ACT scores have declined around the nation, and in Wisconsin as well. Our research shows that the policies of school districts in putting the desires of unions ahead of the needs of children has contributed to this trend. đ§”
â Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) October 14, 2022
In early 2019, as the Defense Departmentâs bureaucracy seemed to be slow-walking then-President Donald Trumpâs order to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria, Joe Kent, a CIA paramilitary officer, called his wife, Shannon, a Navy cryptologic technician who was still in Syria working against the Islamic State group.
ââMake sure youâre not the last person to die in a war that everyoneâs already forgotten about,ââ Kent said he told his wife. âAnd thatâs exactly what happened,â he added bitterly.
The suicide bombing that killed Kent and three other service members days later set off a chain of events â including a somber encounter with Trump â that has propelled Kent from a storied combat career to single parenthood, from comparing notes with other anti-war veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to making increasingly loud pronouncements that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters are political prisoners.
In five weeks, Kent, 42, a candidate for a House seat in Washington state that was long represented by a soft-spoken moderate Republican, may well be elected to Congress. And he is far from alone.
A new breed of veterans, many with remarkable biographies and undeniable stories of heroism, are running for the House on the far right of the Republican Party, challenging old assumptions that adding veterans to Congress â men and women who fought for the country and defended the Constitution â would foster bipartisanship and cooperation. At the same time, they are embracing anti-interventionist military and foreign policies that, since the end of World War II, have been associated more with the Democratic left than the mainline GOP.
AOC, 12/2020, on Antifa activists menacing politicians in public: Activists *should* be impolite. “The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable.”
AOC, last night, to protesters confronting her for funding Biden’s proxy war: I won’t answer you! “You’re being ruude!” https://t.co/iuy4GYOLdY
â Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 13, 2022
https://t.co/NGUQPcmrSr pic.twitter.com/iIEWFglQMY
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) October 16, 2022
A professor fired by New York University after students said his class was too difficult told The College Fix that students are not trying as hard, even as exams have become easier than before.
More than 80 students from Maitland Jones, Jr.âs 350-student chemistry course signed a petition claiming âthat the high-stakes course â notorious for ending many a dream of medical school â was too hard, blaming Jones for their poor test scores,â according to The New York Times, which did not link to the petition.
The Fix asked Jones (pictured) in an email interview whether the number of failing grades in recent years has been unusually high. He responded on October 10 that grades have tanked even as he had made the exams easier to pass.
âIf you include withdrawals with the few Fâs I give in the course, yes,â Jones told The College Fix.
Though âthe exams have become easier (the top of the class now routinely gets 100 on the exams),â he wrote, âthe grades have plummeted.â
âClass attendance (about 33% mid year) and office hours attendance (3-10 and only the top students) has also crashed,â Jones wrote. âIs there a connection? You tell me!â
Yet the tech elite today, as well as their Wall Street allies, no longer resemble the entrepreneurs of the past. The masters of our increasingly âwokeâ corporate elites are, for the most part, now second-generation bureaucrats presiding over the wealthiest, most pervasive monopolies on the plant. Controlling 90 percent of a market like search (Google), operating system software (Microsoft), dominating the cloud and on-line retail (Amazon) or 90 percent of phones (Google and Apple) does not turn executives into-risk takers but acquirers. Three tech firms now account as well for two-thirds of all on-line advertising revenues, which now represent the vast majority of all ad sales. Once paragons of entrepreneurial vigor, these firms, as Mike Lind has noted, have morphed into exemplars of âtollbooth capitalism,â which receive revenues on transactions that far exceed anything they lose in failed ventures and acquisitions.
Finance, the other pillar, has also become markedly more concentrated, with the number of banks down a full third since 2000 in the U.S. while Europe experienced a slower, but similar consolidation. The five largest banks control more than 45 percent of all assets in the U.S., up from under 30 percent twenty years ago. The five largest investment banks control roughly one third of investment funds: the top 10 control an absolute majority.
This growing concentration fosters a greater acceptance and even eagerness for state regulation. In the earlier open, entrepreneurial period, tech and even finance executives tended to a variety of views, with most leaning towards libertarianism. Historically, Silicon Valley elected middle-of-the-road Republicansâliberal on defense and culture but fiscally conservativeâlike Pete McCloskey, Ed Zschau, and Tom Campbell. Democrats certainly were present and competitive, but those too tended towards the center.
It was an important, if not especially proud, moment for Columbia â but it was surely a bigger moment in the lives of those West Harlem business owners, as their property gets taken away to promote the âvisionâ of what is, in fact, a multibillion-dollar corporation servicing the daughters and sons of the wealthy, the powerful and the connected.
Traditionally, the âpublic-domainâ power was used to acquire property needed for things like roads and bridges. Itâs still often defended in those terms, but the âpublic useâ required for such takings has now been interpreted by courts to include pretty much anything the government wants to do with the property â including handing it over to someone else who just happens to be wealthier or better-connected than the original property holder.
In this case, the government lacks even the weak excuse that the change will boost tax revenues, since â as Megan McArdle of The Atlantic Monthly pointed out â the property is being transferred from taxpaying businesses to a largely non-taxpaying enterprise.
Part of the American Dream was the expectation that if you started a business, you might go broke but you didnât have to worry about the government seizing your business on behalf of those with more political juice. That sort of thing was for Third World countries, corrupt kleptocracies where connections mattered more than capability.
Not anymore. In fact, some of those formerly corrupt Third World countries have started providing stronger protection for private property, as theyâve realized that the more power you give to politicians and their cronies, the less incentive people have to try to succeed through hard work. Whatâs the point, if youâre at the mercy of the cronies?
We, on the other hand, seem to be moving backward.
The fact is the powerful and connected â the Bloombergs, the Bollingers, et al â donât really need strong legal protections. Nobodyâs going to take their property anyway. (Whenâs the last time you heard of a rich guyâs home being condemned?) For those with juice, things seldom get as far as the courts.
The courts are supposed to be there to protect the rest: The people without the connections, the ones who depend on the rule of law to keep the predators away.
That protection has never been perfect, of course, but in the area of eminent domain itâs become a sick joke. The message sent is that your property belongs to you â until somebody with more clout wants it for something else, be it a âvision,â or a moneymaking scheme.
KEY FINDINGS:
1. Ivy League payments and entitlements cost taxpayers $41.59 billion over a six-year period (FY2010-FY2015). This is equivalent to $120,000 in government monies, subsidies, & special tax treatment per undergraduate student, or $6.93 billion per year.
As long as TikTok supports the political establishment, it will evade sanction, allowing its data gathering machine to continue unimpeded.https://t.co/U3OTnu7qRa
â John Robb (@johnrobb) October 15, 2022
With each public remark a scholar may add to societyâs collective working memory or subtract from it. Their addition is the new research they present in a journal article or conference presentation. The subtraction, when it occurs, is typically found in the scholarâs portrayal of previous research on the topic.
Editors typically grant scholars, and especially celebrity scholars, quite a bit of latitude in how they reference the universe of other relevant research. The single new study presented in a manuscript sent to a scholarly journal for review may be rigorously critiqued even while the literature review presented at the beginning is not reviewed at all. This dynamic allows scholars to write pretty much anything they please about the universe of researchâdeclaring themselves to be the first in the world to study the topic (and, thus, to be the worldâs foremost expert), ignoring or demeaning the work of professional rivals, or referencing only the work of friends, who may return the favor in their own writings.
Preposterous, you say?
Indeed, the practice of âdismissive reviewsâ pervades contemporary scholarship. Look for yourself. Access a standard internet search engine, such as Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo, and enter phrases such as: âthere is no research,â âthis is the first study,â âlittle research exists,â âthere are few studies,â âpaucity of research,â and the like.
Here are some search engine counts I got on Google (September 12, 2022) for certain phrases:
A potential $50 million contract allows PR firm to be âembedded at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta as part of the Division of Viral Diseases team.â
Iâm still not certain what happened to Americans, who seem to have tossed aside all caution and critical thinking when it comes to medical interventions that get labeled âvaccines.â I can only remark that, to myself and many living in Europe, it comes across as rather disturbing at timesâalmost cultish.
If interested in further reading about the major conflicts of interest and lack of transparency surrounding the COVID-19 vaccines, I won a British Journalism Award for a series of investigations published by The BMJ:
Oxfordâs John Bell is certainly an interesting figure, as he has his fingers in so many pies. Yet Oxford and the British government continue to hide his financial interests and corporate ties. Bell is also a board member of Hakluyt, a British spy firm, with a long shady past. As I wrote a couple weeks back, the Brunswick Group PR firm provides public relations for both Hakluty and British Petroleum (BP), the fossil fuel company which employed Hakluty in the early 2000s to spy on Greenpeace activists.
You might want to look at corporal punishment of children in schools.
â Lucien Lombardo, New York
As a means of controlling classrooms or improving academic performance, corporal punishment has an uninspiring track record. Last year, a review of 69 studiespublished in the medical journal the Lancet found âphysical punishment is ineffective in achieving parentsâ goal of improving child behaviour and instead appears to have the opposite effect of increasing unwanted behaviours.â
The good news is that, in most of the country, fewer than 0.01 percent of public school students were paddled, slapped or otherwise physically punished in the 2017-2018 school year, the most recent for which we have data from the U.S. Education Department.
The bad news is that 10 states, mostly in the South, donât seem to have gotten the memo.
Those 10 states accounted for a full 99 percent of incidents of corporal punishment reported to the Education Department. About 75 percent happened in just four Southern states: Mississippi, Texas, Alabama and Arkansas.
Mississippi is the nationâs corporal-punishment capital, and itâs not particularly close. About 4.2 percent of students there were physically punished, more than double the rate in Arkansas, which ranked second at 1.8 percent. That adds up to more than 20,000 Mississippi students being paddled in the 2017-2018 school year â nearly a third of all American public-school students who were physically punished that year.
In the 10 paddling states, Native American and Black boys are punished at the highest rates (more than double the average), while White boys and boys with disabilities also face relatively high rates of corporal punishment. Girls are physically punished at much lower rates, with Native Americans, Blacks and girls with disabilities bearing the brunt of such punishment in those states.
Statement of Commissioner Gail Heriot in the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report: Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connection to School to Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanicâ
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacherâs Remarks to the School Board on Madisonâs Disastrous Reading Results
Madisonâs taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
âAn emphasis on adult employmentâ
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 canât 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?
Kimâs research particularly dives into U.S. involvement in the Korean military conflict during the Cold War. Her unique approach examines the experiences of ordinary people caught in the machinery of war, rather than narratives of government and military leaders.
She details those accounts in her award-winning book, âThe Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold Story.â The book focuses on Japanese American soldiers whom the U.S. drafted into the conflict. Many of them served as interrogators during the Korean War after being held in U.S. internment camps just five years prior.
Before working at UW-Madison, Kim taught at New York University. She also completed her undergraduate studies at Yale University and received her doctorate from the University of Michigan. Her next book, tentatively titled, âThe World that Hunger Made,â explores how states, organizations and political economies have attempted to regulate hunger rather than solve it.
Loss of Bible literacy was a disaster in the sense that educated people used to be able to draw on about thousand years of a peopleâs history that varied from desert nomads (Exodus) to tribal confederation (Judges) to kingdom (Samuel) to subjects & rebels (Maccabees).
â Nemets (@Peter_Nimitz) October 14, 2022
The average ACT test score for students in the class of 2022 dropped to its lowest level in more than three decades, according to data out Wednesday.
Why it matters: The decline in scores is the latest indicator of the pandemic’s detrimental effects on the nation’s students â and underscores the extent to which graduating high school students are ill-prepared for college.
Driving the news: The national average composite score for graduating seniors in 2022 was 19.8 out of 36, the lowest average score since 1991 and down from 20.3 for graduating seniors in 2021.
Iâve had a colleague stabbed on the way to work. Countless issues of burglary. I mean, thatâs a really difficult backdrop with which to draw talent to your city from,â Griffin told the Wall Street Journal.
In relation to his remarks, it is necessary to point out that, under the leadership of Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D-IL), Chicago recorded 797 homicides in 2021, the highest of any U.S. city.
When I see that we are headed into a significant growth slowdown, even a recession, and bank credit is still growing. The classic definition of a banker used to be that he lends you an umbrella but would take it away at the first sight of rain. Not this time. Banks keep lending, they even reduce their provisions for bad debt. The CFO of Commerzbank was asked about this fact in July, and she said that the government would not allow large debtors to fail. That, to me, was a transformational statement. If you are a banker who believes in private sector credit risk, you stop lending when the economy is headed into a recession. But if you are a banker who believes in government guarantees, you keep lending. This is happening today. Banks keep lending, and nominal GDP will keep growing. Thatâs why, in nominal terms, we wonât see an economic contraction.
Arthur Burns, who was the Fed chairman during the Seventies, explained in a speech in 1979 why he lost control of inflation. There was an elected government, he said, elected to fight a war in Vietnam, elected to reduce inequality through Lyndon B. Johnsonâs Great Society programs. Burns said it wasnât his job to stop the war or the Great Society programs. These were political choices.
You get stagflation after years of badly misallocated capital, which tends to happen when the government interferes for too long in the allocation of capital. When the UK government did this in the 1950s and 60s, they allocated a lot of capital into coal mining, automobile production and the Concorde. It turned out that the UK didnât have a future in any of those industries, so it was wasted and we ended up with high unemployment.
Board member Savion Castro said, âI think weâre going to have to look at another referendum in the coming year or two, given our fiscal situation.â (Taxpayer supported political activity)
CommentaryâŠ
But documented racism provided the kindling for Kielâs political eruption. That story started in 2020 when Amy Wempner discovered racist Snapchat messages sent about her son Armond â one of five Black students at Kiel High School.
The familyâs push for the school district to respond illustrates how a Republican strategy to mischaracterize discussions of race as political indoctrination can prevent schools from protecting students of color.
After the school district brought on a consulting firm to conduct training about racism and harassment, Kiel parents accused the firm of advancing critical race theory. That movement flipped the school board and prompted Armond to transfer to another school district.
In a federal lawsuit filed in October, the family accused the Kiel school district of violating Armondâs civil rights by failing to appropriately address racial hostility.
Notes on Wisconsin Watch $ and influence.
We have extended ourselves beyond a balanced budget with this calculated use of fund balance to make this historical investment in our hourly staff,” board member Christina Gomez Schmidt said, “which we have heard is very important.
“I do want to recognize that our obligation in the next year’s planning and budget is to make the structural changes that we indicated would be needed to balance this investment and not create a structural deficit for future budgets,” she said. Some of those proposed structural changes include repurposing or eliminating 100 positions in the district.
“I know this discussion tonight is about the 2022-23 budget, but beyond this year I’m concerned about future budgets and the future of funding for public education in Wisconsin,” she said.
Board member Savion Castro said, “I think we’re going to have to look at another referendum in the coming year or two, given our fiscal situation.” (Taxpayer supported political activity)
Madison taxpayers have long spent more than most k-12 school districts, now more than $22,000 per student.
Scott Girard: It continued the ongoing drop since the onset of the pandemic, which has seen the district go from 26,977 students in fall 2019 to 25,244 in this yearâs âthird Friday count,â which is completed on the third Friday each September. This yearâs drop, however, was smaller than the past two years, which saw drops of 1,032 and 470 students.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanicâ
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacherâs Remarks to the School Board on Madisonâs Disastrous Reading Results
Madisonâs taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
âAn emphasis on adult employmentâ
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 canât 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?
Ronald Reagan was president and James Wyngaarden was director of the National Institutes of Health when a division of the agency found 10 papers describing trials of psychiatric drugs it had funded had fake data or other serious issues.
Thirty-five years later, one of those articles has finally been retracted.
A 1987 report by the National Institute of Mental Health found that Stephen Breuning, then an assistant professor of child psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, had made up results in 10 papers purportedly describing research funded by two grants the institute had funded.
[As an analogy, itâs awkward for intellectuals on the center left to watch large numbers of working class Americans moving each year from blue states to places like Texas and Florida. Indeed, this fact explains their sudden interest in zoning reform, which is (ironically) a longstanding cause for libertarians like me.]
Thatâs not to say that the US might not have been better off with more welfare spending in the 19th century, just that itâs not an obvious example of the failure of extreme libertarianism. Indeed, Iâd go even further. At the (cross sectional) level, I donât believe world history offers any obvious examples of the failure of libertarian ideology. Not one. If I am wrong, which country is the failed libertarian model?
On the other hand, from a time series perspective there are some seemingly obvious examples of libertarian excess, including the Great Depression of the 1930s and the more recent Great Recession that followed the 2008 banking crisis. While those events certainly look like failures of libertarian ideology, on closer inspection they are both examples of the failure of government monetary policy. Nonetheless, here I believe DeLong is partly correct, as while I see these events as representing government policy failure, I accept DeLongâs view that they largely reflect government policy failures caused by ideas popular among many libertarians, such as opposition to stimulus when NGDP has fallen. So I certainly donât wish to suggest that our hands are clean. Libertarians are like anyone else; they often hold incorrect and even morally objectionable views.
[BTW, throughout the book DeLong sprinkles in a few embarrassing quotes from libertarians like George Stigler and Friedrich Hayek. In contrast, one finds almost no examples of embarrassing quotes from intellectuals on the center-left, even though if you go back in history you can find plenty of such examples on issues ranging from race to gay rights. Whole books have been written documenting the leftâs embarrassing excuse making regarding communist regimes.]
DeLong views Herbert Hoover as an example of how laissez-faire ideology can lead to disaster. The truth is more complicated. At the time, Hoover was regarded as being much more interventionist than Coolidge. DeLong correctly lists some of Hooverâs mistakes, but only those that would be viewed as mistakes by a center-left economist. Thus Hoover favored high tariffs and opposed devaluing the dollar. But DeLong doesnât discuss the many (ineffective) actions that Hoover took to ameliorate the Depression. Nor does he discuss Hooverâs decision to dramatically raise income taxes on the rich (from 25% to 63%), or his success in jawboning corporations to avoid the sort of deep nominal wage cuts that allowed for a fast recovery from the 1921 deflation. Thatâs not laissez-faire. Iâm not one of those libertarians that believe these policy errors caused the Great Depressionâtight money was the main problemâbut these mistakes made it somewhat worse. (As did FDRâs NIRA wage shock.) I suspect that most center-left economists support higher taxes on the rich and oppose nominal wage cuts in a depression, so perhaps this explains DeLongâs oversight.
But given what we know now, the cause of the Great Depression was clearly government failure.
Earlier this month, old-fashioned Xeroxed copies of a newspaper article appeared across the Mid-Market neighborhood in Downtown San Francisco. The article, from the San Francisco Chronicle, featured the headline:âS.F. D.A. Brooke Jenkins says sheâll consider murder charges for fentanyl dealers.â The article was taped to walls on neighborhood corners regularly frequented by drug dealers. At least one of those Xerox copies had the headline translated into Spanish â all the better for the dealers in question, most of whom are Honduran nationals, to get the message.
The photocopies were distributed by Matt Dorsey, Supervisor for the district that includes the Mid-Market area, which is adjacent to the Tenderloin (in San Francisco, which is both a county and a city, Supervisors are the equivalent of City Council members in other cities). Dorseyâs office had organized a neighborhood clean-up and the Supervisor had handed the article for volunteers to promote. Dorsey is himself a recovering addict and prior to becoming Supervisor, he was the Communications Director for the San Francisco Police Department. Ridding the neighborhood of drug dealers is his number one priority â a goal he shares with new District Attorney Jenkins.
Why in hell (our favorite rhetorical flourish) is the Madison public school district promoting a Get Out the Vote rally? For a partisan election! No school board candidate, no school referendum is on the ballot. But Tony Evers and Mandela Barnes are!
Why is the rally, scheduled for Monday 10-24-22 at the State Capitol, called âUnity in the Communityâ? What unity? An election â any election â is up or down, yes or no. Somebody wins, the other guy loses â the antithesis of unity. Unity? Thatâs Kim Jong Un language. The kumbaya word is invoked to hide the partisan nature of this exercise. Unavoidably, the Madison Metropolitan School District gives away its game:
Thielâs spending has been dwarfed this year by at least three other mega-donors â Soros ($128m to the Democrats), shipping products tycoon Richard Uihlein ($53m to Republicans) and hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin ($50m to Republicans). And Thiel has some way to go to match the consistent giving, cycle after cycle, of the Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late Las Vegas casino magnate.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanicâ
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacherâs Remarks to the School Board on Madisonâs Disastrous Reading Results
Madisonâs taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
âAn emphasis on adult employmentâ
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 canât 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?
Until the early 1960s, young people acted older than their actual age. Now, older adults pretend to be younger than their actual age, which is perhaps one of the reasons why boomers are so easy to mock. In a recent article, Abigail Shrier quoted a physician and psychologist who had told her that âFifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys.â
An article in the Wall Street Journal reports:
Aging baby boomers are ⊠struggling with a bunch of issues ⊠One of the most vexing issues they face is deciding what they want to be called by their grandchildren, lest it make them soundâand feelâold ⊠Ms. Wilkofsky has decided to be called Glamma, as in glamorous grandmother, a name suggested by one of her girlfriends. Her husband, Steven, a 58-year-old doctor, said he didn’t want a typical grandfatherly name, either, because âI still feel like I am 25.â So he chose to go by âPapa Doc.â
And this is from an article on the same topic from the New York Times:
However mightily my peers may pine for grandchildren and adore them when they arrive, some donât want to acknowledge being old enough to be dubbed Grandpop or Granny. Such names conjure up gray hair and orthopedic shoes, along with a status our society may honor in the abstract but few boomers actually welcome.
A few months after the student eruptions at Yale in 2015, I met with a professor for coffee.
Gas bills in September were about 33% higher than a year earlier to chalk up an 18th consecutive double-digit percentage gain, according to Labor Department data. Thatâs the longest streak in more than three decades, when a 58-month run of such gains ended in September 1983. Electric bills, which rose 15.5% last month, are on a seven-month streak of double-digit gains, the longest run in 16 years.
US heating bills are poised to be even costlier, given signs of soaring oil and natural gas prices and cooling temperatures ahead of winter along with disruptions exacerbated by a European energy crisis and Russiaâs war in the Ukraine. Natural gas is the key fuel for many US power plants and homes that rely on oil for heat — such as in the Northeast — may be hit even harder by rising costs.
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessw
Close your eyes and imagine a rural person. What do you see?
Now hold on to that image ⊠weâll get back to it.
Growing up, I traded urban and rural values each Wednesday and every other weekend while being shuttled between one parent who lived in the Atlanta suburbs and the other in the rolling foothills of Appalachia.
Even with that partial education in rural life, I find myself constantly contending with my blind spots, which Iâve become even more acutely aware of since last October, when I joined Open Campus and became the nationâs only national reporter dedicated to rural higher education.
Take a recent piece I wrote co-published with Open Campus and The Washington Post about rural broadband, headlined Despite pandemic promises, many rural students still lack fast internet.
Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson went to a debate Thursday night and a Mandela Barnes rally broke out. The crowd for Todayâs TMJ 4âs farce wildly applauded Barnes, repeatedly booed and heckled Johnson, and whipped itself into such a partisan frenzy that it accidentally gave away the media bias game by loudly cheering at some of the questions that moderator Shannon Sims was asking Johnson.
âAudience, please,â moderator Charles Benson chided, perhaps recognizing how obvious it looked that both Sims and the crowd were doing their best to make Barnes look as good as possible (admittedly not an easy task).
As fair-minded and professional as Benson was, though, he was an overmatched ringmaster for this circus. And ironically, it seemed to throw Barnes off his game, as the constant applause that interrupted his answers caused him to fumble many of his best lines.
This serves as an apt metaphor for Barnesâ campaign: Both the media and his fellow Democrats so protected him during the primary that once he faced actual questions about his record during the general election, he found himself unable to come up with satisfactory answers.
The picture isn’t complete, as the count excludes homeschooling and students who pay tuition in private schools. And the numbers released by the Department of Public Instruction on Friday are unaudited.
According to the preliminary numbers, the decline for public school districts is less dramatic than earlier years of the pandemic but continues a downward trend that creates more budget holes for public schools.
Wisconsin public school districts saw a drop of 25,742 students from fall 2019 to fall 2020 amid the onset of the pandemic. The situation slightly stabilized the following year, when the decrease was 3,866, similar to the 3,788 student decrease from fall 2018 to fall 2019.
This year, though, there are 6,889 fewer public school students than last fall.
Enrollment in the four private school parental choice programs, meanwhile, increased 6.7% from last fall to 52,189 students this year.
The state uses enrollment to help determine a school districtâs revenue cap, which limits the amount of revenue it can take in through a combination of state aid and local property taxes.
In its June preliminary budget, MMSD officials had projected an enrollment of 25,238 students.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanicâ
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacherâs Remarks to the School Board on Madisonâs Disastrous Reading Results
Madisonâs taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
âAn emphasis on adult employmentâ
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 canât 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?
CPRE:
This report is the second installment of an updated set of papers that assess the best available evidence on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected Americaâs students.
The Center on Reinventing Public Education has compiled hundreds of studies and convened multiple panels of education experts to interpret the data. Three initial reports released in 2021 assessed what we knew to date about the pandemicâs effects on studentsâ academic progress, its effects on their mental health and social-emotional well-being, and its impact on students with disabilities.
The News: On behalf of the Brown County Taxpayers Association (BCTA), the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed an emergency injunction with the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, arguing that the President cannot spend trillions of taxpayer dollars without authorization from Congress.
WILL Quote: WILL President and General Counsel, Rick Esenberg, said, âThe decision ultimately rests upon higher courts. WILL anticipated this outcome, and is well prepared to advance the rule of law to the Court of Appealsâeven to the U.S. Supreme Court, if need be. The President must be held accountable for his overreach of power.â
Background: WILL filed a federal lawsuitagainst the Biden Administration last week in support of BCTA, challenging the new federal student debt forgiveness program. The âOne-Time Student Loan Debt Relief Plan,â announced by President Biden in August of 2022, promises to cancel debts owed to the U.S. Treasury by tens of millions of borrowers, all without authorization of such a program by Congress or federal law. The U.S. Department of Education is expected to begin automatically canceling debts in the coming days, potentially costing U.S. taxpayers more than $1 trillion.
I am currently studying at a non-english university in a technical specialty involving math (Calculus and Linear Algebra, to be exact). Right now the workload is 3-4 hours of classes a week, which is painfully low. And after a second year, apparently even less time will be spent on it. My English is good enough to consume math content, so that’s not an issue. As well as explanations: I have already found and used resources (both in English and my mother tongue) to self-study fast enough to submit my homework.
What actually is an issue are workbooks (or exercise books, whatever you call it). All the workbooks by which we study vary in quality and there are library shortages. The authors are almost always dropping easy exercises right after the start of the paragraph in favor of much more complex ones.
Since I can buy books on Amazon or acquire PDFs using other methods I am asking for your advice on picking general math workbooks that fall under all of the following criteria:
A newly filed complaint with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) alleges that three tax-exempt organizationsâthe Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL), Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), and National Vote at Home Instituteâunlawfully intervened in the 2020 election in order to aid Democrats.
Under IRS rules, 501(c)(3) nonprofits that engage in partisan election intervention are subject to loss of their tax exemption.
A second IRS complaint alleges that billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, made unlawful personal income tax deductions on the roughly $400 million they gifted to CTCL and CEIR in 2020âfunds which were routed through the left-leaning intermediary Silicon Valley Community Foundationâsince those organizations were engaged in illegal campaign activities.
While McEnaney and Todd call our attention to the manipulative maneuvers behind Spotifyâs algorithms, Jordan Pruett explores the artifices behind the New York Timesâ famous bestseller list (an investigation that pairs well with the NYT bestseller data that he curated and published in the Post45 Data Collective). Pruett lays bare how the seemingly authoritative list has long been shaped by distinct historical circumstances and editorial choices.
The last three essays all tackle important issues of cultural representation by turning to numbers. Howard Rambsy and Kenton Rambsy examine how, and how often, the New York Times discusses Black writers. They offer quantitative proof of the frequently leveled critique that elite white publishing outlets often cover only one Black writer at a time, and they show that this is especially true with writers like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead.
Nora Shaalan explores the fiction section of the New Yorker, especially the view of the world imagined by its short stories over the past 70 years. Despite pretensions toward cosmopolitanism, the magazine, Shaalan reports, largely publishes short stories that are provincial, both domestically and globally.
Denying jobs to students who donât boycott Yale is an obvious case of excess, a moral failure anyone should recognize, especially a federal judge. It punishes innocent students for making reasonable choices about where to get an education. They no more deserve punishment than Judge Hoâs clerks deserve to be denied future jobs for working in his chambers, where cancel culture seems to be embraced. Perhaps Judge Ho does not mean to punish the students, but â at best â his actions treat students as casualties of a boycott targeting Yale, as if the students were products we should refuse to buy, like grapes during the Delano strike.
We should reserve boycotts, shaming, and shunning for intolerable behavior. Judge Ho points us in the opposite direction, into a world where we punish everyone whose views offend us, including those who will not join our boycotts. Strategies like these are the cause of our cancel culture problems, not the solution.
Global household wealth is on track for its first significant contraction since the great financial crisis of 2008, according to a report by Allianz.
After three years of record gains in the value of household financial assets, 2022 is likely to result in a nominal drop of more than 2%, researchers said in a global wealth report published Wednesday. They called this year a âturning pointâ for global wealth, amid scant signs that a meaningful reversal will follow.
In an 1891 essay penned as a student at Harvard, future civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois asked a provocative question: âDoes education pay?â
Anticipating the rivalry with Booker T. Washington that would define much of his early career, Du Bois writes true education is more than just practical job training. Genuine education, Du Bois argues, aims at the higher ends of human life, the âTruth, Beauty, and Virtueâ of the tradition that includes Aristotle, Socrates, Michelangelo, Goethe, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Christâa few of the denizens of the realm that Du Bois calls âthe kingdom of culture.â One enters this kingdom through an education grounded in the liberal artsâthe great works of literature, history, philosophy, and science that have explored the nature and meaning of human life.
Today, a liberal arts education continues to have both detractors and defenders. One hotspot for the conflict between the two is the increasing national interest in returning to classical education.
While this movement has been on the rise in charter schools, homeschooling, and private schools for several decades, it has grown even more prevalent during the last few years as the recent pandemic drew attention to the problems in Americaâs public schools. Just as in the days of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, much of the conflict over classical education is focused on questions of access, particularly for people of color and children from underserved communities.
Law schools report employment data each year to the American Bar Association (ABA) as a condition of their accreditation, as well as to the National Association for Law Placement (NALP). Troublingly, law schools are not required to collect and report any data about the outcomes of many of their graduates prestigious first jobs as judicial law clerks. After law schools receive reports from law clerk alumni about their negative clerkship experiences, institutions are not required to report this data anywhere.
Institutional structures within the legal community discourage law schools from collecting and reporting data about negative clerkship experiences for several reasons. First, no law school wants to appear to publicly antagonize judges, because law schools are incentivized to maintain positive relationships with the judiciary. Second, some law schools would like to remain ignorant of the scope of the problem. Finally, many law schools intend to continue funneling students into clerkships with notoriously misbehaving judges because the clerkships are so prestigious: collecting and reporting data on judicial misconduct could undermine these efforts.
The following critique of the education system goes beyond merely pointing out that these institutions mostly do not deliver on their main promise of teaching valuable skills. I argue that these institutions also destroy the desire to learn. This destruction is, as we will see, a real catastrophe.
If for example certain governments were in the future to take issue with people learning Cantonese, I would prefer that Apple not have any idea which of my users own Cantonese language dictionaries / TTS voices / readers / etc.
â Michael Love (@elkmovie) October 12, 2022
The News: Academic theories underlie the important classes that our children learn in every day at school. But these theories are more than an academic exercise â they shape the lens that students view the world. This is especially true in social studies.
WILL is proud to partner with Scott Niederjohn and Mark Schug, professors who have spent their careers crafting social studies curriculum and training teachers, to provide a roadmap for educators and parents looking to understand how academic theories impact student learning of social studies.
The Quotes: WILL Director of Education PolicyÂÂ, Libby Sobic, said, âWe encourage Wisconsin school districts to use this report as a guide. Students deserve the right resources and skills to analyze social studies-based subjects, for their personal growth and individual liberties.â
At the heart of the second trial to come out of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion probe is a story of disinformation.
Marc Elias, general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, testified both during a House Intelligence Committee investigation in 2017 and recently during Durham’s ongoing probe that he was the one who hired the opposition research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump.
Fusion GPS went on to commission former MI6 agent Christopher Steele to create the infamous “Steele dossier,” which purported to show collusion between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin. It contained several salacious and since-debunked claims about Trump and his alleged ties to Russia.
The federal government infamously used the now-discredited dossier to obtain a warrant to surveil former Trump 2016 campaign aide Carter Page. The Justice Department later admitted the warrant application was full of misinformation and the surveillance warrant should’ve never been approved.
The primary source of the Steele dossier was Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst who’s now on trial as part of Durham’s investigation for allegedly lying to the FBI about his own sources for the information that he provided to Steele.
Instead of the community controlling major educational decisions, charter management organizations control those decisions. Still, allowing parents to seek the form of education they deem right for their children may increase voice in part. Additionally, valid democratic authorities across the country have chosen to provide some education through charter vehicles. Given the strong interest in keeping tax policy in harmony with democratically chosen policies, most ideal in this conflict would be to maintain tax-exemption. However, to be charitable, a charter school and its management organization ought to be democratically operated in some broad sense. The Article thus suggests some ways to increase the democratic accountability of charters.
As definitions go, this is pretty thin. Although Aristotle makes it clear that laughter is a form of disdain, distinct from mockery, he does not explain what sorts of errors and disgrace make a person ridiculous, what sort of pleasure laughter confers, whether any other dramatic devices are needed to elicit a chuckle, or if any other types of laughter are possible. He probably intended to answer these in another part of his treatise. At various points, he promises that there is more to come; some later authorities (Diogenes Laertius, Boethius, etc.) indicate that, in its original form, the Poetics contained at least two books. But at some point in late antiquity the second was lost.
For more than 1,000 years scarcely a trace of the lost treatise remained in the Latin West, beyond a handful of second-hand remarks. In 1839, however, a manuscript was found in the BibliothĂšque nationale de France which looked like a summary of the missing text. Since then, this has been used as the basis for a possible reconstruction. But the manuscript is so garbled that some scholars doubt its authenticity and feel that Aristotleâs full philosophy of laughter may be gone forever
The Ramona Bessinger story is beginning to remind me of the Gibsonâs Bakery story.
A massive bullying educational institution capitulating to and becoming part of a student and administrative mob trying to destroy a career over claimed (but not real) racial sleights, resulting in a defamation lawsuit. Then it was Oberlin College, now itâs the Providence School District. Then it was David and âGrandpaâ Gibson, now itâs Ramona Bessinger.
The Gibsonâs Bakery case ended up with an unapologetic institution owing tens of millions of dollars and capturing the ire of the nation. There was no adult in the room at Oberlin College when it came to Gibsonâs Bakery. There doesnât appear to be an adult in the room at the Providence Schools when it comes to Ramona Bessinger. Providence Schools appear to be acting stupidly.
We covered the Gibsonâs Bakery case since the inception of the student protests, through the legal wrangling, through the verdicts, appeals, and finally payments. It took almost six years in total. My gut tells me itâs deja vu all over again, but weâre in the early innings.
We have covered Bessingerâs story from inception. In July 2021, then a middle school teacher, Bessinger blew the whistle at Legal Insurrection on a new radicalized and racialized curriculum that was creating racial tension in school, including turning students and staff against her because she is white:
Yet the material economy has been hugely constrained in recent years â and deliberately so. This has become all too apparent since the war in Ukraine. Back in the pandemic era, thanks to the recurring lockdowns, the biggest winners were the tech giants and their supporters in Wall Street. Now Silicon Valley, suffering from the worst IPO market in 20 years, resembles something akin to a psychiatric ward, while Goldman Sachs is contemplating mass layoffs. Today, many green-energy projects and ESG funds (that is, funds rated as environmentally sustainable) are languishing, despite benefitting from massive government subsidies and relentless public-relations campaigns in recent years. Meanwhile, oil companies, once demonised by climate-obsessed politicians and activists, are now enjoying bumper profits, as are some commodity firms.
The conflict between the material economy and the economy based in ephemera â such as the creative industries, tech and financial services â is likely to define the coming political conflicts both within countries and between them. The laptop elites, led by Silicon Valley, the City of London and Wall Street, generally favour constraining producers of fuel, food and manufactured goods. In contrast, the masses, who produce and transport those goods, are now starting to realise that they still have the power to demand better futures for themselves and their families. Like railway workers, they can threaten to shut things down and win much higher pay.
American attitudes on education-related issues are undergoing historic changes leading up to this year’s midterm elections. Typically a tertiary issue for voters, education ranked sixth in a recent Pew Research Center poll on issues voters find “very important.” A recent Harris Poll found education to be the fourth-most important issue for parentsâ ââ behind perennial heavyweights such as the economy, taxation, and health care. At the same time, over 80% of parents said that education had become more important to them than in the past, and just as many said they would vote outside their own party for candidates whose education stances matched their own.
Voters’ attention to education issues may be uncommonly high, but an even more momentous shift is suggested by the fact that the political party Americans trust most on education is now a toss-up. Over the past three decades, Hart Research has conducted two dozen polls and found that Americans favored Democrats over Republicans on education issues by a minimum of six points; on average, the Democratic advantage was just under 14 points. But in March 2022, when Rasmussen asked 1,000 likely voters, “[w]hich party do you trust more to deal with education issues, Democrats or Republicans?” 43% reported that they trusted Republicans, compared to just 36% who favored Democrats.
Other polls confirm this finding: A June 2022 poll by Democrats for Education Reform found that 47% of voters in battleground districts trusted Republicans on education while 44% trusted Democrats. Another poll of voters in battleground states by the American Federation of Teachers revealed that 39% of voters trusted Republicans on the issue, giving them a one-point lead over Democrats. It seems that just as education’s salience with voters is rising, Democrats’ advantage is dissolving.
Just released today:
Dear members of our alumni community:
Yale Law School is dedicated to building a vibrant intellectual environment where ideas flourish. To foster free speech and engagement, we emphasize the core values of professionalism, integrity, and respect. These foundational values guide everything we do.
Over the last six months, we have taken a number of concrete steps to reaffirm our enduring commitment to the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. These actions are well known to our faculty, students, and staff, but I want to share some of them with you as well.
- Last March, the Law School made unequivocally clear that attempts to disrupt events on campus are unacceptable and violate the norms of the School, the profession, and our community.
- The faculty revised our disciplinary code and adopted a policy prohibiting surreptitious recordings that mirrors policies that the University of Chicago and other peer institutions have put in place to encourage the free expression of ideas.
- We developed an online resource outlining our free speech policies and redesigned Orientation to center around discussions of free expression and the importance of respectful engagement. Virtually every member of the faculty spoke to their students about these values on the first day of class.
- We replaced our digital listserv with what alumni fondly remember as “the Wall” to encourage students to take time to reflect and resolve their differences face-to-face.
Join @WILawLiberty‘s very own Research Director @WillFlandersWI and @AFPWI this Thursday! Learn more about how schools are funded and what you can do as a parent, guardian, or educator to spread awareness.
Register here âĄïž https://t.co/cqL0Ct9aNp. pic.twitter.com/eU59aR7tre
â WILL (@WILawLiberty) October 12, 2022
Some Americans still believe the federal government is working in the publicâs best interest. If anything can disabuse these naive holdouts of this notion, it will be the bombshell Wall Street Journal investigation that just droppedârevealing runaway corruption among the federal bureaucracy.
The Journal reviewed more than 31,000 financial disclosure forms and analyzed more than 850,000 financial assets and 315,000 trades to shed light on any conflicts of interest among more than 12,000 senior career bureaucrats and political appointees. Its investigation found that âthousands of officials across the U.S. governmentâs executive branch disclosed owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies made.â
âAcross 50 federal agencies ranging from the Commerce Department to the Treasury Department, more than 2,600 officials reported stock investments in companies while those companies were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies, during both Republican and Democratic administrations,â the Journal reports. âWhen the financial holdings caused a conflict, the agencies sometimes simply waived the rules.â
The federal employees werenât even subtle about it. Per the Journal, âMore than five dozen officials at five agencies reported trading stocks of companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions against those companies, such as charges or settlements.â
Thatâs sus.
The U.S.âs pre-eminence among the worldâs top research universities continues to diminish, according to a new global ranking, while Chinese universities are on the rise, producing a greater quantity and higher quality of research than ever before.
This yearâs World University Rankings, released Tuesday by Times Higher Education, a British publication that tracks education, also named University of Oxford in England the worldâs leading research university for the seventh straight year.
There seems to be a growÂing diÂvide among stuÂdents in how they view their edÂuÂcaÂtion. Many are happy to take the easÂiÂest road, with litÂtle conÂsidÂerÂaÂtion of how that may later afÂfect them. The case of MaitÂland Jones, the New York UniÂverÂsity proÂfesÂsor who was fired afÂter a stuÂdent peÂtiÂtion alÂleged his orÂganic-chemÂistry course was too hard, is a great loss for the uniÂverÂsityâand all of acadÂeÂmia, since he is the man who wrote the stanÂdard textÂbook on orÂganic chemÂistry. Mr. Jones tried to keep stuÂdents enÂgaged, spendÂing $5,000 to record lecÂtures and reÂducÂing the numÂber of exÂams. What kind of preceÂdent does this set? Will other proÂfesÂsors pre-empÂtively caÂpitÂuÂlate to stuÂdents who are tryÂing to take the easy way out?
In 2019, a grassroots campaign led by parents succeeded in passing a wave of dyslexia legislation. At least seven states, from Arkansas to Wisconsin, now require teachers to be trained in the Orton-Gillingham teaching approach and use it to help students with dyslexia read and write better. Many more states mandated hallmarks of the Orton-Gillingham method, specifically calling for âmultisensoryâ instruction. In New York, where I live, the city spends upwards of $300 million a year in taxpayer funds on private school tuition for children with disabilities. Much of it goes to pay for private schools that specialize in Orton-Gillinghaminstruction and similar approaches, which families insist are necessary to teach their children with dyslexia to read.
But two recent academic papers, synthesizing dozens of reading studies, are raising questions about the effectiveness of these expensive education policies. A review of 24 studies on the Orton-Gillingham method, published in the July 2021 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Exceptional Children, found no statistically significant benefit for children with dyslexia. Instead, suggesting a way forward, a review of 53 reading studies, led by University of Virginia researcher Colby Hall and published online September 2022 in Reading Research Quarterly, found that much cheaper reading interventions for children with a variety of reading difficulties were also quite effective for children with dyslexia.
Thereâs no litmus test for dyslexia and education experts say the diagnosis covers a range of reading problems. Orton-Gillingham is one of the oldest approaches to help struggling readers, dating back to the 1930s, and it explicitly teaches letters and sounds, and breaks words down into letter patterns. It also emphasizes multisensory instruction. For example, students might learn the letter âpâ by seeing it, saying its name, and sounding it out while tracing it in shaving cream.
Not only was China proÂducÂing more reÂsearch than the U.S. and EuÂrope overÂall but a higher perÂcentÂage of that reÂsearch was among the top 1% of paÂpers most cited globÂally. Dr. WagÂner and her colÂleagues found that China surÂpassed EuÂrope in high-qualÂity reÂsearch in 2015 and the U.S. in 2019.
Lawmakers nationwide are trying to improve reading by embracing a scientific consensus regarding literacy acquisition and enacting robust regulatory regimes touching every part of the learning process. For most actors, âRight to Readâ laws establish clear accountability rules and noncompliance remedies. However, students who are not provided with statutory reading entitlements have inconsistent or nonexistent remedies against their schools. As a result, states do not hold accountable educators using debunked instructional methods and schools failing to provide necessary interventions. And courts abstain from enforcing their entitlements based on anachronistic research and policy. This Note introduces the new literacy science and laws, arguing descriptively that Right to Read regimes are enforceable under an implied right of action or a statutory negligence claim. Nevertheless, it recommends that lawmakers enact a public enforcement scheme that would better serve the students most in need of support.
The report, which builds on a 2019 Wisconsin Policy Forum report on the same subject, comes less than a month before a gubernatorial election that is likely to have a significant impact on the future of school funding.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanicâ
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacherâs Remarks to the School Board on Madisonâs Disastrous Reading Results
Madisonâs taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
âAn emphasis on adult employmentâ
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 canât read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walkerâs election to county Executive and later the Governorâs office.
In the Madison Metropolitan School District, the formula meant $2,068 per student of unfunded special education costs in the 2019-20 school year, according to a district-by-district map that accompanies the report. MMSD spent $80.7 million on special education in the 2019-20 school year and received $19 million in state reimbursement, plus $6.1 million in federal special education funding, leaving $55.5 million total in unfunded special education costs.
The cost can be even higher for some rural school districts like the 737-student Lakeland Union High School District on the stateâs northern border, which had $3,268 per pupil in unfunded special education costs in 2019-20.
âIf you increase the state’s spending on special education through the reimbursements to school districts, it helps every child in every school district in the state,â University of Wisconsin-Madison law and education professor Julie Underwood said.
The report, which builds on a 2019 Wisconsin Policy Forum report on the same subject, comes less than a month before a gubernatorial election that is likely to have a significant impact on the future of school funding.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanicâ
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacherâs Remarks to the School Board on Madisonâs Disastrous Reading Results
Madisonâs taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
âAn emphasis on adult employmentâ
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 canât read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walkerâs election to county Executive and later the Governorâs office.
After publishing âOn John Lennon’s Birthday, a Few Words About Warâ last night, old friend and former Moscow Times editor Matt Bivens* and I discovered weâd written on the same topic. You can find Mattâs excellent essay here. He notes a big thing I missed. A series of ominous statements was buried in Secretary of State Anthony Blinkenâs recent joint press conference with Canadian Foreign Minister MĂ©lanie Joly, trumpeting the âtremendous opportunityâ the Nord Stream blasts afforded to remove âthe dependence on Russian energy.â A few public figures questioned those comments, but Blinken said something else that was worse. The relevant passage:
I also made clear that when Russia made this move, the United States and our allies and partners would impose swift and severe costs on individuals and entities â inside and outside of Russia â that provide political or economic support to illegal attempts to change the status of Ukrainian territoryâŠ
We will hold to account any individual, entity, or country that provides political or economic support for President Putinâs illegal attempts to change the status of Ukrainian territory. In support of this commitment, the Departments of the Treasury and Commerce are releasing new guidance on heightened sanctions and export control risks for entities and individuals inside and outside of Russia that support in any way the Kremlinâs sham referenda, purported annexation, and occupation of parts of Ukraine.
Thereâs no way to know what a State Department official might believe meets the definitions of âpolitical support,â support âin any way,â the âKremlinâs sham referenda,â or any of a half-dozen phrases in that passage. This is why the negative precedent of government watch lists after the PATRIOT Act was important. By making lists, officials can seriously impacting your life without notice or right of appeal. Even if courts later strike down the activity, it may take nearly 20 years to get there, and thatâs assuming a) the state discloses enough to make a court challenge possible and b) they abide by any judicial rulings.
Michael J. Petrilli David Griffith:
High-quality studies continue to find that urban charter schools boost achievement by more than their traditional-public-school counterpartsâan advantage that has only grown larger as the charter sector has expanded and matured. For example, a 2015 analysis of charter performance in forty-one urban locations, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), estimated that students who attended charter schools in these cities gained an average of twenty-eight days of learning in English language arts (ELA) and forty days of learning in math per year. Students who enrolled in urban charters for at least four years gained a total of seventy-two days of learning in ELA and 108 daysâover half a yearâs worth of learningâin math. Moreover, the gains were even larger for Black and Latino students, and the performance of the charter sector improved dramatically over the course of the study period (i.e., between the 2008â09 and 2011â12 school years).
Understandably, some were skeptical of these results. Yet evaluations of matching approaches such as CREDOâs suggest that its estimates closely resemblethose generated by a random lottery, meaning they arenât the product of âselection biasâ or unobserved differences between students in charter and traditional public schools. Nor, according to multiple studies, is there much evidence that charter schools cream the best students. (Indeed, some research suggests that charters enroll unusually low-performing students.)
Emerging research also suggests that the gains associated with charter school attendance go far beyond test scores. For example, recent studies have also found a positive relationship between enrollment in urban charter schools and long-term, real-world outcomes, including college enrollment, teenage pregnancy, incarceration, and voting.
NEW: The campaign to recall DA George Gascon announces they are suing the L.A. County Reigstrar after they say an initial review of some of nearly 200k invalidated signatures shows 39% were wrongfully rejected. They allege that LA voter rolls are inflated by between 200k-500k. pic.twitter.com/1wWA4vV9uW
â Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) October 10, 2022
Women are now supported and encouraged to pursue their intellectual interests, and it is clear that when they do, they excel. These societies now benefit from the many contributions of women in the sciences and humanities. And indeed, many have argued that the inclusion of women in formerly male-dominated fields has broadened the scope of inquiry and shed light on once-mysterious or hitherto neglected phenomena.
So, how are these changes impacting academic cultureâits priorities, policies, and normsâand shaping the direction of higher education and science? It is increasingly evident that men and women view the purpose of higher education and science differently, and that many emerging trends in academia can be attributed, at least in part, to the feminization of academic priorities.
There are more eyes on students today than just a teacherâs watchful gaze. Thousands of school districts use monitoring software that can track studentsâ online searches, scan their emails, and in some cases, send alerts of perceived threats to law enforcement. A recent investigation by The Dallas Morning News revealed that colleges have been using an AI social-media-monitoring tool to surveil student protesters.
While technology companies claim to be able to prevent violence, thereâs little proof that surveillance can actually protect students. Meanwhile, monitoring software has been used to eveal students’ sexuality without their consent. Low-income, Black, and Hispanic students are also disproportionately exposed to surveillance and discipline.
If your school (or your childâs school) uses monitoring software, there are a couple of steps you can take to protect your privacyâand start a conversation with your school.
Ask Your School These Questions
Itâs important first to understand why your school is using monitoring software in the first place. In the US, schools are required by the Childrenâs Internet Protection Act to have some kind of web filtering in place to prevent students from accessing obscene or harmful material online. Schools are not required to implement sophisticated technologies that can scan the content of studentsâ emails and send alerts to police.
Wikipedia may have its internal problems. Maybe itâs too easy to make edits. Maybe itâs too hard to make edits. Maybe they donât use all of the donation money the way you might want them to. Maybe all of thatâs true. Cool, letâs fix that. Keep pressure on Wikipedia. Money can do nasty things to organizations. Donât let them get all weird like Mozilla where I donât even know if I support them anymore (though Iâm a staunch Firefox supporter and MDN supporter).
But if you ask me to pick the most valuable thing on the Web, my answer for many years has been, without a momentâs hestitation, Wikipedia.
As far as Iâm aware, itâs the greatest trove of human knowledge ever assembled outside of the great libraries of the world, and itâs accessible to anyone, anywhere, any time. No advertising. No agenda (or damn near no agenda, I mean, come on – show me a more neutral source for this information).
Indeed, 32 percent of Mississippi students hit literacy targets in 2019, up from 27 percent in 2017 and just 17 percent in 1998, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Despite the successes so far, Ms. Wright â who retired from education this year â believes there are plenty of challenges left to be tackled âto make things better for the children of Mississippi.â
âEach year we tweak our methods, but the goals always remain the same,â said Ms. Wright, who feels that the stateâs math programs are particularly ripe for an overhaul.
Here are some of the actions that helped pull Mississippi up the reading ranks.
The most crucial element of Mississippiâs testing turnaround was the establishment of the Literacy-Based Promotion Act in 2013, which required third-grade students to demonstrate basic reading proficiency levels to progress onto fourth grade.
Championed by the Republican State Senator Gray Tollison and signed into law by former Republican Gov. Phil Bryant, the act not only set clear standards and expectations (âa critical model of accountability,â Ms. Wright said), it also set off a range of policies and legislation â such as provisions for new charter schools â to support students, districts and, most critically, teachers in achieving its aims.
Among the most notable was the Early Learning Collaborative Act, which funds specialized collaborative pre-K programs. Rachel Canter, executive director of Mississippi First, said it encourages partnerships between school districts and Head Start, along with private schools or child care, which could then trigger state funding to run pre-K programs for 4-year-olds.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanicâ
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacherâs Remarks to the School Board on Madisonâs Disastrous Reading Results
Madisonâs taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
âAn emphasis on adult employmentâ
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 canât read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walkerâs election to county Executive and later the Governorâs office.
Elizabeth Branch, a federal judge serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, is joining a concerted push by conservatives on the federal judiciary to no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School. Judge Branch, who was nominated for the Eleventh Circuit by Donald Trump in 2017, informed National Review of her decision in response to NRâs inquiry about the trend, citing the âlegitimate concernsâ that had been ârecently raised . . . about the lack of free speech on law school campuses, Yale in particular.â Branch is the 14th federal judge to have pledged to decline clerkships from Yale Law over the course of the past nine days. …
When asked for a comment on Judge Hoâs speech and the growing number of federal judges joining the boycott, Judge Branch told NR of her decision to add her name to the list:
My friend, Judge Jim Ho, recently raised legitimate concerns about the lack of free speech on law school campuses, Yale in particular. Like Judge Ho, I am gravely concerned that the stifling of debate not only is antithetical to this countryâs founding principles, but also stunts intellectual growth. Accordingly, I accept Judge Hoâs invitation to join him in declining to consider students from Yale Law School for clerkships with me, with an exception for past and current students.
Earlier this week Axios reported on the Democratsâ real fake news gambit: âWriters for a D.C.-based media operation run by prominent Democratic operatives are behind a sprawling network of ostensible local media outlets churning out Democrat-aligned news content in midterm battleground states[.]â Itâs an interesting and well-researched story written up in the dumbed down Axios form by Lachlan Markay and Thomas Wheatley. They found that David Brock was a key operative and fundraiser for the American Independent, âa Washington-based progressive news outfitâ that appears on each of the sitesâ mastheads.
If youâve got an opinion about whatâs wrong with higher education today, it was probably confirmed by a recent New York Times story about the departure of an organic-chemistry professor from New York University after students complained about how he taught his course and graded their performance in it. The still-murky facts of the case have allowed it to serve as an inkblot open to interpretation.
Students these days arenât serious, canât study, and expect to be spoon-fed. Financially motivated administrators at overpriced colleges fancy themselves in the customer-service business, letting the students â and parents â who pay the bills call the shots. The bulk of instructors, who labor off of the tenure track, are expendable: With their employment conditional on keeping both the undergraduates and the administrators happy, theyâre unable to resist their demands.
It is a clichĂ© now to suggest that young people today drink too many lattes and eat too much avocado toast, so canât afford their major costs of living; that they rely too much on handouts from parents â far past when a responsible adult should. They want it all now without working for it.
You may have heard this nonsense enough that youâve come to believe it.
As founder of Generation Squeeze, Iâve been on a mission to show itâs not true. Because these myths inflict real harm, causing many younger people to feel that they are doing something wrong, or that they are personally failing when they struggle to establish a solid financial foundation.
âThere were so many things that went wrong,â Mr. McNamara said. âSNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a rail system.â
Moroccoâs bullet train started service in 2018.
The goal in California in 2008 was to carry passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2 hours 40 minutes, putting it among the fastest trains in the worldin average speed.
The most direct route would have taken the train straight north out of Los Angeles along the Interstate 5 corridor through the Tejon Pass, a route known as âthe Grapevine.â Engineers had determined in a âfinal reportâ in 1999 that it was the preferred option for the corridor.
But political concerns were lurking in the background. Mike Antonovich, a powerful member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, was among those who argued that the train could get more riders if it diverted through the growing desert communities of Lancaster and Palmdale in his district, north of Los Angeles.
The extra 41 miles to go through Palmdale would increase costs by 16 percent, according to the 1999 report, a difference in todayâs costs of as much as $8 billion.
According to interviews with those working on the project at the time, the decision was a result of political horse-trading in which Mr. Antonovich delivered a multi-billion-dollar plum to his constituents.
âI said it was ridiculous,â said Mr. Tennenbaum, the former rail authority chairman. âIt was wasteful. It was just another example of added expense.â
The horse-trading in this case involved an influential land developer and major campaign contributor from Los Angeles, Jerry Epstein.
The student in Cassie Gilboyâs first-grade class stumbled over the word âpig.â Instead of looking at a picture for clues, she tapped out the sound of each letter with her fingers to break the word apartâ/p/ /i/ /g/. She then exclaimed âpigâ with a big smile.
This fall, the students at Broad Rock Elementary School in Richmond are learning to read using their fingers to break down words sound by sound and mirrors to watch how their mouths move when they say specific letters.
The central Virginia school district is placing a big bet on an evidence-based approach to teaching children to read, one that many districts and states are embracing this fall. The approach, known as the âscience of reading,â relies on helping students decode the words on the page by understanding the sounds that letters make.
The field of artificial intelligence has never lacked for hype. Back in 1965, AI pioneer Herb Simon declared, âMachines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.â That hasnât happened â but there certainly have been noteworthy advances, especially with the rise of âdeep learningâ systems, in which programs plow through massive data sets looking for patterns, and then try to make predictions. Perhaps most famously, AIs that use deep learning can now beat the best human Go players (some years after computers bested humans at chess and Jeopardy).
Mastering language has proven tougher, but a program called GPT-3, developed by OpenAI, can produce human-like text, including poetry and prose, in response to prompts. Deep learning systems are also getting better and better at recognizing faces, and recognizing images in general. And they have contributed to the software behind self-driving vehicles, in which the automobile industry has been investing billions.
When a young adult in a New York City suburb visited an emergency department in June after experiencing weakness in their lower legs, the shocking diagnosis would lead local officials to declare a health emergency in New York and put authorities across the U.S. and around the world on a state of alert.
The individual, a resident of Rockland County, had suffered from a fever, a stiff neck, back and abdominal pain as well as constipation for five days. The patient was hospitalized and tested for enterovirus, a family of pathogens that in rare cases can cause weakness in the arms and legs.
New York stateâs Wadsworth Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would subsequently confirm the worst: The young adult was suffering from paralysis after contracting polio, the first known U.S. case in nearly a decade and the first in New York since 1990.
Using data on all major discoveries across science including all Nobel Prize and major non-Nobel Prize discoveries, we can address the question of the extent to which âthe scientific methodâ is actually applied in making scienceâs groundbreaking research and whether we need to expand this central concept of science. This study reveals that 25% of all discoveries since 1900 did not apply the common scientific method (all three features)âwith 6% of discoveries using no observation, 23% using no experimentation, and 17% not testing a hypothesis. Empirical evidence thus challenges the common view of the scientific method.
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More.
âRules for thee but not for meâ seems to be the phrase these days when it comes to criticizing Supreme Court justices. Politico adds to the double standard in its recent story that attacks Justice Amy Coney Barrett for not providing a client list from her husbandâs law firm on her annual financial disclosure form.
Disclosing such clients is neither required nor appropriate, but that didnât stop Gabe Roth of the group Fix The Court, which was funded by a left-wing money outfit connected to Arabella Advisors, from bemoaning the supposed loss of public trust in the court resulting from the lack of information about the clients of Jesse Barrettâs firm. And I donât recall Mr. Roth, or anyone else on the left, hand-wringing over a lack of disclosure from the law firms of the spouses of liberal justices.
The Politico story makes much of Mr. Barrettâs continuing to practice law after moving to Washington when his wife joined the Supreme Court. But by sticking with his Indiana-based firm, SouthBank Legal, Mr. Barrett hasnât raised any appearance issues. SouthBank Legal doesnât have a Supreme Court practice and has never represented clients before the court.
MATTHEW DeFOUR, MATT MENCARINI, and JACOB RESNECK Wisconsin Watch:
Helping fuel the concern over ineligible voters is the case of Sandra Klitzke, a resident of the Brewster Village nursing home in Outagamie County, who voted in the November 2020 and April 2021 elections, even though a court had removed her right to vote in February 2020.
On March 31, the Thomas More Society filed a complaint with WEC on behalf of Klitzke and her daughter, Lisa Goodwin, who stated she âcould not explain why the WisVote voting records would have indicated that my mother votedâ in 2020 or 2021.
Normally the county register in probate mails notification of an ineligible voter to the WEC, according to Jennifer Moeller, president of the Wisconsin Register in Probate Association. The WEC then updates its information and notifies the local clerk, who is the only official authorized in Wisconsin to deactivate a voterâs registration.
Itâs unclear why Klitzkeâs name was not switched to âineligibleâ in the WEC voter file, although it appears to have been an administrative error. Court records related to Klitzkeâs guardianship information are confidential under state law
A contract to centralize voter data was given to Accenture under former Governor Jim Doyle. After that failed, the State built an in house system. Yet, this public data requires a $10,000 payment for each request.
The âWisconsin Center for Investigative Journalismâ or Wisconsin Watch, has received substantial funding from George Soros:
Wisconsin Watch, a 501(c)(3) organization that disseminates news stories to many prominent media outlets statewide and is housed at the taxpayer-fundedUW-Madison campus, has taken more than $1 million from an organization founded by George Soros over the years. Wisconsin Right Now discovered that the group is still prominently pushing out stories by a writer, Howard Hardee, who was dispatched to Wisconsin by a Soros-funded organization to work on âelection integrityâ stories and projects.
When major media outlets like WTM-TV and the Wisconsin State Journal run stories by Wisconsin Watch or Hardee, they fail to advise readers that heâs a fellow with a Soros-linked group. The group says that âhundredsâ of news organizations have shared its stories over the years, giving them wide reach.
Over 400 people attended Wednesdayâs school board meeting. More than 40 of the people who spoke to the board showed support for Cusato:
âMy uncle Daren is standing up for what is right, even though he is standing by himself. I am thoroughly embarrassed that South Side School District has taken this arbitrary stance in choosing to align with the one percent,â his niece said.
âI am standing up here tonight to ask you to separate these two things: the very divisive but trendy topic of pronouns and the precedent that you are setting, which is that teachers need to modify their engagement of students based on how that student feels,â another said.
One woman derided the district for acting in what she perceived to be a fear of âgetting sued.â
âWe shouldnât be afraid of being sued. Fine. If you want to sue us, sue us. Letâs take it to the Supreme Court. Letâs take it all the way,â she said.
Schools Chancellor David Banks quietly promoted Mayor Adamsâ girlfriend to a top job at the Department of Education, just months after Adams hired Banksâ girlfriend as a deputy mayor, The Post has learned.
Banks named Tracey Collins â Adamsâ longtime partner and NYCâs unofficial First Lady â the DOEâs âsenior advisor to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,â Desmond Blackburn. She started the new job in July, and got a giant, 23% raise to $221,597 a year, records show.
Hizzoner named Banksâ girlfriend, Sheena Wright, and four other women deputy mayors last Dec. 21. Deputy mayors made $251,982 in FY 21.
Both womenâs advancement underscores the tight inner circle of the Adams administration.
Wright, 52, previously CEO of United Way of NYC, helped lead Adamsâ transition team. Banks and Wright live together in Harlem. Banks and Adams took office on Jan. 1.
A Queens teacher was stunned to learn of the quid pro beau.
UPDATE (Oct. 7, 2022): Instead of rethinking its arbitrary policing of usersâ expression in the wake of the Free Speech Union incident, PayPal is doubling down: The company has now informed users of changes to its acceptable use policy, including the addition of new categories of prohibited speech. These changes take effect on Nov. 3.
The new policy dramatically expands PayPalâs power to take action against users for activity on the service involving disfavored speech. That includes âany messages, content, or materials that, in PayPalâs sole discretionâ are âharmfulâ or âobjectionable,â depict or even appear to depict nudity, âdepict,âŻpromote, or incite hatred or discrimination of protected groups,â present a risk to a userâs âwellbeing,â âpromote misinformation,â or are, in PayPalâs opinion, âotherwise unfit for publication.â
That last provision effectively means PayPal can slap you with a violation of its acceptable use policy for anything you say as part of a transaction and any expressive content or materials for which you seek payment through PayPal. (FIRE accepts PayPal donations and hopes the company will not find that this blog is âunfit for publication.â) To amplify the chilling effect, each violation of the policy may subject a user to a $2,500 penalty, which PayPal reserves the right to debit directly from the userâs account.
As FIRE explains in our statement on free speech and online payment processors:
When these companies appoint themselves the arbiters of what speech and views are acceptable, shutting people and organizations out of the online financial ecosystem for wrongthink, they seriously undermine our culture of free expression.
We will continue to monitor this space.
I agree with Steve on this (the changes since the 1990s have made the SAT more test-prepable & Asians have benefited accordingly), but I’m basing it on the psychometric nature of the changes. Does anyone have a good cite on the subject using real data? https://t.co/oN48rlhTHg
â Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) October 6, 2022
THREAD: DHS coordinated with a group called the “Election Integrity Partnership” to censor Bidenâs opponents. Iâm on the EIPâs list with @charliekirk11 @RepMTG @DonaldJTrumpJr @JackPosobiec & more. I was censored while I ran for Congress. Bidenâs regime paid EIP groups 12M+! đ§”
â Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) October 4, 2022
Neil Richards thinks privacy is much more than being left alone. Whatever it is, how do we achieve it in our modern, surveillance filled world, and just as importantly, should we? Is the difference between our revealed and real preferences significant enough to justify companies watching us around the clock?
In June 2014, I wrote a piece entitled âReform Intro Economicsâ for Inside Higher Ed. There, I arguedthat then-current introductory economics courses were little changed from those of decades past. I further stated that the students of 2014 found the unrevised course somewhat unsatisfactory:
Todayâs students are ⊠not accustomed to sitting through 50-minute lectures, taking detailed notes of material and techniques, the value of which has yet to be demonstrated to them. Thus, it is little wonder that more students do not elect [to take] introductory economics or, following the course, do not take more economics.
I would argue that this student dissatisfaction persists today, perhaps at an even higher level. What I have noticed, post-pandemic, is that general student interest and student performance in introductory economics have been dropping. (I teach economics at Davidson College and have done so for more than 40 years.) I say âgeneral student interestâ because we still have some economics majors who truly enjoy the subject. However, the typical student, taking the course to satisfy a requirement or to assess a possible interest in economics, is not the equal of his or her peer from the year 2000 where course performance is concerned.
Last month U.S. News & World Report released its 2023 college rankings. The most notable move belonged to Columbia University, which for decades had been steadily rising in the ranks toward the very top of the list. This year it tumbled from No. 2 to No. 18.
Thatâs better than might have been expected. After a blog post in February by Michael Thaddeus, a math professor at the university, showed that Columbia had provided fraudulent data to the magazine, U.S. News summarily unrankedit. When the university was able to update only some of the data in time for the latest rankings, the editors â
SCOOP: Ithaca College is offering a racially-segregated “antiracism” program, with separate sessions for whites and minorities.
“Because Ithaca College is a predominantly white institution, much of the Institute’s work is focused on unpacking the impact of centering whiteness.” pic.twitter.com/BIXWwmwgKO
â Christopher F. Rufo âïž (@realchrisrufo) October 5, 2022
Sometimes, in fact, sex is observed before birth. Most commonly, this happens via ultrasound imaging of the fetus. Less commonly, it is possible to look at the karyotypeâa visual representation of fetal chromosomes, organized roughly by sizeâwhich has been obtained through the usefully diagnostic but somewhat risky mid-pregnancy procedure known as amniocentesis.
All mammals have âGenetic Sex Determination,â which means that we have chromosomes dedicated to starting us down the path of maleness or femaleness. They are called sex chromosomes, in contrast to the autosomes which comprise most of our genetic makeup, and which do not vary predictably by sex. A tiny number of mammalsâthe echidnas, and the duck-billed platypusâhave several pairs of sex chromosomes. The remaining several thousand of us mammals, howeverâeverything from bats to koalas, kangaroos to whalesâall the many thousands of other species of mammals have just one pair of sex chromosomes in each of our cells. Humans are mammals, so we have Genetic Sex Determination. Humans are neither echidnas nor duck-billed platypi, so we have just the one pair of sex chromosomes.
The number of chromosomes in each of our cells varies between species. Ocelots and margays have 18 pairs of chromosomes, for instance, while most other cats have 19 pairs1. Most of the great apes, including chimps, have 24 pairs of chromosomes, but humans have only 23. That is: humans have 22 pairs of autosomes, and at that 23rd position: one pair of sex chromosomes.
Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes in almost all of our cells. Gametesâsex cellsâare a notable exception to this2, however, having only 23 chromosomes each, instead of 23 pairs. If youâre female, your gametes are called eggs; if youâre male, theyâre called sperm. If successful (as the vast majority are not), an egg or a sperm will combine with a gamete of the other type and make a new life. As such, so as not to create a new life with double the chromosomes of their parents, gametes have halfthe chromosomal complement of somatic (body) cells: one copy of chromosome 1, one copy of chromosome 2, etc., all the way down to chromosome 23.
As AI creative tools are becoming widespread, the question of copyright of AI creations has also taken centre-stage. But while copyright nerds obsess over the authorship question, the issue that is getting more attention from artists is that of copyright infringement.
AI is trained on data, in the case of graphic tools such as Imagen, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, and MidJourney, the training sets consist of terabytes of images comprising photographs, paintings, drawings, logos, and anything else with a graphical representation. The complaint by some artists is that these models (and accompanying commercialisation) are being built on the backs of human artists, photographers, and designers, who are not seeing any benefit from these business models. The language gets very animated in some forums and chats rooms, often using terms such as âtheftâ and âexploitationâ. So is this copyright infringement? Are OpenAI and Google about to get sued by artists and photographers from around the world?
This is a question that has two parts, the input phase and the output phase.
A state-authorized public charter school in Madison initially refused to work with police after a student found a gun in a school employee’s backpack, according to a recently released police report, and the employee refused to answer questions about the incident.
Police ultimately closed their investigation of the June 1 incident involving Milestone Democratic School teacher Art Richardson, saying they did not have enough evidence that Richardson knew he had the gun in his backpack and after Richardson put off speaking to them and then cut off communication entirely.
Knowingly bringing a firearm into a school is a Class I felony under state law, punishable by up to three and a half years in prison, a fine of up to $10,000 or both.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanicâ
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacherâs Remarks to the School Board on Madisonâs Disastrous Reading Results
Madisonâs taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
âAn emphasis on adult employmentâ
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 canât read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walkerâs election to county Executive and later the Governorâs office.
Two years into the job, Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent Carlton Jenkins received praise from the Madison School Board for his handling of the districtâs 2022-23 budget and leadership.
A summary of the boardâs annual performance review of the districtâs top staff member was released Wednesday evening. While most of the review was in praise of Jenkinsâ work, the board wrote that it âwould like to partner with Dr. Jenkins to build upon and enhance district-community relationships.â
âThis would bolster community perceptions of district accountability and transparency,â the board wrote. âSuperintendent Jenkins has begun to proactively increase his teamâs work in partnering with community members and business leaders.â
This, in a way, encapsulates the secret recipe that many Madison charter schools use to create environments that donât fit a traditional educational model. To explore what that looks like, photographers Hedi Rudd and Ruthie Hauge recently visited three local charter schools.
The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanicâ
My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacherâs Remarks to the School Board on Madisonâs Disastrous Reading Results
Madisonâs taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.
âAn emphasis on adult employmentâ
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 canât read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Related: The Milwaukee County Pension Scandal that lead to Scott Walkerâs election to county Executive and later the Governorâs office.
Anyone who has studied the left’s march through the institutions and the regular examples of the O’Sullivan’s Law in action, knows the drill knows what happens to previously non-political or even conservative institutions.
The signs of their socio-political presence shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. They are just less bloody versions of what Orwell, Huxley, Dith Pran, and others warned us about.
While you were paying attention to other things, their world view is already deep in our military institutions of higher learning, specifically today the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA.
What already is well past the nose in the tentinvolves in not just narrowing the Overton Window of acceptable speech, but is now compelling speech through membership filtering, fear, and humiliation.
It demands written and spoken self-criticisms – and later (see any of the required DEI training events) often confessions of crimes you did not commit. Like the religious original sin, it is something you simply have by being and must atone for and perhaps never wash the stain away.
Yes, it is socio-political, but mostly political. It is its religious aspects that folds in to the compelled speech – you have to say certain words in certain ways in order to be accepted. A leftist Shahada, in a fashion.
Anyone who has studied the left’s march through the institutions and the regular examples of the O’Sullivan’s Law in action, knows the drill knows what happens to previously non-political or even conservative institutions.
The signs of their socio-political presence shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. They are just less bloody versions of what Orwell, Huxley, Dith Pran, and others warned us about.
While you were paying attention to other things, their world view is already deep in our military institutions of higher learning, specifically today the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA.
What already is well past the nose in the tentinvolves in not just narrowing the Overton Window of acceptable speech, but is now compelling speech through membership filtering, fear, and humiliation.
It demands written and spoken self-criticisms – and later (see any of the required DEI training events) often confessions of crimes you did not commit. Like the religious original sin, it is something you simply have by being and must atone for and perhaps never wash the stain away.
Yes, it is socio-political, but mostly political. It is its religious aspects that folds in to the compelled speech – you have to say certain words in certain ways in order to be accepted. A leftist Shahada, in a fashion.
To put that number into context, at this point in fiscal 2021 the Treasuryâs interest expense stood at $356 billion. That represents a 30% year-on-year increase. Interest expense ranks as the sixth largest budget expense category, about $250 billion below Medicare. If interest rates remain elevated or continue rising, interest expenses could climb rapidly into the top three federal expenses. (You can read a more in-depth analysis of the national debt HERE.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, this is exactly what will happen. It projects interest payments will triple from nearly $400 billion in fiscal 2022 to $1.2 trillion in 2032. And itâs worse than that. The CBO made this estimate in May. Interest rates are already higher than those used in its analysis.
Meredith Kolodner and Annie Ma:
When she asked why he couldnât stay for the rest of the day, Manwell said the school told her they would call child protective services if she didnât take him home.
The call was just one of a dozen that Manwell received last fall telling her John couldnât stay in school because of behaviors she says stemmed from his disability. Many schools have promised to cut down on suspensions, since kids canât learn as well when they arenât in class. But none of these pickups were ever recorded as suspensions, despite the missed class time.
The practice is known as informal removal, defined by the U.S. Department of Education as an action taken by school staff in response to a childâs behavior that excludes the child for part or all of the school day â or even indefinitely.
Alhussein Fawzi, Matej Balog, âŠPushmeet Kohli
Improving the efficiency of algorithms for fundamental computations can have a widespread impact, as it can affect the overall speed of a large amount of computations. Matrix multiplication is one such primitive task, occurring in many systemsâfrom neural networks to scientific computing routines. The automatic discovery of algorithms using machine learning offers the prospect of reaching beyond human intuition and outperforming the current best human-designed algorithms. However, automating the algorithm discovery procedure is intricate, as the space of possible algorithms is enormous. Here we report a deep reinforcement learning approach based on AlphaZero1 for discovering efficient and provably correct algorithms for the multiplication of arbitrary matrices. Our agent, AlphaTensor, is trained to play a single-player game where the objective is finding tensor decompositions within a finite factor space. AlphaTensor discovered algorithms that outperform the state-of-the-art complexity for many matrix sizes. Particularly relevant is the case of 4âĂâ4 matrices in a finite field, where AlphaTensorâs algorithm improves on Strassenâs two-level algorithm for the first time, to our knowledge, since its discovery 50 years ago2. We further showcase the flexibility of AlphaTensor through different use-cases: algorithms with state-of-the-art complexity for structured matrix multiplication and improved practical efficiency by optimizing matrix multiplication for runtime on specific hardware. Our results highlight AlphaTensorâs ability to accelerate the process of algorithmic discovery on a range of problems, and to optimize for different criteria.
Previously I have estimated that PRC is outproducing the US in top STEM talent by a factor as large as 10x. In a decade or two the size of their highly skilled STEM workforce (e.g., top engineers, AI researchers, biotech scientists, …) could be 10x as large as that of the US and comparable to the rest of the world, ex-China.
This is easy to understand: their base population is about 4x larger and their K12 performance on international tests like PISA is similar to what is found in the table above for the Asian category. The fraction of PRC kids who perform in the top band is probably at least several times larger than the overall US fraction. (Asian vs White in the table above is about 6x, or 7x on the math portion.) Also, the fraction of college students who major in STEM is much larger in PRC than in the US.
Americans’ wages are losing ground to inflation at a steep rate, a report on Tuesday from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas said, a finding that offers some support for the central bank’s super-charged campaign to lower price pressures.
“Despite the stronger wage growth due to the tightness of the labor market, a majority of workers are finding their wages falling even further behind inflation,” economists for the Dallas Fed wrote. A majority of workers’ wages, once adjusted for inflation, “have failed to keep up with inflation in the past year. For these workers, the median decline in real wages is a little more than 8.5%.”
The report acknowledged over the last 25 years there have been other periods of lost ground on wages relative to inflation, but added “the current time period is unparalleled in terms of the challenge employed workers face.”
In New York, boys are now lagging behind girls in math and a full grade level behind in English. Similar patterns can be seen across the nation. Boys graduate high school at about the same rate as poor students, while girls account for two out of three high schoolers in the top 10% ranked by GPA. One in four black boys repeat a grade, and 60% of students on college campuses are now women.
When almost one in four boys (23%) are categorized as having a âdevelopmental disability,â it is fair to wonder if it is the boys â or the system â that is not functioning properly.
Instead, the graduate students, who are seeking certification as teachers, will be offered an alternative class taught by a non-heretic.
All but one of Christy Hammer’s students walked out of her Sept. 14 class, âCreating a Positive Learning Environment.” In a discussion the previous week, the professor and one student had argued that biological sex is not “on a spectrum.”
A non-binary student, Elizabeth Leibiger, who’d missed the previous class, brought up the issue on Sept. 14.
There do not appear to be any dissenting voices on the panel. All three scholarsâDevon W. Carbado of UCLA School of Law, Osamudia James of UNC School of Law, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig, the dean of Boston University School of Lawâare outspoken proponents of critical race theory, which claims, among other things, that ostensibly neutral laws perpetuate white supremacy.
The panel demonstrates how a fringe critique of the American justice system has become conventional wisdom for many within it. Derrick Bell, widely considered the godfather of critical race theory, wrote in 1992 that “a perilously racist America” would never accept such a radical challenge to the status quo. In the three decades since, critical race theory went from baroque elective to required coursework at many law schools, which must now educate students “on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism” under rules from the American Bar Association.
Here’s a possible hypothesis: Twitter might not want to look too closely at this problem because then they would have to remove accounts, reducing the number of reported âactive usersâ on the platform. More than 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertisers. And it is probably safe to assume that most of these advertisers are paying Twitter to display ads to real human beings, not bots or Russian trolls masquerading as Americans. If Twitter removed more of these inauthentic accounts, it would ding its âactive userâ metrics, which drive advertising revenueâthe source of value for the platform.
Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart
Lise attended a promotion-and-tenure committee meeting where the dean asked for a volunteer to write the recommendation report and one of the few women in attendance agreed to do it. Laurie walked into the first meeting of an important university committee to find only women in the room. Brenda mentored countless junior staff members, many who werenât even in her department. Linda was asked to serve on the institutional review board, a request made even more difficult because everyone else had declined. âServiceâ assignments like those â or, to use our term, ânon-promotable tasksâ (NPTs) â are important to the college or university. They help it run smoothly, improve its culture, and foster a productive workplace. But an overload of NPTs can have significant negative effects on a faculty memberâs progress since this work rarely enters into performance evaluations or promotion and tenure decisions.
One of the most fascinating things about the modern age we live in is the population of journalists almost exclusively being from mega rich families and the fact they have done such a good job of hiding it from the internet.
â NevilleTheCat (@FearTheFloof) October 5, 2022
Conversations with Tyler – Walter Russell Mead:
With the ballooning of the national security bureaucracies in the Cold War and then even beyond, we now have these ossified institutions. Thereâs always the question, how many analysts of China do you need? The answer is oneâââif you can find the right one. Bureaucratic groupthink, I think, tends to dominate the products of both the State Department and the CIA in ways that often obscure the best of the thinking thatâs being done inside them.
Democrat Beto OâRourke has repeated one refrain in attempts to appeal to teachers and parents: do away with the STAAR test â at least for now.
OâRourke pushed the idea previously and has frequently criticized the stateâs emphasis on standardized testing and the lack of student achievement.
Marianna McMurdock & Meghan Gallagher:
The plea is among thousands of stories made public by the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, one of many efforts to digitize elusive school, state and federal records, to bring the stories of Indigenous survivors and those who never made it home back to their families and tribes.
Last summer, the discovery of more than 900 child graves at former Canadian residential schools tore through international media and reignited investigations of U.S. boarding schools; reports focused on brutal abuse and quantifying death.
Archivists and community members have continued to retrieve haunting letters, student and local newspapers, photographs and other school documents that paint a poignant picture of resistance and survival in day-to-day student life in the boarding schools.
Still, many records remain out of reach to descendants, and those that are accessible can be traumatizing. Some collections sit dormant, held by churches or universities with no plans to return them to tribal communities; others require extensive time and travel to physical archives.
âNative people have never had easy access to their records. And that in itself has continued to contribute to the genocide,â said Tawa Ducheneaux. a citizen of the Cherokee nation working as an archivist at Oglala Lakota Collegeâs Woksape Tipi library on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, where she raised her family for 19 years. âYouâre not having access to relatives and descendants that can educate you more about who you are and where you come from.â
Khiara Bridges remembers the exact moment she lost faith in the Supreme Court. At first, at the start of Donald Trumpâs presidency, Bridgesâa professor who now teaches at UCâBerkeley School of Lawâheld out hope that the court might be âthis great protector of individual civil liberties right when we desperately needed it to be.â Then came 2018. That June, the justices issued Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld the presidentâs entry ban for citizens of eight countries, six of them Muslim-majority. Suddenly, Bridges told me, she realized, âThe court is not going to save us. It is going to let Trump do whatever he wants to do. And itâs going to help him get away with it.â
Four years later, the justices completely shattered whatever remaining optimism Bridges could muster about the court by overruling Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Womenâs Health Organization. When the decision came down on June 24, she got a migraine for the first time in a decade. The image of the court as a majestic guardian of liberty was, she concluded, âa complete lie.â And it wasnât just about her own personal feelings, either: Now she had to teach her students about the work of an institution that made her sick to contemplate.
Bridges is not alone. At law schools across the country, thousands of professors of constitutional law are currently facing a court that, in their view, has let the mask of neutrality fall off completely. Six conservative justices are steering the court head-oninto the most controversial debates of the day and consistently siding with the Republican Party. Increasingly, the conservative majority does not even bother to provide any reasoning for its decisions, exploiting the shadow docket to overhaul the law without a word of explanation. The crisis reached its zenith between September 2021 and June 2022, when the Supreme Court let Texas impose its vigilante abortion ban through the shadow docket, then abolished a 50-year-old right to bodily autonomy by overruling Roe v. Wade. Now law professors are faced with a quandary: Howâand whyâshould you teach law to students while the Supreme Court openly changes the meaning of the Constitution to align with the GOP?
A version of this question has long dogged the profession, which has fought over the distinction between law and politics for about as long as it has existed. For decades, however, the court has handed enough victories to both sides of the political spectrum that it has avoided a full-on academic revolt against its legitimacy. That dynamic changed when Trump appointed Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to replace far less conservative predecessors and created a Republican-appointed supermajority, a coalition further aided by the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to a seat that should have been filled by Barack Obama. The cascade of far-right rulings in 2022 confirmed that the new court is eager to shred long-held precedents it deems too liberal as quickly as possible. The pace and scale of this revolution is requiring law professors to adapt on several levelsâintellectually, pedagogically, and emotionally.