Per Axbom:

By making this the default map in classrooms for centuries, with little context given to the reasons for its appearance, many people have necessarily had a truly twisted view of what the world looks like. There have been many different projections proposed and presented over these centuries, but none have really gained the same popularity as the Mercator one.

Given that the people who claim ownership and ensure distribution of this map have historically been white and rich representatives of the countries in the northern hemisphere, we may have a clue to the reason for its persistence. Why would any of these representatives and leaders have wanted their countries to suddenly appear smaller in favor of poorer countries?

Melissa Korn:

In early 2013, Mikaela Sanford responded to a Craigslist job posting for a small Sacramento company with mundane-sounding responsibilities: communicating with contractors, overseeing data entry and handling client correspondence.

The job led to a felony conviction and a front-row seat to what became known as the Varsity Blues college-admissions cheating scandal.

Ms. Sanford worked for six years at the Key, the company run by William “Rick” Singer that provided standard college counseling and test prep—as well as a side menu of illicit services involving fraud and bribery. She pleaded guilty in 2020 to racketeering conspiracy and was sentenced in May to one year of supervised release and a $67,062 forfeiture order.

Ms. Sanford, 36, testified last fall at the Boston trial of two parents who worked with Mr. Singer, but she hadn’t spoken publicly about the case until a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal.

The Economist:

t the age of 18 Asher Friedman (not his real name) could still neither read nor speak English. His parents, both ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews, had sent him to an unregistered boys’ school in Stamford Hill, in east London, when he was three. Pupils studied scripture for up to 14 hours a day. Beatings with belts or sticks were common. Around 250 boys shared three toilets and there was no soap in the bathrooms—they were told it was a secular extravagance. His brother, who still attends the school, says little has changed.

Jessica Wildfire:

My university has partnered with a dozen major corporations to outline curricula for us. They believe a CEO is more qualified to decide what students should be learning than I am. They’ve hired a dozen consulting firms to decide everything down to when we should teach.

Almost every school does the same.

They love consultants.

They hate teachers.

Demoralization is what happens when you spend years becoming an expert in a subject area, and nobody cares. They’d rather hire another MBA to make all the important decisions, while they stick us on committees writing reports for ghosts. That’s when teachers start to withdraw from their jobs, when we realize it doesn’t matter what we think, and it definitely doesn’t matter how amazing we are at what we do.

So, we give up.

Dave Zweifel:

A number of factors are causing this crisis, including low pay and a lack of discipline in classrooms. But the biggest reason is that all too many teachers feel they aren’t getting the support they need to succeed in their jobs.

Phil Dini:

The second tool is something I’ve been working on recently: SQL-backed full text search of city meeting minutes. You can see this working for the cities of Alameda and Oakland right now. That’s 18,746 pages of city minutes for Alameda, and 37,172 pages of city minutes for Oakland, now fully searchable by anyone.

So let’s talk about how I did this, and how you can do this for your city, possibly with my help!

Isabelle Sarraf:

Some federal pandemic-era provisions that allowed schools to serve universal free meals will expire when districts start school for the fall, leaving many districts unprepared to make up the difference and urging parents to apply for a free or reduced-price lunch. The expiration comes as supply-chain disruptions and rising food prices are pushing school-meal prices higher.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Food and Nutrition Service in fiscal year 2020 suspended eligibility requirements for free and reduced-price meal applications and gave every student a free breakfast and lunch regardless of family income. The government pumped $26.8 billion from pandemic-related funds such as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act to provide universal free lunch in fiscal year 2021.

In 2019, 67.9% of students received free lunches through the National School Lunch Program, while 5.7% got reduced-price lunches.

Christopher Nadon:

I teach at Claremont McKenna College, the No. 1-ranked liberal-arts college for free speech by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. FIRE may need to consider its ratings.

On Oct. 4, 2021, my class discussed Plato’s “Republic” and his views about censorship. A student objected that Plato was mistaken about its necessity. Here in the U.S., she said, there is none. Someone brought up “Huckleberry Finn.” She replied, correctly, that removing a book from curriculums doesn’t constitute censorship. I pointed out that the case was more complicated. The book had also been removed from libraries and published in expurgated editions.

An international student asked me why. I told her, quoting Mark Twain’s precise language, which meant speaking the N-word. This caused the first student to change her mind and acknowledge the existence of censorship in America. Far from being harmed by hearing the word, she now saw that Plato’s views couldn’t be dismissed as outdated and merited more serious consideration. This liberation from her initial prejudice bore fruit. Later in the semester she raised a very thoughtful question about Socrates’ criticisms of the poets: “But isn’t Plato a poet?” A rare success.

David Blaska:

Daniel Buck’s Bottom Line: “Legislators should ease teacher licensing requirements and support any reforms that stop the flow of ideology from schools of education to America’s classrooms.”

Everyone is talking about the monetary cost of student debt forgiveness. But what about the moral cost? Joe Biden has essentially co-signed the greatest endorsement of duty abdication in American history. Without a sense of duty and obligation, society is rendered impossible.

— Christian Watson (@OfficialCWATSON) August 24, 2022

Related: US debt clock

#studentloanforgiveness pic.twitter.com/0l3xwToPFo

— Kyle Welch (@Prof__Welch) August 24, 2022

(1/2) The problem with this loan forgiveness BS is that it creates a moral hazard ie no consequence for bad decision-making. I went to the best low-cost j-school and graduated w no debt and lots of job offers because I learned a skill in writing about econ at @mujschool. All my https://t.co/lxIZ9XbV7i

— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) August 24, 2022

:

In 2010, Obama eliminated the federal guaranteed loan program, which let private lenders offer student loans at low interest rates. Now, the Department of Education is the only place to go for such loans.

Obama sold this government takeover as a way to save money — why bear the costs of guaranteeing private loans, he said, when the government could cut out the middleman and lend the money itself?

Ann Althouse:

The answer to the question in the post title is Paragraph 16. The answer to the question in boldface at the beginning of the post — What legal basis did President Biden cite for his power to cancel student debt? — is that this article never says whether he said anything at all about the need for power. 

I suspect the answer to that question is “none,” so I’m going to let go of my suspicion that “less than 1% of Americans, if surveyed now, could correctly answer the question.” I think a good chunk of Americans are savvy — or cynical — enough to say: NONE! 

But is that the correct answer? Must I comb through the President’s speech? 

ADDED: No, “none” is not correct. Here‘s an AP stating clearly what Biden is relying on:

[I]n a legal opinion released Wednesday, the Justice Department said that the HEROES Act of 2003 gives the administration “sweeping authority” to reduce or eliminate student debt during a national emergency, “when significant actions with potentially far-reaching consequences are often required.”

The law was adopted with overwhelming bipartisan support at a time when U.S. forces were fighting two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. It gives the Education secretary authority to waive rules relating to student financial aid programs in times or war or national emergency.

Houston Keene:

“Just at the White House, nearly 71% or 336 White House officials earn under the $125,000 threshold and potentially even more could be eligible under the household income cap. Counting the agencies, Inside Biden’s Basement has identified over 200 officials who may be eligible for this Biden handout on the backs of taxpayers,” Hollie continued.

“Knowing that hundreds of financial disclosures exposing potential student loan debt have yet to be made public by the White House and federal agencies, the number of Biden officials set to benefit from today’s EO is staggering,” he said. “And the people who will be footing the bill are those who scraped, saved, and sacrificed to pay off their debt, or avoided taking out loans altogether, and those who did not attend college but still have to deal with Biden’s record-high inflation and recession-laden economy.”

White House spokesman Andrew Bates told Fox News Digital he is “unfamiliar” with Inside Biden’s Basement, which he called a “club,” saying “the relief the President just delivered applies to millions of Americans regardless of workplace.”

“Whether they are employed by Fox News, another private business, or a Republican Senate office, 43 million eligible borrowers now have help available to them,” Bates said. “Almost 90 percent of the benefits will go to people earning under $75,000, and none will go to those earning over $125,000.”

Spare me the argument that @POTUS‘s college loan bailout will make the cost of college go up. It’s been going up for years, which is why we have this problem. pic.twitter.com/uChHeHUKU0

— Rick Green (@VTConfidential) August 25, 2022

political commentary.

Susan Dynarski:

Aaron Sibarium:

Google is setting strict caps on the number of white and Asian students that universities can nominate for a prestigious fellowship program, a policy legal experts say likely violates civil rights law and could threaten the federal funding of nearly every elite university in the United States.

The Google Ph.D. Fellowship, which gives promising computer scientists nearly $100,000, allows each participating university—a group that includes most elite schools—to nominate four Ph.D. students annually. “If a university chooses to nominate more than two students,” Google says, “the third and fourth nominees must self-identify as a woman, Black / African descent, Hispanic / Latino / Latinx, Indigenous, and/or a person with a disability.”

That criterion, which an archived webpageshows has been in place since at least April 2020, is almost certainly illegal, civil rights lawyers told the Washington Free Beacon—both for Google and the universities.

Bryan Greene:

John Stauffer, a Harvard English professor who edited The Works of James McCune Smith, says that Smith is one of the underappreciated literary lights of the 19th century, calling him “one of the best-read people that I’ve encountered.”

“The closest equivalent I really can say about [him] as a writer is [Herman] Melville,” adds Stauffer. “The subtlety and the intricacy and the nuance…and what he reveals about life and culture and society are truly extraordinary. Every sentence contains a huge amount.”

Smith was born enslaved in New York City, in 1813, to Lavinia Smith, a woman born in Charleston, South Carolina, who historians believe was brought to New York in bondage. While James McCune Smith never knew his father, a white man, university records indicate he was a merchant named Samuel Smith. (Amy Cools, a University of Edinburgh scholar who has conducted the most extensive research into Smith’s paternity, maintains, however, “Meticulous research has thus far failed to yield any records of [such] a Samuel Smith…indicating the name “Samuel” may possibly have been entered into [the] university records for convenience or respectability’s sake.”). Smith received his primary education at the African Free School #2 on Lower Manhattan’s Mulberry Street, an institution founded in 1787 by governing New York elites. Their aim was to prepare free and enslaved blacks “to the end that they may become good and useful Citizens of the State,” once the state granted full emancipation.

The school graduated a roster of boys who would fill the upper ranks of black intellectual and public life. Smith’s cohort alone included Ira Aldridge, the Shakespearean tragedian and first black actor to play Othello on the London stage; the abolitionist minister Henry Highland Garnet, the first African American to address Congress; Alexander Crummell, an early pan-Africanist minister and inspiration to W.E.B. DuBois; and brothers Charlesand Patrick Reason, the first African American to teach at a largely white college and a renowned illustrator-engraver, respectively. These men’s achievements would be exceptional by any standard, but even more so, for a group who were born enslaved or deprived basic rights as free blacks.

Beck Andrew Salgado

Passionate debate defined the Aug. 8 Wauwatosa School Board meeting after a presentation on a more comprehensive sex education curriculum that would include information on sexual orientation and gender identity lessons.

The updated human growth and development curriculum is proposed for the 2022-23 school year.

As the line for public comment filed to the back of the room at the meeting, parents ardently argued for and against the new curriculum.

“I stand here to vigorously protest the sexual content of your special program. I would feel ashamed and humiliated if I just stood by and let it happen without my vigorous protest,” said one parent.

Others said the new curriculum was not comprehensive enough, saying, It is “beyond time” to update the curriculum and that even the proposed version “is not inclusive enough.”

Charmaine Choi and William Yiu

The head of a Hong Kong special education secondary school who was fired at the weekend has filed a complaint with the Labour Department claiming “unreasonable termination”.

The move came after principal Wong Lai-ting, who was sacked last Saturday, and about 10 teaching and administrative staff accused the board of Hong Kong Juvenile Care Centre Chan Nam Cheong Memorial School in Aberdeen of gross mismanagement at a press conference last Thursday and asked the government to step in.

The group said the board was trying to “paralyse the school operation” by “suppressing teachers”.

Wong spoke through a video link at the press conference and other staff involved attended in person.

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write to a famous author & ask for advice.

Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond.

His reply was a doozy. pic.twitter.com/ozZjFXRDQE

— Michael Warburton (@MichaelWarbur17) August 22, 2022

Andy Matuschak & Michael Nielsen:

We believe now is a good time to work hard on this vision again. In this essay we sketch out a set of ideas we believe can be used to help develop transformative new tools for thought. In the first part of the essay we describe an experimental prototype system that we’ve built, a kind of mnemonic medium intended to augment human memory. This is a snapshot of an ongoing project, detailing both encouraging progress as well as many challenges and opportunities. In the second part of the essay, we broaden the focus. We sketch several other prototype systems. And we address the question: why is it that the technology industry has made comparatively little effort developing this vision of transformative tools for thought?

Sara Randazzo:

In one vision of classrooms of the near future, young children will put on headsets and read sentences aloud as they navigate computer programs powered by speech-recognition technology.

Behind the scenes, that technology will listen to each student and spit out dozens of lines of code, rating the pronunciation for each individual sound and word in the sentence and tracking the timing of every utterance.

By the time each student reads an entire passage aloud, the software will have mapped where they stand on a few hundred finite skills needed to be a fluent reader.

NYT:

Nearly 200 episodes of “Sesame Street” have been pulled from HBO Max, the streaming platform that has been purging films and television shows in recent weeks as it prepares to combine with another streaming service, Discovery+.

Fans of “Sesame Street” were surprised on Friday to see that hundreds of episodes, most from the first 40 years of the show, had been removed from HBO Max.

It is the latest shift at HBO Max following the merger of its former parent company, WarnerMedia, with Discovery Inc. in April. Together, the companies formed Warner Bros. Discovery, which is aiming to find $3 billion in savings in an effort to reduce its $55 billion in debt.

This week, about 70 HBO Max staff members were laid off as a part of the reorganization, and HBO Max announced that 36 titles were being pulled from the platform. The pulled programming included the animated series “Infinity Train” and “The Not-Too-Late Show With Elmo,” a “Sesame Street” spinoff.

David Zaslav, the company’s chief executive, also told investors this month that the company plans to offer a single paid subscription streaming service, bringing together content from HBO Max and Discovery+.

It was not clear what that means for the future of “Sesame Street” on HBO Max.

Chris:

The first thing I did was reach out to Guelph University — but they ignored me. 

I then reached out to several employment lawyers. Five of them answered me.

Unfortunately I don’t think this will be a story that I want to participate in from a branding exercise for my business. Accordingly please attribute the following comment anonymously. I think an interesting arguments can be made that this policy is actually transphobic as only women can apply.

— Anonymous lawyer #1

Ha. Fair enough. I wouldn’t want to risk the reputation of my business on a non-politically-correct opinion either. 

I am curious, though, if this lawyer’s “transphobic” argument actually holds any water, or if he is just trolling. Let’s take another look at the wording in the job posting: “Candidates must be from one or more of the following equity-seeking groups to apply: women, persons with disabilities, Indigenous peoples, and racialized groups.”

According to Guelph, then, if you are a CIS female you are entitled to affirmative action, but if that same CIS female gets a buzzcut and chops off her boobs and changes her name to “George,” all of a sudden “George” is not entitled to affirmative action?

Scott Shackford:

The speech orientation of the law is clearly not neutral: It censors only one position on the controversy based on its viewpoint. Walker further rejects the state’s attempt to say that the act aims to regulate conduct, not speech. (This argument may be familiar to libertarians, who have seen states use it to try to unduly control who is and is not allowed to give advice.) Walker notes that laws against racist conduct at the workplace can be identified separately from speech. But IFA can only be understood through the lens of what is and is not said. It is entirely a regulation of speech, not conduct.

Walker then subjects the law to strict scrutiny, requiring the state to prove that it has a compelling interest to justify engaging in such censorship. To put it mildly, constitutional law is not on the state’s side here.

“The First Amendment does not give the state license to censor speech because it finds it ‘repugnant,’ no matter how captive the audience,” Walker writes. “And even assuming the IFA serves a compelling government interest—like prohibiting discrimination—it is not narrowly tailored. In large part, this is because the [Florida Civil Rights Act of 1992] already prohibited much of what Defendants claim the IFA aims to prohibit. For example, a diversity and inclusion training could be so offensive, and so hostile to White employees, that it could create a hostile work environment. That is already illegal—as both parties acknowledge.” Walker concludes that the IFA attacks ideas, not conduct, and so the plaintiffs are likely to win the case.

Walker also agrees with the plaintiffs that the IFA is “impermissibly vague” in how it defines the forbidden ideas, leaving it for the state to resolve and leaving employers unclear about what sort of discussion about race is and is not forbidden.

genspect.org

On January 24, 2022, the Child & Parental Rights Campaign filed suit in federal court on behalf of parents who allege that Clay County schoolofficials hid their 12-year-old daughter’s (“A.P.”) mental health and gender identity issues for months – only informing them after the child attempted suicide in the school bathroom on two separate occasions. The lawsuit alleges violations of the parents’ custodial rights under the Florida Constitution and the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The suit, which was filed in the Middle District of Florida against the Clay County Schools superintendent and three Paterson Elementary officials, alleges that the school counselor engaged in secret therapy sessions with A.P. over the course of several months last year regarding A.P.’s distress over being bullied and her confusion about her gender. Paterson Elementary is located in Fleming Island.

The suit claims that the counselor breached A.P.’s privacy by purporting to tell other teachers and students about A.P.’s new “male” name and gender identity without the child’s knowledge or approval and without informing her parents, leading to A.P.’s increased distress at school. As stated in the lawsuit, A.P.’s parents were not contacted about any bullying or mental health concerns until the child attempted suicide twice at the beginning of this year, and they were never informed that school officials were encouraging A.P. to “transition” to a male gender identity.

Rick Hess:

There aren’t many good novels about K-12 schooling. I tend to think this is for the same reason there aren’t a lot of good novels about sports. With sports, the story usually comes down to a big game. Win or lose, the tropes are familiar. And the emphasis on cathartic victory or growth-inducing loss leaves little room for character depth, complexity, or whimsy.

Novels about schooling suffer from a similar problem. They’re usually about a teacher’s heroic journey or success in helping that hard-to-reach kid. The themes are worn-out, and the tales tend to feature the moral complexity of a grade-B Western.

Well, Class Dismissed ditches the familiar school novel formula, and it pays off nicely. Published last year by 30-year teaching veteran Kevin McIntosh, who has authored Pushcart Prize-nominated short stories, Class Dismissed traces the eventful journey of high school teacher Patrick Lynch from Minnesota to New York—and then back to Minnesota.

Andrew C. Barr, Jonathan Eggleston & Alexander A. Smith

We provide new evidence that cash transfers following the birth of a first child can have large and long-lasting effects on that child’s outcomes. We take advantage of the January 1 birthdate cutoff for U.S. child-related tax benefits, which results in families of otherwise similar children receiving substantially different refunds during the first year of life. For the average low-income single-child family in our sample this difference amounts to roughly $1,300, or 10 percent of income. Using the universe of administrative federal tax data in selected years, we show that this transfer in infancy increases young adult earnings by at least 1 to 2 percent, with larger effects for males. These effects show up at earlier ages in terms of improved math and reading test scores and a higher likelihood of high school graduation. The observed effects on shorter-run parental outcomes suggest that additional liquidity during the critical window following the birth of a first child leads to persistent increases in family income that likely contribute to the downstream effects on children’s outcomes. The longer-term effects on child earnings alone are large enough that the transfer pays for itself through subsequent increases in federal income tax revenue.

Richard Vedder:

• A rise in ignorance. Despite having immediate access to more information than their parents could have dreamed of, today’s youth increasingly know less about the world around them. On the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment—an international evaluation in math, science and reading for 15-year-old students—Americans scored lower than their peers in Asian powerhouses such as China and Japan and in European allies from the U.K. to Germany.

American universities are subordinating academic achievement to ideology while constricting free expression—the lifeblood of intellectual advancement and prosperity. Teachers unions restrict competition. Knowledge of the past is particularly spotty as schools either down play or distort the nation’s history. The effect is a decline in patriotism and love of country, which loosens the glue of national unity embodied in the motto E pluribus unum.

“Racial Literacy” and “cultural competency” are the ideological litmus test phrases for applicants in education. Your answers must reflect the requisite condescending and provincial assumptions. https://t.co/GnoPaFhH3U

— Paul Rossi (@pauldrossi) August 21, 2022

Automating Life:

Let’s see if we can build some micro-automation to monitor the Toastmasters website and alert me when I need to take action. This will save me time and remind me to always actively participating at meetings and thus improve my public speaking.

Pilot Clark:

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/087082a8-91c1-447b-a08f-4428992b0819

Last month, I went on holiday to a small town at the bottom of Spain that I have been visiting for more than 20 years, where a friend asked: “Why is your Spanish still so bad?”

“Er,” I said, struggling to remember how to say in Spanish that, after decades of fitful studies, there had in fact been times when I could speak as well as any local four-year-old.

This was not one of those times, unfortunately. So I went home, sat down and started writing out lists of verb conjugations by hand, which was when I discovered something worse. My handwriting, never good, had turned into barely legible scrawl. My words jerked across the page like the trails of a snail dunked in crystal meth. The very act of writing was a strain. Years of typing and texting had taken an unattractive toll.

I cannot be alone. Nearly 60 per cent of Britons say they write less by hand than they did five years ago, a survey found last year, and 12 per cent have never written even a shopping list. Children email Santa and some struggle to hold a pen.

The question is, does this really matter? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everything we wrote was as clear and unambiguous as the printed word? The medical world certainly would: a 42-year-old American once died after a pharmacist reading a cardiologist’s sloppily written prescription dispensed the wrong pills.

Ted Balaker:

In a development which should hearten professionals whose speech has been chilled, there is evidence to suggest that many Americans believe cancel culture has gone too far. According to a recent Hill-HarrisX poll, strong majorities of all demographic groups share that sentiment, including 70 percent of Democrats. Recent polls from the likes of Politico and YouGov mostly tell versions of the same story.

Yet even neutral pollsters often define cancel culture so narrowly as to misrepresent its true nature. The Politico survey, for example, uses the dictionary.com definition: “the practice of withdrawing support for (or canceling) public figures and companies after they have done or said something considered objectionable or offensive.”

But none of the people in my examples were canceled in the traditional sense. Though fired, my comedian friend’s reputation hasn’t been smeared by a public trial on Twitter. Kmele Foster, John McWhorter, and Walter Williams weren’t disinvited from the television special—they were simply rejected at an earlier stage. Time will tell what happens to people like Karith Foster.

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox:

We are entering an unanticipated reality—an era of slow population growth and, increasingly, demographic decline that will shape our future in profound and unpredictable ways. Globally, last year’s total population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see population declines while the world’s population is due to peak sometime later this century.

This kind of long-term global demographic stagnation has not been seen since the Middle Ages. World population has been growing for centuries, but the last century has dwarfed previous rises. About 75 percent of the world’s population growth has occurred in the last hundred years, more than 50 percent since 1970. But now, population growth rates are dropping, especially in more developed nations, according to the United Nations (all subsequent references to UN research in this essay are drawn from these data). 

It’s not a matter of if but when global populations will start to decline. Under the UN’s medium variant projection, the world’s population will peak in 2086, while under the low variant, the peak will occur in 2053, and by 2100, the population will be about a billion below today’s level. Demographer Wolfgang Lutz and colleagues project a global population of between 8.8 and 9.0 billion by 2050 falling to between 8.2 and 8.7 billion by 2100. The projected declines are concentrated in countries with high fertility rates, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In the process, we will inhabit a rapidly aging planet. In 1970, the median world age was 21.5 years. By 2020, it had increased to 30.9 years, and the UN projects that it will be 41.9 years in 2100.

We are well past the time when we need to concern ourselves with Paul Ehrlich’s long-standing prophecy that humanity will “breed ourselves to extinction.” On the contrary, we need to worry about the potential ill-effects of depopulation, including a declining workforce, torpid economic growth, and brewing generational conflict between a generally prosperous older generation and their more hard-pressed successors. The preponderance of low fertility in wealthier countries also presages a growing conflict between the child-poor wealthy countries and the child-rich poor countries.

Abortion links: choose life.

Adam Wren:

“If you look down your nose at someone long enough, one day they will punch you in it.” And I think that’s what happened. I sat there that night — I don’t watch much television — but these national network commentators are talking to each other incredulously. What happened here? Well, these under-educated types, you know, these are non-high school graduates … Disdain is not too strong a word. It was condescending.”

That’s very different than what you’re peddling to a sixth or seventh or eighth grader, where a teacher’s word is law.

Misrepresentation of American history and American values has permeated much of — not all, but much of — education now for a good long time. And so the people who imbibed that growing up very often are the people who are now teaching, running school boards and so forth. And so I think that this wasn’t unforeseeable, but I do think it’s very unfortunate, and should be pushed back against.

There’s a lot about our K-12 system that needs improvement. And one reason it’s very hard is that the education establishment stays put in place. Parents come and go. So parents have, in many cases, effectively mobilized to give us more choice, give us more quality, give us more safety, and sometimes had some effect, but all too often, their kids either leave the system or graduate, and they go away. And I think that in some of these matters you’re asking about, we’ve seen parents mobilizing. “What are you peddling to my child?” That is citizen activism of the highest order. That has nothing to do with closing libraries.

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?

Gregory Crespi:

Many law professors now post essentially complete drafts of their articles on SSRN and/or on university-sponsored working paper websites prior to submitting those articles for journal publication. This “pre-publication publication,” so to speak, is useful for both authors and their readers, but it raises some self-plagiarism issues, and there does not yet appear to be a broad consensus on how those issues should be addressed. 

I argue that this increasingly common practice of SSRN and working paper pre-publication of articles should be recognized as entirely appropriate, and that in light of this practice law journals should rather substantially change the way that they operate, moving to a wholly online format and providing only article abstracts and website links for the articles that they “accept,” rather than editing and providing the full text of the articles.

Steven Hayward:

That Hillsdale College is in the crosshairs of the left is not breaking news, but it is curious to see social media and their “fact checkers” joining the leftist mob.

Hillsdale held a conference a few months back on “the great reset,” analyzing the opportunism of elite institutions in using COVID as an excuse to grab more power and “restructure” our economy and wider social order. It’s a variation of “never let a good crisis go to waste.” The conference featured figures such as David Goldman, Brian Wesbury, Mark Mills, and Vivek Ramaswamy. These are not fringe figures.

Hillsdale decided to advertise the videos of the conference on Facebook. And here’s how it turned out:

Louise Perry:

The last 60 years have proved that assumption to be wrong. We need to re-erect the social guard rails that have been torn down. To do that, we have to start by stating the obvious: Sex must be taken seriously. Men and women are different. Some desires are bad. Consent is not enough. Violence is not love. Loveless sex is not empowering. People are not products. Marriage is good.

Margaret Atwood:

A long time ago – 7 December 1992, to be exact – I was backstage at a Toronto theatre, taking off a Stetson. With two other writers, Timothy Findley and Paul Quarrington, I’d been performing a medley of 1950s country and western classics, rephrased for writers – Ghost Writers in the Sky, If I Had the Wings of an Agent, and other fatuous parodies of that nature. It was a PEN Canada benefit of that era: writers dressed up and made idiots of themselves in aid of writers persecuted by governments for things they’d written.

Just as the three of us were bemoaning how awful we’d been, there was a knock on the door. Backstage was locked down, we were told. Secret agents were talking into their sleeves. Salman Rushdie had been spirited into the country. He was about to appear on stage with Bob Rae, the premier of Ontario, the first head of government in the world to support him in public. “And you, Margaret, as past president of PEN Canada, are going to introduce him,” I was told.

Gulp. “Oh, OK,” I said. And so I did. It was a money-where-your-mouth-is moment.

And, with the recent attack on him, so is this.

Naaz Modan:

• 
  Public school enrollment remains down for a second consecutive year, at 49.5 million in fall 2021 compared to 49.4 million in fall 2020, according to preliminary federal counts from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. Comparatively, pre-pandemic enrollment was at 50.8 million students in fall 2019.
• However, when broken down by grade, fall 2021 enrollment data shows a 14% increase for pre-kindergarten and a 5% increase for kindergarten. Both grades experienced the steepest declinesimmediately following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. 
• Public school enrollment counts for grades 1-7 decreased year over year. White student enrollment also fell over the past year, from 22.6 million in fall 2020 to 22.4 million in fall 2021, while other student racial groups slightly increased or stayed the same.

Dive Insight:

Compared with fall 2020, total public school enrollment for Pre-K-12 “was unchanged” this past fall, said NCES Commissioner Peggy G. Carr in a statement. 

However, enrollment changes varied by state, with most states experiencing less than 1% changes in enrollment. The largest enrollment increases — of more than 2% between fall 2020 and 2021 — were in Idaho, Montana and Pennsylvania. The largest decline was in New York, which reported a 2% decrease.

By comparison, some states experienced enrollment decreases as high as 5% in fall 2020.  

The overall drop in enrollment since fall 2020 marks the reversal of near steady enrollment increases over the past two decades. Last year, Carr called this trend “preliminary but concerning.”

Malcolm Moore:

Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/cf187902-2676-4bdb-b803-9ff1fec0f20a

Do you remember how temperamental computers used to be? When they would crash for no reason, and you had to click “Save” every five minutes for fear they would wipe all your work?

I felt that old frustration recently on a visit to a London secondary school, where I was helping teach a class about fake news. The kids were all given laptops to fill in an online quiz. But most of them could not connect to the WiFi. Half an hour later, a teacher borrowed a set of newer-looking laptops from the maths department. They didn’t work either. I watched in dismay as the kids, bright and curious at the start, grew bored and fractious. “It’s always like this,” shrugged a member of staff.

For decades now, parents and educators have been told that they need to invest in computers to prepare kids for the modern world. In the UK, a significant increase in spending on tech began under Tony Blair’s government and, by 2019, there were 3.3 million computers across primary and secondary schools. During the pandemic, the government promised to deliver another 1.8 million laptops to disadvantaged kids so they could study from home.

Julie Kelly:

None of his targets took the bait.

His main FBI handlers, Jayson Chambers and Henrik Impola, working out of the Detroit FBI field office, directed Chappel’s every move. In the summer of 2020, Chambers advised Chappel to lure a man in Virginia to plan a similar operation against Governor Ralph Northam. “Mission is to kill the governor specifically,” Chambers instructed Chappel.

Patrick Brown:

For much of the 1990s and 2000s, discussions around school choice focused narrowly on a bipartisan push to improve academic performance in inner-city schools. It was an era of charter schools, test scores, and “accountability.” 

But that movement stalled out, in no small part because the ultimate question about the purpose of education can only be avoided for so long. A school system cannot paper over profound disagreements over how society should teach about race, gender, and sex by pursuing an unattainable neutrality. And in recent years, people with advanced degrees from Schools of Education and professional administrators have increasingly seen neutrality as part of a system of oppression. 

Recent battles over “critical race theory,” gender theory, and eliminating academic tracking over concerns around “equity” lay bare what scholars like Charles Glenn and Ashley Rogers Berner have long argued—that a school system cannot be neutral when it comes to values. 

As J. Grant Addison recently wrote for the Washington Examiner, following other writers including Robert Pondiscio, Jay P. Greene, and myself, the next generation of school choice advocacy is recognizing anew that there can be no such thing as value-neutral education. That realization should spur a new push for approaches to education that give parents and communities more choices. 

Some legislative efforts focus on setting guardrails on public schools, such as the recently-signed Florida law ensuring young children don’t receive classroom instruction on topics their parents might not want them exposed to. Some of these efforts will be more effective than others; would-be bans on so-called “critical race theory” are easily circumvented by avoiding that phrase while still teaching divisive concepts in the name of anti-racism.

Dave Cieslewicz:

Board members were aghast at the referendum proposal because they said they’d be shirking their duty to decide the issue… as they’ve done for the last year or more. Give Sups. Tim Kiefer and Maureen McCarville credit for being the only two members to realize that a referendum was the only way to break the impasse. Why the other 35 thought there was some other answer given the history of this issue is beyond me. 

It seems to me that what has to happen next is for County Executive Joe Parisi to put the needed money in his 2023 capital budget, which he should be introducing in a few weeks. That could work because adoption of the budget (as opposed to an amendment later on) only needs a simple majority and the Board apparently has that. 

But, of course, costs keep rising. So, it’s important that Parisi build in some added inflation to make sure that the 825 bed plan actually gets built. If he doesn’t, we may be back here having the same discussion a year from now.

Moria Balingit:

While students saw across-the-board gains in the 2021-2022 school year compared to the previous academic year, state education officials said the progress was not enough, and pinned some of the good news on lowered standards — not on better student performance.

“Despite the scores being up from last year, they are down from pre-pandemic levels,” said Jillian Balow, state superintendent of public education, in a news conference Thursday.

The standards of learning data also showed that schools that returned to in-person instruction sooner fared considerably better than schools that remained virtual or hybrid longer.

“Students whose schools were closed suffered the most,” Balow said.

Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin tied the results to school closures, and pledged to address disparities.

“The SOL results released today demonstrate that prolonged school shutdowns undeniably exacerbated the learning loss experienced by Virginia’s students, and the very best [antidote] is in-person education,” Youngkin said.

The differences were particularly stark in mathematics. Two-thirds of students passed math exams last school year, compared to 82 percent before the pandemic. Racial and economic disparities also widened, with White and Asian students making more progress toward their pre-pandemic levels than Black and Hispanic students.

Passage rates remained more than 20 points behind pre-pandemic levels in math for Black, Hispanic and economically disadvantaged students, and among students learning English.

All groups fared better in reading than they did in math, but state officials said that was due to the fact that standards were lowered in 2021, and cautioned against optimism.

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?

Heather Smith:

During his rough and tumble 1997 campaign Evers directly criticized fellow Democrat Benson saying he had failed to call attention to the problems in our state’s education system, and that continual promotion of the good without sounding the alarm on the bad “wrecks our credibility.”  Evers said students and districts were in trouble and that “being a cheerleader has its place, but that place is not the superintendent’s chair.”

(Yes, this is the same guy who – in another ad we recently fact checked – is cheerleading a US News ranking putting Wisconsin schools as 8th in the nation while only about a quarter of students statewide can do English or math at grade level.)

But those are not the only striking political moves Evers made in the 1997 race.

He campaigned on recommendations in the Fish Commission that suggested breaking up MPS.  He accused Benson, who opposed charter schools, of trying to bury them in regulations. Evers supported statewide public school choice and said charter schools work, because they “provide local competition, innovation and research.” He called for clear, measurable standards in core academic areas to help districts improve. He said under Benson, “DPI has become a lackey for WEAC.”  Those are not the words of a guy without political aspirations.

And when Benson claimed that the crisis in public education had been “manufactured” Evers asked – again, in 1997, a quarter century ago:  “Is the 40% dropout rate in Milwaukee public schools a crisis or not?   Is the fact that most colleges remediate our graduates a crisis?” 

The 3.8% of MPS students who can do math at grade level and the 6.4% who can do English at grade level are a crisis today, and colleges are still remediating graduates from our “top 10 in the nation” schools. But while politically savvy Evers used school quality as a wedge issue when he wanted to defeat a fellow Democrat, today, he’s doing the same thing he accused Benson of: cheerleading while schools fail students.

During his time as Deputy, Wisconsin was called out for setting “cut scores” low to game accountability measures to make proficiency scores appear higher. DPI had set reading passing levels for 8th graders at the 14th percentile, while states like South Carolina set theirs at 71%. Evers defended the cut scores saying that the 14th percentile was proficient.

And when Education Sector, a national non-profit, ranked states on which used technicalities to be overly cheery about student performance, Wisconsin topped the list. Evers, who had decried this very habit in his run against Benson, defended DPI saying everything they did “had been approved.”

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?

Raquel Maria Dillon:

Concerns over the role of technology in such prosecutions have ratcheted up in recent days, especially after it was revealed that Facebook had handed over private messages between a young woman and her mother in Nebraska to local law enforcement agencies that were investigating the death of a fetus.

In-q-tel: the CIA and Google.

Google’s business model.

Related: Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Friday April 19, 2013

NCLA:

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has unanimously ruled in Harper v. Rettig that taxpayer James Harper can take the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to federal court for gathering private financial information about his use of virtual currency from third-party exchanges without a lawful subpoena.

IRS has, until now, successfully prevented federal courts from asserting jurisdiction over a significant constitutional challenge to the agency’s unlawful data-collection practices. The First Circuit ruled that the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire erred in its March 2021 decision granting IRS’s motion to dismiss Mr. Harper’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment challenge based on an alleged lack of jurisdiction. The district court did not have the benefit of the Supreme Court’s May 2021 decision in CIC Services, LLC v. IRS, which concluded that the Anti-Injunction Act (AIA) does not prohibit a suit “seeking to set aside an information-reporting requirement that is backed by both civil tax penalties and criminal penalties.” Mr. Harper’s suit, which seeks to set aside IRS’s illegal information gathering, is likewise not a suit brought to enjoin a tax’s assessment or collection, so it is not subject to the AIA’s limits on court jurisdiction.

Daniel Buck:

I studied for a master’s degree in education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015. My program was batty. We made Black Lives Matter friendship bracelets. We passed around a popsicle stick to designate whose turn it was to talk while professors compelled us to discuss our life’s traumas. We read poems through the “lenses” of Marxism and critical race theory in preparation for our students doing the same. Our final projects were acrostic poems or ironic rap videos.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has reviewed the required coursework for 14 programs for teachers-to-be in the Badger State. These programs produce about 80% of all teaching graduates in the state each year. What they found was shocking. Worldview building and ideological manipulation take precedence over teacher preparation.

On the syllabi, noticeably lacking are academic literature or manuals of classroom instruction. Instead, Hollywood movies like “Freedom Writers,” popular books like Jonathan Kozol’s “Letters to a Young Teacher,” and propaganda like “Anti-Racist Baby” abound. In place of academic essays, graduate students write personal poems or collect photographs. These kitschy activities infantilize what ought to be a rigorous pursuit of professional competency.

Jack Fowler:

Beyond the investigating (duties lustfully performed, at the University of Tennessee, by its “Bias Education and Response Team,” which sounds a smidge less scary than the University of Maryland’s “Hate-Bias Response Team”), there is the intimidating — inherent to the enterprise. Bias-reporting systems, by their existence, are institutional deep freezers that create those “chilling effects” on campus speech. They are the instigators of the cautionary thought Should I risk speaking up in the first place? Which is why the foes of BRS, including admirable organizations such as FIRE (newly reminted as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), charge that it prevents students and professors — from the non-woke to the surely conservatives to the leave-me-aloners — from voicing opinions, or even telling jokes, lest they get caught up in a crypto-Soviet dragnet (anonymous accusers, no due process) with an array of consequences: hostility, reprimands, suspensions, the boot, and finding themselves at the dangerous intersection of Here’s My Opinion and You’re Unhireable after Graduation.

In a paper for the American Enterprise Institute calling for the elimination of BRS from colleges, Cherise Trump, a George Mason University graduate who is Speech First’s impressive executive director, railed against its expansiveness and the consequence of its unsubtle silencing: “The fear of being anonymously reported to authorities and subjected to process-is-punishment investigations, diversity and anti-bias trainings, and public stigmatization is a present and powerful force on campuses nationwide.”

As it chills speech, from political to happenstantial, BRS also suppresses diversity — of thought. Which seems the point, after all: to do away with “on the other hand,” a thing central to academic debate and classroom exploration of thought, yet now intolerable and impermissible on many a campus.

Fair Test:

As many high school seniors work on their college applications due in early January, a new tally shows that nearly 80% of bachelor’s degree-granting colleges and universities are not requiring ACT or SAT scores from students seeking to enroll in fall 2022.

According to an updated list released today by the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), more than 1,815 colleges and universities now practice test-optional or test-blind admissions, an all-time high. The list includes nearly all of the nation’s most selective colleges and universities.

FairTest also found that at least 1,400 institutions have already extended those policies at least through the fall 2023 admissions cycle. Among the schools that will not require ACT or SAT tests from current high school juniors are well-know private institutions, such as Amherst, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Stanford and Tufts. In addition, many public university systems including those in California, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Oregon, and Washington will remain test-optional or test-blind.

FairTest Executive Director Bob Schaeffer explained, “Evaluating undergraduate applicants without test scores is here to stay. 80% of schools are ACT/SAT-optional or test-blind for current high school seniors. More than three-fifth of all colleges and universities in the nation have already committed to remaining test-optional or test-blind for fall 2023 applicants. We expect the final percentage to be substantial higher.”

Immediately before the COVID-19 pandemic, 1,070 schools were test-optional with only one test-blind. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics currently recognizes about 2,330 bachelor-degree granting colleges and universities which enroll first-year students

Chloe Berger:

While some of this cohort moved out of Florida during this time frame, many more moved in, creating a net influx of 20,263 high-income households. That’s nearly four times the number of high-rollers the second most popular place attracted: Texas, which saw a net migration rate of 5,356 households.

Like Florida, Texas has warm weather and no state income tax. In fact, the majority of the top 10 states high-earners moved to are in the Sunbelt. And two others on the list—Tennessee and Nevada—also don’t have a state income tax. Both trends indicate that these high-earning migrants were looking for a more affordable cost of living.

Take a look at the top 10 list below, which includes net migration figures:

Christopher Fountain:

Per D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education website, “Beginning in the 2022-23 school year, the COVID-19 vaccine is required for school enrollment and attendance in the District of Columbia for all students who are of an age for which there is a COVID-19 vaccination fully approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).” 

As of right now, that means D.C. students aged 12 and up will have to be vaccinated or they will be unable to attend school in person.

The vaccine requirement makes D.C. an outlier in the nation, as many of the larger school districts recommend but do not require a COVID-19 vaccine in order to attend school in person.

The Daily Signal then asked the mayor about whether or not it was appropriate to respond to kids who aren’t vaccinated by forcing them to attend school virtually.

“You’ve never heard me say that,” Bowser said.

Vía Judicial Watch:

“Since the President is completely entrusted with the management and even the disposal of Presidential records during his time in office, it would be difficult for this Court to conclude that Congress intended that he would have less authority to do what he pleases with what he considers to be his personal records,” she added.

The Media should Not be the Propaganda Arm of the Government w/ @DrJBhattacharya

Full interview: https://t.co/q2QNAovdOp pic.twitter.com/pi16ioze00

— Rob Montz (@Robmontz) August 19, 2022

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Scott Girard:

That was the fourth-highest percentage among the 10 districts in the state with the most Black students enrolled in AP courses, behind only Beloit (83.7%), Wauwatosa (82%) and Racine (68.9%).

Milwaukee Public Schools, the only Wisconsin district larger than MMSD, saw all student groups have lower rates of opting out of AP exams than the state average.

“This is especially important as MPS serves large numbers of students of color and is the district with the highest AP enrollment for English Learners and students who identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, Black, and Hispanic, and is a very close second for students identifying as Asian,” WPF writes in its report.

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?

Sasha Chapin

But many conversations can be nudged in the direction of openness, spontaneous complexity, and shared emotionality. And a surprising number of conversations, thus encouraged, can become quite connective. These are the conversations where you’re likely to find yourself laughing, rambling excitedly, engaging in extended weird riffs, crystallizing old knowledge in new patterns, feeling comprehended, feeling loved, and, generally, having the sensation that you’ve temporarily stepped outside the walls around your being.

Good conversations can heal you effortlessly sometimes, too. I think this is at least 50% of the mechanism of action of talk therapy. So you can go around doing that whenever.

I’ve tried hard to figure out how this can be cultivated. It took effort since I’m naturally untalented in this respect. The method of conversation I had for a bunch of my life was babbling about whatever I was interested in until my interlocutor wandered away. That’s how I did things, until I noticed, after a decade, that people don’t like this, and, what’s more, I didn’t like it. When, occasionally, I met people who managed to induce me to have a more connective conversation, I enjoyed myself much more than I would have if I’d set the tone. 

Eventually I realized that human connection is one of my favorite things, and thus I’ve tried really hard to override my prior instincts. And I think I’ve done a reasonably good job. I think I’ve gone from “terrible” to “at least better than average,” and my job depends on being able to induce conversational depth with reliability.

Daniel Beekman:

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg has asked Sheriff Patti Cole-Tindall to put together an investigation into the deletion of text messages from the phones of then-Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan and other city leaders in 2020.

“It wasn’t clear to me that anyone was going to start this investigation without prompting,” Satterberg said Thursday in an emailed statement. “Just like the public’s right to an open courtroom, people have a right to know what is in public documents — including text messages.”

Satterberg’s office requested the investigation July 28, spokesperson Casey McNerthney said.

“We are in the early stages of reviewing the matter,” said Cole-Tindall spokesperson Cynthia Sampson, giving no other information.

Last year, a whistleblower in Durkan’s office revealed that the mayor’s texts from a 10-month period — including tumultuous weeks in early summer 2020 when police deployed tear gas against Black Lives Matter protest crowds and vacated the East Precinct — were missing.

2020 events in Madison.

By Jennifer J. Schulp and Norbert Michel

Modern life is full of sharing mundane information with others. Your cellphone company knows where you’ve been, your home security system knows your visitors, and your bank knows your spending habits.

And it’s often not just your service providers that know. Law enforcement has used many of these treasure troves of information without first obtaining a warrant. This warrantless surveillance — which prompted a recent hearing by the House Committee on the Judiciary — may be novel for technology and media companies, but it is nothing new when it comes to the government’s surveillance of Americans’ financial activity.

The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970 (BSA) requires financial institutions to assist federal agencies in detecting and preventing money laundering and other crimes. It does this in a number of ways, including by enlisting financial institutions to report certain customer activities to the government.

Tyler Cowen:

Overall I remain astonished how little critical scrutiny the Biden bills are being subject to. By the way, here is a standing history of attempts to reform the IRS/give it more funding. Most have failed.

Ed Knight:

My student, River, spent more time in the courtroom than the classroom last year. One Friday night in September, a drunk friend called and asked for a ride home from a party. River obliged. That’s a problem when you’re 14 years old. On his excellent adventure with his drunk friend, River drove over the landscaping of several local businesses and ended with his car in the woods caught in a web of maple sugaring lines. Things spiralled from there.

All of which is to say that River didn’t learn algebra last year.

I mean it: zero algebra was learned. He wasn’t even present in my classroom for most of three marking periods. At the end of the year, he asked me how he was supposed to pass the state test.

“No problem,” I said. “Just pick all Cs.”

“What?”

“Try it. I bet it will work.”

It worked.

Outrage

Did I have special knowledge? No.

Or yes, if you count actually being able to do math. Apparently the whole “actually being able to do math” thing is special now. New York certainly doesn’t require it.

Now look, you’re probably saying Ed, come on, there must be something that you’re not telling me. There must be something you’re missing.

By Kassie Bracken, Mark Boyer, Jacey Fortin, Rebecca Lieberman and Noah Throop:

Schools across the country have been caught up in spirited debates over what students should learn about United States history. We talked to social studies teachers about how they run their classrooms, what they teach and why.

In the last two years, dozens of state legislatures have introduced bills that would limit what teachers can say about complicated subjects like race, gender and inequality.

The legislation is part of a larger debate over politics in public school education. Across the United States, parents have demanded more oversight over curriculums, and school board meetings have erupted into fiery discussions.

How have these debates affected the classroom?

In 2020, amid widespread protests over racial inequality, some conservative activists began using critical race theory, or C.R.T., as a catchphrase. They claimed that C.R.T., a decades-old scholarly framework that raised questions about structural racism and inequality, was infiltrating modern-day classrooms.

“They’re trying to rewrite history and redesign the future of the United States,” said Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, who last year signed legislation intended to ban C.R.T. in the state’s public schools. “But also, they’re undermining the very values and core of what America stands for.”

But until it became a headline, some of the teachers we talked to had never heard of critical race theory.

Ian Rowe

In 1966, the U.S. Office of Education commissioned the landmark survey “Equality of Educational Opportunity” to study the “lack of availability of equal educational opportunities for individuals by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin in public educational institutions.” James Coleman, who led the study, was a noted sociologist and civil-rights advocate who had been arrested for demonstrating outside an amusement park that refused to admit African Americans.

Known as the Coleman report, the 700-page study drew on data from more than 645,000 students and teachers in 4,000 U.S. public schools. Among its most controversial findings was that family background — not schools, funding, religion, or race — was the only characteristic that showed a consistent relationship with academic performance. The report summarized:

One implication stands out above all: That schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context; and that this very lack of an independent effect means that the inequalities imposed on children by their home, neighborhood, and peer environment are carried along to become the inequalities with which they confront adult life at the end of school.

This unexpected takeaway should have changed the education-policy landscape forever. Yet it never gained widespread traction, principally because it received an unwelcome reaction from most educators, who were unwilling to accept that “schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement.” They feared that emphasizing family background (most notably parents’ marital status) as the greatest driver of a student’s academic achievement would lead to victim-blaming, finger-pointing moralizing directed at single mothers. Even worse, it would turn attention away from addressing racism, underfunding, and other, more acceptable theories of the causes of academic underperformance.

Jacob Gershman:

he cases could turn on what specific promises schools made to students about in-person education—and whether students suffered any harm in the switch to remote classes, said Benjamin J. Hinks, a Boston-area employment and higher-education lawyer who has followed the litigation.

“We’re definitely seeing a trend towards plaintiff-friendly rulings at the pretrial stages,” Mr. Hinks said. “However, these are hard-fought cases, and the fight is not over for universities.”

Most of the cases revolve around the academic spring semester of 2020, when emergency quarantine measures in the period before vaccines forced the country’s higher-education industry to suspend in-person classes and close their physical campuses, barring access to laboratories, dormitories, libraries, student centers and athletic facilities.

At many schools, academia’s temporary move to virtual learning didn’t come with any discounts to tuition or student service fees. But it left a trail of hundreds of lawsuits in federal and state courts demanding restitution.

James Sweet:

Twenty years ago, in these pages, Lynn Hunt argued “against presentism.” She lamented historians’ declining interest in topics prior to the 20th century, as well as our increasing tendency to interpret the past through the lens of the present. Hunt warned that this rising presentism threatened to “put us out of business as historians.” If history was little more than “short-term . . . identity politics defined by present concerns,” wouldn’t students be better served by taking degrees in sociology, political science, or ethnic studies instead?

The discipline did not heed Hunt’s warning. From 2003 to 2013, the number of PhDs awarded to students working on topics post-1800, across all fields, rose 18 percent. Meanwhile, those working on pre-1800 topics declined by 4 percent. During this time, the Wall Street meltdown was followed by plummeting undergraduate enrollments in history courses and increased professional interest in the history of contemporary socioeconomic topics. Then came Obama, and Twitter, and Trump. As the discipline has become more focused on the 20th and 21st centuries, historical analyses are contained within an increasingly constrained temporality. Our interpretations of the recent past collapse into the familiar terms of contemporary debates, leaving little room for the innovative, counterintuitive interpretations.

This trend toward presentism is not confined to historians of the recent past; the entire discipline is lurching in this direction, including a shrinking minority working in premodern fields. If we don’t read the past through the prism of contemporary social justice issues—race, gender, sexuality, nationalism, capitalism—are we doing history that matters? This new history often ignores the values and mores of people in their own times, as well as change over time, neutralizing the expertise that separates historians from those in other disciplines. The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past. This sameness is ahistorical, a proposition that might be acceptable if it produced positive political results. But it doesn’t.

Robert Pondisco:

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.”

Matt Taibbi:

Watching, I found myself wondering, “What is this?” There was no pretense of separateness between the CNN employees, and the spot’s purpose appeared to be to let a senior CIA/FBI counterintelligence official whine about the reaction to the Trump raid, stoke fear, and compare Americans to al-Qaeda. It felt less like news than something out of a dystopian novel like Fahrenheit 451 or We, and this is essentially on air round the clock. Dollars to doughnuts, if you turn on cable right now, you will find, somewhere, a former intelligence official yammering at you through your telescreen.

We’re a week into one of the biggest stories of our time, and the feds and media have spent most every minute acting as an unembarrassed unified front. One after another, national security “analysts” lined up to give breathless, hyperbolic, and and eerily synchronized commentary about the Mar-a-Lago raid. If the message on day 1 was about how they “must have” probable cause of a crime, that was the word up and down the dial. If by the weekend it was “I’ve never seen this level of threat,” you heard that in more or less the same words from the likes of Mudd, McCabe, and others on multiple channels. What’s the public supposed to see, other than an American analog to China Central TV or Rossiya-1, when they tuned in to all this?

Never forget: they filled skateparks with sand in the name of “science” pic.twitter.com/PCtkGN3dYI

— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) August 17, 2022

Anna Allen:

Average scores on the ACT college admissions test dropped to their lowest in 30 years, revealing more evidence of the pandemic’s alarming impact on American education.

The average composite score for the class of 2022 was a 19.8 out of 36, according to a report released Wednesday, falling under 20 points for the first time since 1991. This year’s graduates endured the effects of the pandemic for three of their four high school years.

These results fuel concerns that post-pandemic graduates are not prepared for college-level work. Of the ACT-tested graduates, 42 percent failed to meet any of the four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks (English, reading, math, science). Last year, 38 percent of students did not meet any of the benchmarks.

While ACT scores have been gradually falling in recent years, “the magnitude of the declines this year is particularly alarming,” ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a statement. “We see rapidly growing numbers of seniors leaving high school without meeting college-readiness benchmarks in any of the subjects we measure.”

Aaron Carroll:

Too many messages are still centered on trying to frighten people into compliance by arguing about worst-case scenarios and ‌‌convincing them that things are as dangerous as ever. They amplify every new variant and predict future worsening. They point to charts of the unvaccinated and vaccinated and marvel at the differences in deaths.

Such charts almost always, however, depict outcomes that don’t easily apply to young children. If the goal is to convince parents to take action to prevent harm to their children, this won’t work.

The risk of Covid infection today is not what it was two years ago (or even last year). Hospitals continue to admit people infected with Covid, but many of them are incidentally so, and the intensive care units are relatively empty. Parents have seen many of their children, and their children’s friends, get Covid and do fine, adding to a belief that this isn’t nearly as dangerous as they were led to believe. This perception, when it comes to their children, isn’t necessarily wrong. If public health advocates want to change minds, then they are going to have to change their strategies to accept this safer reality.

Older people ‌‌continue to be at the highest risk of death from Covid. Arguing that they needed to get vaccinated, and more, to save their lives made sense. Saying that childhood deaths from Covid are somewhat more common than influenza may be true, but too many parents don’t think influenza is a problem either. Many ‌‌do not vaccinate their children against that, let alone mask and isolate them.

Some of the information is indeed confusing. Several European countries are not recommending vaccination against Covid in young children because they believe they are not at high enough risk of disease. I disagree with that decision, because even though it’s rare, youngsters do die of it (as they do from influenza). I have no problem recommending we vaccinate them against the flu, too.

What’s more, there are other outcomes from Covid that warrant intervention, and that’s most likely a better argument for childhood immunization. Children who are vaccinated have a lower chance of getting sick at all, and if they do get sick, they are likely to have a lower chance of getting severely ill, developing MIS-C or being hospitalized. They probably have a lower chance of being affected by long Covid, too. Such outcomes are far more common in children than death.

Related: Dane County Madison public health mandates.

Madeline Kearns:

It is no coincidence that states with the greatest respect for parental rights have the least interventionist approaches to sex education. Florida, for instance, has no requirement for sex education but does require its health education in grades six through twelve to emphasize “awareness of the benefits of sexual abstinence as the expected standard and the consequences of teenage pregnancy.” In 2021, before the Parental Rights in Education Act, DeSantis signed a law requiring schools to notify parents of their right to have their child opt out of any sex education offered and to inform them of the curriculum and materials on the district’s website homepage.

To say that schools have a role to play in sex education isn’t controversial. But since the 1980s, there have been two competing visions about when and how schools ought to go about it. One view is that schools should play only a supporting role, sticking to the biological and physiological facts. First, what puberty is, later, how babies are made. And that anything beyond that ought to be about sexual risk avoidance, warnings about unintended pregnancy and disease, and the promotion of abstinence in youth as the only certain way of avoiding these outcomes.

Another view is that sex education ought to be more comprehensive. In addition to basic biology and abstinence, topics include contraception, abortion, consent, sexual orientation, pleasure, masturbation, and, most recently, transgender identity. The progressive Guttmacher Institute calls this “a rights-based approach” that “recognizes that information alone is not enough,” asserting that “young people need to be given the opportunity to acquire essential life skills and develop positive attitudes and values.” But whose values are these?

KQED:

At elite high schools in Silicon Valley, the pressure to succeed is intense. And according to Sophia Shao, a senior at Los Altos High School, her proximity to California’s tech capital is a big reason why.

In this special collaboration with KQED’s Youth Takeover, a yearlong project to highlight compelling stories written and produced by local teens, Shao talks with us about going to school in a place where everyone is expected to succeed.

Mike Antonucci:

But it’s the headline and lede from April 7, 2009.

Alarming stories about teacher shortages are nothing new. I’ve written A LOT about them over the years, going back to at least 2000. But such stories predate me, and I was able to find a warning about impending teacher shortages in The Journal of the National Education Association from October 1921.

The current panic is unusual only in its intensity. Dozens of stories about teacher shortages appear every day in local newspapers and websites. And when reports start showing up on the evening TV news and “Good Morning America,” you know it’s a national media storm.

Another unusual aspect this time is the handful of researchers and reporters fighting the wave. Chad Aldeman of the Edunomics Lab, Christine Pitts of the Center on Reinventing Public Education — both writing in The 74 — Jess Gartner of Allovue, Melissa Kay Diliberti and Heather L. Schwartz of The RAND Corp., Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report and Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat have all questioned the crisis narrative.

Average citizens normally don’t pay too much attention to public education staffing levels. But you don’t need to delve into a lot of numbers to understand what’s happened in the last 20 years. 

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in fall 2000 there was one teacher for every 16 students. In fall 2019, there was one teacher for every 15.9 students.

Through wars, recessions, changes of political parties in power, changes in enrollment and every other possible variable, America’s schools still managed to provide the same ratio of teachers to students.

Emily Mullin:

IF YOU WERE born in the United States within the last 50 or so years, chances are good that one of the first things you did as a baby was give a DNA sample to the government. By the 1970s, states had established newborn screening programs, in which a nurse takes a few drops of blood from a pinprick on a baby’s heel, then sends the sample to a lab to test for certain diseases. Over the years, the list has grown from just a few conditions to dozens.

Elita:

Elita Williams is the heart of a bustling home in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood. She and her husband preside over a household of six children plus extended family, three dogs and a cat. In addition to managing the comings and goings of her active family, she’s a teacher’s assistant at nearby Milwaukee Math and Science Academy. “I’ve been working with the second-graders for about six years now. And I love my job. I love working with the kids,” she says.

The children in her blended family of three boys and three girls are ages 6, 8, 9, 10, 13 and 14. All attend Milwaukee College Prep, a K3-8 public charter school open to all children who live in the city of Milwaukee.

Elita’s oldest child, Brielle King, will be a freshman in the fall at Milwaukee Lutheran High Schoolthrough the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program. Brielle likes to play volleyball, dance, write and do a little math. She’s a bit uncertain about what high school will be like. “I’ve gone to Milwaukee College Prep from K4 to eighth for my entire life, so switching is going to be something new for me. But hopefully, it’ll be OK,” she says.

AP news

In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care.

Ciavarella ordered children as young as 8 to detention, many of them first-time offenders deemed delinquent for petty theft, jaywalking, truancy, smoking on school grounds and other minor infractions. The judge often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to put up a defense or even say goodbye to their families.

Wall Street Journal:

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System reported a negative 6.1% return for the year, which includes a 21.3% positive return on private equity and 24.1% return on real estate as reported through the second quarter of 2022. What will happen if real-estate prices start to fall and some leveraged private-equity buyouts go south amid rising interest rates?

Collective-bargaining agreements limit how much workers must contribute to their pensions, so taxpayers are required to make up for investment losses. Employer retirement contributions—that is, taxpayers—make up 20% of government worker compensation. That amount has soared over the past decade as pension funds tried to make up for losses during the 2008-2009 financial panic.

A recent report by the Equable Institute found that state and local pension plans now are only 77.9% funded on average, which is about the same as in 2008. But some like Chicago’s are less than 40%. Advice to taxpayers in Illinois: Run.

Libby Sobic:

WILL Director of Education Policy, Libby Sobic, is the author of Empower School Board Members With Policy Solutions, a new publication from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The rising tide of parent engagement and activism requires policy thinkers to turn their attention to the local level where school boards can debate and pass reforms that directly impact the classroom and address controversies around curriculum transparency and parental notification.

Sobic highlights a number of the model school board policies WILL released in June 2022, part of the Restoring American Education initiative.

• The Right to Review Instructional Materials and Related Documents:With so much of the friction between schools and parents deriving from a lack of transparency, school boards should adopt language that makes clear “The District values and encourages transparency between parents and the school, and therefore the District shall make every effort to be as transparent as possible.” Parents deserve access to instructional materials and school district employees should know that material must be made available.
• Controversial Issues in the Classroom: With examples of controversial subject matter appearing the classrooms, debates have raged over age-appropriateness and parental notification. This policy requires parental notice and the opportunity to opt-out before controversial issues are discussed in the classroom.
• Parental Notification and Consent on Matters of Student Gender Identity:Parents have an inherent right to direct the education of their child. With controversies swirling around student gender identity, school boards should adopt a presumption that parents have the right to determine the name and gender pronouns of their child. School administrators and teachers should not be diagnosing or treating students for gender dysphoria, and district staff may inform parents about a social transition occurring at school.

Education is fundamentally a local issue. Communities will debate and deliberate the policies that best suit them. But for parents and activists taking on new roles with school boards, the institutions that develop policy at the state and national level must be responsive to the concerns and issues occurring in local school districts.

Tom Knighton

Academic freedom is the shield many in academia use to protect themselves from criticism. More specifically, they use it to keep their jobs when they endorse some of the evilest ideas in human history, such as communism.

To them, academic freedom means they can hold whatever positions they want to hold, and those of us who aren’t slobbering, drooling Marxists are just going to have to come to terms with that.

However, like in so many other instances, it seems there’s a double standard at play. After all, academic freedom only seems to be a one-way street.

Administrations and faculties at University of California campuses are embroiled in a searing controversy over requirements that applicants for faculty positions and candidates for promotion prove their active support, without reservation, of what’s called “diversity, equity and inclusion.”

Candidates must submit “DEI statements” that, under UC’s policies, determine whether they will be considered for employment or promotions, regardless of their academic credentials.

While different campuses use slightly different “rubrics” for judging candidates on their DEI statements, they generally use a 1-to-5 scale to determine whether they should be allowed to advance.

Pradeep Mutalik:

In our most recent Insights puzzle, I challenged readers to figure out how certain magic tricks work. The tricks in question were of the sort where the magician somehow divines the identity of your hidden numbers or playing cards. But how does the magician correctly deduce what’s in your mind based on seemingly no information? As we’ll see below, the secret is to extract just enough information to unravel the mystery through the inexorable logic of mathematics.

Puzzle 1

Our first puzzle was an elementary arithmetic trick suitable for captivating a child:

Ask the child to think of a three-digit number without telling you what it is. Then tell them that you will reveal the number by producing two copies of it side by side! First ask the child to multiply their number by 7. Then ask them to multiply the answer by 11. Finally — and at this point you can add feigned concentration and appropriate magical phrases — ask them to multiply the second answer by 13.

If the child has done this right, you might find a smile start to light up their face. The question for you, or for an older child, is — why does this work?

The reason, as many readers correctly pointed out, is that 7 × 11 × 13 = 1,001, which is the number that you are effectively asking the child to multiply by. That this will produce a copy of the original three-digit number (say, 457) is obvious when you write down the multiplication in the conventional way.

Mike Bloomberg:

I’ve criticized both the left and right for failing to uphold the principles of free expression over the years. In New York’s City Hall, I strongly defended a Brooklyn university when it sponsored a speech by an advocate of the BDS movement, which promotes economic war against the state of Israel through boycotts, divestment and sanctions. I couldn’t disagree more strongly with those in the BDS movement—but I also couldn’t believe more strongly in their right to free speech. I’ve always found that those whose speech we find most objectionable are those whose rights we’re most responsible for defending.

Every generation faces its own bouts with censorship. In my youth, it was Sen. Joe McCarthy’s hunt for communists. I can still vividly remember his questions (“Are you now or have you ever been . . .?”). Today, censorship is coming from both sides of the political aisle, but only one side is writing it into law.

Professors in Florida have sued to block the Stop Woke Act, and let us hope judges will soon strike it down as an abridgment of the First Amendment. Some professors, however, have also urged students to boycott a new state survey meant to gauge whether colleges are hostile to viewpoint diversity. That’s a mistake. Florida’s censorship law is wrong, but it’s a reaction to the very real problem of campus intolerance. The more that students speak out about it—even if anonymously through surveys—the more pressure it puts on administrators to address it.

Higher education is rooted in intellectual exploration. Colleges that don’t expose students to challenging and uncomfortable ideas fail their pupils. The same applies to governments that attempt to block professors from offering their insights or forcing them to teach material as though all theories—like evolution and creationism—should be given equal weight.

The sad irony is that many of the same people who have accused millennial and Gen Z students of being snowflakes—those unable to handle discomforting ideas—are now acting like the most delicate snowflakes of all.

The solution to political repression isn’t more political repression. It’s freedom. Truth has nothing to fear from free speech—on college campuses, or anywhere else.

Betsy DeVos:

The cost to you for all of this? Not one cent. Your state passed an education-savings-account law five years ago. Instead of sending the dollars allocated to your child’s education to a school building you didn’t select, the new law puts them into an education account you control. Your daughter’s love of learning has exploded since then. Sure, there are still mornings when you have to cajole her out of bed, but once she’s up, she’s learning, and there’s no stopping her.

Or perhaps you’re the parent of a high schooler in a rural area in middle America. He goes to what most consider a pretty good regional public school, and for the most part, he would agree. His teachers care, and the classes he can take are fairly engaging.

But they don’t have any of the courses he really wants. His aim is to become an artificial-intelligence and machine-learning engineer. It’s not a common job in his farming community, but he thinks integrating robotics and sensors could really improve crop yields and reduce the amount of water and pesticides required.

He starts his morning on the farm, helping his dad. He’s enrolled in the “Great Books” program at Columbia University and uses the tractor time to listen to the novels. At 9 a.m., he heads to the John Deere factory, where he’s employed in an apprenticeship, working side by side with some of the best thinkers in the AI field. He’s there through lunch and then heads back home and attends a virtual charter school for his core coursework (which also gives him class credit for the apprenticeship). He’s found that the self-paced lessons help him focus better than he did in the classroom; plus, he can work through the material much faster than the classroom pace. Five p.m. is football practice. They’ve shifted to a community-based team rather than a school-based team. Previously there was only one school, and they excluded non-enrolled students. They realized a couple of years ago that that didn’t really make sense. The team has won a lot more games since then.

Beth Hawkins:

Mounting evidence supports an academic strategy known as acceleration, in which students who are behind are challenged with grade-level material while getting help with missing skills or knowledge. But new research finds its use in schools “is currently more talk than action.” 

Analyzing data from 3 million students assigned lessons through a widely used literacy program, the nonprofits ReadWorks and TNTP found that during the 2020-21 school year — the first full year after the start of the pandemic — students were assigned work below their grade level a third of the time. Children in high-poverty schools were given less challenging materials more often than their affluent peers — even when they had already mastered grade-level assignments.

“Our analysis reveals a stark disconnect between the extent of students’ unfinished learning during the pandemic and the opportunities they’re getting to engage with the grade-level work they need to catch up,” states a report outlining their findings. “It suggests that while many school systems are talking about learning acceleration, far fewer have implemented a successful learning acceleration strategy.”

Olentangy:

The Panorama surveys that have been given to the students since 2016, and have been promoted as anonymous surveys, are in fact not anonymous. Panorama has profiles on all students that participated in any of these surveys. They have tracked their responses and given students an SEL score. None of this information has been provided to parents.

Dan Walters:

The University of California is requiring candidates for faculty employment or promotion to write statements declaring their active support for diversity policies, but some see it as impinging on academic freedom.

Elizabeth Beyer:

The Madison School District did not respond to requests for information regarding the number of students on individual education plans (IEPs) during the 2021-22 school year. Nor did officials respond to a request for information regarding the total or per-pupil cost to serve special-education students in the last school year.

If special-education reimbursement had increased to 50% in the most recent biennium, it would have added $16.1 million to the Madison School District’s budget, Heinritz said. That could have allowed the district to hire more special-education staff and pay them more.

“You’re looking at more people, and you’d have much more support for our students, buildings, and it would contribute to teachers focusing on teaching,” Heinritz said.

Democrat Gov. Tony Evers proposed increasing special-education reimbursement to 50% in his draft 2021-23 biennial budget, but the proposal was scrapped by Republicans, although they did bump reimbursement by 2 percentage points to its current rate of roughly 30%.

The shortfall has made recruiting, retaining and training special-education staff difficult, Siravo said.

“I know they want to do better, but they’re still working with a system that’s funded only at a certain degree,” she said of the Madison School District.

Special education funding along with Madison’s spending and program practices have been a topic of discussion for many years. The taxpayer supported school district served 4,314 special education students in 2007.

Marginal Revolution:

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.”

This is one of the most crazy things I’ve read in a long time. For about 4 or 5 years its been difficult to distinguish satire from genuine liberal politics. I roll my eyes now when someone from the right makes that comment because I see it ever few days and it is just so tired….But this passage here is just so insane. I mean, you have teachers complaining that their kids are learning how to read…. They felt “dehumanized” because their students actually learned how to read because something about “the man” and being “colonized” or whatever…..

If I read this in some sort of dystopian novel I would think it was too over the top but this is real life. Crazy stuff.

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?

Karin Fisher:

Nearly 1.3 million students have disappeared from American colleges during the Covid-19 pandemic, raising alarms that the enrollment emergency projected to arrive a few years from now is already here.

High-school seniors uninterested in studying online chose to defer. Working parents strained by the demands of full-time pandemic child care put their studies on hold. International students couldn’t get visas. Those in majors with hands-on practicums or lab work found they couldn’t register for courses required for their degrees.

Doug Lemov:

The students who came back to us had spent long periods away from peers, activities, and social interactions. For many young people—and their teachers—the weeks and months of isolation had been difficult emotionally and psychologically. Some had lost loved ones. Many more had endured months in a house or apartment with nearly everything they valued—sports or drama or music, not to mention moments of sitting informally among friends and laughing—having suddenly evaporated from their lives. Even students who had escaped the worst of the pandemic were out of practice when it came to the expectations, courtesies, and give-and-take of everyday life. Perhaps as a result of this, their social skills had declined.

Our students looked the same—or at least we presumed they did behind the masks—but some seemed troubled and distant. Some struggled to concentrate and follow directions. They were easily frustrated and quick to give up. Many students simply didn’t know how to get along. The media was suddenly full of stories of discipline problems, chronic disruptions due to student distractibility, lack of interest, and misbehavior in the classroom, and historic levels of student absences. In schools where no one had ever had to think about how to deal with a fight, they burst into the open like brush fires after a drought. It didn’t help that many schools were short-staffed, with leaders struggling just to get classes covered and buses on the road.

The first post-pandemic year may well have been harder than the radically disrupted 18 months of rolling lockdowns and remote learning that preceded it. The jarring disruptions related to Covid-19 aren’t the whole story, however. What has happened to our students isn’t just the impact of a protracted, once-in-a-generation adverse event, but the combined effects of several large-scale, ground-shifting trends that predate the pandemic and have reshaped the fabric of young people’s lives. As we look forward, their combined effects should cause us to think beyond short-term recovery and to reconsider how we design schools and schooling.

Emily Schmidt:

About 130 million adults in the U.S. have low literacy skills according to a Gallup analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education. This means more than half of Americans between the ages of 16 and 74 (54%) read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.

Literacy is broadly defined as the ability to read and write, but it more accurately encompasses the comprehension, evaluation and utilization of information, which is why people describe many different types of literacy — such as health, financial, legal, etc. Low literacy skills can profoundly affect the day-to-day success of adults in the real world, and these impacts extend to their families, too.

Dr. Iris Feinberg, associate director of the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University, said anyone can have low literacy skills.

“It’s not just people who are poor. It’s not just people who are racial minorities. It’s not just people who speak funny because they’re from the South. It literally can be anybody,” she said.

Historically, adult literacy has been underfunded and underrepresented in academic and scientific research, according to Feinberg, a sentiment echoed by Dr. Margaret Patterson, a senior researcher at Research Allies for Lifelong Learning.

Kathleen Porter-Magee

One reason we often overlook the American Catholic school “system” is that it isn’t much of a system at all. Rather than being led by a central authority, American Catholic schools are a great example of our country’s commitment to local civic institutions. From the dawn of Catholic education in the United States, schools were created by local communities — largely parishes, but also religious orders — for local communities. This agile, community-centered orientation contributed to the sector’s responsiveness and leadership through the Covid-era crisis.

Indeed, in March 2020, Catholic-school leaders had the autonomy and flexibility to assess the local threat and didn’t need to wait for guidance from a sprawling bureaucracy about how to act. As a result, many Catholic schools were among the first to close. Then, in fall 2020, when it had become clear that children were among those least vulnerable to the virus, and when we had more information about how to mitigate “super spreader” events, Catholic schools found a way to reopen while traditional public and charter schools stayed closed. By September 2020, 92 percent of Catholic schools had reopened for in-person or hybrid learning, compared with just 43 percent of traditional public schools and 34 percent of charter schools. These decisions were driven not by a centralized bureaucracy but rather by the community-focused leadership of principals and pastors who saw how much families needed in-person community and learning.

At the same time, the independent, autonomous spirit that allowed for such transformative leadership during Covid has allowed many Catholic schools to resist the latest curriculum fads and stand firm in favor of a rigorous classical and classically inspired education.

Indeed, it’s that principled leadership that is at the core of the most successful Catholic models. For example, the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education has sparked a renaissance in many parish schools by fostering an embrace of a classical curriculum infused with church teaching. Similarly, the network of Chesterton Academies stands as a telling counter-trend to closing schools and declining enrollment. By combining a classical curriculum with “a focus on truth, goodness, and beauty” and formation in virtues and faith, the network has grown from one school in 2008 to 27 today.

What will it take to keep this renaissance growing?

Jason Gay:

The moment happened last week, in Waco, Texas, during regional play of the Little League World Series. The opponents were Pearland, Texas, and Tulsa, Okla. Pearland pitcher Kaiden “Bubs” Shelton threw a pitch that veered dangerously inside and thunnnnnk—it smacked right off the protective helmet of Tulsa batter Isaiah “Zay” Jarvis, who dropped to the ground and clutched his head. 

It was scary. It’s scary whenever a pitch flies near a batter’s head, and it’s outright terrifying when the pitch knocks a hitter to the dirt. Jarvis, who was likely spared a more serious injury when the pitch hit the corner of his helmet’s ear flap, eventually rose to his feet, and trotted down to first base.

Upon reaching first, Zay Jarvis noticed something: Shelton, the Pearland pitcher, was still reeling about the beanball and seeing Jarvis on the ground. He was in tears.

By Tracy Beth Høeg, MD, PhD:

I added a picture frame to the photo from the article because I imagine one day, in the not-too-distant future, a photo like this will be on display in a museum of Covid-19 mistakes and absurdities. Historians, social scientists, ethicists, film-makers, lawyers, economists, great-grandparents and many others will look back on the pandemic and ask “How was it that Sweden, and to a great extent Denmark and Norway, were able to get it right with children?”

Sweden never closed primary schools and Denmark and Norway had brief, transient closures; they never masked children under 12 and free childcare was always available. Children always had a safe place to go throughout the pandemic. Disruptions to normalcy were minimized.

I suspect we will learn Scandinavia’s compassionate decisions about child policies during the pandemic had less to do with science than cultural commitment. It was clear early on that children were mildly affected by covid and were not primary drivers of the pandemic. However, when Sweden chose to keep primary schools open and in Denmark and Norway reopened schools in April 2020, it was unclear exactly how well it would go.

David Boaz:

But increasingly parents and teachers are pushing back against “whole language” and “balanced literacy” theories. They cite decades of research on how children actually learn to read and write. In 1997 Congress instructed the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development to work with the Department of Education to establish a National Reading Panel that would evaluate existing research and evidence to find the best ways of teaching children to read. The panel reviewed more than 100,000 reading studies. In 2000 it reported its conclusion: That the best approach to reading instruction is one that incorporates:

• Explicit instruction in phonemic awareness
• Systematic phonics instruction
• Methods to improve fluency
• Ways to enhance comprehension

And yet more than a quarter of American school districts use this one particular curriculum that doesn’t reflect those conclusions. Other districts use other curricula built on similar principles. A 2019 investigation by American Public Media revealed “American education’s own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers — and educators may not even know it.”

It’s not like people were unaware of the problems with such approaches to reading before the 2000 report. In 1995, after state test results showed that the vast majority of California public school students could not read, write, or compute at levels considered proficient, Superintendent of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin appointed two task forces to investigate reading and math instruction. The reports were clear — and depressing. There had been a wholesale abandonment of the basics — such as phonics and arithmetic drills — in California classrooms. Eastin said there was no one place to lay the blame for the decade‐long disaster. “What we made was an honest mistake,” she said. Or as the Sacramento Bee headline put it, “We Goofed.” Eastin promised to put more emphasis on phonics, spelling, and computation in the classroom. What an excellent idea. But cold comfort for about 4.5 million students who suffered from the system’s decade‐long “honest mistake” of not teaching them to read, write, or compute. The mistake didn’t come cheap for taxpayers, either. California spent about $201.7 billion on public schools during the “mistake” decade.

Jeffrey Tucker:

In English: everyone can pretty much go back to normal. Focus on illness that is medically significant. Stop worrying about positive cases because nothing is going to stop them. Think about the bigger picture of overall social health. End the compulsion. Thank you. It’s only two and a half years late. 

What about mass testing? 

Forget it: “All persons should seek testing for active infection when they are symptomatic or if they have a known or suspected exposure to someone with COVID-19.”

Oh. 

What about the magic of track and trace? 

“CDC now recommends case investigation and contact tracing only in health care settings and certain high-risk congregate settings.”

Oh. 

What about the unvaccinated who were so demonized throughout the last year? 

“CDC’s COVID-19 prevention recommendationsno longer differentiate based on a person’s vaccination status because breakthrough infections occur, though they are generally mild, and persons who have had COVID-19 but are not vaccinated have some degree of protection against severe illness from their previous infection.”

Remember when 40% of the members of the black community in New York City who refused the jab were not allowed into restaurants, bars, libraries, museums, or theaters? Now, no one wants to talk about that. 

Also, universities, colleges, the military, and so on – which still have mandates in place – do you hear this? Everything you have done to hate on people, dehumanize people, segregate people, humiliate others as unclean, fire people and destroy lives, now stands in disrepute.

Ryan Mills:

Not surprisingly, the district attracted scrutiny earlier this year after it released a spending plan that devoted millions to projects that some see as unrelated to those goals.

The 46-page plan dedicated $12 million to build intimate, multipurpose fine-arts theaters at the district’s three high schools; $4 million to construct educational pods at a city-owned nature sanctuary; $7.7 million for athletics, including new turf fields and gym equipment; and $1.75 million for an e-sports video-game center.

McAllen is not the only school district that has faced pushback for how it plans to spend its Covid-relief dollars. School districts across the country, finding themselves in the unusual position of being flooded with cash they need to spend fast, have found scores of questionable uses for the money.

Sewing machines, batting helmets, security cameras, band risers, T-shirts, and floor polishers are all among the items that school districts around the country plan to purchase with their Covid money, according to news reports. There are lots of proposals for new playgrounds and updated weight rooms. In Whitewater, Wis., the school district used $2 million in pandemic-relief funding to free up local dollars to install synthetic-turf sports fields. Another Wisconsin school district is paying the superintendent’s wife $130,000 to promote an online-learning tool to district parents, according to a local news report. A Michigan school district proposed spending $120,000 on a food truck for its culinary-arts program and $10,000 for a “nutrition room” to make smoothies for student athletes, Chalkbeat Detroit reported in April.

Wyatt Myskow:

Angela Bilia made $18,000 last year as an adjunct at the University of Akron. She once made more — triple, in fact — doing nearly the exact same job.

In the early months of the pandemic, the Ohio university laid off close to 100 faculty members, including Bilia. But the service Bilia had provided to the university — teaching “the bread and butter courses” of the English department for over 15 years — was still needed. So the university hired her back as an adjunct.

“For people like me,” she said, “it was like an assassination of our careers.”

For people like me, it was like an assassination of our careers.

Before the layoffs, Akron had been struggling. From 2011 to 2020, undergraduate enrollment dropped nearly 40 percent. “The sky has been falling,” one professor said. Discussion of faculty cuts over time was already underway. When the Covid-19 pandemic struck, in the spring of 2020, everything changed. And layoffs were needed sooner.

When the university announced the cuts, the then president of the faculty union called it a “bloodbath.” Since then, similar cutbacks have followed elsewhere. Henderson State University, in Arkadelphia, Ark., laid off 67 faculty members after it declared a state of financial exigency; Ithaca College, in upstate New York, cut the full-time equivalent of 116 faculty positions.

Shirin Ali:

Florida has unveiled a new plan to address the state’s teacher shortage, with a focus on recruiting veterans to become temporary teachers. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is directing the state’s Department of Education (DOE) to allow veterans to receive a temporary five-year teaching certificate while they earn a bachelor’s degree. The certificate will allow veterans to become mentor teachers for a minimum of two years. 

In order to be eligible, veterans must have served a minimum of four years of military service with an honorable or medical discharge, earned a minimum of 60 college credits with a 2.5 grade point average, received a passing score on a Florida subject area exam and cleared a background check. 

“Our veterans have a wealth of knowledge and experience they can bring to bear in the classroom and with this innovative approach they will be able to do so for five years with a temporary certification as they work towards their degree,” said DeSantis in a videoannouncing the new initiative.

Shirin Ali:

Florida has unveiled a new plan to address the state’s teacher shortage, with a focus on recruiting veterans to become temporary teachers. 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is directing the state’s Department of Education (DOE) to allow veterans to receive a temporary five-year teaching certificate while they earn a bachelor’s degree. The certificate will allow veterans to become mentor teachers for a minimum of two years. 

In order to be eligible, veterans must have served a minimum of four years of military service with an honorable or medical discharge, earned a minimum of 60 college credits with a 2.5 grade point average, received a passing score on a Florida subject area exam and cleared a background check. 

“Our veterans have a wealth of knowledge and experience they can bring to bear in the classroom and with this innovative approach they will be able to do so for five years with a temporary certification as they work towards their degree,” said DeSantis in a videoannouncing the new initiative.

Eugene Volokh:

From a Justice Department statement released yesterday:

A federal jury yesterday convicted a former Media Partnerships Manager for the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region at Twitter of acting as a foreign agent without notice to the Attorney General, conspiracy, wire fraud, international money laundering, and falsification of records in a federal investigation. The verdict follows a two-week trial before the Honorable Senior U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen for the Northern District of California.

According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Ahmad Abouammo, 44, formerly of Walnut Creek, California, and currently residing in Seattle, was employed at Twitter as Media Partnerships Manager for the MENA region. The evidence at trial demonstrated that Abouammo took bribes in exchange for accessing, monitoring, and conveying the private information of Twitter users to officials of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Saudi Royal family. In this position, Abouammo was responsible for protecting Twitter user information and owed Twitter his honest services. Twitter policies also required Abouammo to disclose violations of Twitter’s security policies and report gifts from those with business dealings with the company. When questioned about the accesses of Twitter user information and his receipt of bribes, Abouammo then lied to FBI investigators and falsified a document.

Wall Street Journal:

K-12 enrollment nation-wide declined by nearly 3%, or about 1.3 million students, over the past two school years, according to the report by the American Enterprise Institute. Notably, enrollment dropped more in 2020-2021 in districts with the most remote learning (3.2%) than those with the most in-person learning (2.1%). Many parents decided to home-school their children rather than have them stare at screens all day.

Districts that returned to in-person instruction sooner saw enrollments rebound faster, while those that stayed remote longest saw further declines. Those that remained remote longest suffered a net decline of 4.4% since the start of the pandemic, while districts that were most in-person recovered about 1% in the second year and declined only 1.2% overall.

Enrollment also fell more in districts in counties that voted for Joe Biden (3.8%) than in those that favored Donald Trump (2%), perhaps because conservatives put a higher priority on keeping schools open. “Districts’ COVID caution or assertiveness had more to do with communities’ shared ideological priors than COVID case rates in the county,” writes AEI fellow Nat Malkus.

Matthew Syed:

Yesterday morning, it was reported that Salman Rushdie — who had been attacked at a literary event on free speech in America— was unable to speak. Many fanatical Muslims will take this as a sign from God. This, after all, was their intention: to censor those who criticise their religion. The assailant kept trying to attack Rushdie even after he was restrained, according to witnesses. “It took like five men to pull him away and he was still stabbing,” one said.

A fatwa was imposed on Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses, a beautifully written novel that was, in my view, tame in its supposed mockery of Islam. To Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, however, the book was blasphemous. After a bounty was

Paul Needham:

All successful revolutions start with local rebellions, and one has been taking place over the last year at Princeton University—the prestigious institution where I have taught mathematics and made my home for the last 35 years, but which is being destroyed from within by an administration committed to the ideology that Weiss accurately identified.

The saga has been well documented in these pages: In July 2020, tenured classics professor Joshua Katz published an article criticizing several illiberal demands made by a large number of Princeton faculty members to correct the university’s alleged “systemic racism,” including the creation of a “committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty …” For his criticism of these demands, and for referring to a by-then-defunct student organization, the Black Justice League (BJL), as “a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the students (including the many Black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands,” Katz was smeared as a racist by the university in its own freshman orientation program, then fired earlier this year on what is recognized by every sane observer as a pretext: a disputed accusation from a former student with whom Katz had a consensual sexual affair in 2006-07—for which he was already punished in 2018—that Katz had discouraged her from seeking mental health care.

The university maintains that the decision to fire Katz had nothing to do with his criticism of illiberal faculty and students in 2020, nor anything to do with the student affair for which he’d already been suspended without pay for a year. Despite the obvious appearance of cracking down on the protected speech of a tenured faculty member and subjecting him to double jeopardy, Princeton claims that Katz’s firing had only to do with an unproven allegation from a recently aggrieved former lover.

Even the most generous and sympathetic interpretation of the university’s actions can no longer avoid the conclusion that it is, quite simply, lying through its teeth. And so, in the interest of shedding more light on the character of this administration, and of bolstering the principles of free speech, transparency, and academic integrity which have been compromised at Princeton under the watch of President Christopher Eisgruber, I have decided to publish the email correspondence I conducted with him between October 2021 and July 2022. The full exchange, which is too long to reprint here, can be viewed on the website of Princetonians for Free Speech. But I will draw the attention of interested readers to a few key points:

Martin Gurri

On April 18, U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle struck down the federal requirement for wearing surgical masks on airplanes, in airports, and while riding mass transit. Online videos showed passengers and airline staff ripping off their masks and celebrating in mid-flight. Given the accumulated frustration of two years of pandemic travel, the reaction was understandable.

Far more remarkable was the vehemence of those opposed to the ruling. Judge Mizelle was unfit for office, they said. She was too young, at 35; she was unelected; she was a single, unrepresentative voice. Worst of all, she was an “activist Trump judge” and thus branded with the mark of the beast. Rescinding government policy—the kind of thing that American judges engage in with abandon, and usually to progressive cheers—in this instance was condemned as a usurpation of the powers of the executive branch.

Judge Mizelle had crashed an exclusive party reserved for people of higher caste. “The CDC has the capability, through a large number of trained epidemiologists, scientists, to be able to make projections and make recommendations,” said Anthony Fauci, bureaucratic czar of all things Covid-19. “Far more than a judge with no experience in public health.”

That was the heart of the matter. Fauci embodied a bureaucracy and political class that, with the active support of the media, had converted the public’s fear of infection into a principle of elite authority. Under this principle, only trained scientists can make projections and recommendations. The writ of government stretched as far as the boundaries of scientific truth—and those boundaries were, of course, determined by government agencies. It wasn’t just a question of specific policies like lockdowns and vaccine mandates. At stake was the restoration of the public’s habit of obedience that had gone missing during the Trump years.

3/

21% of poor, 18% of black, & 23% of Hispanic kids are reading at grade level by 4th grade.

“We abandoned what worked because we didn’t like how it felt to us as adults, when actually, the social-justice thing to do is to teach them explicitly how to read.” —@KJWinEducation pic.twitter.com/49TXg5qh5X

— Free Black Thought (@FreeBlckThought) August 14, 2022

Yi-Fu Tuan:

What is it then that I do? My answer is human geography; more precisely, a sub-field within human geography that might be called (albeit inelegantly) systematic humanistic geography. And what is that? I will try to provide an answer, drawing on my own experience and work. A good way to start is to envisage a faculty social gathering. At such a gathering, a historian is unlikely to be asked, “Why are you a historian?” Yet I have been asked repeatedly, “Why are you a geographer, or why do you call yourself one?” My unimposing physical appearance may have prompted the question, for people even now tend to see the geographer as a robust explorer in the mold of Robert Falcon Scott or Indiana Jones. As a matter of fact, when I was an undergraduate, the professors of geography at both Oxford and Cambridge were explorers. The question “Why do you call yourself a geographer?” may also have been prompted by the titles I have given to some of my books. People don’t immediately understand how Morality and Imagination, Passing Strange and Wonderful, Cosmos and Hearth, and Escapism can be the works of a geographer.

To those who have wondered about my vocation, I respond in three ways, each geared to a different level of seriousness. At a social gathering, when people are not at their most attentive, I am likely to say, “As a child, I moved around a great deal with my family, and there is nothing like travel to stimulate one’s appetite for geogra- phy.” Sad to say, this lazy answer nearly always satisfies my inquirer. It is what he or she expects. My second and more thoughtful response is: I have always had an inordinate fear of losing my way. Of course, no one likes to be lost, but my dread of it is excessive. I suspect that more than physical discomfort is at stake. To be lost is to be paralyzed, there being no reason to move one way rather than another. Even back and front cease to be meaningful. Life, with no sense of direction, is drained of purpose. So, even as a child, I concluded that I had to be a geographer so as to ensure that I should never be disoriented. Geographers always know where they are, don’t they? They always have a map somewhere–either in their backpack or in their head.

We barely had enough to eat. The elementary school I attended was a single, ill-equipped room. Yet, astonishingly, we were given a thoughtfully packaged, cosmopolitan education. We read elevating stories from the Chinese, European, and American pasts, stories about great scientists and inventors such as Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, and Benjamin Franklin that were meant to stimulate our intellectual ambition, and moral tales (ones of filial piety, naturally, but also Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince”) intended to help us grow into compassionate adults.