📣Republicans in Wisconsin:
Hold the Line on DEI cuts to the WOKE UW System💪🏽

The UW System has unfortunately become a cesspool of woke indoctrination. Yet Democrats want over $300 million more tax dollars and ZERO spending cuts in UW’s 32 million budget for “Diversity, Equity… pic.twitter.com/3BZi4MPX56

— Scarlett Johnson (@scarlett4kids) June 21, 2023

Kiera Butlers

Ten years ago, Marilyn Muller began to suspect that her kindergarten daughter, Lauryn, was struggling with reading. Lauryn, a bright child, seemed mystified by the process of sounding out simple words. Still, the teachers at the top-rated Massachusetts public school reassured Muller that nothing was wrong, and Lauryn would pick up the skill—eventually. Surely they knew what they were talking about. Their reading curriculum was well-regarded, and one that encouraged children to use context clues when they couldn’t decode a word. The class was organized into leveled reading groups—bronze, silver, gold, and platinum—with everyone starting out the year in the bronze group. By year’s end, everyone had moved up to a new level—except Lauryn. Muller’s daughter was the only kindergartner stuck in bronze all year.

First grade was no better. The teachers continued to brush off Muller’s concerns—but she couldn’t help but worry for all sorts of reasons, especially because not being able to read was starting to affect her daughter emotionally. Tears started each day, as Lauryn began to refuse to go to school in the mornings. Finally, Muller brought Lauryn in for a private neuropsychological evaluation, and the psychologist who tested her found that her daughter was dyslexic. After a long battle with the school, Muller eventually convinced them to provide appropriate services—something to which all students are entitled by law.

In Lauryn’s case, this meant that her current reading curriculum should have been replaced by a method of known as the structured literacy approach. Instead of guessing and looking for context clues, structured literacy—also known as phonics—teaches students how to map sounds onto letters to decode words. There was only one problem: Muller discovered that the teacher the school assigned to Lauren wasn’t trained in structured literacy. Lauryn continued to struggle.

Muller didn’t know it at the time, but she had stumbled into an educational controversy that in recent months has turned into something of a scandal. A spate of recent reporting—in podcasts, national magazines, and major newspapers—has highlighted new research finding that the balanced literacy approach wasn’t as effective as a phonics-based approach for most students—learning disabled or typical. And the national embrace of balanced literacy was particularly bad for low-income students of color. Today, a staggering third of all children—and half of all Black children—read below grade level. In May, leaders in the country’s largest school system of New York City officially announced plans to transition away from a balanced literacy curriculum and apologized for the harm they had caused. Addressing students and parents in a recent New York Times interview, Chancellor David C. Banks said, “It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault. This is the beginning of a massive turnaround.” Understandably, parents are outraged.

“In a 2020 report, a team of reading researchers at the educational consulting group Student Achievement Partners (SAP) concluded that Calkins’ approach was only effective for students who had already received outside reading instruction.” https://t.co/P5tyNUVg7w

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites) June 21, 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?

WM Briggs:

Here’s why.

Heard about the formal peer-reviewed paper “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases” by Suzanna Diaz & J. Michael Bailey in the Archives of Sexual Behavior?

It was canceled. 

Or, in science speak, retracted. Because why? Not because of any gross error. Because “activists” (i.e. true believers) hated it.

Rapid onset gender dysphoria is the kind of madness that for instance strikes classrooms full of girls, who, under the tutelage of a purple-haired “educator”, or even on their own, suddenly all “discover” they are boys. 

Article says “Parents reported that they had often felt pressured by clinicians to affirm their AYA [adolescents and young adults] child’s new gender and support their transition. According to the parents, AYA children’s mental health deteriorated considerably after social transition.”

Which is no surprise to any sane person. But truth is not a beloved entity in our Regime. So the paper had to go. 

Even more amusing is that “Suzanna Diaz” is a fake name. Imagine. A scholar so frightened of other academics she, or he, had to use a nom de guerre. (There is no typo here.)

You can read all about the cancelling elsewhere. Which is one among many.

Now you and I, dear reader, have looked at hundreds of papers over the years, nearly all bad. Most with mistakes so egregious even Kamala Harris would blush at them. All of them committing scientific sins far in excess in any found in the Rapid Gender Madness paper. None of them have been retracted.

Kevin Mahnken:

COVID-19’s cataclysmic impact on K–12 education, coming on the heels of a decade of stagnation in schools, has yielded a lost generation of growth for adolescents, new federal data reveal. 

Wednesday’s publication of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — America’s most prominent benchmark of learning, typically referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — shows the average 13-year-old’s understanding of math plummeting back to levels last seen in the 1990s; struggling readers scored lower than they did in 1971, when the test was first administered. Gaps in performance between children of different backgrounds, already huge during the Bush and Obama presidencies, have stretched to still-greater magnitudes.

The bad tidings are, in a sense, predictable: Beginning in 2022, successive updates from NAEPhave laid bare the consequences of prolonged school closures and spottily delivered virtual instruction. Only last month, disappointing resultson the exam’s history and civics component led to a fresh round of headlines about the pandemic’s ugly hangover. 

But the latest release, highlighting “long-term trends” that extend back to the 1970s, widens the aperture on the nation’s profound academic slump. In doing so, it serves as a complement to the 2020 iteration of the same test, which showed that the math and English skills of 13-year-olds had noticeably eroded even before the emergence of COVID-19.

Seems like huge spending increases during COVID didn't help.

We need to hold students & teachers accountable and not let the rampant social promotion in K-12 schools continue. https://t.co/krIJY1DgzV

— Robin Vos (@repvos) June 21, 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?

Alex Halderman:

Our report explains how attackers could exploit the flaws we found to change votes or potentially even affect election outcomes in Georgia, including how they could defeat the technical and procedural protections the state has in place. While we are not aware of any evidence that the vulnerabilities have been exploited to change votes in past elections, without more precautions and mitigations, there is a serious risk that they will be exploited in the future.

The report was filed under seal on July 1, 2021 and remained confidential until today, but last year the Court allowed us to share it with CISA—the arm of DHS responsible for election infrastructure—through the agency’s coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) program. CISA released a security advisory in June 2022 confirming the vulnerabilities, and Dominion subsequently created updated software in response to the problems. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has been aware of our findings for nearly two years, but—astonishingly—he recently announced that the state will not install Dominion’s security update until after the 2024 Presidential election, giving would-be adversaries another 18 months to develop and execute attacks that exploit the known-vulnerable machines.

Beyond these implications for election practice, our work is scientifically significant. It is the first study in more than 10 years to comprehensively and independently assess the security of a widely deployed U.S. voting machine, as well as the first-ever comprehensive security review of a widely deployed ballot marking device. Security researchers studied numerous U.S. voting machines 10-20 years ago, and their findings clearly established that voting equipment tends to suffer from security flaws. Yet one might wonder whether election equipment sold today is more secure than equipment produced in decades past. Our findings suggest that the answer is no. This highlights the need for further enhancements to the software engineering, testing, and certification processes for U.S. voting equipment, and it underscores the importance of conducting rigorous post-election audits of every major electoral contest, as recommended by the National Academies.

The Fire

The University of California, Berkeley used diversity statements to weed out candidates for faculty positions, according to public records the university finally released more than two years after FIRE requested them.

Many universities now require or invite current or prospective faculty todemonstrate their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion — often through written statements that factor into hiring, research, evaluation, promotion, or tenure decisions.

As FIRE explained in a public statement last year, these diversity statement requirements can too easily function as ideological litmus tests and cast a pall of orthodoxy over campuses.

Berkeley is no exception. The university expects all new faculty hires to “be committed to advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging[.]” During the 2018-19 academic year, Berkeley’s life sciences departments launched an initiative to advance faculty diversity. As part of the initiative, applicants for full-time faculty positions were required to submit statements on their “contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion,” including information about their “understanding of these topics,” “record of activities to date,” and “specific plans and goals for advancing equity and inclusion.” 

These statements informed the hiring committee’s first round of review: If applicants’ contributions to DEI did not meet a high standard, they were eliminated from consideration.

Minneapolis School Voices

The district’s lack of transparency has limited our ability to report about Minneapolis Public Schools. 

Since launching in November of 2022, Minneapolis Schools Voices strives to provide accurate, timely and useful information about Minneapolis Public Schools’ district administration, school board, and schools for readers. We aim to reach a diverse group of sources and audience members who are parents, educators and community members in the district. 

For over two decades, student academic data has shown a large, persistent racialized gap in the outcomes of the district’s students. In recent years, the chronic, inequitable, underfunding by the State of economically, racially and linguistically diverse school districts in Minnesota, like Minneapolis Public Schools, has become more apparent. The district is on the precipice of a financial crisis, long in the making, and delayed by the pandemic. At the same time, the district is working to become a more welcoming place for the diverse communities it serves. And, it is searching for a new superintendent to lead the district through an as yet unspecified “transformation.”

Amidst everything happening at the nearly 70 schools serving about 30,000 children in Minneapolis, MPS has a transparency problem.

The district has faced consistent criticism for years about its lack of communication with families, staff and community. Given the challenges ahead for the district, and the likely disruption to students, families and staff as the district confronts its large, structural budget deficit, it is even more important for the public to have factual, timely information.

Jerry A. Coyne and Luana S. Maroja

Biology faces a grave threat from “progressive” politics that are changing the way our work is done, delimiting areas of biology that are taboo and will not be funded by the government or published in scientific journals, stipulating what words biologists must avoid in their writing, and decreeing how biology is taught to students and communicated to other scientists and the public through the technical and popular press. We wrote this article not to argue that biology is dead, but to show how ideology is poisoning it. The science that has brought us so much progress and understanding—from the structure of DNA to the green revolution and the design of COVID-19 vaccines—is endangered by political dogma strangling our essential tradition of open research and scientific communication. And because much of what we discuss occurs within academic science, where many scientists are too cowed to speak their minds, the public is largely unfamiliar with these issues. Sadly, by the time they become apparent to everyone, it might be too late.

***

We’re all familiar with the culture wars that pit progressive Leftists against centrists and those on the Right. In the past, those skirmishes dealt with politics and sociocultural issues and in academia were restricted largely to the humanities. But—apart from the “sociobiology wars” of the seventies and our perennial battles against creationism—we biologists always thought that our field would avoid such struggles. After all, scientific truth would surely be immune to attack or distortion by political ideology, and most of us were too busy working in the lab to engage in partisan squabbles.

We were wrong. Scientists both inside and outside the academy were among the first to begin politically purging their fields by misrepresenting or even lying about inconvenient truths. Campaigns were launched to strip scientific jargon of words deemed offensive, to ensure that results that could “harm” people seen as oppressed were removed from research manuscripts, and to tilt the funding of science away from research and toward social reform. The American government even refused to make genetic data—collected with taxpayer dollars—publicly available if analysis of that data could be considered “stigmatizing.” In other words, science—and here we are speaking of all STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)—has become heavily tainted with politics, as “progressive social justice” elbows aside our real job: finding truth.

Neil Johnston and Blathnaid Corless

Lockdown ‘damaged a generation’, says former chief medical officer. Dame Sally Davies holds back tears as she apologises before Covid inquiry and admits ‘economic and social’ factors weren’t fully considered

NYC had a test for teachers. Whites passed at a higher rate than minorities. Now the city has set aside over $1.8 billion to pay failed applicants

One woman failed 10 times. When she heard about the lawsuit, she felt vindicated because she learned the test was the problem. pic.twitter.com/AkCGAD3v0O

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) June 20, 2023

Just arrived in Kensington in Philly. Rampant drug use in plain sight on the middle of streets. Sheer misery. pic.twitter.com/kChe6K6aIg

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 20, 2023

Jenny Holland:

In March 1984, 14-year-old Karen Slattery was babysitting two children in a Florida home when Duane Owen broke in. He repeatedly raped her and then stabbed her to death. Two months later, Owen broke into the home of Georgianna Worden, before raping the 38-year-old mother and murdering her with a hammer. She was found in her bed the next morning by one of her children. 

Last week, after he had spent three decades on death row, the state of Florida executed Owen for his crimes. On the day of the execution, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) issued a statement on social media decrying Florida’s actions. Did the ACLU condemn the use of the death penalty? No. Did it allege that the killer had not received a fair trial? Also no.

Instead, the ACLU’s main complaint was that the Florida prison service was unwilling to provide Owens with the gender-reassignment treatment he had requested before his execution. According to the ACLU, the denial of this ‘medically necessary treatment [caused] her enormous suffering’ (sic).

The ACLU of old used to fight for principles like free speech, gay rights, civil rights and the right to a fair trial. The ACLU of today, however, is fighting for the right of a sexual sadist and murderer to obtain taxpayer-funded breast implants. And it insists on calling that murderer a woman, to boot. What a time to be alive.

An underrated problem with the US education system, microcasmically evinced by this interview, is that the people running it are often quite stupid. https://t.co/AfY4lCw3eJ

— Aaron Sibarium (@aaronsibarium) June 19, 2023

Abigail Anthony:

A large contingent of parents of graduating seniors who sat through Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber’s recent commencement address described it as hypocritical and a “woke sermon” in interviews with The College Fix.

They scoffed at his claim that the Ivy League institution is a bastion of free speech and bristled at his embrace of all kinds of diversity except intellectual diversity.

“President Eisgruber’s commencement speech was a disgrace,” a mother of a graduating senior told The College Fix in an email. “The primary assault on free speech takes place on every campus in this country – including Princeton.”

“It takes the form of blocking and shouting down faculty and invited speakers who dare to stray from the liberal orthodoxy,” she said. “…He chose to use his 2023 commencement address to deliver the rantings of a demagogue.”

Eisgruber told the audience “we must stand up and speak up together for the values of free expression and full inclusivity for people of all identities.”

“There are people who claim, for example, that when colleges and universities endorse the value of diversity and inclusivity or teach about racism and sexism, they are ‘indoctrinating students’ or in some other way endangering free speech,” he said.

Eisgruber also criticized Florida legislation without specifying which bills, suggesting students in Florida are now living in fear. He denounced other newly passed laws across the nation that have reined in illiberalism.

Kaare Brandt Petersen and Michael Syskind Pedersen

What is this? These pages are a collection of facts (identities, approxima- tions, inequalities, relations, …) about matrices and matters relating to them. It is collected in this form for the convenience of anyone who wants a quick desktop reference .
Disclaimer: The identities, approximations and relations presented here were obviously not invented but collected, borrowed and copied from a large amount of sources.

These sources include similar but shorter notes found on the internet and appendices in books – see the references for a full list.
Errors: Very likely there are errors, typos, and mistakes for which we apolo- gize and would be grateful to receive corrections at cookbook@2302.dk.

Its ongoing: The project of keeping a large repository of relations involving matrices is naturally ongoing and the version will be apparent from the date in the header.

Corrinne Hess

In the 2021-22 school year, Wisconsin’s public schools received a total of $16,859 per student, which came from a combination of local property taxes, federal sources and the state. Of that, about $7,728 came from the state, according to the Department of Public Instruction.

“In fact, some of the federal funding factored into that district per pupil calculation is required to be used for services for private school students, meaning it does not support the kids attending public schools in that district,” said Abigail Swetz, DPI spokeswoman. “It is not legitimate for the Republican legislators to take credit for funds that come from local and federal sources, and if the Republican legislators and voucher advocates are claiming that the state provides $14,000 per student, that is patently untrue.”

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has said he will sign the bill.  

The Wisconsin Coalition for Education Freedom praised Republicans and Evers for including funding for school choice in the proposal.  

The coalition represents several groups including School Choice Wisconsin, the Badger Institute, Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.  

Will Flanders, research director with WILL and a coalition member, said the additional funds will allow private choice schools to be more competitive with teacher retention and hiring. And he said the increased funding may open more slots for students at choice 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?

School Choice Under Attack: Minocqua Brewing Company’s $1 million Super PAC just announced plans to file a new lawsuit to eliminate school choice in Wisconsin – citing the new liberal Supreme Court majority.
Permalink here: https://t.co/9BTEyAv7da pic.twitter.com/AC4pJVaT3s

— Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) June 20, 2023

Related: WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators (2010)

“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?

If I were @PeterHotez, I’d also refuse to debate anyone with knowledge to hold me accountable for past acts.

What he did – demand everyone stay home even for protests: until a protest emerged that he liked, then encouraged everyone to go out – destroyed trust in health experts: https://t.co/wv2esTn9JF

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 20, 2023

Elizabeth Wadas:

The Madison Metropolitan School District’s head of communications, Tim LeMonds, is on leave amidst an ongoing investigation. NBC15 Investigates confirmed LeMonds’ employment status with the district’s human resources team Thursday afternoon.

Earlier this month, MMSD broke its silence after a complaint alleging harassment and bullying against its head of communications was made public after NBC15 Investigates went to court to make the complaint public.

After a Dane County judge ruled MMSD had to release the complaint to the public, the district sent a public statement. It was sent byf Communications Manager Ian Folger who confirms the statement was drafted by MMSD’s legal team. The statement addressed a complaint against LeMonds that alleges instances of “emotional abuse, bullying, unequal pay, and harassment on the basis of gender, and race or ethnicity” against current and former district employees.

The complaint details how LeMonds allegedly interacted with and spoke about female journalists, including NBC15′s Elizabeth Wadas. According to the complaint, LeMonds allegedly described Wadas in a Zoom meeting as “Quickly becoming the sleaziest journalist in Madison…What a pig of a journalist” in response to a story Wadas was working on that wascritical of a high school football coach. The school did an initial investigation into the complaint months ago and found most of the claims were found “without merit.” And no action was taken against LeMonds at that time.

More. And.

“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?

John McGinnis:

But laws are often not entirely clear, and men and women legitimately dispute their content and meaning. A central purpose of the legal system is to clarify these rules through adversarial presentations, leading to authoritative decisions by neutral tribunals. Just as the adversary system perfects the rule of law, so a robust culture of free speech and inquiry perfects the adversary system. What the best arguments are, or even what makes an argument best, is often itself unclear and disputed. A culture of exploring arguments vigorously before they reach court, without fear of retaliation, complements the adversary system and improves our governance.

Any free society needs the rule of law, the adversary system, and a culture of free speech and inquiry in law, but this is particularly true of the United States. Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed of the American republic that almost all political issues there became legal issues, and that remains the case today. It’s the law that preserves the U.S. Constitution’s balance of powers, preventing tyranny.

Reuters:

All state-funded colleges and universities in Texas will have to close their diversity, equity and inclusion offices under a measure signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

The law, which one of its sponsors in the Texas state Senate called the most significant ban on diversity offices in higher education in the country, comes as the U.S. Supreme Court later this month is widely expected to ban colleges and universities from considering race as a factor in their admissions decisions.

Under the Texas law, signed by Abbott on Wednesday, any public college or university that does not certify it is in compliance with the measure would not be able to spend state funds allocated to it.

It also mandates that state officials every two years through 2029 conduct studies to gauge the impact of the law on students broken down by race. It will look at the rates of application, acceptance, matriculations, retention and graduation, along with grade point averages. The law does not explain the reasoning for conducting these studies.

Kimberly Wethal:

An April review from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative law firm and think tank, argued that Wisconsin’s system of partially funding technical colleges through the levy contributes to the idea of taxation without representation because district board members are not elected. Districts do go to the voters to approve referendums to exceed their revenue limits.

Richard Hanania

I haven’t seen much in the way of cultural explanations for what has happened. But I think that it would be a mistake to ignore the impacts of woke. Art reflects and speaks to human nature. When cultural and intellectual elites don’t like human nature and want to change it, they are less able to produce compelling works of fiction.

I’m not just talking about Summer of Floyd level of woke being poisonous to art. Even quite well accepted ideas about gender and sexuality, if taken to their logical conclusion, can wreak havoc.

Morality and ideals are inherently gendered. Men and women are so psychologically different that you should expect different kinds of stories to appeal to each sex. We also expect characters to behave in ways consistent with what are now called “sexual stereotypes.” One template of a male story is a hero goes out in the world and, through bravery and strength, tries to overcome some obstacle or challenge. At the end, through this process he finally saves or wins over the girl of his dreams. Think the original Star Wars, Super Mario games, or The Lion King (yes, it crosses species). 

The female template is more passive. A girl wants to be pretty, and win over the hero. She might have obstacles in her way, but instead of showing physical courage, it’s more about resolving some interpersonal dispute in her favor. Think of Ariel in The Little Mermaid getting away from her overweening father, or Cinderella showing up her stepmom and stepsisters by marrying the handsome prince.

Tim Hwang:

Big Science is seductive. It exerts a draw on the imagination that goes beyond purely rational considerations. If you’re romantic about science, Big Science offers some of the most colorful characters, the most dramatic breakthroughs, the boldest public commitments. These projects are breathtaking societal moments, rare points when science broke from its usual staid, plodding, incremental mode and did something dramatically different. 

Big Science is also tangible in a way that a lot of scientific progress is not. You can point to Los Alamos in a perfectly midwit way and say “The Science Happens Here.” Big Science – or at least the dream of it – packages up progress in a way that is concrete, amenable to policy, something we can spend money on. 

I also suspect that, for many, there is a little daydream imagining what it would have been like to be part of something historic like Apollo 11. We should have the bravery to admit that sometimes what underlies an obsession with Big Science is a longing to create such opportunities for ourselves in the present. 

This Big Science imaginary haunts science and technology policy. The pantheon is well-known: Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, DARPA, Apollo, CERN, the Manhattan Project, Operation Warp Speed. We grasp for these templates when thinking about how the government should play a role in advancing progress. 

We need a DARPA for X! An Apollo Program for Y! A Manhattan Project for Z! 

But this infatuation with Big Science as the pinnacle of government involvement in progress can also be corrosive. A love of Big Science can be an obsession about means that causes us to lose sight of the ends.

The extent to which Google is acting to censor RFK Jr. — especially as he rises in the polls against Joe Biden and receives more attention — is very striking and revealing.

Big Tech now routinely censors elected officials and, of course, did so to the sitting US President. https://t.co/0AmmbY9wSP

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 20, 2023

Many taxpayer supported K-12 systems use Google/YouTube services, including Madison.

No mention in this ⁦@AP⁩ story of the effect of rising college costs and legacy admissions on poor Americans and Americans of color. https://t.co/OZYJiIU8ae

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) June 19, 2023

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.

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.”

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.

Richard Phelps:

Curious to track the progress of this foundation-led initiative, I have charted the career paths of 72 US education journalists. To be sure, it is not a scientific sample. The complex employment structure of US journalism does not lend itself to such.

Nonetheless, I have tried to represent a full range of media outlets across the political spectrum. My selection leaned toward print (including online) media, K–12 education coverage, and journalists who write on education research or policy for a national audience. Some media outlets (e.g., Newsweek) do not clearly designate anyone in this way. It would appear that “right-leaning” outlets are more likely to employ an education specialist, whereas “left-leaning” outlets seem more likely to borrow from education-only publications as needed, or to rely on non-journalist stringers (e.g., The Progressive).

You may find the product of my research here.

One overarching trend dominates the results: a migration en masse from traditional independent news outlets to education-only publications heavily subsidized by the Gates and allied foundations (hereafter called “Gates+”). Only two of the younger journalists began their careers at an organization sponsored by Gates+. By the end of their careers, however, 57 of the 72 were so employed.

Just within the past twenty years, Gates+ money has incubated several new education-only media outlets, such as Chalkbeat, EdReports, EdSurge, Education Next, Ed Post, FutureEd, and The 74. Gates+ money has also substantially boosted the efforts of preexisting education-only media organizations, such asEdSource, Education Week, the Education Writers Association, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and the Hechinger Report. All told, this accounts for almost all large-audience, US, K–12-education-only print media outlets, other than those tied to the traditional public education establishment.

Michael F. Shaughnessy, via email:

1. Rick, COVID came, it saw, and it conquered, and it impacted a lot of schools. In your new book, The Great School Rethink, you discuss the pandemic’s effects and the aftermath. Can you talk a bit about the consequences of COVID-19 on the education system?

 

Look, during COVID-19, when schools shuttered across the nation, educators and families suddenly had to scramble. The shift to remote learning spurred new practices and led teachers to explore new skills and attempt new strategies. The pandemic altered household routines and upended how tens of millions of families interacted with schools. Even as schools opened back up, disruption lingered. Students had suffered staggering learning loss. Behavioral and disciplinary issues were rampant. Enrollment in the nation’s public schools declined by more than one million students, the biggest drop ever recorded. Schools struggled mightily to answer the challenges of a once-in-a-century cataclysm highlighted and exacerbated longtime frailties that were hiding in plain sight.

 

2. One consequence of COVID was a switch to online instruction for many students. How do you think this worked out?

 

Initially, harried school leaders responded to school closures by throwing classrooms online—telling unprepared teachers to essentially move their classroom onto a screen filled with glazed-eyed, muted kids. Some schools even implemented a widely reviled practice, derisively termed “Zoom in a room,” in which masked students sat six feet apart in classrooms staring at screens, supervised by a nonteacher, while their teacher taught remotely. This stuff was a debacle. It was glitchy, rote, and dehumanizing. It was technology at its impersonal worst.  

 

This was always going to make for a worse experience. At the same time, online instruction created new opportunities for instructional delivery. Just three or four years ago, the technology for virtual tutoring was something totally alien to most parents and teachers. Today, millions of families think it’s no big deal to enroll kids in online courses, when appropriate, and students are more acclimated to such settings. Used well, this potentially opens a whole world of opportunities to customize course-taking and instructional support.  

 

3. As we “catch our breath” and transition back to normal in education, we may have an opportunity to re-evaluate and re-assess what we are doing. But are people doing this? If not, how would you recommend people go about it?

 

Some of the early signs aren’t promising. When funders, advocates, and the US Secretary of Education started burbling about the need for a post-pandemic “Great Reset,” the grandiose rhetoric left me cold. Look, given what I do all day, I’m well aware that the easiest thing in the world to do is talk about school improvement. It’s a whole lot easier to write white papers, deliver keynotes, and churn out colorful PowerPoints than to change things in real schools for real kids.  

 

As I pondered the opportunities to do better, it struck me that there’s less need for a Great Reset than a great rethink. Instead of more self-assured answers, there might be more value in helping to ensure that we’re asking the right questions. If that impulse doesn’t come naturally to many of those passionately seeking to improve schools, that just may make it all the more necessary.  

 

4. In The Great School Rethink, you address some of the issues coming out of the pandemic. What do you see as the main challenges for education leaders?

Here’s how I see it. As families, communities, and neighborhoods dealt with the fallout from COVID-19, many things became newly clear. Too much school time gets wasted. The parent-school relationship has grown distant. Families need more and better school options. Schools are too inflexible and don’t make good use of new technologies. This doesn’t mean that we need yet another eleven-point plan from on high. Leaders should resist the impulse to come up with those complicated plans, and instead ask hard questions about how schools use time and talent, what they do with digital tools, and how they work with parents. 

5. What has COVID taught us about what makes an effective teacher?

 

During the pandemic, I heard a lot of highly regarded teachers saying that they were having trouble adjusting to online teaching—that their repertoire wasn’t designed for pixel-based instruction. At the same time, plenty of school leaders remarked that they were pleasantly surprised to find that teachers who’d sometimes struggled in classrooms were surprisingly adept when online. The pandemic taught us that some in-person skills translate to remote learning, but not all of them. And remote learning may utilize skills that don’t count for as much in person.  

 

This can all get pretty complicated. But one simple takeaway is that it’s nuts to solely think of teachers as either “good” or “not good.” When we say that an educator is effective, the first question should be “At what?” And the second question should be, “How do we get them doing more of what they’re effective at?” 

6. I hear from a lot of educators that we need more time in the school day or year. Do you agree that we need to extend those to make up for lost time during COVID?

 

Advocates and public officials have long argued that American students need to spend more time in school. Reformers will insist that American students spend too little time in the classroom compared to their international peers. But the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reportsthat, on average, U.S. students attend school for 8,903 hours over their first nine years in school—which is 1,264 hours more than the OECD average.

 

It turns out that enormous amounts of time get wasted in the school year. For instance, researchers studying schools in Providence, Rhode Island, estimated that a typical classroom in a Providence public school is interrupted over 2,000 times per year and that these interruptions combine to consume ten to twenty days of instructional time. Before locking kids into dingy school buildings on a sunny afternoon or warm summer’s day, we should first be sure that we’re productively using the 1,000+ hours a year that schools already command.  

 

7. In The Great School Rethink, you talk about what teachers actually do during the school day. Can you share some of your thoughts on this?

 

Teachers perform many, many different tasks each day. They lecture, facilitate discussions, grade quizzes, monitor hallways, fill out forms, counsel kids, struggle with obstinate technology, and much else. Yet when I work with teachers, they almost invariably report that they’ve never been part of a meaningful effort to unpack what they do each day. That makes it tough to know if time is being used effectively or what might be done differently. 

 

If you get teachers to list out what they do each day, you’ll often find that many teachers are spending a lot of time on things that they don’t think matter the most for kids. Post-Covid, school leaders should start asking how they can get teachers to do more of the hand-on-shoulder work that makes the profession meaningful. 

8. There’s a lot of concern right now about students’ mental and emotional well-being. Given what we saw during the pandemic, is that a product of technology? Or is there any way that these new technologies can help with that?

 

It’s clear that kids’ mental health took a beating during the COVID-driven isolation. Today, kids are enmeshed in fewer social networks than ever before. They are far less likely than they once were to engage in things like church groups, the Boy Scouts, and 4-H clubs. One oft-overlooked downside of this isolation is that kids now encounter fewer potential mentors, which matters for everything from learning to college admissions to landing a job.  

 

Technology can help with some of this. They can provide students, especially those who don’t have a lot of educated adults in their lives, with access to mentors they might not otherwise encounter. For instance, platforms like ImBlaze and Tucson, Arizona-based CommunityShare streamline the act of locating experts and potential partners. School systems can partner with these agencies to increase student engagement with potential mentors. This is the human dimension of mentoring, which is something that risks getting lost in all the enthusiasm for AI-enabled tutoring. 

 

9. Rick, after the pandemic, there has been a lot of consternation about school choice laws coming out of red states. Can you tell us about what’s going on here?

 

You’re right to be puzzled about the proliferation of school choice laws, commonly billed as education savings accounts. Essentially, they entail states depositing a student’s education funds into a dedicated account which families then use to mix-and-match education goods and services from schools and other providers. ESAs are, in large part, a response to the limits of school choice. School choice isn’t a great solution for parents who like their schools but have more specific concerns.  

 

And given that the lion’s share of parents say they like their kid’s school, this means that school choice isn’t much help for many students or families. But because these programs frequently require parents to pull their children from public schools to be eligible for the ESA, are subject to a variety of restrictions, depend mightily on execution, and may be available to only a limited number of families, we’re a long way from the kind of radical evolution that supporters seek and critics fear. 

 

10. Who is publishing your book and how can interested readers get a copy?

 

The Great School Rethink was published by Harvard Education Press. Readers can purchase a copy on Harvard’s website, or through familiar platforms like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. And, if you visit just the right bookstore, you may be able to pluck a copy off the shelves. 

 

I should say that any readers interested in ordering bulk copies for professional development or book clubs can reach out to my assistant, Greg Fournier (greg.fournier@aei.org), who will be happy to work with Harvard to get them the best possible price.

Learn more, here.

Now 18, a then emotionally troubled 12 year-old w/ a series of mental health issues is suing Kaiser physicians for transitioning her to a boy after “a single, 75 minute transition evaluation that Kayla was transgender.” https://t.co/9vxaywg8Bi

What is going on in America? pic.twitter.com/Jhvx6vuJBP

— Paul D. Thacker (@thackerpd) June 18, 2023

Daniel Boguslaw, Sam Biddle, Ken Klippenstein

When the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley enters into his scheduled retirement later this year, one of the perks will include a personal security detail to protect him from threats — including “embarrassment.” 

The U.S. Army Protective Services Battalion, the Pentagon’s little-known Secret Service equivalent, is tasked with safeguarding top military brass. The unit protects current as well as former high-ranking military officers from “assassination, kidnapping, injury or embarrassment,” according to Army records.

Protective Services’s mandate has expanded to include monitoring social media for “direct, indirect, and veiled” threats and identifying “negative sentiment” regarding its wards, according to an Army procurement documentdated September 1, 2022, and reviewed by The Intercept. The expansion of the Protective Services Battalion’s purview has not been previously reported.

The country’s national security machinery has become increasingly focused on social media — particularly as it relates to disinformation. Various national security agencies have spent recent years standing up offices all over the federal government to counter the purported threat.

“The ability to express opinions, criticize, make assumptions, or form value judgments — especially regarding public officials — is a quintessential part of democratic society.”

Simon Kuper:

Elite US colleges could do that even without affirmative action. First, they would have to abolish affirmative action for white applicants. A study led by Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University found that more than 43 per cent of white undergraduates admitted to Harvard from 2009 to 2014 were recruited athletes, children of alumni, “on the dean’s interest list” (typically relatives of donors) or “children of faculty and staff”. Three-quarters wouldn’t have got in otherwise. This form of corruption doesn’t exist in Britain. One long-time Oxford admissions tutor told me that someone in his job could go decades without even being offered a donation as bait for admitting a student. Nor do British alumni expect preferential treatment for their children.

The solutions to many American societal problems are obvious if politically unfeasible: ban guns, negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. Similarly, elite US universities could become less oligarchical simply by agreeing to live with more modest donations — albeit still the world’s biggest. Harvard’s endowment of $50.9bn is more than six times that of the most elite British universities.

But US colleges probably won’t change, says Martin Carnoy of Stanford’s School of Education. Their business model depends on funding from rich people, who expect something in return. He adds: “It’s the same with the electoral system. Once you let private money into a public good, it becomes unfair.”

Stephanie Lee:

Almost two years ago, a famous study about a clever way to prompt honest behavior was retracted due to an ironic revelation: it relied on fraudulent data. But The Chronicle has learned of yet another twist in the story.

According to one of the authors, Harvard University found that the study contained even more fraudulent data than previously revealed and is now asking the journal to note this new information. The finding is part of an investigation into a series of papers that Harvard has been conducting for more than a year, the author said.

Murtaza Hussain:

Last week, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of a teenager in Massachusetts on allegations of providing financial support to the Islamic State group.

A flurry of reports picked up on the arrest of Mateo Ventura, an 18-year-old resident of the sleepy town of Wakefield, echoing government claims that an international terrorist financier and ISIS supporter had just been busted in the United States. The Department of Justice’s own press release on the case likewise trumpeted Ventura’s arrest for “knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources that he intended to go to a foreign terrorist organization.”

The only “terrorist” he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old.

The only problem with the case and how it has been described, however, is that according to the government’s own criminal complaint, Ventura had never actually funded any terrorist group. The only “terrorist” he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old, solicited small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and directed him not to tell anyone else about their intimate online relationship, including his family.

The arrest has shaken his family, who denied allegations that their son was a terrorist and said that he had been manipulated by the FBI. Ventura’s father, Paul Ventura, told The Intercept that Mateo suffered from childhood developmental issues and had been forced to leave his school due to bullying from other students.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

— Chris Rickert (@RickertWisSJ) June 12, 2023

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.”

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]

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.

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

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.