WILL:
Legislation from Senator Duey Stroebel (R-Saukville) and Representative Adam Neylon (R-Pewaukee) would not ban private grants to municipalities but would require the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) to distribute private money equitably around the state. This is a sensible solution.
It’s easy to homeschool in Texas. A cursory search leads to a step-by-step guide for withdrawing your kid from the school system. Plug a few bits of information into a templated letter, send to a district administrator, and voila! You’re running a school, and everything your kid learns is entirely up to you.
“It was so nerve-racking,” says Sarahi Espitia, a mom of four in McKinney, Texas, a suburb north of Dallas. After a grueling spring of remote learning, Espitia began homeschooling her kids at the start of the 2020 school year. As a graduate of public schools, she felt like she had just plunged her family into the unknown. “We’re so used to going to school.”
Except that the definition of “going to school” had been radically upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. Campuses closed abruptly, while children and teachers struggled mightily with online learning. Espitia, who also helps run the family’s restaurant, was left to navigate confusing new platforms, screen-time fatigue, and endless technical malfunctions for four children. Her kids were 10, 8, 6, and 3; her youngest, a preschooler, didn’t even know how to use a mouse yet. By the end of the year, Espitia says, her “kids were crying.” Wearied by online learning, yet wary of letting her children return to in-person learning, she turned to homeschooling—just for the year, just until things got back to normal.
BREAKING: Madison Teachers Inc. leaders, including union president Michael Jones, have filed a lawsuit against @MMSDschools over the ongoing teacher contracts dispute.
Here’s a story from yesterday updating where things were: https://t.co/eiyGBlS8Ps
— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) June 9, 2021
Lester Pines (Pines Bach law firm) has long represented local and state Teacher unions.
Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled
Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).
which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.
While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state.
The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.
The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.
“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”
Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.
All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.
Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Assembly against private school forced closure.
Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.
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]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
This speech at the #loudouncounty school board meeting was absolute 🔥🔥🔥 #alldayeveryday #mustseetv pic.twitter.com/UQuwEjNAWZ
— Ian Prior (@iandprior) June 9, 2021
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
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 40% of Likely U.S. Voters believe Fauci has told the truth about U.S. government funding for so-called “gain-of-function” virus research. Forty-six percent (46%) of voters believe Fauci has not told the truth about U.S. funding of such research, and 15% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul last week said newly released emails show Fauci was aware that American taxpayer dollars were funding gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, suspected as the source of the COVID-19 virus. Fauci has defined gain-of-function research as “taking a virus that could infect humans and making it either more transmissible and/or pathogenic for humans.”
Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled
Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).
which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.
While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state.
The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.
The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.
“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”
Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.
All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.
Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Assembly against private school forced closure.
Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.
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]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
The Madison School District has reissued next year’s teacher contracts along with a letter outlining expected pay increases for education and experience, but the union says its related dispute remains unresolved because the raises are still missing from the document members must sign by June 15.
At issue is a change the district says better aligns with state law, but that skeptical teachers fear would allow administration to pull a bait and switch later on.
Last month, the contracts were issued with teachers’ current-year salaries and a statement they would “make no less than” that amount. That surprised and upset many, as historically the contracts issued in the spring for the following year reflected increases outlined in the Employee Handbook for longevity and extra credentials, known as “steps and lanes.”
Because the School Board approves the handbook, the union maintains that the steps and lanes are already agreed upon, regardless of the budget.
The contracts reissued Monday now show the current year salary “+ steps/lanes + base wage increase,” which MTI communications specialist Michelle Michalak wrote in an email “does not resolve the issue but further confuses it.”
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]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
I’m not inclined to hire a graduate from one of America’s elite universities. That marks a change. A decade ago I relished the opportunity to employ talented graduates of Princeton, Yale, Harvard and the rest. Today? Not so much.
As a graduate of Haverford College, a fancy school outside Philadelphia, I took interest in the campus uproar there last fall. It concerned “antiblackness” and the “erasure of marginalized voices.” A student strike culminated in an all-college Zoom meeting for undergraduates. The college president and other administrators promised to “listen.” During the meeting, many students displayed a stunning combination of thin-skinned narcissism and naked aggression. The college administrators responded with self-abasing apologies.
Haverford is a progressive hothouse. If students can be traumatized by “insensitivity” on that leafy campus, then they’re unlikely to function as effective team members in an organization that has to deal with everyday realities. And in any event, I don’t want to hire someone who makes inflammatory accusations at the drop of a hat.
Student activists don’t represent the majority of students. But I find myself wondering about the silent acquiescence of most students. They allow themselves to be cowed by charges of racism and other sins. I sympathize. The atmosphere of intimidation in elite higher education is intense. But I don’t want to hire a person well-practiced in remaining silent when it costs something to speak up.
What to Know
Biweekly and bimonthly can mean the same thing because of the prefix bi-, which here can mean “occurring every two” or “occurring twice in.” Therefore, biweekly can be “twice in a week” or “every other week.” Bimonthly can also mean “every other week” if it’s twice in a month, or it can mean “every other month.”
Look up the adjective biweekly in this dictionary and you will see it defined as “occurring every two weeks” AND as “occurring twice a week.” Similarly, the adjective bimonthly is defined as “occurring every two months” AND as “occurring twice a month.”
For this, we are sorry. But we don’t mean “sorry” in the sense that we feel penitence; we are not to blame. We mean “sorry” in the sense that we feel a kind of sorrow aroused by circumstances beyond our control or power to repair.
But it took about a minute of reading to realize that not only was his claim, ah overstated, but that this was the worst thing I’ve ever read by ProPublica, and a real contender for the worst thing I’ve read so far in 2021 from a credible outlet. And reading the rest along with its supplements did not disabuse me of those feelings.
My concerns:
As ever though, to show is better than to tell. So what follows will dive in.
The ancient art of handwriting has just pushed the field of brain-computer interface (BCI) to the next level. Researchers have devised a system that allows a person to communicate directly with a computer from his brain by imagining creating handwritten messages. The approach enables communication at a rate more than twice as fast as previous typing-by-brain experiments.
Researchers at Stanford University performed the study on a 65-year-old man with a spinal cord injury who had had an electrode array implanted in his brain. The scientists described the experiment recently in the journal Nature.
“The big news from this paper is the very high speed,” says Cynthia Chestek, a biomedical engineer at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the study. “It’s at least half way to able-bodied typing speed, and that’s why this paper is in Nature.”
For years, researchers have been experimenting with ways to enable people to directly communicate with computers using only their thoughts, without verbal commands, hand movement, or eye movement. This kind of technology offers a life-giving communication method for people who are “locked in” from brainstem stroke or disease, and unable to speak.
more interesting, and ominous, measure of the whole system’s legitimacy is the rising number of shootings. Such an important barometer is moved by more than one thing; the war on cops is a factor, the cultural collapse of the black urban community is another, the 15 minutes of fame the media gives a shooter motivates some. But I think a broad and spreading sense that the establishment has transformed what used to be America into an insane asylum may be a major and unacknowledged cause. Down is now up, white is black, day has become night and night is filled with nightmares. This is Nietzsche’s “transvaluation of all values,” and it is a core component of the Frankfurt School’s cultural Marxism, aka “wokeness”, “Political Correctness”, etc. In an insane asylum, people do insane things, including shooting their families, friends, co-workers, and anyone else they can.
BBC:
Gannett is asking a court to cancel the subpoena, saying it breaches the first amendment of the US constitution, which protects the free press from government interference.
“Being forced to tell the government who reads what on our websites is a clear violation of the first amendment,” said Maribel Perez Wadsworth, USA Today’s publisher.
“The FBI’s subpoena asks for private information about readers of our journalism.”
Ms Wadsworth said the the FBI’s order broke the justice department’s guidelines on the “narrow circumstances” in which the government can subpoena reporters.
Although Gannett’s lawyers had tried to contact the FBI, the agency had not provided it with an explanation for the subpoena, she added.
Gannett’s lawyers say the order is “unconstitutional”, and invades the rights of both the news organisation and its readers, citing a Supreme Court judgement that said: “A requirement that a publisher disclose the identity of those who buy his books, pamphlets or papers is indeed the beginning of surveillance of the press”.
Is Poe really the most influential American writer? Note that I didn’t say “greatest,” for which there must be at least a dozen viable candidates. But consider his radiant originality. Before his death in 1849 at age 40, Poe largely created the modern short story, while also inventing or perfecting half the genres represented on the bestseller list, including the mystery (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold-Bug”), science fiction (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”), psychological suspense (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado”) and, of course, gothic horror (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” the incomparable “Ligeia”).
That’s just the fiction. W.B. Yeats once named Poe “the greatest of American poets,” which does sound absurd. Still, few poems are more famous than “The Raven” with its dolorous tocsin, “Nevermore.” Among my own earliest memories is hearing my steelworker father, not a bookish man, regularly murmur the first stanza of “Annabel Lee”: “It was many and many a year ago/ In a kingdom by the sea . . .”
Finally, Poe — like several of his characters — haunts us from beyond the grave. When we peer at the mournful figure in those familiar daguerreotypes, we seem to glimpse the emblematic image of the modern artist as misunderstood genius, prey to melancholy, drawn to self-destruction.
Programs that provide affordable and stable housing may contribute to better child health and thus to fewer missed days of school. Drawing on a unique linkage of survey and administrative data, we use a quasi-experimental approach to examine the impact of rental assistance programs on missed days of school due to illness. We compare missed school days due to illness among children receiving rental assistance with those who will enter assistance within two years of their interview, the average length of waitlists for federal rental assistance. Overall, we find that children who receive rental assistance miss fewer days of school due to illness relative to those in the pseudo-waitlist group. We demonstrate that rental assistance leads to a reduction in the number of health problems among children and thus to fewer days of school missed due to illness. We find that the effect of rental assistance on missed school days is stronger for adolescents than for younger children. Additionally, race-stratified analyses reveal that rental assistance leads to fewer missed days due to illness among non-Hispanic White and Hispanic/Latino children; this effect, however, is not evident for non-Hispanic Black children, the largest racial/ethnic group receiving assistance. These findings suggest that underinvestment in affordable housing may impede socioeconomic mobility among disadvantaged non-Hispanic White and Hispanic/Latino children. In contrast, increases in rental assistance may widen racial/ethnic disparities in health among disadvantaged children, and future research should examine why this benefit is not evident for Black children.
The press conference was organized by Fight For Schools, a political action committee led by former Trump Justice Department official Ian Prior. Its goal is to remove school board members it perceives as pushing CRT in Loudoun County schools.
“They’re the ones voting on all these policies, they’re the ones supervising what is happening in the administration,” says Prior. “Ultimately, if we want to make change, if we want to get to an education that values students as individuals and not as some identity group, then we have to replace the school board.”
The next LCPS school board elections are not until 2023, but Prior does not plan to wait that long. His group is gathering signatures to recall six members of the board. According to Ballotpedia, they would need about 17,300 votes to recall all six members. If enough signatures are collected, a trial would be held at the circuit court level.
ACLU:
Has the ACLU lost its way? This appears to be a perennial question. In 1994, then-ACLU President Nadine Strossen wrote a 17-page article with 54 footnotes, responding to the charge that the organization “is abandoning its traditional commitment to free speech and other classic civil liberties and is becoming a ‘trendy’ liberal organization primarily concerned with equality and civil rights.” Sixteen years before that, in 1978, J. Anthony Lukas wrote a feature for The New York Times Magazine titled “The ACLU Against Itself,” recounting the controversy over whether the group should have represented a group of Nazis who sought to march in Skokie, Illinois. The question is not new.
But the answer remains the same. The ACLU is committed to the principle of free speech today, just as it was in the 1990s, 1970s, and long before that. And we are specifically committed to the proposition that the First Amendment’s guarantees (like those of the rest of the Constitution) apply to all, not just to those with whom we agree. At the same time, the ACLU also remains devoted to defending other fundamental civil rights and civil liberties, including equal protection of the law — as we always have been. Addressing the tensions that sometimes arise between these commitments is not easy. But we seek to do so, today as always, not by abandoning any of our core commitments, but by acknowledging and confronting the conflicts in as forthright, inclusive, and principled a way as we can.
Some have charged that in doing so we have abandoned our fidelity to the First Amendment in the years since our representation of a white supremacist protester in Charlottesville. In that case, we challenged the revocation of his permit to protest the removal of a monument to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The protest turned violent, the police failed to intervene, and ultimately one of the alt-right adherents, Alex Field, rammed his car into a group of counter-demonstrators, killing one person and injuring 19 others. The Charlottesville tragedy and the ACLU’s role in defending the protesters’ permit led to considerable controversy, inside and outside the ACLU.
Justice Department officials say they will no longer seek access to journalists’ phone and email records amid an outcry over the Trump and Biden administrations’ attempts to seize four New York Times journalists’ email records.
The White House has claimed that nobody was aware of a gag order which barred the Times from reporting the attempts to obtain its staffers’ communications until Friday night, with both the Biden administration and Justice Department since backtracking.
Donald Trump’s officials made the initial request for the records on January 5 this year to try and work out the source of White House leaks about former FBI Director James Comey, with that legal process continuing after Joe Biden took office.
Multiple Twitter users also sent Motherboard images of the lack of image results on Bing while connecting from France, Switzerland, and other countries.
Shane Huntley from Google’s Threat Analysis Group first tweeted a screenshot of the Bing search result. Security researcher Kevin Beaumont also tweeted the same results from what he said was a search from a UK IP address. Motherboard also replicated the search on a U.S. IP address.
A Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in an email that “This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this.”
The woke industrial complex at its finest:
Mark Zuckerberg (Big Tech) effectively teams up with Dr. Fauci (Big Government) to decide what counts as “misinformation.”
They effectively covered up the Chinese lab leak last year: Fauci dismissed it, Facebook censored it. pic.twitter.com/tNkbrjeLpp
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 7, 2021
If you are capable of anything else than being at the orders of someone, you’re on the side of the people who believe that the world is not divided between masters and slaves.
As a person with intelligence who thinks by himself, without taking ideas from others and submits to some as a servant; you now have the opportunity to show that you can be your own owner, that what you say “matters” and people are listening to what you have to say.
The country you live in, is not “THEIRS” it’s “YOUR” country, your community, the location upon which you live your life. Why shouldn’t life be just joy? Democracy in its essence is based on the rule of the people (Demos = “people” / Kratos = “rule) “the RULE of the PEOPLE”. Our current Democracy uses the Inversion Mental Model (IMM) where instead of being the rule of the people, it’s the rule of the elite. Exactly how the Department of Defense (DOD) using IMM becomes the Department of Attack, a description which makes more sense as if you haven’t yet noticed the DOD is actually always Attacking.
The power of the people is formed by you, me, and everybody else with whom we live together, although we let ourselves be ruled and abused by opportunists: people interested only towards their own interests, not in any case of you nor your life or mine. You can observe these facts by yourself, I’m just the one confirming what you’ve already realized and known since you have started thinking by yourself.
Some time during the George W. Bush presidency, Democrats began proudly calling themselves “the party of science.” The moniker was a reaction to the Bush administration’s open embrace of Creationism, and its climate change denialism. The Republican Party was being led around by the nose, liberals charged, by kooky Evangelical philistines and corrupt corporate lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry. It had lost its grip on reality, a development that was comically encapsulated by a Bush official’s pejorative use of the phrase “reality-based community,” in sneering reference to critics who still took things like facts seriously. Liberal bloggers appropriated the phrase to describe themselves ironically.
This new science-based identity was congruous with the ascendance of a key demographic within the Democratic coalition, one that would be instrumental in electing and re-electing President Barack Obama. Prosperous, educated professionals, once a reliable, if liberal, Republican voting bloc, had for some time been shifting their partisan allegiance. As the GOP was increasingly drawing in rural and blue collar voters and, accordingly, elevating cultural issues like guns and religion that were imperative to them, the Democrats were burnishing their appeal to urban and suburban college graduates by embracing free trade, emphasizing identity-based issues like abortion and gay rights, and proudly espousing their commitment to expert-driven, technocratic governance. This rebranding from a workers’ party to the party of sober, rational, informed wonkiness flattered these new Democratic voters’ self-conception.
For starters, no one knows what an “optimal” sperm count is. The World Health Organization sets a range of “normal” sperm count as from 15 to 250 million sperm per milliliter. (Men produce about 2 to 5 milliliters of semen per ejaculation.) But it isn’t clear that more is better. Above a certain threshold — 40 million per milliliter, according to the W.H.O. — a higher sperm count does not mean a man is more fertile.
“Doubling your sperm count from 25 to 50 million doesn’t double your chances,” said Allan Pacey, an andrologist at the University of Sheffield and the editor of Human Fertility. “Doubling it from 100 to 200 million doesn’t double your chances — in fact it flattens off, if anything. So this relationship between sperm count and fertility is weak.”
Mike Allen:
By the numbers: For the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media, according to data from Edelman’s annual trust barometer shared exclusively with Axios. Trust in social media has hit an all-time low of 27%.
56% of Americans agree with the statement that “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”
58% think that “most news organizations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than with informing the public.”
When Edelman re-polled Americans after the election, the figures had deteriorated even further, with 57% of Democrats trusting the media and only 18% of Republicans.
Mr. Goldberger, a Jew who defended the free speech of those whose views he found repugnant, felt profoundly discouraged.
“I got the sense it was more important for A.C.L.U. staff to identify with clients and progressive causes than to stand on principle,” he said in a recent interview. “Liberals are leaving the First Amendment behind.”
The A.C.L.U., America’s high temple of free speech and civil liberties, has emerged as a muscular and richly funded progressive powerhouse in recent years, taking on the Trump administration in more than 400 lawsuits. But the organization finds itself riven with internal tensions over whether it has stepped away from a founding principle — unwavering devotion to the First Amendment.
I was reading my umpteenth news story about Covid-19 science, a story about the latest research into how to make indoor spaces safe from infection, about whether cleaning surfaces or changing the air was more important. And it was bothering me. Not because it was dull (which, of course, it was: there are precious few ways to make air filtration and air pumps edge-of-the-seat stuff). But because of the way it treated the science.
You see, much of the research it reported was in the form of pre-prints, papers shared by researchers on the internet before they are submitted to a scientific journal. And every mention of one of these pre-prints was immediately followed by the disclaimer that it had not yet been peer reviewed. As though to convey to the reader that the research therein, the research plastered all over the story, was somehow of less worth, less value, less meaning than the research in a published paper, a paper that had passed peer review.
Imagine reading about the discovery of the structure of DNA with that same reticence we use today: “In a recent Letter to the journal Nature, Cambridge University scientists James Watson and Francis Crick proposed a new structure for DNA (not yet peer reviewed). They claim their “double helix” model, a spiral of two strands of bases, both explains decades of experimental work, and provides a clear mechanism for copying genes. Their proposal drew heavily on data contained in Letters in the same issue of Nature from the teams of Rosalind Franklin (not yet peer reviewed) and Maurice Wilkins (not yet peer reviewed).”
Despite these very unsettling statistics, you will hear the South African President, Cyril Ramaphosa, talk about how the government is creating jobs and improving the country. In fact, just this week, the President could be heard across different media platforms talking about how the government has been steering the country through a difficult period and making good progress with economic recovery and job creation.
Unfortunately, the numbers don’t lie.
South Africa has a serious youth unemployment problem. Beyond being a problem, it is a ticking time bomb as young able people grow more frustrated with each passing day as they are unable to make ends meet. The data is also quite clear, a lot of the youth do not even complete high school, making them not only unemployed but unemployable.
The Biden administration is expected to reinstate the Obama administration’s 2014 school-discipline guidelines, which prodded schools to suspend all racial groups at the same rate, even if there was more misbehavior among students of one race than another. In response to those guidelines, and worried about being investigated by the Education Department, some school officials adopted unconstitutional racial quotas for school suspensions, or mandated special review of any suspensions of black or Hispanic students, effectively creating special privileges based on race.
The Biden administration renewed this pressure for quotas on June 4, by issuing a notice that called for new federal policies about school discipline, in light of the fact that “students of color are disproportionately subjected to disciplinary actions in contrast to their White peers.” It further implied that there are no racial differences in misbehavior rates, even though studies and surveys show that black students do have higher rates of misbehavior in school. It cited a controversial report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that claimed that “Students of color as a whole, as well as by individual racial group, do not commit more disciplinable offenses than their white peers.”
But as the Washington Post noted in 2019, the Commission never showed that claim was true. The Commission’s chairwoman, who is now Biden’s nominee to head the Office for Civil Rights, “pointed to a few spots” in the Commission’s report to “claim that there are no underlying differences in student behavior. But those citations did not offer such evidence. One set of data referenced in the report showed the opposite,” noted The Post.
ALEXANDER GABUEV, LEONID KOVACHICH:
Amid the deluge of online disinformation during the coronavirus pandemic, geopolitical tensions pitting China and Russia against the West have continued to ratchet up, especially in the digital domain. Russian information operations have drawn greater attention in the West since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and many analysts have seen echoes of such online trolling and disinformation in the more assertive, confrontational posture of Chinese diplomats on social media during the coronavirus pandemic. Russian and Chinese propagandists also seem to be mirroring each other’s tactics and cross-promoting each other’s content, leading some Western analysts and governments to warn of deepening digital cooperation between Moscow and Beijing.
China and Russia do indeed share a lot of strategic objectives, and their partnership has been deepening across the board since the 2014 outbreak of war in Ukraine and Western sanctions against Moscow. After all, both countries’ leaders decry U.S. hegemony and see the United States and its alliances as challenges to their national security and national interests. And both Chinese and Russian policymakers are striving to exploit existing fissures in Western societies while weakening ties between the United States and its allies through information operations and other means. Furthermore, both the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai are intent on defusing Western criticisms of (and perceived designs to topple) their political regimes, while advancing their own self-serving, government-friendly narratives. Beyond these commonly held strategic objectives, both countries have drawn tactically on their own histories while also learning from one another and others.
Universities are luring remote staff at corporations to move from urban hubs to college towns, as companies look to continue flexible work arrangements for their employees.
At least two colleges — Purdue University and West Virginia University — are supporting programs for these remote workers, betting that this mode of work will have staying power after the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to scattered workplaces.
Universities have long hosted corporate incubators, but the new programs represent another way the pandemic has shifted the way colleges think about who works on campus, and why. Many universities are considering how employees’ desires for remote work will affect their own human-resources policies. These colleges, however, are making a play for other people’s employees, showing that campuses will both influence and be affected by this major shift in where Americans live and work.
Purdue is set to hold a visitors’ weekend for a small group of applicants for a so-called “remote-working community” in the campus’s business-and-research park, which is operated by the university’s research foundation and a development company. These people will uproot their lives — some with a deal-sweetening $5,000 — to move to West Lafayette, Ind. They can live at discounted rates in housing built in the Purdue park and access campus facilities, including the library and a co-working space.
I had no choice but to speak out against lockdowns. As a public-health scientist with decades of experience working on infectious-disease outbreaks, I couldn’t stay silent. Not when basic principles of public health are thrown out of the window. Not when the working class is thrown under the bus. Not when lockdown opponents were thrown to the wolves. There was never a scientific consensus for lockdowns. That balloon had to be popped.
Two key Covid facts were quickly obvious to me. First, with the early outbreaks in Italy and Iran, this was a severe pandemic that would eventually spread to the rest of the world, resulting in many deaths. That made me nervous. Second, based on the data from Wuhan, in China, there was a dramatic difference in mortality by age, with over a thousand-fold difference between the young and the old. That was a huge relief. I am a single father with a teenager and five-year-old twins. Like most parents, I care more about my children than myself. Unlike the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, children had much less to fear from Covid than from annual influenza or traffic accidents. They could get on with life unharmed — or so I thought.
For society at large, the conclusion was obvious. We had to protect older, high-risk people while younger low-risk adults kept society moving.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, schools closed while nursing homes went unprotected. Why? It made no sense. So, I picked up a pen. To my surprise, I could not interest any US media in my thoughts, despite my knowledge and experience with infectious-disease outbreaks. I had more success in my native Sweden, with op-eds in the major daily newspapers, and, eventually, a piece in spiked. Other like-minded scientists faced similar hurdles.
Instead of understanding the pandemic, we were encouraged to fear it. Instead of life, we got lockdowns and death. We got delayed cancer diagnoses, worse cardiovascular-disease outcomes, deteriorating mental health, and a lot more collateral public-health damage from lockdown. Children, the elderly and the working class were the hardest hit by what can only be described as the biggest public-health fiasco in history.
Throughout the 2020 spring wave, Sweden kept daycare and schools open for every one of its 1.8million children aged between one and 15. And it did so without subjecting them to testing, masks, physical barriers or social distancing. This policy led to precisely zero Covid deaths in that age group, while teachers had a Covid risk similar to the average of other professions. The Swedish Public Health Agency reported these facts in mid-June, but in the US lockdown proponents still pushed for school closures.
In July, the New England Journal of Medicine published an article on ‘reopening primary schools during the pandemic’. Shockingly, it did not even mention the evidence from the only major Western country that kept schools open throughout the pandemic. That is like evaluating a new drug while ignoring data from the placebo control group.
Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University.
Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled
Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).
which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.
While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state.
The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.
The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.
“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”
Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.
All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.
Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Assembly against private school forced closure.
Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.
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]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
The destruction of scientific credibility has been monumental… pic.twitter.com/zly3dHZDR2
— Dave Collum (@DavidBCollum) June 5, 2021
The documentary itself establishes its lead questions at the outset. Nico Sloot, described as an international entrepreneur, acts as the main voice in the film and our lead detective. What struck me from the start was how he framed the central problem that provoked his investigative journey: when would herd immunity be achieved? On the question of risk: who is going to get sick and who is going to die?
Sloot formed an independent research team that grew to include up to 20 scientists in four countries, across a range of specialties. This was something of an ad hoc think tank. The team encompassed doctors, economists, accountants, data specialists, among other specialties, and each member of the team had his/her own specific research task. It is quite impressive to see such an independent citizens’ initiative form, and it is a welcome antidote to the authoritarian, top-down, ask no questions, just follow orders approach involved with state proclamations and directives by top public health officers. Such independent initiatives should serve as a refreshing reminder—because apparently one is needed—that it is not wrong to ask questions and challenge assertions.
What or who provoked Nico Sloot? In part, he admits, it was a speech given early in the crisis by Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte. This compelled Sloot to conduct what he estimates is about 1,000 hours of research, added to others who joined him, totalling at least 5,000 hours. I suspect he is providing a low estimate. On his motivation, Sloot explains: “In business you always work with risk…so the first thing I looked at was: What are the facts here? How many will die and how many will fall victim to COVID-19?”
We hear and view the same speech by Prime Minister Rutte to which Sloot refers at the opening, and it is the standard kind of dramatic announcement that we all heard in our respective locales (it is included in the trailer I created, in the absence of an English-language trailer).
Yet Sloot himself apparently disagrees: the “collateral damage” of the measures taken were worse than the virus. He mentions that, for The Netherlands alone, around 300,000 hospital procedures had to be postponed. In Canada it was reported that many crucial cancer treatments, colonoscopies, and important surgeries that had been scheduled, were all pushed back thus creating a massive backlog. Even more: Canadian media reported the common occurrence of people suffering from heart problems, or even actual heart attacks, and not going to the hospital (either out of fear of getting infected by the virus, or because they knew hospitals were already dedicated almost exclusively to COVID-19 patients).
Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled
Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).
which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.
While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state.
The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.
The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.
“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”
Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.
All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.
Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Assembly against private school forced closure.
Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.
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]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
Paying “thank you” bonuses to teachers is sparking controversy, reports Matt Barnum on Chalkbeat. “Several states — including Georgia, Michigan, Florida, and Hawaii — and school districts have issued or are considering” paying bonuses to boost teacher morale after a stressful year.
Yet it’s clear many families vowed to leave after losing faith in the district because of the slow reopening of classrooms and ongoing drama among district leadership. That includes an $87 million lawsuit filed by board member Alison Collins against five colleagues after they removed her from the vice presidency and committee positions following the discovery of racist tweets against Asian Americans, which have remained online since 2016.
Claire Raj’s family is among those who have opted out. The mother of three, with a former first-grader and third-grader at McCoppin Elementary, said she felt the district let students and schools down this year.
Despite being a parent leader at the school, she pulled her kids out in January, enrolling them at St. Anne School, which had resumed in-person learning in October. Her youngest son’s teacher at St. Anne informed her that her son didn’t have enough muscle control in his hand to write after months on a computer tablet and that he was well behind peers in reading and writing.
The district just didn’t do enough to help families, she said.
“It’s something we had never considered, going to private school. We aren’t Catholic,” Raj said. “Once we started considering it, it seemed we just didn’t have any choice.”
SF kindergarten enrollment is down 10%.
— Michelle Tandler (@michelletandler) June 3, 2021
It's down 55% among white families.
City stands to lose $20M/year as a result.
This is what happens when the BOE spends the entire year debating how to rename schools instead of how to safely reopen.
A thread… (1/x) https://t.co/hKZ559IaoT
Related: Catholic schools will sue Dane County Madison Public Health to open as scheduled
Notes and links on Dane County Madison Public Health. (> 140 employees).
which pushed Dane County this week not to calculate its percentage of positive tests — a data point the public uses to determine how intense infection is in an area.
While positive test results are being processed and their number reported quickly, negative test results are taking days in some cases to be analyzed before they are reported to the state.
The department said it was between eight and 10 days behind in updating that metric on the dashboard, and as a result it appeared to show a higher positive percentage of tests and a lower number of total tests per day.
The department said this delay is due to the fact data analysts must input each of the hundreds of tests per day manually, and in order to continue accurate and timely contact tracing efforts, they prioritized inputting positive tests.
“Positive tests are always immediately verified and processed, and delays in processing negative tests in our data system does not affect notification of test results,” the department said in a news release. “The only effect this backlog has had is on our percent positivity rate and daily test counts.”
Staff have not verified the approximately 17,000 tests, which includes steps such as matching test results to patients to avoid duplicating numbers and verifying the person who was tested resides in Dane County.
All 77 false-positive COVID-19 tests come back negative upon reruns.
Madison private school raises $70,000 for lawsuit against public health order. – WKOW-TV. Commentary.
WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators
Assembly against private school forced closure.
Wisconsin Catholic schools will challenge local COVID-19 closing order. More.
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]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
I thought I’d start today by sketching out a vision for what we should be about in the conservative movement in the twenty-first century, because I think it’s useful to anchor ourselves, not just in first principles but in the lives of the people affected by those principles, and then I’ll talk about why I think “woke capital” is such a problem.
I think that we should fight for the right of every American to live a good life in the country they call their own, to raise a family in dignity on a single middle-class job. It’s a simple vision: If you work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to live a good life in this country that is your own, that was built by your parents and grandparents, that will be inherited by your children.
Now that’s of course more complicated than it sounds. I think it requires that we respect our history so people are anchored in the traditions of this country, so they can teach their children those traditions, and so they can pass on a feeling of rootedness in their own community. That’s why we worry about the assault on our history and our schools. I think it requires that we give our children and ourselves the right to speak openly and participate meaningfully in this democratic society of ours.
Facebook made a quiet but dramatic reversal last week: It no longer forbids users from touting the theory that COVID-19 came from a laboratory.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps,” the social media platform declared in a statement.
This change in policy comes in the midst of heated debate about how to respond to the perception that social media is amplifying the spread of false information. For the last several years, journalists and politicians have pushed to police so-called misinformation through various means. Major news organizations have hired mis- or disinformation reporters. Lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) have urged social media sites to prohibit speech deemed wrong or dangerous—and have sometimes suggested that this should be required by law. More recently, various groups have asked President Joe Biden to establish a federal initiative to combat online misinformation.
But Facebook’s concession that the lab leak story it once viewed as demonstrably false is actually possibly true should put to rest the idea that banning or regulating misinformation should be a chief public policy goal.
MOST PEOPLE feel, from time to time, that their work is meaningless. David Graeber, the late anthropologist, built an elaborate thesis out of this insight. He argued in a book in 2018 that society has been deliberately creating more and more “bullshit jobs” in professions such as financial services to fill the time of educated workers who need the money to pay off student debts but who suffer from depression because of their work. His thesis has been cited more than 800 times by academics, according to Google Scholar, and often repeated in the media.
When the book came out, this columnist was unimpressed, arguing that the thesis was a partial reworking of the insights of C. Northcote Parkinson, who argued that bureaucracy has an innate tendency to expand and make work for itself. Three academics—Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell—have undertaken a systematic analysis* of the claims behind Mr Graeber’s work and found that the data often show the exact opposite of what he predicted. The bullshit-jobs thesis, in other words, is largely bullshit.
Monica Wichgers says @MMSDschools teachers are promoting racial division through #CriticalRaceTheory.
Republican lawmakers announced new legislation that would ban Wisconsin schools from teaching the divisive, Marxist ideology. #WIright pic.twitter.com/mNN2rjMi4d— MacIver News Service (@NewsMacIver) June 3, 2021
Machine generated transcript:
My mother was the first African-American graduate of Edgewood college. She was a first grade teacher in the Madison schools. I was a product of the Madison schools and my kids are currently in the Madison’s school district. What I am seeing now in the school is something I’ve never seen before. It’s like the teachers are promoting the vision.
We’re always taught unity. And how to get along with one another silver rights helped us advance. And now my children are being made to think of themselves as perpetual victims and to think of the white race as perpetual oppressors. This isn’t right. As a veteran of the United States army, I served to uphold and defend the principles that this bill promotes.
My achievements honor, graduate in basic training. My efforts in the Gulf war and my honorable discharge are a reflection of my individual efforts and sacrifice not given to me due to my race.
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]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration
In his 1994 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the Hungarian born chemist George Andrew Olah acknowledged an aspect of science that rarely is noted in popular discussions:
“[One] way of dealing with errors is to have friends who are willing to spend the time necessary to carry out a critical examination of the experimental design beforehand and the results after the experiments have been completed. An even better way is to have an enemy. An enemy is willing to devote a vast amount of time and brain power to ferreting out errors both large and small, and this without any compensation. The trouble is that really capable enemies are scarce; most of them are only ordinary. Another trouble with enemies is that they sometimes develop into friends and lose a good deal of their zeal. It was in this way the writer lost his three best enemies. Everyone, not just scientists, need a few good enemies!”[1]
If you take science seriously, you must take error as something for which we should always be vigilant, and something we are committed to eliminate. As Olah and Von Békésy have acknowledged, sometimes an enemy is required. It would thus seem to be quite unscientific to complain that an enemy was harassing you, when she was criticizing your data, study design, methods, or motives.
However, the new change allows for sweeping and ill-defined authority. It is a convoluted structure but under the new rule you can be punished for off-campus conduct if it is a substantial disruption to any member of the university that involves “academic work or any University records, documents, or identifications”
That would seem to encompass references to school “identifications” in the form of other students or associations. That ambiguity can be a chilling element in such a speech limitation. Indeed, if a student identifies herself as an Oregon student, is that sufficient “identification”? What does “involved” with an identification mean?
Are today’s students able to discern quality information from sham online? In the largest investigation of its kind, we administered an assessment to 3,446 high school students. Equipped with a live internet connection, the students responded to six constructed-response tasks. The students struggled on all of them. Asked to investigate a site claiming to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science, 96% never learned about the organization’s ties to the fossil fuel industry. Two thirds were unable to distinguish news stories from ads on a popular website’s home page. More than half believed that an anonymously posted Facebook video, shot in Russia, provided “strong evidence” of U.S. voter fraud. Instead of investigating the organization or group behind a site, students were often duped by weak signs of credibility: a website’s “look,” its top-level domain, the content on its About page, and the sheer quantity of information it provided. The study’s sample reflected the demographic profile of high school students in the United States, and a multilevel regression model explored whether scores varied by student characteristics. Findings revealed differences in student abilities by grade level, self-reported grades, locality, socioeconomic status, race, maternal education, and free/reduced-price lunch status. Taken together, these findings reveal an urgent need to prepare students to thrive in a world in which information flows ceaselessly across their screens.
We live in anxious times. But many times in our past were far more anxious, and the reasons for anxiety then were more compelling. Consider, for example, the situation facing the world in the early months of 1941, when Hitler’s triumphant armies controlled continental Europe, when only the British Isles managed to hold out, and when the future of liberty looked very dim—indeed, when civilization itself seemed imperiled. Yet at that moment, the novelist John Dos Passos chose to pen these words: “In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present.”
He must have been tempted to declare, as journalists like to do, that the present situation was utterly without precedent and that the past had nothing to teach the present. After all, had the world ever before seen a more fearsome and pitiless fighting machine than the one that Adolf Hitler had assembled? But Dos Passos chose to convey an exactly opposite message. He urged that we look backward to a past that could be a source of sanity and direction, a lifeline of sustenance and instruction.
Damian D. Guerra and Daniel J. Guerra:
Background: Containment of the COVID-19 pandemic requires evidence-based strategies to reduce transmission. 11 Because COVID-19 can spread via respired droplets, many states have mandated mask use in public settings. 12 Randomized control trials have not clearly demonstrated mask efficacy against respiratory viruses, and 13 observational studies conflict on whether mask use predicts lower infection rates. We hypothesized that statewide 14 mask mandates and mask use are associated with lower COVID-19 case growth rates in the United States. 15 Methods: We calculated total COVID-19 case growth and mask use for the continental United States with data from 16 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. We estimated post-17 mask mandate case growth in non-mandate states using median issuance dates of neighboring states with mandates. 18 Results: Case growth was not significantly different between mandate and non-mandate states at low or high 19 transmission rates, and surges were equivocal. Mask use predicted lower case growth at low, but not high 20 transmission rates. Growth rates were comparable between states in the first and last mask use quintiles adjusted for 21 normalized total cases early in the pandemic and unadjusted after peak Fall-Winter infections. Mask use did not 22 predict Summer 2020 case growth for non-Northeast states or Fall-Winter 2020 growth for all continental states. 23 Conclusions: Mask mandates and use are not associated with slower state-level COVID-19 spread during COVID-24 19 growth surges. Containment requires future research and implementation of existing efficacious strategies.
Espitia is a part of a wave of parents and caregivers who withdrew their children from US public schools and elected to homeschool because of the pandemic—and she’s part of a group that isn’t going back. The crisis gave rise to a diverse swath of families that are using tech to totally customize their kids’ learning, and they might even change what “going to school” means in the post-pandemic world.
A More Diverse Class of Homeschoolers
While homeschooling is legal in all 50 states, it has never been considered the American norm. In 2019, homeschooled students represented just 3.2 percent of US students in grades K through 12, or around 1.7 million students. By comparison, 90 percent of US students attend public school. But a March 2021 report from the US Census Bureau indicates an uptick in homeschooling during the pandemic: In spring 2020, 5.4 percent of surveyed households reported homeschooling their children (homeschooling being distinct from remote learning at home through a public or private school). By fall 2020, the figure had doubled to 11.1 percent.
“I like the idea of presenting material to my kids that’s not necessarily the colonized experience.”
In my early twenties I was fixated on the idea of taking a masters degree. I made myself fairly miserable in pursuit of this goal: I saved almost all the money I earned, moved into my grandmother’s spare bedroom and took out an enormous loan from the government. The obsession was not rational. I am not sure I could ever have coherently explained why I thought I needed a second degree in English literature.
I was, I think, a victim of what the American writer Fredrik deBoer calls “the cult of smart”: the pervasive modern idea that intelligence is the defining human quality and that academic performance is a “shorthand for total human value”.
I believe deBoer is correct: academic intelligence is absurdly overvalued. For
If you, like me, wondered what’s in 17th-century sermons, here’s a big page of links to English sermons from the 17th century. Lots of John Donne sermons here. Sample:
The story has been covered not only by FoxNews.com, but also by GoLocalProv, which quoted the local ACLU Director:
Rhode Island ACLU Executive Director Steve Brown told GoLocal on Tuesday he believes the South Kingstown School Committee’s response is “inappropriate.”
“I can certainly understand the difficulties facing a municipal body when confronted with such a huge number of APRA requests in a short period of time,” said Brown “However, I am also hopeful that, upon consideration, the school committee will recognize that suing a resident for this activity is not an appropriate response.”
Additional outlets included The Daily Wire, The Washington Examiner, Real Clear Politics, Yahoo News, MSN, The UK Independent, and The Providence Journal, which detailed some vicious personal attacks from the school committee chairperson and local unions:
The committee’s chairwoman said Wednesday the requests were part of a national strategy of a “racist group.” ….
South Kingstown School Committee Chairwoman Emily Cummiskey described the possible suit Wednesday as a “potential injunction” to blunt “a nationally-organized, racist group [attempting] to create chaos and intimidate our district. …This is their MO nation-wide and I anticipate other districts in our state will soon experience the same unfortunate influx we have.”
Julie C. Driebea and Ruben C. Arslang
Self-reported mate preferences suggest intelligence is valued across cultures, consistent with the idea that human intelligence evolved as a sexually selected trait. The validity of self-reports has been questioned though, so it remains unclear whether objectively assessed intelligence is indeed attractive. In Study 1, 88 target men had their intelligence measured and based on short video clips were rated on intelligence, funniness, physical attractiveness and mate appeal by 179 women. In Study 2 (N = 763), participants took part in 2 to 5 speed-dating sessions in which their intelligence was measured and they rated each other’s intelligence, funniness, and mate appeal. Measured intelligence did not predict increased mate appeal in either study, whereas perceived intelligence and funniness did. More intelligent people were perceived as more intelligent, but not as funnier. Results suggest that intelligence is not important for initial attraction, which raises doubts concerning the sexual selection theory of intelligence.
The remains of 215 children have been found buried on the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.
Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation said in a news release Thursday that the remains were confirmed last weekend with the help of a ground-penetrating radar specialist.
Casimir called the discovery an “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”
She said it’s believed the deaths are undocumented, although a local museum archivist is working with the Royal British Columbia Museum to see if any records of the deaths can be found.
Some of the children were as young as three, she said.
People were thinking about this a lot a decade ago. During an August 2010 interview, it was on the mind of Eric Schmidt, then the chairman of Google, the creator of the best fossil-digging equipment out there. Mr. Schmidt predicted, “apparently seriously,” according to The Wall Street Journal, that young people would change their names upon reaching adulthood in order to escape their digital pasts. The prediction was widely mocked for its impossibility.
The same month, another prominent data scientist, Jeff Jonas, offered a more utopian prediction: “I hope for a highly tolerant society in the future,” he wrote on a legal blog called Concurring Opinions. “A place where it is widely known I am four or five standard deviations off center, and despite such deviance, my personal and professional relationships carry on, unaffected.”
I remember this prediction because I cited it a decade ago when a 28-year-old woman had her Congressional campaign upended by a “scandal,” one that seems quaint by today’s standards but was a glimpse into our future. The woman who provided it was named, coincidentally, Krystal Ball.
Ms. Ball was running as a Democrat for a House seat in Virginia at the time; a conservative blog got its hands on decade-old photos from a post-college Christmas party, where Ms. Ball was dressed as a “naughty Santa” and her husband at the time was Rudolph with a red dildo for a nose. This sounds ridiculous, but the “raunchy party photos” fueled news stories across the world. I thought that what she was experiencing was notable for its limited shelf life: As more and more people got smartphones and flocked to apps like Instagram and Twitter that encouraged them to thoroughly document their lives and thoughts, this sort of shaming of people’s past selves would surely stop, because the throwing of stones would become hypocritical and dangerous.
New laws in Maryland and Montana are the first in the nation to restrict law enforcement’s use of genetic genealogy, the DNA matching technique that in 2018 identified the Golden State Killer, in an effort to ensure the genetic privacy of the accused and their relatives.
Beginning on Oct. 1, investigators working on Maryland cases will need a judge’s signoff before using the method, in which a “profile” of thousands of DNA markers from a crime scene is uploaded to genealogy websites to find relatives of the culprit. The new law, sponsored by Democratic lawmakers, also dictates that the technique be used only for serious crimes, such as murder and sexual assault. And it states that investigators may only use websites with strict policies around user consent.
Montana’s new law, sponsored by a Republican, is narrower, requiring that government investigators obtain a search warrant before using a consumer DNA database, unless the consumer has waived the right to privacy.
The laws “demonstrate that people across the political spectrum find law enforcement use of consumer genetic data chilling, concerning and privacy-invasive,” said Natalie Ram, a law professor at the University of Maryland who championed the Maryland law. “I hope to see more states embrace robust regulation of this law enforcement technique in the future.”
This sense of atrophy is one way that individuals experience the larger existential crises facing journalism. As an enterprise, journalism has suffered the devastating loss of resources from the collapse of its business model — money from advertising — magnified by the disruption of the internet and the growth of social media.
Who will pay for quality journalism in the future? Many experiments are underway, but no one has the answer. The loss of news and editorial power has left communities — whole states — under-covered, depriving citizens of the information they need to make good decisions about their lives. Some locations are so depleted they have been tagged as news deserts.
But that is just the half of it. The other half of the existential crisis involves vicious attempts to decertify the press, to dismiss it as biased and unethical, to transform its reputation from that of responsible watchdog to enemy of the people. The act of blaming the messenger for the delivery of bad news is ancient, but in the modern world its effect has been to make the practice of journalism more disheartening and at times dangerous.
Power in the U.S. flows through the gates of the Ivy League and a very small tier of other top universities. These institutions set and sanction the boundaries of knowledge, including what kinds of political and social views are welcomed in prestige cultural spaces. This has long been the case. In 1805, for example, Unitarianism won a real degree of respectability when Harvard, then a Calvinist institution, appointed the Unitarian Henry Ware to the Hollis chair, long the most prestigious endowed chair in the country. Last year, in a 21st-century version of the Ware affair, conservatives won when Harvard’s president and provost overruled the faculty and turned away the economist Gabriel Zucman, whose renown rests in large part on his empirical work substantiating the democratic benefits of a wealth tax. Lawrence H. Summers, who once said that “inequality has … gone up in our society” because “people are being treated closer to the way they’re supposed to be treated,” supported the hire but nevertheless explained, shortly thereafter, that raising taxes on the rich is a bad idea.
One of China’s elite universities has a new student that’s distinguishable from the rest of her peers — she’s human-like but powered by artificial intelligence.
Named Hua Zhibing, the virtual student is enrolled at Tsinghua University’s department of computer science and technology, where she will study under the tutelage of a dedicated professor, domestic media reported. Claimed to be the first AI-powered student to attend university, Hua started school on Tuesday and will focus on technology and data-related courses.
Hua was jointly trained by the non-profit research institute Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, along with technology companies Zhipu.AI and Xiaoice, though the motive behind its development was not immediately clear.
The Chinese government has an ambitious vision for the country’s AI sector, with plans to achieve a “major breakthrough” in the basic theory of artificial intelligence by 2025. Officials hope the technology will become a driving force in the country’s economic transformation and in upgrading its industrial capabilities.
In recent years, China has increasingly applied artificial intelligence in several sectors, including health and education, though the growing use of facial recognition technologies has raised privacy concerns. Meanwhile, companies have used AI to develop anything from an app to help save local dialects to self-driving cars, digital doppelgangers for news anchors, and even a chat bot to provide company to lonely men.
It should not be this way, and fortunately, it doesn’t have to be.
The Goldwater Institute’s Academic Transparency Act model language, which has been adapted into legislation passed by the Arizona State Senate and the North Carolina House of Representatives this spring and is now also being advanced in Wisconsin—would provide parents unprecedented access to the classroom materials being presented to their kids. Under the legislation, schools would post on a publicly accessible portion of their website a simple list (i.e., syllabus) of the actual materials being used in student instruction so that prospective parents like Nicole Solas could immediately review the type of content awaiting her daughter if she were to enroll at the local public district school.
Teachers wouldn’t be required to violate copyright law or spend time scanning materials, but rather simply account for whatever curriculum resources they used during instructional periods—whether that be textbooks, essays like those from the 1619 Project, or online news articles—in a format as simple as a Google Doc.
It should not take hundreds or thousands of dollars—much less a willingness to brave the threat of retaliatory lawsuits, as in Ms. Solas’ case—for parents to know what is being taught in the nearby schools in which they’re considering enrolling their students.
With academic transparency, those roadblocks to parental awareness and engagement can become a thing of the past.
Fairfax County Parents Association is a nonpartisan volunteer grassroots organization of parents that seeks to ensure students are the first priority in Fairfax County Public Schools. This is accomplished by educating parents about the governance and administration of the school system and empowering parents to advocate on behalf of their children. We seek to ensure the school board is governed in accordance with the law, specifically that the roles are non-partisan. The FCPA will work to support teachers and staff of the school system to aid their efforts to educate our children.
Libby Sobic and Will Flanders, Ph.D.
Wisconsin invests in our K-12 schools by creating options for families. On average, Wisconsin school districts average revenue (of local, state and federal funding) per student was $14,737 in 2019-2020.
The majority of K-12 education funding is directly distributed to school districts. Under current law, even the lowest funded school districts receive more funding per pupil than independent charter schools and private schools in the parental choice programs.
Today, the claims for more funding for districts are rendered almost comedic in light of all of the federal stimulus funds flooding into the state.
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”
2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results
Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
‘One of the most sweeping bipartisan judicial rejections of an administration’s policy in decades,” commentator David French recently noted, involved the Obama administration using Title IX to undermine due process on American college campuses. The administration’s record, French wrote, “has been rejected by judges across the ideological spectrum and has cost universities millions.”
Given this legacy, George Mason law professor David Bernstein hoped that “legal actors responsible for rather blatant constitutional violations, such as Obama administration OCR [Office of Civil Rights] Chief Catherine Lhamon, will not in the future be rewarded with plum political appointments.” Yet the Biden administration has recently selected Lhamon to return to her old perch atop the OCR, the Education Department office with jurisdiction over Title IX — the federal law that bans gender discrimination in education — and racial-discrimination issues.
Perhaps no public figure in the past decade has done more to decimate the rights of accused students than Lhamon. No wonder that FIRE, the scrupulously non-partisan campus-civil-liberties organization, denounced her nomination and urged senators to reject it unless she committed, under oath, to upholding specific due-process provisions in Title IX tribunals. Given her record, it seems extremely unlikely that she would ever do so.
In 2011, the Obama administration invoked Title IX to address what it considered a surge in campus sexual assaults. The resulting “Dear Colleague” letter mandated a series of procedural changes making guilty findings more likely to result from campus tribunals. The policy’s underlying assumption was that one-sided procedures would change campus culture and lead otherwise-reluctant victims to file reports with their schools. After taking over at OCR in 2013, Lhamon unilaterally produced a second, lengthy guidance document, taking aim at schools’ allowing accused students to conduct cross-examination (most schools already prevented students’ lawyers from doing so) and cautioning universities against prioritizing the due-process rights of the accused.
Fatih Guvenen, Greg Kaplan, Jae Song, and Justin Weidner:
The lifetime earnings of the median male worker declined by 10 percent from the 1967 cohort to the 1983 cohort. Further, more than three-quarters of the distribution of men experienced no rise in their lifetime earnings across these cohorts. Accounting for rising employer-provided health and pension benefits partly mitigates these findings but does not alter the substantive conclusions.
How are these changes reflected in wage/salary earnings? When nominal earnings are deflated by the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) deflator, the annualized value of median lifetime wage/salary earnings for male workers declined by $4,400 per year from the 1967 cohort to the 1983 cohort, or $136,400 over the 31-year working period.
In 1998 I loaded up on student loans against the advice of Amherst College’s financial aid advisor, and left our shores for jolly old England. In my first week at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, I was told to choose subjects for my tutorials. These are one-on-one meetings with professors once or twice per week. I told the faculty advisor that I wanted to steep myself in history and literature to accompany the feeling that I got from wandering the storybook campus. He said he had just the tutor for me. And with that, I ended up studying English Romantic poetry with the late Jonathan Wordsworth, who was a great-great-great nephew of the famous poet William Wordsworth.
The way tutorials work is that you meet your tutor, you discuss a subject, and then the tutor assigns one or more essays for the next meeting that will require some additional reading and research to complete. Then at that next meeting, you read your essays aloud to the tutor during the first 10 minutes. The tutor gives direct feedback on your writing, and you move on to repeat the process from the top.
On a cold day in January, Professor Wordsworth’s study smelled like the scout’s cleaning supplies and old books. I sat across from him at his computerless desk sweating and stumbling through a timid technical analysis of a poem by Coleridge. I knew I had blown it. My writing sucked. Professor Wordsworth told me firstly, I needed to write more about how the poems made me feel rather than all their technical details, and secondly, I might want to take a bit more time to proofread my future essays. In that moment he was Dumbledore—kind, intelligent, and insistent that I do my best.
Matt I. Brown, Jonathan Wai, Christopher F. Chabris:
Despite a long-standing expert consensus about the importance of cognitive ability for life outcomes, contrary views continue to proliferate in scholarly and popular literature. This divergence of beliefs presents an obstacle for evidence-based policymaking and decision-making in a variety of settings. One commonly held idea is that greater cognitive ability does not matter or is actually harmful beyond a certain point (sometimes stated as > 100 or 120 IQ points). We empirically tested these notions using data from four longitudinal, representative cohort studies comprising 48,558 participants in the United States and United Kingdom from 1957 to the present. We found that ability measured in youth has a positive association with most occupational, educational, health, and social outcomes later in life. Most effects were characterized by a moderate to strong linear trend or a practically null effect (mean R2 range = .002–.256). Nearly all nonlinear effects were practically insignificant in magnitude (mean incremental R2 = .001) or were not replicated across cohorts or survey waves. We found no support for any downside to higher ability and no evidence for a threshold beyond which greater scores cease to be beneficial. Thus, greater cognitive ability is generally advantageous—and virtually never detrimental.
Classics majors at Princeton University will no longer be required to learn Greek or Latin in a push to create a more inclusive and equitable program, an effort that was given “new urgency” by the “events around race that occurred last summer,” according to faculty.
Last month, faculty members approved changes to the Classics department, including eliminating the “classics” track, which required an intermediate proficiency in Greek or Latin to enter the concentration, according to Princeton Alumni Weekly. The requirement for students to take Greek or Latin was also removed.
Josh Billings, director of undergraduate studies and professor of classics, said the shift will give students more opportunities to major in classics.
Billings said the changes had been floated before university president Christopher Eisgruber called for addressing systemic racism at the university, but the curriculum shift resurfaced as a priority after the president’s call to action and the “events around race that occurred last summer.”
“We think that having new perspectives in the field will make the field better,” he said. “Having people who come in who might not have studied classics in high school and might not have had a previous exposure to Greek and Latin, we think that having those students in the department will make it a more vibrant intellectual community.”
A plan to reimagine math instruction for 6 million California students has become ensnared in equity and fairness issues — with critics saying proposed guidelines will hold back gifted students and supporters saying it will, over time, give all kindergartners through 12th-graders a better chance to excel.
The proposed new guidelines aim to accelerate achievement while making mathematical understanding more accessible and valuable to as many students as possible, including those shut out from high-level math in the past because they had been “tracked” in lower level classes. The guidelines call on educators generally to keep all students in the same courses until their junior year in high school, when they can choose advanced subjects, including calculus, statistics and other forms of data science.
On May 11th the Washougal School District discriminated and harassed three female community members who came to a public meeting about critical race theory and mask mandates for their children. They were kicked out by Vice Superintendent Aaron Hansen (Salary $142,100+) and Superintendent Mary Templeton (Salary $168,634+), who are vocal supporters of critical race theory. FYI: WA State budget is facing a 9 billion dollar shortfall.
The board voted to end the meeting because they claimed there was a disruption when one member would not put on a mask due to medical and religious exemptions, which she stated multiple times. However, after the three left and everyone pretended they were leaving in their cars, the board started another meeting which is against the law. They have to publicly post a 24 hour notice before any new meeting. When the three citizens learned about this from parents watching on zoom, they came back. The doors were locked (against the law) and all the attendants (fellow educators) from the earlier “adjourned” meeting were inside. They refused to let the community members in and even shut the window closed in their faces and proceeded to laugh and mock them (visibly laughing). Washougal board members called the police and demanded the three be trespassed from City of Washougal property or face arrest for the length of one year. The police trespassed all three, including the two single mothers who wore masks and have children who attend WSD, at the request of the board: police were not given an option to say no to this. There is no way to challenge this trespass besides civil litigation.
As the new complaint filed Monday against Madison lays out, the Center for Tech and Civic Life showered the WI-5 cities with more than $8 million in grant funding, with Madison receiving more than $1.27 million of the cut. The complaint, filed Tuesday, names Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, a Democrat, and City Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl.
In total, CTCL received $400 million from Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, ostensibly to promote “safe and secure” elections during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, critics say, Zuckerberg’s mammoth social network was silencing many conservatives and conservative viewpoints.
Emails show liberal activists and election officials sharing raw voter data and discussing how best to maximize turnout of traditionally Democratic voters in “areas with predominantly minorities.”
Fearful of transparency and change, Yale’s governing body has resorted to procedural tactics to keep alumni from joining that wouldn’t be out of place in a dictatorship.
Back in March 2020, I signed up to gather the 4,394 signatures required to become a petition candidate for the Yale Corporation. In a four-month period, I gathered over 7,200 signatures and won a place on the ballot for the Yale Corporation (which is the governing body of Yale University). It hires the president, grants tenure, adopts the annual budget and sets policy on whatever it wants to affect.
I ran because, as a Yale alumnus, I was tired of getting two names each year of persons I did not know, with no information on why they were running provided. All we got was a bio, and now a video lacking any comments from candidates on issues facing Yale. In my campaign, I also emphasized openness, and my opposition both to expensive administrative growth and to rising tuition during the pandemic.
China is escalating a crackdown on its online education sector, forcing once high-flying startups to mothball plans for multi-billion-dollar initial public offerings this year.
Just months ago, edtech outfits were one of the hottest investments in China’s post-Covid internet industry, pulling in more than $10 billion of venture funding last year from powerhouses like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and SoftBank Group Corp. Then Beijing stepped in.
President Xi Jinping suggested in March the surge in after-school tutoring was putting immense pressure on on China’s kids, signaling a personal interest in curbing excesses. That led to warnings in state-owned media and penalties aimed at predatory practices that play on a nation’s obsession with academic achievement. Now, the country’s education ministry plans to create a dedicated division to oversee all private education platforms for the first time, according to people familiar with the matter.
Police arrested Ms. Mo, along with nearly the entire opposition movement, in January. She and 46 others are charged with conspiracy to commit subversion under the national security law for organizing or participating in an informal pro-democracy primary election last July. Judge Esther Toh denied Ms. Mo bail in April, and the world learned why on Friday.
The Capital Times editorializes, “Madison has a great public schools system” and Board President “Ali Muldrow, is a dynamic leader “who will move Madison schools in the right direction” — sentiments reminiscent of the acclaim it offered former Superintendent Jennifer Cheatham, whose policies Muldrow seems poised to continue.
But is it really great?
Cheatham and Muldrow committed to eliminate the Black achievement gap. After seven years of their leadership, 89% of black third graders remain unable to read, plummeting to 5% by eighth grade — no better than when they began.
Why?
First, the school district persisted in teaching reading with obsolete whole and balanced language methods for two decades after research demonstrated that phonics is superior for disadvantaged kids.
Worse, the district has focused not on fixing its mistakes, but, like a magician’s misdirection, on shifting attention away from those embarrassing reading scores to graduation rates. Then it promptly lowered standards to pump up graduation stats.
The second reason for the district’s failure has been a breakdown in discipline. Just two years ago, Madisonian’s, who like the Cap Times had thought the city still had great schools, woke up to read a shocking article in Isthmus titled “A Rotten Year.”
The article meticulously documented the unraveling of discipline at Madison’s middle and high schools that followed the policies of Cheatham, who threw dedicated teachers committed to racial justice under the bus when they sought to maintain order, and Muldrow, who accused teachers worried about disruptive behavior of being racist.
“What’s new this year,” one teacher said, “is you don’t know how an interaction with a kid is going to go or that the district will support you after the fact. What ends up happening is teachers do nothing.”
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]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
In recent months it wasn’t only the inhabitants of China who were forbidden from speaking ill of the Chinese regime. So were billions of others around the world. Thanks to Facebook and its clampdown on any discussion of the theory that Covid-19 might have been ‘manufactured’ or might have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, people in America, Britain, France and across the globe were subjected to Chinese-style silencing. They were essentially banned from saying things that might embarrass the Chinese Communist Party. The supposedly woke, chilled overlords of the World Wide Web helped to globalise the CCP’s repression of free thought and open debate.
Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Facebook and Instagram services, including Madison.
Ten months later, at the end of a scary article about the history of “gain of function” research and its possible role in the still ongoing Covid pandemic, Nicholson Baker wrote as follows: “This may be the great scientific meta-experiment of the 21st century. Could a world full of scientists do all kinds of reckless recombinant things with viral diseases for many years and successfully avoid a serious outbreak? The hypothesis was that, yes, it was doable. The risk was worth taking. There would be no pandemic.”
Except there was. If it does indeed turn out that the lab-leak hypothesis is the right explanation for how it began — that the common people of the world have been forced into a real-life lab experiment, at tremendous cost — there is a moral earthquake on the way.
Because if the hypothesis is right, it will soon start to dawn on people that our mistake was not insufficient reverence for scientists, or inadequate respect for expertise, or not enough censorship on Facebook. It was a failure to think critically about all of the above, to understand that there is no such thing as absolute expertise. Think of all the disasters of recent years: economic neoliberalism, destructive trade policies, the Iraq War, the housing bubble, banks that are “too big to fail,” mortgage-backed securities, the Hillary Clinton campaign of 2016 — all of these disasters brought to you by the total, self-assured unanimity of the highly educated people who are supposed to know what they’re doing, plus the total complacency of the highly educated people who are supposed to be supervising them.
Then again, maybe I am wrong to roll out all this speculation. Maybe the lab-leak hypothesis will be convincingly disproven. I certainly hope it is.
But even if it inches closer to being confirmed, we can guess what the next turn of the narrative will be. It was a “perfect storm,” the experts will say. Who coulda known? And besides (they will say), the origins of the pandemic don’t matter any more. Go back to sleep.
Going to an elite university exposed me to the people that made me most nervous: the well-spoken, (supposedly) clever people. My first instinct was to flee from this strange new world with its archaic traditions, funny language and weird social habits. But I was too proud to go home defeated, so I decided to fight instead. It didn’t take long for me to realise that the posh kids were all leather shoes, woollen jackets, small-talk and bullshit. I soon shrugged off the idea that there were some mystical clever people somewhere that were better than me: I’d now met them, come up against them one on one, and they were often bang average. I could hold my own on anything substantive. I’d grown up among straight-talking tough people who loved to argue in smoky pubs, so Oxford tutorials felt strangely familiar.
If I’d been confined to a plastic chair, and told to sit in silence and listen for an hour to someone who wasn’t very interesting talk about a subject I hadn’t chosen to be interested in, I suspect I’d have messed about and misbehaved, just as I did as a teenager. But Oxford wasn’t like that. The teaching was personalised, flexible and interactive. That kind of system keeps people like me in the room, fired up and engaged. Kids like me, who don’t flourish in school, can benefit from such attention, and focus, and belief. A good society would strive to give it to them.
Latest @BurbioCalendar school mask map. pic.twitter.com/7pBA3xiOHS
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) May 31, 2021
That my students followed the accounts of these influencers made me curious about their manner of living. And as the enrollment numbers at my university continued to worsen and two of my former students emailed to say that they were dropping out of college and moving to L.A., I spent much of last summer cold-calling publicists, wanting to see where the nation’s young people were heading. I swiftly discovered that the influencer industry had become a piñata for COVID-related outrage, with a number of New York Times stories characterizing these creators as incorrigible Dionysians. The Clubhouse in particular had become a repeated target. Several of their neighbors in Beverly Hills had filed a report with the local police department claiming that, despite quarantine, Clubhouse BH had hosted a party of “over a hundred” people, with cars blocking both sides of the street and even parking in several neighbors’ driveways.
All of this led me to reasonably expect that publicists would be wary of press inquiries—let alone the kind of immersive, fly-on-the-wall piece I was proposing. So I was somewhat surprised to find, one morning in August, an email from the Clubhouse at the top of my inbox. For reasons I cannot explain, their publicists were strangely receptive to this idea. They wanted to know how long I’d stay and when I could come out. They seemed to be under the impression that I wanted to learn how to become an influencer myself. The kids would be more than happy to help me make an account, they said. “Plus, if you get three influencers to tag you in a post,” they said, “you could have half a million followers by the end of the week.”
Some 80% of Tokyo metropolitan high schools have in recent years continued to require higher admission exam scores for girls than boys, despite metro government attempts to fix the discrepancies, the Mainichi Shimbun has learned.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education has applied corrective measures to 30 to 40 schools a year, but still admissions tests from academic 2015 to 2020 for about 80% of schools had higher passing requirements for girls, internal education board documents show. In one case, an entrance exam with the perfect score set at 1,000 had a passing-grade discrepancy 243 points higher for girls, and in another 20 girls failed despite scoring higher than the lowest-scoring successful male applicant.
According to the Mainichi Shimbun’s research, high schools under Tokyo Metropolitan Government jurisdiction are the only prefectural schools to have separate enrollment caps for male and female students. The numbers at each high school are based on the ratio of boys to girls at public junior high schools in Tokyo.
I was ravenous to learn. I’d waited for years for a proper chance at it, and the high school in my town didn’t seem like a place where I was going to get it. I passed the G.E.D. test at fifteen, started community college the following fall, and transferred after two semesters to a four-year college, where I began, at last, to get an education commensurate with my appetite.
What was it, I sometimes wonder, that I was supposed to have learned in the years of high school that I avoided? High school is often considered a definitive American experience, in two senses: an experience that nearly everyone shares, and one that can define who you are, for better or worse, for the rest of your life. I’m grateful I escaped the particular definition that high school would have imposed on me, and I wish everyone else who suffered could have escaped it, too.
For a long time I’ve thought that high school should be abolished. I don’t mean that people in their teens should not be educated at public expense. The question is what they are educated in. An abolitionist proposal should begin by acknowledging all the excellent schools and teachers and educations out there; the people who have a pleasant, useful time in high school; and the changes being wrought in the nature of secondary education today. It should also recognize the tremendous variety of schools, including charter and magnet schools in the public system and the private schools — religious, single-sex, military, and prep — that about 10 percent of American students attend, in which the values and pedagogical systems may be radically different. But despite the caveats and anomalies, the good schools and the students who thrive (or at least survive), high school is hell for too many Americans. If this is so, I wonder why people should be automatically consigned to it.
A new paper by Thomas Piketty makes the rise of right-wing populism look like a historical inevitability
Beijing scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit to try and stave off risks to its economy from a rapidly aging population. But that failed to result in a sustained surge in births given the high cost of raising children in Chinese cities, a challenge that persiststo this day.
The policy change will come with “supportive measures, which will be conducive to improving our country’s population structure, fulfilling the country’s strategy of actively coping with an ageing population”, the official Xinhua news agency said following a politburo meeting chaired by President Xi Jinping.
Among those measures, China will lower educational costs for families, step up tax and housing support, guarantee the legal interests of working women and clamp down on “sky-high” dowries, it said, without giving specifics. It would also look to educate young people “on marriage and love”.
This hyperconformity seems to have developed in two phases: Phase One was a collapse of previously distinct media types (network TV, cable TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, et al) into just “web sites” and now “mobile apps”. This was not their fault. Phase Two was the virtually universal industry-wide adoption of a strident ideological monoculture. This is their fault. I’m a First Amendment absolutist, so I don’t begrudge anyone the freedom to say and write what they think, but we are told that we live in a marketplace of ideas. But if you mainly consume the standard media product, what you are experiencing is closer to a marketplace of idea.
This monoculture challenges two of my most fundamental beliefs. First, in business — and these are businesses — you seek to differentiate, to offer a unique product that your customers can’t get anywhere else. In economic terms, differentiation is the key to pricing power, which is the key to profits, which is the key to staying in business. This is precisely what the existing media industry is not doing; the product is now virtually indistinguishable by publisher, and most media companies are suffering financially in exactly the way you’d expect. Second, civilizational progress happens not by top down unanimity and ideological instruction, but by debate and dispute. That this should happen, but is not happening, in the institutional media today is obvious.
And so I think it’s obvious that the incumbents are handing us, by their own considered and determinedly executed choices, a sparkling opportunity to both build better businesses and an actual marketplace of ideas. I’m intensely proud of both Substack and Clubhouse and have very high hopes that they can deliver.
Locally, the traditional media has largely supported K-12 status quo governance, to the long term detriment of our students and community vigor.
Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul A. Gompers, George Hu & Kaushik Vasudevan
Immigrant founders of venture capital-backed companies have been critical to the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We document the channels through which immigrant founders find their way to the United States and how those channels have changed over time. Immigrants have been an important source of founders for venture capital-backed startups accounting for roughly 20% of all founders over the past 30 years. Immigrants coming to the United States for their education have been the primary source of founders with those coming after being educated abroad and then arriving for work decreasing in importance over time. The importance of undergraduate education as a channel for immigrant founders has increased over time. Immigrant founders coming for education are likely to start their companies in the state in which they were educated, especially states where they received their graduate education, leading to potentially large local economic benefits. The results of this paper have important policy implications for the supply of entrepreneurial talent and efforts to promote entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Dalee Sullivan looked straight ahead into her computer’s camera and started making her case to the judge. She referred to transcripts, emails and policies she had pulled from the student handbook at Alpine High School. The school, she contended, had made errors in tabulating grade-point averages: Classes and exams that should have been included were left out, and vice versa.
Ms. Sullivan had won Lincoln-Douglas debate tournaments and, in her freshman year, was a member of the mock trial team. But she is not a lawyer. She is 18, and she graduated from the lone public high school in the small West Texas town of Alpine just a week ago, which was the reason she was in court to begin with.
“This serves to prove that no matter the outcome of the G.P.A. contest, and no matter how many times we had the school recalculate the G.P.A.,” Ms. Sullivan told the judge during a hearing on Friday, the Alpine Independent School District “was going to make certain I could never be valedictorian, even if I earned it.”
School officials said she ranked third in her class. Ms. Sullivan disagreed.
Brian Gallagher and Kevin Berger:
I can’t see them. Therefore they’re not real.” From which century was this quote drawn? Not a medieval one. The utterance emerged in February 2019 from Fox & Friends presenter Pete Hegseth, who was referring to … germs. The former Princeton University undergraduate and Afghanistan counterinsurgency instructor said, to the mirth of his co-hosts, that he hadn’t washed his hands in a decade. Naturally this germ of misinformation went viral on social media.
The next day, as serendipity would have it, the authors of The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread—philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall—sat down with Nautilus. In their book, O’Connor and Weatherall, both professors at the University of California, Irvine, illustrate mathematical models of how information spreads—and how consensus on truth or falsity manages or fails to take hold—in society, but particularly in social networks of scientists. The coathors argue “we cannot understand changes in our political situation by focusing only on individuals. We also need to understand how our networks of social interaction have changed, and why those changes have affected our ability, as a group, to form reliable beliefs.”
O’Connor and Weatherall, who are married, are deft communicators of complex ideas. Our conversation ranged from the tobacco industry’s wiles to social media’s complicity in bad data. We discussed how science is subtly manipulated and how the public should make sense of contradictory studies. The science philosophers also had a sharp tip or two for science journalists.
If this was a good time for Canadian academia, you would not be able to tell from the blanket of almost absolute silence that has been pulled over universities. There is no euphoria, no celebratory mood, no applause for the changes that are happening. There is, however, a degree of infighting, mutual suspicion, recrimination, and a palpable tension that divides faculty and also pits them against students and administrations. Against a backdrop of publicized cases of ostracism, real worry exists that expressing a perspective that has not been authorized could lead to termination or at least media-driven defamation. University administrations are all-too-quick to proclaim that what Professor X said or wrote, “does not represent the values of this institution”. Why would it? Why should it? These are not private religious colleges; Canada’s universities are public and secular. When applicants go through the hiring process, are they ever once presented with a list of the university’s “values”—a manifesto—and are they then told that if they do not agree with the document they can apply elsewhere, or else sign at the bottom line? No, that never happens (to my knowledge), and yet we work under the dictates of a party line—a decidedly partisan thrust that is distinctly and clearly a carbon-copy of the ideology of the ruling Liberal Party. This is far from the only instance where copy-and-paste has displaced academic reasoning, questioning, and debating.
The word valedictorian comes from the Latin vale dicere or “to say farewell.” So it is a goodbye speech, but also a “Look at what we’ve done” speech. And what seniors have done this year has never been done before. From start to finish, this school year has been under a cloud. At some schools, the doors never opened and learning took place not in thousands of classrooms but in millions of bedrooms and kitchens, on back porches and in parking lots or wherever the WiFi signal was strongest.
Major publishers want to censor research-sharing resource Sci-Hub from the internet, but archivists are quickly responding to make that impossible.
More than half of academic publishing is controlled by only five publishers. This position is built on the premise that users should pay for access to scientific research, to compensate publishers for their investment in editing, curating, and publishing it. In reality, research is typically submitted and evaluated by scholars without compensation from the publisher. What this model is actually doing is profiting off of a restriction on article access using burdensome paywalls. One project in particular, Sci-Hub, has threatened to break down this barrier by sharing articles without restriction. As a result, publishers are going to every corner of the map to destroy the project and wipe it from the internet. Continuing the long tradition of internet hacktivism, however, redditors are mobilizing to create an uncensorable back-up of Sci-Hub.
Last year, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent white male executives to a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their “white male culture” and encouraging them to atone for their “white male privilege,” according to documents I have obtained.
The program, hosted on Zoom for a cohort of 13 Lockheed employees, was led by the diversity-consulting firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners, which specializes in helpingwhite males “awaken together.” The Lockheed employees, all senior leaders in the company, included Aaron Huckaby, director of global supply chain operations; retired Air Force lieutenant colonel David Starr, director of the Hercules C-130 military transport program; retired Air Force lieutenant general Bruce Litchfield, vice president of sustainment operations; and Glenn Woods, vice president of production for the Air Force’s $1.7 trillion F-35 fighter jet program. (Lockheed Martin did not return request for comment.)
At the beginning of the program, the diversity trainers led a “free association” exercise, asking the Lockheed employees to list connotations for the term “white men.” The trainers wrote down “old,” “racist,” “privileged,” “anti-women,” “angry,” “Aryan Nation,” “KKK,” “Founding fathers,” “guns,” “guilty,” and “can’t jump.” According to the participants, these perceptions have led to “assumptions about white men and diversity,” with many employees believing that white men “don’t care about diversity,” “have a classical perspective on history and colonialism,” and “don’t want to give away our power.”
The White Men As Full Diversity Partners team—Jim Morris, Mark Havens, and Michael Welp—framed the purpose of the training session as providing a benefit for white men who embrace the diversity and inclusion philosophy. In response to a prompt about “what’s in it for white men,” the participants listed benefits such as: “I won’t get replaced by someone who is a better full diversity partner,” “[I will] improve the brand, image, reputation of white men,” and “I [will] have less nagging sense of guilt that I am the problem.”
It’s natural to think of scientists as truth seekers, people driven by an intense curiosity to understand the natural world. Yet this picture of scientists and scientific inquiry sits uncomfortably with the reality and prevalence of scientific fraud. If one wants to get at the truth about nature, why lie? Won’t that just set inquiry back, as people pursue false leads? To understand why this occurs – and what can be done about it – we need to understand the social structures scientists work within, and how some of the institutions which enable science to be such a successful endeavour all things considered, also abet and encourage fraud.
Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.” Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.” In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.
That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted. So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions. The system will go from two years of “optional” testing to a “test-blind” system until or unless it develops its own test.
Ending standardized testing will have a notable impact on legal challenges to the use of race in college admissions. Last November, Californians rejected a resolution to restore affirmative action in college admissions.
The Supreme Court has issued a series of 5-4 decisions that have ruled both for and against such race criteria admissions — but even justices supporting such systems have expressed reservations. The author of the 2003 majority opinion in Grutter v. Bollinger, Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, said she expected “that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” That 25 years is about up.
e Fed is financing the government at this level to save the nation from the economic devastation caused by the government-mandated COVID closures of 2020, but it is doing it at the cost of crushing monetary policy. No one in the main financial or political media is calling the Fed out on this outright debt financing, and no one is likely to care because everyone quietly realizes the entire economy and all markets would crumple into the dust if the Fed stopped doing what it is doing.
What they don’t allow themselves to realize is that this situation predictably developed because the Fed has been creating total economic dependence on itself for the last decade. We are now witnessing the terminus of years of bad Fed policy that piled up as the Fed tried to centrally control the US economy under its own superior intelligence as to what is best for markets. (At a level that has made Chinese central planning look like the “B” team.)
Most financial writers and political writers wore blinders to block out that reality throughout the long period over which the Fed tried to create a recovery from the Great Recession. I have always argued they were creating a permanently Fed-dependent recovery that could never withstand the Fed’s withdrawal of stimulus money and never withstand the next major financial crisis.
That was the first time Matthews learned of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Thirty-five blocks of Black-owned businesses and homes in the affluent Greenwood District were reduced to ash in the two-day rampage. Estimates place the death toll between 100 and 300.
One of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history took place in his hometown, and Matthews, who now leads the Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, never heard a word of it in school.
“That’s a very common experience of a lot of Oklahomans,” said Joy Hofmeister, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public schools.
Many, like Matthews and Hofmeister, were well into adulthood when they discovered a wealthy African American district — nicknamed Black Wall Street — existed in Tulsa and that it had been razed in a spree of white violence.
So, you thought the problem of false information on social media could not be any worse? Allow us to respectfully offer evidence to the contrary.
Not only is misinformation increasing online, but attempting to correct it politely on Twitter can have negative consequences, leading to even less-accurate tweets and more toxicity from the people being corrected, according to a new study co-authored by a group of MIT scholars.
The study was centered around a Twitter field experiment in which a research team offered polite corrections, complete with links to solid evidence, in replies to flagrantly false tweets about politics.
“What we found was not encouraging,” says Mohsen Mosleh, a research affiliate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, lecturer at University of Exeter Business School, and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “After a user was corrected … they retweeted news that was significantly lower in quality and higher in partisan slant, and their retweets contained more toxic language.”
When my Harvard colleague Stephen Greenblatt saw my book Extraterrestrial featured on the coverof the Orthodox Jewish magazine Ami, he commented “It is interesting that the Orthodox evidently do not consider their faith threatened by the possibility of other inhabited worlds.” To which I replied: “They appear to be less orthodox than my colleagues in the scientific community.” This was in reference to the pushback that my book received regarding the possibility that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua might have been manufactured by another civilization.
Innovation blossoms in a culture willing to acquire new knowledge rather than being trapped in its past belief system. A mainstream astronomer who worked on rocks in the solar system for decades commented grudgingly: “‘Oumuamua is so strange…. I wish it never existed.” Such a sentiment is not the trademark of an intellectual culture that fosters discovery. In the weeks following the publication of my book I received numerous e-mails from astronomers, some tenured, who confessed that they agree with me but are afraid to speak out because of the potential repercussions to their careers.
Resistance to innovation is not a new phenomenon. When the astronomer Otto Struve suggested in a 1952 paper to search for hot Jupiters—massive, gaseous planets like our own Jupiter orbiting very close to their stars—his proposal was ignored until Didier Queloz and Michel Mayor found 51 Pegasi b. Prior to this discovery, astronomers argued that telescope time should not be “wasted” on this search because a Jupiter-like planet is unlikely to form so close to a sunlike star. Many even doubted whether exoplanets are common in the first place. The fact that this predictive “baby” was born four decades after it was conceived implies that there must be more “babies” that have never born because their existence is still in doubt. Placing blinders on our telescopes keeps us in our comfort zone at the expense of prolonging our ignorance. But reality does not abide by our prejudice; the existence of exoplanets or neighboring civilizations does not depend on whether we search for them.
During the pandemic, many colleges backed off on using SAT and ACT scores in admissions. Research has shown — and lawsuits have argued — that the tests, long used to measure aptitude for college, are far more connected to family income and don’t provide meaningful information about a student’s ability to succeed in college. Wealthier families are also more likely to pay for test prep courses, or attend schools with curricula that focus on the exams.
As pandemic restrictions loosen up, and in-person testing resumes, some universities have begun to reincorporate the SAT and ACT into their admissions. But others have made the temporary changes permanent. That includes Washington state’s public universities, which announced earlier this month that its schools will no longer require test scores for admission.
This spring, the University of California system agreed to continue a test-free admissions policy through 2025. California sends the largest number of high school students to U.S. colleges, and if the UC system no longer uses the tests, it’s unclear whether those students will be interested in applying to other schools that do require them.
Government reliance on the manual entrance of COVID-19 data into basic software has caused data errors and civilian confusion across the globe. The U.K. used a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to track COVID cases—until the high caseload became too large for the software to handle. The maxed-out file stopped loading cases into the government’s system and left more than 15,000 cases behind in the national count. As a result, exposed people were not contact-traced and quarantined, causing an additional 125,000 infections and an estimated 1,500 deaths. One employee’s misstep in Ohioprevented 4,000 COVID deaths from being reported in the state’s system. The newest entry to the COVID count glitch list comes from Spain.
On March 10, a respected peer-reviewed medical journal, the Lancet, published Spain’s child COVID mortality rate as around two to four times that of the U.S., U.K., Italy, Germany, France, and South Korea. The paper said that 54 children (defined as below 19) had died of COVID in the small country, making Spain’s reported death rates a staggering 4.9 percent for kids aged 10-19—which is at least 2.92 percentage points higher than other country in the report.
Today its grad rate is 90% and its public schools rank No. 3 in K-12 achievement, according to Education Week. Since 2009, it’s finished in or near that Top 10 every year.
This, with some of the lowest education spending in America.
Florida spent $9,374 per pupil, according to the most recent federal stats, putting it No. 43 among states.
New York, the No. 1 spending state, spends nearly two and a half times more per student than Florida, with not as much to show for it. (More on that in a sec).
Madison spends about 2X Florida per student, yet we have long tolerated disastrous reading results.
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]
Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.
All the News That’s Fit to Click
Above all, though, we have to factor in the enormous social cost of leaving our entire public discourse in the hands of a censorious few. There may be tremendous social advantages provided by, e.g., Amazon: with the click of a button, a shopper can satisfy almost any want. But is this social wealth enough to offset every other drawback? Who says? If what you want is a conservative book, a click on Amazon may not bring satisfaction. In February, Ryan T. Anderson’s empathetic and well-researched book on transgenderism, When Harry Became Sally (2018), was stripped from the online shelves. And last October, Amazon Prime rejected Shelby Steele’s documentary on race relations in America, What Killed Michael Brown? (2020). Anderson is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center; Steele is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution; neither is a bigot. You can look them both up on Google—before Google stuffs them, too, down the memory hole.
The same discriminatory behavior, mutatis mutandis, exists at Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Last June, under massive pressure from both advertisers and employees, Facebook majority stockholder Mark Zuckerberg formed a committee to decide what is acceptable for publication. According to the New York Post, there may be at least half a dozen Chinese nationals at Facebook working in this “Hate-Speech Engineering” group. You can’t make this stuff up—unless you’re George Orwell. So Facebook users will read only the truth…as Facebook understands it. Or perhaps, as they want you to understand it. But truth, most notably scientific truth, has proved elusive recently. At first, the World Health Organization said the Chinese flu could not be transmitted from person to person. At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised against wearing face masks—until they were for it. Now there is, again, serious doubt about the efficacy of masks. Throughout, Facebook has decided which studies are licit and which must be suppressed. How does the public benefit from such diktats?
Many taxpayer supported K-12 School Districts use Google and Facebook / Instagram services, including Madison.
That headline has been changed to “Facebook no longer treating ‘man-made’ Covid as a crackpot idea/Facebook’s policy tweak arrives as support surges in Washington for a fuller investigation into the origins of Covid-19.” The new headline minimizes the problem with Facebook, which was censorship. That’s more than just treating something like a crackpot idea. One way to treat a crackpot idea is to call it a crackpot idea — that’s the “more speech” remedy that should be our first idea for dealing with bad speech. In this case, more speech would have given us a better chance to approach the truth. By going to censorship, Facebook gummed up the speech process for a year.
Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Facebook / Instagram services, including Madison.
There isn’t much of anything that I agreed with the Trump Administration about, but I think they got at least one thing right. His Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, rolled back Obama era “guidance” (read: “mandate”) to strip those accused of sexual assault or harassment on college campuses of their fundamental rights.
The Obama rules, provided in a “Dear Colleague” letter, but short of actual legislation or formal rules, suggested that any school that received Federal money (basically, all of them) had to tip the scales in favor of the accuser. The standard of proof was reduced to “a preponderance of the evidence,” the accused could not question the accuser, and one person could function as both investigator and judge.
And it expanded the definition of sexual harassment to a ridiculous extent. As staff writer Emily Yoffe wrote in The Atlantic, “It resulted in a radical inflation of the definition of sexual misconduct on campus to potentially include virtually any sexual encounter—from behavior that could meet the criminal definition of rape, to jokes and unwanted flirtation. And schools, desperate to avoid displeasing federal Department of Education investigators, established Title IX procedures that flouted the rights of the accused.”
The aliens arrive in a starship. Surely, one might think, to have all that technology they must have the idea of numbers. Or maybe one finds an uncontacted tribe deep in the jungle. Surely they too must have the idea of numbers. To us numbers seem so natural—and “obvious”—that it’s hard to imagine everyone wouldn’t have them. But if one digs a little deeper, it’s not so clear.
It’s said that there are human languages that have words for “one”, “a pair” and “many”, but no words for specific larger numbers. In our modern technological world that seems unthinkable. But imagine you’re out in the jungle, with your dogs. Each dog has particular characteristics, and most likely a particular name. Why should you ever think about them collectively, as all “just dogs”, amenable to being counted?
Imagine you have some sophisticated AI. Maybe it’s part of the starship. And in it this computationis going on:
I’m not a huge fan of public schools. Part of that is because public schools in my neck of the woods are almost universally bad. The best school in the area is still not all that great compared to the rest of the state, much less the rest of the nation.
Yet the purpose of school is to educate, even if it doesn’t do the job as well as we might like.
Here in the Deep South, there are reasons our schools are crap. That’s a whole post unto itself, though, so I won’t delve into why, but the point is that they still educate.
At least, in theory.
However, it seems that’s not the case in New York City public schools where teachers are being urged not just to be teachers, but also activists. Not just that, but to focus that activism along a particular ideological line.
A New York City principal sent an email to her staff this past week urging them to “take action” in support of Palestinians during the current crisis in Israel and Gaza.
According to the New York Post, the email from Middle School 136’s Amanda Bueno reads “You can take action today by protesting, attending a vigil, making a public commitment to Palestinian Liberation, signing a petition, or calling your government officials to place sanctions on Isreal [sic].”
The message also says people “need not prove [Palestinians’] humanity and right to exist […] Empathy is a bare minimum.” It includes various hashtags such as #GazaUnderAttack and #SaveSheikhJarrah.
“Additional resource” links at the end of the email feature the Teach Palestine website, the main page of which states “We know you share our outrage at attacks by the Israeli military and settlers against the people of Palestine.”
Teach Palestine also has a “Stolen Land” section which compares the plight of Palestinians to illegal immigrants in the U.S.
One problem: A teacher who works for Bueno is Jewish.