

Alhussein Fawzi, Matej Balog, …Pushmeet Kohli

Improving the efficiency of algorithms for fundamental computations can have a widespread impact, as it can affect the overall speed of a large amount of computations. Matrix multiplication is one such primitive task, occurring in many systems—from neural networks to scientific computing routines. The automatic discovery of algorithms using machine learning offers the prospect of reaching beyond human intuition and outperforming the current best human-designed algorithms. However, automating the algorithm discovery procedure is intricate, as the space of possible algorithms is enormous. Here we report a deep reinforcement learning approach based on AlphaZero¹ for discovering efficient and provably correct algorithms for the multiplication of arbitrary matrices. Our agent, AlphaTensor, is trained to play a single-player game where the objective is finding tensor decompositions within a finite factor space. AlphaTensor discovered algorithms that outperform the state-of-the-art complexity for many matrix sizes. Particularly relevant is the case of 4 × 4 matrices in a finite field, where AlphaTensor’s algorithm improves on Strassen’s two-level algorithm for the first time, to our knowledge, since its discovery 50 years ago². We further showcase the flexibility of AlphaTensor through different use-cases: algorithms with state-of-the-art complexity for structured matrix multiplication and improved practical efficiency by optimizing matrix multiplication for runtime on specific hardware. Our results highlight AlphaTensor’s ability to accelerate the process of algorithmic discovery on a range of problems, and to optimize for different criteria.

Steve Hsu

Previously I have estimated that PRC is outproducing the US in top STEM talent by a factor as large as 10x. In a decade or two the size of their highly skilled STEM workforce (e.g., top engineers, AI researchers, biotech scientists, …) could be 10x as large as that of the US and comparable to the rest of the world, ex-China.

This is easy to understand: their base population is about 4x larger and their K12 performance on international tests like PISA is similar to what is found in the table above for the Asian category. The fraction of PRC kids who perform in the top band is probably at least several times larger than the overall US fraction. (Asian vs White in the table above is about 6x, or 7x on the math portion.) Also, the fraction of college students who major in STEM is much larger in PRC than in the US.

Aaron Sibarium:

There do not appear to be any dissenting voices on the panel. All three scholars—Devon W. Carbado of UCLA School of Law, Osamudia James of UNC School of Law, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, the dean of Boston University School of Law—are outspoken proponents of critical race theory, which claims, among other things, that ostensibly neutral laws perpetuate white supremacy.

The panel demonstrates how a fringe critique of the American justice system has become conventional wisdom for many within it. Derrick Bell, widely considered the godfather of critical race theory, wrote in 1992 that “a perilously racist America” would never accept such a radical challenge to the status quo. In the three decades since, critical race theory went from baroque elective to required coursework at many law schools, which must now educate students “on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism” under rules from the American Bar Association.

Richard Reeves:

In New York, boys are now lagging behind girls in math and a full grade level behind in English. Similar patterns can be seen across the nation. Boys graduate high school at about the same rate as poor students, while girls account for two out of three high schoolers in the top 10% ranked by GPA. One in four black boys repeat a grade, and 60% of students on college campuses are now women. 

When almost one in four boys (23%) are categorized as having a “developmental disability,” it is fair to wonder if it is the boys — or the system — that is not functioning properly.

Marek Posard:

Here’s a possible hypothesis: Twitter might not want to look too closely at this problem because then they would have to remove accounts, reducing the number of reported “active users” on the platform. More than 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertisers. And it is probably safe to assume that most of these advertisers are paying Twitter to display ads to real human beings, not bots or Russian trolls masquerading as Americans. If Twitter removed more of these inauthentic accounts, it would ding its “active user” metrics, which drive advertising revenue—the source of value for the platform.

Michael Derby:

Americans’ wages are losing ground to inflation at a steep rate, a report on Tuesday from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said, a finding that offers some support for the central bank’s super-charged campaign to lower price pressures.

“Despite the stronger wage growth due to the tightness of the labor market, a majority of workers are finding their wages falling even further behind inflation,” economists for the Dallas Fed wrote. A majority of workers’ wages, once adjusted for inflation, “have failed to keep up with inflation in the past year. For these workers, the median decline in real wages is a little more than 8.5%.”

The report acknowledged over the last 25 years there have been other periods of lost ground on wages relative to inflation, but added “the current time period is unparalleled in terms of the challenge employed workers face.”

Conversations with Tyler – Walter Russell Mead:

With the ballooning of the national security bureaucracies in the Cold War and then even beyond, we now have these ossified institutions. There’s always the question, how many analysts of China do you need? The answer is one — if you can find the right one. Bureaucratic groupthink, I think, tends to dominate the products of both the State Department and the CIA in ways that often obscure the best of the thinking that’s being done inside them.

Just the news:

The Stanford Internet Observatory, University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, think tank Atlantic Council, and social media analytics firm Graphika claimed their consortium had a 35% success rate getting flagged content removed, throttled or labeled. 

The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the State Department, and liberal groups such as the Democratic National Committee, also flagged purported misinformation through the consortium.

“No news organization should be subjected to an enemies/censorship list for reporting newsworthy facts” Just the News Editor in Chief John Solomon said in a statement. “It’s even more egregious that this censorship machinery was prodded, aided and sanctioned by the federal government.”

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?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

Mark Joseph Stern:

Khiara Bridges remembers the exact moment she lost faith in the Supreme Court. At first, at the start of Donald Trump’s presidency, Bridges—a professor who now teaches at UC–Berkeley School of Law—held out hope that the court might be “this great protector of individual civil liberties right when we desperately needed it to be.” Then came 2018. That June, the justices issued Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld the president’s entry ban for citizens of eight countries, six of them Muslim-majority. Suddenly, Bridges told me, she realized, “The court is not going to save us. It is going to let Trump do whatever he wants to do. And it’s going to help him get away with it.”

Four years later, the justices completely shattered whatever remaining optimism Bridges could muster about the court by overruling Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. When the decision came down on June 24, she got a migraine for the first time in a decade. The image of the court as a majestic guardian of liberty was, she concluded, “a complete lie.” And it wasn’t just about her own personal feelings, either: Now she had to teach her students about the work of an institution that made her sick to contemplate.

Bridges is not alone. At law schools across the country, thousands of professors of constitutional law are currently facing a court that, in their view, has let the mask of neutrality fall off completely. Six conservative justices are steering the court head-oninto the most controversial debates of the day and consistently siding with the Republican Party. Increasingly, the conservative majority does not even bother to provide any reasoning for its decisions, exploiting the shadow docket to overhaul the law without a word of explanation. The crisis reached its zenith between September 2021 and June 2022, when the Supreme Court let Texas impose its vigilante abortion ban through the shadow docket, then abolished a 50-year-old right to bodily autonomy by overruling Roe v. Wade. Now law professors are faced with a quandary: How—and why—should you teach law to students while the Supreme Court openly changes the meaning of the Constitution to align with the GOP?

A version of this question has long dogged the profession, which has fought over the distinction between law and politics for about as long as it has existed. For decades, however, the court has handed enough victories to both sides of the political spectrum that it has avoided a full-on academic revolt against its legitimacy. That dynamic changed when Trump appointed Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to replace far less conservative predecessors and created a Republican-appointed supermajority, a coalition further aided by the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to a seat that should have been filled by Barack Obama. The cascade of far-right rulings in 2022 confirmed that the new court is eager to shred long-held precedents it deems too liberal as quickly as possible. The pace and scale of this revolution is requiring law professors to adapt on several levels—intellectually, pedagogically, and emotionally.

Stewart Baker:

Just to remind us why everyone hates Big Tech’s content practices, we do a quick review of the week’s news in content suppression.

• A couple of conservative provocateurs prepared  a video consisting of Democrats embracing “election denial.” The purpose was to highlight the hypocrisy of those who criticize the GOP for a trope that belonged mainly to Dems until two years ago. And it worked all too well: YouTube did a manual review of the video before it was even released and demonetized it because, well, who knows? An outcry led to reinstatement, but too late for YouTube’s reputation. Jane has the story.
• YouTube also steps in the same mess by first suppressing then restoring a video by Giorgia Meloni, the big winner of Italy’s recent election. She’s on the right, but you already knew that from how YouTube dealt with her.
• Mark covers an even more troubling story, in which government officials flag online posts about election security that they don’t like for NGOs that the government will soon be funding, the NGOs take those complaints to the platforms, and the platforms take a lot of the posts down. Really, what could possibly go wrong?
• Jane asks why Facebook is “moderating” private messages sent by the wife of an FBI whistleblower.  I suspect that this is not so much content moderation as part of the government and big tech’s hyperaggressive joint pursuit of anything related to January 6. But it definitely deserves investigation.
• Across the Atlantic,  Jane notes, the Brits are hating Facebook for the content it let 14-year-old Molly Russell read before her suicide. Exactly what was wrong with the content is a little obscure, but we agree that material served to minors is ripe for more regulation, especially outside the US.

For a change of pace, Mark has some largely unalloyed good news. The ITU will not be run by a Russian; instead it has elected an American, Doreen Bodan-Martin to lead it.

Marianna McMurdock & Meghan Gallagher:

The plea is among thousands of stories made public by the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, one of many efforts to digitize elusive school, state and federal records, to bring the stories of Indigenous survivors and those who never made it home back to their families and tribes. 

Last summer, the discovery of more than 900 child graves at former Canadian residential schools tore through international media and reignited investigations of U.S. boarding schools; reports focused on brutal abuse and quantifying death. 

Archivists and community members have continued to retrieve haunting letters, student and local newspapers, photographs and other school documents that paint a poignant picture of resistance and survival in day-to-day student life in the boarding schools. 

Still, many records remain out of reach to descendants, and those that are accessible can be traumatizing. Some collections sit dormant, held by churches or universities with no plans to return them to tribal communities; others require extensive time and travel to physical archives. 

“Native people have never had easy access to their records. And that in itself has continued to contribute to the genocide,” said Tawa Ducheneaux. a citizen of the Cherokee nation working as an archivist at Oglala Lakota College’s Woksape Tipi library on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where she raised her family for 19 years. “You’re not having access to relatives and descendants that can educate you more about who you are and where you come from.”

Aaron Sibarium:

“I have no confidence that they’re being taught anything.”

With one exception, the judges made clear this is a policy they are imposing on future—not current—Yale Law School students. …

The judges joining the boycott, all of whom requested anonymity in order to speak freely, cited a series of incidents where they say free speech has come under attack at Yale Law …

The law school’s ideological monoculture also poses a problem for vetting clerkship applicants, some judges said, because there are simply no professors whom they trust to recommend conservative clerks. 

The feeder judge told the Free Beacon that he had long relied on Amy Chua, a left-leaning but heterodox Yale Law professor, for recommendations, but that the law school has made it a “speech and thought crime” for students to associate with her.

Institute for reforming government:

The Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection’s budget is $221,221,800 for the 2021-2023 biennium, a 15% increase since 2017. DATCP employs 633 employees.

Beyond the economic challenges facing Wisconsin’s farmers, the state government has done little to alleviate unnecessary burdens. The regulatory environment in Wisconsin makes it harder for them to thrive and focus on farming.

Currently, farmers have to comply with regulations from two state agencies, DATCP and DNR. Like many areas of the Wisconsin economy, this industry would benefit from a more streamlined approach and a regulatory state that works alongside, rather than against the regulated community.

Chris Edwards:

Americans are moving from high‐​tax states to low‐​tax states. The smart states know this and are cutting income tax rates, as discussed in the forthcoming Fiscal Policy Report Card on America’s Governors.

One group that states want to attract with tax cuts are seniors and retirees. Just this year, 10 states cut their taxes on retirement income, which means income from Social Security, defined‐benefit (DB) plans, and defined contribution (DC) plans, such as 401(k)s. Currently, about three‐quarters of the states fully exempt Social Security benefits from taxes. About a dozen states fully exempt DB and DC benefits from taxes, and about half the states partly exempt it. …

Meghan Mangrum

Democrat Beto O’Rourke has repeated one refrain in attempts to appeal to teachers and parents: do away with the STAAR test — at least for now.

O’Rourke pushed the idea previously and has frequently criticized the state’s emphasis on standardized testing and the lack of student achievement.

Eran Amsalem, Alon Zoizner:

Citizens turn increasingly to social media to get their political information. However, it is currently unclear whether using these platforms actually makes them more politically knowledgeable. While some researchers claim that social media play a critical role in the learning of political information within the modern media environment, others posit that the great potential for learning about politics on social media is rarely fulfilled. The current study tests which of these conflicting theoretical claims is supported by the existing empirical literature. A preregistered meta-analysis of 76 studies (N=442,136) reveals no evidence of any political learning on social media in observational studies, and statistically significant but substantively small increases in knowledge in experiments. These small-to-nonexistent knowledge gains are observed across social media platforms, types of knowledge, countries, and periods. Our findings suggest that the contribution of social media toward a more politically informed citizenry is minimal.

Alex Tabarrok

As the private share of school enrollment increases simple cream skimming becomes less plausible as the explanation for a higher rate of achievement in private schools. If the private schools cream skim when they are at 10% of public school enrollment how much cream can be left in the public school pool when the private schools account for 60% of total enrollment? Thus, if this simple form of cream skimming is the explanation for the higher achievement rate in private schools, we would expect the “private effect,” the difference between private and public scores, to be smaller in regions with a high
share of private schooling.

Wall Street Journal:

Statewide, in 2019, 36% of all third grade students could read at grade level. That’s an F, and that’s the good news. That number drops to 27% for Hispanic students and 22% for black students statewide. In certain public school systems, the numbers plummet to single digits. In Decatur, 2% of black third-graders are reading at grade level and only 1% are doing math at grade level. 

We aren’t often speechless, but the extent to which that performance is betraying a generation of schoolchildren is hard to put into words. Third grade children are eight years old, full of potential with minds like sponges to absorb what they are taught. Third grade is the year that children need to achieve a level of reading fluency that will prepare them to tackle more complex tasks in upper elementary grades that require comprehension.

Michael Graham:

On Thursday, NHJournal reported on a press conference held by GOP congressional candidate Karoline Leavitt outside the district’s headquarters, denouncing both the policies and the Democrats who support it. Her opponent, Rep. Chris Pappas (D) voted on Thursday to kill a proposal requiring schools that receive federal funds to inform parents about counseling they receive at school.

“Parents have an inalienable right to know what’s going on in their child’s classroom, and in Congress, I will proudly support legislation to enact a federal parental bill of rights,” Leavitt said. “I will always ensure that Granite State moms and dads feel heard at the highest level of our government. That is why I am here today, and I will always put parents over politicians.”

Friday morning, Buckley tweeted to NHJournal: “You’re purposely going after children, endangering their lives, mental health & safety & its disgusting. Not all families are the same, some kids will be kicked out or beaten (to death), or commit suicide. All to try to get votes for Karoline?”

OpenCulture:

The oldest known writing systems first emerged in Mesopotamia, between 3400 and 3100 BC, and Egypt, around 3250 BC. The Latin alphabet, which I’m using to write this post and you’re using to read it, gradually took the shape we know between the seventh century BC and the Middle Ages. Over the eras since, it has spread outward from Europe to become the most widely used script in the world. These are important developments in the history of writing, but hardly the only ones. It is with all known writing systems that historical map animator Ollie Bye deals in the video above: not just those used today, but over the whole of the past five millennia.

The conquests of Alexander the Great; the Gallic Wars; the colonization of Latin America; the “scramble for Africa”: these and other major historical events are vividly reflected in the spread of certain writing systems.

Ginnie Graham:

In 2017, the state Education Department completed a comprehensive survey on why educators retained their certification but didn’t work as teachers.

A task force report found that pay was a top concern followed by classroom management problems and lack of autonomy in making instructional decisions. The pay raise following the 2018 walkout helped but hasn’t kept up with surrounding states.

Paul Bedard:

The survey, conducted with the Capitol Resource Institute, a parents’ rights organization, is the latest to show how the last two years of school board fights have affected the nation. What started as a clash over teaching critical race theory turned into a broader battle over parental involvement and decision-making during the Glenn Youngkin-McAuliffe gubernatorial campaign.

Near the end of that 2021 campaign, McAuliffe said in a debate that parents should not be determining what goes on in classrooms. He said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” He also said that he was “not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions.”

The backlash reportedly helped Youngkin, a Republican businessman, win in the Democratic state and led to a national fight over schools and parents, leading to some talk of a Youngkin 2024 presidential or vice presidential bid. The issue of parents’ rights has been among Youngkin’s top issues as he’s ridden a wave of support in Virginia.

Wesley Yang:

Progressive dominance was obtained through a slow, incremental process of institutional capture that accelerated through the decades as various inflection points were reached; we are now in the home stretch in which the pace has become a sprint. Ceaseless retail activism by a minority of implacable administrators and faculty over budgets, mandates, sinecures, and faculty hiring eventually delivered a critical mass of power able to dominate whole departments and the institution as a whole. Much of this activity was flagrantly in violation of civil rights law and equal protection, enabled by a combination of progressive consensus to flout the law and conservative lassitude or incompetence in fighting back.

Reversing this trend will require a concerted, comprehensive, well-coordinated, and intelligent application of political power to reshape a crucial domain of elite formation. This will in turn require that the party break with its reluctance to exercise government power in service of shaping our major cultural and educational institutions. After decades of negligence, conservatives must get serious about acting to secure and widen their foothold in the institutions of higher learning by rolling back pervasive abuses and lawlessness normalized therein. Fortunately, there are many ways that conservatives, with sufficient will and proper direction, can use politics to both protect and widen their own stake within universities while preserving the core values of free and disinterested inquiry that the left monoculture now threatens to consume.

It is at the federal level, whenever conservative regain control of it, that the greatest opportunities will lie. In general, conservatives must become as active in using the investigative authorities of Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Education to ferret out and punish wrongdoing as their progressives counter parts have been in shielding it from scrutiny. Universities should be made to fear a Republican administration as much or more than they thrill at a Democratic one. And it would not be impossible to strike some fear into these places, however arrogant they seem at present, if only Republicans knew which rocks to look under and would sustain the will to keep turning them over. Any professor who is honest will tell you, a great amount of conduct of dubious legality, especially with regard to hiring practices, is right there over email.

Jared Walczak:

Everyone owes taxes to non-domiciliary states in which they work, often after working there a single day, though some states adopt reasonable thresholds, like allowing someone to spend up to 30 days in the state before having an income tax obligation. (Every state should adopt these traveler- and remote worker-friendly “mobile workforce” laws.) But athletes and other entertainers operate under different rules than the rest of us: even in states with a multi-day threshold, athletes are always taxed, and the calculations are typically based on what are called “duty days,” which is the number of days they spent in that state as a percentage of their season. These athlete-specific rules are often termed “jock taxes,” though they’re part of the individual income tax.

The table below estimates Hill’s tax liability this season on his $30 million-a-year contract if he played for every team, taking into account taxes paid for each team’s home and away games. We make a number of simplifying assumptions. Most importantly, we assume that each out-of-state away game involves three duty days in that state. Depending on how far a team has to travel and what their schedule looks like, the actual number of duty days will vary. Secondly, we focus entirely on the regular season: calculations change if a team makes it to the postseason, but such schedules are, of course, unknowable. We also disregard the preseason and any out-of-state training camps, though this is a trivial omission, as veteran players are only paid $1,600 a week during this time, truly a drop in the bucket in Hill’s $30 million annual salary.

Because of these and other simplifying assumptions, this table should not be relied upon for tax planning. If you are Tyreek Hill looking to force a trade in the offseason, please consult with your financial advisor or ask Drew Rosenhaus to recommend one.

With that said, let’s explore how much Hill would have paid in taxes this season if he had signed with each team. The value of credits for taxes paid for other states is shown broken out, but these credits are included in the calculation of the amount paid to the home state.

Jennifer Kabbany:

The partners all received federal grants from the Biden administration in the next two years.

The National Science Foundation awarded the Stanford and UW projects $3 million in August 2021 “to study ways to apply collaborative, rapid-response research to mitigate online disinformation.”

Black Mauro:

A U.S. senator has introduced legislation that seeks to require colleges and universities to pay 50 percent of student loan balances that go into default.

Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced the “Make the Universities Pay Act” on Sept. 21 in the wake of President Joe Biden’s announcement that taxpayers will absorb student loan debt to the tune of at least $400 billion, estimated to cost individual American taxpayers $2,500 each.

“For decades, universities have amassed billion-dollar endowments while teaching nonsense like men can get pregnant. All while charging extortionary tuition,” Senator Hawley stated in a news release.

“Now Joe Biden wants to give away another $1 trillion to prop up the system. That’s wrong. Instead, it’s time to put universities on the hook and give students the information they need to make informed decisions.”

Paul Caron:

• Prominent Federal Judge Says He Will No Longer Hire Law Clerks From Yale. Will Other Judges Follow?(Sept. 30, 2022)
• Conservatives Should Oppose Boycott Of Yale Law Students In Judicial Law Clerk Hiring (Oct. 1, 2022)

• Josh Blackman (South Texas), Giving Yale Law School The Heave-Ho: Another Way to Understand the Boycott of YLS Grads
• Ted Cruz, Incredibly Proud of Judge Ho’s Takedown of Cancel Culture
• Mother Jones, Mother Jones Congratulates Judge James Ho on His Decision to Boycott Yale
• David Lat, Ho No He Didn’t! Pundits React to Judge Jim Ho’s Yale Law Boycott
• Jack Marshall (ProEthics), Judge Ho Strikes Again! Is His Yale Law School Ban Unfair Discrimination Or Justly Utilitarian?
• Jonathan Turley (George Washington), Will the Call for a Judicial Boycott Change Yale? Don’t Bet On It
• Steve Vladeck (Texas), Response to Josh Blackman
• Wonkette, Federal Judge Fights Back Against Cancel Culture By Cancel Culturing Yale Law School
• Zero Hedge, Will The Call For A Yale Boycott Be A Wake-Up Call For The Woke? Don’t Bet On It

Stephanie Saul:

In the field of organic chemistry, Maitland Jones Jr. has a storied reputation. He taught the subject for decades, first at Princeton and then at New York University, and wrote an influential textbook. He received awards for his teaching, as well as recognition as one of N.Y.U.’s coolest professors.

But last spring, as the campus emerged from pandemic restrictions, 82 of his 350 students signed a petition against him.

Students said the high-stakes course — notorious for ending many a dream of medical school — was too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor test scores.

The professor defended his standards. But just before the start of the fall semester, university deans terminated Dr. Jones’s contract.

The officials also had tried to placate the students by offering to review their grades and allowing them to withdraw from the class retroactively. The chemistry department’s chairman, Mark E. Tuckerman, said the unusual offer to withdraw was a “one-time exception granted to students by the dean of the college.”

Marc A. Walters, director of undergraduate studies in the chemistry department, summed up the situation in an email to Dr. Jones, before his firing.

He said the plan would “extend a gentle but firm hand to the students and those who pay the tuition bills,” an apparent reference to parents.

The university’s handling of the petition provoked equal and opposite reactions from both the chemistry faculty, who protested the decisions, and pro-Jones students, who sent glowing letters of endorsement.

“The deans are obviously going for some bottom line, and they want happy students who are saying great things about the university so more people apply and the U.S. News rankings keep going higher,” said Paramjit Arora, a chemistry professor who has worked closely with Dr. Jones.

Alan Borsuk:

But the results for MPS were terrible. They were bad before the pandemic, and they’re worse now. The percentages of students proficient in reading and math were in single digits in many schools. What can be done about that? Would the plans either candidate is advocating bring real change in how thousands of Milwaukee students are doing?

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?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

👌 I’ll try again- educating students is not the core function of the public school system. That is an occasional bi-product of the core function, which is set by the interests dominating school board elections. The core function is to maximize adult employment & thus dues. Ergo: pic.twitter.com/05BZBde2F7

— Matthew Ladner (@matthewladner) October 3, 2022

A similar story in math as more students took the Forward Exam this year.

84% of MPS students are failing math, 60% in Madison. pic.twitter.com/C8kHZ4dPjy

— MacIver Institute (@MacIverWisc) September 30, 2022

Has Biden EdSec Cardona ever addressed literacy reform, much less pushed schools to make changes? Have national education teams and outlets been asking him about his position? https://t.co/45kID7plxW

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) October 2, 2022

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?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

School Choice Wisconsin:

On Thursday, September 29, 2022, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction released the state test scores via the Wisconsin Student Assessment System.

As in prior years, students in Wisconsin’s school choice programs outperformed traditional public school students on the college-readiness ACT exam.

“This continuing pattern is quite noteworthy,” said Nic Kelly, School Choice Wisconsin President. He added: “The fact that choice students from low-income and working-class families score higher on average than public school students is consistent with other data and research. Despite taxpayer funding at 60% of public school levels, choice students are ahead of the pack.”

While students are required by state law to take the ACT (and other) exams, more than a quarter of Milwaukee Public Schools students did not do so. By comparison, 90% of choice students took the exam*.

“Private schools in the Choice programs navigated many obstacles to get their kids to take the required tests,” Kelly said.

Sophia Goodriend:

The Listeners tells the history of wiretapping in the United States through ordinary biographies. “Wherever possible, this book is centered on people,” Hochman writes in the introduction. “In part, this is to counteract the long-standing tendency in surveillance studies to grant extraordinary agency to agencies”—the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Instead he looks to the lives of regular criminals, businessmen, spies, and innovators. His story begins with D. C. Williams, an infamous Californian convict. Williams was thrown in jail for intercepting corporate communication, selling the information to stock traders, and amassing millions via illicit espionage. Williams may sound like the cybercriminals of today, who regularly hack into corporate servers and defraud financial markets, but he was actually the first person to be convicted of intercepting electronic messages in America: “The year—and here’s the twist to the story—was 1864.”

The Listeners resurrects figures like Williams in order to underscore that “surveillance is, and always has been a constitutive element of our communications ecosystem.” Wiretappers arrived on the scene around the Civil War, with soldiers tapping into electric cables as soon as they began transmitting wartime communication. Electronic listening spread from military campaigns to criminal pursuits and then to the arsenal of local law enforcement. In 1895, around the time municipal telephone companies established networks in New York City, mob bosses and police forces rented out vacant offices to set up eavesdropping nests. They paid a host of freelance listeners to sit hunched over telephone receivers, listening in on private phone calls across the city. Many received special technical training in signal intelligence during their time in the army and were eager to cash in on their skills.

James Vincent:

A team of machine learning engineers from Facebook’s parent company Meta has unveiled a new system called Make-A-Video. As the name suggests, this AI model allows users to type in a rough description of a scene, and it will generate a short video matching their text. The videos are clearly artificial, with blurred subjects and distorted animation, but still represent a significant development in the field of AI content generation.

Quentin Stafford-Fraser:

The problem is that the media are so keen to feed people a single, simple number, that for weeks we’ve been hearing about what’s happening to the energy costs for the average household and referring to that as a capped number, when in fact, of course, it’s the price per kWh that’s been capped. (More info here.) If, say, you use twice as much as the average household, your bill could be £5000. Some not-very-smart people even think they can use as much as they like, because, hey, it’s been capped now, and they’re going to get a nasty surprise! And similarly, of course, if you use half as much, you can worry a bit less about that headline figure.

This desire to reduce things to one number causes problems in many situations. Remember when the only way most people had to assess the PC they wanted to buy was based on its CPU’s GHz? (Or MHz for those with longer memories?)

Now, the headline figure for every electric car is the number of miles it can do on a charge, when lots of other factors will affect how easy it is to use in reality, like how fast it charges, or its drag coefficient (which affects how its energy use varies with speed). For many people, long journeys are relatively rare, and the important question when embarking on one will actually be something like, “How fast will this be able to recharge at the type of chargers available about 150-200 miles from my house?” And even that question is much less important if the chargers happen to have a nice cafe or restaurant next to them!

Matt Taibbi:

This article began as an aggressive rewrite of history and the Post’s own views, but underwent numerous alterations after it attracted criticism online yesterday.

Zachary Marschall:

Roughly a third of college students are “indeed ‘quiet quitting’ in order to preserve their mental health this fall semester,” Intelligent discovered in its survey of 1,000 participants earlier last month.

“Quiet quitting” is the national trend of over half of the American labor force putting the bare minimum into their jobs because they no longer feel engaged or motivated to grow within the company, according to Gallup.

This trend is the passive – and cowardly – alternative to actively submitting a resignation or bringing up work-related grievances with a supervisor or HR. To borrow from Lionel Trilling, there is a moral obligation to work hard and strive for betterment in all areas of life. Virtue demands it.

Jessica Calarco and Ilana Horn:

We were curious about how teachers reward students who complete their homework and penalize and criticize those who don’t – and whether there was any link between those things and family income.

By analyzing student report cards and interviewing teachers, students and parents, we found that teachers gave good grades for homework effort and other rewards to students from middle-class families like Gina, who happen to have college-educated parents who take an active role in helping their children complete their homework.

But when it comes to students such as “Jesse,” who attends the same school as Gina and is the child of a poor, single mother of two, we found that teachers had a more bleak outlook.

The names “Jesse” and “Gina” are pseudonyms to protect the children’s identities. Jesse can’t count on his mom to help with his homework because she struggled in school herself.

“I had many difficulties in school,” Jesse’s mom told us for the same study. “I had behavior issues, attention-deficit. And so after seventh grade, they sent me to an alternative high school, which I thought was the worst thing in the world. We literally did, like, first and second grade work. So my education was horrible.”

Jesse’s mother admitted she still can’t figure out division to this day.

China News Asia:

Hong Kong’s government has refused permission for jailed pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai to be represented by a British lawyer at his upcoming national security trial, a court heard Friday (Sep 30).

Lai and a group of executives from the now-shuttered Apple Daily newspaper are being prosecuted for “colluding with foreign forces”, an offence under a new security law China imposed on Hong Kong to stamp out dissent.

PBS @NewsHour Classroom Daily News Lesson:
Biden’s plan to improve nutrition, end hunger by 2030 & more news for 9/29

Last such conference took place ’69 when Nixon expanded food stamps & WIC ➡️ baby formula for low-income families

w/ @WmBrangham #sschat https://t.co/jibhY5OVs5

— PBS NewsHour Classroom (formerly EXTRA) (@NewsHourExtra) September 30, 2022

I always find it interesting to observe what is being pushed, and perhaps why. PBS.

Daniela Jaime:

Torres said she’s had to tell students repeatedly not to smoke or vape indoors and be courteous towards patrons, but the response has been so negative that on one occasion, she said, a student threw food at her after being kicked out. Torres no longer allows students to dine in, posting signs at the door, but does provide them to-go orders.

“I have regulars who come from work. I get embarrassed by (students’) behavior, so I don’t sit them anymore,” she said.

But those problems pale in comparison to the series of break-ins at the current site that began in September of last year.

“I just thank God we didn’t have any huge scares,” Torres said, “especially since the waitress is my daughter. The material stuff, well, that comes and goes, but my daughter, she doesn’t.”

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?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

Molly Beck and Daniel Bice:

Evers entered the final two months of the race with about $5 million more in cash than Michels.

The first-term governor received $20,000 donations from 10 individuals, including Andrea Soros, daughter of liberal billionaire George Soros. Others who maxed out were Abigail Dow, an instructional coach in New York City; Joseph Kaempfer, a real estate agent in Virginia; Stephen Clearman of Valatie, New York; Eileen Stauss, a Washington attorney; and Los Angeles billionaire Lynda Resnick.

Among Michels’ supporters who gave the maximum amount were Louis Gentine, the retired CEO of Sargento Foods Inc.; Michele Gentine, Louis Gentine’s wife; Dan Ariens, CEO of the Ariens Co.; David Charles, president Cash Depot; John Dykema, president of Campbell Wrapper Corp. in De Pere; and Madison developer Terrance Wall.

Check out this article from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Group reports $55 million in TV ad buys in Wisconsin governor’s race, making it most expensive in the country.

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

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”

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?

Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walker’s election to county Executive and later the Governor’s office.

Charles Rosenbauer:

It will become practical for ordinary people to write operating systems from scratch again.

1. Silicon compilers will become common place. In response, innovative fabs will scale up wafer-sharing services. It will soon be possible to design a custom CPU or ASIC, upload the files to TSMC’s website, pay $500 and have a batch of 10 chips delivered to your door a couple months later. Hardware engineering will become almost as commonplace as software engineering.
2. In the short term, the inevitable Javascript chip design frameworkswill create massive security problems, baked into unchangeable silicon. Software engineers are not prepared for hardware engineering. The low costs and low volumes around shared wafer prototyping will mitigate problems somewhat, but eventually the powerful formal methods tooling that has already been used by hardware engineers for decades will be forced into the hands of a much wider audience.
3. The computing industry will get over its irrational fear of Turing. Undecidability is deeply misunderstood; undecideable problems must be solved, and are regularly solved by any useful static analysis tool. Undecidable problems are not incomputable (that’s a separate computability class), but rather are the computational equivalent of irrational numbers; impossible to compute exactly, but rather easy to approximate. A golden age of code analysis and formal methods will follow once this misplaced fear is gone.

Sarah Karp:

One of the justifications given for phasing out the West Side’s Crane High School is that most students in the attendance boundary are “voting with their feet” to go elsewhere. Only 17 percent of the students living in the neighborhood this year attend Crane, notes Chief Portfolio Officer Oliver Sicat.

But Crane’s situation is far from unique. In just the last five years, the percentage of students attending their neighborhood high school fell by 10 percent, from nearly half in 2006-2007 to about 37 percent in 2010-2011, according to a Catalyst Chicago analysis of CPS data.  

Five years ago, no high school enrolled fewer than 20 percent of the students in its attendance area.  Last year, nine schools did, and Hirsch and Tilden enrolled just 13 percent of students in their neighborhood.

Dyett High School in Washington Park, also slated for phase-out and eventually closure, enrolls 19 percent of its area’s students.

The flight from neighborhood schools is not just happenstance: It is the result of the district’s orchestrated policy to give students more choices. Those choices include magnet and selective enrollment high schools, which have been a mainstay for years. But over the past decade, the number of options grew significantly, with charter, military and contract high schools opening up. They now serve 26,000 students, five times the population these new schools enrolled in 2000.

Sydney Writers Festival

In How Many More Women? Jennifer Robinson and Keina Yoshida examine the laws around the world that silence women, and explore the changes we need to make to ensure that women’s freedoms are no longer threatened by the legal system that is supposed to protect them.

Join Jennifer Robinson live in-conversation with Jane Caro for a powerful and accessible exploration of our legal systems as she breaks open the big judgments, developments and trends that have and continue to silence and disadvantage women.

This event is presented by Sydney Writers’ Festival, the UNSW Centre for Ideas, UNSW Law & Justice, and is supported by Allen & Unwin.

Matt Taibbi:

A brief note to subscribers about YouTube’s decision to demonetize TK material, saying Matt Orfalea’s factual video “isn’t suitable for all advertisers”

Today we’re releasing a video Matt Orfalea has been working on, showing years of audio and video clips, tweets, and headlines in which Democratic Party politicians and media figures describe Donald Trump’s presidency as illegitimate. Before it was even published on this site, Matt received the above notice.

I’d like to thank YouTube for making our point. The material in this video does not promote the idea that any election was stolen or illegitimate. On the contrary, it shows a great mass of comments from Democratic partisans and pundits who themselves make that claim, about the 2016 election. Those comments were not censored or suppressed when made the first time around, by the likes of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Karine Jean-Pierre, Adam Schiff, Rob Reiner, Tom Arnold, and Chris Hayes, among many others. 

Nor did any platform step in to issue warnings when my former boss, Keith Olbermann, promised with regard to Trump’s ascension to the White House, “It will not be a peaceful transfer of power.”

Evan Mandery:

To some extent, elite colleges are simply collateral damage in the culture war. Indeed, the thrust of Vance’s speech is about the need to break through the indoctrination of the liberal intelligentsia — via what he calls “red pilling,” a reference to The Matrix — where the “fundamental corruption” at the root of the system, as Vance put it, can’t be unseen once seen. “So much of what drives truth and knowledge, as we understand it in this country,” Vance said, “is fundamentally determined by, supported by and reinforced by the universities in this country.”

But that’s not the whole story. Another line of attack is about access. It’s about who gets to be part of the elite, and whether America has gotten a fair return on the massive investment that it has made in elite colleges. For, difficult as this might be for liberals to hear, almost everything Trump said to the crowd Bobby Knight had warmed up was true.

But that’s not the whole story. Another line of attack is about access. It’s about who gets to be part of the elite, and whether America has gotten a fair return on the massive investment that it has made in elite colleges. For, difficult as this might be for liberals to hear, almost everything Trump said to the crowd Bobby Knight had warmed up was true.

Sound like Trump?

Simon’s guest was Malcolm Gladwell, the best-selling journalist, podcaster and public intellectual.

For generations, elite colleges have been given a pass in accounting for what they’ve done in exchange for the massive benefits that they have received. The bill has come due. Soon, elite colleges are going to have to answer two simple questions.

Why are they exempt from taxes?

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

Despite claims that there are “strong signs of recovery,” proficiency in Reading is actually lower than last year once you account for student opt out. Proficiency is slightly up in Math, but still significantly lower than 2019. #wiright pic.twitter.com/KDJUg9AniT

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) September 29, 2022

Olivia Herken:

Middleton-Cross Plains and Wisconsin Heights were among the highest-scoring districts in the county. The lowest scores in the county came from One City Schools, a Madison charter school that opened its elementary school in the fall of 2018.

‘Way behind’

Only 7.7% of One City’s third-graders and 5.9% of fourth-graders scored proficient or higher in English and language arts, and 7.7% of third-graders scored that high in math. In science and social studies, which is given to fourth-graders, 11.8% scored proficient or higher.

Kaleem Caire, founder and CEO of One City, said the low test scores are partly because 68% of the school’s students were new last year, with almost all of them testing two grades behind. The school was also participating in the Forward Exam for the first time and stumbled when following the testing protocol, Caire said, largely because of staffing shortages that left students and staff unprepared.

“We just had kids who were way behind,” Caire said, adding that the school was also adjusting to the pandemic less than two years after it opened.

Caire said he didn’t consider the test scores an essential measure of the school, saying its staff are focused on a holistic approach to students’ education. The school has added a tutoring program and supplemental programming to give direct help to students in the classroom, he said.

Despite the scores, the school’s mission “is working,” Caire said.

“We weren’t expecting to see significant results from our students,” Caire said.

Scott Girard:

The local gap between Black students and their white peers also grew, with 5.8% of Black students testing as proficient in math in 2021-22 and 58.9% of white students. In 2018-19, those figures were 10.4% and 60.6%, respectively.

Zoe Hahn:

You may believe it’s butter, but you may not believe the price.

Butter prices are at an all-time high: One pound of butter cost $4.70 on average in August, compared to $3.63 a year ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the reasons for the price spike are complicated.

Grocery prices rose 13.5% in August on the year, and the price of food rose 11.4%. Both were the highest since 1979. But butter showed one of the biggest jumps in price: In August, butter was 24.6% more expensive year over year.

Nicholas Casey:

On a balmy October day in 2017, Ana Belén Pintado decided to clear out some space in her garage. Her father, Manuel, died in 2010, followed by her mother, Petra, four years later. Their belongings sat gathering dust at her home in Campo de Criptana, a small town in the countryside south of Madrid. As she carefully opened the boxes, she marveled at the objects inside — her childhood dresses, a doll, an old dictionary — each so familiar, reminding her of a life the three of them once shared.

But then she came across some papers she had never seen: medical records from decades ago, including a note from her mother’s doctor. Petra Torres, the note said, had been married for eight years. She was 31 years old and had been trying to have a family. But a set of X-rays indicated that she had a uterine anomaly and obstructed fallopian tubes.

In other words, Pintado’s mother had been sterile. The diagnosis was dated April 1967, six years before Pintado was born.

Pintado had long believed that the couple who raised her were her biological parents, but there were a few puzzling aspects about her family. She had no brothers or sisters, which was rare in a small, Catholic town like Campo de Criptana — Pintado herself, who was then 44, had three children of her own. There was also an odd incident that happened after her father died: A lawyer handling the estate found some papers that showed she was born with a different last name, but before anyone in the family could have a closer look, her mother snatched the documents away and refused to speak about them again.

As Pintado sat in her garage, sifting through the papers, she found another document that was just as confounding as the doctor’s note. It was a birth certificate, which indicated that her mother had given birth to a girl in the Santa Cristina maternity clinic in Madrid. “Good appearance and vitality, good coloration,” a hospital staff member wrote. The paper was dated on Pintado’s birthday, July 10, 1973. There was even a room number: 22.

rnjn.in:

I want to add one more compounding effect based on my experience –

• Slack aping – When a team member is allowed to slack, others are motivated to loaf.

Taylor Swaak:

A growing number of students are taking courses offered by unaccredited private companies and completing them in a matter of days or weeks — often for less than $200 — and then transferring the credits to colleges.

The practice was pioneered by companies like StraighterLine, which entered the market in 2009 to a mix of intrigue and skepticism, seeking to transform college access and affordability. StraighterLine boasts credit-transfer agreements with more than 150 American institutions, most of them private,

Aaron Sibarium:

The oversight committee is requesting a briefing on what steps—”if any”—the department has taken to safeguard academic freedom on campus, according to a copy of the letterobtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Delivered to Biden education secretary Miguel Cardona on Wednesday, the letter rattles off a string of cases in which taxpayers have indirectly footed the bill for censorship, including the $620 million the Education Department sent to Yale University, where administrators investigated a law student for using the term “trap house” in an email.

• Matt Silverlock and James Allworth

What if employers could offer their employees a deal: we’ll cover your monthly data costs if you agree to let us direct your work-related traffic through a network that has Zero Trust protections built right in? And what’s more, we’ll make it super easy to install — in fact, to take advantage of it, all you need to do is scan a QR code — which can be embedded in an employee’s onboarding material — from your phone’s camera.

Well, we’d like to introduce you to the Cloudflare SIM: the world’s first Zero Trust SIM.

Sylvan Kerkour:

So to start, any iPhone (or mobile phone for that matter) is a location tracker that is always on you and tied to your identity (SIM card).

iOS

Now let’s talk about your iPhone’s Operating System: iOS.

According to a study published in March 2021 (PDF) by a team of researchers from Trinity College in Dublin, iOS sends a lot of data about your phone to Apple, such as your phone number, your unique device identifier, your location and your IMEI number.

You can disable some of this data collection (but not all) in Settings > Privacy > Location Services.

iOS also uploads a copy of all your pictures, contacts, calendars, notes… to Apple to synchronize it across your devices and keep a backup in case your iPhone is lost or stolen.

Thus, anyone who has access to your iCloud account, whether it be a hacker, an Apple employee, or a government agency, has also access to that data.

Again, this can be disabled in Settings > Apple ID > iCloud, and then toggle off what you don’t want to upload to your iCloud account.

Finally comes Siri, and this is where I think that Apple is the most dishonest. By default, each app that comes preinstalled with the iPhone, and each app you download from the App Store is used to train Siri on your data. The problem is: it’s not totally clear what data is uploaded to Apple to train Siri in the cloud, and what data stay on your device for local training.

Anyway, you can go to Settings > Siri & Search and disable everything, and then for each app toogle off Learn from this App, Suggestions - Show on Home Screen, Suggestions - Suggest App.

And don’t forget to do that each time you install a new app from the App Store.

Michael Finnegan:

The privacy invasion was vast when FBI agents drilled and pried their way into 1,400 safe-deposit boxes at the U.S. Private Vaults store in Beverly Hills.

They rummaged through personal belongings of a jazz saxophone player, an interior designer, a retired doctor, a flooring contractor, two Century City lawyers and hundreds of others.

Agents took photos and videos of pay stubs, password lists, credit cards, a prenuptial agreement, immigration and vaccination records, bank statements, heirlooms and a will, court records show. In one box, agents found cremated human remains.

Jonathan Haidt

In September 2016 I gave a lecture at Duke University: “Two Incompatible Sacred Values in American Universities.” I suggested that the ancient Greek word telos was helpful for understanding the rapid cultural change going on at America’s top universities that began in the fall of 2015. Telos means “the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims.” The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth, I suggested. The word (or close cognates) appears on many university crests, and our practices and norms — some stretching back to Plato’s academy — only make sense if you see a university as an institution organized to help scholars get closer to truth using the particular methods of their field.¹

I said that universities can have many goals (such as fiscal health and successful sports teams) and many values (such as social justice, national service, or Christian humility), but they can have only one telos, because a telos is like a North Star. It is the end, purpose, or goal around which the institution is structured. An institution can rotate on one axis only. If it tries to elevate a second goal or value to the status of a telos, it is like trying to get a spinning top or rotating solar system to simultaneously rotate around two axes. I argued that the sudden wave of protests and changes that were sweeping through universities were attempts to elevate the value of social justice to become a second telos, which would require a massive restructuring of universities and their norms in ways that damaged their ability to find truth.

Matthew Yglesias

The Supreme Court seems very likely to deal a major blow to college affirmative action programs when it rules on the Harvard v. Students for Fair Admissions case. 

In the controlling precedent from Grutter v. Bollinger, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that “race-conscious admissions policies must be limited in time … the Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” She was writing in 2003, 19 years ago rather than 25. But at the time, Day O’Connor was the median justice. When she retired, the median justice became the more conservative Anthony Kennedy. Then when Kennedy retired, the median justice became the more-conservative-still John Roberts. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, the median justice became the even-more-conservative Brett Kavanaugh. Given this substantial rightward shift, we should expect some precedents to be overturned, and since even O’Connor seemed torn on this particular question, I very much doubt that Kavanaugh is. 

And the Court doesn’t need to fear backlash here. In public polling, overwhelming majorities say race should not factor into college admissions. In Blue Rose Research competitive message testing (previously seen on Slow Boring), affirmative action performs worse than cutting police funding in partisan framing and pro/con arguments.

Kelly Conaboy:

I have a recurring dream. Actually, I have a few—one is about dismembering a body (I’d rather not get into it), but the more pertinent one is about college. It’s the end of the semester, and I suddenly realize that there is a class I forgot to attend, ever, and now I have to sit for the final exam. I wake up panicked, my GPA in peril. How could I have done this? Why do I so consistently self-sabota—oh. Then I remember I haven’t been in college in more than a decade.

Someone with intimate knowledge of my academic career might point out that this nightmare scenario is not that far removed from my actual collegiate experience, and that at certain times in my life, it did not take the magic of slumber to find me completely unprepared for a final. And, well … regardless of what may or may not be true of my personal scholastic rigor, I suspect the school-stress dream is quite a common one. Even among nerds.

!New working paper! In this paper, I show how classroom rank in kindergarten causes significant effects on short and long-run academic outcomes. 1/n pic.twitter.com/GY2ZSaF1sz

— Derek Rury (@DerekRury) September 6, 2022

Mary Chastain:

The administration wants to take these steps:

The reports encourage regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), consistent with their mandates, to aggressively pursue investigations and enforcement actions against unlawful practices in the digital assets space.
The reports encourage Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as appropriate, to redouble their efforts to monitor consumer complaints and to enforce against unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices.
The reports encourage agencies to issue guidance and rules to address current and emergent risks in the digital asset ecosystem. Regulatory and law enforcement agencies are also urged to collaborate to address acute digital assets risks facing consumers, investors, and businesses. In addition, agencies are encouraged to share data on consumer complaints regarding digital assets—ensuring each agency’s activities are maximally effective.

The Financial Literacy Education Commission (FLEC) will lead public-awareness efforts to help consumers understand the risks involved with digital assets, identify common fraudulent practices, and learn how to report misconduct.

The DOJ launched the Digital Asset Coordinators (DAC) Network, which includes “150 designated federal prosecutors from U.S. Attorneys’ Offices.” Eun Young Choi will direct the DAC.

David Larson:

In comment to Carolina Journal, Duke denied that Pritzker had any influence over this decision on the board but did not answer a question about whether any donations from the family were involved in the funding of the clinics. 

J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, is currently the 43rd governor of Illinois, and his family has been very active in Democrat politics. His sister, Penny, was co-chair of former President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and later become his secretary for the Department of Commerce. 

J.B.’s cousin Jennifer Pritzker, a twice-married father of three born James Pritzker, is the only openly transgender billionaire, after announcing a transition in 2013. Jennifer had been a lifelong Republican and was a veteran once based out of Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but in 2020 backed away from that support, donating to Joe Biden as well as the Libertarian Party because of Republican positions on LGBTQ issues. 

Tablet Magazine in June of 2022 published a detailed breakdown by Jennifer Bilek of how J.B., Jennifer, and many other billionaire members of the Pritzker family are influencing the rapid transition of society away from a binary understanding of gender towards a spectrum of synthetic sex identities.

Steven Nelson:

“You gotta say hi to me,” Biden said mid-speech at the National Education Association headquarters in DC. “We go back a long way. She was 12, I was 30. But anyway, this woman helped me get an awful lot done.”

The audience of teachers and union members laughed and cheered at the bawdy remark.

Benjamin Wofford:

Staffed by a plucky 14-person team, Urban Legend keeps its largest asset carefully hidden away inside its servers: an army of 700 social media influencers who command varying degrees of allegiance from audiences that collectively number in the tens of millions. The company has painstakingly cultivated this roster to reflect every conceivable niche of society reflected on the internet: makeup artists, Nascar drivers, home improvement gurus, teachers, doulas, Real Housewives stars, mommy bloggers, NFL quarterbacks, Olympians, and the occasional Fox News pundit.

Sophia Chang:

Total enrollment in the CUNY system has declined from 274,000 in fiscal year 2018 to 243,000 for fiscal year 2022, according to the Mayor’s Management Report released last week.

Peter Lipke, a biology professor at Brooklyn College, said he has trouble recruiting graduate students due to outdated equipment and poorly maintained labs. He recalled a steam pipe leak in 2020 that destroyed a $500,000 electron microscope.

“It’s extraordinarily difficult to train students in state-of-the-art techniques where they would get jobs in laboratories,” Lipke said.

James Davis, president of the Professional Staff Congress that represents faculty and some staff, said repairs would help convince students to return to campuses.

John McWhorter:

We’ve applied the cure long past that point, and have drifted toward an almost liturgical conception of diversity that makes less sense by the year. In a 2003 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the majority, said, ‘we expect that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences’ in the university admissions context ‘will no longer be necessary.’ That was considered resonantly wise at the time. But now we have only about six years to go. Folks, it’s time.”

Additional commentary

Sarah Brown

The state of Florida asserted on Friday that faculty members’ curriculum and in-class instruction at public universities is “government speech” and “not the speech of the educators themselves.” Therefore, such expression is fair game to be regulated by state lawmakers.

“A public university’s curriculum is set by the university in accordance with the strictures and guidance of the State’s elected officials,” lawyers for the state wrote in a court filing. “It is government speech.”

The state was responding to a lawsuit that several professors and a student filed earlier this year, alleging that the “Stop WOKE” Act violates the First Amendment and is unconstitutionally vague and racially discriminatory.

Dell Cameron and Mack DeGeurin

Multiple military intelligence offices have paid a data broker for access to internet traffic logs, which could reveal the online browsing histories of U.S. citizens, Sen. Ron Wyden said in a letter Wednesday, citing an anonymous whistleblower that had contacted his office.

Anna Nowogrodzki

Specifically, the study, published in Nature on 21 September, shows that just 20% of PhD-granting institutions in the United States supplied 80% of tenure-track faculty members to institutions across the country between 2011 and 2020 (see ‘Hiring bias’). No historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) or Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs) were among that 20%, says Hunter Wapman, a computer scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and a co-author of the paper. One in eight US-trained tenure-track faculty members got their PhDs from just five elite universities: the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Stanford University in California; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“It’s not surprising, but it is jarring” to see these data, says Leslie Gonzales, a social scientist who studies higher education at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “There’s so much brilliant work and training of brilliant scholars that’s happening outside of this tiny sliver” of institutions, including at HBCUs and HSIs — and it’s being overlooked, she says.

Twitter and Facebook suspended numerous fake accounts which were spreading propaganda and disinformation to support US foreign policy and the US Security State.

Turns out these fake accounts were created and controlled by the Biden Pentagon😱.https://t.co/8lA24LQ1RJ

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 24, 2022

Good. The PayPal situation is outrageous. Defunding critics is how you end up in political frameworks that bring about Putin types. https://t.co/HEW9d1Yt0i

— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) September 24, 2022

Wall Street Journal:

Many student borrowers get into trouble because they don’t understand basic financial management. Neither do the Biden officials who claim the President’s student loan cancellation is fully paid for by this year’s decline in the federal budget deficit.

The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that the President’s student loan relief could cost as much as $1 trillion. The White House is cagey about the cost, and says it doesn’t matter anyway since the federal deficit is on track to fall by about $1.7 trillion this fiscal year from last year’s $2.7 trillion, which was the second largest in history after 2020.

Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, recently explained: “This is paid for. It is paid for and far more by the amount of deficit reduction that we’re already on track for this year,” adding that “compared to the previous year, 1.7 trillion more dollars are coming into the Treasury than are going out.”

Noah Smith:

It was inevitable that some kind of backlash would happen; you can only force people to pay so much for the places they live before they get mad and revolt. And it was predictable that the revolt would begin in California, the country’s most NIMBY state. YIMBYism is the form that backlash took.

The YIMBY movement is not a typical American movement. Its goals are narrower than most economic movements — it’s not about changing the whole role of government, it’s just about getting more housing. At the same time, it’s an ideological big tent — most YIMBYs are lefties (because most people in overpriced metros are lefties), but a few are libertarian types or fed-up businesspeople, and a few are hardcore socialists. This combination of narrow goals and freedom from broader ideology allows the movement to launch a pragmatic, multi-pronged assault on housing scarcity. YIMBYs want deregulation when it comes to things like zoning and parking requirements, but they also strongly support public housing and a vigorous role for state development planning. In other words, YIMBYs just want housing, and lots of it, any and every way they can get it. 

The California upzoning campaignIt’s instructive to watch the YIMBYs’ progress in California, because that state is really the epicenter and the pace-setter for the YIMBY/NIMBY clash. From 2018 through 2020, State Senator Scott Wiener introduced two bills, SB 827 and SB 50, that would have massively upzoned every part of California that was near a transit hub. Both bills were defeated, leading some to conclude — prematurely — that the YIMBYs would never make a dent in the NIMBY fortress.

Rachel Bachman:

But last school year, basketball dropped to the fourth-most-popular girls’ sport by participation, according to the data released this month by the National Federation of State High School Associations. Girls’ basketball has lost 19% of its players since 2002, while the top girls’ sport, track and field, grew 10%, along with volleyball (+15%) and soccer (+27%). 

Though boys’ and girls’ high school sports participation overall declined 4% since 2019 in the first post-pandemic national survey, girls’ basketball dropped 7%.

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The fall of girls’ basketball is even more pronounced given the growth in popularity of the women’s game: TV ratings for the NCAA women’s basketball tournament and the WNBA are on the rise.

Several forces are driving the decline. More athletes are sticking to one sport nearly year-round. Schools have added other sports for girls, which have lured athletes away from basketball. Some girls see basketball as too difficult to play, or even not “girly” enough, coaches say. 

“It’s sad,” said Erica Delley, first-year head coach at Dallas’s Kimball High School, which was a regional power when she played there in the early 2000s. “That’s why I came back, to make a difference and try to encourage kids to play.”

Glenn Reynolds:

That departure made some sense. Back in February, Biden seemed to grant Vladimir Putin a green light to invade Ukraine. White House spokesmen quickly walked that back, but the green light, coming directly from Biden’s lips, apparently convinced Putin that he could launch an invasion without blowback.

That turned out to be wrong, of course, and now the United States is involved in a proxy war with Russia, while sanctions and export disruptions cause the world’s food and fuel markets to go crazy and have Europe looking at a long, cold winter of gas shortages and electrical blackouts. So firmness, this time.

Leah Triedler:

But in a statement after the speech, Republican Sen. Alberta Darling, chair of the Senate Education Committee, said Wisconsin students’ poor performance stems from Gov. Tony Evers “refusing to reform education in Wisconsin” despite Republican efforts, including a literacy bill Evers vetoed twice.

Darling said Underly is following in his footsteps.

“The DPI Secretary refuses to acknowledge failure,” Darling said. “Under her watch, too many children in our schools are failing. There was not a single acknowledgment that less than one-third of students are proficient in English or Math. Instead of accepting we have the largest achievement gap in the country, she’d rather change the definition.”

Underly, however, outlined ways to improve student achievement and bridge racial disparities. She said policymakers and educators need to recognize that those disparities stem from a gap in representation and engagement, not the student.

“Instead of blaming the student because of their learning challenges or their family, because their parents are working multiple jobs to get by, or their school district or teachers are under-resourced,” Underly said, “instead of placing blame about their achievement, we can make important choices about curriculum that can make a difference.”

That includes increasing representation in curriculum, she said. All students, especially students of color, need to see themselves reflected in what they learn, she said, and not just learn about trauma and struggle, but also growth.

That includes teaching students about the country’s complicated history, Underly said.

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

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.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our 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?

Jenni Younes:

One warm weekend in October of 2020, three impeccably credentialed epidemiologists—Jayanta Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff, of Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard Universities respectively—gathered with a few journalists, writers, and economists at an estate in the Berkshires where the American Institute for Economic Research had brought together critics of lockdowns and other COVID-related government restrictions. On Sunday morning shortly before the guests departed, the scientists encapsulated their views—that lockdowns do more harm than good, and that resources should be devoted to protecting the vulnerable rather than shutting society down—in a joint communique dubbed the “Great Barrington Declaration,” after the town in which it was written.

The declaration began circulating on social media and rapidly garnered signatures, including from other highly credentialed scientists. Most mainstream news outlets and the scientists they chose to quote denounced the declaration in no uncertain terms. When contacted by reporters, Drs. Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH publicly and vociferously repudiated the “dangerous” declaration, smearing the scientists—all generally considered to be at the top of their fields—as “fringe epidemiologists.” Over the next several months, the three scientists faced a barrage of condemnation: They were called eugenicists and anti-vaxxers; it was falsely asserted that they were “Koch-funded” and that they had written the declaration for financial gain. Attacks on the Great Barrington signatories proliferated throughout social media and in the pages of The New York Times and Guardian.

Yet emails obtained pursuant to a FOIA request later revealed that these attacks were not the products of an independent objective news-gathering process of the type that publications like the Times and the Guardianstill like to advertise. Rather, they were the fruits of an aggressive attempt to shape the news by the same government officials whose policies the epidemiologists had criticized. Emails between Fauci and Collins revealed that the two officials had worked together and with media outlets as various as Wired and The Nationto orchestrate a “takedown” of the declaration.

Nor did the targeting of the scientists stop with the bureaucrats they had implicitly criticized. Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorff soon learned that their declaration was being heavily censored on social media to prevent their scientific opinions from reaching the public. Kulldorff—then the most active of the three online—soon began to experience censorship of his own social media posts. For example, Twitter censored one of Kulldorff’s tweets asserting that: “Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older, higher-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Not children.” Posts on Kulldorff’s Twitter and LinkedIn criticizing mask and vaccine mandates were labeled misleading or removed entirely. In March of 2021, YouTube took down a videodepicting a roundtable discussion that Bhattacharya, Gupta, Kulldorff, and Dr. Scott Atlas had with Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in which the participants critiqued mask and vaccine mandates.

Because of this censorship, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff are now plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, a case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, as well as the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), which is representing them and two other individuals, Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines. The plaintiffs allege that the Biden administration and a number of federal agencies coerced social media platforms into censoring them and others for criticizing the government’s COVID policies. In doing so, the Biden administration and relevant agencies had turned any ostensible private action by the social media companies into state action, in violation of the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court has long recognized and Justice Thomas explained in a concurring opinion just last year, “[t]he government cannot accomplish through threats of adverse government action what the Constitution prohibits it from doing directly.”