Richard Phelps:

One of the chapters in my new book, The Malfunction of US Education Policy, relates my experience with a research center focused on educational standards and testing—for decades, the only federally funded research center on the topic. That experience was not good.

Long story short, it grossly misrepresented a study I managed that had been, ironically, funded by a federal agency. In addition, I was told that I could not attend a conference where my study was first misrepresented to the public, and an erratum promised for publication in the center newsletter never appeared. Misrepresentations continued for two decades and can still be found in several of the research center’s publications, available for free download online, paid for with your tax dollars and mine, and in journal publications of the center’s principals.

Because I cannot read minds, I cannot know the motivations of the research center directors, but two coincidences may provide clues. First, they were conducting their own (much smaller) project on the same topic—the costs of educational testing—at about the same time and may have viewed mine as competition for the attention they sought for theirs. Second, they apparently did not like my study’s results.

Evidence for the latter arose a decade later with a report from an amply funded study at a partner organization on the same topic. The authors’ estimates were, in their own words, “about six times higher” than previous estimates. I dissect their estimation methods starting on page 21 here.

As the research center was government funded, naturally there must have been some process available where I could lodge my complaint. That process started with the US Education Department’s official contact for the research center contract, the contract overseer, as it were. I made that contact, and was told he could do nothing, as he had no responsibility for “editorial” decisions made by the center.

In other words, research center members could say whatever they pleased about their and others’ work. Though the center was federally funded, its oversight, at least at that time, was no better than that typically found at academic journals, where whatever passes the cursory review of two unpaid volunteers enters the scholarly record. Once there, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to extract.

Lawrence Andrea:

Wisconsin’s top state legislative Republican continued his attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at the state’s public universities, calling the programming “the single most important issue” and claiming he was embarrassed to be a University of Wisconsin System alumnus because of it.

“This is probably to me the single most important issue that we are facing as a people, as a nation and as, really, humanity,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said in remarks Saturday at the state Republican Party convention.

More:In a video messages to Wisconsin Republicans, Trump repeats false claims about 2020 and gets cheers from the convention

Vos, of Rochester, relabeled the DEI acronym “division, exclusion and indoctrination” and suggested the UW System, and in particular UW-Madison, the state’s flagship university, puts an outsized emphasis on diversity efforts, which he sees as a waste of taxpayer money and source of racial division.

In his remarks during a panel discussion Saturday, he contended he received correspondence from at least one professor who detailed a situation in which her performance was measured by diversity, equity and inclusion goals.

“The overt racism, the overt exclusion, the overt indoctrination is so deep inside the UW System, I am embarrassed to be an alumni.,” said Vos, who graduated from UW-Whitewater in 1991. “We have got to fix that.”

Harold Robertson:

At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen. 

While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.

The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society. 

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England. Following the adoption of the SAT, aptitude tests such as Wonderlic (1936), Graduate Record Examination (1936), Army General Classification Test (1941), and Law School Admission Test (1948) swept the United States. Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.

An amazing tweet.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg disliked Roe v. Wade in part because it went too far, but also because she favored an Equal Protection theory:

Since only women can get pregnant, bans violated their rights.

Planned Parenthood now say that view is bigoted and false: https://t.co/NWBeraXJv4

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 17, 2023

Jack Smith obtained a conviction of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell that was subsequently vacated in a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court. Think how egregiously a prosecutor would have to stretch the law in order to unite Clarence Thomas and Ruth Bader Ginsburg pic.twitter.com/4gmaO4xsmk

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) June 13, 2023

The biology of a virus shouldn’t be political. Medical questions in general shouldn’t be. Like, there isn’t a left- and right-wing way to do a heart transplant.

The problem arises when “science” is used to justify a power grab. A good discussion would separate the two.

— Balaji (@balajis) June 18, 2023

Mandates, school lockdowns and the taxpayer supported Dane County Madison public health bureau…

I’ve met families that moved from Dane County to other states because of our chaotic, school and daycare mandate policies and outcomes. “We cannot plan anything.”

I hope that someone dives into the costs, staffing, errors and outcomes of Dane County Madison Public Health mandates compared to other regions.

meanwhile:

In 2021, suicide and homicide rates for children and young adults ages 10 to 24 in the US were the highest they’ve been in decades, according to a new reportfrom the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Functionalcs:

This is a collection of modern resources on various undergrad level computer science topics, for someone with an interest in theory. Use WorldCat or LibGen if you can’t buy these books. You don’t have to do everything here, just whatever interests you. If I list a resource here it’s because I either completed the whole resource or I used parts of it for something I needed to learn and found it a quality enough resource to include here for somebody else who wants deeper coverage of these topics.

Alice Yan:

A couple in China who hid the death of their eldest daughter from her younger sister for a month until after she sat her university entrance exam have sparked heated online discussion.

News about the unidentified family from Nanjing in Jiangsu province, eastern China, has shocked many in China, with the story widely discussed on mainland social media.

Last week, when the younger daughter returned home after taking China’s national university entrance exam, known as the gaokao, her parents revealed that her older sister had been killed in a road accident a month before, the news site Su Kan Shi Jie reported.

“I don’t have a sister any more,” she said in shock, according to the news report.

Wall Street Journal:

When an of­fi­cer called Mr. Haus, Mr. Haus iden­ti­fied him­self as an IRS agent but said Haus wasn’t his real name. He had used an alias. The of­fi­cer, also sus­pect­ing a scam, warned that if he re­turned to the tax­pay­er’s home he’d be ar­rested. Mr. Haus then filed a com­plaint against the Mar­ion po­lice of­fi­cer with the Trea­sury De­part­ment in­spec­tor gen­eral.

The House let­ter says the tax­payer on May 4 spoke with Mr. Haus’s su­per­vi­sor, who clar­i­fied that she owed noth­ing and said—in the un­der­state­ment of the year—that “things never should have got­ten this far.” Yet the fol­low­ing day, the tax­payer re­ceived a let­ter—ad­dressed to the dece­dent—stat­ing that the dece­dent was delin­quent on sev­eral 1040 fil­ings. This was the first and only mail notif­ication the tax­payer re­ceived. The tax­payer was again told by the su­per­vi­sor that noth­ing was owed and was no­ti­fied on May 30 that the case was closed.

If true, this is some­thing else. An agent of the Trea­sury, wield­ing the power of tax en­force­ment, shows up unan­nounced at a tax­pay­er’s home. He lies about his iden­tity and his pur­pose to get in­side, then threat­ens the tax­payer with pun­ish­ment if she doesn’t pay a tax bill that she doesn’t owe. The IRS agent leaves only af­ter an in­ter­ven­tion by her lawyer, and when lo­cal po­lice call the agent he sics the Trea­sury De­part­ment on the of­fi­cer.

Why did the W3C, which is part of MIT, a supposedly respected academic institution, take my name off the RSS 2.0 spec? They should explain this, fix it, and probably apologize.https://t.co/n2bwf7zzqo

— Dave Winer (@davewiner) June 17, 2023

All of this may be true Jay. But I am afraid that large parts of UW have ceased to be places of inquiry and instead become simple-minded advocates. Yeah we all like engineers and nurse but that’s not all you do. And the rest is just not worth funding. You do a bad job. Change it. https://t.co/eE0O7wkK9o

— Rick Esenberg (@RickEsenberg) June 17, 2023

Jane Coleman

But in the early 1900s, eugenics was mainstream. Well-known figures including Helen Keller, Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Sanger, and W.E.B. Du Bois supported it. It was a legitimate subject of public discourse and academic study.

So it’s not surprising that Vermont’s Middlebury College, like many other schools at that time, promoted eugenics ideology.

What is surprising, though, given its recent righteous indignation over the subject, is that Middlebury College was a eugenics hotbed: For years, its course catalogs offered and even required its study; one professor was a member of the second International Congress of Eugenics; another lectured on eugenic marriages. And Middlebury’s 20-year president, Paul Dwight Moody, chaired the state committee that studied and reported on Vermont’s racial stock.

It’s rich, because in September of 2021, the college expiated those sins by pushing someone else off the cliff: former Vermont Governor John Abner Mead, Middlebury’s renowned benefactor—all because of a speech he once gave about eugenics. For that crime, Middlebury ripped Mead’s family name off the iconic chapel he endowed.

The Mead estate, led by former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, is suing Middlebury over the de-naming.

Tim Higgins:

The first prin­ci­ples process in­volves en­vi­sion­ing what ul­ti­mate suc­cess looks like and then be­ing open to any path that leads there. Even some­thing so in­grained in tra­di­tional school­ing, such as ac­cred­i­ta­tion, showed how Musk’s mind ap­plied first prin­ci­ples rea­son­ing in de­ci­sion mak­ing, rais­ing very sim­ple ques­tions: “What’s ac­cred­i­ta­tion? Why does it ex­ist? What’s it for? What’s the cost? What’s the op­por­tu­nity cost of do­ing that?”

Meanwhile, Madison largely continues with a static k-12 system. This despite long term, disastrous reading results.

Julia Holmes:

When Icelandic filmmaker Jón Karl Helgason hears that there are an estimated 11 million swimming pools in the United States, he nearly spits his hand-rolled cigarette out of the Zoom frame. Put end to end, American swimming pools would make up a river five times the length of the Mississippi; emptied all at once, they’d contain enough water to keep Niagara Falls crashing at full volume for at least two days. But they’re not exactly a national resource — less than 3% of them are open to the public.

In Iceland, it’s pretty much the opposite: The swimming pool is first and foremost a communal space. “The swimming pool is your second home,” Helgason says. “You are brought up in the swimming pool.” There may be only 160, or so, swimming pools in the entire country (which is roughly 305 miles wide by 105 miles long), but every one of them is the essential social hub of a community, large or small.

The swimming pool is a public utility — as critical as the grocery store or the bank. “The British go to the pub, the French go to the cafes — in our culture, you meet in the swimming pool,” says Helgason. Swimmers come from all walks of life, from farmers to artists to clergymen to celebrities. “You can have 10, 15, 20, 30 people [in the pool] — they’re talking about politics and about their lives.”

William Briggs:

We are going to explore, in a series of posts, the Mind of The Academic. There is much to say on this depressing-yet-amusing topic, which by itself is worthy of consideration, but which becomes a crucial subject when we realize the role academics play in our Expertocracy.

Before we get to the meat of it, and although we have done untold scores of these in the past, let’s go through a current example to fix our subject. And before you pretend to be “outraged”, we do of course speak of the average academic. I am sure that you, dear reader, if you are an academic are not in this class.

We have the peer-reviewed paper “Christ, Country, and Conspiracies? Christian Nationalism, Biblical Literalism, and Belief in Conspiracy Theories”—nice alliteration!—by the impossibly named team of Brooklyn Walker and Abigail Vegter, in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Which is like The Vegan’s Guide To Steak. The pretense is the same.

The opening sentence of the Abstract: “When misinformation is rampant, ‘fake news’ is rising, and conspiracy theories are widespread, social scientists have a vested interest in understanding who is most susceptible to these false narratives and why.”

I’ve said something like the following many times: Academics make their living coming up with small twists and additions in the theories to which their individual fields are beholden. Some of these are even true and useful. Academics are proud of their intelligence, and magnify its importance. They view themselves benevolently and with great esteem. 

This is why they find it disconcerting to discover they are not as loved by ordinary folk as they love themselves. “Here we are,” say academics, “thinking great thoughts, really quite terrific deep thoughts, thoughts meant to benefit all of personkind, thoughts which because we thought them are obviously true and beautiful, and therefore should be believed by everybody. So why don’t they?”

So, being academics, and needing to “do research”, they research this most pressing question. Hence this paper, and the many like it.

The Economist

Many have mused on how Chatgpt could change the world, not least schools. Plenty fear the worst. The college essay has been pronounced dead. Chatgpt is causing an educational “crisis”, claims Inside Higher Ed. Maybe so; but Chatgpt could also be a teacher’s friend.

It is easier to see the threat. Users can ask Chatgpt to compare Milton Friedman with Paul Samuelson, and it will create a five-point summary that contrasts their views. Ask it to create a rap about Friedman, and it delivers lines like: “He was an economist with a unique vision / Spittin’ truth about free markets with precision”. This sophistication and creativity worries lots of teachers and schools. New York City public schools, America’s largest school district, banned Chatgpt in January, only to reverse the decision in May. Some universities abroad have banned its use.

“Initially…everybody was thinking that the sky was falling,” says Jonathan Torres, an assistant professor of English at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. He also trains teachers at Quinnipiac, and argues that ai can push them to become better. For example, before Chatgpt came along, an economics teacher might ask pupils to write an essay describing Keynesianism. With Chatgpt as an option, the teacher might ask the students to assess and revise the chatbot’s response to the same question—a more difficult task. ais have other practical uses for teachers. They can help write lesson plans and worksheets at different reading levels and even in different languages. They can also cut down the time spent on duties, such as writing recommendation letters, that devour time that could be spent teaching.

K Anders Ericsson:

I have always viewed the APS Observer as a source for up-to-date summaries of advances in the wide research domains of the Association for Psychological Science (APS). Receiving summarized information about research outside my domain of expertise is only helpful if it accurately represents the consensus views of the active APS members and Fellows. The cover article by Eric Jaffe on “Piecing together performance” in the September 2012 issue of the APS Observer focused on my own area of expertise, namely expert performance and deliberate practice, so I feel that I am able to assess the accuracy of its presentation [1].

Although I accept that the process of writing an engaging popular article requires considerable simplification, I think it is essential that the article does not contain incorrect statements and misinformation. My primary goal with this review is to describe several claims in Jaffe’s article that were simply false or clearly misleading and then discuss how APS might successfully develop successful methods for providing research summaries for non-specialists that are informative and accurately presents the major views of APS members and Fellows. At the very least they should not contain factually incorrect statements and avoid reinforcing existing misconceptions in the popular media.

Erin York, @MaineEA union head and taxpayer paid activist from Hermon, ME, & elementary “teacher,” uses area public school email systems to try and influence her local school board election! York sent this email to Hermon, ME residents and @MaineEA members working in surrounding… pic.twitter.com/tITdP8guoY

— Shawn McBreairty 🇺🇸 (@ShawnMcBreairty) June 15, 2023

Paul Bedard:

In the latest Rasmussen Reports surveyout Wednesday, 56% said officials have been ignoring reports of cheating that has had an effect on results. That includes 44% of Democrats and 74% of Republicans.

The survey, previewed for Secrets, also said 52% of likely voters believe cheating affected the 2022 midterm elections that delivered a much smaller victory to Republicans than polls predicted. Even 41% of Democrats agreed.

And fears it will continue are clear, especially as the country turns to the 2024 elections and efforts by Democrats to dismantle election integrity reforms put in place by Republican-led states.

Rasmussen said a majority, 54%, believe cheating will “affect the outcome” of the 2024 election. Biden and former President Donald Trump are leading their party’s nomination race in national polls.

NEW: Elon Musk expresses his support for free speech at the Viva Technology event in Paris, France.

It’s crazy that this is a controversial take in 2023.

“We should have free speech as much as possible… We want to allow the people to express themselves.”

“Free speech matters… pic.twitter.com/PGZrdmNSML

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) June 16, 2023

National Archivist disclosed how much classified information his agency now maintains.

No way in hell in a free country this huge volume of government records should be “classified.” pic.twitter.com/yR1JJDYDPD

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) June 16, 2023

Allie Kohn:

Readers alarmed by your coverage of a report asserting that Massachusetts is “among the worst states … for preparing teachers how to teach children to read in scientifically proven ways” should be aware that the National Council on Teacher Quality, which issued the report, is a political advocacy group founded by the right-wing Thomas B. Fordham Institute (“Colleges earn low grades on preparing reading teachers,” Page A1, June 14).

Some have understandably objected to the basis for the council’s claims about what prospective teachers are actually being taught in education programs. But the problem here runs deeper. The “science of reading” campaign — with references to “evidence-based” methods — represents a distortion of the data. Many experts have objected to the claim that children must receive explicit phonics instruction in order to learn to read. In fact, that approach, particularly when imposed too early or for too long, can adversely affect children’s depth of understanding (their comprehension of meaning) as well as their enjoyment of reading.

An excellent letter in The Times this morning from ⁦@ClaughtonJohn⁩ — who, if memory serves, combined his work as a master at Eton with writing cricket reports for the Independent on Sunday. pic.twitter.com/sFcfqk9dKr

— Richard Williams (@rwilliams1947) June 13, 2023

Nick Minock:

Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares is calling on Fairfax County Public School to hand over the school system’s independent investigation into how FCPS handled National Merit commendation notifications to students.

“Our job is to get to the truth,” said Miyares. “As you know, word got out in public reports that they [FCPS] had not notified some of our hardest working students that they were National Merit Award commendations [winners]. A lot of parents had questions. We were first told it was a one-time error at one school, Thomas Jefferson High School. Now we know it expanded to eight different schools, withheld National Merit recognition and our job as the people’s protector in the Attorney General’s office is to get to the truth whether this was withheld on the basis of race or national origin. I’d remind your viewers that Fairfax County schools hired an equity consultant out of Berkeley, California. Paid this person $455,000 worth of work to come up with this equity strategic plan and in the equity strategic plan, it said that they should strive for equal outcomes for every student without exception. And in the same equity strategic plan, it said you had to be willing to treat some students purposefully unequally. Well, we want to determine whether by that definition, treating some students ‘purposefully unequally’ it meant they were withholding National Merit recognition.”

Miyares said that’s the purpose of his investigation.

Kimberly Strassel:

Unsurprisingly, a very detailed—and far more aggressive—plan is coming from energetic entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, whose warnings about the unelected bureaucracy have been a central campaign feature from the start. He pledges to dismantle the Education Department, which “should not have existed in the first place.” He’d shut down agencies whose “culture . . . cannot be reformed”—including the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service—and replace them with entities that are “built for purpose” and answer to the president. He’d fire “a good portion” of the federal bureaucracy, ignoring civil-service protections that he believes are unconstitutional. He wants an eight-year term limit on federal civil-servant positions. (Ms. Haley has also called for limits.)

Mr. Ramaswamy is getting a rival in the policy-innovation department in Mr. DeSantis, who this week started to roll out his “day one” plan to revamp all of government. According to a RealClearPolitics report, the Florida governor in a weekend strategy session said that in addition to firings, he plans to reorganize entire agencies, which will include limiting and refocusing the roles of both the Justice Department and the FBI. It will also include breaking up federal agencies (including Justice) and shipping them to other parts of the country (doubling down on a few similar small moves during the Trump administration).

Madison’s very well funded K-12 system (> $25k per student) seeks additional property tax increases amidst declining enrollment long term disastrous reading results.

This week on America This Week, the podcast I do with @mtaibbi, the featured story in the last segment will be Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut. (Due to popular demand and all that.) It’s not long, so read up!

Harrison Bergeron (Vonnegut) Full Text.pdf https://t.co/vmezBW6tsK

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) June 16, 2023

Madison’s very well funded K-12 system (> $25k/student) has long attempted and often implemented one size fits all programs: English 10 and the ongoing efforts to abort AP and honors courses.

Yet, years after Madison’s one size fits all English 10 experiment…

Meanwhile:

I will never get over CISA’s biggest public-private disinfo partner, Alex Stamos, openly telling CISA to focus 80% of its censorship work on domestic US citizens.

He had the chutzpah to say it at an official CISA conference those citizens paid for! pic.twitter.com/NHBwHiQmko

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) June 16, 2023

This is an absolutely brilliant and important speech because it so perfectly captures the deeply authoritarian mentality driving today’s Western liberal despots: yes, we are going to ban you from expressing ideas we dislike, but it’s because we know the Common Good demands it. https://t.co/wTqFbuSEi4

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 16, 2023

Margo Cleveland:

We now know this narrative is false and that Brady served as a clearinghouse for new intel related to Ukraine and not just Giuliani’s materials. The material Brady screened included the FD-1023’s detailed summary of the alleged Biden bribes. One must wonder if the sources planted this narrative with the pliable press, not merely to mislead the public but also to ensure the Delaware team believed everything coming from Brady was related to Giuliani.

The Times also misrepresented the screening process Barr established, with Goldman framing Brady as conducting a separate investigation or an “inquiry” into Hunter Biden, as opposed to being a clearinghouse for material from Ukraine. For instance, Goldman wrote that “investigators considered Mr. Barr’s decision to empower Mr. Brady as highly unusual because prosecutors in Delaware had already been scrutinizing Hunter Biden for more than a year.” The article also noted, “Brady has not brought any criminal charges.”

Badger Institute

Parents are hungry for schools where opportunity abounds — where kids are taught to lead lives of purpose for the good of their families, their communities and their futures.

Yet, it’s difficult to create that opportunity when Wisconsin students are so inequitably funded. Students attending choice schools are funded at 60% the value of their public-school counterparts, meaning schools must spend time and energy raising funds in order to provide the quality education that every child deserves.

So, instead of playing favorites, why not fund what should matter most to everybody in the Badger State? Students and the lives of purpose they choose to create.

This video tells the story of how Kingdom Prep Lutheran High School is instilling purpose and character in young men in Milwaukee.

Rich Kremer:

An effort to rework a tuition reciprocity agreement with Minnesota that would send millions of additional dollars to Wisconsin universities is gaining momentum with state lawmakers. But as drafted, the legislation could temporarily kill reciprocity if Minnesota officials don’t approve.

Under the decades-old reciprocity agreement, students from Minnesota and Wisconsin pay in-state tuition costs while attending public universities in their neighboring state. Since tuition costs more at Minnesota universities, Wisconsin receives a “differential” that varies based on what tuition expenses are at University of Wisconsin campuses. For example, Minnesota students attending UW-River Falls pay around $5,883 per year, while tuition for Wisconsin students attending the same school is around $3,896. 

Under the current reciprocity agreement, any extra money from Minnesota students is sent to Wisconsin’s general fund. This year, a bipartisan group of Wisconsin lawmakers introduced a bill requiring that money to instead be sent to the UW System school enrolling those students from across the border.

During a public hearing Thursday, UW-River Falls Chancellor Maria Gallo told members of the Assembly Colleges and Universities Committee the shift would have a big impact on her campus.

How to recognize propaganda, a 1957 film.

This classic tutorial on how to recognize propaganda shows the progression in dehumanizing rhetoric: from snide jokes, to crude stereotypes, to murderous slanders.

Good thing it has nothing to teach today. Right? pic.twitter.com/wt2FK4XNTt

— Benjamin Carlson (@bfcarlson) June 13, 2023

Jonathan Butcher:

Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, calls itself “the world’s learning company.”1 The British publishing giant produced the exam that was once administered to students in 24 U.S. states and Washington, DC, as part of the Common Core national standards; it has contracted with the U.S. government to produce assessments for federal employees; it remains the largest publisher of U.S. college textbooks; and, at one point, had a financial stake in The Economist and owned the Financial Times and the Penguin publishing house.2 Today, Pearson still owns one of the largest virtual charter school networks in the U.S., Connections Academy, and recently released Pearson+, an online subscription service that provides subscribers with access to thousands of textbooks and instructional videos.3

This behemoth company maintains significant influence in the education-publishing world. So, when the publishing giant’s editorial guidelines say that the company will make radical ideas, such as “antiracism,” “colorism,” “colonial discourse,” “genderism,” and “intersectionality,” part of everything it does, parents should know what this influential publisher is producing for students and adults everywhere.4

In December 2022, the company announced that it purchased Personnel Decisions Research Institutes (PDRI), a business that produces “workforce assessment services” for federal agencies.5 With the acquisition, Pearson now controls the company that operates USA Hire, a website operated by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM). Applicants for positions in the federal government use this website to submit their application materials and then complete assessments as a part of the application process for federal positions. Some 40 federal agencies use the platform, and more than 500,000 applications are reviewed each year.6

Local, state, and federal K–12 education officials, as well as federal hiring managers across the U.S. government, must be aware of the radical race-related and “gender”-related content produced by Pearson because such materials may violate state and federal civil rights laws by promoting unlawful discrimination. Pearson created content based on Marxism-inspired ideas, such as critical race theory (CRT) and critical gender theory. These “woke” philosophies promote racial preferences, including in college admissions. Critical race and gender theories promote prejudice in public programs and education instruction and abandon biology by replacing biological sex with “sexual orientation and gender identity.” Public officials should protect students, teachers, and federal employees from discrimination and reject the use of Pearson’s material that advances critical theory in K–12 public schools and across federal employment programs.

It was one year ago today that we learned that you cannot catch COVID on Saturdays in June at one specific location in Madison. pic.twitter.com/vvhLETBoqN

— joe handrick (@joeminocqua) June 14, 2023

Robert George:

After the Supreme Court of the United States handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization early last summer, Princeton University’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies issued a statementfiercely condemning the ruling. The director stated that the program stood “in solidarity” with the people whose rights had been allegedly stripped away by five conservative justices doing the “racist” and “sexist” bidding of the “Christian Right,” causing women to endure “forced pregnancies,” and waging an “unprecedented attack on democracy.”

I have no doubt that the statement reflected the views of a large majority of those associated with the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. But was the director, speaking on behalf of an official unit of the university, right to declare an institutional stance on the Dobbs decision?

I am myself the director of an academic program at Princeton—the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. A majority of those associated with the Madison Program believe that elective abortion violates the rights of unborn children. So: Would it have been appropriate for the program to put out the following statement?

The James Madison Program of Princeton University applauds the Supreme Court of the United States for rectifying a long-standing constitutional and moral atrocity. The so-called constitutional right to abortion, which had been imposed on the nation by the Supreme Court nearly 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, lacked any basis in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution of the United States. It was “an act of raw judicial power,” to quote Justice Byron White’s dissent in Roe, which deprived the American people of their right to work through constitutionally prescribed democratic procedures to protect innocent children in the womb from the lethal violence of abortion. The Supreme Court has, finally, relegated a tragic error to the ash heap of history alongside such similarly unjust and ignominious decisions as Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell, and Korematsu v. U.S.

The Madison Program put out no such statement. Nor did I, as director, consider even for a moment issuing such a statement or asking my colleagues to do so. My understanding of what is proper was and is that, although I may certainly speak for myself, and identify myself as a Princeton faculty member while doing so, it would be wrong for me and my colleagues to identify the university or one of its units with a view of the rightness or wrongness of the Dobbs decision, or to make sweeping pronouncements on the justice or injustice of abortion.

Roger Partridge:

Over the last twenty years, our education system has slipped from being the envy of the world to barely mediocre.

Kiwi students once ranked near the top of international education league tables. In the latest results from the highly rated Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study, Year 5 students placed last among all English-speaking countries and 24^th out of all 26 participating OECD countries. Students suffered similar slides in maths and science.

The New Zealand education system is also now one of the most unequal in the world. The gap between the educational “haves” and “have nots” eclipses all our English-speaking OECD peers. All this, despite Government spending per child increasing in real terms by more than 30% since 2001.

Commentary.

Ben Carson:

States have also cut benefits for new members. As extreme examples, newly hired teachers in Illinois and Ohio are now receiving a negative retirement benefit — on average, they will contribute more of their own money than they’ll ever get back in benefits.

Like Ponzi schemes, teacher pension plans also assume that new members will continue to be added to the system as it grows over time. But what if those assumptions are no longer correct? What if membership numbers start to flatline or even decline?

Student Enrollment Is Falling

The school closures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic led to an immediate decline of 1.4 million public school students (a 2.8% decline). This stemmed from a number of factors: a rise in homeschooling, a shift to private schools, kindergarten delays, and some students who were simply missing.

It may sound crass, but pension plans are concerned about their membership, not students. And thanks to the combination of rising state budgets and a one-time infusion of $190 billion in federal funds, district budgets have remained strong and the lower student enrollment has not translated into a meaningful decline in pension plan membership. The 10 largest teacher pension plans ended the 2021-22 school year with a combined 1,480 fewer members than they had at the same time in 2019, a decline of just 0.05%.

But the disconnect between student enrollment and pension system membership can’t last forever. State budgets are starting to plateau, and the federal money will run out in September of next year. Meanwhile, enrollment is projected to continue falling. Lower immigration and declining birth rates will cause student enrollment to fall through the rest of the decade. The National Center for Education Statistics now projectsthat public schools will lose an additional 2.4 million students (4.9%) between now and 2031.

Scott Girard

But the board also took a big leap of faith, one that will likely require the help of the Madison community, once again, with another operating referendum in fall 2024. It could be the third straight presidential election in which the Madison Metropolitan School District asks voters for more spending authority above state limits, funded by local property tax increases.

The 2023-24 operating deficit is $15 million, but that includes some ongoing costs covered by one-time COVID-19 relief funding that expires at the end of the year. Without that money, there’s a $27 million hole to dig out from to build the 2024-25 budget.

The alternatives to a referendum aren’t pretty. During a budget discussion Monday night at the board’s Operations Work Group meeting, outgoing Chief Financial Officer Ross MacPherson estimated that to balance the budget a year from now would require cutting more than 300 positions.

“It’s going to be north of 300 positions if we only go that way,” he said. “Otherwise we really have to look at cost reductions around entire programming or, heaven forbid, we look at our schools if we need to restructure somehow.”

Madison’s taxpayer supported budget information.

“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

This bill comes at a critical time for literacy in Wisconsin. According to the most recent data from the Forward Exam, only about 37% of Wisconsin students are proficient in reading.i And this is not just a problem in the largest cities. Districts that “Exceed Expectations” on the state report card often have proficiency levels below 70%—meaning 30% of students aren’t achieving adequately.ii

Sadly, many school districts around the state have not taken the necessary steps to address the problem. Antiquated curricula not based in the “Science of Reading” is pervasive. A recent WILL studyiii found that 44% of districts around the state are using curricula that do not align with the best practices identified in educational research. Those districts had lower reading outcomes on average than districts that used other methods.

Fortunately, there is a better way forward. States that have implemented legislation substantially similar to what’s under consideration today have made significant jumps in reading. One success story is Mississippi, long a bottom-dweller in reading proficiency. In 2013, they ranked 49th in fourth-grade reading as measured by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. After requiring more phonics, today they are ranked 21st. Wisconsin desperately needs a similar revolution.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

WILL:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) following a troubling incident that occurred at Sun Prairie Area School District (SPASD), where an 18-year-old biological male exposed himself to four female girls in the shower and stated “I’m trans, by the way.” Following the school’s failure to sufficiently address the incident, and their stonewalling of an open records request, WILL is seeking an investigation and remedies from the Department of Education under the Biden Administration.

The Quotes: Cory Brewer, WILL Associate Counsel, stated, “Parents and students should feel safe and have peace of mind when kids go back to school this fall. But, the Sun Prairie Area School District has frankly been dismissive in how it has handled the alleged sexual harassment towards these four freshman girls. The Department of Education Office of Civil Rights should promptly investigate the allegations made in this complaint, then act swiftly to remedy unlawful policies and practices.”

There was a lot of good news for #SchoolChoice in WI yesterday, but it was disconcerting to see that some remain either grossly misinformed on the issue or are intentionally misleading. One of the worst offenders was @RepKristina, who made claimed the program is racist (1/x). pic.twitter.com/OrrC3sEHxx

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 15, 2023

School vouchers became a popular tool for perpetuating segregation after Brown v. Board of Education. Southern legislators enacted bills for tuition vouchers or grant programs to close down public school systems altogether, rather than desegregate.

The roots are in the history✌🏽 pic.twitter.com/wZHQF1GFtv

— Rep. Kristina Shelton (@RepKristina) June 15, 2023

Just mis-leading. Who start the Choice/voucher program in Wisconsin???? Wait for it…. Polly Williams a Black Woman Democrat from Milwaukee along with Howard Fuller, a Black Man, Gary George a Black Man, Democrat from Milwaukee, (R) Gov. Thompson https://t.co/XgzMLE8PPg

— Orlando Owens (@orlandoforwi) June 15, 2023

“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?

The Illinois legislature approved a bill that allows up to 10 days of paid leave for teachers union members who are elected to “represent the association in federal advocacy work.” @The74 https://t.co/hwg1B9e7z4

— Mike Antonucci (@UnionReport74) June 15, 2023

“an emphasis on adult employment“

Natalie Stechyson

The fact is that people don’t know how to read maps anymore. I love maps,” said Professor Bradford Parkinson, according to Yahoo News.

It’s a concern shared by Brad Green, who, along with his partner Petra Thoms, owns the shop World of Maps in Ottawa.

Green estimates that the shop, which has run a successful business since 1994, has thousands of maps in stock, and tens of thousands more in its electronic library, ready to be printed.

“There is a bit of a risk of it becoming a lost skill,’ Green said of map reading. “And I think what you lose is the big picture.”

What a hyper-local phone map doesn’t necessarily give you is perspective, Green explained. For example, if you look from the Arctic Circle down, Canada borders on Greenland; if you look at a map of North America, Point Pelee, Ont., runs along the same latitude as Northern California.

100 questions to enlightenment: https://t.co/1qacKyGAHp

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) June 12, 2023

Colin Wright:

Under pressure, a journal once notable for its courage retracts a major paper on the social roots of gender-related distress—all over a minor, inconsistently applied technicality.

The scientific method is the best way for humans to investigate phenomena, acquire new knowledge, and correct mistaken beliefs. Scientific journals play a vital role in this process, encouraging rational, evidence-based debate and the pursuit of truth above all. But since the inner workings of these journals remain largely opaque, citizens, policymakers, and science journalists can struggle to discern when politics has compromised a given publication—especially when ideological agendas are couched in scientific language and given the veneer of scientific authority.

Medical journals writ large are on the brink of such ideological capture, if they haven’t already succumbed to it. Findings that contradict the prevailing “gender-affirming” model of care for transgender-identifying youth, or offer even mild critiques, have become nearly impossible to publish. Still, rare exceptions exist, including the Archives of Sexual Behavior (ASB), a journal published by Springer Nature. This publication has distinguished itself by its willingness to facilitate viewpoint diversity in gender medicine—until now.

An alarming recent event highlights the vulnerability of the scientific endeavor to politics. ASB is a primary target for activist researchers who will not tolerate dissent from their views, and a months-long campaign by activists to pressure Springer Nature into retracting an ASB paper that they didn’t like has culminated in success. While the activists’ desire to censor inconvenient research should come as no surprise, Springer Nature’s capitulation to their demands represents a profound betrayal of scientific integrity and the publisher’s commitment to truth.

Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott

The Sunday Times has reviewed hundreds of documents, including previously confidential reports, internal memos, scientific papers and email correspondence that has been obtained through sources or by freedom of information campaigners in the three years since the pandemic started. We also interviewed the US State Department investigators — including experts on China, emerging pandemic threats, and biowarfare — who conducted the first significant US inquiry into the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak.

Whether the virus emerged as a result of a leak from a laboratory or from nature has become one the most controversial problems in science. Researchers who have attempted to find conclusive proof have been hampered by China’s lack of transparency.

However, our new investigation paints the clearest picture yet of what happened in the Wuhan laboratory.

The facility, which had started hunting the origins of the Sars virus in 2003, attracted US government funding through a New York-based charity whose president was a British-born and educated zoologist. America’s leading coronavirus scientist shared cutting-edge virus manipulation techniques.

The institute was engaged in increasingly risky experiments on coronaviruses it gathered from bat caves in southern China. Initially, it made its findings public and argued the associated risks were justified because the work might help science develop vaccines.

This changed in 2016 after researchers discovered a new type of coronavirus in a mineshaft in Mojiang in Yunnan province where people had died from symptoms similar to Sars.

Rather than warning the world, the Chinese authorities did not report the fatalities. The viruses found there are now recognised as the only members of Covid-19’s immediate family known to have been in existence pre-pandemic.

They were transported to the Wuhan institute and the work of its scientists became classified. “The trail of papers starts to go dark,” a US investigator said. “That’s exactly when the classified programme kicked off. My view is that the reason Mojiang was covered up was due to military secrecy related to [the army’s] pursuit of dual use capabilities in virological biological weapons and vaccines.”

According to the US investigators, the classified programme was to make the mineshaft viruses more infectious to humans.

Alex Baumhardt:

Carl Cole was alarmed by the growing number of students sent to him for special education in the late 1990s. He was director of special education for the Bethel School District near Eugene, and he doubted that so many kids had learning disabilities. 

One of the district’s elementary schools was referring nearly one in five students to special education, and most of them were struggling readers. When he went to visit their classrooms, he realized why.

“Many kids were what we later coined ‘instructionally disabled,’ not special education,” Cole said in a recent interview. In other words, they weren’t being taught to read in ways that many experts, especially those in the field of special education, knew all kids needed to be taught. 

The Capital Chronicle determined that Oregon has spent more than $250 million in the past 25 years on reading. But that money has failed to help more than a generation of students. Over the last 25 years, nearly two in five fourth graders and one in five eighth graders have scored “below basic” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the nation’s report card. That means they struggle to read and understand simple words. Today, few Oregon fourth and eighth graders are proficient readers, according to the report card.

To address this, Gov. Tina Kotek is backing the state’s single largest reading investment in two decades, the Early Literacy Success Initiative, a $140 million grant program to get “evidence-based literacy instruction” methods into classrooms in districts that apply for the funding. Kotek and the bill’s supporters have said it will finally get the “science of reading” into Oregon classrooms, though it’s yet to pass the Legislature that’s been stalled by a Republican-led walkout.

1. TWITTER FILES: Internal documents from @Twitter find Brown University’s @cward1e provides research that helps censor. pic.twitter.com/cxeMWGbc0Z

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) June 14, 2023

Maxine Bernstein:

Nearly a decade into an effort to reduce the glut of sex offenders on the state registry to allow more intense focus on the most dangerous, a bureaucratic morass has nearly doubled the registry instead.

The Oregon parole board remains bogged down in state-mandated assessments to gauge the risk of each offender to commit new crimes.

Of 32,523 people on the sex offender registry, almost two-thirds, or 20,575, are waiting to be classified into one of the state’s three notification levels: Level 1 for low risk, Level 2 for medium risk and Level 3 for high risk.

The backlog has kept hundreds of low-level sex offenders in limbo. Those who stay crime-free for years can petition to no longer register. But they must wait until the state gets around to reclassifying their risk level to petition for relief.

State lawmakers have twice extended a 2016 deadline to complete the risk assessments and set aside more than $6 million for the work. The deadline now is December 2026, but state officials tasked with the job aren’t confident they can meet even that date.

Last year, the state parole board’s executive director, Dylan Arthur, told a legislative committee that it would take two more decades with the current funding and staff to finish.

The reclassifications began in 2014 after the Legislature passed a bill the year before that was touted as a public safety measure to allow the state to focus resources on those at highest risk to commit new sex crimes.

The law was supposed to create uniformity in assigning risk levels based on a single assessment tool instead of the discretion of trial judges based on criminal charges and convictions.

More.

MD Kittle:

The Baraboo School District held focus groups as part of a “Racism as a Public Health Issue” initiative that was exclusively for black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) middle schoolers, offering the minority students in attendance a $100 gift card plus a pizza party.

According to records obtained by The Wisconsin Daily Star, the public health session was part of a $35,000 grant issued to Public Health Sauk County by Governor Tony Evers’ Department of Health Services. The “Qualitative Data for Capacity Building and Alignment” grant program is aimed at engaging with community members or organizations representing “underserved communities in an authentic way,” according to the emails.

More on #UW voting registration drives. Parent just returned from UW-Madison orientation and says they were pushing out of state parents to get their kids to vote in #Wisconsin. Keep in mind that the university belongs to a major voter registration initiative created by a group… pic.twitter.com/7Z8GeSEYNg

— Wisconsin Right Now (@wisconsin_now) June 14, 2023

DEI is entirely inconsistent with constitutional guarantees of equality, due process, freedom of speech & religion. Defunding DEI is not only good policy – it is constitutionally mandated. DEI is an authoritarian, anti-constitutional, Marxist worldview that tramples rights. https://t.co/y4OZBvBkbI

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) June 14, 2023

.@SpeakerVos on @UWSystem DEI funds: “It’s become (the left’s) new religion. They no longer go to church on Sunday, but boy are they trying to make sure…everybody is evangelized…that there’s only 1 acceptable viewpoint. That’s not what I think taxpayers should be funding.”

— Jessie Opoien (@jessieopie) June 14, 2023

Chris Corrigan:

The National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) released its biennial tuition-discounting survey in April. The results indicate that increasing discounts may be the canary in the coal mine for serious financial difficulties looming for private colleges.

The headline from the NACUBO press release is that discount rates for private higher-education institutions are up from 46.4 percent to 56.2 percent in the last 10 years. (The numbers in question apply to first-time undergraduates.) NACUBO defines the tuition discount rate as “the total institutional grant aid awarded to undergraduates” by colleges and universities, as “a percentage of the gross tuition and fee revenue the institution would collect if all students paid the full tuition and fee sticker price.”

In addition to the higher discount rate, the number of students receiving some kind of “grant” rose from 88 percent 10 years ago to 91 percent this year, and the amount of the average grant rose from 53.1 percent to 62.1 percent.

Lower tuition is good for students and families, of course, but enticing students with cheaper fees can be extraordinarily damaging to colleges’ bottom lines. As NACUBO puts it,

Private colleges often advertise high sticker prices compared to public institutions. To enroll students who are unable or unwilling to pay those high prices, colleges employ tuition discounting strategies that subsidize a fraction of the sticker price through financial aid grants. As the competition for students gets more intense, private colleges will be pushed to increase their tuition discount rates in order to enroll the same number of students.

NACUBO tells us what these increasing discount rates have meant for institutions: “After accounting for inflation, net tuition and fee revenue decreased by 5.4 percent per first-time undergraduate and by 5.9 percent among all undergraduates.” Net revenue is what institutions have left to cover their costs, and it is going down.

Laura Testino:

Eight of the board members voted for the change in the job requirements. The ninth, Vice Chair Sheleah Harris, abstained from the vote and denounced the board’s decision. Then she announced she would quit her elected seat. 

Before the amendments approved Tuesday, board policy required candidates to have a certain amount of in-school experience and training in education. Under the new requirements, the board could consider a candidate who has 10 years of work experience and advanced degrees in any of several fields, rather than just education. Board member Amber Huett-Garcia suggested the updates to the existing policies. 

Board members also voted to reopen the application for the superintendent role, hoping to solicit more candidates. Those who apply will have to meet the updated requirements, plus a revised set of desired qualifications the board also approved. 

The decisions Tuesday reactivate a search that has been suspended for nearly two months, as board members tried to resolve differences and misunderstandings about the search process.

“We’ve been hanging this over the heads of the public for far too long,” board member Frank Johnson said of the policy vote.

Between this story and Laura’s coverage of the Memphis superintendent search — a list of situations to avoid for Madison School Board members in their upcoming search for a new MMSD superintendent: https://t.co/a5gbVsJ8YY

— Scott Girard (@sgirard9) June 14, 2023

Nader Issa, Fran Spielman:

To avoid ballooning the overall $9.4 billion budget – which also includes pension payments, central office staff salaries and expenses tied to CPS’ significant debt – officials presented a scaled-down $155 million capital budget plan that will address emergency facility needs to have schools ready for the fall. In past years, the capital plan was released later in the summer and detailed more substantial construction projects. Last year it was $765 million. Officials said they’ll present a plan for more capital funding later this year.

While 25 schools are facing cuts of at least $75,000, the increase in spending at most schools is welcome news compared to last year, when CPS faced protests over its funding allocations. Mayor Brandon Johnson was a Chicago Teachers Union official last year, and more recently campaigned on infusing under-resourced neighborhood schools with more funding. He had little time to influence a budget process that started late last year, months before he was inaugurated in May, but Johnson will be happy to to avoid trouble in his first major education announcement after teachers heavily backed his candidacy.

More.

1/ News today that CPS budget will remain steady at $9.4b in FY 2024. But more notable is that CPS will use its taxing authority to increase property taxes 5% in Chicago to help funding. At this rate, CPS and the city will just own all our houses soon…https://t.co/wNbRwo7B0A pic.twitter.com/9V3OzWswM6

— Stuart Loren (@StuLoren) June 14, 2023

Alexander Shur:

The Legislature’s GOP-controlled finance committee on Tuesday approved increasing K-12 education spending by $1 billion, $1.6 billion less than what Democratic Gov. Tony Evers requested in his budget.

The increase will go toward funding both public schools, which Evers prioritized, and the state’s voucher programs, which Evers had originally sought to limit in his budget despite Republican calls to dramatically expand it.

Many of the education provisions the budget committee approved Tuesday along party lines were first announced last week as part of a deal between Republican legislative leaders and Evers on a separate bill to increase local aid to communities across Wisconsin. Republicans have for months said they would increase spending on public schools if Evers agreed to spend more on the state’s voucher programs.

Same issue…

Somewhat related (deeper dive example): Did Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers veto legislation to increase literacy tests? More.

Legislation and Reading: The Wisconsin Experience 2004-

And..

In the world of Senator Larson, $1 billion in increases for public schools means they are being “defunded.” https://t.co/VQFgitZ492

— Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) June 14, 2023

Scoop: I found some extremely curious counting in the Southern Poverty Law Center’s latest report on hate groups, which now includes the conservative org Moms for Liberty. But the issues go way beyond that one group. THREAD 1/x

— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) June 9, 2023

Deivis Angeli, Matt Lowe, and The Village Team:

We study whether tweets about racial justice predict the offline behaviors of nearly 20,000 US academics. In an audit study, academics that tweet about racial justice discriminate more in favor of minority students than academics that do not tweet about racial justice. Racial justice tweets are more predictive of race-related political tweets than political contributions, suggesting that visibility increases informativeness. In contrast, the informativeness of tweets is lower during periods of high social pressure to tweet about racial justice. Finally, most graduate students mispredict informativeness, more often underestimating than overestimating, reducing the welfare benefits of social media.

wikipedia:

El Paquete Semanal (“The Weekly Package”) or El Paquete is a one terabyte collection of digital material distributed since around 2008^[1] on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet.^[2]Since 2015, it has been the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans,^[1] as Internet in Cuba has been suppressed for many years with only about a 38.8% Internet penetration rate as of 2018.^[3] El Paquete Semanal has its own page that is running in the United States, where one could view its contents and is consistently updated every week.^[4]

dw.com

German primary school students should no longer be taught English, and instead teachers should dedicate this time to improving their German reading and mathematics skills, the president of the German Teachers’ Association, Heinz-Peter Meidinger, has said.

Meidinger told German public broadcaster ARD on Friday that focusing on English lessons was setting the wrong priorities.

“We believe that English lessons are indeed dispensable, and that they can be shifted to, for example, reading lessons,” Meidinger said. “We have to pay more attention to the basics at primary schools: reading skills, writing skills, arithmetic.”

Daniel Klein:

The policing of “information” is the stuff of Naziism, Stalinism, Maoism, and similar anti-liberal regimes. To repress criticism of their dicta and diktats, anti-liberals label criticism “misinformation” or “disinformation.” Those labels are instruments to crush dissent. 

This paper offers an understanding of knowledge as involving three chief facets: information, interpretation, and judgment. Usually, what people argue fervently over is not information, but interpretation and judgment. 

What is being labeled and attacked as “misinformation” is not a matter of true or false information, but of true or false knowledge—meaning that disagreement more commonly arises over interpretations and judgments as to which interpretations to take stock in or believe. We make judgments, “good” and “bad,” “wise” and “foolish,” about interpretations, “true” and “false.” 

On that understanding, the paper explains that the projects and policies now afoot styled “anti-misinformation” and “anti-disinformation” are dishonest, as it should be obvious to all that those projects and policies would, if advanced honestly, be called something like “anti-falsehood” campaigns.

But to prosecute an “anti-falsehood” campaign would make obvious the true nature of what is afoot—an Orwellian boot to stomp on Wrongthink. To support governmental policing of “information” is to confess one’s anti-liberalism and illiberality. The essay offers a spiral diagram to show the three chief facets of knowledge (information, interpretation, and judgment) plus a fourth facet, fact, which also deserves distinct conceptualization, even though the spiral reminds us: Facts are theory-laden.

Stanford's censorship center holds the "El Dorado" goldmine of government censorship documents.

It's the world's most perfectly preserved First Amendment crime scene.

But Stanford is defying a subpoena to stop the public from seeing it.

I explain why to @jsolomonReports: pic.twitter.com/UwUiB60Qqb

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) June 13, 2023

Thomas Kika:

Outrage has been expressed online at Johns Hopkins University over its non-binary-inclusive definition of “lesbian” in its glossary of LGBTQ+ terms.

The Baltimore-based university, a major hub of medical research in the U.S., maintains an extensive glossary of definitions for terms relevant to the broad LGBTQ+ community, which is updated as the subject of gender and sexual identity changes.

On Monday, the glossary’s new definition of “lesbian” came under attack as the university defined the term as “a non-man attracted to non-men.” The update is meant to be inclusive of non-binary individuals who might still identify as lesbians.

Philip Wegman:

“We’ve seen throughout this country that the DOJ and the FBI are controlled by one faction of our society,” DeSantis said on the call, pointing to how those agencies were “going after pro-life activists,” wrongfully investigating parents at school board meetings “who are concerned about things like critical race theory, and forcing kids to wear masks,” and “colluding with tech companies to censor information such as what they did with the 2020 election.”

There are some functions DeSantis would not allow law enforcement to do at all. For instance, he told advisors that as president, he would “completely put the kibosh on the FBI and DOJ’s nonsense with respect to so-called misinformation.”

There are other things DeSantis would have the Justice Department do much differently. He described the mission of the Civil Rights Division during his presidency as one where the agency “is actually policing discrimination.” That division would be truly colorblind, the governor said, because “discrimination is discrimination,” adding that he didn’t think it was acceptable to discriminate against individuals who “happen to be white or Asian.”

And while much of the DeSantis plan to end “weaponization of federal agencies” involves limiting and focusing the role of the Justice Department, the governor pointed to one area of federal expansion. Pointing to Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, he promised to direct the DOJ to go after and hold “accountable” progressive local prosecutors who “are not prosecuting cases against violent criminals.”

David Blaska:

Even at that, reforming justice doesn’t pay as well as disrupting school board meetings. Freedom Inc. paid its co-executive director in 2021, the disputatious M Adams. $545,038! That’s according to the non-profit’s IRS-required 990 form, unearthed by the Werkes’ CPA. Up from $116,115 the prior year on income of $8.3 million.  

Blaska’s Bottom Line: Irony is Freedom Inc. picketed Mahoney’s residence during the push to expel police from our high schools. Unless one believes local law enforcement is targeting minorities for spitting on the sidewalk, we observe (once again) that correlation is not causation.

NCTQ

All children deserve to learn to read, and all teachers deserve the preparation and support that will allow them to help their students achieve this goal. Yet more than one-third of fourth graders—1.3 million children¹ in the U.S.—cannot read at a basic level.²

Not learning how to read has lifelong consequences. Students who are not reading at grade level by the time they reach fourth grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school,³ which in turn leads to additional challenges for them as adults: lower lifetime earnings,⁴ higher rates of unemployment,⁵and a higher likelihood of entering the criminal justice system.⁶ Even more alarming, the rate of students who cannot read proficiently by fourth grade climbs even higher for students of color, those with learning differences, and those who grow up in low-income households, perpetuating disparate life outcomes.⁷ This dismal data has nothing to do with the students and everything to do with inequities in access to effective literacy instruction.

The status quo is far from inevitable. In fact, we know the solution to this reading crisis, but we are not using the solution at scale. More than 50 years of research provides a clear picture of effective literacy instruction. These strategies and methods—collectively called scientifically based reading instruction, which is grounded in the science of reading—could dramatically reduce the rate of reading failure. Past estimates have found that while three in 10 children struggle to read (and that rate has grown higher since the pandemic), research indicates that more than 90% of all students could learn to read if they had access to teachers who employed scientifically based reading instruction.⁸

“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?

Deena Winter:

The district was built to serve about 40,000 students, but currently enrolls about 28,000.

Roethke pointed out that other large Minnesota districts use fewer, larger schools to reduce costs. 

The district’s most recent five-year budget projectionpredicts an “imminent financial crisis” due to declining enrollment and a failure to cut costs. If the district’s leaders continue with the existing “footprint, practices, policies, and priorities… we expect the district to confront an unprecedented fiscal crisis in the 2024-2025 school year,” the report said.

If no action is taken, the general fund will be depleted sometime in 2025 and the district will quickly descend into the red, triggering state intervention.

“Without significant changes, MPS will run out of money during the 2024-2025 school year and be unable to operate as it does now,” the report said.

Dell Cameron:

The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago. 

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans’ lives are described soberly and at length by the director’s own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members. 

What that report ended up saying constitutes a nightmare scenario for privacy defenders. 

“This report reveals what we feared most,” says Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.” 

In the shadow of years of inaction by the US Congress on comprehensive privacy reform, a surveillance state has been quietly growing in the legal system’s cracks. Little deference is paid by prosecutors to the purpose or intent behind limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance activities. More craven interpretations of aging laws are widely used to ignore them. As the framework guarding what privacy Americans do have grows increasingly frail, opportunities abound to split hairs in court over whether such rights are even enjoyed by our digital counterparts.

Byron Tau & Dustin Volz:

new report shows that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence appeared unaware which federal intelligence agencies were buying Americans’ personal data.

WASHINGTON—The vast amount of Americans’ personal data available for sale has provided a rich stream of intelligence for the U.S. government but created significant threats to privacy, according to a newly released report by the U.S.’s top spy agency.

Luke Berg and Cory Brewer,:

Jun 27, 2023 11:00 AM in
DescriptionOver 50 years of Title IX is at stake, and the hard-fought rights, safety, and wellbeing of young women and girls could be turned upside-down. The U.S. Department of Education under the Biden Administration recently published two proposed rules related to Title IX. One would change the definition of sex to include gender identity, and the other is specific to athletics and would prohibit schools from adopting or enforcing policies that categorically ban transgender students from participating on teams consistent with their gender identity.

To learn more, please join WILL attorneys, Luke Berg and Cory Brewer, for a virtual townhall on the recent proposed changes to Title IX on June 27th, at 11 AM CST. Attorneys Berg and Brewer will discuss specifically the status of the law in terms of students’ bathroom and locker room use, and WILL’s work on this very issue.

Frederick Hess:

An invigorating examination of the potential for meaningful change in education, from one of the nation’s most astute observers of schooling and school improvement.

In The Great School Rethink, education policy sentinel Frederick M. Hess offers a pithy and perceptive appraisal of American schooling and finds, in the uncertain period following pandemic disruption, an ideal moment to reimagine US education. Now is the time, he asserts, to ask hard questions about how schools use time and talent, how they work with parents, what they do with digital tools, and how they meet the needs of their communities.

More legal fees down the 🚽

Dr. Reid announces FCPS will fight releasing its report to investigators seeking to uncover the truth about the failure to notify commended students.

This less than a month after a Loudoun judge discredited privilege arguments FCPS now relies on. pic.twitter.com/NAq5VfK76H

— Fairfax County Parents Association (@FFXParentsAssoc) June 12, 2023

Scott Girard:

A report last month showed that students in Madison schools’ full-day and half-day 4-year-old kindergarten programs had similar academic gains over the 2021-22 school year.

The results of the study, which covers the first year of the Madison Metropolitan School District’s full-day 4K program, weren’t a surprise to Director of Early Learning Culleen Witthuhn, given how “tricky” it is to look at academic information for 4-year-olds.

Plus, Witthuhn said, the full-day 4K implementation wasn’t necessarily about seeing better test results for 4-year-olds.

“(That) really wasn’t our goal or our intent,” Witthuhn said. “It was really to provide access to families who typically might not have been able to have any high-quality, early learning experiences at all otherwise.”

Accessing half-day programming can be difficult for families experiencing homelessness, or who have parents or caregivers who work full-time throughout the day, Witthuhn said. 

Full-day programs in MMSD, on average, included more students of color and children whose parents did not attend college compared to the half-day programs, according to the Madison Education Partnership study.

The district began its full-day 4K program in fall 2021 and expanded it for this school year, with enrollment growing from 237 in the first year to 417 in the second.

This fall, it will once again grow with five more classrooms at additional schools.

“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?

Suzanne Moore:

Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, who stood down “unexpectedly” last year, has been hiding in plain sight for so long that I sincerely hope we can see her clearly now. How this woman was ever allowed to have so much influence over vulnerable children, never mind medical professionals, is frankly disturbing. She is a former IT consultant with no medical training – unless you count the fact that she won 2016’s Sparkle Diversity Champion of the Year as a specialised qualification. I certainly don’t. The story of how much power she came to have remains shocking.

The organisation she ran was once not controversial; it was a support group for children and parents of kids with gender issues until she got her hands on it. It became an activist and lobby group receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds in lottery funding and grants and was hired by the Department for Education to provide training on “gender identity” in schools. As with Stonewall, it had huge reach into key institutions and the usual gormless celebrity support.

We now find that Green herself had direct influence on policy at the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. After being told that the Tavistock did not have any records of meeting with Green, when threatened by court action, miraculously it found 300 pages of them.

Jonathan Turley:

A new survey by Princetonians for Free Speech shows that roughly three-fourths of students believe that it is acceptable to shout down a speaker. The distressing results are consistent with other studies and surveys that have been discussed on this blog. Of course, some faculty maintain that it is better to “shoot down rather than shout down” conservatives.

Princeton has tried recently to reinforce free speech principles, but the survey shows these anti-free speech views have been reinforced continually in elementary and high schools. They were told by teachers that free speech is harmful and triggering.

That is evident in this survey:

Richard Hanania:

Within a few months, it’s likely that the Supreme Court will eliminate the explicit consideration of race in college and university admissions in the consolidated cases of SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC. This is a big deal, and should be celebrated, if for no other reason than it pushes the law in the right direction. At the same time, while listening to the oral arguments, I got a sinking feeling that the coming decision may have certain unintended consequences as a result of not going far enough. This could lead to institutions that are less explicitly conscious of race, but more left-wing and less meritocratic due to a desire to indirectly take it into account. If this is the end result of SFFA, it will be the latest in a long line of Supreme Court decisions that sought to push back race- and gender-based governance while only making it stronger. In order to get around this problem, the Supreme Court should make clear that attempts to achieve a racially balanced student body are themselves in violation of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Protection Clause.

Imagine that there was a Southern municipality with a history of discriminating against black people. It is taken to court, at which point a judge decrees that while the city cannot simply refuse to hire blacks, it’s fine for it to only recruit from white areas in hopes of achieving a certain demographic composition of its workforce. This would never be accepted. The principle of disparate impact of course goes much furtherthan this — practices that have the effect of excluding racial minorities from a job or other kind of benefit can be prohibited regardless of the intent of the accused.

apastyle:

The in-text citations and references above are adapted from the reference template for software in Section 10.10 of the Publication Manual(American Psychological Association, 2020, Chapter 10). Although here we focus on ChatGPT, because these guidelines are based on the software template, they can be adapted to note the use of other large language models (e.g., Bard), algorithms, and similar software.

The reference and in-text citations for ChatGPT are formatted as follows:

Jeff Zymeri:

School choice programs in Wisconsin have not significantly affected outcomes for public school students or led to a decline in their test scores, according to a study released on Monday.

Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which commissioned the study alongside School Choice Wisconsin, told National Review that this finding goes directly against one of the main talking points of school choice opponents.

Instead of finding test scores in steep decline, the study saw small positive shifts in reading scores and no statistically significant effect on math scores. Wisconsin has been offering private school alternatives since the 1990s.

Critics often argue that school choice not only diverts critical resources from public schools, but also that choice schools will “skim” the best students, leading to a group of students in public schools that is more challenging to educate. “We have a long track record of this program in Wisconsin and we have no evidence in support of that notion,” Flanders said.

Flanders said Milton Friedman’s notion of school choice as providing the necessary competition to lift all ships is at the heart of the study’s findings.

“When the public school monopoly actually has to deal with competitors, for the first time in many instances, they’re forced to start listening to the desires and needs of families in their communities and that results in improved performance,” said Flanders. “They’re required to become more efficient.”

The study builds upon past research on the Milwaukee Public Schools to include data on outcomes in Racine Public Schools and schools throughout Wisconsin.

More, here.

“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?

Center for Research on Education Outcomes:

Our third installment: This study examines the academic progress of students enrolled in charter schools compared with the progress of students enrolled in traditional public schools (TPS).

How charter school students learned over time
Fifteen years of student performance can provide insights into how schools, school operators, K–12 academic programs and education policy impact student academic success.

Study results: A valuable tool for possibility and growth
Our evidence shows how successful, diverse schools deliver critical proof points of ways to improve outcomes for students and pave the road ahead.

🧵The evidence is increasing for charter schools, according to @CREDOatStanford‘s 3rd national study. It’s not perfect. Some charters are horrible. My takeaways… (1/7)

— Jill Barshay (@jillbarshay) June 12, 2023

“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?

Tom Loveless:

In February, 2023 Bari Weiss produced a podcast, “Why 65% of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read” and Nicholas Kristof, New York Times columnist, wrote “Two-Thirds of Kids Struggle to Read, and We Know How to Fix It.” Both headlines are misleading. The 65% and two-thirds figures are referring to the percentage of 4^th graders who scored below proficient on the last reading test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), administered in 2022.

The problem is this: scoring below proficient doesn’t mean “can’t really read” or “struggling to read.”   It also does not mean “functionally illiterate” or identify “non- readers” as some of the more vituperative descriptions on social media have claimed. It doesn’t even mean “below grade level in reading,” one of the milder distortions.

Both press reports were second-hand accountings of Emily Hanford’s series, Sold a Story. Hanford immediately took to Twitter to try to clear up the matter.

But what about the percent below basic? How do they fare, Tom? And when we go periods of time when we fail to make progress in further reducing the percent below basic we are harming these children and putting their prospects at risk, no? @arotherham @1in5advocacy @CharlesBarone

— Sandy Kress (@Kress_Sandy) June 12, 2023

“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?

Telegraph:

A secretive government Covid unit accused of seeking to suppress free speech during the pandemic was in “hourly” contact with social media firms, the official in charge of the operation has disclosed….

National Association of Scholars:

The National Association of Scholars is delighted that 52 Harvard University professors have formed a Council on Academic Freedom. This group will “advocate for the free and civil exchange of ideas on campus” by promoting the principles of free inquiry, civil discourse, and intellectual diversity. Harvard, no less than other universities, needs professors who defend intellectual freedom—and freedom in general. But because Harvard is Harvard—the oldest and most respected college in the country—the creation of the Council on Academic Freedom sends a message that will reverberate throughout American higher education.

That message is that faculty everywhere face a choice: either to fight for academic freedom or to watch it disappear. Those who imagine that academic freedom will continue without special efforts to preserve it are mistaken. American higher education is sinking into a morass of ideological conformity. A great many faculty members dislike having to endorse views they privately disagree with, avoid subjects that activists say are off-limits, and apologize for imaginary infractions—but they see no practical way to resist. The creation of the Council on Academic Freedom shows that there is indeed a way to resist.

Attack on “Balanced Literacy” Is Attack on Professional Teachers, Research https://t.co/O4h4E0ZIxo via @plthomasEdD

— Paul Thomas (@plthomasEdD) June 11, 2023

Madison, long tolerating disastrous reading results, embraced “balanced literacy”.

“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?

Peter Thiel:

What I’d like to do is delineate a few areas in which diversity is making us ignore the real issues that we should be paying attention to. I want to suggest that, at least on a public-policy level, all these debates about diversity, identity politics, multiculturalism, the woke religion, etc., should be treated like debates about homelessness. Homelessness is a mess. It’s a problem. And at the same time that it is a very real problem, it is a giant machine to redirect attention from all the other problems across America toward a narrow aspect of big-city dysfunction. When homelessness is forced into every policy conversation, it leads to circuitous, dead-end reasoning—We’re never going to fix homelessness until we fix the schools, but we’re never going to fix the schools, the police, or even the roads until we fix homelessness. It becomes an all-purpose excuse for ignoring what’s really going on. So let me, in quick succession, list a few of the deeper issues obscured by our diversity obsession today.

Start with the university. It’s easy to focus on all the insanity in the humanities. But if you remember what universities themselves believe—that all their serious work, their cutting-edge research, is done in the sciences—the focus on the humanities begins to resemble an attention redirect, stifling the hard questions about what is actually going on in the sciences. Are they progressing as advertised? Are we still living in an accelerating world in which science is fundamentally healthy and critical, with diversity of thought? It shouldn’t have required covid to be able to ask these questions, to notice that “science” has somehow gotten to be a very, very diseased thing. Most imagine a scientist to be an independent researcher who thinks for himself, and this figure may still appear in children’s books, but in practice the occupation mostly entails the enforcement of a fixed set of dogmas.

A few years after The Diversity Myth came out, a Stanford physics professor, Bob Laughlin, got a Nobel Prize. And he began to suffer from the supreme delusion that, now that he had a Nobel Prize in physics, he also had academic freedom and could investigate anything he wanted. Now, there are a lot of controversial topics in science. You could have a heterodox view on stem-cell research, or you could be a skeptic of climate change or Darwinism. But Laughlin hit on a topic that was far more taboo than any of the above. He had the idea that most of the scientists were doing no work at all. They were actually stealing money from the government, just creating all these fraudulent grant applications. Laughlin had done a lot of work studying the physics of super-high temperatures (superconductivity and the like), and he once told me that, of the roughly fifty thousand papers written on the subject, maybe twenty-five of them were any good at all.

Laughlin’s team started with the biology department at Stanford, launching a sort of inquiry into what, exactly, it was doing. They didn’t actually publish the results—they just had a public hearing and generally denounced all the professors as having stolen money from the government. The generous conclusion would be that the department wasn’t fully fraudulent: just an incredibly incrementalist exercise in groupthink that wasn’t really moving the dial forward. This was a line of thinking that was completely, completely taboo. I don’t need to tell you how the story ends.

Paula Bolyard:

Dan Phillips, a Christian pastor and sometimes blogger, recently posted a letter he sent to his congregation to help parents explain Pride Month to their children.

The letter (read it in its entirety below) was posted on June 5 on the Pyromaniacs blog, which is hosted on the Google-owned Blogger platform. It was a thoughtful letter with sound biblical advice for families trying to navigate the rainbow-saturated month of June. In fact, I forwarded it to my son and daughter-in-law and told them to bookmark it for when those questions come up with our granddaughter, as they inevitably will.

Not long after the letter was posted, Google/Blogger stepped in and censored the post. If you try to access the page now, you will see this:

Sweden’s PM has an insight about migrants, too late for Sweden, too weakly implemented to undo the damage: “large-scale immigration & poor integration simply do not work. That is why we are now changing Sweden’s immigration policy to the EU’s strictest.”https://t.co/0rUNCHpCsg pic.twitter.com/G9tnN3TiE6

— Fabius Maximus (Ed.) (@FabiusMaximus01) June 9, 2023

Jon Levine, Mary Kay Linge and Matthew Sedacca

One education consultant confirms that some of the city’s top private schools now ask about a child’s gender identity and preferred pronouns on their kindergarten admissions applications.

The schools — with kindergarten tuition north of $60,000 — shamelessly boast about the instruction in their online course materials.

Dalton’s First Program for grades K-3 on East 91st Street on the Upper East Side promises a curriculum that teaches “races” and “gender expressions.” 

There, even the youngest students will “develop an appreciation for, and value the importance of diversity by directly addressing issues of fairness, gender equity, and social justice,” according to the Dalton website.

Breaking:

The NHS have banned puberty blockers for children outside of clinical research.

This day will go down in history as the day that safeguarding of children came back into existence.

— James Esses (@JamesEsses) June 9, 2023

Source Document.

Jasmine Hilton, John D. Harden, Keith L. Alexander and Emily Davies:

Carjackings — which involve violence or the threat of violence and are different from unoccupied cars being stolen — have become so prevalent in the District that they became a political talking point as Congress debatedD.C.’s crime and policing bills. D.C. currently averages one reported carjacking per day compared with every three days in the two years before the pandemic.

Cities nationwide are facing the same burden. According to a Post analysis of crime reports from 2018 to March 2023, Chicago, Fort Worth, New Orleans and San Francisco also recorded an increase in carjackings during the pandemic.Data shows those crimes have remained at elevated levels in each city.

Officials and community leaders have said gaps in the social safety net that were widened by the pandemic explain some of the uptick in carjackings and increased arrests of juveniles charged with the crime.

In the end, scores of victims are left traumatized. Some have been injured or killed.

Lee Alexander Thomas, 54, was killed in December by teens trying to steal his BMW at a gas station in Largo, according to police. The Washington Commanders fan and local bus driver was shot after assailants confronted him and he wouldn’t give up his car, according to hisolder brother, Ernest Thomas.

“There’s no safeguard,” Ernest Thomas said. “He wasn’t doing anything that a normal citizen wouldn’t be doing, getting gas in his car. … You can’t stay in the house all the time.”

Jon Brodkin:

A federal judge in Texas has a new rule for lawyers in his courtroom: No submissions written by artificial intelligence unless the AI’s output is checked by a human. US District Judge Brantley Starr also ordered lawyers to file certificates attesting that their filings are either written or reviewed by humans.

“All attorneys appearing before the Court must file on the docket a certificate attesting either that no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence (such as ChatGPT, Harvey.AI, or Google Bard) or that any language drafted by generative artificial intelligence was checked for accuracy, using print reporters or traditional legal databases, by a human being,” according to a new “judge-specific requirement” in Starr’s courtroom.

Jon Brodkin:

A federal judge in Texas has a new rule for lawyers in his courtroom: No submissions written by artificial intelligence unless the AI’s output is checked by a human. US District Judge Brantley Starr also ordered lawyers to file certificates attesting that their filings are either written or reviewed by humans.

“All attorneys appearing before the Court must file on the docket a certificate attesting either that no portion of the filing was drafted by generative artificial intelligence (such as ChatGPT, Harvey.AI, or Google Bard) or that any language drafted by generative artificial intelligence was checked for accuracy, using print reporters or traditional legal databases, by a human being,” according to a new “judge-specific requirement” in Starr’s courtroom.

Emily Ekins and Jordan Gygi

George Orwell’s 1984 is one of our society’s most frequently referenced illustrations of what life would be like under an authoritarian government. Actual government policies that are viewed as illiberal in varying degrees are often tied to this novel by opponents, an easy and effective way to call out government overreach and control. In the book 1984, citizens of the fictional nation Oceania are under constant government surveillance, including in their own homes. Devices called telescreens display propaganda and record peoples’ actions, allowing the government to monitor people even in what should be the most private place they know—their homes. This type of behavior is meant to be an extreme example of what can happen when a government gains too much power, and opposition to such surveillance has been assumed to be overwhelming and obvious. But is it? We don’t know how much of this preference for security over privacy or freedom is something unique to this generation (a cohort effect) or simply the result of youth (age effect). However, there is reason to think part of this is generational. Americans over age 45 have vastly different attitudes on in‐home surveillance cameras than those who are younger. These Americans were born in or before 1978. Thus the very youngest were at least 11 before the Berlin Wall fell. Being raised during the Cold War amidst regular news reports of the Soviet Union surveilling their own people may have demonstrated to Americans the dangers of giving the government too much power to monitor people. Young people today are less exposed to these types of examples and thus less aware of the dangers of expansive government power.

FIRE wrote today to New College of Florida after trustee Christopher Rufo bragged on Twitter this week that a visiting history professor’s contract wouldn’t be renewed due to his “left-wing” teaching, views, and criticism of university leadership.

That’s unconstitutional. pic.twitter.com/UqRXM5547p

— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) June 8, 2023

Robert Graboyes:

As Ted and I discussed: 

“They were forced to undergo hysterectomies. Their tubes were tied and they were given vasectomies, sometimes without anesthesia.” 

The scientific and political communities in America were solidly behind the project. Those performing the sterilizations were considered humanitarian heroes, and academics who questioned the idea were subject to vilification, loss of employment, and loss of academic funding. The press and political activists formed a solid phalanx to protect the pro-eugenics side. Glenn Reynolds of Glenn’s Substack (another worthy subscribable) linked to the interview on Instapundit.com, framing it as follows: 

PUBLIC HEALTH HAS ALWAYS INVOLVED A LOT OF GROUPTHINK:When Sterilization Was Dogma: Why the Eugenics Movement is Relevant Today.“Eugenicists sought to ‘improve’ the human species in the same way that one would improve cattle or soybeans—and using basically the same techniques.”

Later in the day, Glenn added an update—an excruciatingly poignant email that he had received from a reader:

WisPolitics:

Underly road a historic wave of cashflow to win in 2021, marking a significant win for Dems of the GOP. While the race was officially nonpartisan, the Dem Party contributed $949,844 to Underly’s campaign, which spent $1.53 million over the election. In all, candidates and outside groups spent $3 million on the race, a record to elect Wisconsin’s education department head. 

She also said she knows schools aren’t perfect right now, but she loves them enough to see that “and devote my life to making them better, more equitable and stronger.”

Much more on Jill Underly, here (and her efforts to abort our elementary teacher literacy test: the Foundations of Reading).

Ernesto Van der Sar

To reduce costs, some students choose to share books or buy cheaper second-hand versions. Others go a step further and venture onto the dark side, by downloading or even buying ‘pirated’ books. 

These cost-saving tactics are nothing new. A few decades ago, copying machines at universities were already duplicating copyrighted works every day of the week. However, with digital books becoming more common, copying has become a breeze. This is a form of progress that publishers are not happy with. 

Danish Deterrent?

Textbook piracy is happening around the globe. While enforcement is relatively rare, in Denmark several students have been convicted for selling pirated copies of textbooks. Publishers hoped that these cases would act as a deterrent but there are no signs that this is the case.

Danish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance recently published a new study, conducted by Epinion, which polled the attitudes and behaviors of students towards digital textbooks. In particular, those that are obtained illegally

Christopher Hope:

However, it has “trusted flagger” status with Twitter and Facebook, allowing it to fast-track complaints about content it believes to be in breach of the platforms’ rules.

During the pandemic, Mr Dowden and Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, also attended a meeting with technology companies about how to tackle Covid disinformation.

William Jacobson:

As previously covered here, the Equal Protection Project (EqualProtect.org) of Legal Insurrection Foundation asked the Missouri Attorney General to investigate a business boot camp at Missouri State University that discriminated against white males, and only white males.

In reaction to substantial media coverage, MSU quickly told the media that it was changing the terms for future programs, and that future business boot camps would be open to everyone. We took that as a VICTORY – Missouri State U To Stop Discriminating Against White Males For ‘Business Boot Camp” After Equal Protection Project Complaint.

But in those public statements, MSU was not contrite and accepted no responsibility. To the contrary, MSU President Clif Smart was quoted as saying:

“Frankly, I still don’t think we did anything wrong … given that we have multiple cohorts of this going on and this was just one cohort that was limited. We won’t do that. We’ll do a better job on the marketing and information (and) dissemination side and review the process to make sure that everyone has a chance to participate, but we’re not going to exclude people.”

That sounds like MSU was upset for being caught, not for discriminating. While we were happy that the discriminatory program was changed, what good is a promise from a university that violated its own (and federal and state) anti-discrimination rules, when caught said it did nothing wrong, and appears only to have succumbed due to media attention? What will happen when the media attention fades?

Ranjit Singh

None of these laws did anything. We don’t know how the shooter got his gun. If he got it legally from a firearms retailer, he passed a background check. If he got it illegally, the joke’s on the writers of the “universal” part of Virginia’s background check legislation. The handgun limit didn’t do anything, nor did the Due Process busting red flag law. Crooks don’t give a hoot about any of that. The gun grabbers know it, and they don’t care. Because they want *another* bite at the apple.

Jon Keegan and Joel Eastwood:

Many of the Xandr ad categories are more prosaic, classifying people as “Affluent Millennials,” for example, or as “Dunkin Donuts Visitors.” Industry critics have raised questions about the accuracy of this type of targeting. And the practice of slicing and dicing audiences for advertisers is an old one. 

But the exposure of a collection of audience segments this size offers consumers an unusual look at how they and their families are packaged, described, and categorized by ad companies. 

Because the segments also include the names of the companies involved in creating them, they also shed light on how disparate pools of personal data—collected by tracking people’s online activity and real-world movements—are combined into bespoke, branded groups of potential ad viewers that can be marketed to publishers and advertisers.

Why is Norway failing?#Norway (pop. 5.475.240)
vs. #Finland. (pop. 5.569.431)

Norwegian Public Sector 885.419
Finnish Public Sector 647.000

Finland – less tax, better school system and healthcare. Norwegian politicians are mismanaging the country!
1/5 pic.twitter.com/wqy1nzwzmy

— Alexander Ellefsen⚡️ (@4lexEllefsen) June 9, 2023

Mark Zuckerberg says it was challenging to censor COVID misinformation because the scientific establishment was frequently wrong, which ultimately undermined public trust:

“Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier in the pandemic where there were real health… pic.twitter.com/y0ZaX4kmCE

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) June 9, 2023

Related: Dane County Madison Public Health mandates.

We can now replace every woke teacher with an AI teacher that shares your values as a parent. https://t.co/Pxih2HZI2K

— Balaji (@balajis) June 9, 2023