Drewry:

Drewry’s composite World Container Index decreased marginally by 0.2% to $7,050.94 per 40ft container this week.

Note the price mismatch from <-> to China.

Alex Tabarrok:

A very nice paper in Management Science by Kini, Shen, Shenoy and Subramanian finds that labor unions reduce product quality. Two strengths of the paper. First, the authors have relatively objective measures of product quality from thousands of product recalls mandated by the FDA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration covering many different industries. Second the authors use 3 different methods. First, they find that unionized firms are more likely to have recalls than non-unionized firms (a simple difference in means subject to many potential cofounds but I still like to see the raw data), second they find that in a panel model with industry and year fixed effects and other controls that firms which are more unionized have a greater frequency of product recalls. Finally they find that firms where the union just barely won the vote are more likely to have subsequent product recalls than firms for which the union just barely lost the vote–a regression discontinuity study.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Scott Girard:

Despite enrollment dropping over the past five years districtwide, especially during the pandemic, the full-time equivalent (or FTE) staff positions dedicated to those areas have not dropped at the same rate.

In student services, for example, the 2017-18 school year featured 105.78 students per staff member in positions including psychologist, social worker, nurse and behavior education assistant. Last year, that was down to 98.1.

Similarly, the special education student-to-staff ratio dropped from 46.33 to 35.53.

Yet the ratios reflected here are determined by the district’s annual budget. Given the staff shortages plaguing education and MMSD in recent years, especially following the onset of the pandemic, the number of students per staffer is likely higher.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ann Althouse:

But what’s really bothering Strauss isn’t the outrage of insulting education departments. It’s Hillsdale’s participation in charter schools around the country. There’s the “Hillsdale K-12 curriculum that is centered on Western civilization and designed to help ‘students acquire a mature love for America.'”

Valerie Strauss:

At the reception last week, held at a Cool Springs conference center in Tennessee, Arnn made comments while addressing an audience from a lectern and while sitting on the stage next to Lee on a stage. Here’s a sample:

• “Ed departments in colleges. If you work in a college you know, unless you work in the ed department. Ours [Hillsdale’s] is different. They are the dumbest part of every college. [Audience laughs.] You can think about why for a minute. If you study physics, there is a subject. … How does the physical world work? That’s hard to figure out. Politics is actually the study of justice. … Literature. They don’t do it much anymore, but you can read the greatest books, the most beautiful books ever written. Education is the study of how to teach. Is that a separate art? I don’t think so.”
• “If you read a book called ‘Abolition of Man’ by C.S. Lewis, you will see how education destroys generations of people. It’s devastating. It’s like a plague. … The teachers are trained in the dumbest part of the dumbest colleges in the country. And they are taught that they are going to do something to those kids. … My wife is English, and she is a gardener, big-time. And she doesn’t talk about what she is going to do to these plants. She talks about what they need. Because if you give them what they need, they will grow.”
• “The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement. … They’re messing with people’s children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.”
• “Here’s a key thing we are going to try to do. We’re going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child. Because basically anybody can do it.”

Educators and other Tennesseans said they were angry at Arnn for making the comments and at Lee for failing to defend his state’s teachers and teacher preparation programs. Claude Pressnell Jr., president of Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association, tweeted: “This is incredibly disturbing. Dr. Larry Arnn’s demeaning portrayal of Tennessee’s Ed prep programs and professors is uninformed and offensive. I’m disappointed that @GovBillLee is not on record with Dr. Arnn defending the integrity of Tennessee’s education programs.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Tunku Varadarajan:

If you’re looking for proof that teachers unions don’t care about the interests of schoolchildren, you can find it in the impoverished Bronx neighborhood of Soundview. A school building on Beach Avenue has been shuttered for almost a decade, and the United Federation of Teachers is suing to keep it closed.

On Aug. 22, a new charter high school, Vertex Academies, will begin classes here. In the local school district, only 7% of students who enter ninth grade are ready for college four years later. For black students, the figure is 4%. The new school promises to deliver “a high-quality education to 150 minority students from low-income backgrounds” in its first year, says founding principal Joyanet Mangual.

Vertex will use the premises of the defunct Blessed Sacrament School, where Sonia Sotomayor was valedictorian in 1968. When the school shut down in 2013, the justice declared herself “heartbroken.” Her mother had scrimped and saved to send her there: “She watched what happened to my cousins in public school, and worried if we went there, we might not get out,” Justice Sotomayor told the New York Times.

Ann Althouse:

There are lots of comments at that link. The one with the most up-votes is: “The things that are going on are barely distinguishable from grooming.”
The part about prostitution as a “rewarding job” was about a post at a website, Bish, “an online guide to sex and relationships for children aged over 14,” written by Justin Hancock, who “teaches sex education in schools and provides teacher training on sex education.”

Sara Fischer:

Americans’ confidence in newspapers and television news has plummeted to an all-time low, according to the latest annual Gallup survey of trust in U.S. institutions.

Why it matters: The erosion of trust in media is one of the most significant signs of deepening polarization in America. 

• Political party affiliation has become the primary driver of opinions about the media’s trustworthiness, as Gallup has noted.
• A 2021 poll from Pew Research Center found that Republicans are far less likely to trust media sources that are considered “mainstream.”

Andrew Van Damm:

In 1970, just 1 in 5 U.S.-born PhD graduates in economics had a parent with a graduate degree. Now? Two-thirds of them do, according to a new analysis from the Peterson Institute for International Economics. The trends are similar for other fields (and for foreign-born students), but economics is off the charts.

This partly reflects population trends: Over that same period, the share of parents with graduate degrees and college-age children rose 10 percentage points, to 14 percent, our analysis of Census Bureau data shows. But compared with the typical American, a typical new economist is about five times more likely to have a parent with a graduate degree.

The new analysis comes from Anna Stansbury of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Michigan graduate student Robert Schultz, who got their hands on detailed data on U.S. PhD recipients going back more than 50 years. The data includes extensive information about almost half a million recipients in the 2010-to-2018 period alone.

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

Dan Barry:

But they were also chastened. They hadn’t attended the town meeting. They hadn’t fulfilled their democratic obligation. They hadn’t kept informed about the Free State movement. To some observers, they had gotten what they deserved.

“I was practically kicking myself in the ass for not being there,” Mr. Spiker said. “I guess I assumed our town would take care of it.”

The moment revealed a democracy mired in indifference. Turnout at town meetings has been low for years. The town’s websites are barely rudimentary, with school board minutes posted online sporadically. The select board’s minutes are found at the town hall — open three afternoons a week — or the general store, beside chocolate bars being sold to benefit the local humane society.

From this muddle of anger, confusion and regret, though, a movement was born. It came to be known as We Stand Up for Croydon Students.

Evaluating the utility and effectiveness of ongoing k-12 tax and spending practices is rare….

Calling the proposed budget a “ransom,” he moved to cut it by more than half — to $800,000. He argued that taxes for education had climbed while student achievement had not, and that based in part on the much lower tuition for some local private schools, about $10,000 for each of the town’s 80 or so students was sufficient — though well short of, say, the nearly $18,000 that public schools in nearby Newport charged for pupils from Croydon.

MYKEL J. KOCHENDERFER, TIM A. WHEELER, AND KYLE H. WRAY:

This book provides a broad introduction to algorithms for decision making under uncertainty. We cover a wide variety of topics related to decision making, introducing the underlying mathematical problem formulations and the algorithms for solving them.

Sunlight Policy New Jersey:

After three years of no information on New Jersey’s most powerful special interest, the IRS finally released the NJEA’s 2019 990, which revealed the multi-million-dollar going-away present for Richardson. As executive director from 2013 to 2019, Richardson was paid a total of $5.8 million, or $968,000 a year. By comparison, the average New Jersey teacher made $76,000 in 2019.

But Richardson was not alone. The NJEA’s top ten leadership was paid a record $7.7 million in 2019, with six of the top ten getting record compensation and six becoming New Jersey one-percenters.

ALL OF THIS WAS PAID FOR BY TEACHERS’ HIGHEST-IN-THE-NATION DUES.

If teachers knew their hard-earned salaries were making their leadership multi-millionaires, they would be outraged. If New Jersey citizens knew their hard-earned tax dollars were making taxpayer-funded multi-millionaires, they would be outraged.

Kyle Stokes:

In 2007, leaders of LAUSD and the district’s teachers union agreed to create the first of what they called “pilot schools.” Pilot schools would be semi-autonomous campuses that would have greater freedom over their own budgets and academic programs.

At the time, UCLA had already been working with the union, district and local advocacy organizations to explore launching a community school of its own. In the nascent pilot program — and on the soon-to-be-rebuilt site of the former Ambassador Hotel in Koreatown — the school’s planners saw an opening.

Karen Hunter Quartz, the UCLA Center for Community Schooling director, led the team that submitted the first proposal for what became its Koreatown school in 2007. That proposal was inspired by trips to visit small schools on the East Coast.

“The concept was really, ‘How can we design schools differently to promote these small, nurturing communities?’” said Hunter Quartz. “So based on that experience and the pilot school experience and the building of new buildings in L.A., this was a great opportunity to create that here.”

In 2009, UCLA Community School opened its doors along with five other pilot schools on the RFK Community Schools campus on Wilshire Boulevard.

From its inception, Hunter Quartz envisioned a school that embodied many of the core tenets of the community schools movement — including the elements now known as the “four pillars” of community schooling.

Today, schools that want a share of California’s multi-billion dollar community school grant program will also have to agree to embrace a number of reforms, including these four pillars.

Ian Miller:

But a new study out provides some important new evidence with regards to the efficacy of mask mandates.

The Study Design

The study authors included several credentialed experts like Tracy Høeg and USC’s Neeraj Sood, along with one extremely qualified data analyst, Josh Stevenson. 

You may know Josh from his fantastic work on Twitter as well as Substack, and this study could very well be his most important contribution yet.

Their detailed examination of North Dakota has created more advanced academic level research similar to the data comparisons that myself and many others have shared.

The introduction explains the methodology and goals:

Keeping schools and preschools open when other countries closed them was an extremely difficult decision. In March 2020 the criticism against me was harsh for not closing down schools and preschools, but I was – and still am – convinced that it was the right decision. https://t.co/AzM5RHu5gY

— Anna Ekström (@Anna_Ekstrom) July 9, 2022

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Amanda Ripley

And that gets to the heart of the problem here: If so many of us feel poisoned by our products, might there be something wrong with them?

Last month, new data from the Reuters Institute showed that the United States has one of the highest news-avoidance rates in the world. About 4 out of 10 Americans sometimes or often avoid contact with the news — a higher rate than at least 30 other countries. And consistently, across all countries, women are significantly more likely to avoid news than men. It wasn’t just me and my hypocrite journalist friends after all.

Why are people avoiding the news? It’s repetitive and dispiriting, often of dubious credibility, and it leaves people feeling powerless, according to the survey. The evidence supports their decision to pull back. It turns out that the more news we consume about mass-casualty events, such as shootings, the more we suffer. The more political news we ingest, the more mistakes we make about who we are. If the goal of journalism is to inform people, where is the evidence it is working?

George Will

These kids today “are fluent in the thin-gruel cant (diversity, inclusion, equity, anti-racism, antipatriarchy, antiheteronormativity, etc.) of ostensibly political but actually just emotionally satisfying performative demands.”

In a flattened world drained of greatness, today’s steep decline of humanities majors among undergraduates is a lagging indicator of lack of interest in humanity’s lessons learned on the path to the present. Given this nation’s unhappy present, it is remarkable to remember that the arrival of screen-soaked lives was cheerily announced as the next stage of the “information age.” LOL.

Jeffrey Flier:

In principle, leadership roles in academic institutions perfectly position incumbents to be public intellectuals, robustly engaging with educational, scientific and political issues of the day from their distinguished perches atop the academic pyramid. Unfortunately, anyone holding this view would be severely mistaken.

Academic leaders, such as university presidents and deans, can issue anodyne pronouncements on various matters as long as these safely align with the views prevailing in their communities. Most do so with regularity, occasionally edging a wee bit from the centre lane. But when academic leaders engage in intellectual discourse by expressing views that diverge from prevailing opinion, the ensuing reactions – even when expressed only by a vocal minority – can easily disrupt their ability to fulfil their primary duties. Such disruption, if severe enough, can even end their leadership tenure. Just ask former Harvard president Larry Summers, the reaction to whose provocative speech on potential explanations for the dearth of women at the highest levels of mathematics and engineering led to his having to step down.

Two major factors account for this state of affairs. The first is in the realm of the practical. Leadership jobs are complex and demanding, requiring full-time effort to manage the areas for which the leader is ultimately accountable. These include choosing among competing academic goals, addressing faculty, answering student and alumni concerns, managing facilities and budgets, devising and refining numerous policies, and, of course, leading fundraising efforts. At best, offering public opinions is seen as a frill – surely not essential but perhaps nice to do if time permits.

Amanda Fortini:

“Professors taught what they wished, and students graduated when (or if) they wanted — only about 55 of the 1,200 or so students who attended Black Mountain in its 24-year existence attained a formal degree — as long as they passed two sets of exams, one roughly at the halfway point and the other before the end of their tenure, whenever they decided that was. The hierarchy, too, was minimal, with students and most faculty living in the same building and taking their meals together. There were none of the ‘usual distinctions… between curricular and extracurricular activities, between work done in a classroom and work done outside it.’ Students often performed chores as part of the ‘work program’; afternoons were left free for activities outdoors, which might have included chopping wood, clearing pasture and planting, tending or harvesting crops…. By all accounts, the manual labor was not only fun but gave students a meaningful sense of contributing to the day-to-day maintenance of the college. It was also a great leveler. ‘You might be John Cage or Merce Cunningham… But you’re still going to have a job to do on campus.’

Ann Althouse notes:

As the podcast goes on, Kramer uses the term “popular constitutionalism,” which has to do with judging “by what resonates with us, what makes sense, what kind of society do we want to have” and “not just blindly following popular desires.” What does that mean? What’s the difference between “popular desires” and what “resonates… makes sense… [and] we want to have”? I suspect the answer is elitism. Look at Kramer’s stress on “leadership”:

It involves leadership. If you read Madison’s original stuff, he had an important role for leadership. But it wasn’t leadershiptells the subjects what to do and what they should believe. It’s that we engage in an ongoing active conversation where the role of leadership is to lead towards some sort of better vision. You offer that vision, and you try and persuade, and if you do, the country follows you…. So that’s what political leaders are supposed to do…. The ability of leadership to exercise leadershipis really impaired. The media system has been fragmented. Deference to leadership is down…

And then it’s back to vision: 

So it’s a little hard to see how it emerges, but the idea is that you get competing political visions of what the country should be that are themselves coherent and normatively attractive that are presented and people vote. I mean, Ronald Reagan did that, right. It’s not that we haven’t had visions. He had a vision, and he sold it…. 

But the liberals don’t have a vision. They need a leader with a vision to animate them, but “we’re kind of between, betwixt and between uniting visions.”

and:

That’s 75,000 to 180,000 per year. Rosenberg doesn’t seem to notice that to emphasize the number of new babies is to say, implicitly, that during the reign of Roe, that’s the number, per year, that were quietly and invisibly kept from our presence.

More: Andrew Yang on abortion.

Allison Prang:

Ms. Viazovska took home the Fields Medal for her work on the sphere-packing problem in eight and 24 dimensions, the university said. The problem—how densely one can pack a space with identical spheres—used to only be solved for three dimensions or less, it said.

“In doing so, she resolved a question that had stumped mathematicians for more than four centuries: how to pack spheres—such as oranges stacked in a pyramid—as close together as possible,” EPFL said. The university added that Ms. Viazovska’s proof, which drew on other areas of math, was considered by experts to be “particularly elegant and original.”

Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Trump lost Wisconsin by 20,682 votes, and he lagged the state’s GOP Congressmen by 63,547. Split tickets by Republicans more than explain why Mr. Trump fell short. Drop boxes were an unlawful delivery method, but if real Wisconsinites put real ballots into them, as instructed by local officials, that isn’t “fraud.” Judges are unlikely to throw out legitimate votes after the fact.

That’s actually what happened in Wisconsin. Mr. Trump didn’t raise hell about the state’s voting procedures until after he lost. Then he asked courts to invalidate 28.4% of the votes in Milwaukee County, on the basis of challenged practices that took place statewide. That case failed. The drop box lawsuit decided Friday was filed in 2021 by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. If Mr. Trump was so opposed to drop boxes, why didn’t he bring a claim earlier in 2020, when the WEC memos were issued?

Former Attorney General Bill Barr told a podcast recentlythat Mr. Trump was duly warned to get solid lawyers working to defend business-as-usual voting processes. 

“One of his aides went in and said, look, you need to set up a fund of $20-30 million in escrow, because lawyers don’t trust you to pay their bills, and you need to get a top-flight firm in here,” Mr. Barr said. “He ignored that advice. He did not have a legal team prepared to go and fight around the country. So a lot of these, bending of the playing field, were his own fault.”

James Somers:

For instance I never learned that a man named Oswald Avery, in the 1940s, puzzled over two cultures of Streptococcus bacteria. One had a rough texture when grown in a dish; the other was smooth, and glistened. Avery noticed that when he mixed the smooth strain with the rough strain, every generation after was smooth, too. Heredity in a dish. What made it work? This was one of the most exciting mysteries of the time—in fact of all time.

Most experts thought that protein was somehow responsible, that traits were encoded soupily, via differing concentrations of chemicals. Avery suspected a role for nucleic acid. So, he did an experiment, one we could have replicated on our benches in school. Using just a centrifuge, water, detergent, and acid, he purified nucleic acid from his smooth strep culture. Precipitated with alcohol, it became fibrous. He added a tiny bit of it to the rough culture, and lo, that culture became smooth in the following generations. This fibrous stuff, then, was “the transforming principle”—the long-sought agent of heredity. Avery’s experiment set off a frenzy of work that, a decade later, ended in the discovery of the double helix.

In his “Mathematician’s Lament,” Paul Lockhart describes how school cheapens mathematics by robbing us of the questions. We’re not just asked, hey, how much of the triangle takes up the box?

ICYMI: Top Voter Issues vs Top Media Issues

Our most recent from last week – no changes since then.

What a disconnect. pic.twitter.com/qhpwGwU3Uk

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) July 9, 2022

“Places with low-performing schools kept them shut for longer than others in their regions. Closures were often long in places where teachers’ unions were especially powerful, such as Mexico and parts of the US.” https://t.co/krCiBZd82p

— Alexander (@alexanderrusso) July 9, 2022

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Eugene Volokh:

Yesterday, a grand jury returned an indictment in federal court in Brooklyn charging five defendants with various crimes pertaining to a transnational repression scheme orchestrated on behalf of the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)….

Three of the defendants—Fan “Frank” Liu, Matthew Ziburis, and Qiang “Jason” Sun—allegedly perpetrated in the transnational repression scheme to target U.S. residents whose political views and actions are disfavored by the PRC government, such as advocating for democracy in the PRC. Among other items, the defendants plotted to destroy the artwork of a PRC national residing in Los Angeles, California that was critical of the PRC government, and planted surveillance equipment in the artist’s workplace and car to spy on him from the PRC. Liu and Ziburis were arrested pursuant to a criminal complaint in March 2022, while Sun remains at large.

There are two new defendants charged in the scheme, Craig Miller and Derrick Taylor. Miller is a 15-year employee of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), currently assigned as a Deportation Officer to DHS’s Enforcement and Removal Operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Taylor is a retired DHS law enforcement agent who presently works as a private investigator in Irvine, California. The charges against Miller and Taylor pertain to their alleged obstruction of justice, including by destroying evidence, after they were approached by agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and asked about their procurement and dissemination of sensitive and confidential information from a restricted federal law enforcement database regarding U.S.-based dissidents from the PRC. This information was used by Liu and Sun in the transnational repression scheme. Both Miller and Taylor were arrested pursuant to a criminal complaint in June 2022….

Callum Borchers:

Don’t even get them started on time-off requests, an especially contentious subject in sunny weather. They say colleagues’ family vacations routinely get approved before their own romantic getaways or solo excursions because managers (who often have kids, too) prioritize time with children.

One thing many parents and non-parents can agree on: The always-on culture of work—made worse by the pandemic—is largely to blame for fueling resentment.

Vincent Manancourt

Jack Murphy* was suspicious. His ex-girlfriend, Eve Doherty, seemed to know a lot about who he was calling. 

His suspicions were merited. Doherty had been using her job in the Irish police force to access his phone records, an investigation by the local judiciary revealed. Doherty was disciplined and transferred in 2011.

Three years later, in 2014, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) ruled that the Irish law that forced telcos and internet service providers to hang on to traffic and location data was contrary to EU law, and so was the EU directive it was based on. The data retention regime allowed government agencies to access citizens’ data in ways that violated their privacy — like what Doherty was doing when she accessed those phone records of her ex-boyfriend.

And yet, the risk of similar cases — of police officers overstepping their powers to access phone records — still lingers today.

The landmark 2014 ruling was followed by a bevy of subsequent judgments from the EU’s highest court that reinforced its message to stop blanket data retention. But it didn’t stop Ireland from keeping its mass surveillance of phone and internet data, including who you call and where you are, largely intact.

“In Ireland, we’ve been in a period of lawlessness, at least since 2001,” said TJ McIntyre, chair of Digital Rights Ireland, the non-profit organization whose legal complaint brought down the EU Data Retention Directive in the landmark 2014 case.

Jordan Uhl:

I’m one of the 43.4 million Americans who owe more than a collective $1.7 trillion in student loan debt. Feels great. The average federal balance is $37,014 per borrower, with the total (including private loans) balance a few thousand more.

According to the College Board’s 2021 Trends In College Pricing Report, the average annual tuition and fees at public, 4-year colleges have risen from $4,160 to $10,740—a 158% increase, since the early 1990s. At private institutions there has been a 96.6% increase during that same period, with tuition and fees increasing from $19,360 to $38,070.

Scott Girard:

More than one-third of the Madison Metropolitan School District buildings will have a different principal in the 2022-23 school year than the person in that role last fall.

Among the 19 of 50 principals who left the school they were at last fall are six who left their building mid-year, while the rest finished the school year but left this summer. At least two of them retired, six will be principals at a different MMSD school, five will be principals at schools outside of Madison, one has taken a central office position in a nearby district and one left for a role with the state.

The Cap Times could not determine what the next step is for four of the people who left the principal roles they were in to begin last school year. They did not respond to messages on social media and a search of LinkedIn profiles and news reports did not indicate their new role.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

The Economist

Then the pandemic struck and hundreds of millions of pupils were locked out of school. At first, when it was not yet known whether children were vulnerable to covid-19 or were likely to spread the virus to older people, school closures were a prudent precaution. But in many places they continued long after it became clear that the risks of reopening classrooms were relatively small. During the first two years of the pandemic more than 80% of schooldays in Latin America and South Asia were disrupted by closures of some sort. Even today schools in some countries, such as the Philippines, remain shut to most pupils, leaving their minds to atrophy.

Globally, the harm that school closures have done to children has vastly outweighed any benefits they may have had for public health. The World Bank says the share of ten-year-olds in middle- and low-income countries who cannot read and understand a simple story has risen from 57% in 2019 to roughly 70%. If they lack such elementary skills, they will struggle to earn a good living. The bank estimates that $21trn will be wiped off their lifetime earnings—equivalent to about 20% of the world’s annual gdp today.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Josh Mitchell:

The states that gained the most mi­grants levied an av­er­age max­i­mum in­come-tax rate of 3.8% on in­di­vid­u­als. Four—Flor­ida, Texas, Ten­nessee and Nevada—charged no in­come tax at all. The 10 states that lost the most res­i­dents to moves have an av­er­age tax rate of 8.0%.

Jordana Cepelewicz:

Huh, 39, has now been awarded the Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, for his ability to wander through mathematical landscapes and find just the right objects — objects that he then uses to get the seemingly disparate fields of geometry and combinatorics to talk to each other in new and exciting ways. Starting in graduate school, he has solved several major problems in combinatorics, forging a circuitous route by way of other branches of math to get to the heart of each proof. Every time, finding that path is akin to a “little miracle,” Huh said.

One might say the same of his path into mathematics itself: that it was characterized by much wandering and a series of small miracles. When he was younger, Huh had no desire to be a mathematician. He was indifferent to the subject, and he dropped out of high school to become a poet. It would take a chance encounter during his university years — and many moments of feeling lost — for him to find that mathematics held what he’d been looking for all along.

That poetic detour has since proved crucial to his mathematical breakthroughs. His artistry, according to his colleagues, is evident in the way he uncovers those just-right objects at the center of his work, and in the way he seeks a deeper significance in everything he does. “Mathematicians are a lot like artists in that really we’re looking for beauty,” said Federico Ardila-Mantilla, a mathematician at San Francisco State University and one of Huh’s collaborators. “But I think in his case, it’s really pronounced. And I just really like his taste. He makes beautiful things.”

“When I found out that he came to mathematics after poetry, I’m like, OK, this makes sense to me,” Ardila added.

Mitchell Schmidt:

Bill Lueders, president of the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council, described the court’s ruling as “a body blow to the state’s traditions of open government.”

“It undermines the provision in the open records law that allows litigants to recover actual costs and attorney’s fees in cases in which access to records is wrongfully denied,” Lueders said in a statement. “The court’s conservative majority has created new opportunities for authorities to deprive the public of access to public information.”

Both Kamenick and Lueders called on state lawmakers to pass legislation clarifying state records laws in light of Wednesday’s ruling.

Mike Antonucci:

I provided in-person gavel-to-gavel coverage of every National Education Association Representative Assembly from 1998 — the year of the failed merger attempt with AFT — through 2016. NEA denied me a press credential thereafter due to my partnership with The 74, which they said “does not meet journalistic standards as a credible news outlet.”

In truth, it was a bit of a relief. The convention was tedious and became more and more stage-managed as the years went on. It was also an expensive trip and a week of little rest and bad food.

Looks like I’m not the only who has lost interest in the NEA Representative Assembly. Delegate attendance over the years:
1998 – 9,715
2002 – 8,519
2012 – 7,403
2017 – 6,880
2022 – 5,071 (3,858 in person)

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) July 3, 2022

Thanks to Terry Stoops of the John Locke Foundation and his sources, we now have a complete list of the new business items NEA delegates are debating this week. For this first time, the union has seen fit to hide this information behind a firewall, making it available only to the delegates themselves.

You can take a look at Terry’s Twitter threadto see the items he highlighted, but I’ll point to these few for now:

NBI 15 – The latest in a long history of creating enemies lists (this one from 1998):

“NEA shall compile research to create fact sheets about the largest 25 organizations that are actively working to diminish a students’ right to honesty in education, freedom of sexual and gender identify, and teacher autonomy.”

NBI 31 – The return of merger!

“I move that the NEA create a committee and a plan to work with AFT to strongly consider a national merger of the two education unions.”

NBI 37 – Another in long history of fringe NBIs that never pass from activists in the Oakland Education Association:

“The NEA will work with state affiliates to support a national policy of mandatory masking and COVID vaccines in schools, as well as high-quality virtual education for immuno-compromised students and all families who want it by publicizing successful virtual education programs in public schools throughout the nation in existing media outlets.”

NBI 44 – Offers sample contract language to institute bereavement leave for “pregnancy loss and failed fertility treatments.” Doesn’t open can of worms by including bereavement leave for abortions.

NBI 63 – More sample contract language, this time suggesting “mother” be replaced with “birthing parent” and “father” with “non-birthing parent.” The NBI’s sponsors will need bereavement leave when this gets voted down.

NBI 77 – Wrote about this when the California Teachers Association sent it to committee. Now it’s aiming for nationwide application:

Twitter bans @TerryStoops for 12 hours for posting “other people’s private information,” by which they mean new business items from the NEA Representative Assembly. Hey @Twitter, come get me, too. pic.twitter.com/XhFLG959xo

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) July 6, 2022

By a vote of 3,103-1,084, NEA delegates committed the union to “publicly stand in defense of abortion and reproductive rights and encourage members to participate in… rallies and demonstrations, lobbying and political campaigns, educational events, and other actions…”

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) July 6, 2022

Summary:

The purpose of the four-day assembly is to elect officers, approve the union’s budget and set national policy for the coming school year. In practice, however, the agenda is largely decided by the union’s executive officers, staff and 172-member board of directors. The election results are usually a foregone conclusion, and the budget is always approved with no alterations.

Where the delegates get their say is in the introduction, debate and votes on “new business items.” These are actions that are “specific in nature and terminal in application, shall concern issues beyond one affiliate and shall not call for NEA to do work that is already in progress.” It takes just 50 delegate signatures on a petition to get an item to the floor for debate and vote.

The focus of these items runs the gamut, from battling institutional racism to supporting a national opt out/test refusal movement to calling for Arne Duncan to resign as President Barack Obama’s secretary of education. Many have no relation to education or labor at all.

Though approval of new business items is the expressed will of the delegates, execution of the actions demanded usually falls very short of impactful. The 2021 assembly debated 66 items. Of these, 11 were ruled out of order or withdrawn. Ten were voted down. A full 22 were referred to an NEA standing committee without a recommendation. That left only 23 that were approved. Of those, nine called on NEA to use its print and social media outlets to publicize something.

Brianna Hatch:

Two California universities announced Thursday they are leaving the Pac-12 athletic conference to join the Big Ten. The move is poised to send shockwaves through higher education — with revenue gains, athletes’ well-being, and the organization of college athletics as a whole at stake.

The University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California will become the 15th and 16th members of the Big Ten, effective 2024, the conference announced Thursday. The move comes less than a year after the Universities of Oklahoma and Texas at Austin announced

Kat Rosenfeld:

Gullaba’s agent knew he had something special, and he was excited for a big submission push. But on the eve of sending the manuscript out to publishers, the agent suggested Gullaba update his bio to emphasize his racial identity. Publishers, he reasoned, would be excited to support a young black writer fresh on the literary scene.

There was a problem: Gullaba is Filipino.

“We had never met in person,” he tells me, laughing. “I guess you can’t really judge who’s black or not based on a name like Alberto, and Gullaba is just ethnically ambiguous enough that it could be from Africa? I don’t know.”

What was clear, immediately, was that something had changed. The agent wasn’t excited anymore. Actually, he seemed downright nervous, and he started asking for significant changes to the manuscript.

“The guy’s frightened,” Gullaba says. “God bless him, that’s the reality of that world.”

At first, Gullaba was asked to add an Asian character—east Asian, specifically, perhaps a Pacific Islander. Then it was suggested that Titus’ wingman, the biggest secondary character, should also be assigned an Asian identity. And there was one more bizarre twist: Another agency employee, who we’ll call Sally, was brought in at the eleventh hour to read the book and provide additional feedback.

Eileen is a DHS reporter for NYT who authored the puff piece on Nina Jankowicz — this is her sharing the link. Question for you Eileen: you assert Nina was targeted by false info, but never mention a single falsehood (& there are many!) that she had a history of promoting — why? https://t.co/mCs4cJZ9fq

— Jerry Dunleavy (@JerryDunleavy) July 6, 2022

Lisa Bannon and Rebecca Smith:

American universities are searching for ways to generate more revenue. As a result, hundreds of schools—including Vanderbilt University, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—are teaming up with for-profit companies such as 2U to provide online programs.

As part of the arrangement, one that is reshaping higher education, universities sometimes hand over to companies a great deal of control of student recruitment and instructional design, especially for nondegree programs. For their work, the companies receive hefty shares of tuition dollars.

Much of this isn’t clear to prospective and current students. Universities often cooperate with companies in ways that can blur the lines for students between schools and recruiters.

2U, based in Lanham, Md., has emerged as a leader in the booming field, employing aggressive recruiting practices and in some cases playing down its role, according to interviews with current and former 2U employees and students.

Christopher “Chip” Paucek, 2U’s chief executive and a co-founder, said the company is providing valuable services to universities that many can’t do themselves. “For the last 14 years, 2U has worked to expand access to high-quality online education for learners around the world, enabling hundreds of thousands of students to transform their lives,” Mr. Paucek said in a written statement.

Christina Denkinger wanted something new after 14 years as an elementary-school teacher in Portland, Ore. After shopping around for a course in data analytics last fall, she requested information through a University of Oregon website portal for an online training program, called a boot camp, offered by the university’s continuing-education division.

David Bell:

Last week, the Lancet published a modeling studyby Oliver Watson and others from Imperial College London, funded by, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This predictive model from Imperial College suggests that COVID-19 vaccination introduced at the end of 2020 saved 14.4 to 19.8 million lives in the subsequent 12 months. A summary is provided here. The Imperial College modeling team previously massively overstated anticipated COVID-19 deaths in 2020. 

Models should pass basic credibility criteria to be published, based on plausibility. Alternatively, a lack of coherence with real-world data or known biology should be stated. For reasons upon which one can only speculate, the Lancet again seems not to have actually assessed the credibility of the paper prior to publication. This matters, as others who lack an apparent basic understanding of scientific process, such as The Economist and various commentators on social media, then disseminate the model’s predictions as fact. 

People can die when public health is twisted in this way.

Vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 commenced in late 2020, and significant vaccination rates were not achieved in most populations until at least a few months into 2021. In a respiratory virus outbreak the most vulnerable, most likely to die, are likely to be overrepresented in mortality in year one. However, this first year did not produce anything like the mortality claimed to have been ‘saved’ by the vaccines in 2021. Lockdowns and other nonpharmaceutical interventions don’t account for this.

Here is a compilation of zoomed 4k drone footage of the EF3 tornado in Andover KS earlier this spring with quick analyses of some of the complex vortex dynamics observed. Helical sub-vortices, a descending vortex breakdown bubble, and a low pressure reservoir just above ground pic.twitter.com/uYdpc6NMLB

— Reed Timmer (@ReedTimmerAccu) June 29, 2022

HUGE NEWS: A judge ruled this morning that @LASchools’ student Covid vaccine mandate was illegal, blocking LAUSD from sending kids to independent study for not getting the Covid vaccine. pic.twitter.com/E3mhaKIGhd

— Reopen California Schools (@ReopenCASchools) July 5, 2022

Kay Hymowitz

I am overstating, but not by much. A significant number of American students are reading fluently and with understanding and are well on their way to becoming literate adults. But they are a minority. As of 2019, according to the National Association of Education Progress (NAEP), sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, 35 percent of fourth-graders were reading at or above proficiency levels; that means, to spell it out, that a strong majority—65 percent, to be exact—were less than proficient. In fact, 34 percent were reading, if you can call it that, below a basic level, barely able to decipher material suitable for kids their age. Eighth-graders don’t do much better. Only 34 percent of them are proficient; 27 percent were below-basic readers. Worse, those eighth-grade numbers represent a decline from 2017 for 31 states.

As is always the case in our crazy-quilt, multiracial, multicultural country, the picture varies, depending on which kids you’re looking at. If you categorize by states, the lowest scores can be found in Alabama and New Mexico, with just 21 percent of eighth-graders reading proficiently. The best thing to say about these results is that they make the highest-scoring state—Massachusetts, with 47 percent of students proficient—look like a success story rather than the mediocrity it is.

The findings that should really push antiracist educators to rethink their pedagogical assumptions are those for the nation’s black schoolchildren. Nationwide, 52 percent of black children read below basic in fourth grade. (Hispanics, at 45 percent, and Native Americans, at 50 percent, do almost as badly, but I’ll concentrate here on black students, since antiracism clearly centers on the plight of African-Americans.) The numbers in the nation’s majority-black cities are so low that they flirt with zero. In Baltimore, where 80 percent of the student body is black, 61 percent of these students are below basic; only 9 percent of fourth-graders and 10 percent of eighth-graders are reading proficiently. (The few white fourth-graders attending Charm City’s public schools score 36 points higher than their black classmates.) Detroit, the American city with the highest percentage of black residents, has the nation’s lowest fourth-grade reading scores; only 5 percent of Detroit fourth-graders scored at or above proficient. (Cleveland’s schools, also majority black, are only a few points ahead.)

In April 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of former students suing Detroit schools for not providing an adequate education. The suit cited poor facilities and inadequate textbooks, but below-basic literacy skills were the primary academic complaint. One of the plaintiffs was a former Detroit public school student who went on to community college and ended up on academic probation, in need of a reading tutor. His story is typical enough as to be barely worth mentioning—except for the fact that he graduated at the top of his public high school class. And as if this isn’t bad enough, the numbers appear likely to get worse, with the impact of Covid-19 disruptions.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Gallup:

Gallup summarizes Americans’ overall confidence in institutions by taking an average of the ratings of the 14 institutions it measures consistently each year — all but small business and large technology companies. This year’s 27% average of U.S. adults expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in those 14 institutions is three points below the prior low from 2014.

WILL:

The ongoing discussions about public school education continues to be divisive and difficult. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) provides these model school board policies as an addition and alternative to the limited options that school boards have access to. WILL offers these model policies with goals of increasing parents’ rights and involvement, creating transparency, optimizing student academic achievement and improving school governance.

Michael Walsh:

Before 1776 what eventually became the U.S.A. was a collection of British colonies; in 1619, when black Africans aboard a Portuguese slave ship, taken as bounty by English privateers (aka “pirates”), came ashore in the New World, they did so near Hampton in the British colony of Virginia. At that point, there was nothing “American” about it, other than its location. (The Portuguese, by the way, were among history’s worst black-African slavers, directing the  bulk of the transatlantic slave trade to their colony, Brazil. Yet somehow slavery is “America’s original sin.”)

Instead, slavery was a cause for which hundreds of thousands of Americans died. On these first few days in July 1863, in the midst of the Civil War that may have started as a rebellion but turned into a war to free the slaves, Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and George Meade electrified the nation with the news of their twin victories at Vicksburg, the last of the southern citadels on the Mississippi River, and at Gettysburg, a small town in southern Pennsylvania where Robert E. Lee’s defective generalship finally caught up to his inflated reputation, and killed the Confederacy’s hopes at point-blank range during Pickett’s Charge. It was a blunder that made Grant’s worst military decision, Cold Harbor, look almost sensible.

This is the same Grant who called the “cause” of the Confederacy “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” In a forgotten bit of history, the capture of Vicksburg also vindicated General Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan,” which advocated choking the South to death by blockading its ports and seizing its principal waterways. Which is exactly what Grant—who served under “Old Fuss and Feathers” in the Mexican War—did.

Jacob Howland:

Last week, while we were teaching in the forbiddencourses program of UATX (commonly referred to as the University of Austin), the economist Deirdre McCloskey told me a story. The year was 1969, and an official from Princeton had come to the Institute for Advanced Study to discuss the university’s decision to establish an African-American Studies program. Students in Cornell’s Afro-American Society had recently engineered an armed takeover of Willard Strait Hall. Met with skepticism about the proposal, the exasperated official finally blurted out, “But the black students have the guns!” To which economist Alexander Gerschenkron replied, “When I hear the word ‘guns,’ I reach for my culture.”

On hot-button political issues, Americans today have itchy trigger fingers. Chalk it up to poor education. Academia, which is upstream of culture and politics alike, has become a den of ideological uniformity and score-settling snitching that promotes the forceful (and sometimes violent) suppression of speech. But while most colleges and universities are effectively teaching students to reach for their guns, some teach them to reach for their culture. That means cultivating the citizenly virtues of interpretive charity, intellectual humility, and open-mindedness without which politics in the proper sense—the collective determination of matters of common concern through public debate—becomes impossible.

UATX’s forbidden courses program, which brought together undergraduates from leading colleges and universities, lived up to its name. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s course analyzed “key foundations of critical thinking, argumentation, reasoned debate, and freedom of expression, as these pertain to some of the most controversial issues of our day.” Students studied logical argumentation and read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in preparation for exploring theses like “Islam is a religion of peace” and “transgender women are women” from opposing perspectives. Kathleen Stock’s course on varieties of feminism examined “what kind of metaphysical and political subject is being implicitly conjured in the background under the heading ‘woman,’ and whether it is a coherent one.” Writer Thomas Chatterton Williams introduced his class to the “pain, rage, and hope of America’s most loyal critics,” including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. McCloskey’s course asked whether capitalism has been a tragedy or a triumph. Historian Niall Ferguson led an examination of free and unfree societies in the twentieth century.

Musa al-Gharbi

Indeed, Thomas’ embrace of the Republican Party is consonant with a deep mistrust of white liberals, the institutions they control and the policies they try to advance in the name of “social justice.” 

This mistrust was widely shared among Black activists of his generation — and is in keeping with Thomas’ Supreme Court decisions, including overturning Roe. If anything, the racialized attacks many liberals directed at Thomas in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling confirm the pessimistic view of race relations that prevailed among many of the Black thinkers who shaped Thomas’ worldview and is exhibited by Thomas himself. 

For instance, Thomas was deeply inspired by Malcolm X. He had a poster of Malcolm X that hung in his dorm room. He memorized many of his speeches by heart, and he continues to evoke him frequently to this day.

It was Malcolm X, of course, who famously declaredthat, “In this deceitful American game of power politics, the Negros (i.e. the race problem, the integration and civil rights issues) are nothing but tools, used by one group of whites called Liberals against another group of whites called Conservatives, either to get into power or to remain in power.”

Michael O’Dwyer:

“It’s difficult to stop title inflation as [it is] quite a powerful recruitment tool and cheaper than paying properly,” said one salaried partner whose job title has been upgraded at EY.

Francis Menton:

Of the three decisions discussed, the one likely to have the most far-reaching impact is West Virginia. During his first days and weeks in office, President Biden issued one Executive Order after another instructing every part of the bureaucracy to figure out any way it could to implement the “climate” agenda. Statutory authorization? Who needs that? Now, not only is EPA’s most expansive regulatory initiative getting shut down, but multiple other agencies have comparable gambits likely to fail in the courts. Most famously, the SEC is now out with 100 pages or so of new proposed regulations, mandating corporate disclosures of “emissions”; and the Federal Reserve supposedly is adopting saving the climate as a third of its missions (the other two being price stability and full employment). More such dubious initiatives are under way in agencies from the Department of Energy to the Department of the Interior.

A major transformation of the economy requires specific legislation duly enacted by Congress. Who could have though of such a crazy idea?

Thankful to see another year .It’s always an honor to share the same birthday with the country I love . Happy 4th of July everyone . Please enjoy the day and most importantly, be safe ! Thank you to our brave men & women who have served & currently are serving for your service! pic.twitter.com/Mh5XSlxGZs

— Rodney Smith Jr (@iamrodneysmith) July 4, 2022

Natasha Piñon:

The world’s most famous typing teacher was born in a garage in Sherman Oaks, Calif., more than three decades ago. 

Her creators named her Mavis Beacon and she would go on to teach a generation to type with her trademark tranquility while coaching millions of students through the basics of QWERTY. 

In the many years since, she’s come to represent excellence in typing, used as a shorthand for speed everywhere from the Tonight Show to The Office. As Jim once complimented Pam, arguably one of the most famous characters ever to hold down a typing-centric job: “Mavis Beacon doesn’t even type 90!”

The twist? She wasn’t real.

Steven Nelson:

TV correspondents, famed veteran reporters and leaders of the White House Correspondents’ Association rallied behind the call to end year-old restrictions on venues such as the East Room that in past administrations were “open press.”

Biden aides have refused to tell the Correspondents’ Association the selection criteria for presidential events and individual reporters have received an array of conflicting explanations, resulting in a widespread belief that the practice is meant to shape the variety of questions presented to the president.

“The current method of allowing a limited number of reporters into these events is not only restrictive and antithetical to the concept of a free press, but it has been done without any transparent process into how reporters are selected to cover these events,” the letter says.

A world of languages – and how many speak them [source, read more: https://t.co/goSX1GKWQ4] pic.twitter.com/G5xaUeyuDt

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) July 3, 2022

Scott Girard:

While lesson planning late on a Sunday night last year, East High School social studies teacher Anisa Yudawanti texted a friend, teacher Amy Wilson, with a “wild idea.”

Months later, Yudawanti’s freshmen students and Wilson’s second- and third-graders at John Muir Elementary School held copies of the books they co-created, “What Does it Mean to Tell the Truth?”

“I was asking students for a very different kind of demonstration of learning, a very different kind of assignment that was very closely tied to their personal dreams, their ideas,” Yudawanti said. “A lot of them were not used to that and I think that was a really exciting thing to do.”

Eugene Volokh:

So the rule seems clear: Content-neutral bans on residential picketing are constitutionally permissible. And that would apply whether the residence is that of an abortion provider or that of a Justice who ruled that the Constitution doesn’t secure abortion rights. Perhaps Justices Brennan and Marshall (and possibly Stevens, though his position in Frisby was more complex) were right to reject this, and to conclude that people should be free to picket outside the homes of everyone (again, abortion providers or others). But the current rule upholding residential picketing bans has been useful to abortion providers as well as others.

UPDATE: For more on whether the bans being discussed in this situation are indeed content-neutral and therefore valid, see this post as to Maryland and this post as to Virginia. (Summary: Maryland law very likely invalid, Virginia law likely invalid, Montgomery County ordinance likely valid.)

William J. Bennett:

All Americans should be concerned about any indoctrination of children. But content addressing America’s difficult history of race relations, including today’s challenges, isn’t necessarily evidence of that. Achievements in the realm of civil rights have happened through an imperfect process spanning more than two centuries. The struggles of Americans like King and Frederick Douglass are lessons in striving toward the “more perfect union” of the Founders’ imagination. And they are worth teaching.

The American public-school system must teach both the galling and glorious aspects of U.S. history. As Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has said, “We can teach all of our history, the good, the bad, and Virginia’s children will be better for it.” While it isn’t always a comfortable process, teaching children America’s complete history in an age-appropriate way, with parental awareness, is necessary for their own sake and for our country’s.

Doing so will help take politics out of education. It will prepare kids for the real world, where preventing hurt feelings doesn’t take precedence over facing uncomfortable facts. And it will instill in our children the ability to entertain ideas they may disagree with—an essential condition for a functioning democracy.

American exceptionalism is real, but fragile. Teaching the full story of American history will encourage the next generations of Americans in their own progress toward a more perfect union. America is still, as Lincoln said, “the last best hope of Earth.” If we tell the full story of the American past, it will help write a bright story of the American future.

Pamela Paul:

But today, a number of academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations are working toward an opposite end: to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.

As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word “women” has become verboten. Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture. No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like “pregnant people,” “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas.”

Planned Parenthood, once a stalwart defender of women’s rights, omits the word “women” from its home page. NARAL Pro-Choice America has used “birthing people” in lieu of “women.” The American Civil Liberties Union, a longtime defender of women’s rights, last month tweeted its outrage over the possible overturning of Roe v. Wade as a threat to several groups: “Black, Indigenous and other people of color, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, immigrants, young people.”

It left out those threatened most of all: women. Talk about a bitter way to mark the 50th anniversary of Title IX.

David Larson:

These allegations were submitted to the board by Jacquelyn Lopez of the Elias Law Group on behalf of the N.C. Democratic Party’s deputy get-out-the-vote director, Michael Abucewicz. The accusations — which include that the Green Party misrepresented itself to get some to sign and that they turned in fraudulent sheets of signatures — can be read here. 

But Matthew Hoh, the Green Party’s U.S. Senate candidate — who will now be unable to get on the ballot with Republican Ted Budd, Democrat Cheri Beasley, and Libertarian Shannon Bray — said the national Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Elias Law Group, and the N.C. Democratic Party were less concerned with exposing fraud than keeping Hoh off the ballot to protect Beasley’s vote share. And they used dishonest tactics to get the job done, Hoh said.

Kaleem Caire:

I have grave concern for our children in Dane County and Wisconsin.

We face no greater long-term crisis in America than the widespread underperformance, diminishing motivation and poor preparation of children and young people in our nation’s K-12 schools, and the rapidly declining number of educators available to teach our children.

Student performance in Dane County is troubling. In spring 2021, near the conclusion of our first full pandemic-impacted school year, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s website shows that the percentage of proficient readers in grades three, four and five of public elementary schools across Dane County’s 16 school districts was only:

7% of Black students (5% in Madison alone).
13% of Latino students (7% in Madison).
37% of Asian students (25% in Madison).
42% of white students (41% in Madison).
26% of multiracial students (16% in Madison)

This means they tested at or above grade level on the English language arts section of the state’s Forward exam, administered annually to children in Wisconsin in grades three through eight and 10. The remaining students tested below grade level.

The results were very similar statewide in grades three through eight, across all 423 public school districts and 32 independent public charter schools in Wisconsin.

If the percentages above aren’t shocking enough, consider this: When you look at the educational performance of Black students in Dane County by the conclusion of third grade — when reading shifts from learning how to read to reading to learn — just 10% move on every year to fourth grade as proficient readers. Among the remaining 90%, 30% have a partial understanding of reading and language arts while the remaining 60% struggle to read well at all.

We are talking thousands of children attending public schools in Dane County and our state who are way behind academically. Every demographic is affected by this. The matter has only been made much worse by the pandemic, and by the lack of enough educators to effectively address the problem. The situation is worsening by the day and year. It is not getting any better.

All in favor of teaching civics in Wisconsin high schools, say aye — ‘Aye!’

The future of our community hangs in the balance. The massive numbers of job openings across our region and this country are not because people don’t want to work. We haven’t prepared our young people well enough for the jobs that are available, and we have not helped enough of them develop the skills to create a job for themselves.

We cannot build a future and solve the growing numbers of geopolitical, environmental, housing, food insecurity and public health crises with thousands of children who cannot effectively read a restaurant menu, or who attend schools that aren’t preparing them to solve these problems.

We must do better, and I welcome that conversation.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

TikTok:

3. Do any ByteDance employees have a role in shaping TikTok’s algorithm?

Subjectto the controls described in our response to question 1, ByteDance engineers around the world may assist in developing those algorithms, however our solution with Oracle will ensure that training of the TikTok algorithm only occurs in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and will also ensure appropriate third-party security vetting and validation ofthe algorithm. For more information about how TikTok’s algorithm recommends content, please see our Newsroom post: https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/how-tiktok recommends videos-for-you.

4. Do any Douyin employees have any access to American user data or a role in shaping TikTok’s algorithm?

ByteDance developed the algorithms for both Douyin and TikTok , and therefore some of the same underlying basic technology building blocks are utilized by both products , but TikTok’s business logic , algorithm , integration , and deployment of systems is specific to the TikTok application and separate from Douyin .

By Susan Svrluga and Lori Rozsa:

In June, DeSantis lauded work experience over “a magic piece of paper which likely would have cost too much anyway” when he signed a law allowing state agencies to substitute work experience, including military experience, for college degrees in hiring.

“Give me somebody that served eight years in the Navy or the Marine Corps. That education is going to be much more beneficial and pertinent than someone that went $100,000 in debt to get a degree in zombie studies,” DeSantis said.

He has also pledged to keep tuition at public colleges and universities low, and this week, he changed rules for the state’s Bright Future scholarships to allow work experience by high school students to count toward required community service.

Still, his proposals to rein in the independence of those schools have alarmed some academics in Florida and beyond. In other parts of the country, some legislators and governors are pushing for more autonomy over hiring and firing state employees. Tenure is coming under increasing criticism. And a number of states have passed bills to prevent colleges from teaching “divisive concepts.”

Last month, the accrediting agency announced that it would take no further action after a committee visited the University of Florida toevaluate whether the school was in compliance with standards requiring integrity and academic freedom and reviewed new procedures. School officials said in a statement that the outcome “affirms the university’s commitment to the academic freedom of its faculty members and the First Amendment’s guarantees of the right of free speech.”

It remains to be seen whether other jurisdictions follow Florida’s example on accreditation, Kelchen said. But he noted DeSantis’s significant national clout and said scrutiny of higher education sends a clear “message to the political base during an election year that ‘we care about your priorities.’ ”

Anthony LaMesa:

Findings highlight importance of “normalcy” for children

A recently published journal article concluding Swedish primary school children suffered no learning loss drew international attention, but foreign observers of Sweden’s responsible decision to keep most schools open may have missed a journal article published in December 2021 with good news about the emotional well-being of the country’s middle school students: they didn’t suffer more emotional problems during the early pandemic than would otherwise be expected “due to typical mean-level changes during development.”

Analyzing data from 30 middle schools in western Sweden, the “study’s aim was to compare Swedish middle school students’ (grade 4–5) psychosocial well-being before the pandemic to approximately a year into the pandemic.” The authors concluded that “when students continue attending school, their psychosocial well-being does not worsen as it does for students experiencing school closures.”

Students’ emotional problems showed no differences, whilst small differences in student’s relationships to significant others and factors of psychological adjustment may be partially due to typical mean-level changes during development (Meeus, 2016). Meaningful differences in students’ school adjustment are plausibly attributed to disruptions caused by the pandemic. Holistically, students do not seem to be doing poorly. This study together with Chen et al. (2021) has shown that when students continue attending school, their psychosocial well-being does not worsen as it does for students experiencing school closures (Cresswell et al., 2021; Viner et al., 2021).

The researchers compared data from October 2019-January 2020 (T1) to data from November 2020-February 2021 (T2):

America First Legal

Unlawful actions by the most notorious school district in America include:

• Knowingly, systematically, and willfully violating the Plaintiffs’ fundamental constitutional rights to care for, nurture, and direct the education, moral instruction, and upbringing of their children;
• Knowingly, systematically, and willfully taking advantage of the schools’ coercive power over children to impose a woke social, political, and psychological ideology and agenda, and thereby to shape and control student attitudes, beliefs, and behavior relating to, inter alia, human sexuality, equal rights, and the relationship between a parent and his or her child;
• Requiring schools and teachers as a matter of policy to deceive parents and secretly promote and facilitate a child’s “gender transition”;
• Requiring schools as a matter of policy to provide children with psychological or psychiatric counseling and treatment without parental knowledge or consent;
• Soliciting and obtaining information about student attitudes, habits, traits, opinions, beliefs or feelings regarding sensitive regulated topics such as sex, religion, race, and familial relationships without either express prior parental consent or a direct relationship to academic instruction;
• Knowingly, systematically, and willfully using “social and emotional learning” and other similar methods and techniques for the purpose of affecting childrens’ behavioral, emotional, or attitudinal characteristics related, inter alia, to race and sexuality, without prior parental consent or any direct relationship to academic instruction;
• Invidiously using racial “balancing” and quotas to favor some children at the expense of others;
• Intentionally failing to provide Plaintiffs with a safe and orderly learning environment for their children;
• Illegally hiding information about school operations and curriculum from parents;
• Illegally charging exorbitant fees and/or claiming legally deficient exemptions to Freedom of Information Act Requests;
• Illegally failing to comply with multiple Virginia laws mandating parental notifications and involvement in surveys and teaching related to sensitive personal subjects including human sexuality and race;
• Illegally implementing race-based quota systems for entry into advanced level classes and admission to the Academies of Loudoun; and
• Retaliating and discriminating against parents and children whose beliefs do not align with the woke LCPS agenda;

Census Bureau age estimates, 2021, Wisconsin county “kids-to-seniors” ratios: 44% of Wisconsin counties had more residents ages 65+ than ages 0-17, compared to 35% nationally. Nearly three times as many counties as in 2010. pic.twitter.com/2lALkx1Vf5

— UW-APL (@AppliedPopLab) June 30, 2022

Brian Gitt:

I started to realize that I had accepted as true certain claims about energy and our environment. Now I began to see those claims were false. For example:

• I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions during the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas. 
• I used to think that the world was transitioning to solar, wind, and batteries. This, too, was false. Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%. 
• I used to believe nuclear energy was dangerous and nuclear waste was a big problem. In fact, nuclear is the safest and most reliable way to generate low-emission electricity, and it provides the best chance of reducing CO2 emissions.

It’s now clear I was chasing utopian energy. I was using green energy myths as moral camouflage, and I was able to believe those myths as long as I remained ignorant about the real costs and benefits of different energy sources. 

I’ve dedicated most of my life to protecting the environment. But I was wrong about the best ways to do it. I thought I was acting morally and protecting the well-being of people and the planet. In fact, I was harming both.

Mario Loyola and Eric Groten

The EPA’s attempt to impose such a scheme on states was particularly bold because Congress had just declined to enact a similar scheme. After the 2008 election, Democrats introduced the Waxman-Markey bill, a sweeping cap-and-trade scheme to reduce carbon emissions dramatically. Even with Democratic supermajorities in both houses, Congress failed to pass the bill.

After his party lost the House in 2010 President Obama turned to the EPA, which in 2015 promulgated the Clean Power Plan. The basic idea of the CPP was to pressure states into shutting down coal and (eventually) natural-gas plants and switch to renewable electricity sources. The agency resorted to an obscure provision of the original Clean Air Act that lay largely dormant for decades. It empowers the EPA to designate a “best system of emissions reduction,” or BSER, for existing facilities. The provision had been used only a handful of times, mostly for solid-waste incinerators, to reduce emissions “inside the fence line” of the facility itself.

The EPA decided that BSERs could extend beyond the fence line to the whole economy. The CPP would have imposed costly technological requirements within its purview, but also imposed standards that would force states to switch to natural gas and eventually renewables. The agency even planned to adopt nationwide standards on how and when you are allowed to use electricity in your own house. 

There were a host of statutory and constitutional problems with this scheme, and the Supreme Court stayed it in 2016. In 2019, the Trump administration replaced it with the Affordable Clean Energy rule. That rule held to the traditional “inside the fence line” approach and accordingly focused on modest emissions improvements at coal plants. On the last day of Mr. Trump’s presidency, however, the powerful U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia vacated the Trump rule.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Len Gutkin:

Two summers ago, The Review published a fascinating essay by the historian Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins on the question of “presentism” in the discipline of history. (In her 2002 article “Against Presentism,” Lynn Hunt defined the object of her attack in two ways: “1. the tendency to interpret the past in presentist terms; and 2. the shift of general historical interest toward the contemporary period and away from the more distant past.”) The topic felt newly urgent, motivated by questions about whether Trumpism could be illuminated by analogies to European fascism as well as by a series of highly publicized debates around

Melissa Block:

The NPR/Ipsos poll shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans (63%) are opposed to allowing transgender women and girls to compete on teams that align with their gender identity, while 24% overall support that.

Among Democrats, opinion is fairly split: a plurality, 46%, support trans female athletes’ right to compete on women’s and girls sports teams, while 41% oppose it.

Independent voters oppose trans female athletes right to compete by 3:1 (21% support; 63% oppose).

Among Republicans, support plummets to just 4%, while 88% oppose.

Paul Thacker:

RICH: Correct. My initial efforts were to make an interactive geospatial visualization where you could watch payments drop like raindrops over time and visually recognize patterns. For example, there’s this spike in food and beverage payments at the end of December every year and this coincides with payments for speaker’s fees happening all across the country.

So you start to understand that one doctor was likely speaking to all these other doctors who got dinners and drinks that day.

I want to make it easier to explore the financial relationships between authors of articles in medical journals and industry, mostly drug and device companies.

Any other labels you want to throw at me?

The conversation at the grown-up table is about why the COVID-19 vaccine for children was approved with no data on clinical benefit.

You’re free to come join the adults once you’re done name-calling. https://t.co/Zw0OuznVGO

— Joseph A. Ladapo, MD, PhD (@FLSurgeonGen) June 30, 2022

David Lat:

The nation’s capital is also the latest front in the law-school culture wars. Two law schools in D.C., American University Washington College of Law and the George Washington University Law School, have experienced free speech and cancel culture controversies in the past week. Here’s what’s going at American University (“AU”), per Karen Sloan of Reuters:

American University is investigating eight law students after a conservative classmate claimed they harassed him during an online group chat about the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, one of the students under investigation confirmed Monday.

The incident followed the May 2 leak of a draft of the decision, which was released in final form on Friday and overturned Roe v. Wade, reversing a Constitutional right to an abortion.

A male law student who described himself as Republican and “deeply religious” filed a complaint with the university alleging his classmates harassed and threatened him due to his political affiliation and religion, according to a May 25 letter from the university’s Office of Equity & Title IX.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (“FIRE”), which is assisting one of the students under investigation, has published an article about the episode, which links to a transcript of the GroupMe chat in question. As even cursory review of the chat reveals, it contains nothing remotely “harassing” or “threatening”; it’s just a heated disagreement between law students about a controversial topic. And it’s not even that heated, to be honest; the NYU Law listserv dust-up, which led to accusations of anti-Semitism, was far more contentious.

There are no threats, explicit or implicit, in the chat. Yes, there are some comments that are rude and uncivil—e.g., “can we shut the f**k up about personal opinions while people process this,” “no one asked for your personal opinion,” “[you should] have the decency to shut up while people come to terms with the fact that they’ve just lost a constitutional right”—but none of this rises to the level of harassment or threats.

Beth Mole:

Fauci subsequently went back on Paxlovid for another five-day course. “Right now, I’m on my fourth day of a five-day course of my second course of Paxlovid,” he said Tuesday. “And, fortunately, I feel reasonably good, I mean, I’m not completely without symptoms, but I certainly don’t feel acutely ill.”

Conflicting treatment advice

Fauci’s second course of treatment conflicts with the stance of the US Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a May 24 health advisory, the CDC wrote, “There is currently no evidence that additional treatment for COVID-19 is needed for COVID-19 rebound. Based on data available at this time, patient monitoring continues to be the most appropriate management for patients with recurrence of symptoms after completion of a treatment course of Paxlovid.”

Scott Girard

Katina Maclin won’t be able to vote this fall, but her ideas will be present at every polling place in the city of Madison.

The high school junior, who recently moved from Sun Prairie to Glendale, designed two new voting-themed stickers for voters to consider grabbing after filling out their ballot.

“It speaks to how everyone can have an impact,” Maclin told the Cap Times. “What young people can contribute is something that we should take into consideration.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ed Treleven:

16-year-old boy charged last week with attempted homicide after a homeowner said the boy fired a gunshot at him during a brief struggle at a Southwest Side home is seeking to have his case transferred to juvenile court.

A judge ruled Tuesday that there was enough evidence to find Quamaine Kelly, of Calumet City, Illinois, likely committed the crime. Kelly was charged last week with attempted first-degree intentional homicide for firing a gunshot inside the garage of a home in the 7500 block of Crawling Stone Road on Jan. 15, while allegedly trying to steal a car

Denning, Jeffrey T., Eric R. Eide, Kevin J. Mumford, Richard W. Patterson and Merrill Warnick:

We document that college completion rates have increased since the 1990s, after declining in the 1970s and 1980s. We find that most of the increase in graduation rates can be explained by grade inflation and that other factors, such as changing student characteristics and institutional resources, play little or no role. This is because GPA strongly predicts graduation, and GPAs have been rising since the 1990s. This finding holds in national survey data and in records from nine large public universities. We also find that at a public liberal arts college grades increased, holding performance on identical exams fixed.

Valeria Gurr

Over the last few years, states have taken unprecedented steps to expand parent choice in education for America’s families.

Across the nation, Education Savings Accounts and tax-credit scholarships are being created, expanded or improved to make educational freedom attainable for all.

Leighton Woodhouse:

A few weeks later, one of Charlotte’s teachers asked the kids to introduce their stuffed animals with their pronouns. “The six-year-olds were like, ‘What’s a pronoun?’” Beka said.

A former MCDS teacher whose daughter attended the school said his little girl was similarly confused when MCDS “started introducing gender, and you can be whoever you want, and it’s fluid. She started taking that on.”

The former teacher, who declined to speak openly, said his daughter was hardly alone. A group of girls in her class started to think of themselves as gay, and then transgender. By the fourth grade, his daughter was “dating” other girls in her class. By sixth grade—last year—she had adopted male pronouns and a boy’s name, and had started wearing a breast binder.

“You could see the old going away,” the former teacher said. “It was intense. And it was just sobering to go to these meetings week after week after week, and just talk about the same thing over and over.”

Josh Moody:

An early adopter of income-share agreements, Purdue has paused new enrollments in its plan, citing servicing challenges amid the switch to a new vendor. Critics won’t be sad to see them go.

Purdue University has paused new enrollments in its income-share agreement program, a financing mechanism both praised as a bold experiment to make college more accessible and criticized as a predatory scheme that traps students in dodgy and expensive contracts.

Known as Back a Boiler, the program was quietly paused earlier this month, with a message posted on Purdue’s website around the same time that President Mitch Daniels announced his forthcoming retirement and a successor was selected through a secretive search process.

Purdue officials say suspending Back a Boiler is a technical matter, citing a change from one vendor to a different one that doesn’t originate new income-share agreements but will continue to service existing ones. Critics, however, believe that pausing new enrollments marks the death of the Back a Boiler program.

Other higher ed observers wonder what the pause signals for the future of such agreements.

Eugene Volokh:

I don’t think that a public university’s “mission and values” should be to promote a reading of the Constitution as securing abortion rights, or as not securing abortion rights, as opposed to promoting research on this and related questions. And while of course a public university that runs hospitals should generally perform legal medical procedures, and train doctor with regard to legal medical procedures, I don’t think that justifies the university taking a stand on whether such legality is determined by state legislatures or by Supreme Court Justices.

That’s especially so when, as the UCLA Chancellor’s follow-up letter points out, “The decision is not expected to affect women’s reproductive rights in California,” so UC doesn’t even have much of a direct interest in the outcome of Dobbs as it affects its own operations. (There may be more room for statements by a public university president as to political decisions that do directly affect the operations of the university, such as changes in funding, statutes related to student admissions, and the like.)

More broadly, I tend to agree with the 1970 statement by the Office of the UC President:

There are both educational and legal reasons why the University must remain politically neutral. Educationally, the pursuit of truth and knowledge is only possible in an atmosphere of freedom, and if the University were to surrender its neutrality, it would jeopardize its freedom. Legally, Article IX, section 9, of the State Constitution provides in part that “The University shall be entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom in the appointment of its regents and in the administration of its affairs…”

Emily Yoffe:

a good summary of the Biden proposals.) 

“It’s a document that validates all of the concerns we had about due process and free speech being on the chopping block,” says Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.  He adds that the administration is giving schools the blessing of the Department of Education “to cut many corners that are essential for fundamental fairness.”

As vice president, Biden made clear that campuses were just the first stop in an effort to remake throughout society how males and females interact. He said in a 2015 speech at Syracuse University about sexual misconduct, “We need a fundamental change in our culture. And the quickest place to change culture is to change it on the campuses of America.” 

Then just before entering the 2020 presidential race, Joe Biden was accused by several women of unwanted touching and hair sniffing. Biden didn’t quite apologize, but explained that all his physical contacts were well-meant gestures of friendship and support. This was followed by a more serious allegation of assault, a charge he credibly denied. But a male student accused of such acts under Obama administration campus policies would have faced potential expulsion and been subjected to a grueling investigation, often conducted with a presumption of guilt. A lack of intent to harm, as Biden claimed for himself, would provide no defense—the administration’s policy demanded elevating the subjective feelings of the complainant.

Glenn Greenwald:

Whether one agrees or disagrees with his work, there is no denying that the writer, documentarian, and activist Chris Rufo has had an extremely significant impact on our political discourse, debates and even our laws. Even large liberal outlets which seek to demonize him — such as the New Yorker and New York Times — acknowledge the immensely consequential nature of his work, especially on debates about what is taught in schools about race and LGBT issues. With this significance in mind, I spoke to Rufo about his core worldview and the goals of his political work. It was a spirited and in-depth discussions that focused on some of our differences and the questions many have about his aspirations.

Scott Girard:

The effort to consider a new name for Madison’s Jefferson Middle School is on pause until October, following low attendance by members of the ad hoc committee appointed for the effort.

The School Board appointed the committee in March after Jefferson principal Sue Abplanalp made a renaming request to the board Feb. 28. The district received 42 proposals for new names by the April 8 deadline, but the ad hoc committee has yet to discuss any of them other than eliminating a few proposals to honor people who are still alive.

The committee was supposed to have 12 members, but had dropped to nine as of Tuesday’s meeting, according to Barb Osborn, secretary to the Board of Education. Two of those members had yet to turn in their rubric rankings of the remaining proposals for a new name, leaving the committee unable to move to next steps.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

“Should members of Congress be required to read every word of a bill prior to voting on it?”

– YES –
DEM: 79%
IND: 79%
GOP: 85%
CON: 87%
MOD: 77%
LIB: 79%
All Voters: 81% https://t.co/iCvVzu3UKc

— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) June 8, 2022

Politico

One way: the Democratic National Committee has set up a TikTok account after advising campaigns in 2020 to avoid the app. The committee is taking security precautions. It has dedicated devices for TikTok specifically that are isolated from “other DNC assets/processes/business as a mitigation to the privacy risk,” the committee said.

“The DNC’s privacy concerns with regard to TikTok remain unchanged,” said DANIEL WESSEL, the committee’s deputy communications director. “We take additional precautions when developing content and communicating with voters through that medium, and advise campaigns to take similar precautions.”

But the use of TikTok by the DNC still represents an evolution in the larger attitude the party has adopted with respect to the platform. Other prominent Democrats like Georgia gubernatorial candidate STACEY ABRAMSand Sen. JON OSSOFF (D-Ga.) have also joined TikTok. And the White House has participated in videos with creators like comedian BENNY DRAMA, the JONAS BROTHERS, and science guy BILL NYE — all of whom uploaded the TikToks to their own accounts with wide reach. The White House also gave TikTok stars a briefing on the war in Ukraine, the Washington Post first reported in March.

Bethany Bissel & Robert Stewart:

Jada Gabriel goes grocery shopping for her family of four every two weeks. On her last trip, she noticed the price of butter had increased.

“It was normally 98 cents,” said Gabriel, an ophthalmic technician who was on a shopping trip Wednesday at the Hi Nabor Supermarket on Winbourne Avenue. “Now it’s $1.18.”

While Gabriel hasn’t changed her shopping schedule, she has been buying less at the store and is strategizing her family’s meals so each grocery trip lasts longer.

She doesn’t purchase as many snacks and treats, and she only buys meat items like ground beef that she can use to prepare multiple dishes. She buys the smallest tube to avoid high meat prices, and it only lasts a couple of meals.

“Talking about it stresses me out,” Gabriel said. “I can’t afford to eat.”

Gabriel isn’t alone. Baton Rouge area shoppers and grocery stores are shifting their strategies to combat the worst inflation in the U.S. in decades, which is having an outsized impact on food prices.

The Consumer Price Index, a mechanism for measuring how much average consumers are paying for goods and services, was up by 8.6% year-over-year in May, the steepest climb since 1981. Food prices alone have risen by more than 10% from last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Richard Vedder:

Presidents of prestigious universities often make outrageous decisions inconsistent with such bedrock values as freedom of expression and providing the accused with traditional American due process. The shameful manner in which Princeton University fired Joshua Katz, a distinguished scholar and winner of several teaching awards, leads me to consider Christopher Eisgruber to be the worst Ivy League president, eclipsing even the earlier shenanigans of Yale’s Peter Salovey.

For those unfamiliar with the case, Prof. Katz was fired over alleged improprieties related to an offense—having consensual sexual relations with a 21-year-old girl—that took place over 15 years ago (!). Only after Katz started saying things that the Princeton administration did not like did it punish him for that incident. Fully a dozen years after the 2006 transgression, it suspended Katz without pay for one year. Then, in 2020, Katz expressed his disapproval of so-called anti-racist demands made by some members of the Princeton community after the George Floyd killing. That led to a story in The Daily Princetonian about the 2006 incident, prompting the school to reopen the case, accuse Katz of new improprieties related to the incident, and fire him. (See Katz’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal for more details.)

Princeton’s invidious ousting of Katz is objectionable on at least six grounds:

Certain discussions of racial issues are verboten at Princeton, despite university policies to the contrary.

1. It is clearly racist inasmuch as it implicitly asserts that certain discussions of racial issues are verboten at Princeton, despite university policies to the contrary.

2. More generally, it suggests that members of the Princeton community should be at least partially assessed on biological characteristics, such as race, gender, and sexual preference, rather than predominantly on the basis of academic merit and productivity.

3. It exhibits the cowardice of university administrators afraid of offending the fashionably woke progressive leaders of the university community.

4. It shows a hostility towards unfettered academic discourse and is completely inconsistent with Princeton’s fine version of the Chicago Principles celebrating free inquiry and expression, not to mention the First Amendment.

5. Due process standards were ignored—for example, the notion that an accused person cannot be put in double jeopardy (i.e., tried twice for the same offense).

6. It reinforces the rent-seeking behavior of certain members of Princeton University, who are undoubtably given special protection and clout because their politically favored support of minorities has effectively given them privileged status.

Elizabeth Pennisi:

In their past work comparing primate gut microbiomes, Moeller and colleagues simply looked at genetic markers that broadly identified what genera of bacteria or other microbes were present. Moeller has now taken a closer look at exactly what microbial species have gone missing from the human gut by trying to compile the full genomes of current gut microbes in our closest relatives. “You can tell what went extinct [in humans] by looking at what’s in other primates,” Moeller says.

Dan hart:

The result of this implosion of intact families has been absolutely catastrophic on society, particularly on boys. A recent study conducted by the Institute for Family Studies found stark disparities among fatherless boys compared to their peers with fathers in college graduation (14% versus 35%), idleness at ages 25-29 (defined as not working and not looking for work—19% versus 11%), and who have been incarcerated by ages 15-19 (31% versus 21%) and ages 28-34 (21% versus 10%).

Common sense tells us why this is the case. As Adam B. Coleman has astutely observed, involved fathers provide critical guidance to their sons in a host of ways. In particular, they offer:

• “a blueprint for manhood”;
• “a source of protection” and a “source of security” from the outside world;
• “a builder of confidence and a teacher for how to regulate your emotions in stressful situations”; and
• “the son’s purpose compass as he helps guide him throughout the trials of adolescence towards purposeful adulthood.”

This fatherly nurturing is especially critical during a boy’s childhood and as they approach the teen years. As Family Research Council’s senior research fellow George Barna has written, “Because a worldview is fully developed before the age of 13, young children listen to and watch their parents for clues on how to live an appropriate and successful life.”

Victor Davis Hanson:

The reactive makeover that followed from the Obama-Clinton “reset” was unfortunately an utter failure. Its pompous declarations and talk of “listening” and “outreach” ended in fresh Russian aggressiveness, most notably in the 2014 Russian invasions of both Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Such appeasement created the original seeds for Putin’s eventual spring 2022 catastrophic Russian invasion of most of Ukraine and attack on Kyiv. In addition, Russia earlier in 2013 had reentered the Middle East, on Secretary of State John Kerry’s 2011 invitation, after a three-decade hiatus. Then followed Russia’s informal partnerships with both Iran and China, and Moscow’s much greater and more comprehensive crackdowns on internal dissidents. In all talks of the Great Reset, we should then recall that Vladimir Putin apparently interpreted “reset” as American laxity to be leveraged rather than as magnanimity to be reciprocated. In cruder terms, Americans speaking loudly while carrying a twig was no way to “reset” Putin.

Lori Garver:

We had lost nearly the entire launch market to the French, Chinese, and Russians in the late ’90s, and winning back that market share by paying [private US companies] to take cargo and astronauts to the space station was a big economic boom for the nation.

A few years ago, you said that NASA needs to abandon its “socialist” approach to space exploration. What did you mean by that, and do you still believe that?

That was in direct response to the Space Launch System and Orion, which were started by Congress after our proposal [to defund them] had not been accepted. Really, the shuttle, the Constellation program, which the Bush administration established to follow the shuttle, and then SLS/Orion, were all done in a government-directed way that mimics a Soviet approach.

NASA collaborated on a commercial crew program with SpaceX, and now Boeing, to transport astronauts to the International Space Station. Would you say that was a prescient approach, following subsequent troubles with Russia and how it’s harder to get flights on Soyuz spacecraft?

I guess I feel less “prescient” than it was just so obvious to me, and to a lot of people, that we didn’t want to count on the Russians forever. For one, they were a monopoly provider. They kept increasing their prices, and there was absolutely nothing we could do about it. We needed our own systems, and ideally more than one.

Look, we had the experience with the shuttle: The government developed one. We had two accidents. After each of the accidents, it stood down for more than two years. So it was a bit surprising that the concept seemed so controversial.

Elizabeth Beyer:

An average home valued at $376,765 could see a property tax increase of up to $106, meaning the school portion of the tax bill would be roughly $3,926 in December, compared with $3,820 this past year.

The district’s total property tax levy would increase 2.77% over the previous year, to roughly $366.8 million.

Scott Girard:

The $621.4 million budget includes investments in programs like full-day 4-year-old kindergarten, early literacy and reading curricula, mental health resources for students and improving some of the mechanical systems in school buildings.

Much of it is funded through one-time federal COVID-19 relief dollars, which presented administrators with difficult choices as they sought to avoid creating a “fiscal cliff” with ongoing expenditures funded through one-time money that will not be there in the future.

MTI and staff, however, have argued that anything less than a 4.7% increase in base wage is effectively a pay cut given the significant level of inflation this year. While the “steps and lanes” provide an average of a 2% increase for staff, not all staff members receive any increase through that mechanism.

The union has expressed concerns that without the full increase, the district will continue to lose staff members at a time when staffing shortages have already made it an extremely difficult working environment.

MMSD considers $1,000 bonuses to staff who worked this spring

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Jason Riley:

The philanthropist and veteran school-reform advocate who served as education secretary under President Trump says the Covid pandemic was an inflection point. “During the last two years, the failings of the school system have been laid bare to families in a way like never before,” Betsy DeVos told me by phone on Monday. “I think it’s hastening the moment in time when we will be able to get significant policy change implemented to support families and kids rather than the system.”

That “system” is the subject of Mrs. DeVos’s new book, “Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child.” The title is taken from Horace Mann, the 19th-century politician and educator who is widely credited with founding the public-school apparatus. “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education,” Mann once wrote, “are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.” In a book that is part memoir and part school-reform manifesto, Mrs. DeVos makes a compelling case for freeing the hostages.

“Fuzzy slippers”

With public schools becoming untenable for many parents, Arizona’s GOP legislature set to work on a school choice bill that will give parents the opportunity to send their child to the school of their choice. The bill is heading for Republican Arizona governor Doug Ducey’s desk, and he is expected to sign it in the coming days.

Jay Matthews:

My favorite breakfast table reading, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, recently explained why teacher unions are preventing improvement in our schools. That conclusion was wrong, but, sadly, many people agree with it.

The June 7 editorial, “The Parental School-Board Revolt Continues,” celebrates recent election victories of school board candidates backed by parents. They want something done about school closings and curriculum they feel are hurting their kids.

Scott Girard:

While there is a large influx of federal COVID-19 relief funding, officials have expressed hesitancy at using that one-time money for ongoing operational costs like salaries.

“You’re going to hear no argument from us that our teachers and our staff deserve better,” LeMonds said at one of MTI’s rallies in May. “The fiscal reality is, we are looking at a very regressive state budget and it has put us in a position where — I know our superintendent has mentioned this on several occasions — we’re needing to choose between what is right and what is right.”

Many other districts in the state, however, have already agreed to the 4.7% number, including the other four districts that along with MMSD make up the “big five” largest districts.

MTI has also asked for a $5 an hour increase in the salary schedule for special education assistants and school security assistants, who are hourly employees. That salary schedule is part of the Employee Handbook, which has changes approved by the School Board.

It cannot, however, be directly negotiated between MTI and MMSD under Act 10, which limited the collective bargaining rights of public sector unions.

Officials indicated during a discussion earlier this month, however, that they were looking to find some increase, with the full $5 an hour increase estimated to cost about $3.3 million.

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Wall Street Journal:

Lively and Fearless Freedom

If I were to find myself in the cross-hairs of the social-media mob, any call for defense from my university would likely fall on deaf ears. Defending me amid such an attack would not serve the school’s interests. Colleges today are often more concerned with placating a political mob than being a robust and uninhibited venue for speech.

Any optimism should turn to pessimism when considering whether an institution will defend the right to express diverse and unpopular opinions. Outside academia, private businesses have no responsibility to defend their employees’ opinions, since their chief responsibility is their bottom line. But publicly funded universities have a duty to support the First Amendment, and even private universities should seriously uphold their role as places for the free exchange of ideas.

My university does not have to defend my ideas, but it must defend the freedom to express those ideas. All educational institutions should take a lesson from the University of Chicago and adopt the Chicago Principles: a commitment to recognize the responsibility to “promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation, but also to protect that freedom when others attempt to restrict it.” Anything but a total commitment to these principles would be antithetical to the mission of an educational institution.

—Richard Hammond III, Ohio State University, political science and French

Ben Chapman:

School lunches in the U.S. can get a bad rap: pizza day is OK; everything else is meh. And schools regularly chew over the dispiriting stats on fare that goes from tray to trash. According to a USDA study, about a quarter of school food ends up in the garbage.

So now, Portland and a growing number of districts nationwide are revamping their menus by relying on the opinions of students themselves. Students can be unsparing food critics, Ms. McLucas said, as the carrot hot dog debacle in 2019 attested. That item, which consisted of a roasted vegetable placed inside a typical hot dog bun, lasted for one day before it was removed from the menu.

“Kids didn’t want the carrot,” she said.

Broadening the cafeteria menu is tricky. President Harry Truman signed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 and now more than 30 million students eat lunch at school. As popular as the program is, it isn’t known for its flair. Currently, the top two most popular items are cheese pizza and fried foods, with french fries a top “vegetable,” according to Harris School Solutions, an Ottawa-based technology provider that tracks data on school meals.

Jennifer Bilek:

One of the most powerful yet unremarked-upon drivers of our current wars over definitions of gender is a concerted push by members of one of the richest families in the United States to transition Americans from a dimorphic definition of sex to the broad acceptance and propagation of synthetic sex identities (SSI). Over the past decade, the Pritzkers of Illinois, who helped put Barack Obama in the White House and include among their number former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, current Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and philanthropist Jennifer Pritzker, appear to have used a family philanthropic apparatus to drive an ideology and practice of disembodiment into our medical, legal, cultural, and educational institutions.

I first wrote about the Pritzkers, whose fortune originated in the Hyatt hotel chain, and their philanthropy directed toward normalizing what people call “transgenderism” in 2018. I have since stopped using the word “transgenderism” as it has no clear boundaries, which makes it useless for communication, and have instead opted for the term SSI, which more clearly defines what some of the Pritzkers and their allies are funding—even as it ignores the biological reality of “male” and “female” and “gay” and “straight.”

The creation and normalization of SSI speaks much more directly to what is happening in American culture, and elsewhere, under an umbrella of human rights. With the introduction of SSI, the current incarnation of the LGBTQ+ network—as distinct from the prior movement that fought for equal rights for gay and lesbian Americans, and which ended in 2020 with Bostock v. Clayton County, finding that LGBTQ+ is a protected class for discrimination purposes—is working closely with the techno-medical complex, big banks, international law firms, pharma giants, and corporate power to solidify the idea that humans are not a sexually dimorphic species—which contradicts reality and the fundamental premises not only of “traditional” religions but of the gay and lesbian civil rights movements and much of the feminist movement, for which sexual dimorphism and resulting gender differences are foundational premises.

“It was a propaganda campaign.. A lot of powerful people were dead wrong… They wanted to create an illusion that all scientists were in favour of lockdown. It’s a false illusion of consensus that did not actually exist…”
—Stanford Prof @DrJBhattacharyapic.twitter.com/klPo7s3f56

— Kulvinder Kaur MD (@dockaurG) June 24, 2022

AAUP:

• From 2020–21 to 2021–22, average salaries for full-time faculty members increased 2.0 percent, consistent with the flat wage growth observed since the Great Recession of the late 2000s.
• Real wages for full-time faculty fell below Great Recession levels in 2021, with average salary falling to 2.3 percent below the 2008 average salary, after adjusting for inflation.
• Real wages for full-time faculty members decreased 5.0 percent after adjusting for inflation, the largest one-year decrease on record since the AAUP began tracking this measure in 1972.