C. Thi Nguyen:

The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they can induce us to terminate our inquiries too early-before we spot the flaws in the system. How might the sense of clarity be faked? Let’s first consider the object of imitation: genuine understanding. Genuine understanding grants cognitive facility. When we understand something, we categorize its aspects more easily; we see more connections between its disparate elements; we can generate new explanations; and we can communicate our understanding. In order to encourage us to accept a system of thought, then, an epistemic manipulator will want the system to provide its users with an exaggerated sensation of cognitive facility. The system should provide its users with the feeling that they can easily and powerfully create categori-zations, generate explanations, and communicate their understanding. And manipulators have a significant advantage in imbuing their systems with a pleasurable sense of clarity, since they are freed from the burdens of accuracy and reliability. I offer two case studies of seductively clear systems: conspiracy theories; and the standardized, quantified value systems of bureaucracies.

Dylan Brogan:

The Madison school district is delaying its plan to eliminate standalone honors classes at its high schools.

The district hasn’t publicly announced the policy shift or if it’s considering scrapping the plan entirely. At its Dec. 6 meeting, school board members were told by Director of Advanced Learning Sharon Alexander that the district was on track to end standalone honors classes for 9th graders starting in the 2022 fall semester and 10th graders in 2023. Isthmus learned the plan was being delayed from a high school teacher in January. It took district spokesperson Tim LeMonds three weeks to confirm what administrators had already told teachers. 

“Standalone and earned honors will still be available for 9th and 10th graders next year,” wrote LeMonds in a Feb. 8 email to Isthmus. “We have put a pause on the removal of standalone honors to allow for more time to review this strategy, obtain student and community input, and board involvement.” 

District administrators informed the Madison school board at an April 5, 2021, board meeting they were planning to phase out traditional honors classes for 9th and 10th graders. These courses are for core subject areas like biology, English, and history. There are no exams or other requirements to get into these classes and any student is allowed to enroll. Instead of standalone honors courses, the district was going to focus exclusively on the “Earned Honors” program. Begun in 2017, this program allows students to receive honors designation in non-honors classes if they complete “predetermined criteria.” 

Administrators at the April 5 meeting enthusiastically endorsed eliminating standalone honors classes. 

“This is an anti-racist strategy. Earned honors supports our commitment to truly becoming an anti-racist institution. It allows us to set a bar of excellence for all of our students, for 100 percent of our students,” said Kaylee Jackson, executive director for curriculum. “[Standalone honors classes] are an exclusionary practice in which only some students within our high schools are receiving this rigorous instruction and capable of receiving honors credit.”

According to the latest data from the district, 41 percent of students in standalone honors classes are students of color. White students represent 43 percent of the total student population in the district, but make up 59 percent of standalone honors classes. 

Most school board members expressed support at the meeting for eliminating standalone honors, although no vote was taken to either move forward or reject the idea. Board member Ananda Mirilli said she was “100 percent behind” the plan, a sentiment echoed by board member Savion Castro.

Chris Rickert:

Under a plan proposed by administrators last year, beginning with the 2022-23 school year, ninth-graders would only be able to earn honors credit through the district’s “earned honors” program, which places all students in the same classes but allows those who want to earn honors credit to do so if they meet a set of criteria showing mastery of the content. The same would apply to 10th-graders beginning in the 2023-24 school year.

The shift away from stand-alone honors classes was pitched by administrators as a way to boost racial equity, as students of color historically have been less likely to take honors-only classes, although they are open to all students. Those racial disparities have been closing in recent years.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Bryan Caplan:

The most painful part of writing The Case Against Education was calculating the return to education. I spent fifteen months working on the spreadsheets. I came up with the baseline case, did scores of “variations on a theme,” noticed a small mistake or blind alley, then started over. Several programmer friends advised me to learn a new programming language like Python to do everything automatically, but I’m 98% sure that would have taken even longer – and introduced numerous additional errors into the results. I did plenty of programming in my youth, and I know my limitations.

I took quality control very seriously.  About half a dozen friends gave up whole days of their lives to sit next to me while I gave them a guided tour of the reasoning behind my number-crunching.  Four years before the book’s publication, I publicly released the spreadsheets, and asked the world to “embarrass me now” by finding errors in my work.  If memory serves, one EconLog reader did find a minor mistake.  When the book finally came out, I published final versions of all the spreadsheets underlying the book’s return to education calculations.  A one-to-one correspondence between what’s in the book and what I shared with the world.  Full transparency.

Now guess what?  Since the 2018 publication of The Case Against Education, precisely zero people have emailed me about those spreadsheets.  The book enjoyed massive media attention.  My results were ultra-contrarian: my preferred estimate of the Social Return to Education is negative for almost every demographic.  I loudly used these results to call for massive cuts in education spending.  Yet since the book’s publication, no one has bothered to challenge my math.  Not publicly.  Not privately.  No one cared about my spreadsheets.

The upshot is that I probably could have saved a year of my life. I could have glossed over dozens of thorny issues. Taxes. Transfers. The effect of education on longevity. The effect of education on quality of life. The effect of education on crime. How unpleasant school is compared to work. Instead of reading multiple literatures to extract plausible parameters, I could have just eyeballed and stipulated for every tangential issue. Who would have called me on it?

Notes and commentary.

Dalton Cooper:

Word puzzle game Wordle came out of nowhere, skyrocketing in popularity seemingly overnight and becoming a mainstream fad in the process. Its success drew the attention of The New York Times, the award-winning newspaper that’s been in circulation for over 150 years. The New York Times acquired Wordle for a seven-figure sum, and since then, there have been some subtle changes to the game.

Since New York Times‘ acquisition of Wordle, there have been tweaks to the game, not all of which have been popular. Some Wordle players have reported issues with their streaks being broken, and others have discovered that there are now less words that can be guessed than before. It seems that, in total, The New York Times has removed at least six words from Wordle‘s upcoming answers list, as well as 19 words from the game’s list of guesses.

During the American War of Independence, General Washington had an account at the Bank of England. His monies were not seized. The belief at the time was the Govt could not seize private property absent due process and a judicial proceeding.

Tell #Canada

— Seth Barrett Tillman (@SethBTillman) February 16, 2022

Jill Tucker & Anni Vainshtein:

San Francisco voters overwhelmingly supported the ouster of three school board members Tuesday in the city’s first recall election in nearly 40 years.

The landslide decision means board President Gabriela López and members Alison Collins and Faauuga Moliga will officially be removed from office and replaced by mayoral appointments 10 days after the election is officially accepted by the Board of Supervisors.

The new board members are likely to take office in mid-March. The three were the only school board members who had served long enough to be eligible for a recall.

The recall divided the city for the past year, with a grassroots effort of frustrated parents and community members pushing for the trustees’ removal over the slow reopening of schools during the pandemic and the board’s focus on controversial issues like renaming 44 school sites and ending the merit-based admission system at Lowell High School.

Supervisor Hillary Ronen said she wasn’t surprised by the results.

“We faced the hardest time of our entire lives as parents and as students in public schools and this Board of Education focused on issues that weren’t about dealing with the immediate crisis of the day, and they didn’t show the leadership that that was necessary and that parents needed to hear, and that kids needed to hear,” said Ronen.

At least a hundred recall backers had gathered in the back room of Manny’s Cafe in the Mission District on Tuesday night.

Elizabeth Beyer:

In an election season heated by controversy surrounding COVID mitigation policy and K-12 curriculum, Dane County’s largest school board race appeared split, with voters pushing through a raft of newcomers while ousting one longtime incumbent and advancing another during Tuesday’s primary election.

The SF school board recall should be a wake up call to elected officials — especially Democrats — across the nation: Parents are fed up with the status quo that puts adults ahead of kids and ideology ahead of results.

— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) February 16, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

John Keck:

Over the past 2 years, students around the world have been experiencing the absolute horror of online learning. Let’s paint the picture: one insanely boring teacher rambling on (and maybe sharing their screen to show off their rivetingPowerPoint) with any number of students sitting on mute desperately trying to stay awake. There’s little to no engagement, the teachers hate it, the students hate it, and all is wrong with the world (don’t even get me started on Blackboard or Canvas). Luckily, I only had to deal with this for 2 months as I “graduated” grad school on Zoom but more and more classes are being taught in a grid from hell. 

That’s not to say that all traditional online education is bad. Plenty of folks have figured out ways to take lectures and turn them into quality content. Harvard’s CS50 is the prime example of this, combining world-class curriculum with the production quality of a TV show. It’s not a drastic departure from what you’d get in the physical classroom. In fact, Professor Malan teaches the course live on campus as well as distributing it online. The key here is that Malan and his crew believe that the best way to get through to students is engaging (and dare I say fun) content.

Royal statistical society

A survey by the RSS has found that just over half (52 per cent) of MPs were able to answer a simple probability question correctly, a likely improvement from when politicians were asked the same question ten years ago.

As politicians over the course of the pandemic have dealt with a barrage of statistics, the Society decided to put their statistical skills to the test. A total of 101 MPs were asked the question: if you toss a coin twice, what is the probability of getting two heads? Just over half, 52 per cent, of MPs gave the correct answer of 25 per cent.

This is a likely improvement from when the RSS polled MPs with the same question ten years ago, when 40 per cent of MPs gave the correct answer.

In this latest survey conducted by Savanta ComRes on behalf of the RSS in late 2021/early 2022, 32 per cent of MPs gave the incorrect answer of 50 per cent, compared to 45 per cent of MPs in the 2011 survey.

Of those asked in the most recent survey, there was a modest estimated difference between MPs from the two main parties. In the survey, 50 per cent of Conservative MPs gave the correct answer, while 53 per cent of Labour MPs were right.

This is, arguably, the most consequential 80 seconds of any speech delivered by a government official in as long as I can remember.

This is the panopticon and the new digital gulag. This is the start of The De-personing. This will expand to every country and every “offense.” pic.twitter.com/mFSQJ06AOK

— Cyprian (@cyprianous) February 15, 2022

Scott Girard:

Blaska announced his candidacy in a blog post (link!! not present in the article) on Friday. The longtime critic of the Madison School Board wrote that “Madison voters unhappy with the direction of Madison’s public schools ought to be able to register a protest vote.”

He included a list of solutions that is “essentially the same platform we talked up in 2019 and more critical than ever.” The list includes returning school resource officers to the four comprehensive high schools and deploying some to middle schools, abolishing the Behavior Education Program, removing disruptive students and reducing central administration staff.

He also suggests the district “Quit teaching that Madison is institutionally racist, that some kids are implicitly biased, and that success depends on racial ‘privilege,’” and holding the line on property taxes.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Abigail Rabieh:

Last July, I decided I wanted to take math in college. My heart was set on it. Did I have any desire to major in math? Absolutely not. Did I need a math class to fulfill a requirement? Nope, I wanted to be a history major. But I enjoyed math in high school, and I wanted to continue to explore the field. I had previously taken classes up to linear algebra, so I selected MAT 202 from the Math Department website.

I took math because I desired to learn. One would think a student like me would thrive in this class, especially at a university that prides itself on enabling students “to pursue multiple interests rigorously and deeply,” as President Eisgruber says on the University website. Unfortunately, it is difficult for students pursuing humanities and social science degrees to explore classes within STEM departments due to the inaccessibility of introductory courses.

Though I passed MAT 202 class just fine, my experience in it was miserable. The way the course was run did not at all set up students to succeed — or even learn math. For example, though we were provided with practice problems to prepare for our exams, we were never given solutions. My class consistently begged my professor for these, yet all he could say was that not providing them was departmental policy, and it was out of his control. 

This begs the question: what interest does a department have in making it impossible to study? Study materials are given so that students can learn the course material and prepare adequately for the exam. Solution sets are part of this: to properly learn, one needs to be able to identify their mistakes and understand why they are wrong. By not supporting students who are making an effort to study, it becomes both extremely difficult to learn material, and demoralizing to even try. This struggle was reflected in our exam averages, which were, respectively, in the 50s, the 60s, and the 30s.

Jeffrey Mervis:

A new data-rich report by the National Science Foundation (NSF) confirms China has overtaken the United States as the world’s leader in several key scientific metrics, including the overall number of papers published and patents awarded. U.S. scientists also have serious competition from foreign researchers in certain fields, it finds.

That loss of hegemony raises an important question for U.S. policymakers and the country’s research community, according to NSF’s oversight body, the National Science Board (NSB). “Since across-the-board leadership in [science and engineering] is no longer a possibility, what then should our goals be?” NSB asks in a policy brief that accompanies this year’s Science and Engineering Indicatorsnone, NSF’s biennial assessment of global research, which was released this week. (NSF has converted a single gargantuan volume into nine thematic reports, summarized in The State of U.S. Science and Engineering 2022.)

NSB’s white paper hints at an answer by highlighting several factors it considers essential for maintaining a healthy U.S. research environment. The nation, it says, must sustain excellence in basic research; foster a scientific workforce more diverse in race, gender, and geography; and support high-quality precollege science and math education. The board also calls for forging closer ties between academia and industry, keeping borders open to promote international partnerships, and promoting ethical research practices.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Lucy Adams

Three mothers whose sons have been locked in hospital psychiatric units in Scotland for years have spoken to BBC Scotland because they are desperate to get them out.

The three young men did not break the law but have autism and learning disabilities.

The Scottish government said it was unacceptable to hold people with complex needs in hospital when they could be cared for in the community.
Jamie McMahon has autism and has been in locked hospital units for more than five years despite doctors saying it was not appropriate for him.
He was recorded as a delayed discharge in January 2017, meaning he should have been moved into the community, but no appropriate options were found.

Andrew Gutmann and Paul Rossi

Last spring we exposed how two elite independent schools in New York had become corrupted by a divisive obsession with race, helping start the national movement against critical race theory. Schools apply this theory under the guise of diversity, equity and inclusion programming. Until now, however, neither of us fully grasped the dangers of this ideology or the true motives of its practitioners. The goal of DEI isn’t only to teach students about slavery or encourage courageous conversations about race, it is to transform schools totally and reshape society radically. 

Over the past month we have watched nearly 100 hours of leaked videos from 108 workshops held virtually last year for the National Association of Independent Schools’ People of Color Conference. The NAIS sets standards for more than 1,600 independent schools in the U.S., driving their missions and influencing many school policies. The conference is NAIS’s flagship annual event for disseminating DEI practices, and more than 6,000 DEI practitioners, educators and administrators attended this year. Intended as professional development and not meant for the public, these workshops are honest, transparent and unfiltered—very different from how private schools typically communicate DEI initiatives. These leaked videos act as a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the DEI playbook.

Updating my obesity lecture notes with the most recent data from England’s National Child Measurement Programme. The data are so shockingly upsetting I have to share. 1/8

First off is the clear covid effect, both in reception (ages 4-5 for non-UK tweeps)… pic.twitter.com/K1jjzaAesA

— Dr. J Bernadette Moore (@TheMooreLab) February 13, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Jennifer Sey:

When I traveled to Moscow in 1986, I brought 10 pairs of Levi’s 501s in my bag. I was a 17-year-old gymnast, the reigning national champion, and I was going to the Soviet Union to compete in the Goodwill Games, a rogue Olympics-level competition orchestrated by CNN founder Ted Turner while the Soviet Union and the United States were boycotting each other. 

The jeans were for bartering lycra: the Russians’ leotards represented tautness, prestige, discipline. But they clamored for my denim and all that it represented: American ruggedness, freedom, individualism. 

I loved wearing Levi’s; I’d worn them as long as I could remember. But if you had told me back then that I’d one day become the president of the brand, I would’ve never believed you. If you told me that after achieving all that, after spending almost my entire career at one company, that I would resign from it, I’d think you were really crazy. 

Today, I’m doing just that. Why? Because, after all these years, the company I love has lost sight of the values that made people everywhere—including those gymnasts in the former Soviet Union—want to wear Levi’s.

My tenure at Levi’s began as an assistant marketing manager in 1999, a few months after my thirtieth birthday. As the years passed, I saw the company through every trend. I was the marketing director for the U.S. by the time skinny jeans had become the rage. I was the chief marketing officer when high-waists came into vogue. I eventually became the global brand president in 2020—the first woman to hold this post. (And somehow low-rise is back.)

Over my two decades at Levi’s, I got married. I had two kids. I got divorced. I had two more kids. I got married again. The company has been the most consistent thing in my life. And, until recently, I have always felt encouraged to bring my full self to work—including my political advocacy. 

That advocacy has always focused on kids.

In 2008, when I was a vice president of marketing, I published a memoir about my time as an elite gymnast that focused on the dark side of the sport, specifically the degradation of children. The gymnastics community threatened me with legal action and violence. Former competitors, teammates, and coaches dismissed my story as that of a bitter loser just trying to make a buck. They called me a grifter and a liar. But Levi’s stood by me. More than that: they embraced me as a hero.

Rick Solem

The trickle down of partisan politics into local elections has reached the school board races.

Part of a conversation Friday on La Crosse Talk PM asked UW-L political science professor, Dr. Anthony Chergosky, his thoughts on how that partisanship is contaminating what are supposed to be nonpartisan races.

Well, 24 hours later, the school board race in Holmen will now have to endure through an ugly incident.

Four people are running for two seats on the Holmen School Board:

Leah Asmelash:

A leading journal of art and culture, The Believer published the work of icons like Leslie Jamison, Nick Hornby and Anne Carson. It won awards, it launched careers — it created a home for off-beat, quirky writing. When the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada bought the magazine, observers spoke of Las Vegas as a potential new hub for literary arts. 

Then, in October of last year, the college announced it was shutting the magazine down in early 2022, citing the “financial impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.” In a statement explaining the decision, the dean of the school’s College of Liberal Arts called print publications like The Believer “a financially challenging endeavor.”

The news came months after an incident where the editor in chief exposed himself during a video call with staff and subsequently resigned. Staffers’ complaints about him were also detailed in a Los Angeles Timesreport.

Still, the announcement caused ripples throughout the literary world — Jamison, known for her book of essays, “The Empathy Exams,” tweeted that she was “heartbroken” over the news when it was announced. 

The Believer’s shuttering isn’t isolated. Across the country, universities are slowly, quietly, cutting funding and shutting their literary publications down. Even magazines not connected to universities are closing their doors or changing publication strategies — a trend made worse by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic.

Ben Kuhn:

Yeah,” he replied morosely, “empathy is really hot right now.”

(If you’re still not convinced, the way you can really tell something is horribly wrong is that grad students find PhD Comics darkly funny, not just dark.)

I’ve been low-key worried about this for a while, but it boiled over recently when Eve offhandedly mentioned a department survey that showed over half of her classmates struggling with depression or anxiety.²

Over half! These are some of the smartest people in their field, who I’m confident would thrive in any normally-supportive (or supportive-at-all) work environment. Instead, they’re riddled with anxiety and depression because they’ve been convinced to tie up their entire identity in being one of the lucky 10%³ that lands a tenure-track research job, then hung out to dry by the gatekeepers they probably thought would help them.

How the hell do people think this is reasonable?

Douglas Belkin:

The digital test will continue to be scored on the 1600-point scale. Students will be able to take the digital exam on their own tablet or laptop or on a device provided to them. The College Board has been hit with security breaches in the Middle East and Asia and said the digital platform will make the test more secure. The new format enables each student to have a unique test form, making it “practically impossible to share answers,” according to the College Board.

Hendrik Knoche & Jeffrey Huang:

Despite 800 million illiterate people worldwide little research has aimed at understanding how they use and appropriate mobile phones. We interviewed illiterate immigrants living in Switzerland to inform the design of phones and applications for illiterate users. We report on their use, coping strategies, and appropriation of mobile devices and other media to manage their lives. We found that text represented a valuable component for managing contacts in current smart phones. We provide design recommendations for mobile phone interfaces for illiterate and semi-literate users.

Daniel E Ho, Oluchi Mbonu, Anne McDonough

While many have documented the changing demographics of universities, understanding the effects of prohibiting mandatory retirement (“uncapping”) has proved challenging. We digitize detailed directories of all American law school faculty from 1971–2017 and show that uncapping in 1994 had dramatic effects. From 1971 to 1993, the percent of faculty above 70—when mandatory retirement would typically have been triggered—remained stable at 1%, but starting in 1994, that proportion increased to 14%. We use a permutation test of moving cohorts to show that these increases are attributable to uncapping. Roughly 39% of faculty members would counterfactually have been subject to mandatory retirement. Effects were less pronounced at public schools, which were more likely to have defined benefits retirement plans. Second, we show that schools with the highest proportion of faculty over 70, and thus most impacted by uncapping, also exhibit the slowest integration of female and minority faculty members. Our study highlights crosscutting effects of civil rights laws: preventing age discrimination can have collateral effects on racial and gender integration.

James Freeman:

his was too much even for NPR’s Public Editor Kelly McBride, ostensibly a sort of ombudsman who is not exactly known for blowing the whistle on left-wing bias. Readers will recall Ms. McBride as a willing participant in the disgraceful media blackout of the New York Post’s accurate reporting about Biden family business prior to the 2020 election.

Now Ms. McBride acknowledges that the Totenberg report needs a “clarification.” On Thursday Ms. McBride assessed the Totenberg claims about the Supreme Court:

“Country Faces an Overpopulation by 1975, with Farms Unable to Feed All, Experts Say”

—@nytimes in 1952, fearing that US population would reach 190 million people.

Today we have 330 million people, and our major food-related problem is eating too much of it.#Catastrophizing pic.twitter.com/EzlMYqcoIj

— Alex Epstein (@AlexEpstein) February 11, 2022

American Institute of Mathematics:

To gain our seal of approval an open source mathematics textbook must be able to serve as the primary text in a mainstream mathematics course at the undergraduate level in U.S. colleges and universities. That means that we are not evaluating instructional modules, Java applets, supplementary lecture notes, or other materials that are designed for limited use within a course. Since the minimum length of a traditional course is 10 weeks with 30 hours of class instruction, the books we evaluate must have enough material for that, and most will have more since most college courses are 14 or 15 weeks in length with at least 40 hours of class time.

We are looking for books that we can recommend for consideration to any of our colleagues, books that are suitable for use in traditional university courses. Books must be mathematically sound and written in standard English with evidence that they have been proofread and edited. They need not have color, flashy graphics, or ancillary materials. They must have exercises, and though it would be desirable to have short answers to many of the problems, it is not necessary for approval. It would also be desirable to have more complete solutions available—at least to an instructor.

Furthermore, we expect books of the quality we seek to be class-tested. They should have been used (and be in current use) by faculty other than the author. We are certainly interested in fostering the writing of open source books, and so we may encourage people to try out a book that looks promising, but we would not label such a book as having our full recommendation.

David Blaska

David Blaska is running for Madison school board after all. No, his name won’t be on the ballot because he is a write-in for Seat #4. That’s the one occupied by school board president Ali Muldrow.

We were opponents three years ago and Ali (truly a lovely young lady in many ways) beat me handily. Likely will again, since Blaska is a write in this time and is not spending $20,000 like last time. But the only race for the three seats open this April 5 is over at Seat 3between Laura Simkin and a transgendered performance artist who claims to be a blind, black albino with pronouns.

Madison voters unhappy with the direction of Madison’s public schools ought to be able to register a protest vote. Three years ago the Wisconsin State Journal would not endorse Blaska or Muldrow:

Blaska is right that a police officer should stay in each main high school to promote safety, and that disruptive students should be accountable for their actions. But he goes out of his way to provoke Madison liberals and score political points, while offering few solutions.

Few solutions? Still find that inexplicable. Identify, if you can, the solutions the current school board offers or implemented. The school board voted unanimously to defund school resource police officers and is only just now thinking about convening a committee to study (wait for it) … school safety. Meanwhile, riots at East high school, beatings at La Follette, the whacking at West, and teenagers crashing stolen cars and running through back yards.

David Blaska’s solutions …

Are guaranteed to provoke Madison liberals progressives.  Maybe they need a good provoking! It’s essentially the same platform we talked up in 2019 and more critical than ever:

•  Return school resource police officers to the four high schools and deploy some to the middle schools.

•  Abolish Jennifer Cheatham’s dysfunctional Behavior Education Program.

•  Put teachers back in control of their classroom and principals back in charge of their schools.

•  Remove disruptive students.

•  Boil down the 111-page District Safety Plan to the essentials, beginning with: “Call 9-1-1 First, then Contact Parents.”

•  Quit teaching that Madison is institutionally racist, that some kids are implicitly biased, and that success depends on racial “privilege.”

•   Keep schools open.

•  Reduce central administration staff.

•  Hold the line on taxes. Property taxes up 8.9% in one year.

•  Get federal and state governments to abjure race statistics, including the U.S. Census.

•  Seek changes in the state criminal code to make parents criminally liable for the crimes of their minor children.

• Apologize to “Mr. Rob,” the positive behavior coach forced out at Whitehorse middle school for trying to remove a disruptive student who beat him about the face.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Joel Kotkin:

The labouring masses are restless, as evidenced by the Canadian trucker strike, union drives in Amazon warehouses in the US and in demonstrations throughout the developing world. More revealing still may be the turmoil in the labour markets, where workers are changing jobs, creating their own and, overall, refusing to return to the structures of the pre-pandemic order.

Once working-class protests were often organised by leftists or even Communists, but many of today’s working-class radical movements take on a different, more populist and distinctly anti-statist character. One can question the positions adopted by protesters, particularly on vaccines, but also recognise that the new wave of working-class unrest, whether in Canada or among the gilets jaunes in France, reflects a deep-seated frustration with diktats issued from above by an increasingly authoritarian state.

Generally, these movements are not embraced but are largely met with disdain and even horror by gentry progressives and their media allies. As Edwin Apontenotes on the Bellows, a widely read Marxist blog, this ‘betrays the left’s allergy to the varied social character of the working class as it actually exists in 2022’.

These protests in the US, Australia and Europe are not led by Marxist intellectuals in quest of a new world order, but by those seeking to restore an increasingly threatened world, where individual workers still possess some power and small independent artisans or merchants can support a middle-class lifestyle. Given the persistent worker shortages and supply-chain issues, workers’ power to disrupt the economy and to push back is greater than at any time in the past half century. 

This new leverage is rooted in demographic trends. The US’s working population – people aged between 16 and 64 – grew by more than 20 per cent in the 1980s. In the past decade, it has grown by less than five per cent. To make matters worse, an estimated one-third of American working-age males are not in the labour force, suffering from high rates of incarceration, and from drug, alcohol and other health issues.

DPI Superintendent Jill Underly:

Dear Wisconsin Families and Educators,

I am writing this letter to you as a fellow parent and a former teacher.

Like you, I know what it means to be involved with my children’s education, and I love it. But I look at the way politicians talk about parental involvement, and I don’t recognize it. Family engagement isn’t about yelling at school staff or suing your school board if they don’t do exactly as you demand. It’s also not asking caregivers to homeschool or pay for private tuition if they feel unheard or unseen. Family engagement is about having a real conversation about – and with – our children. Like you, I build relationships with my children’s teachers, I reach out when I need to, and they know they can call if they need to. As a parent, I love my children’s school, and I see the ways our district works to involve all families and the entire community, and how the entire community supports our school. It’s an exchange, because what matters most to all of us is what we all have in common: our children.

Of course, this isn’t what politicians mean when they talk about protecting parental rights when it comes to children’s education. Rather, they’re talking about micromanaging curriculum and preying on our parental emotions during a traumatic time, all with the ulterior motive of placing suspicion on educators by weaponizing lessons about difficult topics, or by placing blame on schools for a pandemic they did not cause but are nonetheless supporting our children through.

As to my fellow educators, you and I all know that this isn’t the first time that politicians in this state have gone after teachers. And as a former civics teacher, I know that teaching the history of this nation cannot – and should not – be done without tackling difficult topics. Families know this and support these opportunities for our schools to engage our children to become critical thinkers and critical consumers of information. We want our students to grow up and be active participants in democracy, and that means they need to know how to examine their past, think critically about their present, and make informed decisions about their future. This critical lens is what makes our democracy stronger, and the only way for our children to engage is through our public schools where this freedom to think critically is encouraged and the skill of thinking critically is actively taught. Teaching is our expertise, and we are happy to learn from parents about your children, just as we hope families are excited to learn the answer to, “What did you do in school today, honey?” when your learner walks through the door.

I’m tired. Like you, I’m tired of the pandemic. I’m getting tired of this winter. And I’m really, really tired of politicians pitting parents against teachers when our children are the ones who get hurt in the end. Because they’re the ones who matter most in this conversation and who matter most for the future of our state. And that conversation – how to best meet the needs of our children and students – is one I’m excited to continue having as a parent and an educator, and to lead as your Wisconsin State Superintendent.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

The Economist:

Global Democracy continued its precipitous decline in 2021, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, EIU. The annual survey, which rates the state of democracy across 167 countries on the basis of five measures—electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties—finds that more than a third of the world’s population live under authoritarian rule while just 6.4% enjoy a full democracy. The global score fell from 5.37 to a new low of 5.28 out of ten. The only equivalent drop since 2006 was in 2010 after the global financial crisis.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Will Flanders & Libby Sobic:

Presumably, the Representative was specifically responding to testimony from parents from around Wisconsin in support of AB 963. In an era where parents who attend school board meetings are called potential terrorists by the National Association of School Boards and subjected to monitoring by the federal government, it is more important than ever to enshrine in law the rights that parents have over their children’s education. The bill, supported by WILL, would ensure some very basic parental rights are protected: the right to be notified about violence in schools, the right to review curriculum, and the right to opt their child out of controversial topics are among them. Most of these rights are things that a previous generation never thought would need to be guaranteed: they are common sense. Yet increasingly ‘woke’ education establishment has placed them under threat. The legislature heard from more than 100 parents (in person or via written testimony) angry at this overreach by local schools, and demanding change. According to Representative Snodgrass, though, their only option would be to switch to a different educational model.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Julie Jargon:

The fact that she home-schools her kids—because her husband traveled frequently when they were young—has made it tougher for her to find friends with similar interests and stances, she said. She doesn’t feel she fits in with the other home-schooling mothers in her area, because she said she feels their views are more conservative than hers.

“It feels strange to think about feeling lonely because I’m never alone,” she said. “There’s always someone around, but I feel like I’m missing that connection with moms who are going through similar things.”

Ms. Reinhardt and a close friend, who has a 6-year-old and another child about to turn 3, watched the TV show “This is Us” together before the pandemic, but as work and life became busier for both, they stopped, figuring they would pick up again later. They haven’t yet.

MD Makowsky:

There are many reasons why an industry can become concentrated within a narrow geographic region. Externally generated increasing returns to scale i.e. a firm becomes more productive simply by being near other firms producing the same thing, is an observation that goes all the way back to Alfred Marshall. That’s the story of Hollywood and Silicon Valley, not to mention a million other micro-industries. The story of journalism, however, is different, because it is not the capital or labor market opportunities, but specifically the labor itself that is concentrated in a narrow location. The “Writer living in Brooklyn” Twitter/LinkedIn/Muckrack bio is a cliche at this point for a reason. But why are they all in Brooklyn? And why do I get the sense that I can summarize at least half of them as White children of the upper-middle class who paid full-freight for an English-adjacent degree from an expensive liberal arts college? 

Wages in journalism have gone to hell while, at the same time, there has emerged an extreme upper tail whose public standing achieved escape velocity, allowing them to go independent via Substack and earn vastly higher incomes. These diverging trends have their origin in the same phenomenon: the skyrocketing potential of any one journalist to reach the masses. The power law scale of social networks means every article, post, or tweet has a chance of going viral, and with it the chance to reach tens of millions of eyeballs. Put another way, its gotten easier to reach people, but harder to get paid to reach people. 

There is a status that comes with strangers knowing who you are, what you wrote, what your core ideas are. It is also a status that disproportionately recognizes itself. When prominent writers hang out with each other, recognizing the ideas that each carries and communicates to large numbers of people, they reinforce the status that comes with that reach. I’m getting out over my psychological skis a bit here, but I’m willing to wager it feels good, in a way not dissimilar to my research being recognized by my academic peers. With less risk to going beyond my own expertise, I’m willing to argue that the reach, imprint, pageviews, and followers; the eyeballs that your work generates, is the prinicipal source of status within the modern journalist community

Stop what you’re doing and watch this.

Kids at a Las Vegas elementary school burst out into cheers after learning they no longer have to wear a mask to school pic.twitter.com/xIuHgFtmHo

— Courtney Holland 🇺🇸 (@hollandcourtney) February 11, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Tax Prof:

Jarrett paid income tax for 2019 on new tokens he created through staking. Contending that property that is created—like bread baked by a baker or a novel written by an author—is only taxed when it is sold, Jarrett filed for a refund in August 2020. The IRS ignored Jarrett’s refund claim, forcing him to pursue the matter in federal court. Today, court filings reveal that the government has offered to grant this refund, an early sign suggesting that the IRS will not tax property created through staking until it is sold.

xsrus.com

Most people sense that school today is poor preparation for the world of work. I think there is a fundamental reason why: linearity.

School is a linear system. By that, I mean the material in classes is presented sequentially, in more or less equally-sized chunks. My school called these chunks “units”. In maths, the functions unit came before the differentiation unit, and so on. At the end of a unit there was always a test. Supposedly, the purpose of the test was assessment: tracking students’ progress. But a secondary outcome was standardising the speed of learning. Regardless of whether students forged ahead with the material or hung behind, they all had to take the same test at the same time. The structure of school calcifies the pace of learning, forcing students to march to the regular ring of the bell.

School rewards effort linearly as well. For example, when required to write essays, my school provided us with a mark scheme: a set of criteria which specified what “competencies” we had to demonstrate in order to achieve a certain grade. If you used 10% more “advanced vocabulary words” you’d get into the next grade band. If you only used one or two good transitions you’d fall into a lower grade band. The mark scheme suggested small improvements to make to our writing, which gave small, predictable increases in our grades.

Andrew Yang:

The data are clear. Boys are more than twice as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; are five times as likely to spend time in juvenile detention; and are less likely to finish high school.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t get better when boys become adults. Men now make up only 40.5 percent of college students. Male community college enrollment declined by 14.7 percent in 2020 alone, compared with 6.8 percent for women. Median wages for men have declined since 1990 in real terms. Roughly one-third of men are either unemployed or out of the workforce. More U.S. men ages 18 to 34 are now living with their parents than with romantic partners.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Kyle Koenen & Lucas Vebber

Recently, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty released Wisconsin Regulation in Focus, a reporti highlighting the scope of Wisconsin’s regulatory state. That report helps call attention to the magnitude of Wisconsin’s regulations, especially when compared with our neighboring states. It also suggests some simple reforms which could be helpful to rein in our ever-growing regulatory state.
This follow up report adds some detail to those reforms while also suggesting some additional ones which could be implemented in order to ensure Wisconsin’s regulatory environment is as efficient and transparent as possible. As discussed herein, we suggest: (1) automatically sunsetting regulations over time; (2) independent reporting on regulations before they’re promulgated; (3) ensuring all new regulations are net-zero in cost by requiring cost savings whenever new costs are imposed; (4) allowing only one rule per scope statement to be promulgated; (5) reforms to the emergency rulemaking process; and (6) changes to public oversight of regulations, making it easier for private individuals to hold government accountable. The following sections of the report describe each of these proposals in greater detail.

Senator Ron Wyden:

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., both members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for new transparency about bulk surveillance conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency, following the release of documents that revealed a secret bulk collection program and problems with how the agency searches and handles Americans’ information.

Wyden and Heinrich requested the declassification of a report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on a CIA bulk collection program, in a letter sent April 13, 2021. The letter, which was declassified and made public today reveals that “the CIA has secretly conducted its own bulk program,” authorized under Executive Order 12333, rather than the laws passed by Congress.

The letter notes that the program was “entirely outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection, and without any of the judicial, congressional or even executive branch oversight that comes from [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] collection.” 

“FISA gets all the attention because of the periodic congressional reauthorizations and the release of DOJ, ODNI and FISA Court documents,” said Senators Wyden and Heinrich in response to the newly declassified documents.  “But what these documents demonstrate is that many of the same concerns that Americans have about their privacy and civil liberties also apply to how the CIA collects and handles information under executive order and outside the FISA law.  In particular, these documents reveal serious problems associated with warrantless backdoor searches of Americans, the same issue that has generated bipartisan concern in the FISA context.”

Wyden and Heinrich called for more transparency from the CIA, including what kind of records were collected and the legal framework for the collection. The PCLOB report noted problems with CIA’s handling and searching of Americans’ information under the program.

Heather Smith:

School board primary elections are next week, and there is much consternation in the education establishment about the civic engagement of parents who are stepping up to take a more active role in the education of their children.

The pandemic brought to light many things about our school system that served as an education to parents across the state.  To be sure some of those things were positive – many parents developed respect and appreciation for teachers who rose to the unprecedented challenges presented by upending the normal structure of classroom learning.

But there were many troubling discoveries. While the American Society of Pediatrics was strongly recommending in-person learning as vital to education as well as student mental, physical, and emotional health, parents saw their schools rejecting these experts’ advice.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

David Blaska:

Look sharp, readers! Make sure car doors are locked and crash air bags working! Tavion J. Flowers, the gift that keeps on taking, is back on the mean streets of Madison! Sprung from the Dane County Jail Monday 02-07-22 for the paltry price of $400.  A week after the 18-year-old’s most recent excellent adventure.

Mr. Flowers was one of the four teenagers — two as young as age 15 — who crashed a stolen car on Mineral Point Road Tuesday 02-01-22 during school hours. Seeing the fleeing boys in her back yard, a likely Mayor Satya-voter invited them in for milk and cookies. Was about to give the boys a lift, seeing that they wrecked their stolen car. Cops got there first. One of the lads was found to possess more sets of car keys than the plaid jacket at the used car lot. At least a couple of products of our public schools were locked and loaded. Madison police say the 16-year old had been adjudicated before. Police identified the oldest of the quartet as our Tavion Flowers.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Wisconsin state representative just deleted this tweet. pic.twitter.com/Mj8pEs9afe

— Corey A. DeAngelis (@DeAngelisCorey) February 10, 2022

I deleted my Tweet since it was lacking in nuance and easily misinterpreted. I wouldn't want anyone to think that parents do not have a role in their child's public education-I sure did. I encourage all parents to engage in voting for school board, join PTO and meet with teachers

— Rep. Lee Snodgrass (@RepSnodgrass) February 10, 2022

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Antonis Adam and Sofia Tsarsitalidou

We use Benford’s law of first digits to determine whether there is evidence of data misreporting in the total COVID19 reported cases across countries. We try to model the differences in the Mean Absolute Deviation of actual data from those predicted by Benford’s law to indicate the factors that lead to data misreporting using regression analysis. Using the Instrumental Variable model ofLewbel (2012) and Settler Mortality as an external instrument for democracy, we show that autocratic countries are more likely to misreport the COVID19 cases.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

THURSDAY: Assembly Committee on Education will be hearing testimony on a Parent Bill of Rights. pic.twitter.com/2zPwBJmbwu

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) February 9, 2022

Notes:

Parent Bill of Rights: In recent years, WILL has represented several public-school parents after their local public schools established policies and procedures that undermined the parent’s rights to make decisions about their child’s education, healthcare and overall welfare. AB 963 is a response to this common experience for Wisconsin’s public-school parents.

• Right to review educational materials and access to learning materials: This legislation empowers parents to have access to learning materials used in the education of their child. This is vital as parents continue to engage with their child’s teachers and school administrators.

• Right to determine the names and pronouns used for the child while at school: WILL has two active lawsuits, representing public-school parents, against the Madison Metropolitan School District and Kettle Moraine School District regarding the districts’ policy on gender pronouns and student nicknames. The legislation ensures that parents are not in the dark about serious and important medical decisions regarding their child.

• Right to opt out and be notified about educational topics: This legislation provides parents with options to decide their own child’s educational experience and learning materials based on whether the material violates the parent’s religious or personal convictions.

• Right to be notified about surveys to students: Federal law protects students from being required to participate in any sort of “survey, analysis, or evaluation” that divulges information concerning, among other things, political affiliations or beliefs of the student or the student’s parent; legally recognized privileged relationships, such as that between a physician and a patient; and religious practices, affiliations, or beliefs of the student or student’s parent.”

• Right to be notified about student safety and incidents of violence: The legislation requires a school to notify parents about security updates, disciplinary actions taken against their child and if crimes or acts of violence occur on school campus.

• Establishes a legal right to direct the education of their child: This legislation creates a legal standard for state infringement on fundamental rights of parents and guardians through specific items enumerated in the bill. It also gives parents and guardians a way to hold the district accountable for their actions by suing the district who fails to comply with this bill.

 

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

David Blaska:

Spot quiz: What word will not be spoken by any of Madison’s candidates for school board? Time’s up! Groucho Marx’s secret word is “discipline.” Discipline is defined as “training to act in accordance with rules; activity, exercise or a regimen that develops or improves a skill.”

Discipline is the sine qua non (more Latin) of education. Mathematics, language, music, athletics — they’re all disciplines. All have rules that require mastery. All require effort — showing up, paying attention, listening to the one who teaches, doing the work.

Here’s the math: Discipline = Education = Success — never more so in our knowledge-based economy. If Madison’s growing cadre of car thieves has one thing in common, it is they are functionally illiterate. Doing crime is the surest way to fail, but Madison’s Woke progressives would rather play identity politics and guilt-trip history than demand performance.

Which is why the Werkes reminds parents that you do have a choice — if not at the ballot box, you can vote with your feet. The Wisconsin School Choice program (as opposed to the Milwaukee and Racine versions) is open for business until April 21 for enrollment next school year. We count 12 eligible non-public schools here in Dane and Columbia counties. Your child may qualify based on family income. Apply here.

If your family does not qualify, consider a more successful public school. Open Enrollment continues until 4:00 pm April 29.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Emily Hamer:

Madison police were called to respond to a lunchtime fight between East High School students Wednesday off campus, but students began to dissipate just before officers arrived, according to the school’s interim principal.

While only a few students were involved in the physical altercation near the parking lot of Milio’s Sandwiches, 2202 E. Johnson St., roughly 30 students were “actively” watching, East High School interim Principal Mikki Smith said in an email to parents.

“It is critical for students to understand how, being a bystander or goading on participants, is unsafe, unhelpful and can cause the situation to become more volatile,” Smith said

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Jonathan Clark:

Such is the case with Mark McGurl’s Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon. Esquire recently published an extended interview with McGurl that praised his “lucid and well-argued prose.” The Los Angeles Review of Books referred to his “intellectual fireworks” and “comic bravura.” This praise can only plausibly apply to McGurl’s reputation and professional status as the Albert Guérard Professor of Literature at Stanford and author of The Program Era, winner of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. It cannot refer to the text of Everything and Less, a lazy, self-satisfied, and infuriating book, the publication of which is unintentionally revealing of the status games that dominate American literary culture.

Amazon has changed the way books are marketed and sold, capturing enormous market share in the process. It also has growing ambitions as a trade publisher, including, through its Amazon Crossing subsidiary, a large and somewhat quixotic bet that it can grow the market for literature in translation. A book by an award-winning critic like McGurl about the company’s impact ought to be an enticing prospect. One can imagine the following sequence: a short, breezy book proposal, comprised of some familiar critical idioms (“the commodification of experience,” “materialist historiography”) and a

Samuel Benson:

A former law clerk for a potential Supreme Court nominee embarked on a Wikipedia editing spree over the past week, bolstering the page of his former boss while altering the pages of her competitors in an apparent attempt to invite liberal skepticism, according to a statement from his fellow clerks.

After POLITICO began inquiring about the changes on Friday, a group of former law clerks for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson identified the anonymous editor as Matteo Godi, another former Jackson clerk. Godi did not respond to multiple emailed requests or a phone call.

Richard Hanania:

Having mentioned the concept a few times, many have been encouraging me to write a Substack on the feminization of political life and its connection to free speech issues. Noah Carl beat me to it, and the idea has also been picked up by no less an authority than Tom Edsall at the New York Times. I’ve already written about the overrepresentation of women in HR. We can understand the decline of free speech as a kind of female pincer attack: women demand more suppression of offensive ideas at the bottom of institutions, and form a disproportionate share of the managers who hear their complaints at the top. 

What is left to contribute on the question of how feminization relates to pathologies in our current political discourse? First, I think that the ways in which public debate works when we take steps to make the most emotional and aggressive women comfortable have been overlooked. Things that we talk about as involving “young people,” “college students,” and “liberals” are often gendered issues. 

This doesn’t always show up in the data, and many may not want to discuss anything controversial without having numbers they can refer to, lest they be accused of everything they say being a figment of their sexist imagination. Nonetheless, I think that anyone who has spent time paying attention to politics, journalism, or academia, or wherever people debate ideas, will understand what I’m talking about.

NYT:

Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat who has imposed some of the nation’s most stringent pandemic-related mandates, will no longer require students and school employees to wear masks, signaling a deliberate shift toward treating the coronavirus as a part of daily life.

Mr. Murphy, the vice chairman of the National Governors Association, said on Sunday that he would officially announce the elimination of the mandate on Monday afternoon. The new policy will take effect the second week of March, two years after New York and New Jersey became early epicenters of a virus that has since mutated and resurged, killing more than 900,000 peoplenationwide.

The debate over mask wearing in schools has proved one of the most divisive issues in the pandemic, embroiling parents, school boards, teachers and elected officials in caustic clashes over academic loss, protecting public health and individual choice.

Mr. Murphy’s move follows a decision last month by the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, to rescind his state’s school mask mandate. The Democratic governors of New York and Connecticut also said last week that they were re-evaluating school mask mandates that are soon set to expire.

An average of 78 New Jersey residents died each day from Covid-19 in the last week, contributing to a daily nationwide death toll of 2,600, a per capita rate that far exceeds those of other wealthy nations.

By Lisa Lerer, Luis Ferré-Sadurní and Astead W. Herndon

It was Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey who began the effort last fall, weeks after he was stunned by the energy of right-wing voters in his blue state, who nearly ousted him from office in what was widely expected to be an easy re-election campaign. Arranging a series of focus groups across the state to see what they had missed, Mr. Murphy’s advisers were struck by the findings: Across the board, voters shared frustrations over public health measures, a sense of pessimism about the future and a deep desire to return to some sense of normalcy.

Republicans excoriated Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles after they were photographed without masks at an N.F.L. playoff game on Jan. 30. (Mr. Garcetti said he held his breath during the photo, creating a “zero percent chance of infection.”)

On Monday, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, called Representative Elissa Slotkin of Michigan “another Democrat hypocrite” after Ms. Slotkin posted a photo of herself unmasked at an indoor campaign event.

And over the weekend, Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat running for governor, deleted a photograph she had tweeted that showed her smiling, mask-free, in front of a classroom full of children wearing masks at a Georgia school.

“This is the Georgia Stacey Abrams wants,” warned a digital ad with which the campaign of former Senator David Perdue, a Republican running for governor, sought to capitalize on the misstep. “Unmask our kids.”

Tuesday night, Ms. Abrams said she had erred by taking the photograph. “Protocols matter,” she said on CNN. “And protecting our kids is the most important thing. And anything that can be perceived as undermining that is a mistake, and I apologize.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Marty Makary:

For most of last year, many of us called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its data on reinfection rates, but the agency refused. Finally last week, the CDC released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination.

Yet the CDC spun the report to fit its narrative, bannering the conclusion “vaccination remains the safest strategy.” It based this conclusion on the finding that hybrid immunity—the combination of prior infection and vaccination—was associated with a slightly lower risk of testing positive for Covid. But those with hybrid immunity had a similar low rate of hospitalization (3 per 10,000) to those with natural immunity alone. In other words, vaccinating people who had already had Covid didn’t significantly reduce the risk of hospitalization.

Similarly, the National Institutes of Health repeatedly has dismissed natural immunity by arguing that its duration is unknown—then failing to conduct studies to answer the question. Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99% of them up to nearly two years after infection. We also found that natural immunity developed from prior variants reduced the risk of infection with the Omicron variant. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of the two-dose Moderna vaccine against infection (not severe disease) declines to 61% against Delta and 16% against Omicron at six months, according to a recent Kaiser Southern California study. In general, Pfizer’s Covid vaccines have been less effective than Moderna’s.

Peter Guest

Now, documents viewed by Rest of Worldshed light on the reputation management industry, revealing how Eliminalia and companies like it may use spurious copyright claims and fake legal notices to remove and obscure articles linking clients to allegations of tax avoidance, corruption, and drug trafficking. The Elephant case may be one of thousands just like it. 

Metadata, filenames and the inclusion of internal company information, including contact details and references to company policies, suggest the documents originated from within Eliminalia. Alongside names referred to as clients, the documents include URLs that were to be removed or de-indexed on their behalf. Rest of World spoke to several people and media organizations who ran websites listed in the documents and confirmed that they had been approached by people linked to, or directly employed by, Eliminalia. 

Among the thousands of names listed as clients in the documents are the former foreign minister of the Dominican Republic, an individual indicted in Argentina for his role in a cryptocurrency pyramid scheme, and people accused of corruption worldwide, all apparently looking to erase information about themselves from the internet. There are 17,000 URLs that were apparently targeted on clients’ behalf between 2015 and 2019. In at least one case, it appears that Eliminalia may have been hired by a third party reputation managment firm on behalf of a client. It is unclear whether the list represents the entirety of the company’s clients, but it includes individuals and companies from Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, and shows the extent to which services of this kind have become a way for wealthy and powerful individuals to control information on the internet.

Philipp Ager, Katherine Eriksson, Ezra Karger, Peter Nencka, Melissa A. Thomasson

During the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, many local authorities made the controversial decision to close schools. We use newly digitized data from newspaper archives on the length of school closures for 165 large U.S. cities during the 1918–19 flu pandemic to assess the long-run consequences of closing schools on children. We find that the closures had no detectable impact on children’s school attendance in 1920, nor on their educational attainment and adult labor market outcomes in 1940. We highlight important differences between the 1918–19 and Covid-19 pandemics and caution against extrapolating from our null effects to modern-day settings.

James Martin:

The components of the red bead experiment include a box of 4,000 wooden beads (800 red and 3,200 white), a paddle with fifty bead size depressions, a second smaller box for mixing the beads, six willing workers, two inspectors who make independent counts, a chief inspector who verifies the counts, an accountant who records the counts and a customer who will not accept red beads. The job is to produce white beads and the standard for each worker is fifty white beads per day.

The daily production operation for each worker includes: 1) poring the beads from the first box into the second box and then back into the first box (to mix the beads), 2) dipping the paddle into the first box without shaking it, 3) carrying the loaded paddle to each inspector for separate counts and then verification, and 4) dumping the day’s work back into the supply box. The six workers perform this operation four times to represent four days’ work. The results of one of Deming’s experiments appear in Table 1.

Jonah McKeown

After a difficult 2020-2021 year for many Catholic schools, enrollment numbers are rebounding nationwide, according to data from the National Catholic Educational Association. 

Overall, enrollment in Catholic schools in the U.S. is up from 1.63 million last year to 1.69 million this year, an increase of more than 3.5%, according to the NCEA. 

Despite the increase, enrollment numbers do not appear to have yet reached 2019 levels, which saw 1.74 million students enrolled.

Anya Kamanetz:

Kerry Dingle is a mother of two. She thinks masks should be optional for kids in schools and child care. And that makes her feel pretty lonely in Silver Spring, Md.

“As soon as you question ‘Is it a good idea to put a 2-year-old in a mask all day?’ you’re suddenly a psychotic, anti-vax right-winger,” she says. “Which really couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Dingle says she loves vaccines and thinks everyone should have them. “And the fact that high-risk people can protect themselves with vaccines and boosters now is fantastic and means that they should do that. And we should stop burdening little kids with protecting other people.”

Her 3-year-old son is in a preschool that mandates masking, although the children are almost always outdoors. “He keeps the cloth mask on, but he sucks on them and he chews holes through them,” she says. “Really, within five minutes of him putting it on, it’s wet.”

Her 6-year-old son, a first-grader, has a tic disorder that she says is exacerbated by a mask. “He makes facial movements that pull it down.” He kept getting in trouble for it until Dingle asked his pediatrician for a letter explaining that, but she says his teachers still correct him all day long.

Andrew Restuccia and Gabriel T. Rubin:

Melanie Kelley, 38 years old, of Denver, has $125,000 in student loans. When the Biden administration’s pandemic-related pause on student-loan payments ends in May, she will owe $1,000 a month.

“It’s become this unmanageable beast for me,” she said. “May isn’t that far away. How am I going to figure this out?” A management consultant, she said she has worked as a DoorDash driver to supplement her income, but her debt has kept her from starting a family or buying a house.

“A lot of people are not going to vote again because they feel like they’re not being heard,” said Ms. Kelley, who voted for Mr. Biden in 2020.

Ms. Kelley is one of around 43 million Americans with student debt. As a candidate, Mr. Biden endorsed canceling $10,000 in student debt per borrower through legislation and proposed forgiving tuition-related federal debt for people who earned undergraduate degrees at public colleges and universities, as well as schools that historically serve Black and minority students.

All told, Americans owe around $1.6 trillion in federal student loans and more than $130 billion in private student loans, according to the data firm MeasureOne.

Lipis.dev

A curated collection of all country flags in SVG — plus the CSS for easier integration.

Corbin Faife:

Federal investigators served Google with a geofence warrant as part of an investigation into an attempted arson against a police union headquarters in Seattle during protests of the shooting of Jacob Blake, as shown by documents unsealed today in federal court. 

The attempted arson took place on August 24th, 2020, one day after police officers shot Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, leaving him paralyzed. Amidst broader protests in Seattle and across the country, two people threw Molotov cocktails at the rear entrance of the headquarters of the Seattle Police Officers Guild (SPOG).

While the building sustained little damage, the attack spurred widespread national interest: Seattle police initially posted a $1,000 reward for information, and the FBI later offered up to $20,000 for any tips that would help identify the people involved.

But documents unsealed on February 3rd show that, before offering the reward for information, the FBI also used a controversial search technique known as a geofence warrant to request information from Google about all Android devices that had passed through the area before and after the attack.

“On August 24, 2020, at approximately 11:00 p.m., two unknown suspects intentionally damaged the SPOG building using what I believe to be improvised incendiary devices,” an FBI agent told the court in the affidavit. “Based on the foregoing, I submit that there is probable cause to search information that is currently in the possession of Google and that relates to the devices that reported being within the Target Location.”

Anna North:

When Covid-19 first hit, teachers were praised to the skies, recalled Maria Salinas, who teaches fifth grade reading in Florida. “You know: ‘Hey, you guys are doing a good job. It’s so wonderful what you’re doing.’”

Now, she’s hearing the polar opposite: “Teachers are lazy. They don’t want to work.” 

Also a mother of four, Salinas finds herself at the center of an ongoing conflict among parents, lawmakers, and educators in which no one is satisfied and everyone is mad. Parents blame teachers for keeping schools closed. Teachers counter that the blame is misplaced — after all, it’s hardly their fault if a school has to shut down because so many staff are sick. At the same time, teachers have concerns about keeping their own families safe amid an ongoing pandemic, and about the burden society seems to be placing on their shoulders. 

At the core of the conflict is the fact that parents don’t just need school to educate their kids — something that can, in many cases, be accomplished virtually (though some studies suggest that remote learning is less effective than in-person class time). They also need school, controversial though this may be, as a source of child care — it’s a supervised place kids can go while parents work, and at least in the case of public school, it’s free. This is the function that has truly broken down in the pandemic, with hard lockdowns giving way to rolling quarantines and intractable staff shortages that have left working parents constantly on edge, wondering when the next closure notice will send them scrambling for a backup plan.

John Phipps:

So it must be explained again: the Uighurs are Turkic Muslims who live in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang; in the past 50 years this region has been transformed from their homeland to one that hosts equal numbers of Han Chinese and Uighur; Uighurs have become second-class citizens; this state of affairs led to dissent, violent protest and may have motivated a handful of terrorist attacks; and the Chinese Communist Party’s response to these attacks was to initiate an enormous state project to destroy the Uighur way of life.

The CCP’s zeal for control has not been limited to China. In 2016 Gulbahar Haitiwaji, a Uighur woman and the author of this bracing new memoir, was living peacefully in Boulogne when she received a phone call from her former employer, a Xinjiang-based oil company. There was a problem with her pension. She would have to come back to sign some papers.

US Department of Education:

Today, the U.S. Department of Education released updates to the College Scorecard that make the tool more useful for students and families weighing college options. The tool also includes new and updated information that may be beneficial to school counselors, college access providers, researchers, and other critical stakeholders. The Department has improved the College Scorecard interactive web tool, in addition to restoring several metrics that help students gauge how their prospective institution compares to other colleges across costs, graduation rates, post-college earnings, and other metrics. The changes reflect the Department’s priority of supporting and encouraging inclusive, affordable postsecondary programs that provide strong career outcomes for students.

Cameron Kaplan:

I didn’t pay for these tests, but they aren’t free. The cost is billed to my health insurance. A few days ago, I received a routine letter from my insurance company summarizing what it paid: $1,140 a month for my daughter’s weekly PCR test. That comes to about $285 per test, 20 times the cost of an at-home rapid test.

Policy makers at both the state and federal levels have opted to finance Covid testing through private health insurance. A California law enacted in November requires insurers to pay for Covid testing without copayments from patients. Insurers must reimburse testing providers, even out-of-network ones, and the state places no restriction on the amount reimbursed.

This gives providers unchecked power to set prices, inflating the societal cost of testing as a tool for controlling the pandemic. Insurance companies will inevitably pass the costs on to policyholders through either higher premiums or reduced benefits.

Let’s revisit the $1,140 per month for testing at my daughter’s preschool. On an annual basis, that would add up to $13,860—a sum that comes close to the $14,974 average yearly expenditure per student in California public schools.

The Economist:

A Big Mac costs £3.59 in Britain and US$5.81 in the United States. The implied exchange rate is 0.62. The difference between this and the actual exchange rate, 0.75, suggests the British pound is 17.1% undervalued

Yet another picture of an unmasked Democrat surrounded by masked children. This is at a Decatur, Georgia elementary school, where they have a district-wide mask mandate. #gapol #UnmaskOurKids https://t.co/36NRJkNmhV pic.twitter.com/GU7DgL2nIA

— Kelley K 😀 * covid-georgia.com (@KelleyKga) February 5, 2022

Patrick Breyer:

The End of the Privacy of Digital Correspondence

The EU wants to oblige providers to search all private chats, messages, and emails automatically for suspicious content – generally and indiscriminately. The stated aim: To prosecute child pornography. The result: Mass surveillance by means of fully automated real-time messaging and chat control and the end of secrecy of digital correspondence. 

Chat control 2.0 coming up

A majority of the Members of the European Parliament adopted the chatcontrol regulation on 6 July 2021 allowing providers to scan communications voluntarily. So far only some unencrypted US services such as GMail, Meta/Facebook Messenger and X-Box apply chat control voluntarily. But this is not the end of the story: The European Commission announced that it will propose follow-up legislation that will make the use of chatcontrol mandatory for all e-mail and messenger providers. This legislation will be presented an 2 March 2022 and would also apply to so far securely end-to-end encrypted communications services. However, a public consultation by the Commission demonstrated that the majority of respondents, both citizens and stakeholders, were opposed to an obligation to use chat control. Over 80% of respondents opposed its application to end-to-end encrypted communications. As a result, the Commission postponed the draft legislation to Q1 2022.

John Hasnas:

Georgetown University’s law school violated its own speech policy last week when it placed Ilya Shapiro, a newly hired administrator, on leave over a tweet that offended some students. Why do universities make grandiloquent commitments to freedom of speech, then fail to honor them? It isn’t so much an issue of ideology as a problem of incentives.

Georgetown’s policy states that speech “may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or ill conceived.”

Dale Chu:

Amid the raging culture fires engulfing our politics and schools comes a concerted push among some conservative groups to codify a “parents’ bill of rights.” House minority leader Kevin McCarthy rolled out his proposal last November, as did U.S. Senator Josh Hawley. Although neither measure is likely to get much traction in Congress, at least not before the mid-term elections, kindred efforts are making headway in some states. Florida’s version was signed into law last June, and Texas and Virginia both jumped into the fray in January. A dozen or so states have bills pending. These plans typically include sections on school or curriculum “transparency,” which calls for information about curricula and instructional materials to be posted online or otherwise made accessible to parents and other interested parties.

They run the gamut from painless to preposterous. Some require schools to provide a list of core curricular materials (although this elides the much thornier question of how or whether such materials are used, never mind how they’re likely to be supplemented), or even an inventory of everything in the school library. Others allow parents to opt their children out of any lesson or assignment they find objectionable (giving new granularity to the concept of choice in education). Still others would allow teachers’ professional development sessions to be open to the public (though this would seem to work at cross purposes with pre-pandemic and post-Columbine efforts to “harden” schools). Some would let parents watch videos—livestreamed or recorded—of their children’s classrooms.

The principle of school transparency has undeniable appeal, yet we can’t avoid asking about the motives behind these efforts and wondering whether an unassailable value like transparency is being deployed as a wedge to worsen the politicization of our discourse and fragmentation of our culture.

Operationally speaking, putting into practice the kinds of curriculum transparency imagined in some of these proposals would be incredibly burdensome on teachers, schools, and districts, and strongly opposed by all their organizations. But before getting lost in the challenges of implementation, let’s ask whether the theory of action undergirding curriculum transparency even makes sense as policy.

Arunk Prasad:

There is a common idea that perfectionism is the need for perfect results: the maximum test score, the flawless recital, the unanimous verdict. But this idea misses the deeper reality. More generally, perfectionism is the tendency to stake your identity on achieving fixed outcomes.

Fixed outcomes vary by person. The perfect performance is the stereotype, but a fixed outcome might be feeling smart, beautiful, and right, or getting that car or job we’ve been craving for so long. Every perfectionist has their own personal ideal.

None of these outcomes are problems. But they become so when they intertwine with our identity and self-worth. If a perfectionist of fame ever feels unknown, then he feels worthless and ashamed.

Hence the perfectionist stakes his identity on achieving his outcomes, meaning his self-worth depends on realizing them. This is a pitiful wager and a poor strategy.

Above all, perfectionism is a tendency, not a law. With practice, we can unlearn it and replace it with far better approaches.

Scott Girard:

Tompkins, who considers himself fortunate to have since found a new job, said he was similarly disappointed to not receive an explanation. He submitted a letter from the pastor of his family church and his reasoning for not getting the vaccine, he said. On appeal, the district asked for “a more in-depth letter” on his reasoning, which he submitted.

He called the district’s lack of clear criteria “deceptive.”

“It was very disheartening and especially considering I was 14 years in the district,” he said. “I couldn’t understand why they were this guarded and not really being transparent with me about what was going on.”

Correction: Britta Hanson is no longer the acting principal of Crestwood Elementary School, though the district’s website still lists her as the principal. The school now has an interim. The article has been updated.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Scott Mildred and Phil Hands:

An outdated state law requires only Madison to elect its School Board members in such an odd way. That law should be changed.

(Interestingly, I saw no inquiry on how the legislation occurred….)

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Elizabeth Beyer:

In solidly Democratic Madison there’s markedly less enthusiasm for running for School Board than in other parts of the state. Of the three seats up for election this year, only one is contested after two incumbents opted not to run again.

Madison School Board President Ali Muldrow, who is up for reelection but is running unopposed, said interest in serving on the board, or any local office, is like the swing of a pendulum based on the political climate. The district hasn’t faced much public outcry over its COVID mitigation or equity policies.

“Madison is a really progressive city. … And I do think progressives are tired,” she said. “Voter engagement is going to matter a lot, and I do think Republicans in more purple parts of the state are going to work really hard this year to establish contrast campaigns.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Alexander Shur:

In vetoing the critical race theory bill, Evers said he is objecting to creating new censorship rules that would prohibit educators from teaching “honest, complete facts about important historical topics.”

“Our kids deserve to learn in an atmosphere conducive to learning without being subjected to state legislative encroachment that is neither needed nor warranted,” said Evers, a lifelong educator.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

“How much ‘wrong’ do you get to be while still holding the default setting for people who represent TheScience?” pic.twitter.com/b0K4Ivuyvm

— Erich Hartmann (@erichhartmann) February 5, 2022

Mark Kreidler:

Early in his first quarter at the University of California-Davis, Ryan Manriquez realized he needed help. A combination of pressures — avoiding COVID-19, enduring a breakup, dealing with a disability, trying to keep up with a tough slate of classes — hit him hard.

“I felt the impact right away,” said Manriquez, 21.

After learning of UC-Davis’ free counseling services, Manriquez showed up at the student health center and lined up an emergency Zoom session the same day. He was referred to other resources within days and eventually settled into weekly group therapy.

That was September 2020. Manriquez, now president of the student union, considers himself lucky. It can take up to a month to get a counseling appointment, he said, and that’s “at a school that’s trying really hard to make services available.”

Across the country, college students are seeking mental health therapy on campus in droves, part of a 15-year upswing that has spiked during the pandemic. U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy in December issued a rare public health advisory noting the increasing number of suicide attempts by young people.

Days of Reckoning:

The energy side of the crisis, however, requires sweeping restructuring which goes well beyond anything the government or the opposition are currently prepared to countenance – not least because the economic models they operate on are so out of step with the real world that they fail even to understand the problem, still less offer a workable solution.

Why the energy cap failed

The state-imposed energy cap, which is the focus of establishment media attention today, was always the wrong solution to the wrong problem.  As I explained four and a half years ago:

“The energy cap will end up upsetting everyone and solving nothing.  This is because, while the failed quasi-market arrangements are an irritant, they are not the true cause of the problem.  The same arrangements were in place prior to 2008; when complaints about overcharging and switching supplier were limited to the affluent classes.  It isn’t the system that has changed; it is the broader operating environment.

“The harsh reality is this: the cost of energy is rising remorselessly.  The cheap North Sea gas, on which Britain built the current energy infrastructure, is gone.  In its place are increasingly expensive gas imports – something that the eye-wateringly expensive fracking of UK shale deposits is not going to change (assuming there is any gas to recover).  Renewables only appear cheap because of the sleight of hand of measuring cost per Kw/h at the point of generation (rather than the point of use).  None of the infrastructure and balancing costs are included, nor are the inefficiencies and relatively low (25-30 years) lifespans of renewables factored into comparisons with coal, gas and nuclear plants (that last for 50 or 60 years).  Nevertheless, with fossil fuel availability falling, and nuclear having a few popularity problems of its own, renewables are going to become the greater part of our energy mix whether we can afford it or not.

“Here’s where government price caps fall down. One way or another, the energy infrastructure has to be built and maintained. Indeed, if you want the additional energy required for a growing economy, you need to build a lot more energy capacity. Someone has to pay for that. And if we are sticking with the current quasi-market arrangement, that someone is investors. And nothing drives private investors away from a business faster than state-imposed price caps.

Anton Jager:

An era of ‘post-politics’ has clearly ended. Yet instead of a re-emergence of the politics of the twentieth century — complete with a revival of mass parties, unions, and workplace militancy — it is almost as if a step has been skipped. Those that were politicised by the era marked by the Financial Crash will remember when nothing, not even the austerity policies imposed in its wake, could be described as political. Today, everything is politics. And yet, despite people being intensely politicised in all of these dimensions, very few are involved in the kind of organised conflict of interests that we might once have described as politics in the classical, twentieth-century sense.

TJCX

You could replace the phrase “face masks” with “shrimp gumbo” and that sentence would still be 100% accurate. If all you can tell me about masks is that, combined with other measures, they can slow the spread of COVID-19—that’s not very compelling! Give me a number! Quantify the effectiveness of mask wearing by itself! If you tell me masks reduce my odds of getting COVID by 50%, then of course I’ll wear a mask. But if it’s only 0.05% then maybe I won’t bother. Numbers matter.

But quantitative data alone isn’t enough—good medical communication is also exhaustive. By “exhaustive” I mean that it includes all research on a given topic. Exhaustive communication bolsters your argument (“look at all this data!”) and helps undermine counterarguments (“we know about the conflicting data, but here’s why it doesn’t matter”).

At first glance, this BBC article appears to thoroughly debunk the use of Ivermectin for treating COVID-19. It says that of the 26 “major” Ivermectin trials, one third have statistical errors or indications of fraud, and the other two thirds don’t support the use of Ivermectin.

Will Flanders:

Findings: Counting the Cost: Wisconsin School Closures and Student Proficiency, by Will Flanders and Miranda Spindt, reviewed school closure decisions in the 2020-21 school year and ran an analysis to see their impact on recent Forward Exam data. The findings point towards significant learning loss for students in districts that chose virtual learning over a hybrid or in-person experience. 

• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in math proficiency. Math proficiency was approximately 4.8% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in fall 2020.
• Districts that remained closed for in-person learning saw significant declines in English proficiency. English/Language Arts proficiency was 1.6% lower in districts that were closed for in-person learning in fall 2020.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Valerie Bostwick, Stefanie Fischer, and Matthew Lang:

There exists a long-standing debate in higher education on which academic calendar is optimal. Using panel data on the near universe of four-year nonprofit institutions and leveraging quasi-experimental variation in calendars across institutions and years, we show that switching from quarters to semesters negatively impacts on-time graduation rates. Event study analyses show that the negative effects persist beyond the transition. Using transcript data, we replicate this analysis at the student level and investigate possible mechanisms. Shifting to a semester: (i) lowers first-year grades, (ii) decreases the probability of enrolling in a full course load, and (iii) delays the timing of major choice. (JEL I23, I28)

Jay Daigle:

One important thing that I think about a lot, even though I have no formal expertise, is the replication crisis. A shocking fraction of published research in many fields, including medicine and psychology, is flatly wrong—the results of the studies can’t be obtained in the same way again, and the conclusions don’t hold up to further investigation. Medical researcher John Ioannidis brought this problem to wide attention in 2005 with a paper titled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False; attempts to replicate the results of major psychology papers suggest that only about half of them hold up. A recent analysis gives a similar result for cancer research.

This is a real crisis for the whole process of science. If we can’t rely on the results of famous, large, well-established studies, it’s hard to feel secure in any of our knowledge. It’s probably the most important problem facing the entire project of science right now.

There’s a lot to say about the mathematics we use in social science research, especially statistically, and how bad math feeds the replication crisis.1 But I want to approach it from a different angle. Why doesn’t the field of mathematics have a replication crisis? And what does that tell us about other fields, that do?

A 58MB PDF [redacted] response to my late November, 2021 request.

I write to request email communication between Public Health Dane County Madison and:

The Madison School District

WEAC

Madison Teachers, Inc.

League of Women voters

For the period July, 2021 to November 26, 2021

Second file

Vince Bielski:

This alternative method of discipline, called “restorative practices,” is spreading across the country – and being put to the test. Many schools are enduring sharp increases in violence following the return of students from COVID lockdowns, making this softer approach a higher-stakes experiment in student safety.

“Kids are getting into more fights and disturbances because they are struggling,” says Yoli Anyon, a professor of social work at San Jose State University. “So schools are relying on restorative practices as a way to help young people transition back to the classroom.”

Long pushed by racial justice groups, the method aims to curb suspensions and arrests that disproportionately affect students of color. It replaces punishment with discussions about the causes and harmful impact of misbehavior, from sassing teachers and smoking pot to fighting (serious offenses like gun possession are still referred to the police). The hope is that students, through apologizing and making amends, will learn from their misdeeds and form healthier relationships with peers and teachers, making school violence less likely as they continue their education.

Notes on Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 Restorative Justice experience.

A month later (11-19-21), he’s walking the hallways of Verona high school with a concealed loaded gun. A school security officer nabbed him. (Attention: Madison public schools!) He was charged with one count of possessing a firearm on school grounds, carrying a concealed weapon and felony bail jumping.

So, how is it he is still recklessly driving the streets of Madison?

As the Werkes reported:

Two days later, a Dane County judge lets Tavion J. Flowers loose on a signature bond and prohibits him from possessing any weapons. Except … except … except … “At the time of his arrest, Flowers was already on a signature bond for a felony theft charge issued in October, which also barred him from possessing any weapons.”

A Madison woman is dead because of Woke justice

Nor was it the maiden voyage for the hit-and-run driver who killed a Madison woman on the East side Saturday 01-29-22. The WI State Journal reports

Rob Jenkins:

iAs if landing a college teaching position wasn’t already difficult enough, the powers-that-be have placed another obstacle in job-seekers’ path: the so-called “Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” better known as the “diversity statement” or “DEI statement.” Many (most?) institutions now require such a document as part of the application packet along with the traditional CV, cover letter, and transcripts.

As a long-time advice columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education, I frequently hear from academics on the job market. Lately, I’ve been getting emails asking how to write a diversity statement. I fear I’m not much help in that department, partly because I haven’t had any firsthand experience writing such statements but mostly because I find the whole concept not only absurd but incredibly toxic.

Still, I do what I can. I realize this is a hoop academic job-seekers must jump through, whether they agree with the premise or not (and I suspect, from the tone of their emails, that many find it just as objectionable as I do). So I direct them to articles in The Chronicle and elsewhere with titles like “Five Don’ts in Your DEI Statement” and “What Not to Write in Your DEI Statement.”

What is perhaps most striking about these essays and others like them is the focus on what applicants should NOT say. This illustrates perfectly the fundamental problem with diversity statements: Their purpose is to prove a negative—namely, that the writer is not a bigot—apparently by demonstrating to the committee’s satisfaction that he or she has whole-heartedly embraced the DEI agenda.  

James Gordon:

It includes Multicultural Counseling, Incidents of Bias Reporting, the Office of Equal Opportunity, and a Victim’s Assistance Hotline.

Even university staff are taken care of with specific services for employees including the Office of Ombuds, and the Employee Assistance Program.

The roll call continues with a host of departments and programs set up to assist minority students, including Student Diversity Program centers for Asian Pacific, Black/African, and Native Americans.

LGBTQ+ are not forgotten either with various services and cultural resources designated for the community.

Students with disabilities and given their own hotline together with women, through the Women and Gender Advocacy Center.

Campus Reform first reported on the sign.

el gato malo

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocation, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet in holding scientific discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

because unlike many generals who are mired in the past and determined to fight the last war, ike saw the shape of the war to come for this, not the arms races of great powers, is the threat to the lives and livelihoods of today and it is further reaching and holds the potential to be FAR more terrible.

this is the “tyranny of experts” and the utter dominance of discourse and the foundational freedoms and order of society that it can attain.

National Law Journal:

After failures in district courts, a handful of students have taken their COVID-19 tuition refund fights to appellate courts in cases that are being closely watched by the higher education community.

Many of the lawsuits, alleging universities breached contracts by shifting to virtual courses while charging in-person prices, were dismissed by district court judges, though results have been mixed. Claims that survived tended to be those seeking compensation for specific fees, such as student activities promised but not delivered during campus closures, observers say.

No circuit courts have issued decisions on the matters yet, but recent oral arguments hint that the idea schools overcharged for remote learning has weight with some judges, said Stetson University Law School professor Peter Lake.

“If you would have called me a month ago, I probably would have said the general trend is unmistakable, the tuition cases are dying … and the exception would be where there was a very specific promise to a particular class of people to deliver something,” Lake said. “It may well be that the circuit upholds the dismissals … but I’m sensing there could be change.”

“I am noticing that there is a certain amount of energy at this moment that’s gathering around this idea of unjust enrichment,” he said. “That’s why we’re watching the outcome like a hawk in this D.C. case because that could be a game changer.”

Peter Shanosky:

Even I got that speech frequently, and I was an underperforming (and often absent) student in a mediocre school. I can only imagine how heavy it was indoctrinated in other districts.

Well, even if it wasn’t implicitly stated, adolescents could get the gist of what was being said: No college means no college-required jobs, which means failure. The obvious conclusion is that non-college careers are failures.

Los Angeles Times:

After a largely in-person fall term, the UC system’s nine undergraduate campuses shifted to remote classes through January as a precaution against the highly contagious Omicron variant. But the return to mostly in-person classes — encouraged by high vaccination rates and signs that the surge has peaked — is anything but smooth.

At UCLA, more than 1,300 people supported a petition urging a boycott of classes Monday and demanding student flexibility to choose between in-person and remote options. Groups representing disability rights advocates, underrepresented students and undergraduate student leadership joined forces to organize a sit-in at the campus administration building and vowed to continue the protest until their demands for online access and educational equity were met.

By early evening, dozens of students sat along a hallway, equipped with blankets, laptops and food; Chancellor Gene Block’s office doors were plastered with fliers accusing UCLA of not caring about Black students or those with disabilities. …

In a statement, UCLA said it recognized the students’ concerns, respected their right to express their views and was “deeply committed” to equity. The campus returned to in-person learning “based on a careful assessment of the current public health situation, including that COVID-19 cases and test positivity rates are rapidly declining on campus and across Los Angeles County, and that many eligible Bruins have received the required boosters,” the statement said.

Associated Press:

 A school board in an affluent Connecticut suburb has rejected a school choice plan that would have had it take in 16 students from the city of Norwalk.

The Darien Board of Education voted 5-4 Tuesday not to participate in a pilot Open Choice program, which was supported by the superintendent of schools and the board’s chairman.

The program, designed to deal with the issue of racial and economic disparities between city and suburban schools, would have allowed up to 16 kindergartners from Norwalk to attend Darien elementary schools in the fall.

“This is our opportunity to show our students we are serious about supporting their voices, that we’re serious about change and that we’re serious about supporting diversity,” School Superintendent Alan Addley told the board.

Opponents cited larger class sizes, uncertainties related to the COVID-19 pandemic and the possible financial burden on the town in rejecting the plan.

Tate Ryan-Mosley:

A police officer is at the scene of a murder. No witnesses. No camera footage. No obvious suspects or motives. Just a bit of hair on the sleeve of the victim’s jacket. DNA from the cells of one strand is copied and compared against a database. No match comes back, and the case goes cold. 

Corsight AI, a facial recognition subsidiary of the Israeli AI company Cortica, purports to be devising a solution for that sort of situation by using DNA to create a model of a face that can then be run through a facial recognition system. It is a task that experts in the field regard as scientifically untenable. 

Corsight unveiled its “DNA to Face” product in a presentation by chief executive officer Robert Watts and executive vice president Ofer Ronen intended to court financiers at the Imperial Capital Investors Conference in New York City on December 15. It was part of the company’s overall product road map, which also included movement and voice recognition. The tool “constructs a physical profile by analyzing genetic material collected in a DNA sample,” according to a company slide deck viewed by surveillance research group IPVM and shared with MIT Technology Review.

Matt Bonesteel:

Penn officials did not respond to a request for comment on either the claims raised in the letter or whether the school planned to mount a legal challenge should Thomas be ruled ineligible for the NCAA championships.

On Tuesday, another group of Penn swimmers released a statement supporting Thomas after an unidentified Quakers swimmer spoke to Fox News about her, claiming she had a “monumental” advantage over her teammates after going through male puberty.

“We want to express our full support for Lia in her transition,” the athletes said in Tuesday’s statement, per ESPN. “We value her as a person, teammate, and friend. The sentiments put forward by an anonymous member of our team are not representative of the feelings, values, and opinions of the entire Penn team, composed of 39 women with diverse backgrounds.”

This tweet promotes COVID disinformation at least as false and harmful as anything a Rogan guest said, but because authoritarians believe disinformation only comes from independent voices, not large corporations, and it advances rather than questions COVID hysteria, it’s allowed: https://t.co/wGWF2qNOtm

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) February 4, 2022

Ainsley Erzen:

The 800-meter time that made me a national champion and state record holder was bettered by 85 Iowa boys at a single meet.

An open letter to the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union from one of the state’s top female high school track and soccer athletes:

To the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union, 

My name is Ainsley Erzen, and I’m writing to you concerning comments in the Cedar Rapids Gazette that the union needs guidance regarding transgender athletes in sports. 

This summer, I won the girls 800-meter high school national championship in track, and broke the Iowa state record. It was such an honor to represent my state as the first Iowa female high school runner to win a national track title, and so humbling to have my name listed among such talented women as Shelby Houlihan and Joy Ripslinger. I believe this is a prime example of some of my most core beliefs: that if you work hard and put your faith in the Lord, He can, and will, accomplish things within you that you could never even dream of on your own.

That being said, my time of 2:06.52, the time that made me the fastest Iowa high school female 800 runner of all time, the time that earned me the title of national champion, was easily beat by 85 high school boys at the 2021 Iowa high school state track meet alone. Eighty-five. Just in our small state of Iowa. The results of the 2021 Drake Relays proved to be no different, as the last male runner came through the line in a time of 2:03. That same year, a time of 2:13 was enough to make me the 800-meter Drake champion. The slowest boy was easily 10 seconds faster than the first-place girl. But I don’t need to explain this to you. Iowa track officials already know there are huge biological differences between boys and girls. Why else would the 2021 girls blue standard (the automatic qualifying time for the Drake Relays) have been 2:16, while the boys was set 20 seconds faster, at 1:56?

Keith Whittington:

The Academic Freedom Alliance has released a public letter to the Georgetown University Law Center objecting to its treatment of a senior lecturer. Ilya Shapiro was director of the Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. It was recently announced that Shapiro had been appointed to be the executive director of the Georgetown Center for the Constitutionand a senior lecturer at the Georgetown University Law Center. He was to begin his duties on February 1, 2022.

On January 26, Shapiro posted a series of tweets on the vacancy created by the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer and President Joe Biden’s declaration that he would be selecting a black woman to fill the spot. Shapiro contended that Biden’s announced limitation on the candidate pool would exclude the person Shapiro thought was “objectively best” for the position and as a consequence the president would be choosing a “lesser black woman” in his stead. Shapiro subsequently deleted the posts and apologized, but a controversy erupted that included demands that he be fired by GULC. The dean of the law school announced that Shapiro would be suspended until an investigation was concluded on whether the tweets had violated any university policies.

Tara Westover:

I wrote about these and other experiences in my 2018 memoir, “Educated,” which surprised me by becoming a best seller. My story was one of extremes: born in the mountains of Idaho to Mormon parents who kept me out of school, I had never set foot in a classroom before my first semester of college at Brigham Young University. I graduated in 2008 and won a scholarship to the University of Cambridge, where I earned a Ph.D.

A curious thing happens when you offer up your life for public consumption: People start to interpret your biography, to explain to you what they think it means. At book signings, in interviews, I’m often told that my story is uplifting, that I am a model of resilience, an “inspiration.” Which is a nice thing to be told, so I say thank you. But every so often someone takes it a bit further, and says something to which I do not have a response. They say, “You are living proof of the American dream. That absolutely anything is possible for anybody.”

Marketwatch

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos’s name will be displayed on a new building at the National Air and Space Museum and in several additional places throughout the Smithsonian Institution for at least 50 years in exchange for his $200 million donation.

The terms of the agreement, which MarketWatch obtained through a public-records request, do not include a “morals clause,” a provision that would allow the Smithsonian to terminate the naming rights if Bezos’s behavior brought disrepute to the institution. …

Big-dollar donations like this one are typically trumpeted by institutions (this one was covered in major media outlets and came with an inspirational video), but the legally binding contracts that surround the gifts are usually kept private. Bezos’s gift agreement with the Smithsonian offers a rare glimpse into how institutions and their wealthy benefactors engineer a mutually beneficial exchange. …

[T]he requirement to prominently display Bezos’s name for the next 50 years comes as naming rights have been under scrutiny. Most notably, the Sackler family name has been removed from museums and other institutions they helped fund with profits from OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma, which is now seen as playing a pivotal role in the opioid epidemic that’s killed some 500,000 people since 1999. …

In light of the Sackler controversy, and amid broader debates about the soft power exercised by elite philanthropists, nonprofits are rethinking how to recognize benefactors’ generosity without tattooing themselves in perpetuity with a donor’s name.

James Causey:

Stop passing kids you know are behind. It sets them up for a lifetime of failure. If they can’t read, nothing else will matter. They will be on the road to dropping out and a life of unemployment or low-paying, dead-end jobs.

In Milwaukee Public Schools, only half of the Black boys who are freshmen today, will walk across the stage in four years. Wisconsin has the highest percentage of Black fourth graders with skills considered below basic — 69%. In reading alone, Black students in Wisconsin trail every other state and the District of Columbia.

Former Milwaukeean, Michael Pratt, who is an educator in Nashville, Tenn., noticed the troubling trend. He conducted his own study, asking boys why they didn’t like to read. Most of them said they didn’t like reading because they didn’t see Black men around them reading. Many didn’t have books in their homes.

Pratt, the son for former acting Mayor Marvin Pratt, said that prompted him to start the grassroots mentorship and reading program he calls “Fatherhood Fridays.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Amy Schwabe:

Two years ago, I never thought I would homeschool one of my children.

Of course, two years ago, I never thought that leaving the house with a face mask would become second nature. Or that my grandma would become computer-literate enough to Zoom with me every few weeks. A lot has changed.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, my daughter Wendy would have days — in hindsight, too many days — when she begged to stay home from school. She cried nearly every morning, and she seemed to have constant stomachaches and nausea. My husband Jonathan and I spent a year taking her to doctors, scheduling medical procedures and giving her various medications, trying to figure out what was going on with her.

I remember standing over her as she cried in her closet one morning, wondering what I was going to do if she actually refused to go to school. What if she really wouldn’t get up? I couldn’t pick her up and force her into the car, force her into school, force her to learn.

I didn’t have to find out what would happen in that scenario because March of 2020 arrived, and we all stayed home. For months. And a curious thing happened. Wendy stopped getting nauseous. She stopped vomiting. We took her for a follow-up at the doctor, and her acid reflux had improved. Stress and anxiety turned out to be her triggers.

Jay’s Blog:

One important thing that I think about a lot, even though I have no formal expertise, is the replication crisis. A shocking fraction of published research in many fields, including medicine and psychology, is flatly wrong—the results of the studies can’t be obtained in the same way again, and the conclusions don’t hold up to further investigation. Medical researcher John Ioannidis brought this problem to wide attention in 2005 with a paper titled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False; attempts to replicate the results of major psychology papers suggest that only about half of them hold up. A recent analysis gives a similar result for cancer research.

This is a real crisis for the whole process of science. If we can’t rely on the results of famous, large, well-established studies, it’s hard to feel secure in any of our knowledge. It’s probably the most important problem facing the entire project of science right now.

There’s a lot to say about the mathematics we use in social science research, especially statistically, and how bad math feeds the replication crisis.¹ But I want to approach it from a different angle.  Why doesn’t the field of mathematicshave a replication crisis? And what does that tell us about other fields, that do?

Why doesn’t math have a replication crisis?

Maybe mathematicians don’t make mistakes