Alex Tabarrok:

In The Student Loan Giveaway is Much Bigger Than You Think I argued that the Biden student loan plan would incentivize students to take on more debt and incentivize schools to raise tuition with most of the increased costs being passed on to taxpayers through generous income based repayment plans. Adam Looney at Brookings takes a deep dive into the IDR plan and concludes that it’s even worse than I thought. Here are some of Looney’s key points:

Elliot Kaufman:

My chess career peaked when I was 6. One game away from victory in the Ontario Chess Championships for the first grade, I blundered and lost.

Since then, I’ve traded on chess trivia. My father spiked a tennis ball into the face of Aman Hambleton, now a grandmaster and popular online chess streamer, when Mr. Hambleton was 12. I tried, without success, to recruit grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky to my college fraternity. In hindsight, his wonderful attacking style might not have translated to the beer-pong table. After my brother accepted a draw in a game at the 2004 World Youth Chess Championships, a 12-year-old Fabiano Caruana, now one of the world’s top players, leaned over from a neighboring board and told him that there had been a way to win. After a decade of second-guessing, my brother entered the game into a computer engine and found out it was a dead draw. Mr. Caruana had been wrong.

Computer engines have another use in chess: cheating. Magnus Carlsen, the best in the world, wouldn’t stand a chance against Stockfish, a top engine. That’s the issue today in a scandal that has the chess world as agitated as a Russian chain smoker with his chess clock winding down.

MIT

This course is an introduction to mathematical modeling of computational problems, as well as common algorithms, algorithmic paradigms, and

Logan Dubil:

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is moving forward on a proposed statement of principles on free speech and academic freedom.

MIT President Rafael Reif announced in early September that there will be two forums this month with faculty to discuss the proposed “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom.”

The working group’s effort, which included a 56-page report released this summer, grew out of a controversy surrounding a canceled speech to be given by University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot.

Professor Abbot saw his speech canceled at MIT after activists led a campaign against him due to his comments critical of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs. He was slated to speak on climate change, not DEI policies.

He did not respond to a media inquiry sent by The College Fix in the past week that asked for comments on the university’s free speech efforts.

Britney Nguyen and Rob Price:

Some job candidates are hiring proxies to sit in job interviews for them — and even paying up to $150 an hour for one.

In a recent Insider investigation into the “bait-and-switch” job interview that’s becoming increasingly trendy, one “professional” job interview proxy, who uses a website to book clients and keeps a Google Driver folder of past video interviews, said he charges clients $150 an hour.

The proxy was approached by Aamil Karimi, who works at cybersecurity firm Optiv as a principal intelligence analyst. Karimi, who posed as a job seeker to talk to the proxy, told Insider’s Rob Pricethat the “bait-and-switch” trend has been on the rise because of more work-from-home jobs and overseas hiring.

This is from an editorial announcing Nature Human Behavior’s decision to censor scientific results, however rigorous, that do not conform to a political narrative.
It is hard to exaggerate the scientific insanity this represents. pic.twitter.com/oraecbZFSq

— Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) August 24, 2022

Matt Taibbi:

But, they say, don’t worry, we’re not using any of those secrets, you can trust us. After all, we’re United States Attorneys. (And their paralegals. And legal assistants. And, perhaps, a few IRS or DEA or FBI agents, whose only job is to make cases against the types of people in those files. But still, don’t worry). Just because the whole concept of attorney-client privilege, as well as the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments — guaranteeing rights to free speech, against unreasonable searches, and to due process and legal counsel, respectively — were created to bar exactly this kind of behavior, they insist the state would never abuse this authority.

Taint team targets are unpopular. They’re accused drug dealers, terrorists, corporate tax cheats, money launderers, Medicare fraudsters, and, importantly of late, their lawyers. You can add Trump administration officials to the list now. In cases involving such people government prosecutors have begun making an extraordinary claim. As a citizen cries foul when the state peeks at attorney communications, the Justice Department increasingly argues that affording certain people rights harms the secret objectives of the secret state. 

The Trump case is almost incidental to this wider story of extralegal short-cuts, intimidation, improper searches, and especially, a constant, intensifying effort at discrediting the adversarial system in favor of an executive-branch-only vision of the law, in which your right to stand before a judge or jury would be replaced by secret bureaucratic decisions. “Trump has become the way they sell this,” says one defense attorney. “But it’s not about Trump. If you focus on Trump, you’ll miss how serious this is. And it started a long time ago.” When? “Go back to 9/11,” he says. “You’ll see.” 

What follows is a brief history of the cases leading to the controversial decisions in Donald J. Trump v. United States of America, as told by some of the key figures in those episodes. TV experts have told you Judge Aileen Cannon’s decision to appoint a Special Master in Trump’s case is an “atrocious,” “shady as fuck,” “utterly lawless” ruling by a “stupid” and “profoundly partisan” jurist, placing Trump “above the law.” Have you noticed these analyses almost always come from ex-prosecutors, that you’ve been trained to not even blink at headlines like, Ex-CIA officer calls judge’s ruling in Trump case “silly,” and that defense attorneys on television are rarer than pearls?

The heart of the DOJ/FBI prosecution was the allegation that Stevens had failed to disclose over $250,000 worth of work on his Girdwood “chalet”. It was $250,000 of work ostensibly done by his friend Bill Allen’s company, VECO, in addition to the $180,000 which Stevens had paid for the so-called improvements.

Events would eventually make it obvious that Stevens overpaid by $80,000 or more and should have been suing to get some of his money back.

But the FBI/DOJ team had a different narrative they were selling.

On July 30, 2007 they hired a locksmith and invited news and TV crews to observe their “raid” on Sen. Stevens home.

The Anchorage Daily News, in the person of Rich Mauer, as well as reporters from Anchorage TV station Channel 2 and commentator-for-hire Shannon (Shannyn) Moore were there by invitation.

What this intrepid band of reporters failed somehow to notice was that there was no way that $180,000 much less the alleged additional $250,000 from VECO, had been spent on upgrading Ted’s rather modest chalet.

Nor did they see any incongruity in the FBI, normally religiously silent about ongoing investigations, inviting them to what became a show and tell.

Nor, it is worth noting, have any of these intrepid souls had the moral courage to set the record straight by admitting that they were duped by the investigators.

But why would Sen. Stevens’ friend Bill Allen testify to something which was patently untrue?

Undisclosed by the FBI/DOJ team were several salient facts:

Bill Allen was in the process of selling his company, VECO, to CH2MHill for net cash proceeds somewhere in the neighborhood of $432,000,000.

The majority of those proceeds were allowed to flow through to Allen family members and trusts as well as several minority owners. Only the $70,000,000, which was to go directly to Bill Allen, was impounded by the DOJ pending his cooperation in the prosecution of Sen. Stevens.

Also undisclosed was the fact that Allen, once named Alaskan of the Year, now drunken and brain-damaged from a motorcycle accident, was himself under investigation by the Anchorage Police Department for illicit sexual relations with a minor, and that the investigation was being quashed by the FBI/DOJ.

The carrot for Allen’s cooperation was the release of his $70,000,000; the stick was the frozen investigation of Allen’s own corrupt criminal acts.

Ultimately the illegal prosecution of Sen. Stevens was thrown out, first by Judge Emmett Sullivan, and then by Eric Holder.

But it cost Stevens his seat in the US Senate.

In July of 2008, just months before the elections, a DC jury convicted Stevens. Using the suborned false testimony of Bill Allen, hiding evidence of Stevens’ innocence, the FBI and DOJ had piled on charges and leaked so much false and damaging evidence to the “press” that the Washington DC jury returned a conviction.

But all this was only part of the story. In Florida, a minor league Democrat named Vic Vickers, packed up his household goods and headed to Alaska. He changed his registration to Republican, filed to run for US Senate and proceeded to spend a million dollars on “campaign” ads that said little, other than “Stevens is a crook.”

And, in Washington DC, the Democratic National Committee, then under Chuck Schumer’s leadership, was grooming Mark Begich to replace Stevens. In Alaska Begich was cautious in his criticism of Stevens because of Stevens’ popularity. In DC where his financial and political support was based he was vicious in attacking Ted.

In April of 2009 Judge Emmet G. Sullivan dismissed the ethics conviction of Ted Stevens. In a 14 minute diatribe he said that he had never seen “mishandling and misconduct like I have seen” in the Stevens trial. He then appointed a special counsel to determine if the prosecutors themselves should face criminal charges themselves.

Tyler Cowen:

A controversy erupted in St. Louis last week when Magnus Carlsen, the world chess champion, withdrew from a top tournament. One interpretation of his decision, drawing upon his tweet, is that he believes competitor Hans Niemann, who beat him in the third round, may have been cheating with computer assistance. Suspicions were raised further when Niemann admitted having cheated twice previously, and when Chess.com issued a statement alleging yet further cheating and banning Niemann from its site.

Corrine Murdock:

The citizen behind the lawsuit, Peggy McClain, claimed that Hoffman violated the Parents’ Bill of Rights provision prohibiting any attempts to encourage or coerce minors to withhold information from their parents. McClain further asserted that the children’s data was vulnerable to hacking and could therefore be sold on the dark web to child predators, noting that some of the adult chat facilitators could be child predators as well. 

“By doing the things set forth above, Katherine Hoffman is encouraging the grooming of young children,” stated McClain.

Martin A. Schwartz

I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.

I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It’s just that I’ve gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn’t know what to do without that feeling. I even think it’s supposed to be this way. Let me explain.
For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can’t be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.

A brief-ish summary of my thoughts on maths textbooks from my talk yesterday… 🧵1/n pic.twitter.com/bxNgb7zd5n

— Ed Southall (@edsouthall) September 4, 2022

Christopher Rufo:

The Michigan Department of Education has adopted a radical gender theory program that promotes gender “fluidity” beginning in elementary school and encourages teachers to facilitate the sexual transition of minors without parental consent.

I have obtained videos and internal documentation from the state’s training program, which first took place in 2020 and was repackaged for public school employees for the 2021–2022 school year. The training program mimics the basic narrative of academic queer theory: the presenters claim that the West has created a false notion that “gender is binary” in order to oppress racial and sexual minorities. In response, the department encourages teachers to adopt the principle of “intersectionality,” a key tenet of critical race theory, in order to “dismantle systems of oppression,” which are replicated through the culture and institutions of education. (In a statement, the Michigan Department of Education defended the program as “respecting all children” and “meet[ing] the needs of their LGBTQ+ students.”)

The first step to dismantling these systems, according to the presenters, is to disrupt the gender binary. In one presentation, trainer Amorie Robinson, who describes herself as a “Black, masculine-identified, cisgendered lesbian baby boomer” and uses the “African name” Kofi Adoma, says that “we’ve been conditioned and we’ve been acculturated in this particular culture that gender is binary.” But teachers should know that, in fact, gender is a spectrum, including identities such as “gender non-binary,” “gender fluid,” “gender queer,” “gender non-conforming,” and “bi-gender.” Likewise, sexual orientation can include an expanding range of categories. Students might identify as “asexual, lesbian, straight, gay, bisexual, queer, questioning, demisexual, demiromantic, aromantic, and skoliosexual,” says Robinson. “I’ll leave that to you to go Google on those. Because we ain’t got time today!”

Lauren Forristal:

Wegman’s losses from the app point to a common problem among companies that utilize in-store scan-and-go technology — shoplifting. Walmart temporarily suspended Scan and Go, its cashierless checkout program due to theft, an ex-Walmart exec told Business Insider in 2019. Walmart initially tested the technology in 2012 and has since relaunched the self-scanning system.

www:

There are over 1 million Black people in Central Europe today. Most Europeans still don’t know of the long history of the Black Diaspora in their countries. As a result, there is a general assumption that Black people are a relatively new presence on the continent and thus are historical and national outsiders. Through historical investigation, Black Central Europe challenges these assumptions.

In our extensive Collection, you can find a wide range of sources that trace the history of the Black Diaspora in Central Europe from as early as 1000 AD until the present day. The sources include paintings, photographs, letters, excerpts of novels, sculptures, newspaper articles and much more. We have organized them into historical categories: 1000-1500, 1500-1750, 1750-1850, 1850-1914, 1914-1945, 1945-1989, and 1989-today. Small icons indicate what type of source you find when you follow the link (text, image, etc). Most of our sources and introductions can be found in both English and German; we are still working on making the website fully bilingual.

Lawrence McDonald:

The Fed and their collection of well-placed pawns keep lecturing us on their policy path filled with endless rate hikes to fight inflation  – but the math tells us the sales pitch is all bs. 

Three Things You Need to Know

1. The income that the Federal reserve generates comes almost exclusively from their $8.8Tr portfolio of Treasuries and agency MBS. The Fed transfers that interest income to the Federal government, and this has been a nice source of income that supports Washington DC deficit spending. However, the interest income the Fed generates is reduced by the interest it pays the commercial banks for their excess reserves. The Fed likes to call these “interest to depository institutions”. Last year this interest rate was still a paltry 0.15% but as it is directly linked to the Fed funds rate, it has since risen to 2.4%. So the interest income the Fed earns is the sum of the money it makes on the QE assets minus the money it pays the banks for their $3Tr in excess reserves.

The Backstory goes all the Way to Lehman Brothers

Fourteen years ago this week – Lehman Brothers failed.How is this colossal financial collapse, tied into the road ahead? After the Great Financial Crisis – our brain trusts in Washington wanted to make sure the U.S. financial system would never again succumb to the double-edged sword of excess leverage. Regulators forced U.S. banks to “reserve up” and so – for the last 14 years – Wall St.’s financial epicenter stored an ever-enormous dollar number of reserves – mostly found in U.S. Treasuries. Today, as promised the Fed must pay these banks MORE and MORE interest on these reserves. As the central bank hikes rates – the unintended consequences are MOUNTING along with a political backlash – potentially louder than a Donald Trump appearance on “The View.” This time next year, the Federal Government is looking at a near $400B negative swing; a) from profit to a loss on the Fed´s transfer of net interest income – triggered by a surge in interest payments to banks on reserves, b) plus $200B additional interest on their $31T debt load. Dollar headwinds are mounting from; emerging market credit risk, China currency devaluation, the Eurozone energy crisis, a weaker U.S. consumer (see Capital One CDS, the cost of default protection is on the rise), and one-year inflation expectations crashing at the fastest pace since the fall of Lehman Brothers. Sit back, think of taking the Fed Funds rate from 25bps in March to 325bps this month, that´s three years of accommodation withdrawal in just six months. The Fed is very close to table max, the risks that they have over-cooked the goose are sky high.

This isn’t a thing. If students’ families can pick where they go, there is no segregation. In the current setup, unless you can afford to live in the neighborhoods with nice schools, you’re locked out. https://t.co/D9ETr84Bfj

— Mister Vigilante (@MisterVigilante) September 16, 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”

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?

Kalley Huang

Instead of just slogging through walls of text, Gen Z-ers crowdsource recommendations from TikTok videos to pinpoint what they are looking for, watching video after video to cull the content. Then they verify the veracity of a suggestion based on comments posted in response to the videos.

This mode of searching is rooted in how young people are using TikTok not only to look for products and businesses, but also to ask questions about how to do things and find explanations for what things mean. With videos often less than 60 seconds long, TikTok returns what feels like more relevant answers, many said.

Alexandria Kinsey, 24, a communications and social media coordinator in Arlington, Va., uses TikTok for many search queries: recipes to cook, films to watch and nearby happy hours to try. She also turns to it for less typical questions, like looking up interviews with the actor Andrew Garfield and weird conspiracy theories.

TikTok’s results “don’t seem as biased” as Google’s, she said, adding that she often wants “a different opinion” from what ads and websites optimized for Google say.

TikTok has leaned into becoming a venue for finding information. The app is testing a feature that identifies keywords in comments and links to search results for them. In Southeast Asia, it is also testing a feed with local content, so people can find businesses and events near them.

Ms. Johnson, a digital marketer, added that she particularly appreciated TikTok when she and her parents were searching for places to visit and things to do. Her parents often wade through pages of Google search results, she said, while she needs to scroll through only a few short videos.

“God bless,” she said she thinks. “You could have gotten that in seconds.”

Kate Anderson:

Morrisey proposed revisions to the South Dakota Department of Education standards to provide “a true, honest, and balanced approach to American history that is not influenced by political agendas” according to an Aug. 15 statement from Governor Kristi Noem. 

Campus Reform spoke with Governor Noem’s Chief of Staff Mark Miller. He said, “Dr. Morrisey is a retired professor of civics, history, an expert on history, and we thought he was the perfect fit for what we are trying to do.”

“We, as a nation, we’re grappling with challenges to civic illiteracy and this…uncivil division between different political points of view.” Miller continued, “So we think a change in approach to how we teach social studies is in order and we expect that South Dakota will become a leader for the country and we think the other states will look to this as a model.”

On the state Department of Education’s (DOEd) website, the new standards are defined as an “[h]onest, balanced, and complete accounts of historical events and debates that foster a love of country that, like any love, is not blind to faults.”

It continues, promising “[h]istory and civics instruction free from political agendas and activism.”

Paul Overberg and John McCormick:

Amer­i­cans as a whole have ex­pe­ri­enced two years in a row of flat or de­clin­ing house­hold in­come, new gov­ern­ment data showed Tues­day, re­flect­ing the pan­dem­ic’s lin­ger­ing eco­nomic pain as in­fla­tion is also tak­ing the largest bite out of pock­et­books in four decades.

The lack of any real growth for 2021 fol­lows a de­crease in in­comes recorded in 2020, the first year of the pan­demic. To­tals in 2020 and 2021 were boosted by sig­nif­i­cant gov­ern­ment spend­ing in re­sponse to the pan­demic that helped re­duce poverty.

Stewart Baker:

But there is a provision of federal law that allows electronic service providers to volunteer information to law enforcement. To do so, they need to believe “in good faith … that an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person requires disclosure without delay of communications relating to the emergency.” 18 USC 2702(c).

So, Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies could have developed an AI engine to search for strings of words that its legal department has precleared — in good faith — as evidence of an emergency involving a danger of death or serious injury. (And after the fact, the injuries that occurred in the January 6 riot could be used to predict such a danger from a lot of antigovernment and “rigged election” talk.)

These passages could be excerpted by social media platforms, along with identifying information, and sent to Justice, under the “danger of death or injury” exception. Justice could then use them to subpoena all of the less inflammatory posts by the same people and then farm out the results to local FBI offices for investigation across the country.

Chris Quintana:

With concerns about college costs and thegrowing burden of student debt, one state university has a plan to change how its students manage their finances. 

In addition to spending millions on financial aid, the University of Kentucky will offer investment accounts to all of its students by 2023.

University president Eli Capilouto said he believes the accounts will help students learn financial literacy, even if it doesn’t make them rich. 

“It’s investing in yourself,” Capilouto said in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY ahead of the university’s official announcement. “To me, this is experiential learning on steroids. We’re going to learn with our students. They’ll be our partners too in how we craft these to be impactful.”

Becky Supiano:

Attending a class where discussion is always dominated by the same handful of confident students can be annoying. It’s not great for learning, either: Participation is a form of practice, and hearing from a broad selection of classmates enhances everyone’s education.

For those reasons, many professors use “cold calling,” picking out a student who did not volunteer to contribute. Or they might use the related practice of “random calling,” found mostly in large STEM classes, in which instructors select a student or group to hear from using a random-number generator, names from a hat, or a similar tool.

Daniel Buck:

Like an overlong proxy war, the “canon” skirmishes of the 1980s and ’90s no longer feature in the media, though the conflict persists. As in a battle over this or that town, the ongoing war might manifest as a fight over particular books, but the real disagreement exists between competing visions for humanity and society.

Critics of the literary canon usually point to its preponderance of white males, but this antipathy toward tradition traces down to a more fundamental, even revolutionary, first principle. The radicals behind the anti-canon movement want more than the expansion of the existing canon; they want to eradicate any commitment to aesthetic ideals, objective truth, or moral imposition. Undergirding their resentment of Shakespeare or Tolstoy is a resentment of Western values as such, and so saving the canon is about more than saving Romeo and Juliet.

Undergirding resentment of Shakespeare is a resentment of Western values as such.

In an essay that astutely chronicles the original canon war, philosopher John Searle rightly observes that “opening up the canon” would not satisfy most professorial radicals; rather, “the whole idea of ‘the canon’” had to be abolished. Professor of education Henry Giroux expresses the more radical belief of the anti-canon proponents when he criticizes the mere liberals of the 1960s (as opposed to the postmodernists), who “remained partially constrained by modernist assumptions.” Postmodernism, meanwhile, “asserts no privileged place, aside from power considerations, for the art works, scientific achievements, and philosophical traditions by which Western Culture legitimates itself.”

Elizabeth Nolan Brown:

On average, each “consumer unit” paid more than $16,000 in taxes last year. This outpaces average spending on food, clothing, education, and health care combined.

The mean for total spending per unit on health care, food, education, and clothing was $16,721.42. This included an average of $8,289.28 on food, $5,451.61 on health care, $1,226.14 on education, and $1,754.39 on apparel.

The mean for total spending per unit on taxes was $16,729.73. This included $8,561.46 in federal income tax, $2,564.14 in state and local income taxes, $2,475.18 in property taxes, $5,565.45 in Social Security deductions, and $105.21 in other taxes, offset by an average stimulus payment of $2,541.71.

In addition to this disturbing tidbit, the new BLS data contains a wealth of other information on American spending habits and offers an interesting glimpse at recovery—and inflation—during the second year of the coronavirus pandemic.

How the 1619 Project does economics. pic.twitter.com/f5BXDEdvAx

— Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) September 15, 2022

Mitchell Schmidt:

A new coalition of conservatives, policy groups and advocacy organizations has begun developing a package of education goals for the coming legislative session — with expanded school choice as a top priority — that could play a considerable role in the upcoming race for governor this November.

Officials with the Wisconsin Coalition for Education Freedom say the goal is to give parents and students more options. But the proposals also stand in stark contrast to priorities laid out by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers — setting up an education policy battle in the Nov. 8 election, in which Evers, a former educator and state superintendent who has opposed expanded private school vouchers, faces businessman Tim Michels, a Republican who has pledged to expand school choice offerings across Wisconsin.

People are also reading…

“The election is critically important,” said Susan Mitchell, a longtime advocate for school vouchers and founder of School Choice Wisconsin. “Gov. Evers, both as (Department of Public Instruction) superintendent and as governor, has repeatedly opposed the expansion of these programs. Tim Michels has made public a completely opposite sort of perspective, so it matters a lot in terms of getting things done.”

The coalition, launched Thursday, includes conservative groups Americans for Prosperity, Badger Institute and law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, as well as education stakeholders such as American Federation for Children, virtual education company K12/Stride, School Choice Wisconsin and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business lobbying organization.

The group did not provide specific legislative proposals, but officials told the Wisconsin State Journal the two biggest priorities will be “school choice for all families” and legislation seeking to establish a “Parental Bill of Rights,” letting parents sue a school district or school official if they don’t allow parents to determine the names and pronouns used for the child while at school, review instructional materials and outlines used by the child’s school and access any education-related information regarding the child, among other measures.

Evers vetoed a GOP-authored bill last session that would have extended those powers to parents, stating in an April 15 veto message he opposed it “because I object to sowing division in our schools, which only hurts our kids and learning in our classrooms.”

He also vetoed a measure that would have vastly expanded private school vouchers by eliminating the income limits in the statewide, Milwaukee County and Racine County private school voucher programs, as well as create a temporary education expense reimbursement program for public school students. A fiscal report estimated the bill could raise property taxes as much as $577 million.

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?

Mitchell Schmidt:

A new coalition of conservatives, policy groups and advocacy organizations has begun developing a package of education goals for the coming legislative session — with expanded school choice as a top priority — that could play a considerable role in the upcoming race for governor this November.

Officials with the Wisconsin Coalition for Education Freedom say the goal is to give parents and students more options. But the proposals also stand in stark contrast to priorities laid out by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers — setting up an education policy battle in the Nov. 8 election, in which Evers, a former educator and state superintendent who has opposed expanded private school vouchers, faces businessman Tim Michels, a Republican who has pledged to expand school choice offerings across Wisconsin.

People are also reading…

“The election is critically important,” said Susan Mitchell, a longtime advocate for school vouchers and founder of School Choice Wisconsin. “Gov. Evers, both as (Department of Public Instruction) superintendent and as governor, has repeatedly opposed the expansion of these programs. Tim Michels has made public a completely opposite sort of perspective, so it matters a lot in terms of getting things done.”

The coalition, launched Thursday, includes conservative groups Americans for Prosperity, Badger Institute and law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, as well as education stakeholders such as American Federation for Children, virtual education company K12/Stride, School Choice Wisconsin and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business lobbying organization.

The group did not provide specific legislative proposals, but officials told the Wisconsin State Journal the two biggest priorities will be “school choice for all families” and legislation seeking to establish a “Parental Bill of Rights,” letting parents sue a school district or school official if they don’t allow parents to determine the names and pronouns used for the child while at school, review instructional materials and outlines used by the child’s school and access any education-related information regarding the child, among other measures.

Evers vetoed a GOP-authored bill last session that would have extended those powers to parents, stating in an April 15 veto message he opposed it “because I object to sowing division in our schools, which only hurts our kids and learning in our classrooms.”

He also vetoed a measure that would have vastly expanded private school vouchers by eliminating the income limits in the statewide, Milwaukee County and Racine County private school voucher programs, as well as create a temporary education expense reimbursement program for public school students. A fiscal report estimated the bill could raise property taxes as much as $577 million.

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?

Leslie McAdoo Gordon:

So, I am going to be taking a short break, starting tonight, to recharge & reorganize after my recent projects & also to prepare myself to take up these challenges. A new course requires a clearing of the decks, a re-stocking of provisions, & a re-rigging of the sails. 

I leave you for now with this observation from Elmer Davis:

“This republic was not established by cowards; and cowards will not preserve it.” 

We need now to screw up our courage and do what needs doing to preserve the Republic. No one else is going to do it for us.

It will not be easy. Nothing worth doing is.

Scott Calvert:

elainey Tidwell says she loves reading. The tricky part for her is understanding the words on the page.

Though she returned to school in August 2020, repeated quarantines left her mostly on her own at home. Her father is a construction supervisor who has to be on site. Her mother works from home but gets few breaks during the day. Delainey sometimes had to care for her little sister during virtual school.

Delainey’s difficulty with comprehension is also hurting her in math class, where she struggles to understand word problems, said her mother, Danyal Tidwell, who pins some blame on the pandemic. “We want to give her every resource we can between school and home, because we want her caught up,” Mrs. Tidwell said.

For two years, schools and researchers have wrestled with pandemic-era learning setbacks resulting mostly from a lack of in-person classes. They are struggling to combat the learning loss, as well as to measure just how deep it is. Some answers to the second question are becoming clear. National data show that children who were learning to read earlier in the pandemic have the lowest reading proficiency rates in about 20 years.

The U.S. Department of Education last Thursday released data showing that from 2020 to 2022, average reading scores for 9-year-olds slid 5 points—to 215 out of a possible 500—in the sharpest decline since 1990. Average math scores fell 7 points to 234, the first statistically significant decline in math scores since the long-term trend assessments began in the 1970s.

Aaron Sibarium:

The largest public university in the United States is reserving faculty positions based on race and making six-figure bonuses available exclusively to minorities, programs that are now the subject of a class action lawsuit.

As part of a new initiative to attract “faculty of color,” Texas A&M University set aside $2 million in July to be spent on bonuses for “hires from underrepresented minority groups,” according to a memo from the university’s office of diversity. The max bonus is $100,000, and eligible minority groups are defined by the university to include “African Americans, Hispanic/Latino Americans, Native Americans, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians.”

🚨🚨GROOMING ALERT! The Wisconsin Dept. of Public Instruction has created a guide for “gender expansive” PRESCHOOLERS

The guide dubs parents “trolls” and “jerks” if they refuse to use “they/them” pronouns or allow their kids to read books about trans toddlers pic.twitter.com/TrQ5BVc1Yw

— Chrissy Clark (@chrissyclark_) September 13, 2022

DPI Commentary:

“The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction supports and advocates for all Wisconsin students, and that includes our trans and nonbinary students of all ages, as well as their cisgender classmates,” Bucher said. “Creating safe spaces by affirming identities benefits every student, and part of high-quality education is learning about different perspectives and lived experiences.”

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?

The $1 billion for Yeshiva students mentioned in the Times was in a time frame that NY state and NYC spent a combined $225 BILLION on education.

Not $2.5 billion.

Not $25 billion.

$225 BILLION!

“The money is flowing” to Yeshivas “as NYC is cutting public school funds.” pic.twitter.com/SKONEMqjZq

— Yossi Gestetner (@YossiGestetner) September 13, 2022

Frederick M. Hess

Biden’s calculus is simple. He’s giving up to $20,000 in taxpayer money to millions of college-educated borrowers, whom Democrats trust to be appropriately grateful. Meanwhile, the cost will be borne by, well, everyone, including children and grandchildren who aren’t yet with us. The politics here are those of sugar subsidies— concentrated, visible benefits and dispersed, ephemeral costs. Most of the time, this kind of politics pays off.

Is there any reason to think things might work differently in this case? Maybe.

Recall that it took some time for the political consequences of Dobbs to shake out. Indeed, the very reasons that Dobbs aids Democrats might suggest why loan forgiveness could cut the other way.

Both Dobbs and loan forgiveness raise hard questions regarding the motives of those upending the status quo. Democrats have effectively used Dobbs to suggest that the right is willing to trample on individual rights in pursuit of some kind of Handmaid’s Tale-style theocracy. Biden’s loan maneuver was tailor-made to fuel the suspicion that Democrats are contemptuous of personal responsibility and intent on catering to woke kids with graduate degrees. 

Both hint at slippery slopes. Dobbs raised the specter that the Supreme Court might revisit other decisions governing gay marriage and privacy. The audacious illegality of Biden’s move and the calls for more from the progressive back-benchers feed the suspicion that Democrats will be itching to do a reprise in the future.

Wall Street Journal:

In response to the concerns raised by Professor Michael Thaddeus on his faculty website, the school said in Junethat it would review past years’ data submissions and wouldn’t participate in this year’s U.S. News & World Report ranking of the nation’s best colleges. …

Also Friday, the school released two sets of numbers for what is known as the Common Data Set, a standardized set of figures that schools can voluntarily publish detailing information about student enrollment, graduation rates, financial aid and faculty, among other subjects [Understanding Columbia’s Common Data Set].

Charley Locke:

Some have been pushed to take more inventive approaches to solve the staffing shortages. In Philadelphia, during a districtwide bus-driver shortage, the district paid families $300 a month to drive their kids to and from school. Atlanta Public Schools used nearly $2.2 million to provide on-site child care for 1,800 teachers to enable them to staff summer programs. Sometimes, retaining teachers has come at the cost of other planned investments: the Alamance-Burlington School System in North Carolina planned to spend $36 million on HVAC upgrades; amid severe staff shortages last fall, it put $10 million of that money toward teacher bonuses instead. 

Once they’ve hired the staff, districts have tended to focus on three approaches to addressing learning loss: summer learning, intensive tutoring and extending the school day, often through after-school programs. According to Burbio, 62 percent of districts plan on summer learning or after-school programs, allocating $1.7 million on average; 23 percent are planning on tutoring, with average spending of $1.4 million. The cost and scale are often staggering. With $27 million, Baltimore created an enormous summer-school program, hiring over a thousand educators to teach 15,000 students at 75 different sites and conduct more than 3,000 home visits. Dallas will spend close to $100 million to extend learning opportunities for nearly 22,000 students, including reinventing the school calendar. Instead of an annual 10-week vacation, a fifth of the district’s campuses will add five weeklong “intersessions” across the calendar, during which students who have fallen behind can still attend school and receive more personalized attention.

But however much sense it might make to address lost learning by expanding time in the classroom, a longer school year or summer school often aren’t politically feasible. In their advocacy on behalf of exhausted, burned-out teachers, unions often protest proposals that require more work from educators, whether a shorter summer, longer school days or mandatory tutoring. Parents themselves often aren’t much interested in tutoring and summer school, particularly when they think their kids aren’t struggling. Many educators are still grading students on a pandemic-adjusted curve, which may be skewing parents’ understanding of the extent to which the crisis has hampered their own children’s educational progress. According to a recent Brookings Institution report, 90 percent of parents responded that their child was doing well academically; less than a quarter were interested in summer school and only 28 percent in tutoring.

Objections from educators and apathy from parents often dilute proposals to add school hours to the point that they become ineffective. In the spring, the Los Angeles Unified School District considered a proposal to lengthen the upcoming school year by two weeks. After opposition from the teachers’ union and lukewarm support from families, the Board of Education instead voted in favor of adding four optional days of school for students, citing the widespread exhaustion among educators. “Students in Los Angeles will have lost the equivalent of 22 weeks of typical math learning,” says Thomas Kane, the faculty director of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research. “There is no way you can make up for 22 weeks of lost learning with four optional days.”

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?

Jason Riley:

Economists call it the “fallacy of composition,” which is the assumption that what’s true for members of a group must also be true for the group as a whole. To use a popular example: It’s true that if someone stands up in a football stadium, that person will be able to see better. But it’s not true that if everyone stands up, everyone will have a better view.

Much public support for President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan rests on the same faulty logic. Just because some will benefit from a four-year degree in pay and choice of jobs, it doesn’t follow that everyone will. Yes, the student-debt problem stems from the dramatic rise in college costs in recent decades. But it’s also a function of too many young people who have little to gain from four more years of classroom instruction being tempted to take out loans and attend college anyway.

Tuition is about 20% of the total cost of attending college, and increases in tuition subsidies track closely with colleges raising their prices. In addition to being legally dubious and economically reckless, Mr. Biden’s debt-cancellation plan will create incentives for schools and potential borrowers alike to act in ways that exacerbate the problem. But the worst part might be that it will also encourage more young people to make poor decisions about their future.

The college-for-all advocates note that degree-holders tend to earn more, but as the economist Richard Vedder explains in his 2019 book on higher education, “Restoring the Promise,” first you must graduate, and 40% of the people who attend college don’t finish. Moreover, “college graduates with poor academic performance, graduating in the bottom quartile of their class, earn roughly the same after graduation as high school graduates.” These former college students must then pay back student debt with earnings equivalent to those of someone with only a high-school diploma.

Wishkub Kinepoway

I wanted diversity. I wanted my children to see, like, different nationalities. I wanted them to feel included. And I also wanted, like – I’m an educator, so I have an education background with early childhood, and I just wanted intentional learning experiences for my children.

I was actually unfamiliar with what a choice school was. I really didn’t have a connection. I didn’t have a source. I didn’t have anybody to say, “Do step one, two and three.” It was an emotional rollercoaster. I wanted the best for my kids, but how do I get there?

I really truly – I went down on my hands and knees praying, like I need something different for my children. And I spent days crying, trying to figure X, Y, and Z out. I kind of like did everything, and then I just, kind of like, threw my hands in the air, and I just left it to the universe. Whatever happens from here, I did my part. 

And so, we did it, and we got accepted, every child got accepted, and I was like, it’s a weight that lifts off of you. Like you’ve been accepted to the choice.

I have a 10-year-old who is going into fifth grade starting tomorrow, and I have a 13-year-old who will be entering eighth grade tomorrow at St. Marcus. My son attends Martin Luther High School in Greendale.

Without Choice, I could not have afforded to send my children to St. Marcus or Martin Luther. It’s money well spent. I would agree, both as a professional, as a parent and from a personal standpoint. I couldn’t be more thankful for this opportunity.

It would just be the over-excelling academic piece that I was like, this is what they need – the challenge. And he (my son) plays sports, so for us choosing Martin Luther specifically is their academics are really high, but their sports program is really good, too.

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?

Andrew Van Dam:

The regretters include a healthy population of liberal arts majors, who may be responding to pervasive social cues. When he delivered his 2011 State of the Union address in the shadow of the Great Recession, former president Barack Obama plugged math and science education and called on Americans to “out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.” Since then, the number of new graduates in the arts and humanities has plunged.

Robert Pondiscio

In 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Oregon law requiring that parents or guardians send their children to public school in the districts where they lived. The Society of Sisters, which ran private academies, claimed that the law interfered with the right of parents to choose religious instruction for their children. The Court agreed, unanimously. States are permitted to run and regulate schools, even to require that all children receive an adequate education. But the Justices held that the state may not “unreasonably interfere with the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”

The decision in Pierce v. the Society of Sisters featured one of the more memorable turns of phrase in Supreme Court history. “The child is not the mere creature of the State,” wrote Justice James C. McReynolds. “The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”

The notion that the state must not interfere with parents and their right to direct their children’s upbringing and education has cast a long shadow over U.S. education. But now, nearly a century after Pierce, the state seems increasingly inclined to relitigate the matter—if not in court, then in practice and policy in America’s public schools. There is a rising and unmistakable tendency on the part of teachers and school districts to assume that government is better positioned than a child’s parents to judge what’s best for children and to act on that assumption, often aggressively, making critical decisions about children’s upbringing and well-being without their parents’ consent or even their knowledge.

There have been myriad recent examples of schools imposing their staffs’ ideological preferences, and in so doing being disingenuous or openly dishonest about critical race theory, trangenderism, “social and emotional learning” programs, and other controversial aspects of school curriculum and culture. The picture that has begun to emerge is of an education establishment straying beyond its remit, emboldened to ignore parents, and determined to subvert local control of schools to advance a social-justice agenda. “It’s infuriating, it’s harmful to children, and it’s unacceptable,” says Vernadette Broyles, an attorney and the founder of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign. “And it’s contrary to law.”

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?

Eric Boehm:

A new poll shows that President Joe Biden’s decision to forgive $10,000 in student loan debt for many individuals who borrowed money from the federal government to pay for college (and $20,000 for those with need-based Pell Grants) is broadly popular—as long as people don’t think about the scheme’s knock-on effects. Once the potential consequences—including higher inflation and rising college tuition costs, are taken into account—support for student debt forgiveness craters, even among self-identified Democrats.

“Support for cancelling federal student loan debt plummets when Americans consider its trade-offs,” writes Emily Ekins, director of polling for the libertarian Cato Institute, which published polling data on student debt forgiveness Thursday. The Cato/YouGov survey includes more than 2,300 Americans and was conducted over six days in mid-August, just prior to the White House’s August 24 announcement of the student loan forgiveness plan.

The results are striking. While 64 percent of respondents (and 88 percent of Democrats) back student loan forgiveness of $10,000 for individuals earning up to $150,000 annually, those totals fall significantly once potential consequences are introduced.

Tyler Cowen

Critics of the policy see it as rewarding Democratic supporters and interest groups, including university faculty and administrators but most of all students. This perception, regardless of whether it’s true, will influence political behavior…

Republicans, when they hold political power, are likely to strike back. They may be more interested in draining the sector of revenue. The simplest way of doing this would be to limit tuition hikes in state universities. De facto tuition caps are already common, but they may become tighter and more explicit, especially in red and purple states. Such policies might also prove popular with voters, especially during a time of high inflation.

A second set of reforms might limit the ability of public universities to spend money on hiring more administrators, including people who work on so-called DEI issues. Given the fungibility of funds, and the ability of administrators to retitle new positions, such restrictions may not be entirely enforceable. Still, they would mean less autonomy for public universities as policy in many states tried to counteract their current leftward swing.

Charles Smith:

The percentage of students who performed at or above the proficient level in reading was 36% in 2019, 35% in 2017 and 34% in 1998. While Wisconsin’s numbers remain higher than Mississippi’s, the trend line is flat.

Further, Black fourth-graders in Mississippi are outperforming Black fourthgraders in Wisconsin in reading, portending what’s to come in other academic measurements as the students age. And while Black students in Mississippi averaged a reading score 21 percentage points lower than White students — nothing to be content with — the performance gap was 39 points in Wisconsin, a chasm that is both shocking and familiar.

“We have done virtually nothing to close the Black-white gap,” said state Rep. LaKeshia Myers, a Milwaukee Democrat.

Nationally, a just-released NAEP report, the first to gauge the impact of the COVID pandemic, shows a national drop in scores. State by state results will come later. Still, while far from perfect, Mississippi appears to offer lessons on how reading improvements can be achieved.

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?

The author is Hasheng Huang of MIT and the subtitle is Examination, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology in Chinese History and Today. Forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2023. Excerpt:

For many years, I struggled to come up with a coherent explanation for the power, the reach, and the policy discretion of the Chinese state.  There is coercion, ideological indoctrination, and probably a fair amount of societal consent as well.

Keju [the civil service exam system] had a deep penetration both cross-sectionally in society and across time in history. It was all encompassing, laying claims to time, efforts and cognitive investments of a significant swath of Chinese population. It was incubatory of values, norms, and cognitions, therefore impacting ideology and epistemology of Chinese minds. It was a state institution designed to augment the power and the capabilities of the state. Directly, the state monopolized the very best human capital; indirectly, the state deprived society access to talent and preempted organized religion, commerce, and intelligentsia. The Chinese state in history and today is an imprinted version of this Keju system.

Julie Jargon:

Based on my conversations, here are some common workarounds children use in their attempts to bypass Apple’s Screen Time restrictions:

Changing the time zone. Setting the device to an earlier time zone can fool Downtime, the Screen Time function that prevents users from accessing a device’s apps after a preset time. Apple was supposed to have fixed this in iOS 15, but the trick sometimes still works on iPhones and iPads.

I tested it out on my daughter’s iPad Pro, which was running the slightly older iPadOS 15.5. I scheduled downtime to begin at 8:25 a.m. Pacific. At that time, all the apps went gray and I couldn’t open them. But when I changed the device’s time zone to Honolulu’s, three hours behind me in California—bingo!—I was able to open any app.

I updated the tablet to the latest version of iPadOS, 15.6.1, and the time-zone hack no longer worked.

Chris McKenna, founder of internet-safety company Protect Young Eyes, has been informing Apple of Screen Time hacks for years. When he scheduled downtime on his up-to-date iPhone and then changed the time zone to an earlier one, he was still able to access all his apps. (This might be because he is the admin for his Family Sharing group.)

Sun Times:

The new 990 report shows that since the foundation was created in 2014, when Obama was still in office, the foundation has raised $866.4 million

The foundation reported on its 990 that in 2021, the Obama Foundation collected $159.6 million in contributions and grants. That’s down from 2020 when the foundation gained $171 million in gifts…. (snip)

Fundraising at this scale is expensive: Overall, 21.95% of the foundation operating expenses were for fundraising, with 54.8% on programs and 23.22% on general administration.

More, here:

Karol Markowicz

A few weeks ago, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked about the abysmal results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress regarding 9-year-olds. “The nation’s report card,” as the assessment’s crafters like it to be known, had found the sharpest drop ever in mathematics and the steepest decline in reading in over 30 years.

There was no way to escape the damning implications of the extended COVID-19 school closures or Democrats’ owning the lion’s share of the blame for them, so Jean-Pierre tried to deflect: “In less than six months, our schools went from 46% to nearly all of them open to full time. That was the work of this president, and that was the work of Democrats in spite of Republicans not voting for the American Rescue Plan, [of] which $130 billion went to schools to be able to have the ventilation, to have the tutoring and the teachers and being able to hire more teachers, and that was because of the work that this administration did.”

This is a lie Democrats are increasingly telling themselves and anyone who will listen because they need the villains of this particular story to somehow be transformed in the public’s imagination into the heroes. The arsonists want to be remembered as the firefighters.

But the reality wholeheartedly refutes the spin. Before President Joe Biden even took office in January 2021, he set a very unambitious goal to get schools open in the first 100 days. One problem: That 100-day goal meant children would finally head back to regular school in May, right around the time schools around the country were shutting down for the summer. In the end, it wouldn’t matter. The 100-day plan would run headlong into the same roadblock that had kept schools closed before Biden became president: Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers who had directed the Democratic officials in her pocket to fall in line.

During a press briefing on Feb. 9, 2021, then-press secretary Jen Psaki suddenly backtracked on what “open schools” meant to the president. “His goal that he set is to have the majority of schools, so more than 50%, open by Day 100 of his presidency. And that means some teaching in classrooms, so at least one day a week. Hopefully, it’s more. And obviously, it is as much as is safe in each school and local district.” Asked to clarify, Psaki answered, “Well, teaching at least one day a week in the majority of schools by Day 100.”

Emily Oster:

My mother had a gift for these hard conversations, to be clear and honest while not being unkind. There are a million examples for me of this, when I think of it. Once, when a close friend’s boyfriend broke up with her the year we graduated from college, my mom said to her, “I know this seems like a big deal now, but I’m telling you: it’s not.” My friend remembers that interaction not as harsh but as kind, honest. Of course, it was also true. 

The one example I always come back to, though, is the time that my mother brought one of her favorite MBA students into her office and told her she needed to upgrade her wardrobe before starting her job in investment banking. Mom even found a fellow MBA student, a friend, to take her shopping. (I think we might all have wished this conversation wasn’t necessary, but my mother was practical, and she was deeply worried that this fixable, external issue would get in the way of the student’s success.) This cannot have been an easy thing to say, or to hear. But it was kind, if not especially nice.

She was so good at these hard conversations that even when she had retired, she’d occasionally be asked to come back to have one of them, when no one else could do it. Her magic wasn’t just the willingness to have the conversation but the ability to make clear that it wasn’t with malice, it wasn’t to be mean. 

I think about this all the time. Mentoring students, in particular, requires these conversations frequently. Be clear, I channel. Be kind.

Matt Taibbi:

Hoenig’s clipped remarks didn’t land with the fanfare of Bryan’s grandiloquent oratory. In fact, it’s hard to imagine two men with less in common, stylistically. Hoenig was and is a reserved former soldier and number-cruncher who disdained limelight and believed in economy in all things, including words, while Bryan was a man born for the soapbox. Moreover, in a misdiagnosis that that persists to this day, Hoenig’s remarks were criticized as the tightwad meanderings of a hard-money reactionary, an impression that grew stronger when “The Fed’s dissident” was lionized in congressional hearings by the likes of “End the Fed” campaigner and gold-standard advocate Ron Paul. If Bryan wanted to loosen the money supply, and Hoenig wanted to rein it in, what linked them? What could American history’s prototype populist possibly share with a fusty economic traditionalist like Hoenig?

In fact there were similarities. Hoenig’s critics tended to see things backwards, pegging beliefs of his we’d now recognize as economic populism as conservatism, and more importantly mis-labeling the bank-friendly, trickle-down policies of Bernanke as liberal progressivism. This radical switcheroo, turning traditional perceptions of liberalism and conservatism on their head, soon spread to non-financial arenas, as elite officials pitched themselves as progressives, deriding opponents as conspiracist reactionaries. Hoenig is essentially patient zero of this phenomenon, and his story is explained brilliantly in The Lords of Easy Money, in my mind the first book that makes the inner workings of the Fed truly accessible to ordinary readers. 

Leonard gets particularly high marks because the Fed — whose officials always used dullness and inscrutability to deflect public scrutiny — is nearly impossible to make interesting and understandable. Leonard pulls it off. A neophyte will come away from The Lords of Easy Money understanding the mechanics of money creation, and the bank’s awesome influence in widening the wealth gap and driving political divisions.

Edward Luce:

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https://www.ft.com/content/6ff4bc06-ea5c-43c4-b8f7-57e13a7597bb

alling life expectancy is the last thing you would expect on a worry list about US national security. Yet when it is dropping as fast as it is in the US — Americans live almost five years less than the wealthy country average — even the Pentagon has to sit up. At 76, Americans now live shorter lives than their peers in China and only a year longer than the citizens of supposedly benighted Mexico. People in Japan, Italy and Spain, on the other hand, can expect to live until around 84. Your people’s longevity is the ultimate test of a system’s ability to deliver. Yet neither Democrats nor Republicans, presidents or legislators, seem too bothered.

Do Americans no longer care how long they live? The answer is obviously no. Yet concern about the country’s falling lifespan is barely reflected in its politics. It is as though Washington has turned a blind eye to the issue that captures the deepest trends behind America’s democratic woes. Terms such as “deaths of despair” and “obesity epidemic” are in frequent use. But America’s shortening lifespan seems too big a subject for Washington to acknowledge. US life expectancy has fallen in six of the last seven years and is now almost three years below what it was in 2014. The last time it fell in consecutive years was during the first world war. In most other democracies this would trigger a national debate.

What explains US indifference? The biggest drivers of America’s morbid trajectory are politically hard to confront — rising obesity, the opioid epidemic and Covid. Over 40 per cent of US adults are now classified as obese — a problem that keeps getting worse. More than half of American adults suffer from a chronic condition, most of which are associated with obesity, such as diabetes, hypertension and heart problems. A quarter suffer from two or more of these conditions. This partly explains America’s unusually high death rate from coronavirus. Almost two-thirds of Americans hospitalised with Covid were suffering from at least one pre-existing condition. The pathogen was working in fertile territory. America’s obesity rate is by far the highest among wealthy countries.

Choose life.

FIRE:

The Overall Score combines seven unique dimensions to identify the top ranked college campuses for student free speech and open inquiry. The top-ranked colleges have the highest average score among all students surveyed and have the most open environments for free speech.

Douglas Belkin:

Now, as the pandemic disruptions wane, many of these families aren’t going back, opting instead to stick with personalized curricula and private instruction. The model, once limited to the very wealthy, is being adopted by families in the upper middle class, according to private-tutor placement companies and their clients.

Many children have endured months of stalled academic progress as a result of the disruptions caused by the pandemic. Last week national fourth-grade reading and math scores revealed the worst decline in decades, one that some educators said could hobble a generation of children.

That stalled progress, combined with teacher shortages, school-board political divisions and classroom disruptions, has for many fueled a flight out of K-12 schools to home schooling and private schools.

Adam Caller, who founded Tutors International in Oxford, England, 23 years ago, said too few schools impart the skills necessary to succeed in a rapidly evolving society, and his clients want a more forward thinking approach to prepare their children to be leaders.

NCLA:

Discovery has unveiled an army of federal censorship bureaucrats, including officials arrayed at the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission. Communications show these federal officials are fully aware that the pressure they exert is an effective and necessary way to induce social-media platforms to increase censorship. The head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency even griped about the need to overcome social-media companies’ “hesitation” to work with the government.

These actions have precipitated an unprecedented rise in censorship and suppression of free speech—including core political speech—on social-media platforms. Many viewpoints and speakers have been unlawfully and unconstitutionally silenced or suppressed in the modern public square. This unlawful government interference violates the fundamental right of free speech for all Americans, whether or not they are on social media. More discovery is needed to uncover the full extent of this regime—i.e., the identities of other White House and agency officials involved and the nature and content of their communications with social-media companies.

Anemona Hartocollis:

Sometimes you have to take a step back.”

Professor Hutchens said it also made a difference that Gibson’s was a small family business, not a large multinational corporation like Walmart or Amazon, which would be better able to sustain the economic losses from such a protest.

Oberlin is a small liberal arts college with a reputation for turning out students who are strong in the arts and humanities and for its progressive politics, leaning heavily on its history of being a stop on the Underground Railroad as well as one of the first colleges to admit Black students. Tuition at Oberlin is more than $61,000 a year, and the overall cost of attendance tops $80,000 a year. The college is also very much part of the town, which is economically dependent on the school and its students. The bakery, across the street from the college, sold donuts and chocolates, and was considered a must-eat part of the Oberlin dining experience.

The incident that started the dispute unfolded in November 2016, when a student tried to buy a bottle of wine with a fake ID while shoplifting two more bottles by hiding them under his coat, according to court papers.

….

After the 2019 jury award against Oberlin, Carmen Twillie Ambar, the college president, said that the case was far from over and that “none of this will sway us from our core values.” The college said then that the bakery’s “archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests.”

But in its statement on Thursday, Oberlin hinted that the protracted and bitter fight had undermined its relationship with the people and businesses in the surrounding community.

“We value our relationship with the city of Oberlin,” its statement said. “And we look forward to continuing our support of and partnership with local businesses as we work together to help our city thrive.”

Commentary:

The highest-rated comment (by a lot) quotes “Archaic chase-and-detain policy” and asks “What should a storekeeper do about a shoplifter?” Good question. Is the answer that what’s not archaic is not to have any sort of shop that is open to the public?

Anyway, I’m glad the bakery is getting its money, and I hope colleges learn how to support student speech without joining the speech. Only join the speech if you stand behind it. Your speech is your speech. You’re not absolved from your lies because you were echoing what somebody else said. That should have been obvious all along.

Wall Street Journal:

You’d think this would be cause for reflection by our education elites, but no such luck. Media headlines blamed “the pandemic,” as if Covid-19 ran America’s school districts and decided to force students to sit at home in front of screens for more than a year. Educators—as they call themselves—did that.

National Center for Education Statistics Commissioner Peggy Carr had a grab-bag of excuses for the tragic learning loss: “School shootings, violence, and classroom disruptions are up, as are teacher and staff vacancies, absenteeism, cyberbullying, and students’ use of mental health services. This information provides some important context for the results we’re seeing from the long-term trend assessment.”

She missed the “classroom disruptions” of not being able to go to class at all.

American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten, who pushed shutdowns as long as she possibly could before parents revolted, tried to forget this ever happened with her statement on Twitter: “Thankfully after two years of disruption from a pandemic that killed more than 1 mil Americans, schools are already working on helping kids recover and thrive. This is a year to accelerate learning by rebuilding relationships, focusing on the basics.” But she and her union were the chief disrupters.

Walter Kirn:

It does impart information, strictly speaking, but not always information about our world. Or not good information, because it’s so often wrong, particularly on matters of great import and invariably to the advantage of the same interests, which suggests it should be presumed wrong as a rule. The information it imparts, if one bothers to sift through it, is information about itself; about the purposes, beliefs, and loyalties of those who produce it: the informing class. They’re not the ruling class — not quite — but often they’re married to it or share therapists or drink with it at Yale Bowl football games. They’re cozy, these tribal cousins. They cavort. They always have. What has changed is that the press used to maintain certain boundaries in the relationship, observing the incest taboo. It kept its pants zipped, at least in public. It didn’t hire ex-CIA directors, top FBI men, NSA brass, or other past and future sources to sit beside its anchors at spot-lit news-desks that blocked our view of their lower extremities. But it gave in. 

I’m stipulating these points, I’m not debating them, so log off if you find them too extreme. Go read more bullshit. Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops, viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls, vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation, and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths. Comfort yourself with the thoughts that the same fortunes engaged in the building of amusement parks, the production and distribution of TV comedies, and the provision of computing services to the defense and intelligence establishments, have allied to protect your family’s health, advance the causes of equity and justice, and safeguard our democratic institutions. Dismiss as cynical the notion that you, the reader, are not their client but their product. Your data for their bullshit, that’s the deal. And Build Back Better. That’s the sermon.

Pious bullshit, unceasing. But what to do?

One reason to stick with the premium name-brand bullshit is to deconstruct it. What lines are the propagandists pushing now? Where will they lead? How blatant will they get? Why are the authors so weirdly fearless? The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom. One wire-service headline used the protests to raise concerns about viral spread in crowds. A puzzling message. It wasn’t meant for the defiant Cubans, who weren’t at liberty to read it and whose anger at their rulers clearly outweighed their concerns about contagion. It had to be aimed at English-speaking Americans. But to what end? American protests of the previous summer hadn’t raised such cautions from the press. To the contrary. Our riots, if one could call them that (and one could not at many companies) were framed as transcendent cries for justice whose risks to public health were negligible, almost as though moral passion enhances immunity. And maybe it does, but why not in Cuba, too? To me, the headline only made sense in the context of the offensive against domestic “vaccine hesitancy” and its alleged fascist-bumpkin leaders. The Reuters writer had seen in Cuba’s revolt a chance to glancingly editorialize against rebelliousness of another type. The type its staff abhors day in, day out, no matter what’s happening in Cuba, or, for that matter, in America. The bullshit is consistent in this way, reducing stories of every kind into nitrogen-rich soil for the same views. These views feel unusually ferocious now, reflecting the convictions of those on high that they should determine the fates of those on low with minimal backtalk and no laughter. Because science. Because Putin. Democracy. Because we’re inside your phones and know your names.

Lorna Gibson:

On the night of Nov., 8, 2016, Donald Trump was elected president and the country was forever changed. But for my family, it was the following night — Nov. 9, 2016 — that our world was turned upside down and has never been set right.

Late that night, my husband, David, came home from work and told me that there had been a shoplifting incident at our bakery, Gibson’s. We’ve been in business for 137 years, so we’ve had our fair share of shoplifters, including earlier that very week. That particular night, a student from the local college, Oberlin, had tried to steal two bottles of wine and use a fake ID to buy a third. Our son, Allyn, had pursued him across the street. Two more students got involved. Allyn was beaten up pretty badly, and the three students were arrested.

David was afraid the incident would blow up, since the students claimed to the police that my son had assaulted them — not the other way around. He told me he was scared it would hurt our business since the students who were arrested were black and bystanders were already claiming that Allyn had racially profiled them.

But none of us had any idea of what was about to happen.

Max Marin and Kasturi Pananjady:

Philadelphia’s latest property reassessment represents “a key moment” for Philadelphia, according to a new report from Pew Charitable Trusts, with the city’s total combined property value rising to $204 billion, up from $168 billion just three years ago.

The report comes amid controversy over thefirst citywide reassessment in three years — and property owners’ frustration over resulting tax hikes. Public opinion of the city’s property tax remains low, with residents scoring it in a Pew poll as one of the most unfair levies. Among large cities in the country, Philadelphia has one of the highest home-ownership rates — both generally and among low-income homeowners in particular.

» READ MORE: Philly property assessments are systemically inaccurate in Black and low-income neighborhoods

Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit and nonpartisan policy think tank that conducts research on issues in Philadelphia, released the report Thursday.Here are six key takeaways:

Philly’s property tax revenue grew 60% in the last decade

Despite ongoing problems with the city’s property tax system, revenue is booming.

Annual revenues collected from property taxes have skyrocketed from just over $1 billion in 2010 to more than $1.6 billion in 2021, a period in which the city implemented four rate increases and multiple reassessments that led to higher tax bills for many property owners.

Eugene Volokh:

From Fellowship of Christian Athletes v. San Jose Unified School Dist., decided yesterday by the Ninth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Kenneth Lee joined by Judge Danielle Forrest (it’s on a preliminary injunction, so this is technically based on a finding of likelihood of success on the merits, but the panel majority seems pretty firm of the subject):

The Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA) requires students serving in leadership roles to abide by a Statement of Faith, which includes the belief that sexual relations should be limited within the context of a marriage between a man and a woman. The San Jose Unified School District … revoked FCA’s status as an official student club at its high schools, claiming that FCA’s religious pledge requirement violates the School District’s non-discrimination policy….

The School District engaged in selective enforcement of its own non-discrimination policy, penalizing FCA while looking the other way with other student groups. For example, the School District blessed student clubs whose constitutions limited membership based on gender identity or ethnicity, despite the school’s policies barring such restricted membership. The government cannot set double standards to the detriment of religious groups only….

We apply strict scrutiny to government regulations that burden religious exercise unless those laws are neutral and generally applicable. A law is not neutral and generally applicable if it is selectively enforced against religious entities but not comparable secular entities. “[W]hether two activities are comparable for purposes of the Free Exercise Clause must be judged against the asserted government interest that justifies the regulation at issue.” … Finally, the “Government fails to act neutrally when it proceeds in a manner intolerant of religious beliefs or restricts practices because of their religious nature.”

Richard Thompson Ford:

Most observers of the Supreme Court expect that it will declare affirmative action unconstitutional next year in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. The plaintiff’s case isn’t strong. Asian American students are admitted in lower numbers than their grades and standardized-test scores alone would predict, but most of the statistical disparity is attributable not to affirmative action but to admissions considerations such as regional diversity, athletic talent, alumni and donor preferences, and subjective evaluation — all of which favor

Gene Johnson:

Seattle Public Schools canceled Wednesday’s first day of school after teachers voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike over issues that include pay, mental health support, and staffing ratios for special education and multilingual students. 

Seattle Education Association President Jennifer Matter announced Tuesday that 95% of ballots returned by the union’s membership favored going on strike absent an agreement with Seattle Public Schools. Contract talks continued. 

“No one wants to strike,” Matter said. “But SPS has given us no choice. We can’t go back to the way things have been.”

The district said in an email to parents that it was “optimistic the bargaining teams will come to a positive solution for students, staff, and families.”

Districts around the country have faced labor challenges as the pandemic put extraordinary stress on teachers and students alike. An infusion of federal stimulus money has helped stabilize school district budgets, and teachers unions have sought to improve pay, resources and and working conditions after a difficult few years.

Anna Kramer:

Wannabe computer science superstars must all run the same rather scary and capricious gauntlet, one that sounds deceptively dull: the computer science conference paper review process. To have a research paper accepted for presentation at a CS conference is a coveted rite of passage among academics and professionals, bestowing on its author a status symbol that can open the door to tenure or competitive job offers.

Last month, the University of California, Berkeley’s much-respected Edward Lee, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering and computer sciences who for several decades has served on program committees that judge research papers, caused an uproar in the CS community after he publicly shared a scathing review of the system, which he’d sent earlier to fellow judges. Program committee members who decide which papers are accepted are volunteers, members of the academic community who agree to spend hours of their time (theoretically) reading submissions, writing opinions and voting on whether papers are worthy of the hallowed halls of whatever conference is in session.

The intervention dynamic: subsidize, drive up prices, institute price controls. https://t.co/7RN9pwVwRW

— Alex Tabarrok (@ATabarrok) August 29, 2022

Tyler Cowen

I combine a regression discontinuity design with rich data on academic and labor market outcomes for a large sample of Florida students to estimate the returns to college admission for academically marginal students. Students with grades just above a threshold for admissions eligibility at a large public university in Florida are much more likely to attend any university than below-threshold students. The marginal admission yields earnings gains of 22% between 8 and 14 years after high school completion. These gains outstrip the costs of college attendance, and they are largest for male students and free-lunch recipients

Christopher Rufo:

Radical gender theory is a catch-all term for academic queer theory, transgender ideology, and gender identity activism. The premise of this ideology is that sex and gender are socially constructed—that is, they are human inventions used as instruments of power, rather than features of objective reality. Radical gender theorists argue that white, European men invented the “gender binary,” or division between man and woman, in order to oppress racial and sexual minorities. They believe that this system of “heteronormativity” must be exposed, critiqued, and deconstructed in order to usher in a world beyond the norms of heterosexual, middle-class society. In order to facilitate the destruction of this system, radical gender activists promote synthetic sexual identities, such as “pansexual,” “genderqueer,” and “two-spirit,” and neo-pronouns, such as “ze,” “zim,” and “zir.” The goal is to replace notions of biological sex, the male-female binary, and the nuclear family with “queer alternatives” and “a world beyond binaries.” Some strains of academic queer theory also support eliminating prohibitions on child pornography, valorizing transgressive sex, and permitting adult-child sexual relationships.

Mitch Daniels:

The col­or­ful Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes once likened George Rom­ney’s run for the pres­i­dency to “a duck try­ing to [make love to] a foot­ball.” I wish he had been around to put a la­bel on the fed­eral stu­dent-loan pro­gram. In the sad cat­a­log of its fail­ures, the fed­eral gov­ern­ment has set a new stan­dard. Pres­i­dent Biden’s debt-can­cel­la­tion an­nounce-ment rep­re­sents the fi­nal con­fes­sion of fail­ure for a ven­ture flawed in con­cept, botched in ex­e­cu­tion, and draped with du­plic­ity.

The scheme’s flaws have been well chron­i­cled. It’s re­gres­sive, re­ward­ing the well-to-do at the ex­pense of the less for­tu­nate. It’s grossly un­fair to those who re­paid what they bor­rowed or never went to col­lege. It’s grotesquely ex­pen­sive, adding hun­dreds of bil­lions to a fed­eral debt that al­ready threat­ens our safety-net pro­grams and na­tional se­cu­rity. Like so much of what gov­ern­ment does, it’s ia­tro­genic, in­flat­ing col­lege costs as schools con­tinue to pocket the sub­si­dies Un­cle Sam show­ers on them. And it’s pro­fanely con­temp­tu-ous of the Con­sti­tu­tion, which au­tho­rizes only Con­gress to spend money.

Spencer Bokat-Lindell:

After the 2020 presidential election, the Trump administration attempted to pre-empt the use of the Heroes Act for this purpose, issuing a memoclaiming that “Congress never intended the Heroes Act as authority for mass cancellation, compromise, discharge or forgiveness of student loan principal balances.”

In its own memo last week, however, the Biden administration argued that the Trump administration’s conclusions were “unsupported and incorrect.” The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice to the executive branch, concurred in a separate opinion, concluding that “reducing or canceling the principal balances of student loans, including for a broad class of borrowers who the secretary determines suffered financial harm because of Covid-19, could be a permissible response to the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Eugene Volokh:

But here’s the thing: If a constitutional convention is called and proposes amendments, they still have to be ratified by legislatures or conventions (the convention gets to decide which) in 3/4 of all states:

The Congress, whenever two thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose amendments to this Constitution, or, on the application of the legislatures of two thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments, which, in either case, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the several states, or by conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other mode of ratification may be proposed by the Congress;

Maybe I’m wrong, but I expect that this will be a pretty serious bar to any particularly radical proposals. If you disagree, tell me this: What amendments do you think a convention could propose that would get the support of legislatures or conventions in at least 38 of the 50 states, and how conservative (or liberal) do you think those amendments would be?

Bruce Vielmetti:

The authors kicked off a national tour Tuesday at Marquette Law School, where Feingold started his teaching career after losing his Senate re-election race to Ron Johnson in 2010. He has since taught at Yale and Stanford, and currently serves as president of the American Constitution Society, often described as a progressive counterpart to the conservative Federalist Society.

Kimberly Strassel:

Then along comes Blu­tarsky, and seven years of col­lege down the drain. It would be hard to fash­ion a pro­gram that car­ries more po­lit­i­cal risk for less po­lit­i­cal re­ward. In the name of pay­ing off that pow­er­ful vot­ing bloc known as “overe­d­u­cated and un­der­em­ployed dead­beats,” Mr. Biden is dump­ing on his own in­fla­tion mes­sage, di­vid­ing his party, and in­sult­ing any Amer­i­can who has ever worked, saved or paid a bill.

Fraser Meyers:

‘You must stay at home.’ That simple instruction from prime minister Boris Johnson, issued before the first Covid lockdown in March 2020, changed the fate of the nation forever.

You might have imagined that in a democratic country such as Britain, a decision of this magnitude would not simply have been imposed by executive fiat. That the shutting down of schools, the economy and society might have been something worth debating and discussing. But for much of the pandemic, lockdown was never subjected to proper scrutiny, even though its harms were obvious from the start. 

Indeed, the harms of lockdown are becoming clearer by the day. The near-collapse of the NHS, the crisis in education and runaway inflation can all be traced back, at least in part, to March 2020. And while the Russian invasion of Ukraine has since sparked a global energy crisis, lockdown is part of what left us so vulnerable to its effects. 

After all, the lockdown was the biggest shock to the UK economy in the history of industrial capitalism. And in the words of one High Court judge, it was ‘possibly the most restrictive regime on the public life of persons and businesses ever’. Many of its awful impacts were predictable and predicted.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Background : “IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning difficulties), as well as, to a lesser extent (with a lot of noise), a form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects — how good someone is at taking some type of exams designed by unsophisticated nerds. It is via negativa not via positiva. Designed for learning disabilities, and given that it is not too needed there (see argument further down), it ends up selecting for exam-takers, paper shufflers, obedient IYIs (intellectuals yet idiots), ill adapted for “real life”. (The fact that it correlates with general incompetence makes the overall correlation look high, even when it is random, see Figures 1 and 2.) The concept is poorly thought out mathematically by the field (commits a severe flaw in correlation under fat tails and asymmetries; fails to properly deal with dimensionality; treats the mind as an instrument not a complex system), and seems to be promoted by

David Blaska:

This Wednesday 09-07-22, Khari Sanford will be sentenced in Dane County Circuit Court for the execution-style slaying of Dr. Beth Potter and her husband Robin Carre.

They were murdered by a person they had tried to help,” their memorial obituary reads.

Khari Sanford was 18 years old on March 30, 2020 when he entered the Carre-Potter’s home in upper middle-class University Heights some time after 10:40 p.m. Using the Volkswagen minivan the couple had lent him, Sanford and his convicted accomplice Alijah “Hunch” Larrue took their captives on a circuitous route to the University of Wisconsin Arboretum. There, not far off the Vilas Park entrance, Sanford forced the two, still wearing their bed clothes in the March cold, to their knees.

With his powerful Glock .357 SIG semi-automatic handgun, Sanford shot Robin once behind the left ear at close range, execution-style. He shot Beth twice, once in the upper arm, once in the back of the head. Perhaps she had struggled. During the 26-minute drive to their execution, one can only imagine how Beth and Robin tried to dissuade the young man from his deadly deed, to remember their many kindnesses, to promise more favors.

“It was calculated, cold blooded and senseless,” the chief of University of Wisconsin Police said at the time.

Shocking and puzzling, too, since the murdered couple had given every consideration to Sanford, a young black man in a romantic relationship with the Carre-Potter’s daughter Miriam, whom the white couple had adopted out of an orphanage in Guatemala.

In the immediate hours after his deadly deed, Sanford attempted to cash out the dead couple’s ATM cards. A form of reparations, perhaps. Payment for the dead couple’s white privilege and the larger society’s institutional racism, it could be argued. Because Khari Sanford certainly identified as a victim. He posted on his Facebook page a few months before the murders. (Source here.)

“We gon’ change this world, cause it’s time to let our diversity and youth shine over all oppressive systemsand rebuild our democracy.”

“They were murdered by a person they had tried to help.”
—  Robin Carre – Beth Potter obituary.

In fairness, Khari O. Sanford came to Madison as damaged goods. Writing from his jail cell to Judge Ellen Berz in September 2021, Sanford wrote he was the oldest of seven children to a single mother in Chicago and a father who spent the son’s first 10 years in prison.

“One of my greatest friends died in my arm at the age of seven years old as the result of a drive by shooting,” he wrote. “That was my first traumatic experience.”

Did progressive Madison teach Sanford his sense victimhood — despite all the opportunities presented him? In his sophomore year at West high school, Sanford joined its newly formed Black Student Union just as social justice warriors, informed by critical race theory taught at the University of Wisconsin, were waging war on police.

A culture of victimization

Madison public schools had already sacrificed discipline in favor of identity politics because “A zero tolerance policy toward discipline … was having a disproportionate and negative effect on students of color.”

A dedicated practitioner of cancel culture, the school district erased name of the slave-holding Founder and renamed one of its schools after a minor black office holder. Inconveniently, Wisconsin’s capital city — founded the year that President died — retains his disgraced name.

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?

Rory Linnane:

Evers said his plan for the 2023-25 budget would draw on the state’s projected $5 billion budget surplus while “holding the line” on property taxes. 

Evers’ opponent in the November election, Tim Michels, called Evers’ plan “more money and more bureaucracy.” 

“The tired, old Evers approach has not worked,” Michels said in a statement. 

Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos also quickly derided Evers’ proposal, taking to Twitter to call the plan a “feeble ploy to try to win votes.”

Republican lawmakers rewrote much of Evers’ proposed 2021-23 state budget, nixing his plan to increase the caps on how much school districts are allowed to spend each year. School district leaders have argued they cannot keep up with inflation with flat spending limits.

The biggest chunk of state funding, $800 million, would allow schools to spend $350 more per student in the 2023-24 school year and $650 more the following year. 

The plan would also invest $750 million to increase how much the state reimburses school districts for special education costs, from about 30% to about 45% in the first year, and 60% the next year. 

The plan also includes: 

• $240 million to expand the “Get Kids Ahead” initiative for school-based mental health services with an investment of $100 per student, ensuring that each district has at least one full-time staff member focused on mental health 
• $20 million for before- and after-school programming in and outside schools
• $10 million for literacy programming, including a state literacy center that would provide training for teachers
• $5 million to help school districts implement financial literacy curriculum
• An unspecified amount of funding to reimburse school districts for meal costs to provide free meals for students who already qualify for free and reduced-price meals, and decrease the cost to other students

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?

John McGinnis:

What differentiates a simple democracy from a republic is the complex system of checks and balances that the latter employs to promote both liberty and stability. In the federal American Republic, authorities are divided vertically between the states and the national government. Powers are also separated among the President, Congress. and federal Judiciary. The Constitution is in essence a charter for dividing decision-making power.

A decision-making charter requires dispassionate enforcement. The political issues that stir people’s souls are almost always substantive rather than decisional. People march for and against abortion rights, not in defense of the appropriate constitutional entity to make that decision. But the locus of the decision is one of paramount importance to the maintenance of a republic, not least because of the danger that one branch of the federal government or the federal government as a whole will usurp power, creating more dangers of tyranny.

Thus, a central underlying issue for a republic is how to assure that those decisions about the proper authority are made in a neutral, dispassionate way—not swamped by the emotions generated by substantive disagreements. The first line of defense is to choose the most dispassionate institution to make these meta-decisions (i.e., the decisions about who decides). When Alexander Hamilton said that constitutional review should be lodged in the judiciary because the judiciary embodies judgment rather than will, he was emphasizing the comparative dispassion of the third branch.

Hannah Natanson

We have all heard, by this point, that school closures during the first year of the pandemic damaged children. We have heard that children slid behind where they should be academically, with the most vulnerable slipping fastest; that many children with disabilities did not learn anything at all and began regressing; that the nation’s youngest citizens spent years feeling upset, angry, sad, frustrated and oh so alone.

Tyler Cowen:

Bryan Caplan as you know argues that even the private return to higher education isn’t what it usually is cracked up to be, especially since large numbers of individuals do not finish with a four-year degree. Susan Dynarski (tenured at Harvard education, but an economist), writing in the NYT, seems to have started flirting with this view:

Kevin Dugan:

The thing about Elon Musk is that whatever it is he’s involved with, the guy wants you to think it’s about something else, something bigger. Tesla isn’t about cars — it’s about the future or the environment or innovation. SpaceX isn’t a rocket-maker; it’s a save-the-human-race-from-extinction company.With Twitter v. Musk, the suit isn’t just about whether the world’s richest man can save $43 billion or so by backing out of an agreement to buy Twitter. There’s a deeper question, one Musk may not like observers asking:Does Elon Musk think he’s bigger than the law?

Law is often made through unusual cases, and there’s a trail of them behind Musk, going as far back to his days with Zip2, his first internet mapping company from shortly after dropping out of Stanford. Since then, he has been challenging corporate law in bigger and weirder ways. There’s Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity, of which Musk was chairman and the major shareholder. There’s the “funding secured” tweet two years later about taking Tesla private, which ended with a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission and his resignation as Tesla’s chairman. Despite settling, Musk continues to say that he actually didn’t do anything wrong with the tweet — and earlier this year, he won a suit against a group of shareholders that challenged the SolarCity deal even though Tesla’s directors settled.

How did you get the idea of starting a class about Elon Musk and his effect on the law?
He’s generating a lot of really interesting case law out of Delaware. Tesla’s acquisition of SolarCity is an excellent case to teach students. And then there is a pending case on his Tesla CEO-compensation package, which is a great case because it’s what will strike the students as an egregious amount of money — billions of dollars in CEO compensation — in excess of anything we’ve ever seen. It’s a great case to talk about: Is this a situation in which it would be rational for a company to put together that sort of a compensation package?

There are all these cases from different areas that all involve Musk, and given how high profile he is this year with Twitter and everything, I thought this would be a way of really grabbing the students’ attention.

Cloudfare:/

This isn’t hypothetical. Thousands of times per day we receive calls that we terminate security services based on content that someone reports as offensive. Most of these don’t make news. Most of the time these decisions don’t conflict with our moral views. Yet two times in the past we decided to terminate content from our security services because we found it reprehensible. In 2017, we terminated the neo-Nazi troll site The Daily Stormer. And in 2019, we terminated the conspiracy theory forum 8chan.

In a deeply troubling response, after both terminations we saw a dramatic increase in authoritarian regimes attempting to have us terminate security services for human rights organizations — often citing the language from our own justification back to us.

Since those decisions, we have had significant discussions with policy makers worldwide. From those discussions we concluded that the power to terminate security services for the sites was not a power Cloudflare should hold. Not because the content of those sites wasn’t abhorrent — it was — but because security services most closely resemble Internet utilities.

Just as the telephone company doesn’t terminate your line if you say awful, racist, bigoted things, we have concluded in consultation with politicians, policy makers, and experts that turning off security services because we think what you publish is despicable is the wrong policy. To be clear, just because we did it in a limited set of cases before doesn’t mean we were right when we did. Or that we will ever do it again.

Jesse Opoien

The funds would create an elections inspector general program and hire 10 additional staffers, in order to “increase the agency’s ability to research public or legislative inquiries — especially those alleging unlawful or non-compliant behavior — in a more timely and effective manner,” according to a proposal from WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe and agency staff.

Jesse Opoien

The funds would create an elections inspector general program and hire 10 additional staffers, in order to “increase the agency’s ability to research public or legislative inquiries — especially those alleging unlawful or non-compliant behavior — in a more timely and effective manner,” according to a proposal from WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe and agency staff.

Karen Hao:

Earlier this month, the Cyberspace Administration of China published summaries of 30 core algorithms belonging to two dozen of the country’s most influential internet companies, including TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd., e-commerce behemoth Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd., owner of China’s ubiquitous WeChat super app.

The milestone marks the first systematic effort by a regulator to compel internet companies to reveal information about the technologies powering their platforms, which have shown the capacity to radically alter everything from pop culture to politics. It also puts Beijing on a path that some technology experts say few governments, if any, are equipped to handle.

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The public versions of the filings explain in plain language what types of data a given algorithm uses and what it does with the data. In many instances, they provide less detail than what Facebook voluntarily discloses to users about how it ranks content in its news feed.

Jonathan Tobin:

Berenson’s final tweet before being banned said the following about Covid vaccines: “It doesn’t stop infection. Or transmission. Don’t think of it as a vaccine. Think of it – at best – as a therapeutic with a limited window of efficacy and terrible side effect profile that must be dosed IN ADVANCE OF ILLNESS. And we want to mandate it? Insanity.” 

As The Atlantic admitted this past week, his claims are inarguably correct. The notion that merely stating his concerns on an issue about which much is yet to be learned was something that merited government intervention and censorship is risible. 

It may be advantageous to take the vaccines, especially for those who are most at risk due to age or other health problems, but you don’t have to be an anti-vaxxer to understand that in the U.S., the government is not meant to have the power to shut down debates. 

Some might claim that normal rules don’t apply during public health emergencies, but that is undermined by the fact that pretty much all of the advice and warnings that came out of the public health establishment during the height of the pandemic were eventually proven wrong. The fact that the government was able to pressure the regulators of the 21st-century town square to silence controversial speech is outrageous and dangerous to democracy.

Our joint statement on discovery disputes legal brief, filed with the court and made public today, reveals scores of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies have secretly communicated with social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech federal officials disfavor. This unlawful enterprise has been wildly successful. Here are just a few excerpts from this document, which includes attachments of hundreds of pages of emails and other governmental and big tech internal communications as supporting evidence. These documents were obtained after we requested the following information on discovery:

Bethany Mandel:

Millions of American children are about to enter their fourth year of Covid-impacted schooling. In vast swaths of the United States, a child now entering second grade has never had anything resembling a normal school experience. No child entering kindergarten has a memory of life before the pandemic. A rising junior in high school has never had a normal high school experience.

Over two years into the pandemic, we know that the effects of “long Covid” are basically nonexistent in kids. Following the release of a study published in the Lancet, Alasdair Munro, a pediatric infectious…

Nicole Ault and Megan Keller:

Randi Wein­garten left no room for doubt. “Crit­i­cal race the­ory is not taught in el­e­men­tary schools or high schools,” the Amer­i­can Fed­er­a­tion of Teach­ers pres­i­dent said in a speech last year. Even if that’s true, a Penn­syl­va­nia fa­ther’s bat­tle with a school dis­trict demon­strates that pub­lic-school teach­ers are be­ing trained in the deeply di­vi­sive racial ide­ol­ogy—and de­fen­sive ad­min­is­tra­tors are play­ing se­man­tic games to al­lay parental con­cerns.

In 2018 the Tredyf­frin-East­town School Dis­trict near Phil­adelphia signed a con­tract with Pa­cific Ed­u­ca­tional Group, a Cal­i­for­nia-based con­sult­ing firm. Ac­cord­ing to the school dis­trict’s web­site, the part­ner­ship’s pur­pose was “to en­hance the poli­cies and prac­tices around racial eq­uity.” The dis­trict as­sured par­ents in an on­line up­date last sum­mer that no “course, cur­ricu­lum or pro­gram” in the dis­trict “teaches Crit­i­cal Race The­ory.”

Ben­jamin Aus­lan­der didn’t buy it. The par­ent of a high schooler in the dis­trict, he wanted to see the ma­te­ri­als used to train teach­ers. Mr. Aus­lan­der, 54, made a for­mal doc­u­ment re­quest but was de­nied. Of­fi­cials told him the ma­te­ri­als couldn’t be shared be­cause they were pro­tected by Pa­cific Ed­u­ca­tional Group’s copy­right. His only op­tion was to in­spect them in per­son—no copies or pho­tos al­lowed. “What are you try­ing to hide?” he asked school board mem­bers at a meet­ing in De­cem­ber.

Wall Street Journal:

You’d think this would be cause for re­flec­tion by our ed­u­ca­tion elites, but no such luck. Me­dia head­lines blamed “the pan­demic,” as if Covid-19 ran Amer­i­ca’s school dis­tricts and de­cided to force stu­dents to sit at home in front of screens for more than a year. Ed­u­ca­tors—as they call them­selves—did that.

Na­tional Cen­ter for Ed­u­ca­tion Sta­tistics Com­mis­sioner Peggy Carr had a grab-bag of ex­cuses for the tragic learn­ing loss: “School shoot­ings, vi­o­lence, and class­room dis­rup­tions are up, as are teacher and staff va­can­cies, ab­sen­teeism, cy­ber­bul­ly­ing, and stu­dents’ use of men­tal health ser­vices. This in­for­ma­tion pro­vides some im­por­tant con­text for the re­sults we’re see­ing from the long-term trend as­sess­ment.”

She missed the “class­room dis­rup­tions” of not be­ing able to go to class at all.

Ann Althouse:

Is he saying vote Democratic? He’s at least saying vote agains the non-mainstream MAGA Republicans. Did we the people pay for this event? Why were Marines there?  

… America is still the beacon to the world, an ideal to be realized, a promise to be kept. There’s nothing more important. Nothing more sacred….

Nothing more sacred than government? And the other guys are the fascists? 

That’s our soul. That’s who we truly are. And that’s who we must always be…. We just need to remember who we are. We are the United States of America, the United States of America….

More:

All 3 networks judged it too political to deserve live coverage in prime time? And yet the Marines were there, attesting to its nonpolitical nature!

Farhi supplies this hilarious tweet from polisci prof Brendan Nyhan: “‘The networks refusing to cover Biden’s speech (presumably because it was going to be critical of Trump and/or not newsworthy enough) is precisely the problem’ confronting democracy.” No, it’s precisely the separation of government and journalism we need in a healthy democracy.

Related: taxpayer funded Administrative censorship.

Mike Masnick:

If you thought cookie pop-ups were an annoying nuisance, just wait until you have to scan your face for some third party to “verify your age” after California’s new design code becomes law.

On Friday, I wrote about the companies and organizations most likely to benefit from California’s AB 2273, the “Age Appropriate Design Code” bill that the California legislature seems eager to pass (and which they refer to as the “Kid’s Code” even though the details show it will impact everyone, and not just kids). The bill seemed to be getting very little attention, but after a few of my posts started to go viral, the backers of the bill ramped up their smear campaigns and lies — including telling me that I’m not covered by it (and when I dug in and pointed out how I am… they stopped responding). But, even if somehow Techdirt is not covered (which, frankly, would be a relief), I can still be quite concerned about how it will impact everyone else.

Tyler Cowen:

I am now reading quite a few analyses of the problem, and so few mention price!  Even when written by economists.  I find this article somewhat useful:

“We are a city with very high levels of poverty, and it’s difficult for us to raise the rates enough to do large scale replacement type projects and not make it unaffordable to live in the city of Jackson,” said former city councilman Melvin Priester Jr.

Yet the cost of Jackson’s poor quality water is still passed on to families who don’t trust the tap and purchase bottled water — which can cost a family of four $50-$100 a month — to drink instead.

The city raised water rates in 2013, but the Siemens deal penned the same year came with an onslaught of problems, including the installation of faulty water meters and meters that measured water in gallons instead of the correct cubic feet. This made any benefits of the rate increase virtually impossible to see.

The results have been nonsensical. Over the past several years, the city has mailed exorbitant bills to some customers and none to others. Sometimes, the charges weren’t based on how much water a household used and other times, city officials advised residents to “pay what they think they owe.” Past officials said the city lacked the manpower and expertise in the billing department to manually rectify the account issues with any speed.

In trying to protect people during the persistent billing blunders, the city has at times instituted no-shutoff policies, which demonstrate compassion but haven’t helped to compel payment.

Bryan Caplan:

I have deep doubts about the intellectual and social value of schooling. My argument in a nutshell: First, everyone leaves school eventually. Second, most of what you learn in school doesn’t matter after graduation. Third, human beings soon forget knowledge they rarely use.

Strangely, these very doubts imply that the educational costs of the coronavirus pandemic are already behind us. Forced optimism notwithstanding, the remote schooling that millions of students endured during the pandemic looks like a pedagogical disaster. Some researchers found that being in Zoom school was about equivalent to not being in school at all. Others simply found that test scores rose much less than they normally would.

But given my doubts about the value of school, I figure that most of the learning students lost in Zoom school is learning they would have lost by early adulthood even if schools had remained open. My claim is not that in the long run remote learning is almost as good as in-person learning. My claim is that in the long run in-person learning is almost as bad as remote learning.

How do we know all this? My work focuses on tests of adult knowledge — what adults retain after graduation. The general pattern is that grown-ups have shockingly little academic knowledge. College graduates know about what you’d expect high school graduates to know; high school graduates know about what you’d expect dropouts to know; dropouts know next to nothing. This doesn’t mean that these students never knew more; it just means that only a tiny fraction of what they learn durably stays in their heads.

This is especially clear for subjects beyond the three R’s — reading, writing and arithmetic. Fewer than 1 percent of American adults even claim to have learned to speak a foreign language very well in school, even when two years of coursework is standard. Adults’ knowledge of history and civics is negligible. If you test the most elementary facts, like naming the three branches of government, they get about half right. The same goes for questions of basic science, like “Are electrons smaller than atoms?” and “Do antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria?”

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?

Stefania Albanesi, Rania Gihleb, and Ning Zhang:

Labor market outcomes for young college graduates have deteriorated substantially in the last twenty five years, and more of them are residing with their parents. The unemployment rate at 23-27 year old for the 1996 college graduation cohort was 9%, whereas it rose to 12% for the 2013 graduation cohort. While only 25% of the 1996 cohort lived with their parents, 31% for the 2013 cohort chose this option. Our hypothesis is that the declining availability of ‘matched jobs’ that require a college degree is a key factor behind these developments. Using a structurally estimated model of child-parent decisions, in which coresidence improves college graduates’ quality of job matches, we find that lower matched job arrival rates explain two thirds of the rise in unemployment and coresidence between the 2013 and 1996 graduation cohorts. Rising wage dispersion is also important for the increase in unemployment, while declining parental income, rising student loan balances and higher rental costs only play a marginal role.

Commentary:

Dylan M. Palmer & Will Flanders:

Generally speaking, university professors enjoy a great deal of trust and respect from their students. They wield considerable influence in shaping how young people, during some of the most formative years of their lives, wind up viewing the world.  

When a professor instructs a future K-12 teacher to view the classroom with reference to “interlocking systems of oppression, including . . . race, class, [and] gender,” as one syllabus for an education-major required course at UW-Green Bay describes), that future teacher may end up believing that this is the proper way to understand the school system. But describing K-12 education as a place of racial, class, or gender oppression is a radical political viewpoint. It’s not clear whether future teachers learning ideas like those at UW-Green Bay understand how damaging and divisive such ideas are. 

We also found, in a required course for education majors at UW-Stevens Point, that students were made to read both “Antiracist Baby” by Ibram X. Kendi and a portion of “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo. “Antiracist Baby” presents itself as a children’s book, even though it traffics in highly political ideas about race and society—most notably, that colorblindness, or treating people without discriminating on the basis of race, is, in fact, racist. “White Fragility,” for its part, argues that virtually all white people are complicit in systemic racism.

This is not to say that college courses shouldn’t expose students to politically controversial topics. Indeed, such exposure is a key part of becoming educated. But, far too often, these radical viewpoints are presented to students as the onlyones through which to understand the world—instead of just another set of arguments, subject to debate and scrutiny. It is no wonder that future teachers come out of this environment primed to indoctrinate young students into similar viewpoints.

Christopher Lloyd:

My mother, 12 years a widow and a deeply private woman all her life, died in January, at home, surrounded by 800 friends.

Like my father, she had entered the workforce as a high school English teacher, serving in a rough area of New Haven, Conn., where she was once admonished by a student for calling Shakespeare’s Polonius a criminal (“I checked with my parole officer, Mizz Lloyd—he was an accessory.”). And like my father she adored books—teaching them, reading them, owning them. But in those days of $4,000 annual salaries, neither she nor my father could remotely have foreseen building a world-class collection of first editions, 800 of which graced the shelves of the home library into which she had moved a hospital bed for her final days.

So it was bittersweet this month to watch my parents’ collection sold via online auction to settle their estate. One at a time they went, one per minute, each with a ping of the computer, a steady disassembly of this literary family built over 50 years—orphans sent to new homes. 

Jonathan Turley:

Only seven percent of liberal students were concerned about how their professor’s ideology would affect their grades while that rate is 6 times higher for conservatives at 42 percent. Sixty-eight percent of conservatives were worried about sharing their views with other students (as opposed to 31 percent among liberal students).

The authors also concluded that a “significant number of students have concerns about stating their sincere political views in class and have self-censored because they were concerned about the potential reactions.”

Universities have failed to push for greater ideological diversity on faculties as hiring committees continue to replicate their own viewpoints and bias. It is not just students but faculty who face this pressure to self-censure. Faculty members risk cancel campaigns that threaten publications, conference invitations, and even their employment if they voice dissenting views.

It is heartbreaking to meet with students who feel, even in law school, that they must remain silent in class to avoid the ire or retaliation from faculty. Most faculties have a small and diminishing number of conservative or libertarian members. I discuss that long trend in my recent publication in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. The article is entitled “Harm and Hegemony: The Decline of Free Speech in the United States.”

Orlando Figes:

The gulf between these two worlds is historical. It was the fundamental problem of the 19th-century revolutionaries and democratic reformers, as it has been a major reason for the failure of today’s intelligentsia to play a more decisive role of national leadership since the collapse of the Soviet regime. The social background of the intelligentsia may have broadened greatly in the intervening period — the revolution cut its roots in the nobility — but in education and outlook it remained just as isolated from the common people as before. In that isolation is its tragedy.

---

Christopher Rufo:

I have obtained insider documents that reveal this troubling collaboration between gender activists at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and school administrators throughout the Chicago area. According to these documents, and a review of school district websites, Lurie Children’s Hospital has provided materials to school leaders promoting radical gender theory, trans activism, and sexually explicit materials in at least four Chicago-area public school systems: District 75, District 120, District 181, and District 204. According to a whistleblower, these documents were circulated to administrators, teachers, and other staff at the middle school and high school level as part of ongoing employee-training programs.

The primary training document, “Beyond Binary: Gender in Schools,” follows the basic narrative of academic queer theory: white, Western society has created an oppressive gender binary, falsely dividing the world into the categories of man and woman, that has resulted in “transphobia,” “cissexism,” and “systemic discrimination” against racial and sexual minorities. Versions of the document were attributed toJennifer Leininger, associate director of Lurie’s Community Programs and Initiatives, and Hadeis Safi, a “nonbinary” gender activist who uses “they/them” pronouns and works for the hospital’s LGBTQ and Gender Inclusion program—which advertises its care for children with “gender expansive” identities and offers “gender-affirming” medical procedures, including puberty blockers for children.

The presentation encourages teachers and school administrators to support “gender diversity” in their districts, automatically “affirm” students who announce sexual transitions, and “communicate a non-binary understanding of gender” to children in the classrooms. The objective, as one version of the presentation suggests, is to disrupt the “entrenched [gender] norms in western society” and facilitate the transition to a more “gender creative” world.

Scott Jaschik

Harvard University may lose the title of the nation’s wealthiest university, Bloomberg reported.

The potential new wealthiest university is the University of Texas, which may overtake Harvard’s $53.2 billion endowment, as of June 21. The value of the Texas endowment at that time was $42.9 billion.

The source of the new wealth: crude oil and natural gas. Bloomberg reports that with rising prices, Texas earns $6 million a day on 2.1 million acres it owns in the Permian Basin.

At a time when other colleges are shedding fossil fuel investments, Texas is having a windfall. “The University of Texas has a cash windfall when everyone is looking at a potential cash crunch,” said William Goetzmann, a professor of finance and management studies at Yale University. “Adjusting your portfolio for social concerns is not costless.”

Florent:

But I don’t think our institutional woes stem only from politics — there’s a deeper cultural issue at play, and everybody should wonder to what extent they contribute to the problem.

Everywhere I look, I see the rise of talkocracy — others have called it the dictatorship of the articulate. Talkers standing in the way of builders; offering we ponder, analyze, investigate, research, dissect, agonize endlessly over plans before we lay a single brick.

I for one like Michael Bloomberg’s approach better:

While our competitors are still sucking their thumbs trying to make
the design perfect, we’ve already gone through five rounds of testing.
By the time our rivals are ready to begin development, we are on
version No. 10. It gets back to planning versus acting. We act from
day one; others plan how to plan—for months.

Sarah KetchenLipson DanielEisenberg

Mental health worsened among all groups over the study period. American Indian/Alaskan Native students experienced the largest increases in depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, and meeting criteria for one or more mental health problem. Students of color had the lowest rates of mental health service utilization. The highest annual rate of past-year treatment for Asian, Black, and Latinx students was at or below the lowest rate for White students. Although Arab American students experienced a 22% increase in prevalence, there was an 18% decrease in treatment.

Limitations

Response rates raise the potential of nonresponse bias. Sample weights adjust along known characteristics, but there may be differences on unobserved characteristics.

Talis Shelbourne:

But as he grew older, Ma’Siah suffered more and more crises. After he turned 3 years old, doctors suspected he was severely asthmatic, but because of his age, they waited to confirm the diagnosis.

Farr was terrified to sleep, fearing she wouldn’t be available if he began having breathing problems. She watched Ma’Siah to catch the slightest hitch in his breath or wheeze from his chest. On the way home from each emergency department visit, she worried about when the next would come.

After having four healthy children, Farr’s focus on her son’s challenges brought an element of trepidation into the family.

Ma’Siah’s asthma was uncontrolled. And when Farr watched him, her feelings went from joy to helplessness.

Farr’s angst would be familiar to parents and caregivers of the 6 million asthmatic children in the United States. The chronic respiratory condition, which afflicts 25 million people overall, disrupts breathing and prevents oxygen from reaching vital organs. A severe attack can be fatal; on average, 11 people die from an attack every day.

George Bulman:

Estimates reveal that growing endowments generate large and persistent increases in spending overall and for instruction, student services, and administration in particular. However, wealthier colleges and universities do not increase the number of students they serve or the fraction of students receiving aid, and only modestly increase the generosity of aid packages. Instead, these institutions offset higher freshman yield rates by becoming more selective and enrolling fewer low-income students and students of color. Overall, colleges and universities appear to use greater endowment wealth to increase spending and to become more selective, resulting in higher institutional rankings, but do not increase the size or diversity of their student bodies.