🚨Today WI will have a big debate about K-12 spending. If you are following it, you must understand these 3 charts by @LibbySobic @WillFlandersWI.

Want more $? Explain where the current $ went & new federal COVID $$ will go – and commit to #transparency so parents are informed pic.twitter.com/ll9c7iiiPa

— CJ Szafir (@CJSzafir) May 27, 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]

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

Christiano Lima:

Shifting definitions on social media: Facebook announced in February it had expanded the list of misleading health claims that it would remove from its platforms to include those asserting that “COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured.” The tech giant has updated its policies against false and misleading coronavirus information, including its running list of debunked claims, over the course of the pandemic in consultation with global health officials.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Facebook and Instagram services, including Madison.

Emily Oster, Rebecca Jack, Clare Halloran, John Schoof, Diana McLeod

This paper reports on the correlation of mitigation practices with staff and student COVID-19 case rates in Florida, New York, and Massachusetts during the 2020-2021 school year. We analyze data collected by the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard and focus on student density, ventilation upgrades, and masking. We find higher student COVID-19 rates in schools and districts with lower in-person density but no correlations in staff rates. Ventilation upgrades are correlated with lower rates in Florida but not in New York. We do not find any correlations with mask mandates. All rates are lower in the spring, after teacher vaccination is underway.

Jenna Robinson:

Last week, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees came under fire for “viewpoint discrimination” over its decision not to offer tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, who will join UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism in July. An anonymous source reported that the decision was “a very political thing.”

But politics needn’t have come into it at all. For one thing, the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees has a long history of granting tenure to left-leaning faculty members—if the political make-up of the school is anything to go by. But more important is Hannah-Jones’ own record. Her history of shoddy journalism, unprofessional conduct, and lack of scholarship is more than enough to disqualify her from tenure at any university.

These shortcomings have been well-documented.

In December of 2019, five historians, led by Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz, wrote an open letter expressing their “strong reservations about important aspects of The 1619 Project.” The signatories were a politically diverse group: Victoria Bynum at Texas State University, James M. McPherson at Princeton, James Oakes at City University of New York, and Gordon S. Wood at Brown University. They called attention to serious factual errors in the project, including its central thesis that the American Revolution was fought to protect the institution of slavery:

These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or “framing.” They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology. Dismissal of objections on racial grounds—that they are the objections of only “white historians”—has affirmed that displacement.

Then in March 2020, a fact-checker who had been employed by The New York Times to vet the project came forward to say that Hannah-Jones and the Times knew about these errors before they went to print. Leslie M. Harris, a professor of history at Northwestern University, is no conservative ideologue. Her criticism of Hannah-Jones essay is based on fact. “Despite my advice, the Times published the incorrect statement about the American Revolution anyway, in Hannah-Jones’ introductory essay,” she wrote in Politico.

Kate Prickett & Jennifer March Augustine:

Scholars have been increasingly concerned about the rise in “intensive mothering” and its implications for the well-being of children and women and for inequality more broadly. These concerns, however, reflect a key assumption: that socioeconomic disparities in mothers’ parenting time observed in earlier eras have continued to grow. Using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from 2003–2005 and 2015–2017 (n = 13,755), we test this assumption by examining whether maternal education gaps in active time spent with children have persisted across the 2000s. We pay particular attention to the continued socioeconomic bifurcation in women’s access to full-time stable work, assessing whether changes in the education-related time gap are due to changes in who works and how much. We find that the gap in active childcare time between mothers with a college degree and those without has closed dramatically. Although some of this narrowing was driven by declines in time among college-educated mothers, most was driven by increases among mothers with less education. These trends, however, are observed only among mothers who were not employed full-time. Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analyses further reveal that although most of the increase in active care time among nonworking mothers with less education was attributable to behavioral change, 58% of the decline among nonworking, college-educated mothers was a result of sociodemographic compositional changes. These findings illuminate population-level trends in mothers’ active parenting time, provide insights into the driving factors, and help update theories, qualitative findings, and policy considerations related to mothers’ and children’s well-being.

Brad Polumbo:

In the mood for a depressing statistic? A new report from the financial services firm Self concludes that the average American will pay an astounding $525,037 in taxes over their lifetime—roughly 34 percent of their lifetime earnings. 

But the numbers aren’t uniform across the country; they vary wildly from state to state. Based on taxes on earnings, spending, property, and cars, here are the 10 states where residents pay the highest taxes over a lifetime.

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

The News: A new report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is urging the adoption of curriculum transparency legislation to arm parents and taxpayers with the ability to access and review controversial curriculum material in public schools. WILL recently issued identical open records requests to nine large Wisconsin school districts and experienced, first-hand, the cost, time, and difficulty of accessing curriculum material.

The Quotes: WILL Policy Associate, Jessica Holmberg, said, “America’s culture wars are finding their way into public school classrooms. With curriculum transparency legislation, we can arm parents and taxpayers with access to curriculum material to ensure that local school districts are held accountable.”

Scarlett Johnson, a Hispanic American parent in the Mequon-Thiensville School District, said, “Parents like myself are at a disadvantage when school districts are not forthright about philosophies like Critical Race Theory being taught in the classroom. More transparency is vital for parents to ensure that our students are not being taught propaganda that denies the fundamentals of the U.S. Constitution or losing precious learning time in critical topics like math, science, and reading.”

We wanted to know how difficult it is to access curriculum material?

Turns out, it's pretty difficult. pic.twitter.com/EP9kif2Mn7

— WILL (@WILawLiberty) May 26, 2021

Livia Gershon:

In high school history class, you might have learned that US leaders and citizens in the nineteenth century believed in “Manifest Destiny,” the inevitable extension of national power across the continent. From that perspective it might look like the destruction of Native nations, the establishment of the western states, and the creation of the US as we know it was almost inevitable. But, as Andrew C. Isenberg and Thomas Richards Jr. write, that’s not really how it looked to a lot of people at the time.

The first known use of the phrase appeared in 1845, as part of a pitch for the annexation of Texas. Newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan wrote of the “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.”

But, Isenberg and Richards write, this was not conventional wisdom at the time. Just ten years earlier, former President John Quincy Adams had warned that any conflict with Mexico would be chancy, particularly given the likelihood that Native American nations and enslaved people would ally with the other side. Many US leaders also opposed President Andrew Jackson’s Indian removal policy, not for humanitarian reasons but because, as a writer for the Arkansas Gazette put it in 1839, “the policy of concentrating on our borders large bodies of armed and hostile Indians, smarting under a sense of recent injury, was generally supposed to be rather dangerous to the quiet of the frontier.”

Derek Hawkins

“Given the number of entities whose approval would be required, I just don’t think it will happen,” Norman Williams, a constitutional law professor at Willamette University in Salem, Ore., said in an email.

Even if there was support among Democrats, Williams said, “no legislature or governor wants to be one (I think) who goes down in history as having given away half of the state’s territory to Idaho.”

His proposal for Idaho to swallow parts of Oregon’s south and east shares DNA with a long-standing push to create a “State of Jefferson,” including Northern California and southwestern Oregon. But asking to join an existing state is a slightly less difficult task than forming an entirely new one. McCarter points to a 1961 land transfer between Minnesota and North Dakota as evidence that it can be done.

McCarter has called the effort “a peaceful revolution” and a way “to gain political refuge from blue states” in interviews with the Oregonian. He claims that relocating the border could bring tax benefits to both states and ease some political gridlock in Oregon.

A signature-gathering campaign by McCarter’s organization paid off last year when Jefferson County in the central part of the state and Union County in the northeast voted to study the proposal. Other counties added referendums on the move to their ballots.

The Economist:

But lately the pendulum has started to swing back. One reason is that more than in other sectors, discussions in tech firms mostly take place over Slack and other corporate communication services—not ideal forums in which to advance nuanced arguments. This has been a problem in large tech firms particularly, which is why Google and Facebook now have moderators to keep internal online debates from getting out of hand.

Many Taxpayer a Supported K – 12 school districts use Google and Facebook / Instagram services, including Madison.

Nils-Christian Bormann, Yannick I. Pengl, Lars-Erik Cederman and Nils B. Weidmann:

Recent research has shown that inequality between ethnic groups is strongly driven by politics, where powerful groups and elites channel the state’s resources toward their constituencies. Most of the existing literature assumes that these politically induced inequalities are static and rarely change over time. We challenge this claim and argue that economic globalization and domestic institutions interact in shaping inequality between groups. In weakly institutionalized states, gains from trade primarily accrue to political insiders and their co-ethnics. By contrast, politically excluded groups gain ground where a capable and meritocratic state apparatus governs trade liberalization. Using nighttime luminosity data from 1992 to 2012 and a global sample of ethnic groups, we show that the gap between politically marginalized groups and their included counterparts has narrowed over time while economic globalization progressed at a steady pace. Our quantitative analysis and four qualitative case narratives show, however, that increasing trade openness is associated with economic gains accruing to excluded groups in only institutionally strong states, as predicted by our theoretical argument. In contrast, the economic gap between ethnopolitical insiders and outsiders remains constant or even widens in weakly institutionalized countries.

Madison recently expanded our least diverse schools, despite nearby space.

John Bowers, Clare Stanton, and Jonathan Zittrain:

We found that of the 553,693 articles within the purview of our study––meaning they included URLs on nytimes.com––there were a total of 2,283,445 hyperlinks pointing to content outside of nytimes.com. Seventy-two percent of those were “deep links” with a path to a specific page, such as example.com/article, which is where we focused our analysis (as opposed to simply example.com, which composed the rest of the data set).

Of these deep links, 25 percent of all links were completely inaccessible. Linkrot became more common over time: 6 percent of links from 2018 had rotted, as compared to 43 percent of links from 2008 and 72 percent of links from 1998. Fifty-three percent of all articles that contained deep links had at least one rotted link.

John Naughton

Why not? The answer is that the EU delegates regulatory power to the relevant institutions – in this case data protection authorities – of its member states. And these local outfits are overwhelmed by the scale of the task and are lamentably under-resourced for it. Half of Europe’s DPAs have only five technical experts or fewer. And the Irish data protection authority, on whose patch most of the tech giants have their European HQs, has the heaviest enforcement workload in Europe and is clearly swamped.

So here’s where we are: an online system has been running wild for years, generating billions in profits for its participants. We have evidence of its illegitimacy and a powerful law on the statute book that in principle could bring it under control, but which we appear unable to enforce. And the only body that has, to date, been able to exert real control over the aforementioned racket is… a giant private company that itself is subject to serious concerns about its monopolistic behaviour. And the question for today: where is democracy in all this? You only have to ask to know the answer.

Carina Julig:

He teared up while discussing a conversation he had with the father of a high school boy who had attempted suicide.

“Our kids have run out of resilience,” he said. “Their tank is empty.”

Chief nursing officer Pat Givens said that the hospital system does not have enough capacity for the number of children in crisis.

“We can’t build enough beds to keep pace with the demand,” she said.

Children with behavioral health needs are now being placed in medical or surgical beds because of the shortage while they wait for a bed in a behavioral unit, she said. Children as young as eight years old have come to the hospital after suicide attempts.

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).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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. 

Channel3000:

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.

Libby Sobic and Will Flanders:

Without fail, each state budget cycle always results in cries from the public school establishment that “we need more money in public schools!” Governor Evers continues this status quo assertion with his 2021-23 budget proposal for massive increases in spending for K12 education (about $1.7 billion). These declarations are often made without regard to the research showing that more money does not improve student proficiency.  But as taxpayers in a state with low reading proficiency statewide, the largest racial achievement gap for minority students nationwide and immense learning disruption after the pandemic, Wisconsinites must expect local school districts to be smart about their investment of taxpayer dollars.

As the Joint Finance Committee debates Wisconsin’s education budget this week, the following will provide clarity around the state and local funds and federal stimulus funds flooding into the state.

K-12 Funding Pre-Pandemic 

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.

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.

Dustin Gardner:

State legislators have accused San Francisco’s school district of trying to exploit a legal loophole to receive $12 million in state funding to reopen schools for in-person learning, arguing the district did not bring back enough students to qualify for the money.

California set aside $2 billion earlier this spring to help school districts reopen during the coronavirus pandemic. To qualify for the money, districts needed to reopen for all elementary grades and at least one grade in middle or high school by May 15.

The San Francisco Unified School District chose to bring back high school seniors but instead of offering in-person instruction to the entire grade, only some seniors were invited to return before the deadline. District officials have said they launched a “hybrid schedule” for seniors by the deadline, which might not qualify under the law.

Dr. Denise K. Lajimodiere:

American Indian boarding schools, which operated in Minnesota and across the United States beginning in the late nineteenth century, represent a dark chapter in U.S. history. Also called industrial schools, these institutions prepared boys for manual labor and farming and girls for domestic work. The boarding school, whether on or off a reservation, carried out the government’s mission to restructure Indians’ minds and personalities by severing children’s physical, cultural, and spiritual connections to their tribes.

On March 3, 1891, Congress authorized the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to create legal rules that required Indian children to attend boarding schools. It also authorized the Indian Office to withhold rations, clothing, and other annuities from Indian parents or guardians who would not send and keep their children in school. Indian Agents forcibly abducted children as young as four from their homes and enrolled them in Christian- and government-run boarding schools beginning in the mid-1800s and continuing into the 1970s.

Captain Richard H. Pratt’s boarding school experiment began in the late nineteenth century. A staunch nineteenth-century assimilationist, Pratt advocated a position that diverged slightly from the white majority’s. Convinced of the U.S. government’s duty to “Americanize” Indians, he offered a variation of the slogan—popular in the American West— that stated the only good Indian was a dead one. The proper goal, Pratt claimed, was to “kill the Indian…and save the man.”

Jamie Goldberg:

Oregon will allow people to go maskless outside but will require them to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 — and be able to prove it — to forgo masks in most public indoor settings.

That’s according to new guidance released by the Oregon Health Authority on Tuesday.

Oregonians will no longer be required to wear masks in public outdoor areas, regardless of their vaccination status, under the new guidance. However, the state is still recommending that people wear masks in crowds and large gatherings, especially if they are unvaccinated or at high risk for COVID-19.

The state will also allow fully vaccinated people to forgo masks in most indoor spaces if their inoculation status can be verified, putting the onus on businesses, employers and faith institutions to check vaccination records.

The new guidance comes after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced last week that fully vaccinated people generally do not need to wear masks or maintain physical distance in most public settings. Masks had been required in most circumstances across all of Oregon since July 1.

Mike Antonucci:

AFT Pennsylvania called for the resignationsof most of the board of the state school employees pension system amid allegations of dubious investments, lack of transparency and funny math.

A federal grand jury is investigating the Pennsylvania School Employees Retirement System (PSERS) “looking for evidence of kickbacks or bribery” and “potential concealment of material information,” according to reports.

“Through alleged errors and omissions, and under a shroud of secrecy, this PSERS Board appears to have jeopardized the present and future financial security of our Commonwealth’s most dedicated public servants,” wrote Arthur Steinberg, president of AFT Pennsylvania, in a letter to PSERS board members.

Robin Hanson:

Are elites nicer than other people? No, but they are better at being nice contingently, in the right situations where niceness is rewarded. And also with being mean contingently, in the situations where that is rewarded. Other people aren’t as good on average with correlating their niceness with rewards for niceness. A similar pattern applies to elites and arguments.

In a world with many strong prediction markets, social consensus would be set by the people willing and able to trade in those markets. Which could be most anyone. And those traders would in general be responsive to good arguments, as they are on the hook to win or lose a lot of money if they fail to listen to good arguments. So then arguments would be a powerful force for producing better beliefs.

But in our world, the perceived social consensus is mostly set by elites. That is, by whatever seems to be elites’ shared opinion. And so the power of arguments depends on elites being willing and able to listen to them. Do they?

Many elites are selected for their ability to generate and evaluate good arguments. So many are quite able to listen. But as with being nice, elites are especially good at a contingent strategy: they listen to and generate good arguments when they are rewarded for that, but not otherwise.

Jack Stripling and Andy Thomason:

Kreiss said he anticipated that, given the national controversy around “The 1619 Project,” there would be some political pushback about hiring Hannah-Jones. At the same time, he said, the Chapel Hill professors would not have brought someone on board who did not embrace the university’s fundamental commitment to intellectual rigor and evidence-based argument.

“If we saw Nikole Hannah-Jones as being an ideologue, who was coming here to push a political point of view, I don’t think the faculty would have so overwhelmingly endorsed her,” Kreiss said. “That’s not the way we teach. It’s not part of our values here.”

The Chicago school board will vote on a resolution this week to automatically promote all elementary and middle school students to the next grade, regardless of their grades — a nod to the pandemic’s disruption to learning.

— Mila Koumpilova (@MilaKoumpilova) May 24, 2021

Chelsea Mitchell:

It’s February 2020. I’m crouched at the starting line of the high school girls’ 55-meter indoor race. This should be one of the best days of my life. I’m running in the state championship, and I’m ranked the fastest high school female in the 55-meter dash in the state. I should be feeling confident. I should know that I have a strong shot at winning.

Instead, all I can think about is how all my training, everything I’ve done to maximize my performance, might not be enough, simply because there’s a runner on the line with an enormous physical advantage: a male body.

I won that race, and I’m grateful. But time after time, I have lost. I’ve lost four women’s state championship titles, two all-New England awards, and numerous other spots on the podium to male runners. I was bumped to third place in the 55-meter dash in 2019, behind two male runners. With every loss, it gets harder and harder to try again.

Associated Press:

“Last night, Pennsylvanians voted to reject Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf’s overreach of executive powers after his failed COVID response – a clear sign of accountability coming in 2022,” Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel tweeted Wednesday morning.

The state’s Republican Party chairman, Lawrence Tabas, said in a statement that Pennsylvanians voted to “put a stop to Gov. Tom Wolf’s dictatorship.”

Wolf has largely lifted his orders to stem the spread of the coronavirus, with the remaining limitations on crowd capacity lifting May 31 and a mask-wearing mandate for the unvaccinated that tracks federal guidance, until the state reaches a 70% vaccination rate.

Wolf’s office maintained that the disaster declaration does not affect orders designed to prevent COVID-19 from spreading.

Rather, it relaxes regulations for medical professionals, gives the state access to federal emergency aid and streamlines National Guard deployments, among other things, his office said.

Brad Polumbo:

“When the [Federal Reserve] says this [inflation] is transitory, I think that’s an excuse for government spending and borrowing,” the senator said. “It’s sort of from the same kind of lexicon of ‘deficits don’t matter.’”

But our spending levels aren’t sustainable. “We added four or five trillion dollars’ worth of debt last year,” Paul added. “We’re probably going to do the same again this year.”

It’s more than just bad budgeting, the senator warned. “What you’ve caused is a massive misallocation of resources, a massive infusion of cash into the stock market.”

“There is [going to be] a time in which people wake up and say ‘the emperor has no clothes,’” Paul said. “And at that moment in time, you will discover that there’s a lot of capital that’s gone in the wrong direction, that demand is exceeding supply… because we’ve disrupted the normal marketplace.”

Ashley Carnahan:

According to Storbeck Search—a firm hired by UC-Berkeley—the university allocates a budget portfolio of $25 million per year for the Division of Equity and Inclusion. 58% of the budget comes from campus and state funds, 31% from federal and state public service grants, and 11% from philanthropy and public grants. 

“As Berkeley strives towards the ideals of an inclusive, uplifting, anti-racist, and justice-centered campus during this unprecedented time in higher education and in the world, the University seeks a collaborative, solutions-oriented leader and accomplished visionary to serve as the next Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion,” read the program layout.

The university announced on Feb. 18 that Storbeck Search would be assisting with the search for a new Vice Chancellor, Equity & Inclusion.

Wisconsin Institute for law and liberty:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) submitted public comment to the United States Department of Education against the adoption of a proposed grant program to prioritize Critical Race Theory in federally funded American History and Civics Education. WILL’s public comment emphasizes our concern that the Biden Administration is attempting to push Critical Race Theory – including the New York Times’ “1619 Project” and the “anti-racism” ideology of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi – into public school curriculum.

The Quote: WILL President and General Counsel, Rick Esenberg, said, “The federal Department of Education’s stated priority to emphasize ‘equity’ and ‘anti-racism’ represents a troubling divergence from American values and principles. Advancing and promoting Critical Race Theory in public schools is not only morally wrong but may leave public schools vulnerable to liability and litigation.”

What is Critical Race Theory? Critical Race Theory is an academic discipline, based in Marxism, that teaches racism pervades every corner of American society, and therefore, that American institutions must be torn down and remade so that all of society’s benefits can be equitably redistributed.

Background: In April 2021, the U.S. Department of Education issued a call for public comment on “proposed priorities” for competitive grants in American History and Civics Education. Specifically, the Department wants to prioritize grant proposals that “support the development of culturally responsive teaching and learning and the promotion of information literacy skills in grants under these programs.”

Supporting background information for the grant priority state:

Glenn Greenwald:

One of the Intercept stories to which I (and many others) objected involved a fund-raising email sent by The Intercept to the public on May 4, in which they proudly boasted that they had obtained the full archive of private data on all users of the social media platform Gab. The Intercept vowed that they would use the data archive to target ordinary citizens, including QAnon conspiracy theorists and those who believe that the election was defrauded. Based on that promise, the email solicited donations from the public (why an outlet lavishly funded by the world’s 73rd richest billionaire and which provides their largely unread writers and editors enormous, above-market salaries has to beg for donations from the public in the middle of a pandemic and joblessness crisis is, as I understand it, the subject of an imminent investigative exposé on their finances). Because I am not on their email list, I became aware of that Gab email only when a former senior Intercept editor forwarded it to me, furious that The Intercept was now doing the work of the NSA and FBI by infringing privacy rights rather than protecting them: a core mission of the organization’s founding.

UCSD:

Papers in leading psychology, economic and science journals that fail to replicate and therefore are less likely to be true are often the most cited papers in academic research, according to a new study by the University of California San Diego’s Rady School of Management. 

Published in Science Advances, the paper explores the ongoing “replication crisis” in which researchers have discovered that many findings in the fields of social sciences and medicine don’t hold up when other researchers try to repeat the experiments. 

The paper reveals that findings from studies that cannot be verified when the experiments are repeated have a bigger influence over time. The unreliable research tends to be cited as if the results were true long after the publication failed to replicate.  

“We also know that experts can predict well which papers will be replicated,” write the authors Marta Serra-Garcia, assistant professor of economics and strategy at the Rady School and Uri Gneezy, professor of behavioral economics also at the Rady School. “Given this prediction, we ask ‘why are non-replicable papers accepted for publication in the first place?’”

Website:

Since 1998, Software Carpentry has been teaching researchers the computing skills they need to get more done in less time and with less pain. Our volunteer instructors have run hundreds of events for more than 34,000 researchers since 2012. All of our lesson materials are freely reusable under the Creative Commons – Attribution license.

The Software Carpentry Foundation and its sibling lesson project, Data Carpentry, have merged to become The Carpentries, a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives, a 501(c)3 non-profit incorporated in the United States. See the staff page for The Carpentries.

CAROLYN MCCUSKER and RHAINA COHEN:

Decades of research show that when a native English speaker enters a conversation among nonnative speakers, understanding goes down. Global communication specialist Heather Hansentells us that’s because the native speaker doesn’t know how to do what nonnative speakers do naturally: speak in ways that are accessible to everyone, using simple words and phrases.

And yet, as Hansen points out, this more accessible way of speaking is often called “bad English.” There are whole industries devoted to “correcting” English that doesn’t sound like it came from a native British or American speaker. Try Googling “how to get rid of my accent,” and see how many ads pop up.

Judith Curry:

What is concerning about this episode is not so much that a consensus has been overturned, but that a fake consensus was so easily enforced for year. This occurred during a key period when understanding the origins of the virus had implications for how it could best be fought. Scientists who understood that there was a great deal of uncertainty surrounding the origins of the virus did not speak up. Probity came from knowledgeable individuals that were outside of the field of virology.

Matthew Crawford states, ” Regardless of how the question of the virus’s origins is ultimately decided, we need to understand how the political drama surrounding the science played out if we are to learn anything from this pandemic and reduce the likelihood of future ones.”

Leo Lewis:

When I speak to her a decade later, Chua — a US-born law professor at Yale — is even more circumspect. And, in a parallel moment of self-awareness, China itself may be reaching a similar conclusion on the wisdom of allowing educational arms races to get out of control.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported Chinese government discussions on curtailing the country’s $120bn private tutoring industry, partly to ease pressure on children, but also to help revive slackening birth rates by reducing the financial burden of after-school classes. Analysts rushed to play down the risks of forced weekend closures and fee-caps, though shares in listed tutoring companies like New Oriental and TAL tumbled. The initiative sounds sensible, but can anyone, even the Communist party, resist the massed instincts of Tiger parents?

Lenore Skenazy:

Hats off to Texas: Over the weekend, it became the third U.S. state, after Utah and Oklahoma, to make reasonable childhood independence the law of the land. Now parents who live there cannot be investigated for neglect simply for giving their kids some old-fashioned freedom.

Amazingly, the bill became law on the 11th anniversary of “Take Our Children to the Park and Leave Them There Day,” a holiday created by Free-Range Kids and once considered so wacky—so dangerous—that it was splashed across the pages of The New York Daily News. The paper quoted the mother of an eight-year-old, saying: “Never in a million years would I do something that stupid. When the kid turns 18—fine. Until then you watch them.” And it spoke to an “expert”—the chief psychologist at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn—who said that “a seven-year-old shouldn’t be left alone in a backyard, much less a park.”

Too bad for that shrink. When the Texas law goes into effect in September, more than one tenth of all Americans will live under laws passed with the help of Let Grow, the nonprofit that grew out of Free-Range Kids, that insists our kids are smarter and safer than our cowering culture gives them credit for.

HB 567 enjoyed bipartisan support, sailing through the Texas Senate unopposed, and winning the House with a vote of 143 to 5.

Matthew Crawford:

The idea that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in a laboratory, and then escaped accidentally, always had a certain plausibility. The virus first appeared in Wuhan, China, where there is a laboratory that conducts research on bat coronaviruses — one of only a handful in the world to do so. Yet this possibility was dismissed quite forcefully and from the beginning of the outbreak by prominent virologists.

Now that same lab-leak hypothesis appears to be on the verge of acceptance as the most likely. Such reversals happen; it is the nature of science. In an emergency, it is understandable that a research community might commit to one theory over another, even if prematurely, in order to focus its intellectual energies and resources. Surely that’s what happened here.

But there may be more to the story. On 2 May, the veteran science reporter Nicolas Wade published a long, detailed account of the career of the lab-leak hypothesis. His reporting appears to have triggered a cascade of defections, not simply from a consensus that no longer holds, but from a fake consensus that is no longer enforceable.

Now 18 scientists have signed a letter in the journal Science with the title “Investigate the origins of COVID-19”. The New York Times notes that “Many of the signers have not spoken out before.” “Speaking out” is an odd locution to use in a scientific context; one expects to find it in a story about a whistle blower. If, during the Covid fiasco, scientists have not felt free to speak their minds, then we have a serious problem that goes beyond the immediate emergency of the pandemic. Regardless of how the question of the virus’s origins is ultimately decided, we need to understand how the political drama surrounding the science played out if we are to learn anything from this pandemic and reduce the likelihood of future ones.

Libby Sobic:

Rocketship Public Schools in Milwaukee is a network of two campuses around the City of Milwaukee that are serving more than 700 K4-5th grade students. Rocketship embraces their students and families to ensure that they are supported in and beyond the classroom. For Ms. Oliver and her daughter, a six-year-old with special needs, Rocketship has been a source of support, not only for her daughter’s academic needs, but ensuring that her daughter’s social needs are met.

Eliane Glaser:

It’s the middle of a dark, November night, and I’m about to have my first baby. But instead of the joyful experience I’d hoped for, I am being rushed into the operating theatre to have an emergency caesarean under general anaesthetic. I have a dangerous complication and my son’s life is at risk. Four hours earlier, I’d been sent home by a midwife who told me I couldn’t stay in hospital and have an epidural because labour wasn’t properly “established”.

It’s a week later and I’m back home with my son who, thankfully, made it. But I’m struggling. If someone asks me how I am, in a kindly voice, my voice cracks. I’m spending a lot of time sitting on the bed in a milk-stained dressing gown. In a few days, my partner will go back to work.

It’s five years later. I’m tired and hungry and alone with the children, who are bickering in the bath. It has been a long evening of trying to keep my temper. My son whacks his little sister. I shout so loud my throat hurts, pull him out of the bath, and shut him in his room. I’d slipped him a towel, but I’m still overcome with remorse. After they go to bed, I sink wretchedly into parenting websites, searching for reassurance. But all I find is cheery, zero-tolerance tips on positive reinforcement and leading by example.

NACUBO:

Private colleges and universities significantly discounted listed tuition and fee prices for most students in 2020-21—continuing a long upward march in discount rates that only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the 2020 NACUBO Tuition Discounting Study, 361 private, nonprofit colleges and universities reported an estimated 53.9 percent average institutional tuition discount rate for first-time, full-time, first-year students in 2020-21 and 48.1 percent for all undergraduates—both record highs. By providing grants, fellowships, and scholarships, these institutions forgo about half the revenue they otherwise would collect if they charged all students the tuition and fee sticker price.

Elizabeth Beyer:

With earned honors, all students are enrolled in classes with the same level of rigor and have the option to earn an honors credit using predetermined criteria at the end of each semester, based on their demonstration of knowledge and skills in the course. Students won’t have to decide in advance whether they think they’re able to achieve honors designation, and teachers won’t determine whether a student meets criteria to obtain honors status, something the district hopes will eliminate barriers to advanced course credits.

Earned honors started in the district’s Pathways program a few years ago and showed an increase in the number of students of color accessing honors designation: 54% as opposed to 41% in traditional honors courses during the 2018-19 school year. The new earned honors option has expanded throughout the district as a means of testing its efficacy before district-wide implementation.

The administration hopes to take earned honors district-wide for students entering into ninth grade by the 2022-23 school year and plans to provide staff with professional development to prepare them to teach earned honors courses before then. By the 2023-24 school year, the district plans for all 10th grade honors options to be earned, as well.

Related: English 10.

1. Last week I was invited to attend a guest series at UChicago’s Harris School of Public Policy. By then, I did not realize that the UC Chinese Students and Scholars Association(CSSA) protested the invitation and accuse me of “hurting” their feelings with all the disinformation. pic.twitter.com/AfjdOKY7oz

— Nathan Law 羅冠聰 (@nathanlawkc) May 22, 2021

Robby Soave:

From 2013 to 2017, the task of enforcing Title IX—the federal statute that prohibits sex and gender-based discrimination in public education—fell to Catherine Lhamon, who served as assistant secretary for civil rights within President Barack Obama’s Education Department.

Continuing the work of her predecessors, Lhamon’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) compelled colleges and universities to adopt sexual misconduct procedures that violated the due process and free speech rights of accused students and professors. Under her authority, the federal government pressured schools to adopt the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, discourage attorneys from becoming involved, and move toward an adjudication model that relied upon the testimony of a single campus bureaucrat vested with investigative powers. When Betsy DeVos became secretary of education under President Donald Trump, she swiftly moved to reverse the agency’s Title IX guidance and restore basic fairness to these proceedings.

But now that Joe Biden is in the White House, he’s giving Lhamon her old job back: Last week, the president appointed her to be assistant secretary for civil rights once again.

“Lhamon’s nomination is the latest example of the White House steering civil rights policy back toward the Obama administration’s approach and is likely to please advocacy groups for victims of sexual assault and civil rights organizations,” noted NBC News.

Assuming the Senate confirms her, Lhamon will be well-positioned to erode DeVos’ reforms. As such, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has called on the Senate to vote her down.

Alex Mungia:

According to Morgan, critical race theory does just the opposite, she continued, causing Americans no longer to see each other as individuals but groups divided by the color of their skin. She can think of “nothing more destructive to the cohesiveness of American culture than imposing [this] new type of racism.”

Morgan was shocked by how widespread is CRT in the American education system and told Campus Reform “I knew indoctrination was occurring at Brown University, RISD and URI, but from the response I have received to my bills in the past few days, I find that the left has surreptitiously infiltrated all our colleges and universities and K-12 schools.”

“We would never accept race shaming if directed towards black school children,” Morgan said, “And we should not accept it when directed at white school children. Or for that matter against anyone based on the color of their skin.“

Carolyn McCusker:

Last month, we published a story in collaboration with the NPR podcast Rough Translation about nonnative speakers navigating the world of “good” and “bad” English. Dozens of readers wrote in with their own stories about how challenging — and frustrating and rewarding — it can be to learn and teach English. 

We’re featuring three responses that we found especially insightful: an English professor from India shares an English word she’s used for years — not found anywhere in the dictionary; an author points out the politics behind terms like “native language” and “mother tongue”; and an engineering professor discusses why stereotypes about “accented English” are totally hypocritical.

Gail L. Heriot and Alexander M. Heideman:

This article makes the following points:

I. Some commentators have argued that in deciding Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the Supreme Court (and Justice O’Connor in particular) was influenced by the “broad societal consensus” in favor of race-preferential admissions policies, there was no such consensus in 2003. Indeed, the consensus of opinion went—and remains—in the opposite direction. Thus, if Justice O’Connor was so influenced, she was mistaken.  

II. Even if there had been such a “broad societal consensus,” it should not have excused the Court from its obligation to strictly scrutinize the University of Michigan’s racially discriminatory admissions policy. Unfortunately, by purporting to “defer” to the university’s judgment on whether the need for racial diversity in education is “compelling,” Justice O’Connor essentially admitted that the Court was not scrutinizing the policy with the level of care that had become customary in racial discrimination cases up to that point. 

III. With the overwhelming rejection of California’s Proposition 16 in the November 2020 elections, it has become all the more clear that a societal consensus really does exist on race-preferential admissions policies, but it’s a broad agreement against such policies, not a broad agreement in favor. Certainly, therefore, if Justice O’Connor based her opinion in part on the belief that Americans were somehow favorably disposed toward race-preferential admissions (at least for the short term), that reasoning can be safely dismissed now. With Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard University likely to come before the Court in the near future, the lesson of Proposition 16’s defeat should be (and likely will be) drawn to the Court’s attention.

The program’s existence came out after the news outlet obtained a copy of a March USPS bulletin that was “distributed through the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers.” It warned of the possibility of violence at upcoming protests though they acknowledged they had no reliable intelligence to suggest any alleged threats were legitimate:

“Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021,” says the March 16 government bulletin, marked as “law enforcement sensitive” and distributed through the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion centers. “Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts.”

[…]

“No intelligence is available to suggest the legitimacy of these threats,” it adds.

The bulletin includes screenshots of posts about the protests from Facebook, Parler, Telegram and other social media sites. Individuals mentioned by name include one alleged Proud Boy and several others whose identifying details were included but whose posts did not appear to contain anything threatening.

“iCOP analysts are currently monitoring these social media channels for any potential threats stemming from the scheduled protests and will disseminate intelligence updates as needed,” the bulletin says.

The report about the previously unknown iCOP sparked an outcry among Congressional Republicans. A House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing was held a week later where a USPS official confirmed its existence without going into a lot of detail:

Wausau School Board members @klo1622 and Jane Rusch have released a statement condemning the controversial “Every Black Life Matters” — an anti-BLM organization — event happening tomorrow at a Wausau High School.

Story to come from @ReneeNHickman and me. pic.twitter.com/iXKCBo433I

— Allison Garfield (@aligarfield_) May 21, 2021

John Solomon:

“While an astonishing number of public schools fail to produce students proficient in basic reading and math, they spare no effort or expense in their drive to instill a radical secular belief system that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago,” he added.

He cited the example of an Iowa public school district’s transgenderism study that declared that “everyone gets to choose if they are a girl, or a boy, or both, or neither, or someone else, and no one else gets to choose for them.”

“One thing we know this is not established science,” he argued. “It is a moral, psychological and metaphysical dogma of the new progressive orthodoxy.”

Asia Society – Southern California:

Of all the industries impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education has experienced one of the most foundational disruptions to its traditional model, displacing in-person classes and a vibrant campus life for virtual coursework done at home. This challenge of translating the college experience to an online format has only been compounded by pre-existing social issues exacerbated by the pandemic. Facing financial hardship, many students, especially within communities of color, have deferred enrollment or been unable to utilize the tools that make at-home classes possible, like designated study spaces or adequate technology. These inequities that low-income students and students of color have encountered during the pandemic threaten to have long-term impacts on their education for years to come.

Emily Oster, Rebecca Jack, Clare Halloran, John Schoof, Diana McLeod:

This paper reports on the correlation of mitigation practices with staff and student COVID-19 case rates in Florida, New York, and Massachusetts during the 2020-2021 school year. We analyze data collected by the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard and focus on student density, ventilation upgrades, and masking. We find higher student COVID-19 rates in schools and districts with lower in-person density but no correlations in staff rates. Ventilation upgrades are correlated with lower rates in Florida but not in New York. We do not find any correlations with mask mandates. All rates are lower in the spring, after teacher vaccination is underway

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Clinical Trial

Retrospective study; not a clinical trial.

Funding Statement

Funding provided by : Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Arnold Foundation, Templeton Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, Brown University Role on the COVID-19 School Response Dashboard: Providing funding for the dashboard, including funding for the engineering support at Qualtrics to host the overall and district-specific dashboards, and funding for staff to clean and review data from districts and states. None of the funding partners have had any influence on which data are displayed in the dashboard or how the data are presented.

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).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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. 

Channel3000:

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.

Joe Killian and Kyle Ingram:

Journalism school will instead offer Nikole Hannah-Jones a fixed five-year contract

In her career in journalism, Nikole Hannah-Jones has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship “Genius Grant.” But despite support from the UNC-Chapel Hill chancellor and faculty, she won’t be getting a tenured teaching position at her alma mater. At least not yet.

As Policy Watch reported last week, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media pursued Hannah-Jones for its Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism, a tenured professorship. But following political pressure from conservatives who object to her work on “The 1619 Project” for The New York Times Magazine, the school changed its plan to offer her tenure — which amounts to a career-long appointment. Instead, she will start July 1 for a fixed five-year term as Professor of the Practice, with the option of being reviewed for tenure at the end of that time period.

Mike Konecny:

Wisconsin’s share, $5.7 billion — $3.2 billion for our state government and another $2.5 billion to more than 2,000 county and local governments — is not needed. And its allocation was almost entirely arbitrary, much of it a matter of simple division rather than targeted need.

The numbers alone are staggering: $405,720,000 for the City of Milwaukee, $183,420,000 for Milwaukee County; $49,190,000 for Madison, $106,030,000 for Dane County; and $25,230,000 for Green Bay, $51,310,000 for Brown County.

Counties will get more than $1.1 billion, but from the most populated to the least populated county, from the wealthiest to the poorest, the shares will be equal, at a rate of about $194 per resident.

Waukesha County was allocated $78,390,000, but through some quirk in the formula, the City of Waukesha is getting “only” $7,150,000. “We’re talking to our legislators about it,” Waukesha City Administrator Kevin Lahner tells me. “We should have been in the (Community Development Block Grant) entitlement category.”

The problem, and this is a big one, is that the federal government is borrowing the money to give to governments that are, for the most part, better off than they were before the pandemic because of the CARES Act in March 2020.

Christian Schneider:

Between June and November, Blank’s office received 192 emails, 80 percent of which supported keeping the UW’s landmark Lincoln statue on Bascom Hill, according to a review of the emails obtained by The College Fix through a public records act request.

Blank has consistently said, despite Lincoln’s “complex” legacy, which “contains actions which, 150 years later, appear flawed,” she opposes removing the statue.

“Chancellor Blank considers a wide range of factors when considering an issue like this, including input from current students, faculty, staff, alumni and others,” university spokeswoman Meredith McGlone told The College Fix in an email.

Of the emailers supporting Lincoln, two dozen specifically threatened to withhold donations or other sorts of funds from the university if it were to give in to demands of activist students who called for the Lincoln statue to be removed.

“I will cease immediately all donations to the university and its student organizations” if the statue were to be removed, wrote one alumnus, adding, “I will also cancel my season tickets to the UW football and men’s basketball teams. And finally, I will engage in a very public and messy campaign to encourage my fellow alumni to do the same.”

Thread: This semester at @MIT, I analyzed over 33,000 @nytimes articles on #Palestine & #Israel using machine learning methods. In a new study, I prove a history of disproportionate bias against Palestinians in the New York Times. https://t.co/qYg7K1rzI0 1/12

— Holly Jackson (@h_jackson_) May 20, 2021

Brad Stulberg:

You’ve probably heard of the 80/20 rule before: once you’ve learned or figured out the first 80 percent of something, the effort it will take to learn the last 20 percent might not be worth it—because the last 20 percent is almost always the hardest. The 80/20 rule, also called the Pareto principle, applies to both physical and cognitive pursuits. For example, it’s usually easier to go from running nine-minute miles to six-minute miles than it is to go from running six-minute miles to five-minute miles; it’s easier to get proficient at chess than to become an international grand master.

The 80/20 rule is interesting to consider, but it can also be misleading. That’s because both the early and the late stages of skill acquisition feature unique benefits despite their varied difficulties.

Beginner’s Luck

When author and Outside contributing editor Tom Vanderbilt had his daughter, he, like so many other new parents, spent endless hours in awe of her capacity to learn new things and the joy those processes brought her. This got Vanderbilt thinking: When was the last time I learned anything new? So began his journey to learn five new skills—chess, singing, surfing, drawing, and juggling—which he details in his latest book, Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. Vanderbilt makes a compelling case that learning something new has myriad advantages, including promoting the brain’s ability to rewire itself, connecting you to new people and new communities, and reengaging our innate curiosity and open-mindedness. While all of these offer tremendous benefits, that last one may be the most important.

Douglas Perry:

Five eastern Oregon counties voted Tuesday in favor of considering becoming part of Idaho. Baker, Grant, Lake, Malheur and Sherman counties join Union and Jefferson, which voted last year to require county officials to study or promote joining Idaho.

Grant voted 1,471 to 895 for county officials “to meet and discuss relocating Idaho border.”

Lake voted 1,341 to 463 for the “relocation of Idaho border” to be taken up in “county board of commissioners meetings.”

Malheur voted 3,050 to 2,572 for “county court meetings regarding relocation of Oregon-Idaho border.”

Sherman voted 429 to 260 in favor of “promoting moving Oregon-Idaho border.”

Baker voted 3,064 to 2,307 for county commissioners “to meet three times per year to discuss a proposal to include 18 counties, including Baker, as part of Idaho,” the Baker City Herald reported. Baker County results are not yet available from the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office.

The grassroots group Move Oregon’s Border for a Greater Idaho wants to flip Oregon’s mostly rural eastern and southern counties — plus a few northern counties in California — into Idaho, believing they’d be better off in Idaho’s more conservative political environment. It’s hoping that political pressure from county initiative votes will lead to negotiations between Oregon and Idaho to move the border between the two states, putting up to 22 of Oregon’s 36 counties in Idaho.

Graduation Speech:

This year, when I say I am happy to be here, I’m not just making small talk. If you’re like me, you’re happy to be anywhere after the year we’ve all been through. I wish we were over in Elliott Hall, celebrating your achievements individually as only Purdue does among schools our size. But this beats the virtual version we were forced to in 2020 and marks a long step back on the path to fully normal life.

As we’ve never done an outdoor commencement before, we may have gotten a few things wrong. For one thing, way out here on the 50-yard line, it feels like we’ve carried that social distance thing a little far. However well it goes, like everything about your senior year, it will be one for the history books. For all the trouble and downsides, there can be some real value in living through a time like that.

For decades to come, scholars and ordinary citizens alike will look back on your senior year, trying to identify its consequences, and imagine what lives so disrupted were like. As they do so, they will know more than we can now about the results of the choices today’s leaders made. They will reach judgments, with the benefit of hindsight, about the wisdom and maturity with which our nation handled the challenge of this particular pandemic.

Odds are, not all those judgments will be favorable. Time will tell.

An ability to comprehend and work with complex facts and data has always been part of a Purdue education. At least since the Industrial Age, that’s been an essential tool for a useful life of the kind at which Boilermakers excel.

William Jacobson:

We have covered the ahistorical 1619 Project and the neo-racist “antiracism” of Ibram X. Kendi many times. There is a growing grassroots and state legislative movement to keep these Critical Race Theory variants out of education.

One of the high priorities of the Biden administration, however, is to force those teachings into public elementary and secondary schools through the federal Department of Education via a Rule Proposal, Proposed Priorities: American History and Civics Education.

Education Week described the heart of the Rule Proposal:

The Biden administration wants a grant program for history and civics education to prioritize instruction that accounts for bias, discriminatory policies in America, and the value of diverse student perspectives.

In describing the basis for the new grant priority for American History and Civics Education programs, the administration cites the scholar and anti-racism activist Ibram X. Kendi, as well as the 1619 Project, a New York Times Magazine project that highlights slavery and its legacy as a central element in America’s story.

“It is critical that the teaching of American history and civics creates learning experiences that validate and reflect the diversity, identities, histories, contributions, and experiences of all students,” the April 19 notice in the Federal Register states.

In West Roxbury, a powerhouse in the exam-school admission race, the overall number of seventh-grade applicants receiving admission offers dramatically declined from 133 last year to 69 this year under a temporary policy that capped admission by ZIP code. The tougher competition meant students needed an A minus to get in.By contrast in Mattapan, a neighborhood where families typically have less means to hire admission consultants, the total number of seventh-grade applicants getting in more than doubled to 51 this year, with some candidates who had a B-minus average securing a coveted acceptance letter from one of the exam schools.

Richard Vedder:

There are three relatively novel ideas to increase efficiency and reduce costs in college that I have promoted, largely to no avail, in recent years. First, I have called for colleges to have “skin in the game,” that is have to share the losses to taxpayers from defaulted student loans. That would incentivize colleges to be careful in matching student desires with capabilities and reality. Second, I have called for Income Share Agreements, a new way to finance college attendance reducing financial risks to students, one that has gained some limited acceptance and may yet be important in the future.

But I have been all but completely ignored in my call for a “National College Equivalence Test (NCET), where students performing well on a broad based fairly rigorous test could be granted a bachelor’s degree or its equivalent. (See this space for July 2, 2018). A student from my early teaching days, Clarence Page (pictured above), a distinguished Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, citing me, recently spoke favorably of a college GED, a way students with brains and ambition but limited formal education and resources could demonstrate that “I have the same capabilities of a typical college graduate and passed the NCET with a score of X.”

Following up on Clarence’s Tribune column, Steve Bertrand of Chicago radio station WGN interviewed me about the Collegiate GED. One listener then wrote me, “ I have no college education and am frustrated at 58 because I’m intimidated by the idea of walking into a university with all the scientific work I have done.” I would speculate the listener had gained a good deal of skill in the sciences from either the work he had performed and/or knowledge he gained through reading and other non-school ways of learning. If the body of knowledge accumulated equaled that of typical college degree holders, why shouldn’t he be eligible for a bachelor’s degree?

Howard Blume:

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.

Although still a draft, the Mathematics Framework achieved a milestone Wednesday, earning approval from the state’s Instructional Quality Commission. The members of that body moved the framework along, approving numerous recommendations that a writing team is expected to incorporate. 

The commission told writers to remove a document that had become a point of contention for critics. It described its goals as calling out systemic racism in mathematics, while helping educators create more inclusive, successful classrooms. Critics said it needlessly injected race into the study of math.

The state Board of Education is scheduled to have the final say in November.

Supermemo:

Children do not like school and they know exactly why. Adults find it hard to empathize and insist that “school is good”therefore “school needs to be endured”. In their difference of opinion, children are right, and adults are wrong. School is not good (I explain that in Problem of schooling). This text is intended for parents to outline the reasons for which kids cannot possibly like school.

The Wisconsin Institute of law and liberty:

Background: A fundamental and long-recognized “inherent right” protected by the Wisconsin (and United States) Constitution is the right of parents to “direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.” This means parents are the primary decision-makers with respect to their minor children—not their school, or even the children themselves.

But the Kettle Moraine School District has adopted a policy that disregards parents’ decision about how their children will be addressed at school. This policy violates parents’ constitutional rights.
This past school year, a couple’s daughter began to experience gender dysphoria and considered adopting a male identity. The family immediately sought professional and medical support for their daughter, but based on extensive research they also knew that immediately transitioning would not be in her best interest. The parents communicated their desire for the school and staff to refer to their daughter using her legal name and associated pronouns, yet the Kettle Moraine School District refused to honor their request, forcing them to withdraw their daughter from school.

After withdrawing her from school and following through on counseling, their daughter realized her parents were right and has re-embraced her birth name and her nature as a girl. She is now enrolled in a different school district.

The best way to learn what we need to know is by getting started, then picking up new knowledge as it proves itself necessary. When there’s an urgent need, we learn faster and avoid unnecessary learning. The same can be true for too much reading:

“Too much book learning may crab and confine the imagination, and endless poring over the research of others is sometimes psychologically a research substitute, much as reading romantic fiction may be a substitute for real-life romance….The beginner must read, but intently and choosily and not too much.”

We don’t talk about this much at Farnam Street, but it is entirely possible to read too much. Reading becomes counterproductive when it serves as a substitute for doing the real thing, if that’s what someone is reading for. Medawar explains that it is “psychologically most important to get results, even if they are not original.” It’s important to build confidence by doing something concrete and seeing a visible manifestation of our labors. For Medawar, the best scientists begin with the understanding that they can never know anything and, besides, learning needs to be a lifelong process.

Libby Sobic:

Wisconsin parents have spent the last year scrambling to help cover learning loss created by the pandemic. For students living in Racine, any learning loss is particularly harmful considering the district was a low-performing school district prior to the pandemic. Despite this unfortunate reality, local leaders in Racine continue to purposefully confuse parents and make it as difficult as possible for families to access the educational options available to their students.

The first thing the district did was update their website to refer to its own public-school options as the “School Choice” program. Of course, the phrasing of this option is misleading for parents when the state has long referred to the Racine, Wisconsin and Milwaukee Parental Choice Programs as the “choice programs.” In fact, the Department of Public Instruction’s (DPI) website for parents to complete applications is called the “private school choice programs.” The district is actually referring to the public school options available to its students within the district that are not assigned to students based on their address.

Racine has a good reason to highlight options for its families. Racine Unified was rated as “meets few expectations” by the state for the 2018-2019 school year. According to DPI, nearly 50% of the district’s students were not proficient in English Language Arts or math on the state’s test for 2018-2019. Without a doubt, students are in a crisis in Racine and deserve access to as many high-quality educational options as possible.

But while imitation is the best form of flattery, in this case, Racine Unified is purposefully misleading parents and confusing the options available to them. In a time when students are struggling academically and families are trying to determine the best options for their kids, Racine’s actions make it needlessly harder.

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).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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. 

Channel3000:

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.

Mike Antonucci:

Few people noticed that Colorado had 652 more teachers in 2020 than in 2019, and that they had a lower turnover rate than all other public school employees.

An emphasis on adult employment.

Wisconsin Policy Forum:

Since 2013, the Wisconsin Policy Forum has produced an annual report on the superintendent’s proposed Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) budget that analyzes and describes the key elements and provides an independent assessment for school board members as they deliberate its contents. Last year, for the first time, we produced a similar budget brief for the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD).

This year, because of several unique circumstances, we alter our approach to consider the budgets of Wisconsin’s two largest school districts in a single report. One reason is the vast uncertainty that surrounds both proposed budgets. MPS and MMSD each will receive huge new infusions of federal dollars from recently adopted pandemic relief packages, but there is still some murkiness surrounding allowable uses of those dollars and they have not yet been plugged into the superintendents’ proposals.

Moreover, state lawmakers have not yet determined whether or how the infusion of federal aid will impact their decision-making on state K-12 aids and revenue limits in the next state budget, thus also casting a cloud of uncertainty over the districts’ state and local revenue picture for next year. Similarly, questions surrounding future district enrollment levels and whether they will rebound in the fall will impact future revenue limits and state aid allocations and provide additional ambiguity for both districts.

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.

G. S. Carr, M.A. (“The Textbook that Unleashed Ramanujan’s Genius”)

THE work, of which the part now issued is a first instalment, has been compiled from notes made at various periods of the last fourteen years, and chiefly during the engagements of teaching. Many of the abbroviated methods and mnemonic rules are in the form in which I originally wrote them for my pupils.

The general object of the compilation is, as the title indicates, to present within a moderate compass the fundamental theorems, formulae, and processes in the chief branches of pure and applied mathematics.

The work is intended, in the first place, to follow and supplement the rise of the ordinary text-books, and it is arranged with the view of assisting the student in the task of revision of book-work. To this end I have, in many cases, merely indicated the salient points of a demonstration, or merely referred to the theorems by which the proposition is proved. I am convinced that it is more beneficial to the student to recall demonstrations with Bach aids, than to read and re-read them. Let them be read once, but recalled often. The difference in the effect upon the mind between reading a mathematical demoustration, and originating one wholly or partly, is very great. It may be compared to the difference between the pleasure experienced, and interest aroused, when in the one case a traveller is passively conducted through the roads of a novel and uncxplored country, and in the other case he discovers the roads for himself with the assistance of a map.

In the second place, I venture to hope that the work, when completed, may prove useful to advanced students as an aide-meirwire and book of reference. The boundary of mathematical science forms, year by year, an ever widening circle, and the advantage of having at hand some condensed Btatement of results becomes more and more evident.

To the original investigator occupied with abstruse researches in some one of the many branches of mathematics, a work which gathers together synopticaUy the leading propoBitions in aU, may not therefore prove unacceptable. ALler hands than inine undoubtedly, might have undertaken the task of making such a digest ; but abler hands might also, perhaps, be more usefully employed,—and vith this reflection I have the less hesitation in commenciiig the work myself. The design which I have indicated is eomevhat comprehensive, and in relation to it the present essay may be regarded as tentative. The degree of success which it may meet witli, and the suggestions or criticisms which it may call forth, will doubtI”; i have theu- effect on the subsequent portions of the work. With respect to tlie abridgment of the demonstrations, I may remark, that while some diffuseness of explanation is not only allowable but very desirable in an initiatory treatise, concisencss is one of the chief requirements in a work intended for the purposes of revision and reference only. In order, however, not to sacrifice clearness to conciseness, mucli more labour has been expended upon this part of the subject-matter of the book than wiU at first sight be at all evident. The only palpable result being a compression of the text, the resiilt is so far a negative one. The amount of compression attamed is illustrated in the last section of the present part, in which more than the number of propositions usually given in treatises on Geometrical Conics are contained, together with the figures and demonstrations, m the space of twenty-four pages.

The foregoing remarks have a general application to the work as a whole. With the view, however, of makmg the earlier sections more acceptable to beginners, it •wiU be found that, in those sections, important principles have sometimes been more fully elucidated and more illustrated by examples, than the plan of the work would admit of in subsequent divisions.

A feature to which attention may be directed is the uniform system of reference adopted throughout aU the sections. With the object of facilitating such reference, the articles have been numbered progressively from the commencement in large Clarendon figures; the breaks which will occasionally be found in these numbers having been purposely made,in order to leave room for the insertion of additional matter, if it should be required in a future edition, -without disturbing the original numbers and references. With the same object, demonstrations and examples have been made subordinate to enimciations and formulse, the former beiug printed in small, the latter in bold type. By tlieso aids, tlic interdcpendt’nco of propositions is more readily sliown, and it Lccomes ca8y to trace the connuxion between thcorcms in different branches of mutliomatics, witliout the loss of time which would be incurred in turning to separate treatises on the subjects. The advantage thus gained will, however, become more apparent as the work proceeds. The Algebra section was priuted some years ago, and does not quite correspond with the succeeding ones in some of the particulars named above. Under the pressure of other occupations, this section moreover wag not properly revised before going to press. On that account the table of errata will be found to apply almost exclusively to errors in tliat section; but I trust that the list is exhiuistivo. Great pains have been taken to secure the acciiracy of the rest of tlie volume. Any intimation of errors w-111 bo gladly received.

I have now to ackiiowledgc some of the sources from which the present part has been compiled. In the Algebra, Theory of Equations, and Trigonomctry scctioiis, I am liirgely indebted to Todhuntcr’s well-known treatises, tlie accuracy aiiil completeness of wliich it would be suporfluous iu mo to dwull upon.

In the section entitled Elementary Geometry, I liave added to simpler propositioiis a selection of tlicorcms from Town. seiid’s ifodrru Geometry and Saliuon’s Conic Sections.

In Geometrical Couics, the liue of domonstration followrd ngrecs, in the main, with that adopted iu Drew’s treatise on tlio subject. I am inclined to think tliafc the method of tliat author cannot bo much improved. It is true thiiA soine iinportant properties of the ellipse, which arr arrived at…..

This, along with many other math posts is done in memory of Richard Askey.

Bethany Blankley:

As school choice bills continue to make their way through state legislatures, a report on student achievement published by the University of Arkansas’s Department of Education Reform argues that the more educational options are afforded parents, the better statewide test results are.

“We find that higher levels of school choice are significantly associated with higher National Assessment of Education Outcomes (NAEP) achievement levels and higher NAEP achievement gains in all our statistical models,” the report states.

According to the Wall Street Journal, 50 school choice bills have been introduced in 30 states so far, designed to create or expand vouchers, tax-credit scholarships and education savings accounts, among other measures.

“This is a banner year for the educational choice movement. Hundreds of thousands of children nationwide will now have greater access to educational opportunities,” Jason Bedrick, director of policy at Ed Choice, a national nonprofit organization that promotes state-based educational choice programs, told The Center Square.

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).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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. 

Channel3000:

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.

Kappanonline:

Common Core began with great promise: broad popular support, the endorsement of policy elites from both parties, boatloads of cash from governmental and philanthropic sources, and adoption by 45 states within a few months of the standards’ June 2010 release.

And yet, more than a decade later, the best-designed study of Common Core’s impact on student achievement found only small, negative effects. No study has documented positive gains that rise to the level of either statistical or practical real world significance.

My recent book, Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core, attempts to describe what happened to that bold initiative.

Media coverage of Common Core followed an arc that mirrored the policy’s fate: perhaps too optimistic at the beginning, but after a few years of documenting the standards’ choppy implementation, a more realistic view of the reform emerged.

I’m no education journalist, but there are some valuable lessons here for the next time a major policy proposal is being presented and adopted: maintain a healthy skepticism, suspend judgment until evidence of outcomes appears, and do not let the assumptions of major policies go unchallenged.

There’s a lot to say. First, we must distinguish between two types of tests, or really two types of testing. When people say “standardized tests,” they think of the SAT, but they also think of state-mandated exams (usually bought, at great taxpayer expense, from Pearson and other for-profit companies) that are designed to serve as assessments of public K-12 schools, of aggregates and averages of students. The SAT, ACT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT, and similar tests are oriented towards individual ability or aptitude; they exist to show prerequisite skills to admissions officers. (And, in one of the most essential purposes of college admissions, to employers, who are restricted in the types of testing they can perform thanks to Griggs v Duke Power Co.) Sure, sometimes researchers will use SAT data to reflect on, for example, the fact that there’s no underlying educational justification for higher graduation rates1, but SATs are really about the individual. State K-12 testing is about cities and districts, and exists to provide (typically dubious) justification for changes to education policy2. SATs and similar help admissions officers sort students for spots in undergraduate and graduate programs. This post is about those predictive entrance tests like the SAT.

Liberals repeat several types of myths about the SAT/ACT with such utter confidence and repetition that they’ve become a kind of holy writ. But myths they are. 

1. SATs/ACTs don’t predict college success. They do, indeed. This one is clung to so desperately by liberals that you’d think there was some sort of compelling empirical basis to believe this. There isn’t. There never has been. They’re making it up. They want it to be true, and so they believe it to be true.
   
   The predictive validity of the SAT is typically understated because the comparison we’re making has an inherent range restriction problem. If you ask “how well do the SATs predict college performance?,” you are necessarily restricting your independent variable to those who took the SAT and then went to college. But many take the SAT and do not go to college. By leaving out their data, you’re cropping the potential strength of correlation and underselling the predictive power of the SAT. When we correct statistically for this range restriction, which is not difficult, the predictive validity of the SAT and similar tests becomes remarkably strong. Range restriction is a known issue, it’s not remotely hard to understand, and your average New York Times digital subscription holder has every ability to learn about it and use that knowledge to adjust their understanding of the tests. The fact that they don’t points to the reality that liberals long ago decided that any information that does not confirm their priors can be safely discarded.

Rasmussen Reports:

A new Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 50% of Likely U.S. Voters who say MSNBC or CNN is their favorite cable news outlet believe more than 100 unarmed African Americans were fatally shot by police in 2020. By contrast, only 22% of Fox News viewers believe police shot more than 100 unarmed black people last year. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Nearly a quarter of CNN viewers (24%) and almost one-in-five MSNBC viewers (19%) think cops fatally shot more than 500 unarmed black suspects last year, but only nine percent (9%) of Fox News viewers think so. Fox News viewers (60%) were about three times more likely than viewers of MSNBC (19%) or CNN (23%) to correctly estimate the number of unarmed black people shot and killed by police in 2020 as less than 50. Sixty percent (60%) of talk radio listeners also estimated the number correctly.

Williamson Evers:

The frame­work rec­om­mends eight times that teach­ers use a trou­bling doc­u­ment, “A Path­way to Eq­ui­table Math In­struc­tion: Dis­man­tling Racism in Math­e­mat­ics In­struc­tion.” This man­ual claims that teach­ers ad­dress­ing stu­dents’ mis­takes forth­rightly is a form of white su­premacy. It sets forth in­di­ca­tors of “white su­premacy cul­ture in the math­e­mat­ics class­room,” in­clud­ing a fo­cus on “get­ting the right an­swer,” teach­ing math in a “lin­ear fash­ion,” re­quir­ing stu­dents to “show their work” and grad­ing them on demon­strated knowl­edge of the sub­ject mat­ter. “The con­cept of math­e­mat­ics be­ing purely ob­jec­tive is un­equiv­o­cally false,” the man­ual ex­plains. “Up­hold­ing the idea that there are al­ways right and wrong an­swers per­pet­u­ates ‘ob­jec­tiv­ity.’ ” Ap­par­ently, that’s also racist.

Among all human endeavors, mathematics stands alone in terms of its beauty, universality, and innumerable applications. Though its role is often obscured by esoteric language, mathematics is behind almost all of humanity’s major advances in science and engineering.

Bridges stand, planes fly, rockets carry us into space, and MRIs can see into our brains thanks to precise mathematical calculations performed by powerful computers, invented by mathematicians such as Alan Turing and John von Neumann. Behind tasks performed by computers—predicting the weather, performing complex financial transactions, or encrypting billions of messages each day—lie sophisticated mathematical algorithms. Artificial intelligence, for example, is but a happy marriage between powerful computers and abstract mathematical models that sort and analyze massive amounts of data.

Before our discipline became the universal global enterprise it is today, great mathematical discoveries passed from ancient civilizations to medieval ones and then to modern ones. One can argue that the preeminence of each civilization was, in part, due to their sophisticated understanding and use of mathematics. This is particularly clear in the case of the West, which forged ahead in the 17th century with the discovery of calculus, one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs of all time.

James Wigderson:

The governor’s proposed state budget included an assault on school choice, three assaults actually, as Will Flanders of the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) pointed out. The budget included an enrollment cap on all private school voucher programs, eliminating the charter school authorizer Office of Educational Opportunity, and a requirement that all teachers in the school choice program be licensed by the state (even as the state faces a teachers shortage).

We know from prior research that school choice helps close the racial achievement gap. We also know that Wisconsin has the worst racial achievement gap in the country.

“The persistent achievement gap is particularly problematic because this represents the situation prior to the coronavirus pandemic,” Flanders wrote last October in an op-ed. “Differences in access to supplementary materials, tutoring, and even basic internet access tend to fall along racial and economic lines. At a time when most education is being conducted at home, some research has suggested that the pandemic will serve to further exacerbate these gaps.”

The largest school districts in the state, serving the largest numbers of minority students, refused to be open to in-person instruction during the pandemic despite research showing that transmission of Covid-19 from students was minimal. Meanwhile, many suburban and rural school districts, along with school choice and charter schools, remained open to in-person instruction and demonstrated that it could be done safely. While the teachers unions kept the schools closed that served the state’s minority populations, Evers remained silent.

Joseph Cox:

The Pentagon is carrying out warrantless surveillance of Americans, according to a new letter written by Senator Ron Wyden and obtained by Motherboard.

Senator Wyden’s office asked the Department of Defense (DoD), which includes various military and intelligence agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for detailed information about its data purchasing practices after Motherboard revealed special forces were buying location data. The responses also touched on military or intelligence use of internet browsing and other types of data, and prompted Wyden to demand more answers specifically about warrantless spying on American citizens.

Chris Rickert:

Madison police have arrested a child in connection with a social media threat made last week against West High School.

The Snapchat message posted early last week said the school would be targeted on Monday.

“My revenge has come,” the message said. “West High School, I despise your students and culture and on May 17 I will seek revenge. You can cancel school or add security that date, but that won’t stop me. I’ll simply Do it on another day … unannounced.”

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).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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. 

Channel3000:

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.

KTVU:

The University of California won’t consider SAT and ACT scores that are submitted with admission and scholarship applications under a settlement of a student lawsuit.

The agreement was announced Friday. The 10-campus system, which has more than 280,000 students statewide, decided not to continue fighting a judge’s injunction issued last fall that barred it from considering the scores for admission even when they were submitted voluntarily.

Iain Marlow and Felix Tam:

What makes the dynamic harder to resolve in Hong Kong is a deeper well of mistrust stemming from unprecedented street protests in 2019 as well as a subsequent crackdown by Beijing and local authorities that has eroded key political freedoms.

With political distrust permeating through every sphere of Hong Kong life, some see a refusal to heed government calls to take the vaccine as a form of resistance — particularly as Covid-19 restrictions and the national security law means forms of dissent have mostly been snuffed out.

“I won’t take the vaccine, because my friends and I just don’t want to follow any instructions or recommendations from the government,” said a 16-year-old student who gave her surname as Chau. “I don’t trust anything from them. We’ll do our best to resist and fight against the government in the way we still can.”

Yujie Xue:

An elite business school created by Jack Ma, the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, has quietly dropped all online references to “university” in a sign that the sought-after school may be adopting a lower profile.
The official Weibo account of Hupan University, which suspended new student recruitment after Alibaba-controlled Ant Group abruptly called off a mega initial public offering in Shanghai and Hong Kong last November, changed its name to the Hupan Entrepreneurship Research Centre.
The official Hupan website was also updated with the new name, while its official account on WeChat, the social media platform run by Tencent Holdings, was changed from Hupan University to simply Hupan on Monday.
Meanwhile, a video clip of a worker erasing the Chinese characters for “university” on a stone at the Hupan campus went viral across Chinese social media platforms on Monday. Hupan means Lakeside in Chinese, a reference to its location near the West Lake in the Zhejiang provincial capital of Hangzhou, where Alibaba is based.

Noah Vernau:

A teacher in the Poynette School District has been placed on administrative leave following an incident at the high school Tuesday.

A video being shared on social media allegedly shows a Poynette teacher berating a student for failing to wear a mask, calling him a “jerk” and “dummy.” The district has not confirmed the video, which was shared by talk radio host Vicki McKenna, is related to the teacher being placed on leave.

McKenna said she got the video from TikTok and edited it to protect the student’s identity. She declined to say who had posted the video to TikTok and a search of the platform did not immediately turn up a related video.

Jack Nicas, Raymond Zhong and Daisuke Wakabayash:

Apple still appears to provide far more data to U.S. law enforcement. Over that same period, from 2013 through June 2020, Apple said it turned over the contents of iCloud accounts to U.S. authorities in 10,781 separate cases.

Apple recently began disclosing how often governments demand that it remove apps. In the two years ending June 2020, the most recent data available, Apple said it approved 91 percent of the Chinese government’s app-takedown requests, removing 1,217 apps.

In every other country combined over that period, Apple approved 40 percent of requests, removing 253 apps. Apple said that most of the apps it removed for the Chinese government were related to gambling or pornography or were operating without a government license, such as loan services and livestreaming apps.

Ben Zeisloft:

A Johns Hopkins University medical professor said that closed schools are an “American disgrace.”

Dr. Marty Makary — a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s prestigious School of Medicine and a Fox News contributor — said during an interview with “Coffee With Closers” ripped public health officials’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the interview, Makary explained his thinking on herd immunity and his correct prediction that the United States would see a slowing of COVID-19 infections by April of 2021.

“What we’re seeing is a divergence in the data right now. You’re going to see two pandemics — one among at-risk people and the other is among young people who are healthy,” he said.

Aljazeera:

Ireland’s data regulator can resume a probe that may trigger a ban on Facebook’s transatlantic data transfers, the High Court ruled on Friday, raising the prospect of a stoppage that the company warns would have a devastating impact on its business.

The case stems from European Union concerns that United States government surveillance may not respect the privacy rights of EU citizens when their personal data is sent to the US for commercial use.

The Republic of Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC), Facebook’s lead regulator in the EU, launched an inquiry in August and issued a provisional order that the main mechanism Facebook uses to transfer EU user data to the US “cannot in practice be used”.

Facebook had challenged both the inquiry and the preliminary draft decision (PDD), saying they threatened “devastating” and “irreversible” consequences for its business, which relies on processing user data to serve targeted online ads.

The High Court rejected the challenge on Friday.

“I refuse all of the reliefs sought by FBI [Facebook Ireland] and dismiss the claims made by it in the proceedings,” Justice David Barniville said in a judgement that ran to nearly 200 pages.

“FBI has not established any basis for impugning the DPC decision or the PDD or the procedures for the inquiry adopted by the DPC,” the judgement said.

Many taxpayer supported K-12 school districts use Facebook / Instagram services, including Madison.

Priceonomics:

The Coronavirus pandemic has upended the real estate market so far in unexpected and varied ways. Record low mortgage interest rates combined with people spending most of their time at home has caused a boom in home buying many housing markets despite widespread unemployment.

Not only that, but people are moving and considering new locations. Office closures mean that many people are working from home and some employers have suggested this may be a permanent trend. All these trends are conspiring together to cause people to consider moving to new places across America.

Along with Priceonomics customer RefiGuide.org, we decided to perform an analysis for people looking to buy a home based on affordability. If you are tired of living in a place where homeownership is out of reach because of high prices compared to incomes, where else should you consider living?

We found that the most affordable housing markets in America were uniformly located in the South and Midwest. The most affordable place we looked at in America was Youngstown, Ohio where the median household income in one year is more than the typical purchase price of a home. On the other hand, almost all the least affordable places to buy a home were in California. Of all the markets we examined, Newport Beach was the least affordable market in the country.

Education-Freedom:

Summary: University would be higher quality and more affordable if students are able to attend a home university where they take a minimum of one class and the option take the remaining classes at any other accredited university in the country.

Claire Suddath:

In a new study published in in the June edition of Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years’ worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found no meaningful cognitive differences between men and women.

Men’s brains were on average about 11% larger than women’s—as were their hearts, lungs and other organs — because brain size is proportional to body size. But just as taller people aren’t any more intelligent than shorter people, neither, Eliot and her co-authors found, were men smarter than women. They weren’t better at math or worse at language processing, either.

In her paper, Eliot and her co-authors acknowledge that psychological studies have found gendered personality traits (male aggression, for example) but at the brain level those differences don’t seem to appear. It’s true that more men are diagnosed with autism and women with Alzheimer’s, Eliot points out, but those differences may be attributed to factors other than brain makeup. When Hans Asperger first defined what he called “autistic psychopathy,” in 1944, for example, he focused only on boys, effectively limiting diagnostic criteria for decades to come.

Applied Divinity Studies:

Since I first read Stubborn Attachments in 2018, I’ve struggled with its foundational provocations. Has growth been good? Will it continue to be in the future? What if it kills us all first? Today, I’m finally prepared to share an article aimed at answering these questions.

David Theo Goldberg:

It is true that anti-racism today has been turned into something of an industry. But “diversity training,” “racial equity,” “systemic” and “institutional” racism, and indeed “anti-racism” itself are not the inventions of CRT; all but diversity training predate it. Like “diversity” over the past decade and “multiculturalism” before that, critical race theory is being made the bag now carrying the load long critical of racism. The foolishness sometimes said and done in its name—including some genuinely wince-worthy—is being used as a sledgehammer to bash any effort to discuss and remedy racial injustice. Attempts to turn these into a manual, largely by those looking to advance personal, professional, or pecuniary standing, are doomed to ridicule, which in turn unleashes the conservative caricatures.

Critics such as Thomas Sowell, taking CRT reductively to claim that racism alone disadvantages Black people, counter that education is a major enabling factor in Black advancement. On the face of it nothing objectionable there. But in blaming Black people for lesser educational attainment, they pay no attention to deep, structurally produced inequities in public school funding. They ignore historical lack of access translating into cross-generational disadvantage. They sideline racially disproportionate class differences enabling a greater proportion of wealthier white students to receive after school tutoring and not have to work to put themselves through college. The conceptual narrowing of “racism” in the British Race Report—limiting it to the beliefs of individuals—engages in the same sleight of hand.

Banning standardized tests is a way to keep the hard-working children of immigrants from ascending the ladder of American society. https://t.co/krcxOQ54Nb

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) May 16, 2021

Eugene Volokh:

I take the same view, of course, of exams for students: I think they can legitimately ask a student to report what the material taught in class indicates, but shouldn’t test students on what they really believe about controversial matters. That may at times be a vague line (though it can be made clearer with clearly worded questions or statements on the exam material), and at times it might be a hard line for courts to enforce, even in public universities that are bound by First Amendment limits on compelled speech. But it’s an important line that universities, whether public universities or private universities that are committed to academic freedom, need to respect.

In this case, the faculty member wrote to the president, provost, dean, Faculty Senate chair, faculty academic freedom committee chair, and the director of the equal opportunity/affirmative action office:

Today I attempted to complete the educational module, Preventing Sexual Misconduct, Discrimination and Retaliation. The most recent email I received on this training states that “This module is a priority for the University and is a required work expectation for all employees. More importantly, completing this module is the right thing to do.”

On this last sentence, I disagree. In fact, I cannot in good conscience complete it, nor should any faculty member at this university, since doing so violates academic freedom.

In particular, in order to continue the training, at multiple points I am required to give the one and only “correct” answer to a question. If such questions were only to see if the trainee understood university policy, a legitimate aim of the university, I would have no problem. But they are not limited to this goal. Instead, the training aims to make the user agree to statements about the world in general which the university has no right to require of faculty.

Helen Pearson:

It wasn’t long into the pandemic before Simon Carley realized we had an evidence problem. It was early 2020, and COVID-19 infections were starting to lap at the shores of the United Kingdom, where Carley is an emergency-medicine doctor at hospitals in Manchester. Carley is also a specialist in evidence-based medicine — the transformative idea that physicians should decide how to treat people by referring to rigorous evidence, such as clinical trials.

As cases of COVID-19 climbed in February, Carley thought that clinicians were suddenly abandoning evidence and reaching for drugs just because they sounded biologically plausible. Early studies Carley saw being published often lacked control groups or enrolled too few people to draw firm conclusions. “We were starting to treat patients with these drugs initially just on what seemed like a good idea,” he says. He understood the desire to do whatever is possible for someone gravely ill, but he also knew how dangerous it is to assume a drug works when so many promising treatments prove to be ineffective — or even harmful — in trials. “The COVID-19 pandemic has arguably been one of the greatest challenges to evidence-based medicine since the term was coined in the last century,” Carley and his colleagues wrote of the problems they were seeing1.

Other medical experts echo these concerns. With the pandemic now deep into its second year, it’s clear the crisis has exposed major weaknesses in the production and use of research-based evidence — failures that have inevitably cost lives. Researchers have registered more than 2,900 clinical trials related to COVID-19, but the majority are too small or poorly designed to be of much use (see ‘Small samples’). Organizations worldwide have scrambled to synthesize the available evidence on drugs, masks and other key issues, but can’t keep up with the outpouring of new research, and often repeat others’ work. There’s been “research waste at an unprecedented scale”, says Huseyin Naci, who studies health policy at the London School of Economics.

Nick Anderson:

The president of the University of South Carolina resigned Wednesday following revelations of a recent plagiarism incident in which he delivered a commencement address that included a significant passage from another person’s speech without attribution.Support our journalism. Subscribe today.

Bob Caslen said in a statement that his resignation would take effect Thursday. “Trust is the most important ingredient of effective leadership, and when it is lost, it is nearly impossible to lead,” Caslen said. “I believe that is the case right now between the University of South Carolina and its president.”

Caslen, a retired Army general, was named president of the state flagship school in 2019. He had previously been superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Jeremy Merrill:

Reed had inadvertently stumbled into a cottage industry of sites that charge high premiums for what are otherwise free or inexpensive government services. It’s an industry that continues to use Google’s ad section, despite blatantly violating Google’s stated policies, and in some cases, the law. 

Google’s ad policy states, “Promotions for assistance with applying or paying for official services that are directly available via a government or government delegated provider” aren’t allowed. Yet The Markup found a swath of examples of ads that appear to do just that.  

Google has “removed all of these ads for violating our policies,” Google spokesperson Christa Muldoon said, after The Markup provided the company with the ads. “We prohibit ads that mislead users by implying an affiliation with a government agency.” 

Muldoon didn’t respond to a question about why the ads were able to violate Google’s policy.

Along with the site that fooled Reed, Tax Filing Forms also operates irs.gov-taxnumber.com—a URL that contains “irs.gov” but isn’t affiliated with the IRS. The Markup found ads for that site on Google in search results for “how to get ein.” Tax Filing Forms’ websites share the subdued design of government websites—enough that Reed didn’t pick up on what happened until her banker raised a red flag over a multiday wait time. (The IRS provides EINs right away.)

Dan O’Donnell:

Recently released emails reveal that last May, Racine Mayor Cory Mason emailed his fellow Democrat mayors in Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, and Kenosha to set up a virtual meeting during which “the Elections Planning Grant will be discussed.”

That grant—from CTCL—was ultimately awarded to the five cities, which were dubbed “The Wisconsin Five.” In both Green Bay and Milwaukee, CTCL deployed a partner organization, the National Vote at Home Institute, to essentially take over the administration of the presidential election.

The National Vote at Home Institute’s Wisconsin director, Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, was given unprecedented access to ballot data and even ballots themselves and so thoroughly (and almost certainly unlawfully) took over Green Bay’s election planning that the city’s municipal clerk quit in disgust.

In Milwaukee, he demanded a daily email from the director of the city’s election commission with detailed statistics on which ballots had been returned and which were still outstanding. He was so brazen that he even asked for access to the city’s absentee ballot database.

Wall Street Journal:

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on Thursday hopped onto the caboose that has already left the station. “There is no doubt: Schools must be open. In person. Five days a week,” the teachers’ union chief declared in a speech.

That’s nice of her to say now that nearly all school districts have announced plans to return to in-person learning five days a week next fall amid growing pressure from parents. Countless studies have shown that schools aren’t major causes of Covid spread, and younger children are unlikely to transmit the virus.

On the other hand, the learning losses from a year of virtual education have been significant, especially for lower-income children. School shutdowns and irregular schedules have also kept many mothers out of work.

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).

Molly Beck and Madeline Heim:

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. 

Channel3000:

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.

Riana Pfefferkorn

You may have seen a story in the news recently about vulnerabilities discovered in the digital forensics tool made by Israeli firm Cellebrite. Cellebrite’s software extracts data from mobile devices and generates a report about the extraction. It’s popular with law enforcement agencies as a tool for gathering digital evidence from smartphones in their custody. 

In April, the team behind the popular end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) chat app Signal published a blog post detailing how they had obtained a Cellebrite device, analyzed the software, and found vulnerabilities that would allow for arbitrary code execution by a device that’s being scanned with a Cellebrite tool. 

As coverage of the blog post pointed out, the vulnerability draws into question whether Cellebrite’s tools are reliable in criminal prosecutions after all. While Cellebrite has since taken steps to mitigate the vulnerability, there’s already been a motion for a new trial filed in at least one criminal case on the basis of Signal’s blog post. 

Is that motion likely to succeed? What will be the likely ramifications of Signal’s discovery in court cases? I think the impact on existing cases will be negligible, but that Signal has made an important point that may help push the mobile device forensics industry towards greater accountability for their often sloppy product security. Nevertheless, I have a raised eyebrow for Signal here too.

UPI:

More than twice as many rural school districts than urban districts in the United States had returned to in-person learning by February after shutting buildings during the pandemic, a report published Tuesday by the RAND Corp. found.

Some 42% of rural school districts offered fully in-person instruction by the end of that month, compared with only 17% of urban districts, the data showed.

Conversely, 29% of urban districts offered fully remote instruction at that time, compared with 10% of rural districts and 18% of suburban districts, the researchers said.

Elizabeth Green:

When Akihiko Takahashi was a junior in college in 1978, he was like most of the other students at his university in suburban Tokyo. He had a vague sense of wanting to accomplish something but no clue what that something should be. But that spring he met a man who would become his mentor, and this relationship set the course of his entire career.

Takeshi Matsuyama was an elementary-school teacher, but like a small number of instructors in Japan, he taught not just young children but also college students who wanted to become teachers. At the university-affiliated elementary school where Matsuyama taught, he turned his classroom into a kind of laboratory, concocting and trying out new teaching ideas. When Takahashi met him, Matsuyama was in the middle of his boldest experiment yet — revolutionizing the way students learned math by radically changing the way teachers taught it.

Instead of having students memorize and then practice endless lists of equations — which Takahashi remembered from his own days in school — Matsuyama taught his college students to encourage passionate discussions among children so they would come to uncover math’s procedures, properties and proofs for themselves. One day, for example, the young students would derive the formula for finding the area of a rectangle; the next, they would use what they learned to do the same for parallelograms. Taught this new way, math itself seemed transformed. It was not dull misery but challenging, stimulating and even fun.

2006: Math Forum audio video

Discovery Math

Connected Math

Dahyeon Jeong & Ajay Shenoy:

We study whether ruling parties can systematically win a slender majority of seats in close legislative elections, a phenomenon called “precise control.” We test for discontinuities in two outcomes that, in the absence of precise control, should be smooth at the 50% cutoff: the probability density of the share of seats won, and the identity of the party that previously held a majority. We find robust evidence of precise control, but only in high-stakes state elections that determine which party controls Congressional redistricting. Its absence in other elections suggests precise control is a strategic option used at the ruling party’s discretion. It shifts its strategy in high-stakes elections from seat maximization to majority-seeking, winning fewer seats but raising the chance it retains its majority. These tactics are disproportionately effective for the party defending a majority. It is 4 times more likely to win than to lose a close election.