Collin Binkley

A civil rights group is challenging legacy admissions at Harvard University, saying the practice discriminates against students of color by giving an unfair boost to the mostly white children of alumni.

The practice of giving priority to the children of alumni has faced growing pushback in the wake of last week’s Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action in higher education. The NAACP added its weight behind the effort on Monday, asking more than 1,500 colleges and universities to even the playing field in admissions, including by ending legacy admissions.

The civil rights complaint was filed Monday by Lawyers for Civil Rights, a nonprofit based in Boston, on behalf of Black and Latino community groups in New England, alleging that Harvard’s admissions system violates the Civil Rights Act.

More on Supreme Court affirmative action ruling

William Jacobson:

Here’s the portion of the segment when I addressed the planned evasion:

(09:39): Anybody who thinks that affirmative [is going away], you see a lot of headlines – ‘Supreme Court ends affirmative action’ ‘ Affirmative action is dead’ etcetera – us kidding themselves. These universities are completely addicted to racial preferences. It is part of their core philosophy on life. It is part of their core being. It’s why diversity, equity, and inclusion has become a religion on campuses. They are not going to give this up.

Harvard, immediately after the decision, sent out a statement that indicates how they’re going do it. So the court drew a distinction. You cannot consider the race of an individual in admissions, but you can consider that person’s personal experiences with racism. And that was something that all the parties had said. You cannot stereotype students. You cannot say all black students get treated the same. All white students get treated the same. But you can, if somebody personally has overcome racism in their lives, you can consider that.

And that is the loophole through which Harvard and other universities are going try to drive a truck. Harvard was very smug about it. They quoted that sentence from the Supreme Court and then they say, of course we will comply with the court’s ruling, meaning that’s how they’re going do it. Of course, they didn’t quote the next sentence in the opinion, which says, these essays and these personal experiences can’t be used as a device to evade our ruling. But that’s exactly what they’re going do.

Anybody who thinks racial preferences are over is kidding themselves. The schools will do a workaround almost universally.

Josh Blackman

For nearly five decades, affirmative action was sustained on the opinion of Justice Louis Powell. The key vote in Bakke thought that a diverse student body could improve learning on campus. Ultimately, Grutter adopted Justice Powell’s rationale, and held that universities have a compelling interest to pursue the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body. That simple premise spawned an entire institution around “diversity.” Universities were forced to frame every decision they took in terms of using “diversity” as a way to help students learn. Of course, the real justification for affirmation action could be found in Justice Marshall’s Bakke opinion. He grounded racial preferences for black students (and not other races) in the centuries of oppression, slavery, segregation, and discrimination. Indeed, the “educational benefits” approach tokenized minority students as curiosities for white students to learn from. Advocates for affirmative action had to grit their teeth to stay in the good graces of old white folk like Justices Powell and O’Connor.

Fast forward to Students for Fair Admissions. The majority opinion did not formally reverse Grutter–though I agree with Justice Thomas that the precedent is all but overruled. Still, the “educational benefits” rationale seems to have been nullified. Harvard identify several specific educational benefits it was pursuing:

Respondents have fallen short of satisfying that burden. First, the interests they view as compelling cannot be subjected to meaningful judicial review. Harvard identifies the following educational benefits that it is pursuing: (1) “training future leaders in the public and private sectors”; (2) preparing graduates to “adapt to an increasingly pluralistic society”; (3) “better educating its students through diversity”; and (4) “producing new knowledge stemming from diverse outlooks.”

The Court easily found those rationales were not sufficient:

Although these are commendable goals, they are not sufficiently coherent for purposes of strict scrutiny. At the outset, it is unclear how courts are supposed to measure any of these goals. How is a court to know whether leaders have been adequately “train[ed]”; whether the exchange of ideas is “robust”; or whether “new knowledge” is being developed?

Of course, the shortcomings of the “diversity rationale” were apparent in Fisher II, and Grutter. Nothing has changed. The voluminous trial record was irrelevant. But the earlier Courts, stocked with “brave” judges of “wisdom,” did not ask the hard questions. They blindly deferred to the universities.

This is an absolutely extraordinary passage in a NYT article from yesterday about the court ruling against the govt's right to suppress speech on social media

It cites a correct statement as evidence of a judge referring to a "debunked claim"https://t.co/DgDiCEFEPT pic.twitter.com/mfWVD6n2yb

— David Zweig (@davidzweig) July 6, 2023

Stephen Caruso, Kate Huangpu, Katie Meyer:

This story has been updated to reflect a statement from Gov. Josh Shapiro that confirmed earlier reporting by Spotlight PA.

HARRISBURG — Gov. Josh Shapiro says he plans to scrap his push for private school vouchers in Pennsylvania’s state budget in order to close a deal with the commonwealth’s divided legislature five days after the deadline.

The Democrat issued a statement Wednesday acknowledging that talks had deadlocked over a $100 million voucher program, which he had supported and which state Senate Republicans passed as part of their budget proposal last week. Pennsylvania House Democratic leaders oppose vouchers and had refused to act on the Senate’s bill.

Shapiro’s solution, he said, was to promise state House Democrats that if they pass the Senate’s budget, he will then line-item veto the vouchers from the $45.5 billion spending plan.

“Our Commonwealth should not be plunged into a painful, protracted budget impasse while our communities wait for the help and resources this commonsense budget will deliver,” Shapiro said in a statement.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro promises to veto his own campaign promise: "I will line-item veto the full $100 million [school choice] appropriation." pic.twitter.com/Zx8RzkSMkJ

— Corey A. DeAngelis, school choice evangelist (@DeAngelisCorey) July 6, 2023

Noah Smith

Over at Slow Boring, Matt Yglesias writes that if Ivies really wanted to promote social justice, they would let in more poor kids instead of fiddling with the name of the English department. Of course, he’s right. Elite schools let in mostly rich kids, because they have every incentive to do so. These schools all give out need-based financial aid, which means that rich kids are a profit center (they pay full price), while poor kids are a cost center (they get a free ride). Even a nonprofit business likes to maximize profit centers and minimize cost centers, so of course the Ivies try their hardest to let in rich kids. Also, given America’s low economic mobility, rich kids are highly likely to become rich adults, and rich adults give big gifts to their alma maters — another important source of income for top schools. So of course these schools aren’t trying to educate the poor. What incentive do they have to do so?

But on a more fundamental level, how much does any of this really matter? How central are the Ivies and other elite private schools to our educational system in the U.S.? And how much would it change our country if they changed their admissions policies?

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Burris, 33, was born in Taycheedah women’s prison on June 19 — Juneteenth. Her great-grandmother, Alline Atkins, became her caregiver when she was three days old.

An elementary school teacher told Burris about the historical importance of her birthday, which commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. Burris liked how her birthday equated to freedom.

“I think because of that I always was a bit of a rebel,” she said.

Around age 6, Burris said, she was “snatched out of school and taken to some strange building and basically told I’m never going home again.” She’s still, to this day, unsure why she was placed into the foster care system.

Burris reunited with her mom at age 13 but was kicked out of the house a couple of years later. She dropped out of high school after sophomore year.

Dan Lennington and Will Flanders

Encouraging high-school graduation is a policy that garners broad support, as it paves the way for higher wages and a better quality of life. In 2015, bipartisan majorities passed the Every Student Succeeds Act, a law aimed at reducing dropout rates. Since then, dropout rates have declined about 13%. But now a new twist: education bureaucrats in Wisconsin are taking a misguided approach by injecting race into dropout calculations. This new policy wrongly assumes that a student’s race is a dropout risk factor, perpetuating harmful stereotypes.

To identify students at-risk of dropping out, most school districts employ something called an “Early Warning System.” This tool is a relatively simple computer program that takes risk factors, weighs them, and then labels some students at-risk, which triggers personalized intervention strategies to help them graduate.

So, what is a dropout risk factor? It’s common sense: attendance, behavior, academic performance, and personal obstacles (homelessness and number of address changes, for example). Students ranking low in two or three of these are identified for extra support.

Simple enough. But commonsense isn’t enough for some schools. Wisconsin is adding another risk factor: race.

Wisconsin’s Dropout Early Warning System, or DEWS, uses race to predict how likely Wisconsin students are to graduate from high school. So if a student is Black, that’s a dropout risk in the same way as a student who is frequently absent.

In practice, however, adding race doesn’t really work. According to a recent investigation by Chalkbeat and The Markup, nonprofit, nonpartisan news organizations, DEWS generated highly inaccurate data, predicting many more Black and Hispanic students would drop out than actually did.

Wisconsin’s own internal validation test showed that the system was wrong almost 75% of the time. This leads to several negative consequences. Decades of education researchprove that students perceived as likely to be low achieving by teachers, even at random, learn less than students for whom expectations are higher. Moreover, distributing resources based on these wrong assumptions will invariably take those resources away from other students who actually do need the help.

Apart from wondering why Wisconsin would use a factor that led to inaccurate results, you may also wonder whether using race to predict drop-out risk is, well, a bit racist.

When asked about that, Wisconsin’s education spokeswoman Abigail Swetz explained, “The reality is that we live in a white supremacist society, and the education system is systemically racist.” 

By artificially injecting “race” as a predictor, Wisconsin education officials are not actually measuring dropout risks. They are making a political statement about their belief in the theory of systemic racism. Adherents to this hold that all racial disparities are caused by racism. Therefore, if more Blacks than whites are dropping out of school, then the cause must be racism. So it makes perfect sense to add race as a dropout factor, since race is the real reason why kids are dropping out.

Taxpayer funded DPI:

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Liam Knox:

When Duke University opened its campus in Kunshan, China, almost a decade ago, it was following on the heels of a movement of institutions eager to establish beachheads in the country during the political and economic détente of the mid-2010s.

But at a meeting with faculty and staff in November, Duke president Vincent Price said the institution’s leaders would “have to be clear-eyed” when considering whether to continue their contract with local partner institution Wuhan University when it comes up for renewal in 2027. 

Price said he was proud of Duke Kunshan and happy that Duke could be a “lifeboat” for students who wanted to come to America. But between rising geopolitical tensions and the gauntlet of managing a Chinese presence through the pandemic, operating the campus had become an undeniably tall order. 

“The world is conspiring to make that kind of a project really hard these days,” he said.

NYT claims court injunction against gov censorship will impede the work of "disinfo" researchers. The first expert quoted runs the UNC think tank that helped produce a report claiming Asian American opposition to affirmative action is a form of "disinfo"🙄https://t.co/bVmRSZT3rx

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) July 6, 2023

Glenn Reynolds:

In recent months, we’ve seen a lot of public-health folks quietly rowing back their once-apocalyptic COVID advice and asking for forgiveness for the mistakes they made.

Well, to make mistakes is human, and to forgive them is divine. 

But it’s easier to forgive human mistakes that aren’t pronounced using the Voice of God.

And deliberate misrepresentations don’t count as mistakes. Those count as lies, because that’s what they are.

In the early days of COVID, Anthony Fauci told the public that masks didn’t work.

It turned out that wasn’t based on the science of masks and COVID (there wasn’t any) but rather on a desire to preserve mask supplies for health workers.

Marcella Moon:

Google has updated its privacy policy to state that it can use publicly available data to help train its AI models. The tech giant has changed the wording of its policy over the weekend and switched “AI models” for “language models.” It also stated that it could use publicly available information to build not just features, but full products like “Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.” By updating its policy, it’s letting people know and making it clear that anything they publicly post online could be used to train Bard, its future versions and any other generative AI product Google develops.

The tech giant has highlighted the changes to its privacy policy on its archive, but here’s a copy of the pertinent part:

Isolde Raftery and Ashley Hiruko

The gun is a Glock 32 that was manufactured in 2017. It is easy to control because it is light, with the feel of a two-pound weight when its 13 bullets are in the magazine. 

It is all black, no frills, and moves through the recoil quickly. That means the shooter barely feels it when it discharges, allowing him to take aim again, and shoot again, even if he is a child. It is valued at $491.

The gun’s owner is a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, a 39-year-old man named Mark who lives in Lynnwood, Washington, a suburb north of Seattle, in an apartment complex with his wife and children – and until last fall, the Glock, which he kept in a black belt bag in his bedroom closet.

***

Last October, a few days before Halloween, Mark called 911. The Glock was gone. He told police that he asked his wife and 14-year-old son if they’d seen it, and they said they had not. We are not including Mark’s last name because he has not been charged with a crime, nor is there talk that he might be, even though there could: Washington state requires that you lock up your gun if you live with children.

Mark’s son admitted later that he had lied and had, in fact, taken the gun. 

It was 5 p.m. on a late summer day, or maybe early fall; accounts differ. He took the belt bag from his dad’s closet and walked down three flights of stairs to a secluded spot behind his apartment building, a narrow area with a railing that oversees a lush ravine. There, he opened the bag so his friends could see the gun.

Moving the Limit

There’s a strange subpopulation of Ivy League undergraduate students. They’re accomplished, driven, and capable. Yet they’re deathly averse to genuine effort. In fact, they actively sabotage their own goals.

In college, as the years passed and the stakes rose higher (from intro classes to job hunting) I noticed some of my friends spent increasing time consuming reality TV, experimenting with drugs, or partying. They drowned themselves in pleasure and mindlessness rather than send an application or crack open a textbook. Although they talked about how badly they wanted to achieve, it seemed that their real goal was to guarantee failure.

“Maybe they got sloppy, maybe they lacked drive, or maybe they couldn’t discipline themselves.” Maybe. But in my late-night talks with them, I found that it ran deeper than apathy, laziness, or an inability to self-manage. After a lifetime of habitual success, my friends weren’t suddenly struggling with the familiar road to achievement; instead, they were actively sprinting in the opposite direction.

Why? Why were these overachievers suddenly sabotaging their own goals?

Mark Judge;

The Supreme Court ended its season by exploding punitive liberalism.

The phrase “punitive liberalism” was coined by James Piereson in his remarkable 2007 book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. Simply put, punitive liberalism means liberalism that exists to punish the United States for all the world’s problems. From foreign policy to racism to personal psychological ills, America is the world’s great Satan.

In its recent landmark rulings, the Supreme Court has blown the doors off punitive liberalism. It has ruled that:

• Racism is bad no matter who does it.
• You can’t punish someone for being a Christian and speaking freely. And, in shooting down President Biden’s loan-forgiveness scam,
• That other people won’t pay your debts.

With the Dobbs decision last year, it ruled that it’s bad to kill innocent babies.

Erica Werner:

A tax on mansion sales in Los Angeles was intended to raise millions to fight homelessness. It hasn’t quite worked out that way.

Instead, wealthy Angelenos rebelled, putting the brakes on sales of homes priced at $5 million and above — those targeted by the initiative — with the result that the tax has raised far less money than expected since taking effect April 1.

The money is intended for eviction prevention, tenant outreach, emergency assistance, affordable housing acquisition and more. Backers of the tax, which passed via a ballot initiative with 58 percent of the vote last year, say they expect sales to pick up once the real estate market adjusts to the change. But taxpayer rights groups and landlord organizations have filed suit to stop the tax, and until the litigation is resolved, some owners will hold off selling, and city officials will proceed cautiously on spending money they might end up giving back.

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Meantime, debate over the legislation has laid bare the vast gap between the rich and the poorthat’s come to characterize life in Los Angeles, and much of the country, in recent years. The city’s homelessness crisis, with more than 40,000 people living on the street, is related to a shortage of affordable housing so severe that even some with jobs cannot afford to rent property, much less buy it — problems that the so-called “mansion tax” is intended to address.

The homeless population increased by 32 percent from 2018 to 2020, but has grown more slowly in the years since, according to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority. Los Angeles has long been a land of extremes, but homelessness may be the ultimate test of whether the liberal dream factory that makes entertainment for the globe can resolve a crisis of humanity in its own backyard.

Opponents argue that a $5 million home can hardly be called a mansion in Los Angeles these days, when the super-rich reside in properties with price tags of $20 million and above.

John McWhorter:

I recall two Black applicants we admitted who, in retrospect, puzzle me a bit. One had, like me, grown up middle-class rather than disadvantaged in any salient way. The other, also relatively well-off, had grown up in a different country, entirely separate from the Black American experience. Neither of them expressed interest in studying a race-related subject, and neither went on to do so. I had a hard time detecting how either of them would teach a meaningful lesson in diversity to their peers in the graduate program….

Sarah Karp

Mayor Brandon Johnson is replacing all but one member of the Chicago Board of Education, bringing on advocates with experience in grassroots organizing and nonprofit organizations. 

The changes are among the new mayor’s most pivotal decisions to date as he looks to transform education in the city. Johnson spent most of his career in education and with the Chicago Teachers Union, which helped catapult him from political outsider to City Hall.

The new board will have a different feel than in past years when consultants, lawyers and bankers filled many of the seven seats. Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot appointed more educators and Chicago Public Schools parents than her predecessors, and Johnson is moving further in that direction by appointing several activists to his new board. Only one of his appointees is a lawyer, and she runs a legal aid organization, while another new member works in philanthropy at a bank.

Conor Friedersdorf

John D. Haltigan sued the University of California at Santa Cruz in May. He wants to work there as a professor of psychology. But he alleges that its hiring practices violate the First Amendment by imposing an ideological litmus test on prospective hires: To be considered, an applicant must submit a statement detailing their contributions to diversity, equity, and inclusion. According to the lawsuit, Haltigan believes in “colorblind inclusivity,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “merit-based evaluation”—all ideas that could lead to a low-scoring statement based on the starting rubric UC Santa Cruz publishes online to help guide prospective applicants. “To receive a high score under the terms set by the rubric,” the complaint alleges, “an applicant must express agreement with specific socio-political ideas, including the view that treating individuals differently based on their race or sex is desirable.” Thus, the lawsuit argues, Haltigan must express ideas with which he disagrees to have a chance of getting hired…. 

What began as an option to highlight work that advanced “diversity and equal opportunity” morphed over time into mandatory statements on contributions to “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”… 

Commentary

Joseph Menn, Will Oremus, Cat Zakrzewski and Naomi Nix:

Issued on the Fourth of July, the order found that the Biden administration probably violated the First Amendment in applying pressure to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media firms to restrict the viral spread of posts that stoked fears about coronavirus vaccines or fueled false claims related to U.S. elections.

Leading U.S. social media companies began coordinating regularly with the federal government in 2017, following revelations of a Russian campaign to sow discord among Americans during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Partnerships between Silicon Valley and Washington on what the tech companies call “content moderation” deepened and broadened during the pandemic, when platforms such as Twitter, Google’s YouTube, and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram became hotbeds for conspiracy theories about the virus and opposition to public health guidance.

The attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, along with a host of other plaintiffs, sued Biden and a bevy of government agencies and officials in 2022, alleging that they had cajoled and coerced the tech firms into removing or suppressing speech that is protected under the First Amendment. The Biden administration has argued that it did not violate the First Amendment, but rather used its bully pulpit to promote accurate information in the face of a public health crisis and foreign interference in U.S. elections.

Govenor Evers veto has put state and property tax payers on the hook for more than $57 Billion in new K12 costs over the next 20 years assuming current enrollment trends continue. By 2043, we’d be on the hook for nearly $5 billion per year. pic.twitter.com/C6k2RnTu42

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) July 5, 2023

Analysis.

Wisconsin got $1.49 BILLION to help students after the pandemic broke them.

With just 1 YEAR LEFT TO USE ESSER III, $492 MILLION is unallocated. What the heck happened with the money?!

Green Bay: $33 MILLION left
Beloit: $18 MILLION
Oshkosh: $11 MILLION
Superior: $5 MILLION pic.twitter.com/lem8kG4tKP

— Quinton Klabon (@GhaleonQ) July 5, 2023

Edward Luce:

If Rome’s oligarchs could have travelled to the future, they might have learned a trick or two from the US Ivy League. It is hard to think of a better system of elite perpetuation than that practised by America’s top universities. Last week the US Supreme Court ended affirmative action in US higher education — a ruling mourned by the heads of each of the eight Ivy League schools. Dartmouth even offered counselling to traumatised students. An ancient Roman might have thought something radical had changed. Little could be further from the truth.

Of the 31mn Americans aged between 18 and 24, just 68,000 are Ivy League schools undergraduates — about a fifth of a per cent. Of these, a varying ratio are non-white beneficiaries of affirmative action. Many of those are from privileged black or Hispanic backgrounds, as opposed to Chicago’s South Side or the wastelands of Detroit. That is the basis on which the Ivy League lays claim to being a deliverer of social change. It is an optical illusion. In that respect the Supreme Court has done America a favour. Any disruption to this status quo is a plus.

But it is unlikely to trigger the soul-searching America needs. The US debate remains stubbornly monopolised by the ethnic breakdown of the tiny number of students who win the Ivy League lottery. The 19mn or so of those 31mn young Americans who do not progress beyond high school, and the roughly 12mn who go to less elite colleges, barely feature. Whatever tweaks the Ivy League has to make to keep its diversity ratios after last week’s ruling are thus largely irrelevant to the 99.8 per cent that will never get there.

The genuinely radical Ivy League option — spending their vast endowments to sharply increase student numbers — is unlikely to be entertained. The key to the Ivy League is exclusivity; a big expansion in intake would dilute that premium. We are thus likely to continue with a situation in which universities such as Harvard, with a $53bn endowment, or Princeton with $36bn, continue to get richer. Each of these fortunes could revolutionise financial aid at dozens of public universities.

The second most radical option would be for the Ivy League to abolish what is called “ALDC” — athletics, legacy, dean’s list and children of faculty and staff. Forty-three per cent of Harvard’s intake come from one of these groups. The first, athletics, includes sports that can only be learned by the privileged, such as lacrosse, sailing and rowing. The generous athletics intake by universities is why so many recent admission corruption scandals, such as the FBI’s Varsity Blues sting operation, involved athletics directors. Contrary to popular opinion, most athletics scholars are not black basketball players. Sixty-five per cent are white.

The second, legacy students, are the close relatives of alumni — the very definition of elite reproduction. Again, these are mostly white. The third, dean’s List, is a euphemism for the children of people who have donated a lot of money. An example of this is Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, whose father, Charles, gave $2.5mn to Harvard. Finally, there are the children of faculty members and staff. Taken together, the Ivy League could as easily be construed as an affirmative action plan for wealthy white people, which is very far from the progressive brand it has cultivated.

Its chief victims are Asian. The historic irony is rich. Affirmative action was conceived in the 1960s as a form of reparation for the descendants of slaves. It quickly morphed into a system of race-based gaming for many ethnicities. The group that has lost out the most, Asian-Americans, are immigrants from countries that had nothing to do with US slavery. The chief beneficiaries have been elite whites, rather than African-Americans. The latter supply window dressing for a system that remains substantially unchanged.

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

Abbey Machtig

This rural patch on Madison’s West Side is one of more than 35 school gardens around the Madison School District, including Lapham, Midvale and Crestwood Elementary schools, Badger Rock Middle School and East and West High Schools. 

Although school is out for the summer, the gardens are far from empty. A network of volunteers and employees help with garden maintenance, and summer camps give students a chance to get outside. The summer camp at Spring Harbor Middle School, currently in session, hosts more than 80 students between the ages of 10 and 14 over the summer. 

Getting your hands dirty 

School gardens aren’t just a place for students to burn off excess energy. By getting their hands dirty outside, students are developing critical learning skills, said Dave Ropa, a science teacher at Spring Harbor and the school’s greenhouse and garden coordinator.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Ann Althouse

From the article: 

In a 155-page ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of Louisiana barred White House officials and multiple federal agencies from contacting social-media companies with the purpose of suppressing political views and other speech normally protected from censorship. 

The judge’s injunction came in a lawsuit led by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana who alleged that the Biden administration fostered a “federal censorship enterprise” in its effort to stamp out what it viewed as rampant disinformation circulating on social media. The government, the lawsuit claimed, pressured social-media platforms to scrub away disfavored views about Covid-19 health policies, the origins of the pandemic, the Hunter Biden laptop story, election security and other divisive topics…. 

Some legal scholars have been skeptical that the government can be held responsible for content-moderation decisions ultimately made by private companies or that courts could intervene without chilling legitimate government speech about controversial matters of public interest…. 

Matt Taibbi:

The country today is run by politicians who spend all their time telling us freedom is dangerous, and the press won’t go near the word unless it can wedge it into an act of self-flagellation, à la the Washington Post headline today: “How an enslaved genius saved the Capitol dome’s ‘Freedom’ statue.” The one thing this country doesn’t need to be ashamed of is its unifying idea, and our cultural and political leaders have somehow managed to turn even that into a source of division.

Noam Chomsky:

The five chapters that follow are modified versions of the five 1988 Massey lectures I delivered over Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio in November 1988. These lectures suggest certain conclusions about the functioning of the most advanced democratic systems of the modern era, and particularly, about the ways in which thought and understanding are shaped in the interests of domestic privilege. Following these five chapters are appendices that are intended to serve, in effect, as extended footnotes amplifying some of the points raised, separated from the text so as not to obscure too much the continuity of the discussion. There is an appendix, divided into sections, for each chapter. Each section is identified by the part of the text to which it serves as an addendum. These appendices should be regarded merely as a sample. As references indicate, some of the topics touched upon in the text and appendices are explored in further detail elsewhere. Many of them merit serious research projects.

The Economist:

Their children go through one of the best schooling systems in the world, a status reflected in outstanding performances in international assessments of reading, maths and science. The latest data from the World Bank show that, on aggregate learning scores, Vietnamese students outperform not only their counterparts in Malaysia and Thailand but also those in Britain and Canada, countries more than six times richer. Even in Vietnam itself, student scores do not exhibit the scale of inequality so common elsewhere between the genders and different regions.

Emil Kierkegaard

Back in 2021, Russell Warne wrote a nice summary article about race differences in intelligence:

• Warne, R. T. (2021). Between-group mean differences in intelligence in the United States are> 0% genetically caused: five converging lines of evidence. The American Journal of Psychology, 134(4), 480-501.

The past 30 years of research in intelligence has produced a wealth of knowledge about the causes and consequences of differences in intelligence between individuals, and today mainstream opinion is that individual differences in intelligence are caused by both genetic and environmental influences. Much more contentious is the discussion over the cause of mean intelligence differences between racial or ethnic groups. In contrast to the general consensus that interindividual differences are both genetic and environmental in origin, some claim that mean intelligence differences between racial groups are completely environmental in origin, whereas others postulate a mix of genetic and environmental causes. In this article I discuss 5 lines of research that provide evidence that mean differences in intelligence between racial and ethnic groups are partially genetic. These lines of evidence are findings in support of Spearman’s hypothesis, consistent results from tests of measurement invariance across American racial groups, the mathematical relationship that exists for between-group and within-group sources of heritability, genomic data derived from genome-wide association studies of intelligence and polygenic scores applied to diverse samples, and admixture studies. I also discuss future potential lines of evidence regarding the causes of average group differences across racial groups. However, the data are not fully conclusive, and the exact degree to which genes influence intergroup mean differences in intelligence is not known. This discussion applies only to native English speakers born in the United States and not necessarily to any other human populations.

This paper is based on a chapter in Warne’s 2020 book, In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence. It’s a good book giving an introduction to the field while disproving popular claims. It basically serves as a kind of FAQ website, only in book format.

In response to the Warne review book, our team conducted a bunch of new tests, and the resulting paper has just been published:

Ann Althouse

The post title is the first sentence of the article, and the next part I quoted is very far down in the article. The SPLC’s designation takes prominence over any explanation of what this group is and why it deserves denouncement, and the explanation isn’t convincing at all. These are the parents who object to sex-and-gender-themed books in schools? The article says “efforts to remove books nationwide”… remove books from where? Schools? Or more? 

Near the end of the article there’s a heading “What does Moms for Liberty want in the next president?” One of the founders of the group is quoted answering “much more respect for parental rights.” The other founder said: “maybe not reach out to the DOJ and the FBI and collude with them.” That, we’re told, refers to…

… a much-decried 2022 National School Bo

Cat Zakrzewski

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked key Biden administration agencies and officials from meeting and communicating with social media companies, in an extraordinary injunction in an ongoing case that could have profound effects on the First Amendment.

The injunction came in response to a lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who allege that government officials went too far in their efforts to encourage social media companies to address posts that they worried could contribute to vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic or upend elections. The Trump-appointed judge’s move could upend years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies.

The injunction was a victory for the state attorneys general, who have accused the Biden administration of enabling a “sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise’” to encourage tech giants to remove politically unfavorable viewpoints and speakers, and for conservatives who’ve accused the government of suppressing their speech. In their filings, the attorneys general alleged the actions amount to “the most egregious violations of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.”

Daniella Silva:

With the fate of Harvard’s affirmative action lawsuit in the hands of a judge, a new study stemming from that suit has raised more questions about the role of wealth, race and access in college admissions at prestigious universities.

The study, published earlier this month in the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that 43 percent of white students admitted to Harvard University were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list — applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard.

That number drops dramatically for black, Latino and Asian American students, according to the study, with less than 16 percent each coming from those categories.

The study also found that roughly 75 percent of the white students admitted from those four categories, labeled ‘ALDCs’ in the study, “would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs,” the study said.

Almost 70 percent of all legacy applicants are white, compared with 40 percent of all applicants who do not fall under those categories, the authors found.

Real Clear Policy:

Three years on from the start of the COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, it’s clear the kids aren’t all right, at least when it comes to school performance. American students’ performance in primary and secondary (K-12) education has taken a beating, with test scores suffering from some of the biggest drops in decades.

Committee To Unleash Prosperity

This new gloomy report on the state of the government’s finances couldn’t have come at a worse time for Biden. Just when Joe was taking a bizarre victory lap an “Bidenomics” — and claiming he “cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion” (sic) — the Congressional Budget Office finds a tidal wave of debt spending and more than $6 trillion of new red ink under Biden’s fiscal stewardship.

This is looking more like the Hindenburg rather than the moon landing to us.

The Economist:

The email had a businesslike tone. From a “client recruitment director”, it was “reaching out” to offer The Economist services. In the next sentence, the word “leverage” was used as a verb, relating to a “perspective”. It concluded with a question: “Would you be able to hop on a 15-minute call”? Yet it stood out from the guff that clutters journalists’ inboxes for one reason: it came not from an established firm but from an undergraduate economics student at Yale University. The perspective to be “leveraged” was that of “Gen z”, a marketing term for people now aged from roughly 11 to 26. The offer was made on behalf of the Yale Undergraduate Consulting Group, a student club with around 60 members.

tgraduate students have long provided paid services to corporate clients. But over the past decade or so, undergraduate “consulting clubs” have proliferated. The idea is to band together and offer to do work for firms for a fraction of the cost of hiring regular consultants, and in the process learn a lot about business. Like real consultants, they pitch for clients, cold-calling or emailing. Some student clubs have a charitable bent: 180dc, a network of clubs founded in 2007 that has spread to scores of universities around the world, targets “social-impact organisations”. Others are more mercantile: Milan Singh, the sender of the Yale email, says the group he belongs to has also worked with several large companies, doing jobs like market research for fees

Maddie Hanna:

“The radicalism that the left has taken to try to force socialism and Marxism in our classrooms is the most outrageous thing this country has ever seen,” said Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction. “You all are on the front lines of it.”

As hours-long protests continued outside, the 600-plus member crowd inside was energized, including at this lunchtime gathering in the Marriott ballroom — the only session outside the presidential speeches to which The Inquirer was granted access Friday, with other workshops closed to media. (Topics included: “Comprehensive Sex Education: Sex Ed or Sexualization,” “Dark Money’s Infiltration in Education — and How to Fight It,” and “Driving the Narrative: If You Aren’t Telling the Story, Someone Else Is.”)

This session, which followed remarks from former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, included a panel of education officials — Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr., Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva, and South Carolina Superintendent Ellen Weaver — who touched on some of the big challenges in education, including pandemic learning loss and a reckoning over reading instruction, which many experts say schools have been teaching improperly.

Kenai Kawase

“There are not enough U.S. workers who have good first-hand experience specifically on building semiconductor manufacturing facilities, and many are not familiar with the requirements for chipmaking plants,” one executive with direct knowledge of the matter told Nikkei.

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

Joseph Simonson and Andrew Kerr:

The department could start by examining how politically connected families like the Bidens get their children into Ivy League schools.

In 2018, Hunter Biden tapped his father and a number of Biden family connections to help get his daughter into the University of Pennsylvania. Text messages and emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop, reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, show how Joe and Hunter Biden worked behind the scenes to get a subpar family member into one of the most selective schools in the country.

Maisy Biden’s college admissions process could raise a number of uncomfortable questions for the president. The saga highlights exactly the kind of “legacy admissions” Biden has slammed. The story also highlights the Biden family’s occasionally shady dealings with the University of Pennsylvania just as congressional Republicans are probing alleged ethical misconduct by both Joe and Hunter Biden.

Maisy Biden was never much of a student. But she had her sights set on the University of Pennsylvania, whose 5.9 percent acceptance rate made it one of the most exclusive schools in the country.

“I applied early decision to Penn today!!” Maisy Biden texted Hunter Biden on October 31.

Just two days later, Maisy asked her father for an update on her application. In the coming months, Hunter and Joe Biden would mount a full-court press on university administrators to get Maisy’s application over the finish line. The Bidens took their case directly to the top: University of Pennsylvania president Amy Gutmann.

On December 13, 2018, the elder Biden texted Hunter that he was “going to try to see [University of Pennsylvania] Pres GUTMANN tomorrow.” Two days later, Joe Biden told Hunter Biden that he “had a great talk with Guttman [sic].”

“Maisy still in the game for regular acceptance. But must do well in class this period. It’s real,” Joe Biden wrote on December 15. “We should talk about tutors etc starting tomorrow.”

Of course, this is a target rich area. “Elizabeth Warren Says Without Affirmative Action, A Native American Girl Like Herself Would Never Have Been Accepted To Rutgers”

Cassandra MacDonald

The students allege that homeless people are in the bathrooms and using drugs at the lunch tables.

“We see them coming into our bathrooms. We have them sleeping in our athletic shred and we also have them breaking fences and doing drugs on the lunch table,” student Alfredo Hernández said during the board meeting, according to a report from NBC News.

The high schoolers said that the problem has been ongoing for roughly a year.

There is currently a large homeless encampment right next to the campus and the students would like a fence to be built.

Scott Gordon:

The preemption of local tenant protections has real-time urgency. On the day that Protasiewicz is sworn in, renters across Madison will be embarking upon the hellish summer ritual of moving on an August lease schedule. A lot of them will be sucking up ever-higher rents, or moving to avoid a rent increase. If you haven’t grasped how dire things are for renters in Madison right now, you live under a rock. 

We’re in this situation in part because landlords have too much power and tenants have too little. At the very least, the City of Madison needs to implement some form of dramatic rent control, require landlords to offer more flexibility in lease terms and offer month-to-month options, ban rental application fees, create stiffer requirements for affordable units in new developments, and enact stronger eviction protections. This is a fast-growing city where people are increasingly priced out and spend far too much of their incomes on rent. State preemptions prevent Madison from treating this like the emergency it is.

ftm.eu

The set-up involving the Quantum Fund was arrived at via a circuitous route. The United States lost its appeal for Soros in 2008, when legislation was introduced to stop tax avoidance using offshore entities. According to Bloombergestimates, he would have to pay billions in federal and local taxes, plus Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) contributions, when the mandatory health care insurance became law.

Hedge fund managers had until late 2017 to comply with this new tax obligation, but – according to Bloomberg – Soros moved part of his investment portfolio to Ireland in 2008. At the time it seemed that this way he would be able to evade the tax obligation, which turned out not to be the case. 

The businessman was put under further pressure by the American government in 2011, when new rules were introduced to force hedge funds to be more transparent subsequent to the banking crisis. 

In order to avoid being subjected to these rules, Soros no longer accepted external investors and transformed the Quantum Fund into a family fund. In 2013 he transferred the portfolio of the Open Society Foundations to the Cayman Islands.

With the 2017 deadline in the offing, meaning that Soros would have to pay his tax liabilities in the United States, he donated a major portion of his own assets to the Open Society Foundations. Since such donations are partially deductible, this helped to ease the tax burden.

Opacity

Thanks to the way in which Soros has structured the finances of the Open Society Foundations, it is entirely unclear how the Quantum Fund currently invests the donations it receives.

Ali Swenson:

Moms for Liberty, a “parental rights” group that has sought to take over school boards in multiple states, is looking to expand those efforts across the country and to other education posts in 2024 and beyond. The effort is setting up a clash with teachers unions and others on the left who view the group as a toxic presence in public schools.

The group’s co-founder, Tiffany Justice, said during its annual summit over the weekend in Philadelphia that Moms for Liberty will use its political action committee next year to engage in school board races nationwide. It also will “start endorsing at the state board level and elected superintendents.”

Her comments confirm that Moms for Liberty, which has spent its first two years inflaming school board meetings with aggressive complaints about instruction on systemic racism and gender identity in the classroom, is developing a larger strategy to overhaul education infrastructure across the country.

Commentary.

Craig Simpson:

Virginia Woolf’s work has been given a trigger warning by publishers over concerns about past attitudes and language, The Telegraph can reveal….

The Economist:

Yet improving school buildings and expanding places only gets you so far. India is still doing a terrible job of making sure that the youngsters who throng its classrooms pick up essential skills. Before the pandemic less than half of India’s ten-year-olds could read a simple story, even though most of them had spent years sitting obediently behind school desks (the share in America was 96%). School closures that lasted more than two years have since made this worse.

There are lots of explanations. Jam-packed curriculums afford too little time for basic lessons in maths and literacy. Children who fail to grasp these never learn much else. Teachers are poorly trained and badly supervised: one big survey of rural schools found a quarter of staff were absent. Officials sometimes hand teachers unrelated duties, from administering elections to policing social-distancing rules during the pandemic.

Devin Willems:

Authorities in southern Wisconsin are looking to identify three juveniles who allegedly cause some mayhem on motorized shopping carts inside a Piggly Wiggly.

According to the Racine Police Department, three juveniles took motorized shopping carts at Piggly Wiggly and knocked items off the shelves. The Piggly Wiggly where the alleged incident happened was reportedly at 3900 Erie Street. 

Authorities also say that the group also intentionally ran the motorized cart into an elderly woman at the checkout line. One of the juveniles, identified only as a woman, allegedly slapped the store manager in the face before leaving.

Mariana Lenharo

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

“It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof,” says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn’t the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: “There’s been a lot of progress in the field.”

Olivia Herken:

Madison had some of the worst reading gaps in Dane County. Only 10% of Black students in grades 3 through 8 scored proficient or higher in ELA, and only 21% of Hispanic students, compared to 45% of their white counterparts.

Other Dane County schools had similar disparities. In Middleton, 20% of Black children were proficient compared to 62% of Black children. In Oregon, 15% of Black students were proficient compared to 47% of white students. In Stoughton, 11% of Black children were proficient compared to 41% of white students.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Rory Linnane:

To address some of the gaps in funding between districts, lawmakers previously set a minimum allowance for each school district, allowing them to collect at least $10,000 per student since 2020. As part of the voucher bill, lawmakers hiked the minimum to $11,000.

About 221 of Wisconsin’s 421 public school districts would be eligible to increase base funding to $11,000 per student under the bill, according to preliminary calculations shared by the state Department of Public Instruction, while almost all other school districts were already getting more than that. DPI noted its calculations factored in provisions of the state budget yet to be approved by Evers, and didn’t factor in other special adjustments districts may be eligible for.

Looking at the largest school districts, Milwaukee, Madison and Racine were already above an $11,000 per-student revenue limit, while Kenosha, Green Bay, Appleton, Waukesha and Eau Claire will be bumped up.

Madison has long spent far more than most K-12 school districts, now > $25K per student.

Madison’s 2023 – 2024 budget is at least $581,000,000 for 25,000 students.

Richard Vedder:

“A majority of Americans don’t think a college degree is worth the cost,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas Belkin in late March. That revelation was inspired by the results of a survey of over 1,000 adults by the highly respected research organization NORC (formerly National Opinion Research Center) at the University of Chicago, in conjunction with WSJ.

Worse yet for colleges, the proportion of Americans with unfavorable assessments of an undergraduate degree’s worth has been rising steadily and rather considerably over the past decade and probably longer. A decade ago, an already worrisome 40 percent thought colleges were “not worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large amount of debt to pay off.” Now that proportion has risen to 56 percent.

At one time, public dissatisfaction with college was far stronger among Republicans, rural citizens, and males than among Democrats, urban dwellers, and females. But even here the data are discouraging for universities, with significant upticks in negative reactions from previously supportive groups. To colleges, the most frightening trend should be that younger (near college-age) adults have become markedly less fervent believers in the positive economic advantages of a college degree.

Near-college-age adults have become less fervent believers in the economic advantages of a college degree.

Probably the most significant spokesperson for the higher-education community is Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council of Education, who concedes the new data are “sobering … and in some ways a wake-up call.”

To be sure, the operational impact of this negative attitudinal change no doubt varies considerably across the higher-education landscape. I doubt the administration and faculty at Harvard or Stanford are worrying much, but employees at mid- or lower-reputation schools should be concerned, as should present and prospective students and those marketing the bonds with which universities finance capital improvements and other needs. On the latter point, in December, Fitch Ratings indicated it “anticipates a deteriorating credit environment for U.S. Public Finance Higher Education in 2023 relative to 2022.”

Matthew Lilley:

Compared to the thorny disputes that often characterize cases that reach the Supreme Court, the disputes in these two cases are refreshingly simple. SFFA alleges, backed by copious statistical evidence, that Harvard’s undergraduate admission process discriminates against Asian-American applicants compared to otherwise equivalent White applicants. SFFA argues that this places Harvard in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin… be denied the benefits of… any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Supposing Harvard does use race in admission decisions, and rejects Asian-American applicants who would be accepted if only their race differed, it is hard to imagine how the violation of the plain meaning of the statute could be clearer. Earning a degree is a core benefit provided by universities to the public, which someone rejected from admission to the university is denied. And like almost every college in the country, Harvard receives federal funding. Universities, even including the most elite institutions such as Harvard, are not above the law.

The lawsuit against UNC-Chapel Hill is similar: SFFA alleges that UNC exhibits an overwhelming tendency to admit underrepresented minority students at the expense of White and Asian-American applicants with superior academic credentials. Since UNC is a public university, SFFA argues that in addition to violating Title VI, these admission procedures are unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment – as in Brown v Board of Education, which found racial segregation in public schools illegal, arms of the government are not generally permitted to discriminate based on race.

Harvard (and UNC), however, take a very different view. They point to over four decades of Supreme Court precedent from the Bakke decision onward, through which the Court has upheld race-conscious policies that consider race as one factor among many in admissions. Harvard argues that it has a compelling interest in obtaining the benefits that stem from having a student body that is diverse along many dimensions including race, and that it would be unable to achieve a comparably diverse class without considering race as a factor in admissions.

In practice, this is indeed the current operative law of the land. But it is also subject to fierce opposition from those, like Justice Thomas, who maintain that “a state’s use of race in higher education admissions decisions is categorically prohibited by the Equal Protection Clause” and “that constitutional imperative does not change in the face of a ‘faddish theor[y]’ that racial discrimination may produce ‘educational benefits.’” Consistent with this, opponents of race-conscious admissions argue that these practices which deny people equal treatment because of their race are unfair and immoral. They further argue that the precedents upon which race-conscious admissions rely are a legally incoherent mess stemming from justices imposing their political preferences over the plain text of law.

Lee Fang:

It’s amazing how many pages the liberal justices spend discussing historical racial wrongs without ever really touching the history of Asian Americans, the actual plaintiffs in the affirmative action case. The only justice to do that is Justice Thomas, in his concurrence.

As the Court’s opinion today explains, the zero-sum nature of college admissions- -where students compete for a finite number of seats in each school’s entering class aptly demonstrates the point. Ante, at 27.° Petitioner here represents Asian Americans who allege that, at the margins, Asian applicants were denied admission because of their race. Yet, Asian Americans can hardly be described as the beneficiaries of historical racial advantages. To the con-trary, our Nation’s first immigration ban targeted the Chi-nese, in part, based on “worker resentment of the low wage rates accepted by Chinese workers.” U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights Issues Facing Asian Americans in the 1990s, p. 3 (1992) (Civil Rights Issues); Act of May 6, 1882, ch. 126, 22 Stat. 58-59.

In subsequent years, “strong anti-Asian sentiments in the Western States led to the adoption of many discriminatory laws at the State and local levels, similar to those aimed at blacks in the South,” and “segregation in public facilities, including schools, was quite common until after the Second World War.” Civil Rights Issues 7; see also S. Hinnershitz, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American

° JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR apparently believes that race-conscious admission programs can somehow increase the chances that members of certain races (blacks and Hispanics) are admitted without decreasing the chances of admission for members of other races (Asians). See post, at

58-59. This simply defies mathematics. In a zero-sum game like college admissions, any sorting mechanism that takes race into account in any way, see post, at 27 (opinion of JACKSON, J.) (defending such a system), has discriminated based on race to the benefit of some races and the detriment of others. And, the universities here admit that race is determinative in at least some of their admissions decisions. See, e.g., Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 20-1199, at 67; 567 F. Supp. 3d 580, 633 (MDNC 2021); see also 397 F. Supp. 3d 126, 178 (Mass. 2019) (noting that, for Harvard,

“race is a determinative tip for” a significant percentage “of all admitted African American and Hispanic applicants”); ante, at 5, n. 1 (describing the role that race plays in the universities’ admissions processes).

Civil Rights in the South 21 (2017) (explaining that while both Asians and blacks have at times fought “against similar forms of discrimination,” “It]he issues of citizenship and immigrant status often defined Asian American battles for civil rights and separated them from African American legal battles”). Indeed, this Court even sanctioned this segregation in the context of schools, no less. In Gong Lum

v. Rice, 275 U. S. 78, 81-82, 85-87 (1927), the Court held that a 9-year-old Chinese-American girl could be denied entry to a “white” school because she was “a member of the Mongolian or yellow race.”

Also, following the Japanese attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans in the American West were evacuated and interned in relocation camps. See Exec. Order No. 9066, 3 CFR 1092 (1943). Over 120,000 were removed to camps beginning in 1942, and the last camp that held Japanese Americans did not close until

1948. National Park Service, Japanese American Life During Internment, www.nps.gov/articles/japanese-american-internment-archeology.htm. In the interim, this Court endorsed the practice. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S.214 (1944).

Given the history of discrimination against Asian Ameri-cans, especially their history with segregated schools, it seems particularly incongruous to suggest that a past history of segregationist policies toward blacks should be remedied at the expense of Asian American college applicants.10 But this problem is not limited to Asian Americans; more

10 Even beyond Asian Americans, it is abundantly clear that the university respondents’ racial categories are vastly oversimplistic, as the opinion of the Court and JUSTICE GORSUCH’s concurrence make clear. See ante, at 24-25; post, at 5-7 (opinion of GORSUCH, J.). Their “affirmative action” programs do not help Jewish, Irish, Polish, or other “white” ethnic groups whose ancestors faced discrimination upon arrival in America, any more than they help the descendants of those Japanese-American citizens interned during World War I.

Lee Fang:

It’s amazing how many pages the liberal justices spend discussing historical racial wrongs without ever really touching the history of Asian Americans, the actual plaintiffs in the affirmative action case. The only justice to do that is Justice Thomas, in his concurrence.

As the Court’s opinion today explains, the zero-sum nature of college admissions- -where students compete for a finite number of seats in each school’s entering class aptly demonstrates the point. Ante, at 27.° Petitioner here represents Asian Americans who allege that, at the margins, Asian applicants were denied admission because of their race. Yet, Asian Americans can hardly be described as the beneficiaries of historical racial advantages. To the con-trary, our Nation’s first immigration ban targeted the Chi-nese, in part, based on “worker resentment of the low wage rates accepted by Chinese workers.” U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights Issues Facing Asian Americans in the 1990s, p. 3 (1992) (Civil Rights Issues); Act of May 6, 1882, ch. 126, 22 Stat. 58-59.

In subsequent years, “strong anti-Asian sentiments in the Western States led to the adoption of many discriminatory laws at the State and local levels, similar to those aimed at blacks in the South,” and “segregation in public facilities, including schools, was quite common until after the Second World War.” Civil Rights Issues 7; see also S. Hinnershitz, A Different Shade of Justice: Asian American

° JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR apparently believes that race-conscious admission programs can somehow increase the chances that members of certain races (blacks and Hispanics) are admitted without decreasing the chances of admission for members of other races (Asians). See post, at

58-59. This simply defies mathematics. In a zero-sum game like college admissions, any sorting mechanism that takes race into account in any way, see post, at 27 (opinion of JACKSON, J.) (defending such a system), has discriminated based on race to the benefit of some races and the detriment of others. And, the universities here admit that race is determinative in at least some of their admissions decisions. See, e.g., Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 20-1199, at 67; 567 F. Supp. 3d 580, 633 (MDNC 2021); see also 397 F. Supp. 3d 126, 178 (Mass. 2019) (noting that, for Harvard,

“race is a determinative tip for” a significant percentage “of all admitted African American and Hispanic applicants”); ante, at 5, n. 1 (describing the role that race plays in the universities’ admissions processes).

Civil Rights in the South 21 (2017) (explaining that while both Asians and blacks have at times fought “against similar forms of discrimination,” “It]he issues of citizenship and immigrant status often defined Asian American battles for civil rights and separated them from African American legal battles”). Indeed, this Court even sanctioned this segregation in the context of schools, no less. In Gong Lum

v. Rice, 275 U. S. 78, 81-82, 85-87 (1927), the Court held that a 9-year-old Chinese-American girl could be denied entry to a “white” school because she was “a member of the Mongolian or yellow race.”

Also, following the Japanese attack on the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans in the American West were evacuated and interned in relocation camps. See Exec. Order No. 9066, 3 CFR 1092 (1943). Over 120,000 were removed to camps beginning in 1942, and the last camp that held Japanese Americans did not close until

1948. National Park Service, Japanese American Life During Internment, www.nps.gov/articles/japanese-american-internment-archeology.htm. In the interim, this Court endorsed the practice. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U. S.214 (1944).

Given the history of discrimination against Asian Ameri-cans, especially their history with segregated schools, it seems particularly incongruous to suggest that a past history of segregationist policies toward blacks should be remedied at the expense of Asian American college applicants.10 But this problem is not limited to Asian Americans; more

10 Even beyond Asian Americans, it is abundantly clear that the university respondents’ racial categories are vastly oversimplistic, as the opinion of the Court and JUSTICE GORSUCH’s concurrence make clear. See ante, at 24-25; post, at 5-7 (opinion of GORSUCH, J.). Their “affirmative action” programs do not help Jewish, Irish, Polish, or other “white” ethnic groups whose ancestors faced discrimination upon arrival in America, any more than they help the descendants of those Japanese-American citizens interned during World War I.

Leor Sapir:

A growing number of countries, including some of the most progressive in Europe, are rejecting the U.S. “gender-affirming” model of care for transgender-identified youth. These countries have adopted a far more restrictive and cautious approach, one that prioritizes psychotherapy and reserves hormonal interventions for extreme cases.  

In stark contrast to groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which urges clinicians to “affirm” their patient’s identity irrespective of circumstance and regards alternatives to an affirm-early/affirm-only approach “conversion therapy,” European health authorities are recommending exploratory therapy to discern why teens are rejecting their bodies and whether less invasive treatments may help.  

If implemented in American clinics, the European approach would effectively deny puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to most adolescents who are receiving these drugs today. Unlike in the U.S., in Europe surgeries are generally off the table before adulthood.  

Why are more countries turning their backs on what American medical associations, most Democrats and the American Civil Liberties Union call “medically necessary” and “life-saving” care? The answer is that Europeans are following principles of evidence-based medicine (EBM), while Americans are not.

ACLU

More.

Joseph Bronski:

Which university major is the smartest? A study of composite GRE scores by PhD program subject found that physicists were the smartest, followed by engineers and mathematicians.

Dave Cieslewicz

The Madison School Board is still dithering around on whether to reinstate out-of-school suspensions of disruptive students. The district suspended the practice in 2021. Now kids who are acting up or worse are kept in school, but sometimes with a monitor who stays with the kid the whole day. This ties up sparse resources that might otherwise go to good kids who just want to learn. 

What’s more the debate on this question gets to the heart of what’s wrong with this school board: with one or two exceptions they are focussed like a laser beam on the trouble makers. Here’s what board member, and the recent board president, Ali Muldrow had to say about this at a meeting earlier this week: “My hope is that the solution promotes student wellness and mental health, that our interventions are developmentally appropriate and that they are de-stigmatized and not used to criminalize young people.”

Gillian McGoldrick:

Gov. Josh Shapiro canceled his Saturday appearance before a state teachers union conference in Philadelphia, as he continues to negotiate a budget deal that missed its deadline on Friday.

However, it also comes as Shapiro continues to receive intense backlash from teachers unions and organized labor for his support of a private school voucher program for Pennsylvania students who attend the state’s lowest-performing public schools.

House Democrats, who control the state House with a one-seat majority, said any budget deal including private school vouchers is a nonstarter in their caucus.

Shapiro was scheduled as a keynote speaker at the biennial convention for the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, according to the convention agenda. He was set to appear alongside AFT national president Randi Weingarten, in Philly to provide a luncheon speech.

Shapiro pulled out of the AFT’s convention on Friday morning due to ongoing budget negotiations, AFT Pennsylvania president Arthur Steinberg said in a statement.

“It was our understanding that Gov. Shapiro had every intent to deliver a keynote address at our Biennial Convention luncheon,” Steinberg added. “While we’re disappointed that he couldn’t address our convention, we’re heartened that it’s because he’s pushing to fully and fairly fund public education.”

Katie Rogers:

In mid-2018, Ms. Roberts was working as a personal assistant to Mr. Biden, according to a person close to her and messages from a cache of Mr. Biden’s files. Their daughter was born later that year, but by then, Mr. Biden had stopped responding to Ms. Roberts’s messages, including one informing him of the child’s birth date. Shortly after their daughter was born in November 2018, he removed Ms. Roberts and the child from his health insurance, which led Ms. Roberts to contact Mr. Lancaster.

Christina Gomez-Schmidt:

An essential duty of any school board is to help plan and approve the annual district budget. Like most budgets, household or business, the goal of a school district budget is to match revenue with expenses to produce a balanced budget. This goal ensures that school districts are managing local, state and federal taxpayer funds to operate public education in a responsible and sustainable way.

The Madison School District’s budget approved on Monday for next school year is neither balanced nor sustainable.

In providing maximum wage increases (8% plus an average 2% increase for experience and advanced degrees), over $26 million is added to every future budget. Increasing hourly custodial wages, unexpectedly changing health insurers and a new transportation contract added millions more.

For two years, the School Board has discussed the looming fiscal cliff once federal pandemic funding for education ends. Yet this budget makes the fiscal cliff even higher against the advice of the district’s own financial experts. One-time funding (the last year of federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund money as well as the district’s fund balance) is used to cover the operating deficit created. Expenses cannot sustainably continue to outpace revenues.

People are also reading…

As a result, significant cuts will be needed to balance the next budget cycle. This will most likely affect schools, classrooms and students directly.

An average 10% salary increase for Madison School District teachers and staff is an incredible boost for each individual staff member. This was another difficult school year, and everyone is challenged by the rising costs of inflation. Staffing shortages continue, and the pressure to address this reality is understandable.

Yet it is the responsibility of the board to consider how this increase affects future budgets in a system with over 4,000 employees and significant challenges ahead. These challenges include continued declining enrollment, guaranteed increases to health care insurance costs, and significant investments needed in instruction, strategic equity projects, maintenance for aging buildings and meeting the district’s 2040 renewable energy goals.

School districts face compounding budget challenges when enrollment declines, costs increase, students need greater support to learn, and cuts to spending are politically unpopular. All of these factors mean less funding, greater expenses, and pressure to not make changes to staffing or programs. A realignment of the Madison School District’s vision, strategy and investment is needed to avoid even larger future deficits.

We can lament the lack of adequate state investment for public education. We should collectively continue to advocate for stronger investment in our public schools. This year’s state budget provides a welcome increase in funding. But no matter what funding levels exist, every school district must still balance its budget as a primary responsibility to its local communities and to future students.

Budgets reflect priorities. Staff are a priority. But we have to acknowledge that the decision to overextend the budget to address one priority will likely limit the district’s future ability to address other priorities where investment is needed.

This should give every district stakeholder pause as we approach that fiscal cliff.

Gomez Schmidt served on the Madison School Board from 2020-2023. She is executive director of the nonprofit Galin Scholars.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Clara Harter:

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho greets students during lunch break at John Marshall High School Monday, June 26, 2023. Carvalho was visiting the campus on the first day of district’s “Summer of Learning” program. (Photo by David Crane, Los Angeles Daily News/SCNG)

Summer schools provide families safe places for their kids and offer free meals, more personal attention from teachers in small groups, and an action-packed activity schedule. The district is using this summer’s programs to help meet Carvalho’s ambitious goal to undo — by the end of the upcoming school year — the steep drop in learning that hit students during the pandemic.

“Los Angeles Unified’s Summer of Learning programs are critical to address learning loss, provide individualized instructional support and offer unparalleled acceleration options for our students,” Carvalho said. “The district will not stop until we have made up ground that was lost during the pandemic, accelerate our students to their greatest potential and position Los Angeles Unified as the district of choice for families.”

Elementary and middle school students enrolled in summer school get targeted teaching as well as enrichment activities in the arts, sports, and STEM (science, math, technology and engineering). High school students can use summer courses for credit recovery, accelerating graduation and preparing for post-secondary education. Students in all grade levels have access to virtual summer learning and enrichment activities.

Jessica McBride:

DOJ sends a letter saying they can’t do anything about it.

Jim Nelles:

Interestingly, Ginsburg had spoken about the case she wished had been heard by the Supreme Court, Struck v. Secretary of Defense. Ginsburg represented Captain Susan Struck, who became pregnant while serving in the Air Force in Viet Nam. The Air Force told her to either terminate the pregnancy or leave the Air Force. Struck wanted to keep the baby and her job. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, but the Air Force backed down, allowing Struck to keep her job and her baby. Said Ginsburg, “I wish that would’ve been the first case. I think the Court would’ve better understood that this is about women’s choice.”  Few, if any pro-choice recognize that their champion wanted to try the case of a woman who desired to keep her baby, not terminate a pregnancy, as the way to grow women’s rights.

It is estimated that more than 63 million babies have been aborted between when Roe became law in 1973 and May 2022. That is 63 million lives lost. Who was never born? What great statesman, scientist, religious leader, or mother, never had the chance to live up to his or her potential? Never had the chance to realize a dream. How many women have gone to sleep each night wondering what would have been, if only they had made a different decision.

I never thought too much about abortion while growing up. My family wasn’t overly religious nor were we activists for one side or the other, we were simply Americans living our lives. People debated the issue when I was in college, mostly taking the pro-choice side, given the liberal leanings of Northwestern University. Again, I listened, but didn’t really participate. It didn’t impact me, and I didn’t care enough to care.

Fast-forward to the day I learned that my wife was pregnant with our son. I had just come home from a concert with friends and found a positive home pregnancy test on the bathroom vanity. I had never been so happy! As the pregnancy progressed, the doctor asked if we wanted to have an amniocentesis, the amnio test, performed to make sure the baby was “normal.” My wife and I had discussed this prior to her pregnancy and had decided that we would perform the test and terminate the pregnancy if any abnormalities were detected. But something strange happened that Wednesday morning in late 2000. We both immediately replied “no.” That was the day I affirmed my pro-life position.

Jeffrey Carter:

No, better to do a non-profit and tackle some cause that has no real solution, like food deserts. Or they’d send their kids to get a degree in public policy and then work for a consulting group dreaming up spider web solutions to issues that are better handled by the free market instead of the government. Or better yet, they’d use their networks to make sure their kids got government grants to do research on big important issues that actually were meaningless.

During the Obama and the current Biden administrations, the culture of the military has been deliberately changed. They are focusing on equity, ESG, and all the woke bullshit that destroys everything else. The days of the USAF being the force that you call when you “absolutely positively have to blow things up” have given way to men in skirts and the words we use becoming more important than the chain of command. 

Is it any wonder that the military is short of its recruiting goals by 25%?

If any institution was based on merit, it was the military. President Truman integrated it and it was one of the first places minorities could earn respect and rise. That spirit of merit is changing and giving way to the woke values that destroy anything good in America.

Tyler Austin Harper:

When I was in graduate school several years ago, I spent my summers getting paid to help Asian American kids seem less Asian. I was a freelance tutor helping high school students prepare for college admissions, living only a few miles from the heavily Chinese and Chinese American neighborhood of Flushing in Queens. For my first gig, on a sweltering summer afternoon, I made my way to a cramped apartment where my teenage client told me what she needed: for me to read over her college applications and make sure she didn’t seem too Asian.

I remember laughing over the death rattle of a geriatric air-conditioning unit; I assumed she was making a joke.

But she pressed on straight faced. Good colleges don’t want to let in Asians, she felt, because they already had too many — and if she seemed too Asian, she wouldn’t get in. She rattled off a list of Asian and Asian American friends from her church with stellar extracurriculars and sterling test scores who she said had been rejected from even their safety schools.

Nearly every college admissions tutoring job I took over the next few years would come with a version of the same behest. The Chinese and Korean kids wanted to know how to make their application materials seem less Chinese or Korean. The rich white kids wanted to know ways to seem less rich and less white. The Black kids wanted to make sure they came across as Black enough. Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids.

Leah Barkoukis

Despite the myriad problems plaguing San Francisco, the city is devoting precious resources to a reparations committee tasked with determining how to address the “legacy of slavery.” This, despite the fact that not a single living SF taxpayer owned slaves, nor were any of them enslaved. And some of the recommendations are staggering—we’re talking payments of $5 million to eligible black adults, guaranteed incomes, homes in the wildly expensive city for just $1, and the elimination of personal debt and tax burdens.

While this is focused just on the city level—and it’s still uncertain if anything will come to fruition from the committee—a new Reuters report may bring the issue into focus on the national level.

In a piece that serves to name and shame prominent office-holders who are descendants of slaves, Reuters identifies that “Among America’s political elite…5 living presidents, 2 Supreme Court justices, 11 governors, and 100 legislators descend from ancestors who enslaved Black people.” Absent from the list is Donald Trump.

Wisconsin Right Now & The Center Square

UW-Madison blacked out lengthy sections of its admissions criteria in response to an open records request from a Republican legislator who is now trying to change state law to mandate that the flagship university admit Wisconsin students in the top 5% of their classes.

UW-Madison’s freshman class was 8,628 students back in September of last year. The UW’s own numbers show that about 45% of that class is from Wisconsin; the rest are from other states or other countries. Sixty percent of Wisconsin freshman applicants who applied to UW-Madison last fall were accepted.

On Thursday, in the wake of the United States Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative action in university admissions at two prominent schools, Wisconsin Right Now obtained the blacked out documents that were sent to state Rep. David Murphy in September 2021. In the wake of the Court decision, UW-Madison admitted, “We have considered the race of applicants as one factor in a holistic admissions process that focuses first and foremost on candidates’ academic strength.”

UW-Madison told Murphy it redacted the documents to protect “trade secrets” and because “release of such information would harm the public’s interest.” The university was also concerned that employees could face “reprisal” if their names were released.

Michael Stratford:

Biden administration officials are devising plans to ease the sting of requiring tens of millions of Americans to resume paying their student loans this fall for the first time in more than three years.

The Education Department in recent weeks finalized a three-month grace period for missed payments once student loans come due in October and directed loan services to be “prepared” to extend that flexibility for subsequent 90-day periods, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Once interest accrual resumes on Sept. 1, under the department’s current plans, it would continue to pile up even if borrowers miss payments.

Ofsted inspected Michaela last month.

This is the Ofsted report- through today!

I know some people worry about the harm we do to children.

Ofsted feel differently. pic.twitter.com/x1iZYT0PX4

— Katharine Birbalsingh (@Miss_Snuffy) June 28, 2023

EXCLUSIVE: Berkeley Law School dean Erwin Chemerinsky explains how he has secretly enacted a policy of racial discrimination in faculty hiring—which is illegal in California.

"If I'm ever deposed, I'm going to deny I said this to you." pic.twitter.com/GYgtNZfhtb

— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) June 29, 2023

Ann Atkinson:

thought that Arizona State University, my alma mater and employer, was different from other schools when it came to free speech. In 2011 the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression awarded ASU a “green light” rating for its written policies on freedom of expression. The university happily complied when FIRE suggested it adopt the Chicago Principles and protect the “free, robust and uninhibited sharing of ideas among all members of the University’s community.” The ASU Barrett Honors College has even been home to heterodox initiatives like the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development, where I served as executive director for the last two years.

But beneath ASU’s written commitment to intellectual diversity lies a deep hostility toward divergent views. The latest trouble started in February when the Lewis Center hosted Robert Kiyosaki, Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk for an event on “Health, Wealth, and Happiness.” This nonpartisan program was part of a popular speaker series focused on connecting students with professionals who can offer career and life advice.

At the names of Messrs. Prager and Kirk, the faculty of ASU’s honors college were outraged. Thirty-nine of its 47 faculty signed a letter to the dean condemning the event on grounds that the speakers are “purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, [and] institutions of our democracy.” The signers decried ASU “platforming and legitimating” their views, describing Messrs. Prager and Kirk as “white nationalist provocateurs” whose comments would undermine the value of democratic exchange by marginalizing the school’s most vulnerable students.

Lindsay Ellis:

Many members of the class of 2023 were freshmen in college in the spring of 2020, when campuses shuttered due to the Covid-19 pandemic. They spent the rest of their college years partially in virtual mode with hybrid internships and virtual classes. Students didn’t learn some of the so-called soft skills they might have in the past by osmosis on the job, from mentors and by practicing on campus.

To address deficiencies in everything from elevator chitchat to presentation skills, companies, universities and recruiters are coming up with ways to train new hires and give them clear advice. They are eating it up.

Recent graduate Joslynn Odom had her first hybrid internship after her junior year and found working in person to be draining thanks to wearing professional attire and staying energetic consistently. It made her realize that she needed to sharpen her communication and networking skills.

Programming arranged by her college, Miami University in Ohio, has since helped. Just before graduation she attended an etiquette dinner where she learned to follow the lead of more senior leaders over dinner: Eat at their pace, discuss neutral topics and avoid personal questions. When buttering bread, it is best to put a slab on one’s own bread plate before applying it to a roll, and when cutting food, holding the fork hump-side up is best, she said.

“Knowing that, I feel more confident,” she said.

Helen Andrews:

Over the weekend, a village in Lancashire celebrated the 80th anniversary of “the Battle of Bamber Bridge.” There was a dramatic reenactment as well as live musical entertainment, a history walk, and an academic symposium in collaboration with the U.S. embassy. In the American press, the anniversary was marked by long feature articles in both the Associated Press and NPR on the episode and its enduring significance.

This was all a bit excessive considering that the Battle of Bamber Bridge was not a battle at all. It was a race riot. Its central incident was not much more than a bar fight.

On June 24, 1943, two American military police on patrol in Bamber Bridge were told that there was a “disturbance” at Ye Olde Hob Inn. When they arrived at the inn, they found a black soldier not in proper uniform, Private Eugene Nunn, whom they attempted to arrest. A crowd of British civilians and a dozen black soldiers protested that Nunn wasn’t hurting anybody and menaced the M.P.s, who left in their Jeep. As they drove away, a beer bottle flew over their heads and broke on the windshield.

Having been prevented from carrying out a lawful arrest, the M.P.s got backup and returned. They found a group of black soldiers, including Nunn, drunk and disorderly in the street. When they attempted to arrest the men, a brawl began. Stones and bottles were thrown, breaking the nose of one M.P. and the jaw of another. One black soldier was shot in the back while trying to grab the gun out of the holster of an unconscious M.P. who had been knocked out by a rock. Two others were shot while hurling projectiles. 

The black soldiers retreated with their wounded back to camp, where they started wild rumors that white M.P.s were on a rampage. A mob of 100 to 200 black soldiers gathered at the main gate. Their NCOs either refused or were unable to impose discipline. At midnight, a group of M.P.s arrived at camp in a Jeep equipped with a machine gun, which inflamed the mob. The commanding officer ordered the M.P.s to leave but the sight of the machine gun had already resulted in a panic. The black soldiers raided the armory, and some took their arms into town. One black private, William Crossland, died in the confused gunfire overnight, the night’s only fatality. Weapons were collected the next morning.

Alec Johnson:

A former Whitnall School District employee has been charged with falsifying results for the election of the School Board’s president.

Shari Rodriguez, 53, was charged June 22 with one felony count of misconduct in public office (act in excess of lawful authority). If convicted, she could face up to a $10,000 fine or three years and six months in prison or both, according to online court records.

Rodriguez was the executive assistant to the Whitnall School District superintendent and Whitnall School Board. She was in charge of collecting the votes from school board members, counting them and announcing the results but had no authority to change the votes themselves, the criminal complaint said.

I wrote earlier: "Censorship and suppression of dissent – achieved by uniting corporate and state power – is the primary weapon of the liberal establishment."

Now we have another example: Google censoring a presidential candidate polling at 20% while interviewed by a reporter: https://t.co/OrcP2442nA

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 27, 2023

Can we talk about this 👇 @deenafaywinter piece? The piece itself is fine — it's the trajectory/impetus someone should unpack.

Nutshell v: After years of pointed talk re bankruptcy, Minneapolis schools now have a "positive spin." 1/https://t.co/xqebWCYOjC

— Beth Hawkins (@beth_hawkins) June 28, 2023

Scott Girard:

A bill headed to Gov. Tony Evers’ desk, approved by the state Senate on Wednesday and the Assembly a week earlier, features a variety of new requirements for the state and local school districts on phonics-based reading instruction for 4-year-old kindergarten through third grade.

Third grade is widely considered a key turning point for literacy, when students move from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.”

Evers has not yet announced whether he will sign the bill.

Below, the Cap Times explains what the legislation would mean for students, schools and families:

Legislation and Early Reading: Wisconsin’s odyssey continues

Jimmy Tobias:

A top adviser to Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes of Health admitted that he used a personal email account in an apparent effort to evade the strictures of the Freedom of Information Act, according to records obtained by congressional investigators probing the origin of Covid-19. The official also expressed his intention to delete emails in order to avoid media scrutiny.

“As you know, I try to always communicate on gmail because my NIH email is FOIA’d constantly,” wrote David M. Morens, a high-ranking NIH official, in a September 2021 email, one of a series of email exchanges that included many leading scientists involved in the bitter Covid origins debate. “Stuff sent to my gmail gets to my phone,” he added, “but not my NIH computer.”

After noting that his Gmail account had been hacked, however, he wrote to the group to say that he might have to use his NIH email account to communicate with them instead. “Don’t worry,” he wrote, “just send to any of my addresses, and I will delete anything I don’t want to see in the New York Times.”

Glenn Reynolds:

Media accounts I’ve seen have tended to suggest that the Supreme Court had found that “diversity” is a compelling interest, sufficient to justify overriding the Constitution’s ban on racial discrimination.  For example, the Wall Street Journal’s report stated:  “For 45 years, the Supreme Court has recognized a limited exception to that rule for university admissions, one based on the schools’ academic freedom to assemble classes that support their educational mission. Diversity was a compelling interest, the court had found.”

But the Supreme Court did not itself find that diversity was a compelling interest.  Rather, it deferred to universities’ claims that diversity was a compelling interest.  A court defers to someone else when it says that it may have a different opinion on the matter itself but it will allow the opinion of the person or entity in question to control because of their expertise.  So, for example, under the now moribund doctrine of Chevrondeference, the Court would defer to an agency’s interpretation of the statute it administers, even if the Court would have interpreted the statute differently.

Thus, for example, in Grutter v. Bollinger the Court said:  “The Law School has a compelling interest in attaining a diverse student body.  The Law School’s educational judgment that such diversity is essential to its educational mission is one to which we defer.”  (Italics mine). So diversity is a compelling interest only because the university says it is.

Deferring to an agency or a university on the question of what policies best serve a compelling interest is one thing; deferring on the question of what constitutes a compelling interest is another, much bigger, thing.  But that is what the Court has done up to now.

But no longer.  As the majority opinion today noted:  “The universities’ main response to these criticisms is ‘trust us.’  They assert that universities are owed deference when using race to

benefit some applicants but not others. While this Court has recognized a “tradition of giving a degree of deference to a university’s academic decisions,” it has made clear that deference must exist ‘within constitutionally prescribed limits.’”

Luke Berg and Cory Brewer:

U.S. Supreme Court Decision – Bostock In June 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. The Court determined that Title VII, pertaining to employment discrimination, could be interpretated to protect an individual against sex discrimination, including on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation.

What has changed under the Biden Administration?

Following the Bostock decision, President Biden issued an Executive Order directing federal agencies to interpret Bostock to apply to any similar federal laws that prohibit sex discrimination.

Following this order, the U.S. Department of Education began the process of issuing new regulations.

Education Policy Innovation Collaborative

In this report, we combine data about students in Michigan’s K-12 public schools and public universities with educator certification testing, credentialing, and employment records to examine how the pool of prospective Michigan teachers changes as candidates progress through the pipeline and into the workforce.

KEY FINDINGS:

1. Enrollment in undergraduate teacher education courses has decreased over time and varies by demographic group.
2. Only a fraction of the students who take an initial education course become student teachers.
3. Prospective teachers of color are disproportionately likely to exit the pipeline during the advanced coursework, student teaching, and licensure testing stages.
4. Recent cohorts of teacher preparation graduates are more likely to work as public school teachers in Michigan.
5. Black teacher preparation graduates are more likely to enter and stay in Michigan’s public school teaching workforce.
6. The pool of prospective Michigan teachers becomes less diverse as candidates progress between the coursework, licensure, and employment stages.

Commentary.

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Justice Clarence Thomas blasts Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s arguments in his concurrence:

KBJ “locks blacks into a seemingly perpetual inferior caste. Such a view is irrational; it is an insult to individual achievement and cancerous to young minds seeking to push through… pic.twitter.com/c3fUQPWETP

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) June 29, 2023

This graph is widely shown, often with astonishment. Its date is seldom mentioned: a quarter-century ago. Long before DEI became a holy crusade of our elites and hysteria raged about fighting ‘white supremacy.’ The current gaps are probably far larger.https://t.co/jfNIG00dR1 pic.twitter.com/eipDKrcUML

— Fabius Maximus (Ed.) (@FabiusMaximus01) June 29, 2023

The last page of Justice Thomas’ concurrence in the Affirmative Action case goes unbelievably hard pic.twitter.com/Zc4dVZoTcT

— Alec Sears (@alec_sears) June 29, 2023

Thomas says history has vindicated his previous views that racial discrimination needs to be completely prohibited. Universities have been getting more aggressive, blatant, and unapologetic about their intent to discriminate and do so forever. pic.twitter.com/CppioVdm9A

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) June 29, 2023

more.

So why not write a bill banning federal funds for any college/university and their employees if they include legacy preferences in their admissions decisions? https://t.co/tUJMxTMwZ6

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) June 29, 2023

Today’s Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on Black people. No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system which is exactly why affirmative-action based programs were needed. Today’s decision is a TRAVESTY!!!

— Erica Marsh (@ericareport) June 29, 2023

Politics and appointments.

Jennifer Mnookin:

To help achieve this, we have considered the race of applicants as one factor in a holistic admissions process that focuses first and foremost on candidates’ academic strength. Our process looks at written statements, extracurriculars, recommendations, and the range of experiences, talents and backgrounds candidates will bring to the university. Every admitted student here at UW–Madison has demonstrated the potential for academic success within our competitive applicant pools.

Though we have seen a roughly 50 percent increase in our underrepresented undergraduate student population in the past five years, our current enrollment percentages of underrepresented students still lag behind many of our peers.

The full implications of today’s ruling — both nationally and on our campus — will not be known for some time. UW–Madison and UW System attorneys are now carefully reviewing the Court’s opinions and monitoring the potential release of additional guidance from relevant federal agencies. We will be sharing information and providing updates at go.wisc.edu/scotusdiversity.

The ruling will require some modifications to aspects of our current admissions practices; we will, of course, adapt our practices to comply with the law. At the same time, I want to reiterate that our commitment to the value of diversity within our community, including racial diversity, remains a bedrock value of the institution.

Mike LaChance

For 58 years, the accreditation system of higher education has stood, enshrined in federal law and reaffirmed with each reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965.

Now, a federal lawsuit from the state of Florida is looking to upend that entire system, which is a key part of the federal accountability system that helps to determine which colleges and universities receive access to federal financial aid.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and other state officials argue in the lawsuit filed last week that Congress has “ceded unchecked power” to the private accrediting agencies, violating the U.S. Constitution. They want a federal judge to permanently block the Education Department from enforcing accreditation-related provisions of the Higher Education Act. Currently, federal law requires that colleges and universities be accredited by an Education Department–recognized accreditor in order to receive federal student aid such as Pell Grants.

“The result is that private accrediting agencies enjoy near limitless power over state institutions,” Florida officials wrote in the initial complaint. “Accrediting agencies have the power to hold billions of federal education dollars hostage based on the formulation and application of substantive education standards that are immune from meaningful government supervision.”

Another article at Inside Higher Ed has the completely predictable response from the Biden White House:

“Governor DeSantis is now bringing his culture wars, like book bans, to the long-standing system that helps ensure students receive a quality college education,” the White House said in a statement. “This administration won’t allow it. We’re committed to ensuring all students receive a high-quality education, and will fight this latest effort by opponents to get in the way of that.”

This article also boils down the issue to this:

Florida passed a law last year that required state colleges and universities to change accrediting agencies every 10 years. The complaint argues that the Education Department has issued guidance over the last year to make it more difficult for a Florida college or university to switch accreditors. The state wants a federal judge to at least toss out the guidance.

The full complaint.

By Hayley Dixon and Louisa Clarence-Smith

A school has called in police over allegations that female pupils were sexually assaulted in its gender-neutral lavatories….

Mukwonago students must use restrooms and locker rooms consistent with the sex they were assigned at birth, under a new policy

I'll confess I'm not entirely clear on what a "Chief Strategy Officer" does all day. https://t.co/c1cFsdWtN0

— Robert Pondiscio (@rpondiscio) June 27, 2023

Julie Kim:

There was a reason for my particular focus: at the time, I’d been researching augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) technology for my daughter, who is five years old and also non-speaking. Underwhelmed by the available options—a handful of iPad apps that look (and work) as if they were coded in the 1990s—I’d delved into the speculative, more exciting world of brain-computer interfaces. Could a brain chip allow my daughter to verbally express herself with the same minimal effort it takes me to open my mouth and speak? How might she sound, telling me about her day at school? Singing “Happy Birthday” or saying “Mama”? I wanted the future to be here now.

But watching Savarese revealed magical thinking on my part. Behind the curtain, the mechanics of his participation were extremely low tech—kind of janky, in fact. 

The process didn’t fit the mold of what I thought technology should do: take the work out of a manual operation and make it faster and easier. The network had invited Savarese onto the program and a producer had emailed the questions to him in advance. To prepare, Savarese had spent about 15 minutes typing his answers into a Microsoft Word file. When it came time for the live interview, the anchorman recited the questions, to which Savarese responded on his MacBook by using Word’s “Read Aloud” function to speak his pre-composed answers. The types of readily available technology that could power an assistive communication device—AI, natural-language processing, word prediction, voice banking, eye-gaze tracking—played no role here. And yet, without any of the features I’d expected to see, Savarese had the tools he needed to express the fullness of his thoughts.

Betsy Hammond:

In the latest sign that Oregon children have been failed by leaders and need an intensive educational rescue, new federal test results indicate that the nation’s students experienced staggering instructional setbacks during the pandemic – yet Oregon’s bore an even worse brunt.

Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the only standardized achievement test given to a representative sample of students in all states, reveal that Oregon schools, which once outdid national averages, produced jaw-dropping declines in student outcomes last school year.

The results, made public late Sunday, show Oregon elementary and middle school students now read and do math far more poorly, on average, than their counterparts nationwide. Oregon’s fourth- and eighth-grade math performance ranked sixth worst in the country, the 2022 results indicate.

In fourth grade, only one state – West Virginia – generated significantly worse math scores. Meanwhile, in the west, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Montana and Utah all significantly outdid Oregon.

Kelly Meyerhofer:

Wisconsin high school graduates ranking in the top 5% of their class would be guaranteed admission to the University of Wisconsin-Madison under a Republican bill expected to be introduced Tuesday.

The state’s top-ranking students would be promised a seat at all UW System institutions and technical colleges they apply to, according to the bill. Most of Wisconsin’s public colleges and universities already operate as open-access institutions, meaning they accept the overwhelming majority of applicants.

As the state flagship, UW-Madison is more selective. It accepted 49% of new freshman applicants, including 60% of Wisconsin applicants, 45% of Minnesota applicants, 35% of international applicants and 51% of out-of-state applicants.

Aaron Sibarium:

But the promised training wasn’t much of a crash course in free speech. Instead, it was an online program that required barely a minute’s effort, according to five people who completed the training as well as screenshots and recordings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Students were given six weeks to watch five prerecorded videos, most about an hour long, then asked to sign a form attesting that they had done so.

The videos could be played on mute, and the form—which could be accessed without opening the training—did not ask any questions about their content, letting students tune out the modules or skip them entirely.

“I watched none of the videos,” one student said. “I never even opened the links. On the day the training was due, I went to the attestation link provided by the university, checked a box confirming I watched the videos, and that was the end of the matter. Whole process took 10 seconds.”

The free speech program was much less demanding than the law school’s modules on Title IX and alcohol issues, which require students to answer questions demonstrating an understanding of school policy, according to people who’d completed both trainings. The contrast has shaken students’ faith in Stanford’s vaunted recommitment to freedom of speech, which, one said, appears to have been “nothing more than hollow virtue signaling.”

Stanford Law School did not respond to a request for comment.

Sara Randazzo, Dan Frosch and Shannon Najmabadi:

Public schools Superintendent Alex Marrero stood at the hospital bed of a 14-year-old boy who had been struck in the face by a stray bullet across the street from East High School.

A dispute among a group of teenagers had escalated into gunfire on Sept. 7, a few weeks into the start of the school year. The injured boy, who couldn’t speak, wrote down a question to Marrero: “Why did I get shot?”

The 40-year-old schools chief had left New York to take the job in 2021, accepting responsibility for the instruction and safety of nearly 90,000 students. “I felt like I had failed for the first time as an educator,” he said about the boy.

Denver school authorities would by the end of the school year catch 16 students around the city bringing guns to campus, a five-year high. The district’s board of education had decided to remove Denver police officers from campuses the year before Marrero arrived. He wondered what it would take for them to change their mind.

The boy’s shooting was the first act of violence that marked two turbulent semesters at East High, the district’s flagship campus. The school occupies a century-old four-story brick building, where hallways are lined with state championship trophies, academic honors and photos of famous alumni, including Don Cheadle and members of the musical group Earth, Wind & Fire.

Douglas Belkin:

In a December interview with the campus newspaper, Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana was given the chance to offer a word of advice to seniors.

“Don’t gratuitously drop the H-bomb,” Khurana said.

The H-bomb, for those unaware of lingo from the most famous Ivy League school, is the thermonuclear act of saying aloud that one attends or attended Harvard. The process of explaining to someone not from Harvard that you went to Harvard is complicated, students at Harvard will tell you, repeatedly.

For years Ivy Leaguers have been conspicuously obtuse about where they went to school. But the H-bomb conversation is at an all-time high.

The odds of admission to Harvard are at historic lows and the Supreme Court is poised to weigh in this month on whether Harvard’s affirmative-action program is constitutional. The high-profile trial that preceded the High Court case shed light on Harvard’s opaque selection process, including evidence that children of donors, offspring of alumni, as well as socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants get special consideration by the admissions office.

The revelations moved Massachusetts lawmakers to recently introduce an act proposing to tax the endowments of schools which consider an applicant’s legacy status or employ early-decision admission, which tends to benefit students from well-off families. The 0.2% surcharge would cost Harvard about $100 million a year and would fund the state’s community colleges. The bill is set for a committee hearing in the Massachusetts legislature this month.

Wispolitics:

The Senate today approved a bill to turn Wisconsin’s approach to literacy into a phonics-based program in an attempt to improve reading.

Senators 25-7 approved the bill, sending AB 321 to Gov. Tony Evers’ desk. The bill would establish an Office of Literacy to contract 64 full-time literacy coaches who would help teachers implement a newer model based on phonics, vocabulary building, reading fluency, and oral language development, among other things.

The measure would also require students who read below grade level to have individualized reading plans until they catch up and to include the percentage of third-grade students who read at that grade level on school report cards.

All Dems present voted against the bill except Sens. Kelda Roys, of Madison, Robert Wirch, of Somers, and Lena Taylor, of Milwaukee. Sen. LaTonya Johnson, of Milwaukee, was not in the chamber during the roll call.

Sen. Chris Larson, D-Milwaukee, said his office reached out to 421 school districts across the state, and of those that responded, only two supported the bill.

Legislation and Early Reading: Wisconsin’s odyssey continues

George Will:

Ian Rowe, a charter school advocate, notes thatsince the “nation’s report card” was first issued in 1992, in no year “has a majority of whitestudents been reading at grade level. The sad irony is that closing the black-white achievement gap would guarantee only educational mediocrity for all students.”

Mysteriously (or perhaps not), California’s most recent standardized test revealed declines in math and English language arts — yet rising grades. Larry Sand, writing in City Journal, reports that 73 percent of 11th-graders received A’s, B’s and C’s in math, while the test showed that only 19 percent met grade-level standards. Among eighth-graders, the disparity was 79 percent and 23 percent. Among sixth-graders’ English scores, it was 85 percent and 40 percent. Amazingly (or perhaps not), the high school graduation rate has risen as students’ proficiencies have fallen.

Grade inflation, sometimes called “equity grading,” and “social promotions,” which combat meritocracy as a residue of white supremacy, leave a wake of wreckage. “According to World Population Review,” Sand says, “California now leads the country in illiteracy. In fact, 23.1 percent of Californians over age 15 cannot read this sentence.”

As alarming as what students are not learning is what they are being taught. Robert Pondiscio and Tracey Schirra of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in National Affairs (summer 2022), say “public education has drifted toward an oppositional relationship with its founding purpose of forming citizens, facilitating social cohesion, and transmitting our culture from one generation to the next.” The result is the emergence of what might be a dominant political issue in 2024: parental rights concerning educational content and curriculum transparency.

Remote learning during the pandemic, say Pondiscio and Schirra, “pried open the black box of America’s classrooms.” Progressives, anxious to slam it shut again, portray any public involvement in public education, other than paying for it, as an infringement of the hitherto unenunciated right of teachers to unabridged sovereignty over other peoples’ children. But as UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has said, “Someone’s got to decide what is going to be taught in K-12 schools.” Teachers, principals, legislatures, school boards — the First Amendment does not say whom.

“unlike the Establishment, with kids in private prep schools and only caring about blame-shifting”

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Institute for Reforming Government

We have a teacher shortage, but we did it to ourselves. College’s costs and complications encumber teachers with debt, don’t prepare them for actual classrooms, and keep the profession monolithic. This leads to worse outcomes for students, stress on our districts, and diminished economic output for our state. 16 states, from Tennessee and Texas to Michigan and California, have unlocked the future of teaching before we have: teacher apprenticeships. A 2+2 model with 2 years of lectures and a 2-year student teaching apprenticeship halves teachers’ tuitions, improves students’ results, and fills the teacher shortage with diverse, qualified educators. The apprenticeship model already works for high-status professions like doctors, IT staff, electricians, and artisans, and teaching can meet that same standard.

Let’s face it: becoming a teacher doesn’t make sense. To start, you have to be one of the 19% of Wisconsin high schoolers who graduates from a 4-year college.1 You probably left $22,000 in debt,2 but your salary starts in the mid-30s and your benefits nosedive if you ever leave the state. Your primary path to a raise is dropping $45,000 more on a master’s degree,3 braving such courses as “Resilience and Self-Care”4 and “Coloniality of Language and Science in Education.”5 You got rocked your first year in the classroom because your college taught you wrong,6 and you’re close to quitting after just 1 year like 11% of Wisconsin teachers do.7 Even the softest hearts for students harden under this pressure.

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

Chris Lau, Gawon Bae, Jake Kwon and Nayoon Kim:

For a country with the world’s lowest fertility rate – one that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to encourage women to have more babies – the idea of barring children from places like cafes and restaurants might seem a little counterproductive.

But in South Korea, “no-kids zones” have become remarkably popular in recent years. Hundreds have sprung up across the country, aimed largely at ensuring disturbance-free environments for the grown-ups.

There are nearly 80 such zones on the holiday island of Jeju alone, according to a local think tank, and more than four hundred in the rest of the country, according to activist groups.

Doubts, though, are beginning to creep in about the wisdom of restricting children from so many places, fueled by concerns over the country’s growing demographic problems.

In addition to the world’s lowest birthrate, South Korea has one of the world’s fastest aging populations. That has left it with a problem familiar to graying nations across the world, namely: how to fund the pension and health care needs of a growing pool of retirees on the tax income generated by a slowly vanishing pool of workers.

Alec Schemmel and Meghan Blonder:

A National Assessment of Educational Progress report published Wednesday found that math and reading scores among U.S. 13-year-olds are at their lowest levels in decades. Cardona responded to those findings by praising “positive results” in student achievement, arguing that the “historic investments and resources” provided by President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan would “reverse the damage.” In school districts across the country, however, a large portion of those funds did not go to more tutoring or new school materials. Instead, they funded bonuses for teachers and administrators.

In North Carolina, for example, the Wake County Public School System from March 2020 to April 2023 spent 78.5 percent of its total pandemic relief funding on salaries and employee benefits, according to the district. Chicago Public Schools—a district where union teachers repeatedly refused to return to the classroom during COVID—similarly spent 77 percent of its pandemic money on staff bonuses, salaries, and benefits. In Tennessee, meanwhile, the state’s comptroller found that a district funneled nearly $28,000 to one administrator alone. And in Nebraska, Lincoln Public Schools attempted to use COVID relief dollars to issue across-the-board teacher bonuses, but the state’s Department of Education said no.

The use of so-called emergency COVID funds to pay for five-figure staff bonuses reflects the stark divide between Republicans and Democrats on education policy. Democrats generally balk at school choice, shooting down taxpayer funding for charter schools in favor of additional public school spending. For Republicans, that spending is already at an all-time high with little to show for it and showcases the need to pursue alternative options rather than funneling more money to powerful teachers’ unions working to pay out their members.

“It turns out the hundreds of billions in taxpayer money that was ‘direly needed to safely reopen schools and improve infrastructure’ was a lie,” Nicki Neily, founder and president of parental rights group Parents Defending Education, said in response to districts’ using federal COVID funds to pay for staff bonuses. “The same teachers’ unions that kept schools closed are now misusing the taxpayers’ money to smooth things over with their growingly dissatisfied members through bonuses and raises. What a slap in the face to families.”

Joanne Jacob’s:

Mississippi students used to rank dead last in learning, writes Phil Bryant, the former governor of the state, on Real Clear Education. Not any more. “Mississippi fourth-graders, when adjusted for demographics, are ranked as the nation’s top performers in reading and second in math,” according to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

Bryant credits legislation passed in 2013 that included “school choice, early childhood education, scholarships for dyslexic students, teacher-education reform — and a requirement that third graders demonstrate reading proficiency to be promoted. 

The “third-grade reading gate” was controversial, writes Bryant, who now advises the America First Policy Institute. Education experts claimed held-back students would be discouraged and push up the dropout rate. 

Instead, graduation rates are now about 10 percent higher than the national average, despite the state’s high poverty rate. Mississippi hired regional coordinators and school-based literacy coaches in the lowest-performing schools, writes Bryant. “A Literacy Coaching Handbook was developed for coaches, K–3 teachers, administrators, and university faculty teaching early literacy,” so everyone understood language structure and how to improve instruction. 

The results are “dazzling,” writes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. He visited a second-grade class in Jackson, where nearly all students come from low-income, black families.

Legislation and Reading: the Wisconsin Experience 2004 –

“Well, it’s kind of too bad that we’ve got the smartest people at our universities, and yet we have to create a law to tell them how to teach.”

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

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

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

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

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

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

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

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

Will Flanders and Cory Brewer:

The recent article by Wisconsin Watch, “Wisconsin students with disabilities often denied public school choices,” suggested private schools that participate in Wisconsin’s school choice program can discriminate against students.

The article specifically alleges that choice schools “expel” students with disabilities, without providing a single example of when this has occurred. While this is a criticism often leveled against choice schools nationwide, it doesn’t reflect reality. Schools in Wisconsin’s choice programs are subject to lots of regulations on admissions.

The statutes governing admission to schools in the voucher programs also are crystal clear: Schools must accept all students who apply within their space limitations. If more students apply than seats available, the school does not have the opportunity to pick and choose. Instead, their students must be chosen at random.

The reality is that the budgets of private schools in the choice program are often stretched thin, because of severe underfunding of these institutions compared to the state’s public schools. Given these budgetary constraints, it may be challenging for some private schools to meet the needs of students with the most severe disabilities. But the decision is still ultimately in the parents’ hands after consulting about any limitations the school may have.

It is also important to highlight that private choice schools around Wisconsin likely serve far more students with disabilities than the data from the state Department of Public Instruction (DPI) shows. A 2015 study from scholars at the University of Arkansas estimated that the rate of students with disabilities in these schools was likely twice more than what the data shows. The reason for this discrepancy is that private schools lack the financial incentive that public schools have to report a student as having a disability. Public schools receive more money from the state when a student is identified, whereas private schools do not unless the student goes through the lengthy process to qualify for the state’s Special Needs Scholarship Program.

Notes and links on Wisconsin Watch, here.

James Fishback:

Once upon a time, the National Speech & Debate Association, or NSDA, was the country’s premier debating organization, touching the lives of two million high school students across its nearly hundred-year history. Its famous alumni include Oprah Winfrey, and Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The NSDA, formerly known as the National Forensics League, currently has 140,000 young debaters on its roster—but now, rather than teaching them to debate, it is teaching them to self-censor and conform their arguments to a new politically correct standard.

The NSDA has allowed hundreds of judges with explicit left-wing bias to infiltrate the organization. These judges proudly display their ideological leanings in statements—or “paradigms”—on a public database maintained by the NSDA called Tabroom, where they declare that debaters who argue in favor of capitalism, or Israel, or the police, will lose the rounds they’re judging.

This has fundamentally changed the culture of high school debate—or so scores of students are telling me. One of them is former high school debater Matthew Adelstein, a rising sophomore studying philosophy at the University of Michigan, who was a member of the NSDA in high school. 

Adelstein told me that, in April 2022, he competed at the prestigious Tournament of Champions in Lexington, Kentucky, where he debated in favor of the federal government increasing its protection of water resources.

In his final round of the two-day tournament, Matthew was shocked to hear the opposing team levy a personal attack against him as their central argument. The opposing team argued: “This debate is more than just about the debate—it’s about protecting the individuals in the community from people who proliferate hatred and make this community unsafe.”

Uri, Joe, & Leif

This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino.

In 2021, we and a team of anonymous researchers examined a number of studies co-authored by Gino, because we had concerns that they contained fraudulent data. We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020).

In the Fall of 2021, we shared our concerns with Harvard Business School (HBS). Specifically, we wrote a report about four studies for which we had accumulated the strongest evidence of fraud. We believe that many more Gino-authored papers contain fake data. Perhaps dozens.

The process that ensued at HBS is confidential (for us also). But here are some things we know:

(1) As you can see on her Harvard home page (.htm), Gino has gone on “administrative leave”, and the name of her chaired position at HBS is no longer listed.

(2) We understand that Harvard had access to much more information than we did, including, where applicable, the original data collected using Qualtrics survey software. If the fraud was carried out by collecting real data on Qualtrics and then altering the downloaded data files, as is likely to be the case for three of these papers, then the original Qualtrics files would provide airtight evidence of fraud. (Conversely, if our concerns were misguided, then those files would provide airtight evidence that they were misguided.)